Bounding power: Deudney's security theory

As a political tradition, republicanism is no household name in IR. ‘Republics’ do feature in democratic peace theory, but they are tied ideologically to liberalism. The democratic peace argument is a cherished element of liberal international theory: it is their liberal constitution that renders republics peace-loving.Footnote ⁹ They are liberal republics, not socialist, nor ‘republican republics’. Taking into account its rise to prominence in intellectual history generally, and in the history of the early American republic particularly, the relative absence of republicanism within our discipline is surprising. Would not IR benefit from being taken beyond Hobbes and Locke, beyond realism and liberalism?Footnote ¹⁰

It is this conviction that animates Deudney's Bounding Power. The book is an elaboration of Republican Security Theory, grounded in a historical excavation of the republican tradition from The Polis to the Global Village.Footnote ¹¹ The book's bottom line is that republicanism – as a tradition of political thought – is better able to articulate a viable security theory for our contemporary global nuclear age than is either (IR) realism or liberalism. Realism is too narrowly focused on the anarchy problematique and liberalism has simply not concerned itself sufficiently, nor coherently, with issues of security. Republicanism, on the other hand, does deal with security issues, but perceives a danger coming from hierarchy as well as from anarchy. What is more, throughout its historical development, it has shown a concern with the role of nature and other material factors, as well as an engagement with the role of technological evolutions. It can deal with changing material and technological conditions, argues Deudney. That is why it could prove useful in tackling insecurity in the nuclear age. Indeed, ‘[t]he overall republican security project has been to achieve security by simultaneously avoiding the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy over successively larger spaces in response to changes in the material context, particularly changes in violence interdependence.’Footnote ¹²

Any security theory should start with a definition of security. David Baldwin has suggested that security be defined as ‘a low probability of damage to acquired values’. In these general terms, the definition is, however, not operational yet. Specification is necessary. At the very least, this entails answering two further questions: ‘Security for whom?’ and ‘Security for which values?’.Footnote ¹³ According to Deudney, republican security theory holds the individual to be the referent object for security, and physical survival its ultimate value. ‘Achieving security requires restraint of the application of violent power upon individual bodies.’Footnote ¹⁴ Any other entity or value in international politics or foreign policy is either instrumentally related to the individual's physical survival, or is derivative of it. Concretely, this means that the state is an instrument established for the sake of individuals' needs and that people cannot enjoy wealth, or prestige, when they are no longer alive. ‘Actually existing’ security policies might have different referent objects or reflect different preference sets, but they should not.

Going one step further down the line still, any theory of security should articulate an ‘anthropology’ (in the philosophical sense of the word) – be it a reflection on the ‘ontological status of the state’Footnote ¹⁵ or an account of the natural needs of individual human beings. Deudney's philosophical anthropology is biologically grounded. It is their mortality, their existence as ‘perishable corporeal beings’,Footnote ¹⁶ that drives people, if they are not somehow misled, to seek protection from physical violence. People are foremost bodies, so that a crippled body entails crippled agency, and, accordingly, a dead body no agency at all. Therefore, it is unnatural, and accordingly irrational, for people to fight. And yet they do, which necessitates the establishment of a political order. Why do people fight in spite of fighting being irrational (except in the case of self-defence)? Deudney lists three reasons. First, there are natural devils ‘willing to risk death […] to achieve power’. They upset the theoretically possibly peaceful state of nature, and if they achieve leadership, they make hierarchical constellations unbearable. Second, human rationality is bounded. Specifically, human reason can be overwhelmed by emotions, causing people to over-react – and fight if need is (mistakenly) perceived. Third, people have second natures. They are not only driven by natural needs (the foremost being security-as-survival), but equally by social needs. It is their attachment to social identities that explains a lot of security-dysfunctional behaviour.Footnote ¹⁷ While, at times, Deudney avers that this view of human nature is typical of Western republican security theory only, ultimately he believes it to be universally valid. He is merely describing ‘a core of robust consensus’,Footnote ¹⁸ grounded foremost in biology. Biological science has sufficiently demonstrated what man is ultimately about.

The end of security theory and policy firmly established, the focus turns to means. Baldwin has noted a ‘tendency of some security scholars to define the subfield entirely in terms of “the threat, use, and control of military force”’.Footnote ¹⁹ Not so Deudney, definitely not when it comes to the means of security policy. In order to achieve durable security, he proposes political, not military, solutions. Military technology features in the argument (more on which below), but as a causal force calling for a security policy, not as a causal force in solving security problems. Authoritative political order enables a secure environment. What is more, not any political order suffices. Ultimately, only the republican variant is viable. Weak states are not, nor are despotic states. This begs the question what a republic is, and what it is about it that makes it republican. In the very beginning of the book (p. 2), Deudney formally defines republics as ‘polities based on political liberty, popular sovereignty, and limited government’, repeating the definition a few pages later (p. 13), with a minor specification: the general notion of ‘polities’ becomes the more specific ‘plural political orders’. Somewhat surprisingly, ‘political liberty’ is left undefined. The reason is that Deudney is elaborating a security theory, so that the only freedom of concern to him is the freedom from violence. The discussion is not one of ends, but one of means. With respect to these, Deudney argues that their reliance on political structures of restraint set republican political orders apart from hierarchical political orders.Footnote ²⁰ Both an individual's fellow-subjects and its rulers ought to be bound by structures of restraint which disable the possibility of doing bodily harm. Those structures can be of a natural or a social kind. The tight intertwinement of republicanism and the rule of law is paradigmatic of its focus on structures of restraint.Footnote ²¹ Think in this respect of practices like Montesquieu's separation of powers, or of the promotion of federal and confederal constitutions. But think also of the stopping-power of water or mountain chains. And, finally, think of virtue – a notion as complex as it sounds simple.Footnote ²² Deudney stresses that republican (security) theory (as such) has no a priori preference for one specific method of restraining. He therefore considers the Cambridge School's reading of republicanism as civic, or neo-Roman, republicanism to be reductionist. It invalidly generalises what is historically contingent. Virtue is not the essence of republicanism, even if it is compatible with it.Footnote ²³

Internationally, the republican insistence on structures of restraint translates into an institutional preference for practices of hiding and/or co-binding, and a wariness of balancing and dominating. The reason that Deudney is concerned with balancing is that so-called ‘internal balancing’ might undercut ‘interior balances’. Shoring up its resources, centralising its decision structures, against an external enemy, the republican state can lose from sight (and lose) its distinctively republican nature. The choice for domination leads to similar problems. This is why, in fact, republics prefer to hide in splendid isolation, a possibility that was traditionally conditional upon favourable topographical conditions. Material isolation facilitates political isolation. With the advent of the globalisation of violence, hiding has become increasingly difficult. A second best solution is to co-bind with others in ‘various forms of union (alliances, leagues, confederations, and federations)’.Footnote ²⁴ The major advantage of co-binding over balancing and dominating is that it allows the republic to retain its internal structures of political restraint. But note that co-binding, that is, joining together with other republics in various forms of union, is geared toward the pooling of power. Only if republics join together can they muster sufficient resources to be safe from external dangers without undermining domestic freedoms. Admittedly, the argument is rather self-centered: if it were not for its domestic effects, co-binding would not be preferable over dominating. This brings me to a first of two observations. It is noteworthy that Deudney presents these four possible strategies as ‘a set of foreign policy […] practices’.Footnote ²⁵ In its prescriptive mode, Deudney's republican security theory is concerned with foreign policy, less so with international order. It starts from a (hypothetical or actual) republic and theorises how it can best preserve its (better: its citizens') security. It is concerned with ‘a republican conception of a republic's security’, not with ‘a republican conception of international or world security’. A second remark concerns the role of virtue. Whereas in theory virtue was still recognised as a historically contingent feature of republicanism, with respect to republican foreign policy practices, it is not even mentioned. Thus, a notion like ‘neo-diplomatic’Footnote ²⁶ education or conscious attempts at socialisation are not taken into account. And yet, ‘virtue’ hovers in the background. Co-binding, that is, is not indiscriminate: it ‘entails republics joining together with other republics’.Footnote ²⁷ The preference for teaming up with the like-minded is justified in functional terms: republics have, empirically speaking, a better historical record when it comes to alliances and federations. There is something disarmingly commonsensical about the idea that similar units cooperate better than do dissimilar units. The question is, however, if this justifies dissimilar units not even trying to cooperate. Does ‘functionality’ justify exclusion? Does ‘is’ straightforwardly lead to ‘ought’? And also, has functionality empirically been the motivating force for republics to co-bind, for example, in NATO?

‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.’Footnote ²⁸ This quote from Adorno kicks off Deudney's first substantial chapter, highlighting the central role that technology plays in the argument. A deep concern for the international implications of nuclear technology drove Deudney to elaborate his practical philosophy.Footnote ²⁹ Technological evolution, in general, is assigned primary causal force in the theory's reading of historical development. Technological evolutions are said to matter because not every instance of anarchy breeds insecurity. Anarchy is incompatible with security, and thus calls for the establishment of authoritative government, only when it is marked by an intense degree of violence interdependence, that is, when it is a ‘first anarchy’. Whereas originally nature (as mainly topography) determined the size of this area, since the 18th century, with the advent of the industrial revolution, man-made technologies have become determining in this respect. Technological changes spur changes in the material context, which determine the size of the area of first anarchy and, relatedly, of rational political order.Footnote ³⁰ Technology, then, features as a changing set of implements, whose (dys)functionality can be assessed in utilitarian terms. Technology is something people use, with greater or lesser effect. Technology can be more or less effective: a slingshot kills, a megaton bomb kills more (and farther away).

Liberalism ‘et praeterea nihil’?

In summarising Deudney's theoretical argument, so far I have focused primarily on it being a security theory, using Baldwin's by now classic treatment of the concept of security as a convenient signpost. While Baldwin's main complaint was that most security scholars do not specify their concept of security well enough, Deudney does not suffer this flaw. As a theory of security, Bounding Power is sufficiently and transparently specified. His position, while debatable, is unambiguous. But how about its republican credentials? To what extent is Republican Security Theory, as Deudney conceives it, actually republican?

A first attempt at answering this question could start by returning to republicanism's roots in Greek antiquity, and further back to Hellenic mythology, and then on to its rediscovery and reformulation in Renaissance Italy, for an analysis of classical republicanism's view on questions of external security and on military matters. One important observation would likely be that unlike Deudney, who separates the military from the political and downplays the importance of the former, classical republican theorists paid a lot of attention to military affairs. Consider, in this respect, the figure of the Homeric warrior, Aristotle's discussion of the virtue of courage (not in the least in battle), and Machiavelli's oeuvre-wide concern with the art of war. Generally, then, warfare was explicitly accepted as an important practice of the polis. But the question remains if this recognition was happily welcomed or if it was rather experienced as a tragic occurrence. Do classical republicans glorify war? Or do they treat warfare as a necessary evil? If the latter interpretation prevails, then there is no ground yet to doubt the republican character of Deudney's security theory. Hypothetically, centuries of political-institutional engineering might well have rid the world of the need to organise defence militarily. However, if the former interpretation holds true, then Deudney's theory can hardly pose as republican theory anymore. What is more, in that case, Deudney would likely not want to be labelled as such in the first place.

Concerning the Homeric warrior, Richard Ned Lebow has shown in some detail that he was not primarily driven by his appetites, but by, what Lebow calls, the spirit. When he fought, he did so in pursuit of glory. Because of this quest for honour, he would regularly persevere in battle in spite of continued fighting being antithetical to his, and his community's, strategic interests and material security.Footnote ³¹ And yet this was no egoistic pursuit. Honour societies sanction risk-seeking behaviour: they foster warriors and sing approvingly about them in their epic poems. The Iliad, in fact, stands as a prime example. However, when Aristotle praises courage in battle and when Machiavelli writes a discourse on the art of war, it is far from obvious that they consider warfare virtuous as such. Thus, Aristotle opines that ‘true courage’ ought to be tempered because it poses problems for the city. For this reason, citizens ought to do the soldiering, because they ‘act from a variety of motives’, courage being one of which, security another, and they have ‘a larger purpose in mind, namely, the defense of the city’.Footnote ³² People who act uniquely ‘for the sake of the noble’ constitute a threat because they are forgetful: they become oblivious to the needs of the city and to the fact that their greatness is dependent on that very city. Similarly, Machiavelli argues in favour of a citizen militia when considering the defence of Florence. Consider the following excerpt from the Art of War.

These sentences come at the end of a paragraph which explains that good officers desire to return to their land after the war and good soldiers to return to their occupations and trades. In this they differ from mercenaries, who have a vested interest in war dragging on endlessly and care less about the fate of the city. Also, mercenaries have no scruples to serve tyrants, whereas this would mean the death of the city and thus suicide for the citizen-soldier. War should therefore not be practiced as a profession by professional soldiers, but as a sometimes necessitous activity by citizens. With respect to these considerations, John Pocock has remarked correctly that ‘they are limited to the extent that they explain why only the citizen can be a soldier. The contention that only the soldier can be a good citizen is also being made, but much less explicitly.’Footnote ³⁴ Other republican theorists of Machiavelli's time, like Donato Giannotti, made the latter argument much more explicitly, observing, for instance, that ‘austerity and discipline’ mark the soldier's life and that only ‘lovers of poverty have pursued liberty, founded republics and overthrown tyrants’.Footnote ³⁵ Only soldiers are made of the materia that makes for good citizens.

Upon inspection, one notices a certain tension in classical republican thinking on military practice and virtue. Because it assumes different roles in different republican theories (or proto-republican in the case of Homer) and sometimes within the same one, warfare also receives different valuations. Sometimes it appears as an intrinsic good, sometimes as an instrumental good, and sometimes as an instrumental evil. Homer firmly adopts the first position, Gianotti firmly the second. Aristotle, one could say, adopts a combination of the first and second position, Machiavelli a combination of the second and third. Deudney, for his part, would seem to adopt a qualified version of the third position; qualified to the extent that military virtue, in his view, was but no longer is necessary.Footnote ³⁶

Note, moreover, that from within the Homeric worldview, a republican security theory comes close to being a contradiction in terms. Considerations of honour trump considerations of security: death before dishonour. From Aristotle on, the notion does become meaningful, but it should be duly observed that not the individual citizen but the polis is to be secured. Here Deudney's focus on individual corporeal survival does set him apart from the classical republican tradition. His instrumental understanding of military virtue, on the other hand, in no way disqualifies Deudney as a republican. Nor actually does his disdain for military practice. Both can be fitted within certain variants of the classical tradition or be read as valid extensions of it.

However, there is a stronger case to be made, a case which does not primarily hark back to republicanism's roots, but one which focuses attention on republicanism being a political ideology and on it being a living tradition. Setting up this case, within a security studies context, it is instructive to juxtapose Baldwin's concept of security (which guided us through the previous section of this article) to the Copenhagen School's concept of securitisation. While Baldwin allows for a degree of subjective appreciation (not in the least as a cause of threat inflation (that is, as a source of irrational distortion), ultimately he considers insecurity to be an objectively assessable condition.Footnote ³⁷ The Copenhagen School, on the other hand, is sociological through and through, defining securitisation as a process whereby an issue ‘is presented as an existential threat’.Footnote ³⁸ Emergency measures are called for, and normal political procedures suspended. In an important sense, Deudney's aim in elaborating republican security theory is to prevent securitising processes to prevail, that is, to free security from securitisation. Thus, strategies of balancing and dominating are warned against because they are apt to trigger a process of securitisation – short-circuiting democracy/the republic in the process. Taking this prescriptive aim into account, it becomes clear why security has to be defined in as objective terms as possible, and why therefore Deudney has, ultimately, to take recourse to biology. The objectivist definition is a defence against threat inflation and as such against the development of a garrison state.

However, one unfortunate consequence is that, in the same movement, the distinction between liberalism and republicanism becomes meaningless. Of course, Deudney is explicit on this issue. Unlike Nicholas Onuf,Footnote ³⁹ who seeks to cash out the distinction, Deudney does not accept the liberalism-republicanism divide.Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather, he presents his republican theory as completing contemporary liberal international theory, by providing it with a security dimension and by giving due attention to material factors. Deudney's reconstruction ‘sets forth a view of Liberalism's main predecessor [republicanism] as the locus for a much more powerful Liberal international approach’.Footnote ⁴¹ His is a contribution to liberal international theory. This assessment finds support in Deudney's rendition of his ‘first Liberalism’, that is, the freedom from violent death, as a ‘negative freedom’.Footnote ⁴² Other indications of Deudney's liberalism are his biological definition of man and his translation of domestic republicanism to the realm of International Relations through foreign policy practices. Deudney starts with an essential state, in casu: a republic, that is exogenous to the international realm and gauges how it should act abroad if it wishes to preserve its identity in interaction. The (admittedly impossible) preference for strategies of hiding is telling in this respect. To hide is to choose privacy over publicity. It is to prefer not to participate in the polis. There is a tight connection between liberalism and the preference for privacy. On most accounts, though, republicanism deals only with public action. Its business is the res publica. Republicanism does not deny the bulk of men's intuitive preference for the private, but exalts, and considers exemplary, the desire of great and noble men to act in public for the public good. What transpires is that Deudney appears to promote the republic as the most desirable political form, but shuns republicanism as an ideology.Footnote ⁴³ He is, what Michael Sandel has called, a ‘procedural republican’.Footnote ⁴⁴ His ideological commitments, for their part, are liberal-democratic,Footnote ⁴⁵ even if he de-ideologises them by advancing arguments from biology in their defence.

There are sound arguments, however, to add an ideological dimension to an analysis of republican security theory, in spite of Deudney's no less appropriate warning against the likelihood of ideology being securitised. One is normative, the other is substantive. The first reason to put emphasis on republicanism's ideological commitments is that it is instrumental in warning against us embracing it all too quickly. Reducing republicanism to a political form reduces our deliberations in favour or against it to rational means-ends calculations. Reconceiving it as an ideology, on the other hand, adds a consideration of ends to our deliberations. The second, substantive, reason to add an ideological dimension is that this inserts a conception of politics into the analysis that is more in line with how classical republicans conceived of it. It takes us beyond a notion of politics as strategic interaction, or the state as a mere instrument for the protection of its subjects' material interests.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, Aristotle recognised that, historically, the polis might have come into being ‘for the sake of the necessary, or mere life’, but that it ‘continues for the sake of the noble or the good life’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, Renaissance republicans, including Machiavelli, used ‘the word politico to denote […] the practical life of a community’, which comprises more than ‘the formal structure of the constitution’, and includes a desire to ‘shape, to educate the passions of the citizens’. Politics was about ‘the concrete collective life of the city, the customs, the habits and the passions of the city’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Adding ideology ups the ante with respect to what, or who, counts as republican. What is more important, it has far-reaching consequences for how republican security will be conceived.

An ideological account of republicanism, articulated in International Relations by Nicholas Onuf and, in a very different way by Heikki Patomäki,Footnote ⁴⁹ centers around the notion of pursuing greatness and/or liberty as citizens among citizens.Footnote ⁵⁰ It would: (a) insist on the primacy of ‘the whole over the parts’; (b) would accordingly insist that community enables agency and, (c) that agency is a public quality. In terms of rule or leadership, republican ideology is (d) concerned with identifying those most suited to rule. These four defining components set republicanism firmly apart from a liberal theory of politics and man. However, as it stands, the fourth element remains somewhat of an empty slot. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that discussion among republican theorists has historically dealt predominantly with this aspect of the theory.

Consider John Pocock's erudite rendering of the republican tradition in Renaissance Italy.Footnote ⁵¹ Pocock's narrative puts Machiavelli centre stage. Renaissance republicanism is an attempt to come to grips with, and to articulate a practical philosophy for dealing with, what Pocock terms the Machiavellian Moment: the recognition that republics exist in historical time, that they have to be founded and that they can perish, and that, while they exist, they are subject to the vagaries of fortuna. But while Pocock credits Machiavelli for defining republicanism's philosophical and practical predicament most appositely (and eloquently), he documents many more solutions to the quandary than Machiavelli's only. Nor does he ever imply that Machiavelli's was the more republican solution per se.

Two axes of intra-republican debate stand out. The first concerns the political role of the elites and the people respectively. The second turns around the relative weight, and political significance, of different kinds of virtue. The first debate harks back to Aristotle's well-known discussion of the different modes of organising a political system: as a monarchy (one), an aristocracy (the few), or a democracy (the many).Footnote ⁵² Since each mode of organisation was presumed to have its shortcomings, and to turn vicious if not kept in check, the well-ordered polity would have to be a carefully balanced combination of the three modes. Renaissance republicans continued to ponder this issue. Macchiavelli, who, it will be noticed, increasingly comes across as an atypical republican, gave a substantive (and active) role to the many. Even though the people will clash with the elites, their military skill and bodily energy are indispensable in countering the challenges posed by fortuna. On wild seas, boats that do not rock, will not stay afloat. What is more, Machiavelli was of the opinion that ‘those who condemn [a popular republic's] tumults, are failing to recognize that there are two contrasting outlooks in every republic, that of the leading men and that of the ordinary citizens, and that all the laws made in favour of liberty are born of the disunity between them’.Footnote ⁵³ However, this view contrasted sharply with the view of most of his contemporaries. These thinkers, like Fransesco Guicciardini, conceived of the republic as a harmonious whole, in which concord was to be preserved. Harmony within was seen as a precondition for attaining greatness.Footnote ⁵⁴ As a result, they inclined toward privileging the political role of the elites. The elite steered the polity, keeping it on a steady course. The many figured as context for the few to act. The liberty of the many lay in their role in ensuring that the acknowledgement of the virtue of the few would be ‘truly public and the rule of virtu and onore a true one’.Footnote ⁵⁵ ‘The one’, for his part, differed in no way from the few. He merely figured as ‘the culmination of the elitist edifice’.Footnote ⁵⁶ But these few republican ‘aristocrats’ were no threat to the free nature of the city, because their rank was not inherited. Not the possession of ‘private means’, nor birth right, but the display of public virtue assured accession to the rank of the few,Footnote ⁵⁷ at least in theory so.

This dispute did not reach a decisive conclusion in Florence, and was very much still in evidence when republicanism hit the English shores in the early seventeenth century. Witness the much-discussed Putney debates.Footnote ⁵⁸ Ideologically, republicanism shows itself to be compatible with ‘elitist’ and ‘popular’ conceptions of rule. In International Relations, Nicholas Onuf is an elitist republican, Heikki Patomäki a popular one. Thus, Onuf states at the outset of his rendition of the republican legacy in international thought that ‘[b]y necessity, republics are hierarchical and coercive’, and avers that, according to republican theory, only ‘some few should rule’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Accordingly, with respect to the management of globalisation, he puts his hopes on the well-educated, urban elites.Footnote ⁶⁰ Patomäki, for his part, signs up to the republican tradition in order to justify widespread popular participation in world politics and interprets the World Social Forum as the practical enactment of republican theory.Footnote ⁶¹

A second source of discretion in republican ideology concerns the nature and kinds of virtue (which is perhaps no essentially defining feature of a ‘procedural republic's’ ruling strategy, but probably nonetheless one of republicanism as an ideology). Roughly, two conceptions of virtue can be told apart: civic and ‘romantic’.Footnote ⁶² Civic virtue refers to a genuine, non-self-interested, concern for the common good. It entails the duty of patriotism (or Westernism, or globalism). Romantic virtue refers to the co-constitution of virtuous citizens and virtuous communities, and entails a much more explicitly ethical, or potentially religious, conception of virtue (and thus, when transposed to international politics, of statehood and of international community).

There is an outspoken tendency among contemporary republican political theorists, who don't merely describe but consciously defend the republican tradition and its contemporary relevance, to reduce republican virtue to civic virtue, and to interpret it as being instrumental in sustaining a (qualified) negative conception of liberty. From this perspective, Machiavelli turns into an archetypal republican indeed. However, in the same move, Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, and Alasdair Macintyre are defined out of the republican tradition – quite explicitly so.Footnote ⁶³ This is no insignificant loss to the tradition, I would argue. Also, it is not warranted on account of Pocock's authoritative history. Remember that Pocock first described the republican conundrum and then proceeded to describe the various republican responses to it. His was no history of consensus but one of intra-republican debate, even if core premises were shared. Given ‘virtue's’ central importance in the republican tradition, it is therefore not surprising that, besides its civic interpretation, Pocock documents several other interpretations, for instance, of civic virtue being intrinsically tied to ‘military virtue’ and to ‘religious virtue’. Thus, Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican priest and one-time ruler of the Florentine republic, combined republican and apocalyptic themes in his rhetoric. Pocock accordingly insists that we should be careful not to ‘construct a false antithesis. […] The attempt to realize a civic community was not far removed, in the thought of the time, from the attempt to realize the holy community […]’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In a comparable vein, Donato Giannotti discerned similar, and similarly beneficial, qualities in soldiers, citizens, and Christians alike. Civic and military practice should accordingly be infused with religious practices: ‘[…] the citizens in arms, mustered by their officers, shall hear mass, take an oath of obedience at the altar, and listen to an oration making clear the religious as well as civic meaning of their duties […]’. Pocock continues: ‘Such ceremonies were actually held […]’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Pocock considers these sentiments and practices Aristotelian and contrasts them with Machiavelli's republicanism. Machiavelli's concern was with civic virtue only. He opined that ‘a city that wants to live politically demands good citizens’. Good citizens care for the common good. They display civic virtue. But note that even Machiavelli believed that ‘politics has an important ally in religion’ when it seeks to promote good citizenship.Footnote ⁶⁶

The claim here is not that republicanism is essentially wedded to a religious or Aristotelian understanding of virtue, but exactly that essentialist definitions are not productive, nor warranted historically. The point is, therefore, that republicanism's focus on virtue is potentially, but not necessarily, merged with (or divorced from) religious interpretations of community and politics. In the process, variants of ideological republicanism increase in number. For surveyability's sake, I have distinguished two variants: civic and romantic republicanism. In contemporary international theory, Onuf and Patomäki (and in fact Deudney), I suggest, subscribe to a civic conception of virtue (as globalism). In contemporary international practice, neo-conservatism might well be an articulation of romantic republicanism.Footnote ⁶⁷

The implication of reconceiving liberalism and republicanism as ideologies is that they can be expected to develop different security theories, not only with respect to the means of security, but more fundamentally with respect to its ends. Whereas liberalism takes individual corporeal survival to be the ultimate end of security, republicanism is generally more concerned with the survival of the polity qua polis or republic. And even if both would take the ‘individual’ as the ultimate referent object for security, the end of security would not be the same. In this respect, Hannah Arendt's distinction between man as animal laborans (concerned foremost with bodily survival, and relegated to the private realm), man as homo faber (who works in isolation), and man as citizen of the polis (speaking great words, performing great deeds, always in public) is telling.Footnote ⁶⁸ If the polis is the (ideal and impossible) model of all subsequent republicanism, then republican security theory seeks to achieve security, not as corporeal survival, but rather as, for instance, public dignity. That is, with reference to the Copenhagen School, liberalism and republicanism securitise differently.

Republican security and the question of technology

How does republicanism securitise differently? Consider, in this respect, Carl Schmitt. While I am aware that it is not common to label Schmitt a republican andthat it is unclear if he self-identified as such,Footnote ⁶⁹ I will argue that, given my account in the previous section, at least the ‘early’ Schmitt qualifies as a republican thinker. He was a republican, moreover, very much concerned with international politics.Footnote ⁷⁰ Interestingly, Schmitt, much like Deudney, identifies technology as a major factor in modern social and political interaction.Footnote ⁷¹ However, unlike Deudney, he does not identify the preservation of physical security as the main security challenge for contemporary politics. He does not fear the extinction of ‘physical being’Footnote ⁷² but that of ethical being. Underlying these different worries lies a different understanding of the nature and extent of technology, and, I argue, the enactment of a different strand of republicanism (or, in Deudney's case, liberalism).

In 1923 Schmitt wrote Roman Catholicism and Political Form, an early and lesser known essay.Footnote ⁷³ At the time of writing, Schmitt was still a practicing Catholic and he aimed to describe the political idea contained in Catholicism, and defend its relevance. In the essay, he developed a critical analysis of the state of Europe and a blueprint for where to take the continent. In keeping with his predilection, Schmitt identified the main threat that Europe faced – Europe's enemy. This was the Soviet Union. Schmitt considered Russia a threat not because he feared a Soviet military invasion nor because of more general geostrategic considerations, but because he thought it to be hostile to the European ‘idea’.Footnote ⁷⁴ What is more, the Soviet Union's incompatibility with the idea did not stem from its alleged atavism. Schmitt did not dislike Russia for its putative feudalism or more general backwardness, nor did he exclude it from Europe because it was (half-)Asiatic. On the contrary, Schmitt thought the Soviet Union to be the ultimate embodiment of modernity. The Soviet Union was too modern.

What, then, was wrong with the Soviet Union and modernity? Basically, and still according to Schmitt, they represent egalitarianism (Dostoyevsky), instrumental rationality (Lenin), and a more general opposition to the European ‘idea’ (Bakunin). Schmitt summarises the problem as that of ‘technology’. The Soviet Union embodies the technological way of thinking and acting, which he considers exploitative. In a similar fashion, modernity reduces human being to a biological or material process. Domestic socialism and liberalism to a greater or lesser extent share these features and they should therefore not be the leading forces in the struggle with the Soviet Union. Catholicism, on the contrary, values substantive human content. Men are more than animals. They are ethical human beings. Also, unlike Protestantism, Catholicism asserts itself publicly. Catholicism champions an ethical notion of personhood that cannot but be publicly lived. To this end, it believes in elite leadership and moral authority. On the basis of theseconsiderations, Schmitt promoted a Roman Catholic European Union to ward off the Soviet threat. He saw the Church as an organisational site in potentia embodying this Union.

Above, it was argued that four features mark republicanism off from liberal political theory. They were: (1) an insistence on the prevalence of the whole over the parts; (2) the belief that community enables agency and, (3) that agency is a public quality. The major point of contention in the republican tradition concerns (4) the identification of those most suited to rule. Schmitt's 1923 essay incorporates all four features in its argument in favour of political Catholicism. European civilisation, for instance, is presented as a whole that precedes, and takes precedence over, the various nation-states that make up its parts. At this point in time, Schmitt's argument is not nationalist but Europeanist (1).Footnote ⁷⁵ Also indicative of the prevalence of the whole, is Schmitt's understanding, and promotion of the idea of representation, which he considers the essence of Catholicism. However, Schmittian representation is not representation of the people, let alone of factional interests within the population, but representation for the people of a true understanding of human nature as having ethical content. It is the representation of a ‘noble value’,Footnote ⁷⁶ most fundamentally of ‘humanity’. This latter observation indicates already that Schmitt conceived of agency in communal terms indeed (2), a belief which becomes explicit when he defines the rationalism of the Roman church as ‘morally encompassing the psychological and sociological nature of man’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Agency and rationality are at once communal and substantive. Agency, moreover, ought to be publicly enacted. Schmitt decries liberals and romantics alike for sharing a subjective and private disposition which is enacted in the domestic or economic realm and contrasts it negatively with the objective and public disposition of Catholicism, which, he claims, is of necessity political (3).Footnote ⁷⁸ When discussing leadership, the value of which Schmitt at no point puts into doubt, he unapologetically defends the hierarchical structures of the Roman Church. Here, his argument partakes in a long republican legacy, identified above, of seeking to suitably distribute power between the one, the few, and the many (4). ‘[The Catholic Church] has long and proudly claimed to have united within itself all forms of state and government; to be an autocratic monarchy whose head is elected by the aristocracy of cardinals but in which there is nevertheless so much democracy […] that even the least shepherd of Abruzzi, regardless of his birth and station, has the possibility to become this autocratic sovereign.’Footnote ⁷⁹

Taking the above into account, and given that he ties civic virtue intimately to religious and moral virtue, the ‘early’, or ‘cleric-conservative’Footnote ⁸⁰ Schmitt comes into light as a ‘romantic republican’.Footnote ⁸¹ As a result, it becomes interesting to inquire how he conceived of security in his 1923 essay. Remember, in this respect, that Baldwin defined security as ‘a low probability of damage to acquired values’.Footnote ⁸² In Roman Catholicism, the Soviet Union is identified as the source of threat, not because of what is does or might do, but because of what it embodies: an extreme form of economic rationalism, which is emptied of content and therefore becomes irrational. Says Schmitt: ‘Economic rationalism is so far removed from Catholic rationalism that it can arouse a specific Catholic anxiety.’Footnote ⁸³ Being anxious, most would agree, is antithetical to being secure. Schmitt continues with a paragraph that is worth quoting at length:

The mention of poison gas is an obvious reference to the First World War, which had only come to an end five years before the publication of Schmitt's essay. In invoking the war, Schmitt simultaneously invokes a more traditional concept of security and of technology's relationship to it. In line with Deudney's assessment, (military) technology can be seen to constitute a threat to people's physical security. It kills. At no point does Schmitt deny this. However, at no point does he thematise it neither. The physical threat that derives from certain technological tools is derivative, Schmitt seems to imply, from a more fundamental (moral) threat of technology as the dominant practice in modern society. In other words, their disagreement stems from a different conceptualisation of technology. Deudney's is ‘instrumental’ and liberal, Schmitt's is ‘substantivist’ and (romantic) republican.Footnote ⁸⁵

I have described above how Deudney analyses technology as a set of implements and that he assesses it in utilitarian terms. Also, technological change is said to really start to impact international politics only with the coming of the industrial revolution, that is, with the coming of modernity. Before that time, topographical restraints trumped technological improvements. Interestingly, while not undisputed, sociologists, historians, and philosophers of technology (one of whom Carl Schmitt) have repeatedly argued that in modernity technology takes on a nature and logic of its own.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is the ‘substantivist’ viewpoint. It is not just that there are ever more, and ever better-functioning, technological implements, which we control and manipulate as an extension of our hands and minds. Rather, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts: technology more than the sum of all technologies. This ascertainment allows for at least two plausible interpretations, which need not be mutually exclusive. Either, technology has turned from a mere set of tools into an epistemology, so that with the advent of technology-as-epistemology, ‘control’ becomes the dominant way of knowing the world. The political implications have been far-reaching. Think here, for instance, of the concept of ‘terra nullius’, or wasteland, as a historical justification for colonisation.Footnote ⁸⁷ The other interpretation refers to technology as an increasingly autonomous system which we cannot control anymore, and which we feel a certain unease with. Technology implies an awkward loss of control. It is alienating, out of line with our sense of agency.Footnote ⁸⁸ Struggling with a Microsoft word processor is a widely shared experience that conveys the gist of the idea. More fundamentally, theorists have warned against the increasing ‘computerization’ of society, which would not in the least be threatening were computers to acquire the capacity to learn. ‘[R]eliance on computers with the capacity to learn raised the prospect that decision-making would be taken out of human hands and might be completely automated on certain occasions.’Footnote ⁸⁹ The resulting loss of agency would be problematic on two scores: experientially (the concern of Heidegger) and in terms of moral responsibility. The latter problem becomes acute when one considers the increasing reliance on technology on the modern-day battlefield. At the apex of this development lies the prospect of ‘automated armed robots in battle’, a prospect which thus far remains fanciful. If it were to come about, however, the decision over life and death would be withdrawn from the control of human beings, and would thus no longer be the subject of moral agency.Footnote ⁹⁰

From a substantivist point of view, technology poses a threat in two ways. First, as detailed above, it takes away control and responsibility from human beings. Second, and of special concern to republicans, it potentially endangers the possibility of authentic human-to-human interaction because interaction is increasingly mediated by technology. In this second instance, technology is seen to disable the experience of meaningful agency. On this point, it is interesting to note that many career officers of the First World War saw gas warfare as ‘a degeneration of warfare, and as degrading for all involved’.Footnote ⁹¹ The use of poison gas precluded the (romanticised) experience of agency typical of body-to-body combat.

Interestingly, but unsurprising given their ideological tack, Onuf and Patomäki both thematise technology-as-epistemology in their accounts of international republicanism. In politics, technology translates as technocracy. A substantial reason for Patomäki to articulate his republican conception of world politics is an express dissatisfaction with the dominant role of liberal technocracy in international (economic) governance. International governance, says Patomäki, suffers from economism, as is evidenced in the practices of, for instance, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF, Patomäki and Teivainen point out, is staffed mainly by economists with ‘degrees from the top US, British and European universities (in that order)’, where they were taught ‘neo-classical orthodoxy’. As such, the IMF alleges to work on the basis of the principle of ‘economic neutrality’. ‘However’, they continue, ‘the doctrine of economic neutrality works only so far as there is a consensus. Anything can, if accepted be defined as technical or economic. Yet anything can also be made political by contesting it in a public sphere.’Footnote ⁹² Most fascinatingly, in Onuf's account of the contemporary manifestations of the republican legacy, technocracy plays the exact opposite role. It is not a cause for republican concern. On the contrary, technocrats (as city-dwellers) are presented as embodying the contemporary notion of virtue. They come closest to meeting the modern ‘condition of rule’. If republicanism is to survive globalisation, it will be due to the technocrats. They sustain, and rule, the contemporary ‘system of needs’. The real danger, which doubles the need for the articulation of a renewed republicanism, is, however, that the ‘Republican “masters” […] tend to become complacent about their circumstances.’Footnote ⁹³ With respect to republicanism's ambiguous relationship to technocratic rule, Hannah Arendt's observation that Plato and Aristotle were among the first to introduce managerial rule into politics is instructive. The question is, however, if in doing so, they were reneging or upholding republicanism and the spirit of the polis.Footnote ⁹⁴

Compare Deudney's material reading of technology, embedded in an all-round defence of materialist political and security analyses. In liberal international theory, he perceives a general lack of appreciation for the importance of material factors in international security, but also realism is said to lack an adequate theorisation of the role of material opportunities and restraints in world politics. However, seeking to redress the balance, and to give material factors their due, the pendulum is perhaps swinging too far in the direction of materialism. Consider Deudney's observation that ‘nuclear weapons are clearly a material variable’.Footnote ⁹⁵ They are. Bombs can be touched, and, when delivered, they have the material effect of killing people as well as destroying buildings and the environment; nuclear bombs more so than conventional bombs. But nuclear weapons are at the same time more than material variables. They have cultural significance. Their meaning hinges on interpretation.Footnote ⁹⁶ In this regard, James Der Derian's account of techno-diplomacy is noteworthy.Footnote ⁹⁷ Featuring in an analysis of diplomacy as the (historically variable) mediation of estrangement, techno-diplomacy deals with the pervasion of diplomacy by technology. Nuclear weaponry, and the consequent balance of terror, argues Der Derian, are the ultimate contemporary locus of estrangement. ‘Nuclear production is fetishized and alien, in effect, identical with destruction; it does not “contain an atom of use-value”. And, in the context of the Cold War, it has deformed human relations into “the fantastic form of a relation between things”.’Footnote ⁹⁸ If there is any truth in this assessment, one would expect nostalgic calls for more authentic, more communal forms of international politics. That is, one would expect romantic republicanism.

Republican security in practice: the Cold War

But was the Cold War, in fact, marked by romantic republicanism? And if so, was a concern with technology driving the call for republican international politics? I want to suggest that the first question can be answered in the affirmative. The argument is not that the Cold War was essentially republican, but rather that surveying the Cold War through the prism of republicanism is instrumental in making sense of it. The answer to the second question, for its part, is less clear but can, with due reservation, be answered in the affirmative as well. What follows is a short case study illustrating the argument, and showing more broadly how ‘ideal-typical discourses, such as the various strands of ideological republicanism, potentially find expression in world political practices’.

In a noted essay, Cold War historian Anders Stephanson traced the ‘conceptual conditions of possibility for talking about something called the Cold War’. Specifically, he opined that ‘one should consider the kind of […] peace the Cold War presupposed and embodied’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Stephanson's genealogy, which discovers a first use of the term in early 14th century Spain (albeit due to a wrong transcription of la guerra tivia [lukewarm war] as la guerra fria), ultimately takes the reader back to Augustine's distinction between pax aeterna and pax temporalis, and within that latter category between pax vera and pax falsa. Pax vera supposedly obtained between Christians and sought to be just, even if it was of necessity imperfect because of its worldliness. A desire for pax falsa supposedly informed the heathens and entailed inequity and non-freedom. During the middle ages, the notion of pax vera was discussed by Aquinas in the context of a res publica Christiania, which was seen by him as ‘the very condition that made it possible for human beings to be human’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Agency, community, and religious virtue can thus been seen to play an important part in Stephanson's conceptual pre-history of the Cold War.

However, the movement from Christian republic to Cold War is not uninterrupted. The idea of a balance of power, codified in the Peace of Utrecht of 1793, soon supplanted Christianity as the organising principle of, what had now become, Europe.Footnote ¹⁰¹ At this point, it should be observed that the balance of power is a fundamentally liberal concept.Footnote ¹⁰² The agents that make up the balance are autonomously sovereign. They recognise their strategic interdependence, but their ‘humanity’ does not (ontologically) depend on the others. Also, religious virtue plays no role in it. At most, the balance of power requires a minimum amount of civic virtue geared toward the preservation of sovereignty as negative freedom. Of the invocation of Europe in the context of the balance of power, apparently a community of sorts, Rousseau consequently observed, from his republican viewpoint, that it is only a ‘pretended brotherhood where nations are in a state of war’.Footnote ¹⁰³

The concept of peace that informs the Cold War (as an American project), argues Stephanson, harks back to the Augustinian tradition, not to the balance of power. Thus, Franklin D. Roosevelt formulated a ‘maximalist notion of peace’ which dismissed peace with ‘lawless aggressors’ as ‘merely “another armistice”’, and thus really considered it war.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ When formulating this conception of peace, Roosevelt mostly had Hitler in mind, but his logic entailed that peace with the Soviet Union would be impossible as well. There can be no peace with the unvirtuous. ‘True peace’, meanwhile, was seen as a condition for people to experience freedom (and thus to be agents). Importantly, with Truman, the first actual Cold War president of the US, freedom became less tangible than the ‘New Deal’ conception of freedom of the ‘Rooseveltian peace’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ It became abstract freedom, as such paralleling Schmitt's idea of the noble value of humanity. In other words, it became romanticised.

Importantly, this ‘republican’ discourse was consciously (even if not literally) inscribed into NATO, the Western security organisation of the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ From the start, NATO was argued to defend Western Civilisation, which political leaders like Churchill and Bevin conceived of as an ethical and spiritual force that superseded the national communities it comprised. Moreover, to be a member of NATO implied that one was willing to assume one's duty as a member. If necessary, one would have to fight for the whole (article 5 of the NATO treaty), but likewise one was supposed to pursue political cooperation. Political isolationism was no option for NATO members. In line with ideological republicanism, the whole thus prevailed over the parts, and agency was communally defined and publicly enacted. What is more, NATO was explicitly conceived as a hierarchical organisation, with the US in a position of leadership. This leadership position was legitimised with reference to the country's (alleged) supreme embodiment of the ethical practices constitutive of Western Civilisation.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ NATO, in other words, was an elitist republican institution.

However, does not the existence from 1949 of a NATO nuclear doctrine belie that NATO's republicanism resulted from a securitisation of technology along republican lines? I would argue that it need not. First, to recap Alexander Wendt's well-known argument,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ nuclear weapons did indeed deform human relations (to use Der Derian's phrase) in the relationship between the Soviet Union and the West, but it did not in the relations among the Western nations. Second, and more significantly, contemporary authors, like George Orwell and James Burnham, had opined that atomised action abroad would be a precondition for establishing the basis of authentic (or, in Orwell's case, disciplined) interaction within.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The case of Burnham is particularly interesting because he had a background in Marxism before becoming a Cold Warrior and was therefore broadly familiar with the problematic of technology. Once a Cold Warrior, Burnham promoted a ‘policy of democratic world order’, which was to be ‘founded on the atomic monopoly’ and should be backed by ‘active warfare, political warfare’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While not coherently structured, republican themes resonate strongly in Burnham's argument, as does the challenge of technology. To be sure, ideologically republican Cold Warriors did not dismiss or securitise nuclear technology wholesale. Nevertheless, they did recognise that nuclear technology was dehumanising and thus threatening humanity. As a result, they promoted it only in the relation with the Soviet Union as a means to prevent technology from mediating relations within the West. In fact, this makes good (romantic) republican sense. A republican's concern is the republic. The unvirtuous are no part of the republic and hence they can be dehumanised and related to as though they are things.

Note that this analysis defines the Cold War rather restrictively. Not everything that happened in world politics, or even in US-Soviet relations, from 1945 to 1990 should count as the Cold War. Remember also that republicanism is a polysemous tradition of political thought. Interestingly, critics of the Cold War oftentimes voiced their concerns from republican premises. Take the case of the Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau strongly felt that the very possibility of nuclear warfare signalled the necessity to move beyond the existing system of sovereign states toward the establishment of a world government.Footnote ¹¹¹ Morgenthau's early engagement with Schmitt has recently been documentedFootnote ¹¹² and he has explicitly been recast as a republican thinker.Footnote ¹¹³ Morgenthau's republicanism, however, was civic and globalist, the Cold Warriors' republicanism was romantic and Westernist. Both thematised technology, but they did so very differently.