J. Toby Reiner - Michael Walzer

It is tempting to adduce biographical reasons for Walzer’s sense that Nazi brutality makes it the exceptional case that cannot be appeased. After all, as a Jewish boy born in 1935, he grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. However, as a young Dissent nik from the mid-1950s onwards, Walzer has also always had a strong streak of anti-communism. Many of his early Dissent pieces criticized the post-Stalinist USSR or Maoist China (e.g. Walzer 1956, 1957, 1958b). This makes Walzer’s insistence that Soviet demands on Finland were not so exceptional as to require resistance somewhat surprising. But in this argument Walzer displays one of the core characteristics of his political thinking: the importance he attaches to collective self-determination. He holds that the choice of whether to resist or not had to be made by the Finns, whose survival as a national entity was at stake and who would have been entitled to choose to cede some territory if it would enhance their prospects of collective survival (Walzer 2015a: 70). Outsiders were entitled to greet the Finnish decision to fight with “moral satisfaction” because international society rests on common values of national independence, including territorial integrity, but not to insist on the fight (70–1). However, Walzer concludes that it is always a good thing to resist aggression, because the wrongness of aggression consists in part in our underlying commitment to a “pluralist world” of independent, self-governing communities (72–3), each with their own common life. It is for that reason that aggression, and only aggression, can in Walzer’s view make war legitimate.

Walzer does, however, allow for limited exceptions to the theory of aggression. These include cases of pre-emption, secession, and counter-intervention in civil wars (Walzer 2015a: 74–100). In each case, the exceptions are intended to be true to the spirit of the theory, as they represent situations in which the pluralist world order requires an exception. This is often because the war in question is an exception to the idea that war is fought between different states, and instead represents conflict within state boundaries.

Walzer develops the curious argument that countries intervening in civil wars in order to respond to another party’s intervention on the opposite side should aim not at winning the war but rather at balancing the intervention of the third party to ensure that the strength of the local forces decides the outcome of the war (96–7). Walzer intended this argument most directly as a critique of the American war in Vietnam that spurred him to write the book. Walzer saw in American involvement in Vietnam a tendency to think that the appropriate political regime for Americans must also be the right one for Vietnam regardless of whether the Vietnamese accepted it as such. More generally, Walzer’s argument about counter-intervention reflects the importance he attaches to collective self-determination and the view that communities should be governed by their own standards, not those that outsiders – be they philosophers or politicians – prefer. While self-determination is a core part of Walzer’s political thought (see especially Walzer 1981), it is, as Orend notes, extremely difficult to imagine how any army intervening in a war might map out a strategy of maintaining a balance of forces rather than winning the war (Orend 2013: 90). Once battle is joined, it seems impossible to do anything but try to win. A strategy of containment would inevitably be a losing one. Walzer is of course a political theorist, not a military strategist, but if Orend’s claim is true, as seems likely, it would appear that counter-interventionists have to decide between allowing the original intervention to alter the course of the war and winning the war themselves; they simply cannot ensure local forces prevail. This is especially so because of difficulty determining to what extent forces depend on external intervention. In the Syrian civil war, for example, how can Americans determine precisely the extent to which the Assad regime relies on Russian weaponry? (On Syria, see Walzer 2018: 6–7, 71–3.)

Walzer’s defense of pre-emption again follows the logic of maintaining international pluralism. He is at pains to distinguish pre-emption from “preventive” war, such as that later waged by the USA against Iraq in 2003 (on which, see the Preface to the fourth edition of Wars , Walzer 2006c), which he deems unjust. On Walzer’s account, preventive war responds to a threat that is somewhat distant, which means that it is freely chosen by the side waging war, even if it dubs itself the defender. By contrast, legitimate pre-emptive strikes occur when a state faces serious and imminent risks to its territorial integrity or political sovereignty. Walzer’s classic example is of the Israeli strike that launched the Six-Day War in 1967. Walzer argues that Israel was justified in pre-emptively attacking Egypt, because Egypt had deployed forces on the border and intended to place Israel in danger by doing so (Walzer 2015a: 80–5). Egypt did not accept Israel’s right to exist, so Walzer endorses Abba Eban’s suggestion that the destruction of an independent state be named the crime of “policide” in international law (52).

However, this argument has proven controversial, because Walzer accepts that although Egypt mobilized against Israel, it probably did not intend to start a war (83). For if pre-emptive strikes do not have to pre-empt an imminent attack, it is hard to see how they are genuinely defensive. Walzer has received severe criticism for his account of pre-emption, with critics arguing that he tailored the doctrine to Israel’s security needs when he would not otherwise have endorsed it (see most importantly Said 1986). As a Labor Zionist since his youth, Walzer had long sought to defend the legitimacy of the state of Israel, succeeding in converting many of the older generation on Dissent to Zionism despite initial disinterest (for discussion, see Reiner 2017a: 458–60). 6One of his earliest interventions was to argue at the time of the Six-Day War – at the height of his opposition to Vietnam – that Israel’s critics were wrong to see in the Middle East the sort of neo-colonial project that Walzer agreed was taking place in Vietnam (Walzer and Peretz 1967; see also Walzer 1970b).

Yet the crucial issue in assessing Walzer’s argument on pre-emption is not his intention but, rather, how it conforms to his theory. I think we must come to a mixed conclusion. By Walzer’s admission, the argument marks “a major revision of the legalist paradigm” because it means that war can occur without an “immediate intention to launch such an attack” (Walzer 2015a: 84). This makes the argument seem inconsistent with Walzer’s insistence that just-war theory base itself on the war convention. However, Walzer’s adherence to the convention is not uncritical: he holds that its judgments must form the starting point for thinking about war, but not the conclusion . That is why exceptions that are in keeping with its spirit are warranted. Here Walzer is on somewhat solid ground, for he notes that if Israel could do nothing to resist Egypt mobilizing on its borders, then Israel would have been vulnerable to attack at any time, and its territorial integrity permanently eroded (83). It does seem intolerable to anyone committed to the survival of a system of independent states that a state should have to tolerate the permanent massing of hostile troops on its borders, and so that some sort of Israeli action must be considered justifiable. On the other hand, that does not mean that any Israeli gambit would be legitimate, nor that the Israeli attack that all-but-destroyed the Egyptian air force necessarily was. Israel might have followed the prescription Walzer would, decades later, suggest the US adopt with regard to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: a “small war” consisting of enforcement of a no-fly zone someway from the border, with threats to attack if the no-fly zone were not respected (Walzer 2006c). One of the important developments in the theory of just war since 1977 relates to jus ad vim , or when it is legitimate to use force short of full-scale war. As a general principle, nations invoking Walzer’s doctrine of pre-emption would enhance their legitimacy were they to do their utmost to ensure use of the minimum force required as a gesture toward their defensive purposes.