On Compromise and Rotten Compromises
By Avishai Margalit
Princeton University Press $26.95/£18.95

After a weekend of remembering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the removal of a foundation stone of the larger edifice of communism, it is fitting to mark the publication of a discerning and deeply reflective book on the morality of compromise. For in considering compromise as a political act, Avishai Margalit refers to great moral moments that include the Russian revolution, which created the communist world, and the rise of Nazism. “They created a change in the world order which in turn resulted in grave moral consequences...[paving] the way to unparalleled murderous regimes.”

At the centre of Margalit’s concern here is an attempt to define those political compromises that are permissible, and those that are not. At the core of that reflection lies the morality or otherwise of compromises with the great tyrannies of the early and mid-20th century, in particular those made by two British prime ministers.

Neville Chamberlain’s pact with Adolf Hitler in Munich, though made for the sake of peace (for which, in general, Margalit believes large compromises should be made), was nevertheless wrong, because it was an agreement with Hitler. “A pact with Hitler was a pact with radical evil, evil as an assault on morality itself. Not recognising Hitler as radically evil was a moral failure on top of a bad error of political judgment”.

The other two accords, subjected to longer analysis, are the alliance of the UK with the USSR to fight Nazi Germany; and the agreement among the Allies – the UK, the US and the USSR – at Yalta in 1944-45. In the first of these, Margalit believes that Churchill was right; and that his much quoted remark – that to fight Hitler he would make an alliance with hell, and would be sure to make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons – to be wise and necessary as well as witty.

Yalta was different. Margalit does not fault the wording that the Big Three thrashed out: rather it was what US president Franklin Roosevelt, and especially UK prime minister Winston Churchill, knew or should have known about USSR leader Joseph Stalin, that rendered the agreement, and the compromises that made it possible, morally rotten. For years after it, the western allies handed over to Stalin some 2m “Soviet citizens” – some of whom had indeed fought against the USSR in the army commanded by Andrei Vlasov, who had formed an anti-Soviet force: but most had not. Second, although the agreement explicitly contained a clause guaranteeing free elections and choice of government to the countries liberated from Nazism by the Red Army, all were forced to submit to Moscow’s dictates. “The Yalta agreement...accepted the systematically cruel and humiliating rule of Stalin over eastern Europe. It accepted a rule of human humiliation as opposed to mere social humiliation (as that imposed by the Versailles treaty). It thereby rendered the Yalta agreement rotten.”

The cardinal difference that emerges is that Margalit pronounces a compromise rotten when it is made with Hitler because of the Nazi’s “radical evil”, but is prepared to debate the morality of a compromise with Stalin. Was the latter not just as evil? Stalinism resulted in many more dead than Nazism – very many more, if Mao and Pol Pot are seen as his disciples. Margalit believes not.

In the conclusion to the book, he argues that Stalinism, a form of Marxism-Leninism, still has an enlightenment base: “Marxist Leninists in the Soviet Union under Stalin retained the moral vision of a non-exploitative classless society for humanity at large; this is a very different doctrine from Nazism.”

Elsewhere in the book, Margalit shows himself as a militant for peace, arguing that compromise should be made for its sake, even where the compromise recognises an earlier violent annexation of territory, or rewards terrorists with office.

For the British, the Belfast or Good Friday agreement – which laid down the principle of majority consent to any change in Northern Ireland’s status but which also ultimately brought the former terrorist leader Martin McGuinness into the provincial government as deputy first minister – was a hard change to swallow: even more, for the Unionist population of Northern Ireland. It is – though Margalit refers to it only in passing – the prime example of his case that moral ambiguity can be necessary in a compromise to achieve the greater good of peace.

This is a book that clarifies an area vital to practical politics, yet which has suffered from the scorn of the many who see politicians who engage in it as intrinsically morally dubious. He shows that compromise can, on the contrary, be morality in action.