Editor's Page
Walzer, Michael
Socialist internationalism was originally based on beliefs that few of us hold anymore: that the workers of the world have no country; that the struggle against oppression is the same...
...Yet all these people find comrades abroad, struggles they can join, in whose outcomes they are morally and politically involved...
...that the struggle against oppression is the same everywhere...
...Their participants have few commitments of the sort that the old internationalism required: to working-class power, or the extension of the welfare system, or the democratization of industry...
...What is the reason for our persistent entanglement with (mostly) powerless people in faraway places...
...The national roads don't all lead to the same place...
...What binds us to them is the fact that they have taken a stand, often at great personal risk, against things that we too oppose...
...Internationalism today is a form of solidarity without certainty, without rigid ideological prerequisites...
...Not so many years ago, a section on "Politics Abroad" in a socialist magazine would simply have measured progress along the various roads— a reiterated tale of victories and defeats, essentially similar wherever they occurred (that's why it was so easy to have a "position" on all of them), with a predetermined end...
...The focus of movements of this sort is mostly negative: against ecological degradation, ethnic cleansing, political repression, genital mutilation, child labor, and so on...
...Now we are required to recognize that different peoples with different histories and ways of life will make different political choices...
...In what sense, then, do we still have comrades in Poland or the Czech Republic, Nicaragua or Costa Rica, Burma or China...
...and, finally, that this will be a global regime, transcending all ethnic and cultural differences...
...So we need to know how they are faring, and whether and how we can help...
...Our own program is similarly minimalist: though we remain committed to welfarism and industrial democracy, we have supported dissidents in many parts of the world without inquiring about their positions on these questions—and without any sure knowledge about what kind of politics their victory would bring...
...that, even if there are different national "roads" to socialism, exactly the same socialism lies at the end of all the roads...
...And so do we...
...SPRING • 1997 • 5...
...We are participants in a new internationalism, heir to the old but looser, more pluralist—most clearly visible in the human rights, environmentalist, and feminist movements (labor belongs in the series too...
...M.W...
...But when socialism is qualified by words like "democratic," internationalism is also qualified...
...We have comrades in all these countries, though "comrade" is a less descriptive word than it used to be: we and our friends abroad often march to different drumbeats, possibly in different directions...
...Still, we are sure enough about our solidarity to organize a symposium in this issue on whether or not the power of the United States—never a comfortable instrument for the left—should be used against political repression and economic exploitation (prison labor, child labor) in China...
...Human rights activists undoubtedly favor democracy, but their minimalist programs are entirely consistent with fairly constrained versions of democratic government...
...And we have added to these reflections a "scorecard" on the efforts of democratic reformers in Latin America, a critical examination of contemporary Nicaragua, and a report on the first signs of democratic resistance in Serbia...
...Environmentalists and feminists don't necessarily care about what sort of government it is that stops the practices they oppose...
...And this same sense of solidarity led us to ask three former East European dissidents, who have kept their balance and maintained a critical position (or three different critical positions) in the years since 1989, to reflect on the difficulties of post-communist democracy...
...What is it that interests us about, say, all the struggles for democracy—sure to lead, if they are successful, to different social and economic policies, many of which we won't like...
Vol. 44 • April 1997 • No. 2
