In Defence of War

The Allied generals who fought the First World War’s Battle of the Somme would seem rather unlikely candidates for a revival of historical reputation. A “byword for criminally disproportionate military slaughter” – the battle wrought 622,221 Allied casualties – to achieve only a six-mile advance.

That Nigel Biggar, professor of moral theology at Oxford, attempts such a revival says much about the spirit and project of his new book, In Defence of War. He sets out not to lionise General Douglas Haig or to valorise war, which, “even when justified, causes terrible evils”, but rather to sympathise with the generals and soldiers who fight: the predicaments they face, the dangers they encounter, and the justice that they sometimes achieve.

The battle in fact had a point, Biggar explains: it saved the French at Verdun, diverted German energies from the Russian front, and hastened Germany’s ultimate defeat. German defeat? A laudable triumph? Here again, Biggar confronts a popular image, in this case that of a war arising not from anyone’s purpose but rather from a combustible system of alliances that required only a spark from the Balkans to burst into flame. Siding with recent German historiography, however, Biggar argues that in fact Germany was at fault for its aggression and its plans for continental domination, which would have been ruthlessly executed had Germany won.

Were not the generals at the Somme nevertheless callous, obsessed with moving their chess pieces? It is a general’s duty to be callous, argues Biggar; only then can he make the decisions that even just wars require. The same generals did not lack compassion, though. Haig was unusually dedicated to visiting the wounded and, after the war ended, to promoting veterans’ affairs.

Biggar’s goal is to recover an understanding of war as a pursuit that is (potentially) richly moral, and even more so, defensible in terms of the Christian Gospel. Such an understanding, he argues, has been largely lost in history, beginning with enlightenment theories that defended armed force only to preserve individual rights to security and not to pursue virtue or justice. Today, we are left with a choice between a “liberal, left story” that is suspicious of war as an imperialist venture and exercises a presumption against it; Christian pacifism; strict legalist approaches; and a misguided Rousseauian optimism that views people as naturally harmonious and war as a surmountable social dysfunction. Taking issue with all of these views, Biggar aims to resurrect the classic just-war tradition that spanned from Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries to Grotius in the seventeenth century.

At the heart of this tradition is the claim that war can and ought to be consistent with the Gospel’s injunction of love. War involves great evils, but so do massacres in Srebenica, Rwanda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Love requires acting against such injustices when possible and not being against war per se. Soldiers who fight justly do so out of love for the people they defend and even for their enemy – a “kind harshness”, in Augustine’s phrase. The just reasons for war extend beyond self-defence and involve punishment of unjust aggressors. A war that is just in Christian terms also involves forgiveness, a will to reconcile once defeat is secured.

Moderns will snort at Biggar’s moral ambitions for war, labelling them the musings of an armchair analyst. Biggar retorts that from his armchair he has read a great deal of military history and that it bears evidence for the purposes and motives that he commends (along with their failure and absence, of course).

Biggar’s historical sensitivity and his testimony from the ground is indeed one of the great virtues of his book. Add to this his careful and sophisticated arguments, his creativity, and his beautiful prose, and the result is what may well become a classic book about the justice of war. At the very least, holders of rival contemporary views will not be able to proceed ahead without first confronting Biggar’s arguments.

Perhaps the greatest unfinished task for Biggar is integrating into his analysis a practice that he agrees is important but announces on page two that he will refrain from discussing: peacebuilding. In the Catholic tradition, the century of the Somme has produced not only a reaffirmation of the justice of war but also vociferous calls for reducing what popes have called the “scourge of war”. A large number of practices have now arisen to bring about this reduction, ranging from UN peace operations to truth commissions to the reintegration of soldiers into civilian life. If Biggar’s own arguments are correct – that war is through and through a moral enterprise, involving punishment, forgiveness, the protection of civilians and, in short, the attainment of a just peace – then these practices are not so distant in purpose from, and deserve to be integrated with, the waging of just war.