Prudence does not amount to morality in international affairs, Des Moore says in reply to Owen Harries

Are states in their international dealings simply ‘cold-hearted monsters’, driven only by power and self-interest? Should not considerations of morality instead—or anyway also—apply? If so, which moral considerations? What if national interest and moral duty point in different directions?

In writing about the place of morality in international affairs in the Autumn 2005 issue of Policy, Owen Harries[1] elegantly and lucidly sets out his position on questions such as these. Is he right? Above all, will international decision-makers find his conclusions useful?

Morality in international affairs

On the role of morality in international affairs, Harries sees two diametrically opposite views.

One, the ‘realist’ view, is amoral (not immoral), as it holds that ‘in international politics, power and self-interest must prevail, and all the rest is decoration’. The opposite, small-l liberal, view is that ‘states can realistically be held to the same moral standards as individuals’.

Harries rejects both views, as being ‘seriously flawed’: the first because ‘national interests differ greatly, often in morally significant ways’, the second because ‘states, and those who act in their name, cannot properly...put virtue before everything, even survival’.[2]

Is Harries right to reject both the realist and liberal view?

Surely yes as to the liberal view, for the reasons he gives in his Policy article, and as persuasively argued by, for example, E.H.Carr in his book The Twenty Years’ Crisis.[3]

No such ready acceptance, unfortunately, can be given to Harries’s two grounds for rejecting the realist view.

The first of his grounds is that realists often falsely assume that ‘the foreign policies of all states...are essentially similar in moral terms’. That is a false assumption, says Harries, because ‘even though it is true that all states are concerned to protect and further their own interests, those interests often differ in morally relevant (and crucial) ways. They are not morally all the same’. And he goes on to instance the ‘huge moral difference’ between ‘a world dominated by a victorious Nazi Germany and one dominated by the USA and Britain’; and he draws a similar moral difference between the actual and alternative outcomes of the Cold War.

But this is really only saying that history is written by the victors. Hitler believed that Germany was ‘the bearer of a higher ethic’, just as Woodrow Wilson believed that American principles were the principles of mankind. The world is a better as well as more agreeable place, we naturally believe, because of the West’s victories; but in the absence of an impartial decider of moral values and who possesses them, claims of moral superiority are simply ‘decoration’, useful for justifying a decision to go to war, say, but not informing that decision. We should be satisfied that through our nations’ self-interested efforts we live in a vastly more agreeable world than one dominated by Hitler’s or Stalin’s successors.

Harries’s second ground for rejecting the realist view is that it falsely assumes that ‘the internal conditions of states, and any change in these conditions, are irrelevant to their international behaviour’; and he instances the view, which he ascribes to ‘leading realists like Kissinger and Brzezinski’, that ‘Russia is Russia is Russia, regardless of changes in regime’.

But, objects Harries, ‘The fact is that while there are constant elements in the foreign policy of Russia, as there are in that of any great power, there are also significant differences between the policies of a Stolypin, a Stalin, and a Putin’. Exactly so, all true realists would say—and even Kissinger and Brzezinski if the matter were put to them in those terms. So Harries’s second ground for rejecting the realist view is misplaced. And in any case, what has it to do with the place of morality in international affairs?

Is prudence a form of morality?

Having rejected (on mistaken or irrelevant grounds) the realist view on morality’s place in international affairs, and having also rejected (on good grounds) the liberal view, Harries goes on to offer his own Third Way view.

This is that morality should find a place in the practice of international affairs—indeed, should be controlling—but only so long as it is a ‘modest’ place and only so long as, ‘more often than not ‘, it answers to the somewhat mysterious rubric of ‘a morality of prudence’.

For Harries, a ‘prudent morality requires modesty of ends, means, and rhetoric’, and ‘a prudential ethic places importance on order and stability’. Rather more helpfully, he lists under ‘prudence’ the probable need for compromise, recognition of the possibility of unintended consequences, care in the setting of precedents, avoidance of double standards even while giving precedence to discrimination over consistency.

But are these really moral considerations, having to do with ethical right and wrong? Aren’t they rather practical considerations to which statesmen from time immemorial have given heed?—if at times insufficient heed.

For to be prudent is no more—though it is a lot—than to take careful thought for the future. It requires sound judgement in practical affairs and involves careful deliberation and circumspection—looking all round a problem.

So prudence requires that manifold considerations be taken into account when deciding on international action—or inaction. But Harries’s list of considerations, and many more, not least feasibility, do not in themselves carry a statesman far. They do provide a sort of check list, but above all what is required, as Harries recognises, is not the automatic application of general principles but the exercise of practical judgement in all the particular circumstances of the time.

Nowhere is that need for practical judgement more evident than in deciding where the national interest lies. That paramount but slippery concept can be said to require the safeguarding of a country’s territorial integrity, the preservation of its political independence, and the advancement of its economic well-being. But turning those precepts into practical and sensible policies in particular circumstances requires the exercise of prudential judgement of a high order.

That exercise can of course turn out to be faulty—as every loser in war learns. But fault if found is the failure not of ‘a morality of prudence’, as Harries describes President Bush’s Iraq policy, but of prudence tout court. Even if true that that policy ‘has been rich in unintended consequences...and dangerous precedents’, those are not moral failings but errors of prudential judgement.

Moreover, whether a judgement actually turns out to be imprudent is not always easy to determine. One reason is that in prudential considerations regard must be had for the consequences not only of acting in a certain way but of not acting at all. Even if in due course the actions in Iraq are generally agreed as a failure of judgement, a decision not to take those actions might have been no less a failure of judgement, though in other ways.

A principal reason for taking on Iraq was its engagement in policies, both internal and external, unacceptable to others and which experience had shown could not be changed by peaceful means (including sanctions) but only by changing the Iraqi government.

So whether Iraq was a failure of judgement or a success can be determined only when the new Iraq’s policies are formulated. If they are no more agreeable to us than Saddam’s were and would be if he had stayed, the conclusion will be hard to avoid that the war was not justified. But that will prove the Iraq war to have been not immoral but imprudent.

The role of morality

So Harries does not really provide international statesmen with useful practical or even philosophical guidance in making their decisions. Nevertheless, the question remains worth asking: Should real morality ever properly enter into statesmen’s considerations? Yes, say those foreign ministers who claim on entering office to be bringing with them ‘an ethical foreign policy’. But reality has a habit of breaking in, and soon little more is heard of their innovation.

One reason, perhaps, is the difficulty of persuading others, including the foreign minister’s own colleagues, that if in a particular matter national interest and morality point in different directions, then national interest must be forgone. As already noted, Harries himself thinks that states, and those who act in their name, cannot properly put virtue before everything, even survival.

Another reason is the difficulty of finding a real canon of morality (not the false ‘ethic’ of prudence) which is responsibly applicable to international affairs.
Neither the Ten Commandments nor the Seven Deadly Sins offer much help. But what about altruism, helping another simply out of the goodness of one’s heart?

Australia’s large gift to Indonesia’s tsunami victims, for example, or our generous budgetary and other aid to PNG, or spending money and effort in bringing order to the Solomons—aren’t all these instances of altruism at work in foreign policy? Perhaps, but not unalloyed altruism. For all too apparent is the national interest consideration underlying each instance. No doubt we appreciated the warm inner glow our actions gave us; but in reality that was not the deciding reason.

Reciprocal altruism—doing another a favour solely in the expectation, or anyway hope, of the favour’s being returned one day—is plainly not based on moral considerations.

Perhaps do as you would be done by fills the moralist’s bill? But that also is a self-serving maxim, not a moralism.

Perhaps one precept that all would agree statesmen should observe is that every country should pull its weight in the world, no country should be a free rider on the back of another which is taking action of general benefit, every country should bear its fair share of the common burden. This could be described as moral—but could also be described as being simply amorally prudent.

International law

Some might look to international law to provide moral guidance. But law and ethics are quite distinct, though some legal injunctions embody moral prescriptions. Considerations of what is allowed by international law certainly have a place in international affairs; but that is because it is the law, not because it is a moral duty.

In any case, international law has two particular drawbacks as a guide. One is that it is often even more uncertain in its content and interpretation than municipal law. Pacta sunt servanda (keep to your promises), but rebus sic stantibus (unless circumstances change). The other drawback is that international law acknowledges the legitimacy of actual state practice as a source of the law. This is how, for unfortunate example, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention in the internal affairs of other states is replacing Article 2(7) of the UN Charter.

Wars for ideas

 

Harries has a go, following J.S.Mill, at ‘going to war for an idea’, at ‘exporting democracy’.

But it is the terrorists who are going to war for an idea, and a particularly baleful one at that. As for exporting democracy, even the USA, while promoting democracy, is not bent—if only for practical reasons—on imposing it, on forcing democracy down others’ throats. But if the decision is to change another regime because its unacceptably awful policies cannot be changed by other means, then instituting a democracy in its place, whatever the difficulties, is the only sensible and acceptable policy to follow; and is a consequence of war, not a cause.

Conclusion

Finally, while Harries’s ruminations about the place of morality in foreign affairs were evidently occasioned by the Iraq war, his prescriptions seem directed to a deeper purpose than disparaging President Bush and inveighing against the war. For Harries, by lauding what he sees as the inherent virtues of a minimalist foreign policy, and by approving,[4] as a specific example of the prudential ethic, the efforts of some to erect a balance of power against the USA, seems to have the purpose of reining in the USA, of curbing its power, of getting it to abjure visionary projects such as rearranging the Middle East.

If that is indeed his purpose, he will be welcomed by those in Europe, led by France and Germany in collaboration, who both exaggerate the USA’s ability to act unilaterally and underestimate the advantage to the rest of us of a USA which can give a lead by being the world’s most influential power, but which because of its essentially island position can never be the world’s hegemon, telling everybody what to do and making sure they do it.

Des Moore is Director, Institute for Private Enterprise and Councillor, Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The views are his own.