Gary Bass’s Freedom’s
Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf, 2008) is an
outstanding work, really a model of how to bring long forgotten conflicts to
life and, without fudging the record, offering important lessons for
contemporary predicaments. The subject, broadly, is European humanitarian
intervention in three separate 19th century episodes, in Greece (the
1820s), Syria (1860) and Bulgaria (1875-78). Each entailed high-stakes
diplomacy among the European Concert, responding to Turkish atrocities that shocked British opinion and produced fervent advocates for intervention,
with Lord Byron for Greece and William Gladstone for Bulgaria leading the most
famous of these campaigns.
About four fifths of
this thick book (at some 500 pages) consists of a deft history of these events, but the narrative
is enveloped by introductory and concluding essays that discuss the broader
problem of intervention and offer direct comparisons with the contemporary
period. Herein you will find just about every argument that can be made about
humanitarian intervention, pro and con. Bass’s sympathies are clearly with the
interventionists. He is at pains to distinguish humanitarian from imperial
aims, no less a problem today than in the nineteenth century, and he is
insistent that the duty of intervention cannot be escaped. But he gives the
other side of the argument, and is not afraid to show the atrocitarians in a
somewhat dubious light.
For the diplomatic
historian, this is as much a case study in the modalities of multilateralism—what,
back then, was termed the Concert of Europe—as of the dilemmas of humanitarian
intervention, but it is, for either purpose, compulsively readable. Who knew
that Dostoevsky was a towering public figure urging Russia to war in the name
of pan-Slavism in the Bulgarian crisis? That Gladstone the humanitarian sputtered with
unholy fire regarding the worthlessness of the Muslims?
These excerpts give
the tenor of Bass’s overall approach to humanitarian intervention: (1131 words)
* * *
If new identities can form within
borders, they can surely form outside of borders, too. The same kinds of
processes that generated national identity could create some kind of solidarity
with foreigners, as well. This solidarity might not be as strong as that within
a country, but it could nevertheless come to play an important role in
international politics. (27)
The humanitarian interventions of
the nineteenth century can be seen as, at the least, the froth of that era's
cresting wave of nationalism. This was a century of great xenophobia, but there
were other more hopeful currents, too. In other words, the same forces of
modernity that forged a sense of common British political identity between
impoverished Welsh villagers and London aristocrats, or between French citizens
in metropolitan Paris and slowly integrating Lorraine, could also create a
weaker but still politically important sense of solidarity with foreigners
facing massacre. Just as the growth of national consciousness relies on knowing
about the lives of other members of the national community living far away, the
growth of humanitarian concern for foreigners relies on knowing about the lives
of foreigners. So the causes of humanitarian intervention lie with the latter
stages of the parallel marches of political liberalization and of mass media
technology. (27-28)
This is not to say that publics
will always demand humanitarianism, nor that governments will always accede.
The fact that liberal ideology mandates sympathies for all suffering humanity
hardly means that state policy will follow. The free press can miss or botch
the story; the elites and mass public can fail to react to the stories; and the
government can decide it would rather face the repercussions at home than take
a misstep in its foreign policy. As Gladstone wrote, "Indignation is
froth, except as it leads to action." But liberal states are torn between
national and international considerations, between self-protection and
solidarity—and in that clash lies much of the basic political drama of this
book. (29)
The problem with realism is it does
a better job of identifying [the] problem than of solving it. Yes, if it were
really true that a humanitarian intervention would cause a vastly larger war,
or embitter the rest of the world against the intervening state, then the
mission probably would not be worth it. But conservatives sometimes give up too
easily. Instead, this book will look for ways to manage the practice of
humanitarian intervention. The diplomatic challenge is to prove benevolent
motivations, with firm and credible commitments not to turn an ostensibly
humanitarian mission into imperial aggrandizement. This book will show that, in
the nineteenth century, diplomats had some impressively successful ways of
doing just that: using a combination of multilateralism, self-restraint, and
treaties as tools to reassure other states about the good motivations behind a
humanitarian mission. The leaders of that century were remarkably skilled at
convincing rival states of their nonthreatening motives—even in a century of
rampant imperialism. Just as it is irresponsible for liberals to hold justice
so far above peace that they spark major wars, it is unconscionable for
realists to hold peace so far above justice that they overlook ways to make it
possible to save innocent lives.
This book is about the nineteenth
century, as an imperfect way to better understand our own current predicament.
The politics of human rights have a long and tangled history, and the dilemmas
faced by today's human rights advocates are often reflections of those faced by
like-minded people who have long since turned to dust. Tsarist manipulation of
Russian panSlavist public sentiments would be totally familiar to Vladimir
Putin; Benjamin Disraeli, digging in his heels against public calls for
protection of human rights in Bulgaria, sounded fully as exasperated as Richard
Nixon and Henry Kissinger struggling to create the United States' alignment
with China.
The image of humanitarian
intervention as an untested novelty is wrong. There were some more or less
humanitarian interventions waged outside of Europe this century: India's war
against Pakistani brutality in Bangladesh, and Tanzania's ouster of Idi Amin's
junta in Uganda. To this roster, along with Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra
Leone, and Ituri Province in Congo, this book means to add the
nineteenth-century European experience of humanitarian intervention. As John
Stuart Mill wrote, considering bloody civil wars in general and of Greece in
particular: "It seems now to be an admitted doctrine" that outside
powers "are warranted in demanding that the contest shall cease, and a
reconciliation take place on equitable terms of compromise.
Intervention of this description
has been repeatedly practised during the present generation, with such general
approval, that its legitimacy may be considered to have passed into a maxim of
what is called international law." Far from being radical innovators in
Bosnia after 1995 and in Kosovo, Clinton and Albright were walking in the
footsteps of Canning, Gladstone, James Madison, and Theodore Roosevelt, as well
as the moral tradition of Lord Byron and Victor Hugo.
This book is not just about a
tradition of humanitarian interventionism, but also about a tradition of
honorable and principled opposition to such adventurism. Sometimes the
politicians who do not want to save oppressed foreigners are callous or
willfully ignorant, but not always. Lord Castlereagh and Disraeli were fixated
on maintaining the peace of Europe, and were convinced that this would
sometimes unfortunately mean the subjugation of smaller peoples. It is no
comfort to the victims that they seem to have been quite sincere in this
belief, but it does put them in a different category from more current Western
leaders who ignored slaughters overseas for rather less lofty reasons.
Castlereagh stayed out of the Balkans because he valued peace more than
justice, and John Quincy Adams stayed out of the Balkans because a weak United
States could only endanger itself; Clinton stayed out of the Balkans until 1995
without any such excuse.
Nor is this book a celebration of
interventionism—and still less of imperialism. There are terrifying hazards
involved in meddling in other peoples' conflicts. Outsiders are often lethally
ignorant of local politics and cultures, as in Vietnam and Iraq; and foreign
meddling can exacerbate local tensions. Ostensible humanitarianism can all too
easily shade into bigotry, or can be based on ignorant or biased information.
It can be manipulated to fit a country's imperialistic or expansionist designs,
or it can bring big powers lurching into a major war. The atrocitarians were
not always pure of heart, and they were often reckless and blind to the potentially
devastating consequences of their activism. But all of these flaws are also why
the atrocitarians are worth understanding: a better grasp of previous efforts
at taming and routinizing the practice of humanitarian intervention should
contribute to a more humble, sober version of the practice in the future. (40-42)
* * *
It is questionable, as
Bass seems to claim, that the humanitarian interventions of the past generation
have been greeted with such widespread approval as to now constitute a rule of
customary international law. UN approval of the “responsibility to protect” is
conditioned on action being undertaken under the auspices of the UN Security
Council, and does not offer a blanket right to any state to undertake such
interventions by itself. How far such illegal interventions are “legitimate” is
an interesting and vital question, which we have to answer these days about
every six months, but it is important to be clear on the legal rule.
Be these criticisms as they may, Freedom’s
Battle is a great book that any student
of international relations will enjoy reading, and that students considering papers on the subject should start with.
