The Just War of the Ukrainians
A long philosophical tradition helps to explain why fighting for independence is morally justified, while besieging civilians is not
By Michael Walzer
March 25, 2022 9:26 am ET
“A conqueror,” wrote the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, “is always a lover of peace. He would like to make his entry into our state unopposed; in order to prevent this, we must choose to fight.” The crime of aggression is to force men and women to make that choice. They can, of course, choose not to fight, as Czechoslovakia did in 1938 when it was betrayed by its allies and left to face Nazi Germany alone. But most people believe that the right choice is to defend your country.
Vladimir Putin apparently believed that the Ukrainians would choose not to fight against Russian invasion—because, he claimed, its inhabitants were really Russians, or because Ukraine was ruled by Nazis and its citizens would welcome liberation. If either of those beliefs had been true, we might not call the Russian war aggression. But the Ukrainians have proven them false. They have proven the value of Ukrainian statehood and the reality of Ukrainian democracy by fighting and dying to defend both.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal under international law, and it is unjust according to every version of just war theory. The decision to begin a war and the subsequent conduct of the war have always been subject to moral judgment. In Europe, just war theory dates from the Middle Ages. It was most fully developed by Catholic theologians, but it also appears in Jewish and Muslim versions. (There are Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian versions, too). And for just as long, “realists” have denied the meaningfulness and the efficacy of all such judgments. Realism is the major alternative to both international law and just war theory.
The conduct of the war by the Russian army clearly violates the Geneva Conventions, and it fails to meet the just war requirement to fight in ways that avoid or minimize civilian casualties. The Ukrainians chose to fight, but it is the Russians who are putting civilians at risk. They have added to the crime of aggression the crime of total war, in one of its oldest and deadliest forms: the siege. Besieging a city, as the Russian army is now doing to Mariupol, is a way of fighting that directly engages and endangers the civilian population. The idea is to surround the city, cut off supplies, bar civilians from leaving and wait until starving men and women force their soldiers to surrender.
It doesn’t always work, as the Russians should know. Leningrad endured a siege by German forces from 1941 to 1943 and never surrendered, though a million of its citizens died of starvation and disease. At Nuremberg in 1945, Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb, commander of the siege, was put on trial for ordering his soldiers to fire at civilians fleeing the city. He was found not guilty; siege warfare was not regulated by international law, and barring civilian flight was “customary” practice.
Theorists of just war have argued differently. The medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides states that “when siege is laid to a city for the purpose of capture, it may not be surrounded on all four sides, but only on three, in order to give an opportunity for escape to those who would flee to save their lives.” It may sound like a hopelessly naive position—how can you surround a city on three sides? Maimonides’ rule seems to bar sieges entirely.
What it actually does is to lower the odds of capturing the city. And that is the crucial point of all the rules that aim to protect civilians from the ravages of war. The deliberate killing of civilians may be a way to win, but armies fighting justly are required to look for other ways (there are other ways). Sitting outside a city, as the Russians are now doing, and using artillery and airstrikes indiscriminately against civilians locked inside—this is a strategy that greatly reduces the risks to soldiers on the ground and may lead, over time, to a victory without serious costs to the invaders. Nonetheless, it is a war crime. Other countries, including our own, may have committed similar crimes, but the existence of wrongs elsewhere is never a justification for wrongs here and now.
Historically, foreign-policy “realists” have mocked this argument. How many armies, they might ask, have risked military success or their own lives in order to reduce the risks that civilians must live with? It has been a feature of realism to refuse to blame soldiers who do anything they can, at any cost to other people, for the sake of their own survival or their army’s victory. Modern realists seldom go so far. Almost everyone in the U.S. and Europe observing the invasion of Ukraine has no difficulty condemning the barbarism of Russian war-making.
The realist argument these days takes another form, having to do with the war itself and not with the conduct of the war. Realists claim to understand Mr. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, even if they deplore its price. Great powers are entitled to a sphere of influence beyond their borders, they argue, and the eastward expansion of NATO seemed to deny Russia its natural sphere. On this view, the idea that little countries near big and powerful countries are entitled to full independence and sovereignty is naive.
That idea is indeed the deep foundation of the moral critique of aggression, and it has had a kind of historical confirmation. The post-World War II settlement, designed at the Yalta conference, gave Russia its sphere of influence in all of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union was recognized as a great power, and it proceeded to establish satellite states and ideologically sympathetic governments throughout its sphere. Realism was given a trial run.
But the refusal to allow anything like local self-determination—the creation instead of brutal, authoritarian, subservient regimes—proved disastrous for the people of the satellite states and ultimately for Russia itself. The failed uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed the necessity of an independent state, a state in the hands of its own people, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc decades later vindicated that powerful idea, as true realists should acknowledge.
A similar story, not the same but not entirely different, could also be told about the American sphere of influence. The refugees struggling to cross our southern border are fleeing corrupt and authoritarian states in whose creation we have often had a hand, states that have never been in the hands of their own people. Their flight is another testimony to the importance of independence and self-government.
The Ukrainian affirmation of statehood and sovereignty comes at a time when students of international politics have been writing about the end of the Westphalian system and the necessary transcendence of the nation-state. The truth is that we need cooperation across borders, but we also need borders like the ones Ukrainian fighters are now struggling to re-establish.
One day the devastated cities of Ukraine will be rebuilt, and the work will require assistance from outside. This will be an international project but not a cosmopolitan one; it won’t be citizens of the world who will join in but rather citizens of many states who will press their governments to provide the necessary funds. The state remains the critically necessary agent of humanity’s well-being. It is also, too often, the agent of persecution and war. That’s why we still need theories of justice that address the actually existing state system, warn of its dangers and explain its value.
—Mr. Walzer is a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study and the author of “Just and Unjust Wars,” among many other books of political theory.
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Appeared in the March 26, 2022, print edition as 'The Just War of the Ukrainians Just and Unjust War in Ukraine.'
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Erős Pista
by Erős Pista Tue Mar 29, 2022 12:31 am
