Abstract
A number of partly interlinked crises have traversed Western societies in the 21st century – from terrorism, financial meltdown, and political polarization, to increasing inequality, accelerated climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and war in Ukraine. Whereas late 20th century intellectuals hubristically claimed that we had reached ‘the end of history’, history is now on the move again, throwing up crucial political and organizational questions related to survival, security, and stability. In attempting to respond to this, commentators, theorists, and public intellectuals are debating which ‘new’ organizational principles and political arrangements might be adequate to cope with the somber outlook facing Western societies. Fewer, however, pause to consider whether already existing – but now largely denigrated and ‘old fashioned’ – organizational principles, public institutions, and political moralities can still be of assistance in fostering political order, security and a civil society, in the literal meaning of that contested term. In this piece, I want to explore the latter route. More precisely, I focus on ‘reason of state’ as an organizing principle and form of ‘political morality’ through which prudential leadership can be cultivated and exercised. Over the last forty years, and increasingly since 1989, reason of state as a prudential political and organizational stance has been swept away on a tide of cosmopolitan, neo-liberal, and globalist enthusiasms, and the backlash to these evident in recent and ongoing populist discontents. Clearly, ‘reason of state’ and ‘political realism’ have been burdened with and indeed provoke some disturbing meanings, most especially in relation to questions of morality and ethics in government. Both terms are frequently assumed, at worst, to deny morality any role in politics and governing, or, at best, to grant it a very minor one. This though fails to recognize reason of state as a form of political morality in and of itself, one to be carefully distinguished from personal morality and, in particular, moralism. At the core of reason of state is a concern with ‘prudence’ as a matter of moderation and of realistic appreciation in the exercise of practical judgment, and with the casuistry of office-holding – whenever a rule or norm of conduct is established by and for a public office (civil or military) there is a potential autonomy from extrinsic moral expectations within its ambit. Context and circumstance are therefore crucial.
Getting Real
A key pillar of post-cold war Western foreign policy now lies in tatters – the stance that encompassed what has been variously described as ‘neo-conservatism’, ‘liberal imperialism’, ‘liberal interventionism’, and ‘liberal hegemony’. This stance is reasonably easy to delineate – seeking to cultivate and impose, notably by using military means, a liberal, democratic, rule or norms based global order. This ambitious orientation involved various Western states, led by the United States, seeking to turn as many of the countries of the world as possible into political mirror images of themselves, while also promoting an open global economy and related international institutions to support it. For some time, this stance was considered a politically sensible one for those Western states to adopt. Attempting to impose liberal democratic norms and practices throughout the world was assumed to be an apposite and practicable enterprise from both a moral and strategic perspective. It would enhance the cause of human rights, ultimately lead to less international conflict, as liberal democracies were thought less likely to go to war with one another than authoritarian regimes, and simultaneously enhance liberalism at home to boot, as the fewer authoritarian and illiberal regimes existed, the more liberal the whole globe could become, with Western states leading the way.
This stance appealed across party lines and national borders. The circumstances in which it could develop and flourish were fortuitous and contingent, most visibly signalled by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama and Anthony Giddens among many others were quick to announce that this seismic event would usher in a world where Western states knew no enemies and large-scale war was unlikely. Under these exceptional circumstances, Giddens argued that it was no longer utopian to connect issues of national and global governance. Unsurprisingly perhaps, in this context a more prudent, skeptical, and realist assessment of state interest was always likely to be swept away in a tide of enthusiasm for liberal intervention in support of what was increasingly assumed to be a universal normative orientation. Strangely, for people who had often exhibited a pronounced distaste for war as a legitimate instrument of statecraft, liberal interventionists appeared to countenance a more bellicose orientation than many realists, but without a suitably Clausewitzian understanding that going to war takes a state into a realm of unintended consequences.
Although the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq exposed the limits of the liberal interventionist stance, its moralisms continued to be espoused not least in the brief Arab Spring of 2010 and the UN-sanctioned overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 under the rubric of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine. Unfortunately, the results of these and other interventions are widely considered to have been disastrous, as the chaotic Western withdrawal from Kabul in the light of the return to power of the Taliban indicated only too clearly. This abysmal failure should have been foreseen, for it is clear enough that doing large-scale political, economic, and social engineering in a country you know remarkably little about while fighting to control it is, to put it mildly, a wickedly hard task. Adequate prudential judgment of the feasibility and consequences of action should have been part of any such endeavor. But they weren’t.
Prudence and Casuistry Recovered
In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that a growing number of voices have challenged some of the clichés concerning the decline of the state, the passing away of sovereignty, and the dubious political morality of reason of state that proliferated during the highwater mark of the liberal interventionist moment. As Ignatieff (2001, pp. 35–36) has argued, instead of regarding state sovereignty as at best an anachronism in a globalized world and at worst the chief danger to human rights, the need to appreciate the state system as the basis of international order has presented itself afresh. For Ignatieff, it is both foolish and dangerous to look forward to an era beyond state sovereignty, not least because the chief threat to human rights comes from failed states, civil war and anarchy. In other words, governments that accord their citizens security without democracy are preferable to no government at all. Similarly, in his autobiography, the former Chief of the Defence Staff in the United Kingdom, General Sir David (now Lord) Richards (2014, p. 333), argued that while a focus on ‘reason of state’ always seems selfish in contrast to the moralistic ideals of democratization and human rights, it nonetheless serves a useful purpose by enabling policymakers and other public officials to prioritize their objectives, choosing almost inevitably between less than optimal alternatives in a world where all states have to provide for their own security in the absence of a higher authority to protect them.
These and other voices seek the revival of a more limited and prudential orientation to statecraft that, in the words of Morgenthau (1978, p. 12), promotes a realist view of state interest and advocates the presumption that there ‘can be no political morality without prudence; that is without the consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action. Ethics in the abstract’, Morgenthau continues ‘judges action by conformity to the moral law; political ethics judges action by its political consequences.’ Of key significance here has been a renewed interest in classical conceptions of state, sovereignty, office, and reason of state both as a useful corrective to the moralisms that have informed ‘liberal interventionism’ and, indeed, the cosmopolitan normative tradition more generally, and as a guide to action for those charged with rule (Du Gay & Lopdrup Hjorth, 2022). The aim, then, of recovering the significance of these concepts and doctrines is to disclose a practical form of reasoning still relevant to the organization and conduct of Western states and their internal and external security and order.
This of course, chimes with the worldview articulated by a well-known holder of high office, one who is not an easy person to restore to good public opinion. Henry Kissinger served as US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Loathed equally by the left and the right of the political spectrum, Kissinger’s diplomatic statecraft expressed in the policies of ‘détente’ and ‘balance of power’ were firmly rooted in an enduring preoccupation and appreciation of the hard work of establishing the modern concept of sovereignty at the Treaty of Westphalia, the peace that ended the genocidal, religiously inspired Thirty Years War in Europe. Viewed, not incorrectly, as the arch-realist of his age, if Kissinger’s approach to the conduct of the offices that he occupied was determined above all by anything, it was by ‘reason of state’. For him the survival of the person of the state ‘was his “first and ultimate responsibility”’ (Gewen, 2020, p. 390). Assessment of national interest and the need to balance power grew out of this sense. Whereas the ‘one world moralists’ argued that a policy based on reason of state approximated to ‘a prescription for amoral selfishness’, Kissinger viewed it as a ‘force for moderation and caution’ (Gewen, 2020, p. 390). For Kissinger, ‘accepting the limits of one’s capacities is one of the tests of statesmanship; it implies a judgment of the possible’. Lacking idealistic or ultimate ends, a concern for reason of state did not expect too much, accepting ‘imperfections and partial solutions’. According to Kissinger, those espousing global aspirations for universal democracy and world peace had difficulty setting limits to their utopian aims. They were on an endless crusade, and their dogmatism could lead ‘to self-righteousness, fanaticism and the erosion of all restraints’ (Kissinger quoted in Gewen, 2020, pp. 390–391).
In the aftermath of the recent adventurism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, it may well be timely to contend that the return to such an official comportment – state-interested, historically particularist, and prudentially calculated – might serve contemporary states and their citizens rather better than the ongoing predilections for abstract, universal, axiomatic norms, not least because the world as we find it has become more ‘Kissingerian’. The focus on prudence and casuistry at the heart of ‘reason of state’ as a political morality has implications not only for the contemporary conduct of statecraft, but also for organizational life outside of the realm of government. Cultivating prudence and casuistic judgment would not be a bad summary of the character and comportment required of the executive that Chester Barnard sought to foster in his classic text on organization (1968) and in his own organizational practice. It certainly contrasts sharply with the organizing moralisms associated with the dogmatic pursuit of shareholder value, on the one hand, or those moral absolutisms shadowing the introduction of EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) initiatives, on the other. In both cases, an obsessive preoccupation with one value or judgment occurs to the detriment of a sense of balance in estimating the place of that value or judgment in a wider scheme of things or in particular contexts.