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236 PART V Culture: Customs, Norms, and Learning

F ollowing the ancient Greeks, I contend that appetite, spirit and reason are fundamental drives, each seeking its own ends. Existing paradigms of international relations are nested in appetite (Marxism, liberalism) or

fear (realism). The spirit-what the Greeks often called thumos-had not until recently generated a paradigm of politics, although MaFhiavelli and Rousseau recognized its potential to do so ....

I limit myself to four underlying motives: appetite, spirit, reason and fear. Modern authorities have offered different descriptions ofthe psyche and human needs. Freud reduces all fundamental drives to appetite, and understands reason only in its most instrumental sense. Another prominent formulation is Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, developed from his study of great people and what accounted for their accomplishments. More recently, psychologists have sought to subsume all human emotions to seven fundamental ones. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is conceptually confusing and rooted in a distinctly nineteenth-century understanding of human na­ ture. Contemporary psychology's efforts to classify emotions assumes that its typology is universally applicable, which is highly questionable. Even if defensible, this and other typologies include emotions like love, sadness and joy that can hardly be considered central to foreign-policy decisionmaking. Other emotions, like anger, surprise, disgust and contempt, have more rel­ evance but, I contend, can effectively be reduced to one or the other of my four motives.

THE SPIRIT A spirit-based paradigm starts from the premise that people, individually and collectively, seek self-esteem. Self-esteem is a sense of self-worth that makes people feel good about themselves, happier about life and more con­ fident in their ability to confront its challenges. It is achieved by excelling in activities valued by one's peers or society and gaining respect from those whose opinions matter. By winning the approbation of such people we feel good about ourselves. Self-esteem requires some sense of self but also rec­ ognition that self requires society because self-esteem is impossible in the absence of commonly shared values and accepted procedures for demon­ strating excellence.

The spirit is fiercely protective of one's autonomy and honor, and for the Greeks the two are closely related. According to Plato, the spirit

Richard Ned Lebow, from "Spirit, Standing, and Honor," in Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War. Copyright© 2010 Richard Ned Lebow. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

RICHARD Nrn LEBOWI Spirit, Standing, and Honor 237

responds with anger to any restraint on its self-assertion in private or civic life. It wants to avenge all affronts to its honor, and those against its friends, and seeks immediate satisfaction when aroused. Mature people are restrained by reason and recognize the wisdom of the ancient maxim, as Odysseus did in the Odyssey, that revenge is a dish best served cold ....

Societies have strong incentives to nurture and channel the spirit. It engenders self-control and sacrifice from which the community as a whole prospers. In warrior societies, the spirit finds expression in bravery and selflessness, from which the society as a whole profits. All societies must restrain, or deflect outwards, the anger aroused when the spirit is chal­ lenged or frustrated. The spirit is a human drive; organizations and states do not have psyches and cannot be treated as persons. They can neverthe­ less respond to the needs of the spirit the same way they do to the appetites of their citizens. People join or support collective enterprises in the expec­ tation of material and emotional rewards. They build self-esteem the same way, through the accomplishments of the groups, sports teams, nations and religions with which they affiliate. Arguably, the most important func­ tion of nationalism in the modern world is to provide vicarious satisfaction to the spirit ....

Self-esteem is closely connected to honor (time), a status for the Greeks that describes the outward recognition we gain from others in response to our excellence. Honor is a gift, and bestowed upon actors by other actors. It car­ ries with it a set of responsibilities which must be fulfilled properly if honor is to be retained. By the fifth century, honor came to be associated with political rights and offices. It was a means of selecting people for office and of restrain­ ing them in their exercise of power. The spirit is best conceived of as an innate human drive, with self-esteem its goal, and honor and standing the means by which it is achieved.

Hierarchy is a rank ordering of statuses. In honor societies honor de- . '

termmes the nature of the statuses and who fills them. Each status has privileges, but also an associated rule package. The higher the status, the greater the honor and privileges, but also the more demanding the role and elaborate its rules. Kings, formerly at the apt!x of the social hierarchy, were often expected to mediate between the human and divine worlds and de­ rived authority and status from this responsibility. This holds true for so­ cieties as diverse as ancient Assyria, Song China and early modern Europe. Status can be ascribed, as it was in the case of elected kings or German ~ar chiefs. In traditional honor societies·, the two are expected to coin­ cide. The king or chief is expected to be the bravest warrior and lead his ~orces int_o battle. Other high-ranking individuals must assume high-risk, if subordmate, roles. Service and sacrifice-the means by which honor is won and maintained-have the potential to legitimize hierarchy. In return for honoring and serving those higher up the social ladder, people expect to be looked after in various ways. Protecting and providing for others is

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invariably one of the key responsibilities of those with high status and of- . £ice. The Song dynasty carried this system to its logical extreme, integrat­ ing all males in the kingdom into a system of social status signified initially by seventeen, and then twenty, ranks. Obligations, including labor and military service, came with rank, as did various economic incentives. As in aristocratic Europe, the severity of punishments for the same crime varied by rank, but in reverse order.

Great powers have had similar responsibilities in the modern era, which have been described by practitioners and theorists alike. The United Nations Security Council is an outgrowth of this tradition. Its purpose, at least in the intent of those who drafted the United Nations Charter, is to coordinate the collective efforts of the community to maintain the peace. Traditional hierar­ chies justify themselves with reference to the principle of fairness; each actor contributes to the society and to the maintenance of its order to the best of its abilities and receives support depending on its needs. More modern hier­ archies invoke the principle of equality. The United Nations attempts to in­ corporate both in two separate organs: the Security Council and the General Assembly.

Honor is also a mechanism for restraining the powerful and preventing the kind of crass, even brutal exploitation common to hierarchies in modern, interest-based worlds. Honor can maintain hierarchy because challenges to an actor's status, or failure to respect the privileges it confers, arouse anger that can only be appeased by punishing the offender and thereby "putting him in his place." Honor worlds have the potential to degenerate into hierarchies based on power and become vehicles for exploitation when actors at the apex fail to carry out their responsibilities or exercise self-restraint in pursuit of their own interests.

I define hierarchy as a rank order of statuses. Max Weber offers a differ­ ent understanding of hierarchy: an arrangement of offices and the chain of command linking them together. Weber's formulation reminds us that sta­ tus and office are not always coterminous, even in ideal-type worlds. In the Iliad, the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles arises from the fact that Agamemnon holds the highest office, making Achilles his subordinate, while Achilles, the bravest and most admired warrior, deeply resents Agamem­ non's abuse of his authority. In international relations, great powerdom is both a rank ordering of status and an office. As in the Iliad, conflict can become acute when the two diverge, and states-more accurately, the lead­ ers and populations-believe they are denied office commensurate with the status they claim.

Standing and honor are another pair of related concepts. Stand­ ing refers to the position an actor occupies in a hierarchy. In an ideal­ type spirit world, an actor's standing in a hierarchy is equivalent to its degree of honor. Those toward the apex of the status hierarchy earn the requisite degree of honor by living up to the responsibilities associ­ ated with their rank or office, while those who attain honor by virtue of

RICHARD NED LEBOW I Spirit, Standing, and Ho~or 239

their accomplishments come to occupy appropriate offices. Even in ideal spirit worlds, there is almost always some discrepancy between honor and sta~~ing because those who gain honor do not necessarily win the com­ petit10ns that confer honor. In the Iliad, Priam and Hector gain great honor because of their performance on and off the battlefield but lose their lives _and city. In fifth-century Greece, Leonidas and his band of Spartan ~arno~s won hon~r and immortality by dying at Thermopylae. Resign­ m_g ~££ice for the nght reasons can also confer honor. Lucius Quinctius Cmcmnatus was made dictator of Rome in 458 and again in 439 BCE. He resigned his absolute authority and returned to his humble life as a hardscrabble farmer as soon as he saved his city from the threat of the Vols~ians and Aequi. His humility and lack of ambition made him a legend­ ary fi~ure after whom a ~ity in the wilderness of Ohio was named. George Washmgton emulated Cmcinnatus and retired to his plantation at the end of the Revol~tionary War. Later, as first president of the new Republic, he refused a third term on principle and once again returned to Mount Ver­ non. His self-restraint and commitment to republican principles earned him numerous memorials and a perennial ranking as one of the top three presi­ dents in history.

Honor and standing can diverge for less admirable reasons. Honor worlds are extremely competitive because standing, even more than wealth is a re­ lational concept. Hobbes compares it to glory, and observes that, "ifall men have it, no man hath it." The value placed on honor in spirit-based worlds and the intensity of the competition for it tempt actors to take shortcuts to gain honor. Once actors violate the rules and get away with it, others do the same to avoid being disadvantaged. If the rules governing honor are consis­ tently violated, it becomes a meaningless concept. Competition for honor is transformed into competition for standing, which is more unconstrained and possibly more violent. This is a repetitive pattern in domestic politics and in­ ternational relations.

The quest for honor generates a proliferation of statuses or ranks. These order~ngs can ~eep conflict in check when they are known and respected, and effectively defme the relative status of actors. They intensify conflict when they are ambiguous or incapable of establishting precedence. This is most ~ikely to happen when there are multiple ways (ascribed and achieved) of gain­ i~g honor and office. Even when this is not a problem, actors not infrequently disagree about who among them deserves a particular status or office. This kind of dispute has particularly threatening consequences in international re­ lations because there are no authorities capable of adjudicating among com­ peting claims.

External honor must be conferred by others and can only be gained through deeds regarded as honorable. It has no meaning until it is ac­ knowledged, and is more valuable still when there is a respectful audience. The Greek word for fame (kleos) derives from the vt;rb "to hear" (kluein). As Homer knew, fame not only requires heroic deeds, but bards to sing

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about those deeds and people willing to listen and be impressed, if not in­ spired to emulate them. For honor to be won and celebrated, there must be a consensus, and preferably one that transcends class or other distinctions, about the nature of honor, how it is won and lost and the distinctions and obligations it confers. This presupposes common values and traditions, even institutions. When society is robust-when its rules are relatively un­ ambiguous and largely followed-the competition for honor and standing instantiates and strengthens the values of the society. As society becomes thinner, as it generally is at the regional and international levels, honor worlds become more difficult to create and sustain. In the absence of com­ mon values, there can be no consensus, no rules and no procedures for awarding and celebrating honor. Even in thin societies, honor can often be won within robust sub-cultures. Hamas and other groups that sponsor sui­ cide bombing, publicize the names of successful bombers, sometimes pay stipends to their families and always encourage young people to lionize them. Such activity strengthens the sub-culture and may even give it wider appeal or support.

Honor societies tend to be highly stratified and can be likened to step pyramids. Many, but by no means all, honor societies are sharply divided into two classes: those who are allowed to compete for honor and those who are not. In many traditional honor societies, the principal distinction is between aristocrats, who are expected to seek honor, and commoners, or the low-born, who cannot. This divide is often reinforced by distinc­ tions in wealth, which allow many of the high-born to buy the military equipment, afford the leisure, sponsor the ceremonies and obtain the edu­ cation and skills necessary to compete. As in ancient Greece, birth and wealth are never fully synonymous, creating another source of social ten­ sion. Wealth is generally a necessary, but insufficient condition for gain­ ing honor. Among the egalitarian Sioux, honor and status were achieved by holding various ceremonies, all of which involved providing feasts and gifts to those who attended. Horses and robes, the principal gifts, could only be gained through successful military expeditions against enemy tribes, or as gifts from others because of the high regard in which brave warriors were held.

Recognition into the elite circle where one can compete for honor is the first, and often most difficult, step in honor worlds. The exclusiveness of many honor societies can become a major source of tension, when individu­ als, classes or political units demand and are refused entry into the circle in which it becomes possible to gain honor. What is honorable, the rules governing its attainment, and the indices used to measure it are all subject to challenge. Historically, challenges of this kind have been resisted, at least initially. Societies that have responded to them positively have evolved, and in some cases gradually moved away from, wholly or partly, their warrior base.

RICHARD NED LEBOW I Spirit, Standing, and Honor 241

A final caveat is in order .... I use the term "recognition" to mean acceptance into the circle where it is possible to compete for honor. Rec~g~ition carries with it the possibility of fulfillment of the spirit; and tt 1s not to be confused with the use the term has come to assume in moral philosophy. Hegel made the struggle for recognition (Kampf um Anerkennung) a central concept of his Philosophy of Right, which is now understood to offer an affirmative account of a just social order that can transcend the inequalities of master-slave relationships. In a seminal es­ say published in 1992, Charles Taylor applied Hegel's concept to the de­ mands for recognition of minorities and other marginalized groups. He argued that human recognition is a distinctive but largely neglected hu­ man good, and that we are profoundly affected by how we are recognized and misrecognized by others. The political psychology of recognition has since been extended to international relations, where subordinate states are assumed to have poor self-images and low self-esteem. Axel Honneth stresses the importance of avoiding master-slave relationships among states. _Fernando Cornil argues that subaltern states enjoy the trappings of sov_ere1gnty but often internalize the negative images of them held by the ma1or powers.

I acknowledge the relationship between status and esteem but make a different argument. In terms of at least foreign policy, it is po;erful states, not weak ones, who often feel most humiliated. My explanation for this phe­ nomenon draws on Aristotle's understanding of anger, which is narrower than our modern Western conception. It is a response to an oligoria, which can be translated as a slight, lessening or belittlement. Such a slight can is­ sue from an equal, but provokes even more anger when it comes from an actor who lacks the standing to challenge or insult us. Anger is a luxury that can only be felt by those in a position to seek revenge. Slaves and subordi­ nates cannot allow themselves to feel anger, although they may develop many forms of resistance. It is also senseless to feel anger toward those who cannot become aware of our anger. In the realm of international relations, leaders­ and often peoples-of powerful states are likely to feel anger of the Aristote­ lian kind when they are denied entry into the system, refused recognition as a great power or treated in a manner demeaping to their understanding of their status. They will look for some way of asserting their claims and seeking revenge. Subordinate states lack this power and their leaders and populations learn to live with their lower status and mo,re limited autonomy. Great pow­ ers will feel enraged if challenged by such states. I believe we can profit from reintroducing the Greek dichotomy between those who were included in and excluded from the circle in which it was po~sible to achieve honor and Aris­ totle's definition of anger.

Let us turn to the wider implications of honor as a motive for for­ eign policy. First and foremost is its effect on the preferences of states and their leaders. Realists and other international-relations scholars insist that

242 PART V Culture: Customs, Norms, and Learning

survival is the overriding goal of all states, just as domestic politics explana­ tions assert that it is for leaders. This is not true of honor societies, where honor has a higher value. Achilles spurns a long life in favor of an honor­ able death that brings fame. For Homer and the Greeks, fame allows people to transcend their mortality. Great deeds carry one's name and reputation across the generations where they continue to receive respect and influ­ ence other actors. In the real world, not just in Greek and medieval fiction, warriors, leaders, and sometimes entire peoples have opted for honor over survival. We encounter this phenomenon not only in 'my case studies of an­ cient and medieval societies but also in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and Japan. Morgenthau and Waltz draw on Hobbes, and Waltz on Rousseau, to argue that survival is the prime directive of individuals and political units alike. Leo Strauss sees Hobbes as an important caesura with the classical tradition and among the first "bourgeois" thinkers because he makes fear of death and the desire for self-preservation the fundamental hu­ man end in lieu of aristocratic virtues. A more defensible reading of Hobbes is that he aspired to replace vanity with material interests as a primary hu­ man motive because he recognized that it was more effectively controlled by a combination of reason and fear. For Hobbes, the spirit and its drive for standing and honor remained a universal, potent and largely disruptive force.

As Thucydides and Hobbes und~rstand, the quest for honor and will­ ingness to face death to gain or uphold it make honor-based societies ex­ tremely war-prone. Several aspects of honor contribute to this phenomenon. Honor has been associated with warrior societies, although not all warrior societies are honor societies, and not all warrior societies are aristocratic. In such societies, war is considered not only a normal activity but a neces­ sary one because without it young men could not demonstrate their mettle and distinguish themselves. More fundamentally, war affirms the identity of warriors and their societies. I have argued elsewhere that Thucydides considered the threat Athenian power posed to Spartan identity, not their security, the fundamental reason why the Spartan assembly voted for war. Erik Ringmar makes a persuasive case that it was the principal motive be­ hind Sweden's intervention in the Thirty Years War, where standing was sought as a means of achieving a national identity. In A Cultural Theory of International Relations, I document how such considerations were im­ portant for leaders and peoples from post-Westphalian Europe to the post­ Cold War world.

In honor societies, status is an actor's most precious possession. Chal­ lenges to status or to the privileges it confers are unacceptable when they come from equals or inferiors. In regional and international societies, sta­ tuses are uncertain, there may be multiple contenders for them and there are usually no peaceful ways of adjudicating rival claims. Warfare often serves this end, and is a common cause of war in honor societies. It often finds expression in substantive issues such as control over disputed territory, but can also arise from symbolic disputes (e.g. who is to have primacy at certain

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RICHARD N rn LEBOW/ Spirit, Standing, and Honor 243

festivals or processions, or whose ships must honor or be honored by others at sea).

For all three reasons, warfare in honor worlds tends to be frequent, but the ends of warfare and the means by which it is waged tend to be limited. Wars between political units in horior societies often resemble duels. Combat is highly stylized, if still vicious, and governed by a series of rules that are generally followed by participants. Warfare among the Greeks, Aztecs, Plains Indians, and eighteenth-century European states offer variants on this theme. By making a place for violence in community-governed situations, it is par­ tially contained and may be less damaging than it otherwise would be. How­ ever, these limitations apply only to warfare between recognized members of the same society. War against outsiders, or against non-elite members of one's own society, often has a no-holds-barred quality. Greek warfare against tribesmen or against the Persians at Marathon, Salamis and Plataea, American warfare against native Americans and colonial wars in general illustrate this nasty truth.

Despite the endemic nature of warfare in warrior-based honor societies, cooperation is not only possible but routine. Cooperation is based on appeals to friendship, common descent and mutual obligation more than it is on mu­ tual interest. The norms of the hierarchy dictate that actors of high status assist those of lower status who are dependent on them, while those of lower status are obliged to honor and serve their protectors or patrons. Friendship usually involves the exchange of gifts and favors and provides additional grounds for asking for and receiving aid. Cooperation in honor societies is most difficult among equals because no actor wants to accept the leadership of another and thereby acknowledge its higher standing. This situation makes cooperation difficult even in situations where there are compelling mutual se­ curity concerns.

As honor is more important than survival, the very notion of risk is framed differently. Warrior societies are risk-accepting with respect to both gain and loss. Honor cannot be attained without risk, so leaders and followers alike welcome the opportunity to risk limbs and lives to gain or defend it. Ac­ tors will also defend their autonomy at almost any cost because it is so closely linked to their honor, unless they can find some j~tification for disassociating it from honor that is convincing to their peers. Risk-taking will be extended to the defense of material possessions and territory to the extent that they have become entwined with honor and symbols of th.em.

To summarize, honor-based societies experience conflict about who is "recognized" and allowed to compete for stanqing; the rules governing agon or competition; the nature of the deeds that confer standing; and the actors who assign honor, determine status and adjudicate competing claims. Track­ ing the relative intensity of conflict over these issues and the nature of the changes or accommodations to which they lead provide insight into the extent to which honor remains a primary value in a society and its ability to respond to internal and external challenges. It also permits informed speculation about its evolution.