[p. 539]
|539| themselves. Every peace treaty – and peace treaties are the proper treaties on which the political rights of the powers against one another are founded – contains the main article that friendship shall obtain between the contracting powers. Besides this main article it contains the determination of the remaining relations, especially of those over which dispute had previously arisen. However generally the main article expresses the preservation of good understanding, it is clear of itself that this is not to be understood unconditionally.
The Turkish Empire almost seems to maintain its relations with foreign powers in the sense of being at peace with them in general until it is itself attacked, and only rarely has the policy of the other European states succeeded in throwing it into a political war. Otherwise, however, the relation of states is so many-sided, every single relation determined in a peace has again so many sides, that with all exact determination of them in the relation infinitely many remain over about which quarrel is possible. No power attacks a stipulated right immediately and directly, but on some undetermined side differences arise, which then overturn the peace as a whole and, through the condition of war, now also make the establishment of the remaining determinate rights waver.
This sublation of the mutual political rights is at first only a consequence of the condition of war. The treaties and the relations determined in them would well remain standing, they are not immediately violated or directly attacked with open force, one does not play with the treaties; but if quarrel otherwise arises over points and circumstances not clearly settled, then everything else that treaties had previously established is thrown into confusion.
Wars, whether one calls them wars of aggression or of defence – on which naming the parties never come to an understanding – would be called unjust only
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