By Michael Kocsis

Extensive Intervention

      In this section I will examine the arguments of Walzer's critics, and prepare to apply the model of sovereignty described above to some geopolitical conflicts. Each argument begins from the foundational claim that individual rights are the primary concern for moral theory, and each therefore challenges the claim that states are entitled to moral standing. Therefore these arguments expand the scope of human rights norms for both enforcement and intervention. Walzer's critics contend that the theory of non-intervention a) protects states that are not entitled to protection from foreign intervention, and b) justifies protection on moral claims that cannot be sustained.16

      David Luban and Richard Wasserstrom contend that Walzer's theory of non-intervention unreasonably emphasizes the right of people to defend their political autonomy and territorial integrity.17 Luban questions outright Walzer's analysis of the state-individual relationship, arguing instead that some states are essentially antagonistic to the interests of citizens. But in the process Luban responds directly to Walzer's argument from territorial integrity. Luban acknowledges that citizens can be expected to come to the defense of their states, that violations of human rights, as a part of the modern conduct of war, are a necessary outcome of forcible humanitarian intervention. But he draws a different conclusion from that claim. Luban argues that interventions are justified if they protect "socially basic human rights," which are rights of the same basic character described above. Wars to protect socially basic human rights are justified if they are "proportional" to the violations that motivate the war.18 Basic human rights, Luban says, are a basic unit of value, and they are therefore "worth fighting for." The only cases in which violations of basic human rights are justified are those cases where protection of the human rights of others is at stake, where interventionary war would violate fewer rights than it protected. An interesting aspect of this approach is that it contains a natural limitation on interventions; forcible interventions will only be justifiable in cases of widespread human rights violations. Thus Luban's theory justifies either more extensive or equivalent interventions, but it does not involve non-intervention or the doctrine of state sovereignty.

      But notice that this view of rights rests on some questionable claims. The most significant claim is that the question of intervention rests on a "utilitarian" calculation about the outcome of the intervention. It seems offensive to build on the claim that the rights of some individuals can be sacrificed in a trade-off over the rights of others.19 The purpose of human rights is to protect the "inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights" of individual human beings.20 And furthermore, the calculation seems just as comfortably to support Walzer's principles, depending on the position one takes on the moral standing of states. If one takes the position that political autonomy is a basic value of human well-being, as Luban clearly does not, than the calculation provides just as solid grounds to prohibit the intervention.

      I previously stated that Luban took issue with Walzer's conception of legitimacy. The second important argument against Walzer's theory of non-intervention develops this line of criticism. Charles Beitz is skeptical about the role state sovereignty can play in arguments about international morality. In Political Theory and International Relations, Beitz develops a cosmopolitan theory of international politics according to which global institutions, including global institutions of distributive justice, can be defended through an analogy with Rawls's liberal theory of justice.21 Beitz thinks that state sovereignty "brings a spurious order to complex and conflicting moral considerations."22 Being skeptical about the standing of state sovereignty as such, Beitz challenges Walzer's political autonomy argument by arguing that the communal integrity thesis cannot be sustained. According to Beitz, while the political history and institutional integrity of a state may be valuable, there are no independent grounds to establish that the political autonomy of a state is a value that should take precedence over other foundational values, in particular the values protected by human rights. State boundaries are relevant because they enclose a piece of territory in which a balanced political process distributes power and benefits and burdens through the population of that territory.

      Beitz argues that the character of the institutions in the territory can be judged independently of the history and culture of citizens. While he agrees with Walzer that history and balancing of interests has shaped all states, Beitz disagrees about the value and integrity of those institutions. He argues; "State boundaries are morally decisive barriers to intervention, in most cases, because they represent the outer limits of participation in [the political] process [of any state]. What needs explaining is why such a process deserves the special moral status Walzer gives it."23 Beitz thinks that there is no justifiable explanation. There are no definite characteristics of the contractual relationship to which Walzer appeals. The relationship between citizen rights and state sovereignty is based on the moral claim that states satisfy morally foundational preconditions. States can make claims of legitimacy, with which sovereignty rights are naturally associated, because state governments satisfy more fundamental rights of individual citizens.

      I said above that the challenge to Walzer's notion of legitimacy is an aspect of Luban's theory as well. Luban argues that Walzer falls prey to confusion between "horizontal" and "vertical" social contracts. A horizontal contract, Luban says, is one where "people bind themselves together prior to a state," where a vertical contract is one where a people merely accept the authority of a sovereign.24 Political legitimacy can only rest on a vertical contract, Luban says, because the state, as opposed to the nation, is at best an abstract vehicle that allows the people to consent to shared institutions. Walzer's horizontal contract, then, conflates the relations between states with the relations between states and individuals, and therefore fails to ground the claim that states are entitled to moral standing. This claim is reflected in Gerald Doppelt's argument as well. Doppelt thinks that "the right of an established government (free or unfree) to political sovereignty derives from its claim to protect from external encroachment what Walzer calls 'the common life' or 'independent community' which a people has shaped over a long period of time."25 Doppelt adds to Beitz's argument by pointing out that some states have been shaped in part by military interventions with diverse justifications that in fact benefited the sovereign state, and improved the conditions of individuals and the political communities as such. Essential to Walzer's notion of communal integrity is the claim that states have been shaped by historic development and institutional transformation. Doppelt suggests that since many contemporary states were shaped in part by military intervention we have less reason to think that the uninterrupted or entirely autonomous development of a political community is not the real source of legitimacy claims; legitimacy lies somewhere other than shared history or affection toward compatriots. Both Doppelt and Beitz, then, argue that Walzer's theory of non-intervention relies on an unsustainable theory of communal integrity. Walzer's theory considers illegitimate states legitimate, and therefore prohibits justifiable interventions.

      Another position develops this unifying aspect of the cosmopolitan challenge to state sovereignty. Kok-Chor Tan provides a model of legitimate intervention that does not rest on the principle of non-intervention, which Tan views as unsustainable. According to Tan, intervention is permissible when the following conditions obtain;

a) when the basic human rights of a people are actively being violated by their state, b) when intervention can be scaled proportionally to the grade of human rights abuse, c) when the intervention is welcomed by the oppressed, and d) when the objectives of intervention are noble, i.e., when the intervention is not a screen for a strategic interest.26 These restrictions (as a conjunctive set) would leave a far wider scope for interventions than Walzer's; in particular interventions designed to institute and protect the second class of human rights would be authorized, whereas on Walzer's theory they would not. For many, this set of parameters represents the ideal international order, the ideal model of human rights enforcement.

      Notice that an upshot of condition d is that intervention will likely only be permissible where other members of the international community authorize them. Authorization might include the full body of states, or more likely it might include a subset of interested states, like the UN Security Council. This is an important point, because it demonstrates that the cosmopolitan model is consistent with the conception of global political institutions which are at the heart of the internationalist enforcement model. This model seems to assume an adequate adjudication or enforcement mechanism where none exists. Even if interventions could be regulated by some family of normative principles, if those principles were accepted as part of a binding moral system for state conduct they would have to be accepted by independent states. For the system to bring about consensus among independent states it would have to recognize some aspect of state sovereignty injustifying humanitarian intervention. When the conditions are arranged as a set they seem to come to the same conclusions as the non-intervention principle. The argument rests instead on a set of stipulations, which effectively enforces, in my view, the moral elements of the non-intervention principle. If the theory does not enforce the non-intervention principle, it would authorize interventions that states could not be reasonably expected to accept.

      This illustrates the core conflict between internationalist and cosmopolitan models of human rights enforcement. On both models international legal and political institutions generate issues of fairness, but the models differ with respect to how these issues should be resolved. Internationalists think that human rights issues, excluding extreme violations of basic rights, should be resolved within the boundaries of political communities, but cosmopolitans think that resolution should not consider the saliency of state boundaries. Both models acknowledge obligations to individuals independent of state boundaries (these obligations are stated in human rights norms). But cosmopolitans ask why state boundaries seem to dissolve our acknowledged obligations to individuals--internationalists recognize the concept of state sovereignty in human rights enforcement, cosmopolitans reject the concept. Where, to ask the question bluntly, do our obligations to individual persons go? I think this is the "organizing centre" of the critique of Walzer's theory, and I think that an emphasis on the features of the abstract social contract will illuminate the conflict.

      The distinction is further established in the dual notions of legitimacy that frame the debate between Walzer and his critics. Walzer has an inclusive notion of legitimacy in mind, his critics however prefer to make the term coextensive with "liberal-democratic" or "republican." Kant thought that legitimacy was a matter of degree, and his justification for this claim is revealing. According to Kant, democratic states enjoy unqualified legitimacy, or what we might call an ideal fit, between government and citizens. Apart from "structurally" legitimate states there are states that are a) historically necessary precursors of legitimate states, and b) states governed "in the spirit" of structurally legitimate states.27 Other states are illegitimate. Walzer's view is that since rights and duties, as well as benefits and burdens are distributed among inhabitants in a sovereign territory, the territory must be protected against external interference. Where a particular state belongs along Kant's three-way distinction is a matter to be worked out domestically, because it can't be worked out anywhere else, and because the potential harm of interference raises the threshold of justification for intervention. Or, to put the claim in Luban's language, the social contract at the core of the internationalist ideal of legitimacy is not necessarily vertical and not necessarily horizontal; it takes its form on the basis of a political and cultural tradition, developed through enduring social institutions. There is a moral question to be answered in this debate, and Walzer's is the approach that takes seriously the constraints imposed on that question by objective conditions. Recognizing that state boundaries are an aspect of international politics, Rawls says, "reconciles us to our political and social condition," in the sense that it respects the real features of our political world.28

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