The Hundred Years War

Humanitarianism and Its Wars

Simon Schama's doco on Henry VIII played recently on Sky. He traced the gradual descent of Henry's reign into the murderous and tyrannical. The Divine Right of Kings (or, of governments in general) has always been a pernicious doctrine; it necessarily spawns great evil. Henry was no exception.

Human rights doctrines are equally pernicious and tyrannical. It is not an exaggeration, nor is it drawing a particularly long bow, to argue that Human Rights doctrines have produced the fifty years war of the United States and the West (and counting). Now, of course, Henry and his ilk had a justification for capriciously executing all and sundry who crossed them. The Divine Right of Kings asserted that the king was the avatar of God and therefore carried absolute authority. To resist the king was to impugn the dignity and being of God Himself. All resistance to Henry was implicit blasphemy.

Human Rights doctrines assert that Man is the ultimate and highest being--at least in their modern secular form. It is apt to name this approach the doctrine of humanitarianism--that is, the ultimacy of humanity. Man's glory and honour must not only be respected, but protected. The duty of all governments is to defend the honour of mankind. Those who oppress or harm human beings impugn the glory and dignity of all. Those who harm other human beings are committing blasphemous acts. Thus, it is not at all surprising, that nations in the West have felt compelled to go to war against other nations which were believed to be violating human rights. The upshot has been a complete bloody mess.

In a recent article in World Affairs, entitled Saviors & Sovereigns: The Rise and Fall of Humanitarianism, Mark Mazower reviews the unseemly spectacle.

On November 9, 2001, George W. Bush created a new public holiday—World Freedom Day. The United States, he explained, would lead the global fight for “liberty, freedom and the universal struggle for human rights”; it would try to help the “more than two billion people” still living under repressive regimes. The idea that America could, or should, do this had informed a certain kind of Washington mind-set throughout the Cold War. But after the Berlin Wall came down, freedom’s crusaders increasingly set their eyes not so much on Communism as on violators of human rights in general. They unfurled the banner of humanitarianism and, righteously, scorned the cowards and skeptics who wanted to keep America’s powder dry.

Mazower suggests there are signs that going to war to defend human rights is becoming unfashionable, and cites President Obama's less "hawkish" tone. We believe this is nonsense: humanitarianism will not stop its wars until Human Rights doctrines are rejected. Obama continues to conduct its wars. Afghanistan has become part of the humanitarianism cause: American armed force is now being employed to "nation build" in that country. Humanitarianism remains firmly in place as a governing doctrine of the Republic.

Humanitarianism is implicitly absolutist, whilst hopelessly confused. This is a very dangerous combination. It creates happy hunting ground for populist manipulating politicians, hucksters and charlatans.

A pair of seminal scholarly articles from the early 1980s, influential on both left and right, offer a starting point: in these, Columbia University professor Michael Doyle argued that democracies were inherently peace-loving. The gratifying implication was that American security and international peace would both be served if existing democracies banded together and—perhaps—if they helped democratize the rest of the world as well.

The Balkans became the "theatre" where this doctrine was first played out.

At the time, the intellectual case for taking on Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo was being hammered out by no one in more public detail than by Michael Ignatieff (academic and current leader of the Canadian Liberal Party). In the aftermath of Bosnia, he had mused that the task of the contemporary intellectual was to defend “the universal against the violence and closure associated with the tribal, national, and ethnic.” Somewhat diffidently, he called for a defense of Western universalism as the alternative to tribalism. He did not dissent from the West’s right to intervene abroad on humanitarian grounds; his test was whether a breach of human rights threatened international peace.

Human Rights doctrines lead naturally into the ideology of humanitarianism, which, in turn leads the West to attempt to impose democracies on other nations--for their own good. Humanitarianism assumes that lying just beneath the surface of all oppressive and tyrannical governments are people who are true believers in Human Rights theology. Ironically, the more interventions occur, the more obvious it becomes that this is just plain flat-out wrong.

At least as worrying was the thought that the “ordinary people” in whom the intellectuals placed their hopes might not exist as imagined. Were they natural democrats? Not according to those who argued that even Yugoslavia’s descent into turmoil had been the product of mass nationalism and the political failure of less divisive movements. Radovan Karadzic and Franjo Tudjman were not tyrants, it was said, but the voices of a popular, deeply nationalistic general will, or the beneficiaries of the collapse of a one-party state and the democratization that followed. Soon, the idea that a “civil society” was waiting to be born in every dictatorship started to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

It is important to grasp that the doctrines of humanitarianism and interventions to punish human rights abusers is not a recent post-World War II phenomenon. It, like the Divine Rights of Kings, has been held for generations throughout Europe and the West in general.

The idea of humanitarian intervention was not a late-twentieth-century invention, of course. William Gladstone’s foray into Egypt more than a century earlier bore all the hallmarks of the idea, and one could go farther back. The re-emergence of the idea in the 1990s was the latest flourishing of a distinctive form of Western liberal thinking about global affairs. If liberal values were the only true values, then the West’s power and prestige should be deployed to promote them. And not merely to promote them, but to save suffering humanity from the excesses of that other Western invention, the idea of state sovereignty. With the United States in the ascendant after 1989—and a public culture steeped in the horrors of the Holocaust and the sinfulness of inaction in the face of evil—the temptation has been to elevate intervention to a general principle. As Jürgen Habermas wrote in 2008, through their mass violations of human rights, many states lost the presumption of innocence that entitled them to claim sovereignty. The cosmopolitan conscience must trump the autonomy of the evildoing dictator.

Knocking off a dictator is the easy part. Winning the "peace" is an entirely different matter.

Toppling dictators might staunch the worst human rights abuses. But the same Western public opinion that welcomed their fall blanched at the years, billions of dollars, and (Western) lives spent to build democratic institutions from scratch. Well before the election of Barack Obama, the drain on military resources posed by Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the fragility of the new institutions in Bosnia and Kosovo, suggested that we should be wary of imperial projects.

Human cultures and civilizations are incredibly thick with nuances, significances, and meanings. In the end they reflect the prevailing shared religious beliefs of human beings within a culture. Western Human Rights humanitarianism is no exception; it is nothing more, nor less than an imperialist, absolutist attempt to impose its own culture and religion upon other peoples of the world.

This, of course, is not to say that all cultures are equally moral or holy or sanctified. Many are deeply degenerate--and the West, sadly, falls into this category. But it is to say that regime change does not mean culture change. Holding elections does not mean changes of heart and world-view. Cultures can only change for the better (or worse) from the inside out, from new patterns of love, courtship, marriage, child rearing, family worship, work, and labour--and so forth. These are not the things that the West can speak authoritatively about any longer.

And the rest of the world knows it.