Duties beyond Borders

Abstract

Duties Beyond BordersA via media approach to morality in international politics?Is there a place for moral and ethical action in international politics? And if yes, what is the proper scope and place of those concerns in the making of states' foreign policy? What are the obstacles and possibilities for the realization of ethical foreign policy? Where do ethical concerns stem from, i.e., what is their origin? What are the target and agency of an ethical foreign policy? In his now-classical Duties Beyond Borders - the 1982 winner of Le Prix Adolphe Bentick for its contribution to the unity and cause of peace in Europe - Stanley Hoffmann gives an affirmative answer to the first question and elaborates on the others.1 Though he is driven by a staunch commitment to liberal values and the advancement of moral cause in international affairs, Hoffmann is sharply aware of the reality of international life characterized by power politics. Thus, in his endeavour to open up space for morality in the game of politics, he lays out a moral politics, paying attention to pragmatic and realist constraints in international affairs. In elaborating his notion of an ethical foreign policy, Hoffmann gives us important clues about his understanding of international relations, especiaUy insofar as world society, its basic features, and the role of the states and individuals within that society are concerned. It is upon those latter aspects that this article intends primarily to focus.THE BOOK IN CONTEXT: MORALITY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSIn Duties beyond Borders, consisting of five lectures delivered at Syracuse University, Hoffmann takes on an age-old controversy, the place of morality in international politics. Although traditional Machia veUian statecraft did not place ethical concerns high on the agenda of international politics, there existed a stream of thought that gave priority to advancing nonmaterial aspects of international relations - for example, the just war tradition or the Kantian project of cosmopolitanism. Yet the burgeoning discipline of international relations in the post- Second World War period pushed those considerations to the margins ofthe academic study of world politics. Above all, realism, the dominant paradigm of postwar international relations, defined itself vis-a-vis the moralism, or idealism, of the interwar period, which was blamed for causing the calamities of a great war. Second, the methodological debates within the discipline, which ended with the triumph of a scientific or behaviouralist approach over a traditionalist one, contributed to the isolation of international politics from the contaminating effects of moralism. Indeed, it proved to be rather difficult to study elusive moral issues with scientific rigour in a positivistic research agenda. Moreover, a strict commitment to MachiaveUian ethics, with its heavy emphasis on the primacy ofthe state, the survival ofthe state, and advancing states' interests, complemented the tendency to exclude ethical dimensions of international politics. In an age of superpowers equipped with nuclear weapons, how could one dare pursue any moral end other than the survival ofthe nation? Even the (neo)liberal institutionalist theories that mounted the major challenge against mainstream realism by emphasizing the cooperative and non-power aspects of international relations could not escape this tendency. Not only did they construct their theories by mirroring (neo)realist assumptions on the nature of international politics within a positivist paradigm, but they also took great pains to emphasize that their notion of cooperation was not based on assumptions about normative motivations on the part of the states, but rather convergence ofthe common interests of essentiaUy selfish actors.2However, on the fringes of mainstream international relations, attention was paid to the ethical dimensions of foreign policy. Traditionalist international relations scholars were mostly concerned with the place and nature of morality in international politics. …