International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

ethren, to the exclusion of those who are of other lines of human descent. On the
other view—associated with Kant and also with Hobbes—we organize ourselves
into political communities in order to establish justice among those to whom there
is a danger that we will act unjustly, or to resolve conflicts among those to whom
our proximity is likely to generate tangled and endemic conflict. On the one view,
we form a community among those we have reason to trust and love. On the other
view—again a Hobbesian view—we join in community from fear of each other,
with those whom we would otherwise fight. 73
On the one view, boundaries are set by the limits of a distinct people’s
immemorial presence in a land, following lines of clear separation from strangers.
On the other view, boundaries are haphazard and arbitrary—the residue of history
or providence—representing nothing much more significant than the place where
the efforts of one group of people to do justice and resolve conflict among
themselves ran up against the efforts of another group of people to do justice and
resolve conflict among themselves—each group consisting of an array of people
who, happening to find themselves in one another’s vicinity, had no choice but to
try and order their relations. In O’Donovan’s words, people are always coming in
and going out; for a time they just happen to be where others are; that is the basis
of political community
I think it is well-known which of these alternatives I favor. 74 I said in my
lecture last week that entering into political community is a duty, not an option;
and I believe the same is true with the choice of who we enter into political
community with. We are not to pick and choose. We have a duty to enter into
political community with those who happen to be in our vicinity—and our
relatedness to one another in a nation is initially nothing much thicker than that.
This is not in itself necessarily a Christian position; it is not dictated by
scripture and it can be reached by other routes. But it is supported by Christian
teaching in two ways. It is supported, first, in the rebuttal of any claim that ties of
(say) ethnic affinity matter more than the common humanity evinced in simple
proximity. It is supported, secondly, in Christian conceptions about the
transcendence of grievance and the renunciation of nurtured distrust of strangers. I
mean Christian theses about forgiveness and about safety in the face of enmity—
73 Hobbes associates political community among humans with conflict. What interests him is “how and by what
stages, in the passion for self-preservation, a number of natural persons from fear of each other have coalesced into
one civil person to which we have given the name of commonwealth” (Hobbes, De Cive, CUP edition, p. 74).
“From fear of each other,” that’s the point—diffidence, suspicion, conflict, and the possibility of a war of all against
all (individually or in small scale factions) that is likely to result from that – that’s the basis of political community.
74 I have defended it in a paper called “The Principle of Proximity,” available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1742413
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