Linklater_MenandCitizensinInternationalRelations_.pdf

1 ‘Men and citizens’ in
international relations

Since Rousseau political theorists have had frequent recourse to a contrast be-
tween the fragmented nature of modern social and political life and the allegedly
more communitarian character of the Greek polis. At the heart of this opposition
was the belief that the polis represented a condition of unsurpassable harmony
in which citizens identified freely and spontaneously with political institutions.
Compared with their ancient counterparts, modern citizens exhibited a lower level
of identification with the public world and a stronger resolution to advance their
separate interests and to pursue private conceptions of the good. Nevertheless, the
disintegration of the polis was not depicted in the language of unqualified loss.
History had not been an entirely unmitigated fall, because the individual’s claim
to scrutinize the law of the polis on rational grounds involved a significant ad-
vance in human self-consciousness. The positive aspect of its decline was found
in the transcendence of a parochial culture in which neither the right of individual
freedom nor the principle of human equality had been recognized. The modern
world had lost the spontaneous form of community enjoyed by the ancients but it
surpassed that world in its understanding and expression of freedom (Hegel 1956:
252–3 and Hegel 1952: paras 260–1, esp. additions; see also Plant 1973: ch. 1 and
Taylor 1975: chs 14–15).

Much is made in the writings of Hegel of the necessity of integrating the
ancient ideal of community with the modern principle of individuality. Indeed,
for Rousseau, Hegel and the early Marx the modern political problem is how to
make good citizens out of modern individuals, out of persons who are no longer
spontaneously citizens (O’Malley 1970: introduction, esp. pp. xi–lxiii). This
problematic relationship between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ combines with an equally
important, if less discussed, political problem: how should human beings relate
the obligations they acquire as humans with the obligations they acquire as citi-
zens of bounded political communities? Again, Hegel’s account of the experience
of Greece is important. Within the polis, only citizens lived properly human lives;
neither slaves nor the citizens of other states were thought to have equal moral
worth. Moreover, the citizen’s integration into the life of the polis involved an
unquestioning acceptance of the roles and responsibilities of membership. This
‘immediate’ identification dissolved on account of the individual’s claim to

16 The problem of community

criticize the life of the polis in accordance with principles of universal reason. A
new type of moral consciousness challenged both the exclusiveness of the polis
and the supremacy of its civic obligations. Later, it made possible the claim to
belong to two societies: the natural society of one’s birth and the universal society
embracing all persons by virtue of reason (Colletti 1973: ch. 12; Taylor 1975: pp.
385, 395–7). The distinction between ‘men’ and ‘citizens’ created an important
problem for international political theory: the problem of how to reconcile the
actual diversity and division of political communities with the newly discovered
belief in the universality of human nature.

The conflict between citizenship and humanity is fundamental to the experi-
ence of the modern states-system. This is so because the emergence of moral and
religious individualism or universalism divided the Western experience of moral-
ity between two dominant perspectives (see Walsh 1972). According to one con-
ception of moral life, the individual understands morality as ‘an affair internal to
a particular community’ (Walsh 1972: 19); the separate community is the source
of concrete ethical life and the main object of political loyalty; the states-system
is the inevitable product of the species’ division into a variety of particularistic
social moralities; the idea of humanity, lacking expression in the roles and respon-
sibilities of a form of life, exerts little or no constraint upon the relations between
states. According to the second conception, ‘the moral law binds men as men and
not as members of any particular community’ (Walsh 1972: 19); individuals may
employ their rational faculties to determine the rights and duties that necessar-
ily govern them all; the state, moreover, is an incomplete moral community, too
limited to satisfy the individual’s sense of wider moral responsibilities, and the
states-system is an obstacle to the institutional expression of the human race.1

The earliest systematic writings on the modern states-system displayed deep
tensions between these moral traditions (Pufendorf 1927, 1934a, 1934b; Vattel
1964). In the history of modern international thought these works comprise the
first stage in the understanding of the relationship between humanity and citizen-
ship. As human beings, it was argued, moral agents have duties to one another that
are prior to the formation of separate states; as citizens they acquire specific obli-
gations that they share with fellow members of bounded political associations. As
political obligations are superimposed on primordial moral ones, individuals have
to decide their relative claims on them. For the classical writers of the states-sys-
tem ‘the services of humanity’ ought to survive the establishment of any ‘special
bond with some particular society’ (Pufendorf 1934a: 242); they claimed that ‘no
convention or special agreement can release [men] from the obligation . . . to fulfil
the duties of humanity to outsiders’, a responsibility now assumed by the state
and its rulers (Vattel 1964: 5–6). The classical writings assumed that states could
deftly balance the obligations that individuals incurred as human beings with the
obligations they have as the citizens of particular societies.

A second stage in the history of international thought highlighted an endemic
weakness in these proposed solutions to the problem of relating two types of mor-
al experience. Classical theory itself conceded that the processes of establishing

‘Men and citizens’ in international relations 17

special bonds within states were concluded without contractors conforming with
their natural duties.2 Rousseau and Kant made the important claim that universal
ethical obligations were compromised by forms of competition and conflict that
were inherent in a world of sovereign states. The species’ condition was trans-
formed totally by the experience of living in and among states. It was necessary
now for individuals to behave merely as citizens and to ignore the ties of human-
ity. Thus, for Rousseau each one of us is ‘in the civil state as regards our fellow
citizens, but in the state of nature as regards the rest of the world; we have taken
all kinds of precautions against private wars only to kindle national wars a thou-
sand times more terrible; and . . . in joining a particular group of men, we have
really declared ourselves the enemy of the human race’ (Rousseau 1970: 132).
The states of Europe exhibited ‘glaring contradictions’ between ‘our fair speeches
and our abominable acts, the boundless humanity of our maxims and the bound-
less cruelty of our deeds’ (Rousseau 1970: 135–6). Extending this theme, Kant
wrote that ‘the same unsociableness which forced men into (a Commonwealth)
becomes again the cause of each Commonwealth assuming the attitude of uncon-
trolled freedom in its external relations’; citizenship provided individuals with
the security that facilitated the development of a kingdom of ends within the state
while jeopardizing the goal of a kingdom of ends at the global level (Kant 1970a:
183). In this way, the contradiction between citizenship and humanity came to be
regarded as the key ethical problem of international relations.

Insofar as there has been an impetus for Western political theorists to reflect
upon the relations between states, it has been provided by this dichotomy. Theo-
rists have confronted not a world of politics the ‘recurrence and repetition’ of
which is alien to a discourse concerned with and progress but a world of
moral tensions, and their first business has been to discover a means of understand-
ing and overcoming them. This ambition underwent a radically new development
when, building on ideas that originated in the late eighteenth century, theorists
inaugurated a new phase in the history of international thought. Underlying this
departure was the historicist assault upon both the supposed uniformity of human
nature and the alleged timelessness of universal ethical principles. The focus upon
the diversity and incommensurability of moral systems was combined with a cri-
tique of that realm of human obligation that had been presumed to be in conflict
with the ties that bind national citizens (Berlin 1976: xxiii; see also ‘Herder and
the Enlightenment’ in the same volume; and Stern 1962: ch. 6).

Whether defensive or critical of the ‘man–citizen’ dichotomy, it is unsurprising
that theorists of international relations made it their principal concern. Its pre-
eminence corresponds with the view that ‘the need for philosophy arises when
the unifying power has disappeared from the life of man’ (Marcuse 1969: 36).
However, what must be at issue since the emergence of historicism, and relativ-
ism, is the validity of arguments that seek to defend the claim that the experience
of living in and among modern states exhibits unresolved tensions. To consider
this problem further, and to specify what turns upon it, I propose to analyse three
conceptions of the ‘man–citizen’ dichotomy. Two of these perspectives have been

18 The problem of community

mentioned – modern natural law and historicism. To these shall be added a third
perspective that focuses on the historical development of the species’ capacity for
self-determination.

The rights and duties of citizens
The dichotomy between citizenship and humanity appears in the earliest theories
of the modern states-system. These writings reflected a broader movement in Eu-
ropean culture, the rise of individualism, and its particular expression in political
theory, the substitution of an ‘ascending’ for a ‘descending’ conception of govern-
ment (see Ullman 1961: 24). Contractarianism was incorporated into these theo-
ries to account for political obligations and to justify the primacy of obligations to
fellow citizens. Civil society was conceived as the outcome of individual negotia-
tion. Individuals surrendered their inherent, absolute rights to obtain a condition
of civility conducive to their ‘utility’ (Pufendorf 1934a: 103; Vattel 1964: 9a–
10a). Because of their natural equality and liberty, society could be constructed
only through free, individual exchanges of equivalent benefits; reciprocity made
social life possible and consent gave force to obligation. As a society of individu-
als was more necessary than a society of states, and since a universal political
association was unobtainable anyway, contracts were concluded not by the whole
of humanity collectively but separately within emergent political groups (Pufen-
dorf 1934a: 274; Vattel 1964: 5–6). Individuals left the state of nature by granting
each other determinate rights and duties, the rights and duties of citizens. Between
their respective political associations, however, the state of nature continued to
exist. As individuals were not parties to contracts with outsiders they were free
from specific international moral responsibilities. States, moreover, had binding
or ‘perfect’ obligations to those who had consented to their establishment, but not
to other persons. By such compacts, individuals specified the ultimate obligations
of citizenship within associations, the sovereignty of which expressed the neces-
sarily bounded character of moral and political life.

Classical theorists did not presume that the states-system consisted solely of
insulated moral enclaves, however. Had they done so the individual would have
possessed a unified moral experience. On this assumption the state would have
been the sole moral constituency and the states-system would have been an un-
problematic form of world political organization. That these conclusions were
avoided was a function of the belief that states were artefacts superimposed upon
a primordial moral community coextensive with humankind. Classical theorists
sought the theoretical integration of contractarianism and moral universalism.
They developed that tradition of thought that originated in one of ‘the most deci-
sive change[s] in political thinking’, a change that ‘came some time between the
days of Aristotle and Cicero, and proclaimed the moral equality of men’ (Carlyle
1930: 7–11). The doctrine that human reason was endowed with the capacity to
apprehend non-contractual, immutable moral principles inherent in the nature of
things became part of the dualistic foundations of modern international theory.
Thus, ‘the universal society of the human race’ arose as a ‘necessary result of

‘Men and citizens’ in international relations 19

man’s nature’ (Vattel 1964: 5–6). There was an obligation upon ‘the race of men’
to cultivate ‘a friendly society’ because of ‘nature’s will’ that all persons are ‘kins-
men’ (Pufendorf 1934b: 212). On account of this primordial and universal moral
community, obligations to citizens could not constitute the outer parameter of the
individual’s moral experience; and vertical divisions between states, correspond-
ingly, could not be the sole, defining characteristics of the states-system.

The attempt to mediate between two distinct philosophical traditions made it
impossible for those early theories to develop a coherent account of the modern
system of states. Their failure is manifest in their discussion of the character of
sovereign rights and the principles of statecraft. Ascertained within contractari-
anism, the constitutive principles of the states-system are rough reproductions
of the principles of conduct observed by individuals within the original state of
nature (Pufendorf 1927: 90; Vattel 1964: 7). The sovereign’s right to promote
the interests of his association, by force if necessary, is analogous to the right of
self-help that existed prior to the creation of society. States must possess these
rights until and unless they consent to their amendment or surrender. But, from
a perspective inclined to highlight the unifying capacity of human reason, the
attempt to endorse these absolute, vertical divisions between communities is un-
justified. It commits the error of forming ‘a plan of geographical morality, by
which the duties of men in public and private situations are not governed by their
relation to the great Governor of the Universe or by their relations to humankind,
but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels not of life, but of latitudes’ (Burke,
cited in Bredvold and Ross 1970: 17). Such a ‘plan of geographical morality’
violates the existence of a universal moral constituency upholding the rights and
duties that bind all persons together in a world society. The ethical state cannot
regard its rights and responsibilities as constituted by the transactions between its
individual members alone; the former cannot emanate from a pact that excludes
all but future citizens, and the rights and duties of insiders and outsiders must be
harmonized. Indeed, as Fichte observed, to avoid being ‘in contradiction with the
concept of right, a commonwealth . . . must embrace the whole globe, or at least,
must contain the possibility of uniting the whole of mankind’ (Fichte 1869: 215).
The dual foundations of classical theory advanced competing ways of ascertain-
ing the scope of the individual’s moral sensibilities and their implications for the
organization of international society.

Sharply opposed accounts of the morality of statecraft emerge from these di-
verse philosophical bases. Here, a familiar dichotomy between private and public
ethics arises alongside the ‘man–citizen’ division. On the contractarian account,
the principle of reciprocity facilitates the emergence of a society of states, but the
reason for states is a constraint upon the level of sociability that can be exhibited
in their external relations. Because of the structure of political obligation, states
cannot allow that international obligations are permanently binding nor can they
dismiss out of hand any act of duplicity or violence outlawed within domestic so-
ciety. Because duties between human beings cannot be extended indefinitely into
the space between states, moral and political experience is bifurcated into the dis-
tinct realms of private and public ethics. This bifurcation is an inevitable product

20 The problem of community

of the compact that the sovereign, as trustee for the welfare of the community,
must sometimes deny the validity of principles that are normally observed in the
conduct of purely private relations. This dichotomy is not objectively given in the
anarchic nature of the states-system but depends on the prior decision to confine
the principal moral constituency to the boundaries of the political association. On
account of the apparent rationality of this decision, morality can be neatly divided
into two realms without disturbing the unity of citizens’ moral lives.

Nevertheless, if the states-system is an artefact superimposed upon a pre-exist-
ent world morality then the legitimacy of this division must be questioned. Con-
sidered alongside the belief in universal reason, the separation between private
and public ethics is a reflection of the incomplete, one-sided nature of moral life.
Artificial boundaries between states create an indefensible tension at the heart
of the individual’s moral experience, whether apprehended or not. What is at is-
sue, therefore, is the existence of particularistic social moralities that centre the
individual’s moral sensibilities on the immediate, political group. Against this
practice, moral universalism asserts that a person should be concerned with ‘the
all-encompassing sphere of cosmopolitan sentiment’ (Kant 1964: 140); moreover,
the moral self-consciousness of individuals and societies ought to develop to the
point at which ‘a violation of right in one place of the earth is felt all over it’ (Kant,
cited in Forsyth et al. 1970: 216). The sovereign should not be party to a division
between the principles of domestic and international political life; and, as moral
agents, sovereigns should honour obligations to collaborate to control the states-
system so that ‘it may be brought into conformity with natural right’ (Kant 1970b:
228–9). On this account, the attempt to weave universal moral principles into the
affairs of states holds the key to overcoming the tension between the obligations
of men and citizens.

Two conceptions of moral obligation were embedded in the classical reflections
on the Western states-system. But the corresponding visions of world political or-
ganization were not made explicit and the internal contradictions of the argument
were suppressed. Typical of these writings was the tendency to relax the force of
obligations to humanity. Pufendorf and Vattel both relied on the argument that
these obligations possess an essentially indeterminate status. Pufendorf (1927:
48) argued that it is only within civil societies that human beings have ascertained
the precise composition of the rights and duties that should bind them together;
the social contract established what they could not be certain of on the basis of
the natural law alone. Vattel (1964: 7–8) stated that the content of the natural law
is imprecise, that it lends itself to varying interpretations, and that states should
therefore generally refrain from judging each other’s conduct. Obligations to
citizens are determinate; obligations to other human beings are not. However,
neither Pufendorf nor Vattel wished to deny the realm of human obligation with
its supposedly civilizing effects on the relations between states. Perhaps the im-
plication to draw is that the states-system is as rational a form of world political
organization as human beings can establish prior to making obligations to human-
ity more concrete at some (improbable) future point. But, in neither writer’s work
is there a suggestion that the states-system exhibits only an imperfect or qualified

‘Men and citizens’ in international relations 21

form of rationality. Indeed, the roles and responsibilities of members of sovereign
states appear to pre-suppose the absolute rationality of the state and the finality of
the states-system. Although ‘the services of humanity’ survived the formation of
special political arrangements, citizens were urged to hold ‘nothing dearer’ than
the ‘welfare and safety’ of the state; similarly, sovereigns were required to comply
with the imperative that ‘the welfare of the people is the supreme law’ (Pufendorf
1927: 121, 144). ‘No convention or special agreement’ could cancel ‘the duties
of humanity’, but a constitutive principle of the state-system declared that ‘the
liberty of a Nation would remain incomplete if other Nations presumed to inspect
and control its conduct’ (Vattel 1964: 5). The attempt to legitimize these proposi-
tions reveals that, at best, classical theory equivocated between contractarianism
and universalism.

The principal merit of Kant’s political philosophy was its attempt to overcome
the inadequacies of earlier international relations theory. In contrast to ‘the miser-
able comforters’ (Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel), Kant aimed to take the principle
of equality seriously as a principle of international relations (Kant 1970b: 211;
Gallie 1978: ch. 2). The main features of his conception of world politics are
sufficiently well known to make recapitulation unnecessary here. In short, the ap-
proach sought to establish the absoluteness of reason and to overcome the division
between contractarianism and universalism (Murphy 1970: 110–1). Nevertheless,
the dominant trends in social and political thought did not coincide with Kant’s
individualistic foundation for a world ethic; they ran counter to doctrines that
supposed there was a distinction to be made between the norms of particular times
and places and the values supplied by an overarching reason. Romanticism, for
instance, criticized two key elements in the traditional contractarian theories of
society and politics as exemplified in the writings of Pufendorf and Vattel: first,
the belief that human arrangements were artefacts through which humans sought
to satisfy pre-social needs; and, second, the belief that individuals possessed, ir-
respective of their cultural or temporal location, the same set of rational capacities
(Lovejoy 1941). The second of these criticisms was presumed by later writers to
undercut Kant’s critique of the states-system.3 Irrespective of the accuracy of this
point, the impact of romanticism was to transform the basis on which traditional
international relations theories had rested.

The historicist theory of international relations
Employing the romanticist critique of individualism and rationalism, historicism
claimed that human capacities were inseparable from the forms of life in which
they developed. By claiming that ethical capabilities were similarly dependent,
it was thought possible to subvert the belief in a universal moral constituency
required by transcendent reason. The latter worldview was predicated upon the
wrongful abstraction of individuals from their social and historical contexts.
Individuals, it was argued, were not human beings first and French or German
afterwards (Treitschke 1915: 127–8). Only in the West had thinkers become pre-
occupied with analysing the human condition as it might have been prior to the

22 The problem of community

appearance of different social and political practices (Treitschke 1915). The dis-
course that aimed to depict the natural characteristics of early humans simply
underlined its cultural limitations; invariably, present day social categories were
projected on to the thought and action of ‘natural man’. Culture’s unavoidable
and irreducible qualities were no more evident than in the theorist’s ambition to
transcend them.

It was therefore argued that the primordial fact about humanity is the exist-
ence of cultural individualities. Individuals are not undifferentiated members of
a humanity that might one day attain political unification but participants in the
diverse communities of ‘intellect and spirit’ which have developed in history
(Sterling 1958; Aron 1966: 585–91). The function of states was not to maximize
the pre-social requirements of their members but to preserve and enhance the
cultures for which they were responsible. Human existence involved cultural
pluralism and the necessity of recognizing divisions between sovereign states.
But, if there is no moral law that is transcultural, on what basis can international
political theory be developed and what possibilities are there for reasoning about
the relations between states? Historicists believed that they had established that
a theory of obligations to humanity was problematic; the aspiration to specify
universal moral duties immediately privileged values that were dominant within a
few cultures. But the rejection of transcultural or suprahistorical values was not a
denial, it was supposed, of a genuinely international political theory. Historicism
took humanity to be neither an essence shared by all persons nor a set of innate
natural tendencies but the totality of diverse and often incommensurable cultural
configurations.4 Humanity was revealed in the various forms of life that had de-
veloped in radically different cultural contexts. No single culture could manifest
the totality of human possibilities; and since every state had a significant role to
play in preserving and unfolding human capacities, separate states did not detract
from, but enhanced, humanity.

A unique discussion of the presuppositions of a states-system emerged along-
side this account of humanity. Each culture had the right of access to its own
political form under the rubric that institutional differentiation was required by
cultural pluralism. For the historicist, the state has obligations to enhance its
variant on humanity, and moral consciousness need not appear in the form of a
tension between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ ethical requirements. Horizontal moral
ties between individual members of world society are deemed illusory; what is
objectively necessary is the division of the species between bounded political
communities (Sterling 1958; Aron 1966). Unlike classical theory, however, these
propositions could be advanced without being vulnerable to Kant’s charge of fail-
ing inexcusably to apply principles of natural right to the ‘wasteland’ between
states. Historicism had sought to overcome that dichotomy between the state and
humanity which had produced internal contradictions in rationalist theories of
international relations. By reducing individualism and cosmopolitanism to mere
abstractions, historicism sought to overcome the age-old separation between man
and citizen.

The historicist critique of modern natural law theory may appear to be un-

‘Men and citizens’ in international relations 23

answerable, but historicism cannot avoid generating its own set of internal contra-
dictions. Rather then dwell on the familiar argument that historicist reasoning is
self-refuting,5 it is important to identify some problems in its attempt to character-
ize the relationship between culture and humanity.

In to do this, I shall assume the existence of two cultures that are founded
on mutually exclusive principles of international relations. While one culture ac-
cepts the historicist’s claim that all cultural configurations help to manifest human-
ity, and acknowledges obligations to other states on this basis, the other confines
obligations simply to relations between members of its own, allegedly superior
cultural formation. The historicist argument is that each culture is necessary in
to manifest the diverse range of human possibilities. …