CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

international bodies. For Aquinas it was relatively straightforward: due authority can
readily be translated ‘sovereign authority’ and this, in his context, could only mean a
state. Private citizens have no right to assemble armies and declare wars because ‘if
such a person has a serious grievance it is his duty and opportunity to apply for just
vindication from the appropriate political authority superior to him.’ 136 Tooke goes on
to point out that even for Aquinas there should be some debate about what constitutes
sovereign authority for, theoretically at least, the plethora of minor princes who between
them ruled most of Europe, all owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire and so all
had an ‘appropriate political authority to whom they could turn for peaceful vindication
of alleged wrongs.’ The reality, of course, was somewhat different and it can be argued
that setting aside the particular political conditions of the day, Aquinas was seeking to
make a much more fundamental point of enduring value:
By allowing the sovereign the ultimate power to make war, Aquinas, in his own
political context, was admitting war between equals, that is, war between cities
and provinces as well as kingdoms. That such should be legitimate when war
between private persons is not so may be due to the fact that in the former case
there is no effective higher authority having common jurisdiction over both
parties, whereas local or national government supplied a means of resolving
individual conflicts. 137
In the international system that was to emerge after the Peace of Westphalia (1648),
these ‘equals’ were to be states and this paradigmatic right of states alone, within certain
moral boundaries, to resort to use of force continued, effectively, until the signing of the
Kellog-Briand Pact in 1928. It can be argued that, eventually, with the UN and the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) there arrived that ‘higher authority’ to which states
could refer disputes – thus placing them on the same footing as individual citizens in
Aquinas’ doctrine. So the justification for states’ use of force was undermined.
Conversely, it may be argued that failure of the higher authority to be effective
legitimises again states’ use of force.
Although, as noted, Augustine’s doctrine would perhaps better be interpreted as
justified war – a necessary evil, never, per se, a righteous undertaking – and
notwithstanding Aquinas’s ‘whether it is always a sin’, it is frequently held that in the
Thomian period and beyond such restraint on war as the doctrine demanded, was
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