The thick values are the particular values Walzer holds as a Jewish American
social democrat. Obviously the boundaries for the responsibilities entailed by these
different identities are not identical. But Walzer places particular emphasis on the
political community, usually embodied in the citizenship of a state. His account of
why this is necessary, most famously set out in Just and Unjust Wars , need not
detain us beyond the fact that Walzer derives the rights of the political community
from the rights of the individuals that make it up.^76 The important point is that the
political community, which we can identify here – not entirely unproblematically –
with the state, still remains, at its best, the most complex example of
institutionalised solidarity. As such it defines the gap between the scope of our
institutionalised responsibilities (to our fellow citizens) and the scope of our
concern (all humanity), even as it arguably, through the process of institutionalising
that domestic solidarity, has expanded the scope of our concern internationally.
So, there is a communitarian restriction on the scope of our day-to-day
responsibilities, yet moral minimalism entails a wider concern, an internationalist
commitment. Much of Walzer’s work, and the response to it, focuses on that
restrictive move, that critique of the defining of cosmopolitan responsibilities, Thick
and Thin itself is mostly written in that vein. It places itself in a conversation with
contemporary cosmopolitanism, but also arguably fits into debates that go back to
Mazzini, to the tension between self-determination and broadly conceived universal
human rights (Walzer draws on J. S. Mill in Just and Unjust Wars to establish his
take on this issue^77 ), to Woodrow Wilson and the dilemmas of forcibly “self-
determining” others. What will be introduced in the rest of this section is the
permissive flipside of Walzer’s prevailing restrictive mood. It asks what kind of
solidarity an internationalism resting on moral minimalism can accommodate, and
suggests that a more nuanced reading might be fruitful, particularly in its potential
accommodation of humanitarian solidarities.
Returning to the marchers of Prague, Walzer concludes that in general, if we
are to consider the possibility of military intervention, prudence is of the essence.
76
77 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars , 53-55.
Ibid., 87-91.