Russell's Federative Imperialism

Yesterday’s post (here) on “War as an Institution” (1916) elicited comment from some readers about the nature of young Bertrand Russell’s proposed “federation of the world” in comparison to Kant’s federalism. (My page-numbers are to the 1960 edition of The Principles of Social Reconstruction. The book also appeared as Why Men Fight Stateside.)* Now Kant’s federalism is basically an association of commercial republics, and the federal state is de facto itself a federal republic. Kant’s model is clearly the American constitution (although obviously drawing on the richer history involving Machiavelli, More, Spinoza, Montesquieu, St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Adam Smith, etc.)

Russell leaves the details of his world state rather vague, but here I argue that his model is really modern (late nineteenth century) empire. But he recasts it with one important intellectual move: the unbundling and redistribution of executive functions. In fact, this is a rather important theme in Russell’s thinking during the period, and I shall return to it in a separate digression before long. Here’s what I have in mind:

The civil functions of the State—legislative, administrative, and judicial—have no very essential connection with the military functions, and there is no reason why both kinds of functions should normally be exercised by the same State. There is, in fact, every reason why the civil State and the military State should be different. The greater modern States are already too large for most civil purposes, but for military purposes they are not large enough, since they are not world-wide. This difference as to the desirable area for the two kinds of State introduces a certain perplexity and hesitation, when it is not realized that the two functions have little necessary connection: one set of considerations points towards small States, the other towards continually larger States. Of course, if there were an international Army and Navy, there would have to be some international authority to set them in motion. But this authority need never concern itself with any of the internal affairs of national States: it need only declare the rules which should regulate their relations, and pronounce judicially when those rules have been so infringed as to call for the intervention of the international force. How easily the limit of the authority could be fixed may be seen by many actual examples. (p. 72)

By the “greater modern States,” Russell means imperial states like Brittain, France, Germany, and the United States. He calls these “civilized.” In fact, Russell understands civilization as the system of institutions, whereby one is forced to “live more and more by purpose rather than impulse.” (That’s from the first chapter, “The Principle of Growth.”) However, for Russell, civilization does not involve the elimination of impulse, but rather the cultivation of progressive and energetic impulses. And, crucially, civilization itself involves dependence on society itself, that is, an advanced division of labor along multiple dimensions.

As an aside, I am pretty sure that in 1916, Russell’s conceptualization of civilization is distinct from the one we find in his more famous (1946) A History of Western Philosophy. As I have argued (here), in the later work Russell draws on the idea popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century approach to comparative philosophy that there are a number of great civilizations (such as India, China, Europe, Persia, etc.)

Be that as it may, the federal state has (near) monopoly on military capacity. It also has juridical mechanisms for fact-finding and the enunciating of general regulations. The functions are held together, and perhaps gain legitimacy, by a ‘parliament of nations,’ which also is allowed to propose alterations to “the distribution of territory.” (p. 62) But in other respects the principle of subsidiarity should hold.

It’s wholly unclear which nations are supposed to be represented in that “parliament of the nations.” But there are plenty of clues that Russell wishes to restrict them to the civilized “Great powers.” (p. 62) So, there is a sense in which Russell proposes to regularize and expand the nineteenth century Concert of Europe at a global level (with the inclusion of the United States, especially).

Before I offer further evidence for that thought, one may be surprised by this claim because it seems to presuppose that Russell is at ease with Imperialism (which is not his reputation in the 1960s). That’s exactly what I think. In The Principles of Social Reconstruction, Russell seems to be only a critic of the role of capitalism in imperialism, but not the imperial project as such (although there are some phrases that might be quoted to suggest otherwise). My reason for thinking of this is the paragraph that follows the one I just quoted:

The civil and military State are often different in practice, for many purposes. The South American Republics are sovereign for all purposes except their relations with Europe, in regard to which they are subject to the United States: in dealings with Europe, the Army and Navy of the United States are their Army and Navy. Our self-governing Dominions depend for their defense, not upon their own forces but upon our Navy. Most Governments, nowadays, do not aim at formal annexation of a country which they wish to incorporate, but only at a protectorate—that is, civil autonomy subject to military control. Such autonomy is, of course, in practice incomplete, because it does not enable the “protected” country to adopt measures which are vetoed by the Power in military control. But it may be very nearly109 complete, as in the case of our self-governing Dominions. At the other extreme, it may become a mere farce, as in Egypt. In the case of an alliance, there is complete autonomy of the separate allied countries, together with what is practically a combination of their military forces into one single force. (pp. 72-3)

I want to make five observations on this paragraph.

First, this paragraph develops Russell’s main argument that the functional organization of governmental tasks does not need to be concentrated in one government or one level of government. In this paragraph the examples all involve cases where external defense is born by a different government than the one responsible for internal policing.

Second, the examples are all imperial examples. This is most clear in the examples discussing the way the British are responsible for Dominions like Canada and Australia, which are examples of settler colonialism, and vassals/protectorates like Egypt, which have subject populations. In the case of Dominions, when there is “disagreement” — say between “England and Canada” — “it is taken as a matter of course that a settlement shall be arrived at by discussion, not by force.” (p. 73) As Russell implies, force may be used in the case of protectorates (as Egypt was before the first World War).

Third, on my interpretation Russell is also treating the United States as an imperial power in the Americas. In describing the early twentieth century version of the Monroe doctrine, Russell explicitly notes that The South American republics are “subjects” to the United States in their external relations.

Fourth, Russell’s description of what “most governments” aim at is itself only true for those that engage in imperial practices (that is, to incorporate a country). It really should read, “most governments that the British government will regard as possible rivals in the Imperial game.”

Fifth, and most importantly, then, the World State is, thus, not just the site where Great Powers can accommodate each other’s territorial claims and provide collective security against those that wish to disrupt the status quo, but also itself modelled on, in part, the practices of imperial states in relation to those that are not capable of resisting them.

As regular readers know I am not especially interested in condemnatory history of philosophy. But it’s my sense that in the shared collective myths and self-understanding about the founders of the origin of analytic philosophy (we’re only a few years after Principia Mathematica, The Problems of Philosophy, and, most importantly, “On Scientific Method in Philosophy,” after all), Russell’s (noble) pacifism, his (courageous) anti-nationalism, and his syndicalism of this period, gets much more attention than his (mitigated) imperialism.

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*I thank Alexander Klein and Sander Verhaegh for discussion of this material.