WORLD
POLICY JOURNAL
ARTICLE:
Volume XVI, No2, SUMMER 1999
A New Age
of Liberal Imperialism?
David Rieff
If anything
should be clear from the Kosovo crisis, and, for that matter, from
the unhappy experiences that outside intervention forces, whether
serving under their own flags, the U.N.'s, or NATO's, have had over
the past decade in places like Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, it is
that ad hoc responses to state failure and humanitarian catastrophe
are rarely, if ever, successful. At the same time, the fact that
there is now demonstrably a willingness on the part at least of
the NATO countries to intervene militarily in the internal conflicts
of other nations represents a radical change in international affairs.
The conflict over Kosovo, the first war ever waged by the NATO alliance,
was undertaken more in the name of human rights and moral obligation
than out of any traditional conception of national interest. Indeed,
had strictly practical criteria been applied to Kosovo, NATO as
a whole might well have taken the same tack its European members
did in Bosnia and attempted to prevent the conflict from spreading
rather than trying, however halfheartedly, to reverse Slobodan Milosevic's
campaign of murder and mass deportation.
The longer
term implications of this further step in the post-Cold War moralization
of international politics are not yet clear. Realists, whether they
belong to the pure national interest school of a Henry Kissinger
or the "lead by moral example" of a George Kennan, are
alarmed, as well they should be. For it is now clear that half a
century of campaigning by human rights activists has had a profound
effect on the conduct of international affairs. The old Westphalian
system, in which state sovereignty was held to be well-nigh absolute,
is under challenge as never before. As former U.N. secretary general
Javier PÈrez de Cuellar put it in 1991, "We are clearly witnessing
what is probably an irresistible shift in public attitudes toward
the belief that the defense of the oppressed in the name of morality
should prevail over frontiers and legal documents."
Whether it
is really "irresistible" is of course debatable. Sometimes
what appears at first glance as a prescient description of the future
can turn out to be little more than an accurate diagnosis of the
present. But PÈrez de Cuellar, who, for all his grandee's aloofness,
was a far abler diagnostician of his times than he is usually given
credit for being, does seem to have discerned an essential shift
and discerned it early. The Westphalian system in which he was formed
as a diplomat now had challengers, many of whom spoke the language
of human rights and derived from this language the belief that,
in extreme cases at least, human rights abuses necessitated international
intervention. The Franco-Italian legal scholar Mario Bettati and
the French humanitarian activist and politician, Bernard Kouchner,
even formulated a doctrine: the right of intervention.
And they and
those who took a similar line had a profound effect on the thinking
of Western governments. Human rights became an organizing principle
for action in the 1990s the way anticommunism had been throughout
the Cold War. The result was that most of the interventions of the
1990s, whether they were meant to protect civilians in states that
had fallen apart, as in Somalia, or to shield an ethnic group from
the murderous intent of its own government, as in Kosovo, were undertaken
under the banner of preventing human rights abuses or righting humanitarian
wrongs. Kosovo has been only the latest example of this, as President
Clinton made clear when he said that NATO had acted to prevent "the
slaughter of innocents on its doorstep."
Ends and
Means
However, the fact that while the NATO powers are often willing to
intervene they have also shown themselves almost never willing to
take casualties suggests that this commitment is as much about having
fallen into a rhetorical trap as about being guided by a new moralizing
principle. The means employed simply do not match the high-flown
rhetoric about ends. There have been times during the Kosovo crisis,
as there were during the Bosnian war and the Rwandan emergency,
when it has appeared that Western involvement came about because
the leaders of the Western countries no longer found it politically
possible to get up at a press conference before a television audience
and say, in effect, "Sorry about the starving X's or the ethnically
cleansed Y's. It's just awful what's happening to them, but frankly
they don't have any oil, nor are those that oppress them a threat
to us. So you, Mr. and Ms. Voter, will have to continue to watch
the slaughter on the evening news until it burns itself out."
Of course,
that is precisely what members of the policy elites in Washington,
Brussels, Paris, London, or Berlin say in private to one another
all the time. But public language, along with public pressure, is
often what drives policy. By now, commonplace expressions of realism
in international affairs have become, to borrow the Early Christian
theological distinction between elite and mass Christianity, an
esoteric language restricted by and large to policymakers when they
are out of public view. It is the language of human rights and humanitarianism
that now stands as the exoteric language of public discourse about
such questions. What this demonstrates is the degree to which there
really has been a human rights revolution in the attitudes, though
not to nearly the same degree in the practices, of the Western public
and its poll-addicted, pandering governments.
The fact that it is all but inconceivable that a responsible Western
leader could say of the Kosovo conflict what Neville Chamberlain
said of Czechoslovakia, that this was "a quarrel in a far away
country between people of whom we know nothing" should be demonstration
enough-even though, strictly speaking, this would be no more than
a simple statement of fact, all the rhetoric about Albania being
in the "heart of Europe" to the contrary notwithstanding.
To be sure, a politician or cabinet official will occasionally flout,
intentionally or unintentionally, the new moral bilingualism. When,
famously, then Secretary of State James Baker said of the breakup
of Yugoslavia, "We don't have a dog in that fight," he
was breaking the unwritten rule that held that, in public, representatives
of the Western democracies were always supposed to insist that they
stood ready to defend high moral principles.
But for the
most part, what a human rights advocate would probably describe
as the triumph of the categorical imperative of human rights-an
imperative that, in extreme cases anyway, is held to trump all other
political or economic interests or criteria-and what a realist might
describe as the hypermoralization of international political action,
has taken hold not just as a rhetorical but as an operating principle
in all the major Western capitals on issues that concern political
crises in poor countries and failing states. The fact that there
is, as the writer Aryeh Neier has pointed out eloquently, a human
rights double standard where powerful countries like China are concerned
does not mean nothing has changed.
The problem
lies in separating the cosmetic from the fundamental, the makeover
from the moral and political sea change. In all likelihood, elements
of both figure in. It is not just that the possibility of any senior
government official of any Western government speaking as bluntly
as Baker did about the former Yugoslavia has receded, at least when
the press microphones are on. The changes are deeper than that.
The writer Michael Ignatieff is surely correct when he insists that
"the military campaign in Kosovo depends for its legitimacy
on what fifty years of human rights has done to our moral instincts,
weakening the presumption in favor of state sovereignty, strengthening
the presumption in favor of intervention when massacre and deportation
become state policy."1
By "our,"
of course, Ignatieff means the Western public that is, as he says,
perturbed by distant crimes in a way that it would probably not
have been 50 or 75 years ago. Obviously, some sectors of public
opinion in all Western states have viewed international affairs
largely through a moral lens. U.S. relations with China before the
Second World War, to cite only one obvious example, were highly
influenced by the agenda of the missionaries. What is impressive
is the degree to which these largely Christian missionary (and imperial)
habits of thought and categories of analysis find their much broader
echo in the secular human rights movement of the past 30 years,
and how successfully that movement has been in persuading governments
to act at least publicly as if they shared the same concerns and
at least some of the same priorities.
Moral Ambitions
Had the consequences of this ascendancy largely been beneficial,
and had the actions undertaken by governments in the name of human
rights and humanitarian imperatives been as successful as activists
initially expected them to be, it would be possible simply to welcome
the changed rhetorical and, perhaps, even moral circumstances in
which international politics must be conducted. But this is not
the case. From Somalia to Rwanda, Cambodia to Haiti, and Congo to
Bosnia, the bad news is that the failure rate of these interventions
spawned by the categorical imperatives of human rights and humanitarianism
in altering the situation on the ground in any enduring way approaches
100 percent. Time and time again, our moral ambitions have been
revealed as being far larger than our political, military, or even
cognitive means. And there is no easy way out.
It is undeniable that the Western television viewer does indeed-and
surveys support this contention-see some scene of horror in Central
Africa or the Balkans and want something to be done. But "something"
is the operative word. Even in situations where the media pays intense
attention over a long period of time, there is rarely a consensus
that military force should be used, while there is usually a great
deal of anxiety about involvement in any operation whose end point
is not fixed in advance.
No matter how
profoundly the influence of the human rights movement has led to
a questioning of the inviolability of state sovereignty, the wish
to help and the increasing consensus, at least in elite opinion
in most NATO countries, that the West has not just the right but
the duty to intervene in certain egregious cases is not matched
by any coherent idea of what comes next. This is assuming-and as
Kosovo has demonstrated, success is anything but assured-that the
intervention has succeeded in bringing the particular horror to
an end.
Perhaps this
is why, in Western Europe at least, the prestige of humanitarianism
increased so dramatically over the past 15 years. The humanitarian
enterprise-giving help to people desperately in need of it-has seemed
to cut through the complexities and corruptions of politics and
national interest. Here at last, it seemed, was something morally
uncomplicated, something altruistic, something above politics. Of
course, what the humanitarian movement discovered painfully over
the past decade (though many aid workers had understood this much
earlier), starting in Bosnia and culminating in the refugee camps
of eastern Zaire where aid helped not only people in need but those
who had perpetrated the Rwandan genocide, was that there was no
transcending politics. Aid undeniably did good things. A vaccinated
child is a vaccinated child. But at least in some instances, it
also prolonged wars, distorted resource allocations, and, as in
Bosnia, where the humanitarian effort became the focus of Western
intervention, offered the great powers an alibi for not stopping
the genocide of the Muslims. And Somalia demonstrated that what
the West saw as a humanitarian intervention might well be understood
by the locals as an imperial invasion, which, whatever its intentions,
to a certain extent it almost always is.
An Unstable
Mixture
As the limitations of humanitarianism have increasingly become apparent,
human rights has taken center stage in the imaginations of those
in the West who continue to believe in human progress. Even many
humanitarian aid workers have increasingly come to believe that
they too must uphold rights, and most of the major private voluntary
groups like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, or the International
Rescue Committee, are taking bolder and bolder positions on the
need to redress wrongs as well as build latrines, set up clinics,
or provide food.
As aid becomes
more and more of a business, and private-sector companies expert
in construction projects increasingly vie with aid agencies for
contracts from principal funders like the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) and the European Commission Humanitarian Office
(ECHO), some humanitarian workers are coming to believe that the
more emphasis they place on human rights (something that private
companies are hardly likely to have much taste or aptitude for)
the more important a role they will retain. But it is more than
a question of corporate self-interest; the way out of the crisis
of confidence humanitarianism has undergone has seemed to lie in
the quasi-religious moral absolutism and intellectual self-confidence
of the human rights movement.
For Western
leaders, these distinctions have very little resonance. The Clinton
administration, like its European counterparts, routinely conflates
human rights and humanitarian concerns. Kosovo is probably the most
extreme example of this, but the pattern has been consistent. The
best one can say is that most post-Cold War interventions have been
undertaken out of an unstable mixture of human rights and humanitarian
concerns. And yet the categorical imperative of upholding human
rights and the categorical imperative of getting relief to populations
who desperately need it are almost as often in conflict as they
are complimentary.
The human rights
activist seeks, first and foremost, to halt abuses. Usually, this
involves denouncing the states or movements who are violating the
laws of war or the rights of their citizens. In contrast, the humanitarian
aid worker usually finds that he or she must deal with the abusive
government or rampaging militia if the aid is to get through safely
and be distributed.
So far at least, there is more confusion than any new synthesis
between human rights and humanitarianism. And the consequences of
this have been immensely serious, both operationally and in terms
of rallying support for interventions like the ones that took place
in Rwanda, Somalia, or Bosnia. Somalia, in particular, revealed
the difficulty of engaging in an operation that was supposed to
end a famine but that ended up as a war between the foreign army
deployed to help the humanitarian effort and one of the Somali factions.
Americans were appalled to see soldiers killed in such circumstances,
and their revulsion cannot be attributed solely, or even fundamentally,
either to the pictures of a dead U.S. soldier being dragged naked
through the streets of Mogadishu or to the trauma of Vietnam.
Soldiers are
expected to die in a war, but the Somali operation was not presented
as a war; it was presented as a humanitarian mission. And soldiers
are not supposed to die in such circumstances. Even when the U.S.
government declared Mohamad Farah Aideed its enemy, and set out
to hunt him down through the back alleys of Mogadishu, it did so
using the language of police work. Aideed was a criminal, U.S. officials
kept saying.
The result
was that the American public came to think of the hunt for Aideed,
even though they knew it was being carried out by U.S. Army Rangers,
not as war but as police work. Casualties in war are understood
to be inevitable. Soldiers are not only supposed to be ready to
kill, they are supposed to be able to die. But casualties in police
work are a different matter entirely. There, it is only criminals
who are supposed to get hurt or, if necessary, killed, not the cops.
Again, the fundamental problem has not been some peculiar American
aversion to military casualties. Rather, there has been an essential
mistake in the way such operations are presented to the public,
and, perhaps, even in the way they are conceived of by policymakers.
Under the circumstances, it should hardly be surprising that public
pressure on Congress and the president to withdraw U.S. troops predictably
arises at the first moment an operation cannot be presented in simple
moral terms, or when the casualties or even the costs start to mount.
Conflating
War and Crime
The emphasis, both in Bosnia and Rwanda, on tribunals and apprehending
war criminals, however understandable, has only further muddied
the moral and political waters. For it cements this conflation of
war and crime. One deals with an enemy in war very differently from
how one deals with a war criminal. And wars against war crimes,
which is how Kosovo was presented at the beginning of Operation
Allied Force, must either be waged as the Second World War was waged-that
is, until unconditional surrender-or run the risk of seeming utterly
pointless when, as in most noncrusading wars, a deal is struck between
the belligerents that leaves those who have previously been described
as war criminals in power. The tensions of such a policy were apparent
at the end of the Bosnian war when Slobodan Milosevic, who had quite
correctly been described previously by U.S. officials, at least
in private, as the architect of the catastrophe, was seen as the
indispensable guarantor of the Dayton Accords.
If the tensions
are inevitable, so too is a crime-based outlook about war. Ours
is an era when most conflicts are within states, and have for their
goal less the defeat of an adversary's forces on the battlefield
than either the extermination or expulsion of populations. Actually,
there are few wars that do not seem to involve widespread and systematic
violations of international humanitarian law, so thinking about
war as crime is not just an understandable but in many ways a rational
response to objective conditions.
And yet the
emphasis on the Yugoslav and Rwandan ad hoc international tribunals,
and, more recently, on the International Criminal Court (ICC), has
not only created false hopes but false perceptions of what a human
rights-based international order implies. The false hopes are easier
to categorize. Such tribunals may, like the death penalty, deter
the individual in question, breaking, as Michael Ignatieff put it,
"`the cycle of impunity' for [certain] particular barbarians,"
but they cannot hope to seriously deter future criminals or crimes
any more than the death penalty deters future murderers-a fact one
might have expected the largely anti-death penalty, pro-ICC activists
to have confronted more seriously.
But it is by
insisting that there is no intellectual or moral problem with demanding
that international law should be upheld as strenuously as the domestic
laws of democratic states that human rights activists, and the governments
that are influenced by them, however intermittently, are engaged
in a project that almost certainly seems doomed to failure. Starkly
put, its presuppositions do not withstand scrutiny. It is all very
well to talk about these laws, or courts, or imperatives, as expressing
the will of the "international community." In practice,
however, the definition of this "community" is highly
if not exclusively legalistic and consists of the states that sign
various treaties and conventions and the activist non-governmental
organizations that lobby them to do so.
In finessing
this fundamental problem of legitimacy-the ICC, as one of its American
defenders once conceded, was largely the concern of "hobbyists
and specialists"-and in asserting that a body of law that is
the product of a treaty has the same authority as a body of law
that is the result of long historical processes that involve parliaments,
elections, and popular debate, the activists have in effect constructed
a legal system for a political and social system that neither exists
nor is likely to exist any time in the foreseeable future. Presented
as the product of some new global consensus, it is in fact the legal
code of a world government.
No World
Government
But there is no world government. There is only world trade, and
national governments. To say this is not simply to indulge in nostalgia
for the Westphalian system or to deny that, in the West anyway,
there has been a shift in consciousness toward believing that certain
conduct by nations within their borders should not be tolerated
whatever the current legal status of state sovereignty may be. Obviously,
the power of nation-states to control their destiny is less today
than it was half a century ago. And in trade law, there has been
a real ceding of sovereignty. Where politics and, above all, in
the conduct of international relations that can result in war are
concerned, however, the picture is much more mixed. States must
wage war, and only the state's inherent legitimacy can make it plausible
both for young soldiers to kill and die and for their fellow citizens
to support or at least tolerate such a tragedy.
The problem
with the human rights approach-and in this Western governments that
have eagerly seized on the rhetoric of human rights are, if anything,
far more blameworthy than the activists themselves-is less that
it is wrong than that it is unsustainable in the absence of a world
government, or, at the very least, of a United Nations system with
far more money, autonomy, and power than it is ever likely to be
granted by its member states.
A U.N. mercenary
army organized along the lines Brian Urquhart has proposed might
well have been able to break the back of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
or the warlords in Somalia. In places where the interests of the
great powers are not involved, the Security Council may at times
be willing to grant a mandate for intervention to the secretary
general. And open-ended U.N. protectorates in those or similar places,
backed up by military force and the mandate to use it, unlike such
short-lived operations along the lines of the U.N. Transitional
Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) that have actually taken place, would
theoretically have a chance of restoring the broken societies over
which they had taken control.
But even leaving
aside the question of whether such a move toward world government
would be in humanity's best interest, it is obvious that no such
option is now available. Even the prospect, seemingly quite realistic
in the late-1980s, that U.N. peacekeeping would become a central
instrument of international peace and security has receded over
the course of the 1990s, with peacekeeping reduced to a narrower
and more traditional role of postconflict cease-fire monitoring
and truce enforcement. But if the United Nations has been marginalized,
and if the demands of the emerging human rights consensus among
the Western elites have proved to be not just hard to satisfy but
hard even to define except in the broadest and most nebulous terms,
it is equally clear that the current ad hoc-ism is also unsustainable.
"Just
Do It"
Kosovo has seen to that. The conflict there has revealed more than
simply the fact that NATO was willing to bomb but not-at least not
before it was too late to prevent a second slaughter in the Balkans
in a single decade-to take the kinds of military action that might
have prevented the ethnic cleansing of almost the entire Kosovar
population. In Pristina, before the NATO air war began, young Kosovars
walked around wearing T-shirts with the Nike logo and their own
gloss on the Nike slogan. "NATO," it read, "Just
do it!"
In a sense,
that is what important constitutencies within the human rights community
had been saying as well. Obviously, neither the activists nor the
Kosovars themselves imagined the kind of limited, hesitant, politically
hamstrung military campaign NATO would undertake when they called
for action. And yet this was the predictable, perhaps even the inevitable
consequence of not defining that "it." The new language
of rights, so prevalent in Western capitals, has been revealed to
be at least as misleading about what is and is not possible, what
it did and did not commit Western states to, as it is a departure
from the old language of state sovereignty.
It is not just
that the issues over what the future of a postwar Kosovo would be
were fudged from the start. Was the province to be liberated by
force? If so, was it to be turned into a NATO or an Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) protectorate? Or was
it to be given its independence? These are only some of the questions
that were never answered satisfactorily in Washington or in Brussels
before the air campaign began.
More gravely
still, there is no evidence that a Marshall Plan for the Balkans,
clearly a sine qua non for regional stability even before the bombing
started and the mass deportation began, had been worked out. The
World Bank was barely consulted; the U.N. specialized agencies,
on whom responsibility for the predictable refugee crisis rests,
were caught flat-footed. And most Western governments had to run
to their parliaments just to get supplemental appropriations to
pay for the war; they had no coherent plan for the future whatsoever.
Thus, on the political level, the economic level, and the military
level, the West was improvising from the start.
But war, even
war undertaken on human rights grounds, is not like jazz singing.
Improvisation is fatal-as the Kosovars have learned. Just do it,
indeed! A country that ran its central bank this way would soon
collapse. And yet it continues to be the implicit assumption of
the NATO powers that they can confront the crisis of failed states
by making it up as they go along. In Somalia, in Rwanda, and in
Congo, the Western powers chose to respond with disaster relief,
which both guaranteed that the political crises in those countries
would continue and represented a terrible misuse of humanitarian
aid. In Bosnia, the emphasis was on containing the crisis. In Algeria
and Kurdistan, it has been either to ignore it or exploit it.
Finessing
the Disaster
And yet in Kosovo (this had almost happened in Bosnia), the West
was finally hoist on the petard of its own lip service to the categorical
imperative of human rights. It was ashamed not to intervene, but
it lacked the will to do so with either vision or coherence. Kosovo
is probably a lost cause; it is certainly ruined for a generation,
whatever eventual deal is worked out, as Bosnia, whose future is
to be a ward of NATO, America, and the European Union, probably
for decades, has also been ruined for a generation, Dayton or no
Dayton. What remains are the modalities through which this disaster
can be finessed, and its consequences mitigated.
It is to be
hoped that in the wake of Kosovo, the realization that this kind
of geo-strategic frivolity and ad hoc-ism, this resolve to act out
of moral paradigms that now command the sympathy but do not yet
command the deep allegiance of Western public opinion-at least not
to the extent that people are willing to sacrifice in order to see
that they are upheld-will no longer do. To say this is not to suggest
that there are any obvious alternatives. Even if one accepts more
of its premises than I do, the human rights perspective clearly
is insufficient.
As for the
United Nations, it has been shown to be incapable of playing the
dual role of both succoring populations at risk while simultaneously
acting like a colonial power and imposing some kind of order and
rebuilding civic institutions. The important Third World countries
seem to have neither the resources nor the ideological inclination
to intervene even in their own regions, as Africa's failure to act
in Rwanda in 1994 demonstrated so painfully.
The conclusion
is inescapable. At the present time, only the West has both the
power and, however intermittently, the readiness to act. And by
the West, one really means the United States. Obviously, to say
that America could act effectively if it chose to do so as, yes,
the world's policeman of last resort, is not the same thing as saying
that it should. Those who argue, as George Kennan has done, that
we overestimate ourselves when we believe we can right the wrongs
of the world, must be listened to seriously. So should the views
of principled isolationists. And those on what remains of the left
who insist that the result of such a broad licensing of American
power will be a further entrenchment of America's hegemony over
the rest of the world are also unquestionably correct.
What Is
to Be Done
But the implications of not doing anything are equally clear. Those
who fear American power are-this is absolutely certain-condemning
other people to death. Had the U.S. armed forces not set up the
air bridge to eastern Zaire in the wake of the Rwandan genocide,
hundreds of thousands of people would have perished, rather than
the tens of thousands who did die. This does not excuse the Clinton
administration for failing to act to stop the genocide militarily;
but it is a fact. And analogous situations were found in Bosnia
and even, for all its failings, in the operation in Somalia.
What is to
be done? The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees cannot solve crises of such magnitude; these days, it is
hard-pressed even to alleviate one without logistical help from
NATO military forces. The humanitarian movement has even fewer means.
In becoming dependent on NATO's logistical support, or, as in Kosovo,
in effect serving as a humanitarian subcontractor to one of the
belligerents, its intellectual and moral coherence, which is based
on impartiality, has been undermined. And human rights activists,
for the valuable work they do in exposing brutality and violations
of international law, are demanding a regime of intervention whose
implications they clearly have failed to think through seriously.
By this, I
do not mean the issue of consistency-a debate that, these days is
usually framed, "If Kosovo, then why not Sierra Leone?"-although
the distorting effect of concentrating exclusively on the south
Balkans and channeling what monies exist for aid in its direction
cannot but have a devastating effect on Africa in particular. To
insist on this point is, when all is said and done, to make the
great the enemy of the good. There will be no serious intervention
in Sierra Leone; that is no reason for us to turn our collective
backs on the Kosovars.
But Kosovo
is an anomaly-a crisis at the edge of Europe that comes on the heels
of the Bosnian crisis about which the NATO powers have a bad conscience.
Even had the NATO countries responded more effectively, Kosovo would
not have provided a model for how to do post-Cold War interventions.
A deeper problem
is how to replace a chaotic post-Cold War disorder with some kind
of order that does what it can to prevent both the worst sorts of
repression and ethnic cleansing. A realist would say the effort
is not worth it. For those who believe differently, whether it is
simply because they find the suffering of people in places like
Kosovo or the Great Lakes region of Africa as unconscionable when
their countries have the means to set it right, or because they
believe that too much disorder, even at the periphery of the rich
world, is a clear and present danger, the task is to think through
how such an order might be imposed.
A more active,
attentive, and consistent diplomacy will certainly be necessary,
but so will the occasional use of force. Realistically, this means
either NATO or the army of the Russian Federation, or both, since
only these military establishments have the logistical capacity
to move troops long distances in short periods of time. But it is
hard to imagine, after the experience of Kosovo, that there will
be much appetite for further improvisation. At the same time, it
is evident that America's strategic partners will not be disposed
to support a renewed Pax Americana in which the United States acts
as the global policeman of last resort, even if America were willing
to reassume that role. And it never will, since the American consensus
is strongly against such an arrangement.
Back to
the Future
Where does this leave us? One possible solution would be to revisit
the mandatory system that was instituted after the Versailles Treaty.
Its pitfalls are obvious. In practice, League of Nations mandates
became thinly disguised extensions of the old colonial empires,
with trusteeships distributed more on strategic than on humanitarian
grounds, and neither improved the situation of the peoples of the
territories in question nor brought about any great improvement
in regional stability. Woodrow Wilson's warning during the negotiations
at the Paris Peace Conference that "the world would say that
the Great Powers first portioned out the helpless parts of the world
and then formed the League of Nations," needs to be borne in
mind.
But Wilson's
original idea, which was, as he put it, to take temporary control
over certain territories in order "to build up in as short
a time as possible...a political unit that can take charge of its
own affairs," may be one way out of the current impasse. The
unhappy experience of the United Nations in Cambodia suggests that
an ad hoc imposition of a trusteeship is doomed to failure, if for
no other reason than supervisory control is simply too diffuse and
too subject to political pressure. Had the United Nations stayed
in Cambodia for a generation, as, to his credit, then Secretary
General Boutros-Ghali argued that it should, it might indeed have
improved that unhappy country's prospects; by staying two years,
it provided little more than a short respite. Haiti represents a
similar failure to stay the course.
To insist on
this point is not to bash the United Nations. The structure of the
institution, above all the cross-currents and conflicting interests
that find their expression in the work of the Security Council,
simply makes it the wrong organization to undertake to administer
a new trusteeship system. Regional organizations and great powers
are far likelier to be able to devise a system of burden sharing.
For all its faults (and the "imperialistic" interests)
involved, the Nigerian invasion of Sierra Leone has been a positive
development. The problem was not that the Nigerians came; it was
that once there, they had neither the will nor the money to follow
up their military conquest with state reconstruction. Perhaps, if
General Olusegun Obasanjo really does represent a return to democracy
in Nigeria, such efforts will begin.
Obviously,
behind the scenes the NATO countries and, above all the United States,
would have to exercise some degree of supervisory control over the
trusteeships and underwrite efforts at nation building. Funding
would be politically controversial (obviously, most would have to
come from the Western powers and possibly from the Bretton Woods
institutions) and difficult to appropriate wisely. But, on balance,
the costs would still be less than the astronomical figures that
will be required to rebuild Kosovo, or, for that matter, were needed
to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Central Africa in the mid-1990s.
Waste and mismanagement are facts of life. They should not become
the impediment to actually dealing with the current disorder and
tragedy in so much of the poor world.
It is likely
that, were such a system to be put in place, the role of American
power might actually diminish over the long term, although in the
short run it would probably increase. For the most part, however,
except in emergencies, or where the rapid dispatch of troops is
required, other, mid-sized nations-rather than NATO powers-could
do the actual administrating and the policing. And a structure that
would necessarily involve this degree of burden sharing between,
small, medium, and great powers might also serve useful purposes
in other fields of international relations, although it would be
foolish to expect too much on that score.
The central
point is that a mandatory system could take the insights of the
human rights revolution into account without overreaching; it could
provide a framework for action that could only be an improvement
over the current system-if it can even be called that-in which each
crisis comes as a kind of lightning bolt from the blue; and it would
not be constrained by the kind of divisions that make any sort of
serious action through the U.N. Security Council all but impossible
to imagine.
Is this proposal
tantamount to calling for a recolonization of part of the world?
Would such a system make the United States even more powerful than
it is already? Clearly it is, and clearly it would. But what are
the alternatives? Kosovo demonstrates how little stomach the United
States has for the kind of military action that its moral ambitions
impel it to undertake. And there will be many more Kosovos in the
coming decades. With the victory of capitalism nearly absolute,
the choice is not between systems but about what kind of capitalist
system we are going to have and what kind of world order that system
requires. However controversial it may be to say this, our choice
at the millennium seems to boil down to imperialism or barbarism.
Half-measures of the type we have seen in various humanitarian interventions
and in Kosovo represent the worst of both worlds. Better to grasp
the nettle and accept that liberal imperialism may be the best we
are going to do in these callous and sentimental times.
Indeed, the
real task for people who reject both realism and the utopian nihilism
of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass
deportation of the Kosovars rather than strengthen, however marginally,
the hegemony of the United States, is to try to humanize this new
imperial order-assuming it can come into being-and to curb the excesses
that it will doubtless produce. The alternative is not liberation,
or the triumph of some global consensus of conscience, but, to paraphrase
Che Guevara, one, two, three, many Kosovos.
Note
1. Michael Ignatieff, "Human Rights: The Midlife Crisis,"
New York Review of Books, May 20, 1999.
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