War Guilt in the History of Thucydides

Abstract

The fact that the question of war guilt has frequently followed in the wake of major wars has contributed little, if anything, to a clarification of the concept. The perplexing difficulties raised by it are amply illustrated by the unsuccessful attempts, made periodically at various ages and on various levels of civilization, to arrive at criteria permitting a differentiation between the bellum justum and the bellum injustum. States, unlike individuals, are not confronted with simple choices between obeying or violating the law. Determination of the initial violation of existing covenants sheds little, if any, light on the responsibility for commencing war. Nor is such responsibility necessarily incurred by launching the first attack. Nothing could be more futile than to equate this act with aggressive and unjust war. The initial attack may be a legitimate response to an existing situation, and a war of aggression, as St. Augustine already pointed out, a just war; nor is there any reason to assume that the party forced into the defensive is invariably innocent. If war guilt is to be more than a specious pretense for inflicting punishment upon the vanquished, it can be measured only in terms of the alternatives available to a state, and the choice has to be viewed in the light of historical, ethical, and political factors. The assessment of such guilt is a problem of extraordinary complexity. To confine it to formal legal considerations would result not only in gross injustice, but would tend to perpetuate international tensions.