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The Religious Dimension of Liberal Warfare

David A. Hughes (Oxford Brookes University)

Abstract

Liberalism originated as a key component of the Western Enlightenment and is standardly

taken to be a secular ideology appropriate to the modern nation-state. Liberal wars are

accordingly understood as fought in order to defend or promote secular liberal values such as

human rights, democracy, and individual freedom. This paper, in contrast, examines liberal

warfare through the lens of religion. The argument proceeds as follows: (i) that liberalism

functions as a secular theodicy, retaining in particular a Christian philosophy of history; (ii)

that contemporary liberalism transcends traditional political distinctions of left and right and

has become “the” Western ideology in place of Christianity; and (iii) that, like Christianity,

liberalism is not a unified, homogenous belief system. Linking these ideological considerations

to warfare, it is further argued (iv) that liberal wars are analogous to medieval crusades insofar

as they are primarily fought to uphold Western ideology, even both types of warfare assume

various forms; (v) that liberal wars mimic the “two swords” logic of the High Middle Ages

insofar as they privilege universal moral values above secular jurisdiction; (vi) that because

globalization undermines the universal political structures on which liberal wars rest, the latter

will eventually follow crusades onto the scrap heap of history; and (vii) that the United States’

attempt to justify the “War on Terror” as a liberal war is undermining its moral legitimacy

abroad, much as the papacy’s attempt to justify its temporal pursuits in spiritual terms damaged

its moral authority in the lead up to the Protestant Reformation.

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Introduction

On 16 September 2001, five days after a series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks killed over

3,000 civilians in the United States, the devout Methodist president George W. Bush referred

to the “War on Terror” as a “crusade.”1 The White House swiftly retracted the comment for

fear of stoking religious tensions between the West and the Islamic world, something which

Osama bin Laden had long since been attempting to do precisely by using the language of an

American crusade against Muslims.2 Then, in February 2003, the British Prime Minister Tony

Blair, who would later come out as a Roman Catholic, went to the Vatican in order to seek the

approval of Pope John Paul II for the War in Iraq, thus echoing the medieval tradition of

sanctified violence in which a crusade had to be authorized by the pope.

How are we to understand these feudal overtones in twenty-first century international

relations? The most obvious response is probably the liberal one: intimations of crusade may

be unfortunate but they are essentially accidental. Bush’s one-off comment may have

mistakenly breached the principle of keeping religion and politics separate, but it was

immediately taken back. Granted, Islamic fundamentalists such as bin Laden may invoke the

discourse of crusade to incite anti-Western hatred, but in truth the “War on Terror” is about

protecting freedom, democracy, and human rights. It is not a religious war, but an entirely

secular one. Proof of this comes in the fact that Blair took Britain to war regardless of the fact

that the pope refused to give his blessing to it.

Alternatively, from a conservative standpoint, the crusading aspect of Western foreign

policy may be seen as reflecting deep-seated cultural differences between the West and the 1 “This is a new kind of – a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning tounderstand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while” (Hodges and Nilep 2007, 233).2 In 1998, for example, bin Laden told his followers: “the call to wage war against America was made becauseAmerica has spearheaded the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousands of its troops to the landof the two Holy Mosques [...]” The fact that America had recently intervened in Kuwait, Somalia and the Balkansto save Muslim lives was evidently too inconvenient a truth to mention.

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Islamic world that were always bound to resurface following the end of the Cold War and its

bipolar overcoding of all major conflict in terms of capitalism vs. communism. This, of course,

is the essence of Samuel Huntington’s (1996) “clash of civilizations” thesis. Admittedly, there

are many on the Right who disagree with Huntington, preferring to stress nationalism and the

self-interest of nation-states, rather than cultural difference, as the primary drivers of world

conflict. Still, there has been no shortage of thinkers who have seen the historical validation of

Huntington’s thesis in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Western intervention in the Middle

East, the alleged failure of multiculturalism, and so on.

On the Left, there exists a school of thought that treats the very idea of crusade as a

facade for plunder and exploitation. This mindset derives from a wing of Marxism that tends to

privilege material factors above ideology (viz. the Theses on Feuerbach rather than The

German Ideology). So it was with the crusades of the Middle Ages, and so it remains today on

this view: it really makes no difference which values Western leaders invoke when they wage

war against non-Western societies, since their underlying motivation is economic. It is about

opening up or securing new trade routes, competing for valuable resources, and increasing the

wealth and power of elites. The Crusades were thus an early prototype of Western imperialism.

Religion, culture, and the rule of law are all secondary if not irrelevant considerations here.

The purpose of this paper is to cut diagonally across the positions sketched above by

interrogating the religious dimension of contemporary Western wars (especially those fought

since 1989) from a long-term historical and cultural perspective. Although I will call those

wars “liberal wars” for reasons that will become clear, this is not a liberal argument. On the

contrary, the main thrust of this paper is that liberal wars today have a strongly religious

character, something which liberals would strenuously deny. That said, however, the logic of a

“clash of civilizations” is also rejected here. Liberal wars do not come about because of

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cultural difference; to think as much is to reify culture, inflame inter-cultural hatred, and

project a parochial fear of multiculturalism outwards onto the international stage.3 Nor are

liberal wars reducible to functions of capitalism. Such a viewpoint grossly underestimates the

power of ideas, and religious ideas in particular, to shape the pursuit of material interests.4

The argument will proceed as follows: (i) that liberalism functions as a secular

theodicy, retaining in particular a Christian philosophy of history; (ii) that contemporary

liberalism transcends the traditional political distinction between left and right and has become

the Western ideology in place of Christianity; and (iii) that, like Christianity, liberalism is not a

unified, homogenous belief system. Linking these ideological considerations to warfare, it will

then be argued (iv) that liberal wars are analogous to medieval crusades insofar as they are

primarily fought to uphold the Western ideology, even both assume various manifestations; (v)

that liberal wars mimic the “two swords” logic of the High Middle Ages insofar as they

privilege universal moral values above secular jurisdiction; (vi) that because globalization

undermines the universal political structures on which liberal wars rest, the latter will

eventually follow crusades onto the scrap heap of history; and (vii) that the United States’

attempt to justify the “War on Terror” as a liberal war is undermining its moral legitimacy

abroad, much as the papacy’s attempt to justify its temporal pursuits in spiritual terms damaged

its moral authority in the lead up to the Protestant Reformation.

3 The usual conservative strategy for alledging cultural irreconcilability between the West and Islam is to treat theformer as wholly secular and the latter as fundamentally theocratic. But as I argue below, politics and religionhave never been wholly separate in the West, while the idea “that Islam regulates Islamic societies from top tobottom, that dar al Islam is a single, coherent entity, that church and state are really one in Islam” is, in EdwardSaid’s view, an Orientalist myth (1997, xvi). On the “clash of civilizations” as inverse disdain formulticulturalism, see El-din Aysha 2003.4 This is, of course, an allusion to Max Weber’s famous “switchman” metaphor in the introduction to hisSociology of Religion (1920): material interests may act as the “engine” of history, but religious ideas, like aswitchman, determine the direction in which those interests are pursued,

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Liberalism as Secular Theodicy

One of the defining characteristics of liberalism is that seeks to drive a wedge between politics

and religion, making the former a matter for public debate and the latter an entirely private

concern (Hurd 2007, 35; Deudney and Ikenberry 1999, 193; Hall 1999, 58). It is true that the

Western Enlightenment separated Church and State, issuing in a legal separation of religion

and politics. However, it also spawned a range of secular political ideologies that took on many

of the characteristics of Latin Christianity. Liberalism was one such ideology.

Vital to this process was the role of myth: “if ancient myth served as a principal vehicle

for the communication and socialization of religion, so modern secular ideologies depend in

large measure on political myth for their social appeal and potency” (Egerton 1983, 498). In

order to galvanize support, each ideology created its own mythology: revolutionary class

struggle culminating in the classless society for communism; evolutionary progress and a

vision of free human fulfilment for liberalism; social Darwinism and a new order of racial

supremacy for fascism; and so on. The potency of these myths was, in each case, increased by

drawing on Christianity and thereby tapping into the West’s most powerful cultural tradition.

By the time these myths came to animate secular nationalism they proved strong enough to

make the quasi-religious demand that citizens be willing to die for them (Juergensmeyer 1993,

Ch. 6). “The race, the nation, the ethnic group, and the class served as secular religions by

offering an entire worldview that justified sacrifice” (Kaempf 2009, 657).

According to Egerton, “A principal feature of all modern ideologies has been the

formation and communication of a didactic view of history, a view which gives the

participating group a sense of origins, location in present trends, and a confirming perception

of destiny” (1983, 500). This is certainly true of liberalism, which is shot through with a

Christian philosophy of history. For example, the liberal belief in progress, which sees history

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as a series of stages, each better than the last, derives from the Christian belief in providence.

For liberals, as for Christians, history has a telos: a Golden Age of “perpetual peace” in which

war and suffering will cease and human beings will live harmoniously alongside one another.

The idea of “perpetual peace” in political philosophy was coined by Immanuel Kant in his

treatise Towards Perpetual Peace (1795), whose content today forms the intellectual

foundation of liberal democratic peace theory. Common to both is the idea that mankind has

the power to bring peace on earth and that politics is the proper vehicle for achieving this.

An excellent example of the way in which a Christian philosophy of history still

pervades liberal discourse is Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis, which proclaims

“the triumph of the West, of the Western idea” in view of the demise of Soviet communism

and suggests that liberal democracy could emerge as “the final form of human government”

(Fukuyama 1989, 3, 5). Fukuyama’s argument follows a pattern of promise, fulfilment and

transcendence that will be well known to students of Christian theology. Christ’s coming was

prophesied in the Old Testament and realized in the New Testament, pointing forward to the

end of human history with his Second Coming. Along similar lines, Fukuyama assigns liberal

values a sacred character by assuming them to be timelessly true; he sees the historical

validation or fulfilment of those values in the triumph of liberalism over communism and

fascism; and he interprets that validation as pointing forward to the end of history in the sense

of the absence of major conflict.

Modern liberalism is thus not just a political philosophy but also a secular theodicy of

the kind first undertaken by the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. It retains the Judeo-

Christian ideal of a universal brotherhood of man while abandoning the religious requirement

for a transcendental commitment. It was not the only secular religion to emerge from the

Western Enlightenment; however, since its emergence as the dominant ideology in world

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politics since 1989 it has acquired a cultural significance in the West such as has not been

witnessed since pre-Reformation Christianity.

Liberalism: “the Western ideology”

Liberalism today is the overwhelmingly dominant ideology in the West. It is what Andrew

Gamble (2009) refers to simply as “the Western ideology.” Other ideologies, such as

traditional conservatism, socialism, or even Marxism, still exist in the West, but they are no

longer any match for liberalism, which has become “hegemonic” in the Gramscian sense. True,

nationalism remains a potent force in world politics, yet in the West at least nationalist parties

remain marginal and a repeat of conflict between Western nations on the scale of the twentieth

century seems barely conceivable. All Western nations are now liberal democracies. Since the

end of the Cold War – an era when liberalism still had a meaningful ideological competitor

– the traditional political distinction between left and right has become increasingly blurred as

virtually all major political parties in the West have gravitated toward the centre, unable to

differentiate themselves from one another in any substantive sense as all espouse variations on

liberal themes. Political difference, one might say, is being subsumed under cultural unity.

Liberalism, which draws on Christian mythology, is an ideology that today suffuses the

Western mindset in a way not seen since late medieval Christianity. It provides a unifying

sense of identity, a set of values in which all Westerners can (in principle at least) believe.

Major ideological divisions, be they religious (Catholic vs. Protestant) or secular (republican

vs. monarchist, radical vs. conservative, democratic vs. totalitarian) have riven the West for the

last five centuries. Only very recently have such divisions disappeared. This is not to say that

contemporary liberalism goes unchallenged, any more than Roman Catholic orthodoxy went

unopposed by “heretics” and dissenters. It is simply to assert that, for the first time since

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Renaissance Catholicism, the West now has a single dominant ideology without a major

competitor. In that sense, liberalism has become the Western ideology in place of Christianity.

To see how slight political differences have become under the aegis of liberalism,

consider the broadly “neoliberal” agenda of the Clinton administration vs. the broadly

“neoconservative” outlook of the Bush administration in the United States. The “neo” prefix

indicates that this is not a traditional clash of liberalism and conservatism, although there are

indeed some marked differences between the two “new” ideologies.5 Rather, both ideologies

are, at base, manifestations of liberalism: both aim at the universalization of liberal values and

differ only in how this is to be achieved.6 It is no secret, for instance, that “many of the views

now associated with neo-conservatism derive from the liberal President Woodrow Wilson who

believed that American power could be used to promote justice and democracy abroad”

(Freedman 2005, 99). Many early neoconservatives, indeed, were disillusioned liberals, and

the two camps “are more alike than they admit in their ideological ambitions and their moral

justifications” (Steele 2003). The Bush administration, in fact, was “an administration

dominated by ultra-liberals” rather than reactionary conservatives – by “radical progressives

dedicated to a worldwide democratic revolution” (Gray 2009, 287).

All mainstream politics today boils down to how best to promote the Western ideology

at home and abroad. The ideology itself is not questioned, apart from at the margins. It has thus

acquired the status of dogma like so much religious belief before it. Liberal political

philosophy has become “the political religion of the contemporary intelligentsia” and has

acquired a distinctly cultish quality: “So ubiquitously pervasive are liberal ideas and

5 These come chiefly with respect to the power of the unregulated market to produce social goods, the role of thestate in promoting morality, and the importance attached to international institutions.6 Neoliberals stress free trade and international institutions as the means to create a universal middle class whoserising prosperity will everywhere give rise to demands for political participation and thus liberal democracy.Neoconservatives, in contrast, advocate the “principled projection of force” to rid the world of illiberal regimesand non-state actors.

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assumptions in American intellectual life, and such is their constraining power over public

discourse, that it sometimes seems barely possible to formulate a thought that is not liberal, let

alone to express it freely” (Gray 2009, 218, 222). Thus, ironically, the liberal belief in free

thought and free speech is coming under assault from the increasing dogmatic nature of

liberalism itself. Neoliberals, in spite of their secular outlook, display a well-nigh religious zeal

in their intolerant insistence that “There Is No Alternative” to their political beliefs and values.

Their metaphysical faith in the free market, steered by the mystical “invisible hand,” is not

finally open to rational disputation. Similar is true of neoconservatives in their adamant belief

that they know what is best for the world: their foreign policy is fuelled by crusading zeal as

they insist that America flexes its military muscle in order to propagate the Western ideology.

Just as no amount of economic devastation – globalization’s “discontents,” as Joseph Stiglitz

(2002) put it – will ever be enough to convince a neoliberal of the falsity of the Washington

Consensus, so no amount of death and war-induced suffering will ever be enough to convince

a neoconservative that the Iraq War in 2003 was wrong. The reason is that neoliberals and

neoconservatives share a messianic conviction, deeply rooted in American culture, that they

can save the world. The fact that the Bolsehviks thought the same with their pipe-dream of a

communist utopia seemingly evades them.

One Ideology, Many Interpretations

In its content, liberalism draws on Christian mythology and eschatology; formally, it has

replaced Christianity as the Western ideology. But much as “the [late medieval] Roman

Church might be compared to a huge edifice under whose roof a number of theological

systems flourished” (Schwiebert 1950, 9), so liberalism can hardly be treated a unified and

homogenous belief system. We need to be careful to distinguish between different strands of

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liberalism, much as we normally do for Realism. Doubtless there are many such strands,

including utilitarian, contractarian, and rights-based systems of liberalism, each acquiring

different inflections in the writings of different authors and varying according to historical

circumstance and geographical location. One key issue, therefore, is which particular version

of the Western ideology, among so many competing versions, is most valid. Here we are faced

with a legitimation crisis analogous to that facing Renaissance Catholicism. Although the

papacy, in virtue of its spiritual and cultural centrality to Western Christendom, had the final

say in defining Christian doctrine and validating theological opinion, its legitimacy was

increasingly undermined by the proliferation of theological schools offering contradictory

opinions on the gamut of doctrinal affairs. Today it is the United States that, in virtue of its

cultural hegemony, possesses unrivalled power to define the Western ideology. Contemporary

liberalism is embedded within an American world order to the extent that it is often conflated

with American values and institutions. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that liberalism

is a much broader church than Americanism, just as Roman Catholicism was far more diverse

than what Rome said it was. The precise contours of each are virtually impossible to plot.

Liberalism and Liberal Wars

I have so far argued that liberalism rests on a Christian philosophy of history and exerts an

ideological hegemony comparable to that of Renaissance Catholicism prior to 1517 even

though neither ideology was ever a fully coherent belief system. In the remainder of the paper,

I will examine the implications of these claims for the concept of liberal warfare. Before doing

so, however, two preliminary observations need to be made.

First, there is some dispute as to what counts as a liberal war. At least four types of war

need to be taken into account. In order of escalating controversy, these are: wars fought in the

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name of “collective security”; wars fought to protect other, vulnerable groups (humanitarian

interventions); wars fought to “democratize” other countries; and wars fought in the name of

national security (viz. the “War on Terror”). Collective security is a staple of the liberal

internationalist ethic; most liberals subscribe to the principle of humanitarian intervention if

not always the practice7; liberal opinion divides along Kantian/Painean lines as to whether

democracy can be promoted at the barrel of a gun (Walker 2008); and there is fierce

disagreement on whether torture and unilateral military intervention on the part of the US can

be justified on liberal grounds. Common to all four types of war, however, is the claim that

they are being fought primarily to defend or promote liberal values rather than for reasons of

self-interest. Of course, no war is ever entirely free of self-interest, and there is probably a

sliding scale of how much realist considerations counter-balance liberal motivations, ranging

from slightly in the case of humanitarian intervention to substantially in the “War on Terror.”

Still, the key point is, to quote Sir Lawrence Freedman (2005, 98), that “Liberal wars are not

pursued in the name of strategic imperatives but because values are being affronted.”8

Second, in the same way that liberal values now transcend traditional political divisions

of left and right, so liberal wars attract support and condemnation from across the political

spectrum. Traditionally, leftists used to condemn military intervention in the affairs of another

state as imperialistic. Following the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and Bosnia in

the early 1990s, however, emerged a “small but growing number of people on the left who 7 From a liberal perspective, the primary problems with humanitarian interventions tend to lie not in the jus adbellum (even in the worst case scenario “the inherent illiberality of war may at times have to be set against theeven more illiberal consequences of inaction” [Freedman 2005, 104]) but the jus in bello, particularly withmitigating “collateral damage” and ensuring non-combatant immunity as far as possible via adherence toInternational Humanitarian Law (especially the principle of proportionality) and the moral tenets of the just wartradition, perhaps supplementing the requirement of good intention with a “duty of care” towards non-combatants(Kaempf 2009; Walzer 1992).8 The influence of the just war tradition is palpable here, viz. St. Augustine’s claim that “True religion looks uponas peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object ofsecuring peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good” (Can. Apud. Caus. xxiii, qu. 1).

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now favor intervening, here and there, driven by an internationalist ethic” (Walzer 1995, 55).

Since then, humanitarian intervention has gained increasing acceptance in international society

(Donnelly 1995; Finnemore 2003). More striking, however, is the apparent redundancy of left

vs. right in the case of the Iraq War. “In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, support in the

United States for the war was bipartisan, largely because it was justified within the Liberal

tradition” (Desch 2007, 30). It may have been seen as a “neoconservative” war, but Madeline

Albright, Samuel Berger, Paul Berman, Peter Bienart, Bill Clinton, Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey

Goldberg, Richard Holbrooke, Michael Ignatieff, George Packer, David Remnick, and Jacob

Weisberg all supported it (Tomasky 2007, 210). Elsewhere, “the support coming from a

Labour Prime Minister in Britain suggest[ed] that [America’s inteventionist] approach cuts

across traditional political lines of left and right” (Freedman 2005, 97).

Liberal Wars as Modern-Day Crusades

If liberalism has replaced Christianity as the Western ideology while remaining anchored in a

Christian philosophy of history, then a war fought to uphold liberal values is the modern-day

equivalent of a medieval crusade. Crusades were fought in the name of Christian values and

they too had a distinct political objective in mind:

Sacred violence always stemmed from the conviction that Christ’s wishes for mankind

were associated with a political system or course of political events in this world. For

the crusaders his intentions were embodied in a political conception, the Christian

Republic, which was thought to be a single, universal, transcendental state ruled by

him, whose agents on earth were popes, bishops, emperors and kings (Riley-Smith

1987, xxviii).

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There are clear continuities here with contemporary liberal wars whose ultimate goal is the

creation of a universal civilization governed by liberal values and institutions. To quote one of

their proponents, “Liberalism is nothing if it is not a crusade, and the Middle East clearly needs

conversion” (Gray 2009, 291).

The four types of liberal warfare identified above can be traced back to four distinct

periods of crusade. Contrary to the common misconception that the earliest crusades were a

pretext for plunder, they in fact cleaved to spiritual ideals in their conception if not in their

execution, which was notorioulsy marred by massacres of non-Christians. “Christ was believed

to authorize crusades himself – this was one of their characteristic features – and he did so

through his chief representative on earth, the pope” (Riley-Smith 1987, xxviii). Legally, the

early canonists did their best to place restrictions on the sanctioning of holy war. “A crusade

had to be proclaimed by the pope, and there were strict rules governing such proclamations as

well as the relationships that obtained among the participating princes” (Bobbitt 2002, 78).

Bishops, archbishops, and all other clergy did not have the authority to declare a crusade, nor

were they allowed to fight in one; instead, command of troops had to be assumed by secular

authorities. What motivated the combatants was not power or greed (Christiansen 1980, 251;

Madden 2002), but the opportunity to pay penitential service through warfare. In that sense,

crusade was seen as an act of charity, an opportunity to express love for one’s oppressed

brothers in a just cause. As Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar: “You carry out in deeds

the words of the Gospel, ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his

friends.’” Crusaders were referred to as “knights of Christ” or “the faithful of St. Peter,” and

they were often seen as undertaking a pilgrimage for which they would receive an indulgence.

Thus the early crusades, not unlike humanitarian intervention today, were inspired, first and

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foremost, by spiritual ideals even if their actual execution resulted in thousands of unwanted

deaths.

Crusading took on a very different character on account of the struggle between the

papacy and the Holy Roman Empire for control of various lands in Italy during the High

Middle Ages. Italy, and not the eastern frontier of Christendom, “became the main theatre of

papally led Holy War [...] For a long while popes did not hesitate to sanctify these territorial

Italian wars as crusades, extending to their participants the attraction and privilege of

indulgences” (Chambers 2006, 17). Crusading became less about upholding spiritual ideals in

distant lands9 and more about the “defence of the Church” to secure the papacy’s temporal

interests against fellow Christians. The moral basis of crusade was replaced by a legal one:

crusades were justified, not so much because they enforced Christian values, but because they

were declared by the pope. This introduced an uneasy tension that would only get worse in

subsequent centuries: to what extent was a crusade proclaimed for spiritual reasons, and to

what extent was it intended to further the papacy’s temporal ambitions? Here we see a

harbinger of accusations that the United States wages war primarily out of self-interest despite

championing the universal ideology of liberalism.

The nature of crusading changed again with the westward expansion of the Ottoman

Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In particular, the fall of Constantinople in

1453 – the extinction of “one of the two lights of Christendom,” as the future Pope Pius II

(1458–64) put it in a letter to his predecessor, Nicholas V (1447–55) – “made urgent some

form of military response to this dramatic show of strength. Despite longstanding western

awareness of the Byzantine capital’s jeopardy, its capture was profoundly shocking” (Stinger

1998, 112). As a result, in subsequent decades, the papacy found itself “trying to revive 9 Though occasional, if futile, attempts at crusade in the East were made by Clement V (1342–52) and InnocentVI (1352–62).

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something of the crusading initiatives of the great medieval popes from Urban II to Innocent

III” (Chambers 2006, 48). Unlike the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however,

those of the Cinquecento were fundamentally a rearguard action against a powerful and

threatening enemy. Holy war was conceived less for altruistic purposes or the “defence of the

Church” as for the defence of Western civilization. In that respect, it was not ideologically

dissimilar from the West’s struggle against the “evil empire” during the Cold War: both were

intended to marshal collective security against a perceived mortal foe.

“The crusades did not fade from the horizon of politics because of a decline of holy

zeal [...] If anything they had rather too much of it, as the history of the religious wars of the

Reformation period testifies” (Keen 2005, 251). Indeed, the Voyages of Discovery in the

1490s “had the messianic sense of creating, under papal headship, the plenitudo gentium, a

brotherhood of the whole human race” (Stinger 1998, 301). Pope Alexander VI thus “saw

exploration as a glorious means to evangelize pagans [...] He saw [its fruits] not as a means to

conquest, or as enterprises for the rape of distant lands, but as ventures for the propagation of

the faith” (Johnson 1981, 216). Thus, “At least in the early days of the conquest of America the

impact of the crusading ideal upon this new kind of venture is very clear” (Keen 2005, 251-

52). Nevertheless, an important shift had taken place: rather than spiritual ideals providing the

justification for warfare, the conquest of newly discovered lands now provided the opportunity

for evangelism. In this we see the origins of the contemporary debate about democratization:

can the Western ideology be delivered at the barrel of a gun, or should it be introduced by

other, more peaceful, means?

None of the above is intended as an argument for a series of one-to-one

correspondences between types of liberal wars and types of crusades. The point, rather, is to

illustrate the heterogeneity of both types of warfare despite the fact that both can be defined,

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most simply, as wars fought to uphold the Western ideology. Moreover, that heterogeneity

arises from a similar structural matrix in which wars can be justified from the perspective of

spiritual ideals, security needs (both of the West’s cultural hegemon and the West as a whole),

and the impulse toward evangelization.

The Two Swords of Liberalism

Harking back to the High Middle Ages, liberal wars rest on a “two swords” logic whereby

“spiritual authority not only has its own exclusive sphere but also occupies a place of

superiority over the secular within the world” (Johnson 2003, 15). Or, put in modern parlance,

liberal wars rank the authority of liberal values higher than state sovereignty.

Contrary to common misconception,10 the two swords theory was first proposed by St.

Bernard of Clairvaux in De Consideratione (ca. 1145–51), a book of advice to Pope Eugenius

III. According to St. Bernard, the pontiff possessed two swords to suppress evil, one spiritual,

the other temporal or material. The first was only his to use, but the second he could delegate

to a secular ruler to use at his bidding: “The [material] sword also is yours and is to be drawn

from its sheath at your command, though not by your own hand” (cited in Chambers 2006, 13).

This provided the theological justification by which the pope was able to authorize crusades,

with religious orders such as the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar wielding the

material sword on his behalf. It served as a means of reconciling the peaceful example of

10 It is almost universally held that the “two swords” doctrine originated with Pope Gelasius I and his twelfth letterto the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I in 494. Strictly speaking, however, Gelasius’s letter is an archetypalstatement of the separation of spiritual and temporal authority in the West, asserted against the cesaropapism ofthe Eastern Empire whereby the emperor assumed ecclesiastical authority. It does not mention the two swords orthe waging of war, so is more properly regarded as “a draft of an argument that would grow and grow into theWestern Church’s ‘Two Swords’ theory” (McGuckin 2011, 394).

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Christ and the pacifism of the clergy11 with the millenarian impulse to reconquer the Holy

Land. It explicitly did not condone war waged in the papacy’s temporal interests, since St.

Bernard reproached Eugenius in 1149 for deploying Sicilian troops and the papal militia to

overcome the seditious Roman commune. The Biblical foundation fancifully invoked by St.

Bernard comes in Christ’s seeming approval of the Apostles possessing two swords at the Last

Supper (Luke 22: 38) and the fact that St. Peter himself clearly wields the material sword (John

18: 10-11).

Precisely the same passages are cite by Pope Boniface VIII in the famous bull “Unam

Sanctam” (1302), which goes on to assert: “Both, therefore, the spiritual and material swords,

are in the power of the Church, the latter indeed to be used for the Church, the former by the

Church, the one by the priest, the other by the hand of kings and soldiers, but by the will and

sufferance of the priest” (cited in Beatty and Johnson 1991, 319). Crucially, however, the bull

adds: “one sword should be under the other, and the temporal authority subject to the spiritual

power [...] it is for the spiritual power to establish the earthly power and judge it.” No longer

are spiritual and secular authority merely distinct, with crusades in the East representing a

special case of the papacy’s power to authorize war. Rather, secular authority is seen as

deriving from, and subservient to, spiritual authority. “Unam Sanctam” resulted from a series

of conflicts with the French king Philip IV over the relative authority of church and state, e.g. a

king’s right to tax and to put on trial the clergy living in his realm. But it opened the door to

increasing interference in secular affairs by the papacy in subsequent centuries. Rome claimed

“authority for use of the sword, both to protect true religion and to punish dissent and heresy,

11 St. Ambrose (340-97), for instance, proclaimed that – unlike Old Testament leaders such as Joshua or David –Christian clerics should refrain from force: “I cannot surrender the Church, but I must not fight”; “Againstweapons, soldiers, the Goths, tears are my arms, these are the defences of a priest” (cited in Chambers 2006, 4).One of the earliest specialists in canon law, Burchard of Worms (965-1025), similarly insisted that “the clergycannot fight for both God and the World” (cited in Chambers 2006, 8).

18

and also to oppose temporal rulers judged guilty of misgovernment, especially if that were

manifest in opposition to the true religion of the Catholic Church” (Johnson 2003, 13).

Wielding the spiritual sword, the pope could excommunicate his enemies or impose other

forms of ecclesiastical discipline on them; and with the temporal sword he could authorize the

use of military force against them. A fitting symbol of this is the first recorded papal gift of a

sword to a secular ruler in 1357, which later became an annual custom (the recipient of the

sword being seen as blessed with divine favour in warfare).

Pace conservative authors such as Roger Scruton (2003, 5), who claim that “throughout

the course of Christian civilization we find a recognition that conflicts must be resolved and

social order maintained by political rather than religious jurisdiction,” the issue is by no means

as clear cut as this.12 During the High Middle Ages the boundary between spiritual and

temporal authority blurred as the “two swords” doctrine allowed successive popes to authorize

all manner of wars against heretics, non-Christians, and non-compliant rulers – indeed against

anyone who threatened papal power. Ultimately the “two swords” doctrine served to inflame

the wars of religion, with Protestant rulers following Martin Luther in claiming a strict

separation of religious and secular authority in opposition to papal orthodoxy. Catholic

apologists such as Johnson have tried arguing that the “two swords” were not properly

representative of Christian doctrine in the first place, linking Luther’s position back to St.

Thomas’s (and St. Augustine’s) requirement for legitimate (i.e. state) authority in order to

wage a just war and claiming that “the ‘two swords’ position [...] was never in fact deeply

rooted in Christian doctrine or law, and after [1648] it disappeared” (2003, 15). But did it

disappear? 12 It is telling that in Scruton’s sketch of “the Christian separation of religious and secular authority” he citesvarious examples from the Patristic and early medieval period but almost nothing from the High Middle Agesapart from Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (1324), which in any case was branded heretical by the papacy,before skipping forward to the separation of Church and State in the early modern period (2003, 4–5).

19

It is no secret that the Western just war tradition faded in significance following the

Peace of Westphalia, in whose various treaties “[t]he concept of the just war was nowhere

mentioned. It had become irrelevant” (Bobbitt 2002, 507). In place of the respublica

Christiana, as the modern state system crystallized, stood “[t]he idea of a juridical order

without a higher political or ecclesiastical authority” (Bobbitt 2002, 508). Ever since 1648, the

conventional wisdom goes, “[t]he Westphalia legacy of international order, based on the twin

principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention, has been the basis of international law, the

realist theory of international relations, and the practice of diplomacy” (Hehir 1992, 243). This

Eurocentric myth continues to hold sway in IR.13

Nevertheless, the post-1945 world order has witnessed an increasing return of the just

war tradition, in particular its concern with the jus ad bellum and jus in bello (Hehir 1992:

259). The most important legal codifications of that tradition can be found in the United

Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) and its subsequent covenants (1966,

ratified 1976), as well as the Geneva Conventions (1949) and their Additional Protocols (1977,

2005). Certainly, these documents do not represent a sudden “break” in the history of

international law, for not only were they foreshadowed by the Hague Conventions (1899,

1907), but the Westphalian principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention remained

dominant throughout the Cold War era and arguably beyond. From their inception, however,

those documents were

regarded as a significant crack in the shell of state sovereignty. In contrast to the pre-

UN regime, when human rights violations were regarded as matters of “domestic

jurisdiction,” the UN texts affirm an obligation on the part of states to defend human

13 See Tarak Barkawi 2010 for an excellent deconstruction of that myth. Non-Western states have never been“sovereign,” territorially bounded, and immune to intervention to the extent that Western states have, and even inthe West no state has ever been absolutely sovereign.

20

rights in states found guilty of persistent and gross violations of rights. The evolution of

this process has been slow and halting […] Nevertheless, the assertion of responsibility

for human rights sets limits to the sovereign claims of states (Hehir 1992, 244).

Insofar as a universal regime based on moral imperatives now asserts a higher jurisdiction than

the legal imprimatur of sovereignty, meeting resistance in the process, the world since 1948

has come to resemble with Western Christendom pre-1648.

“The reconfiguration of the international arena, following the demise of the Cold War

and its ideological underpinnings, has necessitated a reassessment of just war theory as an

organizing framework for the moral analysis of war” (Ilesanmi 2000, 40). This is because, with

liberalism’s triumph as the Western ideology, the boundary between spiritual and secular

authority has become blurred. The two swords are back: war is no longer justified by secular

authority alone but through appeal to spiritual ideals such as human rights that are held to be

universal. As Freedman writes, “A general Western confidence with regard to the universality

of their political values, especially after their triumph in the confrontation with state socialism,

has discouraged attempts to justify the privileged position of the state in all circumstances”

(2005, 97). Indeed, a defining feature of liberal warfare today is the challenge it poses to state

sovereignty: “For true liberals sovereign states can only be accidents of history, with no claim

to our allegiance. Human rights know no borders. Only individuals have rights, and when

states violate them they can be invaded and overthrown” (Gray 2009, 287). Such sentiment is

no different in kind from the medieval belief that secular rulers could justly be deposed if they

violated Christian codes of conduct as ultimately decreed by the pope.

One key area of debate arising from the return of the two swords is the problem of how

to weigh legitimacy against legality. That problem was epitomized by the Kosovo war in 1999:

in the West the war was seen as indisputably legitimate in order to prevent genocide

21

(especially in the wake of Rwanda and Bosnia); but outside the West that view was not shared

by Russia and China, who vetoed military action in the UN Security Council, rendering the

war a breach of international law. For some proponents of liberal warfare, legitimacy trumps

legality and the challenge is to define the conditions under which sovereignty can legitimately

be violated: one thinks here of Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago in April 1999, in which the

British Prime Minister laid out a series of pre-conditions for military intervention. For others,

legality remains paramount: viz. the Annan Doctrine that “if it is to enjoy the sustained support

of the world’s peoples, intervention must be based on legitimate and universal principles,” i.e.

those sanctioned by the United Nations with the UN Security Council representing “the sole

source of legitimacy on the use of force.” More radically, authors such as Philip Bobbitt (2008,

508, 472) have argued that international law needs to be re-written in order to reflect American

principles of “translucent” rather than “opaque” sovereignty, the latter being seen as a cloak for

abuses. At the heart of the debate lies a fundamental tension between moral and legal, or

spiritual and secular, imperatives. As in the late Middle Ages, however, the secular will

triumph over the spiritual.

The End of Crusade and the Future of Liberal Wars

Medieval crusades died out, not through lack of zeal or true belief (messianic fervour arguably

reached a high point in Western Christendom after 1492), but because the incessant workings

of capitalist modernity undermined the universal political structure on which they depended.

Over time, as feudalism gave way to early modern state formation, not only did crusade come

to appear anachronistic from a strategic perspective,14 but the very idea of crusade was

14 The Ottoman Empire “was in command of military might overwhelmingly superior to any single expedition ofChristian knights” (Stinger 1998, 111). The Crusade of Nicopolis (1396) is sometimes considered the last large-scale crusade: the Franco-Burgundian nobility relied on the frontal charge of heavily armoured knights and was

22

increasingly subordinated to state-building imperatives. This was as true of the papacy as it

was of great powers such as Spain – where the war against Granada represented “the crusade

harnessed by the monarchy for the business of state-building” (France 2005, 290) – and

France, as when Charles VIII used crusade as a pretext for invading Italy in 1494.

As feudalism crumbled, successful crusades became ever harder to mount and the

crusading ideal was increasingly vitiated:

Over time, [...] as so many proclamations of crusade, so many diplomatic missions, so

many congresses, so many abortive campaigns failed to eradicate, or even come to

grips, with the Ottoman menace, the currency of crusade became devalued. When

crusading tenths became part of the normal income of the Spanish crown (and spent in

Italian wars), when Alexander VI made overtures to Bayezid for assistance against the

Italian invasion of Charles VIII of France in 1494, when the same pontiff sanctioned

the partition by France and Spain of the Kingdom of Naples in 1501 as being in the

interests of the crusade and diverted crusading funds to finance Cesare’s campaigns in

the Romagna, then the whole notion of crusade became just another negotiable item in

the tangled skein of international politics (Stinger 1998, 118).

Note that the papacy itself was, by the late fifteenth century, the most spectacular culprit in

debasing the idea of crusade as state-building imperatives skewed papal interests ever further

in a secular direction.

The demise of medieval crusades was cemented by the French invasion of Italy in

1494, an event that began the Italian Wars that would last until the Peace of Chateau-

Cambresis (1559). “[I]n the sixteenth century, Christians became busier than ever fighting

duly decimated. For others, “the last crusade based on the medieval model” was the Crusade of Varna (1444),which ended in devastating defeat for the Hungarian and Polish armies on the shores of the Black Sea (Stinger1998, 112).

23

other Christians” (Keen 2005, 252), and the immediate imperative of survival was far more

pressing than high-minded ideas about crusade:

The nature of inter-state politics and the chaos into which Italy fell from 1494 onwards

made it impossible to persuade the princes to sink their differences for long enough.

They could always be convinced that a dispute with a neighbour or a justifiable claim

was more important than the Turkish threat to Europe (Riley-Smith 2005, 281).

In fact, one could reasonably mark the death of the crusading ideal somewhere during this

period (Riley-Smith chooses 1517) on the basis that the universal respublica Christiana on

whose account crusades were fought was increasingly undermined by secularization until it

finally fractured with the Protestant Reformation.

Today’s liberal wars will go the same way as medieval crusades for the same reason:

modernization is relentlessly undermining the universal political structures on which they

depend for their legitimation. Globalization is creating, on an unprecedented scale,

transnational flows of information, cultural values, capital, people, goods, services, weapons,

diseases, etc. that will fatally undermine the nation-state paradigm of legitimate order, much as

similar flows, on a smaller scale, undermined feudalism in the late Middle Ages. The

assumption here is that liberalism, despite claiming universal applicability, is in fact embedded

within a Western, and more specifically American, system of world order that is starting to

come apart at the seams. Thus, although neoliberalism champions that which goes under the

umbrella term “hyper-globalization,” the more “hyper” globalization actually becomes, the

faster will be eroded the legitimacy of the great international institutions such as the UN, IMF,

and World Bank. Eventually the universal framework of international law will crumble and

American world order as we know it today will be no more.

24

It is ironic that the most articulate and thorough exponent of this viewpoint is Philip

Bobbitt (2002), the same man who, a Bush administration later, painstakingly makes the case

for strict adherence to liberal values in the “War on Terror” (Bobbitt 2008). Bobbitt is torn by

the fact that he foresees the end of American world order yet is devoutly committed to

American values. In his eyes, a different world order can be crafted in response to the

challenges of globalization but it can still be built on the principles of the one true faith: the

Western ideology as defined by the United States. In truth, however, once American hegemony

is lost then liberalism’s alleged universal validity will be lost with it, much as Roman

Catholicism never recovered from the challenge to papal primacy posed by Protestantism.

When that happens, the basis of liberal wars will be irredeemably compromised and in time

liberal wars will fade away.

Already we are seeing the first signs of this process. Today there exists widespread

disenchantment with liberal warfare on the grounds that it increasingly appears to be fought for

secular rather than spiritual reasons, as was the case with crusade in the early sixteenth century.

It is important to point out, however, that, the problem is not bad intentions masquerading as

good, regardless of how hypocritical Western actions may at times seem (why intervene in

East Timor but not Angola, Sierra Leone but not Burundi, Libya but not Bahrain? Clearly,

geopolitical interests play a decisive role in liberal wars). Allegations of hypocrisy tend to flow

from a crude anachronistic Marxism that sees all Western interventions as a mask for

imperialism, much as it wrongly regards the early crusades as a pretext for plunder. In reality,

the primary motivation for contemporary liberal wars, as for medieval crusades, stems from a

(quasi-)religious, at times messianic, devotion to the Western ideology; there is no reason to

doubt its sincerity. Material interests do play a vital role, but in and of themselves they cannot

adequately explain liberal wars. The real problem, then, is not that liberal wars are hypocritical

25

but that the West’s universalizing aspirations push in one direction while capitalist modernity

pulls in the other. As the universal structures of international order break down, wars fought in

the name of universal ideals are inevitably being subordinated to the security concerns of

individual states. Consequently, liberal warfare is rapidly losing its sacred character, much like

crusade after 1494.15

From Bosnia to Iraq: the Desacralization of Liberal Warfare

The contradictions in liberal warfare that are causing its progressive desacralization were

already in evidence in the early 1990s. Ever since the Jewish Holocaust, there had been an

overwhelming consensus in the West that genocide would never be allowed to happen again.

Yet when 800,000 people lost their lives in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and when the

Srebrenica massacre took place on Europe’s doorstep in 1995, the West stood strangely

paralyzed. “[T]he dithering and the ad hockery, the affectations of cynicism and the placid

deceit that so typifies the international behaviour of the great powers in this period” (Bobbitt

2002, 7) recall the attitude towards crusade in the 1490s. Although the war in Kosovo (1999)

was hailed in the West as a successful prevention of a repeat of the Bosnia debacle, the Second

Congo War (1998–2003), was allowed to rage unchecked, killing an estimated 5.4 million

people and thus becoming the deadliest conflict since World War II. As that war ended,

conflict erupted in Darfur and continued for a further seven years without decisive

intervention. Thus, as with late medieval crusade, universal spiritual ideals (here the protection

15 Clearly there is a difference in time-scale here. In the Middle Ages it took several centuries for earlymodernization to undermine the long-entrenched paradigm of feudalism, although the process was most starklyevident in the decades after 1494. In contrast, the West’s universal template of legitimate order today can only betraced back to the birth of the UN in 1945 (or at a push to the foundation of the League of Nations in 1919) andprocesses of modernization are occuring at an historically unprecedented rate and scale. The result, however, isthe same: universal political structures are giving way to the onslaught of modernity.

26

of human rights), coupled with urgent need and the best of intentions, have, in the main, failed

to inspire effective co-ordinated political action.

Liberals argue that the mixed track record of humanitarian interventions reflects the

“discretionary” aspect of liberal wars: “the case for intervention may be strong but the military

options poor or the economic requirements too large. Political leaders in democratic societies

dare not take on too many external problems” (Freedman 2005, 104). On this view, liberal

wars retain their essentially spiritual character and are limited only by practical constraints.

Yet, in truth liberal wars are vitiated by far more than matters of simple expediency. Despite

being fought in the name of universal values, they increasingly lack the support of a universal

political community and so are coming to acquire a more secular or statist character. The war

in Kosovo, for instance, was a peculiarly Western war declared by NATO rather than the UN

and it drew allegations of illegality and self-interested aggression from Russia and China.16

Doubtless Blair and Clinton were sincere in their intent to prevent genocide, but so poorly was

the war executed17 that one NGO found reason to suspect that “military intervention to prevent

severe human rights crimes might become a pretext for military adventures in pursuit of

ulterior motives” (Human Rights Watch 2000, 659). The boundary between spiritual and

secular motivations in liberal warfare was evidently blurred in Kosovo.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have shown beyond reasonable doubt that liberal

wars have now assumed a predominantly secular character. In a telling piece of discourse

analysis, Nicholas Kerton-Johnson concludes:

16 We are seeing a similar tension again today with Russia’s veto of UN intervention in Syria.17 Many of the targets attacked – the electrical grid, heating plants, broadcast facilities, bridges, refineries –disrupted civilian life in a way that was clearly “excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantageanticipated,” the standard of proportionality codified in Article 57 of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions. Thewar resulted in the deaths of thousands of non-combatants, caused an international refugee crisis, led to a sharpincrease in the sexual trafficking of women, and left the formal sovereignty of Kosovo unresolved for years.

27

The justifications for the war in Afghanistan were framed in egoistically moral

language rather than the moral language of human rights that was used to justify, for

example, the war in Kosovo, the most recent previous use of force by the United States.

Supposed universal moral and ethical values were identified with the United States – in

essence, universal justifications were tied to a national morality and interest (2008,

1003).

This is even more obvious in the case of Iraq, a war declared unilaterally by the United States:

“The hegemon located morality in itself, installing itself as both the definer and defender of

international law” (Kerton-Johnson 2008, 1007). Pace Freedman (2005), therefore, liberal

wars today are fought less to uphold the universal principles of liberalism per se than to

defend liberalism as defined by the United States. Universal values since 2001 have been

subordinated to the temporal interests of the West’s cultural hegemon, much as they were in

1501 when Alexander VI channelled crusade funds into the papacy’s own military campaigns.

Like the crusades of the late Middle Ages, therefore, liberal wars are losing their universal

spiritual foundation and acquiring a far more secular and particularist character.

Fidei Defensor?

As Blair’s experience at the Vatican in February 2003 went to show, it is no longer the pope

who has the moral authority to decree a just war, but the President of the United States. Liberal

wars, our modern-day crusades, are ultimately sanctioned by Washington. But because of their

increasingly secular character, they are now serving to undermine America’s moral legitimacy

abroad in much the same way that the papacy’s untrammelled pursuit of its temporal interests

eroded its spiritual authority in the decades leading up to the Protestant Reformation.

28

By the early sixteenth century, the papacy was behaving in decidedly secular fashion as

it sought to secure its temporal interests. It tore up the balance of power arrangements in Italy

enshrined in the Peace of Lodi (1454) and sought instead to build a powerful centralized state

capable of withstanding French and Spanish invasions. The conquest of the Romagna by

Cesare Borgia (son of Alexander VI) between 1501 and 1503 was so ruthless that Machiavelli

was an ardent admirer.18 “Symbolic of the peak of this process [papal state-building] is Julius

II’s winter campaign of 1510–11 against the Duke of Ferrara and his allies, when he took

personal command in an offensive military operation (the siege of Mirandola)” (Chambers

2006, 3). Indeed, it was chiefly during Julius II’s pontificate that papal ideology acquired

unmistakably imperialist traits as papal military victories, coupled with Christian conquests of

distant lands, meant that “triumph, glory, and imperial dominion replaced martyrdom and

holiness as themes for praise in humanist writings” (Stinger 1998, 10). Meanwhile, the Spanish

Inquisition continued to receive papal blessing, not for spiritual reasons (Sixtus IV had tried

opposing it), but because the papacy was reliant on Spain’s temporal support, particularly its

military support.

Importantly, Rome itself never recognized a contradiction between the pursuit of its

temporal interests and the universal interests of the respublica Christiana as a whole. If

anything, “Contemporaries viewed the city’s meaning and destiny as transcending the

mundane human task of urban renewal and state building. What mattered more was the place

of Rome and of the papacy in the providential schema of human salvation” (Stinger 1995,

187). Insofar as the pope was thought to be Christ’s representative on earth, papal state

building could only contribute to the redemption of mankind and the achievement of peace on

earth. Thus, it is possible to argue that “papal state building should be seen not as an alternative

18 See Chapter Seven of The Prince.

29

to the exercise of universalism but as an attempt to make this universalism survive in new

historical circumstances” (Headley 1989, 408). The Italian Wars, on this pro-papal reading,

may have created new temporal imperatives, yet they did nothing to undermine the papacy’s

spiritual authority.

Not everyone saw it that way, however. For a pope to take direct command of an army

was unheard of,19 and Erasmus of Rotterdam famously condemned Julius II for his martial

exploits. As the papacy conquered Bologna in 1506, Erasmus observed: “Pope Julius wages

war, conquers, triumphs and acts wholly like Julius [Caesar]” (cited in Stinger 1998, 236). In

1526 he still recalled the time “when our earthly Jupiter was hurling his thunderbolts at

Bologna” (Chambers 2006, 113), and in Julius Exclusus (1518) he satirically lampoons the

dead pontiff by depicting him being denied entry into heaven by St. Peter, who cannot

recognise a Christian in the bellicose figure before him. For Erasmus, as for many

contemporaries, the rampant militarism and imperial aspirations of the papacy were simply not

Christian. Papal wars were not being fought in defence of the faith, but for entirely secular

reasons.

How much has really changed in five centuries? Today, as globalization undermines

the universal template of American world order, the United States is, for reasons of self-

defence, willing to tear up international law, engage in ruthless unilateral military conquests to

expand its power, and openly sanction the use of torture. Meanwhile, pro-American ideologues

glorify US imperialism and the use of force in order to suppress opponents and propagate the

Western ideology (Krauthammer 2001; Ferguson 2003).

From a pro-American perspective, there is no contradiction involved between the US

pursuing its national interest and the improvement of global security and prosperity. If one sees 19 The same cannot be said of “the great age of the warrior-cardinal” who would engage in or even lead militarycampaigns on behalf of the Church in the High Middle Ages (Chambers 2006, 18).

30

the US as the embodiment, or the wellspring, of liberal values, then it is by definition

impossible for the US to act illiberally, and to defend America’s national interest is always to

defend liberalism in general. This is why the “War on Terror” is sometimes framed as a liberal

war even though it originated as a war of necessity on the part of the United States and has

involved such traditionally illiberal measures as torture and imperialism. Enhancing security

and promoting liberal values are as one; secular and spiritual interests are in harmony. On this

reading, by implication, all wars waged by the US and its allies today count as liberal wars,

even the war in Iraq.20 By the same token, it becomes possible to redefine all security discourse

in liberal terms: inter/national security, for instance, becomes a matter of “human security”;

weapons of mass destruction become “weapons of civil destruction” (Freedman 2005, 107).

America’s war is everyone’s war.

As in Erasmus’s day, the militaristic behaviour of the West’s spiritual leader is proving

enormously controversial. The crux of the problem is not so much the violations of

international law, the arrogant disregard for international opinion, or the self-righteous

insistence that America knows what is best for the world – although all these issues have

proven massively damaging to American legitimacy. Most fundamentally, the problem is the

gulf that now yawns between liberal values and the behaviour of the alleged definer and

defender of those values. The US “still provokes the most virulent hostility overseas when it

abandons the basic American principles that it wants to trumpet” (Micklethwait and Wooldrige

2005, 394). In the eyes of one critic, “George Bush will be remembered not only for the lives

he has broken, but also for smashing everything he claimed to defend” (Monbiot 2008). Pace

Michael Desch (2007), it is not that liberalism contains within it the seeds of illiberalism; it is

20 So, when the phony security justification for that war was exposed by the absence of WMD there, the war wasseamlessly recast as part of America’s mission to “democratize” the Middle East. And when it became clear thatdemocracy was not taking root in any meaningful sense, then the war was painted in more humanitarian terms, asa means of liberating “the Iraqi people” (if such a thing ever existed) from tyranny.

31

that the Western ideology is now being distorted to serve the temporal needs of the West’s

cultural hegemon. US foreign policy in recent times has simply not been liberal, much as the

papacy’s behaviour on the eve of the Reformation just was not Christian. Unless the US can

convincingly find a way of remaining true to its founding values as American world order

comes unstuck, it will suffer from the same loss of moral authority as the papacy experienced

in 1517.

Conclusion

Liberalism may feign to keep religious out of politics, but not only is it rooted in a Christian

philosophy of history, it has taken the place of Christianity as the dominant ideology in the

West, even though neither was a ever unified, coherent belief system. Contemporary liberal

wars, fought as they are to uphold that ideology, function as modern-day crusades. Like their

medieval ancestors, they take various different forms, ranging from wars motivated by

universal moral concerns but problematic in execution (humanitarian interventions) to wars

arising from local security needs but framed in universal terms (the “War on Terror”). Legally

speaking, liberal wars mimic the “two swords” logic of the High Middle Ages whereby secular

jurisdictions are expected to accede to a higher universal morality, giving rise to a fundamental

tension between legitimacy and legality. But because globalization is undermining the

universal political structures on which that universal morality depends, liberal wars will

eventually lose their universal foundation and follow crusades onto the scrap heap of history.

Already liberal wars are assuming an increasingly secular character, and the United States’

attempt to justify the “War on Terror” as a liberal war is undermining its moral legitimacy

abroad, much as the papacy’s attempt to justify its temporal pursuits in spiritual terms vitiated

its moral authority in the decades prior to the Protestant Reformation.

32

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