Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs

by Robert W. McElroy

Overview

Most international relations specialists since World War II have assumed that morality plays only the most peripheral role in the making of substantive foreign policy decisions. To show that moral norms can, and do, significantly affect international affairs, Robert McElroy investigates four cases of American foreign policy-making: U.S. food aid to the Soviet Union during the Russian famine of 1921, Nixon's decision to alter U.S. policies on biochemical weapons production in 1969, the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties in 1978, and the bombing of Dresden during World War II.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691608921
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #201
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

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Morality and American Foreign Policy

The role of Ethics in International Affairs

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By Robert W. McElroy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08621-7

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CHAPTER 1

THE DEBATE ON MORALITY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

For the first sixty years of this century, the question of what role morality plays in the formulation of foreign policy lay at the very heart of the scientific study of international relations. But during the past quarter century, in contrast, the role of morality in international affairs has been banished to the periphery of the field. Leading scholars may reject the charge that their scientific approaches to international relations lead to amoral conclusions, but they do not dedicate serious attention to investigating the influence of moral values on the conduct of nations.

There are two major reasons for this transposition of the question of morality in the field of international relations. The first stems from the desire to establish the independence of the study of international affairs from all ethical and philosophical presuppositions, to construct a value-free science "consisting of formal models in which the preferences of the actors are treated as givens and in which attempts are made at quantifying the multiple unponderables of international affairs." The second reason for the vanishing interest in the role of morality flows from the massive impact that realism has had in the field of international affairs. The realist tradition, which has remained the dominant paradigm in the study of international relations almost without interruption for the past thirty years, stresses the roles of necessity and anarchy in the politics of nations. In such a world of intense competition among nations, there is little room for meaningful choice on the part of state decision makers, and even less room for the choice of moral values that conflict with the national interest.

But if the role of morality in the formulation of foreign policy has come to occupy a peripheral place in the field of international relations, it has become an ever more prominent part of the field of applied ethics. There has arisen in the past decade a vast new literature that investigates the moral choices inherent in foreign-policy decision making and offers prescriptions for ethical conduct in foreign affairs. In part, this literature has focused upon specific moral questions such as the deployment and use of nuclear weapons or the inequality in the distribution of resources among nations. But there has also appeared a series of more general theoretical treatments of the role of morality in foreign policy, treatments that grapple with the realist analysis of international relations and offer substantive non-normative criticisms of the realist worldview. Such writers as Charles Beitz, Marshall Cohen, and J. E. Hare have challenged the realist paradigm by arguing that all political action is goal-oriented activity, that there are substantive moral principles that meaningfully address questions of international affairs, and that the formulation of foreign policy is intrinsically a domain of moral choice.

The result of this resurgence in normative treatments of international relations has not been a substantive dialogue between empirical students of international affairs and ethical thinkers. Rather, there have emerged two separate scholarly communities, each operating from a different worldview, using different languages, and arriving at different conclusions about the essential nature of the politics among nations. This was not what Hans Morgenthau had in mind when he wrote Politics among Nations in 1948. For Morgenthau saw in the realist enterprise an effort to build a bridge between normative and empirical thinkers in the field of international relations, so that the leaders of nations could erect their foreign policies upon foundations that were both ethically sound and realistically conceived.

This study is an effort to assist in building such a bridge. Speaking from an empirical rather than a normative perspective, it seeks to identify concrete ways in which moral norms can substantively influence foreign-policy decision making.

The first step in this process is to review the efforts that previous authors have made to identify the role that morality plays in the formulation of foreign policy. While realist thought remains the most important body of commentary on the question of morality and international relations, realism comes in many shades, and authors who would consider themselves to be in the realist tradition dramatically disagree with one another on important issues in the debate. These differences, as well as the common theoretical core that unites all realists in sharply delimiting the role of morality in international affairs, are crucial to understanding how a bridge between the empirical and normative communities can begin. Equally crucial are the criticisms that ethical thinkers and political theorists have leveled against the realist school in recent years; for in locating weaknesses in the realist definition of morality and how it functions in human action, these normative authors have effectively challenged the notion of "political man" that lies at the heart of the realist critique. But before examining either the proponents of realism or their critics, it is necessary to begin in the interwar period, with the liberal internationalist thought that dominated the field of international relations from 1918 to 1945 and formed the background against which the debate on morality and foreign policy has been waged.

The Creed of the Internationalists

The liberal internationalists were a group of English-speaking commentators on international relations who wrote in the interwar period and maintained that the era ushered in by the Treaty of Versailles marked a watershed in the relations among nation-states. A distinguished company that included most of the pioneers of the academic study of international relations, the liberal internationalists were led by Alfred Zimmern, the first professor of international relations at Oxford University; Gilbert Murray, the president of the League of Nations Union; Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University; and James T. Shotwell, the first Carnegie professor of international relations and the architect of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. What bound these thinkers together was their belief that the postwar world could be made more stable, more just, and more peaceful than any previous epoch in human history. The internationalists believed firmly in the notion of human progress, and they contended that the twentieth century held the promise of fundamentally transforming the politics among nations to give it a more cooperative and transnational cast.

The formative event for the proponents of internationalist thought was World War I. This cataclysmic event, which rent both the political and social fabric of Europe, was seen as the ultimate indictment of the power politics that had governed European interstate relations since the Napoleonic Wars. The "balancing of power with power" that was supposed to have checked the ambitions of every major power was revealed to be an unreliable restraint, and even before the war had ended, students of international relations were searching for new approaches to the politics among nations. "The great adventure of our day," wrote Shotwell, "is the uprooting of barbarism in international relations."

Crucial to this endeavor was the notion that war arose not from the nature of the human person, but rather from patterns of state interaction that could be altered through moral education and the collective action of the peoples of the world. Gilbert Murray exemplified this internationalistic mind-set when he wrote in 1929:

The apologists for war ... get their minds badly confused because they continue to speak of war as if it were an element of human nature, like strife or fear or ambition.... The war which is formally renounced in the Pact of Paris and practically guarded against in the covenant of the League of Nations is not an instinct, it is a form of state action. It is not an element in human nature, it is part of a political programme. It is no more an instinct, or an element in human nature, than the adoption of the income tax.

Since war was part of a political program, that program had to be changed. What needed to be stressed was the common interest that all nations had in preserving peace and in creating a stable and just international order. The internationalist writers did not believe by any means that this would be an easy task, for they recognized that war is an all-too-alluring tool of state policy. But they believed that the trauma of the Great War had created a situation of revolutionary potential, in which "the will to peace is paramount in the civilized world."

This "revolutionary potential" of the postwar era, according to the internationalists, arose not merely because World War I had revealed the bankruptcy of the Old Order, but also because the growing economic, technological, political, and cultural interdependence among nations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had created the beginnings of a genuine international society. Alfred Zimmern noted in his inaugural lectures at Oxford the profound implications of this reality: "The Industrial Revolution and the consequent interdependence of the parts and peoples of mankind have already changed the conditions of political activity. The problems of the modern world are no longer local, but large-scale, no longer concerned with the broils and prejudices of neighbors, but with forces which, in the vast sweep of their influence, affect millions of men in all parts of the globe." Such forces of interdependence ranged from commercial policy to raw-material networks to issues of public health, and while they certainly had not eliminated the enormous importance of state boundaries, they had created new conditions for the interaction of states. Most importantly, as Murray noted, they had changed the way in which individuals looked at the boundaries of their world:

If you look back at history, you find at every epoch or in every society that there is a set of precincts within which the world is understood or is at least understandable, and outside of which rage the unknown heathen. There was the Hellenic world, within which there were doubtless many wicked and hateful persons, but they were still Hellenes and had customs upon which you could calculate.... To the men of the Middle Ages, the precinct was Christendom, within which reigned, ideally at least, the law of Christ.... It is that fence which [modern conditions] have, I will say, not merely broken down, but as far as human beings are concerned, removed the edges off the map of the world.

To the internationalists, the central change in the relations among states in the era following World War I arose from the fact that human beings in all parts of the world shared a destiny that was increasingly interconnected on the economic, political, cultural, and technological planes.

But the mere fact that relations among nations and national societies were growing more complex with every passing year was less important than the question of what form those relations would take in the years following 1918. As Zimmern noted, "We have reached a stage in world development when the common affairs of the world can and will be organized. The only question is whether they will be organized in the interests of mankind." This was both a moral and a political question, and its affirmative answer would require action on both the moral and political planes. The internationalists found significant hope that such a moral renewal in foreign policy was possible, and they looked to recent history for support for their position. "I think we must recognize," Murray wrote, "the influence of moral advances made by civilized man in the nineteenth century, the awakening of his social conscience and the ever-widening range of his imaginative sympathy, as shown by the great humanitarian efforts to relieve suffering." All of these advances, the internationalists claimed, were signs that moral parochialism was breaking down among the nations of the world, and that principles of an incipient genuine international morality could be discerned.

The internationalists were quick to point out that only the beginnings of an international morality could be detected in the years following World War I, and that "the public opinion of mankind is not yet ripe for a permanent written constitution which [would] regulate its political activities." There were still many issues with moral overtones on which there was no international consensus. But in the growing support for the peaceful resolution of conflicts, for joint efforts to carry out humanitarian aid to countries stricken by plague or natural disaster, and for the erection of a commercial regime that would attempt to embody just rules for international trade, the liberal internationalists perceived the emerging tenets of a true international morality that would grow more detailed and more cohesive as the twentieth century progressed.

Even if there were emerging standards of international morality that governed the politics among nations, the question remained: how could such standards be brought to bear upon the formulation of foreign policy? The internationalists proposed that there were three channels through which morality could influence international relations; none of these channels offered a consistent or foolproof way of incorporating moral principles into the relations of nation-states, but each of them provided an opportunity to make foreign policy significantly more moral than it had been before.

Domestic public opinion was the first channel through which morality could influence the making of foreign policy. No longer was statecraft to be solely the province of diplomats and heads of state, for the democratization of Europe had created a situation in which the mass public of each nation would enjoy an ever-larger role in the politics among nations. Nicholas Murray Butler spoke for the internationalists when he maintained that

at no time in history has there ever been so widespread and grave a questioning of the underlying principles of the political, the economic, and social order of mankind. From the time when the Greek philosophers began their classical examination of those questions, down, perhaps, to the middle of the nineteenth century, these discussions were confined to what might be called the leaders of opinion, the intellectual classes, and those who, by reason of circumstance or capacity, were guiding the affairs of their several peoples. In our time, however, this constituency has been broadened and extended by the principles of democracy, until it includes substantially the entire mass of mankind. Men and women everywhere, in America, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, and in Australia, are now in a position of authority with respect to the formation and guidance of public opinion and through it, to the control of the conduct and policies of government.

The first results of this broad-based reexamination of the international social, economic, and political order could be found in the increasing commitment of the peoples of the world to the peaceful resolution of conflict, the desire to establish just commercial relations among nations, and the acceptance of international responsibility for humanitarian relief. As a result, domestic public opinion in each nation-state could be expected to periodically hold in check actions of state leaders that contradicted these principles of the emerging international morality.

It is important to emphasize that the internationalists did not blindly believe in the uprightness of public opinion; nor did they ignore the role that public opinion had played in fomenting war throughout the early twentieth century. As Zimmern noted in his classic treatment on the League of Nations and the rule of law:

Not only can the general public never become as familiar with [international] problems in detail as with the ordinary issues of domestic politics; there is the added difficulty that the conditions involved are generally so remote from the experience of the "average man in the street" that he has no easy means of bringing his healthy common sense to bear upon them. Thus it is easy for him to divest himself, unconsciously, of his saving realism and to fall a victim either to the well-meaning appeals of the ignorant sentimentalist or to the artful wiles of the unscrupulous propagandist. ... The remedy here is not to mobilize sentiment against sentiment or propaganda against propaganda, but to deepen and strengthen the foundations of general education.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• Tables, pg. ix
• Acknowledgments, pg. xi
• CHAPTER ONE. The Debate on Morality and International Relations, pg. 1
• CHAPTER TWO. Toward a Theoretical Understanding of the Role of International Moral Norms, pg. 30
• CHAPTER THREE. United States Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, 1921, pg. 57
• CHAPTER FOUR. America's Renunciation of Chemical and Biological Warfare, pg. 88
• CHAPTER FIVE. Colonialism and the Panama Canal, pg. 115
• CHAPTER SIX. The Limits of Moral Norms: The Bombing of Dresden, pg. 148
• CHAPTER SEVEN. Conclusions, pg. 168
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 185
• Index, pg. 191

Editorial Reviews

"Robert McElroy, in this excellent book . . . proposes to show the role morality plays in United States foreign policy. . . . [He] combines realist and internationalist theory by forming his own understanding of the value and role of morality in international relations."—-Jan Goldman, The Friday Review of Defense Literature

"These case studies are at once persuasive and provocative. . . . [McElroy's] book ought to be of great interest to anyone concerned with the morality of foreign affairs."—-William P. George, Christian Century

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