Intervention and Civilization

This column by Andrew Linklater is part of Global Policy’s e-book, ‘Lessons from Intervention in the 21st Century: Legality, Legitimacy and Feasibility', edited by David Held and Kyle McNally. Contributions from academics and practitioners will be serialised on Global Policy until the e-book’s release in the summer of 2014. Find out more here or join the debate on Twitter #GPintervention.

The moral and political tensions confronting modern societies are best understood in long-term perspective by reflecting on the course of the European or Western civilizing process. Until quite recently in their relations with other peoples, most Europeans supposed that non-European societies would follow the path of modernity, at one and the same time emulating the Western process of state formation and freely embracing related conceptions of civilization. The reality has turned out to be rather different. Western peoples now face the crisis of the state in several of the former colonised regions, and they confront unpredicted assaults on Western conceptions of civilized behaviour. The unexpected questions facing Western governments have been how to reconstruct war-torn societies, how to secure justice for the victims of serious human rights abuses, and how to implement democracy promotion. Dwarfing all others has been the question of whether to intervene in societies where state structures have collapsed or where those who control the instruments of violence wage war on sections of their own population.

From the period of the civil war in Somalia in the early 1990s through to the current Syrian crisis, modern liberal democratic governments have faced public pressures to intervene in supreme humanitarian emergencies, whether by using force to prevent serious human rights violations or to deploy whatever non-military resources they can muster to end the suffering of distant strangers. Their civilized self-images are a factor here in creating public opposition to, or unease with, any government’s decision to stand aside. The notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ is the latest iteration of the ethical conviction that modern states have an obligation to ensure that other peoples are relieved from the burden of violent harm. As the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty maintained, ‘where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect’. Such orientations towards other peoples are unique in the history of the Western states-systems. They are products of modern forms of repugnance to violence, rape and enslavement, and to other examples of what have come to be known as human rights abuses, that are integral to the so-called civilizing process – the process in which modern Europeans came to regard themselves as more advanced than their ancestors and more ‘developed’ than neighbouring peoples.

But such orientations have created unsolved problems for supposedly ‘civilized’ societies. Efforts to embed principles of humanitarian intervention in international society clash with traditional conceptions of order that are centred on the ideas of sovereignty and non-intervention. The latter have long been regarded as critical for maintaining stability between the great powers. A repeated criticism is that support for humanitarian intervention will allow those powers to relax hard-won restraints on force. Significantly, some of the most vocal exponents of the classical, ‘pluralist’ image of international society are to be found in the new states that cast off their status as colonised peoples in recent decades. Many fear that the idea of ‘the responsibility to protect’will be employed to justify unwanted Western military expansion – or that, as in the 2011 Libyan conflict, what started out as an exercise to protect endangered civilians will mutate into the radical, contested policy of regime change. They are troubled that national governments will use humanitarian language to justify actions that stem from mixed or impure motives. For them, doctrines of intervention reflect earlier dichotomies between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage’ in which the former assume rights to protect other peoples from themselves and to end the violent struggles that are evidence of the absence of ‘civilized’ political institutions and ‘civilized’ patterns of self-restraint elsewhere.

Within the West, many have added that the idea of humanitarian intervention must be subordinate to the higher goal of ensuring peaceful relations between the major powers, if the two come into conflict. The reality that the classical principles of order were designed to promote order between states rather than to protect individuals in their own right greatly concerns the advocates of the ‘solidarist’ conception of international society. They have argued that interventions such as the one in Kosovo in 1999 may have lacked legality since they did not have the sanction of international law, but they possessed legitimacy since they gave expression to more fundamental moral principles by which international society and its core practices must ultimately be judged – specifically whether they promote a cosmopolitan project of safeguarding the security of individual people.

Debates continue about whether any particular alliance of states can assume the right to intervene to end intolerable suffering in the absence of a firm commitment on the part of the great powers in the United Nations Security Council. Since NATO’s action in Kosovo, disputes about intervention have been centred on the principle that if the United Nations ‘fails to discharge its responsibility to protect in conscience-shocking situations crying out for action’, then ‘concerned states’ may opt for ‘collectively authorized international intervention’. Recent discussions about appropriate Western responses to human rights violations in Syria have included the pluralist argument that humanitarian intervention is imprudent or dangerous when opposed by one or more of the great powers.

There is no simple resolution of the tensions between those standpoints. The society of states is no longer simply ‘pluralist’; it now embodies ‘solidarist’ moral convictions that hold that the fundamental members of international society are individuals rather than states. Many believe that something must be done to prevent serious human rights violations. But liberal democratic populations are not always prepared to risk the lives of co-nationals to save strangers. Many are opposed to sacrificing military personnel in order to protect people who may appear to them to be incapable of restraining their own violent impulses, their hatred for others, and an unquenchable thirst for revenge. The inhabitants of ‘civilized’ societies may feel some compulsion to act to end human rights violations, but running through the same societies are perceptions that lives should not be wasted in trying to protect ‘savage’ groups from their ‘atavism’. One might wonder if lurking below such standpoints is a degree of resentment that the peoples involved had been given an opportunity to ‘modernise’ that has been squandered. One side of the civilising process therefore reflects earlier racist and colonial imaginaries and reassuring cultural stereotypes; another side involves the quest for more ‘realistic’ understandings of war-torn societies from which a more ‘realistic practice’ may emerge. (1) The latter include more sympathetic explanations of the violence of other groups that recognise the dangers that confront people whenever they must provide for their own security. The future of ‘civilized’ intervention and other responses to the crisis of the state in non-European places may depend to a significant extent on the future balance of power between those competing forces.

‘Civilized’ peoples, it has been argued, find themselves in peculiar entanglements that other peoples did not face. They cannot wash their hands of people whose lives are in danger; they cannot lay claim to a ‘civilized’ status and do no nothing at all. But a practical solution to the question of how to end serious human rights violations given strong support for a pluralist international order eludes them. It may be that the society of states may become more solidarist as a result of the influence of Western ‘civilized’ values. But such commitments may have the opposite effect of leading to public weariness with military efforts to end human rights violations and also to collective resistance to expending resources to trying to repair war-torn societies that require long-term strategies that do not come with any guarantee of success. Modern ‘civilized’ orientations to distant suffering at one and the same time invite precisely such commitments and stand in their way. No-one should doubt that ‘civilized’ peoples are often tempted to exaggerate their capacity to solve political problems in other societies; and no-one should doubt their ability to withdraw into themselves when confronting what they regard as the incurable ‘barbarism’ of ‘pre-modern’ peoples.

(1) I am grateful to Ian Clark and Andre Saramago for discussions on this point.

Andrew Linklater is an international relations academic, and is the current Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University.