A Few Words on Mill, Walzer, and Nonintervention

Ethics and International Affairs

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 349-369

  Doyle, Michael W ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77950774117     PISSN: 08926794     EISSN: 17477093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2009.00228.x     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Citations to the 1859 “Non-Intervention” essay are to John Stuart Mill, “A Few Words on NonIntervention,” in Essays on Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1973), pp. 368—384. Citations to Walzer (1977) are to
2. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
3. I have also found helpful in comparing the two Walzer's “Mill's ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’: A Commentary,” in Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras, eds., J. S. Mill's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 347—356.
4. Lassa Oppenheim, International Law (London: Longmans, 1920) vol. I, p. 221. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force in general and GA Res 2131 (XX) (1965) provides partial evidence for customary law norms when it outlines potential violations and declares the “Inadmissibility of Intervention into the Domestic Affairs of States.” For the complicated legal record
5. see Lori Damrosch et al., International Law: Cases and Materials, 4th ed. (St. Paul, Minn.: West, 2001), chap. 12.
6. As surveys of a large literature, I have found especially valuable R. J. Vincent, Nonintervention and International Order (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974)
7. Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979)
8. Stanley Hoffmann, Duties Beyond Borders: On the Limits and Possibilities of Ethical International Politics (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1981)
9. Anthony Ellis, “Utilitarianism and International Ethics,” in Terry Nardin and David Mapel, eds., Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 158—179
10. Fernando Teson, Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry Into Law and Morality (Irvington-On-Hudson, N.Y.: Transnational Publishers, 1997)
11. Nicholas Wheeler, Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
12. Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
13. Deen Chatterjee and Don Scheid, eds., Ethics and Foreign Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
14. J. L. Holzgrefe and Robert Keohane, eds., Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
15. Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003)
16. Jennifer Welsh, ed., Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
17. Thomas Weiss, Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)
18. Gary Bass, Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Knopf, 2008).
19. Hans Morgenthau famously states: “International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power,” in Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. 25
20. Michael Walzer begins Just and Unjust Wars with a chapter titled “Against ‘Realism.”’ For one discussion of the varieties of realist, liberal, and socialist philosophy of world politics.
21. see my Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997)
22. See, e.g., the influential works of David Luban, “Just War and Human Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 160—181
23. Hadley Arkes, First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). Both Luban and Arkes are cosmopolitans in this sense, but their conceptions of which rights are fundamental differ profoundly, the first tending toward social democratic and the second libertarian in orientation, with correspondingly large differences in judgment on interventions.
24. Pushpin was a mindless game in which boys stuck pins in each other's hats and then took turns knocking them off. Good discussions of the wider aspects of Mill's ethical theory are in Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)
25. Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 249—265.
26. See his Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
27. Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), for his more general reflections on justice—domestic and international
28. For analysis of Mill's politics, see Dennis Thompson, John Stuart Mill and Representative Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976)
29. for Walzer, see his Thick and Thin.
30. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 376.
31. Kant's fifth preliminary article of Perpetual Peace prohibits forcible interference in “the constitution and government of another state,” for to do so would violate “the right of people dependent on no other and only struggling with its internal illness.” Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant's Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 93—130.
32. For comment, see also Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), chaps. 4, 5.
33. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 381; emphasis added.
34. The voluntarist and deliberative element in Mill's conception of political liberty is captured in Nadia Urbinati, “The Many Heads of the Hydra,” in Urbinati and Zakaras, eds., J. S. Mill's Political Thought, pp. 66—97.
35. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 381; emphasis added.
36. “Non-Intervention,”., p. 382.
37. “Non-Intervention,”.
38. “Non-Intervention,”., p. 380.
39. Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States,” in Charles R. Beitz et al., eds., International Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 221, n.7.
40. For discussion, see Jennifer Welsh, “Taking Consequences Seriously: Objections to Humanitarian Intervention,” in Welsh, ed., Humanitarian Intervention, pp. 56—68.
41. “Agreements must be upheld.” See Terry Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983)
42. Thomas Franck, Fairness in International Law and Institutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
43. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 383.
44. “Non-Intervention,”., p. 382.
45. “Non-Intervention,”.
46. Quoted from Lord Burghley's State Papers in Wallace MacCaffrey, “The Newhaven Expedition: 1562 —1563,” Historical Journal 40, no. 1 (1997), p. 2. For an insightful and wide-ranging analysis of religious internationalism in this period
47. see John Owen, “When Do Ideologies Produce Alliances?” International Studies Quarterly 49 (2005), pp. 73—99.
48. See Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007), esp. pp. 45—46, 58—61
49. for a general comparison, the classic by Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Political Power: USA/USSR (New York: Viking, 1961).
50. MacCaffrey, “The Newhaven Expedition,” p. 19.
51. See R. B. Wernham, Before the Armada (London: Cape, 1966)
52. G. D. Ramsay, The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (London: Macmillan, 1984), who describe dual balancing, against both foreign and domestic threats.
53. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 383.
54. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper, 2002), for background and Mill's letter to Parke Goodwin quoted
55. in Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York: Macmillan, 1954), p. 427.
56. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 111—124.
57. Just and Unjust Wars., p. 117.
58. See Gary J. Bass, “Jus Post Bellum,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32, no. 3 (2004), who explores the justice of these kinds of settlements, but limits his arguments to the demonstrably necessary case of post-genocide.
59. Ian Buruma surveys the debate on the issue in “The War over the Bomb,” New York Review of Books, September 21, 1995, pp. 26—34.
60. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 205ff., discusses the difficulty of persuading the Japanese Cabinet to limit negotiations to the preservation of the emperor, even after the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been dropped.
61. For a discussion of the circumstances favoring successful peacekeeping and peace building in a civil war context, see Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace: United Nations Peace Operations (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), and the large literature we cite.
62. For discussions of the ethical issues raised in reconstruction, see Stefano Recchia, “Just and Unjust Postwar Reconstruction,” pp. 165—188, and related articles in the special issue of Ethics & International Affairs 23, no. 2 (2009), on the Responsibility to Rebuild.
63. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 380.
64. Bass, Freedom's Battle, chaps. 4—12, treats this conflict under the rubric of humanitarian concern. It fits there, but it was also a war for secession, as noted below. Conflicts typically overlap: great powers forcibly mediated a protracted civil war with large casualties and promoted the secession of Greece from an established empire, Ottoman Turkey.
65. H. V. Livermore, A New History of Portugal, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 274.
66. See Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London: Constable, 1970), pp. 317—320
67. W. Smith, Anglo-Portuguese Relations, 1851—1861 (Lisboa: Centro de Estudios Historicos Ultramarinos, 1970), p. 16.
68. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 381.
69. Livermore, New History of Portugal, pp. 288—290.
70. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 383.
71. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, chap. 6.
72. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 383.
73. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 95.
74. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 383. For a modern interpretation stressing Hungary's success in civil reform despite its failure in acquiring independence
75. see Domokos Kosáry, Hungary and International Politics in 1848—1849, trans. Tim Wilkinson (Boulder, Colo.: Atlantic Research and Publications, 2003).
76. Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 97—99.
77. Just and Unjust Wars., pp. 101—108.
78. see discussion of various forms of despotism in Nadia Urbinati, “The Many Heads of the Hydra” (unpublished paper, 2007)
79. Mark Tunick, “Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill's Defense of British Rule in India,” Review of Politics 68, no. 4 (2006), pp. 586—611.
80. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” pp. 377, 379.
81. “Non-Intervention,”., p. 377.
82. Tunick, “Tolerant Imperialism”
83. see Stephen Holmes, “Making Sense of Liberal Imperialism,” in Urbinati and Zakaras, eds., J. S. Mill's Political Thought, pp. 319—346, for related arguments.
84. Jennifer Pitts points out that J. S. Mill, like his father, James Mill, stressed the moral and intellectual failings of the “barbarous” peoples and lumped their various social structures, from nomadic tribes to feudal and bureaucratic empires, into one category of barbarism. In doing so, the Mills broke with earlier liberal traditions that posited a common rationality and varying societal and political regimes, as did Bentham and such philosophers as Adam Smith. See Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 5, passim
85. for Smith, Doyle, Ways of War and Peace, chap. 7.
86. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, 1857—1858: A Study of Popular Resistance (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), quoting Metcalf, p. 33.
87. Lt. Col. C. E. Luard, “The Indian States: 1818—1857,” in H. H. Dodwell, ed., The Cambridge History of India, vol. 5 (Delhi: S. Chand, 1987), chap. 31.
88. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 379.
89. See Karl Marx, “The Annexation of Oude,” New York Daily Tribune, May 28, 1858.
90. Mill, “Non-Intervention,” p. 379.
91. For background on Mill's career in this connection, see Lynn Zastoupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 87.
92. In “The Politics of Rescue,” Dissent (Winter 1995), Walzer discusses the challenges of interventions from which there is no quick exit.