SOME time ago, I was invited to write an article about the Lambeth Conferences and decided to ask the question: has there ever been a distinctively Anglican approach to the great questions of international relations?
Why, after all, should there not be? Roman Catholics can show us a coherent and authoritative body of Catholic teaching — on social thought, for example — and over time this has acquired a firm identity, forming a fertile basis for confident critical reflection and development.
As for the secular world of foreign-policy analysis, schools and models abound — from those of realism, liberalism, and constructivism, to very many more. Marxism has produced schools of thought in international relations. So has feminism. What, I wondered, about Anglicanism?
Over a century and more, and in a succession of reports, debates, and resolutions, the Lambeth Conferences did seek to state their views on international relations Church historians have made almost nothing of this; political historians are entirely oblivious.
The bishops maintained the model of the nation as something God-given, instinctive to human beings, or merely unavoidable. All nations, great or small, new or old, had equal rights; limits must be set on sovereignty in view of the welfare of an international community.
This difficult correlation between national and international interests they defined by examining the causes of war. Already in 1897, the bishops invested their authority in supporting successive models of international arbitration and denied to any government the power to judge a question wholly for itself and to go to war without submitting to these things. While war itself might be honourable, it occurred only in contradiction of the mind and example of Christ, and must always be abhorrent in its violence, suffering, destruction, and grief.
After the First World War, they voiced a vivid support for the League of Nations, even when there were doubts, and later they approved firmly of the United Nations. They argued that the accumulation of armaments could be a cause for war, and they favoured disarmament as something conducive to peace. In the nuclear age, they were divided on the question of unilateral disarmament. Ultimately, they moved towards a concern with regional violence and conflicts of various kinds.
THE Lambeth Conferences offered the politicians and diplomats a particular language and a high moral justification, at a time when great efforts were made to raise the standards of international diplomacy to a quite new level. Moreover, it was an achievement of the age of the League of Nations to democratise what had once been the preserve of elites.
The words that came from the Lambeth Conferences were a part of this. They invited a wider discussion of international morality, outlining ideas that possessed a place and a recognisable value in a wider public discourse. All of this is to say that the bishops found their place within models of liberal internationalism to which scholars of international relations continue to turn today.
But, evidently, there was little capacity, or inclination, to develop this into a continuous source of research and reflection. In contrast, in 1946, the new World Council of Churches established a Commission of the Churches on International Affairs. If Anglicans felt that the World Council was the right place for such work, what originated in Geneva was, by and large, left there. There remained an Anglican office, and a “permanent representative” at the United Nations in Geneva.
IT IS impossible to look at the Lambeth Conferences between 1920 and 1958 without sensing in the background the figure of George Bell. Indeed, if one is to look for a substantial and developed approach to international relations in Anglicanism, we have Bell’s regular contributions to the foreign-affairs debates of the House of Lords, not simply during the Second World War, but over almost 20 years.
PA ArchiveBishop George Bell in 1954
All of this was rooted in a rich and compassionate experience of the world, and myriad relationships with academics, diplomats, and public servants, not least in the Grotius Society, of which Bell was a member. For Bell, the conduct of warfare itself must answer to international law, to “higher standards”, and to a longer view. It was a fundamental principle to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants: simple, indiscriminate devastation was unjustifiable.
It was also important to distinguish between those who governed a country and those who lived, often miserably and helplessly, under their tyranny. A blockade should permit the provision of humanitarian aid and food to a population under military occupation. The destruction not of a political state but of an entire society was not only wrong and deplorable, but could serve only to legitimate those who had seized power, to maintain them in authority, and bind them still more intensely to people who suffered in common and found no alternative.
Bell also warned that the legacy of such warfare could be only bitterness, hatred, and still greater destruction. Whereas conventional wisdom acknowledged human suffering or material destruction as the consequences of state policy in wartime, Bell’s view of justification began with these realities.
That these speeches represented a distinctive approach to international relations can hardly be denied — not least because Bell so often reached conclusions that set him apart from other peers. They do not simply belong to a period of history. When we look at Ukraine or Gaza today, we still feel their force and sense what may be at stake in them.
SUCH material may encourage us to explore again the art of diplomacy as a moral science and as a part of the morality of democracy. We might even come to view it as a part of the Anglican vocation in a tradition that has long sought to justify its existence in terms of embodying a via media in a polarised world.
Of course, broad interpretative models that integrate Christian ideas with political, legal, and diplomatic themes do not fare well in an age of secularisation, professionalisation, categorisation, and academic specialisation.
The approach of the bishops at Lambeth was not conventionally analytical: it sought to articulate ethical, pastoral, and humanitarian moralities. But this is exactly what remains distinctive and vital. Indeed, it may be all the more valuable in a world in which political and diplomatic values are losing any sense of abstract and absolute principles and embracing an increasingly brutal moral relativism, self-interest, and opportunism.
Nor should Anglicans view too lightly the tangible place that they occupy in the world and the responsibilities that follow. We need only observe the plight of the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza to see an Anglican institution that has come to crystallise a great many urgent questions in contemporary foreign-policy analysis.
Perhaps the idea a school of Anglican international relations seems far-fetched to us. But, if such a thing never emerges, it will not be because such a thing is intellectually impossible or morally superfluous. Anglicans today will need to see how to cultivate a tradition that has perhaps been neglected, and to ask how their Church is to speak to a world in disarray.
Dr Andrew Chandler is Professor in Modern History at the University of Chichester. His books include George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State and resistance in the age of dictatorship (Eerdmans) (Books, 7 October 2016) and British Christians and the Third Reich: Church, State and the judgement of nations (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
