Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight
But Battling Bill (who slew him) thought it right.

-Hilaire Belloc

HILAIRE BELLOC penned this sardonic couplet in those halcyon days before 1914 when, in Europe and North America, "the Peace Movement" was reaching its height. The rest of the twentieth century, with its unprecedented bloodshed and catastrophic results, might seem to justify the views of Ebenezer. Is the world any better, we may ask, as a result of all those wars? Should people not have listened to him rather than to Battling Bill and, like him, refused to fight? Today Ebenezer's successors continue gallantly to urge their cause; and even if they have failed to persuade us that to fight is "wrong," at least we now expect our governments to think a great deal harder before they put their soldiers (as the rather-charming American euphemism has it) "in harm's way": that is, order them to kill people and run a distinct risk of getting killed themselves.

In considering the reasons that people give, and have given in the past, for killing one another, I have in mind something rather different from the justification, the jus ad bellum, that governments give when they go to war. Rather, it is the justification invoked by the people who do the actual killing; that exemption from the normal laws of humanity which licenses, indeed orders, them to do things that would otherwise be considered abominable. If we look for the answer in the history of the Western world, we find it conveniently summarized in the motto under which the British army went to war in 1914: For God, King and Country. But nowadays the first of those authorities, if He is invoked at all, is likely to provoke contention rather than unity. The second has little significance even where such a person still exists. Finally, in a global and interdependent world order, even the demand "to die for one's country" has lost much of its appeal; more so perhaps in a Europe battered after two bruising world wars than in a victorious and still-intact United States.

Further, although it is conceivable that wars may still have to be fought for territorial defense, in practice those in which the United States and her allies have engaged for the past half century have consisted of the projection of armed force to distant parts of the world to engage in conflicts that, although fought in "the national interest," often bear a very remote connection to the actual defense of one's native land. Sometimes the connecting thread seems very tenuous indeed. Under such circumstances a new and stronger argument may be needed to provide a convincing license to kill.

THE TRIAD of "God, King and Country" offers a useful summary of the reasons that people in the Western world have given for killing one another over the past thousand years. Like most historians, I assume a central "Westphalian" period in European history, dating from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and lasting into the twentieth, if not the twenty-first, century, that began when Europe sorted itself out into the system of sovereign states which has been the template for international relations until our own time. Before that we find a "feudal" era, when relations between political powers were vertical rather than horizontal. Then, all political authority was seen as being ultimately derived from God, from whom it devolved through a pyramid of authorities, all of whom claimed by derivation to act as His agents; a claim ratified by the sanction of a universal Church. When these authorities fought between themselves-as they did almost continuously-they did so to uphold, or restore, a divinely ordained order, and could thus invoke divine sanction to justify their claims. In practice, their conflicts were usually struggles over possession or inheritance of landed property. For them war was a form of litigation, an appeal to God's judgment, and fighting was the means of ensuring that His will should be done. The people who did the fighting usually did so to fulfill their obligations to an overlord who rewarded them with land and the political power that went with it; but in any case they were born to warfare, thoroughly enjoyed it and had little else to do with their time.

When they were not fighting among themselves, Christians engaged in a more existential conflict against what they saw as incarnate powers of evil, the Muslims; adversaries whose encroachments threatened the entire structure of Western Christendom for the best part of a thousand years, from the eighth well into the eighteenth century. It was a conflict that saw Muslim armies penetrate deep into France and Christian crusaders establish themselves in Palestine, and that persisted in southeast Europe well into the nineteenth century. For Christians the justification for killing, and if necessary dying, in combat with such an adversary seemed self-evident. Their adversaries fought with similar enthusiasm for their own conception of God. All too many of them still do.

For Western Europe, however, the menace of the Muslims eventually waned, leaving behind a large class of désoeuvré warriors who knew no other way of earning their living. These fighters formed themselves into mercenary bands and placed their swords at the disposal of anyone who would pay for them. For them war was no longer a means of serving God, but a straightforward trade. They were professionals. Their loyalty was to their own group leader. They served whomever employed them so long as they were paid. If they were not paid they did not fight. But so long as they were paid, they were content to kill or be killed. Their motivation was pure professional pride.

THESE PROFESSIONALS eventually found steady employment in serving the dynasties who achieved dominance over Europe in the later Middle Ages and were anointed by a complaisant Church, on the Judaic model, as "Kings": a status that was seen to place them in a direct relationship with God. The feudal pyramid gradually disappeared, and these monarchs assumed the sole right to "make war" and demand the obedience of their subjects in so doing; thus providing that all-important element in the Christian jus ad bellum: "right authority." This royal authority was still allegedly derived from a divine source-in serving one's King one was serving God-but the Westphalian era had now begun. The feudal hierarchy based on obedience to a pyramid of overlords evolved into a "system of states" in which monarchs were the sole judges of the legitimacy of their cause and from whom there was no appeal, either upward to God or downward to "the people." Kings required no justification for their wars beyond the need to protect or extend their own power, or occasionally to preserve "the balance of power"; an objective explicitly invoked to justify the upkeep of the British army until the middle of the nineteenth century.

But although they might claim their ultimate authority from God as "anointed Kings," the power of these monarchs still depended on military force. This required that they should successfully convert the existing mercenary bands into disciplined and loyal armed forces; which they could do only if they found the money to pay them. It was largely to ensure a regular source of income to do this that European monarchs created the mechanism of taxation and representation that became known as "the State." The English political thinker Thomas Hobbes was to call the State a "Leviathan" describing it as "that Mortall God," "our peace and defense"-a secular authority that replaced the rather-less effective Immortal God in providing security for its members. With the resources of such States at their disposal, monarchs were now able, from the mid-seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth, to wage wars much as they willed, with professional armed forces who killed one another and got themselves killed in the name of the King to whom they swore allegiance and who paid them; not caring very much whether or not he derived his authority from God.

Then peoples began to discover that, so long as the mechanism of the State functioned effectively, Kings themselves were expendable. A new concept of loyalty gradually took shape; one to a community with which people could more directly identify themselves. In this development the British led the way. There an unpopular King, James II, was expelled in 1689, and little reverence was felt for his foreign successors. The British army formally swore allegiance to the monarch, but in practice developed that fanatical loyalty to specific regiments which survives to this day, while the sailors who won command of the seas in the great wars against France fought not so much for their King as for their "country"; a concept that would be inherited by their cousins in North America a few years later when they discarded the royal connection altogether.

The territorial concept of "country" is interestingly distinct both from the term "nation" in whose name the French were to dispose of their own King, and even more from that which was to so profoundly stir their German neighbors, "Volk": a quasi-metaphysical concept associated with Blut rather than Boden, blood rather than soil, and one of which the English word "People" can give only a misleading and inadequate impression. To these terms were to be added the classical and familial Patrie, Patria and "Fatherland." These differences in terminology provide an interesting insight into the cultural distinctions that were beginning to reveal themselves as the peoples of Europe gradually developed self-awareness; to analyze them adequately would demand a very large book; but what they all shared was universality and immense emotional force.

The universality was important in an increasingly secular age when a dwindling number of people were prepared to die simply for God, and an even-more rapidly dwindling minority were prepared to lay down their lives for their King, even assuming that they still had one. Armies now consisted increasingly of volunteers or conscripts who needed a motivation that would inspire them all, regardless of class or creed. As the traditional foci of loyalty faded, they were replaced by the far more powerful concepts that were to fuel the great national wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which young men were to die and kill for their "country" or "Fatherland"; though when possible, as we have seen, "God" and "King" were bracketed with it in an all-embracing trinity.

BUT BY the twentieth century we are entering a third, or post-Westphalian era: that of what might be termed "Enlightenment Wars." The savants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had argued that war, so far from being an inevitable if not positively desirable element in human affairs, was an unnecessary evil created by the self-interest of monarchs and their attendant aristocrats who then ruled the peoples of Europe. Wars were thus justifiable, they argued, only if they were fought to liberate peoples from these oppressive regimes, whether they were homegrown or foreign-imposed. The first such war for what would now be termed "regime change" was that commenced by the French revolutionary government in response to the Allied invasion of 1793, when the French invaded their neighbors to liberate them from monarchical oppression; a rationale that inspired the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte to carry the flag of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity throughout a rather ungrateful Europe. This set the pattern for "wars of liberation" fought during the nineteenth century to free the Greeks, the Italians and the peoples of the Balkan peninsula from oppressive Austrian or Ottoman rule. It was a concept that received its full epiphany in 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson took the United States into the First World War, proclaiming that America would fight not, like the European powers, simply for her own national interest but "for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself free." The conflict between Pale Ebenezer and Battling Bill now seemed resolved: the justification for going to war was to bring war itself to an end.

But although the democracies triumphed in 1918, their peoples still proved very reluctant to fight Enlightenment Wars. The Americans dissociated themselves from Wilson's "concert of free peoples," the League of Nations, with all the uncomfortable obligations that membership would have involved. The French and British refused even to contemplate war against Japan in 1931 or Italy in 1935 when those states invaded and subjugated peaceful peoples in defiance of their international obligations. When France and Britain did eventually go to war in 1939, their immediate justifications were in principle purely "Westphalian": to fulfill treaty obligations and maintain a balance of power; but fundamentally their peoples agreed to fight because they realized that their "countries" were now in danger. The United States and the Soviet Union remained aloof even longer, and entered the war only when they were themselves physically attacked. Whatever the rhetoric of their leaders, the vast majority of the people who actually fought those wars did not do so for democracy or fascism or communism. They simply fought, as they had a generation earlier, for their "countries"; the Americans as much as everyone else.

Nevertheless, whether or not the American people believed that they had been fighting an Enlightenment War for a better world, at the end of it President Roosevelt was better placed than had been any of his predecessors to insist upon a truly Enlightenment peace; that is, the establishment of a community of self-governing democracies, by definition peace-loving, who would go to war only to restore the international order if it were threatened by a "rogue state." Five years later, when North Korea invaded its southern neighbor, the United Nations actually did so. National armies then fought, however notionally, under a United Nations flag. But it was still assumed that such wars would be fought between states. Their object was to preserve an inter-national order in which the only serious actors would be states who still enjoyed, as Max Weber had put it, a "monopoly on violence." To that extent the system was still "Westphalian": peace would be kept and order maintained by interstate agreements. Those who fought these Enlightenment Wars, if called upon to do so, would do so because their State so ordered, albeit in a higher cause. So far as the armed forces themselves were concerned, they were still fighting for their country.

THEN CAME the appalling atrocity of 9/11. This foreshadowed an entirely new era; one in which states could be threatened, and international order disrupted on a major scale, by "nonstate actors." It was no longer states as such whose integrity was now threatened, in whose defense they might invoke traditional patriotism: it was the whole structure of international society, on whose effective functioning the well-being of all its members depended. Nonstate "terrorists" of a kind had always existed in the shape of domestic rebel groups or extranational pirates, but their impact had hitherto been marginal and local, posing problems mainly of internal order. Now, in an interdependent world, their activities could have global consequences: with the availability of nuclear weapons, they threatened lethality on a scale comparable to that of a major war. In the United States this new situation has been termed "The War on Terror," but even if there is no such all-embracing conflict, there are certainly specific wars being fought in which people are killing and being killed. These deserve to rank as "Enlightenment Wars," but of a kind rather different from their predecessors.

Hitherto, as we have seen, "Enlightenment Wars" have been fought by states to preserve or restore peaceful order among themselves. Today they have to be fought, not only against nonstate actors, but on behalf of nonstate actors: that is, of a global, interdependent, transnational civil society that transcends states, but on whose effective functioning the entire world depends. In this perspective 9/11 must be seen not as an act of "war" but as a global "breach of the peace." Its perpetrators, whatever they may think of themselves, should be regarded not as "belligerents" but as transnational criminals against whom it may be necessary to deploy-as in domestic police operations it may be necessary to deploy-limited and strictly controlled armed force in order to preserve the global order that they are seeking to destroy.

For lack of any alternative, such armed force can still be provided only by existing states. States must now be not only the guardians and protectors of their own national interests, but also trustees for the security of that transnational order on which the well-being of their citizens ultimately depends. It is their responsibility as trustees of the global community that now provides a jus ad bellum for intervention in regions where events pose an evident danger to that community, giving their armed forces a license to kill and expose themselves to the risk of being killed.

The trouble is, the motivation of those forces is still likely to be "Westphalian." That is, they still enlist to fight for their country against its enemies, not act as international policemen on behalf of a global community. They still instinctively think in terms of defeating an enemy and proclaiming a victory, rather than of bringing criminals to justice and maintaining a just order. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once put it, they are not there just to escort kids to school. But if these Enlightenment Wars are to be fought effectively, it can only be by military forces that possess the restraint and humanity of good policemen who take escorting kids to school as a matter of course and regard killing, though it may occasionally be necessary, as a sign of ultimate failure; a lesson that the forces committed to Iraq have had, rather painfully, to learn.

It is not surprising that states, even the most "enlightened," find this a problem. It still remains easier to motivate young people to fight and die for their "country," antiquated though that appeal may be, than to act as policemen for a "global society"-a concept with which many of them may have little sympathy anyhow-under conditions of great discomfort and danger a very long way from home, where they are confronting adversaries ready and willing both to kill and to die in the name of their own God. To do so demands from the military a new kind of professionalism, at once dispassionate and humane, rather different from the Westphalian readiness to kill and to die in the name of their country against a named and evident enemy.

But we now have to accept that our "countries," however great their power, glorious their past and noble their intentions, can no longer be regarded as "Mortall Gods" in whose service it is always legitimate to kill. They can still issue a license to do so, but only in the service of that wider community whose well-being is the ultimate condition of human survival. The reasons we advance to justify our wars, as well as the methods we use to fight them, need to be made relevant to the needs of our own time.

That might provide some comfort for poor Ebenezer.

Sir Michael Howard is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, Professor Emeritus of Military and Naval History at Yale University, and Life President of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

This article is based on a talk delivered to a Columbia University workshop on "The Laws of War" on April 18, 2008.