Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner

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1 The Justice of Resorting to War

      Walzer was interested in justice in war from childhood, with his longest piece of young writing focusing on World War II, which he continues to view as the paradigm of a just war. His first book, The Revolution of the Saints (1965), ends with a chapter on Puritan attempts to rework the Catholic just-war theory of the Middle Ages so as to allow for revolutionary wars that create a holy republic (268–99; see also Walzer 1963a, 1963b, 1968a). Throughout the 1960s, his opposition to the American war in Vietnam led him to invoke just-war arguments in justification of his position (see especially Walzer 1967b, also, Walzer 1966a, 1966b 1969, 1970a). But it is with the publication of Just and Unjust Wars in 1977 that Walzer really made a name for himself on the subject. Wars is not only Walzer’s most systematic study of the ethics of war but his most famous contribution to political and international relations theory per se: it has sold as many copies as all of Walzer’s other books combined.¹ Wars remains of the utmost importance to Walzer’s career as, although some of his positions have developed over the years,² the basic framework of analysis he introduces in the book continues to guide both his work on just wars and that of many other scholars (as noted by, among others, Lichtenberg 2008: 112, Orend 2013: vii–viii). Wars, and the literature it created, is thus the focus of the next two chapters. My division follows Walzer’s own. He notes that there is a distinction between the moral considerations that govern the outbreak of war (jus ad bellum) and those that apply to conduct during war (jus in bello).³ This chapter thus considers both Walzer’s argument that just-war theory is a plausible endeavor and his account of the justice of resorting to war.

I start by setting Walzer’s work in its context. This is twofold. First, his thought about justice in war developed out of his involvement in the left-liberal or democratic-socialist branch of the anti-Vietnam War movement (Howe and Walzer 1979: 16) and seeks to advance core commitments of that movement. Second, Walzer wanted to “rediscover the just war for political and moral theory” (Walzer 2015a: xxvi) by rebutting objections from both realists, who hold that moral judgments are inapplicable during war, and pacifists, who argue that no war can be just. I show that Walzer’s major contribution to theorizing about the justice of resorting to war is twofold. First, unlike earlier notions of just war that developed out of Christian theology, Walzer’s basis is human rights to life and liberty (Walzer 2015a: xxviii). This brings the theory in line with contemporary ethics, in particular in the insistence that all just wars must be defensive. Second, unlike much recent just-war theory that uses almost exclusively the tools of contemporary philosophy, Walzer situates his account in military history and practice, claiming that these give war a “moral reality” (3–48) that includes a “war convention” (127–221) that is the appropriate guide to just-war thinkers. Walzer calls his method “casuistic,” meaning that he advances his argument through a series of historical cases and insists that it is important that the cases be historical ones rather than hypotheticals (xxviii). The historical basis of Walzer’s just-war theory reflects his determination to offer a politically engaged account (Nardin 2013). It also means that the theory overlaps in significant, and often unrecognized, ways with Walzer’s broader corpus, as both focus on interpretation and critical scrutiny of existing norms. The chapter concludes by considering Walzer’s account of exceptions to the principle that cross-border aggression is never justified, focusing in particular on humanitarian intervention.

Against Vietnam

Just-war theory is now a thriving cottage industry and a mainstay of syllabi in global ethics. During the Vietnam War, while Walzer was writing Wars, however, the dominant notion was that justice in war was a sort of category mistake. We should not overstate this: in his first major work on military ethics, Walzer argued that most Americans accepted that the decision to go to war might be just or unjust but rejected restrictions on military conflict once war had begun (Walzer 1967b). Inceasingly, much of the political left tends toward pacifism, or at least to rejection of the use of force by the USA, fearing a sort of neo-imperialism cloaked in just-war language.

      As a result, even while participating in the movement against the American war in Vietnam, Walzer objected to most of the common arguments against that war, in particular those that sympathized with the communism of the North Vietnamese government and of the Vietcong (Howe and Walzer 1979: 15, Chomsky, Morgenthau, and Walzer 1978: 390–1). While the USA would have been entitled to support an indigenous anti-communist movement – indeed, Walzer would have done so himself – it could not replace an indigenous communist regime with a dictatorship of its own, no matter how benevolent it felt itself to be. The “ghastliness” (Walzer 1968d: 13) of the war consisted in the combination of two particular features, on Walzer’s view. First, it was “partly an inherited colonial war” in which the USA, like colonial France before it, refused to accept the right of the Vietnamese people to collective self-determination (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). This meant that the war could not be won, because the government of North Vietnam and the Vietcong “had succeeded in appropriating the historical energies of Vietnamese nationalism” (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). Although those movements were not, Walzer insisted, part of a global progressive cause, they had the loyalty of the vast majority of the Vietnamese people, which meant that the American war in Vietnam was not one against a hostile regime, but rather against an entire people. This made the government of South Vietnam illegitimate, which meant that the US intervention had to be understood as furthering its own geopolitical goals, not those of Vietnam (Walzer 2015a: 98–9). In short, the US did not “respect the character and dimensions of the Vietnamese civil war” (Walzer 2015a: 100). The US cause as a whole was akin to those military leaders who, faced with local intransigence to American goals, believed that, to save a particular village, they would have to destroy it. Walzer holds that the American war could be won only if it obliterated, rather than restoring, Vietnamese society, which is why US officers often felt forced to target entire villages (see Walzer 2015a: 309–16, on the My Lai massacre).

Walzer’s second objection was that the war was the result of Cold War ideology (Schrecker and Walzer 1965, Howe and Walzer 1979: 17). The geopolitical goals for which the US fought involved the containment of communism, and resulted from the struggle between the US and the Soviet Union (and, later, China). Again, it is important to emphasize that Walzer did not sympathize with the Soviet government; indeed, for Walzer and Dissent, one of the major challenges for an American socialism was avoiding the collapse into authoritarianism of the Soviet experiment. However, the goal of containment did not make the war legitimate, because it clashed with the moral requirement of “[w]orking for a bit of freedom in third world countries” such as Vietnam (Howe and Walzer 1979: 17–18). While such a task might have been stymied by the dominance of Soviet-style communism within both the North Vietnamese government and the Vietcong, this did not make the war legitimate. Rather, it suggests that Walzer’s opposition to the war had “no happy ending to offer” (Howe and Walzer 1979: 18), but nonetheless insisted that American geopolitical hostility to Soviet communism could not legitimately be pursued at the expense of Vietnamese lives and self-determination.

      At the heart of Walzer’s opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, then, is the claim that the Vietnamese people must determine for themselves their system of government. This belief, rooted in Walzer’s version of social democracy, which insists that each community must govern itself by its own standards, was to become a central plank of his just-war theory, most notably in the claim that almost all just wars are fought in defense of national sovereignty. It recurs throughout Walzer’s work in the claim that communities need a protected space for their common life.