Moral Issues in International Affairs: Problems of European Integration

268 Pages·1998·27.34 MB·English

by  Bill McSweeney (eds.)

MORAL ISSUES IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Moral Issues in
International Affairs
Problems of European Integration
Edited by
Bill McSweeney
Head of the Centre for Peace Studies
Irish School of Ecumenics
First published in Great Britain 1998 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-26466-7 ISBN 978-1-349-26464-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-26464-3
First published in the United States of America 1998 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-21128-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moral issues in international affairs: problems of European
integration / edited by Bill McSweeney.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21128-8 (cloth)
I. International relations-Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Europe
-Economic integration-Moral and ethical aspects. I. McSweeney,
William.
JZI306.M67 1998
172' .4'094-dc21 97-40513
CIP
© Irish School of Ecumenics 1998
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1998
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sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 321
07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
Contents
Notes on the Contributors vii
Introduction: Comments on Morality and Peace Research
Bill McSweeney 1
PART I MORALITY AND SECURITY: THEORETICAL
ISSUES
1 Morality in International Affairs: a Case for Robust
Universalism
Fred Halliday 15
2 Morality and Global Security: the Normative Horizons of
War
Richard Fa lk 31
PART II NORMATIVE QUESTIONS IN EUROPEAN
INTEGRATION
3 Ideals and Idolatry in the European Construct
Joseph Weiler 55
4 Moral Choice and European Integration
Bill McSweeney 89
PART III MORAL CHALLENGES IN NEGOTIATING AN
EVER CLOSER UNION
5 The Compatibility of EU Membership with Neutrality
Walter Carlsnaes 117
6 The Indivisible Continent: Russia, NATO and European
Security
Michael MccGwire 139
7 European Integration and the Arms Trade: Creating a New
Moral Imperative?
Ian Davis 187
v
vi Contents
8 Leading by Virtuous Example: European Policy for Overseas
Development
David Coombes 221
Appendix: Address by Vaclav Havel to the European
Parliament, Strasbourg, 8 March 1994 246
Index 253
Notes on the Contributors
Walter Carlsnaes is Professor of Government at Uppsala University and
the founding editor of the European Journal of International Affairs. His
publications include Energy Vulnerability and Swedish National Security
(Frances Pinter, 1988); The EC and Changing Foreign Policy (ed. with
Steve Smith) (Sage, 1993).
David Coombes is Professor of European Integration Studies at the
University of Limerick. His publications include European Integration,
Regional Devolution and National Parliaments (Policy Studies Institute,
1979); Politics and Bureaucracy in the European Community (Allen &
Unwin, 1970).
Ian Davis is pursuing doctoral research on the arms trade at the Depart
ment of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford and is the author of
several reports on UK defence policy.
Richard Falk is Professor of International Law and International
Relations at Princeton University. He is the author of On Humane
Governance: Toward a New Global Politics (PSU Press, 1995).
Fred HalUday is Professor of International Relations at the London
School of Economics. His most recent publications include Rethinking
International Relations (Macmillan, 1994); Islam and the Myth of
Confrontation (I.B. Tauris, 1996).
Michael MccGwire is former Fellow at the Brookings Institute, Emeritus
Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of
International Politics at University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. His
recent publications include Perestroika and Soviet National Security
(Brookings Institute, 1991).
Bill McSweeney is Senior Lecturer in International Politics and Head of
the Centre for Peace Studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics. Publica
tions include Roman Catholicism: the Search for Relevance (Blackwell,
1980); Ireland and the Threat of Nuclear War (ed.) (Dominican Publica
tions, 1985); Security and Identity in International Relations Theory
(forthcoming).
vii
viii Notes on the Contributors
Joseph Weiler is Manley Hudson Professor of Law at Harvard
University, and Co-Director of the Academy of European Law, European
University Institute, Florence. His publications include Human Rights and
the European Community (Nomos Verlag, 1991); An Ever-Closer Union:
Critical Analysis of the Draft Treaty (European Policy Institute, 1985).
Introduction: Comments on
Morality and Peace Research
Bill McSweeney
It should come as no surprise that an institute founded to advance
pluralism and tolerance through its postgraduate programmes of 'ecumen
ical studies' displays a bias towards issues of morality and ethics. The
religious origins of the Irish School of Ecumenics, which was the principal
sponsor of this collection of papers, make it predictable and appropriate
that it should focus on such questions.
Neither should it puzzle the reader to find that a Centre for Peace
Studies - a department of the Irish School of Ecumenics, engaged in
teaching and research on a range of Peace Research topics - shows a
similar disposition to raise the ethical question in the analysis of security,
conflict and its resolution. One should expect this explicit orientation,
given the contrast between the ideal and the existing order, the gap
between human possibilities for amelioration and nature in the raw, which
is filled by the term 'peace' in every language. The option for 'peace'
rather than 'international' studies conveys the conviction that any estab
lished order is a consequence of choice and is therefore susceptible to
change in favour of alternatives.
But it is clear that many Peace Research (PR) institutes in the past, like
ours, have been inhibited from displaying the moral concern announced in
their name and in the statement which it conveys to students and potential
funders in contrast to the discipline of International Relations (IR). We
have long co-existed in the academic community in ambiguous relation to
our more prestigious IR colleagues. While addressing much the same area
of human relationships, we claim to be different from them; while insist
ing that we apply the same rigorous standards of scholarship, we do so on
a different (higher?) moral plane. But the difference has not been apparent
to generations of students, trained in an approach to the study of inter
national affairs which is reactive to the judgments and conclusions of the
older discipline and uncritical of the theoretical framework that generates
them. Above all, we have too easily deferred to the reigning principle of
political science which makes the ethical the enemy of truth and the facts
sacred and unproblematic.
1
2 Introduction
This situation is changing rapidly since the beginning of this decade.
Paradoxically, the transformation required to provide a more ade
quate theoretical foundation for a 'peace' orientation to international
affairs is occurring, not in the PR institutes, but in those of International
Relations.
Since their inception in the 1960s, institutes of Peace Research have
always competed for the rewards of academe at some disadvantage in
relation to the discipline of IR. It has never been easy to define their area
of interest and competence in contradistinction to that of the IR com
munity. During the Cold War, when the major question demanding atten
tion revolved around the nature, number and deployment of weapons
constituting mutual deterrence, PR institutes enjoyed an easy demarcation
for students and practitioners, by virtue of their role as critics of the main
stream. For four decades following the end of W orId War II, the dis
cipline of IR provided a relatively unitary and simple target for the PR
community, permitting the latter to rest comfortably with its definition in
opposition to the former. In the elaboration of a complex defence of
nuclear deterrence on the part of IR scholars, peace researchers found a
target adequate to the demands of their constituency of students and peace
activists.
The relationship between the two communities of scholars, however,
was skewed in favour of IR; the competition for funds, prestige and polit
ical support, particularly in the universities, was never equitable. Like
women in relation to male centres of power, peace researchers in the
universities found they had to work harder to establish their credentials as
scholars. In an academic community where the canons of natural science
established the measure of scholarly worth, where the whiff of moralizing
was deemed in bad taste, and where the scientific standard for the study
of international security was set by the realist school of International
Relations, Peace Research made a dubious bedfellow. In its defence,
peace researchers adopted the analogy of medicine to illustrate the
compatibility of ethical commitment with dispassionate objectivity. Like
medical scientists in respect of disease and physical suffering, peace
researchers saw violence and war as an evil to be controlled or elimin
ated, and made an ethical commitment to that end; this did not impugn
their capacity to employ the same rigorous scientific method to their
study of international relations as their colleagues in the other social
sciences.
It was an attractive riposte in its day. Who could deny that ethics
entered into the choice of the research topic without thereby distorting the
objectivity of the research process? If medical research and nuclear