Challenges to the nation-state model in the contemporary world come not just from increased cultural diversity within state boundaries, but also from the globalization of the world economy and the growth of transnational governance institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. One of the major growth areas in political theory in the last thirty years has been exploration of the ethical issues raised by these changes (for introductory overviews, see Armstrong 2012, Hutchings 2010). In 1993, Walzer commented that this was, along with the study of civil society, one of two major growth areas in the discipline (Walzer 1993c).
Much of this work is cosmopolitan in spirit; that is, it seeks to develop normative principles that take individual human beings as the ultimate unit of moral concern, that apply universally, and that are binding on all moral agents (Caney 2005: 3–7, Beitz 1999: 3–10, O’Neill 2000: 1–7). Cosmopolitanism does not necessarily entail a call for global government, but it requires taking all human beings to be of equal value. This renders problematic claims that nations or communities are entitled to privilege their citizens or members over other human beings.1 Rather, cosmopolitans seek the more effective protection and enforcement of human rights around the globe. Thus, both the critics of Walzer’s restrictive position on humanitarian intervention discussed in Chapter 1 and the revisionist just-war theorists considered in Chapter 2 take cosmopolitanism as an inspiration.
Scholars have developed cosmopolitan positions in several areas relevant to Walzer’s work. These form the basis of this chapter. First, some have called for principles of jus post bellum (justice after war), involving regime change and rehabilitation to ensure that states become rights-respecting members of the global community (Orend 2000: 135–52, 2013: 160–219, Patterson 2012a, 2012b, Evans 2009, 2012). Second, many have argued for global justice, taking that to require substantial redistribution of resources from wealthy to poor areas of the world so as to reduce inequality (Beitz 1999, Caney 2005, Miklos 2013; but cf. Rawls 1999: 113–21). Third, some have sought to develop schemes of global governance to ensure stability and rights-protection.
Cosmopolitanism is a major challenge to Walzer’s commitment to international pluralism in general and to his interpretivist social-meaning thesis in particular. In many ways, it is the global extension of liberal egalitarianism, and as such challenges Walzer’s social-democratic position to come up with some formal principles that ensure equality. Walzer’s claim that value is always a cultural product seems to suggest that there is no metric by virtue of which human beings around the world can be judged equals. Indeed, he has been and remains skeptical of major aspects of the cosmopolitan position, in particular of global distributive justice. This is an important challenge for an egalitarian theory, for the major inequalities in the contemporary world are across, not within, borders (for statistics, see Armstrong 2012: 14–15). This raises the question of whether social democracy can coherently claim that egalitarianism must rest on meanings specific to particular societies if that means not addressing the greatest inequalities.
Over time, Walzer has adopted some internationalist language (Walzer 2018: 35–52), and incorporated more elements of human-rights discourse, accepting a global duty to prevent massacre and famine (Walzer 2007: 251–63). While Walzer’s position has shifted,2 he remains committed to the view that states must be the primary actors in global politics, and so to at most a minimal form of global justice (Walzer 2018: 98–115), and remains a key critic of cosmopolitanism. Walzer’s account accepts the need for improvements in global governance, but contributes a corrective to universalist political theory on the grounds that the “great advantage of today’s world order is its pluralism” (Walzer 2018: 116). He suggests that egalitarian improvements should focus mostly on improving states and global civil society and only secondarily on global institutions (134–5). This reiterates the claim made in criticizing Rawlsian liberals that equality is a political relationship that overcomes subordination and oppression, not a measurement of possessions.
Since the turn of the millennium, one of the growth areas in cosmopolitan thought has involved theorizing about principles to govern the termination of conflict, on the grounds that just-war theory must do more than it has traditionally done to prevent the outbreak of war by providing post-conflict principles that avert the danger of descent into chaos. This serves to make war less likely in the first place and so to answer the pacifist claim that just-war theory is too sanguine about the inevitability of war. Post-war settlement was increasingly important in the post-Cold War world because of the renewal of ethnic conflict across both Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, which increased the need for both humanitarian intervention and the use of military force in “chaotic arenas of insecurity” (Patterson 2012b: 7–8). Theorizing about justice after war can contribute to a more peaceful and just world by linking military ethics to domestic principles of justice, most notably to human rights. Advocates of jus post bellum reject the legalist paradigm that guides Walzer’s just-war theory in favor of a model of rehabilitation that seeks to ensure that aggressor regimes are reconstituted as “progressive member[s] of the international community” (Orend 2012: 183–4, Orend 2002). The theory thus breaks with the view that just wars are limited in their ends by the principles of political sovereignty and territorial integrity, bolstering the cosmopolitan conception that just wars are a form of global law enforcement. Jus post bellum seeks to break the cycle of violence and promote a world in which rights are more uniformly respected across state boundaries (Lucas 2012).
In Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer devoted relatively little attention to war’s aftermath, although he did consider the importance of war crimes tribunals for political leaders who start aggressive wars (Walzer 2015a: 287–96) and for soldiers who commit in-bello atrocities (304–23). This is because he followed the traditional paradigm in assuming that post-war settlements should focus on a “better peace,” meaning one “more secure than the status quo ante bellum, less vulnerable to territorial expansion, safer for ordinary men and women and for their domestic self-determinations” (122). Walzer insisted that these words be used relatively. Just-war theory cannot ensure perfect safety, whatever that might mean, because the ends of war are limited by “the rights of nations, even of enemy nations, to continued national existence and, except in extreme circumstances, to the political prerogatives of nationality” (122–3). Thus, although post-war settlements should ensure that the conditions that caused the war be changed to prevent a new war, they cannot require the remaking of the world order to encourage the spread of liberal, rights-respecting regimes. Extending this principle, Walzer argued that humanitarian intervention, too, should end with the cessation of rights-violations, not with democratization. Interveners should be guided by a rule of “in and quickly out” (Walzer 2007: 246–7).
Commenting on this, Orend argues that Walzer’s model treats post-war justice as essentially about revenge, requiring apologies from aggressors, war-crimes tribunals, demilitarization, and abandonment of territorial gains (Orend 2013: 179–81). By contrast, his model seeks rehabilitation of aggressors, rejecting sanctions or compensation payments, and espousing regime change instead so as to ensure the construction of “minimally just” states that do what they can to respect human rights (187; see also Luban 1980a). However, Walzer’s motivation was in fact his commitment to collective self-determination, which he holds to be a crucial individual right that aids participation in a common life (Walzer 1980a: 234). This commitment follows from Walzer’s foundational belief in social meanings as the bedrock of philosophical theorizing, which implies that there is no one right way to determine political questions, and thus insists on pluralism of political forms. As Walzer argues, rather than assuming that their preferred set of institutions and norms are right for all peoples, outsiders ought to presume in the first instance a fit between government and community (Walzer 1980a). Politically, although Walzer is critical of what he takes to be the “default position” on the American left – that the use of force overseas is almost always unjustified (Walzer 2018: 1–8) – he is wary enough of American power to suggest that leftists should advocate “self-limited hegemony” (91), which requires mutuality rather than regime change.
However, Walzer’s position has shifted over the years, and he now accepts a need for jus post bellum (Walzer 2012b). He has also modified the post-intervention strategy to “in and finally out” (Walzer 2007: 247–8; for application to the case of Iraq after 2003, Walzer and Mills 2009). Jus post bellum, on Walzer’s current view, reflects the need for war to aim at “social justice in its minimal sense: the creation of a safe and decent society” (Walzer 2012b: 45). This modification reflects Walzer’s adoption in Thick and Thin (1994) of a minimal universal morality, which admits of certain standards that ought to hold everywhere. It is also the result of political change: since the 1990s, Walzer’s sense has been that state disintegration or collapse, as happened in Somalia and Sierra Leone, was a danger greater than Western imperialism (Walzer 2004b: 67–73). In such cases, conflict results from a “decentralized, anarchic, almost random” brutality and oppression (Walzer 2007: 240). In other cases, such as the Rwandan genocide, the absence of Western geopolitical interests means that there is greater likelihood of non-intervention in an event that really does shock the conscience of humanity than of unwarranted intervention (Walzer 2007: 244–5). In recent years, Libya and Syria probably meet either or both of these conditions.
In such circumstances, the problem is the “collapse of any effective government,” resulting in a “widely dispersed, disorganized, and murderous war of some against some” (Walzer 2004b: 70). Given Walzer’s commitment to self-determination, the view that there is a need for justice after war to ensure that such situations are avoided and that everyone, everywhere has membership in a functioning political community seems more continuous with his older thought than at first blush. However, it does lead him to the view that leftist opposition to establishing protectorates or trusteeships so as to ensure the minimal functioning of government must be rethought (Walzer 2007: 247, 2004b: 75–7). Although communities are entitled to self-determination, and so principles of jus post bellum must avoid remaking the entire world on the Western liberal model, some post-war reconstruction to enable the project of self-determination to restart must be legitimate. Yet Walzer remains committed to a minimal notion of jus post bellum that respects international pluralism and, in particular, is insistent that the replacement of just wars by global law enforcement carried out by an international force is not an imminent possibility and should be regarded with skepticism (Walzer 2004b: 80–1).
Walzer’s position, then, is cautious about the cosmopolitan project of extending rights-protection globally, but does accept the need for some movement in that direction. Walzer argues that, in the contemporary world, there is a case for global enforcement of rights to be protected from famine, malnutrition, and pandemic disease (Walzer 2007: 257–9, 2018: 98–115). On Walzer’s account, the argument is analogous to that in favor of humanitarian intervention. States are there to protect people’s rights, so when they fail to do that, interventions allow others to step in. Given that, as scholars such as Amartya Sen and Iris Young have shown, “famine, exactly like massacre, is caused by malevolent or (probably more often) by negligent human agents,” access to the necessities of life is also a right that can be enforced (Walzer 2007: 258, Young 2007, Sen 2009: 342–5). Walzer concludes that states, NGOs, and the UN have obligations to enable and implement rights to subsistence in cases in which states cannot do so. More importantly, international institutions ought to foster states that can provide subsistence and protection against disease, because people have “a right to a … decent state that protects their rights” (Walzer 2007: 260). Interestingly, this position combines acceptance of the cosmopolitan view that states must be “decent,” where decency entails protecting rights, with Walzer’s longstanding commitment to the pluralist view that rights to self-determination set a sharp limit on the cosmopolitan project by insisting on the right to membership in a particular community that may absent itself from global norms. This means striking a balance between pluralism and cosmopolitanism, by accepting minimal global rights-enforcement combined with diversity of social arrangements above that floor.
Walzer specifies his preferred sense of where that balance lies in “Governing the Globe” (Walzer 2000). Walzer notes that there is a continuum of global political arrangements from left to right of the political spectrum, with a world state on what many think of as the left end and international anarchy on what most take to be the right (Walzer 2000: 171–2). That is, the left side of the spectrum is a “realm of unity” tending toward greater global governance, while the right is a “realm of pluralism” tending toward maintenance of the international state system (176). Cosmopolitans’ tendency is to move toward the left end of the spectrum so as to maximize rights protection, although many are not legal cosmopolitans who want to reform global politics entirely in the direction of a world state. Walzer views the pluralism of the international system as a source of strength and is wary of a world state not only on the Kantian grounds that such a state might become tyrannical or despotic but also because of the threat it would pose to cultural and religious diversity (176). Walzer thus argues that leftists should worry about greater centralization and that their task is to “overcome the radical decentralization of sovereign states without creating a single all-powerful central regime” (186). In order to do this, Walzer maps out seven possible political arrangements, from global state on the left through anarchy on the right, and defends the median position, which he calls the “third degree of global pluralism” (186).
This degree would involve building on the international institutions that currently exist while avoiding either a unified state or even a federation of nation-states (Walzer 2000: 186–7). Such global pluralism would contain a strong UN with powerful peacekeeping forces but with important checks on when they could be used. It would require a world court with power to arrest war criminals but that needed UN support before making arrests. Additionally, it would require a global civil society in which associations such as labor unions and political parties reached across state boundaries but in which regional centers remained significant assurances of diversity (187–8). Walzer recognizes that this system would contain disadvantages – in particular, there would be peacekeeping failures, difficulties in promoting global equality, and moments in which liberty was insufficiently protected (189–90). It is thus unlikely to satisfy cosmopolitans, for whom rights-protection is the sine qua non of political legitimacy. However, Walzer argues, this reflects the lack of interest in political processes for which he has so often criticized liberal philosophers (especially Walzer 1980a, 1981, 1984, 1989/90). Cosmopolitanism is, if it is anything, the global extension of liberal theory. So, it is no surprise that Walzer’s modified pluralism will not please cosmopolitans.
In defending his position, Walzer rehearses with particular clarity his critique of philosophical liberalism for being anti-political. He argues that, to
appreciate the beauty of this pluralist arrangement, one must attach a greater value to political possibility, and the activism it breeds, than to the certainty of political success. To my mind, certainty is always a fantasy, but I don’t want to deny that something is lost when one gives up the more unitary version of globalism. What is lost is the hope of creating a more egalitarian world with a stroke of the pen – a single legislative act enforced from a single center. And the hope of achieving perpetual peace … And the hope of a singular citizenship and a singular identity for all human individuals.
(Walzer 2000: 188)
Walzer’s opposition to an ambitious cosmopolitan position stems from the view, absorbed from earlier generations on Dissent, that progress toward justice must emerge from social and political movements that seek to address particular concerns in particular places, not from abstract theory. Importantly, as Irving Howe wrote, they must achieve their goals via “steady work” (Walzer 2018: xii). The most basic rights must indeed be assured, but beyond that, movement toward a global liberal order would sacrifice important values embedded imperfectly in the existing international order, notably participation and activism within smaller units built to a human scale.3 The dangers of tyranny or intellectual authoritarianism in a world marked by strong global centralization are sufficient to require accepting the risk of some rights-violations so as to maintain the possibility of collective political action (see also Benbaji 2014). While the “third degree of pluralism really is a move” from the current system of independent states (Walzer 2000: 191), it seeks to ensure a balance between rights-protection and leaving room for egalitarian political activism. Walzer thus concludes by rejecting claims to a more expansive set of human rights beyond those to protection from famine and disease, such as rights to educational equality (Walzer 2007: 261–2). Moral universalism covers threats to the continuation of life itself, but other egalitarian values must be defended within a thicker local morality. This reiterates the claim that equality must be equality of a particular place.
Walzer’s pluralism is importantly also a critique of major currents in American left politics. In his most recent book, A Foreign Policy for the Left (2018), Walzer rejects the “default position” – which opposes the use of force, especially by the United States, in favor of support for the United Nations, International Criminal Court, and other global organizations (Walzer 2018: 1–8). On Walzer’s account, an important corollary to this position is a type of leftist cosmopolitanism that is hostile to all nationalisms but especially to those of the USA and Israel (118; for an example of the sort of position Walzer has in mind, see Rule 1992), and that seeks to replace the system of sovereign nation-states with greater internationalism. Walzer calls this position the “art of pretending,” because it proceeds as if institutions such as the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, and the international courts can be construed as though they were a nascent world government (128–33). Walzer rejects this view because the “world is not a political unit for which anybody feels responsible in the way (some) political elites in domestic societies feel responsible for the fate of their country” (129). He urges instead that the appropriate left internationalist task is not the rejection but the completion of the state system. This means that leftist work should bolster weaker states so as to move toward providing all people with a decent state that can provide citizens with rights. This means recognizing that there is value in statehood (134), not the least of which is that rights must be created before they can be enforced. In the contemporary world, “states are the critical agents of rights enforcement” (Walzer 2007: 260), as they are the only extant entity the normative purpose of which is enforcement of particular peoples’ rights. This means that security for human beings is more likely achieved by strengthening than denying the power of states to enforce rights.
Walzer’s position is, as he notes (135), more reformist than revolutionary: it seeks to improve the nation-state system, not to transcend it. That is in keeping with his longstanding commitment to social criticism, which proceeds from the starting point that the world in which we live is of value to us and contains the resources for its own improvement. Walzer notes that in the era of right-wing nationalism, leftists must find a “way to accommodate national feelings and defeat nationalist zealotry” (124–5). That requires insisting on limits to the sovereignty of states while granting the right to pursue collective governance within those limits.
Given that Walzer brands himself an egalitarian, a reader might expect that he would be sympathetic to the project of such theorists as Charles Beitz (Beitz 1999) to extend John Rawls’s theory of justice (Rawls 1971) to the global level. Beitz argues that the original position that Rawls invokes ought to be global rather than national in scope (see discussion of Rawls in Chapter 3). Walzer is of course a critic of Rawls, but Beitz’s claim is in part based on emerging international norms, not abstract theory. That is, Beitz argues that what makes transnational redistribution a moral imperative is the increasing globalization of the world economy, which renders states interdependent and thus requires that their interactions be governed by norms of reciprocity (Beitz 1999: 3–5, 129–36, 143–54). Following Beitz, many political theorists have argued for global principles of redistribution to ensure greater equality between rich and poor, often appealing to Rawls’s theory and the increasing interconnections of global economic life (see Caney 2005 for an approach that does not do this). The appeal to recent changes in international life seems to make at least some of this work the sort of contextual account that Walzer himself seeks to invoke.
However, Walzer mostly rejects the notion of global justice. He accepts a humanitarian duty of mutual aid (Walzer 2018: 102), but denies the claim that globalization makes it desirable, or even possible, to enact a version of distributive justice across borders. Walzer insists that what the global poor most need are effective states of their own within which they can pursue projects of domestic justice more successfully (Walzer 2018: 98–117, 1994a: 21–40, 2004a: 131–40). Indeed, Walzer calls Rawls’s attempts to deny that the logic of his theory is such that the original position ought to be global in scope “heroic” (Walzer 2004a: 176, n. 7, citing Rawls 1999: 64–70), in recognition of narrowing of the gap between their worldviews by the 1990s. As with human rights, Walzer’s position is that a minimalist version of global justice is indeed necessary, to ensure relief to those in need and to repair local political institutions such that communities can be self-determining and prosperous (Walzer 2018: 115). However, because distributive justice is something that must be determined within a community, both because meanings are cultural and because justice can only be produced through political action, he rejects more ambitious or maximalist global justice. The best way to sum up his position is his own: “everyone should have the justice they need right now so that they can pursue the justice they will never finally have” (115). That is, minimal global justice enables the unfinishable project of domestic justice to proceed.
What’s wrong with the argument that globalization makes distributive justice applicable across the world? Walzer has several criticisms. First, he notes, there is no “global agent of justice”; that is, no global government that can enforce the project (Walzer 2018: 99). However, this could of course be rectified, and advocates of global justice argue that it should be by, for example, taxation on emissions of fossil fuels wherever they happen to occur. The advantage of such a scheme would be that it did not require a world state, but just the sort of improvement to the state system for which Walzer calls. More important to Walzer’s case, then, is the fact that the versions of global justice differ radically (99). While the same is true to some extent locally, this claim leads to Walzer’s most important argument: “we can’t be sure that whatever story we tell will be understood in the same way by everyone who hears it … The story won’t connect with a universal common life with interests and ideals that might make it comprehensible” (99–100). This claim restates the view that animates Walzerian distributive justice: that meanings are always cultural in form and are not shared by different cultures. Even where different communities understand the same language, or know the meaning of terms from other languages, the denotation of familiar terms will always have a local inflection (Walzer 1994a: 1–19). Or, put differently, the goods that are available for redistribution are social products with particular meanings in each place (Walzer 1983: 6, Reiner 2016). If, as Walzer argues, this is true even of foodstuffs and other necessities of life, how much more so will it be true of money, the good most likely to be redistributed globally, bearing in mind that cultures differ radically in the degree of their materialism?
Walzer’s view is an example of what the literature sometimes calls a “metric objection” to global justice (Armstrong 2012: 90–1, 102–3; see Miller 20007 for the most important example of this argument). This view suggests that we have no way of measuring equality globally, given the different values held by people around the world. There are some things, of course, that we all need to survive, but many of our desires are either culturally inflected or idiosyncratic or some combination of both. Redistributing money to a monk who has taken a vow of poverty or to a Buddhist committed to the Noble Truth that suffering is caused by desire may not benefit them. For Walzer, equality must always be recognized as such by the beneficiaries of the redistribution that seeks to create equality, because the point of an egalitarian theory is to overcome domination. As he puts it in Spheres, “Simple equality is a simple distributive condition, so that if I have fourteen hats, and you have fourteen hats, we are equal … On [my] view … however, we simply have the same number of hats … Equality is a complex relation of persons … not an identity of possessions” (Walzer 1983: 18). Equality is possible within a society, Walzer’s cultural theory of goods suggests, because there is sufficient commonality of interest to make a roughly equivalent condition plausible and to prevent domination and oppression. Yet the same does not hold globally, at least not yet (Walzer 2018: 101).
What we need is minimal global justice, which involves “recognition that other people are like ourselves, sympathy with their suffering, and a few widely shared moral principles” (101). The major forms this minimal justice will take are relief and repair. Relief is the global humanitarian project of mutual aid against the victims of disaster, whether they be floods, earthquakes, famines, or massacres. None of these can be thought of as simply natural, because “their effects are often aggravated by malevolent or negligent human agents” (102). Humanitarian relief comes largely from voluntary organizations and citizens, but requires also concerted state action (102–5). Walzer notes that it is a vexed issue how much time and money individuals ought to give. In this sense, humanitarian aid is an imperfect duty, in that it falls on no one agent to relieve all suffering. This is one reason for institutional reform.
Repair is the political project of the left (105–10) and involves bolstering political institutions, both domestic and international. Walzer notes that most poverty is the result of “political plunder, economic disruption, civil war, and mass flight” assisted by terms of trade that allow people from afar to profit from local disaster by selling weapons, bribing officials, deregulating the economy, and accepting plundered money (105–6). Rectifying this situation would require working through the sovereign state system to enable the struggle for domestic justice (110). What Walzer means is that functioning states provide the necessary means through which citizens prevent disasters and pursue in their own way a vision of the common life. This is a pluralist vision that would “[l]et a hundred flowers bloom” (111).4 Yet it also involves structural reform at the global level, rejecting the “neo-liberal version of a global economy” governed by free trade in favor of effective international regulation that enables states to act as the “crucial agent of self-help” (107–9). Minimal global justice ensures that every community can govern itself effectively, but does not aim at equality across the world, not least because it doubts whether such a notion is comprehensible, let alone desirable.
Walzer’s vexed relationship with American left politics is nowhere more strained than on international justice – indeed, his most recent book is a critique of dominant leftist views (Walzer 2018; see also 2002a, 2003, 2005). The crux of the issue is that Walzer insists on pluralism, which leaves him hostile to attempts to ensure greater global equality. But what animates the dispute is mostly political vision: Walzer rejects the worldview that sees the USA as a new empire dominating the world without challenge, insisting that it is more accurately seen as a hegemon that cannot always gets its way and must rely on cooperation and consensus (Walzer 2018: 77–97). Even more significant is Israel. Walzer’s Zionism puts him in tension with advocates of Palestinian liberation, even though he supports Palestinian nationhood. This leads many on the left – including some in his own magazine, Dissent (Rule 1992, 2012, Slater 2007) – to deny his leftist credentials (Said 1986, discussed in Chapter 7, is the classic statement). Walzer views anti-Israel sentiment as one of the most important “shortcuts” that undermines the “decency” of common versions of leftism (Walzer 2018: 32),5 and argues that it leads leftists into unwise support for authoritarian regimes so long as they oppose American and Israeli interests (32–3). In insisting that left positions must oppose authoritarianism, Walzer follows in the footsteps of predecessors on Dissent, who spent much of the 1950s and 1960s arguing that neither the Soviet Union nor Cuba nor China were good models for socialism (Howe and Coser 1955, Coser 1954; for discussion, Reiner 2017a). Walzer claims that what the left needs is a critique of the USA within limits, and that that requires telling a story of world politics that is less holistic and readier to accept nuance in its image of global affairs, attempting to aid those in trouble without trying to remake the world entirely. Yet this puts Walzer’s nationalism under the microscope and is a key test of his social-meaning thesis. Can we combine commitment to the downtrodden with any sort of loyalty to powerful global actors? This is one of the central questions of Chapters 7 and 8.