Justice, Intervention, and Force in International Relations

Kimberly A. Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134009275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This book analyses the problems of current just war theory, and offers a more stable justificatory framework for non-intervention in international relations.

The primary purpose of just war theory is to provide a language and a framework by which decision makers and citizens can organize and articulate arguments about the justice of particular wars. Given that the majority of conflicts that threaten human security are now intra-state conflicts, just war theory is often called on to make judgments about wars of intervention. This book aims to critically examine the tenets of just war theory in light of these changes, and formulate a new theory of intervention and just cause.

For Michael Walzer, the leading scholar of just war theory, armed humanitarian intervention is permissible only in cases of genocide, ethnic cleansing, widespread massacres, or enslavement. This book shows why this threshold is too restrictive in light of the progressive shift away from interstate conflict as well as the emerging norms of 'sovereignty as responsibility' and the 'responsibility to protect'. Justice, Intervention and Force in International Relations aims to establish a new, stable foundation for non-intervention and a revised threshold for 'just cause'. In addition, this book demonstrates that over-reliance on the just cause category distorts understanding, analysis, and public discussion of the justice or injustice of resorting to war.

This new book will be of much interest to students of ethics, security studies, international relations and international law.

Kimberley Hudson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at American International College, and has a Phd in International Relations from Brown University.

1 Walzer’s formulation of just cause

Walzer elaborates his formulation of non-intervention and just cause across four broad categories: national self-defense, collective self-defense, pre-emption, and exceptions to the non-intervention rule. I’ll summarize his views on each of those four categories here, highlighting the underlying reasons he gives for his positions.

National self-defense

Walzer’s conception of just cause is among those threads of the tradition sometimes referred to as the aggressor/defender paradigm. In Walzer’s formulation, offensive war (war for any purpose other than defense) is always wrong. Defensive wars are assumed to be justified, except the defensive wars of societies engaged in massive human rights violations (genocide, enslavement, and widespread massacre).¹ One element of Walzer’s view is the idea that “no war, as medieval theologians explained, can be just on both sides.”² In Walzer’s understanding, all offensive war, or any armed attack on the political independence or territorial integrity of a sovereign state is a crime of aggression. “Nothing but aggression can justify war,” Walzer writes. “Nothing else warrants the use of force in international society.”³

Aggression is the name we give to the crime of war. We know the crime because of our knowledge of the peace it interrupts—not the mere absence of fighting, but peace-with-rights, a condition of liberty and security that can only exist in the absence of aggression itself. The wrong the aggressor commits is to force men and women to risk their lives for the sake of their rights. It is to confront them with the choice: your rights or (some of) your lives! … Aggression is remarkable because it is the only crime that states can commit against other states…. Aggression is a singular and undifferentiated crime because, in all its forms, it challenges rights that are worth dying for.⁴

The “rights worth dying for,” according to Walzer, are the rights of individuals to a community: “the rights of contemporary men and women to live as members of a historic community and to express their inherited culture through political forms worked out among themselves.”⁵ Walzer does not require that these historic communities exhibit any particular characteristics except that they are not subject to foreign coercion, and in that way they are “self-determining.”

He extends the right of self-defense (and the right to non-intervention) to severely repressive regimes: “Domestic heresy and injustice are never actionable in the world of states. Hence, again, the principle of non-intervention.”⁶ Walzer does make an exception to this rule; it’s not absolutely true for him that domestic injustice is never actionable in the world of states. Walzer holds that states are normally, but by no means always, the institutional arrangements by which people work out their community lives. He recognizes:

If no common life exists, or if the state doesn’t defend the common life that does exist, its own defense may have no moral justification. But 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.⁷

In other words, any first use of force (except justified pre-emptive self-defense) is aggression, and therefore, unjust. The party who retaliates is acting in self-defense, and this is almost always unconditionally justified for Walzer (except in the case of a slave society defending slavery or a genocidal government aiming to continue its genocide). The other jus ad bellum categories are assumed to be met if the situation is grave enough to say there is a just cause for war. I will say more about this in due course in Chapter 5, where I distinguish Walzer’s views from my own views on last resort, proportionality, reasonable hope of success, legitimate authority, and right intention. In this chapter, I am focusing on Walzer’s view of just cause.

There are wars where there is justice on neither side, “because justice doesn’t pertain to them or because the antagonists are both aggressors, fighting for territory or power where they have no right.”⁸ As a case in point, Walzer cites Lenin’s hypothetical example of such a conflict, between “a slave-owner who owned 100 slaves warring against a slave owner who owned 200 slaves for a more ‘just’ distribution of slaves.”⁹ Walzer thinks there is no right of self-defense on the part of a genocidal or slave state. However, all other states possess a right of self-defense against aggression. In Walzer’s formulation, aggression includes wars of humanitarian intervention against tyrannical regimes if the regime’s crimes do not rise to the level of genocide, widespread massacre, enslavement, or ethnic cleansing.

Collective self-defense: wars of law enforcement

Walzer writes, “Aggression justifies two kinds of violent response: a war of self-defense by the victim and a war of law enforcement by the victim and any other member of international society.”¹⁰ If one state is a victim of aggression, other states are entitled to join in its defense. There is a “presumption in favor of military resistance once aggression has begun” according to Walzer, because future would-be aggressors ought to be deterred, and the rights of states to political independence and territorial integrity ought to be maintained.¹¹ Walzer’s view is that the victim of aggression fights back not only in his own defense, but in defense of the international order and the rights of all members of international society (states) to political independence and territorial integrity. An attack on one member of international society is an attack on the rights of all states and upon the international legal order. Any member of the international society, therefore, is entitled to defend that order, and thereby the stability of the international states-system. Although third-party states are entitled to join in the defense of the victim of aggression, they are not bound to do so; all states have a right to remain neutral.¹²

One important quality to note about Walzer’s view of collective self-defense is that it is not motivated by charity, compassion, or the duty to assist a neighbor as such. It is the norm of non-intervention that is being defended as much as the state under attack. The entitlement of the third-party state to intervene is generated by the attack on the norm against aggression. It is the attack on the system, and its generation of insecurity for the third-party state and all other states that unanswered aggression poses, that generates this right of response by the third-party state.

Pre-emption

pre-emption, in Just and Unjust Wars, is a form of self-defense in which the victim of aggression defends itself with a first strike. For Walzer, preemption is justified “under sufficient threat,” which is “conceptually between ‘preventive war’ and ‘pre-emptive strike in response to imminent threat.’” Under sufficient threat means, according to Walzer, that three criteria are met:

First, there is a manifest intent to injure, made clear by some evidence; second, there is a degree of active preparation that makes that intent a positive danger, and third, a general situation in which waiting, or doing anything other than fighting, greatly magnifies the risk.¹³

Walzer’s concrete example of such a situation is the three weeks immediately prior to the Israeli pre-emptive strike in the Six-Day War of 1967.¹⁴ In this case, Egypt responded to a false report of Israeli troops massing on the Syrian border by placing Egyptian troops on “maximum alert,” massing their troops in the Sinai, expelling the United Nations from the Sinai and the Gaza Strip, and closing the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping on May 22, 1967 – this closure itself a casus belli. By the end of May, the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had announced that “if war came, the goal would be nothing less than the destruction of Israel”; Jordan, Syria, and Iraq announced their alliance with Egypt against Israel during the next two weeks. Diplomacy seemed to be useless. Israel pre-emptively launched attacks in what Walzer calls “a clear case of legitimate anticipation.” Israel, against most expectations, won that war in six days.

In response to more recent events, noting that the “old arguments did not take into account weapons of mass destruction,” Walzer has taken a slightly different view, but he has not fully elaborated a new doctrine. “Perhaps the gulf between preemption and prevention has now narrowed so that there is little strategic (and therefore little moral) difference between them.”¹⁵ Walzer’s discussion of preemption in Just and Unjust Wars does not include any mention of pre-emptive collective self-defense or pre-emptive humanitarian intervention.

Interventions

Generally speaking, for Walzer, the right to non-intervention and national self-defense is possessed by all sovereign states. Under normal circumstances, “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.”¹⁶ Walzer does, however, make three exceptions to this general rule. The three exceptions are in the cases of secession, counter-intervention in a civil war, and humanitarian intervention. I will discuss each of these rules of disregard in detail below, along with a fourth exception Walzer has added more recently, the case of failed states.

Walzer argues that the non-intervention norm may be disregarded in the following circumstances (the first three rules of disregard are elaborated in Just and Unjust Wars, the fourth in more recent work):¹⁷

1. when the particular set of boundaries clearly contains two or more political communities, one of which is already engaged in a large scale military struggle for independence; that is, when what is at issue is secession or “national liberation”;
2. when the boundaries have already been crossed by the armies of a foreign power, even if the crossing has been called for by one of the parties in a civil war, that is, when what is at issue is counter-intervention; and
3. when the violation of human rights within a set of boundaries is so terrible that it makes talk of community or self-determination or ‘arduous struggle’ seem cynical and irrelevant, that is, in cases of enslavement or massacre.¹⁸
4. Intervention in the case of a less than fully capable state; this is acceptable either to aid the individuals inside the state or in self-defense. Intervention is permissible in a failed state to stop widespread suffering and death due to state collapse and the ensuing chaos. Intervention is also within the borders of a state that is incapable of controlling the population within its borders (for example, Walzer made this argument about Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza¹⁹).

Exception 1: secessions

In his discussion of secessionist movements in Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate secessionist movements by what he calls the “test of self-help.”²⁰ The test of self help applies to governments, revolutionary movements, and secessionist groups: if the government, movement, or group can fight its own internal war successfully, it has met the test of self-help.

Intervention is permitted to aid the government against the rebels until such time as the secessionist movement can garner sufficient support to meet the test of self-help. After that, intervention on the part of either side is prohibited. Foreign powers must stay out and let the local balance work out on its own; such a fight is part of the process of self-determination. If foreign powers do not stay out, a counter-intervention is permitted on behalf of the other side, to restore the balance of forces to what it would have been, had the first, unjust intervention not occurred. Counter-intervention (not an initial intervention) is only permitted to aid a secessionist movement if the movement would have had sufficient support among the people to win a war against its government, and it is not permitted if it does not.

First, if the movement could win its freedom without external interference because a sufficient portion of the people is willing and able to fight, the movement meets the “test of self-help.” In such a case, foreign governments are no longer allowed to provide military assistance to the government; a strict rule of neutrality is now in force.²¹ Where a secessionist movement could win a revolt on its own without external assistance, Walzer’s theory is permissive in allowing foreign support, even military assistance, for the revolt. When the movement is strong enough to win on its own, Walzer’s theory endorses the movement’s claim to a self-determining political community. Its ability to fight its own war, successfully, is evidence that the movement represents the historic community’s self-determination.

For secessionist movements that cannot win a war of secession without foreign assistance, the rule of disregard does not apply. There is not a right to intervention (on the part of foreigners) to assist a secessionist movement, unless such assistance would not be necessary for the group to win in the absence of external force being brought to bear. There is not a right of intervention to assist the secessionist movement, even if it has met the self-help test, unless another foreign power has already intervened on behalf of the government. Walzer holds that if the movement is truly a legitimate movement, with standing among the people, it will succeed on its own. If it cannot succeed, it is because the people do not want it or perhaps because they think it is imprudent to rebel. Walzer makes no moral distinction between these two reasons. Whatever the people’s reasons, forei...