CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

into the First World War to “make the world safe for democracy” 144 ; during the Cold
War, the West drew upon the moral authority of the principle of ‘self determination’,
whilst the Soviet bloc claimed a duty to the cause of the international proletariat. The
continued relevance of transnational moral authority today can be deduced from the
regularity with which the world’s leaders continue to appeal to it – justifying action by
reference to ‘Western values’, ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’ or ‘universal human rights’. 145
In taking the decision to attack Iraq in 2003 without international backing, President
Bush might be seen to place a lesser regard on moral authority, but even so there was
much reference to ‘making the world a safer place’, to ‘freeing the Iraqi people’ and
‘bringing democracy to the Middle East’. As Suzanne Nossel notes, ‘(a)fter September
11, conservatives adopted the trappings of liberal internationalism, entangling the
rhetoric of human rights and democracy in a strategy of aggressive unilateralism.’ 146
All of this suggests that the notion of moral authority still holds considerable sway even
with a strongly realist-leaning US Administration. It was clearly an even more
important issue for Tony Blair – though perhaps more to meet domestic political
imperatives that to retain international moral standing – hence his preparedness to ‘go
the extra mile’ for the so-called ‘second’ UN Resolution even though, eventually, he
was prepared to go to war without it.
Hall is careful to observe the importance of context: ‘moral authority – like money or
the credible threat of military force in a conventionally anarchic system – acquires
utility as a power resource to the extent that it is institutionalized as a convention(;) …..
when it becomes socially embedded in a system of actors whose social identities and
interests impel them to recognize it as a power resource’ 147 . However, he notes that
resort to force was ‘usefully unproblematic’ when there was no convention against it.
The corollary to this is that if today’s conventions against use of force are undermined –
as they appear in danger of being – then we risk return to an international order in which
moral authority carries no value and censure against use of force is ineffective; and that
begins to tend towards the world of Hobbes.
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