Ethics F International Affairs 19,no.2 (2005). All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or utilized in any form without the written permission of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs.

Against the New Internationalism Anthony Burke

Bad consequences can discredit good intentions. —Jürgen Habermas1

hen I think of the challenges fac- term residents are denuded overnight of rights ing international society in the by the quaintly named “USA-PATRIOT Act,” wake of the invasion of Iraq, two and secret trials, forced interrogations and W summary executions are re-imaged as no images come to mind. The first, a work of longer the instruments of tyranny but the pre- postcard art, depicts a screenprint of the rogatives of Enduring Freedom.3 Statue of Liberty, with a twist. In the place of her striking face and radiating crown That was written in 2002, when the war on appears a decidedly masculine image: that of terror was only taking shape. Now bitter a helmeted marine, grim and tight-jawed, a irony is the soup of the day, and Western cigarette poking insolently from his lips. The leaders and opinion-makers ask us to find in caption reads, in bold white capitals on it not nihilism but nourishment. Words and black, “PEACE,” and beneath it another things no longer correspond. Liberty is a phrase, asterisked: “conditions apply.”2 The hermaphrodite, male and female, warrior second is a newspaper photograph of a and peacemaker, the only possible way of young woman in New York taken during the representing the army that frees, the democ- global demonstrations against the war in racy that slaughters, the liberator that tor- February 2003. She has been called out of the tures. Postcards ring truer than the speeches march by the photographer and stands, at of politicians; and, as if to affirm the young once defiant and bewildered, against a row placard waver, George W. Bush tells us that of mounted police. Rugged up against the “the advance of freedom leads to peace.”4 winter cold, she holds a placard upon which Peace and war are no longer antonyms, she has written a question: “Perpetual war utterly irreconcilable, but new lovers naively for perpetual peace?” imagining a brighter future. What then can Upon seeing these images I was immedi- ately reminded of Suvendrini Perera’s 1 Jürgen Habermas, “Interpreting the Fall of a Monu- description of the war on terror as one “of ment,” Constellations 10,no.3 (2003), p. 364. category confusions and bizarre doublings”: 2 “Liberty design” by Phil Hannaford, Arts Bandit, 2003. 3 a war where soldier, terrorist and refugee can Suvendrini Perera, “What Is a Camp?” Borderlands 1, be made indistinguishable, where victims flee- no. 1 (May 2002); available at www.borderlandsejour nal.adelaide.edu.au. ing Taliban oppression can be constructed as 4 George W.Bush,“Remarks by the President at the 20th potential “sleepers” for its terror, where inter- Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democ- national conventions fail to protect asylum- racy,” speech given at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, seekers from being criminalised as “illegal”; a Washington, D.C., November 6, 2003; available at war where cluster bombs and food parcels www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106- share similar packaging; where loyal, long- 3.html.

73 we salvage of liberal internationalism? Jür- credible liberal ethic of international peace gen Habermas calls the war “an unimagin- and security. In relation to contemporary able break” with existing norms, and in its concerns about terrorism, nation building, wake we may well wonder if they are not and WMD proliferation, this article thus beyond repair.5 The danger lies deeper even sets out and critiques the claims of the new than Perera suggests, in the gap between the internationalism. As an alternative it draws cosmopolitan norms of civil rights and upon Immanuel Kant’s normative commit- international law, and the exceptionalist ment to perpetual peace—visible also in prerogatives of national sovereignty. It lies in the UN Charter and the Treaty on the Non- the potential transformation of cosmopoli- proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)— tanism itself, in the construction of new but questions commitments in his thought “internationalist” norms built not on the that have enabled highly coercive and self- developing dialogue, normative consensus, regarding forms of realpolitik and sover- and collective decision-making of the inter- eignty to find their way into the very heart national community, but on the physical of internationalist power. In my view, the power, and ethical vision, of the United new internationalism of Shawcross, Ignati- States and its allies. eff, Feinstein, Slaughter, Elshtain, and This project, promoted in writings others only amplifies this problem, and if it by British prime minister Tony Blair and gains undue influence the impact both on such influential intellectuals as William international security and on efforts to Shawcross, Michael Ignatieff, Lee Feinstein, develop positive and credible ethical frame- Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Jean Bethke works for the use of force will be grave. Elshtain, constitutes a sweeping effort to Against their conclusions that it is the norms combine preventive war and unilateral and structures of the United Nations that humanitarian enforcement into a new nor- need to be radically transformed, I argue mative framework for international inter- that what must change is the violent and vention. While some of these writers have exclusivist idea of sovereignty that lingers, argued for the United Nations’ structures like a latent illness, in the very depths of and principles to undergo radical change, modern cosmopolitanism. and others for it to be sidelined, all have framed their arguments in terms of a potent 5 Habermas, “Interpreting the Fall,”p. 366. universalist claim about international jus- 6 6 William Shawcross’s book is Allies (New York: Public- tice and right. While they do not reject the Affairs, 2003). The others are discussed below. A 2004 United Nations or the UN Charter outright article by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane pro- as normative and legal frameworks for moting the creation of a “cosmopolitan institutional” framework for authorizing the preventive use of force decisions about war and peace, these “new also treads similar ground, but its scope is far more lim- internationalists” do seek to displace its cen- ited (to cases of the imminent first use of WMD), it trality and erect a new consensus in its place. affirms the United Nations as the prime context for If they succeed, the implications for inter- deliberation, and it sets a much higher threshold of dis- cussion and accountability than other proposals. For national society and global security will be these reasons it cannot be strictly classified with the very disturbing indeed. “new internationalism,”and will not be discussed here. In the face of this new activist project of Allen Buchanan and Robert. O Keohane, “The Preven- tive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Pro- norm building, I wonder whether, and how, posal,” Ethics F International Affairs 18,no.1 (2004), pp. it might be possible to revive and rethink a 1–24.

74 Anthony Burke THE TRANSFORMATION OF Blair revived the “doctrine of the interna- COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITY? tional community” in March 2004, this time in relation to Iraq. This time the revolution- British prime minister Tony Blair outlined ary normative ambitions visible there were the shape of the new paradigm in the clos- fully developed—a new vision of liberal uni- ing stages of the Kosovo war, when he deliv- versalism melded with the preemptive war ered a speech in Chicago with the portentous doctrine of the U.S. neoconservatives. He title “Doctrine of the International Com- justified invading Iraq even in the face of munity.” While it made sensible arguments weak intelligence with an argument that about the need to recognize and respond to “the risk of this new global terrorism and its the implications of growing global interde- interaction with states or organizations or pendence for security, and set out argu- individuals proliferating WMD is one I am ments for humanitarian intervention, a simply not prepared to run . . . this is not the more ambitious agenda was also visible: time to err on the side of caution; not a time We may be tempted to think back to the clar- to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not ity and simplicity of the Cold War. But now we a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise have to establish a new framework. No longer who favor playing it long.”10 This urgent, is our existence as states under threat. Now our fear-soaked rhetoric was matched with a actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in sweeping argument that “nations that are defending the values we cherish. In the end free, democratic and benefiting from eco- values and interests merge. If we can establish nomic progress tend to be stable and solid and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, partners in the advance of humankind”: human rights and an open society then that is We cannot advance these values except within in our national interests too. The spread of our a framework that recognises their universality. values makes us safer.7 If it is a global threat, it needs a global re- While Blair sought to set conditions on sponse, based on global rules. . . . Britain’s role is to find a way through this: to construct a humanitarian intervention, the speech is consensus behind a broad agenda of justice notoriously vague about how far the doc- and security and means of enforcing it.11 trine stretched—with heavy hints that it went beyond actions against massive and Far from being on the back foot over the continuing violations of human rights to failure to find WMD in Iraq or the contro- “dealing with dictators” and spreading the versy over the legality of Britain’s participa- “values of liberty” and “open society.”These were not immediate or ad hoc goals, but to 7 be the basis of an entirely “new framework” Tony Blair, “Doctrine of the International Commu- nity,”speech given at the Economic Club, Chicago,April for promoting “the cause of international- 24, 1999 10 8 ; available at www.number- .gov.uk/output/ ism.” The seeds of his later support for the page1297.asp. 8 Ibid. removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime via a 9 military invasion (his government already Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (New York: Verso, supported CIA covert action to remove 2002), p. 31. 9 10 Hussein) can already be seen here. Likewise Ten Downing Street Press Release, “Prime Minister the speech’s premonition of the Bush Warns of Continuing Global Terror Threat,” March 5, 2004; available at www.number-10.gov.uk/output/ administration’s 2003 “forward strategy of page5461.asp. freedom” are striking. 11 Ibid.

against the new internationalism 75 tion in the war, Blair was already redirecting the International Commission on Interven- British foreign policy toward the task of tion and State Sovereignty’s report The revolutionizing global institutions and Responsibility to Protect, chaired by Gareth rules—in ways that would make regime Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun.16 Feinstein change and preemption into the basis for a and Slaughter assert that the commission’s new normative framework: “efforts to redefine basic concepts of sover- It means reforming the United Nations so its eignty and international community are Security Council represents 21st century real- highly relevant to international security,”17 ity; and giving the UN the capability to act despite Evans’s and Sahnoun’s clear state- effectively as well as debate. It means getting ment in 2002 that the report’s concerns and the UN to understand that faced with the threats we have, we should do all we can to recommendations should not be related to spread the values of freedom, democracy, the the post–September 11 debates over security rule of law, religious tolerance and justice for against terrorism and “hot pre-emption” of the oppressed, however painful for some WMD threats—the issues were “conceptu- 12 nations that may be. ally and practically distinct.”18 Like Bush A slightly less ambitious, but no less dis- and Blair, Feinstein and Slaughter are driven turbing, argument in this vein has been put by a conviction that certain states cannot be by Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter trusted with weapons of mass destruction in the January 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs.13 and that deterrence will not suffice to deal There they assert a new principle: a “collec- with the threat they might one day pose, and tive ‘duty to prevent’ nations run by rulers like Blair they argue that national interest without internal checks on their power from and humanitarianism have converged in the acquiring or using WMD.” As with Blair’s post–September 11 environment: “The links arguments in 2003, they are seeking to between the two sets of issues, especially the embed a new internationalist norm with need to tackle them with proactive strate- potentially revolutionary consequences, gies, are becoming more evident.” Such based on the “premise that the rules now strategies range from “diplomatic pressure governing the use of force, devised in 1945 or incentives,” “economic measures,” to and embedded in the UN Charter, are inad- “coercive actions” along a scale from sanc- equate.”14 It is not enough, they argue, that tions, inspections, and blockades, to the use the UN already possesses the power to iden- of armed force in the last instance. The “util- tify a state’s WMD programs as a “threat to ity of force in dealing with the most serious international peace and security” and take proliferation dangers,” they incredibly sug- measures, as it did with Iraq after 1990: gest, “is not a controversial proposition,” But articulating and acknowledging a specific duty to prevent such governments from even 12 Ibid. acquiring WMD will shift the burden of proof 13 Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “A Duty to from suspicious nations to suspected nations Prevent,” Foreign Affairs 83,no.1 (2004),pp.136–50. and create the presumption of a need for early 14 Ibid., p. 137. 15 and, therefore, more effective action. 15 Ibid., p. 138; emphasis added. 16 International Commission on Intervention and State They see such a “duty to prevent” as a Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: smooth development of the emerging norm IDRC, 2001). 17 Feinstein and Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,”p. 141. of humanitarian intervention, even (some- 18 Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun,“The Respon- what scandalously) mimicking the title of sibility to Protect,” Foreign Affairs 81,no.6 (2002), p. 99.

76 Anthony Burke and while they do not overtly endorse a state call for help,”where “states fail to stop regime change actions such as in Iraq, their terrorists on their soil from launching proposal leaves the door open to such attacks,” and where “as in Iraq, North Korea actions since it seeks to control not only and possibly Iran, a state violates the non- WMD proliferation “but also the people proliferation protocols regarding the acqui- who possess them.” We can perhaps be sition of chemical, nuclear or biological grateful that they still affirm the centrality of weapons.” These, he says, “would be the the UN Security Council in the “duty to pre- cases when intervention by force could be vent” (and if it is paralyzed, a regional authorized by majority vote on the Security organization, such as NATO, “with suffi- Council.” To his credit, Ignatieff does argue ciently broad membership to permit serious that the membership of the Security Coun- deliberation over the exercise of a collective cil should be expanded, that the veto power duty”). However, they still ultimately of the Permanent Five should be abolished, endorse unilateral action or “coalitions of and that the U.S. should “commit to use the willing” after “these options are tried in force only with the approval of the Council.” good faith.”19 This is undermined, however, by the vastly Michael Ignatieff makes a similar move, expanded freedom of (preventive) action he linking WMD proliferation to humanitar- advocates for the UN.21 ian intervention and folding it into a new The dangers in the arguments of Fein- universalist framework based on the power stein, Slaughter, and Ignatieff are threefold: and moral authority of the United States. In they are ultimately seeking to create a norm doing so, he strongly endorses the principle of prevention applied selectively to states of preventive war, and the U.S. invasion of deemed potential dangers; they endorse Iraq, although not without some moral unilateral action, at least as a last resort; and, anguish and genuine anger at many U.S. if such a norm were indeed to become actions.20 In a long New York Times article in accepted by NATO or the UN Security September 2003, he argues, “If the United Council, as all hope, it is likely to undermine States fails in Iraq, so will the United the Charter and the nonproliferation regime Nations.” In order to save the United even more than unilateral actions such as the Nations from what he sees as a deeply flawed invasion of Iraq, which are at least hotly dis- (if principled) U.S. policy, based too much puted. (This is without considering how it in unilateralism, corporate self-interest, and could undermine the growing but fragile sanguine assumptions about the ease of acceptance of the “modified sovereignty” transforming the country into a stable free- norm and intervention in cases of grave market democracy, he argues that the UN’s norms need to change: “It will have to rewrite its own rules for authorizing the use 19 Feinstein and Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,” pp. 137, 149. of force.” Here, like Blair, Feinstein, and 20 Slaughter, he equates “defend[ing] human See Michael Ignatieff, “I Am Iraq,” New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003, pp. 13–14; for his criticism of rights” with long-term threats from WMD, the Bush administration, see Michael Ignatieff, “The and adds to the now widely accepted Year of Living Dangerously,” New York Times Magazine, grounds for intervention (such as ethnic March 14, 2004,pp.13–16. 21 Michael Ignatieff,“Why Are We in Iraq? (And Liberia? cleansing and mass killing) cases “where And Afghanistan?),” New York Times Magazine, Sep- democracy is overthrown and people inside tember 7, 2003,p.85.

against the new internationalism 77 human rights violations if such interven- extrapolate from this case to “a duty to pre- tions were to be perceived more and more vent” a selective list of rogue governments as imperialistic.) That their proposals from acquiring WMD, while other states are would undermine the NPT is made clear in left to do so unhindered, is deeply irrespon- Feinstein and Slaughter’s argument that sible. Such a norm, if accepted, could destroy “regimes such as Iran’s, because they spon- the credibility of the entire nonproliferation sor terrorism, suppress democracy, and have regime, which rests on its consistency and clear nuclear designs, are not entitled near-universality. The refusal of nuclear to the same rights as other NPT members.”22 weapons states to abide by their disarma- Even as they seek to build the “duty to pre- ment obligations nearly doomed the NPT at vent” on the basis of the NPT regime, its twenty-five-year review conference in their locus of concern is grossly selective, 1995, and it now limps from five-year review limited merely to American enemies such to five-year review, ever vulnerable to com- as Iraq, North Korea, and Iran rather than plete abandonment.24 the designated nuclear weapons states or The NPT regime could in fact be newer nuclear powers such as India, Pak- described as preventive, but on a universal istan, and Israel. rather than a selective basis. It was never Perhaps seeing the NPT as an idealist meant as a shield for existing nuclear platform unduly limited by the principle of weapons states to retain or enhance their noninterference, Feinstein and Slaughter fail capabilities while denying them to strategic to understand how it is a pragmatic docu- competitors (which is precisely the Bush ment based on widely accepted understand- administration’s declared nuclear policy25). ings of the unstable character of deterrence Feinstein and Slaughter are wrong to assume and the genuine dynamics of proliferation that some states can be trusted with WMD (which is usually driven by a desire to attain because “the behavior of open societies is strategic security rather than by genocidal subject to scrutiny,” in contrast to govern- intentions, Saddam Hussein’s appalling ments who lack “internal checks” on their departure notwithstanding). That their pro- power: U.S. debates over nuclear strategy posals could in fact make the situation worse during the Cold War and the experience of is a prospect they refuse to see. They con- the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis suggest that sider neither that unwisely chosen preven- strategic decision-making in democracies tive action may actually encourage both horizontal and vertical proliferation, as is 23 arguably true in the case of North Korea, 22 Feinstein and Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,”p. 145. 23 nor that in the absence of general WMD dis- Roland Bleiker, “A Rogue is a Rogue is a Rogue: US Foreign Policy and the Korean Nuclear Crisis,” Interna- armament—as set out in Article VI of the tional Affairs 79,no.4 (July 2003), pp. 719–37. NPT—preventive or preemptive action 24 Richard Butler, Fatal Choice: Nuclear Weapons and the would merely be a dangerous and unpre- Illusion of Missile Defense (Boulder, Colo.: Westview dictable form of triage for an epidemic obvi- Press, 2001), pp. 45–52. 25 Bradford Plumer, “Busting Out,” Mother Jones, ous decades before. They are right to May/June 2004; available at www.motherjones.com/ identify Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical news/dailymojo/2004/06/06_521.html; and U.S. weapons as a legitimate precedent for selec- Government,“National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,” December 2002; available at tive disarmament, and to suggest his prose- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/WMD cution for crimes against humanity, but to Strategy.pdf.

78 Anthony Burke can also be closed and secretive, and just as In many ways the arguments of her article prone to producing genocidal decisions in a are important and welcome, especially crisis.26 This is why the NPT is nondiscrim- regarding the moral failure of the interna- inatory in principle, and why it is a great deal tional community in relation to such cases as more than a counter-proliferation mecha- Rwanda and Bosnia, and its reluctance to risk nism. The norm embodied in the NPT is dis- the lives of its own troops in the cause of armament; counter-proliferation is merely a humanitarian intervention, or in her effort to means to that end. imagine a model of international citizenship In a 2003 article, the political theorist and that builds upon (but overcomes) selfish ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain builds a similar patriotism and “obliges those who are mem- argument for a new normative framework bers of a particular community in relation to centered on the United States, but it is one others outside their community.”29 Likewise, far less dependent on the legal authority of her critique of NATO members’ self-regard- the United Nations and less rhetorically ing reluctance to deploy ground forces in embedded in “cosmopolitan” claims about Kosovo is incisive, and her overall support for human rights. Her argument replays at the more robust and effective interventions to domestic level Hedley Bull’s argument prevent crimes against humanity is laudable. about order, guaranteed by great powers, Her critique of the UN’s slowness to decide being the condition for justice in interna- and deploy, and its weak response in cases tional society27—the important detail such as Bosnia, however, are more relevant to being, of course, her view that this means Chapter VI operations, which are con- that international society must be restruc- strained by limited “peacekeeping” man- tured so as to embed a norm of forcible dates. The 1999 East Timor intervention intervention on behalf of the domestically showed that when a more forceful Chapter ill-treated.What lies before the international VII mandate supports a military coa- community, she writes, is the problem of lition with the ability and willingness to “how to bring about the political stability— move fast, many lives can be saved. (Signifi- the minimal civic peace—necessary to cantly,the United States refused an Australian attain and secure fundamental human request for “boots on the ground” in that goods, including, of course, a measure of case, suggesting that domestic constraints distributive justice”: may prevent the realization of her proposal for a new U.S.-led pax humanitas and but- What follows is an argument for international tressing arguments for the creation of a UN justice construed as an equal claim to the use rapid deployment force.) of coercive force, deployed on your behalf, if you are a victim of one of the many horrors attendant upon radical political instability . . . 26 the burden of this responsibility will be borne See Robert S. McNamara’s remarks on the Cuban disproportionately by the United States, given Missile Crisis in his book with James G. Blight, Wilson’s its unique capability to project power. I realize Ghost (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), pp. 188–91. 27 For a summary of this view, see Christian Reus-Smit, that some will argue that the kinds of inter- American Power and World Order (Cambridge: Polity ventions I call for in this essay amount to Press, 2004), pp. 108–109. imperialism. I believe, however, that we simply 28 Jean Bethke Elshtain, “International Justice as Equal must get past the almost inevitable negative Regard and the Use of Force,” Ethics F International reaction to views that call on the United States Affairs 17,no.2 (2003), pp. 63–64. 28 to exercise robust powers of intervention. 29 Ibid., p. 66. against the new internationalism 79 Nonetheless, Elshtain makes salient prosecutions for violations of the laws of points about the existing model of interven- war.33 While the problems with the UN tion, which has involved a neglect of recon- Security Council are certainly well known, struction: humanitarian intervention, she Elshtain devotes a single paragraph to dis- argues, embodies a “victim/victimizer” missing it in favor of an argument that there model in which force “is a kind of rescue, is “a presumptive case in favor of the use of even welfare, as opposed to the use of force armed force by a powerful state or alliance of as a way to strengthen or to secure a polity states who have the means to intervene, to within which accountable officials are interdict, and to punish in behalf of those responsible for securing civic security, order, who are under assault.”34 and minimal decency.”30 Her argument can Who is to be this state, and who its allies? be read as a welcome call for better efforts to Here Elshtain conducts an ethical sleight of commit to and rebuild shattered societies hand: while she bases her normative claim like East Timor, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, for equal regard not merely in just war doc- but in this form it can also be put to use as a trine and Christianity but in “principles that rationale for a much more ambitious pro- are part of the universal armamentarium of gram of intervention and order building states . . . if they are members of the United that includes regime change. Elshtain does Nations and signatories of various interna- not seek here to use her “equal regard” ethic tional conventions,” she immediately either to support the removal of dictator- brushes that body and its capacity for global ships or to address WMD proliferation, debate and transparency aside. Instead she unlike the other “new internationalists.”She offers the “Spider-Man” ethic: “The more does, however, cite Hussein’s Iraq as “a vio- powerful have greater responsibilities.” The lator of minimal civic peace,” and she did superpower, the United States, is recast as support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq in the superhero, with all the absence of moral Boston Globe.31 ambiguity such a metaphor implies: There are two further problems with her The United States is itself premised on a set of argument. The first is the overreliance on universal propositions concerning human just war theory as a guide both to jus ad bel- dignity and equality. There is no conflict in lum conditions for decisions about force principle between our national identity and universal claims and commitments. The con- and jus in bello protection of civilians. Elsh- flict lies elsewhere—between what we affirm tain rightly makes the caveat that interven- and aspire to, what we can effectively do, and 35 tions should avoid,“to the extent that this is what we can responsibly do. humanly possible, either deepening the injustice already present or creating new

instances of injustice,” but in my view just 30 Ibid. war principles of proportionality and un- 31 See Jean Bethke Elshtain, “A Just War?” Boston Globe, October 6, 2002,p.H4. intentional harm fail to address adequately 32 such dangers.32 The second problem flows Elshtain, “International Justice,” p. 68; Anthony Burke, “Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of from what is a major flaw in just war theory: Strategic Violence after 9/11,” International Affairs 80, the refusal to place the UN Charter and no. 2 (2004), pp. 329–53. 33 Security Council at the center of normative Buchanan and Keohane, in “The Preventive Use of Force,”p. 4, make this latter criticism of just war theory. decisions about the use of force, or interna- 34 Elshtain, “International Justice,”p. 67. tional criminal tribunals at the center of 35 Ibid., pp. 73, 74.

80 Anthony Burke While she is right to suggest that U.S. with the Security Council only passing a res- power is likely to be called upon in many olution creating a UN mission in Sudan on emergency situations, the real import of her March 24,2005,while a substantial in-country argument is that the UN as a decision- military presence to assist the African Union making body no longer has legitimacy, and mission will take many more months to that preponderant power can be matched establish.37 The United States cannot find with unilateral prerogative. Instead we can enough troops for Iraq, let alone a new rely on “coalitions of the willing” or “other intervention in the Sudan, where Africans avenues for multilateral action, perhaps a will bear the major burden. Trapped in a series of regional security alliances.”36 Such web of its own making in Iraq, Spider-Man alliances, however, are always structured by has ironically been reduced to playing a sup- self-interest and skewed especially toward porting role in the UN Security Council and their most powerful members (something in NATO.38 for which she rightly excoriates the UN While Elshtain’s argument cannot be Security Council), and cannot match the reduced to the U.S. neoconservative posi- possibility for greater dialogue, equality, and tion, it comes close to the arguments of transparency present, admittedly imper- those, like Francis Fukuyama, who criticize fectly, in the United Nations. The war realism, applaud the “traditional moralism against Iraq is instructive here. The domi- of U.S. foreign policy,” and promote a new nant coalition members, the United States internationalism but refuse to accept that it and Britain, spent enormous energy putting should be based upon the UN Charter. a fraudulent case for war to the global com- Claiming Kant’s case for “an international munity and their own publics, while the league of liberal democracies governed by British, Spanish, and Australian govern- the rule of law” as inspiration for his argu- ments were opposed by significant propor- ment for a new league that “looks much tions of their own parties, parliaments, and more like NATO than the United Nations,” national communities. The poverty of dia- Fukuyama argues that “such a league should logue and accountability offered by coali- be much more capable of forceful action to tions is palpable here, and Elshtain’s ethic, protect its collective security from threats based as it is on narrow dialogue between government elites, fails to grapple with the profound problem of accountability to citi- 36 Ibid. zens inherent in all security policy-making. 37 See the reports from the International Crisis Group, The invasion and occupation of Iraq also “Darfur: The Failure to Protect,” Africa Report 89, suggests a further problem for her proposal March 8, 2005; and “A New Sudan Action Plan,” Africa Briefing 24, April 26, 2005; available at www.crisis for a global pax humanitas underpinned by group.org/home/index.cfm?id=1230&l=1. the idealism and power of the United States. 38 A May 24, 2005, press release states that the NATO The war has not only sullied the moral rep- Council has agreed on “initial military options for pos- utation of the United States, but deeply con- sible NATO support to the African Union” in Darfur, such as “strategic airlift; training, for example in com- strained its ability to respond to what is mand and control and operational planning; and arguably the worst international crisis since improvement of ability of the AU’s mission in Darfur to Bosnia and Rwanda: Darfur. The interna- use intelligence.” NATO Press Office,“Statement by the Spokesman on NATO Support to the African Union tional community has been agonizingly for Darfur”; available at www.nato.int/docu/pr/2005/ slow to respond to this two-year-old crisis, p05-065e.htm.

against the new internationalism 81 arising from the non-democratic part of work of open and transparent processes of the world.”39 It is difficult, in principle, to international law- and decision-making distinguish Elshtain’s view that it is in centered when at all possible upon the the long-term interest of the United States to United Nations. Notwithstanding the need foster and to sustain an international society to use or deploy force for purposes of deter- of equal regard from Fukuyama’s neocon- rence, defense, and humanitarian interven- servative view that “the United States and tion, such an ethic would also be directed other democracies have a long-term interest toward long-term disarmament.) Not only in preserving the sphere of democracy in the is there the danger that such views, already world, and in expanding it where possible given enormous public airing in the Western and prudent.”40 For Fukuyama, this is the world, could force real change and impose hard strategic edge of the end of history, themselves as the basis for a new normative where societies are violently transformed framework, but we should also ask ourselves from being “still stuck in history” to partici- what they might reveal about liberal inter- pants in its culmination—an end to which nationalism. Why can they seemingly Elshtain’s optimistic belief in the “universal inhabit it so comfortably? What then might claims and commitments” of the United be an authentic, or at least ethically and States can too easily be turned.41 In the wake politically defensible, liberal ethic of war of the invasion of Iraq, with its ongoing and peace? chaos, twenty-one thousand civilian dead, The first question we face regards the role and the scandal of Abu Ghraib, it is hard to of force in such an ethic. The new interna- share her faith.42 Is the United States truly tionalists all share a relatively sanguine view to be the vehicle for the new international- of the role and legitimacy of force in inter- ism, and is this an acceptable price? national life. So long as it is deployed for apparently idealist or cosmopolitan ends, as THE FATE OF PERPETUAL PEACE decisions to use it are reached through a specified procedure, and as its use is limited Elshtain evokes a Hollywood comic-book by ethical constraints, the use of force is hero, Spider-Man, as an image of the new both normatively right and practically effec- conjunction of power and right underpin- tive. Clausewitz with a liberal face: war is the ning the new internationalism, but a more continuation of morality by other means. apt analogy might be Invasion of the Body Have they forgotten that the vision of the Snatchers. This cannot be a legitimate great cosmopolitan philosopher Immanuel internationalism, even less a cosmopoli- Kant was perpetual peace? Peace was not to tanism, but it speaks with its voice, wears its be a wishful supplement to the enactment of clothes, and has declared its intention to a cosmopolitan international polity, but renovate its house. This creates serious problems for those, like myself, who wish to defend and improve a liberal ethic of 39 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last war and peace. (Such an ethic would, in my Man (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 276–84. view, be focused upon the limitation of the 40 Ibid., p. 280. 41 resort to and destructiveness of strategic Ibid., p. 276; Elshtain, “International Justice,”p. 74. 42 Casualty figures are minimal estimates based on an violence and the enforcement of interna- ongoing cross-reference of media reporting sourced tional human rights law, within a frame- from Iraq Body Count: www.iraqbodycount.net.

82 Anthony Burke utterly central to it. Kant promoted the to nonexistent enforcement of the interna- gradual abolition of standing armies and, tional law of war, modern jus in bello with the establishment of a “federation of restraints have done little to stand in the way peoples” based on republican constitutions of this machinic, instrumentalizing process, and principles of universal hospitality, the with often disastrous results. definitive abolition of the need to resort to The norm of peace and the condemnation war. Kant saw this as a “pacific federation,”in of war are not only present in philosophy, contrast to the new internationalists, who but in international law and many key doc- wish to ground in norms what can only be uments of twentieth-century global politics. termed a “martial federation.”The first arti- The Preamble to the UN Charter states that cle of “Perpetual Peace,” in fact, was to pre- the union was formed “to save succeeding vent hostilities being concluded generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sor- with a secret reservation of material for a future war . . . if this were the case, it would be row to mankind,” and that its members a mere truce, a suspension of hostilities, not a undertake “to ensure, by the acceptance of peace . . . peace means an end to all hostilities, principles and the institution of methods, and to attach the adjective “perpetual” to it is that armed force shall not be used,save in the already suspiciously close to pleonasm. A con- common interest.” While this certainly clusion of peace nullifies all existing reasons 43 builds in an operative tension between col- for a future war. lective security and disarmament, the norm Furthermore, Kant argues that perpetual of peace is unequivocally declared.Article VI peace is essential to the preservation of of the NPT goes further, saying: human rights, because not only is war “bad Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to because it produces more evil people than it pursue negotiations in good faith on effective destroys,” the “hiring of men to kill or be measures relating to cessation of the nuclear killed seems to mean using them as mere arms race at an early date and to nuclear dis- machines and instruments in the hands of armament, and on a treaty on general and someone else (the state), which cannot be complete disarmament under strict and effec- tive international control.45 easily reconciled with the rights of man in one’s own person.”44 While the modern It does not matter whether this clause seems phenomena of ethnic cleansing and geno- unrealistic or unwise, particularly in the cide have certainly problematized an exclu- short to medium term. It establishes a norm sively pacifistic extrapolation from these endorsed by the 182 countries that have arguments, lending credence to those who signed and ratified the treaty.46 This norm is argue for “cosmopolitan” deployments of the basic condition of the treaty’s viability, force to protect human rights and enforce international human rights law, his argu- 43 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical ment here still retains enormous normative Sketch,” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings and analytical power. It can sensibly be (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 93–108. extended into an argument that in modern 44 Ibid., pp. 112, 95. strategy not only are one’s own soldiers 45 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; made into “mere machines and instru- available at disarmament.un.org:8080/wmd/npt. 46 Jonathan Schell, The Unfinished Twentieth Century: ments” of power, but so are the lives of the The Crisis of Weapons of Mass Destruction (New York: enemy and its citizens. In the light of the rare Verso, 2003), p. 58.

against the new internationalism 83 without which any practical claim to pre- ducible opposites confronting one another,” vent nuclear proliferation ceases to exist. It with war the enemy to peace. And politics, establishes, in international law, Kant’s which is the way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets elimi- injunction to eliminate standing armies. It 48 nated. is an injunction driven by the weight of awful history, not merely of the memory of Is politics truly eliminated? Such a Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the near- statement is only meaningful if politics is Holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but reduced to war—in Clausewitzian terms, of what Étienne Balibar calls “the long if war is politics by other means. Here it is twentieth-century ‘European civil war’” not peace that cannot escape the logic of that decisively discredits any Clausewitz- war; it is politics. It would seem obvious, ian equivalence of violent means and however—if we refuse to naturalize vio- political ends: “No ‘absolute’ victory is lence and quarantine it from intensive possible, no final suppression or neutral- critical inquiry—that peace requires not ization of the enemy. Whenever you an end to politics but more politics: more believe to be able to reach this ‘final’ solu- creative and sensitive efforts to resolve tion, you create the conditions for more conflict, promote dialogue, and preserve destruction and self-destruction. Mutual differences rather than either magnify or extermination as such does not have an efface them through violence. ‘end’ . . . it can reach an end only when it is Furthermore, Elshtain’s gesture at radically deprived of its legitimacy, and if deconstruction (“war’s historic oppon- collective institutionalized counterpowers ents . . . are inside a frame with war”) dis- emerge.”47 solves into normative incoherence. Peace Needless to say, the new international- is not the Janus face of war, but its nor- ism has little time for this norm and the mative other. Certainly peace and war are disarmament project it imposes. The selec- linked as systems of meaning—the hor- tive enforcement of nonproliferation rors of war provide peace with its norma- norms advocated by most is matched by an tive force—but as norms there is a vast ontological challenge to peace as a con- distance between them. They are like cept, especially in the work of just war the- planets separated by the vacuum of space, orists such as Elshtain. Her book Women their overlapping gravitational forces and War argues that “peace is an ontologi- drawing every action, every policy, and cally suspicious concept, as troubling in its every ethic in one direction or another. own way as war,” and it contains a brief, There is no ontological middle ground, but sweeping, rejection of Kant’s “Perpet- no viable normative place of war/peace ual Peace,” saying that it is “a ghost that where the two can mesh together in a should be put to rest”: mutually enhancing exchange. I argue His peace is a solipsistic dream which can this because it is just such an imagined exist among “like kinds and equals only,” making of the mere existence of “otherness” a flaw in the perfect scheme of things. Kant- 47 Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections ian peace promises not only what can never on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton be but what would be undesirable in any University Press, 2004), p. 222. case, a logic that cannot get beyond the logic 48 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: of war, conjuring up images of “two irre- University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 255.

84 Anthony Burke normative harmony of war and peace that normative approval from war and underpins the new internationalism and demands a longer-term effort to eliminate hides there as a new ontological claim. it from human society. With the aim of The practical force to my argument is distinguishing such an approach from just supplied by the fact that just as every nor- war doctrine—which is based on a norm mative argument made in this field will of limited war—I have advocated such a reinforce either war or peace, policy actions long-term effort under the label “ethical will also do so, ineluctably affecting the peace.” Drawing inspiration from Kant’s future possibilities for global security and vision, ethical peace combines confidence conflict. Such a practical understanding is building, conflict resolution, and sus- implicit in the international system of arms tained disarmament efforts with a far control set out by the NPT, the Compre- more stringent and accountable norma- hensive Test Ban Treaty, and the now mori- tive regime for the use of force nested bund Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which is within existing international law and structured by the need to manage and norms. As an ethical system it is not based gradually eliminate the security dilemma. in a rigid procedural system of moral rea- In this sense, the new internationalists who soning—a “tick the box” ethic that has argue for selective/preventive counter- already taken too many lives—but in a proliferation, while remaining silent about relentlessly self-critical ethic that is con- the U.S. administration’s plans for missile cerned as much with the outcomes of defense and space, are literally playing with decisions as with adherence to rules. In nuclear fire. As Neta Crawford argues, a this sense ethical peace is only partially preventive security doctrine “is likely to deontological: it is anchored in a universal create more of both fearful and aggressive normative claim (peace) but eschews the states . . . instability is likely to grow as a modernist confidence in procedure typi- preventive war doctrine creates the cal of much moral theory.51 Ethical peace mutual fear of surprise attack.”49 Likewise does not require the obsessive search for a Article VI of the NPT, with its injunction metaphysical absolute divorced from dif- for general as well as nuclear disarma- ficult realities, as Elshtain believes. It does, ment, embodies an insight that WMD however, demand a single-minded, long- proliferation is also driven by a desire to term effort to dismantle security dilem- counter conventional military threats mas, brick by terrible brick. Conflict will cheaply. This is the widely understood still be a part of human society, and poli- basis for Israeli nuclear doctrine, and it tics will be necessary, but it must be made seems reasonable to see it as at least part of less lethal. the rationale for the Iranian and North Korean programs.50 A desire for asymmet-

ric as much as mutual deterrence drives 49 WMD proliferation, and hence the prolif- Neta C. Crawford, “The Slippery Slope to Preventive War,” Ethics F International Affairs 17,no.1 (2003), pp. eration of conventional and mass destruc- 30–39. tion weapons cannot be disentangled. 50 See Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: While perpetual peace does not imply Columbia University Press, 1998); and Roland Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (Min- an absolutist pacifism, or deny peoples a neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). limited right to self-defense, it withholds 51 Burke, “Just War or Ethical Peace?” pp. 349–53.

against the new internationalism 85 THE MORAL CRISIS OF France) in supporting the regime through LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM the 1990s with loan guarantees and exports that allowed it to develop WMD programs to I find the arguments of the new internation- the extent that it did.54 alists so disturbing—especially their rejec- When it comes to the selective and coer- tion of the United Nations in favor cive disarmament of a state under the banner of unilateral or alliance-based action— of liberal internationalism, three important because they compound an already pro- considerations must be foremost. The first is found crisis in the practical evolution of that the program supports the larger norma- liberal internationalism. My concern is that tive regime—nuclear disarmament and liberal internationalism has been inexorably nonproliferation—from which it derives drawn toward the norm of war and the legitimacy. The second is the need for the instrumental images of the human Kant program to be principled and morally bene- believed war would engender. ficial, in an absolute sense: that it enhance The moral crisis of liberal international- both global security and the security of the ism is starkly set out in the “containment” of citizens of the state being disarmed. The Iraq during the 1990s under the banner of a third is that it serve and enact universal, number of UN Security Council resolutions rather than statist or particularist, values and calling for the disarmament by Iraq of its interests. In my view the containment and WMD capabilities and the dismantling of its disarmament of Iraq fails all three tests. The programs. This was a novel experiment in approval by the U.S. president in 1991 of a international law enforcement that, far from covert CIA operation to remove Saddam setting an admirable precedent as it should Hussein from power, and the U.S. and British have, represents a profound moral and polit- insistence that the sanctions should remain ical failure. While I believe that the Iraqi in place until he was gone (in direct violation regime’s use of chemical weapons during the of Resolution 687), perverted the process 1980s constituted a legitimate precedent for with a statist, geopolitical agenda.55 And this both selective and coercive program, this while the regime certainly sought to conceal was not the sole or primary reason for it.52 In its programs and thwart the work of the the United States especially, arguments inspectors, the U.S.-U.K. regime change pol- about the security of the United States and its allies in the Middle East were uppermost. As 52 UN Security Council Resolution 687 (1991) did refer former U.S. Marine and UNSCOM inspec- to Iraq’s “prior use of chemical weapons,”but also men- tor Scott Ritter argues, “In many ways the tioned the “use by Iraq of ballistic missiles in unpro- war-ending 1991 Security Council resolution voked attacks.” The United Nations and the Iraq-Kuwait 687 Conflict 1990–96 (New York: UN Department of Public with its economic sanctions was sup- Information, 1996), p. 194. ported as much for the pressure it would put 53 Scott Ritter, Endgame (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 133. on Saddam’s regime as for its disarmament 54 benefits.”53 Nor did the United States and Alan Friedman, Spider’s Web: Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit (London: Faber and Faber, 1993). Britain make any effort to set up an ad hoc 55 Cockburn and Cockburn, Saddam Hussein, p. 31; Stan- tribunal to prosecute the regime for crimes ley Meisler,“U.S.Sanctions Threat Takes UN by Surprise,” against humanity, perhaps because it would Los Angeles Times,May 9, 1991,p.10; and Glen Rangwala, “The Myth That All Iraq Needs to Do to Lift Sanctions Is expose the culpability of the Western allies Comply with Weapons Inspectors”; available at (and other permanent members, such as www.middleeastreference.org.uk/mythoflifting.html.

86 Anthony Burke icy did little to convince the Iraqi government article) of morally bizarre arguments, like that the UN was acting neutrally or that it those of Chris Brown, that the suffering should cooperate with the inspectors.56 Nev- caused by the sanctions could “provide the ertheless, it now appears Iraq was virtually best available justification for moving away disarmed by 1997.57 from containment and employing force to Furthermore, the sweeping and draconian bring about a change in the Iraqi regime.”62 sanctions, imposed by the Security Council The moral failure of the containment on a country whose infrastructure had been effort could have profoundly negative con- badly damaged by war and administered in a sequences for global and human security: particularly vindictive way (even if com- pounded by Saddam’s refusal to accept the 56 oil-for-food program until 1996), directly Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz directly raised con- cerns about the U.S.-U.K. covert operations with contributed to the deaths of anywhere from UNSCOM chairman Rolf Ekeus. Scott Ritter also 58 200,000 to one million people. Even the quotes an Iraqi colonel who revealed to him that the creation of the Kurdish safe haven and the regime had foiled a June 1996 coup plot, coordinated by the CIA, which had been timed to coincide with Security Council’s “revo[cation] of the Iraqi UNSCOM inspections, and mentions his own concerns government’s free use of its own airspace,” about the role of CIA covert operations staff seconded which Jürgen Habermas saw as evidence of to UNSCOM in 1992 and 1993. See Ritter, Endgame, pp. 140, 131–34, 143–44. the evolution “of an international commu- 57 See David Kay’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Com- nity that eliminates the state of nature mittee on Armed Services on January 28, 2004; available between nations,” was perverted to statist at globalresearch.ca/articles/KAY401A.html. 58 ends.59 The safe havens were used as bases for Cockburn and Cockburn cite an FAO study estimat- ing that 576,000 children had died as a result of sanc- CIA coup making, while the southern no-fly tions and a WHO study (using Iraqi Ministry of Health zones gave the United States an opportunity figures) estimating that 90,000 Iraqis were dying every to bomb Iraq without reference to the Secu- year in public hospitals over and above normal death 60 rates. Extrapolating from these figures, they argued in rity Council. Some U.S.policy-makers even 2000 that the number of Iraqis of all ages who died as a saw the sanctions as serving their regime result of the sanctions was “closer to one million.” A change agenda: a former CIA official associ- March 1999 Richard Garfield study, commissioned by ated with the Iraq operation has said that sen- the Joan B. Kroc Institute of International Peace Stud- ies in the light of concerns about the UN’s methodol- ior U.S. policy-makers “really believed that ogy and sources, estimated 106,000–227,000 deaths of the sanctions policy might encourage a children under the age of five. However, these were not coup,”and in 2002 Colin Powell was still say- figures for all ages and did not continue until 2003, when the sanctions were lifted. Cockburn and Cock- ing that “the pressure of sanctions are part of burn, Saddam Hussein, pp. xxix, 114–35; and Richard a strategy of regime change, support for the Garfield, Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi Children opposition, and reviewing additional options from 1990 through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions, Joan B. Kroc Institute for that might be available of a unilateral or mul- International Peace Studies, March 1999. 61 tilateral nature.” The perversion of the Iraqi 59 Habermas, quoted in Giovanna Borradori, Philoso- disarmament efforts by illegal statist agendas, phy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and the enormous crime against humanity and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 39. that resulted from the sanctions, corrode any 60 Dilip Hiro, Iraq: A Report from the Inside (London: claims that the containment of Iraq could Granta, 2003), p. 147. 61 represent a legitimate normative expression Cockburn and Cockburn, Saddam Hussein,p.44; and Rangwala, “The Myth That All Iraq Needs.” of liberal internationalism. Yet still we have 62 Chris Brown, “Self-Defense in an Imperfect World,” the appearance (in an otherwise thoughtful Ethics F International Affairs 17,no.1 (2003), p. 7.

against the new internationalism 87 it may undermine the credibility of future back where it belongs, as the leader of the counter-proliferation activity, complicate international community instead of the efforts to restore stability to Iraq and involve deeply resented behemoth lurking off- the United Nations, and corrode the entire stage.”63 The second is their poorly con- normative validity of the United Nations cealed desire for decisive solutions to and the liberal internationalism it claims unwelcome and threatening political reali- to embody. ties, and their view that force can easily pro- The problem for us is that while the con- vide them. tainment of Iraq cannot be a legitimate nor- In his book Virtual War, Ignatieff makes mative expression of cosmopolitanism, it the revealing statement that “virtual war” was a very powerful political one. Such produces merely “virtual victory”: “Since an intrusion of highly coercive and self- the means employed are limited, the ends regarding forms of national sovereignty into achieved are equally constrained: not the architecture of internationalist power unconditional surrender, regime change or reveals a profound practical and conceptual destruction of the war-making capacity of aporia within liberal internationalism. Both the other side, only an ambiguous ‘end- the experience of Iraq and the arguments of state.’”Posing a question that now reads like the new internationalists show us that pres- a prophecy, he asks, “Why do virtual wars sures for the qualification of sovereignty are end so ambiguously?” and then answers: coming from within the space of sover- “Liberal democracies that are unwilling to eignty. In such an internationalism the vio- repair collapsed states, to create democracy lent and exclusivist modern concept of where none existed, and to remain on guard sovereignty is not being transformed, as a until the institutions are self-sustaining and genuine cosmopolitanism would expect, but self-reproducing, must inevitably discover strengthened and affirmed. that virtual victory is a poor substitute for the real thing.”64 INTERNATIONALISM, These then, are the passions that drove UNDER AN EMPTY SKY liberals to support the invasion of Iraq, and which drive them, in its wake, to refashion Two further elements are particularly strik- liberal internationalism in a new guise, as a ing, and disturbing, about the arguments of convergence of universal and American val- the new internationalists. The first is the ues backed by “decisive force.” Yet Ignatieff material and moral centrality of the United also cautioned that we may never “ask our- States to the new normative order that they selves clearly enough whether our moral envision. Elshtain argues that the United emotions are real . . . we need to reflect on States is a bearer of universal values and of the potential for self-righteous irrationality the primary burden of enforcement, while which lies hidden in abstractions like Ignatieff argues for “putting the United human rights.”65 The destructive trap hid- States at the head of a revitalized United Nations”: “New rules for intervention, pro- posed by the United States and abided by it, 63 Elshtain, “International Justice,” p. 74; and Ignatieff, would end the canard that the United States, “Why Are We in Iraq?” p. 85. 64 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond not its enemies, is the rogue state. A new (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 208–10. charter on intervention would put America 65 Ibid., pp. 213–14.

88 Anthony Burke den in the appeal of international moral- We do not have to subscribe to Morgen- ism was identified long before by Hans thau’s realist pessimism to acknowledge the Morgenthau, who felt that the historic profundity of his appeal for caution, a cau- weakness of cosmopolitan morality leaves tion that must temper any idealism we may the statesman with a “perpetually uneasy still want to harbor in a chastened, post- conscience” that is soothed by pouring “the modern search for perpetual peace. The contents of his national morality into the United Nations has long been fissured by a now almost empty bottle of universal tragic and intractable struggle between the ethics.” Nations “oppose each other now as prerogatives of sovereignty and the cosmo- the standard-bearers of ethical systems . . . politan vision of the “universal commu- the moral code of one nation flings the nity”—but it should be resolved not by challenge of its universal claim with mes- radically transforming its structures and sianic fervor into the face of another, principles, but by transforming sovereignty which reciprocates in kind. Compromise, and its violent conceptual form in ways we the virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes have only begun to explore. A revived lib- the treason of the new.”66 This Morgenthau eral internationalism must be tempered by rightly saw as particularly dangerous, the fear that our ideals may be suspect, our because it leaves little room for plural claims: means dangerous, and our ends tarnished; The world has room for only one, and the and if it is to be a guide to action, it must other must yield or be destroyed. Thus, carry- resist the perennial seductions of an age ing their idols before them, the nationalistic that strives for a day when thinking can masses of our time meet in the international stop, and action can be pure. arena, each group convinced that it executes the mandate of history, that it does for humanity what it seems to do for itself, and that it fulfils a sacred mission ordained by 66 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Providence, however defined. Little do they Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. know that they meet under an empty sky from Knopf, 1964), pp. 245–49. 67 which the Gods have departed.67 Ibid., p. 249.

against the new internationalism 89 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 74

we salvage of liberal internationalism? Jür- credible liberal ethic of international peace gen Habermas calls the war “an unimagin- and security. In relation to contemporary able break” with existing norms, and in its concerns about terrorism, nation building, wake we may well wonder if they are not and WMD proliferation, this article thus beyond repair.5 The danger lies deeper even sets out and critiques the claims of the new than Perera suggests, in the gap between the internationalism. As an alternative it draws cosmopolitan norms of civil rights and upon Immanuel Kant’s normative commit- international law, and the exceptionalist ment to perpetual peace—visible also in prerogatives of national sovereignty. It lies in the UN Charter and the Treaty on the Non- the potential transformation of cosmopoli- proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)— tanism itself, in the construction of new but questions commitments in his thought “internationalist” norms built not on the that have enabled highly coercive and self- developing dialogue, normative consensus, regarding forms of realpolitik and sover- and collective decision-making of the inter- eignty to find their way into the very heart national community, but on the physical of internationalist power. In my view, the power, and ethical vision, of the United new internationalism of Shawcross, Ignati- States and its allies. eff, Feinstein, Slaughter, Elshtain, and This project, promoted in writings others only amplifies this problem, and if it by British prime minister Tony Blair and gains undue influence the impact both on such influential intellectuals as William international security and on efforts to Shawcross, Michael Ignatieff, Lee Feinstein, develop positive and credible ethical frame- Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Jean Bethke works for the use of force will be grave. Elshtain, constitutes a sweeping effort to Against their conclusions that it is the norms combine preventive war and unilateral and structures of the United Nations that humanitarian enforcement into a new nor- need to be radically transformed, I argue mative framework for international inter- that what must change is the violent and vention. While some of these writers have exclusivist idea of sovereignty that lingers, argued for the United Nations’ structures like a latent illness, in the very depths of and principles to undergo radical change, modern cosmopolitanism. and others for it to be sidelined, all have framed their arguments in terms of a potent 5 Habermas, “Interpreting the Fall,”p. 366. universalist claim about international jus- 6 6 William Shawcross’s book is Allies (New York: Public- tice and right. While they do not reject the Affairs, 2003). The others are discussed below. A 2004 United Nations or the UN Charter outright article by Allen Buchanan and Robert Keohane pro- as normative and legal frameworks for moting the creation of a “cosmopolitan institutional” framework for authorizing the preventive use of force decisions about war and peace, these “new also treads similar ground, but its scope is far more lim- internationalists” do seek to displace its cen- ited (to cases of the imminent first use of WMD), it trality and erect a new consensus in its place. affirms the United Nations as the prime context for If they succeed, the implications for inter- deliberation, and it sets a much higher threshold of dis- cussion and accountability than other proposals. For national society and global security will be these reasons it cannot be strictly classified with the very disturbing indeed. “new internationalism,”and will not be discussed here. In the face of this new activist project of Allen Buchanan and Robert. O Keohane, “The Preven- tive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Pro- norm building, I wonder whether, and how, posal,” Ethics
International Affairs 18,no.1 (2004), pp. it might be possible to revive and rethink a 1–24.

74 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 75

THE TRANSFORMATION OF Blair revived the “doctrine of the interna- COSMOPOLITAN COMMUNITY? tional community” in March 2004, this time in relation to Iraq. This time the revolution- British prime minister Tony Blair outlined ary normative ambitions visible there were the shape of the new paradigm in the clos- fully developed—a new vision of liberal uni- ing stages of the Kosovo war, when he deliv- versalism melded with the preemptive war ered a speech in Chicago with the portentous doctrine of the U.S. neoconservatives. He title “Doctrine of the International Com- justified invading Iraq even in the face of munity.” While it made sensible arguments weak intelligence with an argument that about the need to recognize and respond to “the risk of this new global terrorism and its the implications of growing global interde- interaction with states or organizations or pendence for security, and set out argu- individuals proliferating WMD is one I am ments for humanitarian intervention, a simply not prepared to run . . . this is not the more ambitious agenda was also visible: time to err on the side of caution; not a time We may be tempted to think back to the clar- to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not ity and simplicity of the Cold War. But now we a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise have to establish a new framework. No longer who favor playing it long.”10 This urgent, is our existence as states under threat. Now our fear-soaked rhetoric was matched with a actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in sweeping argument that “nations that are defending the values we cherish. In the end free, democratic and benefiting from eco- values and interests merge. If we can establish nomic progress tend to be stable and solid and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, partners in the advance of humankind”: human rights and an open society then that is We cannot advance these values except within in our national interests too. The spread of our a framework that recognises their universality. values makes us safer.7 If it is a global threat, it needs a global re- While Blair sought to set conditions on sponse, based on global rules....Britain’s role is to find a way through this: to construct a humanitarian intervention, the speech is consensus behind a broad agenda of justice notoriously vague about how far the doc- and security and means of enforcing it.11 trine stretched—with heavy hints that it went beyond actions against massive and Far from being on the back foot over the continuing violations of human rights to failure to find WMD in Iraq or the contro- “dealing with dictators” and spreading the versy over the legality of Britain’s participa- “values of liberty” and “open society.”These were not immediate or ad hoc goals, but to 7 be the basis of an entirely “new framework” Tony Blair, “Doctrine of the International Commu- nity,”speech given at the Economic Club, Chicago,April for promoting “the cause of international- 24, 1999; available at www.number-10.gov.uk/output/ 8 ism.” The seeds of his later support for the page1297.asp. removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime via a 8 Ibid. 9 military invasion (his government already Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession (New York: Verso, supported CIA covert action to remove 2002), p. 31. Hussein) can already be seen here.9 Likewise 10 Ten Downing Street Press Release, “Prime Minister the speech’s premonition of the Bush Warns of Continuing Global Terror Threat,” March 5, 2004; available at www.number-10.gov.uk/output/ administration’s 2003 “forward strategy of page5461.asp. freedom” are striking. 11 Ibid.

against the new internationalism 75 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 76

tion in the war, Blair was already redirecting the International Commission on Interven- British foreign policy toward the task of tion and State Sovereignty’s report The revolutionizing global institutions and Responsibility to Protect, chaired by Gareth rules—in ways that would make regime Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun.16 Feinstein change and preemption into the basis for a and Slaughter assert that the commission’s new normative framework: “efforts to redefine basic concepts of sover- It means reforming the United Nations so its eignty and international community are Security Council represents 21st century real- highly relevant to international security,”17 ity; and giving the UN the capability to act despite Evans’s and Sahnoun’s clear state- effectively as well as debate. It means getting ment in 2002 that the report’s concerns and the UN to understand that faced with the threats we have, we should do all we can to recommendations should not be related to spread the values of freedom, democracy, the the post–September 11 debates over security rule of law, religious tolerance and justice for against terrorism and “hot pre-emption” of the oppressed, however painful for some WMD threats—the issues were “conceptu- 12 nations that may be. ally and practically distinct.”18 Like Bush A slightly less ambitious, but no less dis- and Blair, Feinstein and Slaughter are driven turbing, argument in this vein has been put by a conviction that certain states cannot be by Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter trusted with weapons of mass destruction in the January 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs.13 and that deterrence will not suffice to deal There they assert a new principle: a “collec- with the threat they might one day pose, and tive ‘duty to prevent’ nations run by rulers like Blair they argue that national interest without internal checks on their power from and humanitarianism have converged in the acquiring or using WMD.” As with Blair’s post–September 11 environment: “The links arguments in 2003, they are seeking to between the two sets of issues, especially the embed a new internationalist norm with need to tackle them with proactive strate- potentially revolutionary consequences, gies, are becoming more evident.” Such based on the “premise that the rules now strategies range from “diplomatic pressure governing the use of force, devised in 1945 or incentives,” “economic measures,” to and embedded in the UN Charter, are inad- “coercive actions” along a scale from sanc- equate.”14 It is not enough, they argue, that tions, inspections, and blockades, to the use the UN already possesses the power to iden- of armed force in the last instance. The “util- tify a state’s WMD programs as a “threat to ity of force in dealing with the most serious international peace and security” and take proliferation dangers,” they incredibly sug- measures, as it did with Iraq after 1990: gest, “is not a controversial proposition,” But articulating and acknowledging a specific duty to prevent such governments from even 12 Ibid. acquiring WMD will shift the burden of proof 13 Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “A Duty to from suspicious nations to suspected nations Prevent,” Foreign Affairs 83,no.1 (2004),pp.136–50. and create the presumption of a need for early 14 Ibid., p. 137. 15 and, therefore, more effective action. 15 Ibid., p. 138; emphasis added. 16 International Commission on Intervention and State They see such a “duty to prevent” as a Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: smooth development of the emerging norm IDRC, 2001). 17 Feinstein and Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,”p. 141. of humanitarian intervention, even (some- 18 Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun,“The Respon- what scandalously) mimicking the title of sibility to Protect,” Foreign Affairs 81,no.6 (2002), p. 99.

76 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 77

and while they do not overtly endorse a state call for help,”where “states fail to stop regime change actions such as in Iraq, their terrorists on their soil from launching proposal leaves the door open to such attacks,” and where “as in Iraq, North Korea actions since it seeks to control not only and possibly Iran, a state violates the non- WMD proliferation “but also the people proliferation protocols regarding the acqui- who possess them.” We can perhaps be sition of chemical, nuclear or biological grateful that they still affirm the centrality of weapons.” These, he says, “would be the the UN Security Council in the “duty to pre- cases when intervention by force could be vent” (and if it is paralyzed, a regional authorized by majority vote on the Security organization, such as NATO, “with suffi- Council.” To his credit, Ignatieff does argue ciently broad membership to permit serious that the membership of the Security Coun- deliberation over the exercise of a collective cil should be expanded, that the veto power duty”). However, they still ultimately of the Permanent Five should be abolished, endorse unilateral action or “coalitions of and that the U.S. should “commit to use the willing” after “these options are tried in force only with the approval of the Council.” good faith.”19 This is undermined, however, by the vastly Michael Ignatieff makes a similar move, expanded freedom of (preventive) action he linking WMD proliferation to humanitar- advocates for the UN.21 ian intervention and folding it into a new The dangers in the arguments of Fein- universalist framework based on the power stein, Slaughter, and Ignatieff are threefold: and moral authority of the United States. In they are ultimately seeking to create a norm doing so, he strongly endorses the principle of prevention applied selectively to states of preventive war, and the U.S. invasion of deemed potential dangers; they endorse Iraq, although not without some moral unilateral action, at least as a last resort; and, anguish and genuine anger at many U.S. if such a norm were indeed to become actions.20 In a long New York Times article in accepted by NATO or the UN Security September 2003, he argues, “If the United Council, as all hope, it is likely to undermine States fails in Iraq, so will the United the Charter and the nonproliferation regime Nations.” In order to save the United even more than unilateral actions such as the Nations from what he sees as a deeply flawed invasion of Iraq, which are at least hotly dis- (if principled) U.S. policy, based too much puted. (This is without considering how it in unilateralism, corporate self-interest, and could undermine the growing but fragile sanguine assumptions about the ease of acceptance of the “modified sovereignty” transforming the country into a stable free- norm and intervention in cases of grave market democracy, he argues that the UN’s norms need to change: “It will have to rewrite its own rules for authorizing the use 19 Feinstein and Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,” of force.” Here, like Blair, Feinstein, and pp. 137, 149. 20 Slaughter, he equates “defend[ing] human See Michael Ignatieff, “I Am Iraq,” New York Times Magazine,March 23, 2003,pp.13–14; for his criticism of rights” with long-term threats from WMD, the Bush administration, see Michael Ignatieff, “The and adds to the now widely accepted Year of Living Dangerously,” New York Times Magazine, grounds for intervention (such as ethnic March 14, 2004,pp.13–16. 21 Michael Ignatieff,“Why Are We in Iraq? (And Liberia? cleansing and mass killing) cases “where And Afghanistan?),” New York Times Magazine, Sep- democracy is overthrown and people inside tember 7, 2003,p.85.

against the new internationalism 77 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 78

human rights violations if such interven- extrapolate from this case to “a duty to pre- tions were to be perceived more and more vent” a selective list of rogue governments as imperialistic.) That their proposals from acquiring WMD, while other states are would undermine the NPT is made clear in left to do so unhindered, is deeply irrespon- Feinstein and Slaughter’s argument that sible. Such a norm, if accepted, could destroy “regimes such as Iran’s, because they spon- the credibility of the entire nonproliferation sor terrorism, suppress democracy, and have regime, which rests on its consistency and clear nuclear designs, are not entitled near-universality. The refusal of nuclear to the same rights as other NPT members.”22 weapons states to abide by their disarma- Even as they seek to build the “duty to pre- ment obligations nearly doomed the NPT at vent” on the basis of the NPT regime, its twenty-five-year review conference in their locus of concern is grossly selective, 1995, and it now limps from five-year review limited merely to American enemies such to five-year review, ever vulnerable to com- as Iraq, North Korea, and Iran rather than plete abandonment.24 the designated nuclear weapons states or The NPT regime could in fact be newer nuclear powers such as India, Pak- described as preventive, but on a universal istan, and Israel. rather than a selective basis. It was never Perhaps seeing the NPT as an idealist meant as a shield for existing nuclear platform unduly limited by the principle of weapons states to retain or enhance their noninterference, Feinstein and Slaughter fail capabilities while denying them to strategic to understand how it is a pragmatic docu- competitors (which is precisely the Bush ment based on widely accepted understand- administration’s declared nuclear policy25). ings of the unstable character of deterrence Feinstein and Slaughter are wrong to assume and the genuine dynamics of proliferation that some states can be trusted with WMD (which is usually driven by a desire to attain because “the behavior of open societies is strategic security rather than by genocidal subject to scrutiny,” in contrast to govern- intentions, Saddam Hussein’s appalling ments who lack “internal checks” on their departure notwithstanding). That their pro- power: U.S. debates over nuclear strategy posals could in fact make the situation worse during the Cold War and the experience of is a prospect they refuse to see. They con- the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis suggest that sider neither that unwisely chosen preven- strategic decision-making in democracies tive action may actually encourage both horizontal and vertical proliferation, as is 23 arguably true in the case of North Korea, 22 Feinstein and Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,”p. 145. 23 nor that in the absence of general WMD dis- Roland Bleiker, “A Rogue is a Rogue is a Rogue: US Foreign Policy and the Korean Nuclear Crisis,” Interna- armament—as set out in Article VI of the tional Affairs 79,no.4 (July 2003), pp. 719–37. NPT—preventive or preemptive action 24 Richard Butler, Fatal Choice: Nuclear Weapons and the would merely be a dangerous and unpre- Illusion of Missile Defense (Boulder, Colo.: Westview dictable form of triage for an epidemic obvi- Press, 2001), pp. 45–52. 25 Bradford Plumer, “Busting Out,” Mother Jones, ous decades before. They are right to May/June 2004; available at www.motherjones.com/ identify Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical news/dailymojo/2004/06/06_521.html; and U.S. weapons as a legitimate precedent for selec- Government,“National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,” December 2002; available at tive disarmament, and to suggest his prose- www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/WMD cution for crimes against humanity, but to Strategy.pdf.

78 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 79

can also be closed and secretive, and just as In many ways the arguments of her article prone to producing genocidal decisions in a are important and welcome, especially crisis.26 This is why the NPT is nondiscrim- regarding the moral failure of the interna- inatory in principle, and why it is a great deal tional community in relation to such cases as more than a counter-proliferation mecha- Rwanda and Bosnia, and its reluctance to risk nism. The norm embodied in the NPT is dis- the lives of its own troops in the cause of armament; counter-proliferation is merely a humanitarian intervention, or in her effort to means to that end. imagine a model of international citizenship In a 2003 article, the political theorist and that builds upon (but overcomes) selfish ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain builds a similar patriotism and “obliges those who are mem- argument for a new normative framework bers of a particular community in relation to centered on the United States, but it is one others outside their community.”29 Likewise, far less dependent on the legal authority of her critique of NATO members’ self-regard- the United Nations and less rhetorically ing reluctance to deploy ground forces in embedded in “cosmopolitan” claims about Kosovo is incisive, and her overall support for human rights. Her argument replays at the more robust and effective interventions to domestic level Hedley Bull’s argument prevent crimes against humanity is laudable. about order, guaranteed by great powers, Her critique of the UN’s slowness to decide being the condition for justice in interna- and deploy, and its weak response in cases tional society27—the important detail such as Bosnia, however, are more relevant to being, of course, her view that this means Chapter VI operations, which are con- that international society must be restruc- strained by limited “peacekeeping” man- tured so as to embed a norm of forcible dates. The 1999 East Timor intervention intervention on behalf of the domestically showed that when a more forceful Chapter ill-treated.What lies before the international VII mandate supports a military coa- community, she writes, is the problem of lition with the ability and willingness to “how to bring about the political stability— move fast, many lives can be saved. (Signifi- the minimal civic peace—necessary to cantly,the United States refused an Australian attain and secure fundamental human request for “boots on the ground” in that goods, including, of course, a measure of case, suggesting that domestic constraints distributive justice”: may prevent the realization of her proposal for a new U.S.-led pax humanitas and but- What follows is an argument for international tressing arguments for the creation of a UN justice construed as an equal claim to the use rapid deployment force.) of coercive force, deployed on your behalf, if you are a victim of one of the many horrors attendant upon radical political instability . . . 26 the burden of this responsibility will be borne See Robert S. McNamara’s remarks on the Cuban disproportionately by the United States, given Missile Crisis in his book with James G. Blight, Wilson’s its unique capability to project power. I realize Ghost (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), pp. 188–91. 27 For a summary of this view, see Christian Reus-Smit, that some will argue that the kinds of inter- American Power and World Order (Cambridge: Polity ventions I call for in this essay amount to Press, 2004), pp. 108–109. imperialism. I believe, however, that we simply 28 Jean Bethke Elshtain, “International Justice as Equal must get past the almost inevitable negative Regard and the Use of Force,” Ethics
International reaction to views that call on the United States Affairs 17,no.2 (2003), pp. 63–64. 28 to exercise robust powers of intervention. 29 Ibid., p. 66.

against the new internationalism 79 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 80

Nonetheless, Elshtain makes salient prosecutions for violations of the laws of points about the existing model of interven- war.33 While the problems with the UN tion, which has involved a neglect of recon- Security Council are certainly well known, struction: humanitarian intervention, she Elshtain devotes a single paragraph to dis- argues, embodies a “victim/victimizer” missing it in favor of an argument that there model in which force “is a kind of rescue, is “a presumptive case in favor of the use of even welfare, as opposed to the use of force armed force by a powerful state or alliance of as a way to strengthen or to secure a polity states who have the means to intervene, to within which accountable officials are interdict, and to punish in behalf of those responsible for securing civic security, order, who are under assault.”34 and minimal decency.”30 Her argument can Who is to be this state, and who its allies? be read as a welcome call for better efforts to Here Elshtain conducts an ethical sleight of commit to and rebuild shattered societies hand: while she bases her normative claim like East Timor, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, for equal regard not merely in just war doc- but in this form it can also be put to use as a trine and Christianity but in “principles that rationale for a much more ambitious pro- are part of the universal armamentarium of gram of intervention and order building states ...ifthey are members ofthe United that includes regime change. Elshtain does Nations and signatories of various interna- not seek here to use her “equal regard” ethic tional conventions,” she immediately either to support the removal of dictator- brushes that body and its capacity for global ships or to address WMD proliferation, debate and transparency aside. Instead she unlike the other “new internationalists.”She offers the “Spider-Man” ethic: “The more does, however, cite Hussein’s Iraq as “a vio- powerful have greater responsibilities.” The lator of minimal civic peace,” and she did superpower, the United States, is recast as support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq in the superhero, with all the absence of moral Boston Globe.31 ambiguity such a metaphor implies: There are two further problems with her The United States is itself premised on a set of argument. The first is the overreliance on universal propositions concerning human just war theory as a guide both to jus ad bel- dignity and equality. There is no conflict in lum conditions for decisions about force principle between our national identity and universal claims and commitments. The con- and jus in bello protection of civilians. Elsh- flict lies elsewhere—between what we affirm tain rightly makes the caveat that interven- and aspire to, what we can effectively do, and tions should avoid,“to the extent that this is what we can responsibly do.35 humanly possible, either deepening the injustice already present or creating new

instances of injustice,” but in my view just 30 Ibid. war principles of proportionality and un- 31 See Jean Bethke Elshtain, “A Just War?” Boston Globe, intentional harm fail to address adequately October 6, 2002,p.H4. 32 such dangers.32 The second problem flows Elshtain, “International Justice,” p. 68; Anthony Burke, “Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of from what is a major flaw in just war theory: Strategic Violence after 9/11,” International Affairs 80, the refusal to place the UN Charter and no. 2 (2004), pp. 329–53. 33 Security Council at the center of normative Buchanan and Keohane, in “The Preventive Use of Force,”p. 4, make this latter criticism of just war theory. decisions about the use of force, or interna- 34 Elshtain, “International Justice,”p. 67. tional criminal tribunals at the center of 35 Ibid., pp. 73, 74.

80 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 81

While she is right to suggest that U.S. with the Security Council only passing a res- power is likely to be called upon in many olution creating a UN mission in Sudan on emergency situations, the real import of her March 24,2005,while a substantial in-country argument is that the UN as a decision- military presence to assist the African Union making body no longer has legitimacy, and mission will take many more months to that preponderant power can be matched establish.37 The United States cannot find with unilateral prerogative. Instead we can enough troops for Iraq, let alone a new rely on “coalitions of the willing” or “other intervention in the Sudan, where Africans avenues for multilateral action, perhaps a will bear the major burden. Trapped in a series of regional security alliances.”36 Such web of its own making in Iraq, Spider-Man alliances, however, are always structured by has ironically been reduced to playing a sup- self-interest and skewed especially toward porting role in the UN Security Council and their most powerful members (something in NATO.38 for which she rightly excoriates the UN While Elshtain’s argument cannot be Security Council), and cannot match the reduced to the U.S. neoconservative posi- possibility for greater dialogue, equality, and tion, it comes close to the arguments of transparency present, admittedly imper- those, like Francis Fukuyama, who criticize fectly, in the United Nations. The war realism, applaud the “traditional moralism against Iraq is instructive here. The domi- of U.S. foreign policy,” and promote a new nant coalition members, the United States internationalism but refuse to accept that it and Britain, spent enormous energy putting should be based upon the UN Charter. a fraudulent case for war to the global com- Claiming Kant’s case for “an international munity and their own publics, while the league of liberal democracies governed by British, Spanish, and Australian govern- the rule of law” as inspiration for his argu- ments were opposed by significant propor- ment for a new league that “looks much tions of their own parties, parliaments, and more like NATO than the United Nations,” national communities. The poverty of dia- Fukuyama argues that “such a league should logue and accountability offered by coali- be much more capable of forceful action to tions is palpable here, and Elshtain’s ethic, protect its collective security from threats based as it is on narrow dialogue between government elites, fails to grapple with the profound problem of accountability to citi- 36 Ibid. zens inherent in all security policy-making. 37 See the reports from the International Crisis Group, The invasion and occupation of Iraq also “Darfur: The Failure to Protect,” Africa Report 89, suggests a further problem for her proposal March 8, 2005; and “A New Sudan Action Plan,” Africa Briefing 24, April 26, 2005; available at www.crisis for a global pax humanitas underpinned by group.org/home/index.cfm?id=1230&l=1. the idealism and power of the United States. 38 A May 24, 2005, press release states that the NATO The war has not only sullied the moral rep- Council has agreed on “initial military options for pos- utation of the United States, but deeply con- sible NATO support to the African Union” in Darfur, such as “strategic airlift; training, for example in com- strained its ability to respond to what is mand and control and operational planning; and arguably the worst international crisis since improvement of ability of the AU’s mission in Darfur to Bosnia and Rwanda: Darfur. The interna- use intelligence.” NATO Press Office,“Statement by the Spokesman on NATO Support to the African Union tional community has been agonizingly for Darfur”; available at www.nato.int/docu/pr/2005/ slow to respond to this two-year-old crisis, p05-065e.htm.

against the new internationalism 81 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 82

arising from the non-democratic part of work of open and transparent processes of the world.”39 It is difficult, in principle, to international law- and decision-making distinguish Elshtain’s view that it is in centered when at all possible upon the the long-term interest of the United States to United Nations. Notwithstanding the need foster and to sustain an international society to use or deploy force for purposes of deter- of equal regard from Fukuyama’s neocon- rence, defense, and humanitarian interven- servative view that “the United States and tion, such an ethic would also be directed other democracies have a long-term interest toward long-term disarmament.) Not only in preserving the sphere of democracy in the is there the danger that such views, already world, and in expanding it where possible given enormous public airing in the Western and prudent.”40 For Fukuyama, this is the world, could force real change and impose hard strategic edge of the end of history, themselves as the basis for a new normative where societies are violently transformed framework, but we should also ask ourselves from being “still stuck in history” to partici- what they might reveal about liberal inter- pants in its culmination—an end to which nationalism. Why can they seemingly Elshtain’s optimistic belief in the “universal inhabit it so comfortably? What then might claims and commitments” of the United be an authentic, or at least ethically and States can too easily be turned.41 In the wake politically defensible, liberal ethic of war of the invasion of Iraq, with its ongoing and peace? chaos, twenty-one thousand civilian dead, The first question we face regards the role and the scandal of Abu Ghraib, it is hard to of force in such an ethic. The new interna- share her faith.42 Is the United States truly tionalists all share a relatively sanguine view to be the vehicle for the new international- of the role and legitimacy of force in inter- ism, and is this an acceptable price? national life. So long as it is deployed for apparently idealist or cosmopolitan ends, as THE FATE OF PERPETUAL PEACE decisions to use it are reached through a specified procedure, and as its use is limited Elshtain evokes a Hollywood comic-book by ethical constraints, the use of force is hero, Spider-Man, as an image of the new both normatively right and practically effec- conjunction of power and right underpin- tive. Clausewitz with a liberal face: war is the ning the new internationalism, but a more continuation of morality by other means. apt analogy might be Invasion of the Body Have they forgotten that the vision of the Snatchers. This cannot be a legitimate great cosmopolitan philosopher Immanuel internationalism, even less a cosmopoli- Kant was perpetual peace? Peace was not to tanism, but it speaks with its voice, wears its be a wishful supplement to the enactment of clothes, and has declared its intention to a cosmopolitan international polity, but renovate its house. This creates serious problems for those, like myself, who wish to defend and improve a liberal ethic of 39 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last war and peace. (Such an ethic would, in my Man (London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 276–84. view, be focused upon the limitation of the 40 Ibid., p. 280. 41 resort to and destructiveness of strategic Ibid., p. 276; Elshtain, “International Justice,”p. 74. 42 Casualty figures are minimal estimates based on an violence and the enforcement of interna- ongoing cross-reference of media reporting sourced tional human rights law, within a frame- from Iraq Body Count: www.iraqbodycount.net.

82 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 83

utterly central to it. Kant promoted the to nonexistent enforcement of the interna- gradual abolition of standing armies and, tional law of war, modern jus in bello with the establishment of a “federation of restraints have done little to stand in the way peoples” based on republican constitutions of this machinic, instrumentalizing process, and principles of universal hospitality, the with often disastrous results. definitive abolition of the need to resort to The norm of peace and the condemnation war. Kant saw this as a “pacific federation,”in of war are not only present in philosophy, contrast to the new internationalists, who but in international law and many key doc- wish to ground in norms what can only be uments of twentieth-century global politics. termed a “martial federation.”The first arti- The Preamble to the UN Charter states that cle of “Perpetual Peace,” in fact, was to pre- the union was formed “to save succeeding vent hostilities being concluded generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sor- with a secret reservation of material for a future war ...ifthis were the case, it would be row to mankind,” and that its members a mere truce, a suspension of hostilities, not a undertake “to ensure, by the acceptance of peace ...peace means an end to all hostilities, principles and the institution of methods, and to attach the adjective “perpetual” to it is that armed force shall not be used,save in the already suspiciously close to pleonasm. A con- common interest.” While this certainly clusion of peace nullifies all existing reasons builds in an operative tension between col- for a future war.43 lective security and disarmament, the norm Furthermore, Kant argues that perpetual of peace is unequivocally declared.Article VI peace is essential to the preservation of of the NPT goes further, saying: human rights, because not only is war “bad Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to because it produces more evil people than it pursue negotiations in good faith on effective destroys,” the “hiring of men to kill or be measures relating to cessation of the nuclear killed seems to mean using them as mere arms race at an early date and to nuclear dis- machines and instruments in the hands of armament, and on a treaty on general and someone else (the state), which cannot be complete disarmament under strict and effec- tive international control.45 easily reconciled with the rights of man in one’s own person.”44 While the modern It does not matter whether this clause seems phenomena of ethnic cleansing and geno- unrealistic or unwise, particularly in the cide have certainly problematized an exclu- short to medium term. It establishes a norm sively pacifistic extrapolation from these endorsed by the 182 countries that have arguments, lending credence to those who signed and ratified the treaty.46 This norm is argue for “cosmopolitan” deployments of the basic condition of the treaty’s viability, force to protect human rights and enforce international human rights law, his argu- 43 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical ment here still retains enormous normative Sketch,” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings and analytical power. It can sensibly be (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 93–108. extended into an argument that in modern 44 Ibid., pp. 112, 95. strategy not only are one’s own soldiers 45 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; made into “mere machines and instru- available at disarmament.un.org:8080/wmd/npt. 46 Jonathan Schell, The Unfinished Twentieth Century: ments” of power, but so are the lives of the The Crisis of Weapons of Mass Destruction (New York: enemy and its citizens. In the light of the rare Verso, 2003), p. 58.

against the new internationalism 83 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 84

without which any practical claim to pre- ducible opposites confronting one another,” vent nuclear proliferation ceases to exist. It with war the enemy to peace. And politics, establishes, in international law, Kant’s which is the way human beings have devised for dealing with their differences, gets elimi- injunction to eliminate standing armies. It nated.48 is an injunction driven by the weight of awful history, not merely of the memory of Is politics truly eliminated? Such a Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the near- statement is only meaningful if politics is Holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but reduced to war—in Clausewitzian terms, of what Étienne Balibar calls “the long if war is politics by other means. Here it is twentieth-century ‘European civil war’” not peace that cannot escape the logic of that decisively discredits any Clausewitz- war; it is politics. It would seem obvious, ian equivalence of violent means and however—if we refuse to naturalize vio- political ends: “No ‘absolute’ victory is lence and quarantine it from intensive possible, no final suppression or neutral- critical inquiry—that peace requires not ization of the enemy. Whenever you an end to politics but more politics:more believe to be able to reach this ‘final’ solu- creative and sensitive efforts to resolve tion, you create the conditions for more conflict, promote dialogue, and preserve destruction and self-destruction. Mutual differences rather than either magnify or extermination as such does not have an efface them through violence. ‘end’ . . . it can reach an end only when it is Furthermore, Elshtain’s gesture at radically deprived of its legitimacy, and if deconstruction (“war’s historic oppon- collective institutionalized counterpowers ents . . . are inside a frame with war”) dis- emerge.”47 solves into normative incoherence. Peace Needless to say, the new international- is not the Janus face of war, but its nor- ism has little time for this norm and the mative other. Certainly peace and war are disarmament project it imposes. The selec- linked as systems of meaning—the hor- tive enforcement of nonproliferation rors of war provide peace with its norma- norms advocated by most is matched by an tive force—but as norms there is a vast ontological challenge to peace as a con- distance between them. They are like cept, especially in the work of just war the- planets separated by the vacuum of space, orists such as Elshtain. Her book Women their overlapping gravitational forces and War argues that “peace is an ontologi- drawing every action, every policy, and cally suspicious concept, as troubling in its every ethic in one direction or another. own way as war,” and it contains a brief, There is no ontological middle ground, but sweeping, rejection of Kant’s “Perpet- no viable normative place of war/peace ual Peace,” saying that it is “a ghost that where the two can mesh together in a should be put to rest”: mutually enhancing exchange. I argue His peace is a solipsistic dream which can this because it is just such an imagined exist among “like kinds and equals only,” making of the mere existence of “otherness” a flaw in the perfect scheme of things. Kant- 47 Étienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections ian peace promises not only what can never on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton be but what would be undesirable in any University Press, 2004), p. 222. case, a logic that cannot get beyond the logic 48 Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: of war, conjuring up images of “two irre- University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 255.

84 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 85

normative harmony of war and peace that normative approval from war and underpins the new internationalism and demands a longer-term effort to eliminate hides there as a new ontological claim. it from human society. With the aim of The practical force to my argument is distinguishing such an approach from just supplied by the fact that just as every nor- war doctrine—which is based on a norm mative argument made in this field will of limited war—I have advocated such a reinforce either war or peace, policy actions long-term effort under the label “ethical will also do so, ineluctably affecting the peace.” Drawing inspiration from Kant’s future possibilities for global security and vision, ethical peace combines confidence conflict. Such a practical understanding is building, conflict resolution, and sus- implicit in the international system of arms tained disarmament efforts with a far control set out by the NPT, the Compre- more stringent and accountable norma- hensive Test Ban Treaty, and the now mori- tive regime for the use of force nested bund Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which is within existing international law and structured by the need to manage and norms. As an ethical system it is not based gradually eliminate the security dilemma. in a rigid procedural system of moral rea- In this sense, the new internationalists who soning—a “tick the box” ethic that has argue for selective/preventive counter- already taken too many lives—but in a proliferation, while remaining silent about relentlessly self-critical ethic that is con- the U.S. administration’s plans for missile cerned as much with the outcomes of defense and space, are literally playing with decisions as with adherence to rules. In nuclear fire. As Neta Crawford argues, a this sense ethical peace is only partially preventive security doctrine “is likely to deontological: it is anchored in a universal create more of both fearful and aggressive normative claim (peace) but eschews the states . . . instability is likely to grow as a modernist confidence in procedure typi- preventive war doctrine creates the cal of much moral theory.51 Ethical peace mutual fear of surprise attack.”49 Likewise does not require the obsessive search for a Article VI of the NPT, with its injunction metaphysical absolute divorced from dif- for general as well as nuclear disarma- ficult realities, as Elshtain believes. It does, ment, embodies an insight that WMD however, demand a single-minded, long- proliferation is also driven by a desire to term effort to dismantle security dilem- counter conventional military threats mas, brick by terrible brick. Conflict will cheaply. This is the widely understood still be a part of human society, and poli- basis for Israeli nuclear doctrine, and it tics will be necessary, but it must be made seems reasonable to see it as at least part of less lethal. the rationale for the Iranian and North Korean programs.50 A desire for asymmet- ric as much as mutual deterrence drives 49 WMD proliferation, and hence the prolif- Neta C. Crawford, “The Slippery Slope to Preventive War,” Ethics
International Affairs 17,no.1 (2003), pp. eration of conventional and mass destruc- 30–39. tion weapons cannot be disentangled. 50 See Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: While perpetual peace does not imply Columbia University Press, 1998); and Roland Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (Min- an absolutist pacifism, or deny peoples a neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). limited right to self-defense, it withholds 51 Burke, “Just War or Ethical Peace?” pp. 349–53.

against the new internationalism 85 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 86

THE MORAL CRISIS OF France) in supporting the regime through LIBERAL INTERNATIONALISM the 1990s with loan guarantees and exports that allowed it to develop WMD programs to I find the arguments of the new internation- the extent that it did.54 alists so disturbing—especially their rejec- When it comes to the selective and coer- tion of the United Nations in favor cive disarmament of a state under the banner of unilateral or alliance-based action— of liberal internationalism, three important because they compound an already pro- considerations must be foremost. The first is found crisis in the practical evolution of that the program supports the larger norma- liberal internationalism. My concern is that tive regime—nuclear disarmament and liberal internationalism has been inexorably nonproliferation—from which it derives drawn toward the norm of war and the legitimacy. The second is the need for the instrumental images of the human Kant program to be principled and morally bene- believed war would engender. ficial, in an absolute sense: that it enhance The moral crisis of liberal international- both global security and the security of the ism is starkly set out in the “containment” of citizens of the state being disarmed. The Iraq during the 1990s under the banner of a third is that it serve and enact universal, number of UN Security Council resolutions rather than statist or particularist, values and calling for the disarmament by Iraq of its interests. In my view the containment and WMD capabilities and the dismantling of its disarmament of Iraq fails all three tests. The programs. This was a novel experiment in approval by the U.S. president in 1991 of a international law enforcement that, far from covert CIA operation to remove Saddam setting an admirable precedent as it should Hussein from power, and the U.S. and British have, represents a profound moral and polit- insistence that the sanctions should remain ical failure. While I believe that the Iraqi in place until he was gone (in direct violation regime’s use of chemical weapons during the of Resolution 687), perverted the process 1980s constituted a legitimate precedent for with a statist, geopolitical agenda.55 And this both selective and coercive program, this while the regime certainly sought to conceal was not the sole or primary reason for it.52 In its programs and thwart the work of the the United States especially, arguments inspectors, the U.S.-U.K. regime change pol- about the security of the United States and its allies in the Middle East were uppermost. As 52 UN Security Council Resolution 687 (1991) did refer former U.S. Marine and UNSCOM inspec- to Iraq’s “prior use of chemical weapons,”but also men- tor Scott Ritter argues, “In many ways the tioned the “use by Iraq of ballistic missiles in unpro- war-ending 1991 Security Council resolution voked attacks.” The United Nations and the Iraq-Kuwait Conflict 1990–96 (New York: UN Department of Public 687 with its economic sanctions was sup- Information, 1996), p. 194. ported as much for the pressure it would put 53 Scott Ritter, Endgame (New York: Simon & Schuster, on Saddam’s regime as for its disarmament 1999), p. 133. 54 benefits.”53 Nor did the United States and Alan Friedman, Spider’s Web: Bush, Saddam, Thatcher and the Decade of Deceit (London: Faber and Faber, 1993). Britain make any effort to set up an ad hoc 55 Cockburn and Cockburn, Saddam Hussein,p.31; Stan- tribunal to prosecute the regime for crimes ley Meisler,“U.S.Sanctions Threat Takes UN by Surprise,” against humanity, perhaps because it would Los Angeles Times,May 9, 1991,p.10; and Glen Rangwala, “The Myth That All Iraq Needs to Do to Lift Sanctions Is expose the culpability of the Western allies Comply with Weapons Inspectors”; available at (and other permanent members, such as www.middleeastreference.org.uk/mythoflifting.html.

86 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 87

icy did little to convince the Iraqi government article) of morally bizarre arguments, like that the UN was acting neutrally or that it those of Chris Brown, that the suffering should cooperate with the inspectors.56 Nev- caused by the sanctions could “provide the ertheless, it now appears Iraq was virtually best available justification for moving away disarmed by 1997.57 from containment and employing force to Furthermore, the sweeping and draconian bring about a change in the Iraqi regime.”62 sanctions, imposed by the Security Council The moral failure of the containment on a country whose infrastructure had been effort could have profoundly negative con- badly damaged by war and administered in a sequences for global and human security: particularly vindictive way (even if com- pounded by Saddam’s refusal to accept the 56 oil-for-food program until 1996), directly Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz directly raised con- cerns about the U.S.-U.K. covert operations with contributed to the deaths of anywhere from UNSCOM chairman Rolf Ekeus. Scott Ritter also 58 200,000 to one million people. Even the quotes an Iraqi colonel who revealed to him that the creation of the Kurdish safe haven and the regime had foiled a June 1996 coup plot, coordinated by the CIA, which had been timed to coincide with Security Council’s “revo[cation] of the Iraqi UNSCOM inspections, and mentions his own concerns government’s free use of its own airspace,” about the role of CIA covert operations staff seconded which Jürgen Habermas saw as evidence of to UNSCOM in 1992 and 1993. See Ritter, Endgame, pp. 140, 131–34, 143–44. the evolution “of an international commu- 57 See David Kay’s testimony to the U.S. Senate Com- nity that eliminates the state of nature mittee on Armed Services on January 28, 2004; available between nations,” was perverted to statist at globalresearch.ca/articles/KAY401A.html. 58 ends.59 The safe havens were used as bases for Cockburn and Cockburn cite an FAO study estimat- ing that 576,000 children had died as a result of sanc- CIA coup making, while the southern no-fly tions and a WHO study (using Iraqi Ministry of Health zones gave the United States an opportunity figures) estimating that 90,000 Iraqis were dying every to bomb Iraq without reference to the Secu- year in public hospitals over and above normal death 60 rates. Extrapolating from these figures, they argued in rity Council. Some U.S.policy-makers even 2000 that the number of Iraqis of all ages who died as a saw the sanctions as serving their regime result of the sanctions was “closer to one million.” A change agenda: a former CIA official associ- March 1999 Richard Garfield study, commissioned by ated with the Iraq operation has said that sen- the Joan B. Kroc Institute of International Peace Stud- ies in the light of concerns about the UN’s methodol- ior U.S. policy-makers “really believed that ogy and sources, estimated 106,000–227,000 deaths of the sanctions policy might encourage a children under the age of five. However, these were not coup,”and in 2002 Colin Powell was still say- figures for all ages and did not continue until 2003, when the sanctions were lifted. Cockburn and Cock- ing that “the pressure of sanctions are part of burn, Saddam Hussein, pp. xxix, 114–35; and Richard a strategy of regime change, support for the Garfield, Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi Children opposition, and reviewing additional options from 1990 through 1998: Assessing the Impact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions, Joan B. Kroc Institute for that might be available of a unilateral or mul- International Peace Studies, March 1999. 61 tilateral nature.” The perversion of the Iraqi 59 Habermas, quoted in Giovanna Borradori, Philoso- disarmament efforts by illegal statist agendas, phy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and the enormous crime against humanity and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 39. that resulted from the sanctions, corrode any 60 Dilip Hiro, Iraq: A Report from the Inside (London: claims that the containment of Iraq could Granta, 2003), p. 147. 61 represent a legitimate normative expression Cockburn and Cockburn, Saddam Hussein,p.44; and Rangwala, “The Myth That All Iraq Needs.” of liberal internationalism. Yet still we have 62 Chris Brown, “Self-Defense in an Imperfect World,” the appearance (in an otherwise thoughtful Ethics
International Affairs 17,no.1 (2003), p. 7.

against the new internationalism 87 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 88

it may undermine the credibility of future back where it belongs, as the leader of the counter-proliferation activity, complicate international community instead of the efforts to restore stability to Iraq and involve deeply resented behemoth lurking off- the United Nations, and corrode the entire stage.”63 The second is their poorly con- normative validity of the United Nations cealed desire for decisive solutions to and the liberal internationalism it claims unwelcome and threatening political reali- to embody. ties, and their view that force can easily pro- The problem for us is that while the con- vide them. tainment of Iraq cannot be a legitimate nor- In his book Virtual War, Ignatieff makes mative expression of cosmopolitanism, it the revealing statement that “virtual war” was a very powerful political one. Such produces merely “virtual victory”: “Since an intrusion of highly coercive and self- the means employed are limited, the ends regarding forms of national sovereignty into achieved are equally constrained: not the architecture of internationalist power unconditional surrender, regime change or reveals a profound practical and conceptual destruction of the war-making capacity of aporia within liberal internationalism. Both the other side, only an ambiguous ‘end- the experience of Iraq and the arguments of state.’”Posing a question that now reads like the new internationalists show us that pres- a prophecy, he asks, “Why do virtual wars sures for the qualification of sovereignty are end so ambiguously?” and then answers: coming from within the space of sover- “Liberal democracies that are unwilling to eignty. In such an internationalism the vio- repair collapsed states, to create democracy lent and exclusivist modern concept of where none existed, and to remain on guard sovereignty is not being transformed, as a until the institutions are self-sustaining and genuine cosmopolitanism would expect, but self-reproducing, must inevitably discover strengthened and affirmed. that virtual victory is a poor substitute for the real thing.”64 INTERNATIONALISM, These then, are the passions that drove UNDER AN EMPTY SKY liberals to support the invasion of Iraq, and which drive them, in its wake, to refashion Two further elements are particularly strik- liberal internationalism in a new guise, as a ing, and disturbing, about the arguments of convergence of universal and American val- the new internationalists. The first is the ues backed by “decisive force.” Yet Ignatieff material and moral centrality of the United also cautioned that we may never “ask our- States to the new normative order that they selves clearly enough whether our moral envision. Elshtain argues that the United emotions are real ...we need to reflect on States is a bearer of universal values and of the potential for self-righteous irrationality the primary burden of enforcement, while which lies hidden in abstractions like Ignatieff argues for “putting the United human rights.”65 The destructive trap hid- States at the head of a revitalized United Nations”: “New rules for intervention, pro- posed by the United States and abided by it, 63 Elshtain, “International Justice,” p. 74; and Ignatieff, would end the canard that the United States, “Why Are We in Iraq?” p. 85. 64 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond not its enemies, is the rogue state. A new (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 208–10. charter on intervention would put America 65 Ibid., pp. 213–14.

88 Anthony Burke 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 89

den in the appeal of international moral- We do not have to subscribe to Morgen- ism was identified long before by Hans thau’s realist pessimism to acknowledge the Morgenthau, who felt that the historic profundity of his appeal for caution, a cau- weakness of cosmopolitan morality leaves tion that must temper any idealism we may the statesman with a “perpetually uneasy still want to harbor in a chastened, post- conscience” that is soothed by pouring “the modern search for perpetual peace. The contents of his national morality into the United Nations has long been fissured by a now almost empty bottle of universal tragic and intractable struggle between the ethics.” Nations “oppose each other now as prerogatives of sovereignty and the cosmo- the standard-bearers of ethical systems . . . politan vision of the “universal commu- the moral code of one nation flings the nity”—but it should be resolved not by challenge of its universal claim with mes- radically transforming its structures and sianic fervor into the face of another, principles, but by transforming sovereignty which reciprocates in kind. Compromise, and its violent conceptual form in ways we the virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes have only begun to explore. A revived lib- the treason of the new.”66 This Morgenthau eral internationalism must be tempered by rightly saw as particularly dangerous, the fear that our ideals may be suspect, our because it leaves little room for plural claims: means dangerous, and our ends tarnished; The world has room for only one, and the and if it is to be a guide to action, it must other must yield or be destroyed. Thus, carry- resist the perennial seductions of an age ing their idols before them, the nationalistic that strives for a day when thinking can masses of our time meet in the international stop, and action can be pure. arena, each group convinced that it executes the mandate of history, that it does for humanity what it seems to do for itself, and that it fulfils a sacred mission ordained by 66 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Providence, however defined. Little do they Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. know that they meet under an empty sky from Knopf, 1964), pp. 245–49. 67 which the Gods have departed.67 Ibid., p. 249.

against the new internationalism 89 073-090_Burke.qxd 7/6/05 10:03 AM Page 90