International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

the challenge of climate change—might arise anyway, irrespective of our forms of
mid-level political organization. As I said, many of these tasks are urgent, in the
sense of immediately compelling. If we do not quickly organize to get them
performed, they will not be performed: and great loss or harm may result.
Responding to these challenges, I believe, requires some sort of cooperation
through the medium of law and institutions, on an international scale. 91 One way or
another, attention has to be paid to their performance. Responsibility must be
taken for the overall discharge of the proper tasks of governance in the world at
large, including the governing of relations between the entities that are taking
responsibility for discharging the proper tasks of government in each particular
country. That is the major premise.
But my view is that a Christian will be in principle agnostic about the
institutional facilities through which law operates to frame our discharge of these
responsibilities.
8. World government
But should we not dismiss out of hand the prospect of world government? I
wonder. If it turned out that order in the world could be secured, and could only be
secured, under the auspices of empire, or a world state, or under the auspices of an
international rule of law that preempted and crowded out national sovereignty, then
we should presumably render unto Caesar (now in a more or less literal sense)
whatever is necessary for Caesar to do the requisite work (unless that is
incompatible with rendering unto God that which is God’s).
Oliver O’Donovan maintains that Christians should oppose any such idea of
world government. “In securing the total tradition of humanity, we are in a context
in which it is out of place to invoke the commanding role of government,” though
not, he adds, the commanding role of law. 92 But the reasons he produces seems to
me to add little to familiar Kantian apprehensions, in Perpetual Peace and
elsewhere, about the extent of empire and possible global despotism. 93
Professor O’Donovan says that every government, however, imperial, loses
its identity if it cannot contrast itself with others. “Whatever their claim to
universality, in practice all empires need [to] define their identity by excluding
people who live beyond them.” 94 But why should this sort of definition of identity
be judged desirable, given what he has said elsewhere about the connection
91 We have talked about the Christian basis of this assumption at our earlier sessions.
92 O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, 73
93 Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace (1795), and ___ [?]
94 O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment, 214.
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