Walzer on international justice: an unorthodox view

Walzer's political prescriptions range from the consolidation of the Nation-State system to a radical reform of International Society. Here I want to explore his more radical claims, such as his claim that the past injustices of world politics (the British Empire or American or Soviet aggression) should be repaid, perhaps by ‘far reaching redistributions of wealth and resources’.Footnote ⁴ I want to examine these claims and see if there is one coherent theoretical underpinning that links them with his more conventionalist claims concerning the right to self-determination and inviolability of sovereignty; that is with the established body of his work.Footnote ⁵ It is the case that Walzer's pronouncements have grown more ambitious over the years. Indeed the tension between Walzer's claim that ‘all in all, we cannot be happy with the current state of the world’Footnote ⁶ and the standard view of his work as strictly conventionalist seems too much to ignore. It is certainly true of the more radical aspect of Walzer's work, as Orend notes, that:

Nevertheless with the publication of ‘Governing the Globe’ there is enough consistency to his wish to reform International Society to warrant a serious examination.

If we survey the range of Walzer's work it seems that there is a tension between the claim that international justice hinges on the proliferation of nation-states and the expansion of the nation-states system and his more recent claim that the best form of international society is characterised by what he terms ‘the third degree of global pluralism’ which, ‘in its fully developed (ideal) version […] offers the largest number of opportunities for political action on behalf of peace, justice, cultural difference and individual rights’.Footnote ⁸ This model incorporates national, regional and global political structures and places a heavy emphasis on the weakening of national sovereignty and the creation of ‘alternative centres’ capable of protecting and encouraging political and social identity, encouraging, as Walzer puts it, political possibility.Footnote ⁹

A progressive conventionalist

I do not want to challenge the more conservative image of Walzer's political theory fully. The image of Walzer the advocate of sovereign independence and non-intervention in international affairs is correct (as far as it goes). Nevertheless there is another side to Walzer's theory, a more progressive side that has always sat uneasily with his conventionalist image. Without an adequate grasp of this side of his work we cannot understand the impact of Walzer's contribution to the most important debates in contemporary international studies. My claim is that there is firm theoretical consistency between these sides of Walzer's work. My argument is that the link between these contrasting views can be found in Walzer's distinctive approach to the issue of how universal political principles arise. The claim is not that Walzer has always rested his account of just war or international justice on a clear, distinctively particularist account of universalism. It is quite clear, for example, that his early account of the development of international moral principles, especially those politically urgent rights to life and liberty that underpin the rules of disregard that ground his early defence of intervention, is based on a problematically orthodox liberal-universalism. His claim that such rights are ‘somehow entailed by our sense of what it means to be a human being’Footnote ¹⁰ was ruthlessly targeted in the early critical debates that surrounded the publication of Just and Unjust Wars. What is so important about these exchanges is the place they have in the evolution of contemporary normative political and international theory. The criticism of Walzer, especially by Beitz, Luban and Doppelt,Footnote ¹¹ and the subsequent issue of Philosophy and Public Affairs that allowed the argument to developFootnote ¹² set out the terms of the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate. Here the inability of Walzer to justify his moral claims without seeming to rely on a liberal-universalism led to a number of theoretical positions becoming deeply entrenched in normative IR theory. The most important was that communitarians cannot make coherent claims about universal human rights or the development of international justice more generally. From this it followed that communitarians in IR theory were statists, only methodologically distanced from the ranks of realists that were the nemesis of normative judgment and that cosmopolitanism was the only basis for a morally progressive IR theory. Walzer thus became identified with a deeply conservative normative communitarianism. However despite the fact that Walzer did not have the theoretical vocabulary to defend his position in these early exchanges it is quite clear that his subsequent work developing a distinctively particularist account of universalism is an important attempt to give voice to his belief that communitarianism and universal moral principles are compatible.

My argument relies on a reconstruction of the trajectory of Walzer's thought from ‘The Moral Standing of States’ to ‘Governing the Globe’. The development of key ideas through essays such as ‘Philosophy and Democracy’,Footnote ¹³ ‘Liberalism and the Art of Separation’,Footnote ¹⁴ ‘The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism’,Footnote ¹⁵ ‘Nation and Universe’Footnote ¹⁶ and Thick and Thin Footnote ¹⁷ is vitally important to any understanding of Walzer's position. We need to take very seriously the link between Walzer's communitarianism and his account of universalism. For those of us interested in the ethics of intervention this link manifests itself Walzer's development of his account of Jus ad Bellum to incorporate Jus ad Vim and his later argument in favour of a radically redeveloped international political order. It allows us to really understand why Walzer developed the ‘rules of disregard’ that legitimate some interventions in Just and Unjust Wars and why he progressively relaxes the principle of non-intervention throughout his career. For those of us interested in IR theory more generally this link forces us to rethink the content of Walzer's communitarianism and provides the impetus to move normative theory beyond the cosmopolitan/communitarian impasse. It tells us why we are mistaken to view Walzer as an ultra-conservative normative communitarian and why we might better think of him, in Adler's rather useful terminology, as an ‘analytic communitarian’, someone whose account of the development of universal moral principles reinforces (rather than denies) the epistemological and ontological importance of communities.Footnote ¹⁸

For a political theorist interested in world politics Walzer's argument is immediately and intuitively engaging because it promises a universal theory that can explain the appeal of moral particularism and the place of distinct (if not discrete) political communities. Such an approach offers to make sense of a world in which we are all keenly aware that political sovereignty is both a much valued and key element of world politics and one of the central reasons why we are not making the major advances in international law and politics that the normative discourse of international society requires. It is politically engaging because it allows us to think about both universal justice (with its emphasis on human rights, multilateralism, humanitarianism) and sovereignty (with its stress on pluralism, self-determination and non-intervention). It is philosophically engaging because it promises to retell the story of universalism in a way that claims to avoid the pitfalls that beset much modern and virtually all cosmopolitan thinking. At both of these points Walzer has been the object of much criticism. Walzer's emphasis on the necessity of particularist or communal ‘thickness’ to the everyday lives of the world's inhabitants and his subsequent defence of sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention has led to accusations of moral and political conservatism (for which read insensitivity) for over twenty-five years.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly the general view of liberal and cosmopolitan critics has been that there is a marked lack of substantive theory in Walzer's work; that he did not, and could not, defend his conservatism or his occasional foray into universal (but very thin) human rights. Not only do I think that the standard criticism of Walzer's justificatory theory can be shown to be wide of the mark but also that Walzer's general theory is far more radical than a conventionalist defence of the status quo. Indeed his apparent communitarianism finds him one step away from the ideal of a pacific federation found in the Kantian tradition.Footnote ²⁰ Despite Walzer's own reticence in Thick and Thin, The Company of Critics or Just and Unjust Wars Footnote ²¹ it is the logic of his theory of ‘reiterative universalism’ that has led him this way. In making these arguments I want to begin to tease out the more radical side of Walzer's theory. I think his radicalism goes a long way beyond the moral minimum found in Thick and Thin or the amendments to the ‘Legalist Paradigm’ in Just and Unjust Wars that limit a state's right to self-determination. Ultimately I want to suggest that the force of Walzer's IR theory requires that we begin to rethink the dominant norms of international politics and ethics and the peremptory norms of international law (Jus Cogens). Far from being a statist with a ‘sovereignty fixation’ Walzer offers a vision of international society that has to change to become more politically effective and more tolerant towards lives ‘without clear boundaries’.Footnote ²²

I am aware that this is an unusual reading of Walzer. I am, nevertheless, convinced that the standard view of Walzer's general theory does not tell the full story. This view can be summarized by drawing on Orend's excellent book Walzer on War and Justice. He argues that:

I have no quarrel with Orend's analysis as far as it goes (it was written before the publication of the essay that forms the basis of this article and in fact it is one of the few texts that explores the vital link between Walzer's just war theory and the moral theory laid out in Thick and Thin). However, Walzer has developed an important general theory of international justice. Just war is no longer his overwhelming focus in international affairs as the legalist paradigm and the war convention (however amended) are no longer the most relevant or adequate tools in world politics. These tools are used to fight a rearguard action against the break-up of the old order of world politics, a break up fostered by the actual mobility of people, businesses and their problems and the inability of the sovereign state system to deal adequately with this. Walzer acknowledges that war is still a big part of world politics but war (at least the old-style national war) is no longer the most significant interaction between states. On the back of these arguments Walzer has begun to focus his attention on the reform of the international system and the transcendence of the nation-state system.

Just and unjust wars: Walzer and the first degree of global pluralism

In his paper ‘Governing the Globe?’ Walzer presents us with the image of a continuum of ideal types or models of international society.Footnote ²⁴

On this continuum our current situation is most accurately modelled by the first degree of global pluralism, one step in from the right side and international anarchy. This is also where we find the Walzer of Just and Unjust Wars, the defender of non-intervention. Caricatured cosmopolitans favour a global state but most cosmopolitans, such as Beitz and Pogge, tend to favour the federation model, as did Kant.Footnote ²⁵ Interestingly both Beitz and Pogge will, when pushed, accept something like the third degree of global pluralism model which is Walzer's ideal (in the sense of best).Footnote ²⁶ These opposing forces arrive at the same position from different sides of the continuum. This is not to say that any compromise is automatically possible. While their political prescriptions may be similar their disagreement at the level of theory is total. The cosmopolitans rely upon the strong Kantian idea that interdependence triggers our dormant obligations to the rest of humanity,Footnote ²⁷ a position that has philosophical difficulties and tends to push them towards the stronger and, argues Walzer, more dangerous federative ideal.Footnote ²⁸ But my point is that Walzer can be seen to share political ground with the cosmopolitans.

This, of course, is quite some claim. Walzer is more usually thought of as a defender of national self-determination, non-intervention and, most recently, a very thin but universal ‘moral minimum’ that serves principally to justify Walzer's apparent communitarianism and statism. I have no quarrel with this as an interpretation of the main body of Walzer's work. However, if we explore the character of his position here it becomes clear that the potential to move beyond the nation-state system was always present.

The key to understanding the potential in Walzer's theory is the idea of reiteration, which finds its fullest expression in Thick and Thin. The idea of reiteration, or reiterative universalism, is extremely important in Walzer's moral theory as it is the vehicle by which we move (albeit temporarily in Walzer's first instalment of his IR theory) from particularism to universalism and therefore from international anarchy to the first degree of global pluralism. It is also the concept that leads him in his most recent work to argue for what he calls the third degree of global pluralism. Reiterative universalism can most readily be understood if we contrast it with covering-law universalism (and here covering law universalism is what we usually refer to when we talk of universalism). The reiterative way in which we arrive at the formulation of the universal law is distinctly communitarian. We abstract from the particular to the universal through repeated experience of shared political problems. Walzer argues, ‘perhaps the end product of this effort will be a set of standards to which all societies can be held – negative injunctions, most likely, rules against murder, deceit, torture, oppression, and tyranny’.Footnote ²⁹ This all sounds very optimistic but Walzer's initial position is not so up beat. He argues that the very thing that allows us to form these minimalist positions necessarily prevents them from developing into maximalist ones.

Walzer does not believe that all agents make ‘thick’ or sustained assumptions and so his conclusions are casuistical rather than transcendental. In essence he argues that we do make such globalist assumptions but only in the context of international political crises and that we do not go on to incorporate these assumptions into the moral hierarchy of our everyday lives. The character of international society and the way we (as citizens of sovereign states) confront each other in the international sphere have historically limited the effectiveness of the reiterative process.

International Society, writes Walzer, is the most tolerant of all forms of society.Footnote ³¹ This is not an expression of admiration but rather a consequence of the ‘good fences make good neighbours’ thesis.

International justice is not a Universalist ethic in the traditional sense. It is a product of recognition of a multiplicity of claims to justice as a series of family resemblances, a distillation of what it means to have a claim to justice. It is a consensus on a minimalist position that is not sufficient to guide our lives but that recognises each family resemblance for what it is, a glimpse of oneself in a totally separate ‘other’.

Nevertheless it is important to note ‘that what is recognised is just this (partial) commonality, not the full moral significance of the other cultures. Most people most of the time do not see the others, in context, as carriers of value; most people are not pluralists’.Footnote ³⁴ For Walzer cultural pluralism is a part of ‘a thickly developed liberal politics’. Reiterative universalism in this first stage of the development of international society relies on something much weaker, on ‘overlapping expectations’ about the behaviour of others.Footnote ³⁵

Walzer argues that in the contemporary international system ‘rights are only enforceable within political communities where they have been collectively recognised … the globe is not, or is not yet, such an arena. Or rather the only global community is pluralist in character, a community of nations, not of humanity.’Footnote ³⁶ Yet for Walzer the concept of individual rights is also central to the minimalist morality created in response to the problems of international relations. These values are not good in themselves. Walzer argues that ‘the value of minimalism lies in the encounters it facilitates, of which it is also the product. But these encounters are not – not now, at least-sufficiently sustained to produce a thick morality.’Footnote ³⁷ Nevertheless Walzer believes that they both do important work in international politics. We develop a reiteratively universal standpoint to judge them from, a perspective from which a global ethics is a possibility and from where the right of sovereign powers to go to war or to act in certain ways towards their citizens in the name of Raison d'état is limited. If, at this point, we read Walzer's later insight back into his earlier work we must recognise that it is on this basis that Walzer develops the six propositions and five revisions that make up the Legalist Paradigm and later, in Thick and Thin, states his case for the centrality of a ‘thin’ version of human rights. Interpreting his struggle to reconcile universalism and particularism in this way and viewing it as his response to the early criticisms of his ethical theory, provides a compelling reason to review his early argument and offers the basis for a critical grasp of his most recent work.

These rules are constructed from within our social context and while they may be framed as ‘covering-laws’ they are historically conditioned and certainly not sufficient to mould a maximalist account of international ethics. The rights to life and liberty are, however, based on a commonly held perception (or a family of perceptions) of what it means to be a human being. Nations (domestically) and states (in the international sphere) are products of moral and political reasoning and producers of moral and political reason, the fount of our understandings of the moral reality of international politics. In an uncharacteristically optimistic moment Walzer outlines the full range and derivation of his international theory and it is worth quoting him at some length here:

Walzer's method does not have the capacity to demand these reforms in world politics but he is suggesting that these actions are already considered a part of the necessary framework for international survival and well-being. His reiterative universalism is intended to describe the basic reasons that can be given for this recognition and Walzer's optimism grows in his most recent work.

Despite this optimism Walzer is still firmly of the opinion that international society is still limited to this first degree of global pluralism. The nation-state (or religious republic) is where and how most groups would prefer to be tolerated. Peoples, particularly those who are under threat, culturally or politically, aim for sovereignty ‘with governments, armies, and borders, co-existing with other nation-states in mutual respect.’Footnote ³⁹ For those seeking a kind of political sanctuary this makes historical and political sense. But for those of us who seek international justice the current organisation of international society causes more problems than it solves. This tension is not just a tension in Walzer's theory; it is not Walzer the communitarian theorist versus Walzer the bleeding heart academic. This tension characterises our experience of world politics. What Walzer offers is a case for the development of international society beyond the nation-state system (and beyond the UN system of international politics that is not so far removed from this model) that recognises the appeal of national sovereignty as well as its intrinsic dangers. The crux of the issue can be set out as follows. We have learned that we must respect the integrity of sovereign peoples yet we have also learned, or at the very least are beginning to learn, that sovereignty necessarily establishes illegitimate moral and political boundaries. It is often the case that the intolerable is, by structurally encouraged act and omission, tolerated in international society.

Walzer recognised this problem early on in his career and this is why the issues surrounding intervention have been so important to him. I do not want to explore Walzer's theory of legitimate intervention here. His views here are well known and, in any case, such an exploration would take us away from our principal concern in this article. What I do wish to examine is Walzer's understanding of the constitutive norms of international society that once prioritised strict adherence to the principle of self-determination (as a matter of practical ethics) but now criticise such prioritisation. The moral problem that seems to weigh heavily upon contemporary world politics is that while:

It is the weakness of international political structures in the face of reiteratively established norms, or thin, minimalist principles that leads Walzer to advocate a renovated international society capable of supporting the third degree of global pluralism.

Reiterated norms and the case for the third degree of global pluralism

Characteristically Walzer's reiterated moral minimum is very thin. Essentially this is because Walzer was so wary of the intellectual hegemon that is liberal cosmopolitanism and the ‘tyrannical potential’ of powerful political regimes who offer aid in return for imitation. This concern is still a significant part of Walzer's thinking and the reason why he resists all pressure from the left side of his continuum of international societal models.Footnote ⁴¹ The key to Walzer's new international relations theory, his argument in favour of finding political expression for a sustained moral minimum (a major move away from the typical Walzerian position), lies in the reiterated recognition that the nation-states system simply cannot deal appropriately with the crises it faces. The system has come under sustained pressure from all sides. It is clear to us that the existing system of semi-impervious political boundaries is unhelpful. Border disputes, wars of secession, civil wars, ethnic cleansing; these are very familiar consequences of the current division of the world's territories. We might not know what to do about Rwanda, Eastern Europe or Palestine but we are aware that the nation-building projects that have forged these conflicts are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. From the opposite direction the globalisation of the world's economy and migration, in all its political and economic forms, is calling into question the utility and the justice of the nation-state system. Again, the issues are huge but we can be sure that nation-building (in both the territorial sense and the sense in which Kymlica articulates the formation of national identity)Footnote ⁴² is unhelpful. That this is a position that can be ascribed to Walzer would undoubtedly come as a shock to many of Walzer's critics.

Let me unpack this last paragraph a little. The concept that is doing all the work here is still moral reiteration. The way that Walzer presented this idea in Thick and Thin stressed the temporary and casuistical nature of the moral minimum. We make urgent moral judgments in times of great crisis. Over time we develop a stock of reiterated judgments that we use to deal with each crisis as it arises. However we do not incorporate such judgments into the thick moral fabric of our everyday lives. The reason we do not incorporate these judgments into our moral maximalisms stems from two inter-related roots. Firstly we are only called upon to make these universal moral judgments in unusual circumstances. The most sustained range of international judgments we make have related to the just cause and conduct of war. The relative thickness of the legalist paradigm and the war convention stand as testimony to this.Footnote ⁴³ The decisions we make here are relevant only to an extreme situation and are therefore of limited use to us in the conduct of our everyday lives. Even the very thin universal moral principles, ‘the right to life and liberty’ upon which the legalist paradigm is predicated find better expression in our separate moral maximalisms.

The reason these principles find better expression in our thick everyday lives is related to the second point. The political context in which we make these decisions is very different from the context in which we live our everyday lives. Historically we have chosen to value our separate ways of life by privileging the principles of sovereignty and non-intervention and the sorts of moral and political judgments we make in international politics are contorted to fit this model. Again we would make different and more effective decisions in our everyday lives, decisions that simply could not be entertained in international politics. But this is changing. Or at least this is what Walzer must be claiming if his new IR theory is to hold water. The sorts of crisis that we find intolerable and impelled to act upon are becoming (or have become) a fixture in our political lives and the political constitution of international society has adapted to the point where the basic assumptions of sovereignty, non-intervention, self-determination and of the anarchical society do not make sense of our moral and political commitments. In short, we have reiterated and shared reasons for needing to change the shape of world politics. The key interpretative claim that I am making here is that the temporary, casuistical and reiterative process of norm construction has itself developed as the constitutive context of world politics has changed. The underpinning of Walzer's most ambitious essay suggests that these thin moral universals have become, or are becoming, freestanding – a part of our ‘common human reason’ providing autonomous moral reasons that transcend their origins.Footnote ⁴⁵ The suggestion is that this marks the evolution of Walzer's particularist account of universalism rather than a departure from it and offers vital lessons for a communitarian account of international ethics.

An argument of this sort would not, I think, be a new departure for Walzer. Indeed I think he underplayed the potential of the reiterative process in his earlier work. He underplayed its potential because he wanted to highlight the fact that we need to let it happen in its own time. Forcing the issue corrupts the reiterative process. The image of the social critic in Walzer's earlier work is that of a person who is ‘hanging in there’Footnote ⁴⁶ waiting for the appropriate moment to steer international society towards a brighter future. For Walzer this is the pattern that political morality takes.

Walzer's claim must be that now the time is right to begin to steer international society towards a new political constitution. This claim is predicated on a reading of international politics that claims that the way the peoples of the world confront one another in this now politicised arena has changed significantly over time. Most importantly Walzer's argument is that neither the nation-state (the most intolerant of all societal structures)Footnote ⁴⁸ nor international society as currently constituted (the most tolerant) are practical or just enough for our contemporary international political needs. This argument must be predicated on the claim that our thin, reiteratively universal understanding of human rights to life and liberty has thickened up in significant ways to become a key part of our moral justificatory framework.

Statehood and toleration in a multicultural world

For Walzer the modern project can be characterised as the search for ‘collective toleration’, which incorporates a struggle for boundaries.

The key to this project, and the key to all of Walzer's political theory up until his most recent work, is the need to recognise that membership in specific groups is the basis of life in a differentiated world. In this model the nation-state is the core unit. The nation-building projects that fostered this development have given this, the most intolerant of political structures, the central role in our domestic lives and have also given rise to the nation-state system in international politics which Walzer characterises as the most tolerant (indeed as far too tolerant). As the key to Walzer's ‘communitarianism’ and as the key to a description of how modern politics has developed I find this position compelling. However just as compelling is Walzer's claim that both the intolerance of the nation-state and the super-tolerance of the nation-state system of international politics have outlived their usefulness; that the modern project is drawing, or should be drawing to a close.

This argument rests on a strong claim about the ways in which we confront others at a national, regional and international level. At the national level states are increasingly coming under pressure from within and pressure from without. From the inside the disturbingly random way in which geopolitical boundaries have been drawn has led to secessionist movements and ethnic conflict. From the outside immigrant pressure, from the fall-out from these conflicts and from the increased economic need for mobility, has, Walzer suggests, led to the increasing recognition that the nation-state has practical limitations. It seems that intolerance has become, in many vital ways, intolerable. Non-intervention makes no sense in light of our intolerance towards ethnic cleansing. Nation-building (again in Kymlica's sense which Walzer adopts for his description)Footnote ⁵⁰ makes no sense of, or rather cannot make full sense of, our experience of the world.

This blurring of the basic principles of national membership has developed alongside repeated or reiterated encounters with a burgeoning international society. In dealing with refugee crises, or catastrophes such as the Kosovo conflict, or a rapidly developing international civil society, we have developed ‘a plurality of international political and financial organisations, with a kind of authority that limits but does not abolish sovereignty.’Footnote ⁵² An international society with nation-states existing next to international organisations such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO is familiar to us all as are its limitations. As Walzer notes:

The reiterated facts of international politics are that the globalist institutions of international society are too weak and that retreat into the nation-state is not the solution. With these reiterations come others. The ‘ultra-minimal’ rights to life and liberty arose through repeated encounters with separate ‘others’ in world politics. We did not incorporate any ‘thick’ understanding of these rights in our moral maximalisms because of the way they arose. It seems that this minimalist universalism found its best expression in a very thin account of human rights in IR and, in a vast plurality of ways, in our separate moral maximalisms. But the logic of the reiterative process does not stop here. Once established in the moral consciousness of international society these principles become more than the recognition of some ‘partial commonality’ in a totally separate ‘other’; they become a critical tool. The consequence of this is that we come to recognise that our thin, but intensely important, moral minimum no longer finds adequate expression in membership of a sovereign nation-state in a loose international society.

Walzer's theoretical and political shift to globalism and universalism is extraordinary. But we must not over-egg the pudding. It must be noted that this reiterative process is not simply a matter of unilinear progress. What Walzer calls, somewhat guardedly, his post-modern project has not superseded the modern project. Rather:

The argument is not that we have abandoned the categories of international relations, or that we universally acknowledge that the values of membership, sovereignty and non-intervention are now defunct. While the ‘solid lines on the old cultural and political maps are turned into dotted lines […] coexistence along and across those lines is still a problem.’Footnote ⁵⁵ But Walzer's universal morality does, he argues, offer arguments that underwrite an international society that ‘would bring many of the advantages of a global federation but with greatly reduced risk of tyranny from the centre.’Footnote ⁵⁶ To appreciate the monumental shift in Walzer's political argument, consider the following description of his ideal form of international society:

The key, for Walzer, is ‘to create a set of alternative centres and an increasingly dense set of social ties that cross state boundaries’.Footnote ⁵⁸