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"The Moral Standing of States" is the title of an essay Michael Walzer wrote in response to four critics of the theory of nonintervention defended in Just and Unjust Wars (of which I was one).1 The essay was written nearly thirty years ago and is still read today. This is not only because it clarifies and deepens the argument about the nonintervention principle presented in the book. That principle belongs to a wider conception of what we might call global political justice, so an account of the principle's grounds and requirements also sheds light on this wider conception. And the wider conception is a matter of both theoretical and practical interest, perhaps even more so now than when the book and article were written.
In this paper I want to reconsider the subject of "Moral Standing" and try to put Walzer's views about intervention, and particularly humanitarian intervention, in the context of a conception of global justice in which the value of collective self-determination is central. The main elements ofthat conception can be found in Just and Unjust Wars and "Moral Standing," but to see its full force we must look also at some subsequent essays on states and nations, the prospects for global governance, and the practice of humanitarian intervention. Walzer's writings on these topics over the years exhibit both consistency and growth, the latter indicated especially by a developing internationalism that was implicit from the beginning but has become more pronounced since the close of the cold war. As I suggest at the end of this paper, this is an essential element of the wider view as it applies to a world like ours.
THE LEGALIST PARADIGM AND ITS REVISIONS
The "moral standing" referred to in the title of Walzer's essay is the idea that states have a certain kind of right of due regard in global politics: each state is bound to respect the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of other states by refraining from coercive interference in their internal affairs. In Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer presents the nonintervention principle as part of a conception he calls "the legalist paradigm," the "primary form" of the "theory of aggression."2 I will not summarize it here except to recall that the main organizing...