Cristianesimo e politica internazionale nel pensiero di Reinhold Niebuhr e Herbert Butterfield

Abstract

The Christian worldview influences the study of international politics at three levels. First, Christianity contains a set of beliefs about the human nature and man’s socio-political behavior. Second, the Christian doctrine is a moral code aiming at guiding human relations in the domestic and the international arena. Finally, Christianity attempts to strike a balance between these two aspects of human behavior in the analysis and explanation of interstate politics. The application of Christian ideas to the interpretation of world politics is far from uniform. Building on similar basic principles, different authors have offered different readings of human relations at each of the three stages mentioned above. Here the author analyzes two versions of Christian International Relations, represented by the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Herbert Butterfield. The former is the most prominent figure of contemporary «Christian realism», while the latter is among the founders of the «English school» of IR. In addition to pointing out the main differences and similarities between these two leading Christian approaches to IR, the article sheds some light on the broader theoretical and methodological «debate» between realism and the English school.