Justice, Prizes and the Great Chess-Board of Human Society

The scene is almost comic, were the subject not so grave. A jurist is sitting in the palace where the victors once judged the crimes of a world war, when she is told that a committee in a distant northern capital has crowned her life’s work with a peace prize. In the same hour, one great power announces sweeping punishments upon an international court to which she once belonged, and the government of a state accused by a commission she chaired denounces the award as a grotesque weapon. The laurel that pretends to unite mankind in admiration thus serves first as a mirror, revealing how violently divided that admiration remains.

Of the laureate herself, the established facts are simple and in their own way impressive. As a young advocate under apartheid she defended a man who would become the emblem of South Africa’s peaceful transition; she sat in judgment on atrocities before an international criminal tribunal; she presided over a global office for human rights; and she later chaired an inquiry which declared that a particular state had committed genocidal acts with intent to destroy a people in Gaza. Around these labours gather admirers, who praise her firm moral compass, and accusers, who charge her with lies and hatred. Here the impartial spectator, of whom I spoke in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, must earn his keep.

That spectator, if well informed and disinterested, will distinguish the person from the passions she excites. To devote one’s talents to the exact administration of justice, to the patient accumulation of evidence, to the attempt to subject even the powerful to rules they did not themselves frame, has, in its general character, much to recommend it. In Wealth of Nations I argued that the state’s first duties are defence and justice, and that certain institutions, though they yield no profit to a private undertaker, may yet profit society greatly. International courts and inquiries, though unwieldy and often unpopular, resemble such public works. They are expensive, slow, and imperfect; but the alternative is not some costless harmony, it is impunity armed with artillery.

Yet when the impartial spectator quits the tribunal for the street, he discovers another aspect. Every sentence of “genocide” pronounced by an international body is also a price signal in the great market of states. It alters alliances; it invites sanctions; it stiffens some combatants and enrages others; it encourages certain lobbies to demand ever harsher measures and others to insist that the whole apparatus is a rogue contrivance. The visible beneficiaries are a few celebrated jurists and politicians; the invisible payers are the labouring poor on every side who bear the costs of disrupted trade, inflamed conflict, and the sudden scarcity which follows when peace becomes more remote and security more dear. Before we applaud the declaration, we must ask who, quietly and without applause, will pay its bill.

Here, too, one must beware the man of system. It is an amiable dream to suppose that, having perfected a code of international crimes and a court to judge them, we might treat the world as a tidy chess-board, moving armies and ministers, rebels and refugees, according to rules that admit of no exception. But in the great chess-board of human society, the pieces move themselves. States under accusation do not wait patiently for the verdict; they retaliate; they denounce; they attempt to cripple the court with financial or legal blows. Other powers, jealous of their own freedom of action, seize the occasion to discipline any tribunal that might one day sit in judgment upon them. A scheme that requires rulers to submit meekly to fetters of their own forging rests upon an expectation of virtue which the experience of all ages has discredited.

None of this proves that the pursuit of international justice is vain. It proves only that, as in commerce, we must attend to incentives, not to proclamations. When a prize committee announces that it wishes to remind the world that the rule of law underpins peace, it states a noble aspiration; when governments reply that the same prize has been weaponised, they proclaim, in less elegant terms, that law itself has become one more instrument in the perpetual bargaining of power. In Wealth of Nations I remarked that men are often led, as if by an invisible hand, to promote ends they did not intend. Here, by contrast, we see them very plainly intend what they promote: status, impunity, influence over the narrative by which future generations will judge them.

What then is left for the impartial spectator to approve? He may, I think, distinguish praise from praise-worthiness. To spend a long life labouring, however imperfectly, to strengthen institutions that restrain cruelty and defend human dignity, is an object of reasonable esteem, whether or not the laurel sits easily upon the brow. But to imagine that any medal, any single report, any set of sanctions announced in the heat of controversy, can reorder a conflict as old as living memory, is to indulge the very presumption that has so often turned good intentions into new calamities. Peace will not be awarded; it will be built slowly, under laws that men obey because they find in them, at last, more safety than shame.

Between the lonely judge reading affidavits in a cold chamber and the peasant in Gaza or in the towns that fire upon it, there lies a long chain of ministers, soldiers, merchants, and tribunes of the people, each pursuing his own interest, each deeply concerned with how he shall be praised or blamed. My fear is not that international law and peace prizes attempt too much justice, but that they tempt us to believe the work is done when the ceremony is over. The true test of any such honour will be whether, when the banners have been folded away, fewer of the innocent must trust their lives to the mercy of men who have already shown how little of that virtue they possess.