Papal White and Shades of Green: On the Tides of Just War

Abstract

This article investigates curious parallels in the development of thinking on war and peace in the Catholic Church and the German Green Party. Like Catholicism, the Greens started as an overwhelmingly pacifist movement. However, similarly to Catholicism after it became the state religion of Rome, the Greens began to support military action in the late 1990s when they first held political power. While until 2005 they could be categorized as contingent pacifists, in the context of the developing Responsibility to Protect norm, the Greens adopted just war. Based on this development, the article demonstrates that assuming political power, adopting the “burden of statecraft,” leads previously pacifist movements toward an embrace of the just war framework. Crucially, as the article also shows, the reverse pattern can apply, too. The example of the Catholic Church illustrates that the gradual move away from political power can result in a more restrictive attitude toward armed force. That is why the article identifies a pattern that it calls “the tides of just war.” While the flow that follows the assumption of political power washes ashore just war, the distancing from such responsibility results in the ebb carrying the just war, or parts of it, back into the sea.