Volume 55, Number 3 · March 6, 2008
When Is It Right to Invade?
By Jeremy Waldron
Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory
by Michael Walzer, selected, edited, and with an introduction by David Miller
Yale University Press, 333 pp., $30.00
When Michael Walzer's best-known work, Just and Unjust Wars, was published in 1977, it was criticized by some reviewers for being too deferential to national sovereignty.[*] They viewed the traditional doctrine of sovereignty as a shabby and outdated relic, whose main effect was to protect states against military invasion even when they were guilty of mistreating their own people. Walzer's critics looked forward to a world in which human rights would become something more than a utopian ideal, a new world order in which armed force would be available to uphold human rights, if necessary without regard to national borders. (The euphemism 'humanitarian intervention' is used to refer to a military incursion by one sovereign state in the territory of another to relieve suffering or bring an end to human rights abuses in the second state.) But Just and Unjust Wars, hailed on its publication as 'a brilliantly reasoned book about the relevance of moral argument to modern war,' refused to participate in this denunciation of sovereignty and, worse still, it insisted that in many cases states were entitled to resist 'humanitarian intervention' as just another instance of international aggression.
Review, 4485 words
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