WAR. - I. CONCEPTS.
There are many definitions of war. Their extreme variety stems either from the influence of particular ideologies, or from the overly broad sense given to the term, so as to include forms of struggle that are not properly war, or from the selection of some evaluative element of the fact, which then restricts its scope of application. The first defect is found in those who conceive war as a pure assertion of power; in the second, for example, Grotius fell, followed by Vattel, who included civil war within the concept of war; in the third, along with others, Taparelli erred, defining it as a “clash of equal societies to uphold right by force,” where the reference to the end of defending right would prevent considering as war those aggressions that violate II.
A definition, derived from careful analysis of the fact, must be able to embrace only and all uses of force that correspond to certain common elements, and must disregard, as Grotius already observed, any evaluative judgment, since wars are as much those waged in defense of right as those that trample II. Keeping this requirement in mind, war may be defined as: a state of armed conflict between sovereign peoples who intend to resolve pending issues between them by this means, imposing their will on the adversary.
War, first of all, does not consist in a single act of hostility that closes and exhausts itself, nor in episodic clashes, but properly in a state or condition that continues uninterruptedly from the very beginning of hostilities until the conclusion of peace, and includes the acts performed during this period: passive resistance, active campaigns, truces, armistices, all coalescing into a single relationship commonly called the state of belligerency. Hostilities are not in themselves war, but become war when they are the consequence of such a state. Indeed, forms of violent pressure and hostile acts that do not produce the state of belligerency and are therefore not considered war are recognized in practice and international law. An example is reprisals in peacetime.
Balladore Pallieri observes that 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 such an act is undertaken with the *animus bellendi*. From an objective standpoint this does not appear necessary, since international law does not require that a State expressly declare its will; if coercive action is not accompanied by a contrary declaration, the use of force implicitly carries the *animus bellendi* and produces the state of belligerency. Once the will of a State to resolve a given issue by force is made manifest, whether explicitly or implicitly, the state of war arises, which immediately suspends some rules of conduct that States are obliged to observe in peacetime, permitting a series of actions previously forbidden by those same rules, and at the same time bringing into force others designed to regulate the new condition arising between the belligerent parties.
Properly speaking, war is, secondly, that which is waged between sovereign peoples who, as equal and independent subjects of the international community, enjoy autonomy in determining the lines of their domestic and foreign conduct without having to resort to a higher authority. Suárez wrote at the time, and all modern authors agree with him, that an external conflict contrary to external peace is properly called war only when it takes place between two sovereigns or two States: in other cases it is either sedition if it occurs between authority and citizens or between factions of the same nation, or a duel or brawl if it occurs between private individuals. It should be noted, however, 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 with their own government, the conditions would be met for the emergence of a state of war and for considering the two factions as belligerents.
Finally, since war is a human act emanating from the community through its representatives, to exhaust its concept mention must be made of some end to which it is directed. This cannot consist in anything other than the goal that each belligerent, in whatever circumstances, proposes to achieve, disregarding any moral or legal evaluation of II. It is beyond doubt that every war is undertaken to resolve some issue that could not or would not be resolved peacefully, so as to impose by force on the adversary the solution that the belligerent considers most in accordance with its right or interest. The nature of the issue does not affect the essence of the fact, which will be war whether it pursues the defense of right or aims at the triumph of a mere interest.
These elements distinguish war from other similar uses of force by which one State seeks to exert pressure on the will of another State to induce it more easily to yield to its demands. Such are reprisals in peacetime, temporary occupation of part of a territory, naval and land blockade, and embargo.
II. Classification.
War is usually distinguished into defensive and offensive, applying a purely external criterion. It is called defensive when it serves to repel an aggression, offensive when it attacks the adversary. The same external criterion of the initiation of hostilities serves to establish who is the aggressor. The same distinction could be drawn by applying a moral or legal evaluative criterion of the fact. In this second case, defensive war would be one waged in defense of a right, offensive war one that violates II. But since every just war has as its aim the defense of a right, whether presently threatened or already violated, defensive war and just war would coincide, so that only the unjust would be offensive; this would, for practical purposes, complicate the question of defining aggression because of the difficulty of evaluating the motives that led to recourse to arms. Moreover, the adoption of 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 as a historical note, of the other distinction between just and unjust war, common to all treatises from Grotius to Vattel, to cite only two better-known names, before the triumph of legal positivism. Just is the war that has as its aim the defense of a grave and certain right, unjust that which violates II. The accuracy of this distinction, constantly accepted by Catholic tradition down to our own day, will be evident from what will be said regarding the morality of war, the central point of disagreement with the philosophical and juridical speculation of contemporary thought.
### III. Errors
Diverse are currents of philosophical thought, or those that so designate themselves, which, although not always agreeing in their principles, nevertheless concur in declaring war either always licit as the sole source of rights or at least not evaluable by moral and juridical criteria. According to Hobbes’ naturalistic conception, war would be the normal condition of humanity, governed by the law of the war of all against all. Sociological conceptions have accepted this fatalistic stance. The history of humanity would evolve according to a necessarily predetermined direction by the laws of the cosmos and life, among which the struggle for existence stands out, of which war between peoples would be an inevitable manifestation. Political Darwinism has reinforced these conceptual positions by rigidly applying to relations between peoples the principle of the survival of the fittest. Peoples would be destined to fight one another so that the stronger may affirm its right to life through victory over the weaker. Every people naturally seeks an adversary with which 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, Treitschke, and other worshippers of raison d’état or supporters of the theory of the Übermensch, translated into the theory of superiority or outstripping, have sung hymns to force as the sole foundation of relations between states, which ought to be conceived as relations of pure power. The end of every political entity would be the affirmation of its power and the expansion of its dominion, for which the use of force is necessary. These assessments of war are shared by both materialistic and idealistic currents. According to Hegel, war is necessary to peoples as the breath of the winds is necessary to the sea to prevent it from falling into putrefaction.
Militarists like von Bernhardi and realist politicians like Bismarck, not to mention the more recent totalitarian regimes, have made this divinization of force their own, to the point that its glorification has even lapsed into lyricism, presenting war as the fostress of the masculine virtues of peoples, a stimulant of fruitful initiatives for the progress of humanity, and a promoter of civilization. War, it has been said, is to peoples as motherhood is to woman, a source of life and natural vigor and a necessity.
On another plane stands J. de Maistre, who boldly proclaims war as a divine thing. At the root of his thought lies the erroneous concept that all life is dominated by the law of destruction until the attainment of the silence of death. To this divine law man would obey when he descends upon the battlefield and destroys himself with enthusiastic fury, without understanding what he is doing.
The theories just outlined share a blind fatalistic naturalism, derived from mechanistic, biological, and monistic conceptions of the universe, with the exception of de Maistre, who relies on a providential fatalism, and the consequent denial of any possibility of moral evaluation of war.
Legal positivism concurs in this conclusion. According to most contemporary internationalists, war in the international order is always and under any supposition a juridical licit act, to which a state may resort for any reason it deems opportune, whether to defend a right or to secure an interest. International law, as maintained by Strupp and Anzilotti, and more recently by Balladore Pallieri, cannot say whether a state may or may not wage war, but can only regulate hostilities once they have begun and a state of belligerency has been established. The distinction between just and unjust war consequently falls outside the law and could at most be drawn using metajuridical criteria of abstract justice.
The reason for this position is to be found in the principle according to which no other law exists to regulate the conduct of states except that which is posited by their will or consecrated by custom, whence it follows that, when such law does not dictate any explicit norm, 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 thus in the international order it would always be a juridical licit act. It must however be added that opposition to this theory has arisen even within the juridical field. The Vienna school of Verdross, for example, has returned to supporting the distinction between just and unjust war on the basis of certain implicit positive norms in the international order, and the Italian institutionalist theory could better return to it by leveraging the principles inherent to the international society it upholds.
At the opposite extreme stand theories that condemn war as an always illicit means. Humanitarianism, inspired by a certain vaporous and abstract cult of humanity, would abolish all national, political, and religious divisions, eternal sources of conflict, to ensure perpetual peace among peoples. One need only recall Kant’s dream of perpetual peace. Pacifists have joined this crusade, to which some Catholic currents have also given their assent. Drawing on the Gospel, which commands non-resistance to evil, condemns the use of the sword, inculcates the precept of charity even toward enemies, and counsels meekness, 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 now become immoral from another principle, namely, the disproportion that today exists between the immense evils war produces and the defense of rights; whence it would follow that a procedure licit in other circumstances, by a change of circumstances, must be considered essentially illicit. It has even been argued by some that, for the reasons adduced and by the principle of international charity, a state unjustly attacked might have the obligation to sacrifice itself for the good of the community.
### IV. Catholic Doctrine
The exposition of Catholic doctrine will suffice to reveal the error of all these attitudes.
The tradition of Catholic thought has always regarded armed conflict between peoples as a deplorable scourge, a calamity that befalls them when it upends civil life, heaping up material and moral ruin, sowing massacres and human victims in its bloody path. No ideological current, like the Catholic one, has had as vivid a sense of the tragic nature of war, nor has any worked as hard to mitigate its effects, strengthening in peoples the feeling of universal brotherhood, unity, and love. Remaining in history as stages of a long journey toward forms of a higher civilization are the efforts made by Christianity to render conflicts less harmful, to soften customs, and to inspire feelings of humanity in belligerents—such as the Truces of God established in medieval society and the other rules on the treatment of prisoners and the conduct of war, from which the formation of contemporary international law took its beginning.
Nonetheless, the Christian conception has remained equally distant from the shoals of fatalism as from those of humanitarianism and unrealistic pacifism. A fundamental principle of Christianity is that war is not a necessary effect of cosmic, physical, biological, or economic forces, but rather the work of man—a conscious, free, and responsible being whose actions are not subject to any determinism of nature, since spirit governs and shapes them with full autonomy from its laws. Public society is entirely fermented by this spiritual leaven, being composed of men, and thus its life unfolds on the higher plane of freedom, where no fatalism reigns. War, like all other collective determinations, depends on human will, which, with full awareness of the ends it pursues and the means it adopts, chooses and produces it, even though 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 undoubtedly lies the idea of original sin, of which it is a painful consequence. St. Augustine, in particular, insisted on this concept, but not to deduce a fatalism in the manner of De Maistre. Original sin explains why man yields to the instinct of violence, to the passions of pride and power, but it does not destroy human freedom and responsibility, leaving both man and society in control of their actions. War, therefore, despite original sin, remains a freely willed act and one that can be evaluated according to moral principles. Within the higher plan of Providence, it is an evil, but an evil that man produces through his voluntary choice.
No conception is more humane than the Christian one, and yet its most genuine supporters have not been deluded by exaggerated sentimentalism. Peace is a great good, indeed the greatest earthly good of humanity, to whose maintenance social life must be ordered. It is not, however, a good to be maintained at any cost by sacrificing justice and right, which must rather be protected and defended. The use of force and war, as St. Augustine rightly said, have as their purpose peace and the order of civil society, and may be employed against its disturbers. 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 dictated for the sanctification of the individual, to whom are addressed the counsels of non-resistance to evil, of renouncing the use of the sword, of loving one’s enemies, of turning the other cheek to those who strike him, in view of a reward beyond this earth, which will reward his meekness. The same precepts and counsels cannot be transferred to collective life without resulting in the impunity of the wicked and the disintegration of society. The State, moreover, does not have a future life in which it may receive compensation for its renunciations; its mission unfolds and concludes on earth, concerns temporal goods and not eternal ones, the well-being of present life and not future happiness, at least directly. It is therefore its duty to safeguard itself and order while respecting all rights, using appropriate means, including war, if this is necessary.
This position is confirmed rather than contradicted by the Gospel itself. Catholic theologians and moralists have asked whether war is contrary to the essence of the Christian message, and, following St. Augustine, have demonstrated that no such contrariety exists. Not only are certain military exploits praised in the Old Testament, such as those of the Maccabean brothers, but in the New Testament St. John the Baptist does not command the soldiers who come to him to receive the baptism of repentance to abandon their profession. In the same way, Jesus Christ behaved toward the centurion whose piety was praised. If the military profession is not evil in itself, neither can the use of arms for defense be judged intrinsically evil.
This has been the Christian attitude from the very beginning. It has now been demonstrated by the studies of Battifol, Vacandard, and Vanderpol that Christians served in the armies of pagan emperors, finding no incompatibility between their profession and the faith they professed. When the Fathers of the Church advised them to abandon it, they did so not on grounds derived from evangelical preaching but solely on practical grounds of the moral and religious dangers encountered in its exercise. Except for Lactantius, and to a somewhat lesser extent Origen and Tertullian, 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 motives of faith, one must wait for the innovators of the Protestant Reformation.
Nevertheless, a rather clear formulation of Catholic doctrine on war did not emerge until St. Augustine. The importance of the principles he enunciated is such, in relation to later doctrinal elaboration, that it is worth fixing them. St. Augustine distinguishes between just and unjust war. Unjust wars, waged for the greed of conquest or domination, are a form of brigandage on a large scale and a great robbery. Just wars aim at maintaining peace, which is tranquility in order, a state of affairs to which it is repugnant that the wicked go unpunished and injustices remain uncorrected. War, therefore, is legitimate if it seeks to repair injustices, to restore the order of peace disturbed by wrongs done to individuals, so that they may not recur. He adds, however, that since war produces the gravest evils, recourse must be had to it only in cases of grave necessity, which arises when the iniquity of the adversary forces the wise man to take up arms: “Iniquitas partis adversae iusta bella ingerit gerenda sapienti.”
These ideas are concentrated in a celebrated text that has served as an inspiration to all medieval speculation. “Just wars,” St. Augustine writes (In Heptat., VI, 10: PL 34, col. 781), “are ordinarily defined as those which avenge injuries; if any people or state which is to be punished by war either neglects to punish a wrong done by its subjects or fails to restore what it has unjustly taken.”
The framework of Catholic doctrine was thus fixed forever by the pen of St. Augustine. Later thinkers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, who expounded it in systematic form, and particularly the theologians and moralists of the 16th century—among whom stand out de Vitoria and Suárez—developed it into an organic body of doctrine that has remained almost unchanged to our own day. This doctrine is summarized in a few concise propositions.
War, considered in itself as the use of force, is neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil, but morally indifferent. It becomes good or bad, just or unjust, according to the ends it seeks to achieve. Defensive war against an unjust aggressor is always licit, for “vim vi repellere omnia iura permittunt”: as individuals, so too peoples have, by the order of natural justice, the right of legitimate defense. For offensive war to be just, it must meet certain conditions. In the first place, it must have as its motive and aim the vindication of a gravely violated right or the reparation of a serious wrong suffered—this alone can justify recourse to military violence. All other motives—expansion of power, national pride, ambition for dominion, political interest, prevention of another’s prosperity, irredentism, and the like—are morally and juridically invalid.
In the second place, war must be the final means to which the State resorts, the ultimate attempt to save the right and avenge the offense, which can legitimately be adopted only when all peaceful avenues have been exhausted. Finally, its morality depends on the proportion between the evils that war usually produces and the importance of the right that is intended to be defended. If it is foreseen that war will be harmful to the nation or, as Vitoria adds, to the community of nations, in such a way that the evils do not balance the importance of the right, prudence and justice require that it be avoided.
Having established these principles, it remains to be seen what degree of certainty must be attained regarding the possession of the right that is intended to be defended by 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 the justice of war, a morally certain and grave right is required. As long as doubt persists, the State has the duty to exhaust all means to remove it; and if it fails to do so, it is obliged to refrain from any act of war, seeking instead with the opposing party a solution of compromise. In this context, Suárez introduces the concept of arbitration, which is capable of extensive development.
Catholic writers are also unanimous in condemning preventive war and in holding that a war cannot objectively be just on both sides, although they do not exclude the possibility that it may be subjectively just on both sides, inasmuch as it may happen that one who is objectively in the wrong believes, through error, that justice is on his side. Catholic thought, therefore, rejects the application of probability 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 it must always aim either at the defense of a right presently threatened or at the defense of a right already violated.
It now remains to justify this position. Its first foundation lies in the consideration of force as a means in itself indifferent. The correctness of this assessment is derived from the laws that guide human action. Man acts in conformity with his rational nature when the motives of action are suggested to him by the intelligence and freely accepted by the will. What moves man is always an internal principle, a judgment of the intelligence that presents an object as true and good, and an act of the will that loves and desires this good. From these internal sources springs the force that binds the will to duty, the moral obligation that imperiously dictates a necessary norm for human conduct.
Physical force, on the other hand, is an extrinsic principle, a violence that touches the organic part of man and not his spiritual faculties. It cannot, therefore, be a human law, nor can such a law generate it; hence it is reduced to a means that man can and must use according to the higher dictate of reason, from which alone it can derive the note of morality. Only deterministic materialism or no less deterministic idealistic monism can deny the correctness of this reasoning. If war, then, is nothing other than violence, it is at the same time a means whose moral character will be determined by the motives on which its use is based.
In internal civil life, the use of force, except in the case of legitimate defense, is forbidden to the private individual, the defense of right being entrusted to the organs of supreme authority. This is not the case in international society, where, because of the lack of a higher authority, natural law itself entrusts this task to individual States, which not only can repel unjust aggression but can also punish the violator of justice, compelling him by force to make reparation for the wrong done and to restore the order of justice. It is a supreme exigency of social life that the wicked not go unpunished and that injustice be repaired; and since in a society of equals without a central authority this office cannot be performed except by him who has received the offense, the objective order of justice invests him with the right to punish and to repair.
The justification of war, therefore, is founded on the one hand on the hypothesis—which is in fact a reality—of the lack of a supreme authority in the international community, and on the other hand on the exigency of the law of nature that the transgressor of the norms of social coexistence be punished and the order of justice, violated by the crime, be repaired. It remains then to clarify the penal character that war assumes in this conception.
Catholic tradition recognizes three forms of justice: war to repel injuries (ad repellendas iniurias), or properly defensive; war to avenge injuries (ad vindicandas iniurias), or offensive; and war to recover things (ad repetendas res), a form of offensive war of a particular kind. The first, although initially not an act of vindictive justice, becomes such by reason of the unjust aggression to which it is opposed. The second, however, is entirely directed toward the punishment of guilt. The State that wages it, according to the common conception of Catholic theologians and moralists, exercises against the adversary the function of a judge who punishes and restores order. Two grave difficulties must, however, be resolved if the penal concept of war is to be accepted. The first arises from the necessity of jurisdiction to exercise the office of judge, which does not exist in itself between equal and independent subjects; the second from the fact that the judging State becomes a judge in its own cause.
To the first of these difficulties, Suárez has given an exhaustive answer, a solution that has since been extensively developed by Tapparelli. It rests on the concept that the State committing the injustice naturally becomes subject to the offended State by reason of the delict. Justice also requires in international society the punishment of the crime 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 offending party and derives from the same order the investiture of judge with the right to punish and to avenge the crime committed by the other. The exercise of punitive justice, therefore, is founded upon a jurisdiction that emerges from the position of guilt.
For the solution of the second difficulty—that of the judge in his own cause—appeal is made to the impossibility of providing otherwise, so long as the international community remains in an unorganized state. The appeal is undoubtedly objective, but it does not serve to remove the dangers implicit in the fact that the judge is at the same time party to the cause, nor to ensure observance of the deepest norm of justice, which commands impartiality in every penal judgment. This is a weak point in the doctrine.
As Regout has shown, the penal conception of war is not exclusive to Catholic tradition, which, as has been said, has recognized a form of offensive war directed not to avenging injuries but to recovering things, lacking any penal character, as when the adversary holds things that do not belong to him, e.g., a province, believing himself to have a legitimate claim to them. Since in this supposition there is no guilt, the foundation on which the exercise of vindictive justice rests is also lacking.
Connecting in part with this concept, but chiefly by virtue of a deeper analysis of human psychology, theologians and moralists of the 16th century developed and perfected the preceding doctrine, which had been uncertain on this point, maintaining that to wage a just war it is not necessary to ascertain moral guilt, but it suffices that juridical guilt be present in fact, since it is not possible to know the internal dispositions of the adversary. This shift in doctrine toward a more objective evaluation has been judged by Vanderpol and Salvioli as a rupture with the previous position, which they claimed was based solely on the strict concept of moral guilt. This criticism has been shown to be unfounded.
One might now raise the question whether the method of total war, which involves the entire belligerent nation in hostilities and, with new means of offense, accumulates immense and frightful material and moral destruction, does not compel a revision of the classical doctrine on the just war. Some Catholic theologians have thought so, as was noted at the outset, holding that under the new circumstances war has become a means that is always and intrinsically illicit. It has been observed, however, that defensive war will remain a lawful and just act under any supposition, since the right of natural self-defense will always permit a State unjustly attacked to repel force with force.
With regard to offensive war, it has been emphasized that the increase of evils caused by new methods of warfare and by deadly new weapons cannot remove the natural exigency that crime be punished and right defended. For, as Tapparelli rightly affirms, law is the highest good of social life, since without its observance society would dissolve. The proportion between the evils caused by war and the good intended to be protected by it will always favor the good, provided that the right vindicated and defended is important. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the immense evils produced by modern war is that the right to be vindicated must be of greater gravity for the life of the State if recourse to arms is to be permitted.
A total revision of classical doctrine would be necessary only if the hypothesis from which it proceeds were to fail, namely, if the international society, now in an inchoate form, were to assume an organic form by constituting a supreme power charged with the defense of right and capable of fulfilling this office. So long as such a supreme organ is not created, war, under the conditions already described, will remain a morally and juridically lawful act.
For a complete picture of Catholic doctrine on war, V. OSTILITÀ; PACE; RAPPRESAGLIA.