Such bounding of the sphere in which principle can be applied has an inevitable effect on the general character of the political life of nations. For if what can be achieved in practice limits the applicability of principle, then it follows that a higher standard will have force where there is an agent with sufficient power to realize this higher standard. Thus in the arena of domestic politics in an established state, the very presence of a sovereign government possessed of an effective monopoly of force affords a relatively high degree of applicability to normative principle. It is for this reason that domestic politics so often inspire the sense that a given principle or right can be treated as an absolute. One has to think hard to reach the borders of experience where the application of the principles of domestic law—the right to one’s life, for example, or the right to property—brings about the negation of these principles and they cease to be operative. In the relations among nations, on the other hand, the absence of an agent with an effective monopoly of power—and the existence of such an agent in the world arena would be an evil greater than any of those we might hope to remedy thereby—means that nearly every principle one is inclined to apply rapidly collides with its limits, and that the applicability of principle is consequently far more circumscribed.²²

It is recognition of this difference between the domestic and foreign spheres that has led to the development of the extreme theories of raison d’etat, according to which there can be no moral considerations regarding the affairs of nations. Yet it would seem that a true understanding of the conditions prevailing outside the state does not require such an exclusion of principle from the affairs of nations, but rather its limitation. Indeed, the politics of nations cannot require the renunciation of principle, without which every murderer on his route to power will deserve the assistance of our nation in direct proportion to the number of the slain. What is needed, rather, is the recognition that principle cannot be equally applicable in the absence of an agent possessed of a universal monopoly of power. Moreover, it is manifestly false that a nation unwilling to take into account the limiting effects of the lack of power, and of the self-negation of principle that is the inevitable consequence of insufficient power, can be said to pursue a policy that is in some sense more moral than that of a nation acting from an awareness of the limits of principle. On the contrary, the state that squanders its energies in pursuit of a supposed moral aim that is in fact no more than a mirage, only diverts public resources from the pursuit of other, no less pressing matters of principle, and ends by losing its influence even in those matters in which it might have wielded real influence.

That this fundamental political truth is poorly understood by some is evident from the example of Belgium, whose parliament has recently declared that its law is applicable universally to war crimes committed everywhere on earth, and is consequently being inundated by court cases initiated by every aggrieved party, Arab and Jew, in the Middle East—cases that its courts have neither the competence nor the resources to adjudicate. But the same vanity on the part of statesmen that in this case has made for such splendid farce is elsewhere a very real threat to the well-being of peoples. This is particularly true with regard to those who have championed the absolute applicability of the principle of national liberty over the course of the past century. In the hands of President Woodrow Wilson and others, what was the truly noble dream of the American founders—the attainment of national liberty for a society oppressed by a distant power—was transformed into a categorical imperative that sought to bring the American experience to every people in the world. For Wilson, this principle was blessed with universal applicability due to the birth of a “new world” in which “the day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone,” and in which “this happy fact [is] now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone.” Encouraged by the sense of unlimited power that accompanies such chiliasm, Wilson declared his Fourteen Points to be “the moral climax of… the culminating and final war for human liberty,” and the content of this climax to be the absolute applicability of the principle of national liberty: “All peoples and nationalities,” he said, would henceforth have a “right to live on equal terms… with one another, whether they be strong or weak. Unless this principle can be made its foundation, no part of the international structure of justice can stand.”²³

But of course, Wilson’s international structure of justice did not stand. Like all moral systems that follow Kant in preferring the absolute applicability of principle to a reasonable chance of success in practice, Wilson’s new world had no chance of succeeding. Consider, for example, the Versailles policy regarding Austria-Hungary, which was, after the collapse of Russia, the only state that could perhaps have served as an impediment to German expansion to the south and east. Wilson himself had had the foresight to suspect Germany of seeking for herself “a place of mastery among the peoples of the world,” and yet the postwar settlement was aimed not at assuring that this could not happen, but rather at pursuing the principle of the sovereignty of all peoples, whether strong or weak. The result was the dismantling of the Austrian Empire and its replacement by half a dozen weak states—a decision that dramatically strengthened Germany’s eastward position, paving the way for Hitler’s devastation, twenty years later, of each of these countries in turn.²⁴

I do not know whether the dissolution of Austria provides us with an unequivocal case of political myopia; certainly there was something important to be said for Czech independence, for example. Yet it does shed light on the manner in which the principle of national sovereignty, when applied categorically, can bring about its own negation and the enslavement of peoples as readily as it can bring about their freedom. One must bear in mind that the world comprises thousandsof peoples. More than four hundred distinct languages are spoken in India alone. Nor is there any way to place a downward boundary on what may be reasonably called a “people” once there exists a powerful political incentive to claim such a title; when necessary, every nation can be reduced to peoples, peoples to tribes, tribes to clans, clans to families, without limit. The granting of sovereignty is the recognition of the principle of a monopoly of power; but the indefinite extension of the principle of sovereignty entails the dissolution of each existing monopoly in favor of ever-smaller potential sovereignties, draining the idea of the monopoly of meaning and bringing the principle of sovereignty to its negation. In other words, in trying to grant sovereignty to one and all—whether they be strong or weak, benign or imperialistic, Western in outlook or openly hostile—one in the end grants actual sovereignty to none, instead returning the world to a night of anarchy and empire. Like the foolish king who discovers he can pay his debts by ceaselessly minting currency, statesmen of the last century discovered they could reap good feeling by ceaselessly minting sovereignties. But sovereignty, like currency, quickly depreciates in value when circulated in too great a quantity, and is soon enough found to be worthless.

There is a second limitation on the principle of national sovereignty that must be treated here, which concerns the freedom of each sovereign nation to pursue its own distinct purposes and policies. As I have suggested, this freedom is the basis for the maintenance of a government in keeping with the interests and aspirations of a given people; and it is also responsible for creating an order of unique nations, with the particular experiences of each contributing to the overall stock of mankind’s knowledge of the craft of government. Yet this having been said, I do not believe it is possible to accept the argument that has been made, most famously by Hobbes, to the effect that the principle of national freedom entails perfect and unlimited freedom of action for each sovereign state, and that this, in fact, is the very meaning of the idea of sovereignty. For just as the principle of national sovereignty becomes unworkable and even evil when transformed into an absolute right of every people to independence, so too does it become unworkable and even evil when interpreted as an absolute right of government to pursue any end it wishes, using every means at hand. For we know that at the limits of experience, such an absolute sovereignty cannot be tolerated: A state whose purpose is the extension of empire or anarchy throughout the world, for example, cannot claim the liberty to do so on the basis of the principle of national freedom, for this would mean the destruction of the very order by virtue of which this freedom exists.

Similarly, the right to limit the sovereignty of such an imperial state, or, in the extreme case, even to deprive such a state of its sovereignty altogether, does not derive from an independent premise, according to which every state has a natural right to self-defense. There can be no such right, which would lead to the “right” of even such overtly imperial states as Hitler’s Germany or the Soviet Union to defend themselves—that is, the right of the criminal to continue in his crimes so long as he has the force of arms to forestall interference. Rather, one must see the source of the right to interfere in the machinations of imperial powers as being in the ordering principle of national sovereignty itself, which is ultimately irreconcilable with the legitimacy of such powers. I do not intend here to defend an absolute principle of violence against empire, as I think that such principles, applied categorically, do at least as much harm as good; and as experience has shown, we may find it necessary to maintain a relatively mild despotism such as the Austrian Empire, or even an imperial terror like that of Stalin, as during the campaign against Nazi Germany, in an attempt to protect the freedom of nations more generally. But the fact that we may be constrained by prudence to collaborate with tyrants must not cloud our vision concerning the reason for such collaboration, which is the limitedness of our own strength, and not any acceptance of regimes whose aim is indefinite extension within the order of sovereign states. And should the opportunity arise to weaken these countries so that they might do that much less harm, I say that every state that still has its independence would be justified in taking it.