Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives

16. The Ethical Core of the Nation-State: A Postscript to Part Two

16 The Ethical Core of the Nation-State A Postscript to Part Two j. peter burgess The title of the present volume, Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War, announces a daunting project. The countless constellations of war, nation, justice, and peace, past and present, and the wide variety of conceivable ethical approaches to them, resist discrete summary. And yet it should at once be underscored that both the “ethics” in question and the “war” (and peace) to which they aspire to take recourse are of a special brand and breed, belonging to a very specific historical moment. Transformations of the notions both of ethics and of war and peace have accelerated in the course of the twentieth century in unforeseeable ways. Ethics—the systematic mapping of rights and obligations, premises and conditions of conduct—has veered from its classical roots and is no longer understood merely as the systematic search for a singular response to the question What is the Good Life? “War and peace,” a constantly evolving pair, has made a leap from the perfunctory character of violence in something like Herodotus’s Histories to the desperate theses of Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). Today, questions of war and peace are more frequently rediscovered in intrastate relations, in experiments with new weapons technologies, opening new questions of modalities, aims, and means, collateral consequences, circumstances and scope, objects and actors. 372 ∏ Many of the empirical illustrations brought to bear in the arguments of the second part of this book, to which this chapter is meant as a postscript (although I do not comment on all of the articles), deal in one way or another with the issue and the destiny of the European nation-state. All, for better or worse, engage the European notion of a three-way synergy (between individual, people, and political institution), the immediate derivative of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. The contributions to a large extent explore the tension between the particular cultural, spiritual, ethical, and/or religious collective impulse at the heart of any given nation-state and the bare, transparent, institutional structures and universal principles to which they relate. Such principles were already thematized in political and philosophical debates by Locke, Lessing , Bayle, Simon, Schiller, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Paine, and others at the outset of the European nation-state movements at the close of the eighteenth century in what Reinhart Koselleck called the “pathogenesis” of European bourgeois political culture (1973; Böckenförde, 1999). The paradox of the nation-state’s ethical universality was clear from the start, that is, already in the first Enlightenment philosophies of state, people, and rule of law. It was famously dramatized by Kant’s thinking on the nature of a cosmopolitan world republic, the natural consequence of the universal principles of the nation-state in his well-known 1784 essay “The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” and his 1795 essay “On Perpetual Peace” (Kant, 1991a, 1991b). In the currently expanding debate on postnationalism and the limits of nationality, Kant’s concept of cosmopolitanism has been repeatedly revisited, in both the debate on the nature of globalization (Bauman, 1998; Höffe, 1999: 64– 67; Delanty, 2000), and that on the possible forms of a European superstate (Pogge, 1992; Schultz, 1994; Habermas, 1998; Segers and Viehoff, 1996; Ferry, 2000). Much of the discussion concerns the modifications and clarifications necessary in order to bring Kant’s conception of a cosmopolitan world order to a contemporary coherence, in general, or to make it applicable to a possible European federal state, in particular. The contemporary historical determination of these debates revolves around the geopolitical changes in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall. Most of these arguments would have been impossible before the Wende, the more or less peaceful collapse of the Soviet-steered East Bloc beginning with the dramatic events in October 1989. Before then, the cold war Ethical Core of the Nation-State 373 and the ideological borders frozen along the lines of European national borders completely overshadowed the prospects of any sort of philosophical cosmopolitanism. Although globalization was long since a reality , principled questions about the nature of a universal order based on political or ethical doctrine were as good as unthinkable (FernándezArmesto , 1995). The less thoroughly scrutinized reality of the Wende is that it marks the birth of a new brand of nationalism...