Dr Tom Young is Senior Lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
This is not Italy. This is Africa ! (an ‘Italian’ official writing to the Count of Cavour from southern ‘Italy’)
There is lots of talk at the moment about ‘humanitarian intervention’ or the ‘droit d’ingerence’ or even ‘liberation.’ Interestingly, this idea is widely supported across the political spectrum (as was colonialism,) and the Left’s critiques never amount to more than accusations of hypocrisy or inadequacy.
Firstly, we should be clear about humanitarian intervention and its synonyms, and then I will suggest why it’s a bad thing.
Problem One: definitions. Academics always make life difficult with definitions. So, lets keep it simple: humanitarian intervention is what Britain does not do to France (and vice versa). We don’t invade French territory; we don’t try to undermine its politics; we don’t publicly insult French politicians or tell the French parliament not to pass certain kinds of legislation. And so on. You get the picture. That’s how you treat proper states (and they get very upset if you don’t!).
Problem Two: naivete. Humanitarian intervention seems to go with all sorts of other nice things like liberalism. What comes into your head when you hear the word liberalism? Locke? Mill? Kant? Rawls? Cialdini? Who? Look at the quote at the beginning. The unification of Italy in the 1870s involved a decade of massive repression, in which thousands of peasants were killed. This was carried out by impeccable liberals like General Cialdini who ordered village massacres, and was a great fan of the firing squad. How could jolly nice liberals do such things (discreetly supported by the liberal England of the day)? Because they were doing the work of ‘civilisation’, making them (at least more) like us. So lets not call it humanitarian intervention, let’s call it what it is, liberal war. That’s really what they were doing, not something else (making money, cornering the Sicilian sulphur industry etc.)
So I take the warriors at their word, but I want to argue that what they do is bad: bad for them, bad for us, actually bad for everybody.
1. Bad for them
a. It can exacerbate conflicts both directly & indirectly. Directly because with the increasing tendency, itself fuelled by humanitarian intervention arguments, to moralise and criminalise some parties to a conflict, outside intervention actually becomes locked into the situation. Rwanda is a perfect example of this. Indirectly by way of providing resources to one party rather than another.
b. It constantly orientates local politics towards outside forces & agencies and actually delays the processes of consolidation of nation-states or other forms of stable political order. Protagonists, just as they learn to play the aid game & appeal to current Western fashion, also learn to play the political correctness game. The SPLM has convinced the West that it is an inclusive, modern liberation movement and party that would usher in progress and peace. That is not what is going to happen in southern Sudan.
c. It is really just a form of liberal imperialism which, under a surface of respect for others, in fact buttresses claims to superiority and the implicit right to impose one form of social and political order on others, and which will, in the end, encourage rejection and hostility.
2. Bad for us
a. It debases our politics by generating lies and hypocrisy because there is no democratic political consensus in Western states for such intervention. We can’t be truthful about why intervention is being conducted, or about its likely costs, and so we contrive all sorts of apparently instrumental justifications to frighten domestic populations into sullen acquiescence: humanitarian intervention is about drugs, people trafficking, so-called terrorism, all of which problems could be much more easily handled than by invading other peoples’ countries.
b. It debases our politics further because it generates illusions and falsehoods about the consequences of intervention which are, in fact, more and more extensive involvement, grappling with conflicts deeply rooted in local societies [Bosnia, Rwanda, Cote d’Ivoire and Libya are all examples of this]. Often these conflicts have a regional dynamic, the acknowledgement of which further compromises the ethical claims for intervention and requires the toleration of some atrocities but not others. Look no further than Rwanda and the Congo.
c. It constantly blinds us to the fact that politics is politics, not ethics or at the very least the one is not reducible to the other. It is not law either. That however much we mouth slogans about ‘terrorists’ or ‘evil men’ in the end politics is about doing deals and that there must be somebody to do a deal with. In the end the British government did a deal with the ‘terrrorist’ IRA whose main source of support was the United States (which has of course supported many ‘terrorist’ outfits over the years). There was no Truth and Justice Commission either.
3. Bad for everybody
a. It undermines an order of sovereign states which is still the best way of running a world of endlessly diverse peoples and cultures.
b. It fuels a moralisation and criminalisation of forms of politics in which we make judgements about them. It justifies the surreptitious remodelling of the international order back towards the nineteenth form of the ‘standard of civilisation’.
c. It generates ludicrous inconsistencies. No Russian or Chinese officials will be indicted (Chechnya, Tibet) but neither will any Sri Lankan ones. These inconsistencies are not just a matter of the Great Powers, think of the inconsistencies in reaction to Cote d’Ivoire and Madagascar or in relation to Somaliland and South Sudan.
Point to Africanists: Africa remains the chasse gardee of Western moralism. We are left with the position that the only place where there are crimes is Africa. This is patently absurd and points to the fact that Africa’s states are weak and that Africa itself presents a fertile field for experimentation in new forms of Western imperialism.
Point to students: you should read Rawls, you should know about Cialdini.
