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This article was downloaded by: [University of Ulster Library] On: 07 December 2014, At: 03:28 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Military Ethics Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/smil20 Realism and the Just War Barrie Paskins a a Department of War Studies , King's College London , UK Published online: 28 Jun 2007. To cite this article: Barrie Paskins (2007) Realism and the Just War, Journal of Military Ethics, 6:2, 117-130, DOI: 10.1080/15027570701381971 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15027570701381971 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/ terms-and-conditions

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Ulster Library]On: 07 December 2014, At: 03:28Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Military EthicsPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/smil20

Realism and the Just WarBarrie Paskins aa Department of War Studies , King's College London , UKPublished online: 28 Jun 2007.

To cite this article: Barrie Paskins (2007) Realism and the Just War, Journal of Military Ethics,6:2, 117-130, DOI: 10.1080/15027570701381971

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15027570701381971

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms& Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Realism and the Just War

BARRIE PASKINSDepartment of War Studies, King’s College London, UK

ABSTRACT This paper suggests three main lines of argument. 1) About nuclear weapons: Does‘supreme emergency’ do any real work in Just and Unjust Wars? Could we not drop it in favour ofa critical engagement with the full range of ‘realities’ � political as well as ‘moral’ � concerningnuclear deterrence? 2) About Michael Walzer as a theory-minded activist: Is there a tendency forhis creativity as an activist to conflict with his salutary demonstration that the just war tradition isunavoidable? 3) About political realism: Isn’t the real challenge from political realism its doubtthat the just war tradition can impose serious restraints on the conduct of war? Doesn’t the chapter‘Against political realism’ underestimate this? Do we perhaps now most need a thorough study ofthe extent to which there can be agreement by prudent realists to some tenets of the just war, andare these the ones which look most uncontentious compared to the more activist, anti-statistfeatures of Just and Unjust Wars?

KEY WORDS: Nuclear deterrence, supreme emergency, scepticism, political realism

I

Just and Unjust Wars (JUW) continues to be indispensable for studying thejust war tradition. For students new to the subject, it remains a uniquelyfresh, infectiously engaged, and engrossing immersion in just war argumentabout a wide variety of topics. For all of us, it contains many treasured pagesand insights, overall a thought-provoking demonstration of the value ofconcrete reasoning about well-chosen historical realities, to a very large extentavoiding hypothetical examples.

And, like many good books, JUW continues to provoke. In this essay, Iwant to grapple with two of its principal provocations: supreme emergency,and what I shall call its activist individualism. I shall suggest that nuclearweapons are the real issue at stake in ‘supreme emergency’. They are betterconceived in other terms, I shall argue, so that we can and should jettison thephrase ‘supreme emergency’. The activist individualism of Just and UnjustWars is a subtler and more all-pervasive issue. My contention is that it tendsto skew the just war tradition into an anti-statist shape, which exaggeratesthe tensions between realism and the just war. The activist viewpoint and toneimpress upon the reader an admirably involving sense of the urgency of the

Correspondence Address: Barrie Paskin, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK. E-mail:

[email protected]

1502-7570 Print/1502-7589 Online/07/020117�14 # 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/15027570701381971

Journal of Military Ethics,Vol. 6, No. 2, 117�130, 2007

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‘moral realities’ of war but need to be reassessed if they are not to result in alarger scepticism that is entirely contrary to Michael Walzer’s aim.

I had better begin with some words about political realism, whose optimaldefinition is at stake in what I want to say both about supreme emergency andabout activist individualism. The definition of realism is a large subject. Threeobservations may perhaps suffice for our present purpose.

First, there is more to it than one might suppose from the opening chapterof JUW. ‘Against Realism’ aims at a target analogous to the defeat ofThrasymachus near the start of Plato’s Republic . Just as Thrasymachus failsto put a stop to Socrates’ intricate enquiry into the nature of justice, so hereThucydides and Hobbes are presented as failing to disprove ‘what I want tocall the moral reality of war � that is, all those experiences of which morallanguage is descriptive or within which it is necessarily employed’ (Walzer1977: 15). This brief chapter prepares the reader to feel the intricacy of what isto come as exemplary of this ‘moral reality’. The realist is to be driven out bya brief general onslaught followed in the rest of the book by involvementin concrete arguments on important specific issues; the concreteness isempowered by the opening gambit of discrediting realist scepticism, and is inits detail and persuasiveness to convey a sense of what moral reality is.

In its way, this opening chapter serves its purpose. The just war traditiondoes have, at least in appearance, a practical force and urgency that realistsare sometimes apt to ignore, and the rest of the book assembles tellingexamples of important issues. But there is more to scepticism than this. Theforce of the realist’s emphasis on the state cannot be summed up adequatelyin anything like the person of Thrasymachus. And that emphasis has a veryspecial bearing on the just war tradition that we ignore at our peril.

Second, then, let us recall that the realist is above all a statist , who insiststhat the principal agent in war and military affairs is the state. Each state hasits own survival as its principal achievement and objective. To the extent thatthis is felt to be unproblematic, a state is very much concerned with powerand interest. Such order, such pattern, such possibility of moral reality asthere is in war derives to a large extent from the character principally not ofindividuals but of states. States instruct the conscience of individuals, and it isthe unavoidably very limited responsibility of individuals, so instructed, to dotheir bit. Like Plato, we need to think point by point about the macrocosm aswell as the microcosm; unlike Plato, we need to keep our eyes constantly onwhat can make sense in the system of states if we are to avoid burdening theindividual with pseudo-responsibilities at the expense of retaining a livelyunderstanding of what can be asked of states individually and in theirinterrelationships. Thus, I shall suppose, a statist might argue if prodded intocareful debate about the kind of challenge posed by JUW.

Much of the vivacity of JUW derives from its holding this state-centricperspective at arm’s length, concentrating instead on individual human beings,very many of them not characterised in terms of their state responsibilities, ifany. In this respect, the texture of JUW is very unlike that of Plato’s Republic .Once Thrasymachus has been silenced, Plato is at pains to discuss the polisand the individual in parallel, striving constantly to notice correspondences

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between the macrocosm and the microcosm. JUW achieves many of its effectsby encouraging us to look through an interesting individual’s eyes withoutattempting to keep under constant review the question of how each point as itarises must strike those who speak for the state.

Third, the downplaying of state perspectives in JUW results in neglect of,or abstraction from, a kind of scepticism about the just war tradition that ishighly characteristic of realists and which is, if anything, encouraged ratherthan ameliorated by Walzer’s bold individualism. Realists often think that thejust war tradition is so vague and ambiguous, so indeterminate in practice,that its fine words lend themselves to so many conflicting interpretations asto afford no definite guide to policy. If we are in a mood to debate ‘moralrealities’, so the sceptical argument goes, then realists will choose interpreta-tions that suit them, interpretations shaped by realism, not by the just wartradition. Whether to employ the just war idiom may be a matter partlyof taste, partly of political context, but the deep realist thought is thatthis language is too vague to be doing any real work. The moment JUWbecomes controversial, its cutting edge is lost because the so-called moralrealities mean different things to realist and non-realist.

‘Supreme emergency’ might well be taken by the realist to illustrate andconfirm this general scepticism. JUW offers no clear-cut, uncontroversialdefinition of what is and is not a supreme emergency, and many adherents ofthe just war tradition are uncomfortable with the very idea. Won’t peoplehandle it as they see fit? In other words, is it not an optional extra in thevocabulary of international politics? Similarly, the many contentious moralclaims throughout JUW encourage, do they not, a tendency to dispense withall of its vocabulary?

Along such lines as this, the realist has, I believe, a very important kind ofcriticism of the project of JUW. My aim in this essay is to try two ways ofresponding to the difficulty. First, I propose to jettison ‘supreme emergency’ infavour of a discussion of something whose reality no one doubts � nucleardeterrence. About that, I shall seek to learn from the realist, hoping to narrowthe gap between realism and the just war. Second, I propose to re-read samplesof JUW on the lookout for a large-scale pattern of contrasts. On one side of amore or less sharp line, I shall suppose, lie examples of just war idiom on whichrealists might agree in terms of the enlightened self-interest of states; on theother side of the line are uses of just war terminology that realists can agree toregard as the idiosyncrasies (as they would see it) of an activist individualist.About the latter, I shall suppose, realists may be as polite or rude as they wishwithout imperilling the power of the former to support genuine commonground between realists and adherents of the just war tradition.

Drawing this distinction, I suggest, strengthens the case against scepticism.It does not settle any of the issues but clarifies their status. Nuclear deterrenceis quite obviously a case apart, not immune from moral judgment but socentrally difficult as to need envisaging in its own unique terms. That caseapart, the scepticism which is fuelled by abstraction from the state may beovercome by noticing what statists can recognize as an argument that maybe supportable in something like their own terms.

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II

According to JUW, ‘Supreme emergency has become a permanent condition’in the era of nuclear deterrence (1977: 274). ‘Nuclear weapons explode thetheory of just war’ (1977: 282). The chapter on deterrence concludes:

Nuclear war is and will remain morally unacceptable . . . [W]e must seek out ways toprevent it, and because deterrence is a bad way, we must seek out others. It is not mypurpose here to suggest what the alternatives might look like. I have been moreconcerned to acknowledge that deterrence itself, for all its criminality, falls or may fallfor the moment under the standard of necessity . . . [W]e are under an obligation to seizeupon opportunities of escape . . . [T]he readiness to murder is balanced, or should be, bythe readiness not to murder, not to threaten murder, as soon as alternative ways to peacecan be found. (1977: 283)

Taken together, these remarks suggest that there is a permanently validcategory � supreme emergency � into which nuclear weapons slot for alimited period until something less unsatisfactory is found. I incline toquestion this both negatively and, more important, positively. Negatively,nuclear deterrence is the only example of a supreme emergency accepted assuch in JUW; World War II city bombing is considered as a candidatebut rejected in terms that we will consider later. As regards the earlier part ofthe bombing campaign, when Britain was alone against Germany, Walzerrejects all arguments for it save that it was something we could do, and thishe presents as a singularly pointless reason for attacking noncombatants.Later, when the bombing was formidable enough to influence the outcome, itwas, he thinks, no longer needed for that purpose. The notion does no realwork outside the analysis of nuclear deterrence. Positively, I suggest, nucleardeterrence goes deeper than constituting a transient moral embarrassment.The kind of moral difficulty that it is can be addressed only in terms that goto the root of the state and the interstate system. And to make this clear toourselves, we need to pay careful heed to that realism which, I have suggested,poses a deeper challenge than is acknowledged in JUW.

To argue this, let me begin with some (doubtless contestable) points ofdefinition and fact. By ‘nuclear deterrence’, I shall mean any military systemthat includes nuclear weapons as a significant component and which as awhole tends to deter all resort to war against a fellow possessor of nuclearweapons. Only states possess or are likely to possess such a deterrent, forthere is a deep Faustian fit between the territoriality of states and theseweapons deployed in this sort of mode. Nuclear deterrence has as its principalstrategic attraction that no state can plausibly be expected to be undeterredwhen its territory might reasonably be thought to be vulnerable to suchweapons. The risk is a wonderful motivation towards sobriety even among themost bitter of enemies, and a powerful inducement to ensure that one’s ownsecurity does not become imperilled by a Dr Strangelove, ready to run risksbeyond the needs of ensuring that one’s own deterrent does not becomeincredible.

At present, about ten states are actively engaged in nuclear deterrence � theUSA, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, and Pakistan, with Israel having

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the capacity to deploy such weapons in a very short time however committedit may be not to be the first to introduce them into the Middle East. NorthKorea is currently compelling attention by its behaviour on the fringes ofdeploying a nuclear deterrent. If any state ever needed nuclear weapons since1945, then it is Iran, which currently stands accused of violating its freelyundertaken treaty obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Nonon-state actor has nuclear weapons, nor is there any royal road for non-states from The Bomb to Deterrence. Terrorists could conceivably stage somehorrific spectacle, but the stability of nuclear deterrence, what makes it sofundamental, such a profoundly troubling moral reality, is that relationsamong the states which possess it are shaped by mutual vulnerability todevastation of a wholly unprecedented kind.

The objective novelty of thermonuclear weapons needs emphasizing incontrast to the unhelpful subjectivity which is hard if not impossible to avoidin the phrase ‘supreme emergency’. According to Clausewitz, war takes itscharacter from a tendency to escalate towards an extreme of destruction thatis never reached. By removing all limit from the possible yield of a singleweapon, the H-Bomb changes military affairs radically. The theoretical limitis now a practical possibility, and mutual assured destruction exploits this toensure that those one is seeking to deter would be mad to risk escalation inthat direction.

The moral status of nuclear deterrence is complicated by, as we might putit, the human factor. The technology is not a doomsday device set to work onits own from generation to generation. It is sustained every minute of everyday by those who staff the deterrent. They are under orders to proceed alongstandard lines. Their readiness to carry out these orders without question istested not regularly but often, and any who show a tendency to pause andquestion when the order to fire comes are necessarily removed to otherduties, if only to obviate the possibility of the deterrent’s being sabotaged. Atthe very moment when I write this and at the moment when you read it,conscientious individuals are poised to operate the military systems whichthreaten mass slaughter in such a way as to deter. The technicalities of thedeterrent are inherently intimately bound up with the ethical.

Nuclear deterrence is, as Michael Walzer rightly insists, an outrage, but isthere any possibility of its being abandoned in any conceivable future? Theimplication in JUW that we can count on something turning up needs morediscussion than it receives. There is, so far as I know, only one remotelypossible way forward � via the NPT � and that needs to be thought about bypaying careful heed to the sober thinking of realists about the nature ofnuclear proliferation.

The NPT is a voluntary treaty that invites states to participate in a mutuallyadvantageous bargain. Within the treaty regime, possessors of nucleardeterrence are to negotiate in good faith towards the reduction and eventualelimination of nuclear weapons. This eventual outcome is so desirable thatit is in the enlightened interest of a great many non-possessors to renouncethe acquisition of these weapons. The NPT offers appropriate accompanyinginducements: have-nots will not miss out on the advantages, if any, of civil

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nuclear power; if anxious, they can look to the possessors of nucleardeterrence for security guarantees, for what they may be worth.

The British example of nuclear deterrence is well worth pondering in eventhe briefest survey of the realities of nuclear deterrence. At the time of writing,the UK will decide fairly soon whether to update its independent nucleardeterrent. Any realist will, I think, mention three main factors as relevantto this decision. I summarize these without attempting to suggest any orderof significance. A strategic rationale is that our Trident is, and any likelyreplacement would be, usable independently in the unlikely worst manageablecase that the UK again, as in 1940, stood alone against a menacing greatpower. Even if we were alone, we could count on deterring the opponent.Another kind of realist consideration is that nuclear weapons are a badge ofgreat power status: great powers have these weapons, we are a great power, sowe must have these weapons. Not every realist, perhaps, will allow this to bea powerful realist consideration, but its influence in the UK case, as in thatof India, is hardly to be set aside as a matter of historical and political fact. Athird factor is that it is hard to believe that it would make any impact ininternational relations if the UK were to refrain from renewing its deterrent:to renew is the routine, politically easy thing to do, and this too is a politicalreality.

Such complexities as this need bearing in mind, I suggest, as we askourselves what the ‘moral realities’ of nuclear deterrence are. Let me try tosum them up. To use nuclear weapons to kill, as has not been done since 1945,would be atrocious. But nuclear deterrence seems to bring with it a mostwelcome sobriety, as recently in Kashmir, and makes it plausible to supposethat a kind of enforced stalemate can be the long-term effect of the deterrenceof all war between the possessors of nuclear weapons. For lesser powers,nuclear weapons can be a welcome badge of status � a factor never perhapssufficient in itself to motivate proliferation, but for the UK a natural thing topersist in so long as the country desires to retain its veto-wielding status asone of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

How, against this mixed background, should we think about the horizontalproliferation of nuclear weapons? In the long term, can we hope that allmilitary fears may fade between former enemies, until the need for the nextreplacement comes to seem an absurd extravagance, and deterrence withersaway amid growing evidence that it is not needed? I hope so, and I know of noother way to imagine the replacement of nuclear deterrence by something lessrepugnant. Meanwhile, I suggest, we need to take seriously the argument ofthe celebrated realist Kenneth Waltz (1981), that ‘more may be better’.Specifically, I suggest, we need to accept that states have an inalienable rightto acquire nuclear weapons (as is affirmed in the NPT) and to amend thetreaty accordingly. At present, we have the bizarre situation that India andPakistan cannot become parties to the Treaty. Do we not need to accept onthe strength of their experience that the kind of ‘necessity’ that JUW calls‘supreme emergency’ presses states from time to time to acquire nucleardeterrence, and then (witness the UK) makes leaving the nuclear clubpolitically difficult? Do we not also need to accept that nothing is likelier to

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push states towards proliferation than the threat to attack them for this orother reasons (Iran, North Korea)? In short, do we not need to abandon thekind of schizophrenia that allows us to feel comfortable with our bomb butinclined to reckless talk of rogues when we ponder uses of force to preventstates with which we are less than comfortable from sharing the luxury?

Finally, in this all-too-brief survey, let us recall that it is an implication ofWaltz’s argument that we may need to assist in some cases of nuclearproliferation, lest the balance of terror between a pair of enemies tilts toodangerously in the direction of pre-emptive attack by one against the otherwhile the going is good. Deterrence is most stable when neither of a pairof enemies dares discount the possibility of triggering disaster from theother’s second-strike capability. A moment at which one felt able to pre-emptwith a disarming first strike the mutual vulnerability on which deterrence issupposed to rest would be a moment of enormous danger not only to the pairof states in question but to the whole world. The pattern of non-use that hasprevailed since Nagasaki might be imperilled. However we might wish tostand aside, the mutual entanglement of states might very well make it vitalthat we allow ourselves to be drawn in sufficiently to reduce to vanishing-point the prospect of a disarming first strike. In this sort of way, theresponsibilities of the existing nuclear weapons states are unavoidably liableto be enlarged every time the bomb spreads to another state.

To draw a clear, sharp line in all this between the moral and the non- ora-moral is, I suggest, peculiarly difficult, and that is part of the reality of thesituation. JUW leaves all this out of account because of its non-statistviewpoint. Michael Walzer’s acquiescence in deterrence is under-described inits omission of the perspective(s) of states. We as individuals (activists or not)have standing in this matter only through our ability to influence states (to beplain, I personally very much hope that the UK does not replace Trident andvery much support non-violent witness in support of this). The moral realityof nuclear deterrence is that the possibility of its ever being abandoned strainsbelief. The only possibility is that war will wither away through a kind ofstalemate that was inconceivable before 1945. Getting there from where weare can only happen through the agency of states, and this involves in theinterim difficult decisions of the sort outlined by realists such as KennethWaltz.

Does it help to speak of this difficult situation of states in terms of‘supreme emergency’? I doubt it, and such talk oversimplifies the bizarre mixof repugnancy and promise that is nuclear deterrence. The need is simplyto understand the not very subtle motivations of nuclear deterrence andproliferation, and the colossal practical difficulties that ensue.

It may be worth considering how this all-too-bluntly stated set ofassertions affects another part of the discussion of supreme emergency inJUW. A couple of quiet sentences are directed against President Truman:‘Harry Truman’s flat statement that he never lost a night’s sleep over hisdecision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is not the sort of thingpolitical leaders often say. They usually find it preferable to stress thepainfulness of decision-making’ (Walzer 1977: 19). This seems to catch

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decision-makers in an impossible bind, between hypocrisy and insensitivity,and gives no clear sign whether the acquiescence in nuclear deterrenceincludes the atom-bombings of Japanese cities. A larger uncertainty of thesame kind concerns ‘The dishonouring of Arthur Harris’, a section almost atthe end of JUW that has always made me peculiarly uncomfortable. It comesat the end of the chapter on Nuremberg and My Lai. It discusses the publicstanding of the head of Bomber Command during World War II and rejoicesin his not having received a peerage, as other well-known commanders haddone. Michael Walzer, having argued at length that the bombing of Germancities was terrorism, acknowledges that the policy implemented by Sir Arthurwas knowingly chosen and sustained by the government of Sir WinstonChurchill but, as an activist, sees fit to rejoice in what one might be temptedto call the hypocrisy of denying recognition to the leader of BomberCommand:

[I]f blame is to be distributed for the bombing, Churchill deserves a full share. ButChurchill’s success in dissociating himself from the policy of terrorism is not of greatimportance; there is always a remedy for that in retrospective criticism. What isimportant is that his dissociation was part of a national dissociation � a deliberatepolicy that has moral significance and value. (1977: 324)

In 1977 this had, no doubt, implications for the Vietnam aftermath, but myconcern at present is with re-reading JUW thirty years later. In theintervening years, Sir Arthur has been memorialized in a statue at the RAFchurch, St Clement Danes, almost directly across the road from King’sCollege London where I am writing this, so I must register a doubt aboutthe continuing fact of that policy of ‘national dissociation’, if such everexisted. Not being an activist, I am uncertain about the value of any suchact or policy of dishonour. I am far from disputing the importance ofappropriate public sentiments, what I want to debate is which sentimentsare proper, and how they relate to the just war tradition and to politicalrealism. Nuclear deterrence seems to me objectively difficult: the difficulty ispart of the moral reality. Is the World War II bombing campaign any lessdifficult? I think it is. The British war cabinet should have known betterthan to have thought that committing murder was better than doingnothing in 1940, but even this claim needs to be accompanied byacknowledgment of how desperate things seemed in 1940. I wonder whether‘dishonouring’ in such a context can ever be constructive. Perhaps a betterway to work towards the internalization of the just war tradition by realistsis to emphasize that such proceedings as the Nuremberg trial and itscontemporary descendants in UN ad hoc tribunals and the InternationalCriminal Court have a wider as well as a narrower constituency. As well asthe doing of justice to the accused, they provide a focus for law-abidingopinion, prompting an unknowable but potentially large and influentialaudience to venture beyond the minimal requirements of international law.This leads from deterrence and supreme emergency towards my other maintheme, the role of activist individualism in JUW.

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III

Nowadays, states are required in international law to instruct their personnelin the laws and customs of war. These individuals, so instructed, are requiredto disobey manifestly illegal orders � a requirement that can be shown tohave real, practical content in, to mention an example that is well discussed inJUW, the My Lai massacre. States and individuals meet in this elementaldivision of responsibilities. States have the responsibility to bring the laws andcustoms of war into line with the just war tradition. Individuals are notrequired to invent the ethics of war but to participate in what we mightventure to call spheres of justice in hell � spheres ranging from the narrowduty to disobey manifestly illegal orders via broader and more debatableobligations to question and to challenge to the widest and most problematicof circles, taking it upon themselves to venture altogether beyond the rules setby states. This division of responsibility between states and individuals haspotential, I suggest, to unify many of the topics discussed in JUW whileavoiding the tendency of activist individualism to drive a wedge betweenrealism and the just war tradition. The moral realities are most solid andincontestable, most resistant to scepticism, in the narrowest sphere; they aremost nebulous and debatable where they altogether lose contact with whatcan possibly be required by the enlightened self-interest of states. The statist isto be taken aboard as an arbiter of what can count as a scepticism-proofexample of a moral reality; in return, realism is to be questioned for itsopenness to moral realities.

Consider as an example the scope in realism and in ‘moral reality’ forbenevolent quarantine. Two possible cases of this, as Michael Walzer makesadmirably clear, are the privileged status of prisoners of war and thebehaviour of populations in occupied territory. Both, one might like tothink, are cases in which best practice might be, and to some extent is,internalized in state behaviour as enlightened self-interest.

Prisoners of War

As Michael Walzer (1970) well emphasizes in Obligations: Essays onDisobedience, War and Citizenship, soldiers who offer to surrender areentitled to be permitted to do so and to count on benevolent quarantineuntil the end of hostilities. They are not required to seek to escape, must notkill if they do try to escape, are not to be subjected to interrogation beyondthe formality of name, rank, and number, and are not to be investigated orprosecuted on suspicion of war crimes while captive as PoWs. Difficult cases,especially hypothetical ones, cannot be ruled out, but there is ample scopehereabouts for best practice that is as straightforward as anything can beexpected to be in military ethics. If deterrence is difficult, this is or shouldbe easy.

To style it easy is not to say that it is automatic. The mistreatment of PoWsby Japan in World War II remains a grievance, and it is still the case that acareful comparison of it with the harshness of Japan to its own soldiers as two

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examples of failure in a duty of care might well be worth undertaking (thecontinuing failure of Japanese governments to pursue this might perhapscount against my early expression of unease about Michael Walzer’s positiveevaluation of the act of dishonouring). Even the easiest of good practice hasits practical difficulties, requiring vigilance.

The extension of the PoW convention to non-state belligerents has greaterdifficulties, not least as regards the recognition of the non-state as anythingbut a criminal enterprise. It would be a very considerable political gain forany non-state belligerent to secure recognition that its violent activity iswar rather than crime and hard to imagine that states could concede suchan advantage. On the other hand, any astute insurgency might well seeadvantage in unilateral conformity, so far as possible, to the prisoner-of-warconvention, and it is not difficult to imagine this eliciting de facto reciprocity.Is it contrary to realism to see mutual advantage in this?

Another kind of issue attendant upon insurgency and counter-insurgencyconcerns interrogation. Some of the issues seemed to have been resolvedin the UK by the Gardiner Report (1975). The ‘robust’ intimidation withwhich we have recently been re-familiarized by Guantanamo Bay andelsewhere had been practised by the UK in its withdrawal from empire toAden and had become a topic of controversy in Northern Ireland. Thethree reports, culminating in Gardiner’s, accepted that hypothetical argu-ments about the easily imaginable difficult case of a man possessed of vitalinformation from which he could be known to be partable by roughtreatment but not otherwise were rejected as of negligible overall impor-tance compared to routine, unproblematic intelligence gathering. That thislesson has been so forgotten that the ICRC has felt moved to protest inpublic against torture is a disturbing illustration of how precarious even themost stable of civilizing measures can be. In general, JUW is invaluable inits concentration on real as distinct from fancifully hypothetical cases. Itmight be interesting to hear how Michael Walzer now sees this standingtemptation to open a way to barbarism by the hypothetical case. Is thebenevolent quarantine of captives worth ring-fencing against the nearcertainty that any hypothetical exceptions will be too corrosive in practiceto be worth contemplating?

Occupied Territory

Roughly corresponding to the benevolent quarantine of PoWs is the holdingof enemy territory while war continues. States in war do surrender territory,and sometimes whole states surrender, as did France in World War II. Ithappens, it is a familiar mutuality, and a code of good practice has developed.Like the PoW convention, it rests on mutual restraint. Occupiers typicallywant the occupied to keep out of their way, to pursue everyday life withouttying up troops, let alone exposing them to danger. If the locals will do this,then the occupier has ample opportunity to treat them with consideration,refraining from provocative interventions in day-to-day existence. One of the

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most memorable incidents in JUW dramatizes one facet of this in a way thathighlights some of the costs � I incline to say the moral costs � of activistindividualism (1977: 176�179).

Beginner students are in my experience almost always struck by MichaelWalzer’s apt re-telling of a story from Ophuls’s documentary film The Sorrowand the Pity. French peasants, seemingly engrossed in digging potatoes, shootoccupying German soldiers with hidden weapons. Years later, the Germans’commander was still indignant: ‘What happened in that field was murder,’ hesays (1977: 176). Walzer disagrees. He suggests that ‘resistance is legitimate,and the punishment of resistance is legitimate’ (1977: 178). In saying this,though he acknowledges that France had surrendered, he seems to forgetthat any who wished to continue the fight could do so by leaving Franceand volunteering for a place in the armed forces of one of the states thatwas continuing the general war against Germany � no need to imperil thecondition of benevolent quarantine that was made possible by the submissionof the overwhelming majority of French citizens. (It is not part of Ophuls’sstory to remind us that things were different for French Jewry. True enough,but discussion of that needs to begin with failures to provide places of safetyin the UK and USA.)

Does the activism of JUW conflict in the presentation of this memorableepisode with the general realism of a healthy preference for benevolentquarantine where possible? Michael Walzer actually states the case againstthe killing of the German soldiers at greater length and with greaterforce than I have done. But he qualifies it, if ‘qualifies’ is the right word,by debating whether the peasants were ‘traitors’ guilty of ‘war treason’ (1977:177, his inverted commas). He hypothesizes that ‘the surviving soldiers rallyand fight back; some of the partisans are captured, tried as murderers,condemned and executed. We would not, I think, add those executions tothe list of Nazi war crimes. At the same time, we would not join in thecondemnation’ (1977: 178). I wonder whether this is in some respects toosimple and in others too complicated: too simple in overlooking the scopefor patriots to leave their country in search of legitimate military serviceelsewhere; too complicated in asking that we condemn or not condemn; toosimple in failing to ask whether such executions would be unwise in thecircumstances relative to the general desirability of mutual restraint; toocomplicated in asking that we envisage the situation in terms of the nowadaysunfamiliar terminology of war treason. In short, is this not a pretty simplecase of the partisans behaving with reckless indifference to the merits ofbenevolent quarantine, needlessly complicated by the activist’s sympathy forthe resistance hero?

Between deterrence and benevolent quarantine, I suggest, many topics canbe surveyed to advantage with reference to the extent that the ethical iscontinuous with enlightened self-interest.

The sympathy for ‘resistance’ is part of a larger pattern that goes so far asto lend great weight to the national self-determination of peoples. More orless anyone who chooses to take up arms in quest of military objectives is

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ipso facto accorded much the same status as established states. MichaelWalzer says that ‘the land follows the people’ and in a revealing footnote(1977: 93) shows that he means this in a remarkably radical sense:

[T]he will and capacity of the people for self-determination may not establish a right tosecede if the secession would remove not only land but also vitally needed fuel andmineral resources from some larger political community. The Katangan controversy ofthe early 1960s suggests the possible difficulties of such cases � and invites us to worryalso about the motives of intervening states. But what was missing in Katanga was agenuine national movement capable, on its own, of ‘arduous struggle’ . . . Given theexistence of such a movement, I would be inclined to support secession. It would then benecessary, however, to raise more general questions about distributive justice ininternational society.

The scope in passages such as this for armed political fragmentation to beconsidered unexceptionable is quite remarkable. A contrasting view might bethat secession which is not unproblematically unresisted (Norway fromSweden) must be considered highly problematic. Must not all the legitimateconcerns of neighbouring states weigh very heavily against secession? Is it notpart of the legitimacy of the ANC’s rebellion against apartheid that it wassupported by neighbours, the front-line states, and that there was no questionof secessions?

JUW shows its activism in its tendency to favour the rebel at the expenseof the quietist. Another aspect of this is the kind of union that MichaelWalzer seems to be imagining between the state and the individual. Earlyon, he contrasts two conditions of participation in war. Volunteers, hethinks, are relatively unproblematic in that they agree to fight, thoughthe terms of their doing so is under-explored. How well informed are thesehypothetical volunteers supposed to be? To what extent are they at libertyto learn from experience, turning against combat if they don’t like it? Theyare mentioned principally to point a contrast with those, the vast majority,who are forced to fight. For these, one of the principal reasons why it isso important to win is that killing and dying has been forced on them. Thisis a curious kind of reason for resenting aggression, and a curiouslyindividualist one. A more ‘realistic’ account might be that the overwhelmingmajority of actual military personnel accept the legitimacy of their state ina world of states and do their bit out of acceptance of a statist world-orderin which it would seem odd to resent what one is ordered to do. InObligations, Michael Walzer provides a hard-working, creative examinationof special cases, such as conscripts who are in a significant way alienatedfrom the society of the state that seeks to conscript them. In JUW, therelation between state and military individual is more generalized, and bythis token more puzzling, less ‘realistic’. As for aggression, JUW omits toconsider the obvious thought that nowadays, after 1914, states cannot allowor trust one another to resort to war as an instrument of foreign policybecause it is such a threat to their vital interests. Reasons of state have theirown moral weight, are themselves moral realities, or so at least one mightincline to think in ways that are squeezed off the page by the anti-statisttendency of JUW.

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In this essay I have sought to ponder some of what is excluded by the verystrengths of JUW. It is engrossing to have such a vast array of cases surveyedfrom an individualist viewpoint. That viewpoint and tone is so sustained thata pattern emerges. My suggestion is that realism is an excellent diagnostic ofthis pattern.

I am not suggesting that the just war tradition should be subordinated torealism. My thought is rather that any account of ‘the moral realities of war’which adopts anything like the intuitive, casebook approach of JUW mightwith advantage be organized in terms of what is most and least difficult, asmeasured by what can and cannot be internalized by a realist.

Correspondingly, such an enquiry might usefully be envisaged as directingpointed questions to the realist, in request of a fuller account of what realismis. I have in this essay quietly helped myself to ample latitude in what Iattribute to realism, moving freely from interest defined in terms of power torealism determined more loosely by interest, and including such ‘commonsense’ realism as that a great power would find great difficulty in abandoninga badge of status without amply compensating reward.

I had better conclude with a few words about the present historicalsituation, for it casts a shadow over the whole of what I have said. We haveinvaded and occupied Iraq � naked aggression � and have not yet withdrawn,though there is much talk of our declaring that we gave the Iraqis theiropportunity and they blew it and must now be left to fight one another. TonyBlair has received a fervent standing ovation at his last Labour conference asparty leader but has not yet ceased to be Prime Minister. His determinationthat pre-emption shall not be ruled out as a serious strategic possibility forthe future is a matter of record in Hansard. This is, in short, a time of shameand confusion, a historical moment that I need to acknowledge in order tocontrast it with the tone of JUW. That wonderful and exhilarating book isexplicitly the work of an activist against the American intervention inVietnam. It is a monument to a time when what we are currently calling ‘theVietnam moment’ (the moment of ignominious withdrawal) was already pastand the author could look back in triumph on a period of campaigning inwhich he, among others, had found much to value in the just war tradition.

The present, I feel, is a moment for chastened respect towards realism (notseparable from questioning whether realists spoke early enough and withsufficient clarity and emphasis before the Iraq adventure). It was a failure ofrealism after 1991 that we failed to treat Iraq as a sovereign state thathad been proportionately punished for aggression through the destruction ofits offensive military capability. It was contrary to the principle of non-combatant immunity that the sanctions, as we chose to call them, killed vastnumbers of Iraqi children. It was aggression when we chose to attack withouttesting the grounds of our grievance by seeking a further UN resolution. Itwas reckless that we perpetrated this aggression hoping for a democraticoutcome that was so widely condemned as unrealistic in London, as in othercentres of expertise on the Middle East. In the short term, perhaps, thisadventure is ending so badly (if it is now ‘ending’) that the danger is of theUSA lurching from unilateralism to isolationism. In the longer term, the

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leaning towards pre-emption and prevention remains unrepudiated, and thechapter on this in JUW can hardly avoid being read with bleak unease.

The mood of the moment is always a very poor guide for ethics, as forpolicy, but our recent record is so bad that the collectivist tendency of statism,that sort of leaning towards collectivist security, can hardly fail to have itsattractions, especially as one re-reads a book as infectiously optimistic andoutgoing as Just and Unjust Wars. This is not the moment, is it, to trustourselves to venture beyond the narrowest spheres of justice in hell?

References

Gardiner Report (1975) Report of a Committee to Consider the Context of Civil Liberties and Human

Rights, Measures to Deal with Terrorism in Northern Ireland (Cmd. 5847, London).

Waltz, K. N. (1981) The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper No. 171.

Walzer, M. (1970) Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press).

Walzer, M. (1977) Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic

Books).

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