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Echoes of a Forgotten Past: Mid-Century Realism and the Legacy of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 September 2012

Oliver Jütersonke
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Extract

Those studying the work of Hans J. Morgenthau, widely considered the “founding father” of the Realist School of International Relations, have long been baffled by his views on world government and the attainment of a world state—views that, it would appear, are strikingly incompatible with the author's realism. In a 1965 article in World Politics, James P. Speer II decided that it could only be “theoretical confusion” that explained why Morgenthau could on the one hand advocate a world state as ultimately necessary in his highly successful textbook, Politics Among Nations, while writing elsewhere that world government could not resolve the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States by peaceful means. According to Speer,

Morgenthau posits at the international level a super-Hobbesian predicament, in which the actors on the world scene are motivated by the lust for power, yet he proposes a gradualist Lockean solution whereby the international system will move, through a resurrected diplomacy, out of a precarious equilibrium of balance-of-power anarchy by a “revaluation of all values” into the “moral and political” bonds of world community, a process whose capstone will be the formal-legal institutions of world government.

This oscillation between Hobbes and Locke, Speer asserted, must be the result of Morgenthau's “commitment to the organismic mystique that comes out of German Romantic Nationalism,” although he admitted in a footnote that his reflections on the intellectual sources of Morgenthau's theories were “mere speculation.”

Type
Review Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , Fall 2012 , pp. 373 - 386
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2012

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References

NOTES

1 All in-text references are to these works.

2 Morgenthau, Hans J., Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948)Google Scholar.

3 Speer, James P. II, “Hans Morgenthau and the World State,” World Politics 20, no. 2 (1968), pp. 207–227, at p. 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Craig, Campbell, “Hans Morgenthau and the World State Revisited,” in Williams, Michael C., ed., Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 195Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. 199.

6 Morgenthau, Hans J., La réalité des normes, en particulier des normes du droit internationale: Fondements d'une théorie des normes (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1934), p. 1Google Scholar. For a more detailed treatment of Morgenthau's early writings and their links with Kelsen, see Jütersonke, Oliver, Morgenthau, Law and Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 75–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Baumgarten, Arthur, Die Wissenschaft vom Recht und ihre Methode, three vols. (Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr-Siebeck, 1920, 1922)Google Scholar. The play on words is based on the fact that Lehre (the study of) and Leere (emptiness) are pronounced identically in German.

8 Kelsen, Hans, Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts. Beitrag zu einer reinen Rechtslehre [1920], 2nd ed. (Tübingen, Ger.: Mohr, 1928), p. 2Google Scholar.

9 Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 211.

10 See Kelsen, Hans, Unrecht und Unrechtsfolge im Völkerrecht (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1932)Google Scholar.

11 Morgenthau, La réalité des normes, p. 242.

12 See Baumgarten, Arthur, “Souveränität und Völkerrecht,” Zeitschrift für ausländisches Recht und Völkerrecht 2 (1931), pp. 305–334Google Scholar.

13 Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 419.

14 Koskenniemi, Martti, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument [1989], reissue with a new epilogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

15 Bristler, Eduard [Herz, John H.], Die Völkerrechtslehre des Nationalsozialismus (Zurich: Europa, 1938)Google Scholar.

16 Herz, John H., Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)Google Scholar; and Herz, John H., International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

17 See in particular Booth, Ken and Wheeler, Nicholas J., The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar; Stirk, Peter, “John H. Herz: Realism and the Fragility of the International Order,” Review of International Studies 31, no. 2 (2005), pp. 285–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and International Relations 20, no. 2 (2008)Google Scholar, a special issue on Herz.

18 Frei, Christoph, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

19 Flechtheim followed a similar trajectory: born in Düsseldorf, he also fled to Geneva, where he studied at the Graduate Institute before emigrating to the United States. Unlike Herz, however, he eventually returned to Germany, where he received tenure in 1952.

20 Herz, John H., “The Pure Theory of Law Revisited: Kelsen's Doctrine in the Nuclear Age,” in Engel, Salo, ed., Law, State and International Legal Order: Essays in Honour of Hans Kelsen (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1964), pp. 114 and 108Google Scholar.

21 Herz, John H., “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, no. 2 (1950), pp. 157–80, at p. 157CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944)Google Scholar.

23 Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” p. 179; emphasis in the original.

24 Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism, p. 143.

25 See in particular Scheuerman, William E., Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 225–51Google Scholar; and Koskenniemi, Martti, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 413–509Google Scholar.

26 Morgenthan, Hans [sic], La notion du “politique” et la théorie des différends internationaux (Paris: Sirey, 1933)Google Scholar. One can only imagine how upsetting it must have been for Morgenthau to realize that the publishers had misspelled his surname on the front cover and throughout the volume.

27 “The judicial function in the international realm, the nature of its organs and the limits of its application; in particular, the concept of the political in international law.” The published version appeared in 1929, with a slightly modified and abbreviated title: Morgenthau, Hans J., Die internationale Rechtspflege, ihr Wesen und ihre Grenzen (Leipzig, Ger.: Noske, 1929)Google Scholar.

28 Ibid., p. 78 [my translation, OJ].

29 For a discussion of the reviews, see Jütersonke, Morgenthau, Law and Realism, pp. 53–60.

30 Lauterpacht, Hersch, The Function of Law in the International Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), p. 164Google Scholar.

31 Morgenthau, Hans J., Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1946), p. 94Google Scholar.

32 Shklar, Judith N., Legalism: An Essay on Law, Morals and Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 126Google Scholar.

33 Morgenthau, Hans J., “About Cynicism, Perfectionism, and Realism in International Affairs,” in Morgenthau, Hans J., The Decline of Democratic Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 128Google Scholar.

34 See Kunz, Josef L., “The Swing of the Pendulum: From Overestimation to Underestimation of International Law,” American Journal of International Law 44, no. 1 (1950), pp. 135–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 495.

36 Ibid., p. 496.