Michael Walzer. J. Toby Reiner. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: J. Toby Reiner
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
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isbn: 9781509526338
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of rights-violation such as ethnic cleansing warrant humanitarian intervention because such cases “shock the moral conscience” of humanity (Walzer 2015a: 107, 2007: 238–40). More routine rights-violations, and run-of-the-mill oppressors, must be dealt with locally if pluralist international society is to survive. The norm, then, is non-intervention (Walzer 1980a: 220, 2018: 55).

      The issue revolves around two competing approaches to military ethics. The emerging orthodoxy in the field is cosmopolitan: it seeks to rethink just wars as rights-protection on a global scale by establishing a world order comprised of “legitimate states” that are “minimally just” because they do their utmost to protect the human rights of their constituents (Orend 2013: 35–43). Thus, David Luban argues that just wars are not fought in defense of the sovereignty of states but of “socially basic human rights” (Luban 1980a: 175; see Shue 1980 for an account of basic rights). Cosmopolitan just-war theorists tend to criticize Walzer for using the legalist paradigm, which grants states’ rights to non-interference by analogy with individual rights (Doppelt 1978: 3–5). As Wasserstrom puts it, while the analogy would hold were citizens to have chosen the characteristics of their state, it is less clear that it does when states do not rest on consent. He concludes that unless “states have an independent, defensible claim to use the deadly force of war to resist all movements onto their territory or all attempts to alter their structure, the case against the initiation of war has not yet adequately been made out” (Wasserstrom 1978: 543).

      If just wars are fought to protect basic rights, Walzer makes several mistakes. First, he should not grant all states rights, just legitimate ones. Second, he should not insist that all just wars are wars of national defense but should broaden the scope for intervention such that wars fought to encourage rights-protection, reduce the likely incidence of future wars, and enhance the legitimacy of states around the world be considered just. Both Wasserstrom and Doppelt conclude that Walzer’s theory would not have allowed for intervention in apartheid South Africa, but should have done, while Luban insists that it ought to have allowed for intervention on behalf of the Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua in 1978 (Wasserstrom 1978: 544, Doppelt 1978: 23–4, Luban 1980a: 170–1). Neither the apartheid nor the Somoza regimes merited rights because they excluded the majority of the population from political participation and violated their basic rights. As a result, wars fought to establish legitimate regimes in those countries would, the critics suggest, have been legitimate.

      With regard to the cases his critics adduce, Walzer argues that intervention would have been warranted in apartheid South Africa, but because apartheid was not “ordinary oppression,” but rather a case of “near-slavery” that also constituted a national-liberation struggle (Walzer 1980a: 226). As a result, failure to intervene did not mean allowing a political process to work out the local meaning of freedom but denying the process itself. By contrast, Walzer denies that intervention in Nicaragua in defense of individual rights would have been legitimate. It would have violated “the rights of Nicaraguans as a group to shape their own political institutions and the rights of individual Nicaraguans to live under institutions so shaped” (227), and would pose a “radical challenge to communal integrity” (229), leading to remaking the whole world on liberal-democratic lines (229–32). The problem with such a remaking is its singularity, rejecting the history of social and political institutions in favor of granting wide latitude to international bureaucrats. Such a denial would lead to the destruction of common lives and make political participation on a local scale impossible. Yet, on Walzer’s account, participation in the community is one of the foremost individual rights because of its role in identity formation (234, Walzer 1983: 31–63).