Theology and international order: Questions,challenges and explorations

The idea of order is part of the constitutive vocabulary of International Relations; it is, along with power, anarchy, security, cooperation, justice and so forth, integral to how we think and speak about the subject. If this proposition is both obvious and uncontroversial, suggesting that theology illuminates the character of international order is great deal less so. Mingling theology with politics, we are regularly told, is a foolhardy enterprise that opens the door to irrationality, fanaticism and violence. Keeping these domains separate is what distinguishes Western liberal democracies from the rest; they have learned, at great expense, anguish and suffering, that excluding questions of religion from the everyday goings-on of politics is necessary to keep the primordial impulses of political theology at bay (Lilla, 2007: 3–5). But this self-congratulatory story elides the extent to which liberal thought is entangled in what it is said to have overcome. As Nelson (2019) argues, the liberal political tradition can be interpreted as offering rival answers to the problem of theodicy. The way in which the idea of international order is generally understood in International Relations is similarly intelligible in terms of theological ideas and problems, creation and omnipotence prominent among them. It is difficult, though, to fathom such connections because they are concealed by a pervasive secular ideology, a veil which naturalises unbelief as the default position for thinking about politics. Belief in God may be of historical significance but it has little bearing on understanding international order today. To be modern and, therefore, enlightened is to forsake invisible sky fairies for knowledge acquired by reason, experience and experiment. Turning away from God attends the transition from child-like immaturity to full development, which culminates in an exclusive humanism and a world that can be explained entirely on its own terms (Casanova, 2009: 1053–1055).

I challenge this pervasive view by arguing that modern theories of international order presuppose ideas that are rooted in medieval theology. It is against this backdrop that I pursue two objectives in Political Theology of International Order (PTIO). The first is to provide a better intellectual history of international order that reimagines the story that international relations scholars tell about their subject. This involves demythologising founding moments, decisive turns and canonical figures that are invoked to fix the identity and meaning of the field. The second is to theorise international order in terms of its presuppositions – that is, conditions that render the concept intelligible to those who utter as well as hear it. Decentring the dominant narrative by taking medieval theology as a starting point helps to uncover the underlying assumptions, claims and justifications of international order. Only then is it possible to grasp that international order, however it is understood, is embedded in a world of ideas that frames and structures what can be coherently formulated, argued and defended. My intention in pursuing these objectives is to give an account of international order that calls into question some of the most resilient assumptions that anchor the identity of the field and the way in which it is studied. It is enormously gratifying to have five distinguished scholars assess what I have achieved, what falls short and what comes next. I am indebted to Cornelia Navari, Daniel Philpott, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Murad Idris and Friedrich Kratochwil for their thoughtful and, indeed, generous engagement with PTIO. In probing the arguments that compose the book, they raise cogent questions and offer incisive observations relating to the coherence of particular traditions of international theory and the narratives that support them; revisions that either refine or challenge the argument; and future explorations that arise from the argument.

Revisiting an early statement of the argument I present in PTIO (Bain, 2017), Navari interrogates what I take to be incoherence located in the foundations of English School thought. Perhaps no other tradition of international theory has devoted more sustained attention to theorising international order, with Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society standing as the iconic exemplar. Bull elucidates the peculiar character of international order with reference to classical thinkers, an approach which follows the lectures Martin Wight (1991) delivered at the London School of Economics in the 1950s. Though Wight identified three traditions, the bearers of which are Hobbes, Grotius and Kant, the difference between the first two – Hobbes and Grotius – inform the crucial English School distinction between ‘system’ and ‘society’. Bull uses this distinction to explicate the disposition or arrangement of states – that is, the pattern and quality of order they impart. The Hobbesian tradition illustrates the absence of order, where war is a normal state of affairs and states pursue interests and goals ‘without moral or legal restriction of any kind (Bull, 1977: 25)’. In contrast, the Grotian tradition is for Bull the most agreeable alternative to Hobbesian non-order, more so than the disruptive proclivities of Kantian universalism. Common interests and common institutions, leavened by genuine obligation and mutual restraint, are the hallmarks of the Grotian view (Bull, 1977: 9–16, 24–27). Navari teases out what is at stake in getting these thinkers right, instead of misappropriating their thought to authorise a problematic account of the present. What is normally attributed to Hobbes and Grotius is radically unsettled when we treat the theological content of their thought as something more than a vestigial appendage of what ‘really’ deserves our attention.

In taking the theological provenance of their thought seriously, Navari issues a searching indictment of the English School’s traditions-based nomenclature. In short, she finds it wanting because so-called Hobbesian and Grotian traditions of international thought misunderstand the intellectual roots of the dominant discourse of international order; consequently, they also misunderstand the political and legal dynamics that can be plausibly derived from Hobbes’s and Grotius’s thought. What is more, the English School’s three traditions, which embody different ways of imagining international order, are beset by considerable confusion. To recognise and to appreciate the scope of this indictment is not to issue a concomitant call to close the English School, as did Roy Jones (1981) in alleging all sorts of confusion in an article published over four decades ago. Two observations pre-empt such a call. The first relates to the English School project itself, or at least one aspect of it. A humanistic approach to studying international relations, grounded in history, philosophy and law (to which I would add theology), affords ample room for classical political thought. The limitations of English School interpretations are now well known; indeed, caricature is not too strong a word to use to describe some (Brown, 2006: 680, 2017: 228; Dunne, 1993: 312–316). Including theology in our investigations subverts these caricatures, opening space to re-imagine international order; and it expands the canon by rescuing medieval thinkers – theologians, philosophers and jurists – who seeded the intellectual culture of modern international relations. From this observation follows another. Navari argues that, given modern sensibilities, shifting the foundations of international society from Grotius to Hobbes provides a more convincing account of the sources of international order. The will and artifice that is characteristic of Hobbes’s thought provides the basis of coexistence that is not tarred by the pejorative sense of ‘second-best’; and it also provides a defensible alternative to the missionary universalism of European thought and practice, a topic to which Idris draws attention in his contribution.

Philpott moves beyond a particular tradition of international thought, the English School, to consider a narrative that is complicit in securing the identity of international relations as a secular domain of enquiry. Westphalia is the principal metaphor for narrating the transition from medieval religiosity to modern secularity. So pervasive is this narrative that one example must stand for many: ‘Westphalia represents the taming and domestication of religion (Jackson, 2000: 182)’. But is it an instructive metaphor, one which is emblematic of early modern international relations? It is now common to disparage Westphalia as myth. Much of what is claimed for Westphalia, including territorial jurisdiction and non-intervention, is not found in in the treaties that comprise the Peace of Westphalia (1648) (Krasner, 1999: 20). Nevertheless, the secularisation part of the narrative has proven to be remarkably durable despite its ostensibly mythical character. Westphalia may be plausibly interpreted as instituting arrangements to manage religious disagreement, as Benjamin Straumann (2008: 174) argues, but it is an exaggeration to say that it marks a momentous turn to a rational scientific outlook that dispensed with God altogether (Toulmin, 1990: 16–18). This is part of the received, though strained, account of modernity, according to which Descartes, Newton, Hobbes and others, threw off the yoke of other-worldly superstition. One of the contributions of PTIO is to show, for example, that a particular type of theology is embedded in Hobbes’s political philosophy and that this theology moulds our thinking about international order.

What, then, of Westphalia? Philpott asks why it is necessary to deny Westphalia to sustain the argument I develop in PTIO. My aim was not to refute Westphalia as much as to rebalance the narrative. There is no denying that Westphalia curtailed the transnational authority of the papacy. Pope Innocent X (1967) denounced the religious provisions of the settlement in the bull Zelo domus Dei, declaring them ‘perpetually null, void, invalid, wicked, unjust, condemned, reprobated, futile, and without strength and effect’ and secular princes ignored his bluster and carried on in the face of a diminished papacy. One of the persistent errors in international relations scholarship – one that Philpott does not make, however – is to equate the decline of the pope’s transnational authority with the decline of religion as such and the concomitant secularisation of international relations. That noted, the Westphalia metaphor becomes unhelpful when it is used to assert the binary opposition of secular and religious life, which privileges a certain kind of politics and certain political forms – the sovereign state above all else (Cavanaugh, 2009: 161–163, 2015: 237). European thought and practice remained thoroughly embedded in Christian culture no matter what was agreed as Munster and Osnabruck. To his credit, Philpott explains with greater concision than I do that early modern changes in religious authority and practice did not dissolve theological ideas that continue to shape thinking about international order. My attempt to uncover those ideas gives effect to the character of those changes, which, regrettably, is still very much concealed by the standard narrative about the emergence and consolidation of the modern states system.

A second line of critique follows from what seems to Philpott as an uneasy decision in favour of imposed order in the book’s conclusion. However, this should not be seen as indicating a normative preference, but a statement about what seems to be the dominant mental universe. Here the question of faith is revealing, despite self-confident pronouncements – channelling the Enlightenment critique of religion – that belief in invisible sprits is unworthy of rational individuals. Concealed in the claim that human reason alone can attain truth is the uncomfortable realisation, at least for some, that philosophy and science rest on unevident decisions, just as belief in God does (Strauss, 1997: 29; Torrance, 1981: 26–38). This is of great consequence because exponents of secular exceptionalism disclose no contrition, much less self-awareness, when they mock the irrationality of revealed religion because God’s existence cannot be demonstrated by empirical observation. The point I wish to make is not that belief in God is false but that the alternatives – common humanity or rational autonomy, for example – are no more true than belief in God. To insist on verification as the test of the postulates that ground our thinking is to confuse truth with logical efficacy (Collingwood, 1998: 32). Philpott finds this unsatisfactory because it forecloses the choice between immanent order and imposed order prematurely. It seems to me, however, given the work that secular ideology does, necessary first to demonstrate that secular belief and knowledge is no more secure than that which depends on something beyond this world. It then might be possible to formulate a persuasive argument for choosing Aquinas instead of Nietzsche. This, of course, is a matter for another book, as Philpott suggests, but this choice – or some version of it – is the big question that flows from the argument I advance.

Jackson probes the implications of the theory of imposed order and the extent to which its nominalist postulates provide an adequate frame for constructing knowledge of international relations. He is correct to observe that the nominalist mental universe entails a methodological orientation; whereas the theory of imposed presupposes a diversity of knowledge, its intellectual counterpart, the theory of immanent order, presupposes a unity of knowledge. Here we are reminded that these intellectual orientations structure the questions we ask about international order and the way in which we answer them. Understanding the logical efficacy of these orientations illuminates what Jackson describes as dissatisfaction with a world framed exclusively in terms of imposed order, which he traces to the nominalist separation of a worldly domain that is known by human reason, expressed in correlations of cause and effect, and an other-worldly domain that is impervious to reason, which is known by faith. The modern tendency to forsake the latter of these domains, while focusing solely on the former, broke the coordinate relation of reason and faith that is characteristic of nominalist theology. They no longer have distinctive, though complementary, roles in explaining the world, whereby reason tells us there are multiple roads to Rome and faith tells us which one to take (Gerrish, 1962: 14). The person wedded to an exclusive humanism, shorn of all transcendence, mobilises reason to perform both of these roles, which amplifies the fragmentation of knowledge and the difficulty of adjudicating disputes between rival claims.

Jettisoning the other-worldly transcendence of the theological original, and absent an alternative that resolves fragmentation into some kind of stability, leads Jackson to the unwillingness of many human beings to live with only the worldly half of the nominalist package. This is a crucial point that deserves emphasis. Jackson argues that notions of immanent order are scientifically implausible today, yet it seems that we cannot live without them. This suggests not the choice that Philpott lays out, but an engagement in translation, one which accommodates such notions within a hegemonic nominalist frame. This task issues a monumental challenge given the conspicuous intellectual and cultural diversity that exists beyond the nominalist way of knowing and explaining the world. This raises for Jackson the identity of the ‘we’ and the ‘our’ for whom the task of translation is undertaken. What this engagement in translation might yield is, along with Philpott’s choice, a subject for another book. I will venture to say, however, that attempts to translate must proceed with greater self-awareness than is usually found in International Relations scholarship. Greater self-awareness is an indispensable precondition of answering Jackson’s call to work across the lines that separate different traditions of thought. To figure out how a more expansive ‘we’ can live in a plural world requires, as a first step, recognition that the vocabulary of International Relations is intelligible in a world of ideas that reflects a particular time and place. PTIO contributes to this engagement by uncovering the theological ground of significant parts of this vocabulary. This I take to be necessary in order to hear and understand other ways of thinking about order.

Idris explores the broader critical potential of the PTIO project, bringing to light more of what is often elided in international thought. In doing so, he introduces a complementary story that centres on colonialism, hierarchy and resistance. He argues from the margins of my text to illuminate the productive role of difference in linking political theology to patterns of enmity and violence. The relative absence of non-Christian theology in the book is described as ‘striking’, although the omission on my part is more about keeping the materials under control, and my desire to resist a dubious narrative about a secular international domain, than any doubt about the importance of such thought. That said, there is no gainsaying the significance Idris ascribes to Islamic thought, which is a story that has yet to receive the attention it so richly deserves. At the heart of this counter-history is a dialectic of debates within Christian theology and the bearers of a rival faith that many Christians viewed as both threatening and erroneous. He makes the important point that understanding this dialectic offers more than an enlarged cast of characters and, thus, a more inclusive canon of international thought; the prize, as it were, is a ‘more global story’ that transcends what might otherwise appear as a ‘parochial intra-Christian’ dispute about the nature of God. This has the effect of establishing ‘difference’ as the axis of enquiry; for example, Martin Luther’s unfavourable opinion of the Turk turns on what he understands as God’s will, the point being that the difference exhibited by the ‘other’ is interposed between theological principle and its historical meaning. This must be correct; heretics, apostates and infidels have always been entangled in elaborating theological ideas. Francisco de Vitoria (1991: 233–251) is another well-known case in point; his famous relectio de Indis begins with a question about the lawfulness of baptising indigenous children against the wishes of their parents; and his answer, couched in a discussion of ius and dominium, is inseparable from the difference exhibited the newly discovered barbarians and, though acknowledged less frequently, Christian heretics (Muldoon, 1980).

I want to endorse the main thrust of Idris’ reply and the course of enquiry it proposes. Uncovering presuppositions that have roots in medieval theology, as I do in PTIO, helps to provincialise governing conceptions of international order, thereby narrowing the scope of taken-for-granted understandings and making room for alternatives, including non-Christian theologies. It also contributes to a project of resistance and emancipation. Idris asserts that both theories of order – immanent and imposed – accommodate justifications of colonialism. I agree; but exposing the logical efficacy of these theories – that is, the way in which they structure the horizon of possibility and impossibility – is requisite to mounting cogent and, indeed, meaningful resistance. Here it is well to remember that political theology and the patterns of order it sustains can be oppressive as well as liberating. Political theology was used to justify white rule in apartheid South Africa and to resist (faulty) biblical interpretations upon which racial hierarchy rested (Challenge to the Church, 2010: 9–11). But with this endorsement I want to attach a rider which relates to the cynical view that the theories of immanent order and imposed order are merely different ways of rationalising dispossession, hierarchy and violence. Neither theory leads inexorably to these outcomes; they are capable of accommodating rival positions and the disagreement and contradiction they entail. To treat them as instrumental rationalisations, self-consciously employed by men and women in the goings-on of politics, is to misunderstand their character. They are not political doctrines but rather intellectual constructs that provide coherent accounts of order in terms of conditions and a peculiar logic. In other words, they are about thinking rather than doing. Keeping this character in the foreground of our enquiries augurs against a kind of emblematic history, replete with useful ‘just so’ stories, which valorise and villainise persons, events and practices to meet the needs of the present (Oakeshott, 1999: 44–47).

Like Idris, Kratochwil suggests ways in which to continue the investigation I undertake in PTIO. The extent of his commentary exceeds what I can offer in reply given the constraints of space. With that noted, I want to address issues he raises about different ways of imagining international order and the use of analogies in pursuing this engagement. Kratochwil asks if the master distinction between immanent order and imposed order exhausts the possibilities for thinking about international order. The answer here must be in the negative. There are certainly other ways of imagining international order; for example, a relational conception of order derived from the scientific cosmology now making its way into international relations scholarship does not sit easily within the immanent-imposed distinction (Kurki, 2020: ch. 3). As intellectual constructs, the theories of order that ground my argument offer an organised and coherent way of thinking about international order without excluding other approaches. I do claim, however, that these theories illuminate important aspects of the subject matter, their limits notwithstanding. We then come to realise that the concept of anarchy, for example, is neither the product of straightforward empirical observation nor an innocuous assumption that happens to generate useful knowledge; it is an achievement of thought that is embedded in a particular intellectual culture. And we learn, too, that the ostensible secularisation of modern international relations is less an obvious fact than a way of privileging and disciplining knowledge. The point I wish to make is that knowledge arising from the immanent-imposed distinction provides clear and coherent, though not panoptic, sight of international order.

A related question pertains to the scope of imposed order. What exactly does it mean to impose order on a multitude of things, such as persons or states? Imposition, as I understand it, includes, but is not restricted to commands issued by one agent and addressed to another. Imposed order encompasses different instantiations of imposition without subsuming them to a single, undifferentiated type. Command is one type of imposition, but so too is convention arising from the wisdom of time – that is, custom. Consent is another, as when a concatenation of voluntary acts institutes political authority (Riley, 1982: ch. 1). However, intention is not necessary to impose order on a multitude of otherwise unrelated things. The self-love of Smith’s (1981) butcher, brewer and baker (pp. 26–27) imposes order through the impersonal operation of the market without intending to produce complex social order or related goods. In the same way, states seeking to survive in a condition of anarchy impose order on themselves, without necessarily intending to do so, by balancing power (Waltz, 1979: 79, 128). So, to this point, we agree with Kratochwil that real differences distinguish commands, rules and plans. But what unites these examples of imposition, over and above their differences, is that order is expressed in terms of a system of external relations – that is, relations imposed from without. They are, in other words, instantiations of will and artifice. What is made can be unmade because in this idiom of thought there is no necessary pattern of right order dictated by God or nature or extra-mental archetypes; arrangements of order are fundamentally indifferent. In such a world, social reproduction does depend on satisfying criteria of social co-existence, albeit without necessary form; property, for instance, can be held individually or collectively, with the question of which being a matter of human decision.

That imposed order is indifferent in respect of form reminds us, as Kratochwil puts it, that the activity of ordering is a constant task. The precise character of this activity, I argue, is a function of analogising divine and human freedom. Such analogies are routinely used to comment on politics; for example, to explain the nature and operation of political power, the source and normativity of law and the allegiance that is owed to the state. It is against this backdrop that Kratochwil asks if creation ex nihilo is an appropriate model for such commentary since the good universe created by a good God in Genesis chapter 1 is now stricken by sin, owing to man’s original pride and disobedience. Here Kratochwil hints at an issue that is typically ignored when theological analogies enter discussions of politics. An analogy draws attention to a likeness between two things for the purpose of explanation; it refers to a resemblance rather than an identity. Most theological analogies focus on resemblances, following Carl Schmitt’s (1985) oft-quoted remark about the secularisation of theological concepts (p. 36). In contrast, little, if any, attention is given to knowledge arising from instances where analogies are inexact or when resemblances diverge. The act of creation in Genesis can be used to describe the act of establishing a commonwealth, as does Hobbes (2012, vol. 2: 16) in the first sentence of Leviathan; and, though rarely noticed, it can also be invoked to counsel restraint, precisely because human beings are not good like God (Oakley, 1984: 113–114). Making sense of social reproduction demands that we work theological analogies in two directions: resemblance and divergence. It is then possible to affirm the will and artifice of human action and, at the same time, subject that action to restraint. That is to say, rulers can, as a matter of fact, make and unmake law, but, because they are not exactly like God, they should act within the confines of established legal order.

Kratochwil’s notion of ordering as a never-ending task lays bare the condition, or what some would describe as the predicament, of the present. It is no doubt true, as Kratochwil observes, that the problem of ordering today is not what it was when medieval theologians clashed over the answer to Tertullian’s (1902) enduring question: ‘What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem (p. 326)’. In posing this question, Tertullian does not mean that Christians should reject intellectual enquiry for an austere fideistic faith, but that they should endeavour to understand better what they believe (Wolterstorff, 2010: 286). PTIO is similarly motived by a desire to understand international order better than we do at present. One immediate and very important conclusion is that exclusive secularism, the belief that theology has no place in our investigations, is a conceit born of excessive pride, not unlike that which led Adam and Eve to disobedience. Ordering international relations can no longer be interpreted within such a frame without obscuring what we seek. In a globalised world shot through with difference – political, economic, cultural and moral – there are good reasons to doubt that values can be ordered once and for all. But, before surrendering to the throes of relativism, we are reminded that difference is intelligible only from a point of unity (though not necessarily one that is objective or transcendent). And this leaves open the possibility of escaping the nominalist mental universe, as Philpott wishes to do. PTIO offers no solution to the problem of ordering the present; but it does offer an account of how we came to imagine ourselves as inhabiting such a world. In doing so, it illuminates choices between different possible worlds in the past, while clearing the ground for choices to come in anticipation of a still to be determined future.