The fact involving a decision by the Human Rights Committee on Luiz Inácio da Silva registering for the 2018 presidential elections provides reasons to reflect on the diplomatic order. In the Brazilian Judiciary and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself, versions appeared that proclaimed national “sovereignty” or technical details about the registration of treaties in the country's laws. Such incidents show the difficulty, experienced throughout the world, of establishing cogent international law for States. The bibliography on the subject is immense, but the brute fact of hegemonic interests has long been almost identical. State machines move instruments of war, from primitives to atomic bombs. Diplomacy, often, only serves to delay belligerence. Against those who repeat old dreams, like the Saint-Pierre Perpetual Peace Project by I. Kant, or Hegel's saying also applies: “Universal history is the court of the world” (1)
Let's look at the issue according to Hegelian thought, whose warning helps to understand war and diplomacy more closely. But I begin with a philosopher who, although important for Hegel, does not enter into his dialectics. Conatus sese conservandi primum et unicum virtutis est fundamentum. (Spinoza). (2) Every being that expresses Substance perseveres in it. From individuals to States, the imperative is to preserve oneself. Such strength is called virtue for the great philosopher, follower of Machiavelli. A weak State tends towards disintegration, it does not have life assured within itself. In the same line of reasoning, according to Hegel, the loss of strength leads to the natural death of people, something close to suicide: internal weakness leads the collective to split into individuals. External forces play a minor role in such a process, the most important being the tearing apart of a people.
According to Hegel, if microstates wish to guarantee their lives, the worst policy they can pursue is combat against the great powers. Let us also remember Spinoza. In natural law, the terrible reality governs: the bigger fish devour the smaller ones. (3) States live in natural law, different from the civil legal order. After such a Machiavellian reminder, let us return to Hegel: “The small states that oppose themselves, in terms of power, to a power a thousand and more times greater, suffer ruin, their necessary fate. And with lamentations they prove the feeling of need and guilt attributable to pygmies who, when placed against colossi, are destroyed”. The attachment of small States to a fictitious sovereignty is comparable to that of individuals, in civil society, who intend to preserve their assets and the enjoyment of them and, precisely for this reason, expose themselves to losing them. (4)
Although he does not share his contemporaries' thesis about the balance between States, Hegel indicates a system in which they attack or support each other reciprocally. (5) International public law, advances the Philosophy of law, results from relations between independent powers. This right takes the form of a duty to be (Should), but the effective (really) depends on the different sovereign wills. International laws are fragile when it comes to dominating different political entities. They are formal and their effective content can only occur before powers moved by existing wills. The same thing happens today in international law. UN declarations (among them those dealing with human rights, combating drug trafficking and terrorism, corruption, etc.) exist formally. But in practice they suffer obstacles from states and societies with precise interests that exclude each other. The moral formalism that embraces the duty to be (For thatn) as the basis of warlike, economic, political and social actions, it does not manage the wills in struggle to obtain advantage and predominance. (6)
The brute fact is that the state being is not bound by moral or civil law limits. In the case of private persons there is always a place of judgment above them (court ) who decides according to the law. The verb “decide” is very important in such a context. In the case of a powerful State, a superior power would be needed capable of deciding what is contrary to the law and imposing such a decision on the facts. International law does not go beyond the barrier of duty, it does not limit States or oblige them to legal obedience. To certify the existence of a certain State it is necessary to know its Constitution and the reception it has from other States.
But such recognition is linked to the guarantee of reciprocity he offers to others. Therefore, everyone is interested in what happens within friendly or enemy power. (7) Diplomacy comes into consideration because recognition presupposes knowledge about oneself and other state mechanisms. The diplomat fulfills this role. Recognition comes from the strength of each unique State. The weaker the political entity, the more arduous its reception by others in the butcher shop called history. Hegel quotes Napoleon's phrase: “the French republic, to be recognized, only needs the Sun”. Strength, comments the philosopher, guarantees recognition “without needing to be expressed”. Robert Derathé, interpreter and translator, concludes the phrase “sans que celle-ci (la reconnaissance) ait besoin d´être exprimée par un acte diplomatique".
For mutual recognition, treaties between powers need respect. But the powers are found in the state of nature and their rights do not find support in a general will above them. The prevailing will is yours, private. The law of nations, therefore, does not go beyond the duty-to-be (Should). Thus, at certain times the treaties are valid, at others they are not. We have in a note to paragraph 333 of Philosophy of law the famous Hegelian formula about the obstacle in the fulfillment of agreements, treaties and international laws: “There is no praetor, high magistrate or mediator between States, but at most arbitrators who intervene contingently, according to the particular will of each State. The Federation (Staatenbund) imagined by Kant in Perpetual Peace, presupposes unanimous adhesion of the States. But the reasons for such unity lie in religious, moral or other elements, therefore in the sovereign private will. They remain in the contingent.
Even formal, the law that governs States expresses a link between them and makes them respect each other, even in war. Belligerence itself guards the right of nations to perceive war as not perennial and peace as possible and to ensure that “ambassadors are respected and, in general, the fight is not conducted against institutions such as the family and private individuals” . Despite the cautions, in paragraph 340 Hegel sees in international dealings, with their violence, injustice, vice “a game (Game) during which the ethical whole, the independence of the State, is exposed to chance (Zufälligkeit)”. Such a game leads to the court that decides everything, Weltgerichte, where the destinies of powers, big or small, are cast. (8)
States are individuals who, clustered in a League (The club) spawn enemies. “Those of the Holy Alliance could be the Turks or Americans” says Hegel still in Philosophy of law, cited by Claudio Cesa. Here Hegel allows passage to a 20th century jurist known for his theses on the enemy, Carl Schmitt. (9) For the people gathered in a State or League, survival is given by the invention of an enemy that guarantees internal cohesion. Cesa points out the link between the two thinkers when citing Schmitt's extensive references to Hegel in the strategic Der Begriff des Politischen. If the enemy is conditio sine qua non For cohesion, the people must renounce any influence on international decisions. Yes, compact unity within the limits of its own power guarantees the freedom of citizens. But “unlike the member of the ancient State, the member of the modern State no longer deliberates on peace and war. It limits itself to electing deputies whose mission is to approve budgets and whose collaboration, in case of urgency and external danger, the sovereign can mitigate”. Such a situation, for Hegel, is not pathological, as it preserves the strength of the State through the balance between civil society and politics. Thus, citing Hermann Lübbe, the stronger a State, the lesser the weight of concrete individuals: “We is, for those who pronounce it, stranger the larger the multitude of citizenship. The part that every individual has in an act is so insignificant that he is almost unable to speak about the matter as an action of his own. Participation in your nation's fame is so great, but it only means 'I belong to the nation', not 'I am'. The whole exercises a dominion over him to which he is subjected.” (10)
Let us leave war and diplomacy according to Hegel and move on to the broader and more current context of the subject. Diplomaty and diplomat are terms whose origin comes from the Latin diploma. In Greek, Diploûn, neutral form of the adjective diploûs means double: the letter from a sovereign entity to its foreign peer so that the bearer can be heard. As for the diplomat, most analysts attribute the designation to Robespierre to replace “negotiator”. In England he would have been used for the first once by Edmund Burke. Diplomacy, in turn, was defined in France by the Academy in its Dictionary: “the science of relations, of the interests of power to power”. We have countless other definitions, but they always summarize the fact of exchange, positive or negative, between States. Even today, the dominant conception of diplomacy and the diplomat bears that mark. A book like Henry Kissinger's (Diplomacy) still thinks of the diplomat as a transmission belt for the interests held by state leaders. (11) Such a belt is linked to the isolated sovereignty of States, so that there would be no greater and deeper scene for its exercise.
Diplomacy in the 21st century, however, is marked “by the management of the world that became a kind of meeting of co-owners, a meeting that would never end” (Hubert Védrine). (12) Now, contrary to what Hegel stated, public opinions in various countries are not content with approving or demanding international policies from their governments. They actively participate on the world stage. Therefore, thinkers propose a reformulation of diplomatic history and suggest changes in the essence of diplomacy. The latter, says one of them, “did not emerge at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, with the birth in Europe of modern states, the creation of the first permanent embassies and the first governmental structures in charge of conducting foreign policy. There were 'pre-Westaflian' diplomatic relations in Antiquity and the Middle Ages with their actors, practices and logics, which were very variable depending on the places and moments”. (Laurence Badel). Let us leave the promising diplomatic present (which does not augur a happy future despite everything) and let us summarize diplomacy as understood by those who link it to the history of the state machine. This resumption allows us to notice the differences between what has become almost a legal and political dogma and the new way of exercising the exchanges of people and classes on a global level. States, slowly but steadily, leave the state of nature. Brazil, however, it is sad to note, is kept in the realm of manipulated brute force (which is very serious) by judges with police and prosecutors who abuse their power and imagine themselves to be sovereign.
I return the problem at the beginning, the determination by a UN committee that deals with human rights. The issue is whether or not Luiz Inácio da Silva has the right to run for president. If the Hegelian way of dealing with public law is considered validly, it makes no sense to talk about the attitude of the aforementioned Committee, since the matter would necessarily pass through Brazilian sovereign power, whose use of force in monopoly brings together considerable sectors of the federal Executive ( the Itamaraty), Justice (Attorneys of the republic and judges), political parties, Federal Police, press. Brazilian sovereignty, supposedly, has the power to block “undue interference from smaller UN bodies”.
But the new times of diplomacy and sovereign powers, although they retain many of the modern doctrines and practices of the state order, open paths not accepted by defenders of state absolutism. It is true that the UN and regional decision-making bodies (such as the OAS and others) are still driven by the must-be plan, the Should criticized by Hegel. Most of the orders addressed to the omnia et singular, on a global level, remain almost a dead letter. But if we consider the trend in international relations, we can say that, yes, the norms issued and put into practice by the UN must be accepted and assumed by the Brazilian State. Let us add another fact: if international relations increasingly involve citizenship and no longer just the specialized apparatuses of sovereign power, such as official diplomatic means, in the case at hand it is possible to say that it immediately interests Brazilian citizens and who, in other countries, are concerned about the problems here.
The international press, unlike ours, has given intense coverage to the Lula issue, a large number of people on the world stage, from the most relevant to the anonymous, speak out in favor of the Brazilian president. Public opinion polls in the country show an unprecedented strength of that politician among the masses. This is not just a prison problem or one linked to elections. In reality, the citizens who propose to support that candidate already have a broader diplomatic agenda that involves human, labor and social rights (for example, the violence of slavery that rages in Brazilian countryside and cities), unemployment, lack of public services and widespread threats of privatization. These are items on a list that involve the policies of all states that exist today and that compete for economic, military and diplomatic control of the world arena. Those problems don't just concern judges and bureaucrats, they involve the survival of millions and millions, here and on the planet.
Under the UN order we have the essential point of the philosophical and also ethical reflection of Spinoza and Hegel: virtue, now more than ever, resides in the practice of self-preservation. Otherwise, we would say with Hegel, the people commit suicide, if they accept helplessly the privatist nonsense that manifest themselves in the veto of the candidacy of the politician who has in his favor the feat of bringing innumerable masses of people into social life, the same ones that today reveal her desire for him to return to the public scene.
Thus, the Lula/UN case is not restricted to the fight between the Brazilian power machine and an international agency. He shows that the paths of diplomacy, practiced not only by instruments of official power, but by citizens, heralds a new war in the world, which is being fought between those who claim to own the planet for their own profit, and those who fight for the survival of the same immense biome called Earth. I return to Hegel for the last time, no pygmy state like Brazil can escape such a clash. Our State, Hegelian-style, does not accept moral limits for its activity, especially that which it moves against its citizens, in a cowardly and clumsy way. Without greatness to elevate itself to the global public sphere, micro sovereignty, here, is content to abuse the strength and internal legal order, often emanating from a Legislature that operates in favor of the representatives and almost never of the represented. Beneath the aged veneer of official legality, however, the new brought by the sovereign people throbs. Soon the old envelope of oligarchies will be broken in favor of a different understanding of Brazil and the world. Who lives will see.
1) World history is the world court. Lessons on the Philosophy of Law, paragraph 340. Quote from the poem “Resignation”, composed by Schiller. It is impressive, after the Holocaust, to return to another poem on the subject, 'Jonah', written by D. Bonhoeffer, a German cleric and theologian killed by Hitler's regime. The horizon of war and peace is evoked in all the passages mentioned, from philosophers and poets.
2)Ethics:, book IV, Proposition 22, corollary.
3)Tractatus Theologicus politicus, chap. XVI, De reipublicae fundamentalis; de jure uniuscujusque naturali et civili, deque summarum potestatum jure. “Per jus et institutum naturae nihil aliud intelligo, quam regulas naturae uniuscujusque individui, secundum quas unumquodque naturaliter determinatum concipimus ad certain mode existendum et operandum. Ex. gr. pisces a natura determinati sunt ad natandum, magni ad minores comedendum, adeoque pisces summo naturali jure aqua potiuntur, et magni minores comedunt.” Opera, im Auftrag der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, hrsg. von Carl Gebhardt, Heidelberg, Carl Winters Universitaetsbuchhandlung, 1972, vol. III, p. 189
4) Hegel, Schriften zur Politik, cited by Claudio Cesa, “Considerazioni sulla hegelian theory of war”, in Hegel political philosopher (Napoli, Guida, 1976), p. 192.
5) “In Europe, every people is limited by another and alone cannot start a war with another European nation; Outside of Europe, such a thing can only happen in the direction of America.” Hegel, aesthetics, II, trans. Merker-Vaccaro (Milano, Einaudi, 1976), p. 1188. The memory of the passage belongs to Cesa.
6) In this sense, the inspection of state interests is more useful, as Rohan does in the strategic treatise “Sur l ´interêt des princes de la chrétienté”.
7) The role of espionage is notorious, Hobbes has good insights into the topic throughout his texts.
8) Mearsheimer, John J. The tragedy of great power politics (London/NYA, WW Norton, 20013). The game metaphor, evoked by Hegel, condenses an essential semantic constellation in modern rationality. From calculating probabilities to political and diplomatic strategies, the game includes meanings essential to the collective and individual order. Cf. E. Pozzi Giochi diguerra e tempi di pace”.The sociological critique, 67, Fall 1983, p. 42 ff. The bibliography is immense, collecting the names of philosophers, mathematicians, political and military strategists. Later I intend to return to the point. Romano, Roberto: “Ethics, war, sport” Lecture at Postgraduate Congress in Physical Education, in http://oapolitico.blogspot.com/2007/02/tica-guerra-e-esporte.html
10) Theory and Entscheidung, cited by Cesa, op. cit. P. 201.
11) Kissinger's book, in its entirety, is published with free access on the internet
12) Quoted in Badel, Laurence ' Une histoire globale de la diplomatie ?” Magazine Worlds, 2014/1, n. 5, Paris, Armand Colin. reproduced in CAIRN.INFO. For a correct analysis, check the entire article, which I use here extensively, without modifying statements, but following them faithfully.
