Imperialism and "Human Rights" posted by Richard Seymour

Review of David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, Pluto Press, 2002.

The Kosovo war was fought "not for territory but for values" according to Tony Blair. The bombing of Afghanistan in 2001 was conducted to help "the oppressed people of Afghanistan", according to George W. Bush, so that they may know "the generosity of America and our allies". Meanwhile, according to Jack Straw, stopping the bombing "would only prolong the suffering of the Afghan people". Pro-war adepts could easily adduce similar comforting thoughts about the war waged on Iraq in March 2003. The ideology of human rights is not only unversalist, but also universally accepted. Human rights organisations now regularly call for "humanitarian intervention" and decry the lack of attention to such crisis spots as the Democratic Republic of Congo. David Rieff notes that humanitarian organisations are now "among the most fervent interventionists". From a politics of fence-sitting to one of active political engagement, the ‘human rights’ movement has conducted a rapid and striking volte-face in the past decade, a paradigm-shift of shocking proportions. It is as if Ptolemy and Aristotle had given way to Copernicus and Descartes in ten, instead of 200, years. And David Chandler, for one, would like to know why.

Chandler’s book begins by establishing exactly how universal the doctrine of ‘human rights’ has become. Indeed, the language is ubiquitous, and no Minister of Defense can resist the temptation to sound like a UN Secretary General or an Amnesty International activist – even a liberal revolutionary, pace Tony Blair greeting cheering Kosovars with his blue shirt-sleeves rolled up and a heroic cast of expression on his kisser. And what is most objected to by the new generation of human rights activists has been precisely the demand for neutrality. Geoffrey Robertson derides the "obsessive neutrality ingrained in US personnel and procedures", while Michael Ignatieff demanded of Boutros Boutros-Ghali: "Why insist on being neutral, in the face of a clear aggressor and a clear victim, when that neutrality daily undermines the United Nations’ moral credit?" The IRCR has been widely condemned for having remained silent about the concentration camps during World War II, and recently for not divulging information it had about the mistreatment of prisoners in Bosnia with the Hague tribunal. The silence was not due to moral paucity, but to a surfeit of principle – one must never, under any circumstances, compromise one’s political neutrality. This is the idea that modern ‘human rights’ activists are inclined to question. The IRCR has pointed out that they would never have had access to suffering victims in prison camps had it not been for their reputation for neutrality, and indeed were the only charitable organisation able to operate in Serb-controlled areas. But the new humanitarians consider this a "one more blanket" approach – small gestures of alleviation that do not go to the root of the problem.

And there are a number of cases that appear to obviate the need for a specifically partisan approach. In Rwanda, for instance, many human rights organisations withdrew aid from some refugee camps because they believed that among the recipients would be genocidairres. For the first time in its history, Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) did just that. The rejection of neutrality has resulted in a "new humanitarianism" among NGOs, specifically Oxfam, Save the Children and UNICEF who now see their role as being a radical attempt to alter the shape of non-Western societies. They seek to get to the root causes of deviant conduct by states and opposition groups in those societies, and challenge them. MSF, meanwhile, is the leading exponent of this approach. As Bernard Kouchner noted, "MSF’s work was political from the start", while Alain Destexhe, former secretary-general of MSF, insisted that "humanitarian action is noble when couple with political action and justice. Without them, it is doomed to fail." (It is therefore no surprise to find several of their leading theorists hailing interventions into Kosovo and Sierra Leone in their book In the Shadow of the "Just War", 2004).

Another aspect of the paradigm-shift has been the break with the traditional concern for immediate human needs, with tending the suffering of all, to the preferment for human rights. In this view, it is permissible to allow some preventable deaths in circumstances where it is deemed to lead to better long term human rights outcomes. This has been, not only contiguous with, but absolutely essential for, the growing politicisation of humanitarian aid. The attachment of aid to human rights conditions has been the official policy of the UK government since 1994. The UN World Food Programme immediately suspended aid to Afghanistan following the attack on the World Trade Centre despite a humanitarian crisis precisely because they feared it might get into the hands of the Taliban. Geoffrey Robertson argued that sanctions on post-war Serbia were justified since "most of Serbia’s 8 million citizens were guilty of indifference towards atrocities in Kosovo". There is a counter-trend to this. Oxfam’s Nick Stockton denounces the new ideology of the "undeserving victim" as "morally and ethically untenably, and practically counter-productive", fatally diluting the universalism of human rights. To withhold aid on the grounds that its recipients may be criminals is arbitrary application of punishment before trial, he argues. "Such treatment is arguably a crime against humanity".

Since humanitarian action is no longer about sustaining minimal conditions of comfort and freedom from pain for all human beings, regardless of which ‘side’ they are on, and is instead about pursuing rights-based political strategy, states are free to appropriate the language of humanitarianism. They even co-opt human rights activists into their efforts, be it in Afghanistan, Kosovo or Iraq. Michael Pugh notes that "Military humanism" is no longer an oxymoron since military action is increasingly justified in human rights terms. And it is at this point that the agenda of the ‘new humanitarian’ dovetails with that of the pro-war liberal. It was not beneath the Observer, for instance, to argue during the war on Afghanistan that if UNICEF’s predictions that continued bombing of the country could result in 100,000 extra deaths were correct, then it was still better to bomb rather than squander an opportunity for the ‘greater good’. (Editorial, Observer, 21st October 2001). The language of humanitarianism had come a long way.

Evil as The Ultimate Ethical Horizon

The attractions of an "ethical foreign policy" are Chandler’s next subject. While there is a tendency, especially among US policy officials, to pretend that human rights was embedded in its foreign policy outlook since the revolution, others argue that the doctrine of humanitarian intervention developed gradually. Beginning with the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, through the 1948 Convention on Genocide, the international covenants of 1966, the 1993 UN Vienna Declaration on Human Rights to the Treaty of Rome, human rights ideology is seen to have evolved in discreet stages. Other commentators regard its new emphasis as a result of the allegedly parlous condition of the world since the end of the Cold War. The UN Convention on Global Violence asserts that there is a spreading "culture of violence" among the world’s governments, which is "sometimes perceived as an end in itself". Martin Shaw argues that "genocide has come to dominate the war strategies of many local states and state-like movements". Kouchner suggests that the post-Cold War world is "aflame", and the "world community" must be able to intervene to prevent an "explosion of human rights violations". However, as David Chandler points out, both of these explanations are ineffectual. In the first instance, because in the first instance, the Convention on Genocide was "a dead letter" during the Cold War, and was only ratified by the US Senate in 1988. Prior to the 1990s, only a few states claimed to have a foreign policy based purely, or at least centrally, on human rights. Those states typically had few strategic assets overseas. In the second case, because the statistics show a general decline in the rate of casualties from conflict compared with the Cold War period. Of 35 wars taking place during the mid-1990s, 27 originated from before 1989.

But the most popular explanation for the paradigm-shift is simply the success of normative values. The work of NGOs and the advent of the 24-hour news generation has placed civil conflicts right in everyone’s living room, so Geoffrey Robertson argues. This, again, will not do. NGOs have not the membership capable of influencing elections, have no say in the detail of international treaties, have relatively little funding to speak of, and therefore lack the clout of traditional interest groups. States prevail, and NGOs remain largely dependant on them for funding. Studies by Steve Charnowitz have shown that NGOs generally assume greater importance in times of institutional transition – hence, the 1850-1914 period, the 1920s and the last two decades. More importantly, the reason for this cycle has been the needs of government and their attempts to realign NGOs. The attempt of late has been to create an "effective adhocracy" as Alvin Toffler put it, in which NGOs can become the sounding boards for policy initiatives in collaboration with the UN, proclaiming what cautious states dare not proclaim. As for the media, the case seems somewhat over-stated. The apparently overwhelming public demand for humanitarian intervention registered as only a minority priority in US opinion polls during the Nineties. Clinton, before bombing Kosovo, had first to point it out to American audiences on a map. CNN coverage did not prompt either intervention into Rwanda and Zaire, nor was there any particular enthusiasm for the Kosovo war although people generally acquiesced.

The source of the paradigm-shift, according to Chandler, lies in the "transformation of domestic and international political frameworks" after the Cold War. In particular, with the absence of a superpower rival, Western powers have had no institutional challenge to its proclaimed role in defining and pursuing universal values. That the Soviet bloc and its associates formally supported the anti-colonial movement (while in reality often doing much to hinder it) was significant at a symbolic level as well as at a military level. The claim to universalism is undone somewhat when at least half the world seems to be against you. The other significance of the end of the Cold War has been the impact on domestic politics. The traditional constituencies of labour and capital are no longer deemed an appropriate basis for a political programme, particularly on the centre-left. Governments have instead sought for the middle ground, and have tried to locate a discourse that unites more than it divides, and that discourse is to be found in what Alain Badiou contemptuously dismisses as "nihilist" – ethics. The discourse coheres an apparently unrelated array of policy nostrums. After 9/11, that discourse took off in a startling way. Bush announced that he was protecting American values against the "heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th Century", while Blair presented his usual sequence of clipped, verb-less sentences: "We are democratic. They are not. We have respect for human life. They do not. We hold essentially liberal values. They do not." God was not available for comment, but we have the word of those two avatars that he watched from above, and approved.

The doctrine of human rights, as presently framed, thus offers a raison d’etre for the political class, and for interventions in a variety of global situations. The UK’s Strategic Defense Review, published by the Select Committee on Defense (UKSCD) notes that Britain could "take a narrow view" of its role in the world which "did not require a significant military capability … This is indeed a real choice, but not one the Government could recommend to Britain". The reason, of course, is that to do so would limit the enormous flexibility in foreign policy that accrued to Britain and other Western states following the end of the Cold War. The significance of Kosovo for the UK government was not the fate of ordinary Kosovars, who received no sympathy when they arrived in Britain, but the way in which it symbolically sealed New Labour’s zealous commitment to virtue as a cornerstone of foreign policy.

But if the ‘new humanitarianism’ provides Western states with a coherent philosophy for a flexible, but global interventionism, it does so primarily on account of its own internal weaknesses. For one thing, NGOs rarely provide any serious political or social analysis of the atrocities or abuses they record. Their role enjoins them to quantitatively monitor and describe the "human wrongs" they are endeavouring to put right. Human rights situations are thus presented devoid of social, political and economic content. In State Crimes, by Tony Ward and Penny Green (Pluto Press, 2003), we learn that governments tend to resort to torture and repression in inverse proportion to their ability to mitigate or attenuate the conditions which cause people to form opposition movements. In particular, all the Central American states repressed the peasant movements during the Cold War and after. But the level of brutality was contiguous with the capacity governments had to meet peasant needs without fundamentally altering the structure of wealth and class power in that country. El Salvador murdered in the hundreds of thousands, Honduras in the hundreds to thousands. But that sort of analysis is precisely what is verboten, even in the more perceptive and genuinely analytical output of the aid organisations. Many aid organisations feel that to provide such explanations for abuse might be to give succour to those perpetrating them. And since NGOs are campaigning organisations, they will reduce complex situations to simple uni-dimensional tales – a technique known in PR as "characterisation". The issues are usually presented in the context of simple condemnation (which is often deserved), a gesture which assumes that the problems of a particular state originate entirely from within – either due to its amoral electorate or to its immoral government. The international system with its structure of power, its sanctions and isolation techniques shapes significantly the condition of a particular state. Afghanistan is a particular example of this.

The Republic of Humanitarian Management versus The Democracy of Risk.

Another reason that the discourse of ‘human rights’ has proved so useful to political elites is that it undermines the traditional basis for legitimacy of government action. Ordinarily, governments are expected to meet their obligations to their electorate and to at least abide by its general wishes. But since the political subject is universalised in ethical discourse, the government can claim that it has just as much obligation to the citizens of Bulgaria as it does to its voters. From Mary Robinson to Kofi Annan, those whose official duty involves the preservation of human rights at some level have argued that everyone is responsible for everyone else – a transparently slender "responsibility" that is simple enough to evade, (or at least to place in the trust of political and military elites). This "moral accountability" thus removes the necessity of political accountability. Tony Blair insists that he is ready to meet his maker, but he seems curiously reluctant to meet his critics now that the Iraq war is over.

It also provides a catch-all reasoning for war. Failure is simply impossible in the new human rights paradigm since, regardless of how many victims pile up, the absence of intervention would have led to a worse outcome. (And our bodies are always accidental, or the result of deviant action by individuals). The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, while dismissing the idea that there was a Serb campaign of genocide in Kosovo, nevertheless insisted that the true issue was that Milosevic’s campaign would have continued for years if there had not been intervention, creating more death and instability than the bombing did. This provides excellent post facto cover for literally any outcome that you can imagine, except, perhaps, the death of every single Albanian at Nato hands which would, at any rate, still have been an accident, the result of a few miscreants… etc etc. Similarly, when there were calls for a cessation or pause in the bombing of Afghanistan, countless ‘humanitarian’ reasons were presented for the refusal to do so, including the prospect of the Taliban marauding triumphantly round the country, killing many more people than the bombers could. Once again, if 100,000 deaths as a result of Western action would not have invalidated the humanitarian reasoning for war, then nothing could. And, of course, in this doctrine, it is intentions that matter – alleged ones at that – rather than consequences. Hence, Peregrine Worsthorne insists that "the noble intentions should produce noble results, but if that – for reasons beyond our control – proves impossible, then it is at least something to be proud of to have had the noble intentions". Similarly, Jonathan Freedland suggested of the Kosovo war that if the West had not intervened, it would have made us "bystanders to evil". Often, the most important thing in a humanitarian engagement is what it means for us, and not for those on the ground.

Human rights theorists are quick to dismiss conceptions of state sovereignty (a concept not wholly of my own liking) in favour if humanitarian action. Since political subject is now global, her rights transcend those of the territorial state. But the vital point which should not be missed is precisely Hannah Arendt's point in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the oppressed are first stripped of state rights before they are massacred. Albeit, the gesture of over-riding state powers can be seen as an attempt to infuse democratic, political and civil rights with a moral content (by, for example, expecting countries on the receiving end of aid to pursue policies in alignment with restrictions prescribed by NGOs), Chandler notes that the freedoms of the public and political sphere (to assemble, trade, vote etc.) are negative freedoms with no value content whatsoever. That aspect is exactly what is problematic for human rights advocates. Some argue that since economic, social and cultural rights are positive rights, requiring positive state action, it is a state's right to restrict liberty for social goals, and therefore political rights are subordinate to economic, social and cultural rights in classical political theory. Unfortunately, precisely this conflation of rights of autonomy and rights of recognition which are above state sovereignty leads to human rights theorists abandoning attention to process and concentrating on outcomes. So, Paddy Ashdown suppresses democracy in Bosnia so that he can ensure the 'correct balance' of forces persist in government (see Chandler's other book, Faking Democracy After Dayton, 1999). The Nato powers in Kosovo can exclude most of the public from participation in government since they are likely to vote for the wrong people. The Serbian people are declared morally incapable of running their own affairs by that notorious intellectual fraud, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, because they voted for Slobodan Milosevic. The subordination of process to outcome has other significant consequences which I'll come to in a second.

State Sovereignty and Democracy

Chandler also involves the reader in a compelling discussion on the legal controversies of the 'new humanitarianism', which involves an apparently radical rejection of "state sovereignty", but which has profoundly elitist consequences. According to these theorists, "sovereignty is not a fact but a theory". According to Geoffrey Robertson, the classical doctrines of international law is responsible for damaging human rights, privileging "'state rights' when it is human rights that are being violated". Similarly, Max Boot argues that "most of the world's states do not have Westphalian legitimacy in the first place" but rather are "highly artificial entities, most created by Western officials in the 20th Century". (Presumably, the thought here is 'we made them, so we can do what we like with them'). But of course, the kind of 'sovereignty' that is under attack is not state sovereignty per se, but specifically the sovereignty of selected non-Western states deemed to have failed to meet certain standards of human rights. This attack does not impact on the US, for instance, whose grotesque catalogue of human rights violations since WWII beats all comers. (Go ahead and find me anything that tops Vietnam since WWII). The US is not punished for its failure to sign up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (being one of a handful of countries that executes non-adults). Rather, it is the wealthy states who, according to Martin Shaw, Geoffrey Robertson and The Guardian who are to be the agents of human rights practise. To be sure, Roberston et al have a point when they argue that the UN General Assembly is not really representative - countries with a population of millions are formally equal to states representing a few tens of thousands. But the alternative to this would be a global state involving the input of all citizens, which is not a measure being called for by the theorists of human rights - although George Monbiot has had a stab at outlining such an idea in his The Age of Consent, (2003). If international law is not to be based on the consent of participating nation-states, then "the distinction between law (based on formal equality) and repression (based on force and arbitrary power) disappears. The abandonment or over-riding of state sovereignty in the present conjuncture can only mean the dictatorship of the powerful nations. The failure to investigate Nato crimes in Kosovo, which Human Rights Watch described as a "disturbing disregard for the principles of humanitarianism", renders the point absolutely eloquent.

The retreat from state sovereignty, however, forebodes something rather ominous - the retreat from political democracy. Michael Pugh asserts that elections "can heighten tensions between groups and communities rather than dampen them". Roland Paris argues that "instead of promoting democratic elections ... peacebuilders could encourage rival parties to share power in a nondemocratic regime". Mary Kaldor insisted that "What is needed is an alliance between local defenders of civility and transnational institutions which would guide a strategy". Nils Roseman argues that we are no longer dealing with unelected tyrants of the ilk of Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, but elected monsters such as Milosevic, Fujimori and Vladimir Putin. The people cannot be trusted to their own devices, especially in Afghanistan where, according to John Simpson, "The Afghan's own devices are what have ruined this country...". For Clare Short the trouble, again, was the Afghans who were too "independent-minded". Alenka Savic of the Bosnia Womens' Initiative programme asserts that women's support for nationalist parties just showed how easily they could be manipulated: "People think they have an opinion but they haven't - they share the opinion of their society, of the media, of their environment. Bosnian women are not used to thinking independently, they haven't learnt that." Or, as libertarian campaigner John Wadham argues, "Elected parliaments in this country and around the world have shown that, on their own, they are not able to protect human rights properly.". This lead him to call for removing the power to appoint judges from the elected government and place it in the hands of "an independent appointments committee". Hence, "democratic government is being redefined as human rights governance." This is exemplified by the "protectorate solution" in Kosovo, which is run by a colonial governor who also happens to be an avid human rights campaigner, Bernard Kouchner. As he argues, "Everywhere, human rights are human rights. Freedom is freedom. Suffering is suffering." Those rights, however, are won only by shutting down political rights. In Bosnia, for instance, parties may discuss, debate and challenge policies. They may suggest amendments. Ultimate power, however, resides in the Office of the High Representative, run by Paddy Ashdown. Political authority is denied to those who win the majority of votes, but is not delegated to minorities either.

The Charge Sheet

The new doctrine of human rights is thus impugned by David Chandler for being internally weak, inconsistent, poor at explaining human rights violations, poor at curtailing them, anti-democratic and inherently imperialist. States are credited with moral authority precisely on account of their military power and their willingness to intervene. Meanwhile, democratic procedures are distrusted precisely because they involve governments being subject to 'special' interest as against universal, ethical interest. The concern with 'genocide' and 'atrocities' has, as Chandler suggests, little to do with the Holocaust, or the crimes of Serbia in Bosnia or the slaughter in Rwanda. It is related to domestic political considerations and the hegemonic position of Western powers. The advocates of 'human rights' fail to see that there are serious human rights consequences of abandoning state sovereignty, restricting democracy and reducing politics to morals. The failure to contextualise human rights abuses denudes them of social, political and economic content. They are rather held to attest to something constant in human nature which is to be suppressed in various ways - in particular by reducing the political spere. The human subject is held to be passive, rather than an active agent. (Hence, the famous New York Times interview with a Kosovan woman during the Balkans war, in which she explained that she had no political opinions, sympathised with the Serbs, hoped it would all end soon... See Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, 2000). It is a profoundly pessimistic, and therefore conservative, view of human nature. "[H]umans need to be restrained from their inner darkness" according to Langlois. It is, as Badiou argues, a nihilist doctrine in that the only thing that can really happen to one in the ethical discourse is death. (Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 2000). There is plenty of material in Chandler's densely researched book to underline and amplify the point over and over. Chandler argues that what is needed is not a new humanitarianism, but a new humanism. If the doctrine of 'human rights' sustains "the self-belief of the governing class", it nevertheless cannot "create stability or offer a constructive vision for the future". The active subject must be re-emphasised. Mass politics must be reinvigorated, and we must make the most of "people's capacity for autonomy and collective rational decision-making, a capacity denied by the proponents of ethical regulation from above".