In Memory of David P. Calleo – Bologna Conference

by
Robert Skidelsky
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21st of October 2024

I am so happy to have been asked to contribute to this round table in honour of David. We were close friends for over fifty years. All who knew him well could sense the extraordinary unity between his life and work. His life bore testimony to his ideals. There were no obvious tensions, loose pieces. I want to capture something of what we got from him because his thinking remains an indispensable fount of wisdom in an increasingly deranged world.

Let me start though with his idea of order, and how it fits into the discourse of interstate relations, because it was as a theorist of world order that he made his most sapient contributions.

Theories of international relations fall into two main categories: empire and balance of power.

Imperial rule was the oldest and most enduring escape from Hobbes’s state of nature. It emerges at the dawn of history and the start of the division of labour between town and country. The city depends on the countryside for food. To ensure a reliable food supply, the city it takes over the countryside. Over the centuries it grows fat on the produce of the land. Slave labour is a common, but not necessary accompaniment, the slaves. being populations captured in successful wars, The Roman Empire is the most famous western example.

Imperial rule in one form or other has lasted into modern times.

Since there had never been a world empire, the problem has always been how to prevent or limit between rival states. Some empires solved it by being isolationist -China is the best example. But it became a particular problem for Europe with the disintegration of the Roman Empire into fiercely competitive dynastic states.

A partial answer was given by ecumenical religion. The Catholic Church headed by the Pope substituted soft power of Christianity for the broken hard power of the Roman empire. But Christian ecumenicalism collapsed into the 17^th century wars of religion.

The modern European answer was the Westphalian system, based on the Lockean idea of a contract between independent rulers. It envisaged a system of independent Christian states whose powers were so finely balanced that there was no excess or deficiency in any one state. But this ideal was confined to the Christian, or as was later said, civilised, world. Balance of power in Europe, imperial rule over everyone else.  Hobbes and Locke coexisted, applying to different parts of the world, depending on their moral worth. The British Empire was the most notable example of these extra-European empires.

It is important to recall that the USA was never part of the European balance of power system. For geographical reasons it started isolationist and in the era of the two world wars it entered the international arena as a hegemon, a global peacemaker.  Fortress America morphed into imperial America. Its imperial role was dictated by its power as well as by its conviction that it was bringing to the world a new moral impulse which built on the best of old Europe but transcended it in wisdom.  American hegemony has been the nearest approach to world empire.

These remain the two roots of modern concepts of world order. American scholars talk of a multilateral or rule- based world order, underpinned by American hegemony. The BRICS insist on ‘multipolarity’. I have been puzzling over the difference between multilateralism and multipolarity, but this is for another occasion.

David’s scholarly work amounted to a rejection of the American claim to hegemony.  This rejection was at root philosophical. For him ‘balance’ , or what he called ‘measure’ was a moral principle. Its opposite was hubris. This led him to argue that America’s claim to supreme leadership was unsustainable and self-destructive, because it reached the natural order of things. Colleagues and students of David will not need reminding how firmly set he   was against the idea of unipolarity and the moral claim underlying it.

It’s a weird fact that for some years Francis Fukuyama, the apostle of American’s unipolar moment and David Calleo,   the relentless critic of any such idea,   both shared the same corridor at SAIS.

The problem for David was to identify the moral pole with whom   the USA could share the balance of power. Bipolarity with the Soviet Union was based on a balance of terror, not a Westphalian morality.  That left Europe.  Hence the predominant role of the problem of US-European relations in David’s work. And hence his complicated reaction to the emergence of the European Union – at once a problem and a solution.

Briefly the problem was this: only a united Europe -lets call it a federal Europe- could balance the imperial power of United States; but this was incompatible with the Westphalian or ‘confederal’ system within Europe itself championed by David’s hero, Charles de Gaulle. David was a Gaullist in the sense that he applauded De Gaulle championship of independence from America.  But there was no way in which a a Westphalian union of nation states could balance American power. I don’t think David ever resolved this dilemma.

I want to turn briefly to the economic aspect of David’s attack on American hubris. Over a number of books, he asserted the idea of imperial ‘overstretch’. Hegemony, he thought, is ultimately unsustainable because it drains the hegemon of resources. The hegemon is required to provide the public goods of world peace and prosperity, but because it is hegemonic rather than imperial, it could not tax its satellites for the protections it offered. Hence it would run into a self-destructive ‘fiscal crisis’ I don’t know whether David got this idea of hegemonic instability from  Charles Kindleberger, or whether it was a natural outcome of his Aristotelian idea of natural balance.  Trump and Harris represent the old dichotomy in ever more convoluted forms. 

David was rarely explicit about the philosophic roots of his work:  Plato, Aristotle, and Catholicism were fused in his complex philosophy of Idealism.

He  constructed his own utopia, at Casa Fangati,  in Elba, a small  but beautiful estate which he bought in the early 1970s, and which was his home for three months or so of the long academic vacations, There,  in time   with his wife the diplomat Avis Bohlen,  a devoted but   lively  intellectual sparring partner, he reigned for forty years.  It was a Platonic Republic in miniature.  David was the philosopher king, writing his books, and engaging in continuous   but bantering conversation with his close friends, and below them a hierarchy of about a dozen ‘slaves’ divided into researchers, and  kitchen and garden workers,. mostly undergraduates and graduate students from Yale or SAIS, who were paid their keep, slept in dormitories, and eavesdropped at the symposia. David was an exceedingly kind and good-natured host.  My son Edward recalls the seasons he spent helping to beautify the estate   in idyllic terms, since apart from their physical labours,  the slaves  took a full part in the   cultural land gastronomic  feasts and   ascent  to Olympus was always possible for the gifted and high spirited.