Joseph Capizzi, professor of moral theology and ethics and executive director of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, spoke about how Catholics have approached government and statecraft. The following is a transcript of the lecture.

Thanks, Mark. Thanks, IRD. Thanks, Providence. Thank you all for coming. It’s a pleasure to be here today. I’m going to speak on the subject matter that was really brought up already by Daniel Strand in the opening today. This is not planned, but something I’ll be doing is developing some of these ideas, perhaps tweaking or challenging a couple as well.

I am going to read a paper. I apologize in advance for that, but I think it’s worth paying attention to it. I’m talking about statecraft today, and in particular from a perspective. I know I am the token Catholic speaker this weekend, and I’m happy to fill that role. But, I don’t think this is just a Catholic perspective on statecraft. In fact, I think, again, it’s quite amenable and relatable both to the Methodist theologian Paul Ramsey and to the broader Augustinian tradition that Dan and I both draw on, that Jean Bethke Elshtain drew on as well. 

So there are important ways that we all overlap here with it. But I do also want you to pay attention and maybe even ask me about and question an assumption or an argument that I’m going to make about the nature of realism, or the realism that I find acceptable to the Christian perspective. Okay, so just pay attention to that. It’s not something that’s accepted by everybody.

So the just war ethic is an exercise in statecraft with its suggestion of the primary focus. The ethic is on the maintenance, preservation, and guidance of the politics and governance of some nation-states that find themselves inescapably located in an international order of constant flux. As such the ethic strives to make war possible as an instrument of politics, particularly against realist and pacifist critiques that are joined.

As Methodist theologian Paul Ramsey said, in thinking that in war evil must be done that good may come of it. The pacifist, of course, refuses to do evil and thus rescinds from statecraft. Right? They will not do statecraft. And a famous example of this is Stanley Hauerwas, another Methodist theologian. He refuses to theorize on the state. He refuses to provide a theology of the state, whereas the realist steps in and pursues statecraft by appeal only to the inner order and interests of the state of which he is a part.

Because realism and the just war ethic both pursue war in certain contexts, they can appear to be close cousins or species of the same genus. That appearance, I argue, is false. In fact, the just war ethic shares less with realism than realism shares with pacifism. The statecraft pursued by realism diverges from that pursued by the just war ethic in at least four ways, and that’s what I’m going to do right now: I’m going to outline four ways that there’s a divergence between the realism associated with the just war ethic and the other kinds of realism that are not associated with it.

First, for realism, international engagements begin from the assumptions of certain kinds of problems. The existence of other states, for instance, creates conditions of suspicion and distrust. No state can presume the goodwill of others, in part because states cannot read each other’s intentions, and in part because all assume the others are competitors in their pursuit of power. Thus, the international system is marked by anarchy or polyarchy. For the absence of an ordering power possessing sovereign authority is one of necessary competition and severely limited possibilities of cooperation.

Anarchy need not assume relentless conflict. It does, however, assume that states always act in their self-interests and to the extent that is permitted by their power. Indeed, states always act to maximize their power to create the conditions of the future maximization of power at the expense of other states. The erstwhile father of realism, Niccolò Machiavelli, claimed, “All men are evil, and they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope to do so.” The task of the statesman in this account, therefore, is accordingly to use his power to anticipate, prevent, and restrain the wicked acts of his opponents to the extent possible.

The second divergence is that the realist assumes the job of the state, and therefore statecraft, is to pursue the state’s interests narrowly conceived. This entails pursuing the increase of its power in relationships with other states. And as realists often maintain, doing so without regard for the interests of other states, peoples, or the international community, except insofar as those interests are related to the interests of the state itself. 

In other words, states always pursue their own interests and only derivatively, if at all, pursue other concerns. They would never, as John Mearsheimer writes, work together to promote world order for its own sake. Instead, realist statecraft is interested in a world order justified only in terms of national interests. Peaceful world order or stability, then, is no more than the unintended consequence of self-interested state behavior ordered to the pursuit of power. It is not something pursued in itself or to be maintained at any cost to a state. 

Further, it makes no reference to justice. World order makes no reference to justice. World order is a non-moral category. Mearsheimer points to the Cold War as an instance of this.

The international stability we can ascribe to the Cold War was the unintended result of U.S. and Soviet joint pursuit of power. Neither sought stability for its own sake. Instead, each worked to undermine the other. This might be an obvious consequence that weakening the other power imperiled that stable order. The necessary law of power maximization, the realist argues, compelled each to seek to prevail against the other, despite the predictable adverse effects on the stability of world order. Each did this because, according to realism, that’s what states do—they seek to maximize their power at the expense of others.

The third divergence. Typically, realism aligns with the full-bodied conception of state sovereignty. Typically, realism aligns with a full-bodied conception of state sovereignty that is contrary to Christian claims about the sovereignty possible for human governance. On the one hand, we can be sympathetic. Just war theorists will be sympathetic to realist conceptions of sovereignty that resist the equally flawed internationalist conception by which state sovereignty is limited only by the sovereignty claimed by some international institution.

The internationalist claim places limitations on state sovereignty through the sovereignty of other regional or international organizations. The realist and the internationalist share against the just war statesman a conception of sovereignty that is alien to Christian claims. Neither the realist nor the internationalist recognizes that sovereignty, in the sense they are claiming, has been claimed for the rule of Christ alone and that states, of whatever size or jurisdiction, possess an imperfect and therefore limited sovereignty. Sovereignty to judge within their jurisdiction in accordance with an order ruled by Christ. Their sovereignty is a pale shadow of Christ’s true sovereignty.

The realist and the internationalist think full sovereignty on earth is possible and disagree merely on the principles of its division. According to this false view, political authority can be fully sovereign in the sense of any order and even justice by its own activity. Those acts are self-justified as their justification points to the good of the community the acts serve, absent any reference to external measures by which they might be judged. 

What makes a political act good, according to this false conception of sovereignty? The good of the community, as determined by those in governance. How do they know that act is good? Because they have determined its service to the good that they govern. The only basis for questioning the judgment of political authority, then, could be internal to that community—that is, in the light of an alternative claim about how the political act actually does serve that community.

A consequence of this false conception of sovereignty is a proliferation of claims of right: so many states, so many claims of right. Each is capable of critical penetration of the other. Statecraft, on this model, is an assertion and counter-assertion of claims, only resolved by the instruments of force. Cognizant of the absurdity and threat of independent states claiming contradictory conceptions of rights, the internationalist appeals for a world state to bring peace and harmony by the articulation of a hegemonic conception of right.

How do you solve, in other words, the conundrum produced by sovereign states impenetrably claiming right in their own name? You collapse sovereign states into one. Assertion meets no counter-assertion—only the receiving echo of the righteousness of a claim as it crosses the globe. That solution, however—and I think most people recognize this—is worse than the problem it seeks to solve because it begins from the same flawed understanding of sovereignty and adds to it the impracticality and sheer horror of governance by a world authority.

The realist, anticipating that disagreement and conflict are not solved by a hegemonic imposition of right onto diverse political cultures, reasonably favors the anarchic state system over the internationalist alternative. It is not enough to go against this view of sovereignty as Tillich, who was a famous Protestant theologian from the middle of the 20th century, the absence of horizontal limits would conduce to a rebellion against God, as described in the Babel story. As Tillich explains in his theological ethics, this is a volume on politics, a hegemonic world sovereign of the sort advocated by proponents of world authority—many of whom were Catholic in the middle of the 20th century—would, unchecked horizontally by competitive sovereignty claims, play the role of the Antichrist.

The hegemonic world authority would actually work as the Antichrist because of the unchecked assertion of right without any sort of external measurement. He continues to point out the loss of the world’s unity and said that loss of unity proceeds and would make impossible a world state unless it be a rebellious world state. This is a quote: “Such as would necessarily precipitate a repetition of what happened at the Tower of Babel—the casting off of people, the confusion of tongues, and conflicting interests and claims.”

Realism is thus infinitely concerned with the activity of states. In this, it shares concerns with just war statesmanship, particularly its emphasis on the service of power to the goods of real communities of people organized by governments into states. Realist claims can seem amoral, but they are not. Realists seek to avoid the explosion of conflict into war by the exercise of power. If we think in terms of order and justice, both of which compose the peace described by the just war ethic, realists ordinarily prefer order to justice. They would not chase justice at the expense of order unless compelled to do so by state self-interest. Instead, they prefer the limited peace provided by political order over the pursuit of greater justice at the expense of that peace.

Realism imposes rules upon states and governments. It holds that all political activity must be coordinated toward the general interests of the particular people the government serves. Therefore, the tight jurisdictional conception of the right to wage war flows from that government’s responsibility for that nation’s conception of the common good. This claim limits state activity from pursuing justice in the abstract, including recent neoconservative aspirations to place power at the disposal of world reordering for justice under the guise of a supposed responsibility of states to protect. In other words—note this responsibility to protect (R2P)—realists, as pointed out earlier, will also have dim views about the capacity of military force to effectuate political restructuring and suspicions about the motivations involved. They will understand these motivations to be self-interest masked as other-concern.

Certainly, realism has deep theoretical and practical objections to state behavior that appears to express these international concerns. All such behavior has to be viewed, first of all, as self-interested. If it cannot, quote, “be closely connected to the maximization of state power,” then it is impossible to justify from a realist’s point of view.

The fourth and final disagreement where realism diverges from the just war ethic centers around what I’m going to call its determinism. Harken back to some of the quotations already mentioned or the descriptions I’ve made of realism before. Realism makes claims about persons and governments contradicted by central claims of the just war ethic. In particular, realism begins from two fundamental presuppositions not shared by the just war ethic. 

First, it claims people—and people in politics especially—are bad. This is a point Dan made in his paper as well. Realism begins, we could argue, with a fundamental conception of original sin and its effects on all of us. It is also about a worldview that sees the nastiness of human beings toward each other, but that cannot be the complete story. It’s not the complete story. It’s a bit of a miracle, right, to view what happens in the world among peoples or states. Nor is it, arguably, the full story in Scripture about sin’s effects on human beings or the capacity of people to act well or out of good motivations toward each other. 

The claim is: People are bad; therefore, they will always act out of self-interest, even when not conscious of this. The political activity of states, insofar as it follows from deliberations and judgments made by those people, will therefore do the same. They will act predictably and in accordance with those interests. Thus, Machiavelli could claim, “All cities and peoples have the same desires and the same traits as they have always had.” 

This is really important to his way of understanding the operation of a good prince or a good politician: to be able to make this kind of claim. All states and all peoples are going to act in the same way. Why? Because they are all bad in the same way. They are all always acting out of self-interest. 

If that’s not true, then you’re going to have to have a different kind of account of what it means to be a good statesman or what it means to have  good statesmanship. Good statesmen or systems will act to preserve themselves at any cost, so long as they are free to do so. Likewise, contemporary realists, assuming the operations of raw self-interested power beneath all political acts, hold that those acts, though they may differ in kind, will always be explicable and anticipatable in terms of the interests of the states and those in power.

How do you know how to respond to what states might do to you? You try to project, what are their interests, right? Which is not a bad exercise, right? But to connote that it’s deterministic is a different thing.

Though realism is not amoral, just war statesmanship rejects many of its claims in favor of certain internationalist moves realists would never accept, including moves open to humanitarian intervention and the development of regional and international institutions of judgment, like the International Court of Justice. The just war ethic remoralizes just cause, remoralizes war.

Put it differently, as I argue in my book, it makes it possible for politics and the pursuit of certain kinds of goods. State claims of right are not self-justifying. According to the just war ethic, state claims of right are not self-justifying; they can be assessed and criticized by anyone according to the criterion of right authority. The political act makes a claim about right in the context of love of neighbor and enemy that challenges the state-founded conception of authority and, therefore, the conception of state sovereignty invented in international law.

The just war ethic’s conception of right authority embraces the extension of  political responsibility beyond state borders to the extent that states are responsible for injustice outside their borders and that they may be capable of addressing it. Because provoked by the universality of the gospel, the ethic recognizes a fundamental unity of persons beneath the plurality of states and peoples. The unity of persons, coupled with Christ’s dominion, places all states under His judgment for their care of the people that He claims. He claims them all.

So states—those who are in positions of government—let’s go back to the language of Providence that Dan brought up earlier. Providentially being in positions of responsibility. They do have to attend to the way the exercise of their power impacts people outside their own communities. War, though itself a symptom of the disruption caused by human sinfulness, nonetheless remains an instrument of peace so long as it adheres to principles derivative of the fundamental unity of humankind. War, therefore, brings statesmen an opportunity to expand the possibilities of better and expanded institutions of negotiation and mediation post-conflict.

Yet acknowledging the reality of a fundamental unity beyond the nation-state does not presuppose an internationalist, imperial, or cosmopolitan ethic. Instead, the acknowledgment provides the coherence necessary to think of a morality binding even the practice of war. States draw on an order beyond themselves, beyond their own sovereignty. 

One of their own sovereignty, in fact, presupposes they must look to the wisdom of other states by informing and expressing their own sovereignty. A coherent, if conflictual, order of states is marked out by implicit and explicit international law. One of my favorite writers on this was Heinrich A. Rommen. He put it this way: “The duty of the state in international cooperation for the realization of the international common good is a complement of its undisturbed right of existence as an independent sovereign national order. The independence or relative autonomy of individual political communities presupposes an order of which they are a part, just as the sovereignty of an individual presupposes the community of which he or she is a part.” 

Sovereignty always raises a “with regard to what or to whom” question. Solve the case of war by reference to the wider community; it becomes the context within which peace is pursued. To disregard that wider community would be a failure of statesmanship, as the job of the statesman is to see the overlap between the good of the community he or she represents with the good of the wider community always coming into being.

Thank you very much. 

Q&A

Question: Thank you, that was really wonderful. However, given we just two days ago celebrated Reformation Day, I couldn’t help but be struck by the quote about the claim to hegemonic world power being the Antichrist. It seems to me this is exactly the claim that the Reformers made about the nature of papal authority and its international juridical claims in the Reformation. So I wonder if that wasn’t more a presentation of Protestant theory of statecraft than a Catholic one. Please respond.

Answer: Well, no, it’s not a protestant presentation. No, the question obviously is provocative and also a good question, right? Because there are going to be times when the Catholic claims about ecclesial jurisdiction and political jurisdiction really kind of merge and inform each other. And we’ve seen, at least for some period of time—some centuries, right?—a kind of departure of the jurisdictional nature of those claims. Whereas, as Pope Benedict will put it, there is a  legitimate and rightful secularity of political order. There were moments, as you know, in the Catholic political tradition where guys like Dante made claims about universal world governance and connected them very closely to the same kinds of claims that Popes made.

I don’t think either, in terms of the Catholic tradition or in terms of logic those plans necessarily need to accompany each other. We’re seeing an emergence among some Catholics of a kind of reinvigoration of an integralist conception of political order, which draw on that kind of thing, but I don’t think that’s there. As you know—or should know—there’s enough disagreement within the Catholic tradition itself about the nature of these kinds of claims.

I certainly do get—if you wanted to place me,within the Catholic tradition or into the broader Christian tradition. I give a, let’s call it, a more Augustinian reading of these things. It’s not alien to the Catholic tradition, but it’s different than something that might be a little bit more—let’s call it a Thomist tradition, right? But even there, you’re going to say, “I’m not gonna want to say I’m not Thomist. I’m gonna say Thomas is good on Augustinian thought.” I’m going run into my colleagues, and they’re gonna say, “No, he was more Aristotelian,” right? So, I don’t… cheeky question.

I don’t think it’s a Protestant conception. It’s one that recognizes the real good and the real juridical force of international law, right? As a kind of coming into being of certain kinds of natural law and ius gentium claims that have been around since at least the Romans. The Romans thought they were ancient claim when they had them. These are claims that have been in the Western patrimony against empires or against states that didn’t accompany the same ecclesial jurisdictional claims.

Question: You say that international governance is not something we ought to pursue at least on Christian grounds. What do you make of international law, then? Someone will agree with that and say, “Yeah, United Nations, global governance. This is antiChrist and a bad idea.” But they still want to hold to some sort of normative… It seems that this is what you want to do. To say that there is some normative order still binding us together, some common humanity, and then the reign of Christ.

How do you actually make that operative? Are bodies going to enforce this, or is it something that we might just hold up as an ideal and say, “We have this international body that has certain norms?” And is it enforced by states against other states? How do you see that coming together?

Answer: I pointed to the International Court of Justice, right? I do. I do point to international law. These are actual institutions, and they’re institutions that I think are supported by this account.

You’re going to want to resist an institution and any kind of world government authority that projects a claim about right. And what it’s doing there is understanding that claim to be a sovereign claim of the sort that states now make. Arguably, you know, some have argued that these are all Protestant moves, right? But I find that to be both, you know, somewhat ecumenically impolite and also historically shorthand, right? But I get what he’s saying. These are all false conceptions of sovereignty that arguably can trace to two certain Reformation arguments but also can trace backward even to certain false conceptions of sovereignty right there in the Catholic vision as well.

Nonetheless, generally, Christians are going to agree about something like a moral order, right? This is the part of realism that none of us discuss when we say realism, right? Part of what we’re claiming is we are acting in ways that are most in accord with reality. And not just theology as it’s empirically tested. But reality is a gift that is revealed to us by God and the Scriptures, but it’s revealed also by nature. If you read the book of nature—this is classic Middle Ages language—there’s a reality there. A reality about male and female, going back to the presentation earlier. A reality about human beings in society, and so on. There’s a real thing there we’re all responding to, and there’s an order associated with it that we can perceive.

There are going to be tonal differences among Protestants and Catholics, and among different kinds of Protestants and different kinds of Catholics, about how much of that we can perceive. But we’re all kind of talking about natural law. One of the wonderful things in all of our traditions, in our shared traditions, is that even before the rise of the EU, the UN, the World Court, and so on—all these institutions—every once in a while, people would stop themselves. Christians would stop and consult, “Wait, is what we’re doing right? Actually morally right?”

One of the most famous instances of this, as we started talking about a little at lunch, was when the Spaniards were discovering the New World. As they began to basically pillage it, they stopped and actually had a theological convocation to ask, “By what right are we exercising ourselves in the New World? Do we actually have a rightful claim here?” They questioned the sort of raw claim of power by their state interests. But they were saying, “That’s not enough. Is this right? We’re actually subordinate to something else.” 

And that’s all deriving from the notion of something to which even rulers are subordinate. And that’s available in the ius gentium. The Romans themselves pointed to the ius gentium as an example. The Spaniards drew on this to say, “Is there a right of travel? Is there a right of trade? Do the native populations have the right to say no?” And so on. So, it’s been there. It can be institutionalized, and it is in some ways institutionalized right now for us. It’s imperfect, and so on, but still defensible from this perspective.

Question: When you’re talking about realism, a lot of international relations theorists make a distinction between structural neorealism—which has an epistemological assumption of rational empiricism—and more classical or neoclassical realism, which is less deterministic and roots its conception of in more of an understanding of human nature that is borrowed from Christianity in some respects.

I take your point about deterministic neorealism not being able to be harmonized with the just war tradition. I think that’s well taken. What about the more neoclassical variant? Are there some possible symmetries and ways to harmonize that with the just war ethic?

Answer: Great question. The simple answer is yes. I do agree with the distinction and say, for sure, there will be places where there are deep affinities between them. And we can talk about that with more time. Thank you.