ABSTRACT
“Covenants, without the Sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.” All careful observers of society have always known that this sentence is false. 1 Even the most Machiavellian politician or the most Austinian jurist has known that some bargains are kept without the sword. At almost every level and kind of bargaining there are well-known examples of bargains that are kept out of mutual self-interest and even perhaps out of affection. One can instance, for example, marriage and other family agreements and market bargains which in every society are 199typically concluded with a conventional sign, like a ring or a handshake, and enforced by custom and not by the sword. The Hobbesian could assert, however, that these many billions of bargains kept without coercion are not good examples because the authority of the sheriff and the judge is always lurking in the background. More compelling examples can be drawn, therefore, from the realm of international politics, where the absence of coersive authority guarantees that, if a covenant is kept at all, it is kept without coercion. One such example is the peacetime alliance (for example, the 1939 alliance between England and France and Poland) which develops into an alliance for waging war even though only one of the peacetime allies is attacked by a prospective enemy. There is hardly any way to say that the unattacked ally comes to the aid of the attacked ally because of some sort of coercive authority. Surely England and France did not fear Poland in 1939. And generally, since a government at war can hardly take time off from fighting an enemy to coerce an ally, the unattacked ally has no present fear of reprisals for failure to keep the bargain. Typically also the unattacked ally has no fear of future reprisals. It is hard to imagine that England or France could have feared future coercion from Poland. Common sense assures us that the object of English and French fears was the common enemy, not the common friend and not any conceivable international authority. They kept their agreement with Poland because they believed it was advantageous, to do so–and they kept it with no possible enforcement in sight.
