Walzer chapters 6, "Interventions"

Overview: Walzer is discussing 4 additional modifications of the legalist paradigm. (The first was pre-emptive strike, chapter 5.)

The legalist paradigm makes respecting sovereignty a nearly absolute requirement. Walzer claims that his guiding principle is that modifications in the legalist paradigm must all be ways of upholding the values of individual life and communal liberty, which is the whole purpose of sovereignty. Boundary crossing are acceptable only where they are not serving their original purpose of protecting communal autonomy. Usually protecting and upholding communal autonomy requires nonintervention; the exceptions to the legalist paradigm allow crossing boundaries to achieve the same goal, upholding communal autonomy.

Secessionist movements (struggles for “national liberation”)

1. Consistent with this notion, Walzer claims that members of a political community must seek their own freedom, that self-determination is the right of people (quoting Mill) “to become free by their own efforts” if they can and that no foreign power should intervene to insure success. This means that people have no right to be protected against their own domestic failure or even to be protected against a bloody repression. He expresses some sympathy for Mill’s idea that citizens get the government they deserve. (p. 88) Do you agree with this?

2. A big problem is that “it isn’t always clear when a community is in fact self-determining.” (p. 89) With a secessionist movement the problem is “one cannot be sure that it in fact represents a distinct community” until it gets popular support (p. 93). If it is not a distinct community and one crosses boundaries to help, one is then interfering in a domestic conflict. He considers Hungary in 1948 a classic case of a distinct political community, distinct from the larger Austria-controlled Hapsburg Empire. It is Austria that is a foreign power from which the Hungarians are trying to free themselves. What makes Hungary so clearly a distinct community for Walzer? Do you have any problem with the way he treats minority (Slavic) groups within Hungary? Consider how this relates to similar issues today. Was Serbia clearly separate from “Yugoslavia”? Is Montenegro a distinct community from Serbia? Is Kosovo? Is Chechnya a distinct community from Russia? Tibet from China? Kurdistan from Turkey or Iraq? The Nation of Islam from the United States? How do you decide?

Civil Wars

3. How does the key principle of upholding communal autonomy get expressed when the issue is whether to intervene in a civil war? Here (by definition of “civil war”) the conflict is domestic, so why might intervention by an outside power ever be permissible?

4. Generally, outside governments are allowed to help an established government that faces internal dissension (e.g., a small rebel group). When does this change to a civil war?

Humanitarian Intervention

5. Walzer says “domestic tyrants are safe” and, above, that people have to win their own freedom and should not be rescued even from repression. (Self-determination can exist for people who do not have a democratic government.) But this only applies to “ordinary repression.”

a) What might be the moral reason for not permitting outside intervention to improve the life of people who are subject to a repressive government?

b) When does repression become so out of the ordinary for Walzer that an outside power may intervene; i.e., when the people do not have to win their own freedom by their own efforts? Do you think Walzer has formulated the right standard here (i.e., that he has drawn this difficult line in about the right place)?

6. A strong condition is that the outside power that intervenes for humanitarian reasons (and to help national liberation struggles (secessionist movements) “must, to some degree, enter into the purposes of those people” being helped. (my emphasis) The intervening political power cannot have a strong agenda of its own (though he recognizes that there will usually be mixed motives).

7. Intervention for humanitarian reasons is a major issue in the world today. Do the US interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo meet Walzer’s conditions for an appropriate intervention?