Hans Morgenthau and the Lasting Implications of World War I

ABSTRACT

World War I was an epochal event that permanently redefined international politics. Yet, there is no consensus about what kind of international system it erected. This article argues that since 1918 to the present day, there is a unique revolutionary/revisionist system in existence. To confirm the argument, this article will revisit the mid-twentieth century writings of political realism's founding father Hans J. Morgenthau. His political thought is premised on the co-constitutive relation between ethics and politics, which characterized international politics throughout the Westphalian era and which was irreversibly lost in the tragedy of World War I. By sketching some of Morgenthau’s main arguments on the political and ethical transformations brought about by total war and total politics, the article argues that World War I generated a revolutionary system indifferent to political and non-political spheres, where insulated ethical systems clash in a kind of “global civil war”.

KEYWORDS:

• Morgenthau
• World War I
• international system
• ethics
• politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Petar Popović is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb where he teaches Theories of International Relations, Introduction to the Study of International Politics and Modern International History. Previously he lectured at Libertas, International University Dubrovnik. He specializes in International Relations and has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and has delivered conference papers within IR. Popović is the author of two books: Controversies in the Theories of International Relations (Zagreb 2012); and The Crisis of the 21st Century International Order (Zagreb 2014). He is the editor of the book-review rubric of the Croatian Political Science Review and has served as the president of Croatian United Nations Association (2016–2020).

Notes

1 Since the early Renaissance period, nearly all wars fought in Europe were limited: i.e. they were relatively short and reduced to either mercenaries or professional armies. Only two instances saw the use of unlimited violence, the religious Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) and the ideological Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).

2 The concern of Morgenthau’s realistic theory of international politics was not simply academic but actively political; see Frei (2001), Lebow (2003), Molloy (2004), Williams (2005, 2007), Bell (2009), Neascu (2009), Scheuerman (2009), Jütersonke (2010), Behr and Rösch (2013), Rösch (2013), Navari (2017).

3 The term “political”, or das Politische has been debated among some of the most prominent names in twentieth century political theory, including Arendt, Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Rudolf Smend. Scheuerman pointed to the fact that when Morgenthau immigrated to the United States, he translated the concept of the political into a more acceptable language to English-speaking readers: power politics (Scheuerman 2007a, 67). Thus, the concept of the political and the concept of power politics are basically synonymous.

4 Morgenthau's view of the role and purpose of the state to promote the “common good” of society is heavily influenced by Aristotle’s Politics. See the collection of his lectures on Aristotle in Lang (2004).

5 As Chris Brown has shown, Morgenthau differs from Schmitt in that the latter saw the limitation of war as a rational outcome of mutual recognition between sovereigns as legal enemies, while the former saw it primarily in ethical terms based on the restraining effects of Christian civilization. Schmitt’s conception is based on a spatial ordering of the system, in which the legal decision to wage war needs no justification, least of all an ethical one. Morgenthau, on the other hand, sees limitation as synonymous with humanization, which could not have been achieved had there not been a culturally induced moral consciousness of shared Christian culture and values (Brown 2007, 50–56).

6 Actually, Morgenthau’s stance on the state as the reflection of power politics was neither new nor original. It was shaped by Max Weber’s influential lecture Politics as Vocation, held in Bavaria in 1919. On Weber’s influence on Morgenthau, see Turner (2009).

7 According to Morgenthau, civil war as “internal conflict” should not be seen as a historical exception. Its latent destructive forces brew beneath the social web of opposed and conflicted class, racial, religious, and other group interests. Some hundred years prior to two world wars, there was, according to Morgenthau, a burgeoning trend of civil wars, with the average ratio of one civil war per three inter-state wars (Morgenthau 2006, 511–512).

8 Mary Kaldor (2013) argues from the macro-sociological perspective that the nature of war has not changed, but only its logic. She defines it in relation to; (a) actors: a varying combination of state and non-state actors in the conflict; (b) goals: wars predominantly fought in the name of identity politics; (c) methods: wars are not fought on battlefields, but over political control of territory, targeting civilians, and population displacement; and (d) forms of finance: under the globalized decentralized economy and the weakening of the state as a central financial center, there is a rise in predatory private financing of war, including looting and pillaging, “taxation” of humanitarian aid, diaspora support, kidnapping, and contraband.