Kuwait Diary

From the University of Chicago

Rules for the World Stage
By Martha Nussbaum
Newsday (New York)
April 20, 2003

There once was a noble vision of what the world of
international relations can be. In recent weeks this
vision, once nearly realized, has receded from view,
so much so that we might forget that human beings ever
had such a dream. The idea I have in mind is Hugo
Grotius' concept of "international society": the
notion that all human beings form part of a single
moral community, regulated by binding ethical norms
that constrain the actions of nations in pursuit of
their own advantage.

Grotius (or Hugo de Groot), the founding father of
international law, lived between 1583 and 1645. A
child prodigy, he played a leading role in Dutch trade
negotiations at the age of 15, and published books
from that time onward. But he was also a man who stuck
his neck out. Prevailing religious doctrine in the
Netherlands held that human beings were not free to
alter the course of their salvation by their own
choices. Closely linked to this idea was a political
belief that people had no right to give themselves
laws, deciding how to conduct their own affairs.

Grotius was a great believer in choice and human
freedom, and in the freedom of each state to make its
own laws. For both of these beliefs, he was convicted
of heresy and sent to prison in a gloomy castle. But
he was permitted to receive books, which his wife
would deliver and cart away in a large trunk. One day
the outgoing trunk had an extra occupant: Grotius
himself. He managed to get on a boat to France, where
he spent the next five years in exile and wrote his
great work, "On the Law of War and Peace."

The book has been hugely influential for many reasons:
for its insistence that war is just only if it
responds to a conspicuous and serious act of
aggression; for its insistence that even then, the
party in the wrong must be treated in accordance with
strict moral laws; for its insistence that killing of
innocent civilians is morally wrong, even though the
formal international law of that time did permit it;
for its insistence that a stable and moral peace
should be the long-term goal of international
relations.

But the work's greatest contribution lies in its
conception of relations among states. For Grotius,
each state has sovereignty: the right to give itself
laws and control its destiny. This is not just a fact,
but a moral norm that expresses something deep about
human freedom, something for which Grotius himself was
prepared to risk imprisonment and worse. Second,
however, the world contains interactions between
nations, which are mediated not just by concerns for
expediency and safety but by moral considerations.
Moral laws bind all nations in their dealings with one
another, whether these laws have been turned into
enforceable international law or not. Why should this
be? Because, third, the world contains, most
fundamentally, individual human beings, who are needy
and trying to flourish. The moral duties to support
human well-being bind us all into what Grotius calls
"international society."

The norms of this society begin with the idea of
humans as creatures who are both rational and social,
and who need to find a way to live together. Certain
ways of behaving support that conception (for example,
abiding by treaties that one has made), and others do
not (killing civilians in wartime).According to
Grotius, then, when international law limits America
in some of its plans, Americans are not wrong to feel
constrained. But Grotius would insist that the more
fundamental identity we have is as members of a moral
world of human beings.

National sovereignty also is limited internally by
morality. If a nation commits certain very bad acts
against its own population, such as torture and mass
murder, another nation may intervene - what we now
call "humanitarian intervention" - to help the people.
National sovereignty's importance derives from its
value to people and their freedom; it cannot be
invoked to justify genocide and torture.

Grotius was also a radical in his thought about
material need. He saw that a lasting peace among
nations requires thinking about how all citizens of
the world can get the things they need to live. He
held that when any person anywhere is in extreme need,
that person has a right to food and other necessities
of life (he explicitly mentions medical care). He even
says that the needy person owns the surplus that the
rich are squandering, if he needs it and they don't.

Grotius' vision was not the way the world was seen in
his own day. But by insisting on the power of this
vision he created a climate of opinion in which that
vision increasingly became real. Although his
contemporary Thomas Hobbes influentially developed the
pre-Grotian idea that the realm between nations is one
of force and interest only, Immanuel Kant in the 18th
century sided with Grotius, envisaging a world that
achieved lasting peace through a federation of
nations. Such ideas eventually led to the United
Nations and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Although the UN treats nations as the major actors in
international affairs, the human rights movement moves
us closer to Grotius' picture of a world in which
national boundaries are porous, and international
agreements have at least some power to constrain
nations.

Are these ideas still alive? The Bush administration
treats such moralized visions with utter scorn,
casting the United States as the Hobbesian sovereign
needed to bring order to an amoral realm. This stance
is deeply alien to America's founding traditions:
Thomas Paine and other founders were steeped in the
continental human rights tradition that had grown out
of Grotius' ideas. In the Grotian/Kantian vision,
alliances among republican nations are crucial to
lasting peace. In our current foreign policy, by
contrast, even once-stable alliances are treated with
contempt. The duty of wealthy nations to ensure that
all humans have urgent needs met does not rank high on
the agenda of any major politician or political party.

We shall see how effectively humanitarian aid is given
in Iraq; the example of Afghanistan gives reason for
skepticism. But the more important issue is that the
United States has long lagged behind wealthy nations
in the proportion of gross domestic product it
designates for foreign aid, giving, for example, about
one-tenth of Norway's share. The Grotian vision
entails support for all urgent needs, not just those
of a nation one has invaded.

For me, the events of the past weeks engender a
powerful grief, grief for a hope that is dying. And
yet, moral norms are not docile, submissive things.
They do not quit the scene when people treat them with
contempt Instead, they call us to outrage and protest.
Just as the leaders of the Civil Rights movement did
not abandon their vision of human equality in the face
of the contempt and scorn of white society, so those
of us who care about the vision of international
society that Grotius bequeathed to us should insist on
that vision. People in power may say that we are
dealing with "rogue states" and must shape our
thinking accordingly. Grotius had seen a side of human
conduct that he called "bestial." He argued that in
such a world it is all the more important to proclaim
and abide by principles of which a decent society can
be proud and to work tirelessly to produce a world in
which such principles increasingly hold sway. He
warned people in power that if they imitate wild
beasts they may forget to be human. Grotius' own life
also takes its stand against the course of despairing
detachment, a great temptation in this time as in his
own. He conspicuously does not say, "These times are
bestial, so we right-thinking people had better check
out." Instead, living in exile, he created a norm of
cooperation and moral order that continues to inspire,
and to determine the course of some world events, even
if not all.

Those of us who feel a deep moral sadness about the
current conduct of the United States, as our
leadership shows contempt for this vision of a
multilateral world, could do worse than to follow
Grotius' example. Moral norms do not cease to exist
because current leaders do not believe in them. We may
refine them and further develop them, in the hope that
once again, sooner or later, their day will dawn.

OVER

Martha Nussbaum is professor of law and ethics at the
University of Chicago Law School and author, most
recently, of "Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence
of Emotions" and "For Love of Country?"