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russell’s view of life without world government*
The judgments passed by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy on the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes are primarily negative. However, the type of politics Hobbes advocated that countries adopt domestically Russell advocated that countries adopt internationally. Though others have noted this analogy, including Russell himself, more needs to be made of the Hobbesian that Russell was capable of being when it came to international relations, especially since Russell was the sort of rebellious reformer who probably would not be tolerated by the sovereign of a Hobbesian state.
Hobbes advocated a complete concentration of power in the sovereign both because the separation of powers is thought to diminish power’s efficacy and because, however much power corrupts and is subject to abuse, such corruption and abuse only increase in proportion to the number of parties empowered. Moreover, for Hobbes it is inconceivable that the interests of the sovereign and interests of the subjects diverge.3 The interests of the people are best served by their having an absolute sovereign. The sovereign’s absolute rights include “the absolute use of the sword in peace and war, the making and abrogating of laws, supreme judicature and decision in all debates judicial and deliberative, the nomination of all magistrates and ministers, with the rights contained in the same”, and they ought to re-enforce each other and not be divided. For example, the power of the judiciary is vain without the power of executing the laws. Hobbes thought democracy’s supposed superior liberty is really just its proximity to the state of nature and war of all against all. If supporters of democracy would only grasp this, they would abhor the liberty of democracy as “worse than all kinds of civil subjection whatsoever”.4 In his History of Western Philosophy, Russell was persuaded by few of Hobbes’ points and took him to task, observing that: [Hobbes] always considers the national interest as a whole, and assumes tacitly, that the major interests of all citizens are the same. He does not realize the importance of the clash between different classes, which Marx makes the chief cause of social change.... In time of war there is a unification of interests, especially if the war is fierce; but in time of peace the clash may be very great between the interests of one class and those of another. It is not by any means always true that, in such a situation, the best way to avert anarchy is to preach the absolute power of the sovereign. Some concession in the way of sharing power may be the only way to prevent civil war. This should have been obvious to Hobbes from the recent history of England (1945 pp. 556-7). Russell believed that the gravest danger of the state is that its paramount objective is power for its own sake. Given this priority, he says: “It is of the essence of the State to suppress violence within and facilitate it without”, maintaining that “The tyranny of the holders of power is a source of needless suffering and misfortune to very large sections of mankind”. Democracy, by preventing the concentration of power in the hands of the few, has “ ... in addition to stability … has the merit of making governments pay some attention to the welfare of their subjects – not, perhaps, as much as might be wished, but very much more than is shown by absolute monarchies, oligarchies, or dictatorships.” In response to the BBC’s Woodrow Wyatt’s query about the quality of the West’s democratic systems, Russell touted the checks on their power as their primary merit.5 Moreover, while he agreed with Hobbes that the earlier sort of anarchic existence is worse than legally governed societies, Russell preferred even anarchy to efficient fascism, arguing that “A state may … be so bad that temporary anarchy seems preferable to its continuance, as in France in 1789 and Russia in 1917”. And the perils that accompany the exercise of power can only be compounded by a minority’s incompetent approaches to governing.6 Within the realm of Russell’s own thinking, though, a sharp contrast can be found between his political thinking on domestic and foreign policy. In domestic matters, Russell expressly preferred erring on the side of anarchy rather than tyranny, but when it came to international politics, Russell believed that “only one thing can make world peace secure, and that is the establishment of a world government with a monopoly of all the more serious weapons of war” (1952, p. 277). A Utopian vision? Not to Russell. He saw the idea of world government as being no less fantastic than the idea of national governments had been during the Middle Ages. In Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, Russell says: All this, however utopian it may appear, is only a close parallel to what happened in national States as a result of the invention of gunpowder. In the Middle Ages throughout Western Europe powerful barons in their castles could defy the central Government. It was only when artillery became able to destroy castles that the central Government was able to control feudal barons. What gunpowder did in the late Middle Ages, nuclear weapons have to do in our time. I do not mean that they have to be actually employed. Gunpowder does not often have to be employed to enforce the authority of national Governments against internal criminals.... Submission to a Central Authority may be as distasteful as submission to the king was to medieval barons, but it is in the long run equally necessary” (pp. 69, 71).Nor did he think because a world government was most likely to be a tyranny, at least at first, that this made the idea unacceptable. In Unpopular Essays, he wrote: In the history of social evolution it will be found that almost invariably the establishment of some sort of government has come first and attempts to make government compatible with personal liberty have come later. In international affairs we have not yet reached the first stage, although it is now evident that international government is at least as important to mankind as national government (p. 142).Russell’s political activism ranged from supporting the West’s Cold War priorities to campaigning for nuclear disarmament. The fixed stars in this ever-changing constellation of his political stances, though, were his support for world government and his view that “The only legitimate use of force is to diminish the total amount of force exercised in the world” (1917b, p. 70). During the 1920s, 30s and 40s, Russell believed that “Far the easiest road to international government would be the unquestionable preponderance of some one State. That State would then be so strong that no other would venture to quarrel with it, and it might for its own purposes forbid the others to fight among themselves....” And in a 1945 article for Cavalcade, he more specifically remarked: “I would rather see the United States conquer the whole world and rule it by force than see a prolongation of the present multiplicity of independent Great Powers.” However, when Russia acquired nuclear weapons, Russell retreated from the idea of establishing a world government by force and began looking more and more to the United Nations to serve the function of a world government with “sole possession of the major weapons of war”.7 For example, in a July 14, 1960 letter to The Guardian, Russell declared: “The road to World Government, if it is to become possible, must be through the United Nations, enlarged and strengthened, and not through rival military alliances” (Perkins 2002, pp. 223-5). And in his Autobiography he said: The ultimate goal will be a world in which national armed forces are limited to what is necessary for internal stability and in which the only forces capable of acting outside national limits will be those of a reformed United Nations. The approach to this ultimate solution must be piecemeal and must involve a gradual increase in the authority of the United Nations or, possibly, of some new international body which should have sole possession of the major weapons of war. It is difficult to see any other way in which mankind can survive the invention of weapons of mass extinction” (1969, p. 268.).But whether advocating world government via the US or the UN, Russell’s view was that “Every argument that [Hobbes] adduces in favour of government, in so far as it is valid at all, is valid in favour of international government. So long as national States exist and fight each other, only inefficiency can preserve the human race. To improve the fighting quality of separate States without having any means of preventing war is the road to universal destruction” (1945, p. 557). Hobbes’ reasons for replacing the state of nature with the sovereign were Russell’s reasons for replacing this planet’s individual autonomous states with world government. Interestingly though, it is at just this level of international relations that Hobbes despaired of a legal society with power concentrated in a sovereign; whereas it is precisely at such a level that Russell seemed particularly sanguine about seeing power so concentrated. True, the whole notion of international law was not as common in Hobbes’ time as it is in our own. But Hobbes’ despair on this front is more attributable to the darkness of his overall outlook than to the conventional wisdom of his day. Over a century earlier, the University of Salamanca’s Francis of Vitoria (1480-1546) had composed his landmark tract defending the native Americans in the light of the ius gentium, or law of nations. Francis Suárez (1548-1617) further developed the concept of international law, and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) remains renowned to this day for his De Jure Belli ac Pacis’s contribution to the field.
I suspect that Russell would have encouraged us to understand the contrast as being not so much between domestic politics and foreign policy as between civil and military power. Russell was in favor of this dissociation of civil and military power on the grounds that “The greater modern States are already too large for most civil purposes, but for military purposes they are not large enough, since they are not world-wide” (1916, pp. 71-2). I think Russell would also have hastened in directing us to understand that for Hobbes the power of the sovereign is absolute,8 whereas Russell saw himself as preferring the establishment of a world government by consent rather than by force (1948). He further advocated much narrower powers for a world government than anything involved in Hobbes’ sovereign. For example, in Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, Russell spoke of how “There will need to be, as in any Federation, a well-defined Constitution, deciding which powers are to be federal. It should be understood that these powers must be only such as are involved in the prevention of war. There must be no interference by the Federal Authority with religion or economic structure or the political system” (1959, p. 68). At the beginning of World War I, Russell’s view was that an international council charged with arbitrating all disputes between nations should rely on moral force alone, for fear that if it tried to enforce its verdicts with armed force, the world was likely to become embroiled in warfare as a result. In taking this view, Russell assumed that such a council would be armed with the forces of its member nations rather than with an international force directly under its control. Such a situation, he thought, would lead to coalitions of belligerents defying the council and neutral states refusing to take part in opposing them so the result was more likely to be a world-wide war than to any other outcome. However, by the following year, he had come to the view that a truly international force assembled under the direct control of the council would be the best way to maintain peace.9 But what assured Russell that a world government with a monopoly on military power, whether it is the United States or the United Nations, would not seek power for its own sake much as national governments do? Russell’s faith in a world government’s police power seems to contrast quite sharply with his grim assessments of police power within a country. In Political Ideals, Russell made the issue seem as simple as “Just as the police are necessary to prevent the use of force by private citizens, so an international police will be necessary to prevent the lawless use of force by separate states” (1917b, p. 71). And yet, in his 1938 work Power, Russell made the point that, even in democracies, “individuals and organisations which are intended to have only certain well-defined executive functions are likely, if unchecked, to acquire a very undesirable independent power. This is especially true of the police” (p. 192). So why would this not be equally true of an international police? In the ninth chapter of Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, Russell addressed this issue when he said: Whenever an international armed force is suggested, many people at once raise objections which are equally applicable to municipal police forces. They suggest that such an armed force might make a military revolution and establish a tyranny over the civil authorities. In theory this is possible in the case of national armed forces, and in the less settled parts of the world it sometimes occurs. But there are well-established methods, both in Communist and in non-Communist countries, by which, not only in Russia and in the United States, but even in Nazi Germany, the civil authorities have maintained their supremacy. I see no reason to doubt that these methods would be equally effective in the international sphere (1959, p. 70; see also 1961a, p. 264 and 1961b, pp. 86-87).And in “Ideas That Have Helped Mankind”, Russell stated: I find it often urged that an international government would be oppressive, and I do not deny that this might be the case, at any rate for a time, but national governments were oppressive when they were new and are still oppressive in most countries, and yet hardly anybody would on this ground advocate anarchy within a nation ... as in the course of the past 5,000 years men have climbed gradually from the despotism of the Pharaohs to the glories of the American Constitution, so perhaps in the next 5,000 they may climb from a bad international government to a good one (1950, pp. 142-3). In 1945, Russell expressed his preference for “all the chaos and destruction of a war conducted by means of the atomic bomb to the universal domination of a government having the evil characteristics of the Nazis”.10 Yet in the 1950s and 60s, Russell was horrified by claims like those of Eleanor Roosevelt and Sidney Hook that the extinction of the human race would be better than life under Soviet rule.11 For example, in the early 1960s Russell inveighed against anti-Communists who invoked Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death!” to support their claims that “a world without human beings would be preferable to a Communist world”. Russell countered that Patrick Henry’s words were “right and proper” in his day because a loss of American lives was an inevitable price to be paid for triumph over British hostility, so “his death might promote liberty”. However, Russell contended, “ordered liberty such as Patrick Henry wanted” would never result from a nuclear war.12 Significantly, then, if forced to choose between “peace under a tyranny” and “bloodshed under a democracy,” Russell would have opted for the former. In “World Government: By Force or Consent?” in the September 4, 1948 edition of The New Leader, Russell acknowledged that “I should wish the advocates of world government to realize that its greatest merit, namely the prevention of war, does not depend upon its being established by general consent, but upon its possession of obviously irresistible armed force.”13 And besides, he viewed history’s most horrific regimes as having had a sufficiently brief duration so as to make the long-term preservation of the human race worthwhile. For example, he noted that Genghiz Khan and Kublai Khan were only a generation apart.14 This preference has been aptly characterized by J.C.A. Gaskin as “pure Hobbes”.15 Predictably, Russell would have retorted that “peace under a tyranny” and “bloodshed under a democracy” do not exhaust the options. Rather there is the third option, which he in fact favored, wherein a world body governs countries federally and voluntarily. The present writer’s reservation about Russell’s imaginary retort here is that even Hobbes would have been quite fine with voluntary and democratic institutions, provided they acted as a “unitary” sovereign that did not share power with some other governmental unit such as a monarch or other assembly. It is, however, precisely when ideal choices are not available that the resulting tough choices provide an index to a person’s true politics. In that context, Russell was prepared, with Hobbes, to make the pragmatic choice of tyranny over anarchy.
As noted above, the US is reluctant even to pay its UN dues, and especially during the Bush administration, has withdrawn from or declined to participate in international treaties at an alarming and unprecedented rate, in particular from treaties that aim to make the world safer from war. Among others, it has withdrawn from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, rejected the Landmine Treaty of 1997, opposed a UN agreement to restrict international trade in small arms (the only UN member to do so), rejected the Kyoto Agreement on Global Warming, and opposed the international criminal court, demanding immunity of all US citizens from prosecution by it. And in threatening to deny Iran (which is an NNPT signatory) civilian nuclear technology while agreeing to provide India (which is not an NNPT signatory) with civilian nuclear technology, both in defiance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the US threatens to destroy, or at least leave that treaty agreement as well. If anything, the US is kicking to pieces whatever international agreements on limiting war there once were.16 At the end of the Cold War, the world seemed suddenly safer than it had at anytime since the end of WWII, but that greater safety is not so apparent today. While the Cold War’s strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) has receded into the background of international relations, the threat of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons has not, especially with the chance that North Korea and Iran might soon have such weapons (along with Israel, India, Pakistan, China, Russia, France, Britain, and the US, who already have them). In fact, just before his death, Joseph Rotblat argued that the threat of a new nuclear arms race is more possible now than ever before given the relaxation about arms control after the end of the Cold War, the Bush administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, which declared that nuclear weapons should now be treated like any other weapons in the military arsenal, that is, used whenever militarily appropriate, and the fact that the US is now building new nuclear weapons that will need to be tested. Similarly, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, with their famous Doomsday Clock set to just a few minutes before midnight to represent the threat of nuclear holocaust, moved the minute hand back to 10 minutes to midnight in 1990 from 3 minutes to midnight in 1984, and then back again in 1991 to an unprecedented 17 minutes to midnight, in the same sense of safety others felt at the end of the Cold War. Since then, however, citing circumstances similar to those cited by Rotblat, they have moved the minute hand steadily forward again until it now stands at 7 minutes to midnight, in the same position at which it began when the clock first appeared on the Bulletin’s cover in 1947. Russell’s disappointment with the ability of the United States or United Nations to effectively serve as a world government, combined especially with what Joseph Rotblat and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists see as a recent heightened threat of nuclear war, would probably have prompted Russell, were he alive today, to contend that now, more than ever, even with its attendant risks, efforts should be directed toward power being concentrated in a world government.
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society at McMaster University, Hamilton Ontario, May 14, 2005.
Coates, Ken, 2003, ‘Dealing with the Hydra’, Strangelove Doctrine: The Spokesman 80. stratoflampsacus@aol.com |