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State capacity depends, most of all, of its democratic institutions. Only a strong and legitimate state will be able to provide good governance, individual and social justice, the guarantee of property rights and contracts, the protection to political and social rights, the defence of the national interests. An effective and efficient democratic state depends also on a good state organization and on competent government officials, able to make trade-offs between their legitimate personal objectives and the public interest. Public management reform is the contemporary form of assuring this kind state organization. In modern democracies, government officials–public managers as well as elected politicians–although also looking out for their own interests, are supposed to share republican virtues, to be committed to the general interest and to the protection of the public patrimony. Democratic institutions make them accountable for that.

A summary of the stages through which the modern state has passed historically. It began as authoritarian and patrimonial in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it was the absolutist state. In the nineteenth century, it turned liberal and bureaucratic: the liberal state imposed the rule of law and assured civil rights. In the first part of the twentieth century, the transition to democracy was completed: it was the time of the liberal state, of elitist or liberal democracy, and, still, of bureaucratic administration. In the second part of that century, the state becomes social-democratic, and assumes a developmental character; democracy now is social or plural rather than just liberal. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the state is aiming to become social-liberal and republican; democracy is aiming to become participatory or republican; and administration is aiming to become managerial, or inspired by the principles of new public management.

This is the third of three chapters on the three traditions of war, and introduces the republican tradition, which is represented partially through the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, along with Pasquale Paoli and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, advanced a unified system of the republican good life and war in conjunction with the laws of war. The way in which this tradition developed in the nineteenth century is depicted. The different sections of the chapter are: The Republican Tradition of War; Republicanism; The Three Founders [Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko]; Rousseau’s Republican War; Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Nature of Man and the State of Nature: Rousseau contra Hobbes and Grotius; The Nature of War; Liberty; Government, Society, and the Republic; Republic; Patriotism and Nationalism; Republican Nationalism; Republican Founders of the Tradition of War: Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Republican Tradition in the Nineteenth Century; The Nineteenth-Century Republican Tradition of War; and The Development of the Republican Tradition of War.

Post‐cosmopolitan citizenship is offered as an alternative to liberal and republican conceptions of citizenship. It is contrasted with cosmopolitan citizenship, in the belief that it offers a more compelling practical account of transnational political obligations.

The social-democratic state existing in advanced democracies is gradually changing into a republican state. The ultra-liberal wave failed because modern societies need a strong, not a weak, state. A republican state is strong enough to protect itself and the public patrimony from private capture. Its strength originates in governments’ political legitimacy, in the active participation of citizens organized in civil society, in a dense public space where social accountability and public debate take place, and on the existence of politicians and civil servants endowed with republican virtues. The republican state that is emerging is fiscally strong because it limits its debts, it is administratively strong because it is engaged in public management reform, and it is politically strong because citizens, politicians, and civil servants know that the principles ruling politics are not the same that rule markets: besides the private, the public interest must be taken into consideration. Undertakes a short survey of the literature on republicanism to substantiate these claims.

In the more developed countries, democracy was liberal in the first part of the twentieth century, social-democratic in the second part, and now is in transition to republican or participative democracy. Liberal democracy followed Schumpeter’s definition and was elitist. Social-democracy may also be called “plural” and “public opinion democracy”, in so far as electors’ general views become politicians’ central concern. Recently democracy is turning republican or participatory, as the public space becomes a reality and an increasing number of citizens seek to influence political decisions through civil society’s organizations either representing group interests or directly promoting the public interest. In the future, we may think in a deliberative democracy, as public debate gains density, political advocacy gains strength, and politicians’ accountability is enhanced. A short survey of the literature on participative democracy substantiates the argument.

This chapter argues that the Civil War began with one set of purposes, and ended with another. The original motive for resisting Southern secession was preserving the Union, but the final goal was to abolish slavery and reinvent the United States on the basis of a new set of principles – at the heart of which lay the Reconstruction Amendments. The principles of this new legal regime are so radically different from our original constitution that they deserve to be recognized as a second American constitution. Where the first constitution was based on principles of nationhood as a voluntary association, individual freedom, and republican elitism, the guiding premises of the second constitution are organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy – all themes signaled in Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address.

This chapter connects the demise of exclusive religious establishments with the foundation of republican governments. It also traces the extension of equal recognition to previously marginal groups, such as Roman Catholics. Indeed, by the founding period, the wholesale condemnation of religious minorities had become quite rare and the presumption that faith of many different kinds was better than no faith at all had become widespread. James Madison’s struggle to extend the meaning of “religion” in the Virginia legislature and John Carroll’s efforts to ensure equal rights and recognition for Catholics highlight the widening scope of American pluralism.

Mitterrand's leadership role is situated within the context of French political tradition. Particular attention is paid to the tradition of the republican state and its relationship to the idea of ‘economic government’. Other important influences are from the idea of French leadership in Europe and primacy to construction européenne. This idea has, in turn, been closely linked to the franc stable policy and the power of the Trésor. Perhaps most central of all has been the search for economic independence from the USA and the linkage between EMU and a rebalancing of economic power in the international monetary system.

This is the third of three chapters that set out the differing contexts through which the dilemma in the laws of war over the distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants can be viewed, and explores a range of intellectual approaches to the laws of war and war itself, assessing their relative methodological value and limitations. Previous chapters have illustrated that there existed at all levels a profound disagreement about the classes of people who were permitted to engage in political violence in times of war, and by narrowing the scope of inquiry to this one aspect (lawful versus unlawful combatants) of the laws of war, these chapters have also shown that there were strong normative elements to this lack of accord. Starting with this chapter, the remainder of the book argues that these normative elements were expressions of profound ideological clashes among three contending philosophies of war: martial, Grotian, and republican. From a methodological perspective, the explanation for the failed attempt to construct a distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants will be seen to lie in incommensurable normative frameworks of war, rather than in the specialized analytical tools of legal theory, diplomatic and archival history, and international relations theory. This chapter first assesses both the intellectual contributions and limitations of the legal, historical and international relations approaches before defining the three distinct traditions of war (martial, Grotian, and republican), and highlighting their explanatory value.

By the end of the Geneva negotiations in 1949, significant progress had been made in the codification of the laws of war, although the question of the legal distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants remained essentially unresolved. The book has outlined both the conceptual and practical historical contexts within which this problem was confronted, and in doing so has offered an explanation of its intractability, its argument being that three fundamentally divergent philosophies of war that cannot be reconciled lie at the heart of the problem. A number of central and important themes have been identified: (1) the book has underlined that in situations of war or military occupation, many of the traditional dichotomies in both international relations theory and political theory are lost; (2) from the perspective of international law, in contrast with the conventional depiction of the legal arena as an exclusive instrument for advancing and reconciling state interests, the analysis has shown that legal systems are also (and perhaps primarily) the expressions of ideological norms and values; and (3) the importance of ideological traditions has been demonstrated. Finally, in its treatment of the themes of war and military occupation, a number of points have been highlighted: (1) the opaque nature of occupation in nineteenth-century Europe; (2) the existence of a powerful custom of civilian resistance to occupation, not even accounted for by the makers of the laws of war; (3) the impossibility of maintaining a distinction between the public and private spheres under occupation; (4) the incoherence of a Groatian formulation in the face of such army practices as reprisal (a martialist policy); and (5) the explicit emergence of patriotism and nationalism in these situations. These points demonstrate that it was hardly surprising that the attempt to introduce a distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants failed, and show that the essential truth oaboutwars of military occupation and conquest is captured in the opposition between martial and republican paradigms.