WALZER CHAPTER 4: “Law and Order in International Society”

1. WALZER CHAPTER 4: “Law and Order in International Society” What, if anything, morally justifies war? What is the relation between international law and the morality of war?

2. Questions About Jus Ad Bellum • (1) What makes war a ‘crime.’ What is the wrongness/injustice done? • (2) What gives the attacked entity the moral right of response? • (3) What is the right unit of concern in a war? Who is suffering from the injustice when one country invades another? The state? The individual? • (4) What is ‘aggression.’ Are there any grey areas with aggression? • (5) If a state is oppressive or not politically legitimate should it have the same rights as legitimate states to respond to aggression? • (6) Why does Walzer think it is morally right and required to respond, even in cases where you are likely to lose?

3. Aggression • Walzer offers a rights-based view of the crime of war. • “Aggression is the name we give to the crime of war.” (p. 51) By its nature, it violates rights because liberty and security require peace. • “The wrong the aggressor commits is to force men and women to risk their lives for the sake of their rights.” It forces people to choose between their rights or their lives. • --Fighting is “the morally preferred response” to aggression. • What are some options to this view that fighting is the morally preferred response? • Why would it be morally preferred? What exceptions might exist?

4. What is aggression? • Walzer: Every violation of the territorial integrity or political sovereignty of a state is aggression. [Is it easy to determine when this occurs?] • Aggression “opens the gates of hell.” • It also does not depend on resistance. Czechoslovakia did not resist the German invasion while Poland did but Czechoslovakia was also aggressed upon. • Aggression is “morally as well as physically coercive.” What does this mean. • Walzer points out that the aggressor does not want resistance so he will claim he is a “lover of peace.” • But it challenges “rights that are worth dying for.” (p. 53) What are these rights?

5. The Rights of Political Communities • The rights are (1) territorial integrity and (2) political sovereignty. These are collective rights but derive from the rights of individuals. • People are “morally entitled to choose their form of government” according to Walzer. • So why wouldn’t this make intervention to bring about a democracy a legitimate form of aggression? • What is a political community? For Walzer, membership in such a community is a fundamental feature of being human. • The rights are either natural or artificial but the political community acquires the right to defend the person though consent of its members.

6. “The Common Life” • How do individual rights give rise to the state’s right to respond to an act of aggression? Why is a state’s aggression an attack on individual rights? • “Over a long period of time, shared experiences and cooperative activity of many different kinds shape a common life. ‘Contract’ is a metaphor for a process of association and mutuality, the ongoing character of which the state claims to protect against external encroachment.” • What about the pluralism of communities?

7. Right to sovereignty • How can an oppressive state have a right to sovereignty if this right is derived from a citizen’s right to control his or her own political destiny? • Walzer says “most states do stand guard over the community of their citizens, at least to some degree: that is why we assume the justice of their defensive wars.” • Territorial integrity and political sovereignty “can be defended” in exactly the same way as life and liberty. • Does this apply to oppressive regimes? • Are all responses to aggression justified, even if there is no social contract in the standard sense between the government and its people?

8. What does the case of Alsace Lorraine show? • In 1870 Germany and France claimed these provinces. • Walzer’s idea is that the land should follow the people’s will rather than the ancient title. The common life is the ultimate decider • The 2 provinces were annexed by Germany and there was always a question whether the French should try to get them back. • Sidgwick: Once people acquire a certain identity/common life then the “moral effect of the unjust transfer must be obliterated.” • Boundaries/territory for Walzer circumscribe a habitable world.

9. The Legalist Paradigm/Domestic Analogy • States possess rights like individuals. The idea of aggression is analogical reasoning. • International society is like domestic society in that men and women “live at peace within it…negotiating and bargaining with neighbors…” • But it is not like domestic society because a crime against peace can bring the whole structure down. When a bad actor (country) threatens the structure, they have to be stopped. (Otherwise it’s like catching a murderer and then letting him go.) • Two presumptions follow (1) The presumption in favor of military response once it has begun and (2) Resistance is law enforcement.

10. Theory of aggression • (1) There exists an intl society of independent states • (2) This intl society has a law that establishes the rights of its members (territorial integrity and political sovereignty) • (3) Any use of force or imminent threat of force by one state against the political sovereignty or territorial integrity of another constitutes aggression and is a criminal act. • (4) Aggression justifies 2 types of violent response (2) self defense and (3) aid from the intl community • (5) Nothing but aggression can justify war. • (6) Once aggressive state is defeated, it can be punished.

11. Appeasement • What is appeasement? Is it true that Finland was right to fight, even though they could not win?