THE QUESTION OF INTERSTATE RELATIONS IN THE WORKS OF ROUSSEAU AND ITS CENTRAL PROBLEM: THE ENIGMA OF THE ORIGIN OF WAR

Rousseau declares that he has given up the idea of addressing the questions of international relations, to which he had originally planned to devote half of the work that was, as he writes in the Confessions IX, to appear under the title Political Institutions (Reference Rousseau and Kelly1995, 339/404). In Book V of Émile, he summarizes what he had planned to cover under this title. This description provides details about the internal law of the state (so that it is a kind of summary of the Social Contract), but is reduced to allusive remarks when it comes to the “relations” between political societies (Reference Rousseau, Kelly and Bloom2010, 659/848–9).

In the Social Contract, IV:ix, Rousseau recognizes the merit of having made a contribution to what he calls “droit politique” or internal law, but he leaves to others the task of founding external law. In reality, the problem is more complex. If we consider the breadth of the other philosophical and literary projects that Rousseau brought to a successful conclusion, it is difficult to accept the explanation that he left the Political Institutions incomplete because of the “too vast” character of this “object” and his “short sight” (Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997d, 152/470), This failure is probably better explained as resulting from a profound meditation on the contradictions that arise when dealing with the issue of interstate relations, fed in particular by the knowledge of the authors who had thought about “the Law of War and Peace” before him—to take up the title of the masterwork of Grotius, which Rousseau had read very closely.

An attentive reading of Rousseau's works confirms the existence of such deep reflection. A part from the end of the summary of the Political Institutions inserted into Émile; a few short passages in the Social Contract, principally I:iv; the texts on the Project to Perpetual Peace of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre (the Abstract and the Judgment),Footnote ⁷ and several passages from texts on Corsica and Poland shows that Rousseau had in fact carried out a deep and above all coherent analysis of these questions. Yet the Discourse on Inequality and the Principles of the Right of War contain the most decisive elements for understanding the originality and importance of Rousseau's thought concerning external relations. In these texts, we find an idea whose originality must be judged relative to the ideas current in Rousseau's time.

Rousseau opposes the Hobbesian and Lockean conceptions of the “state of Nature;” that is, their conceptions of societies and human relations in the absence of political power and positive law. For Hobbes in particular—Locke is more ambiguous about this point—as soon as a human being encounters another human being, conflict becomes inevitable, and social relations are transformed into a “war of all against all” (Hobbes Reference Hobbes1996, I:xiii, § 8). War thus has an origin that one might describe as “natural,” and it is the artifice of the state, working in the opposite direction, that produces peace. In contrast, according to Rousseau, the appearance of political power and legal order is the cause of the appearance of war: He writes in the Principles of the Right of War that “war was born from peace, or at least from the precautions Men took to ensure a lasting peace” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 155/266). The advent of what he calls “genuine war” is incomprehensible within the framework of the stateless society.

Rousseau proceeds in a methodical fashion in the Principles of the Right of War to demonstrate his thesis. He begins by defining the “genuine war.” It is possible to have an absence of peace without that implying a genuine war, in the same way that the absence of war does not imply the existence of a genuine peace. There is war as soon as “the one has to die so that the other can live” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 160/271). The radical nature of Rousseau's account of the struggle to the death that is war allows genuine war to be distinguished from all states of temporary violence resulting from impulsiveness, from conflicts that are occasional and not resolvable, and from duels or vendettas.

Rousseau poses the following question: How do genuine wars become possible? He writes, “[W]hen a genuine war is involved, just imagine what a strange position this same man must be in if he can preserve his life only at the expense of another” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 160/271). It is far from simple to resolve this question, though Rousseau has given himself the means to do so. He shows that Hobbes's theses is false, but not only for moral or anthropological reasons. When commentators address Rousseau's views on war, their focus is nearly always on its cultural, moral, and psychological aspects (mainly its criticism of cosmopolitanism and praise of patriotism). Now, if Hobbes's theses are false, it is because he does not take into account sociological and economic modifications that transform what is explicitly designated in the Social Contract, I:iv, as “property relations” (“relations réelles”) (Rousseau Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997d, 46/357).Footnote ⁸ Sociological and economic relationships—relationships between people that are mediated by the appropriation of things—at the same time render possible and necessary the advent of “genuine war.”

Rousseau explains the “strange position” that implies that people must kill in order not to die in the Discourse on Inequality—more precisely at the beginning of the second part and in the developments that follow—and in several passages of the Principles of the Right of War. This “position” is the one that results from the appropriation of land:

Rousseau presents this first appropriation as a private appropriation, the act of one or many individuals. Later in the text and in other works, he describes this primal appropriation as a form of a conquest of territories, and thus as a collective appropriation. Nevertheless, the two forms of appropriation have the same structure and are often indistinguishable, as Rousseau very clearly illustrates in the Social Contract, I:vii: If the state ought to exercise sovereign power over a territory, it is primarily because of the need to protect the private property found there.

We can thus identify two essential elements here. First, the appropriation of land is impossible if it is not supported by the institution of the state, meaning a power exercising a sovereign influence on a territory. Second, this state-supported appropriation of land plays a determinant role in the emergence of war.

Why this connection, which Rousseau formulates so often? The principal reason is as follows. The earth is a sphere, a finite surface. Of necessity, therefore, the appropriation of land at some point leads to a situation in which appropriation is saturated and the system is full, without any remainder or exterior left over. The appropriation of the earth sets in motion a chain reaction. Once it has started, it must necessarily come to completion. For the people already present in a territory, an appropriation by strangers is always an expropriation. A first appropriation can have but two consequences: Either it extends itself indefinitely and completely absorbs territories and populations under a single domination, or it encounters resistance. Yet this resistance is possible only if the menaced population constitutes itself as a political society that in its turn defends its own sovereign influence over a territory:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the discovery of new lands to be conquered, and thus the process of colonization, was frequently conceived as implying a sort of unending opening up of the world, providing access to inexhaustible lands (see, for example, Locke Reference Locke1993, ch. V, §§ 33, 43 and 45). On the contrary, Rousseau interprets this period of discovery and distant conquests as a process whose necessary result is that humankind will end up feeling that it is running out of space on earth. This feeling of confinement will result from the fact that human societies will for the first time find themselves literally crushed against each other, all bumping elbows in order to find the space necessary to eke out a meager existence on a finite earth.

This appropriation of the world—the institution of spheres of influence over the inhabitable world—thus artificially creates a situation of penury and a struggle for existence (this situation is not therefore “natural” as Hobbes claims). On this point, it is in the Principles of the Right of War that Rousseau's analysis is the most developed. He illustrates his claim initially by contrasting this moment of saturation with the situation of pre-political societies. The necessary struggle for life that characterizes genuine war is inconceivable in the pre-political condition when, as Rousseau writes, “among individuals everything is in a continual flux which ceaselessly changes relations and interests. So that a subject of dispute arises and ceases instantaneously, . . . and there may be fights and murders but never or very rarely protracted enmities and wars” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 160/271). The pre-political state is characterized by “continual flux,” a situation of fluidity in the relations both of humans among themselves, and of humans and the earth; this fluidity disappears when states have conquered all inhabitable territory.

The analysis developed in the Principles of the Right of War underlines the contrast between the situation of pre-political societies and that which results from the institution of political societies. States maintain “mutual relations” that are “far more intimate than those of individuals” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 162/273). Hobbes overlooks this distinction, but Rousseau underlines it: For him, only states are in such an indiscriminate relation and have their interests so closely bound together that the ambitions of some necessarily threaten the mere existence of others—their existence, not simply their well-being or their honor. According to Rousseau, between states there emerges “a general relationship tending towards their mutual destruction” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 164/275–6).

THE CONTENT OF THE LAW OF WAR AND THE QUESTION OF ITS EFFECTIVENESS

Rousseau demonstrated how the institutions of law and the state were the real causes not only of the possibility but also of the necessity and perpetuity of the “state of war”Footnote ⁹ between powers. But he nevertheless had the ambition to write a book dedicated to the “right of war” and the legitimate war. As reconstructed, this work sets out the principles of law concerning the two main aspects of the jus belli: the right to make war (jus ad bellum) and rights within war (jus in bello).

Following from Rousseau's analysis of the nature of war, the only proper military operations are those that have a direct relation to the authentic aim of war: the struggle for or against a sovereign power. Therefore the members of the body politic can only be envisaged as targets of military violence insofar as they are instruments of the collective will and, more precisely, as instruments of a power that poses a menace to another body politic. The jus in bello thus excludes all targeting of persons and goods considered in light of their private existence: The disarmed soldier is not a vital menace, and it is therefore illegitimate to kill or enslave him (Rousseau Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997d, 46–7). More broadly speaking, the law excludes military tactics that are disguised forms of predation: “[As soon as] land, money, men—all the spoils you can appropriate—. . . become the principal objects of mutual hostilities . . ., war finally degenerates into brigandage, while little by little enemies and warriors turn into Tyrants and thieves.” This is why Rousseau condemns as illegitimate not just the sacrifice of prisoners and the reduction of individuals or entire peoples to slavery, but also annual tribute in men,” the suppression of “commercial liberty,” “pecuniary contributions, in merchandise or in foodstuffs,” “territory stolen,” or “inhabitants transplanted” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 165–66/277–78).

We may observe that transgressions of the jus in bello as it is conceived by Rousseau are inseparable from transgressions of the jus ad bellum—it is for this reason that Rousseau conserves the concept of the “just war,” in the sense of a war that is just in its ends and not merely in its means. In so doing, Rousseau places himself in radical opposition to the conceptions of the law of war in force at his time, which were nourished by the influence of Hobbes, Grotius, and Pufendorf. For these authors, an act of war (for example, the taking of booty) may be legitimate and establish a right to property or, on the contrary, may be mere brigandage, depending on whether its author is a constituted and recognized state or an informal collective body not constituted into a state—a band of insurgents, for example (see Grotius Reference Grotius and Campbell1814, III:iii, §§ 1–3). Rousseau entirely inverts the distinguishing criteria: It is the nature of the act that determines its legitimate or illegitimate character. From this point of view, far from prolonging, as Schmitt contends, the dominant point of view of Jus publicum europeaum, Rousseau is formulating a radical critique of it. The state that carries out hostilities not to satisfy the demands of self-preservation but to increase its well-being or glory is in reality indistinguishable from a band of brigands. For Rousseau, there is a right to make war only insofar as the vital interests of the state are at risk.

It is true that Rousseau does not give a detailed definition of the criteria for jus ad bellum, as had been the usual practice in traditional theories of just war since the Middle Ages; these criteria included legitimate authority, just cause, proportionality, reasonable chances of success, last resort, and right intention (see Brunstetter and Holeindre Reference Brunstetter and Holeindre2012, 14). But this does not mean that he does not care about normative requirements—quite the contrary, because respecting the rights of civilians and of disarmed enemies and avoiding useless destruction and plunder are the best criteria for knowing whether a war is just from the point of view of jus ad bellum. He therefore has a completely unambiguous position on the possibility and the need to verify, while observing the modalities of the conduct of war, whether the ends of war are just or not. As soon as war becomes a predatory enterprise, it is evident that the ends of military actions no longer correlate with those authorizing war; in other words, the necessity of killing or at least weakening the enemy to preserve one's own life. This point is the only one that is crucial: Are there, strictly from the point of view of the rational self-interest of the state, reasons to make war, and if so, what military means are indispensable to ensure the salus populi?

However, a very difficult question now arises: How does Rousseau conceive of the efficacy of the jus belli? At the beginning of the Principles of the Right of War, he writes that the jus gentium is a completely theoretical ideal and that it is in reality completely inefficacious. Rousseau does not entertain illusions about the possibility either of pacification by good will or of instituting international laws and arbitration. But, as we see later, these criticisms do not prevent him from considering that the jus belli as he conceives it is not merely a pious wish, but has a kind of efficacy.

REFUTATION OF THE IDEA OF A JUS GENTIUM BASED ON BENEVOLENCE OR ON CIVILIZED CUSTOMS

The first hypothesis that Rousseau refutes is that of a tendency to natural benevolence and the spontaneous recognition of principles of justice among peoples. This interpretation of interstate relations, which is moral or customary rather than strictly juridical, is actually one of the senses of the expression jus gentium, which in antiquity and the Middle Ages designated a set of customs that “civilized” nations were supposed to respect on the basis of a cultural and/or rational, or indeed religious, consensus (the term still partly retained this broad and equivocal signification in the modern period, notably in the works of Grotius Reference Grotius and Campbell1814, I:i, § 14).

In the Geneva Manuscript, an early version of the Social Contract, Rousseau refutes the hypothesis of a natural sociability that would unite the human race morally, independently of any political or juridical institutions. However, he does not deny the existence of universal moral principles. According to him, good certainly exists in the spirit of “wise men” and in “the systems of the Philosophers,” but he does not think that it is the motivation that really drives people (see Rousseau Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997c, 155–56/284–85).

Rousseau places this thesis in the mouth of an “enlightened and independent man” who argues against the exhortation to act with benevolence toward those who resemble him. He takes particular care to note that in this text he is explicitly comparing the reasoning of the “enlightened and independent man” with the reasoning that determines the foreign policy of states: “This is how every sovereign society accountable for its conduct solely to itself reasons” (Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997c, 156/285). His argumentation takes up an essential thesis of Hobbes, namely the need to connect the respect for another's laws with a guarantee of reciprocity (see Hobbes Reference Hobbes1996, II:xvii, §§ 3 and 13). Without guarantees “against every unjust undertaking,” the “independent man” will be “exposed to all the evils which the stronger might choose to visit upon [him]” (Rousseau Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997c, 156/285). The same idea is found in the Social Contract, II:iv. The requirement of reciprocity implies that transgressions against the rules of justice will be “sanctioned,” something that is not done “naturally.”

Because Rousseau places the reasoning of the “enlightened and independent man” on the same level as that motivating the external relations of nations, it is not surprising to find this argument reappearing in the Principles of the Right of War in almost identical terms; namely, the affirmation of the insufficiency of law founded only on the good will of the parties to establish relations of effective justice among states:

The consequence of this set of analyses is clear: A necessary condition to conceive an effective jus gentium will be the institution of legal rules that actually apply, and in an identical manner, to all states without exception. This necessity explains the interest shown by Rousseau in the project of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, which sought to institutionalize the rights of nations.

REFUTATION OF THE IDEA OF A JUS GENTIUM BASED ON A CONTRACT AMONG NATIONS

Rousseau worked for a long time on the projects of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, the purpose being to give a more readable and condensed presentation than that given in the Abbé's original texts.Footnote ¹⁰ An old tradition tends to attribute to Rousseau an adherence to the project of Saint-Pierre and to ignore the trenchant criticism he expressed.Footnote ¹¹ Windenberger (Reference Windenberger1899, 237) considers that there is a necessary continuity in Rousseau between his theory of the social contract among individuals and the idea of a contract among nations. Lassudrie-Duchêne (Reference Lassudrie-Duchêne1906, 133) is more attentive to the skepticism formulated by Rousseau, but instead of going into his reasoning in depth, considers that there is some incoherence in this part of his thought: “If one considers, like Rousseau, that every society rests on a convention, it is logical to conclude that international society also finds its basis in a contract lately concluded among states” (my translation). Now, Rousseau clearly distanced himself from this activity with the Project to Perpetual Peace, discretely in the Abstract Footnote ¹² and more explicitly in the Judgment that he prepared in parallel.

What are his main arguments against this project? One might be tempted to pick out his denunciation of Saint-Pierre's naïveté in supposing that rationality should play a determining role in the political choices of monarchs. We know that this criticism is seen again in Kant, who prolongs and completes the ideas of Saint-Pierre, but tries to make them less chimerical. According to Kant, there are reasons to hope that the spread of republican regimes would result in a progressive movement toward a desire for peace, the product of fatigue with the sufferings caused to populations by repeated wars (see Kant Reference Kant and Nisbet1991, VIIth proposition). Carter (Reference Carter1987, 157) considers that the question of the nature of power (absolute or moderated) constitutes the point of the greatest divergence between Rousseau and Saint-Pierre. Asbach (Reference Asbach2002, 103–22) also insists on this aspect of the question as resolving the contradiction between the skepticism of Rousseau concerning Saint-Pierre's project and his belief in the possibility of progressively escaping from a state of war between states. According to Asbach's conception, a historical process of internal domestication (“Zähmung”) of states, turning them into states with democratic laws, should lead to a progressive domestication of the relations among states.

Certainly, Rousseau does not deny that the question is formed differently according to whether the hypothesis involves a monarchy or a republic (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 160/272). But he refuses to reduce the problem to a change of political regimes. Universalizing the republican model is not, for Rousseau, a guarantee of true pacification in relations between states. In fact, he writes in the Discourse on Political Economy that “it is not impossible that a well-governed republic might wage an unjust war” (Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997b, 8/246). And he argues in the Abstract of the “Project of Perpetual Peace” that “in the absence of any sure clue to guide her, reason is bound, in every case of doubt, to obey the promptings of self-interest which, in itself, would make war inevitable even if all parties desired to be just” (Reference Rousseau and Vaughan2009, 20/569; my italics). This last formulation, whose consequences are significant, must be related to the analyses of the Principles of the Right of War: “The body politic . . . is forever obliged to compare itself in order to know itself. Depending upon all that surrounds it, it must take an interest in all that occurs there” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 162–3/274). We thus understand why “in every case of doubt, . . . war [would be] inevitable even if all parties desired to be just.” Each state, even should its ambition be to “remain within itself without gain or loss,” will necessarily be led to “take an interest” in the behavior and intentions of other powers (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 163/274).

The intentions of states in relation to their neighbors are unpredictable. This is why the life of each state, understood as a simple desire to guarantee the security and liberty of its members, is constantly and really threatened. At any moment, a state must expect to see its tranquility put in peril by the ambitions of other states that seek, by means of their own forces or by making a coalition for that purpose, to destroy or weaken it (see Rousseau Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 163/274). It is therefore both necessary and normal that each state should prepare for war. Each state, even if it only reasons according to the logic of “amour de soi” and not that of “amour proper,” may legitimately carry out preventive wars of aggression, but only insofar as doing so is indispensable for its own preservation and does not aim at an unlimited increase of its power or glory. We must note that Rousseau does not formulate any critical judgment on this point, because this reasoning remains true regardless of any pro-war logic, whether it be nationalistic or imperialistic; see Rousseau (Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997a, 116/113; Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997b, 28/268; Reference Rousseau and Watkins1986a, 237/1013) and Bachofen (Reference Bachofen2012, 277 and 292–8).

Now, the anticipation by each state of a possible war, and its wish to prepare for it or to prevent its occurrence in advance, will be highly likely to excite a legitimate, reciprocal fear in its neighbors, which will lead them to reason in the same way, thus confirming the original fear. The fear of war engenders the state of war or, indeed, actual warfare. But Rousseau goes further. If we have followed his reasoning so far, there is nothing to prevent us from seeing in interstate relations a kind of reasoning comparable to that which Hobbes (and Rousseau himself) sees in individuals living in the state of nature and that leads them to establish a social contract. This is why the decisive point is to insist on the different nature of individuals and states. Theories of the social contract rest on the idea of “natural rights” attached to each individual, which originally make them all equal and which serve as a basis for the definition of the subjective rights that must necessarily be ascribed to them once the state is instituted. The same cannot be said for states, because neither their existence nor their fundamental rights are comparable to those of individuals. From that point of view, there is a strict logical continuity with the analyses of the Discourse on Inequality and the Principles of the Right of War concerning the connection between the advent of the state and the beginning of war. The factual origin of states (the conquest, usurpation, and unequal appropriation of the entire world) implies that it is impossible to make an objective definition of the “rights” of each individual state. For a given state, the “rights” of the other states are always open to question. Rousseau, evoking the right to appropriate a territory, writes in the Social Contract, I:ix, that “[p]ossession [does not] change[s] in nature . . . and becomes property in the hands of the Sovereign: But . . . public possession in fact has greater force and is more irrevocable, without being any more legitimate, at least for foreigners” (Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997d, 54; my italics). He goes so far as to write in the Abstract that “if we could get back to the solid ground of primitive right, few would be the sovereigns in Europe who would not have to surrender all that they possess” (Reference Rousseau and Vaughan2009, 20/569).

This is a first difference between the relations among individuals and those among states. But there is another one that is no less important: Rousseau is well aware of Hobbes's argument that the state of war is an untenable situation for individuals because, in such a state, they would immediately see a breakdown in their experience of individuality. However powerful he or she might be, in the long term no individual can hope to resist the hostile endeavors of others without the protection of a sovereign political and juridical order (see Hobbes Reference Hobbes1996, I:xiii, § 1). But Rousseau shows that the question does not arise in the same terms for states: “Man has a measure of strength and size fixed by nature . . . . The State, by contrast, being an artificial body, has no determinate measure, the size pertaining to it is undefined” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 162/273–74). This difference automatically produces a certain number of effects that in the end definitively demolish the idea of a social contract among states—however plausible it might seem at first sight. On this point see Riley (Reference Riley1973, 16).

The difference in kind between individuals and states is nearly always ignored in the conceptions of social contract theorists regarding international law. This was already the case for the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, it remains so for Kant, and the misunderstanding persists for Rawls, whose work The Law of Peoples is strongly inspired by Kant.Footnote ¹³ In this work, Rawls applies the principle of the “veil of ignorance” not to individuals, but to the representatives of “decent” societies, asking them in particular to make an abstraction concerning the size of the various different states.Footnote ¹⁴

Rousseau, on the contrary, is quite lucid in anticipating the crippling problem arising from an analogy between states and individuals. Hoffmann underlines this difference between the theses of Rousseau and those of Saint-Pierre (Hoffmann and Fidler Reference Hoffmann and Fidler1991, xiii–xiv) and, in a commentary published in the same volume as the French translation of The Law of Peoples (Rawls, Reference Rawls1996, 144–5), criticizes what he sees as the problematic character of Rawls's reasoning. Although one may imagine that the “representatives of peoples” decide, for moral reasons, artificially to “ignore” the specific sizes and the relative power of the states to which they belong, they cannot fail to know about the fact of the disproportion among the various state powers. There thus arise effects that are independent of the good or bad intentions of peoples or their representatives, because the theory of the social contract does not rest on positions of moral principle, but rather fundamentally on a pragmatic calculation.

We already find this reasoning in Rousseau, who insists on the fact that, in international relations, there always exist a certain number of political bodies that judge that it is possible for them to enjoy, solely as a result of the disproportion between their own power and that of their neighbors, a durable security. A certain number of states see no need to renounce their independence by submitting to the laws of any outside sovereign body. At the most, and according to circumstances, they might make some formal adjustments to their relations with other states, something belonging more to diplomacy than to law but that in fact merely places a sheen of legal appearance on relations based on power. Rousseau formulates this idea very clearly in a letter to Malesherbes:

Rousseau considers that the submission of states to international laws or treaties is always a disguised and hypocritical form of the “state of war” and for this reason can even be the cause of new conflicts. That is because these treaties necessarily provide motives for dissatisfaction for those on whom they are imposed and are therefore sources of counterclaims, a thirst for revenge, and new wars. In the Constitutional Proposal for Corsica, he writes about “alliances” and “treatises” that “such things may bind the weak to the strong, but never the strong to the weak” (Reference Rousseau and Watkins1986b, 280/903; cf. Considerations on the Government of Poland, Reference Rousseau and Watkins1986a, 268/1037).

Fundamentally, Rousseau criticizes the principles of the project of Saint-Pierre because he considers that it only reproduces, under nother seemingly more egalitarian form (in particular the institution of a permanent assembly), the repeated attempts of the time to ensure peace by bilateral or multilateral treaties. In Rousseau's eyes these are only leonine treaties that formalize relations based on unequal forces. The “European Union” that Saint-Pierre imagined would for Rousseau fall under the logic of the “balance of powers” theory that, since the Peace of Westphalia, had enjoyed such a vogue in the ruling circles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Rousseau, the “balance of powers” (which is supposed to create a pacifying and stabilizing equilibrium) is in reality a case of perpetual motion. That is why he has no illusions as to the reality or the stability of the peace produced by such means.

One of Rousseau's most original and interesting theses on this point is the relative nature of the notion of power for a state. Power cannot be reduced to simple quantitative data such as the extent of its territory, the size of its population, or its military power. According to him, the greater or lesser determination of the members of the state to defend it, and thus to involve it in military undertakings, plays an essential role that is far too often neglected in the geostrategic calculations of sovereigns and their ministers:

Therefore, peace can neither be established by the spontaneous renunciation of all aggression based on good will, nor by equality and security guaranteed by law and by the contract existing among the powers, nor by a more or less definitive and stable hierarchy established among the powers.

THE INTERNAL FOUNDATION OF EXTERNAL RIGHTS

Rousseau, as we have seen, puts no faith in jus gentium, whether in a moral or customary form or in an institutionalized form. However he takes the idea of a law of war very seriously. Above all he does not consider that it would be devoid of any kind of effectiveness.

The resolution of this question is of special interest because it bypasses the issue that most often arises in studies of Rousseau's theory of international relations: Should he be placed among the “realists” or the “idealists”? Waltz (Reference Waltz1959, 159–86), Fetscher (Reference Fetscher1975, 172–257), and Hassner (Reference Hassner, Tarcov and Orwin1997, 200–19) place him among the realists. Hoffmann (Reference Hoffmann and Hoffmann1965a) has probably best grasped the specific nature of Rousseau's thought, showing that in reality he stands outside this classic division. Although he places him more or less on the side of the realists, he insists on the atypical character of his position (see also Hoffmann and Fidler Reference Hoffmann and Fidler1991, xxi–xxii).

Paradoxically, Rousseau thus appears to be a realist and an idealist at the same time. How does he rise above this distinction? To resolve the paradox, we should look at his response to the question: What does it mean to win a war? An unexpected turn of argumentation is to be found in the final third of The Principles of the Right of War. After having defined genuine war as a struggle to the death from which it is impossible to extricate oneself, Rousseau shows that the “death” that is referred to can only be the death of the state. It is states, and not humans qua humans, that entertain an “intimate relation” such that if the one adversary state abandons the terrain in the struggle, it has given up its own existence. From this there follows another crucial and extremely complex question: What does it mean for a state to live, weaken, and die? From the response to this question follows the normative aspect of Rousseau's theory, because the rights of war are deduced from an analysis of the conditions necessary for the death or the crippling of the state qua state.

The “life” of the state, he writes, is constituted by the social pact. This is why to “wage war on the sovereign . . . means to attack public convention” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 168/280). And yet the social pact exists in the heart or the will of its members. From this follows a very original conception of what it means to attack and “kill”—or at least weaken—a body politic and thereby to win a war:

War, most rigorously defined, opposes the organs of one collective will against the organs of another collective will. It is thus an extreme form of a political program.Footnote ¹⁵ The state cannot “live,” except on the condition that its members desire its existence and share in a common will to see it exist. For Rousseau, a population possesses a political existence as soon as its acts manifest something like a general will. He was intensely interested, as we can see in some Political Fragments, Émile, and finally the Considerations on the Government of Poland, in the situation experienced by two peoples in his time: the Poles and the Jews. These peoples, Rousseau says, are and remain “political bodies,” having resisted in this name spoliation, material domination, the destruction of their institutions, and even (in the case of the Jewish people) dispersion and privation of territory. He writes in the Government of Poland that the members of the Jewish people have resisted these things because the “social pact” that makes of them “political bodies” continues to live (Reference Rousseau and Watkins1986a, 163/956). He is inspired by this example to give the Poles the advice to

As Clausewitz would very justly remark a few decades later, the aim of war is to impose law on the enemy (Reference Clausewitz1832, I:i, § 4). Hoffmann (Reference Hoffmann1965b, 217) evokes Clausewitz in a transparent manner, although without quoting him explicitly, to underline the convergence between certain of his own theses and those of Rousseau on the nature of interstate relations. Both insist on the essentially political character of warfare and on the need, indissociably pragmatic and normative, to subordinate the military power to the political power, thus making the practice of war subject to the essential needs of the political power—which is to obtain the durable and free obedience of individuals to the law. The proper aim of war is the destruction or the annexation of the sovereignty of the enemy. Translating this into the vocabulary of Rousseau, this means that war consists, in the final instance, in proposing a new social pact to the members of the attacked people or at least in testing their attachment to the existing social pact.

A war waged against a state, Rousseau says, can strictly speaking have but two outcomes. In the first case, the will to destroy the social pact of the attacked state will be crowned with success. In concrete terms, the citizens of the attacked state will renounce the defense of their institutions and dissociate themselves from the organs of the state. In the extreme case, according to this hypothesis, “the State [might] be killed, without a single man dying” (Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 168/280). This means that the members of the state might choose to adopt a new social pact or to integrate themselves into the aggressor state. In the second case, the aggressor state does not arrive at its political goals: Whatever might be its military successes (pillaging, devastation, enslavement), the war cannot be considered as won. An armistice, a treaty of leonine peace, might be accepted by some private individuals pretending to represent the political body, but in reality the political body continues to “live.” The social pact resists and survives where it really exists; that is, in the will of the members of the body. In the reality of wars that take place in history, all variants can be found, from the destruction pure and simple of the institutions of the vanquished state—or its population—to partial annexations, voluntary secessions, occupations imposed by force and provoking resistance that may be more or less visible and vigorous, or finally occupations and annexations carried out exclusively by force but progressively established and accepted through lassitude, indifference, or self-interest. Among these very different cases, the general principle remains the same, even if it is applied to different situations according to the circumstances: War is a struggle between the wills to existence of two “political bodies.”

One thus begins to understand why, in reality, all military enterprises that transgress the jus belli run a significant risk of failure. From these analyses can be derived a pragmatic, and not a juridical, auto-limitation of military practice. The testing of the social pact that is war can be effective only on the condition that the military enterprise is submitted to specifically political ends: the attempt to subjugate the enemy's sovereignty. This supposes that one exclusively attacks public forces, which are the organs of sovereign and executive power (Rousseau Reference Rousseau and Hoare2012, 165–66/276–77).

The Rousseauist conception of the intrinsic limits of war, a conception that might appear abstract or idealistic, in reality testifies to a lucid analysis of war as it is fought and observed when one penetrates beneath the surface of history. The examples of the Polish and Jewish people evoked by Rousseau quite concretely illustrate that human history is in reality a succession of unfinished, poorly won, and eternally restarted wars. If one is surprised that a military victory, even one apparently without appeal, resolved nothing in history or that lost battles are so often replayed decades or even centuries after the initial engagement, then one has understood nothing of the essence of war: One has instead confused conquering by violence with rightful power.

If Rousseau tells us that war ought to be waged in a manner that is honest if it cannot be waged in a manner that is strictly speaking legal, he does so for reasons that do not derive from positive law, honor, or morality. Instead, it is this honesty alone that permits a war to be a decisive event. As Rousseau writes in the Social Contract, I:iv, “a just prince may well seize everything in enemy territory that belongs to the public, but he respects the person and the goods of private individuals; he respects the rights on which his own are founded” (Reference Rousseau and Gourevitch1997d, 47/357; my italics). To respect disarmed enemies, private property, and individual security is, for a fighting state, to establish the foundations of its legitimacy as a state. The state that discredits itself in its manner of waging war weakens itself while believing that it is reinforcing itself. From this claim there follows a weighty consequence: The principles of military justice are grounded neither on contractual nor moral obligations, but on a pragmatic concern rooted in the principles of internal public law.