Moral Agency and

International Society

Chris Brown*

Politicians, op-ed page contributors, and informed public opinion are, quite charac-

teristically, content to posit the existence of an “international community”—albeit

often not without misgivings. There is no generally agreed understanding as to what

the term means, but it is clear that the international community is presumed to pos-

sess agency, the ability to act in the world. Moreover, this agency is often assumed to

be explicitly moral, insofar as a characteristic usage is to suggest that the internation-

al community has a moral duty to do such-and-such—come to the aid of famine vic-

tims, protect the human rights of the East Timorese, or whatever. Quite frequently the

term is used in the context of moral failure—thus, for example, the international com-

munity is castigated for failing to prevent the genocide in Rwanda or for failing to take

the necessary measures to cope with environmental degradation. Even so, the contin-

ued use of the term implies the existence of some kind of collective agency-possessing

body, though one that frequently lacks the necessary will to do the right thing. The

purpose of this essay is to investigate whether there is, actually, some sense in which a

formal or informal collective body of states could be said to possess either agency as

such or, more specifically, moral agency.

Scholars in the mainstream of contemporary international relations shy

away from this possibility. The structural realist approach to the world rests on the

working assumption that the international system is generated by the self-regarding

actions of its component states, and that while this system may indeed constrain the

behavior of actors, it does not possess agency. The notion of an international com-

munity is thus a fiction, and more to the point, an unhelpful fiction, for two reasons:

First, it is unhelpful because it draws attention away from the fact that states are the

key actors in international relations—thus, when the international community is

described as “acting,” it is actually states that are exhibiting agency, whatever com-

munity-oriented explanation they may give of their deeds. Second, it is unhelpful

because it implies that action can or should be taken on behalf of the common good,

* An earlier version of this essay was presented at the workshop “Can Institutions Have Morals?”

sponsored by the International Studies Association and the British International Studies Association and

held in Cambridge, England, in November 2000. I am grateful to the participants—and especially to the

organizer, Toni Erskine—for their comments.

Reprinted from Ethics & International Affairs 15, no. 2.© 2001 Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs

whereas the mainspring of international action is the interests of states and their

desire to survive (or, perhaps, to dominate). Use of the term “international commu-

nity” implies the possibility of altruism and self-sacrifice on the part of states, but

such behavior is not to be looked for. Interestingly, many radical writers would agree,

albeit with the twist that state interest is shorthand for the interests of the ruling

class. Thus, Noam Chomsky has developed a whole school of interpretation on the

principle that international action by the United States is always driven by the needs

of U.S. capital. In Britain, John Pilger’s columns in the liberal press are devoted to

unmasking the evil intent behind conventional references to the international com-

munity—a particularly fine example being his suggestion that UN action in East

Timor in autumn 1999 was designed to preserve the province for Indonesian/

American/world capital.1

A certain amount of skepticism about the idea of an international

community—although, perhaps, not as much as Pilger and Chomsky demonstrate—

is obviously justified, but it would be rash to dismiss the term as altogether a matter

of smoke and mirrors. This is a case where it would be sensible to follow the method

of Aristotle, who in investigating issues of this kind always began with “what people

say” about a particular topic, moving from there to a wider and more thoughtful

interpretation of conventional wisdom, but an interpretation that can be related to its

starting point. In other words, the working assumption ought to be that if it is com-

monly thought (that is, if “people say”) there is an agency-bearing international com-

munity, then it is unlikely that this is simply an illusion—although quite probable that

when we look more deeply we will see that a great deal of refinement of the notion

will be required.

It is obvious where this refining process must begin. The convergence of per-

spective of structural realism and Chomskyan radicalism is hardly surprising, because

each in its different way stands opposed to the classical liberal internationalist per-

spective, which is prepared to give at least some intellectual credence to a version of

the notion of an international community. In particular, the traditional notion of a

“society of states” or “international society” clearly stands in some kind of relation-

ship to the idea of an international community; it is here if anywhere that we should

look if we expect to find a version of the latter idea that has some intellectual sub-

stance and is not simply a rhetorical ploy.2

Chris Brown8 8

1 See Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) and

The New Military Humanism (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1999); and John Pilger, “Under the

Influence: The Real Reason for the United Nations’ Role in East Timor Is to Retain Indonesian Control,”

Guardian, September 21, 1999.2 International society is the master-concept of the “English School.” See Hedley Bull, The Anarchical

Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

Agency and the Idea of an International Society

What is meant by the term “international society”? It should be noted that the “soci-

ety of states” is not a “society” in the sense in which most sociologists characteristi-

cally understand that term. “Society,” from their point of view, is a term with a very

specific meaning, and one of great portent: It is the social system that encompasses all

other social systems within itself. From this angle it is a moot point whether one could

envisage a “world society” or a “society of societies” replacing national societies as

the main focus of interest, but it is quite clear that a “society of states” or “interna-

tional society” is a misuse of the term.

In the academic literature of international relations, however, to refer to an

international society is simply a way of drawing attention to the (posited) norm-gov-

erned nature of relations between states, the fact that there are general practices and

customs of international law and diplomacy to which states usually adhere. The point

of reference here is not sociological theory, but a comparison with the idea of an inter-

national system, which is the key concept of neorealist thought, and whose premise is

that relations between states are based on patterns that emerge as a result of the oper-

ation of power politics.3 From this point of view, a “society” of states could be termed

an “association” or a “club” of states without any real loss of content, whereas this

would be an impossible move for almost any sociologist.

This all may seem at first sight to be a digression, but it is, in fact, of consid-

erable significance. From a sociologist’s point of view, the exercise of agency by “soci-

ety” is highly problematic. Everyday usage is instructive here: When we say “society is

to blame” for some particular event, the intention is generally ironic. Such formula-

tions are widely understood as misplacing agency; this was what Margaret Thatcher

intended to draw attention to when, with characteristic sensitivity, she made her

(in)famous remark that there was “no such thing as society,” only individuals and fam-

ilies. Her point was that to blame “society” for anti-social behavior was to dislodge

responsibility on to some amorphous, ill-defined external force, which, in practice,

meant that no one was to blame; social factors may be important in influencing behav-

ior, but society itself does not act.

On the other hand, clubs and associations do act. Casting an understanding

of international society in this way opens up the possibility of a serious discussion of

agency, as clubs may possess legal personality, and they are characteristically attrib-

uted with the ability to act as agents, even moral agents. Thus, to take a trivial exam-

M O R A L AG E N C Y A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L S O C I E T Y 8 9

3 The notion of an international society as opposed to an international system is explored in Chris

Brown, “International Theory and International Society: The Viability of the Middle Way,” Review of

International Studies 21, No. 2 (1995), pp. 183–96.

ple, it makes perfect sense in ordinary language to speak of a sports club taking deci-

sions, that is, exercising agency. Moreover, clubs are commonly believed to possess the

capacity to behave morally or immorally (for example, when a private golf club

excludes potential members on the basis of their gender, religion, or race). Now,

everyone understands that a golf club is an abstraction that may possess legal person-

ality but cannot literally act; instead, a committee acting on behalf of the club usual-

ly sets down discriminatory rules. Again, when the fans of a particular baseball team

say things like “the Yankees should hire a new coach,” they know and we know that

this is a form of shorthand—agency here is actually exercised by the owner and not

by the abstract entity of the club itself. Is any of this relevant to the notion of a “soci-

ety of states” that, unlike a golf club or the Yankees, is not a legally established cor-

poration, but a club in a much looser sense of the term? Are there individuals (actors)

who stand in relation to international society as the committee stands in relation to a

golf club, or George Steinbrenner to the Yankees, and who, therefore, can exercise

agency on its behalf? This is the question this essay attempts to answer.

Agency, International Society, and the United Nations

We have now determined the shape of the argument—insofar as international society

resembles a club or association of states, it is not out of the question to imagine it pos-

sessing agency. Where do we go from here? First, it is clear that no collective body stands

to the society of states in quite the way that the committee of a golf club stands to the

golf club. A golf club is a legally constituted body. Its committee will have legally

defined powers to manage the club in the interests of its members—in other words, the

agency it exercises is based on an external legal system that, ultimately, is capable of

overriding its actions. None of this can be directly applied to a discussion of the society

of states, but it may have some indirect resonance. Like a club, international society

exists in the context of a body of (international) law; it might also be argued that the

global body created under international law and tasked with maintaining international

peace and security—the United Nations, and perhaps more specifically, the Security

Council—acts on behalf of the society of states, that is, possesses agency (and therefore

may possess moral agency—the capacity to act on the basis of moral principles).

The attribution of a key role to the Security Council as the bearer of agency

on behalf of international society rests on the UN Charter, the behavior of its mem-

bers, including the most powerful of them, and, to an extent, on public perception

(“what people say” again comes into play). Although the UN Charter is less clear

about the relationship of the organization to international law than was the covenant

Chris Brown9 0

of the League of Nations, the signatories of this international treaty do assign to the

Security Council primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace

and security, while retaining for themselves the right of self-defense (but only until

such time as the Security Council has taken over the matter—see Article 51). Does this

transfer of the right to act from individual states to a collective body amount to the

creation of an agent capable of acting on behalf of international society?

States sometimes—indeed, quite frequently—act as though the Security Council

does possess this capacity. Thus, during the 1990–91 Gulf crisis, the United States and its

coalition partners went to considerable pains to achieve council resolutions that legiti-

mated their actions—for example, by calling upon UN members to use “all necessary

means” to bring about the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait, this turn of phrase being

generally accepted as code for the use of military force. That this was achieved appears

to have been quite important in swinging key votes in the U.S. Senate behind President

Bush’s stand, and, more generally, in swaying significant parts of Western public opinion

in support of the action (which, incidentally, seems to suggest that the public at large at

least sometimes equates their notion of the “international community” with the UN).

Similarly, the lack of explicit Security Council authorization for NATO’s action in

Kosovo in 1999 was widely perceived as embarrassing; in this case the key phrase “all nec-

essary means” was not to be found in Security Council resolutions—although other

phrases almost equally supportive of action were—and this lack certainly made it at least

marginally more difficult to generate public support for this action.

As noted above, one reason for the desirability of Security Council legitimation

for action is that public opinion—perhaps especially Western public opinion—is keen that

it be present. More generally, the failings of the “international community” are frequent-

ly laid by the public at the door of the UN, which is deemed to have failed to act with suf-

ficient speed or purpose in Rwanda, Somalia, or wherever. The problem with this position

is that it is insufficiently sensitive to the complexity of the relationship between the UN as

an institution and its members. A similar problem exists with respect to the attitude of the

states themselves and is the main reason why the idea that the Security Council could act

as the agent of international society is not satisfactory, or at least not entirely satisfactory.

The point is, the UN was not just created by states; its central agencies actu-

ally consist of states—fifteen in the case of the Security Council, five of which are per-

manent members. These states do not simply pursue the common good of the society

of states. Rather, they pursue their own interests even in the case of a clash with the

common good—or, perhaps, to get the political psychology right, they define the

common good in such a way that it corresponds to their own interests. What is more,

the UN Charter actually authorizes them to act in this way, as the voting provisions of

the Security Council give a veto to the permanent five members on the (tacit)

M O R A L AG E N C Y A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L S O C I E T Y 9 1

understanding that they will use it to further their own interests. These states then

have not transferred their capacity to act as agents to the council.

So, when the council gave authorization to use “all necessary measures” in the

Gulf but not in Kosovo, this was not the exercise of discriminating moral judgment by

the council acting as a collective body, but in both cases, the operation of political

judgments based on calculations of interest. Seen in conventional moral terms, pre-

serving the human rights of the Kosovo Albanians was a rather better cause than pre-

serving the property rights of the Al Sabah family in Kuwait. For a variety of reasons,

however, some good and some bad, Russia and the People’s Republic of China were

not prepared to abstain in 1999 as they had in 1990–91. The Security Council defeat-

ed a resolution to condemn the Kosovo operation by twelve votes to three, but those

three included two permanent members—a clear indication that any resolution in

support of the operation would fail. There are, of course, very good reasons why the

veto power exists—the experience of the 1930s demonstrated that any attempt to

force a Great Power to compromise its conception of its core interests (by being out-

voted) was doomed to embarrassing failure. The logic behind this position remains as

sound today as it was then, but these good reasons also point to the disadvantages of

regarding the UN or the Security Council as agents of international society. Insofar as

they exercise agency on behalf of international society at all they do so hesitantly.

Moreover, much of the time, because of the veto, they will simply be unable to act.

Returning to the earlier analogy, the relationship between the UN’s members

and its organs is different from the relationship between a golf club and its committee. In

one (legal) sense the committee actually is the club, whereas the Security Council clearly

is not legally the same thing as the society of states. The most important difference, how-

ever, lies in the goals the two bodies pursue: A golf club is, in Terry Nardin’s terms, a

“purposive association” united around a clearly defined end, which in this case is the

playing of golf (or the making of social and business contacts). International society, on

the other hand, is a “practical association” with no purpose other than to facilitate the

coexistence of its members in peace and justice.4 In the first case, the club committee is

expected to do—or try to do—whatever is necessary (within the law) to achieve the club’s

purposes. In the second case, however, it need not be necessary to do anything at all—

and therein lies the problem. The exercise of agency (moral or otherwise) only becomes

an issue when there actually is a threat to international peace and security; otherwise the

system works perfectly well without anyone doing anything. Whereas most of the time a

very weak power of agency is actually more than is necessary, when action is required, a

much stronger power is called for—and it is not provided by the Security Council.

Chris Brown9 2

4 This distinction is set out in Terry Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1983).

As the example of Kosovo cited above illustrates, the absence of Security Council

backing does not necessarily prevent international action. In spring 1999 NATO certainly

considered itself to be acting on behalf of the international community even though this

action was not legitimated by a positive vote in the council. NATO’s claim, set out very

clearly in Tony Blair’s speech “The Doctrine of the International Community,” was that

the unwillingness of the UN to act was a sign that something was wrong with that body,

and that in the absence of UN approval, action could still be legitimate provided it met

certain criteria.5 The criteria themselves bear some resemblance to the conventional crite-

ria for a just war (albeit containing a reference to the interests of the affected states in a

way that such conventional criteria do not), but what is interesting in the context of this

essay is the claim that a group of states could exercise agency on behalf of the interna-

tional community without UN sanction. What is to be made of such a claim?

The Informal Agency of “Coalitions of the Willing”

It might be thought that, in a time before the emergence of global organizations ostensi-

bly devoted to the maintenance of international peace and security, states would have been

obliged to fend for themselves and would thus have been unlikely to give a high priority to

the interests of international society. The operation of the Westphalia system prior to 1919

proves this idea wrong. For example, as Stephen Krasner demonstrates, collective action

in support of societal goals (the protection of religious minorities) was actually provided

for by the Westphalia treaties.6 At least part (although perhaps only a small part) of the

motivation behind the various coalitions formed against the French revolutionary and

Napoleonic state was the desire to protect the institutions of the “one great republic” that,

according to Edmund Burke, was the eighteenth-century society of states.7 The suppres-

sion of the slave trade in the nineteenth century was a British project that eventually was

adopted by the wider international society. 8 The most systematic attempts to give inter-

national society the capacity to act came, however, in the Congress System that followed

the Napoleonic Wars and in its successor, the Concert of Europe.9

The Congress System, as the name implies, was based on a series of con-

gresses at which the states of Europe, under the direction of the Great Powers (Britain,

M O R A L AG E N C Y A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L S O C I E T Y 9 3

5 Tony Blair, “Doctrine of the International Community” (speech given in Chicago, April 22, 1999).6 Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).7 Jennifer Welsh, Edmund Burke and International Relations: The Commonwealth of Europe and the

Crusade against the French Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).8 Chaim D. Kaufmann and Robert A. Pape, “Explaining Costly International Moral Action: Britain’s

Sixty-Year Campaign against the Slave Trade,” International Organization 53, No. 4 (1999), pp. 631–68.9 Carsten Holbraad, The Concert of Europe: A Study in German and British International Theory,

1815–1914 (London: Longman, 1970).

France, the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, and Imperial Russia), rearranged the map of

Europe in the interests of the restoration of peace under the old, dynastic regime.10

The Congress System was relatively short-lived because the ideological consensus

upon which it rested, the Holy Alliance, was unstable. Britain declined to join on spu-

rious technical grounds—because of the madness of King George there was, alleged-

ly, no one who could sign this alliance of sovereigns—and after the July Revolution in

France in 1830, the pretense that the two “liberal” powers were in agreement on inter-

national issues with the others was abandoned. Nonetheless, while the Congress

System lasted it took positive action on behalf of its conception of the needs of inter-

national society, including authorizing military interventions in Spain and Italy. The

Concert of Europe was a more informal affair, based on the idea that in the face of a

potentially dangerous crisis the major European powers should attempt to resolve

matters acting together, that is, in concert. Although the overall impact of the concert

is debatable, some crises actually were resolved in this way—the Berlin Conference of

1878 on the Balkans being a kind of high spot in this respect.

The Congress System and the Concert of Europe involved different levels of

institutionalization of the notion that the Great Powers of Europe had some kind of

collective responsibility to ensure that the society of states functioned as smoothly as

possible. These powers took this role upon themselves without the sanction of an

international treaty (although congresses and conferences often led to the latter); their

mandate was their power, their capacity to put into effect their collective will. They

were the agents of international society because they declared themselves to be so, and

because they could back up their interpretation of the needs of that society by force if

necessary. There are, of course, two obvious drawbacks to this state of affairs. In the

first place, it is most definitely not clear that the interpretation of the needs of inter-

national society agreed upon by the Great Powers will meet with the approval of

everyone else—indeed, part of the normal functioning of the congress/concert when

it did function “properly” was the sacrifice of the interests of minor powers in the

cause of international peace and stability. Second, in practice the more serious draw-

back to the actual operation of the congress/concert system was the lack of consen-

sus among the Great Powers. It was only for a short period after 1815 that all the

majors shared, at least to some extent, in the reactionary values of the Holy Alliance,

and it is no accident that this was the one period in the nineteenth century during

which effective agency could be attributed to the society of states. For a short time the

Congress System was based on a genuine consensus and worked (albeit in ways often

contrary to the wider interests of humanity).

Chris Brown9 4

10 Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace,

1812–1822 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

The congress/concert idea survives into the twentieth century in a number of

forms: The composition and powers of the Security Council were partly influenced by

the vision of what the major powers could do if they worked in concert, and the more

recent practice of forming contact groups to oversee diplomacy in some particular area

(Namibia, Bosnia) is also reminiscent of the concert/congress idea. However, a more

common late-twentieth-century version of the concert is the notion of a “coalition of

the willing”—a group of states that take it upon themselves to act on behalf of inter-

national society, but that do not necessarily include all the Great Powers acting in con-

cert. Thus in the Gulf in 1991 a coalition of the willing reversed Iraq’s aggression in

Kuwait. It was built by and around the United States and had the approval of the

Security Council—meaning that it also had the acquiescence of Russia and China,

though not their participation. In Kosovo in 1999 NATO was the focus for another

coalition of the willing, which tacitly included some non-NATO members (Romania

and Bulgaria, for example) but was actively opposed by both Russia and China.

How are such coalitions to be understood? The models of the posse

comitatus and the vigilante band have been proposed as heuristic aids—the former

being an informal but legally constituted body, the latter not legally constituted but,

at least in principle, intended to enforce the law. Certainly the idea of the United

States as an international sheriff has become a cliché, especially among critics of the

U.S. role in the world (who seem to forget that the sheriff is a legal officer with author-

ity to act and to recruit a posse, unlike the leader of a band of vigilantes). However,

there are two points against these understandings of the new coalitions of the will-

ing—or perhaps the same point that takes two forms.

First, posses and vigilante bands are static bodies that are (formal or infor-

mal) agents of the existing legal order. They have no capacity or authority to change

the norms they are enforcing; insofar as they act as the agents of international soci-

ety, they do so on the basis that they are enforcing an agreed body of law or an exist-

ing normative consensus. The problem with this is that the norms of international

society are currently undergoing quite substantial change. The emergence of an

international human rights regime after 1945 poses a challenge to conventional

understandings of sovereignty and nonintervention (although, as noted above, con-

ventional understandings are themselves open to interpretation and revision), and

the need to negotiate a safe path between these two apparently conflicting sets of

norms requires a degree of flexibility that informal coalitions of the willing are

unlikely to possess.

This point can be made by way of a contrast between the Gulf War and the

Kosovo campaign. In the former case the well-established principle of nonaggression

had been challenged, and the idea that a posse was formed to meet this challenge has

M O R A L AG E N C Y A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L S O C I E T Y 9 5

a certain amount of plausibility. The fact that the coalition acted under perhaps rather

distant UN authority reinforces the analogy of the posse. In the Kosovo campaign, on

the other hand, new ground was being broken: The sovereignty of one UN member

was being challenged by others in the name of the human rights of a minority popu-

lation. Though the protection of minority rights is not unprecedented, as the case of

the Westphalia system shows, in a modern context this action has to be seen as an

example of a coalition of the willing attempting to generate a new norm—without

the backing of a UN resolution and without the degree of consensus needed if new

customary international law is to be created. It is difficult to see how a self-constitut-

ed and self-legitimated group of states could act as the kind of agent that would be

needed in order to carry out this act of norm creation.11

In addition, the terminology of a posse or a vigilante band empties the idea

of a coalition of any substantive content—it is simply a group of states that have

come together to enforce a particular norm or bring about a particular result; they

have nothing (much) else in common. Again, the coalition formed for the Gulf War

fits this description better than the one formed for the Kosovo campaign. The former

included traditional Arab states, some radical Arab states (Syria in particular), and a

selection of Western liberal democracies. What these states had in common was a

mixture of distrust of Saddam Hussein, respect for the UN Charter, and allied status

with the United States. But there was no ideological consensus among them, which

was why the goals of the coalition were tightly defined, ruling out, for example, a seri-

ous attempt to topple the Iraqi regime directly.

In Kosovo, on the other hand, the coalition consisted of NATO and a few East

European friends, all of which were (nominally, at least) democracies. Moreover, the

states that fought the war—the United States, France, Britain, Germany, and Italy—

were established liberal democracies, sharing broadly similar institutional structures

and long-established links that predated this particular issue (unlike the Gulf War

coalition). Here an analogy with the nineteenth-century Congress System may seem

apt, for it was at its most effective when it represented the society of states from a posi-

tion of ideological consensus. The members of the Holy Alliance had a clear (reac-

tionary) sense of what ought to happen in the world, an interpretation of the needs of

international society that was substantive and not just formal. Thus, a figure such as

Metternich did not simply wish to see existing law obeyed, he thought that the inter-

ests of international society would be best served by intervening in the domestic

affairs of its members to ensure that disruptive forces could not get a foothold. Can

we see the Kosovo coalition as, in some sense, a modern equivalent to the Holy

Chris Brown9 6

11 The best discussion of this issue is Nicholas J. Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian

Intervention in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Alliance, but committed to a substantively humanitarian conception of the needs of

international society, as opposed to the reactionary goals of the earlier body?

The analogy is far from perfect. The Holy Alliance, at least for a short peri-

od, contained all the major powers and represented the interests of a great majority of

the minor sovereigns of Europe (as opposed, of course, to their peoples). The Kosovo

coalition obviously did not have the support of two of the Security Council’s perma-

nent five members, and it is very much moot whether minor states in the UN actually

shared the coalition’s conception of what it was doing—many states and peoples

clearly believed that the Kosovo campaign was simply an expression of U.S. and

NATO power. On the other hand, as suggested above, it may not be too fanciful to see

the Kosovo coalition as the agent of a new conception of international society based

on a substantive understanding of the requirements of humanitarianism. The influen-

tial German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has analyzed this claim by calling the

Kosovo campaign a war fought “on the borders of justice (Recht) and morality.”12 He

is rightly skeptical of the legitimacy of NATO’s authorizing itself to act, but in the

face of what he calls the current “under-institutionalization of the law of global civil

society,” he does not dismiss outright its claim to represent a nascent democratic-

humanitarian consensus even without a UN mandate. Indeed, he lends some support

to the view that NATO’s action can be seen as a step toward the transformation of the

classical law of nations into the cosmopolitan law of a global civil society.

At this point any Chomskyan or realist who has not yet given up in disgust will

be horrified by this characterization of the “new military humanism”—and with some

reason.13 There is very little evidence to support the view that the Kosovo campaign was

deliberately prosecuted in the interests of U.S. imperialism—what little there is relates

to the lack of impartiality on the part of the United States at the Rambouillet confer-

ence, which was explicable, surely, in terms of then-president Milosevic’s record over the

previous ten years in Bosnia. There are, however, very good reasons to be worried by the

idea of a coalition of liberal-democratic states engaging in a crusade to spread human-

itarian values throughout the world and claiming to act as agents of a new moral con-

sensus. Apart from the political disorder such a crusade would generate, it has to be

emphasized that the notion of “humanitarian war” is profoundly ambiguous. It may, in

certain circumstances, be legitimate to refer to the causes of a particular war as human-

itarian, but the conduct of the war itself is another matter altogether. The Kosovo

M O R A L AG E N C Y A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L S O C I E T Y 9 7

12 Jürgen Habermas, “Bestialität und Humanität: Ein Krieg an der Grenze zwischen Recht und

Moral,” Die Zeit, April 29, 1999.13 A representative realist position might be Colin Gray, “No Good Deed Shall Go Unpunished,” in Ken

Booth, ed., The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimension (London: Frank Cass, 2001), also published

as a Special Issue of the International Journal of Human Rights 4, Nos. 3 and 4 (2000). The present author’s

essay “A Qualified Defence of the Use of Force for Humanitarian Reasons” is in the same volume.

campaign may have been a “virtual war” for the NATO military forces but it was very

real for the Yugoslav army and for Yugoslav and Albanian civilians.14 If this is what is

involved in the proposition that the Kosovo coalition represents the future for the idea

of agency in international society, then there is very good reason to be apprehensive.

Conclusion

Fortunately—or, perhaps, unfortunately from the perspective of future victims of state

terror—it is very unlikely that the Kosovo campaign will constitute this kind of prece-

dent. Although NATO appeared to achieve its immediate objectives (and without being

obliged to fight a ground war), none of the NATO leaders give the impression that they

want to see any kind of rerun in the event of a similar crisis in the future. In any case,

whatever lessons are to be drawn from Kosovo have to be seen in the context of the

general perspective on agency and international society set out above.

If it is acknowledged that the “social” element in international society (the

club of states) is minimal, amounting to no more than the assertion that relations in

the society of states are grounded by the norms, practices, and customs of interna-

tional law and diplomacy, then it becomes clear that this notion of society is difficult

to stretch to encompass a liberal-democratic humanitarian crusade. Moreover,

although it is suggested above that some kind of informal “coalition of the willing”

may, on occasion, exercise agency—even moral agency—on behalf of the liberal

democracies, there is no body that acts for the society of states as a whole in the kind

of direct way that would enable such a crusade to be legitimately initiated. It may be

that in the long run a global moral consensus of the kind that Habermas envisages

will emerge—and it is very much in the interests of the oppressed and downtrodden

that it should—but, for the time being, the world is more likely to continue to suffer

from the effects of the lack of such a consensus being associated with international

society than from a surfeit of good intentions on the part of an emerging liberal-

democratic consensus. In short, as predicted at the beginning of this essay, those who

posit the existence of an international society that can act morally in world affairs are

not wholly mistaken, but the values and norms upon which that society can act are

limited in range and scope. It is better able to handle conventional violations of inter-

national law such as that which occurred when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 than the

less-dramatic violations of human rights that take place on a day-to-day basis today,

and around which a genuine international consensus to act rarely solidifies.

Chris Brown9 8

14 See Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000).