ABSTRACT
The countless constellations of war and peace, past and present, and the wide variety of conceivable ethical approaches to them, resist discrete summary. And yet it should at once be underscored that both the ‘ethics’ in question and the ‘war’ (and peace) to which they aspire to take recourse are of a special brand and breed, belonging to a very specific historical moment, to a unique politics and to a constellation of tacitly shared values whose origin and finality exceed the frame of the war room. The transformation of the notions of both ethics and of war and peace have accelerated in the course of what Hobsbawm called ‘the short 20th century’ in unforeseeable ways. Ethics – the systematic mapping of rights and obligations, premises and conditions of conduct – has veered from its classical roots and is no longer merely understood as the systematic search for a singular response to the question of the ‘Good Life’.1 ‘War and peace’, a constantly evolving pair, have made a leap from the perfunctory character of violence in something like Herodotus’Histories to the desperate theses of Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did not Take Place (Baudrillard, 1995). Today, questions of war and peace are more frequently rediscovered in intra-state relations, in experiments with new weapon technologies, opening new questions of modalities, aims andmeans, collateral consequences, circumstances and scope, objects and actors. The paradox of the nation-state’s ethical universality was clear from the
start, that is, already in the first Enlightenment philosophies of state, people and rule of law. It was famously dramatized by Kant’s thinking on the nature of a cosmopolitan world republic, the natural consequence of the universal principles of the nation-state in his well-known 1784 essay ‘The Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,’ and his 1795 essay ‘On Perpetual Peace’ (Kant, 1983b; 1983c). In the currently expanding debate on post-nationalism and the limits of nationality, Kant’s concept of cosmopolitanism has been repeatedly revisited, both in the debate on the nature of globalization (Höffe, 1999: 64-7; Delanty, 2000; Bauman, 1998), and on the possible forms of a European superstate (Schultz, 1994; Segers and Viehoff, 1996; Ferry, 2000; Habermas, 1998b; Pogge, 1992). Much of the discussion concerns the modifications and clarifications necessary in order to bring Kant’s conception of a cosmopolitan world order to a
contemporary coherence in general or to make it applicable to a possible European federal state in particular. The contemporary historical determination of these debates revolves
around the geopolitical changes in the wake of the fall of the Berlin wall. Most of these arguments would have been impossible before theWende, the more or less peaceful collapse of the Soviet-steered Eastern Bloc beginning with the dramatic events in October 1989. Before then, the Cold War and the ideological borders frozen along the lines of European national borders completely overshadowed the prospects of any sort of philosophical cosmopolitanism. Although globalization was far from a reality, principled questions about the nature of a universal order based on political or ethical doctrine were as good as unthinkable. The less thoroughly scrutinized reality of the Wende is that it marks the
birth of a new brand of nationalism, inevitably proceeding, explicitly or implicitly, from the assumption of a certain kind of national core or kernel. By ‘kernel’ I mean an essence or substance that is essential to the nation, but which is neither equivalent to it nor reducible to it. A great deal of available scholarship highlights and explores the ethical nature of the nation-state by looking at its ethical presuppositions and consequences. It examines the relationships between various actors and concrete situations and interprets them in terms of a network of ethical meaning linked to the nation-state. Nations are ultimately defined by power and, when necessary, they are created and defended by force. The kernel is a hard one: on the one hand, the nation-state is the original form of the political and ethical principles of self-determination and non-intervention. On the other, the nation-state can still not be dissociated from the violence carried out in its name.
