Thirty-year war and rise of liberalism
Understanding International Relations Theory
国立高等经济大学
4.7(89 个评分) | 11K 名学生已注册
The course aims to introduce the key assumptions of the international relations theory as a part of social science and as an analytic tool, focusing on the problems of war and peace, foreign policy decision-making, etc. The course combines historic approach and analysis of the modern political problems. The historic part shows the evolution of the international relations theory from being a part of political philosophy to its emergence as a special branch of political science, which is essential to understand the key ideas of the IR science. The lectures also include broad outline of the modern concepts and debates in the context of the contemporary political problems, such as rise of China and other emerging powers, threat of terrorism, US-Russia confrontation, etc. The lectures of the two outstanding Russian scholars and political analysts – Timofey Bordachev and Dmitry Suslov - cover such fields as the problems of international security and conflict resolution, international economic relations, foreign policy decision-making, global governance, the role of power in the IR.
Excellent course!! Professor Dmitry Suslov explains perfectly well. He became my inspiration to following career in the International Relations.
I have learnt a lot of things in this course related to the subject. The teacher and the class were very helpful.
Origins of Liberalism
The lecture introduces the students to the second grand paradigm of international relations: liberalism. What if the international politics is not a static world of fights and survival, but a permanent movement to a better world? The origins of the new approach lies in the age of Enlightenment and even earlier - in the very core ideas of Christianity.
Thirty-year war and rise of liberalism9:20
Power of Enlightenment8:47
Dmitrii Suslov
The emergence of international law was also a part of
the liberal tradition in its very early stages during the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
But why international law emerged exactly at that time?
The reason is simple. There was
no law and there was no morality in international relations.
After the Christian religion became dominant in Europe,
it was a Roman pope who decided how people should treat
each other and how people should behave when they go to war.
In other words, the Christian morality dominated the behavior of people,
and it was up to the church decide do people behave or they misbehave?
In the 16th century,
the Christian Rome has been undergoing very very deep changes and very,
very deep corrosion of its power.
People actually lost any respect to the Rome, well,
with the exception of some Southern European regions like Spain or Italy, for example.
The other Europeans did not have any respect and the Rome after
Reformation didn't have any power to impose the rules of behavior,
the rules of morality, upon the people.
And result of this was very,
very clear during the Thirty Years' War,
which we have already discussed during our previous conversation.
Thirty Years' War in Europe was an example of unprecedented brutality of the conflict.
Around eight million people died during the war.
Big territories and lands became absolutely devastated.
The cities was destroyed.
Christian world, and we should not forget that for
the Europeans the Christian world was a synonym of the world,
there was no any civilization beyond these borders.
So, Christian world was shaken by
the religious wars and especially by the Thirty Years' War.
Christians eliminated and brutally killed Christians. What was the reason?
There was absolute lack of norms of behavior.
The Christian morals were not able to stop
unprecedented violence because people did not have any respect to them,
and there was no any other laws of behavior,
any other morals to replace them in the beginning of the 17th century.
So, people needed to invent these laws.
And the first inventor was a Dutch philosopher and jurist, Hugo Grotius,
who actually lived during this terrible Thirty Years' War
and became one of the fathers of the international law and modern international law.
So, exactly to Hugo Grotius,
we must be very thankful for the existence of
the documents like Charter of the United Nations,
Declaration of Human Rights.
During the Thirty Years' War,
Hugo Grotius proposed to establish certain rules and norms of
interstate relations to decrease number of casualties coming from international conflict.
We should not forget that Hugo Grotius did not go to eliminate the war's effect.
He understood that the wars between
the states are inevitable because interests are different.
Material interests are different and political interests are different.
But he wanted to bring law,
so he wanted to bring rules into the international conflicts and make
these international conflicts to be conducted
not accordingly to the brutality of the human nature,
but accordingly to the certain law.
But the biggest problem was that
the Christian morality had a source in a God as Christians believe.
But what can be the source of the new law?
And so, the cornerstone of Grotius' philosophy is the concept of natural law.
The law which is a part of the nature as such,
which is not invented by people,
which is not from God but which belongs to nature,
to everything, what is around us.
The concept of natural law is a doctrine which
asserts that fundamental rights such as property rights,
personal security, and some others are inherent by
the virtue of human nature and inseparable from human being.
In other words, Hugo Grotius wanted to replace
the religious morality with the universal morality of human nature,
and then bring this morality and bring this law to the interrelations between the states.
Hugo Grotius wrote in
his most famous pamphlet the Law of War and Peace published in 1625.
He wrote, "The law of nature is a dictate of right reason,
which points out that an act, according as it is,
not in conformity with rational nature,
has in it a quality of moral baseness or moral necessity, and that,
in consequence, such an act is either forbidden
or enjoined by the author of nature, God."
So, for him, the author of nature,
God, and nature as such,
and the morality and the law in relationships between individuals,
we're all inseparable and common.
Let us look further on the genesis of international law
under its first and most prominent author, Hugo Grotius.
Based on his concept of natural law,
which governs relations between individuals,
Hugo Grotius developed a complex doctrine of international law.
Just like Thucydides developed his concept of
interstate relations from assumption about human's nature,
Grotius pointed out that creation and maintenance of
laws and rules are also natural for human beings,
and therefore, for the states.
But, for Thucydides and those who followed him in the classic realist tradition,
this nature was not good and could not be changed.
But for Hugo Grotius,
this nature was much better and could have been changed.
Hugo Grotius wrote the law of nations is based on the law of nature,
which has received its obligatory force from the will of all nations or of many nations.
Beyond the idea of natural law,
Hugo Grotius developed the concept of
just war and formulated three cases of such a conflict.
Self-defense. If one nation is attacked by the other nation,
it has just reasons to go for war.
The second reason, protection of property.
If the property of a certain nation is taken by the other nation without compensation,
this nation must go to war in order to defend its property.
And the third case is a revenge or compensation.
If one nation has been deprived of something,
it has right to go to war to revenge or to get a reasonable compensation from the others.
Beyond these, Hugo Grotius did not believe that
nations have any reasons to go for the military conflict.
The other great humanist and the other great thinkers of the classic liberal tradition.
John Locke lived in England and he emphasized that all individuals have rights.
Freedom, right of property, and right for living.
Do you remember our first paragraph about the liberal tradition?
The early liberals believed in the individual, as John Locke did.
A government, according to him,
appears only as a result of a social contract,
aiming to establish an institution to protect personal security and property.
So, the government is only the instrument of
protection of the individual freedoms, security and property.
A government is responsible, John Locke wrote,
for protecting these rights and have to serve
its citizens rather than suppress their will.
So, in the beginnings of liberal tradition,
as John Locke wrote, the government is a servant of citizens, not the other way.
In this sense, Locke is opposite to Hobbes,
whom we studied during our first lecture on the classic realist tradition.
Despite both Hobbes and Locke lived in England,
despite both thinkers based their concepts on the idea of social contract,
origins, form, and aims of these contracts were fundamentally different for them.
Hobbes believed in Leviathan.
Hobbes assumed that the contract between people and
the contract between people and omnipotent government that Leviathan was made.
The only aim of this agreement,
according to the Thomas Hobbes,
was the survival of the nation.
Only purpose as a whole, to some extent,
even if lives of some individuals may be sacrificed to fulfill this goal.
Because perhaps, the Leviathan was more important for the nation to survive.
But for Locke, the most important purpose was the survival of individual,
and according to him,
the social contract aims to protect individuals and property,
while the government could be constructed in a way convenient for the citizens,
and must be convenient for the citizens.