THE DUTY TO RESCUE
by Michael Ignatieff
The New Republic
September 24, 2008
Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention By Gary
J. Bass (Knopf, 528 pp., $35)
Gary J. Bass has written a wonderfully intelligent and sardonic history
of the moral causes celebres of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries: Byron and Greek independence in 1825, the European campaign
to save the Maronite Christians of Syria and Lebanon in 1860, Gladstone
and the Bulgarian atrocities in 1876, Henry Morgenthau and the Armenian
genocide of 1915. Bass resurrects these forgotten causes to remind
us that humanitarian intervention did not begin in the 1990s. For
nearly two hundred years, the impulse to save strangers from massacre
has rivaled raison d’etat as a driver of European statecraft. As we
respond–or do not respond–to the Rwandas and Darfurs of the future,
we can still learn from this forgotten history.
Bass expertly brings to life a rich panoply of characters: Byron,
Gladstone, Disraeli, Metternich, and Hugo, to name just a few. The
stock villain of the piece is none other than the knavishly devious
Count Ignatiev, chief advocate of Russian expansion into southern
Europe in the 1860s and 1870s. He makes an excellent villain, oozing
charm from every pore, lying his way through the chancelleries of
Europe, inciting the suppressed nationalities of the Ottoman Empire
to revolt and then seeking to subject them to the none-too-tender
mercies of the czar. He happens to have been my great-grandfather,
and alas, Bass gets him just right.
Freedom’s Battle is full of fascinating and ironic incident:
Byron giving his life for Greek independence but confessing that
he could not stand the Greeks; Metternich raging that humanitarian
intervention was nothing more than a "villainous game which takes
religion and humanity for a pretext in order to upset all regular
order of things"; Disraeli dismissing the calls to save the Bulgarians
as "coffee-house babble brought by an anonymous Bulgarian," only
to find himself overwhelmed by the tidal wave of Gladstone’s moral
indignation. Bass avoids the Whiggish temptation to turn the history of
humanitarian intervention into the triumph of conscience over imperial
cynicism. Each intervention presented a genuine dilemma. Realists such
as Metternich and Disraeli thought intervention would destroy the order
of Europe, and the humanitarians–or "atrocitarians," as Bass somewhat
inelegantly calls them–believed that the conscience of Europe must
not be sacrificed on the altar of order. Unlike the interventions of
the recent past, the full consequences of which are still unfolding
in Kosovo, Bosnia, and East Timor, the cases studied by Bass allow
us to observe just how deeply conscience shook the order of states.
The campaign around Turkish atrocities against Bulgarian Christians
is a stirring case in point. Had an American journalist not filed his
sensational report on these atrocities in 1876, Gladstone might not
have supplanted Disraeli, Russia might not have gone to war against the
Turks in 1877, the Austro-Hungarians might not have occupied Bosnia
in 1878, and the chain of consequences that led Gavrilo Princip to
assassinate the archduke in Sarajevo in 1914 might not have been
set in motion. One clear message for the humanitarians of today is
that they cannot allow themselves the luxury of indifference to the
strategic consequences of their own moralism. Before they call for
action, they must, as best they can, examine–or game out, as we now
say–how the dominoes are likely to fall.
The realists of the time, Disraeli and Metternich, foresaw these
consequences more clearly than the humanitarians. They believed
that it was necessary to keep the Ottoman Empire afloat if the
combustible nationalisms of Eastern Europe were to be contained and
the long imperial peace maintained. And so it came to pass: once
the liberal interventionists started intervening on the side of the
peoples groaning under the Turkish yoke–first the Greeks, then the
Bulgarians, finally the Armenians–the long slide into world war began.
If the realists anticipated these consequences more clearly than
the interventionists, the realists certainly failed to understand
that maintaining the Ottoman Empire by massacre was itself not a
viable option. Nationalist revolts against Ottoman domination were
inevitable, and the imperial order that the realists defended was
steadily weakening and was finally bound to collapse. The atrocitarians
saw this more clearly than the realists. The real Eastern Question
was not whether the Ottoman Empire could be saved, but who would
benefit from its collapse–Russia or the Western powers, and the
various nationalisms that each promoted.
Bass argues at length that while Western intervention in the Ottoman
Empire was driven by both imperial and humanitarian motives, the
two impulses were distinct. Many humanitarians–Jeremy Bentham, for
example–were vehement opponents of their own empires. Byron did not
die for the British Empire. He died for the Greeks, and of course
for his own glory. Despite these examples, it is possible that Bass
works too hard to persuade us that humanitarianism is unclouded by
imperial impulse. Imperial racism toward Muslims in general and Turks
in particular played a recurring role in propelling the European
conscience to action. Gladstone’s famous pamphlet Bulgarian Horrors
and the Question of the East–one of the Magna Carta documents of the
modern human rights movement–was, as Bass rightly notes, a mixture of
over-the-top moralizing and raw anti-Turkish bigotry. Gladstone knew
exactly nothing about Islam, the Turks, or the Ottoman Empire. But
this did not stop him from characterizing the Turks as "the great
anti-human specimen of humanity."
Humanitarians may be as racist as realists. The same condescension
that prompts realists to stay out of the quarrels of little peoples can
prompt humanitarians to plunge in to save them. If humanitarians–then
and now–often underestimate the costs of intervention, it may be
because they condescend to the capabilities of the butchers they are
out to defeat. If they overestimate the gratitude of the people on
whose behalf they intervene, it may be because they are too much in
love with the fantasy of helpless and thankful victims.
Bass argues strenuously that these nineteenth-century interventions
reveal a conspicuously modern human rights consciousness, secular and
universal in character. It is less clear to me that the humanitarians
drew a distinction between saving fellow Christians and saving fellow
human beings. This is not to say that abstract moral universalism was
not available to the humanitarians of the nineteenth century. Since
Grotius in the 1620s, philosophers of law had argued that the moral
duty to protect and to save extends to human beings per se and not
simply to co-religionists or fellow subjects. Enlightenment figures
such as Adam Smith had castigated the moral partiality of religious
sectarians. It is also true that unbelievers such as Byron went to
Greece to save the Greeks, not fellow Christians. Still, the fact
that the enemy was Muslim and the victims were Christian seems to have
shaped the moral partialities of a devout Christian such as Gladstone.
While Bass does make the case for an independent self-subsisting moral
universalism in Western culture, in the instances of intervention
that he discusses Christian solidarities seem more salient as motives
than the human solidarity of the modern human rights variety. But
these are minor quibbles about a book that is a spirited and elegant
contribution to the moral history of humanitarian emotions and their
tangled relation to imperial interest and religious faith.
In the grim present, humanitarian intervention feels like an idea whose
time has come and gone. The reasons for this are worth exploring. For
ten years after the end of the Cold War, stopping ethnic cleansing and
massacre in other countries became the cause celebre of every liberal
internationalist. Some of the political leaders who took up the cause
were even aware that humanitarian intervention had a lineage that they
could use to justify their actions. Tony Blair explicitly placed the
mantle of the Gladstonian heritage on his own shoulders in defending
the Kosovo intervention in 1999. By early 2000, the idea that all
states have a "responsibility to protect" civilians at risk of ethnic
cleansing or massacre in other states appeared to carry all before
it–it became something approaching a principle of international law.
In this moment of apparent triumph, it was easy to forget that this
idea became possible simply because intervention ceased to carry
the risk of armaggedon. Conscience could trump caution so long as
the military risks were low. The interventions in Kosovo and Bosnia
were possible for the West because the Russians, however much they
backed the losing Serbs, were unable and unwilling to stop NATO
and the Americans. The East Timor intervention was possible because
Indonesia lacked a protector powerful enough to forbid the creation
of a free Timor. No intervention occurred to stop the Russian carnage
in Chechnya because the Russians would not allow it.
And now the current crisis in Georgia reminds us that we are no longer
living in an era of Russian strategic weakness. The parenthesis that
allowed humanitarian interventions to occur has come to an end. In the
case of Georgia, the humanitarian impulse has collided with raw, vast,
and unyielding power. The United States can intervene to keep Georgia
from disappearing, but it cannot re-instate its sovereignty. Russia
has gone ahead and declared the independence of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia. This is an obvious riposte to Kosovo’s independence, and
therefore a warning that further humanitarian interventions of that
type will not be tolerated in Russia’s zone of influence.
China has delivered similar messages about Darfur. It grudgingly
acquiesces in a failing U.N. military presence in the Sahara, but it
will certainly stand against any political dismemberment of Sudan that
would allow the Darfurians to break free of the regime in Khartoum. The
combined resurgence of the Russians and Chinese makes it unlikely that
the Security Council will authorize humanitarian interventions again,
at least in regions vital to their interests.
But this is not the only factor, or even the main one, that threatens
to consign humanitarian intervention to yesterday. The U.N. report that
advocated the new doctrine of the "responsibility to protect" was sent
to the printers in late August 2001. It was the high-water mark of the
humanitarian faith. When it appeared in late September 2001, as the
ruins of the World Trade Center were still smoldering, it was already
irrelevant to American and European policymakers. Their overriding
concern had shifted from protecting other country’s civilians
to protecting their own. And homeland security, not humanitarian
intervention, has remained the policy imperative ever since.
Humanitarian intervention in the 1990s always required an American
military component, or at least American strategic assistance. But the
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have swallowed up all available
military capacity and policy attention in Washington. Humanitarian
intervention is no longer in the frame for any Western state. It
is not merely that no one wants to go in anymore. It is also that
no one believes that, once you do, you can succeed and then come
home. Fixing broken states once looked possible. In Afghanistan and
Iraq, everyone has learned how difficult it is to stay this course,
especially for impatient societies such as our own.
This is why, for the moment at least, world-weary realism
rules. Metternich and Disraeli are back in the saddle again. It
is not that the need for intervention has disappeared. The case
for intervention of some kind–to compel Mugabe to leave Zimbabwe,
to compel Burma to allow relief workers to help cyclone victims,
to protect Darfurians being murdered by the Janjaweed–remains as
forceful as ever. The demand for humanitarian intervention is high,
but the supply has dried up. The need to do something remains, but the
moral conviction, together with the political will and the material
resources to do it, has dwindled or disappeared.
And there is still another consideration that reinforces the idea
that interventions are an impulse of Christian empires. It is that
post-colonial countries are reluctant to shoulder the interventionist
burden once taken by European states. The solution to the unfolding
nightmare in Zimbabwe begins in South Africa, doesn’t it? But
African statecraft in general remains allergic to this sort
of intervention. Imperialists thought big, and took on faraway
responsibilities, for better and for worse; but post-imperial
nation-states rarely think or act beyond their own immediate
interests. The solidarity of oppressed peoples often disappears with
their oppression.
>>From all this we might draw the wrong conclusion, namely that
humanitarian intervention was a hectic but fleeting moral fashion of
the 1990s–an opportunity for the West to display its insufferable
moral superiority at low cost, and for liberal intellectuals to
wear their consciences on their sleeves. Bass helps us to see our
own moral history in a more serene and clear-eyed light. There
was more to the interventions that saved the Bosnians, Kosovars,
and East Timorese than moral vanity. The philosophical beliefs that
drove those foreign campaigns had a history going back to Byron and
the Greeks. Thanks to Bass’s fine book, we can uncover the lineage of
some enduring intuitions about the duties that people owe each other
across borders. These moral intuitions may be in retreat right now,
with great power politics in the ascendant; but it would be foolish
to pronounce their demise. The impulse to save and protect others
will survive this parenthesis of retreat. We are not done with evil,
and so we are not done with humanitarian intervention. Its time will
come again; or it had better come, if we are to continue to respect
ourselves.
Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian member of parliament and a former
member of the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty.