Mervyn Frost on Ethics, Globalisation, and War
The Lookout Report had the chance to sit down with renowned South African scholar Mervyn Frost
Interview Conducted by Marin Verspieren
Mervyn Frost is a South African and British scholar in International Relations. He was Head of the War Studies department at King’s College London and has written extensively on ethics, civil society, and security in the past 40 years.
In your book Global Ethics, you urge policy-makers, states, and scholars alike to consider an ethical dimension to international relations and politics more broadly. Explain the rationale behind it.
“Traditionally people who have approached ethics from a philosophical point of view do it quite narrowly and they consider conundrums like an individual facing a decision whether it would be okay when you're in a firefight to wound people on the sidelines. It’s always a question of what should an individual soldier do in a dire situation and, while those are definitely traumatic ethical puzzles for the people involved, it seems to me that ethics is buried far deeper in our everyday lives than we actually realise. Just about any action that you want to give an account of has some kind of ethical dimension.
For example, consider Brexit in this country. The minute the issue arose it was not just a straightforward action should we leave or shouldn't we leave or will it be to the advantage of Britain or not to the advantage of Britain. Instantly people realised that there were issues involved in that decision that went to their very identity of who they were. The remainers felt very strongly that they understood themselves to be citizens of the world - in particular of this big European world - which had been wrapped in wars for decades and now wasn't. They had formed a political arrangement in which all men and women were free and equal and then suddenly, that was taken away. That group saw themselves as little England which was a diminished ethical standing. Conversely, the leavers also saw that this was an ethical issue: they had the notion that Britain was a great country. Its involvement in the minutiae of European life diminished its standing and the very identity of Great Britain.
My whole view is: How do we resolve that kind of ethical tension? It crops up just about everywhere, any action in international relations you care to think about probably has an ethical dimension of that kind. To sum up, actors in international relations always have an idea of who they are. That notion of “who we are in doing this” includes a very strong ethical component. I wanted to introduce critical thinking about that.”
What ethical responsibilities should the most powerful states have in their foreign policies? In your opinion, how well or poorly are they living up to these responsibilities?
“The question itself poses an ethical problem for me because it means that the state can choose to be ethical or not. Constitutive theory - the theory that I’ve developed, also called practice theory - says that states are not free agents that can pick and choose their ethics. They are constituted as states within the wider practice of states with an elaborate system of mutual recognition between them. To be a state - and to claim statehood for oneself - is already to identify oneself as a participant in this practice, and to participate in that practice you have to be - not voluntarily - constrained by the ethical norms definitive of that practice. If you have committed to becoming a soccer player, you can’t do so unless to commit to the rules of the game. Each game specifies what counts as cheating, or unacceptable behaviour of one kind or another. We all know what that means in sports. The rules of the IR game have built-in notions of ethical soundness, and the participants know what counts as unacceptable practice. All states know that aggression against a neighbouring state - except in self-defense - is ethically wrong. If a neighbouring state aggresses your state, you are ethically enabled under the Just War tradition to defend your state.
In any system of rules, it’s always possible for a participant to break the rules. The rules are called for to constrain actors who might be tempted to break them. Some of the powerful actors in this global practice have quite often flouted the rules. When they have done that, they have opened themselves to widespread criticism. For example, we currently have two dramatic and tragic wars going on in Ukraine and Gaza. You see exactly this back-and-forth ethical claim in these cases. It’s quite difficult to work out who’s right and who’s wrong. The military actions that take place are a consequence of somebody giving an answer to the question of who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s hardly an academic question. They’re of fundamental importance to the soldiers on the ground, the members of parliament, and of course to the ordinary citizens, all of whom face the chance of being killed. No one would want to be killed as a result of unjust action by your government.”
In 1946, Ernest Hemingway said: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” Do you agree or disagree? Why?
“I disagree with that. As the world is constructed now, we have a global practice of states with a system of international law and a sense of what a just war is. Under certain circumstances, in narrow circumstances, going to war is not a crime. For example, if you are defending yourself against wrongful aggression by another state. The easiest example over the last hundred years or so would’ve been WW2 when Germany just invaded - and transgressed the sovereignty of - Poland, the Netherlands, and more. In each case, it was a wrongful aggression against a sovereign state and provoked a very dramatic reaction from the other states of the world. Quite rightly, in the end, the wrongdoer was brought to heel.
It’s become much more complicated in modern forms of warfare which sometimes come under the broad label of asymmetrical wars. These are typically between one traditional power with all the apparatus of a fully-fledged state against a much smaller actor with none of those things (take ISIS). The smaller actor is never under the delusion that they are going to defeat the powerful actor in great pitched battles because the aim of the smaller actor is simply to provoke the great powers to do unethical things. My colleague - Professor Lebow - and I have written about this procedure of ethical trapping. It’s a different kind of war. I kick you in the shins in the hope that you’ll go berserk and do all sorts of things in response. I think that there’s no wide understanding of what’s going on in these asymmetrical wars because, over and over again, the dominant power falls into the ethical trap. They overstep all sorts of conventional boundaries and thereby incur the ethical outrage of the rest of the world. We saw that in the American reaction to 9/11.”
How might your conception of constitutive theory be applied to contemporary disputes over statehood and self-determination, such as debates about Palestinian independence?
“Constitutive theory as I’ve developed it says that for us to be fully realised as free people we have to be - at the same time - recognised as rights holders and exist within a democratic sovereign state as citizens. So anybody who is denied either of those aspects is being done a damage - an ethical damage. In South Africa, for example, the anti-apartheid movement made a claim to the international community in the past that they were being wronged. You can apply that logic to any group that is being deprived of their rights, both individual and citizenship rights. When you consider a place like Gaza, the Palestinians are - as it would appear to me - being denied both sets of rights. Their individual rights are not being recognised, especially by the Israelis, and their citizenship equally so: they don’t have a state. What ought to happen for that to be rectified is somehow a Palestinian state has to be created. But that’s easier said than done because, from the outset in 1948, Palestinian movements have said “This state that was created here called Israel has no right to exist”. In that way, they’re doing a comparable wrong in the other direction. In that case, you can see what an awful ethical dilemma we’re in.
What’s bedeviling the world at the moment - it seems to me - is people think they must choose either the Israeli side or the Hamas/Palestinian side as if one is right. In the light of practice theory, one can see how the ethical problem is much greater than that. What has to happen for the problem to be resolved is that all the people in the region need to be part of a sovereign state and have their individual rights recognised. But at the moment, neither side is doing that, so there’s a long ethical learning curve that has to be experienced. The international community is - as we speak - marshaling its forces to bring about something approximating what I’ve been talking about. Unfortunately, it’s taken a long time, lots of lives have been ruined, and it’s a disaster. Nevertheless, the direction of travel will be - of it I’m perfectly confident - what I’ve just set out.”
Does Globalisation enhance civil society by connecting individuals together, or does it hurt it by entrenching people in identity politics?
“If you think about the so-called identity politics fights that have emerged in recent times, a lot of them have to do with social media. It’s a place where people can find like-minded individuals form little groups and then become very passionate about defending the interests of that little group. The label then emerges: “This is identity politics gone wild”. But I would bring us back to the people using social media like that are acting in accordance with the rights we recognise them as having as members of global civil society. This is not the end of global civil society: it is global civil society in action, in very fast action. All of the people who make these identitarian claims are relying on the solidity and coherence of the whole. For example, all of them depend on social media. Keeping this global media going requires global governance and the prosperity of the global market. All this exciting activity depends on the stability of the framework - of this global IR framework. The globalised framework is the precondition for it to take place. Before the invention of all this modern social media technology, many ordinary men and women felt excluded from the political domain altogether. And now suddenly politics is available to everybody, even in countries that aren’t democratic, or even for the poorest person in an industrial society. It’s a cacophony, but it’s really rather marvelous.”
What is the most important affair happening in International Relations right now? Why should people be aware of it?
“Well, I think the most important thing is not so much an event but an absence. I really worry about the absence of a comprehensive understanding of our global practices. We’ve got lots of people with a very primitive understanding of IR, and in particular, the realists who just see IR as a struggle for power between actors that kind of exist independently of any social practice. They still think of “us” and “them” and other very localised terms. To my mind, the greatest imperative is to inculcate a better understanding that all of us are - not because we’ve chosen to - already constituted as international actors. We must introduce a better understanding or, as Hegel used to talk about, Bildung: a kind of educational awareness that we need to get to to avoid becoming bogged down in micro-struggles. Prior to all of that is this interdependent global economy which is massively sophisticated and hugely productive. When we think in primitive terms about various strong ones struggling in a ring, that doesn’t do justice to what we are participating in. Realism oversimplifies, it is reductive.”
The full interview is available at the hyperlink.
Thanks. An intellectual and practical read.