REPARATIONS. — Reparations consist in that complex of financial and economic burdens and various services which the victor ordinarily imposes upon the vanquished as compensation for the damage suffered and the expenses incurred during the military campaign. They are also commonly called war indemnities. They must not be confused with the restitution of territory or of disputed property held by one of the belligerent parties, nor, at least conceptually, with sanctions, which rest upon different moral and juridical norms. Reparations go beyond restitution and are in themselves narrower than sanctions, although in peace settlements no practical distinction is made between the former and the latter. Their amount and the terms of performance are usually determined in peace treaties, which ordinarily contain a separate section expressly devoted to this matter.
The same term is used, less properly, to designate compensation for possible damage caused by the war to foreign citizens, subjects, and neutral States. It is commonly held that a foreigner residing in another State is obliged to bear the burdensome consequences of war like other citizens and therefore cannot legally claim privileged treatment. Whoever has settled in a country remains in every respect subject to its laws and shares its fortunes: he may only demand to be treated on the same footing as citizens. Exceptions to this rule have not been absent from peace agreements, but they must be regarded as illegal. With regard to the damage suffered by private citizens, justice and equity require that they be compensated to the extent possible, so that the burdens of war may be distributed equally and its liabilities fall upon the community as a whole. If a belligerent has committed acts contrary to the rights of neutrals, it is obliged to provide compensation for the damage caused.
Modern law of war almost entirely neglects the question of reparations. This attitude is due to the positivist principle applied to law, according to which reparations imposed by a peace treaty would have no juridical foundation outside the conventional norm contained in the treaty and in its acceptance by the vanquished. In this way the theory reduces such an important aspect of the law of war to an arbitrary manifestation of the victor’s will, removing the imposition of reparations from any binding and limiting rule. Moreover, having abolished the distinction between just and unjust war, it succeeds in granting complete freedom to the victorious force, which may legally impose burdens even when it has been employed against the certain right of the defeated party. A more comprehensive view of international relations, however, cannot accept this opinion.
Catholic doctrine on war and on its conclusion through a peace treaty has an entirely different orientation. From its beginnings, its leading representatives founded the structure of international law upon the principle of the equality of the subjects of the society of nations, and established as the first fundamental rule to which their relations must be subject the norm deriving from commutative justice, which requires equilibrium between giving and receiving, between reparations and damage. This norm was applied to the particular case of reparations; together with the more general principle that war is just only when it is waged in defense of a certain and serious right, it led to the conclusion that only the victor in a just war has the power to impose upon the vanquished burdens as reparations for the damage suffered and the expenses incurred in the conduct of hostilities. In the conditions of peace, consequently, he may impose upon the vanquished a certain amount of contributions which, in the abstract, equal the damage suffered in the defense and vindication of his own right. His power, however, encounters a moral and juridical limit in the principle of commutative justice, which commands the preservation of equality between the damage and its compensation.
Among the leading Catholic theorists this conclusion is maintained rigorously and leads to other practical conclusions which cannot but appear excessive to a modern reader. Suárez, for example, maintains that, if reparations were insufficient, it would become lawful to kill certain guilty enemies or deprive them of their liberty; not only that, but if the property of the guilty could not cover compensation for the damage, he admits as lawful recourse to the property of the innocent and their reduction to servitude. de Vitoria proves more restrained, while Molina, grounding the law of reparations upon the cephalitas of commutative justice, arrives at deductions not far removed from those of Suárez. Taparelli belongs to the same line of tradition, although in his work the rigor of his predecessors begins to be tempered (cf. A. Vanderpol, La doctrine scolastique du droit de guerre, Paris 1918, passim).
Their theoretical position, logically unassailable if referred to the norm of commutative justice, in substance lends itself to the legitimization of a summa istoria for the observance of a summum ius. When then compared with the damage caused by modern war, it demonstrates its untenability, since the straightforward application of the principle would lead to the suffocation and extermination of the vanquished people. The ancient doctrine must therefore be revised by introducing other principles established by those same ancient theorists. Taparelli maintains, in fact, that when the victor’s right in a just war is to be determined, compensation for damage cannot be extended so far as to deprive individuals of that happiness to which they are called by the very nature of social beings. Here is an important limit to the egalitarian rule of commutative justice, which, springing from a natural source, requires that reparations never become so burdensome as to suffocate the life of the vanquished, absorbing his entire economy and subordinating it to the victor’s demands, which in such a case would be unjust.
This limitation is reinforced by the requirements of collective life in international society, whose purpose consists, as de Vitoria, Suárez, and their successors saw very clearly, in the common prosperity. Today States are more interdependent than in the past, so that the common welfare requires a certain economic and social equilibrium, which would be harmed by the void created in one sector by excessively burdensome peace impositions. These must consequently remain subordinate to the more universal purpose of the international community and be kept within the limits of its imperative demands. It must also be added that, according to the common Catholic conception, the State waging a just war does not exercise merely a private right of self-defense, but at the same time performs a public function, insofar as it takes the place of that auctoritas totius mundi of which de Vitoria speaks expressly. From this public character of its action it follows that it cannot have only private welfare in view, but must also keep its gaze fixed upon the general welfare of the community when determining the amount of reparations. The principle of commutative justice is therefore joined to that of distributive justice, so that both, without cancelling one another, must be harmonized in such a way as to provide equitable satisfaction to the victor without prejudicing the public good. Besides, once hostilities have ceased, if the States are once again to enter into peaceful relations and these
and maintain them as unchanged as possible, it is easy to see how this becomes exceedingly difficult when a people is subjected to excessively onerous reparations. Driven to desperation by necessity, it will not be slow to violate the treaties and foment a spirit of hatred and rebellion against the existing order, as happened in Germany after the burdensome reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Peace, the ultimate aim of war according to St. Augustine, requires indispensable moderation.
Catholic theorists, particularly the more recent ones, have been content to appeal to political prudence. But such moderation is too weak unless principles of true justice are invoked. More realistically, Vattel held that, if the rules of exact and rigorous justice were to be observed in the peace treaty, so that each party received precisely what belonged to it, peace would be impossible: it could be achieved only through a settlement whereby a satisfactory arrangement was reached for both victor and vanquished. In this regard, the rule enunciated by de Vitoria retains perennial value: «Oportet moderate victoria uti, cum minima calamitate et malo Reipublicae nocentia».
Benedict XV was guided by this criterion when, in his letter to the belligerents of the First World War (1 September 1917: AAS, 9 [1917], pp. 417 ff.), he suggested total and reciprocal remission as a solution to the problem of reparations. Pius XI, in his handwritten letter to Cardinal Gasparri of 24 June 1923 (AAS, 15 [1923], pp. 353–55), concerning the reparations imposed on Germany, affirmed that justice and social charity, as well as the very interests of the creditors and of all nations, required that the debtor not be asked to pay what he could not give without completely exhausting his resources and productive capacity. The same doctrine is contained in the allocutions and radio messages of Pius XII delivered during the Second World War (v. especially Sermo on Christmas Eve 1945: AAS, 38 [1946], pp. 22 ff; and on Christmas Eve 1946: AAS, 39 [1947], pp. 11 ff), in which, as prerequisites for an international order founded on morality and justice, he advocated victory over the seeds of conflict, consisting in excessively sharp divergences in the sphere of the world economy, and over the spirit of cold egoism. For other kinds of reparations V. DANNO; RESTITUZIONE; RISARCIMENTO.