Mervyn Frost Full Interview
Conducted by Marin Verspieren
Mervyn Frost is a South African and British scholar in International Relations. He was Head of the War Studies department at King’s College London and has written extensively on ethics, civil society, and security in the past 40 years.
In your book Global Ethics, you urge policy-makers, states, and scholars alike to consider an ethical dimension to international relations and politics more broadly. Explain the rationale behind it.
Traditionally people who have approached ethics from a philosophical point of view do it quite narrowly and they consider conundrums like an individual facing a decision whether it would be okay when you're in a firefight to wound people on the sidelines. It’s always a question of what should an individual soldier do in a dire situation and, while those are definitely traumatic ethical puzzles for the people involved, it seems to me that ethics is buried far deeper in our everyday life than we actually realize. Just about any action that you want to give an account of has some kind of ethical dimension.
For example, consider Brexit in this country. The minute the issue arose it was not just a straightforward action should we leave or shouldn't we leave or will it be to the advantage of Britain or not to the advantage of Britain. Instantly people realized that there were issues involved in that decision that went to their very identity of who they were. The remainers felt very strongly that they understood themselves to be citizens of the world - in particular of this big European world - which had been wrapped in wars for decades and now wasn't. They had formed a political arrangement in which all men and women were free and equal and then suddenly, that was taken away. That group saw themselves as little England which was a diminished ethical standing. Conversely, the leavers also saw that this was an ethical issue: they had the notion that Britain was a great country. Its involvement in the minutiae of European life diminished its standing and the very identity of Great Britain.
My whole view is: How do we resolve that kind of ethical tension? It crops up just about everywhere, any action in international relations you care to think about probably has an ethical dimension of that kind. To sum up, actors in international relations always have an idea of who they are. That notion of “who we are in doing this” includes a very strong ethical component. I wanted to introduce critical thinking about that.
Why is normative theory, in your opinion, historically marginalised in favour of more realist viewpoints?
That goes back to the origins of international relations. Up until the end of WW1, there was no separate subject called international relations. There was political science and the centre of political science was the study of governments: states within their boundaries. This discipline grew between the wars and there was still no clear distinct discipline of IR - or a very small one - after the end of WW2.
Since then, this discipline has grown, mainly in the US, and its main focus has been on power. This is because if you study what happens within states, you can understand that what should be studied are institutions, parties, parliaments, pressure groups, etc... When you get to the international, it’s not a global state, there’s no global governance, there’re no global parties. What going on there? The short realist answer was: what’s going on there is a struggle for power. My whole career has been aimed at challenging that. Internationally, it’s not merely a struggle for power because we have a very elaborate system of international law. We have lots of international institutions. We have a global political economy. All of these have, built into their very foundations, several ethical principles, values, and theories. If you want to understand what’s going on there, you need to understand the ethics.
To give the strongest example, most IR scholars agree that the subject - or part of it - is states and their relation. This relationship between states is seen in terms of the sovereignty of each state. Yet, this notion of sovereignty is an ethical notion. It’s not simply a statement about power, it’s a statement about an ethical claim that this entity - state x - claims it’s got against all other states. It has to do with “this is my domain” as distinct from “your domain”. So, the more you think about international relations the more you see that, all over the place, are ethical judgments - including judgments about justice, equality, liberty, and individual human rights.
What ethical responsibilities should the most powerful states have in their foreign policies? In your opinion, how well or poorly are they living up to these responsibilities?
The question itself poses an ethical problem for me because it means that the state can choose to be ethical or not. Constitutive theory - the theory that I’ve developed, also called practice theory - says that states are not free agents that can pick and choose their ethics. They are constituted as states within the wider practice of states with an elaborate system of mutual recognition between them. To be a state - and to claim statehood for oneself - is already to identify oneself as a participant in this practice, and to participate in that practice you have to be - not voluntarily - constrained by the ethical norms definitive of that practice. If you have committed to becoming a soccer player, you can’t do so unless to commit to the rules of the game. Each game specifies what counts as cheating, or unacceptable behaviour of one kind or another. We all know what that means in sports. The rules of the IR game have built-in notions of ethical soundness, and the participants know what counts as unacceptable practice. All states know that aggression against a neighbouring state - except in self-defense - is ethically wrong. If a neighbouring state aggresses your state, you are ethically enabled under the Just War tradition to defend your state.
In any system of rules, it’s always possible for a participant to break the rules. The rules are called for to constrain actors who might be tempted to break them. Some of the powerful actors in this global practice have quite often flouted the rules. When they have done that, they have opened themselves to widespread criticism. For example, we currently have two dramatic and tragic wars going on in Ukraine and Gaza. You see exactly this back-and-forth ethical claim in these cases. It’s quite difficult to work out who’s right and who’s wrong. The military actions that take place are a consequence of somebody giving an answer to the question of who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s hardly an academic question. They’re of fundamental importance to the soldiers on the ground, the members of parliament, and of course to the ordinary citizens, all of whom face the chance of being killed. No one would want to be killed as a result of unjust action by your government.
In 1946, Ernest Hemingway said: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” Do you agree or disagree? Why?
I disagree with that. As the world is constructed now, we have a global practice of states with a system of international law and a sense of what a just war is. Under certain circumstances, in narrow circumstances, going to war is not a crime. For example, if you are defending yourself against wrongful aggression by another state. The easiest example over the last hundred years or so would’ve been WW2 when Germany just invaded - and transgressed the sovereignty of - Poland, the Netherlands, and more. In each case, it was a wrongful aggression against a sovereign state and provoked a very dramatic reaction from the other states of the world. Quite rightly, in the end, the wrongdoer was brought to heel.
It’s become much more complicated in modern forms of warfare which sometimes come under the broad label of asymmetrical wars. These are typically between one traditional power with all the apparatus of a fully-fledged state against a much smaller actor with none of those things (take ISIS). The smaller actor is never under the delusion that they are going to defeat the powerful actor in great pitched battles because the aim of the smaller actor is simply to provoke the great powers to do unethical things. My colleague - Professor Lebow - and I have written about this procedure of ethical trapping. It’s a different kind of war. I kick you in the shins in the hope that you’ll go berserk and do all sorts of things in response. I think that there’s no wide understanding of what’s going on in these asymmetrical wars because, over and over again, the dominant power falls into the ethical trap. They overstep all sorts of conventional boundaries and thereby incur the ethical outrage of the rest of the world. We saw that in the American reaction to 9/11.
Many argue that talk of global ethics and justice masks the harsh reality that power dynamics rule geopolitics. What’s your response? Is it naïve to prioritize ethics over national interests?
That’s a traditional criticism of the kind of argument I’ve been offering. It’s one I don’t accept at all because it suggests that power and ethics are two separate things. States or other organisations engage in a power struggle against each other and ethics is a narrative that the virtuous people try and use to constrain the power-play. So ethics is froth, but underneath is the real stuff - hence the name realism. I don’t think that is plausible at all because the so-called powers involved in the power play are often states. These states only have power because the people involved in them and people elsewhere understand them to be ethical constructs. Not any group that gets together with arms is a state with that status (like the mafia or gangs). To be a state is to have a form of ethical status. The power that states bring to the table stems from the ethical status they have within the greater practice. So, the separation of ethics from power is wrong. To understand power - how it might be used or what erodes it - you must have an ethical understanding from the get-go.
Is communitarianism a barrier to a more unified world? If so, how does this complicate global ethical discourse?
The answer to that depends on your idea of communitarianism. The narrow view says the world is made of separate communities, and each community has its own rules for the game. The idea is that each community doesn’t see itself as bound by overarching ethics that constrain it. If you understand communities like that, your question must be answered affirmatively. However, I think it’s simply not possible to make a case that that’s how the world is. You can ask a student - any first-year student - what we study in the world of IR and they’ll answer in terms of states, international law, military power, systems of diplomacy, and networks of international organisations. What’s being described there is a global practice - with its global norms and laws - that makes these elements cohere with one another. It’s much more like a single practice rather than isolated communities bumping against one another. There’s a better way of using “communitarian” which says “To analyse this global practice, you need a sense of a global community”. That’s a communitarian explanation but it’s a global community.
The theory I’ve developed says there are actually two global practices: the practice of sovereign states and the global rights practice. The latter explains that individual men and women around the world recognise one another as rights holders. In many ways, those two are related but independent of each other. In some parts of the world, namely Africa, the state has almost collapsed: they are weak, failed, or corrupt. Yet, we would all still say that the people there still have human rights, and they would say the same about me. In a class, I can assert that one of my students is a rights holder irrespective of whether she’s from place x or place y. It might be that the place she comes from doesn’t respect her rights or protect them. That she has them is irrespective of the place she lives in.
How might your conception of constitutive theory be applied to contemporary disputes over statehood and self-determination, such as debates about Palestinian independence?
Constitutive theory as I’ve developed it says that for us to be fully realised as free people we have to be - at the same time - recognised as rights holders and exist within a democratic sovereign state as citizens. So anybody who is denied either of those aspects is being done a damage - an ethical damage. In South Africa, for example, the anti-apartheid movement made a claim to the international community in the past that they were being wronged. You can apply that logic to any group that is being deprived of their rights, both individual and citizenship rights. When you consider a place like Gaza, the Palestinians are - as it would appear to me - being denied both sets of rights. Their individual rights are not being recognised, especially by the Israelis, and their citizenship equally so: they don’t have a state. What ought to happen for that to be rectified is somehow a Palestinian state has to be created. But that’s easier said than done because, from the outset in 1948, Palestinian movements have said “This state that was created here called Israel has no right to exist”. In that way, they’re doing a comparable wrong in the other direction. In that case, you can see what an awful ethical dilemma we’re in.
What’s bedeviling the world at the moment - it seems to me - is people think they must choose either the Israeli side or the Hamas/Palestinian side as if one is right. In the light of practice theory, one can see how the ethical problem is much greater than that. What has to happen for the problem to be resolved is that all the people in the region need to be part of a sovereign state and have their individual rights recognised. But at the moment, neither side is doing that, so there’s a long ethical learning curve that has to be experienced. The international community is - as we speak - marshaling its forces to bring about something approximating what I’ve been talking about. Unfortunately, it’s taken a long time, lots of lives have been ruined, and it’s a disaster. Nevertheless, the direction of travel will be - of it I’m perfectly confident - what I’ve just set out.
What is the appropriate role you believe civil society should play concerning states and formal governance institutions like the UN? Partner, watchdog, or replacement model?
Practice theory says that - as we are constituted at the moment in the world - we are simultaneously participants in both civil society and the society of sovereign states. To answer your question on the role of civil society, it is constitutive but it’s not the dominant one and neither are states. For our modern conception of ourselves, we need to be participants in both. One must be careful not to see civil society as one set of actors and the system of states as another set of actors that are opposed like an old-fashioned war between us and them. Having said that, the most interesting tensions in the modern world have arisen because the practices sometimes appear to be going in different directions. For example, Elon Musk having been a schoolboy in Pretoria is now the richest man in the world and he owns a huge portion of the global wealth. Control of that wealth confers upon him an enormous power that he can use for good or bad. That concentration of power in a civil society poses all sorts of problems for the states and all the actors constituted in it. Another one is AI. Individual actors develop this technology and it starts looking enormously powerful. Once again, the states are saying: “We need to have a look at this, we need some kind of regulatory regime”. And I think that’s going to be the most interesting one because states individually can’t solve this problem. They have to come together and work as a concert if they’re going to have regulations that hold AI developments within ethical channels. I think we’re going to see an emergence of a kind of global governance that we haven’t seen before, and it’s going to happen quite quickly. It’s that jostling of ethical conflict that emerges as a result of new technologies, movements of people, and more that makes life interesting.
Does Globalisation enhance civil society by connecting individuals together, or does it hurt it by entrenching people in identity politics?
If you think about the so-called identity politics fights that have emerged in recent times, a lot of them have to do with social media. It’s a place where people can find like-minded individuals form little groups and then become very passionate about defending the interests of that little group. The label then emerges: “This is identity politics gone wild”. But I would bring us back to the people using social media like that are acting in accordance with the rights we recognise them as having as members of global civil society. This is not the end of global civil society: it is global civil society in action, in very fast action. All of the people who make these identitarian claims are relying on the solidity and coherence of the whole. For example, all of them depend on social media. Keeping this global media going requires global governance and the prosperity of the global market. All this exciting activity depends on the stability of the framework - of this global IR framework. The globalised framework is the precondition for it to take place. Before the invention of all this modern social media technology, many ordinary men and women felt excluded from the political domain altogether. And now suddenly politics is available to everybody, even in countries that aren’t democratic, or even for the poorest person in an industrial society. It’s a cacophony, but it’s really rather marvelous.
Do the emerging wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Gaza show a trend of a declining system of global governance, or do you think the reason lies elsewhere?
Since the beginning of human kind - as far as I can make out, and I’m not a very good historian but from my reading and I suspect yours too - war has been a feature of all societies. Always. New technical developments like the invention of gunpowder, then tanks, then flying, and now space travel and world wide webs have created opportunities for new and destructive forms of warfare. It still occurs. So we’ve got these wars that you’ve mentioned that are ongoing and pretty awful but they’re taking place within the structures I’ve already outlined. The other participants are looking on with horror but aren’t just distant. They are participating. There are very strong forces at work to try to bring a resolution to these wars. I don’t think they [the wars] indicate an unraveling of the global practices and their ethical components that I’ve already spelled out.
What is the most important affair happening in International Relations right now? Why should people be aware of it?
Well, I think the most important thing is not so much an event but an absence. I really worry about the absence of a comprehensive understanding of our global practices. We’ve got lots of people with a very primitive understanding of IR, and in particular, the realists who just see IR as a struggle for power between actors that kind of exist independently of any social practice. They still think of “us” and “them” and other very localised terms. To my mind, the greatest imperative is to inculcate a better understanding that all of us are - not because we’ve chosen to - already constituted as international actors. We must introduce a better understanding or, as Hegel used to talk about, Bildung: a kind of educational awareness that we need to get to to avoid becoming bogged down in micro-struggles. Prior to all of that is this interdependent global economy which is massively sophisticated and hugely productive. When we think in primitive terms about various strong ones struggling in a ring, that doesn’t do justice to what we are participating in. Realism oversimplifies, it is reductive.
What is the last opinion you changed your mind on?
It’s not recent, but I started out as a conventional liberal thinking that the world was composed of individuals who held rights. I didn’t think through that statement in social terms. I thought of it like a section in the Bible: “In the beginning, we’re individuals with rights”. Then, as a result of reading various people (in particular Hegel), I realised that it’s not the case. To be an individual is to be part of a social whole already. We become aware of ourselves in social wholes. Hegel had this view that you first become aware of yourself in the family. And then, at the next step, I become aware of myself in the wider civil society. I can buy things from that person and make a contract with that one. Later I become aware of myself as a citizen of a state with rights and so on. A South African scholar, who was a great politician as well, and a mover and shaker in the founding of the League of Nations, was a man called Jan Smuts. He wrote a book called Holism. It’s that move from crude liberalism to holism that was a big step in my life.