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The permissive power of the ban on war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2016

Ian Hurd
Ian Hurd*
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Studies Program, Northwestern University
*
*Correspondence to: Ian Hurd, Associate Professor (also Legal Studies And Director, International Studies Program), Department of Political Science, Northwestern University – Political Science, Evanston 60208, United States. Author’s email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The ban on inter-state war in the UN Charter is widely identified as central to the modern international order–Michael Byers calls it ‘one of the twentieth century’s greatest achievements’. Even if it is only imperfectly observed, it is often seen as a constraint on state autonomy and an improvement on the pre-legal, unregulated world before 1945. In response to this conventional view, this article shows that the laws on war in the Charter are better seen as permissive rather than constraining. I make two points. First, by creating a legal category around ‘self-defence’, the laws on war authorise, and thus legitimate, wars that are motivated by the security needs of the state, while forbidding other motives for wars. Second, state practice since 1945 has expanded the scope of this authorisation, extending it in both time and space beyond the black-letter text of the Charter. The permissive effect of law on war has therefore been getting larger. These two effects suggest that international law is a resource that increases state power, at least for powerful states, and this relation between international law and power politics is missed by both realists and liberal internationalists.

Keywords

Self-defenceInternational LawInternational SecurityLaws of WarLegal Justification
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of International Security , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2016 

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References

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37 Several book-length treatments exist including Gray, International Law and the Use of Force; Franck, Recourse to Force; O’Connell, ‘Peace and war’. On self-defence in particular, see Alexandrov, Self-Defense Against the Use of Force in International Law.

38 This is set out in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) at Article 31(1).

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41 For contestation over this among American legal scholars, see the essays in ‘Agora: Future implications of the Iraq Conflict’, in the American Journal of International Law, 97:3 (2003).

42 Michael Byers provides a rare exception in Byers, ‘Jumping the gun’, p. 5 where he says ‘the UN Charter provides a clear answer to these questions: in the absence of an armed attack, the Security Council alone can act.’ This is at odd with Byers’s analysis in War Law, and reflects perhaps the fact that for Byers the US invasion of Iraq was not the sort of war which should be legitimated by finding it to be legal under the Charter.

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46 See the references in Schachter, Oscar, ‘Self-defense and the rule of law’, The American Journal of International Law, 83:2 (1989), pp. 259–277 CrossRefGoogle Scholar (p. 263, fn. 22). See also, Franck, Recourse to Force, p. 50.

47 In both the Iraq-Kuwait war in 1990 and the Afghanistan war in 2001, for instance, the states invoking self-defence did not defer to the Council and the Council followed up by affirming their right not to do so.

48 See, among others, Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan, p. 259: ‘The notion that states have a right of self-defense in the face of an “imminent threat” was widely recognized in international law and diplomacy.’ The consensus around this even includes scholars who are otherwise committed to a literal reading of the Charter. Oscar Schachter, as an example, is generally opposed to ‘expanded conceptions of self-defense’ but he finds it unproblematic to say that there is ‘strong resistance to widening self-defense to permit force except where there has been an armed attack or threat of armed attack’ (emphasis added). By accepting the legality of anticipatory self-defence, he is accepting the ‘expanded’ conception and arguing in effect that it should not be expanded any further. Schachter, ‘Self-defense and the rule of law’, pp. 271, 273.

49 Variations, of course, exist. The idea of ‘imminence’ is often derived from Daniel Webster, who said that anticipatory acts are acceptable when ‘the necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation’. See Webster, Daniel, ‘Letter to Henry Stephen Fox’, in K. E. Shewmaker (ed.), The Papers of Daniel Webster: Diplomatic Papers, 1841–1843, Volume 1 (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

50 The issue of ‘anticipation’ came up in 1945 and was struck down by the Five Powers who dominated the Charter-drafting process. The US considered the issue internally in its delegation and Harold Stassen expressed the definitive official position against it: ‘this was intentional … we did not want exercised the right of self-defense before an armed attack had occurred’. Ruys, ‘Armed Attack’ and Article 51 of the UN Charter, p. 65. citing Foreign Relations of the United States (1945), p. 818.

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58 Ruys, ‘Armed Attack’ and Article 51 of the UN Charter, p. 6. It is through this process that many states and scholars have argued that humanitarian intervention has become a legal form of international military action. As states have come to see humanitarian intervention as desirable, they have consequently argued that it is legal under the Charter. Belgium made this argument at the International Court of Justice in the Legality of the Use of Force case, as did the United Kingdom in relation to the Kosovo bombing: ‘The action being taken is legal. It is justified as an exceptional measure to prevent an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe … . In these circumstances, military intervention is legally justifiable.’ See Gray, International Law and the Use of Force, p. 42.

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71 Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon.

72 Consider a passage from Louis Henkin, as he argued in 1971 that Article 2(4) had been influential in shaping American foreign policy. He said ‘few believe that the OAS [Organization of American States] or even the United States alone would use force against the political independence or territorial integrity of any country in the [Western] Hemisphere, even in the event of sharp local deviation, if it was not in fact abetted from the outside.’ Henkin meant this to show how profoundly the ban on war had been internalised in American foreign policy. He believed American decision-makers would find it hard to justify violating it. But at the same time he saw ‘outside’ influence over ‘local deviations’ to be sufficient justification for lawful American intervention. He appeared to think that the ban on war protected states from American intervention as long as they remained on line with American preferences regarding their policies. For Henkin, then, the use of force by the US in Latin America was not prohibited by Article 2(4) if it was a response to Soviet or other ‘outside’ actions there. Henkin, ‘Reports of the death of Article 2(4) are greatly exaggerated’, pp. 544–8 (p. 546).

73 On ‘after’, consider that the US attacks on Libya in 1986 were characterised as ‘self-defence’ after Libyan attacks on various US interests around the world including the Berlin disco bombing but took place some ten days after the disco bombing on 5 April of that year.

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