A Foreign Policy for the Left by Michael Walzer

Author:Michael Walzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

FIVE

Global and Domestic Justice

As I argued in the introduction, domestic justice is the first commitment of the left; it is the project with which we have always been most effectively engaged. When we look abroad, we are inclined to focus on issues like those that we grapple with at home: sweatshop factories, anti-union practices, tyrannical managers, and so on. But we also need to think about the larger distributive issues and the gross inequalities across international society. And we can’t—for reasons I will describe—aim at exactly the same kind of justice abroad that we aim at domestically. So what should justice abroad mean to men and women of the left, and what efforts should it inspire?

Global justice would seem to require a global theory—a single philosophically or ideologically grounded account of what justice is that explains why it ought to be realized in exactly this way, everywhere, right now. Many people on the left—and many liberals, too—look for such a theory or, better, for a comprehensive and compelling story about the just society, about equality, liberty, international trade, mutual aid, and much else—a story that need only be repeated again and again, for it applies identically to every country in the world, even to every person, and calls for a straightforward linear realization.

There are several well-known difficulties with this project. First, there is no one to tell the story to who can act authoritatively in its name. There is no global agent of justice comparable to the ruling class of a modern state or its democratically elected government. Marxists once believed that the international working class or the proletarian dictatorship would become the global agent, but right now there is no reason to believe that anything like that is possible. Nor is there an alternative set of agents, states, or NGOs whose legitimacy is widely recognized, who might take up the story in its one true version and pursue the project it describes. The members of the UN Security Council are obviously unwilling and unable to undertake any such effort.

Second, even those who agree that there ought to be a single comprehensive story end up telling different stories. Old leftists believed in the existence of an ideologically correct position but never agreed on what it was. There are cosmopolitan and statist versions, revolutionary and reformist versions, even religious and secular versions—and each version has its own storytellers (and philosophers) who insist that theirs is the one true version.

Third, we can’t be sure that whatever story we tell will be understood in the same way by everyone who hears it—or that it will be understood in the way the storytellers intend. The story won’t connect with a universal common life with interests and ideals that might make it comprehensible and then appealing. There are many common lives of different sorts but no common life of that sort. The diversity of cultures and the plurality of states make it unlikely that any one account of justice could ever be persuasive or enforceable across the globe.

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