War

GUERRA. –

I. NOTIONS

There are many definitions of war. Their extreme variety depends either on the influence of particular ideologies, or on the overly broad meaning attributed to the term, so as to include forms of struggle that are not properly war, or on the selection of some evaluative element of the fact, which subsequently restricts its scope of application. The first defect is found in those who conceive of war as a pure affirmation of power; the second, for example, was committed by Grotius, followed by Vattel, who included civil strife within the concept of war; the third was accepted, together with others, by Taparelli, who defined it as a “clashing of equal societies to uphold right by force,” where the emphasis on the purpose of defending right would prevent aggressions that violate it from being regarded as war.

The definition, deduced from a careful analysis of the fact, must be able to encompass only, and all, uses of force that correspond to certain common elements, and must disregard, as Grotius had already observed, any evaluative judgment, since both wars fought in defense of right and those that trample upon it are wars. Bearing this requirement in mind, war may be defined as: a state of armed struggle between sovereign peoples, who intend by this means to resolve questions pending between them, imposing their will upon the adversary.

War, first of all, does not consist in a single act of hostility, which begins and ends in itself, nor in episodic clashes, but properly in a state or condition that continues uninterruptedly from the first outbreak of hostilities until the conclusion of peace, and comprises the acts carried out during this period: passive resistance, active campaigns, truces, armistices, and so on, combining them all into a single relationship commonly called a state of belligerency. Hostilities are not in themselves war, but become war when they are the consequence of such a state. In fact, international practice and international law recognize forms of violent pressure and hostile acts that do not produce a state of belligerency and that, for this very reason, are not regarded as war. Reprisals in peacetime may serve as an example.

Balladore Pallieri observes that, in order to determine concretely whether a hostile act is war or not, it is necessary to examine the will of the State that produces it—namely, whether the act is undertaken with the animus bellandi. From an objective standpoint, this does not appear necessary, since, as it is neither indispensable nor in itself required by international law that the State should expressly declare its will, if the coercive action is not accompanied by a contrary declaration, the use of force implicitly entails the animus bellandi and produces a state of belligerency. Once a State’s intention to resolve a given question by force has become explicit or implicit, a state of war arises, causing the immediate suspension of certain rules of conduct that States are obliged to observe in peacetime, permitting a series of actions previously prohibited by those same rules, and at the same time bringing into force others intended to regulate the new condition that has arisen between the belligerent parties.

Properly speaking, war is, secondly, that fought between sovereign peoples who, as equal and independent subjects of the international community, enjoy autonomy in establishing the lines of their internal and external conduct and need not appeal to a higher authority. Suárez already wrote in his time, and all modern authors agree with him, that an external conflict, contrary to external peace, is properly called war when it takes place between two sovereigns or two States: in other cases it is either sedition, if it occurs between the authorities and citizens or between factions of the same nation, or a duel and brawl if it occurs between private persons. It should only be noted in this regard that, according to the opinion of more than one publicist, if a sedition were to acquire such extent and strength as to divide a people into two militarily organized parts, each with its own government, the conditions would exist for a state of war to arise and for the two factions to be regarded as belligerents.

Finally, since war is a human act carried out by the community through its representatives, in order to complete its concept it is necessary to mention some end toward which it remains directed. This can consist only in the goal that every belligerent, in any circumstances, seeks to attain, irrespective of any moral or legal evaluation of II. Now there is no doubt that every war is undertaken in order to resolve some question that could not or was not desired to be resolved by peaceful means, so as to impose by force upon the adversary the solution that appears to the belligerent most consistent with its right or interest. The nature of the question does not affect the essence of the fact, which will be a war whether it pursues the defense of right or seeks the triumph of a pure interest.

The elements described distinguish war from other similar uses of force by which one State intends to exert pressure on the will of another State, in order to induce it to yield more readily to its demands. Such are reprisals in peacetime, the temporary occupation of part of a territory, naval and land blockade, and embargo.

II. DIVISION

War is customarily distinguished as defensive or offensive, applying a purely external criterion. It is called defensive when it serves to repel an aggression, and offensive when one attacks the adversary. The same external criterion—namely, the initiation of hostilities—serves to establish who the aggressor is. The same distinction could be derived by applying a moral or juridical criterion that evaluates the act. In this second case, a defensive war would be one undertaken in defense of a right, and an offensive war one that violates II. But since every just war has as its aim the defense of a right, either presently threatened or already violated, defensive and just war would coincide, so that only an unjust war would be offensive; this would complicate the matter in practical terms when defining the aggressor, because of the difficulty of evaluating the motives that prompted recourse to arms. Moreover, adopting the moral criterion presupposes that the question of just and unjust war has already been resolved—a question far from settled among scholars of international law.

For this reason, mention is made here, provisionally and almost in a historical capacity, of the other distinction between just and unjust war, common to all treatise writers, from Grozio to Vattel, to cite only two of the better-known names, before the triumph of juridical positivism. Just is the war whose aim is the defense of a grave and certain right; unjust is that which violates II. The accuracy of this distinction, consistently accepted by the Catholic tradition down to our own day, will emerge from what will be set forth concerning the morality of war, the central point of disagreement with the philosophical and juridical speculation of contemporary thought.

III. ERRORS

There are various philosophical currents, or currents so called, which, although not always in agreement in their principles, nevertheless agree in declaring war either always licit, as the sole source of law, or at least not assessable according to moral and juridical criteria. According to Hobbes’s naturalistic conception, war would be the normal condition of humanity, governed by the law of the bellum omnium contra omnes. Sociological conceptions have accepted this fatalistic view. The history of humanity would develop according to a direction necessarily determined by the laws of the cosmos and of life, among which that of the struggle for existence stands out, of which war among peoples would be an inevitable manifestation. Political Darwinism has strengthened these conceptual positions by rigidly applying to relations among peoples the principle of the survival of the strongest. Peoples would be made to fight one another so that the stronger might assert its right to life through victory over the weaker. Every people naturally seeks an enemy with whom to measure itself, and this once again by virtue of an inexorable law that dominates all life.

Political philosophy, for its part, has not lagged behind. Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Treittche, and other worshippers of raison d’état or proponents of the theory of the superman, translated into the theory of the super-race or super-nation, have sung hymns to force as the sole foundation of relations among States, which should be conceived as relations of pure power. The aim of every political organization would be the assertion of its power and the expansion of its dominion, for which the use of force is necessary. These evaluations of war are shared both by currents with a materialistic basis and by those with idealistic content. According to Hegel, war is necessary to peoples as the breath of the winds is necessary to the sea in order to prevent it from falling into putrefaction.

Militarists, such as von Bernhardt, and realist politicians, such as Bismark, not to mention the more recent totalitarian regimes, have made this divinization of force their own; in its glorification they have even gone so far as to lapse into lyricism, presenting war as the fosterer of the manly virtues of peoples, the stimulator of fruitful initiatives for the progress of humanity, and the promoter of civilization. War, it has been said, stands to peoples as maternity stands to woman, a source of life and of natural and necessary vigor.

J. De Maistre moves on another plane when he boldly proclaims war to be a divine thing. At the foundation of his thought lies the erroneous concept that life in its entirety is dominated by the law of destruction until the attainment of the silence of death. Man would obey this divine law when he descends onto the battlefields and destroys himself with enthusiastic fury, without understanding what he is doing.

The theories just mentioned have in common a blind fatalistic naturalism, deduced from mechanistic, biological, and monistic conceptions of the universe, with the exception of De Maistre, who relies upon a providential fatalism, and the consequent denial of any possibility of a moral evaluation of war.

Legal positivism agrees with this conclusion. According to the majority of contemporary international jurists, war within the international order is always and under every supposition juridically licit, and the State may resort to it for any reason that seems suitable to it, whether to defend one of its rights or to secure one of its interests. International law, as Strupp and Anzilotti maintained, and more recently Balladore Pallieri, cannot say whether or not a State may wage war, but can only regulate hostilities once they have begun and a state of belligerency has arisen. The distinction between a just and an unjust war consequently remains outside the law, and could at most be drawn according to the metajuridical criteria of an abstract justice.

The reason for this position is to be sought in the principle according to which no other law exists that can regulate the conduct of States except the positive law established by their will or consecrated by custom; hence the conclusion that, when such law lays down no explicit rule, States enjoy perfect freedom of action. War would fall within this sphere of freedom not contemplated by law, nor regulated by it in any way, and would therefore always be juridically licit within the international order. It must nevertheless be added that opposition to this theory has arisen within the juridical field itself. The Viennese school of Verdross, for example, has once again upheld the distinction between a just and an unjust war on the basis of certain positive norms implicit in the international order; and the Italian institutionalist theory could return to it with even greater justification, relying on the principles immanent in international society that it maintains.

On the opposite side of the barricade stand the theories that condemn war as a means that is always illicit. Humanitarianism, inspired by a certain vaporous and abstract cult of humanity, would abolish all national, political, and religious divisions, the perennial source of conflicts, in order to secure perpetual peace for peoples. One may recall the Kantian dream of perpetual peace. Pacifists have joined this crusade, to which certain Catholic currents have also given their support. Relying on the Gospel, which commands nonresistance to evil, condemns the use of the sword, inculcates the precept of charity even toward enemies, and counsels gentleness, these currents have concluded that war is always immoral because it would oppose the essence of the Christian message.

Some Catholic theologians and sociologists have derived the condemnation of war, as a means that has by now become immoral, from another principle—namely, the disproportion that would exist today between the immense evils produced by war and the defense of rights. It would follow that a procedure once licit, circumstances having changed, must be regarded as essentially illicit. Some have even maintained that, for the reasons indicated and by virtue of the principle of international charity, a State that has been unjustly attacked might be obliged to sacrifice itself for the good of the community.

IV. CATHOLIC DOCTRINE

The exposition of Catholic doctrine will by itself serve to reveal the error of all these positions.

The tradition of Catholic thought has always regarded armed conflict among peoples as a deplorable scourge, a calamity that descends upon them and disrupts their civil life, accumulating material and moral ruins, sowing slaughter and human victims along its bloody path. No ideological current has possessed as acute a sense as the Catholic one of the tragic nature of the event of war, and none has worked as assiduously to mitigate its effects by strengthening among peoples the feeling of universal brotherhood, unity, and love. The efforts made by Christianity to render conflicts less harmful, to soften customs, and to inspire the belligerents with sentiments of humanity remain in history as stages along a long path toward higher forms of civilization: for example, the Truces of God established in medieval society, and the other rules concerning the treatment of prisoners and the customs of war, from which the formation of modern international law began.

Nevertheless, the Christian conception has kept equally distant both from the shoal of fatalism and from that of humanitarianism and pacifism divorced from reality. One of its fundamental principles is that war is not the necessary effect of cosmic, physical, biological, or economic forces, but the work of man, a conscious, free, and responsible being, whose actions are subject to no determinism of nature, because the spirit dominates it and conducts itself in full autonomy from its laws. Public society is wholly permeated by this spiritual leaven, since it is constituted by human beings; hence its life too unfolds on the higher plane of freedom, where no fatalism reigns. War, like all other collective determinations, depends upon the human will, which, with full awareness of the ends it pursues and the means it adopts, chooses and produces it, although external causes may influence II. It is therefore, like every human act, a moral act, subject to certain principles and laws of action.

At the foundation of the Catholic conception of war there undoubtedly lies the idea of original sin, of which it is a painful consequence. S. Agostino insisted particularly on this concept, but not in order to deduce from it a fatalism in the manner of De Maistre. Original sin explains why man yields to the instinct of violence and to the passions of pride and power, but it does not destroy human freedom and responsibility, leaving both man and society in mastery of their acts. War, therefore, despite original sin, remains a freely performed act, to be evaluated according to moral principles. In the higher plan of Providence, it is an evil, but an evil that man produces through his voluntary choice.

No conception is more human than the Christian one, yet its most genuine supporters have not allowed themselves to be deceived by exaggerated sentimentality. Peace is a great good—indeed, the greatest earthly good of humanity—and social life must be ordered toward its preservation. It is not, however, a good to be maintained at any cost through the sacrifice of justice and right, which must rather be protected and defended. The use of force and war, as s. Agostino taught, have as their purpose peace and the order of civil society, and may be employed against those who disturb II. Catholic doctrine is peaceful but not pacifist; it is humane but not humanitarian.

This principled approval of the use of force to preserve or restore the order of peace in justice is not contrary to the teachings of the Gospel. The Gospel is a code of life prescribed for the sanctification of the individual, to whom are addressed the counsels of non-resistance to evil, renunciation of the use of the sword, charity toward enemies, and turning the other cheek to anyone who strikes him, in view of an otherworldly reward that will recompense his meekness. These same precepts and counsels cannot be transferred to collective life without resulting in the impunity of the wicked and social disintegration. The State, moreover, has no future life in which it may receive compensation for its renunciations; its mission unfolds and ends on earth, concerns temporal rather than eternal goods, and the well-being of present life rather than future happiness, at least directly. It is therefore its duty to protect itself and order, with respect for all rights, by appropriate means, including war, if this is necessary.

This position is not contradicted but rather confirmed by the Gospel itself. Catholic theologians and moralists have posed the question whether war was contrary to the essence of the Christian message, and, following s. Agostino, have demonstrated that no such contradiction exists. Not only are certain military undertakings praised in the Old Testament, such as those of the Maccabee brothers, but in the New Testament, too, s. Giovanni Battista does not require the soldiers who come to him to receive the Baptism of repentance to abandon their profession. Jesus Christ acted in the same manner toward the centurion, whose piety was praised to him. If the military profession is not in itself evil, neither can the use of arms in defense be judged intrinsically evil.

This was the Christian attitude from the earliest beginnings. The studies of Battifol, Vacandard, and Vanderpol have now demonstrated that Christians served in the armies of the pagan emperors, finding no incompatibility between their profession and the faith they professed. When the Fathers of the Church advise them to abandon it, they do not rely on reasons derived from evangelical preaching, but solely on the practical consideration of the moral and religious dangers encountered in its exercise. With the exception of Lattanzio, and, to a considerably lesser degree, Origene and Tertulliano, the other Fathers saw no incompatibility between the profession of arms and the profession of the Christian faith. To find an absolute condemnation of war, supported by reasons of faith, one must await the innovators of the Protestant « reformation ».

Nevertheless, a fairly clear formulation of Catholic doctrine on war is not found until s. Agostino. The importance of the principles he enunciated, in relation to the subsequent development of doctrine, is such that it is worthwhile to establish them. S. Agostino distinguishes between just and unjust wars. Unjust wars, waged out of greed for conquest and domination, are large-scale brigandage and grand larceny. Just wars have as their purpose the preservation of peace, which is tranquility in order, and to this it is repugnant that the wicked should remain unpunished and injustices unrepaired. War, therefore, is legitimate if it aims to repair injustices and restore the order of peace disturbed by wrongs inflicted upon individuals, so that they may not be repeated. He adds, however, that since war produces the gravest evils, it should be resorted to only in a case of grave necessity, which exists when the iniquity of the adversary compels the wise man to take up arms: « Iniquitas partis adversae iusta bella ingerit gerenda sapienti ».

These ideas are concentrated in a celebrated text that served as an inspiration for the whole of medieval speculation. « Iusta bella definiri solent, - writes s. Agostino (In Heptat., VI, 10: PL 34, col. 781) - quae ulciscuntur iniurias, si qua gens vel civitas quae bello petenda est, vel vindicare neglexerit quod a suis improbe factum est, vel reddere quod per iniurias ablatum est ».

The outline of Catholic doctrine was thus fixed forever by the pen of St. Augustine. Later generations would work upon it: St. Thomas, who set it forth in systematic form, and especially the theologians and moralists of the sixteenth century, among whom de Vitoria and Suárez stand out, developing it into an organic body of doctrine that remained almost unchanged down to our own times. This doctrine may be summarized in a few brief propositions.

War, considered in itself, insofar as it is the use of force, is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil, but indifferent. It becomes good or evil, just or unjust, according to the ends it seeks to achieve. Defensive war against an unjust aggressor is always licit, because « vim vi repellere omnia iura permittunt »: individuals and peoples alike possess, by virtue of the order of natural justice, the right of legitimate self-defense. For offensive war to be just, it must satisfy certain conditions. First, its motive and purpose must be the vindication of a gravely violated right or the reparation of a grave wrong suffered, the one and only reason that can legitimize recourse to the violence of war. All other motives—expansion of power, national pride, ambition for domination, political interest, prevention of the prosperity of others, irredentism, and so on—are morally and juridically invalid.

Secondly, war must be the last resort to which the State has recourse, the final attempt to save the right and avenge the offense, which may legitimately be undertaken only after all peaceful avenues have been exhausted. Finally, its morality depends in part on the proportion between the evils that war generally produces and the importance of the right one intends to defend. If it is foreseen that war will be harmful to the nation or, as de Vitoria adds, to the community of nations, in such a way that the evils are not balanced by the importance of the right, prudence and justice require that it be avoided.

Once these principles have been established, it remains to determine what degree of certainty must be attained regarding possession of the right that one intends to defend through war. With few exceptions, Catholic writers have been unanimous in maintaining that a doubtful or morally uncertain right cannot legitimately be defended by arms. For a war to be just, a morally certain and grave right is required. So long as the doubt persists, the State has the duty to employ every means to remove it; if it fails to do so, it is obliged to abstain from any warlike violence and to seek a compromise solution with the opposing party. In this context, the concept of arbitration appears in Suárez, capable of extensive development.

Catholic writers are likewise unanimous in condemning preventive war and in holding it impossible for a war to be objectively just on both sides, although they do not exclude this possibility in the subjective sphere, since it may happen that one who is objectively in the wrong mistakenly believes that reason is on his side. Catholic thought therefore excludes the application of probabilism to the grave matter of war. Animated by the cult of right and justice, it ultimately recognizes as legitimate only defensive war, in the sense that war must always aim either at defending a right presently threatened or at defending a right already violated.

This position must now be justified. Its first foundation lies in the consideration of force as a means indifferent in itself. The correctness of this assessment is deduced from the laws that guide human action. Man acts in conformity with his rational nature when the motives for action are suggested to him by the intellect and freely accepted by the will. What moves man is always an internal principle, an evaluative judgment of the intellect that presents an object as true and good, together with an act of the will that loves and desires this good. From these inner sources flows the force that binds the will to duty, the moral obligation that imperatively dictates a necessary norm for human conduct.

Physical force, on the other hand, is an extrinsic principle, a violence that affects man’s organic part and not his spiritual faculties. Consequently, it cannot be a human law, nor can such a law generate it; it is therefore reduced to a means that man may and must use according to the higher dictate of reason, from which alone it can derive the character of morality. Only deterministic materialism or the no less deterministic idealist monism can deny the correctness of this reasoning. If war, then, is nothing other than violence, it is at the same time a means that acquires its moral character from the motives underlying its use.

In internal civil life, the use of force, except in the case of legitimate self-defense, is forbidden to private individuals, since the defense of rights is entrusted to the organs of supreme authority. The same is not true in international society, where, because of the lack of a higher authority, this task is assigned by the natural law itself to individual States. These may not only repel unjust aggression but may also punish the violator of justice, compelling him by force to repair the wrong inflicted and to restore the order of justice. It is a supreme requirement of social life that the wicked not remain unpunished and that injustice be repaired; and since, in a society of equals without a central authority, this office can be performed only by the one who has suffered the offense, the objective order of justice invests that party with the right to punish and to make reparation.

The justification of war therefore rests, on the one hand, upon the hypothesis—which is in fact a reality—of the absence of a supreme authority in the international community and, on the other, upon the requirement of the natural law that the violator of the norms of social coexistence be punished and that the order of justice, injured by the offense, be restored. It remains, then, to clarify the penal character that war comes to assume in this conception.

Catholic tradition recognizes three forms of just war: war ad repellendas iniurias, or properly defensive war; war ad vindicandas iniurias, or offensive war; and war ad repetendas res, offensive war of a particular character. The first, although at the outset it is not an act of retributive justice, becomes one by reason of the unjust aggression to which it responds. The second, by contrast, is wholly directed toward the punishment of guilt. The State that undertakes it, according to the common conception of Catholic theologians and moralists, exercises against its adversary the function of a judge, who punishes and restores the order. Yet two serious difficulties must be resolved in order to accept the penal concept of war. The first arises from the necessity of jurisdiction for the exercise of the judicial office, a jurisdiction that does not in itself exist among equal and independent subjects; the second from the fact that the judging State becomes judge in its own cause.

Suarez responded to the first of these difficulties in an exhaustive manner, and his solution was subsequently developed at length by Taparelli. It rests upon the concept that the State responsible for the injustice naturally becomes subject to the offended State ratione delicti. Justice requires, in international society as well, the punishment of the offense and the restoration of order. Since this cannot be achieved through the intervention of an authority superior to the two parties, by virtue of a norm existing in the order of nature the offended party becomes superior to the offender and derives from that same order its investiture as judge, with the right to punish and avenge the offense committed by the other. The exercise of retributive justice therefore rests upon a jurisdiction that emerges from the position created by guilt.

To resolve the second difficulty of the judge in his own case, appeal is made to the impossibility of proceeding otherwise so long as international society remains in an inorganic state. The appeal is undoubtedly objective, but it does not help to avert the dangers implicit in the fact that the judge is at the same time a party to the case, nor to ensure observance of the most profound norm of justice, which commands impartiality in every criminal judgment. This is a weak point in the doctrine.

As Regout has demonstrated, the penal conception of war is not exclusive to the Catholic tradition, which, as has been said, recognized a form of offensive war directed not ad vindicandas iniurias, but ad repetendas res, stripped of any penal character, if the adversary retains things that do not belong to him—for example, a province, believing that he has legitimate possession of II. Since guilt is absent from this supposition, the foundation on which the exercise of vindictive justice rests is also absent.

Partly connecting with this concept, but principally by virtue of a deeper analysis of human psychology, the theologians and moralists of the sixteenth century developed and perfected the earlier doctrine, which was uncertain on this point, maintaining that, in order to wage a just war, it is not necessary to ascertain moral guilt, but that the presence of merely juridical, factual guilt suffices, since it is impossible to know the adversary’s inner dispositions. This inflection of the doctrine toward a more objective evaluation was judged by Vanderpol and Salvioli to constitute a break with the preceding position, which, in their view, rested exclusively on the strict concept of moral guilt. This criticism has been shown to be unfounded.

The question might now be raised whether the method of total war, which draws the entire belligerent reaction into hostilities and, with the new means of attack, piles up immense and terrifying material and moral ruins, does not require a revision of the classical doctrine of just war. Some Catholic theologians have thought so, as was mentioned at the outset, holding that under the new circumstances war has become a means that is always and intrinsically illicit. It has nevertheless been observed that defensive war will be a lawful and just act under any supposition, since the law will always permit a State that has been unjustly attacked to exercise the natural faculty of legitimate self-defence, repelling force with force.

With regard to offensive war, it has furthermore been pointed out that the worsening of the evils caused by the new methods of warfare and by the new deadly weapons cannot put an end to the natural requirement that crime be punished and rights protected. Since right is now, as Taparelli correctly maintains, the supreme good of social life—for without its observance society would dissolve—the proportion between the evils caused by war and the good that it is intended to protect will always favour the good, provided that the right claimed and defended is important. The sole conclusion to be drawn from the immense evils produced by modern war consists in the greater gravity that the right to be vindicated must possess for the life of the State, so that it may permit recourse to arms.

A total revision of the classical doctrine would be required only if the hypothesis from which it proceeds were to disappear—that is, if international society were to pass from an inorganic to an organic form, establishing a supreme power entrusted with the defence of right and capable of discharging this office. Until such a supreme organ is created, war, under the conditions already described, will be a morally and juridically lawful act.

For a complete account of Catholic doctrine on war, V. OSTILITÀ; PACE; RAPPRESAGLIA.

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