Offering Hospitality: Questioning Christian Approaches to War

Chapter Three: Hospitality toward Others

49 C h a p t e r Th r e e Hospitality toward Others One basic problem in addressing failed state conflicts is that abstrac­ tion has rendered them unimportant in the field of international rela­ tions. While this is changing within the discipline, it has yet to affect political theologies on war. A theological approach to war is obviously normative: finding ways of preventing war, taking nonviolent stances, or finding ways to make fighting wars more palatable to the Christian conscience. Hospitality provides a normative theological approach to failed state conflicts, deriving its importance from how the vulnerable are treated. The lives of individuals and the lives of those in failed states have often been only marginally addressed. While the Christian theo­ logians covered in this book have done a better job of dealing with the lives of people on the margins within their own communities or states—Reinhold Niebuhr as a minister committed to social justice in Detroit, Stanley Hauerwas as an advocate for raising awareness about differently abled people, and Jean Bethke Elshtain as a feminist con­ tributor to theology and IR—they have yet to deal with those on the margins outside of their own states. Recognizing the vulnerability of those on the margins means accounting for their lives and deaths. Vulnerability is a particu­ larly touchy subject in IR, but it is a central theme in Christianity. 50  Offering Hospitality Hospitality operates from understandings of vulnerability as well as agape, or “self-­ giving love,” which I discuss below. Agape overturns no­ tions of power in relationships because the only power that exists is between God and humans. Therefore, integrating hospitality into IR truly seeks to change the paradigmatic approach to power that has de­ fined the subject for decades. Vulnerable Humanity The failure to see others fully—to recognize the conditions they live in or to acknowledge the importance of their security—denies a piece of their humanity. In security discourse, vulnerability is to be avoided. Drawing upon Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue, IR scholars are trained to know that vulnerability invites attack. A small island in the Aegean, Melos was vulnerable because of its distance from and unimportance to Sparta, its colonial protectorate. Knowing this, the Athenian gen­ erals, fresh from winning the Peloponnesian War, felt assured of the decision to invade Melos. Furthermore, if the Athenian generals passed Melos by or retracted the decision to invade, they would have been indicating a weakness in the Athenian empire in relation to its colonies and enemies, opening it to rebellions from its colonies or to challenges to its hegemony. Michael Walzer highlights how such vulnerability is framed as a wholly unacceptable weakness within the political realist IR paradigm (1977: 4–12). Yet vulnerability is a part of life; no abstractions of power are ever going to fully rid the world, a state, or a human of vulnerability. Vul­ nerability is a fundamental human condition and a basic part of Chris­ tian theology as witnessed in Christ’s sacrifice and humiliation on the Cross. The focus upon and seeking of power in IR attempts to mitigate and/or deny both state vulnerability and human vulnerability. Some of the ways this is done is through the use of power (by political realists) and by the acceptance of war (Just War adherents). Yet these methods provide security for some states at the expense of other states and the populations within them. Both IR as a whole and Christian political Hospitality toward Others   51 theology focused on IR need to deal with vulnerability that is not lim­ ited to particular states or groups of people. Anxiety and vulnerability go hand-­ in-­ hand (see Williams, 2011). Anxiety is made worse when a person or a state is vulnerable. The documentation from both sides of the Cuban Missile Crisis demon­ strates this. The crisis could have ended very badly, but the persistence of the Kennedy Administration in pursuing diplomatic measures over a military confrontation helped to resolve the crisis. In fact, it is the ideological differences between the United States and U.S.S.R. that led to mistrust and the creation of an anxious atmosphere. This helps to il­ lustrate how anxiety operates. An encounter with difference interrupts how a state, or a person, or persons within a state order the world. The anxiety in the Cold War stemmed from the United States’ fear that the Western way of...