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Realism and the Just War
Barrie Paskins a
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Department of War Studies, King's College London, UK

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To cite this Article: Paskins, Barrie (2007) 'Realism and the Just War', Journal of
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 Journal of Military Ethics,
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Vol. 6, No. 2, 117
130, 2007

Realism and the Just War

BARRIE PASKINS
Department 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 of
a critical engagement with the full range of ‘realities’
political as well as ‘moral’
concerning
nuclear deterrence? 2) About Michael Walzer as a theory-minded activist: Is there a tendency for
his creativity as an activist to conflict with his salutary demonstration that the just war tradition is
unavoidable? 3) About political realism: Isn’t the real challenge from political realism its doubt
that 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 of
the extent to which there can be agreement by prudent realists to some tenets of the just war, and
are these the ones which look most uncontentious compared to the more activist, anti-statist
features 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 the
just war tradition. For students new to the subject, it remains a uniquely
fresh, infectiously engaged, and engrossing immersion in just war argument
about a wide variety of topics. For all of us, it contains many treasured pages
and insights, overall a thought-provoking demonstration of the value of
concrete reasoning about well-chosen historical realities, to a very large extent
avoiding hypothetical examples.
And, like many good books, JUW continues to provoke. In this essay, I
want to grapple with two of its principal provocations: supreme emergency,
and what I shall call its activist individualism. I shall suggest that nuclear
weapons are the real issue at stake in ‘supreme emergency’. They are better
conceived in other terms, I shall argue, so that we can and should jettison the
phrase ‘supreme emergency’. The activist individualism of Just and Unjust
Wars is a subtler and more all-pervasive issue. My contention is that it tends
to skew the just war tradition into an anti-statist shape, which exaggerates
the tensions between realism and the just war. The activist viewpoint and tone
impress 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
 118 B. Paskins
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‘moral realities’ of war but need to be reassessed if they are not to result in a
larger scepticism that is entirely contrary to Michael Walzer’s aim.
I had better begin with some words about political realism, whose optimal
definition is at stake in what I want to say both about supreme emergency and
about activist individualism. The definition of realism is a large subject. Three
observations may perhaps suffice for our present purpose.
First, there is more to it than one might suppose from the opening chapter
of JUW. ‘Against Realism’ aims at a target analogous to the defeat of
Thrasymachus near the start of Plato’s Republic. Just as Thrasymachus fails
to put a stop to Socrates’ intricate enquiry into the nature of justice, so here
Thucydides and Hobbes are presented as failing to disprove ‘what I want to
call the moral reality of war
that is, all those experiences of which moral
language is descriptive or within which it is necessarily employed’ (Walzer
1977: 15). This brief chapter prepares the reader to feel the intricacy of what is
to come as exemplary of this ‘moral reality’. The realist is to be driven out by
a brief general onslaught followed in the rest of the book by involvement
in concrete arguments on important specific issues; the concreteness is
empowered by the opening gambit of discrediting realist scepticism, and is in
its detail and persuasiveness to convey a sense of what moral reality is.
In its way, this opening chapter serves its purpose. The just war tradition
does have, at least in appearance, a practical force and urgency that realists
are sometimes apt to ignore, and the rest of the book assembles telling
examples of important issues. But there is more to scepticism than this. The
force of the realist’s emphasis on the state cannot be summed up adequately
in anything like the person of Thrasymachus. And that emphasis has a very
special 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 insists
that the principal agent in war and military affairs is the state. Each state has
its own survival as its principal achievement and objective. To the extent that
this is felt to be unproblematic, a state is very much concerned with power
and interest. Such order, such pattern, such possibility of moral reality as
there is in war derives to a large extent from the character principally not of
individuals but of states. States instruct the conscience of individuals, and it is
the unavoidably very limited responsibility of individuals, so instructed, to do
their bit. Like Plato, we need to think point by point about the macrocosm as
well as the microcosm; unlike Plato, we need to keep our eyes constantly on
what can make sense in the system of states if we are to avoid burdening the
individual with pseudo-responsibilities at the expense of retaining a lively
understanding of what can be asked of states individually and in their
interrelationships. Thus, I shall suppose, a statist might argue if prodded into
careful debate about the kind of challenge posed by JUW.
Much of the vivacity of JUW derives from its holding this state-centric
perspective at arm’s length, concentrating instead on individual human beings,
very many of them not characterised in terms of their state responsibilities, if
any. 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 polis
and the individual in parallel, striving constantly to notice correspondences
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between the macrocosm and the microcosm. JUW achieves many of its effects
by encouraging us to look through an interesting individual’s eyes without
attempting to keep under constant review the question of how each point as it
arises 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 is
highly characteristic of realists and which is, if anything, encouraged rather
than ameliorated by Walzer’s bold individualism. Realists often think that the
just war tradition is so vague and ambiguous, so indeterminate in practice,
that its fine words lend themselves to so many conflicting interpretations as
to afford no definite guide to policy. If we are in a mood to debate ‘moral
realities’, so the sceptical argument goes, then realists will choose interpreta-
tions that suit them, interpretations shaped by realism, not by the just war
tradition. Whether to employ the just war idiom may be a matter partly
of taste, partly of political context, but the deep realist thought is that
this language is too vague to be doing any real work. The moment JUW
becomes controversial, its cutting edge is lost because the so-called moral
realities mean different things to realist and non-realist.
‘Supreme emergency’ might well be taken by the realist to illustrate and
confirm this general scepticism. JUW offers no clear-cut, uncontroversial
definition of what is and is not a supreme emergency, and many adherents of
the just war tradition are uncomfortable with the very idea. Won’t people
handle it as they see fit? In other words, is it not an optional extra in the
vocabulary of international politics? Similarly, the many contentious moral
claims throughout JUW encourage, do they not, a tendency to dispense with
all of its vocabulary?
Along such lines as this, the realist has, I believe, a very important kind of
criticism of the project of JUW. My aim in this essay is to try two ways of
responding to the difficulty. First, I propose to jettison ‘supreme emergency’ in
favour of a discussion of something whose reality no one doubts
nuclear
deterrence. About that, I shall seek to learn from the realist, hoping to narrow
the gap between realism and the just war. Second, I propose to re-read samples
of JUW on the lookout for a large-scale pattern of contrasts. On one side of a
more or less sharp line, I shall suppose, lie examples of just war idiom on which
realists might agree in terms of the enlightened self-interest of states; on the
other side of the line are uses of just war terminology that realists can agree to
regard 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 wish
without imperilling the power of the former to support genuine common
ground 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 deterrence
is quite obviously a case apart, not immune from moral judgment but so
centrally difficult as to need envisaging in its own unique terms. That case
apart, the scepticism which is fuelled by abstraction from the state may be
overcome by noticing what statists can recognize as an argument that may
be 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 the
theory of just war’ (1977: 282). The chapter on deterrence concludes:
Nuclear war is and will remain morally unacceptable . . . [W]e must seek out ways to
prevent it, and because deterrence is a bad way, we must seek out others. It is not my
purpose here to suggest what the alternatives might look like. I have been more
concerned to acknowledge that deterrence itself, for all its criminality, falls or may fall
for the moment under the standard of necessity . . . [W]e are under an obligation to seize
upon opportunities of escape . . . [T]he readiness to murder is balanced, or should be, by
the readiness not to murder, not to threaten murder, as soon as alternative ways to peace
can be found. (1977: 283)

Taken together, these remarks suggest that there is a permanently valid

category
supreme emergency
into which nuclear weapons slot for a
limited period until something less unsatisfactory is found. I incline to
question this both negatively and, more important, positively. Negatively,
nuclear deterrence is the only example of a supreme emergency accepted as
such in JUW; World War II city bombing is considered as a candidate
but rejected in terms that we will consider later. As regards the earlier part of
the bombing campaign, when Britain was alone against Germany, Walzer
rejects all arguments for it save that it was something we could do, and this
he presents as a singularly pointless reason for attacking noncombatants.
Later, when the bombing was formidable enough to influence the outcome, it
was, he thinks, no longer needed for that purpose. The notion does no real
work outside the analysis of nuclear deterrence. Positively, I suggest, nuclear
deterrence goes deeper than constituting a transient moral embarrassment.
The kind of moral difficulty that it is can be addressed only in terms that go
to the root of the state and the interstate system. And to make this clear to
ourselves, 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 of
definition and fact. By ‘nuclear deterrence’, I shall mean any military system
that includes nuclear weapons as a significant component and which as a
whole tends to deter all resort to war against a fellow possessor of nuclear
weapons. Only states possess or are likely to possess such a deterrent, for
there is a deep Faustian fit between the territoriality of states and these
weapons deployed in this sort of mode. Nuclear deterrence has as its principal
strategic attraction that no state can plausibly be expected to be undeterred
when its territory might reasonably be thought to be vulnerable to such
weapons. The risk is a wonderful motivation towards sobriety even among the
most bitter of enemies, and a powerful inducement to ensure that one’s own
security does not become imperilled by a Dr Strangelove, ready to run risks
beyond the needs of ensuring that one’s own deterrent does not become
incredible.
At present, about ten states are actively engaged in nuclear deterrence
the
USA, 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 committed
it may be not to be the first to introduce them into the Middle East. North
Korea is currently compelling attention by its behaviour on the fringes of
deploying a nuclear deterrent. If any state ever needed nuclear weapons since
1945, then it is Iran, which currently stands accused of violating its freely
undertaken treaty obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). No
non-state actor has nuclear weapons, nor is there any royal road for non-
states from The Bomb to Deterrence. Terrorists could conceivably stage some
horrific spectacle, but the stability of nuclear deterrence, what makes it so
fundamental, such a profoundly troubling moral reality, is that relations
among the states which possess it are shaped by mutual vulnerability to
devastation of a wholly unprecedented kind.
The objective novelty of thermonuclear weapons needs emphasizing in
contrast to the unhelpful subjectivity which is hard if not impossible to avoid
in the phrase ‘supreme emergency’. According to Clausewitz, war takes its
character from a tendency to escalate towards an extreme of destruction that
is never reached. By removing all limit from the possible yield of a single
weapon, the H-Bomb changes military affairs radically. The theoretical limit
is now a practical possibility, and mutual assured destruction exploits this to
ensure that those one is seeking to deter would be mad to risk escalation in
that direction.
The moral status of nuclear deterrence is complicated by, as we might put
it, the human factor. The technology is not a doomsday device set to work on
its own from generation to generation. It is sustained every minute of every
day by those who staff the deterrent. They are under orders to proceed along
standard lines. Their readiness to carry out these orders without question is
tested not regularly but often, and any who show a tendency to pause and
question when the order to fire comes are necessarily removed to other
duties, if only to obviate the possibility of the deterrent’s being sabotaged. At
the very moment when I write this and at the moment when you read it,
conscientious individuals are poised to operate the military systems which
threaten mass slaughter in such a way as to deter. The technicalities of the
deterrent are inherently intimately bound up with the ethical.
Nuclear deterrence is, as Michael Walzer rightly insists, an outrage, but is
there any possibility of its being abandoned in any conceivable future? The
implication in JUW that we can count on something turning up needs more
discussion than it receives. There is, so far as I know, only one remotely
possible way forward
via the NPT
and that needs to be thought about by
paying careful heed to the sober thinking of realists about the nature of
nuclear proliferation.
The NPT is a voluntary treaty that invites states to participate in a mutually
advantageous bargain. Within the treaty regime, possessors of nuclear
deterrence are to negotiate in good faith towards the reduction and eventual
elimination of nuclear weapons. This eventual outcome is so desirable that
it is in the enlightened interest of a great many non-possessors to renounce
the acquisition of these weapons. The NPT offers appropriate accompanying
inducements: 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 nuclear

deterrence for security guarantees, for what they may be worth.
The British example of nuclear deterrence is well worth pondering in even
the briefest survey of the realities of nuclear deterrence. At the time of writing,
the UK will decide fairly soon whether to update its independent nuclear
deterrent. Any realist will, I think, mention three main factors as relevant
to this decision. I summarize these without attempting to suggest any order
of significance. A strategic rationale is that our Trident is, and any likely
replacement would be, usable independently in the unlikely worst manageable
case that the UK again, as in 1940, stood alone against a menacing great
power. Even if we were alone, we could count on deterring the opponent.
Another kind of realist consideration is that nuclear weapons are a badge of
great power status: great powers have these weapons, we are a great power, so
we must have these weapons. Not every realist, perhaps, will allow this to be
a powerful realist consideration, but its influence in the UK case, as in that
of India, is hardly to be set aside as a matter of historical and political fact. A
third factor is that it is hard to believe that it would make any impact in
international 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 political
reality.
Such complexities as this need bearing in mind, I suggest, as we ask
ourselves what the ‘moral realities’ of nuclear deterrence are. Let me try to
sum 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 most
welcome sobriety, as recently in Kashmir, and makes it plausible to suppose
that a kind of enforced stalemate can be the long-term effect of the deterrence
of all war between the possessors of nuclear weapons. For lesser powers,
nuclear weapons can be a welcome badge of status
a factor never perhaps
sufficient in itself to motivate proliferation, but for the UK a natural thing to
persist in so long as the country desires to retain its veto-wielding status as
one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.
How, against this mixed background, should we think about the horizontal
proliferation of nuclear weapons? In the long term, can we hope that all
military fears may fade between former enemies, until the need for the next
replacement comes to seem an absurd extravagance, and deterrence withers
away amid growing evidence that it is not needed? I hope so, and I know of no
other way to imagine the replacement of nuclear deterrence by something less
repugnant. Meanwhile, I suggest, we need to take seriously the argument of
the celebrated realist Kenneth Waltz (1981), that ‘more may be better’.
Specifically, I suggest, we need to accept that states have an inalienable right
to acquire nuclear weapons (as is affirmed in the NPT) and to amend the
treaty accordingly. At present, we have the bizarre situation that India and
Pakistan cannot become parties to the Treaty. Do we not need to accept on
the strength of their experience that the kind of ‘necessity’ that JUW calls
‘supreme emergency’ presses states from time to time to acquire nuclear
deterrence, and then (witness the UK) makes leaving the nuclear club
politically 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 or
other reasons (Iran, North Korea)? In short, do we not need to abandon the
kind of schizophrenia that allows us to feel comfortable with our bomb but
inclined to reckless talk of rogues when we ponder uses of force to prevent
states 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 of
Waltz’s argument that we may need to assist in some cases of nuclear
proliferation, lest the balance of terror between a pair of enemies tilts too
dangerously in the direction of pre-emptive attack by one against the other
while the going is good. Deterrence is most stable when neither of a pair
of enemies dares discount the possibility of triggering disaster from the
other’s second-strike capability. A moment at which one felt able to pre-empt
with a disarming first strike the mutual vulnerability on which deterrence is
supposed to rest would be a moment of enormous danger not only to the pair
of states in question but to the whole world. The pattern of non-use that has
prevailed since Nagasaki might be imperilled. However we might wish to
stand aside, the mutual entanglement of states might very well make it vital
that 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, the
responsibilities of the existing nuclear weapons states are unavoidably liable
to 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- or
a-moral is, I suggest, peculiarly difficult, and that is part of the reality of the
situation. JUW leaves all this out of account because of its non-statist
viewpoint. Michael Walzer’s acquiescence in deterrence is under-described in
its 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 be
plain, I personally very much hope that the UK does not replace Trident and
very much support non-violent witness in support of this). The moral reality
of nuclear deterrence is that the possibility of its ever being abandoned strains
belief. The only possibility is that war will wither away through a kind of
stalemate that was inconceivable before 1945. Getting there from where we
are can only happen through the agency of states, and this involves in the
interim difficult decisions of the sort outlined by realists such as Kenneth
Waltz.
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 mix
of repugnancy and promise that is nuclear deterrence. The need is simply
to understand the not very subtle motivations of nuclear deterrence and
proliferation, and the colossal practical difficulties that ensue.
It may be worth considering how this all-too-bluntly stated set of
assertions affects another part of the discussion of supreme emergency in
JUW. A couple of quiet sentences are directed against President Truman:
‘Harry Truman’s flat statement that he never lost a night’s sleep over his
decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is not the sort of thing
political leaders often say. They usually find it preferable to stress the
painfulness 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 deterrence
includes the atom-bombings of Japanese cities. A larger uncertainty of the
same kind concerns ‘The dishonouring of Arthur Harris’, a section almost at
the end of JUW that has always made me peculiarly uncomfortable. It comes
at the end of the chapter on Nuremberg and My Lai. It discusses the public
standing of the head of Bomber Command during World War II and rejoices
in his not having received a peerage, as other well-known commanders had
done. Michael Walzer, having argued at length that the bombing of German
cities was terrorism, acknowledges that the policy implemented by Sir Arthur
was knowingly chosen and sustained by the government of Sir Winston
Churchill but, as an activist, sees fit to rejoice in what one might be tempted
to call the hypocrisy of denying recognition to the leader of Bomber
Command:
[I]f blame is to be distributed for the bombing, Churchill deserves a full share. But
Churchill’s success in dissociating himself from the policy of terrorism is not of great
importance; there is always a remedy for that in retrospective criticism. What is
important is that his dissociation was part of a national dissociation
a deliberate
policy that has moral significance and value. (1977: 324)

In 1977 this had, no doubt, implications for the Vietnam aftermath, but my
concern at present is with re-reading JUW thirty years later. In the
intervening years, Sir Arthur has been memorialized in a statue at the RAF
church, St Clement Danes, almost directly across the road from King’s
College London where I am writing this, so I must register a doubt about
the continuing fact of that policy of ‘national dissociation’, if such ever
existed. Not being an activist, I am uncertain about the value of any such
act or policy of dishonour. I am far from disputing the importance of
appropriate public sentiments, what I want to debate is which sentiments
are proper, and how they relate to the just war tradition and to political
realism. Nuclear deterrence seems to me objectively difficult: the difficulty is
part of the moral reality. Is the World War II bombing campaign any less
difficult? I think it is. The British war cabinet should have known better
than to have thought that committing murder was better than doing
nothing in 1940, but even this claim needs to be accompanied by
acknowledgment of how desperate things seemed in 1940. I wonder whether
‘dishonouring’ in such a context can ever be constructive. Perhaps a better
way to work towards the internalization of the just war tradition by realists
is to emphasize that such proceedings as the Nuremberg trial and its
contemporary descendants in UN ad hoc tribunals and the International
Criminal Court have a wider as well as a narrower constituency. As well as
the doing of justice to the accused, they provide a focus for law-abiding
opinion, prompting an unknowable but potentially large and influential
audience to venture beyond the minimal requirements of international law.
This leads from deterrence and supreme emergency towards my other main
theme, the role of activist individualism in JUW.
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III
Nowadays, states are required in international law to instruct their personnel
in the laws and customs of war. These individuals, so instructed, are required
to disobey manifestly illegal orders
a requirement that can be shown to
have real, practical content in, to mention an example that is well discussed in
JUW, the My Lai massacre. States and individuals meet in this elemental
division of responsibilities. States have the responsibility to bring the laws and
customs of war into line with the just war tradition. Individuals are not
required to invent the ethics of war but to participate in what we might
venture to call spheres of justice in hell
spheres ranging from the narrow
duty to disobey manifestly illegal orders via broader and more debatable
obligations to question and to challenge to the widest and most problematic
of circles, taking it upon themselves to venture altogether beyond the rules set
by states. This division of responsibility between states and individuals has
potential, I suggest, to unify many of the topics discussed in JUW while
avoiding the tendency of activist individualism to drive a wedge between
realism and the just war tradition. The moral realities are most solid and
incontestable, most resistant to scepticism, in the narrowest sphere; they are
most nebulous and debatable where they altogether lose contact with what
can possibly be required by the enlightened self-interest of states. The statist is
to be taken aboard as an arbiter of what can count as a scepticism-proof
example of a moral reality; in return, realism is to be questioned for its
openness to moral realities.
Consider as an example the scope in realism and in ‘moral reality’ for
benevolent quarantine. Two possible cases of this, as Michael Walzer makes
admirably clear, are the privileged status of prisoners of war and the
behaviour of populations in occupied territory. Both, one might like to
think, 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 on
Disobedience, War and Citizenship, soldiers who offer to surrender are
entitled to be permitted to do so and to count on benevolent quarantine
until the end of hostilities. They are not required to seek to escape, must not
kill if they do try to escape, are not to be subjected to interrogation beyond
the formality of name, rank, and number, and are not to be investigated or
prosecuted on suspicion of war crimes while captive as PoWs. Difficult cases,
especially hypothetical ones, cannot be ruled out, but there is ample scope
hereabouts for best practice that is as straightforward as anything can be
expected to be in military ethics. If deterrence is difficult, this is or should
be easy.
To style it easy is not to say that it is automatic. The mistreatment of PoWs
by Japan in World War II remains a grievance, and it is still the case that a
careful 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 (the

continuing failure of Japanese governments to pursue this might perhaps
count against my early expression of unease about Michael Walzer’s positive
evaluation of the act of dishonouring). Even the easiest of good practice has
its practical difficulties, requiring vigilance.
The extension of the PoW convention to non-state belligerents has greater
difficulties, not least as regards the recognition of the non-state as anything
but a criminal enterprise. It would be a very considerable political gain for
any non-state belligerent to secure recognition that its violent activity is
war rather than crime and hard to imagine that states could concede such
an advantage. On the other hand, any astute insurgency might well see
advantage in unilateral conformity, so far as possible, to the prisoner-of-war
convention, 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-insurgency
concerns interrogation. Some of the issues seemed to have been resolved
in the UK by the Gardiner Report (1975). The ‘robust’ intimidation with
which we have recently been re-familiarized by Guantanamo Bay and
elsewhere had been practised by the UK in its withdrawal from empire to
Aden and had become a topic of controversy in Northern Ireland. The
three reports, culminating in Gardiner’s, accepted that hypothetical argu-
ments about the easily imaginable difficult case of a man possessed of vital
information from which he could be known to be partable by rough
treatment but not otherwise were rejected as of negligible overall impor-
tance compared to routine, unproblematic intelligence gathering. That this
lesson has been so forgotten that the ICRC has felt moved to protest in
public against torture is a disturbing illustration of how precarious even the
most stable of civilizing measures can be. In general, JUW is invaluable in
its concentration on real as distinct from fancifully hypothetical cases. It
might be interesting to hear how Michael Walzer now sees this standing
temptation to open a way to barbarism by the hypothetical case. Is the
benevolent quarantine of captives worth ring-fencing against the near
certainty that any hypothetical exceptions will be too corrosive in practice
to be worth contemplating?

Occupied Territory
Roughly corresponding to the benevolent quarantine of PoWs is the holding
of enemy territory while war continues. States in war do surrender territory,
and sometimes whole states surrender, as did France in World War II. It
happens, it is a familiar mutuality, and a code of good practice has developed.
Like the PoW convention, it rests on mutual restraint. Occupiers typically
want the occupied to keep out of their way, to pursue everyday life without
tying 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 that
highlights some of the costs
I incline to say the moral costs
of activist
individualism (1977: 176
179).
Beginner students are in my experience almost always struck by Michael
Walzer’s apt re-telling of a story from Ophuls’s documentary film The Sorrow
and the Pity. French peasants, seemingly engrossed in digging potatoes, shoot
occupying German soldiers with hidden weapons. Years later, the Germans’
commander was still indignant: ‘What happened in that field was murder,’ he
says (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 forget
that any who wished to continue the fight could do so by leaving France
and volunteering for a place in the armed forces of one of the states that
was continuing the general war against Germany
no need to imperil the
condition of benevolent quarantine that was made possible by the submission
of the overwhelming majority of French citizens. (It is not part of Ophuls’s
story 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 safety
in the UK and USA.)
Does the activism of JUW conflict in the presentation of this memorable
episode with the general realism of a healthy preference for benevolent
quarantine where possible? Michael Walzer actually states the case against
the killing of the German soldiers at greater length and with greater
force 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 rally
and fight back; some of the partisans are captured, tried as murderers,
condemned and executed. We would not, I think, add those executions to
the list of Nazi war crimes. At the same time, we would not join in the
condemnation’ (1977: 178). I wonder whether this is in some respects too
simple and in others too complicated: too simple in overlooking the scope
for patriots to leave their country in search of legitimate military service
elsewhere; too complicated in asking that we condemn or not condemn; too
simple in failing to ask whether such executions would be unwise in the
circumstances relative to the general desirability of mutual restraint; too
complicated in asking that we envisage the situation in terms of the nowadays
unfamiliar terminology of war treason. In short, is this not a pretty simple
case of the partisans behaving with reckless indifference to the merits of
benevolent quarantine, needlessly complicated by the activist’s sympathy for
the resistance hero?
Between deterrence and benevolent quarantine, I suggest, many topics can
be surveyed to advantage with reference to the extent that the ethical is
continuous with enlightened self-interest.
The sympathy for ‘resistance’ is part of a larger pattern that goes so far as
to lend great weight to the national self-determination of peoples. More or
less 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. Michael
Walzer 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 to
secede if the secession would remove not only land but also vitally needed fuel and
mineral resources from some larger political community. The Katangan controversy of
the early 1960s suggests the possible difficulties of such cases
and invites us to worry
also about the motives of intervening states. But what was missing in Katanga was a
genuine national movement capable, on its own, of ‘arduous struggle’ . . . Given the
existence of such a movement, I would be inclined to support secession. It would then be
necessary, however, to raise more general questions about distributive justice in
international society.

The scope in passages such as this for armed political fragmentation to be

considered unexceptionable is quite remarkable. A contrasting view might be
that secession which is not unproblematically unresisted (Norway from
Sweden) must be considered highly problematic. Must not all the legitimate
concerns of neighbouring states weigh very heavily against secession? Is it not
part of the legitimacy of the ANC’s rebellion against apartheid that it was
supported by neighbours, the front-line states, and that there was no question
of secessions?
JUW shows its activism in its tendency to favour the rebel at the expense
of the quietist. Another aspect of this is the kind of union that Michael
Walzer seems to be imagining between the state and the individual. Early
on, he contrasts two conditions of participation in war. Volunteers, he
thinks, are relatively unproblematic in that they agree to fight, though
the terms of their doing so is under-explored. How well informed are these
hypothetical volunteers supposed to be? To what extent are they at liberty
to learn from experience, turning against combat if they don’t like it? They
are 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 is
so important to win is that killing and dying has been forced on them. This
is a curious kind of reason for resenting aggression, and a curiously
individualist one. A more ‘realistic’ account might be that the overwhelming
majority of actual military personnel accept the legitimacy of their state in
a world of states and do their bit out of acceptance of a statist world-order
in which it would seem odd to resent what one is ordered to do. In
Obligations, Michael Walzer provides a hard-working, creative examination
of special cases, such as conscripts who are in a significant way alienated
from the society of the state that seeks to conscript them. In JUW, the
relation between state and military individual is more generalized, and by
this token more puzzling, less ‘realistic’. As for aggression, JUW omits to
consider the obvious thought that nowadays, after 1914, states cannot allow
or trust one another to resort to war as an instrument of foreign policy
because it is such a threat to their vital interests. Reasons of state have their
own moral weight, are themselves moral realities, or so at least one might
incline to think in ways that are squeezed off the page by the anti-statist
tendency of JUW.
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In this essay I have sought to ponder some of what is excluded by the very
strengths of JUW. It is engrossing to have such a vast array of cases surveyed
from an individualist viewpoint. That viewpoint and tone is so sustained that
a pattern emerges. My suggestion is that realism is an excellent diagnostic of
this pattern.
I am not suggesting that the just war tradition should be subordinated to
realism. My thought is rather that any account of ‘the moral realities of war’
which adopts anything like the intuitive, casebook approach of JUW might
with advantage be organized in terms of what is most and least difficult, as
measured by what can and cannot be internalized by a realist.
Correspondingly, such an enquiry might usefully be envisaged as directing
pointed questions to the realist, in request of a fuller account of what realism
is. I have in this essay quietly helped myself to ample latitude in what I
attribute to realism, moving freely from interest defined in terms of power to
realism determined more loosely by interest, and including such ‘common
sense’ realism as that a great power would find great difficulty in abandoning
a badge of status without amply compensating reward.
I had better conclude with a few words about the present historical
situation, for it casts a shadow over the whole of what I have said. We have
invaded and occupied Iraq
naked aggression
and have not yet withdrawn,
though there is much talk of our declaring that we gave the Iraqis their
opportunity and they blew it and must now be left to fight one another. Tony
Blair has received a fervent standing ovation at his last Labour conference as
party leader but has not yet ceased to be Prime Minister. His determination
that pre-emption shall not be ruled out as a serious strategic possibility for
the future is a matter of record in Hansard. This is, in short, a time of shame
and confusion, a historical moment that I need to acknowledge in order to
contrast it with the tone of JUW. That wonderful and exhilarating book is
explicitly the work of an activist against the American intervention in
Vietnam. It is a monument to a time when what we are currently calling ‘the
Vietnam moment’ (the moment of ignominious withdrawal) was already past
and the author could look back in triumph on a period of campaigning in
which 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 (not
separable from questioning whether realists spoke early enough and with
sufficient clarity and emphasis before the Iraq adventure). It was a failure of
realism after 1991 that we failed to treat Iraq as a sovereign state that
had been proportionately punished for aggression through the destruction of
its offensive military capability. It was contrary to the principle of non-
combatant immunity that the sanctions, as we chose to call them, killed vast
numbers of Iraqi children. It was aggression when we chose to attack without
testing the grounds of our grievance by seeking a further UN resolution. It
was reckless that we perpetrated this aggression hoping for a democratic
outcome that was so widely condemned as unrealistic in London, as in other
centres of expertise on the Middle East. In the short term, perhaps, this
adventure is ending so badly (if it is now ‘ending’) that the danger is of the
USA lurching from unilateralism to isolationism. In the longer term, the
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leaning towards pre-emption and prevention remains unrepudiated, and the

chapter 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 for
policy, 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 its
attractions, especially as one re-reads a book as infectiously optimistic and
outgoing as Just and Unjust Wars. This is not the moment, is it, to trust
ourselves 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).