International Legal Evangelism: Intelligence, Reconnaissance & Missions

etween pride and faction and the formation of communal identities? 95
O’Donovan also says that
it is essential to our humanity that there should always be foreigners, human
beings from another community who have an alternative way of organizing
the task and privilege of being human, so that our imaginations are refreshed
and our sense of cultural possibilities renewed. 96
But he does not explain why that sense of renewal cannot be nourished by the vast
diversity of minds and practices, the vast civil society, that would exist within an
integrated world community.
He does worry, quite rightly, about the hubris of empire: “The titanic
temptation which besets collectives needs the check of a perpetual plurality at the
universal level.” And he tells us that, whatever Paul’s acquiescence in or appeal to
the pax Romana, the biblical tradition is fundamentally one that sees empire on a
world scale as a “bestial deformation.” The biblical tradition awaits the collapse of
the titans, and the emergence, as he puts it, of “[a] family of humble nations
[creeping] out from the wreckage of empire.” 97 The humility of nationhood
compared to world empire is his strongest suit. This is part and parcel of
O’Donovan’s consistent counsel in favor of modesty in our aspirations for
international law. As I said last week, in ordering the world we are not building
the new Jerusalem. That point is well taken.
The idea of world government is frightening to most people: black
helicopters, blue helmets, and comprehensive disenfranchisement of everyone
except the bureaucrats in Geneva or at the easternmost end of 42 nd Street in New
York. We should recall, however, that the idea of a world state is in many respects
an ambiguous phrase, and along several possible dimensions it is a matter of
degree.
So let us ask: is any movement at all in the direction of world government
inappropriate? If we define states in Weberian terms, then we can think of a
continuum between a world government having no armed forces of its own all the
way through to a tightly controlled organization exercising a monopoly of force in
the world. 98 We are so close to the left-hand pole of this spectrum—for as things
stand international institutions barely have the wherewithal to exercise force at all
in the world, let alone monopolize it, though the UN Charter does seek a degree of
95 Ibid., 212. See also The Desire of the Nations, 235.
96 O’Donovan, Desire of the Nations, p. 268.
97 Ibid., p. 71.
98 I am thinking of the definition of “state” in Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” as an organized entity that
possesses a monopoly on the forms of legitimated violenc,.
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