The politics of legitimacy and force in international relations: Vitoria and Rawls on the 'Law of Peoples' and the recourse to war
- URI:
- https://hdl.handle.net/10925/961
- Carrera:
- Ciencia Política y Gestión Pública
- Facultad:
- Facultad de Ciencias Sociales
- Fecha de publicación:
- 2012-10-05
- Datos de publicación:
- Revista de Ciencia Política, Vol.32, N°2, 449-478, 2012
- Temas:
- Política internacional - Derecho internacional - John Rawls - Francisco de Vitoria
- Cultura y Sociedad [432]
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- Resumen:
- This article confronts two philosophical positions that define the nature of international
order in matters concerning state legitimacy and the justifications for the recourse
to war. The first position, set forth by Francisco de Vitoria in the sixteenth century,
frames legitimacy and the use of force within the traditional, Christian natural law
conception of justice. Legitimate are those states that uphold universal principles
of justice, not the political principles of a particular regime form, while the recourse
to war is likewise justified by the constitutive tenets of the ius ad bellum and the ius
in bello. By contrast, Rawls’ Law of Peoples, which compares itself to the Christian
natural law tradition, articulates nonetheless a particular liberal conception of justice
that defines legitimacy in wholly political terms. In addition, in its appeal to the
so-called ‘supreme emergency exemption’ the Rawlsian Law of Peoples dispenses
with a crucial aspect of the traditional ius in bello that prohibits the targeting of
civilian populations, as an exceptional means for defending and promoting a liberal
international order. It is argued that such an ideologically based view of order posits
a non-inclusive conception of justice in a culturally and politically diverse world
and, hence, encourages conflict, resistance and strife between liberal and non-liberal
states, and even strengthens autocratic government beyond the liberal zone of peace.
A more tolerant and sound view, held by Terry Nardin’s conception of ‘common
morality’, is similar to Vitoria’s traditional conception of a more politically tolerant
justice-based order and expresses in contemporary ethical language the principal
tenets of the tradition of the laws of war set forth by Vitoria himself.