after reading the PDF Walzer, then you will do it Walzer raises serious questions about the Supreme Emergency vs. the political need for unconditional surrender. In Chapter 16 of Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer affirms a doctrine he calls Supreme Emergenc
Michelle_Michy
201710032239502006_walzer.pdf
A discussion with Michael Walzer April 2006
Since the publication in 1977 of his book on war, Just and Unjust Wars (which has since
become a classic), Michael Walzer is one of the outstanding thinkers on just war theory,
terrorism and war in general. His numerous books – which have been translated in more
than 10 languages - include Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship
(Harvard University Press, 1970), Spheres of Justice (Basic Books, 1983), On Toleration
(Yale University Press, 1997) and more recently Arguing about War (Yale University
Press, 2004).
Prof. Walzer, who is the UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies
at Princeton University (USA), is also the author of numerous articles on war, terrorism
and other related issues and the editor of Dissent magazine.
Terrorism and supreme emergencies
Terrorisme.net – Prof. Walzer, you defend the principle of non-combatant immunity. However
in extreme cases, this principle may be overridden. These cases are called “supreme
emergencies”. You define two conditions for those emergencies: the imminence of a certain
danger and its nature (it must be “of an unusual and horrifying kind”). Recent studies have
shown that people defending fundamentalist worldviews very often consider that the threat
they are facing is of an “unusual and horrifying kind” (linked to the “devil”) and
simultaneously is already at work against them and their fellow believers. In one of your
articles, you wrote that terrorism could be justified “only if the oppression to which the
terrorists claimed to be responding was genocidal in character”. Could not certain
fundamentalists practicing violence invoke the argument of “supreme emergencies” to justify
their deeds, in addition to the religious justification?
Michael Walzer – It is a problem with all political and moral terms: they can be used in ways
that the people who first used them did not intend. So, for example, Communist Bulgaria
could be called a people’s democracy. I think of supreme emergency as an objective
condition, which means that the danger has really to be imminent and has to be, realistically,
of an unusual and horrifying kind. So I would not want to recognize religious fantasies as
cases of supreme emergency. However in Bosnia it was not a fantasy, there really was terrible
violence. But there also was non-terrorist resistance, and there was a good chance of working
for the kind of intervention that eventually occurred. So you were pretty far from the stage I
would think when the resort to something like the killing of innocent people could possibly be
excused.
Terrorisme.net – But if I attempt to place myself in those people’s framework, they will
probably objectively tell you that the so-called “Ummah” is under attack.
Michael Walzer – Yes, but you will have to explain to them that it is not the case in the sense
that they are claiming that it is the case. These kinds of arguments go on all the time in
politics. There is no way of devising a moral language that is going to settle these arguments
in advance. There is no a priori formulation that is going to set you free from those
difficulties. The Bulgarian Communists would have said that they really did represent the
working class, and the working class was the majority, and this was a democracy. And you
would have to say “no, that is not the case,” and then explain what democracy in fact requires.
And that is all you can do. This is a common feature of political debate; it is like “one man’s
freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist”--and all you can do is to disagree with that and
offer a definition of terrorism and of freedom fighting that distinguishes the two.
But there is also another just war criteria that I do not talk about much because it raises all
kinds of problems of its own: it is the “effectiveness” of what you are doing, the criteria of the
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“probability of winning”. For example, a Jewish terrorist campaign against German civilians
in 1943 would certainly not have been effective in saving Jewish lives. And a terrorist
campaign in Bosnia would also have been ineffective; it would only have made the Serbs look
better. It would not have enforced the moral distinction that intervention was eventually based
on.
Terrorisme.net – In your article “9/11: five questions about terrorism” (2002), you define
terrorism as the “deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, in order to spread fear
through a whole population and force the hand of its political leaders”. In your just war
framework, though, you consider soldiers as the paradigm of non-innocents, due to their
capacity of harming. How would you characterize the soldiers that have been victims of
terrorist attacks (there are numerous cases either in Israel or in Lebanon in 1983 for
example)?
Michael Walzer – My instinct is to say that attacks on soldiers are not terrorist attacks. That
does not make them right, terrorism is not the only negative moral term in our vocabulary. I
did not think that the plane that flew into the Pentagon in 2001 was a terrorist attack or, better
said, it was a terrorist attack only because the people in the plane were innocent civilians who
were being used and murdered. But if you imagine an attack on the Pentagon without those
innocent people in the plane, that would not have been a terrorist attack--whereas the attack
on the Twin Towers was terroristic.
I feel the same way in the Israeli cases: whatever you want to say about Palestinian resistance
to the occupation, there is a difference between attacking soldiers and killing civilians, and it
is an important moral difference. Now there are ambiguous cases. In the film “The Sorrow
and the Pity” - Marcel Ophül’s movie about the German occupation of France - there is a
wonderfully complicated moment when, after the French have surrendered, Vichy has been
created, the Germans are in the North, and there is a column of German soldiers marching on
a French country road. Their guns are not “at the ready”, just on their backs, and they march
past a group of peasants working in the fields; but these are not really peasants, and as the
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soldiers march past, the “peasants” attack them. It is the example I bring in my Just and
Unjust Wars. Now the Germans said, this is terrorism. And you can make that case because
the French had surrendered, the German soldiers were no longer fighting men; they thought
they were in a safe place; that is why they were not moving more cautiously through the
countryside. But still, an attack on soldiers is different from an attack on civilians--and there
were German civilians and even families in Paris and other cities and the French resistance
did not try to kill them. So I would work very hard to maintain that distinction.
Terrorisme.net – However in the historiography of terrorism, what happened in 1983 in
Lebanon and at the Pentagon is still considered terrorism.
Michael Walzer – I would resist that; I want to hold on to that distinction. It does not mean
that I would not condemn the killing of those Marines in Beirut. I might even be critical of the
killing of the German soldiers in France--although the American presence in Lebanon was
much less ugly than the German presence in France. In any case, we need to look for other
terms of condemnation; we need to have available a more complicated vocabulary than just
“terrorism”.
Terrorisme.net – Do you think that after what happened after the attacks of London or New
York, this very distinction between soldiers and civilians - which is at the core of your work -
can be maintained, when we know that in asymmetrical warfare and terrorism nowadays
civilians are usually perpetrating the attacks?
Michael Walzer – That is also true to some extent in guerrilla warfare or in any form of
informal warfare. But that just means, you make the distinctions as best you can. The
members of a terrorist organisation, the active members, are like the members of an army; and
you try as best you can to identify them and go after them. That is why so much of the war on
terrorism is actually police work--because the identification is much harder than it is in
combat. But we also have rules for the police, who are not allowed to kill civilians even if the
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people they are after are also (criminal) civilians. That is why the framework of the “war on
terrorism” is often irrelevant, and the relevant rules are much more like the rules of police
work. But the police also make distinctions, they have their own combatant/non-combatant
distinction. If you think about the rules of police work--for example, the rules on “collateral
damage” are much more constraining than those for soldiers. We really do not want the police
firing into a crowd of civilians even if that means letting the criminals escape.
Terrorisme.net – So why use the framework of war, as you do in your essays?
Michael Walzer – In a new essay that will soon be published, I talk about how you have to
negotiate between the concept of police work and the concept of war. I use the example of the
killing of those 5 Al Qaeda militants in Yemen with an American missile. Imagine that the
same attack had taken place at the same time against the same people in Afghanistan rather
than Yemen: it would have been an act of war, and we would have had no trouble with it,
assuming that the Al Qaeda people were really Al Qaeda people. But if the missile attack had
happened in Philadelphia, we would have been horrified: that is not the way you are allowed
to behave in a city at peace; you would have had to arrest the people, provide defense
attorneys, and all that. Now, Yemen is somewhere in between Afghanistan and Philadelphia--
you have to negotiate the in-between space, and I try to suggest some ways of doing that.
Collective responsibility and cultural relativism
Terrorisme.net – After the London bombings on 7/7, a cleric claiming to be “Al-Tartusi”
justified the attacks by saying that in the UK the most important political decisions are
“based on public support voiced through the British Parliament” which is itself elected by the
people. As the Parliament voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq, the electors would be
responsible. What would be your answer to people ascribing a kind of collective responsibility
to electors of democracies that are under terrorist attacks (like the U.S, Spain or England)?
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Michael Walzer – I think collective responsibility of this sort is just an obvious fallacy, both
because the people you are killing include people who voted for the government, but also
people who voted against it, and also people who are politically indifferent, inactive, not
engaged (after all people have a right to be disengaged); and it includes children who did not
participate at all. If you could invent a bomb that only kills, for example, Republicans, then
maybe there would be something to talk about, though I would still want to distinguish
between ordinary citizens and people materially engaged in the war effort. Anyway, since
there is no such bomb, it is not even an issue that needs to be discussed. Indiscriminate killing
is bound to involve people who are not responsible, and who are obviously not responsible.
Terrorisme.net – In that same article, Al-Tartusi argued that the “distinction between a
soldier and a civilian is a modern one and has no basis in Islamic law.” What would be your
answer to such cultural relativism (i.e the thesis that certain elements are the product of a
culture and are not “transposable” to other cultures) that has been in the limelight in the past
few months/ years?
Michael Walzer – I am almost certain that some version of the civilian/soldier/combatant/non-
combatant distinction has emerged and been discussed in every major human civilization and
culture. Perhaps the earliest form it takes is – you already get this in the Bible – to mark off
men on the one side and women and children on the other. And since children include male
children, that is in fact very close to the combatant/non-combatant distinction--in many of
those societies all men were fighters. I just do not believe that this distinction does not appear
in Muslim law; I am sure there are Muslim discussions about why killing women and children
is wrong. The same distinction appears in Greek civilization, in Jewish civilization, in China,
India…
My view of cultural relativism is quite limited: I think that the most basic human values of life
and liberty are in fact universal, even if they get expressed in different idioms. Our rights’
language is not universal, but the value attached to life and liberty is. I would even argue for a
naturalistic foundation for this universalism – if I were pushed to provide the foundationalist
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argument that I never want to provide: a general conception of human vulnerability. All
human beings are vulnerable in the same way. It is easy to kill, enslave, and dominate us, and
the arguments against doing that are common and very well known. I am sure anthropologists
can turn up some peculiar and tiny human group, in a corner of New Guinea possibly, which
does not have these values, but all the higher civilizations, these laws of war - because wars
are fought across cultural boundaries - have been universal almost from the beginning. When
we bombed Vietnamese villages, Lyndon Johnson insisted that we were not doing that
because he knew that it was wrong to do it, and the North Vietnamese condemned us for
killing civilians, because they also knew that it was wrong. The soldier/civilian distinction
that emerged in the 19th century is just a particular manifestation of arguments and principles
that are much older and that have been expressed in different idioms, in different cultures.
The transformation of war and the just war paradigm
Terrorisme.net – The AKUF (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kriegsursachenforschung an der
Universität Hamburg) presented some years ago statistics about the development of war since
1945. Among these developments, it is interesting to point out the fact that wars between
states represent only 16% of all wars that happened between 1945 and 1992. In 1998 and
1999, this rate dropped to almost 10 %. Considering the foundation of your legalist
paradigm, which is based on wars between states, isn’t this paradigm and any just war theory
relying on a similar foundation in need of a serious revision? Did not we enter in a “post-
classical war” era that would necessitate a fundamental revision of the just war framework?
Michael Walzer – Let us assume that it is the case, that most wars in the world today are civil
wars. What does that change? It may pose problems for international law. Whether it poses
problems for just war theory or for any other of the moral arguments that we want to make
about killing, I am not sure. Consider the American civil war. First of all, so far as jus in bello
goes, all of the arguments that arose in the civil war are familiar: the treatment of prisoners,
the endangering and killing of civilians, Sherman’s brutal “march to the sea,” which was
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condemned by Southern writers for very good jus in bello reasons. I cannot think of any
unfamiliar arguments that might require significant revision of the theory. There were issues
in international law to deal with, for example, British attempts to help the South, because they
were buying cotton there. John Stuart Mill wrote a passionate essay against doing that, and
there are now provisions in international law about external states intervening in civil wars.
There are also now arguments in just war theory about that, beginning from John Stuart Mill’s
essay On Non-Intervention. And again, I do not think that those are new.
Terrorisme.net – But in your framework, the “moral entities” or “persons” are states. In
asymmetric warfare, however, the two enemies facing each other are not necessarily states
anymore (there are for example states against a network etc.)?
Michael Walzer – Maybe what I am struggling to do is to loosen the framework enough so
that it can still work. Someone else might come along and provide a new framework, and we
would have to argue about whether that was better. Look at the Afghanistan war: my argument
in defense of the war was that we had been attacked by a terrorist organization, which had
established a partnership with the Taliban government of Afghanistan. It was not that the
Taliban government was harboring a terrorist organization in the way that the Syrian
government provides office space for Hamas and Hezbollah. This was an active partnership.
The Taliban government was providing Al Qaeda with all the advantages of sovereignty, most
importantly a territorial base, where they could bring people to train them and organize
attacks--and that made the Taliban government the legitimate object of an American attack.
Now if that is not the case, if there is no active partnership of that sort, if the relations are
much more nebulous, then war is obviously not the right response. If you are worried with
what the Syrians are doing with Hamas, you have to use political or economic pressure, find
ways to cooperate with international police forces, persuade the Syrians to use their own
police. Does that mean that the theory of just war does not work in those cases? Rather, the
theory tells us not to go to war with Syria the way we went to war with Afghanistan. So it is
still doing some work.
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Terrorisme.net – But the problem nowadays seems to be that we apply the war framework on
every conflict…
Michael Walzer – A good just war theorist would say: no, you cannot do that and the theory
would support that negative response; and the theory should have said “no” to the Irak war for
those reasons.
Terrorisme.net – The military historian Martin van Creveld, in an interview he gave some
years suggested indirectly (without actually endorsing it) invoking the categories of
“innocent” and “non-innocent” to characterize soldiers and civilians/non-combatants in the
war in Chechnya and arguing that the “classical” laws of war do not hold anymore.
Considering the erosion of classical wars, do you think we should introduce new moral
categories to define the protagonists of war (in a kind of parallel to what you suggest for the
victims of terrorism)?
Michael Walzer – I would want to look at cases. If in fact, the combatant/non-combatant
categories do not work, then we have to find some other distinctions that do because we will
still want to constrain the use of force and to defend some set of people, whether they are
called civilians or something else. It still seems to me that some version of the combatant/non-
combatant distinction is the one we are going to keep going back to; I cannot imagine any
other. Look at some recent essays by the American philosopher Jeff McMahan: you will find
that he is proposing to use innocent/non-innocent instead of civilian/soldier. His argument is
that some soldiers are innocent and some civilians are non-innocent, and we should try to find
ways of making those distinctions. But in my view he has not been successful in suggesting
how we could discriminate among the civilian population or among the soldier population.
You will see he does not have many examples of what he wants to do….
To be precise, for me “innocence” is a term of art. When we say that civilians are innocent,
we mean that they are disengaged from the military enterprise, they are not material
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supporters, they are neither soldiers nor are they carrying supplies to the soldiers, nor are they
working in factories making tanks and missiles. Whether they are morally supportive of the
war effort (or not) does not matter. I do not think that it is crazy to say that someone going to
work in a factory producing missiles in wartime loses his “innocence” while he in engaged in
direct support for the war effort. People who are disengaged from all military and war-related
activity, even if their state of mind is pro-war, are innocent because we as fighters have no
access to their state of mind. They are presumptively innocent because their practical
activities do not engage them militarily.
Jus post bellum
Terrorisme.net – The recent war in Iraq and the postwar situation have dramatically put in
the limelight the necessity of a valid jus post bellum. You suggest that “self-determination,
popular legitimacy, civil rights, the idea of common good and the distribution of benefits” be
the criteria constituting the jus post bellum (in a similar vein to the reconstruction of post
Nazi Germany). But what if democracy A occupies democracy B, because B has unjustly
attacked A (even if it was democratically validated). In the case of B, the criteria you propose
are more or less satisfied. Wouldn’t there be a need for complementary criteria? What could
they be?
Michael Walzer – In the case of defeated democracy B, the government would probably be
maintained, and only questions of security and reparation would arise. The first thing that A
has a right to insist on is that there are some safeguards against another attack. This can be
achieved in a variety of ways, for example, through a total or partial demilitarization, some
limitation on rearmament, some set of constraints on the size of the army, and so on. These
constraints could be enforced either by democracy A itself or, better, by some international
agency. But once that is done, you could still ask “Is the occupation of country B by country
A to the material benefit of country A?” “Are they trying to control the oil or are they insisting
on military bases?” All those issues would still arise. I have not produced a full-scale theory
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of jus post bellum-- somebody else will have to do all the work that is required. I am just
suggesting that these would be the kinds of criteria that might be required.
The discussion with Prof. Walzer took place at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Interview by Jean-Marc Flükiger. Thanks to Margareta Flükiger for her contribution to the edition of the English text.
© 2006 Terrorisme.net - Jean-Marc Flükiger
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