book: Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention

book: Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention | Gary J. Bass ...

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	• Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention Gary J. Bass Knopf, 2008 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Regarding the Suffering of Others

Humanitarian intervention was a term often heard during the 1990s. In the decade following the end of the Cold War military intervention in sovereign states to prevent ethnic cleansing and other kinds of mass murder came at a lower price. Liberal internationalists could excercise their collective conscience more freely as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. American and Nato intervention in Bosnia (1995) came late as a massacre was already underway. The intervention in Kosovo (1999) was timely, for an ethnic cleansing had surely been averted. (Another good book on this subject is Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (P.S.).) The interventions were possible because there was no great power willing or able to stop them. There was a convergence of realism and idealism. It was not only morally imperative but practical to reduce the suffering of others.

Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton, has given us a very thoroughly researched and elegantly written history of humanitarianism that goes back to the early 19th century. In the 1820s Byron and other philhellenes agitated for Greek independence from the Ottoman yoke. Arch-realists such as Metternich and Disraeli were afraid it would upset the balance of power in Europe. The Ottoman Empire, in their view, was keeping order among many restless nationalities in the East.

There was another movement for intervention against the Turks in the 1870s. This time it was led by British Prime Minister Gladstone who campaigned to save the Bulgarian Christians from Turkish atrocities. (In fact Tony Blair invoked Gladstone before the invasion of Iraq.) Bass here is very good at showing how the moral impulse to save others can be contaminated with imperialism and racism. The effort to save the Christians turned into a campaign to portray the Turks and Islam as something less than human. Gladstone was inclined to demonize things he knew very little about, a practice that one easily falls into when the enemy is brutal.

Bass points out the Western interventions on bahalf of rebellious peoples was not without long-term consequences. On the negative side, the realists were vindicated. Intervention in Eastern Europe set off a chain of events that ultimately led to World War I. Metternich and Disraeli had often warned that Europe would slide into chaos. On the positive side, Bass sees the origins of the more recent human rights consciousness that is both secular and universal. Even though many of the examples of humanitarian intervention given in this work were cases of saving Christians from Muslims, the groundwork for saving other human beings regardless of ethnicity or faith was laid. It must be noted that in the 20th century it was the West that came to the aid of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In the 21st century the victims in Darfur, Myanmar, and other places have not been so lucky. With the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the spreading global financial crisis, the realists once again control the agenda, and the interventionists are seated firmly on the sidelines. Bass has written an excellent history on the ebbs and flows of humanitarian intervention and the conditions under which it is possible.

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Why do we sometimes let evil happen to others and sometimes rally to stop it? Whose lives matter to us? These are the key questions posed in this important and perceptive study of the largely forgotten nineteenth-century ?atrocitarians??some of the world?s first human rights activists. Wildly romantic, eccentrically educated, and full of bizarre enthusiasms, they were also morally serious people on the vanguard of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about the human rights crises of today.

Gary Bass shatters the myth that the history of humanitarian intervention began with Bill Clinton, or even Woodrow Wilson, and shows, instead, that there is a tangled international tradition, reaching back more than two hundred years, of confronting the suffering of innocent foreigners. Bass describes the political and cultural landscapes out of which these activists arose, as an emergent free press exposed Europeans and Americans to atrocities taking place beyond their shores and galvanized them to act. He brings alive a century of passionate advocacy in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States: the fight the British waged against the oppression of the Greeks in the 1820s, the huge uproar against a notorious massacre in Bulgaria in the 1870s, and the American campaign to stop the Armenian genocide in 1915. He tells the gripping stories of the activists themselves: Byron, Bentham, Madison, Gladstone, Dostoevsky, and Theodore Roosevelt among them.

Military missions in the name of human rights have always been dangerous undertakings. There has invariably been the risk of radical destabilization and the threatening blurring of imperial and humanitarian intentions. Yet Bass demonstrates that even in the imperialistic heyday of the nineteenth century, humanitarian ideals could play a significant role in shaping world politics. He argues that the failure of today?s leading democracies to shoulder such responsibilities has led to catastrophes such as those in Rwanda and Darfur?catastrophes that he maintains are neither inevitable nor traditional.

Timely and illuminating, Freedom?s Battle challenges our assumptions about the history of morally motivated foreign policy and sets out a path for reclaiming that inheritance with greater modesty and wisdom.

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