Editor's page
Walzer, Michael
About a week before Arafat, I visited Jericho to see how "the autonomy" (as my Israeli friends call it) was faring. It was, that week, faring well. The city, bedecked in Palestinian flags, was...
...still, there I was, walking peacefully around a square in . . . Palestine...
...The central issues have to do with intervention in civil wars and "failed states" and with the U.S...
...Jericho was a popular festival but probably not a budding democracy...
...Today, the readiness of people on the left (I had better be careful: some people) to call for military intervention in places like Bosnia or Haiti makes it a necessary topic again...
...Eighty-four years ago, Jean Jaurès, who had no trouble with the assumption, answered this question in his L'armee nouvelle...
...role in the global economy...
...Democracy remains, should remain, the central goal of the left, but insofar as we think about state policy, we need to lower our sights...
...the old police and new security forces seemed to be effective and, for the moment, popular...
...The most striking truth about international society today, and especially about its most powerful grouping, the West European/North Atlantic states, is the absence of the capacity and the will (which one, really...
...What is necessary today is minimal decency: peace on the ground if not in the heart, subsistence and shelter, security for minority populations...
...We lead off with a programmatic statement by Stanley Hoffmann, to which we asked eight editors, contributors, and friends, whose views range fairly widely, to respond...
...to work effectively for minimal decency...
...This is peacemaking on the ground, and though it can turn very sour very fast, it is a remarkable achievement—made possible, we should remember, by the victory of the Israeli left in a democratic vote two years ago...
...The one sign of future trouble was that every official I met came from outside, from Tunis, Lebanon, or Iraq...
...Virtually everything remains to be done...
...M.W...
...the locals seem to have been displaced—though perhaps they have only retreated into temporary invisibility...
...And in much of the world, civil war and anarchy, desperate poverty and famine, masses of people in flight make any kind of democratic politics impossible...
...In this issue of Dissent, we focus on American foreign policy (but the same questions arise for the Europeans: Daniel Bell's "Future of Europe" suggests the difficulties they are likely to have answering them...
...But this close link between democracy and peace is by no means guaranteed...
...No doubt, a number of editors will want to disagree, and we will make room for them in later issues...
...the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols were the surprising success story of the autonomy's first stage...
...In countries like Serbia and Croatia, nationalist politicians with maximal programs easily win elections and fight wars...
...In any case, the new civil administration was not yet at work, and elections were still months away, on the most optimistic schedule...
...I hope to have a long essay on intervention ready for the Winter issue—in which I will argue, with Knight, for its lasting necessity...
...FALL • 1994 • 437...
...But in the cold war years, serious arguments about military matters were virtually forbidden...
...The city, bedecked in Palestinian flags, was quiet...
...The field of strategic studies was foreign territory...
...The question assumes that the answer is: some sort...
...As the arguments in these pages demonstrate—on foreign policy, European social democracy, markets and health care—we remain committed to a steady engagement with all the hard questions...
...Labor could have lost the last election, could still lose the next one...
...A separate article by Charles Knight opens an argument much neglected by the left (not only by Dissent): what sort of military organization and budget should leftists defend...
Vol. 41 • September 1994 • No. 4
