from Part IV - New social movements and the politics of difference
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Since the start of the modern political era, if not longer, most people in almost all countries have believed that the incidence of international war is most likely to be reduced if countries repudiate aggression yet maintain armed forces, and if necessary also military alliances, strong enough to stop others being tempted into expansionism by the prospect of easy pickings – a deterrent stance whose credibility requires a perceived willingness to fight.
This majority viewpoint is here labelled ‘defencism’ because it regards national defence efforts as the best prophylactics against war and believes that self-defence is a sufficient justification for fighting (Ceadel 1987, ch. 5). Its rejection of aggression distinguishes it both from militarism, which glorifies fighting and believes that the conquest of weak states by strong ones advances civilisation, and from crusading, which believes that aggressive force is justified where by promoting justice it ultimately contributes to peace (Ceadel 1987, chs. 3 and 4). Frequently summed up by the Latin tag si vis pacem, para bellum (‘if you want peace, prepare for war’), defencism was generally treated by its supporters as a self-evident truth until early in the Cold War when a ‘realist’ school of academic students of international relations began to articulate its intellectual assumptions in order to justify them. However, it has long been associated with an ethical tradition which has attempted to delimit the circumstances in which a ‘just war’ can be declared (jus ad bellum) and the methods of fighting which can be used in its name (jus in bello) (Johnson 1975; 1981).
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