Abstract
This article revisits some of the main tenets and problems of the Just Peace concept as developed in the German Protestant Church, showing how it is beset by incoherences, ironical returns of expanded violence, as well as the problem of abstraction: once the Just Peace concept is applied to concrete problems, it runs dry. The article then examines some recent contributions made under the wider umbrella of ‘peace ethics’, showing that attempts to combine the Just Peace and bellum iustum are bound to fail. It then retraces the present shift to Just War thinking that reorders the basic terms, whilst also retaining some of the tenets of the Just Peace approach. Some refinements of these developments are indicated.
Introduction
The Just Peace concept is a unique phenomenon which grew out of the most destructive war in human history. It came of age during the confrontation between two global superpowers threatening each other with weapons able to destroy civilisations. If war meant that much destruction, contemporaries asked, how could it possibly be justified, even ‘just’? Before the backdrop of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and distant proxy wars, civil society in the West seemingly could only focus on building peace, be it with reconciliation or democratisation in mind. International law would peacefully regulate conflict, albeit with occasional exceptions. In the East, peace was engrained in the idea of international communist brotherhood. At the same time, the anti-communist resistance frequently demanded peace over against oppressive regimes. 1 It seemed war as an ‘institution’ could be overcome, peace be waged instead of war.
Although the liberal moment of the early 1990s passed quickly, this essential Just Peace idea was put forth by Catholic and Protestant thinkers well into the new millennium. This article will show how the Just Peace concept is increasingly untenable, looking mainly at the Protestant tradition in Germany. How to enforce the law, how to do justice even in the face of corrupt or non-existent legal regimes, when to resist, overthrow or cease fire: specifically political deliberation remains indispensable, and particularly so in extremis. I will retrace how this position emerges as a result of logical problems in the current Just Peace concept itself, and that it is inevitable once authors open the Just Peace position to the concerns of the bellum iustum tradition.
Living in God's Peace (2007)
The Just Peace concept has dominated Protestant theological debates in Germany since the 1980s. Si vis pacem, para pacem: ‘Whoever wants peace must prepare peace’, was a key phrase of the German Evangelical Church's (EKD) seminal memorandum Living in God's Peace—Working for a Just Peace (2007). This Friedensschrift (‘peace memorandum’) remains the central reference point for the Protestant debate on war and peace in Germany, so it requires a brief revisit.
Crucially, after a biblically grounded explanation of God's peace (shalom), the practices of justice and peace were equated in the document: ‘Peace as the “fruit” or “work” of justice is not the external result of actions independent of it; rather, peace-making just action can only occur in peace and emerge from it.’ 2 This rules out attaining justice by means of violence, indeed this section demands justice to be ‘peaceful’. A ‘social process’ of ‘decreasing violence and increasing justice’ was ‘directed’ toward four goals: the avoidance of the use of violence, the promotion of freedom, of cultural diversity, and the reduction of hardship. 3 Internationally, Just Peace was to be secured through the legal system and institutions, to be further developed (‘legal pacifism’). Whilst ‘law-sustaining force’ was deemed a possible ultima ratio in that context, the bellum iustum was declared outdated. 4 Thus formulated, Just Peace was again proclaimed to be a magnus consensus in 2013. 5 A 24-volume, multi-authored series on Just Peace based on a three-year consultation process at Heidelberg (2016–2019) 6 discussed a variety of implications and problems, some of which I shall refer to below. Yet, significantly, it came to no summary conclusion.
Part I: Tensions of the Just Peace Concept—Abstractions and Ironies
The Just Peace concept has been dogged by problems, namely inconsistency, abstraction and irony. First, on the level of construction: the document proleptically localises the ‘directional dimensions’ of the process in just, peaceful coexistence. Yet precisely the practical achievement of these ‘dimensions’, such as protection from violent perpetrators, always implies the possible use of violent force, thwarting the purportedly ‘peaceful social process’. So after all, the unstable connection of ‘Just’ and ‘Peace’ must operationally fall apart—into justice and subsequently peace. 7 Second, already immanent to the concept there is a ‘tension’ between the four ‘dimensions’. 8 Insofar as they are formally conceived, their real-world concretisation entails hierarchisation, conflict, and potentially violence. This is repeated on the international level. An ever-expanded legal framework, if it is to be more than a bureaucratic apparatus, would have to be enforced, indeed installed in the first place. Hence, ironically, the use of force comes into play through the back door. In order to disguise this inevitable, logical turn into a bellum iustum, the Friedensschrift relabels violence as ‘a kind of police action’. The bellum iustum criteria in this context are tautologously relabelled Prüffragen (‘check questions’). 9
Third, as Gerhard Beestermöller has shown, ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the sense of the human rights idea is a continuation of the pre-Reformation notion of an ordered global Christendom. 10 The concept of ‘just policing’, which Ines-Jacqueline Werkner, for example, takes up from the self-professed ‘Mennonite Catholic’ Gerald Schlabach, accomplishes the remarkable synthesis of the radical Reformation's messianic near-expectation and quasi-canonical legalism. 11 This fusion is certainly ironic for a Protestant ethic. It is followed by others. Bernard of Clairvaux once associated militia with malitia—and contrasted both with the purified militia Christi of the Order of the Temple. 12 Analogously, Christopher Daase raises the spectre of the crusades when he speaks of a ‘legally nobilized form’ of violence as a means of ‘legitimate coercion’. 13 Such talk of ‘just policing’ within a legal peace order (Friedensordnung) claims absolute justice for one side. Yet this idea had been rejected by early modern bellum iustum theorists precisely because of its incendiary potential. 14
By way of comparison, the German Catholic bishops had published a memorandum on Just Peace already in 2000. Here, Just Peace as a practice is explicitly located within the Church as a global social society. It is a ‘guiding vision’ on a ‘search’, and the ‘spirit of non-violence’ is merely seen as a ‘source of inspiration for political, social and economic programmes that truly serve the promotion of peace’. 15 Perhaps wisely, the bellum iustum was not extensively debated in this document, even though a 1989 ecumenical document from the German Democratic Republic seeing the ‘teaching of the just war at an end’ was approvingly quoted. 16 Hence the political, deliberative zone was left more open, diffusing a confrontation between Just Peace and Just War approaches. At the same time, a greater Catholic emphasis on virtue ethics allows for the Just War debate to move from international systems, norms and rights to moral anthropology. 17
Pacifist Tendencies—2019
For the EKD, one logical conclusion was to push the EKD's position towards a more pacifist stance. This was the thrust of the 2019 peace synod's final statement, owed also to the influence of the pacifist bishop Richard Kramer:
18
‘The guiding vision of the Just Peace puts non-violence first.’ There is no reference to the use of force as the ultima ratio, even force to ‘preserve the law’ can’t be found.
19
Instead: On the path of justice and peace, we hear God's call to nonviolence. We follow Jesus, who meets violence neither with passive indifference nor with violent aggression, but with active renunciation of violence. This way transforms enmity and overcomes violence, and it respects the dignity of all people, including opponents.
20
and Ukraine
The problems of pushing political and military Just War considerations to the margins of the Just Peace paradigm became obvious in early 2022. As it were, concrete reality broke in. The church establishment was caught by surprise, speechlessness got mixed with a fast endorsement of media-driven narratives. 21 Widely held convictions for Germany not to deliver weapons into active conflict zones were overthrown almost overnight. 22 The argument followed along legal-pacifist lines and referred to Article 51 of the UN Charter or what Paul Ramsey called the aggressor-defender doctrine: no first use of force is permitted; the morality of war is compressed into its justifying occasion of self-defence. 23 Even the pacifist German Federation for Social Defence (Bund für Soziale Verteidung, BSV) settled for a ‘system of total defence’. Critical thinking on sanctions, weapons deliveries or technologies was by some dismissed as enemy propaganda, 24 psychologised (‘German guilt complex’) or historicised.
However, if mere self-defence amounts to restoring paganism, as Oliver O’Donovan wrote over twenty years ago, 25 ethical reflection of war heeds multiple, concrete political responsibilities, national interests and strategic situations, power (im-)balances within the international order as well as long-term capacities. The dynamic of events, particularly in ongoing conflicts, requires persistent judgment beyond the initiation of war, and greater room for change, even entirely new perspectives, than a statist international order often implies.
Part II: Attempts to Merge Just War Theory and Just Peace
The EKD's Just Peace concept has frequently been met with critique for the reasons outlined above. 26 Yet there are also attempts to meet these criticisms, largely by combining Just Peace thinking with Just War elements. However, similarly to neo-classical and revisionist Just War theory, they remain incompatible. 27 Hence, any proposed combination is bound to collapse into either position.
Ulrich Körtner—Evangelical Social Ethics
One such attempt, a Just War within Just Peace, is that of Ulrich Körtner. In his Introduction to Evangelical Social Ethics he criticises the Friedensschrift's intention to unite different Protestant voices at the cost of coherence. The classical criteria (auctoritas, proportionalitas, recta intentio etc.) are briefly referred to. 28 At the same time Körtner claims that there is ‘agreement … on the priority of nonviolent options in securing and creating peace’. 29 The concern is for the ‘use of military means within the framework of a comprehensive peace policy’. 30 Thus both positions, those of Just War and Just Peace, are appreciated.
But Körtner cannot coherently maintain this coexistence. In a concrete situation, the criterion of proportionality (proportionalitas) would collide with the ‘primacy of nonviolent options’. For while ‘primacy’ suggests an inadequacy of violent means regardless of what they are used for, a proportionality judgment assesses means exclusively in relation to their end. 31 As soon as a concrete purpose is manifest, the means would have to be ordered to it. Indeed, the ‘priority of non-violent options’ likely arose from a proportionality assessment, or from the suspicion that the use of force leads to a disproportionate escalation. Körtner seems to see the primacy of proportionality at least indirectly. A few pages earlier, he criticizes the EKD memorandum for speaking too one-sidedly of law-preserving force, ‘while at times, however, law-creating violence is also necessary, without which even the primacy of civilian means of peacemaking and peacekeeping cannot be maintained’. 32 But with law ‘preserved’ or even ‘created’ by force—not merely enforced—as a condition for peaceful/civil means, the purported ‘primacy’ of the latter collapses. Civil means need the background of right secured by the threat of force—full stop.
On the status of the legal order, Just War and Just Peace once again jar. Like the Just Peace approach he criticizes, Körtner himself postulates law and order as separate from (the threat of) violence. He argues ‘that the lasting acceptance of the state's monopoly on the use of force is not based exclusively and primarily on the threat of force, but on the rule of law and an order that citizens perceive as just’. 33 However, law and order are, after all, perceived as just by citizens indeed because they threaten violence to those who do not comply. 34 If law prevails only for those who are compliant, it either does not prevail or it is no law in any compelling sense. To be sure, one might agree with Körtner that most people are likely to adhere to law and order primarily out of a sense of justice. The threat of violent force concerns them only secondarily, if at all. The obedient and the disobedient would be on different sides of the same coin. But Körtner tears this reading down immediately, when he recapitulates the separation of force and law, assigning the latter to reconciliation: ‘The churches, however, are to be emphatically agreed that lasting peace is not established and maintained by violent force and the threat of violent force, but rather by reconciliation, by law and justice.’ 35 In the end, therefore, he retreats to familiar Just Peace grounds. 36
Hartwig von Schubert—a Kantian Just War Theory
A more recent project of realistic peace ethics has been offered by Hartwig von Schubert, who seeks a ‘legal pacifism’ as the practical continuation of the Rechtsstaat, the rule of law within a state in the tradition of Kant. The rule of law quells private violence and war, distinguishes a republic from despotism (as ‘forms of government’ rather than ‘forms of rule’, which may include a monarchy). And it has the minimal task of facilitating a life of freedom. Within this paradigm Schubert goes so far as to say that even the residual right to defence or self-defence doesn’t amount to a ius ad bellum, but a ius contra bellum. Individuals or nations purportedly defend themselves in order to ‘stop the war’. 37 So far, so familiar.
Yet unlike many Just War revisionists, Schubert knows all too well that Kantian principles, international laws and institutions are frequently ignored. He also supports violence in the genesis of a legal state/rule of law as well as in its defence—just like Kant did with regards to the revolutionary new orders. But then he moves away from a legalist reading of Kant (commonly criticised in the Anglosphere) by emphasising the role of the faculty of judgment. ‘Determining judgment’ links the general (laws, concepts) and the particular; reflective judgment takes a particular to enquire after a general. This last general term, for Kant, is ‘functionality, finality and teleology as it appears in the beautiful and the living’. The faculty of judgment is a faculty of imagination, also imagining ourselves in the position of others (here von Schubert aligns with Hannah Arendt's reading of Kant). As such it plays an important role in rational political deliberation. Crucially, it marks a mediate term between a free-standing moral law and natural-mechanistic laws. Thus read, the faculty of judgment is a form of practical wisdom, ‘assigning to occurrences not an objective universality, but subjective general validity’. 38
Von Schubert then interprets the Just War criteria in that way in a section on ‘political imagination’. So, a legitima potestas, which concerns the ‘role of the subject and prohibition of wilfulness’, is ‘Only an instance that is impartial to and independent from the legal partners [Rechtsgenossen] as well as the legal partners themselves!’ A causa iustificans, which concerns ‘duties regarding a threat to freedom’, is: ‘Only the proven violation of provably indispensable external conditions of freedom!’ A finis iustificans, i.e., ‘goods to facilitating freedom’, is ‘Only the indispensable external conditions of freedom as a precondition for being able to pursue interests.’ Proportionalitas here belongs to the ‘virtues in the execution of freedom [Vollzug der Freiheit]’. Von Schubert asks: ‘Which attitudes, actions and means are legitimate? Precisely those that are suitable, necessary and adequate in order to preserve the indispensable external conditions of freedom of everyone concerned.’ 39 What he calls a ‘heuristic of normative proposals’ is de facto a Just War proposal. Still not quite feeling he belongs to the camp, von Schubert critically asks Just War theorists to ‘offer examples for critical procedures, i.e., some that led to a decision in favour of, others in a decision against a plan to go to war’. But of course this would be no problem for Walzer, Biggar and others. 40
At the same time, von Schubert's legal pacifism remains dogged by the same problems as the Just Peace approach: the urge to relabel war (‘Whoever talks about armed conflict is looking towards norms; whoever talks about war is not’ 41 ); the dialectical tendency to extend war because its aim is to abolish war (ius contra bellum); putting the enemy hors-la-loi (von Schubert counters this possibility by insisting on the dignity of the human being and the banality of evil). 42 And when he suggests to the EKD that ‘the prevention of danger’ is to be preferred to ‘fighting dangers’ (as a ‘redactional change’ 43 ), he confuses the non-concrete, general desirability of a state of affairs with specific moral judgment. Nonetheless, because he is primarily interested in the (non-)theological justification of the state in support of freedom and human dignity, von Schubert spends comparatively little time on the international legal system. As a realist Kantian, he moves away from an all too impractical Just Peace concept to Just War thinking, even if nolens volens.
The Measure of the Possible (2023)—Exodus from the Just Peace
A similar movement can be observed in a recent ‘contribution to the debate’ (Debattenbeitrag) entitled Maß des Möglichen (the measure of the possible), multi-authored in early 2023 under the umbrella of the evangelical military deacon. 44 Despite maintaining that we should not ‘fall behind the teaching of the Just Peace’, 45 the document reorders basic ‘peace-ethical’ terms and effectively shifts to a Just War position. Just Peace, which was the Christian modus operandi in the Friedensschrift, is now more emphatically a ‘guiding vision at the horizon’. 46 Moreover, the need for ‘an ethic of the penultimate’ 47 is recognised. ‘Peace ethics’ as a whole is relocated within the ‘horizon of an ethic of the political’. This shift is arguably undergirded by a larger, also generational shift from ‘public theology’ to ‘public Protestantism’. The former sought to inject practices of faith into a largely apolitically conceived public ‘society’. As a result, it frequently, sometimes naively, landed on politically problematic grounds. 48 The latter is concerned with safeguarding public debates without denying material differences between positions, whilst heeding given political responsibilities to a greater degree. 49
Rather than attacking the Friedensschrift directly, Maß des Möglichen distinguishes between pacifist peace ethics and a subdued ‘realistic’ stance to be further developed. A ‘pacifism within peace ethics’ is seen as problematic ‘when applied directly and without mediation to questions of political order. In this way it is removed from its biblical context in a hermeneutically irresponsible way to then become an abstract political principle that escapes the complex deliberations of political reality.’ 50 By contrast, a Just Peace that relies on theologies of shalom and emerges from ‘spiritual practices’ is relegated to church communities, because ‘local contexts are the key place for violent dynamics to develop and to be broken’. 51
Shalom is a key term here: in the Old Testament it describes an all-encompassing peace, order, reconciliation, good health, individual and communal well-being in life with God. Since the 1960s it has resonated with the expanded, post-Marxist notion of ‘structural violence’ and hence peace promoted by Peace Studies. 52 The frequently reiterated formula that ‘peace is more than the absence of war’ is also, as it were, rather long short-hand for shalom read that way. However, as its dimensions go well beyond what politics could ever (be trusted to) accomplish, applying it to the political without mediation on the one hand corrodes concrete political responsibility, as the Debattenbeitrag rightly criticises. Simultaneously it can politicise quotidian local and individual life quite to the detriment of peace. Moreover, passages such as Isaiah 32:17 (KJV: ‘And the work of righteousness shall be peace [shalom]; and the effect of righteousness quietness and assurance for ever’) or Ps. 85:11-12 do not per se exclude Just War considerations. Indeed, the 1983 German Catholic bishops’ document title ‘Justice leads to Peace’ (Gerechtigkeit schafft Frieden) arguably supports that approach more than it sustains Just Peace as a non-violent modus operandi. 53
Maß des Möglichen makes full use of the ‘hints’ and ‘additions’ in the 2007 Friedensschrift pointing towards Just War reasoning: materially, there is the ‘prospect of enforcement’ inherent in the law. 54 There is the awareness that the criteria ‘apply not only to the case of war, but … also to policing, the right to resistance within states, and a legitimate freedom fight’. 55 The criteriology is deemed to be in need of further development. 56 At significant points the authors draw on the Barmen Declaration and Bonhoeffer's work on the state's responsibility, positioning them against the Friedensschrift: ‘The threat and use of violent force may only be an exceptional case of the state's normal action. Yet according to Barmen V they belong to the state's basic task [Grundauftrag] to “care for right [Recht] and peace”.’ 57
The Just Peace ethic, they continue diplomatically, ‘in light of the close connection between law and violent force’, would have to be ‘developed in the direction of—rechtsstaatlich [i.e., by the legal state] legitimised violent force as a necessary part of a state and inter-state order aimed at peace’. 58 And, if the state ‘in particular has the task to protect its citizens from illegal violence’, then ‘it also has the duty to defend itself’. 59 Indeed, the Debattenbeitrag regards as ‘foundational’ each nation's right to self-determination and ‘above all the territorial integrity of states’. 60 Of course, these two aims may well collide: conflicts over national self-determination within states are the very stuff of history, particularly if one looks at a multi-national country such as Ukraine. 61
Either way, the Just Peace ‘perspective’ of a substantial global human rights order—never far from moral or actual colonialism—is largely abandoned. Instead, the new Protestant realism emerging here suggests the idea of a pluralistic world order. Not without reservations the concept of agonistic democracy is transferred onto the international sphere: the idea of tamed, regulated competition between differing value systems. This theory ‘expects a conflictual side-by-side of values and is interested not in conflict as a “struggle between gods” (Max Weber), but as a domesticated political controversy’. 62 The ‘glue’ between polities are treaties, cooperations, agreements. They provide regulating frameworks. Of course, they also require minimal forms of moral understanding. So, whether a ‘thick’ understanding of human rights is upheld here after all is a valid question. 63 Moreover, whether agonism can realistically tame antagonism internationally is a matter of theoretical debate as much as historical chance. 64
Some substantial references to the Just Peace remain. The ‘primacy of non-violence’ is one, even though, as explained earlier, proportionality and primacy are incompatible in concreto. Moreover, the ‘rule of law’, after all, is commonly a domestic concept, so ‘world domestic policy’ seems not to have entirely given way to foreign policy. Arguably, international treaties and agreements stand in for an absent ‘rule of law’. Equally, the claim that whenever a state defends itself, it also defends the legal order, seems to be an afterthought to the idea of ‘law-sustaining force’ explained in the Friedensschrift. 65 In itself this legal-positivist formulation may reflect a deeper Protestant unease with natural law sources of international law. But insofar as natural rights play a role (according to, e.g., Hartwig von Schubert they don’t), then a natural right to self-defence persists independently of whether an entity avails itself of the right or indeed fails to defend itself. Indeed, the individual right to self-defence in conjunction with associative rights and duties may in the future put much more pressure on the state's right to national defence than is obvious at this point. 66
Despite these critical enquiries, one must acknowledge the significant shift accomplished here. Protestant peace ethics seek to be ‘responsive, steeped in reality, compatible with actual situations, close to the contexts of political responsibility, in one word: “realistic”’. 67 This entails the much-needed exodus from a permanent state of ‘dilemma’ (because, supposedly, all killing is equally sinful) or ‘paradox’ (the use of force is passé—the use of force may be necessary).
Outlook
The Just Peace as a guiding vision that combines peace and justice into a modus operandi has been influential in the German Protestant debate and the wider ecumenical sphere for a long time. Yet, due to its inner contradictions, but more recently in light of new, persistent conflicts, the old paradigm has been gradually replaced by a new, more realistic one. Whether this shift is further pursued remains to be seen. If the Russia–Ukraine war prompted theological ethicists to reconsider the state's tasks and the right to national defence, the situation in Israel–Gaza may urge them to look beyond initial moments of defence and retribution. In Germany, the obvious historical connections with Israel account for much of the public theological debate; charges of antisemitism abound. 68 Yet in light of the atrocities committed in that conflict, revisiting Christian political theologies in contrast to radical Islamism or exclusivist Zionism could explain the sheer grief amongst Catholics and Protestants alike. It could also account for a certain reluctance to clearly take sides, a reluctance that may well be mistaken for pacifism. The Christian differentiation of national politics and religion may not only substantiate ethical criticisms. It may also help discern outlines of peace, however spiritual or unlikely they may be. 69 In any case, a stance that equates a practice of peace with international juridification has fallen out of time.
