Just and Unjust Wars has long been held as a manifesto against war-mongering and war-waging. The catalyst for Michael Walzer's writing the book was the wicked American intervention in the Vietnam War, against which he was an activist, and he has long since been a doyen of the American Left. I read the 1977 edition at University, and it seemed to me at the time to close off any moral notion for war except in self-defence, and to be strongly opposed to Great Power intervention. And yet when reading the 1992 edition this week in light of wars since then up to and including the successful Libyan uprising, I have had second thoughts. Are they wrong …. ?
Walzer gets himself into a pickle right from the start. The 1992 edition has a preface on Gulf War One, in which he reflects on the 1991 War in light of his theory, rather presupposing you have already read the book! He goes on to argue that Just War theory runs a middle course between contentious conceptions he has of realism and pacifism. Rather dangerously given other religions & their warfighting heritages, he charts the theory's origins in Christianity and attempts to establish it in a secular, modern context (Part One). I can only imagine that anyone who isn't either Christian or secular (most of the world) could quite easily reject Walzer's injunction against causing or conducting war altogether.
In Part Two The Theory of Aggression, he betrays himself with another dose of cultural dissonance when he underpins Just War theory with the very Western ideas of individual human rights and consent theory of state legitimacy. I'm not even sure that the Anglo-Saxon world even practises what Walzer preaches anymore.
But he hoists himself on his own petard when trying to reconcile his six propositions for his theory of aggression and his arguments subsequent. His six propositions are:
“1 There exists an international society of sovereign states.
2 This international society has law that establishes the right of its members – above all, the rights of territorial integrity and political sovereignty.
3 Any use of force or imminent threat of force by one state against the political sovereignty of another constitutes aggression and is a criminal act.
4 Aggression justifies two kinds of violent response: a war of self-defence by the victim and a war of law enforcement by the victim and any other member of international society.
5 Nothing but aggression can justify war.
6 Once the aggressor state has been militarily repulsed, it can also be punished.” (pp 61-2)
He then tests the strength of these propositions, and ends up arguing for ‘pre-emptive self-defence’; support for secessionist movements that are fighting for ‘national liberation’; balancing the intervention of other states in a civil war with counter-intervention; and, citing the Indian invasion of Bangladesh, rescuing populations threatened with enslavement or massacre. Nuclear deterrence, he argues, explodes the theory of just war.
Walzer's book is a classic because he so elegantly illustrates his moral arguments with so many famous historical case studies such as Thucydides’s story of the Melian Dialogue, the Allied bombing of Germany, and the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. He supported the American justification of Gulf War One, believing that the United States and its allies were right not to march on Baghdad once Kuwait’s sovereignty was restored. He argued that liberation from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein was not an American responsibility: it was up to the citizens of Iraq, and those in Kuwait also, to rid themselves of despotic rule, he stated. As for the conduct of the war, he condemned the policy of destroying the infrastructure of Iraq, which he argued failed to distinguish adequately between military and civilian targets. He also criticised the air attacks on fleeing Iraqi soldiers at the end of the war, since the soldiers no longer posed a real threat to American or other allied troops. Despite also disagreeing with Bush Senior's rhetoric of a New World Order and a victory for democracy, he did not condemn the oil motive, arguing it was only a subsidiary one, or the selectivity of US policy against aggression as a good reason to abandon the theory.
Throughout the book there is a conflict between a commitment to universal rights and the right to self-determination. Second, there is a tension arising from his appeal to human rights as the basis of the war convention regarding jus in bello, and his appeal to limiting the right to go to war for the purpose of self-defence. By appealing to human rights as the basis of the war convention regarding the use of force once war has begun, and by conceding exceptions to the rule of non-intervention on grounds of human rights, Walzer creates problems for himself. If the legitimacy and sovereignty of states derives ultimately from the rights of individuals, then to the degree that a state violates human rights, it loses both its legitimacy and its sovereign rights, including the right to be protected by the principle of non-intervention.
There always has been and seems especially today to be such a clamour for “Justice!” that those who claim they have it deem themselves morally justified to go to and wage any war they want. And my re-reading of Michael Walzer's great book made me feel he gave them the weapons to do so. Is this unjust of me?
my dear charles this was an interesting post
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