The Political Economy of Human Rights Enforcement: Moral and Intellectual Leadership in the Context of Global Hegemony (Global Ethics)

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The Political Economy of Human Rights Enforcement

Ivan Manokha


Global Ethics Series Series Editor: Christien van den Anker, Reader, Department of Politics, University of the West of England, UK Global Ethics as a field builds on longer traditions of ethical reflection about (global) society and discusses ethical approaches to global issues. These include but are not limited to issues highlighted by the process of globalisation (in the widest sense) and increasing multiculturalism. They also engage with migration, the environment, poverty and inequality, peace and conflict, human rights, global citizenship, social movements, and global governance. Despite fluid boundaries between fields, Global Ethics can be clearly marked out by its multidisciplinary approach, its interest in a strong link between theory, policy and practice and its inclusion of a range of work from the strictly normative to the more empirical. Books in the series provide a specific normative approach, taxonomy, or an ethical position on a specific issue in Global Ethics through empirical work. They explicitly engage with Global Ethics as a field and position themselves in regard to existing debates even when outlining more local approaches or issues. The Global Ethics Series has been designed to reach beyond a liberal cosmopolitan agenda and engage with contextualism as well as structural analyses of injustice in current global politics and its disciplining discourses. Titles include: Ivan Manokha THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF HUMAN RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT

Global Ethics Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–01958–4 You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

The Political Economy of Human Rights Enforcement Ivan Manokha

ª Ivan Manokha 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13 HB: 978–0–230–55072–8 ISBN-10 HB: 0–230–55072–X This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my parents

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1

1

The Existing Analyses of Human Rights Enforcement: a Critical Review 1

2

2

Human-rights enforcement in the post-Cold War years What is problematic about human-rights enforcement? The existing literature The political economy approach The structure of the argument

Introduction Humanitarian intervention Strategies and techniques National interests Sovereignty and law Radical critiques The War on Terror Strategies and techniques National interests Legal approaches Just-war theory Radical critiques Human rights Conclusion

1 4 8 14 18

25 25 27 28 32 34 46 51 53 55 58 61 64 66 70

Ideology and the History of Human Rights Enforcement

72

Introduction Feudalism, the ideology of divine right and just war Capitalism and the ideology of individual rights Ideology and humanitarianism in the pre-Charter period Ideology and humanitarian intervention in the post-Charter period Conclusion

72 75 83 93

1 2 3 4

vii

104 119

viii Contents

3

Globalization and the Development of a New Form of Global Hegemony 1

2

4

Introduction Globalization Economic transformations Political transformations The development of global governance Globalization as de-territorialization and de-historicization Global hegemony Conclusion

121 121 124 127 136 142 152 163 171

Human Rights Enforcement and the Moral and Intellectual Leadership of Hegemony 173 Introduction Moral leadership and human-rights enforcement Operation Provide Comfort Operation Restore Hope Humanitarian force in Bosnia-Herzegovina Operation Restore Democracy, Haiti Humanitarian intervention in East Timor ECOWAS intervention in Liberia ECOWAS intervention in Sierra Leone NATO’s Operation Allied Force in Kosovo The War on Terror: Military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq Haiti and Bosnia: post-intervention economic reforms 2 Intellectual leadership and human-rights enforcement Conclusion Conclusion: A Noble Practice in an Ignoble Context: Unintended Consequences of Human Rights Enforcement for the Late-modern world 1

173 176 180 183 187 191 193 196 198 201 207 213 221 233

236

References

245

UN Resolutions Cited in the Text

276

Index

279

Acknowledgements I would like to thank John Maclean for his extensive and insightful comments as well as for his guidance and supervision during my years at the University of Sussex. Without him this book would not have been possible. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Christien van den Anker for her careful reading of the manuscript and her help and encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank Adrian Treacher for his assistance and support over the years.

ix


Introduction

The last 15 years have seen an extraordinary development of international military interventionism in the name of human rights. The 1990s were a decade of humanitarian interventions whose declared objectives included putting an end to large-scale violations of rights and bringing to justice the perpetrators of abuses. The early 2000s have been marked by two major military campaigns led by the United States – in Afghanistan and Iraq – which started as wars to combat international terrorism and destroy weapons of mass destruction respectively, but quickly incorporated an extensive human rights rhetoric that identified promotion of individual freedom and rights as one of their key objectives. The aim of this study is to provide a political economy approach to the phenomenon of international human-rights enforcement that has developed in the post-Cold War period. This Introduction seeks to do the following: 1. 2. 3. 4.

To outline the concept of human-rights enforcement; To specify what this study identifies as problematic about it; To identify the shortcomings of the existing literature on the subject; To delineate the key elements of a political economy approach adopted in this study; and 5. To sketch out the structure of the book.

1

Human-rights enforcement in the post-Cold War years

The 1990s witnessed a range of international military operations justified as interventions to stop massive violations of individual human rights, particularly the right to life and the right not to be 1

2


tortured. The operations with such objectives are usually referred to as ‘humanitarian interventions’. and there is a general agreement among experts that in the 1990s the following instances of international use of force constituted acts of humanitarian intervention: the UN-authorized actions in Northern Iraq, carried out mainly by the US, Britain and France; Bosnia-Herzegovina, by a multinational UN contingent, UNPROFOR; Somalia, by the US-led UNITAF force and later by the UNOSOM II contingent; East Timor, mainly by Australian forces; and Sierra Leone where a series of military operations was undertaken by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Britain and UN troops. In addition to these, there was also a case of humanitarian intervention in Kosovo, which was undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) without UN endorsement. Each of these operations constituted a step towards a progressive international recognition of large-scale human-rights violations as crimes warranting some form of international coercive action. The Kosovo case was a culmination of this process and had three major outcomes: first, in addition to human-rights protection the Kosovo operation included a new objective that previous interventions did not have, namely the goal of punishment – the capture and prosecution of the key perpetrators of atrocities; second, it set a precedent for an international military action unauthorized by the Security Council and carried out outside the UN framework; third, it led to an emergence of what some analysts referred to as the ‘Clinton doctrine’ (for example, Krauthammer, 1999; Klare, 1999; Daalder, 1999; Brown, 2000), or a commitment, first expressed by the former US President during the Kosovo operation, to use force in the future to stop massive human-rights abuses anywhere in the world, even without a UN authorization if necessary. The legal, political, normative and technical precedents set by a ‘decade of humanitarian intervention’ in a way prepared the ground for the War on Terror of the early 2000s, particularly for the use of humanrights protection as one of the proclaimed objectives of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It has been noted by some critics of these military campaigns, as we will see below, that human rights were invoked by the coalition leaders when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and when it was necessary to justify and legitimize the war on alternative grounds. However, even before this the rhetoric of human rights was used in presenting the case for military intervention in both cases. Thus, in outlining the objectives of the imminent war in Afghanistan, US President George W. Bush stated that it was a war to ‘defend international human rights’ and to punish ‘enemies of freedom’

Introduction 3

who ‘do not respect or value individual human rights’ (Bush, 2001a). The same argument was made by the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who asserted that the coalition waged the war against the Taliban in order to ‘guarantee respect for human rights’ (The Guardian, 2001b, p. 3). The British Prime Minister Tony Blair also made a series of statements concerning abuses of rights practised by the Taliban in his presentation of the case for war (Blair, 2001). George Bush and Tony Blair were joined by their spouses – Laura Bush and Cherie Blair – who made several speeches on women’s-rights abuses in Afghanistan. Laura Bush, for example, told Americans in a radio address in November 2001 that ‘the brutal oppression of women is a central goal of the terrorists’ and that ‘civilized people throughout the world’ should unite and fight ‘the brutality against women and children in Afghanistan’ (quoted in Weber, 2005, p. 371). This argument was further elaborated in the US Department of State’s Report on the Taliban’s War against Women, released shortly after Laura Bush’s radio address. The same is true in relation to the preparations for the war against Iraq. For instance, speaking at the UN General Assembly before the invasion, George Bush explicitly mentioned human-rights abuses in his critique of the Iraqi regime: ‘Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and the regime’s repression is all-pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture . . . and all of these horrors are concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state’ (Bush, 2002a). Tony Blair, speaking on 10 September 2002, similarly referred to the denial of individual freedoms in Iraq as a justification for a military intervention: ‘We want the Iraqi people to be free to live fulfilling lives without the oppression and terror of Saddam’ (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2002, p. 3), an argument that was later reiterated by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who stated that ‘the abuses of the Iraqi regime extend far beyond its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in violation of its international obligations’ and include ‘torture, rape and other horrific human-rights abuses’ (Daily Mail, 2002, p. 2). In other words, despite significant differences between pre- and postSeptember 11 contexts, and the fact that the War on Terror began in response to an attack on the United States, we can nevertheless observe an unquestionable continuity between the humanitarianism of the 1990s and the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the new century. On the one hand, one of the outcomes of the ‘decade of humanitarian intervention’ was an increased acceptance by the international community of legitimacy of the use of force to protect human

4


rights and to bring to justice the perpetrators of massive human-rights violations. On the other hand, the 1990s set important precedents for the use of force outside the UN framework, particularly by the United States. The Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam’s regime in Iraq had perpetrated significant violations of individual rights and, given the legacy of interventions of the 1990s, it was consistent to identify these violations as sufficient reason for intervention. Whether this was done out of a pragmatic plan to give legitimacy to an otherwise legally dubious campaign, as its critics assert, or from a real concern for the victims of human-rights violations in these countries, is of secondary importance to the analysis in this book. What will be highlighted is the fact that we are dealing with a phenomenon that has been developing over the past 15 years or so since the end of the Cold War, a phenomenon that will be referred to here as ‘human-rights enforcement’ and which constitutes the focus of this study. It will be suggested that the concept of ‘human-rights enforcement’ enables us to deal with what the War on Terror and the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s have in common, that is, the use of force against perpetrators of human-rights violations; at the same time it will not ignore their differences nor collapse the significant distinctions between them. What this book seeks to offer is a historical and holistic analysis of the post-Cold War practice of human-rights enforcement. What explains the development of this phenomenon? What are its implications for the late-modern world? What actors and social forces benefit from its development? These are questions that will be dealt with throughout the book.

What is problematic about human-rights enforcement? As will be seen in the next section, humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and the War on Terror of the early 2000s have stimulated a large amount of academic and non-academic writing. What this body of literature identifies as problematic about these phenomena usually relates to their legality in respect of existing norms and procedures for the use of international force, or their selectivity, which has led many scholars to question the real motives and intentions of the interveners. The present study has been motivated by different concerns and what it sees as problematic about post-Cold War human rights enforcement has so far escaped the attention of experts. The starting point for the analysis is the fact that the late-modern world is characterized by a development of a global form of capitalism

Introduction 5

whose functioning results in massive inequality and large-scale human suffering from poverty and poverty-related problems. Although these phenomena are in themselves not qualitatively new, inequality and poverty have sharply increased in the last 15 to 20 years marked by a general shift towards neoliberal economic reforms; today they have reached dramatic levels. For example, one of the latest in a series of gruesome reports on ‘human development’ regularly published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – which equally regularly fails to lead to any comprehensive action to force change – states that 1.1 billion people currently live on less than $1 a day, more than 1 billion people lack access to safe water, another 2.6 billion do not have adequate sanitation, and almost 2 million children die each year for want of clean water and basic hygiene, and 1.4 million more die from diseases that could be prevented by vaccination (UNDP, 2004). At the same time, amidst this human misery there has developed a global moral discourse at the core of which lies the idea of the promotion and protection of individual human rights, support for democratic and transparent state institutions and, more recently, encouragement of socially responsible business practice. Since the end of the Cold War, which has been largely perceived as a victory of freedom over tyranny, there has been a commitment expressed by a multiplicity of different state and non-state actors to further combat oppressive and authoritarian regimes, to spread democratic values and institutions, and to promote individual rights. These rights are primarily political and civil rights, such as the right to freedom of thought and expression, the right not to be tortured, the right to be free from arbitrary detention, the right to equality before law and the right to vote. The practice of human-rights enforcement has therefore developed as an integral part of this moral discourse and has played an important role in its further development by increasingly subjecting the rule of state sovereignty to scrutiny in terms of their respect for human rights. We are therefore dealing with two phenomena whose time-frames coincide – the ascendance of global capitalism in its neoliberal form with hundreds of millions of people being condemned to abject poverty, on the one hand, and a development of a global moral discourse which identifies individuals and their political and civil emancipation as its key objective. A crucial question that arises in this respect is whether these two phenomena are causally related or not. Does this economic order require such a moral discourse to help sustain an unjust set of social relations? If the answer to this question is negative, then we may assume that there is nothing problematic about human-rights enforcement in

6


this respect, and that it is a noble and commendable practice that saves at least some individuals from horrible fates. If the answer is positive, however, then the use of force to protect human rights becomes rather problematic. A closer examination of this question reveals that there are at least two indications that point to an existence of a possible causal relation between global capitalism and the catastrophic outcomes of its functioning on the one hand, and human rights protection, promotion and enforcement on the other. First, a general global moral discourse of human rights and democracy, and the practice of human-rights enforcement in particular, are permeated by notions of freedom, equality and justice which are defined in exclusively formal terms, that is, in terms of respect for individual negative rights. It advances as absolute a conception of freedom and justice which is, in fact, partial – confined only to the political and civil rights of individuals – and which seems to underprivilege and objectify explanations of human suffering from massive economic inequality and poverty. This is not to say that it renders poverty and misery invisible – no moral discourse would ever be able to achieve this given their scale and scope – but it relegates them to the realm of the economy, which in turn, is naturalized as a sphere that has its own laws and mechanisms; this sphere comes under nobody’s control and its understanding is the prerogative of economists who can help us make sense of its functioning and develop better economic policies – and nothing more than that. In other words, this moral discourse makes an implicit distinction between political crimes, whose perpetrators are identifiable and ought to be punished, and economic problems that have no such identifiable architects and which cannot be seen as crimes. Rather they are viewed as unfortunate outcomes of objective processes and laws – the ‘invisible hand’ of classical or liberal economic theory inspired by Adam Smith and Hegel – and which may be corrected or ameliorated only to a limited extent (for example, by means of economic aid to the states affected). The values and ideals of individual rights may therefore be said to result in the privileging of the human suffering from political causes over that which is brought about by the functioning of the capitalist economy; they also naturalize and objectify the capitalist economy, which is, in fact, a specific historical product of human activity and has nothing natural about it. Second, a global moral discourse which involves a continuous reiteration of a commitment by different states and non-state actors to fight tyranny and oppression and to promote individual rights and liberties, and a wide range of policies adopted to this end – including the

Introduction 7

use of force in some cases – seems to provide the emerging global order with a significant degree of moral legitimacy. This legitimacy appears to have two dimensions: retrospective and contemporary. In the case of the former, its roots go back to the Cold War period when superpower rivalry was constructed in the West as a struggle of good against evil, of freedom against tyranny and of individual rights against repressive state institutions. The West, led by the United States, finally prevailed and with this prevailed such an interpretation of the Cold War. The disappearance of socialist/communist dictatorships was equated with a victory of a free and just order, and because the Western system was built on a capitalist mode of production, the collapse of the USSR and its allies was also equated with the supremacy and inevitability of capitalism. In short, capitalism emerged from the Cold War as a system said to guarantee individual freedom and which is seen as the most efficient and the only viable way of organizing production. The global moral discourse, which today has at its core the idea of individual negative rights, provides the existing order with a retrospective legitimacy in comparison to an alternative which not only failed economically, but was also marked by political repression and massive violations of human rights. This makes a radical critique of capitalism much more difficult today for its alternative ended up suppressing and flagrantly violating individual freedom in the service of collective goals. As regards the contemporary dimension of moral legitimacy, it lies in continuous condemnation of instances of human suffering caused by political factors and an adoption of policies, including military intervention, that provide the developing order with very strong moral appeal. It is an order in which torture, mass murder, war crimes and genocide are increasingly less tolerated, and where the perpetrators are more and more often brought to justice. What could be better illustrations of such a commitment than the removal from power and the prosecution of the likes of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein or the establishment of tribunals for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and for acts of genocide in Rwanda? In short, the global moral discourse in general, and a practice of human rights enforcement in particular, seems to contribute to a construction of a more righteous and just emerging global order, particularly in the light of massive poverty and human misery that currently affect hundreds of millions of people. Together, these observations reveal a perplexing and irrational contradiction that seems to mark post-Cold War human-rights enforcement: actors coming to the rescue of people threatened with

8


imminent slaughter appear to be unintentionally contributing to a reproduction of a system that subjects an incomparably larger number of people to suffering and death from poverty, hunger and disease. That such a causal role can be played by human-rights enforcement clearly requires a careful investigation and an analysis of a relationship between global capitalism and the use of force to protect human rights. So far such an analysis has not been provided by the existing literature on humanitarian intervention and the War on Terror. A review of available studies reveals that not only do they not attempt to examine the relationship between global capitalism and human-rights enforcement but they also frustrate any such attempt to do so by continuosly constructing them as two separate phenomena; and by treating humanrights enforcement as an exclusively legal/political phenomenon with no relationship to the economy or the system of production.

The existing literature The majority of available works on the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s tend to be policy-oriented and ‘problem-solving’, that is, they focus on ways of improving intervention techniques, post-intervention policies and aim to learn lessons from the past cases. Those approaches that go beyond such technical-instrumental questions usually focus on issues of the conformity of interventions with international law, the national interests of states involved in military operations, or the ethical dilemmas posed by interventions. The same is true of the literature on the War on Terror, which is also dominated by policy-oriented works, particularly with respect to policies of post-war reconstruction and statebuilding in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the multiplicity of legal studies and those concerned with US national interests or US ‘imperial’ ambitions. The role of human rights in the War on Terror is curiously neglected except in terms of the impact of anti-terrorist legislation on human rights, or abuses of rights of suspected terrorists captured by the coalition forces, or with respect to the employment of human rights as a cover for real interests of the US and its allies (which are widely described in terms of getting hold of Middle Eastern oil reserves). Overall, the body of literature on post-Cold War enforcement of human rights suffers from two major shortcomings: it is, for the most part, reductionist and ahistoric. The reductionism of the existing analyses has two dimensions: methodological and ontological. In the former case, most of the available analyses suffer from a problem often referred to in social

Introduction 9

theory as ‘methodological individualism’; this belief, whose roots are found in the writings of Max Weber, posits that social phenomena can be explained by examining the intentions, properties and capabilities of individual actors. In this view, a social whole is nothing but a sum of constitutive units whose behaviour is governed and determined by their motivations, interests and powers. What is problematic about this approach to social reality is that it completely ignores causal roles played by structures and totally disregards what is known as an ‘agent/structure dilemma; or a problem ‘of finding a way of accounting for human experience which recognizes simultaneously and in equal measure that history and society are made by constant and more or less purposeful individual action, and that individual action, however purposeful, is made by history and society’ (Abrams, 1982, p. xiii). The agent/structure relationship involves reciprocal causality: structures govern agents’ behaviour, usually by setting limits on options available to them and to what they perceive as normal or acceptable, whereas agents, through their conscious and purposeful activity, reproduce – for the most part unintentionally and unconsciously – the structures within which they operate. For example, the structure of a capitalist society compels individuals who do not possess capital or land and have no alternative sources of income to enter into a wage-labour relation with those who possess the means of production. Those individuals who succeed in finding a job and securing paid employment do not intend to reproduce the capitalist structure of production – their intention is simply to get a source of income – but their actions, nevertheless, produce such a consequence; that is, they reproduce the wage-labour relation that is central to capitalist production. As Bhaskar puts it: people, in their conscious activity, for the most part unconsciously reproduce . . . the structures governing their substantive activities of production. Thus people do not marry to reproduce the nuclear family or work to sustain the capitalist economy. Yet it is nevertheless the unintended consequence and (inexorable result) of, as it is also a necessary condition for, their activity (Bhaskar, 1979, p. 58). The literature on post-Cold War human-rights enforcement is predominantly ‘methodologically individualist’ as it reduces this phenomenon to a mere foreign policy tool of individual states and it always sees the outcomes of each particular operation in terms of the deliberate and conscious plans, intentions or interests of the actors involved. An impression that one gets from reading, for example, Realist accounts of

10 The Political Economy of Human Rights Enforcement

humanitarian interventions or critics of the War on Terror made by the likes of Noam Chomsky (for example, Chomsky, 1999a) is that the US and Britain simply invented human rights to deceive everybody and achieve their national interests or to implement their imperial projects. It is nothing short of amazing how such authors ignore what structures must be in place for states to be able to act in the name of human rights, or for a dominant conception of freedom to be defined in terms of negative individual liberties, or for terrorists to be designated as enemies of freedom and human rights. The fact that the US-led intervention in Haiti in 1994 was followed by an imposition on Haiti of a policy of free trade with the US and a set of other neoliberal reforms as a precondition for financial aid immediately leads the likes of Chomsky to conclude that humanitarian intervention is nothing but a means for the US to extend its neoliberal empire. No questions are asked as to why neoliberal reforms have come to constitute a kind of a ‘matrix’ or a set of hegemonic standards with reference to which some actors may discipline others, or why human rights are becoming a globally accepted criterion for the evaluation of state governments and for the coercion of those who do not conform to this standard. The fact that today agents who may exercise power over other agents with reference to the established norms and structures are substitutable is totally overlooked by these commentators. Thus, in some cases it may be the United States disciplining another state by using these standards, in others it may be the World Bank or the IMF or other global institutions, yet in others it could be multinational corporations. Furthermore, there are cases when actors discipline themselves in a rather Foucauldian manner in order to conform to the existing standard of normality, even without prior coercion, for a range of reasons (for example, to gain a better investment rating or to stand better chances of obtaining foreign aid in the case of poor states, or to conform to the emerging norm of social responsibility in the case of corporations adopting codes of good business). No do existing analyses allow for a possibility of there being unintended consequences of enforcement actions. For instance, to continue with the earlier example, had the intervention in Haiti not been followed by neoliberal reforms, no questions about humanitarian intervention and neoliberalism would have been asked, as they were not asked with respect to Somalia or Kosovo because there was not such an identifiable empirical outcome. The aim of this study, as mentioned above, is to investigate a relationship between post-Cold War human-rights enforcement and global capitalism in its neoliberal variety even when no empirical

Introduction 11

connection is available; that is, it is to enquire about unintended consequences that the development of the phenomenon of humanrights enforcement in the post-Cold War period might have had with respect to the structure of a global capitalist economy as a whole and not just to the individual states that have experienced interventions. This leads to the second element of reductionism – the ontological. The existing literature on human rights enforcement treats it as a purely political, legal, military or technical phenomenon in complete isolation from the economy, except occasionally when, as in the case of Haiti mentioned above, there are some observable indications of such a relationship. No study of humanitarian intervention or the War on Terror, as we will see in the next chapter, has ever attempted to inquire into a potential relationship between human-rights enforcement and global capitalism. The reason for this lies in the traditional separation of polity and economy that characterizes social science; they are treated as discrete and only sporadically or conjuncturally connected realms. The roots of this separation go back to the development of capitalism and the emergence of the notion of the ‘self-regulating market’, the central mechanism responsible for allocation of resources and distribution of goods and services in a capitalist society. This set in motion a transformation of the study of political economy as a single field into the two separate disciplines of politics and economics. This separation first appears in the writings of Adam Smith whose work, as Winch observes, stands ‘as an important landmark in a more complex and troubled version of the history of liberal individualism, one in which ‘‘economy’’ and ‘‘society’’ are replacing ‘‘polity’’ (Winch, 1978, p. 22; also Hobsbawm, 1987, p. 270; Bauman in Beilharz, 2001, p. 167). The following passage where Smith discusses Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that ‘wealth is power’ illustrates this well: Wealth, as Mr. Hobbes says, is power. But the person who either acquires, or succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily acquire or succeed to any political power, either civil or military. His fortune may, perhaps, afford him the means of acquiring both, but the mere possession of that fortune does not necessarily convey to him either. The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him is the power of purchasing; a certain command over all the labour, or over all the produce of labour which is then in the market (Smith, 2000, p. 34). What is crucial in this statement is that by political power Smith refers to a position of influence within the state apparatus, in the realm of the


public political sphere. He clearly fails to acknowledge that the power to possess capital and the related power to extract surplus from the labour of others are in themselves political and had always been seen as such, as his citation of Hobbes illustrates. Smith’s view, as well as the current dominant view of politics and economics as discrete spheres, is explained by the difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of surplus extraction. The latter had been characterized by political means of personal or juridical dependence, while in capitalism the function of surplus extraction is performed by economic means – through a wage-labour relation – and political coercion is no longer necessary to obtain surplus. This, however, does not mean, as Smith states, that the power to extract surplus no longer involves political power. There are, in fact, two dimensions of political power involved in the process of extracting surplus by means of wage-labour: on the one hand, it is the power to exercise command and control over employees, to ensure that they perform the required tasks and that their work results in profit which is unequally shared between the employer and the employees; on the other hand, such a method of surplus extraction requires a particular political organization of the society, that is, a state capable of providing the security of private property and necessary legal and institutional forms to ensure a smooth functioning of the economy. The latter observation is informed by Marx’s view that the economic structure of society is the real foundation which conditions a legal and political superstructure, and to which specific forms of social consciousness correspond (Marx, 1971). This is not say that economic relations determine other social institutions, but only to point out that the latter ultimately take such forms that are compatible with the existing material relations. It cannot, for example, be asserted that the capitalist organization of production necessitates individual rights; however, it can be observed that today justice and freedom are defined in terms of negative individual rights, a notion that is compatible with the operation of capitalism; we cannot understand such a conception without examining the transformation of feudal production relations into capitalist ones and the changes in political, legal and ideational realms that this put in motion. To return to the literature on human-rights enforcement, it takes for granted and reproduces the apparent separation of politics and economics and of the use of force in the name of individual rights from the global capitalist economy. This study seeks to correct this shortcoming and examine the nature of the relationship between the emerging neoliberal order and human-rights enforcement.

Introduction 13

The second shortcoming of the existing literature – and one directly related to the problem of reductionism – is its profoundly ahistorical nature. Like historians of antiquity who were unable to master the dialectical complexities of particularity and universality and remained trapped at the level of anecdotal particularism (Meszaros, 1995, p. 8), the existing analyses of the history of humanitarianism are predominantly descriptive, and offer little more than the reporting of individual past events described in terms of the decisions or intentions of the actors involved. No reference to the structural context is made, and no synthesis between historical particularity and historical universality is attempted. For example, legal studies looking for historical precedents of contemporary military humanitarianism see history as a collection of events that took place in the past and simply narrate what happened. The same applies to scholars following an approach to international relations known as the English School, who explicitly define their project as historical but who seldom achieve anything beyond a simple reporting of phenomena. Thus, with respect to human rights, the English School does nothing to explain them, but only describes the evolution of this norm in the international society of states. But the most problematic manifestation of the ahistoricism of the existing literature is a development in recent years of a multiplicity of studies using medieval just-war theory to analyse the ethical, legal and military aspects of contemporary events. The most popular way to employ just-war theory has been to list its conditions for a war to be regarded as just and describe the manner in which a war is conducted, usually referred to in Latin as jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively, and then to apply them to the intervention in question. Thus, if just-war conditions are satisfied, the war is just; if not, the war is unjust. The problems of such an approach lie in its treatment of the modern practice of human-rights enforcement as nothing but a continuation of practices whose origins go back to the Middle Ages. This results in a construction of the history of humanitarian wars as a linear evolution from medieval just-war theory through to early modern humanitarianism as an exception to the Peace of Westphalia, through to modern human rights-based humanitarianism as an exception to the UN Charter. Such an interpretation of the history of humanitarianism ignores profound changes that have taken place in social structures and relations of production over centuries. This problem is inseparable from both methodological and ontological reductionism; they do not allow such analyses to acknowledge differences between seemingly similar actions such as, for example, the use of force by medieval monarchs to protect


Christians outside their kingdoms and contemporary instances of humanitarian intervention to enforce human rights, because these differences lie in the causal relations of these practices with their respective social contexts. Thus, the humanitarianism of St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and other theologians and ecclesiastics was grounded in religion and was part of the feudal ideology which involved interpreting all social relations as God-ordained and therefore unquestionable; this inevitably helped feudal relations to be sustained. Contemporary military interventions, in contrast, take place in the context of global capitalism. The aim of this study is to examine how they contribute to the reproduction of the latter. As will be argued below, contemporary human-rights enforcement, at the core of which lies the idea of individual rights, is a fundamentally different phenomenon from the just-war doctrine based in theology; to see one as evolving from the other is to create a false continuity and ignore differences in the causal powers of these phenomena in relation to their respective social contexts. Having outlined what are seen here as the key deficiencies of the existing analyses, I will now provide a brief summary of a political economy appoach.

The political economy approach To overcome the deficiencies of the existing works on post-Cold War human-rights enforcement – their reductionist and ahistorical nature – the present study develops a political economy approach which seeks to provide a holistic and historical analysis. It is rooted in Marx’s methodology which is in turn based on an assumption that social phenomena do not exist in isolation but constitute a totality or an organic unity. That is to say, it seeks to enable the theorization of any particular part or unit of social reality in relation to a total social whole, an entity that cannot be reduced exclusively to politics, economics, social reproduction and so on, but that constitutes a complex set of dialectical internal relations between these domains. As Arthur observes, knowledge of any phenomenon ‘must take the form of a system of related categories rather than a series of discrete investigations’ (Arthur, 1992, p. x). Nevertheless, as already mentioned, the key to understanding each particular historical configuration of social totality lies in the material relations which constitute the foundation of any society. For Marx, to ensure the process of social reproduction, any society must first and foremost produce the means of subsistence; the way that

Introduction 15

material production and distribution are structured constitutes the society’s ‘essence’ which influences other social institutions and relations, and is in turn influenced by them. To repeat, this does not mean that the economy determines everything else; it only means that production relations set ultimate limits on other social institutions. It also means that changes in economic relations will eventually lead to corresponding transformations in political, legal and other social domains. As Marx puts it, ‘the changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure’ (Marx, 1971, p. 21). Marx’s method allows us to correct both forms of reductionism – methodological and ontological – that characterize existing studies of human-rights enforcement. Concerning the former, individual agents and their actions can be examined in relation to a set of social structures within which they interact, for ‘society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 264–5). Concerning the latter, legal, political or ideational phenomena cannot be understood without an ultimate examination of their relationship with the existing economic structures. Overall, Marx’s method resolves the agent/structure problem as follows: first, agents’ behaviour is influenced and shaped by a complex set of different relations which together constitute an organic unity or totality; and secondly, social totality, in turn, cannot be properly explained or understood without reference to the existing relations of production. As Marx famously puts it, ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under selfselected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1977, p. 19). And these already existing circumstances are based on the ‘economic structure of society’, which is ‘the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’ (Marx, 1971, pp. 20–21). However, to argue that structures influence the behaviour of agents, while the latter reproduce the structures, does not completely resolve the agent/structure problem; the question arises as to why agents reproduce structures which are based on unequal and exploitative relations. A crucial concept in this respect is ‘ideology’. The notion of ideology in Marx’s writings has had different interpretations. In this study I follow Larrain (1983), Maclean (1988a), Allman (2001) and a number of other analysts who interpret the concept of ideology in Marx’s writings, particularly in The German Ideology, as a critical concept, or what Larrain


refers to as ideology in the ‘negative sense’. In this view, ideology designates ideas which express or interpret social reality inadequately or incompletely, or which distort or misrepresent it. What is important to stress here is that this ‘distorted form of knowledge’ is not reducible to the deliberate project of a class. Ideological ideas are ‘encouraged to a great extent’ by a social reality which is ‘inverted’, that is, which appears different from what it really is (Lukacs, 1971). As Allman argues, ideology refers to ideas which are ‘only the partial truth, or fragments of something that we cannot fully comprehend unless we can grasp it in its entirety. In this way they distort the truth and thus prevent us from fully comprehending a situation – in other words, they ‘tend to frame our thinking within certain horizons or parameters’ (Allman, 2001, p. 7). In short, ideology in the negative sense refers to ideas which misrepresent existing relations of power and exploitation, but which do so not because of an intentional project by some dominant social force, but because reality so presents itself that it encourages such views on the part of both the dominant and the subordinate. However, although ideological ideas may be shared by all classes, ideology serves the interests of the dominant class because the role it plays in the negation or concealment of contradictions inevitably contributes to the reproduction of those contradictions (Larrain, 1983, p. 28). For example, as will be seen later, in feudal society both lords and peasants or serfs shared a view that society and their respective social roles were Godordained, had a divine purpose and, therefore, could not be questioned. Religion was an ideology which helped sustain feudal relations of personal dependence and undoubtedly benefited the feudal lords, but it was not reducible to their deliberate project or ‘conspiracy’, because both the serfs and the feudal lords interpreted reality in such a way. The concept of ideology will be of central importance to the following analysis of post-Cold War human-rights enforcement because it avoids reducing consequences to the conscious plans of agents and permits a structural analysis of their behaviour. In relation to the ahistoricism of the literature, Marx’s method of ‘historical materialism’ enables us to not only describe and report what happened in the past, but also to explain it. Historical materialism is a structural analysis applied to past events: these events are located within their historical social context – a historical social totality – with the primary focus being placed on material relations. Such an approach avoids the ‘anecdotal particularism’ of existing studies which, as has been said, reduce history to a reporting of past events seen purely in terms of the intentions or decisions of agents. It equally avoids the

Introduction 17

opposite extreme, that is, a historiography that explains everything in terms of universality; this was the method of many medieval historians who saw everything as an outcome of divine providence. Marx’s method approaches history as a constant interplay of universality and particularity and strives to create a synthesis of agents and structures. In this study the history of modern humanitarianism – which goes back to the medieval doctrine of just war – will be examined in terms of its relations of reciprocal causality with social structures in different historical epochs. It will be seen that contemporary instances of humanrights enforcement are fundamentally different, in terms of their causal roles, with respect to the late-modern global political economy (GPE), from the medieval tradition of just war, its place in the ideology of feudal society, and the way it contributed to the latter’s reproduction. This will demonstrate how problematic are the existing accounts of the history of human-rights enforcement which construct it as a linear evolution or continuous development from medieval times to the present. Before proceeding to a summary of arguments that will be developed in this study by using a political economy approach, one more methodological issue vital to the analysis needs to be addressed. It is the relationship between theory and practice, between substantive events and the way they are studied, between instances of humanitarian enforcement and the academic literature on the subject. It is usually assumed in social sciences that theory and practice are two categorically separate realms. Such a view results from the dominance of a positivist epistemology; this is based on a belief that to be scientific, social inquiry must adopt the methods of impartial observation and description of the physico-chemical sciences. What this assumes is that it is not only possible but also imperative for social scientists to separate themselves from social reality and study the latter in an objective (meaning valuefree) manner (Adorno, 2002, p. 77; Durkheim, 1964, p. xliii). However, in the natural sciences subjects are distinct from objects, which is not the case in social inquiry; in this human beings study themselves. Treating society as equivalent to nature externalizes it, or as Bauman argues, it takes society as ‘unproblematic nature-like society’ (Bauman 1976, p. 7), which it turns into a ‘second nature’. This, in turn, has very serious implications for practice. By declaring that to be scientific social analysis must be value-free, and by treating practice as categorically separate from theory, such an approach plays two causal roles: on the one hand, by taking the existing society as its starting point, as given, it inevitably contributes to its reproduction, and to sustaining the status quo, which in turn serves the interests of those who benefit from it; on the other


hand, it limits possibilities of radical change by dismissing as ‘normative’ and unscientific those approaches that reject the theory/practice dichotomy. To borrow Cox’s famous dictum, ‘theory is always for someone or some purpose’ (1981, p. 128), the academic literature on human-rights enforcement generally takes for granted the appearance of its separation from global capitalism and thereby reproduces it. As a result, it contributes to a development of a global moral discourse which privileges human suffering from political causes over human suffering brought about by the functioning of the global economy. It therefore plays a role in the relegation of poverty and poverty-related problems to the domain of a ‘self-regulating market’, thereby objectifying and naturalizing the capitalist economy. Marx’s methodology is rooted in a denial of a categorical separation of theory and practice and treats theory as part of practice – as part of the substantive phenomenon that it seeks to analyse. It also explicitly develops a theory of praxis, that is, a theory which is from the beginning transformative, and that seeks to understand society in order to change it. Overall, Marx’s methodology can be described as holistic and historical. The idea of social totality enables us to locate events that we want to analyse within a larger social structure and examine them in terms of a constant interplay of agents and their social contexts, of particularity and universality. The notion of social totality rejects the reduction of phenomena to exclusively legal, political, economic or moral realms, and instead seeks to comprehend them through the organic unity of these domains. Particular attention is paid to the economy, to the way the process of production and distribution is organized and the manner in which it dialectically relates with other social institutions and forms. Applied to history, such a methodology goes beyond a mere description or reporting of events, but explains them with references to historical social structures, again paying key attention to the material relations that prevail in the historical epoch in question. It also overcomes the theory/practice dichotomy by seeking to analyse not only substantive events and practices, but also how they have been studied by others and the implications of that study for the events and practices concerned.

The structure of the argument Chapter 1 carries out a review of the existing literature on humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and the War on Terror of the 2000s. As mentioned above, informed by a Marxist methodology, its analysis of a

Introduction 19

substantive phenomenon begins with an examination of the way it has been dealt with by available academic studies. The aim of such a literature review is two-fold: first, to show the deficiencies of the existing analyses; and, secondly, to highlight the nature of the causal relationship between theory and practice, and between academic analyses and the practice of human-rights enforcement. To achieve the first objective, a survey of the existing literature will demonstrate the reductionist and ahistorical nature of available studies, dwelling in particular on their treatment of human-rights enforcement in isolation from the economy. It also highlights the fact that most analyses are state-centric and reduce the concept of human rights and their enforcement to the capabilities, properties and intentions of particular states. Such methodologically individualist studies divorce post-Cold War instances of the use of force from the structure of the late-modern GPE and its functioning, which conditions the behaviour of states, as well as different non-state actors, by limiting the range of policy options available to them, by encouraging some actions and discouraging or rendering impossible others. In relation to the second aim of the literature review, the chapter will show that there exists a relationship of reciprocal causality between the practice of human-rights enforcement and the way it is analysed. On the one hand, the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement, by appearing to have no relationship with the operation of the global economy, encourages academic analyses which approach it in this way, that is, as a phenomenon which is exclusively political, legal or moral. On the other hand, by taking for granted the appearance of the absence of any causal relation between humanitarian force and global capitalism, the existing literature contributes to a further reproduction of this appearance; that is, to a continuous construction of the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement in isolation from the global economy and the catastrophic results that it produces. Academics who examine human-rights enforcement it in a reductionist and ahistorical manner contribute to a further concealment of a causal relationship between human rights, the practice of their enforcement, and the operation of a global capitalist economy. They also contribute to a process of privileging instances of human suffering from political causes over those that result from the operation of the economy, and to treating the latter instances as the outcome of self-regulating and natural processes, thereby playing a role in the further objectification and naturalization of global capitalism. Chapter 2 seeks to provide a historical analysis of the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement. It starts with an examination of the medieval just-war doctrine elaborated by St Augustine and later


expanded by a number of other theologians and ecclesiastics. The analysis begins by describing the feudal society within which this doctrine emerged and developed, paying particular attention to the manner in which the function of surplus extraction was performed. The argument is based on the work done by scholars such as Ellen Wood, Ernesto Laclau, Robert Brenner and other Marxist analysts who have argued that at the heart of feudal society lay production relations based on surplus extraction performed by politico-juridical means. The relationship between serfs and feudal lords was characterized by the personal dependence of the former on the latter; the surplus produced by the peasants was appropriated by the lord because the peasant was legally obliged to surrender the product of his labour, over and above what was needed for family subsistence and the simple reproduction of the peasant household economy. The feudal lord in his turn would often be the vassal of a feudal superior, and the chain of such dependent tenures linked to military service would extend upwards to the highest peak of the system – a monarch. The relationship of inequality and exploitation between the propertied classes and peasants was cemented by an ideology in the negative sense which assumed a religious form. As Larrain observes, the rationalization of personal dependence is found in a sacred order which is revealed by God and which, therefore, cannot be questioned by man. Personal dependence upon, and loyalty to, the landlord is spontaneously expressed in the ideological submission to God, from which all subordination is modelled (Larrain, 1983, p. 38). The chapter also demonstrates that the doctrine of just war, which was based on a religious interpretation of wars ordained by God, was an integral part of the feudal order where social and natural events were seen as an outcome of a divine will and which consequently could not be altered by man. The tradition of just war thereby played a causal role in the reproduction of the feudal order. With the rise of capitalism, the key transformation that took place was the development of economic means of surplus extraction, that is, a wage-labour relation that ensured the extraction of surplus in the realm of the market. Non-economic compulsion became unnecessary for this surplus to be extracted, which enabled a gradual formal emancipation of individuals. It took the form of natural rights, which initially included only the right to life, property and liberty, but which later expanded to incorporate other civil and political rights. With this political and civil emancipation, which was first acquired by the bourgeoisie and was later progressively extended to other classes, capitalist society developed a new form of ideology, one of individual liberty and equality. Although,

Introduction 21

compared to feudalism, capitalist society made massive progress in terms of individual freedoms and rights, the view that in capitalism individuals are free and equal is ideological because freedom and equality amount to formal liberties and rights only, that is, to an equality of negative rights only. Alongside the political and civil emancipation of individuals persisted relations of power and equality in the realm of a ‘self-regulating market’. These relations were objectified and naturalized within the discourse of rights; this process benefitted those who owned property, land or capital, and put those who did not possess the means of production in a subordinate position, forcing them to enter into a wagelabour relationship. What is important to observe is that, beginning with the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius (1583–1685), this new ideology gradually penetrated the doctrine of just war, and thereby fundamentally transformed it. A just war was now defined as a war against governments that abuse the individual rights of their citizens. This doctrine, particularly in the 19th century, developed into the idea of humanitarian intervention which survives to the present day. A crucial question that arises from this historical analysis, and one which will be explored in Chapter 3, relates to the relationship between the late-modern GPE, characterized by a global ascendance of the neoliberal variety of capitalism on the one hand, and the practice of human-rights enforcement, which developed to such an extent after the end of the Cold War, on the other. First, an analysis of the late-modern GPE, that is, of a structure within which the phenomenon of humanrights enforcement has developed, will be provided. It begins by examining the process of globalization and develops a particular understanding of it, namely as referring to not only quantitative increases in interdependence and interconnectedness, as it is usually understood, but also in terms of qualitative transformations. These qualitative transformations have taken place in the way agency is conditioned and disciplined, that is to say, the transformations at the level of causation, moving from territorial geographical place to nonterritorial or n-dimensional space. The term ‘global’ therefore refers to a space of causal power in the world (Maclean, 1999b) which is no longer capable of being described in exclusively territorial terms. What this means is that there has developed a set of economic, political and moral standards, all of which used to have a particular territorial attachment and were associated with specific class interests, but which are now global, meaning that they have become objectified and are now increasingly seen as universally valid.


For example, free trade, which used to be associated with British hegemony and was often imposed by force, is now a global policy issue which has lost its historical attachment to particular interests. ‘Market economy’, a rather neutral term which in fact refers to a capitalist organization of production, is similarly becoming a de-historicized global standard, usually identified with notions of efficiency and competitiveness. Political criteria such as secular and transparent state institutions, representative democracy with regular elections, individual human rights, and a developed civil society constitute a global political ‘matrix’ in terms of which agents are evaluated and often disciplined, and in terms of which they increasingly evaluate and discipline themselves in order to conform to the norm (at least officially or formally). Finally, moral standards centre around the idea of equality – equality of individual political and civil rights and equality of ‘opportunity’ – as well as around the notions of freedom and emancipation defined in terms of legal and political liberation of individuals, or guarantees of individuals’ negative rights. With the recent development of a discourse of corporate social responsibility some of these standards are also increasingly used to evaluate corporations, particularly the largest ones. Together, these developments constitute a development of a new hegemonic order which cannot be described as ‘international’ – as previous hegemonies were. Rather it is global, meaning that its foundations are non-territorial and de-historicized. The notion of hegemony is borrowed from the Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci to mean an order based on consent rather than coercion. The argument in this chapter will follow in the footsteps of a so-called ‘neoGramscian’ approach to international relations. The latter has argued that a developing order can be described as a hegemony of transnational capital, but this argument will be refined in the following way: the emerging global hegemony indeed serves the interests of transnational capital, but it is not reducible to it. It is a structure within which hegemonic actors are substitutable: they can indeed be transnational corporations, but they can also include different international organizations or states that exercise power over other actors with reference to a set of global standards. To repeat an earlier argument, there are scholars who challenge the US on the grounds that it uses human rights to promote the market economy and free trade. Such an argument, however, is reductionist in that it conceives of the market economy, free trade and human rights purely in terms of US interests and intentions, without taking into account the structural context, and

Introduction 23

without asking what must be the situation that allows the US to use these notions in the way it does. The answer lies in the development of a new global hegemony in which these policies and values have lost their historical and territorial attachment and have become objectified. And today there is a close correspondence between originally ‘subjective’ American interests, and those that constitute the objective, natural or taken-for-granted conditions of the global political economy as a whole – that is, for both the USA and other dominant agents, and for subordinant agents (Maclean, 1999a). Chapter 4 is devoted to cases of post-Cold War human-rights enforcement. Bearing in mind the historical relationship between capitalism and the idea of individual rights, it seeks to establish the role of human-rights enforcement in the context of an emerging global hegemony. It further develops Gramsci’s arguments concerning hegemonic orders, most notably his view of hegemony as moral and intellectual leadership. According to Gramsci, a hegemony necessarily requires a moral dimension, that is, a set of universalizable moral values that a ruling group or class adheres to in the exercise of its leadership. What is crucial about these moral values is that they must be compatible with the economic foundations of the hegemonic order, that is, with its relations of production. It will be argued, based on the analysis of the historical relationship between individual rights and capitalism carried out in Chapter 2, that human rights, and methods for their promotion and protection, including the use of force, satisfy this requirement and can therefore be seen as providing the emerging order with a quality of moral leadership. Such a causal role played by human-rights enforcement must be seen as an unintended consequence rather than a deliberate intention. In addition, the chapter examines the intellectual dimension of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, that is, the role of academics and other ‘organic’ intellectuals (as Gramsci refers to them) in the existing order. With this, we again touch upon the theory/practice relation discussed in Chapter 1; today, academics dealing with human-rights enforcement in a reductionist and ahistorical manner, as well as those who study other issues in a similar way, indirectly contribute to a further objectification of the key foundations of the existing order, and perform the role described by Gramsci’s concept of intellectual leadership. To sum up, the present study provides a holistic and historical analysis of the practice of human-rights enforcement, an analysis that situates this phenomenon within a larger structure of the late-modern GPE and examines its relationship with global capitalism. The key contribution of


this book lies in the fact that it offers a critical account of human-rights enforcement, but one which is not critical of the practice itself but of the social context which makes this noble practice ideological such that it has an unintended consequence of contributing to the reproduction of a global form of capitalism and the worldwide human suffering and misery that results from its functioning. To put it differently, when massacres and massive violations of human rights take place it is our duty to intervene and stop them. However, saving people from persecution and promoting political and civil emancipation should be carried out alongside major economic transformation and a counter-hegemonic project in order to save millions of people who are currently condemned to a miserable existence and suffering within the global capitalist system.

1 The Existing Analyses of Human Rights Enforcement: a Critical Review

Introduction This chapter examines academic analyses of the practice of humanitarian intervention and of the War on Terror. It seeks to fulfil two tasks: 1. To show what is missing from existing analyses; and 2. To highlight the nature of the causal relationship between theory and practice, and between academic analyses and the practice of humanrights enforcement. While the first task represents a traditional way to begin a scientific analysis and consists in demonstrating the deficiencies of available studies in order to justify another analysis or another approach to the problem in question, the second aim of this review of literature is much less conventional. What it implies is that theory is causally related to practice and in order to analyse a substantive phenomenon we need to study not only its empirical manifestations, but also the way it has been constructed in theory, and the implications of the latter for practice. To put it differently, the review of academic literature on post-Cold War policies of human-rights enforcement provided here is part of the research, and not a preliminary to it, as is usually the case in studies underpinned by a positivist epistemology which categorically separates theory from practice. In this respect, the overall aim of this book can be broadly described as an establishment of the content of the concept of human-rights enforcement by ‘exposing the complex set of relations in and through which it is constituted – theoretically and substantively’ (Maclean, 1999b, p. 181, emphasis added). 25


The issue of human-rights enforcement, particularly in the 1990s with the unparalleled development of the practice of humanitarian intervention, has been one of the most debated topics in international politics (Fixdal and Smith, 1998, p. 283; Moore, 1998, p. 2; Ramsbotham, 1997). It has been dealt with very extensively in political science, sociology, philosophy, international relations, international law, and various subfields of these disciplines. ‘Few topics in international affairs have fascinated so many writers as the problem of humanitarian intervention,’ observes Kirsch, especially after NATO’s action in Kosovo in 1999 when ‘scholars of philosophy, of international relations and international law contributed to the public and academic debate in innumerable publications’ (Kirsch, 2002, p. 324). When one first confronts this massive amount of literature, it appears that it is characterized by a multiplicity of different themes and foci of analysis, as well as uncompromising debates and disagreements among scholars working on the subject. Upon closer examination, however, it turns out that the range of issues discussed is quite limited, the analyses in many cases are rather simplistic, the debates, as a rule, involve minor or superficial differences as authors adopt identical epistemological and ontological assumptions, and the same arguments are restated over and over again. There are two key deficiencies in the existing analyses: first, they are predominantly reductionist. On the one hand, they are methodologically individualist, that is, they reduce the phenomenon of humanrights enforcement to the properties, interests and capabilities of agents, and offer no analysis of structures. On the other hand, the available studies are ontologically reductionist in that they reduce social totality to specific and categorically separate domains – for example, politics, law or morality – and examine the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement as part of one of these realms, without making references to the others. What is particularly deficient is that they separate their analyses of these domains from any exploration of the functioning of the global capitalist economy. Second, the literature is profoundly ahistorical: the history of humanitarian intervention is either not discussed at all; or is treated in a descriptive manner in order to demonstrate that a certain practice did or did not exist in the past (this is especially so in the case of legal approaches to modern humanitarianism); or aims to demonstrate a certain recurrence in state actions throughout history (for example, the use of moral values as a cover for real state interests by Realist scholars); or uses some criteria developed in the past to assess the contemporary use of military force (as is the case with those who employ medieval just-war theory to evaluate

The Existing Analyses of Human Rights Enforcement

27

modern humanitarian operations). The implications of this, as already noted, are far-reaching: the origins of the notion of individual rights and the process of transformation of production relations from feudalism to capitalism are not discussed. Rather, the history of modern humanitarianism is constructed as a linear evolution from medieval practices to modern humanitarian wars, and analyses completely overlook the fact that the just-war tradition was part of a feudal ideology, whereas modern humanitarianism, as we will see in the following chapters, is part of a different ideology specific to capitalism. In pursuing the second objective of this chapter, we will see that theory of human-rights enforcement and its practice are dialectically related. Thus, the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement indeed presents itself as entirely separate from the functioning of the global economy, thereby encouraging academic analyses that reproduce this appearance. Such analyses, in turn, contribute to a continuous construction of modern humanitarianism as a phenomenon that is wholly separate from global capitalism. They play a role in a further development of a global moral discourse which defines freedom and justice in terms that are compatible with the existence of capitalism and help objectify and naturalize it. In addition, as will be argued in Chapter 4, they also contribute to the development of Gramsci’s moral and intellectual leadership in the context of a global hegemony of capital. This chapter is divided two parts: the first part deals with a review of literature on humanitarian intervention that accumulated in the 1990s and early 2000s; the second part examines publications on the War on Terror.

1.

Humanitarian intervention

The literature on humanitarian intervention can be broken down into four categories: 1. Strategies and techniques, which brings together analyses which focus on techniques and strategies of intervention, and ways of improving them; 2. National interests, which groups texts adopting a Realist-type view on the subject; 3. Sovereignty and law, which assembles arguments concerning the legality of human-rights enforcement and its compatibility with existing norms of the international order; and


4. Radical critiques, which contains works of all those who seek to show how human-rights enforcement is related to the ‘imperialism’ of the West in general, and of the US in particular.

Strategies and techniques This section groups together policy-oriented and prescriptive writings aimed at developing or improving the strategies and methods of humanitarian intervention. Such studies do not analyse the practice of humanitarian intervention as such, that is, they do not discuss its origins, historical development and relationships with other practices, institutions and social relations, but focus exclusively on its technical/ instrumental side. For example, Weiss (1994; 1996; 1998; 1999), who has written extensively on humanitarian intervention, has attempted to contribute to an improvement in techniques of enforcement. To sum up his arguments, today the international community has recognized that ‘to halt abuses of human rights is absolutely essential’ and that ‘humanitarian intervention becomes a reality’ (Weiss, 1994, pp. 59, 62), but shortcomings or outright failures in Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda demonstrate that ‘much remains to be done’ (Weiss, 1998, p. 25). Weiss offers a number of ‘prescriptive thoughts about improving humanitarian action’ which include policies that states must adopt, such as increasing accountability for military subcontracting, improving links between non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations, consolidating UN agencies’ (p. 25), better co-operation of humanitarian interveners and the media (Weiss and Rotberg, 1996, p. 184), and the use of forcible sanctions as an alternative to a humanitarian action which, he argues, may be more efficient (Weiss, 1999, p. 507). In a more recent work Weiss extends his policy prescriptions and argues that eight lessons can be learnt from cases of intervention that took place in the 1990s: three relate to the causal impact of humanitarian values (recognizing the importance of ideas; distinguishing first- and second-order principles; and avoiding political correctness), and five concern specific practical issues (avoiding the ‘international community’; distinguishing the roles of international organizations; rejecting best-case scenarios; moving beyond paralysis by analysis; and taking care about extrapolation from today’s headlines) (Weiss, 2001, p. 419). Haass, another prolific researcher, has argued that it is important to know ‘when and how to respond to situations’ when a government


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severely represses the human rights of its own people (1999a, p. 13). He asserts that ‘it makes no sense to use force if it cannot realize its purposes at an acceptable cost; and cost can only be assessed by examining a specific course of action within a specific context and judging likely results’ (p. 87). Haass is particularly critical of air bombardment, which, according to him, can accomplish many things, but not everything. It can prepare a battlefield, but it cannot control it (Haass, 1999b, p. 3). He maintains that if human-rights enforcement is to succeed there are certain criteria to be taken into account before the decision to intervene is made, such as the scale of the problem (for not every repression is a genocide), the likely costs and consequences of acting (both for the immediate problem and for broader US strategic interests), and the extent of military and financial help the United States can expect from other states (pp. 2–3). In another publication Haass (2000) emphasizes that human-rights enforcement should aim at achieving only the basic requirement of saving lives, while more ambitious objectives such as promoting multi-ethnic societies or democracy, or engaging in nation-building should be avoided. He also suggests that to reduce costs, the US should work to train and equip others so that they can carry out humanitarian operations themselves. A priority should be placed on the development of a regional force for Africa, and US allies in Europe and Asia should also be encouraged to develop forces suitable for intervention (also see Haass, 1997, 1998; Haass and O’Sullivan, 2000). Roberta Cohen also discusses implementation techniques, but she argues that human-rights enforcement is not only about protecting human rights, but also not violating them in the course of action (R. Cohen 1999; R. Cohen and Deng, 1998). She argues that the US government should develop preventive measures, making greater efforts to protect relief workers as well as promoting training in human rights and protection concerns and, when necessary, deploying troops or supporting others to do so with protection components in their mandates (R. Cohen, 1999). In a more recent publication (R. Cohen, 2002) she pursues her prescriptive analysis and argues that the new Bush administration must remedy four major failings in the US government response to previous humanitarian disasters: 1. Inadequate protection of the physical safety and human rights of the affected populations; 2. Insufficient focus on internally displaced persons as compared with refugees;


3. The absence of robust institutional mechanisms to co-ordinate the many disparate offices of the US government working on humanitarian and human rights emergencies; and 4. Inadequate attention to deficiencies in the international response system. To make interventions more effective, she says, the Bush administration must deal with these four problems (also see R. Cohen and Deng, 1998; R. Cohen and Korn, 1999; R. Cohen and O’Hanlon, 2001). Thus, Cohen, like Haass and Weiss above, focuses exclusively on the practical side of the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement and offers technical advice to future interveners and aid deliverers. The above texts deal with general strategies of humanitarian intervention; below are examples of studies that focus on individual cases of military humanitarian operations in order to identify mistakes and develop better techniques for future interventions. Clarke and Herbst (1996) discuss the intervention in Somalia which, according to them, demonstrated that no massive intervention in a failed state can be assuredly short by plan, politically neutral in execution, or wisely parsimonious in providing ‘nation-building’ development aid. The military commanders cannot expect a failed state to become inherently peaceful and stable, and their efforts, in the long run, will fail without the work of developmental and civil affairs experts (pp. 71–85; see also Clark and Herbst, 1997). Farer (1996) also seeks to draw lessons from the Somalian case and concludes that two things could be learnt from it: first, in its humanitarian operations the UN should maintain a posture of impartiality among political factions or states and, second, neither the UN nor any other actor should ever mix coercive activities with mediation and other soft measures for building and maintaining peace (p. 3; for other technical analyses of the Somali case see Patman, 1997a and 1997b; Lewis and Mayall, 1996; Sahnoun, 1998). Kuperman (2000) tries to derive lessons from the Rwandan genocide, to which the international community did not respond. What we need to learn from the Rwandan case, he says, is that intervention is no substitute for prevention and even an ideal intervention in Rwanda would have left hundreds of thousands of Tutsi dead. To avert such violence there is no alternative to the time-consuming business of diplomacy and negotiation (Kuperman, 2000. p. 117; see also Dallaire, 1998). Howe (1997) carries out a similar technical analysis of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) intervention in Liberia,


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whose shortcomings, he maintains, show that interveners in such conflicts should have a strong knowledge of regional affairs, should be able to judge whether their own political and military capabilities are equal to the proposed tasks, and should have a centralized structure whose authority would support strategy and tactics (Howe, 1997, pp. 173–4; see also Olonisakin, 1996). Betts (1994) examines cases of intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti and comes to the conclusion that if an intervention in a conflict is to succeed, it must not be impartial. He argues that trying to be impartial, ‘blocks peace by doing enough to keep either belligerent from defeating the other, but not enough to make them stop trying’ and attempts to do this ‘have brought the United Nations and the United States – and those whom they sought to help – to varying degrees of grief in Bosnia, Somali and Haiti’ (Betts, 1994, p. 21). Mansson (2001) examines the Kosovo intervention, particularly the peacekeeping stage, and argues that a clear division of labour between the human-rights component and the police component in a peacekeeping force must be developed right from the start, that standardized procedures for information sharing within the peacekeeping operation should be better structured, and that the human rights field operation should avoid political pressure as much as possible (Mansson, 2001, p. 132). Wheeler and Dunne (2001) analyse the case of East Timor and conclude that this revealed once again the UN’s chronic deficit in the area of conflict prevention, and a failure to come up with a robust and effective anticipatory intervention force to ensure the security of the election process in East Timor (Wheeler and Dunne, 2001, p. 827). There are also works which deal with yet more specific technical questions. For example, Patman (1997a) examines the issue of microdisarmament during the Somali intervention, McDermott (1998) and Morris and McCoubrey (1999) look at the relationship between the UN troops and NGOs, Griffin (1999) focuses on the issue of subcontracting of peace enforcement and peacekeeping operations, while Ofuateykodjoe (1995) stresses the need for the UN to improve its institutional capacity to deal with human rights abuses. Technical/instrumental analyses therefore take the existence of human rights and their enforcement as a starting point, without attempting to explain these phenomena or to analyse their historical development and implications. This, of course, is not to say that any study of humanitarian intervention must address such issues. It is only to demonstrate that there is a gap in this body of literature, namely the lack of studies of a relationship between human-rights enforcement and


a global capitalist economy. Furthermore, bearing in mind the earlier observation about the relationship between theory and practice, it is also important to stress that the numerous instrumental and policy-oriented works produce an unintended consequence for practice: they render the existence of human rights and the practice of their enforcement unproblematic, as something self-evident, which only needs some practical/logistical/technical improvement. They thereby contribute to a reproduction of these phenomena, as well as of a global moral discourse which defines justice and freedom in terms of negative individual rights, and which, as will be argued below, contributes to the development of a global hegemony. National interests The writers included in this category either explicitly or implicitly share a set of assumptions and propositions about human-rights enforcement common to a Realist theory of international relations. Realism sees the international system as made up of sovereign states – the main actors and units of analysis – and as first and foremost anarchic. States, which compete within the system for resources, are dangerous to each other and can never be certain about each other’s intentions. The basic motive driving state behaviour is pursuance of national interest, which is defined in terms of power (Donnelly, 2000; Burchill et al, 2001; Brown, 1997). This is how things are and have always been because such is the nature either of human beings (Morgenthau, 1967) or of the international system (Waltz, 1979), which compels states to engage in a zero-sum power game. Realists draw their assumptions from the writings of such political theorists as Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Hobbes who, generally speaking, conceived of human nature as selfish, immoral and prudent, and who saw moral or ethical state actions as always intertwined with selfish interests. As a result they treat humanitarian intervention and humanrights policies as one of a range of state policies aimed at the achievement of national interest: ‘all nations will continue to be guided in their decisions to intervene and their choice of means of intervention by what they regard as their respective national interests’ (Morgenthau, 1967, p. 430). Or, as Stromberg argues, the abstract injunction to intervene where there is strife, just because it is strife, will never send a single soldier to war. National interest must still, as of old, determine action’ (Stromberg, 1956, p. 260; see also Mearsheimer, 1995; Betts, 1994). Realists concede that humanitarian considerations might play a part in motivating a government to intervene, but states will not use


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force unless they judge vital interests to be at stake. Furthermore, Realists claim that humanitarian intervention will always be used selectively and permitting this practice would lead to its application in a highly discriminating way (Franck and Rodley, 1973, p. 288). There follow some examples of analyses of the practice of humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War period. Bennis, for example, states the following with respect to UNauthorized humanitarian operations: in the real world any UN decision to intervene or any UN decision to legitimize or endorse any country’s unilateral intervention against another country will reflect the dominant power of the intervening side and the relative impotence of the subject nation [and] . . . anyone who believes that the real motivation for outside governmental military intervention (UN endorsed or otherwise) is the alleviation of civilian hardship is suffering from a serious delusion of benevolence (Bennis, 1996, p. 84). This position is echoed by Ayoob who argues that the great powers, especially the US, while claiming to be acting on behalf of the international community, choose targets for intervention selectively while ignoring human-rights violations of equal or greater magnitude elsewhere. ‘Much of this selectivity stems from the strategic interests of the dominant North Atlantic Concert,’ he contends, and ‘humanitarianism is the new code word for old-fashioned intervention undertaken for punitive purposes that have little to do with humanitarian concerns’ (Ayoob, 2001, p. 225). Forsythe highlights the fact that action in the name of human rights is not undertaken when there is no strategic or economic interest at stake; he says there is an ‘enormous gap between the liberal legal framework on human rights that most states have formally endorsed, and the realist principles that they often follow in their foreign policies’ (Forsythe, 2000, p. 139). Neier also challenged the Clinton administration for willingly denouncing human-rights violations in pariah states or the governments of countries that are not considered politically or economically important, while refusing to condemn repressive governments that are deemed to be economically or strategically important for the US (cited in Chandler, 2002, p. 85). Rieff similarly asserts that the US has ‘voraciously embraced’ a humanrights agenda at the level of rhetoric, but has simultaneously insisted that this agenda ‘is entirely consistent with the traditional global


interests of US’ (Rieff, 1999). A similar argument is made by Hurrell, who argues that unilateral or multilateral actions depend upon, or can be manipulated by, major states, and ‘the problems of doublestandards, of self-serving behaviour cloaked in idealistic clothes, of picking only those cases that serve other political or economic goals, remain all too evident’ (Hurrell, 1999, p. 284). Especially in the case of the United States, he argues, there is no sign whatsoever that the tensions between human rights and ‘harder’ security or economic interests have altered in any significant way (p. 284). When it comes to an analysis of particular instances of human-rights enforcement Realists always search for possible interests that the actors involved might have pursued. McGwire, for example, in his analysis of NATO’s campaign in Kosovo, argues that what drove NATO to bomb Belgrade was ‘the importance of demonstrating the continuing relevance of NATO on its 50th anniversary, and the opportunity presented by Kosovo to further the out-of-area issue and to establish NATO’s right to act without specific UN endorsement’ (McGwire, 2000, pp. 12–14). Gowan similarly argues that ‘Western powers usually legitimise military interventions in terms of a proclaimed commitment to some universalist norm’, and that NATO’s actions were governed by ‘state political interests and state political goals’ (Gowan, 1999, p. 83). Realist analyses of humanitarian intervention are therefore problematic in a number of ways. First, they fail to provide a historical analysis of the practice of humanitarian intervention. Secondly, they categorically separate the practice of humanitarian intervention from the economy and reduce all explanations to the level of agents, that is, states, and their interests. The Realist argument that states use human rights to achieve national interests, even if it may have been the case, does not tell us much about human rights nor about their enforcement. Realists do not tell us why it is the notion of human rights and not some other concept that is used, and what the implications are of this – in particular of the fact that respect for mainly negative individual rights is equated with freedom and justice – for the developing global order.

Sovereignty and law In this category are included scholars who share the assumptions and propositions of the English School (ES), those working in the field of international (public) law, those associated with the recent revival of just-war theory and those involved in the cosmopolitanism/communitarianism debate within IR.


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The English School The English School (ES) has developed as an apparent alternative to Realism’s exclusive focus on conflict and power relations among states, and emphasizes instead the existence of shared values, norms and institutions developed by states in the course of their historic interaction. In this respect the ES makes a distinction between ‘international system’ and ‘international society’. The former refers to a condition where ‘states are in regular contact with each other and where, in addition, there is interaction between them, sufficient to make the behaviour of each a necessary element in the calculation of the other’ (Bull, 1977, p. 10). The latter describes a situation whereby states are ‘conscious of certain common interests and common values’ and they also ‘conceive of themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions’ (p. 13; Bull and Watson, 1984, p. 1). Such rules and institutions include, among others, the notion of state sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention. The ES is broadly divided into two groups, the Pluralists and the Solidarists. The Pluralists argue that the ultimate goal of international society is to ensure international order and peace. The notion of state sovereignty is the basis of the order, and making exceptions to this principle may lead to chaos. Hence the principle of non-intervention must prevail ( Jackson, 2000). The Solidarists, on the contrary, assert that in the present conditions of international society there are potentialities which may enable us to transform international society into a realm where ethically higher goals, such as the protection of human rights, are achieved to a greater extent without at the same time sacrificing the minimum goal of international order. In this view, human-rights enforcement by states is permissible, even without UN authorization (Wheeler, 2000a; 2000b). As Buzan puts it, ‘pluralists think that the sovereignty/non-intervention principles restrict international society to fairly minimal rules of coexistence. Solidarists think that international society can develop quite wide-ranging norms, rules and institutions, covering both coexistence issues and cooperation in pursuit of shared interests, including some scope for collective enforcement’ (Buzan, 2002, p. 4; see also Mayall, 2000, p. 14). The Pluralist/Solidarist debate with respect to human rights and humanitarian intervention may be traced back to Hedley Bull and John Vincent. In The Anarchical Society Bull advanced the Pluralist position when he argued that intervention to protect human rights may put


international order into jeopardy, because carried to its logical extreme, ‘the doctrine of human rights and duties under international law is subversive of the whole principle that mankind should be organised as a society of sovereign states’ (Bull, 1977, p. 152). In his later work, Justice in International Relations, Bull restates this position: ‘The promotion of human rights on a world scale, in a context in which there is no consensus as to their meaning and the priorities among them, carries the danger that it will be subversive of coexistence among states, on which the whole fabric of world order in our times depends’ (Bull, 1984, p. 13). Vincent, on the other hand, laid the foundations for the Solidarist view. He argued that international society has accepted human rights as an established norm, and the question is ‘whether these standards legitimise action, either by international society as a whole or by states as its agents’ (Vincent, 1986, p. 126). Vincent’s answer is that ‘humanrights enforcement is reserved for extraordinary oppression’, and in such cases the ‘international community has a duty of humanitarian intervention’ (pp. 126–7). Today the Pluralist/Solidarist debate is associated mainly with Robert Jackson and Nicholas Wheeler. Jackson’s has been called ‘the most comprehensive contemporary restatement of Bull’s argument’ (J. Williams, 2002, p. 4). Jackson maintains that the weakening of the non-intervention principle in pursuit of cosmopolitan normative goals, such as the protection and promotion of human rights, risks conflict with states where such ideas are not accepted, and the needs of order should be placed above the pursuit of justice should that pursuit conflict with the core tenets of international society ( Jackson, 2000, pp. 249–93; 400–25). ‘If world politics operated with a doctrine of human-rights enforcement it would mean that states were no longer protected (normatively speaking) by their sovereignty and would not enjoy any pre-emptory right of non-intervention’ (p. 251). To Jackson this is dangerous for it may jeopardise more important values such as international peace and security (p. 291; see also Chandler, 2002, p. 72). Wheeler, on the other hand, argues that human-rights enforcement does not conflict with the basis of international order. Instead, ‘there is often a compatibility between protecting the national interest, promoting international order, and enforcing human rights’ (Wheeler, 2000a, p. 309). In other words, it may indeed be the case that, as the Realists argue, states carrying out intervention do it to pursue national interest. However, this is not important so long as the humanitarian outcome is achieved. Wheeler refers to constructivism (more precisely to that version of it which studies norms and institutions in a state-centric


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manner, for example, Wendt (1992; 1999)) and claims that ‘rules and norms both constrain and enable actors’ (Wheeler, 2000a, p. 6). This argument is correct, for social structures both set limits to as well as enable the actions of agency. Wheeler, however, views such norms in exclusively state-centric terms; that is, he reduces the origins of such norms as human rights to an invention by states. He also separates them from the economy, as other ES followers do. Overall, although the ES defines itself explicitly in opposition to Realism, the differences between the two are minor. It questions the notion of anarchy that is at the core of a Realist approach, but it reduces order and different norms that govern state interactions to intentions and capabilities of states, an outlook which is, like the Realist analysis, state-centric and methodologically reductionist. They also separate the political from the economic and focus exclusively on the former. Furthermore, the ES and Realism are similar in respect to the place of history in their analyses, despite the fact that the ES explicitly claims to have an historical approach. What this ‘historicism’ amounts to, however, is nothing more than a description of an historic interaction between states. It is nothing more than a reporting of past events in order to uncover similarities in state behaviour over time. As such, history is not explained, the historic is separated from the social, and states of the ancient and medieval periods are treated as identical with states today. The category ‘international society’ is ahistoric in this regard because it is applied equally to all states at all times regardless of their internal constitution and their social context. With respect to humanitarian intervention, the ES analysis not only completely divorces the practice of intervention from the economy, but also treats it in mostly instrumental terms (that is, whether humanitarian intervention should take place and, if so, under what conditions). Human rights, which the ES sees as the basis for humanitarian intervention, are discussed only marginally and again in a state-centric manner. As a result, the ES reproduces the apparent separation of human-rights enforcement from material relations, and the existence of the practice of humanitarian intervention is taken for granted with the focus being on what to do about it, rather than why it has developed, and on its role in the late-modern GPE. International law The work on human-rights enforcement in the discipline of international law focuses on the formal and legal aspects of humanitarian intervention. When international legal analysts examine a case of


intervention it is usually in order to establish its conformity with the requirements of international law. In legal debates on humanitarian intervention, cases of humanitarian force authorized by the UN Security Council do not usually constitute an object of controversy. The analyses focus mostly on unilateral and unauthorized human-rights enforcement, and discussions tend to centre around questions as to whether a new custom of unilateral humanitarian intervention may be said to be developing, whether unilateral human-rights enforcement undermines international law and should, therefore, be discouraged, or whether in some cases it ought to take precedence over the law (Hilpold, 2001; Cassese, 1999a, 1999b; Chesterman, 2001; 2005). We begin our overview of legal analyses of humanitarian intervention with the debate as to whether a new state practice can be said to be developing. One of the questions raised in this respect concerns cases of intervention which took place before the end of the Cold War (India’s action in Pakistan (1971), Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia (1978) and Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda (1979)) and whether or not they could be defined as examples of humanitarian intervention. Some legal scholars contend that although these cases of intervention did improve human-rights situations in the countries concerned, human rights played a marginal role in the intentions of the interveners. Hilpold, for instance, asserts that these cases ‘provided some humanitarian relief’, but ‘it must be acknowledged that additional – in most cases prevailing – elements were always present that prompted the intervener to act’ (Hilpold, 2001, p. 444; see also Murphy, 1996, p. 94). Hilpold concludes that the necessary elements for the formation of a customary rule allowing measures of human-rights enforcement during the Cold War ‘were not only not present but relevant state practice was a thorough confirmation of the rule which excludes the permissibility of such interventions’ (Hilpold, 2001, p. 445). Having argued that during the Cold War there was no evidence of a new state practice with respect to unilateral humanitarian intervention, Hilpold moves on to examine the post-Cold War case of NATO’s action in Kosovo; here he similarly asserts that it cannot be said to provide evidence of the development of a new customary rule of law, because ‘a consistent number of states . . . voiced doubts and criticisms about this action’ (p. 460). The same opinion is shared by Chesterman (2001) and Gray (2000). Both agree that neither the Cold War cases nor the post-Cold War actions reflect an acceptance of a right to unilateral human-rights enforcement. Charney similarly maintains that ‘the international community has moved toward . . . a greater enforcement’, but it ‘has


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not authorized some states to intervene by the use of force in third states to protect those rights’ (Charney, 1999, pp. 840–1). Taking the opposite view, Cassese (1999a; 1999b) argues that the NATO intervention in Kosovo may be seen as representing the first step towards the development of a customary-law principle allowing acts of humanitarian intervention in a unilateral way. He observes that ‘human rights are increasingly becoming the main concern of the world community as a whole’, and ‘the international community is increasingly intervening, through international bodies, in internal conflicts where human rights are in serious jeopardy’ (Cassese, 1999a, p. 24). He further argues that a series of post-Cold War humanitarian interventions testify to the fact that a new customary law of unilateral human-rights enforcement is in the process of development and it is the task of ‘international lawyers to pinpoint the evolving trends as they emerge in the world community’ (p. 30). Franck makes a similar observation: ‘Movement in this direction is surely discernible . . . Not everyone welcomes the evolution of such broad global jurisdiction at the expense of state sovereignty, but a trend is unmistakable’ (Franck, 1999, p. 858). Wedgwood supports this view when she observes that ‘the Kosovo intervention may represent a sea change in the responsibility of multilateral organizations to attempt to thwart ethnic slaughter – even if multilateralism takes a different form’ (Wedgwood, 1999, p. 834). The debate in international law is virtually identical to the Pluralist/ Solidarist debate examined above. Hilpold, for example, advances a Pluralist view and even uses the term ‘international society’ when he states that ‘there are varying degrees to which a norm is prone to be abused’, and that in extreme cases, ‘the relevant norm will provide an easy excuse for acts which otherwise would be outlawed and which are harmful for (national or international) society’ (Hilpold: 2001, pp. 454– 5). The same view is advanced by Henkin who argues that unilateral intervention is and should remain unlawful: ‘In my view, unilateral intervention, even for what the intervening state deems to be important humanitarian ends, is and should remain unlawful’, because ‘no individual state can be trusted with authority to judge and determine wisely’ (Henkin, 1999, p. 825). Therefore, he continues, ‘in my view, the law is, and ought to be, that unilateral intervention by military force by a state or group of states is unlawful unless authorized by the Security Council’ (p. 826). Simma likewise contends that in the absence of a Security Council authorization ‘military coercion . . . constitutes a breach of Article 2(4) of the Charter’ (Simma, 1999, p. 10; see also Byers and Chesterman, 1999). Charney also asserts that ‘the so-called


doctrine of human-rights enforcement can lead to an escalation of international violence, discord and disorder, and diminish protections of human rights worldwide’ (Charney, 1999, pp. 834–5; see also Chinkin, 1999, p. 847; Schachter, 1991, p. 126; Falk, 1999, p. 848). The opposite view is to allow the right of unilateral human-rights enforcement. It comes down to the assertion that ‘we delude ourselves if we think that the role of norms is to remove the possibility of abusive claims ever being made’ (Higgins, 1994, p. 247), and ‘it is a big mistake, in general, to stop short of recognition of an inherently just principle . . . merely because of the possibility of non-genuine intervention’ (Fonteyne, quoted in Higgins, 1994, p. 247). Among international lawyers analysing human-rights enforcement it is common to refer to Richard Lillich who as early as 1967 argued that ‘to require a state to sit back and watch the slaughter of innocent people in order to avoid violating blanket prohibitions against the use of force is to stress black letter at the expense of far more fundamental values’ (Lillich, 1967, p. 344). Tesoń similarly asserts that a government that engages in substantial violations of human rights forfeits its international legitimacy and that ‘foreign armies are morally entitled to help victims of oppression in overthrowing dictators’ (Tesoń, 1988, p. 15). Robertson argues that international law ‘still talks, illogically, of violation of ‘‘state rights’’, when it is human rights that are being violated. Some of its classic doctrines – sovereign and diplomatic immunity, non-intervention in internal affairs, non-compulsory submission to the ICJ, equality of voting in the General Assembly – continue to damage the human-rights cause’ (Robertson, 1999, p. 83). ‘The reality,’ he goes on, ‘is that states are not equal. There can be no ‘‘dignity’’ or ‘‘respect’’ when statehood is an attribute of the governments which presently rule Iraq and Cuba and Libya and North Korea and Somalia and Serbia and the Sudan’ (p. 371). Similarly, Urquhart asserts that sovereignty serves as a ‘cloak of impunity’ (Urquhart, 2000). As we can see, the work on humanitarian intervention done in international law treats it in a largely descriptive manner; that is, it seeks to determine whether cases of humanitarian enforcement that have taken place so far are in conformity with existing norms of international law, and if they are not, whether they may be said to constitute a development of a new state practice or new customary law. Humanitarian intervention is seen by virtually all legal scholars as the use of force to stop or prevent violations of human rights, but the notion of human rights is taken for granted, as a starting point, with no attempt to analyse its historical origins. Furthermore, the analysis is state-centric and reduces humanitarian intervention to state properties, capabilities or


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intentions. There is equally no attempt to place the phenomenon of humanitarian intervention, as a practice which promotes a very specific conception of justice and freedom as a respect for individual negative rights, within a larger framework of the late-modern GPE, or to examine it in relation to global capitalism. The just-war theory In recent years there has been a revival of academic interest in the justwar tradition. This started in the 1990s in the context of humanitarian interventions and reached its apogee in the early 2000s when analysts of all sorts employed it in relation to the War on Terror, as we will see in the second part of this chapter. The origins of the just-war tradition are usually traced back to St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and then through the writings of Grotius, Vattel and Vitoria to its modern formulations (Gorry, 2000, p. 178; Fixdal and Smith, 1998, p. 291; Beach, 2000, p. 112; Butler, 2003, p. 226, 231; Ramsey, 1968; Walzer, 1977; Elshtain, 2000; Nardin, 2002). Just-war theory comprises two sets of principles: jus ad bellum (the right to wage war) and jus in bello (just behaviour in war). It is the former that is usually invoked by scholars as the predecessor of humanitarian intervention, for it is jus ad bellum that provides a list of conditions that must be fulfilled before a just war is waged. The list encompasses, as has been maintained by many writers, many of the dilemmas that still face those who carry out humanitarian intervention today. The conditions developed over time to include legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, formal declaration, proportionality and reasonable hope of success. Although the roots of academic interest in just-war theory go back to the postSecond World War period, and later the war in Vietnam ( Jasper, 1967; Childress, 1978; Walzer, 1977; O’Brien, 1979), another outbreak of writings on just-war theory began in the immediate post-Cold War period. It has been argued in a number of recent publications that justwar theory provides us with a useful set of criteria to decide whether to intervene in each particular case, or with a helpful framework for evaluating cases of intervention that have taken place. Fixdal and Smith argue that the just-war theory provides tools for discussing and evaluating humanitarian intervention, in particular ‘the three most common criteria in the just-war tradition that have come down to us from medieval times from [Thomas] Aquinas, who argued they were the necessary conditions for a war to be deemed just: ‘‘right authority’’, ‘‘just cause’’, and ‘‘right intention’’’ (Fixdal and Smith, 1998, p. 291). The authors then go on to discuss particular situations in which


different authorities may be seen as legitimate, and address questions as to what causes and intentions can be qualified as just (pp. 291–305). Gorry applies the criteria of the just-war tradition to a ‘test case’ of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo and argues that NATO failed to secure four ad bellum requirements: the war was not conducted by a lawful authority (as it was not authorized by the UN); it was not used as a last resort (for there were diplomatic solutions available); no formal declaration of war was issued by NATO; and finally, there was no reasonable hope of success (Gorry, 2000, p. 180). Beach adds to this assessment that ‘the strongest case against NATO’s actions, in the light of the just-war criteria, lies in the areas of proportion and discrimination’, for the fact of bombing from 5000 metres and the use of cluster bombs ‘made discrimination much more difficult and doubtless led to some of the much publicized cases of admitted accidental damage (Beach, 2000, p. 117). Butler utilizes the just-war criteria to assess American foreign policy and the US participation in humanitarian interventions. His argument comes down to an assertion that in most cases it is the motive, that is, just-cause considerations, that prevail in the US decisions to intervene: ‘Generally speaking . . . an adequate justifying cause for military intervention is a more robust factor than other justice considerations such as legitimating authority or right intention in making determinations about an intervention’ (Butler, 2003, p. 243). Reichberg and Syse apply the just-war criteria to the environmental destruction that accompanies wars in general, and especially recent cases of human-rights enforcement when aerial bombing has led to destruction of the natural environment, and argue that ‘destruction of the environmental setting upon which civilians depend . . . is a violation of their non-combatant status’ (Reichberg and Syse, 2000, p. 463). The criterion of proportionality may also help in evaluating interventions, for if ‘the natural resources are in some way ‘‘owned by’’ or ‘‘due to’’ those who depend on them for their survival and that this includes future generations, then the destruction of such resources will often stand in disproportion to contemplated war gains’ (p. 464). Just-war criteria have also been used by an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS, 2001) in its report entitled ‘The Responsibility to Protect’. The Commission lists the requirements of the just-war tradition and then seeks to develop the parameters of each requirement. Thus, events that qualify as a just cause include largescale loss of life or large-scale ‘ethnic cleansing’; a right intention must be aimed at averting human suffering; the criterion of last resort is


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satisfied only when every non-military option has been explored; proportionality means that the scale, duration and intensity of the intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the objective; there must also be a reasonable prospect of success, meaning that the consequences of military action should not be worse than the consequences of inaction (ICISS, 2001, p. 1). In sum, such analyses add little to our understanding of humanitarian intervention today, except in a rather instrumental or policy-oriented manner; in this way they are quite similar to the technical writings discussed above. What the majority of them argue is that the just-war tradition provides a useful set of moral and practical guidelines for contemporary policy-makers. And, more importantly, such studies construct a form of continuity or linear evolution in the historical development of humanitarian intervention without noticing how the writings of St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas were fundamentally different in terms of their views of society from those embodied in the notion of individual human-rights-based that is at the heart of humanrights enforcement today; that is, they fail to show how they related to their historical context. Even if in these medieval writings one may find arguments similar to those that are used today in relation to intervention, it is a serious mistake to treat them as identical because fundamental transformations in the social context have taken place – in particular the transformation from feudal society, in which just-war theory emerged, into capitalist society. As will be argued in the next chapter, medieval humanitarianism based on a theological view of justice and solidarity was part of the ideology of feudal society; characterized by a religious interpretation of social relations, it contributed to a reproduction of feudal social relations. Contemporary humanitarianism, at the heart of which lies the idea of individual rights, is part of a different ideology which is internally related with capitalism and has a totally different causal power, namely its contribution to the reproduction of capitalism. The cosmopolitan/communitarian debate Cosmopolitanism can be described as an attitude which has at its heart ‘a refusal to regard existing political structures as the source of ultimate value’ (Brown, 1992, p. 24). It is ‘the idea that a social order must be justified in terms of how it affects the entitlements of individuals or their general welfare . . . independently of commitment to any particular social relations’ (Thompson, 1992, p. 21). Cosmopolitanism is based on assumptions that are universalist and individualist in orientation.


Communitarianism, on the other hand, is particularist and oriented towards a shared community life: ‘the root notion of communitarian thought is that value stems from the community, that the individual finds meaning in life by virtue of his or her membership of a political community’ (Brown, 1992, p. 55). It is ‘a moral standpoint which is tied to a local discourse, a particular community or historical tradition’ and to the values communities hold (Thompson, 1992, pp. 19, 22). The core tension of the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate ‘is reflected in the case these writers make for international political theory and its task: whether individuals or states should be the subject of justice’ (Cochran, 1999, p. 6). Both cosmopolitans and communitarians seem to accept the idea of humanitarian intervention. The two authorities at the core of the cosmopolitanism/communitarianism debate are John Rawls and Michael Walzer. Rawls is one of the most influential contemporary liberal philosophers, ‘whose contractarian theory of justice is widely agreed to have been the most important contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century’ (Norman, 1998, p. 190). Rawls’ original concern (Rawls, 1971) was mainly with self-sufficient independent societies, with their internal constitution and the principle of justice as fairness within such societies. His theoretical approach involves an act of imagination to bring people together to establish rules of fairness behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. Rawls imagines what principles of justice people would want if they did not know in advance of their own social position. When faced with such ignorance, people tend to follow self-interest, which can be universalized. In his later work Rawls (1999) attempts to extend his ideas developed for independent self-sufficient societies to the realm of the international, or to the ‘law of peoples’ as he calls it. Rawls devotes one of the central elements in this ‘law of peoples’ to human rights. More precisely, he (1999, pp. 21–2) argues that the law of peoples must be based on three main elements: a list of certain basic rights and liberties of opportunities (familiar from constitutional democratic regimes); a high priority for these fundamental freedoms, especially with respect to claims of the general good and of perfectionist values; and measures assuring for all citizens adequate all-purpose means to make effective use of their freedoms. Rawls then argues that there is a duty of non-intervention if these principles are to be secured, but he qualifies it in the light of humanrights violations: ‘although suitable for a society of well-ordered democratic peoples who respect human rights, it fails in the case of disordered societies in which wars and serious violations of human


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rights are endemic . . . The right to independence is no shield from that condemnation, or even from coercive intervention by other peoples in grave cases’ (p. 24) and ‘any systematic violation of these rights is a serious matter and troubling to the society of peoples as a whole’ (p. 32). Rawls argues that a society’s system of law must be such as to impose moral duties and obligations on all its members and be regulated by what judges and other officials reasonably and sincerely believe is a common-good conception of justice. ‘For this condition to hold, the law must at least uphold such basic rights as the right to life and security, to personal property, and the elements of the rule of law, as well as the right to claim liberty of conscience and freedom of association, and the right to emigration. These rights we refer to as human rights’ (p. 32). Rawls here explicitly identifies as universal human rights political and civil, or negative, rights only, a view of human rights which prevails today and which, as will be argued below, is internally related to global capitalism. In his early work, Walzer sidesteps any direct engagement with a theory of the individual, but nevertheless does attribute the rights of life and liberty to individuals, asserting that these are simply a part of being human. He writes, ‘if they are not natural, then we have invented them, but natural or invented, they are a palpable feature of our moral world’ (Walzer 1977, p. 54). None the less, and despite his occasional appeal to abstract, individual rights, his idea of justice hinges primarily upon his understanding of how the person is socially constituted. To begin with, he suggests that humans universally share the need for community, and it is through the culture, religion and politics of a community that other socially recognized needs are generated (Walzer, 1983, p. 65). Furthermore, our identity as individuals is shaped by these historical determinations, the way we ‘conceive and create, and then possess and employ social goods’ (p. 8) Walzer argues that ‘one characteristic above all is central to my argument. We are (all of us) culture-producing creatures; we make and inhabit meaningful worlds’ (p. 314). He further maintains that community is perhaps the most important good that there is to be distributed and what makes community valuable is that its constitution is determined internally, by its members (p. 29). Furthermore, Walzer defends the importance of the notion of state sovereignty for the selfdetermination of communities. The sovereign state to him is the guarantor of the separation of one community from another, it is the ‘agent of separation and the defender, as it were, of the social map’ (Walzer 1984, p. 327), protecting its collective life from external threats. However, as regards humanitarian intervention enforcement, Walzer concedes that the massive abuse of human rights is a legitimate cause for


the violation of state sovereignty, although he accepts human-rights enforcement only if it is authorized by the ‘society of nations’. Unilateral action is not desirable but may be allowed as a last resort: Humanitarian intervention is much closer than any other kind of intervention to what we commonly regard, in domestic society, as law enforcement and police work. At the same time, however, it requires the crossing of an international frontier, and such crossings are ruled out by the legalist paradigm – unless they are authorized, I suppose, by the society of nations . . . We worry that, under the cover of humanitarianism, states will come to coerce and dominate their neighbours; once again, it is not hard to find examples . . . Morality, at least, is not a bar to unilateral action, so long as there is no immediate alternative available . . . Human-rights enforcement is justified when it is a response (with reasonable expectations of success) to acts that shock the moral conscience of mankind (Walzer, 1977, pp. 106–7). Walzer further argues that human-rights enforcement reflects ‘deep and valuable standards’ which are our commitments to human rights (p. 108). Thus, Walzer’s argument, although important in terms of stressing the role of the community, which, in turn, may be developed further as a counter-argument to the Western individualist conceptions of rights, is insufficient because it fails to relate human rights to the economy. He also reproduces the apparent separation of human-rights enforcement from global capitalism, which in turn contributes to further separation of the two. Thus, in this debate the existence of humanitarian intervention and human rights is again simply asserted and such questions as why they exist, what are the origins of the two concepts, and what is their relationship with their historical and social context are neglected. The arguments are explicitly normative, accepting a dichotomy normative/ non-normative that has dominated social inquiry; the fact that the ‘oughts’ of social life are causally inseparable from the ‘ises’, that is, the way practice influences normative prescriptions by setting limits on what can be imagined is not discussed. This issue will be discussed in the later examination of the concept of ideology. Radical critiques Recent cases of human-rights enforcement have generated much critical writing by academics and journalists of the Left, published in such journals and periodicals as Monthly Review, New Left Review, the Morning


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Star, Race and Class, as well as the online database ZNet. A review of these studies shows that what is common to them is an attempt to conceptualize the growing use of force in the name of human rights as an imperialist project of the West, in particular the US, driven by political and economic interests. They usually interpret humanitarian intervention as a cover-up for American/Western interests and they often speak of human-rights enforcement as a means for the US to assert its global hegemony. Hegemony, however, is here used in a narrow sense of economic and political dominance backed by military coercion. This differs from the notion of hegemony developed in chapters 3 and 4 of this book, which is borrowed from Gramsci (and reworked to analyse the realm of the international) and emphasizes consent rather than coercion, as well as an internal relationship between polity and economy. The problem with radical critiques is that, like the Realists and the English School approaches discussed above, they tend to reduce humanitarian intervention to the interests and capabilities of the United States. Even if the US may sometimes achieve some of its goals, these analyses fail to ask why civil and political rights – rather than other values – are used by American leaders as justifications, and fail to explore the implications of this for the latemodern world. It is also surprising, given the explicit Marxist/Leftist stance of these approaches, that polity and economy are often treated as only externally related, and that their internal relationship is generally neglected. The relationship between human-rights enforcement and the economy is discussed in terms of the economic gains that states carrying out interventions might achieve, which means that if no such direct and observable economic interests are identified, there is no relationship acknowledged between human-rights enforcement and the global capitalist economy. In contrast, this study will argue that there is an internal relationship between human-rights enforcement and the continuous production and reproduction of global capital. In the chapters that follow, in particularly in Chapter 2, I will borrow extensively from Ellen Wood’s analysis of capitalism, especially from her analysis of the internal relationship between polity and economy. However, her approach to the realm of the international, although useful in terms of highlighting the economic interests that the interveners may pursue in undertaking humanitarian operations, suffers precisely from that separation of polity and economy which she challenges in her analysis of national capitalism. Thus, she writes the following about the NATO action in Kosovo: Forget humanitarian motives. This is about US global hegemony. And more immediately, it is about the role of NATO as the US conduit to


Europe . . . It is also about Russia and its geopolitical containment . . . With these larger objectives in mind, it is probably unnecessary to invoke oil supplies and pipelines – which are regularly, and often correctly, cited to explain US military adventures, including this last one . . . [It is also about] demonstrating that the United States can deploy its massive military power any time any place, with or without intelligible reasons, objectives or strategies (Wood, 1999, p. 2). It can be seen how closely Wood’s argument resembles the assertions of the Realists, and how human-rights enforcement is effectively reduced to an expression of US interests. These interests also include ‘ensuring that the forces of the capitalist market prevail in every corner of the world . . . and of manipulating those market forces to the advantage of the most powerful capitalist economies and the United States in particular’ (p. 3). In other words, there is an indication of the relationship between human-rights enforcement and capitalism, but it is treated as external and in a reductionist state-centric manner. Wood is also right in arguing that ‘the US interpretation of human rights violates any meaningful conception of human rights and destroys the very foundations of any such conception’ (p. 5), which is a critique of the dominant view of human rights as merely civil and political liberties. However, what are the implications of the fact that such a conception of freedom and justice, defined as respect for the negative rights of individuals, has become dominant and underpins the human-rights enforcement which is becoming part of a new global order? And can this conception be reduced to US interests only, or have the originally ‘subjective’ American interests become identical to what increasingly presents itself as the objective, natural, or taken-for-granted conditions of the global political economy as a whole – for the US and other dominant agents, as well as for subordinate agents (Maclean, 1999a, p. 61)? In subsequent chapters the latter view will be developed. John Pilger has criticized humanitarian intervention for being the latest form of imperialism. He argues that since the end of the Cold War the economic and political crises in the developing world, precipitated by debt and the disarray of the liberation movements, have served as retrospective justification for imperialism and ‘humanitarian intervention is the latest to satisfy the criterion of doing what you like where you like, as long as you are strong enough’ (Pilger, 1999a). Pilger argues that NATO in its Kosovo campaign did not care about human rights, because its actions actually resulted in massive violations of human rights, leaving 10,000 innocent civilians dead or maimed, the country and


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region poisoned, and Kosovo itself in ruins, littered with explosives and an atomic dust from depleted uranium (Pilger, 1999b, p. 18). American imperialism and its ambition to dominate the world are often discussed in the British socialist daily, the Morning Star. Cases of US-led intervention abroad are, as a rule, interpreted as examples of the US pursuing its project of imperialism, accompanied by an aim of opening up more markets for its products. For example, Rob Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, writes in the Morning Star that ‘the US imperialist strategy is to use its economic, political and military power to bring free markets and free trade to every corner of the world’ (Griffiths, 2003, p. 10). In his view, this project has been assisted by Tony Blair, who ‘has been acting as a US under-secretary of state because he believes that British big business has more to gain from tying itself to US imperialism than from challenging it’ (p. 10). In another article in the paper Griffiths argues that ‘US and British imperialism’ has ‘turned Bosnia and Kosovo into NATO protectorates – forward bases for imperialism’, which are ‘governed by puppet administrations, as their economies are taken over by Western transnational corporations’ (Griffiths, 2001, p. 7). He further asserts that ‘the major capitalist states have launched a drive for political and military globalization to complement the economic globalization led by their financial and industrial corporations’, while at home (in Britain) privatization proceeds apace in the health, education and prison services’ (p. 7). Here Griffiths raises several important issues: a relationship between humanitarian wars and the interests of big capital (see also Chandler, 1999; Pugh, 2002), a relationship between humanitarian interventions, globalization, in particular its economic side, and the fact that behind the British ‘moral crusade’ of humanitarianism (p. 7), neoliberal reforms continue to take place. These arguments, however, reduce the analysis of humanitarian intervention to the level of agents, and to a deliberate project by the US and Britain, completely ignoring the structures within which they operate. In addition to this methodological reductionism, Griffiths treats the relationship between polity and economy as external and ahistorical, and appears not to be aware of the process of their historical and dialectical development, in which political forms are influenced by material relations and vice versa. His treatment of the neoliberal reforms implemented in Bosnia after the war make it look as if such reforms were invented by the US and international financial institutions. This completely ignores the fact that neoliberalism today is not reducible to these agents alone. It has become hegemonic, and the


US and its allies, as well as such actors as the IMF and the World Bank, mediate what can be seen as Gramscian consent in respect of neoliberal policies. Moreover, they can be seen as exercising power with respect to those who fail to conform to hegemonic policies, rather than possessing it. These arguments will be developed in detail in chapters 3 and 4. Tariq Ali is another writer who has characterized humanitarian intervention as a project aimed at ensuring US world hegemony (meaning dominance based on force), in particular, US economic interests. In relation to the Kosovo war, Ali argues that it was a war that ‘has little to do with the people of the old Yugoslavia’, for it has been a ‘war for US hegemony in Europe and the world, the act of a triumphant imperialism designed to rub the face of its old enemy in mud enriched with depleted uranium’ (Ali, 1999a, p. 9). More precisely, he argues that this war was about ensuring a free market for the US: ‘NATO is being transformed from a defensive alliance into a mobile, global police force which can hit a target state anywhere in the world to defend the interests of the United States, defined, of course, as ‘‘human rights’’ and the ‘‘free market’’’ (Ali, 1999b, p. 62). He also highlights the selectivity of humanrights enforcements; they are undertaken in some circumstances, yet not carried out in virtually identical ones. Once again, it may well be the case that the US had some particular interests in the Balkans, and has other interests elsewhere which prevail over human-rights considerations. However, this is an insufficient explanation of human-rights enforcement because it is reduced to US interests and power, and conceived in an empirical/behavioural manner. Nor is it an adequate analysis of human rights, the history of the concept and the role it might play in the late-modern world. A range of other scholars on the Left also emphasize the selectivity of humanitarian intervention. For example, Said has argued that ‘the pretext this time is, of course, the persecution, ethnic cleansing and continued oppression of Albanians in the province of Kosovo by the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic. For Palestinians, 1948 was like this minus CNN: at that time 780,000 were evicted from their houses and property by Zionist forces. They remain a nation in exile fifty-one years ˇ izˇek similarly asks ‘why Albanians in Serbia later’ (Said, 1999, p. 73). Z ˇ izˇek, and not also Palestinians in Israel, Kurds in Turkey, and so on? (Z ˇ izˇek is also right to highlight the development of a kind of 1999, p. 77). Z moral order in which sovereignty ceases to be an obstacle to upholding human rights. This argument will be developed further in Chapter 4 in a discussion of whether human-rights enforcement can be said to constitute a form of moral and intellectual leadership in the developing


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ˇ izˇek also correctly points out that there is a global hegemony. Z relationship between humanitarian intervention and capital, although not only an external one to which his observation is confined: ‘the flipside of the much praised new global ethical politics in which one is allowed to violate state sovereignty on behalf of the violation of human rights . . . is international capital and its strategic interests ˇ izˇek, 1999, p. 77). (Z Noam Chomsky has similarly argued with respect to the NATO intervention in Kosovo that ‘in the case of Turkey the story is different. Washington should most definitely ‘show sympathy’ for the villains responsible for savage ethnic cleansing and other atrocities against the Kurds, surely comparable to Serbian crimes in Kosovo and not carried out under NATO’s bombs’ (Chomsky, 1999a, p. 7). Chomsky pursues his argument concerning selectivity with reference to the crisis in East Timor, which failed to generate a strong response on the part of the US because, according to him, no power interest would be served by intervening in East Timor (1999b), and with reference to the US support and provision of military aid to regimes that in fact violate human rights, such as Turkey and Colombia (2000). Military aid or trade in arms with regimes that abuse human rights is also highlighted by Pilger with reference to British shipments of guns to Pakistan and Indonesia, which the latter allegedly used in carrying out massacres in East Timor (Pilger, 1999a). To sum up, radical critical analyses of humanitarian intervention suffer from the same shortcomings as do the approaches discussed earlier, particularly Realism. Humanitarian intervention is discussed in exclusively state-centric terms and is reduced to American/Western interests. Human rights are examined only as a cover-up for the pursuance of these interests, without attempting to explain their historical origins and development, nor their relationship with global capitalism. Humanitarian intervention is studied in relation to the economy only in terms of empirically observable economic interests achieved by interventions without analysing the internal relationship between the dominant understanding of human rights – as negative rights of individuals – and the global capitalist economy.

2

The War on Terror

The reaction of the academic community to the War on Terror has followed a pattern similar to its discussion of humanitarian interventions of the 1990s: a torrent of policy-oriented and instrumental writings on various technical, organizational or military aspects of interventions


in Afghanistan and Iraq; a large number of studies concerned with their legality and their implications for international law; an employment of just-war theory as a set of parameters to check whether or not the War on Terror can be said to be just; numerous works inspired by the Realist paradigm and concerned with national interests of those involved; and a range of works that interpret the War on Terror as a manifestation of American imperialism. A survey of this literature reveals a very important shortcoming – an absence of studies of the human-rights rhetoric in justifications for the War on Terror. Scholars who do address human-rights issues in the context of the War on Terror focus predominantly on two issues: first, human-rights violations perpetrated by US and British troops during the combat, and especially against prisoners of war and terrorist suspects, as well as a suppression of certain rights and liberties in the West with the adoption of anti-terrorist legislation; and secondly, the question as to whether or not the presence of human-rights justifications makes it legitimate to describe the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as cases of humanitarian intervention. The works in the latter category do acknowledge the use of human rights in making a case for war, but do not problematize this fact except in a strictly legal or formal manner. No attempt is made to examine the implications of this fact for global capitalism; this constitutes the key deficiency of this body of literature. To systematize the analysis of the literature on the War on Terror, a similar typology as that used for the literature on humanitarian intervention will be used, with the following categories: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Strategies and techniques National interests; Legal approaches Just-war theory; Radical critiques; and Human rights.

There are three modifications to this typology compared to the categories employed earlier: first, approaches using just-war theory to analyse the War on Terror are given a category of their own because of their very large number; second, in the discussion of the War on Terror and international law the focus is solely on legal analyses and excludes those that exist in the discipline of IR or concern the notion of sovereignty, its transformations and whether or not these transformations ought or ought not to take place; and a separate category has been


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added devoted to the way the role of human rights in the War on Terror has been dealt with. Strategies and techniques The key practical issue that academics have extensively dealt with is the failure of the coalition forces to develop a coherent postwar reconstruction and state-building policy in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The question that numerous analyses have raised can be summed up as follows: what exactly went wrong in terms of postwar reconstruction, particularly with respect to Iraq, and what needs to be done to for this process to succeed? Some analysts contend that the US and British planners spent most of their efforts on military strategies and neglected the policies of postwar state-building. This argument is made, for example, by Rieff who contends that ‘as much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation’ (Rieff, 2003, p. 32). His argument is echoed by Ferguson who maintains that in planning for the war ‘Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did a brilliant job, but in planning for the peace that would follow, he did a dreadful job’ (Ferguson, 2004, p. 52). When it became clear in 2003, according to Feldman (2004), that the coalition forces had no plan for postwar state-building in Iraq, and that a political vacuum was being created within which the three central constituencies of the old Ottoman and British colonial state would be compelled to contend for primacy, an internal war inevitably erupted. The mistakes in planning for peace in Iraq as well as Afghanistan are also analysed in great detail by Phillips (2005) and Diamond (2005) who both criticize the US administration for such errors in postwar policies as sidelining regional experts and putting inexperienced Pentagon civilians in charge, sidelining the UN on the ground and retaining US dominance over the political transition, and the policies of de-Ba’athification and the abolition of the Iraqi armed forces. A similar argument is made by Chesterman, who observes that a greater UN involvement would have avoided mistakes in Afghanistan (Chesterman, 2002) and Iraq (Chesterman, 2004). The identification of problems with insufficient involvement of the UN in the postwar state-building process in Afghanistan and Iraq has led a number of scholars to call for a greater UN role in this process. Dobbins, for example, notes that before the War on Terror began a widely held perception, especially among Americans, was of inadequate performance


by the UN; this contrasted with the steady improvement in the quality of American leadership in the field of nation-building. However, as US-led efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq encountered serious setbacks, it became necessary to challenge this view and increase the role of the UN in postwar state-building in these two states (Dobbins, 2005, p. 81). Dobbins argues that although the US and UN styles of nation-building are distinguishable, they are also highly interdependent. It is a rare operation in which both are not involved and neither is likely to succeed without the other. So both have much to learn from each other’s experience (p. 101). Talentino reiterates the argument that the perception of UN irrelevance was short-lived and that in the postwar period in Afghanistan and Iraq it is now seen by many as the only body capable of bestowing legitimacy upon the process of reconstruction (Talentino, 2004, p. 330). The UN, according to Talentino, has the practical power to pursue peace and nation-building and although US officials do not like to acknowledge the UN’s importance, they clearly require the organization’s support (p. 331). Berdal also asserts that the suggestion, made repeatedly in the run-up to war in 2003, that the UN was on the verge of irrelevance has turned out to be profoundly misplaced and that the organization needs to play a more important role for the process of state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq to succeed (Berdal, 2004, p. 83; similar arguments are also advanced by Tardy (2004), Byman (2003), and Rathmell (2005)). In addition to increasing the role of the UN, a number of other recommendations have been suggested. Thus, Monshipouri highlights the role of NGOs and the need to develop a better coordination between NGOs, international organizations and the military in the state-building effort in Afghanistan (2003, p. 138). His argument is reiterated by a range of scholars (Roberts and Bradley, 2005; Martin 2000; Sommers, 2000; Reindorp and Wiles, 2001) who point out that during interventions as well as in the post-intervention period, when different entities operate with almost complete organizational independence, they create a ‘coordination nightmare’ (Martin 2000, p. 23) which in turn results in failures, service overlap, inefficiency and waste (Roberts and Bradley, 2005, p. 113). Marsden raises the question of long-term financial aid when he argues that the Afghan government needs international donors to provide it with a definite commitment of funding over a three- to fiveyear period in order to be able to develop a long-term plan of rebuilding education, healthcare and the infrastructure of the country (2003, p. 105). Lock-Pullan emphasizes the need to train US soldiers for more effective postwar reconstruction (2006, p. 394; on this point also see


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Quirk (2006)). Barnette, Eggleston and Webber (2003) call for a democratization of the reconstruction process in Iraq through widespread popular consultations and a maximization of the participation of Iraqis in political and economic processes. Kirk (2004) and AkhmedGhosh (2006) develop a similar argument with respect to the participation and empowerment of women, particularly in Afghanistan. Finally, Giegerich and Wallace call for a greater role for the European Union in international peace enforcement and state rebuilding in general, and in the War on Terror in particular (2004, p. 179). Their argument is supported by Ulriksen (2004) who observes that the failure of US-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq to establish long-term security points to a need for a reappraisal of European capabilities (Ulriksen 2004; see also Sedra, 2006 and Bloed, 2004). As was the case with the technical/instrumental analyses of humanitarian intervention examined above, these writings take for granted military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and problematize them only in a strictly policy-oriented manner. Both the fact that human rights rhetoric was used in justifying these interventions, and the implications of this use for the late-modern GPE, are not discussed.

National interests The Realist analysis of the War on Terror suffers from exactly the same shortcomings as its approach to humanitarian intervention – it separates it from the economy and reduces it to a foreign-policy tool of states aiming to pursue national interests. The role of human rights in justifications given for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq is not analysed. The questions as to what the conditions must be for the dominant conception of justice and freedom to be expressed in terms of individual negative rights, and for them to be used as a justification for these invasions (and the implications of this for the late-modern GPE), are not addressed. The Realist approach to the War on Terror can be summed as follows: do the invasions of Afghanistan, and more importantly, of Iraq, serve the national interests of the Coalition, and particularly the United States? If they do, then what exactly are the gains from these wars? In a letter signed by a group of American Realist scholars in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, Richard Betts, Robert Jervis, John Mearsheimer, Kenneth Waltz, Steven Walt and other prominent signatories expressed their recognition that war is sometimes necessary to ensure US national security and other interests, and that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant; however, they argued that military force should only be used when it


advances US national interests. War with Iraq, according to these scholars, did not meet this standard: Saddam Hussein is a murderous despot, but no one has provided credible evidence that Iraq is cooperating with al-Qaeda. Even if Saddam Hussein acquired nuclear weapons, he could not use them without suffering massive US or Israeli retaliation . . . Even if we win easily, we have no plausible exit strategy. Iraq is a deeply divided society that the United States would have to occupy and police for many years to create a viable state . . . The United States should maintain vigilant containment of Iraq . . . and be prepared to invade Iraq if it threatens to attack America or its allies. That is not the case today (Group of Scholars, 2002). The same position was taken by George F. Kennan, the veteran architect of the theory of containment of Soviet communism, who similarly expressed serious concerns about the post-invasion consequences of the war in Iraq (Kaufman 2002). As Nuruzzaman observes, the Realist opposition to the Iraq war is based on two specific grounds – first, small states have little influence on the balance of power and maintaining a balance of power between major powers is more important; and second, occupation is a hugely costly game, not only in economic and military terms, but also in terms of the serious resistance to the occupation forces from local fighters (Nuruzzaman, 2006, p. 248). Nuruzzaman himself, however, advances an alternative understanding of the war in Iraq. He sees it as the expression of an emergence of a neoconservative, unilateralist turn in US foreign policy. The events of September 11 were an opportune moment for the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, who capitalized on it to realize two objectives: first, to serve as an eye-opener to any future challengers to US dominance in the world; and secondly, to reimpose American leadership on allies in Western Europe and East Asia. In this view, the principal interests that the War on Terror in general, and the US invasion in Iraq in particular, serve include the following: strengthening American defence to support American global leadership; promoting unilateralism in US foreign policy; and effectively dealing with regimes hostile to American interests (Nuruzzaman, 2006, p. 251). Such an assessment of the War on Terror is echoed by Rockmore (2004) who argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have little to do with terrorism and are in fact about securing and increasing the preeminence of the US in the current and future international situation (p. 400). Rockmore argues that what we are witnessing is a case of the most


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powerful nation the world has ever known ‘striking out against real or imagined foes while pursuing its own perceived self-interest’ (p. 401). There is also a group of scholars who have highlighted the factor of oil in the War on Terror, and particularly in relation to the invasion of Iraq, a country which has access to 113 billion barrels, the second largest reserves in the world after those of Saudi Arabia, constituting 11 per cent of the world’s total. Jhaveri (2004), for example, observes that the ‘real motive behind removing Hussein was in order to control Iraq’s oil’ (p. 2). Jhaveri notes that Middle Eastern oil endowment has been one of the central goals of the Project for a New American Century (Ali, 2003) whose members, according to Jhaveri, are the real masterminds behind the Iraq war. For these ‘hawks’, long frustrated with former President Clinton’s lack of military global assertiveness, the September 11 attacks were a timely geopolitical gift for muscling into place their bellicose enterprise. The war in Iraq, according to Jhaveri, provides the United States with ‘ecoliquidity’, that is, a dual and fluid circulation of oil both as an asset to be interchanged with money, and a geoecological form of power, which enables the pursuit of global dominance that the hawks have been seeking (p. 3). Neoconservative geostrategy based upon the idea of US global supremacy is also invoked by Clark (2004) as an explanation for the US invasion. Clark argues that such a strategy could not tolerate any nation, be it France, Russia or China, getting control over Iraqi oil. He observes that had the UN inspectors been allowed to complete their ‘prewar’ inspection, they could have ultimately determined that Iraq was indeed free of weapons of mass destruction. The neoconservatives, however, could not allow such a scenario, which, according to Clark, would mean that the lease contracts and oil exploration rights that Russian, French and Chinese companies held in relation to Iraq’s oil fields could have been legally initiated; lifting UN sanctions would have allowed foreign investment to begin rebuilding and exporting Iraqi’s vast reserves, while simultaneously impeding the ability of major US and UK oil companies to gain access to Iraqi oil, given Saddam’s dislike of US and UK post-1991 foreign policies towards Iraq. Scott (2003) recalls a report from the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy, published in 1997, which addressed the problem of ‘energy security’ for the United States, and which noted ‘the threat of Iraq and Iran’ to the free flow of oil out of the Middle East, along with the more general threat that Saddam Hussein posed to Middle Eastern security. The Bush administration returned to this theme as soon as it took office in 2001 by following the lead of a second report, ‘Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century’; this concluded that the US remained a prisoner of its energy dilemma,


while Saddam Hussein’s Iraq remained a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil into international markets from the Middle East. ‘Therefore,’ the report stated, ‘the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic and political/ diplomatic assessments.’ Scott concludes that the US invasion in Iraq was certainly dictated by these oil considerations and in support of this opinion quotes Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, who stated bluntly that ‘regardless of whether we say so publicly, we will go to war, because Saddam sits at the center of a region with more than 60 per cent of all the world’s oil reserves’ (Scott, 2001). The oil factor as an explanation for the invasion of Iraq is also emphasized by a range of other analysts: Welton observes that war with Iraq satisfied the US oil lobby (2003, p. 641); Pemberton lists a series of benefits that the US oil companies would get from an Iraqi ‘oil bonanza’ (Pemberton, 2003); and Reddy notes that the war in Iraq is an invasion of a country with the second largest reserves of crude oil by the world’s largest consumer of oil (Reddy, 2003). Realists, constrained by their theoretical assumptions (states are the key international actors and units of analysis which compete for power in an anarchic system), advance shallow propositions about the War on Terror which, for the most, are descriptive rather than explanatory or analytical. The fact that a nation-state is inseparable from the capitalist mode of production and is a necessary element in the process of capital accumulation cannot be accommodated into the Realist framework; this examines states from the outside only, that is, only in terms of their foreign policy. The fact is that there develops a contradiction between states that are national units, and the process of capitalist accumulation which is now global; that states are dominated today by highly mobile capital which limits their policy options and forces them to be more and more aggressive internationally; that states seek to support by whatever means their large corporations and help them achieve a monopoly position; and the way states themselves are transformed – all these are missing from the Realist analysis. The Realists observe that states compete for power, but cannot explain this except by a very limited notion of anarchy. In their approach to the War on Terror, what is also missing is any meaningful account of the role of human rights in this war in relation to global capitalism, a shortcoming that this study seeks to redress. Legal approaches The key question addressed by the writings included in this category is whether the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are legal from the point of


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view of international law. In the case of Afghanistan there is a virtually unanimous consensus that given the support that al-Qaeda received from the Taliban regime, and the fact that its training camps were located on Afghan soil, the US attack was an act of self-defence and did not raise legal problems. The Iraqi case, however, has divided international lawyers. There are those who believe that the case made by the US and the UK for war in Iraq was strong. These include Taft and Buchwald (2003), who maintain that the coalition forces were not in breach of international law because both the United States and the international community had a firm basis for using preemptive force in the face of past actions by Iraq and the threat that it posed over a protracted period of time. Preemptive use of force, they maintain, is certainly lawful where, as in the case of Iraq, it represents an episode in an ongoing broader conflict initiated – without question – by the opponent (p. 563). This position is shared by Yoo (2003) who maintains that international law permitted the use of force against Iraq on two independent grounds. First, the Security Council authorized military action against Iraq to implement the terms of the ceasefire that suspended the hostilities of the 1991 Gulf war. Due to Iraq’s material breaches of the ceasefire, established principles of international law – both treaty and armistice law – permitted the US to suspend its terms and to use force to compel Iraqi compliance. Second, international law permitted the use of force against Iraq in anticipatory self-defence because of the threat posed by an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction and in potential cooperation with international terrorist organizations (Yoo, 2003, p. 575). This argument is reiterated by Schmitt (2004) who maintains that a material breach of the 1991 ceasefire in Security Council Resolution 687 released the US and UK from their obligation to refrain from hostilities, thereby reactivating the use of force authorization in Security Council Resolution 678 adopted in 1990. The opposite view is adopted by Falk (2003) who asserts that the facts did not support the case for preemption, as there was neither imminence nor necessity. As a result, the Iraq war seemed, at best, to qualify as an instance of preventive war, but there are strong legal, moral and political reasons to deny both legality and legitimacy to such a use of force. Preventive war is not an acceptable exception to the Charter system, and no effort was made by the US government to claim such a right (p. 598). Franck (2003) is of a similar view; he is alarmed by the fact that the US did not really bother providing a real legal case for its action, but instead tried to develop new jurisprudence: ‘what is remarkable is that


once-obligatory efforts by the aggressor to make a serious effort to stretch law to legitimate state action have given way to a drive to repeal law altogether’ (p. 608). Another legal scholar, Sapiro (2003), similarly doubts the legality of Operation Iraqi Freedom and cautions that creating a doctrine of preventive war like that set up by the US would expand the already controversial justification of anticipatory selfdefence beyond the point where it would be consistent with presentday international law, and would set an inflammatory precedent (Sapiro, 2003, p. 606; also see McGoldrick, 2004). There is also a group of legal scholars who acknowledge the dubious legal nature of the intervention in Iraq but who at the same time claim that international jurisprudence itself needs to change in order to answer new challenges posed by a post-September 11 strategic environment, most notably the development of organized international terrorism. Thus, Wedgwood (2003) asserts that the September 11 terrorist attacks have changed the strategic responsibilities of democratic states. Today, when terror networks are driven by unworldly motivations and give little thought to possible retaliation for terrorist bombings, democratic governments may need to anticipate, rather than respond to, possible attacks (p. 582). A new legal setting permitting such anticipatory measures is therefore necessary. Stromseth (2003) supports this view and argues that both legal rules and the system need refining, so that the law is not seen as a barrier to necessary action, but as a means to enhance global security in the face of emerging threats (p. 629). A similar argument is made by Gardner (2003) who contends that in the face of a terrorist threat current UN members should be allowed to use military force even without Security Council approval to destroy terrorist groups operating on the territory of other members when those states fail to discharge their international legal obligations to suppress them. Armed force should also be used to prevent a UN member from transferring weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups (p. 590). This position is shared by Sofaer (2003) who argues that a more flexible standard for the use of preemptive force is appropriate for situations in which the state from which attacks are anticipated is either unwilling or unable to prevent the attacks, or may even be responsible for them (Sofaer, 2003; for a similar view see Farer, 2003; Brunneé and Toope, 2004). Overall, the body of legal literature on the War on Terror, just like the legal works on humanitarian intervention, approaches it in strictly juridical terms, without attempting to analyse the fact that the War on Terror involved human rights justification and the implications of this for the late-modern GPE.


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Just-war theory As observed above, the development of the practice of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s generated an increased interest in medieval just-war theory. With the War on Terror this interest has grown further. As Welsh remarks, ‘just-war principles, which pertain to both just cause and just conduct, animated much of the commentary on the use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq’ (Welsh, 2004, p. 182). However, the use of this theory, whose problems were outlined above, has not changed. Scholars proceed as they did with respect to humanitarian intervention: they outline the criteria of just-war theory as developed by St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and other scholastics, and then evaluate the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the light of these criteria. If they correspond, the intervention in question is seen as just; if they do not, it is unjust. Without emphasizing again the highly ahistoric nature of such use of just-war theory, a few examples of such approaches will now be examined. Enemark and Michaelsen (2005, pp. 545ff) observe that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was militarily efficient and achieved the swift overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, they ask, was it just? To answer this question they adopt the framework of just-war theory because it is ‘a useful tool’. The authors use six criteria to assess the justice of going to war: just cause, right authority, right intention, reasonable prospect of success, proportionate cause and war as last resort. Among the six criteria the authors establish that only the requirement of right intention seemed to be fulfilled by Operation Iraqi Freedom. The article concludes that the war against Iraq was an ‘unjust invasion’, and that it set a dangerous precedent because states outside the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ may now ‘feel they are morally entitled to act in like fashion, for either the moral and legal rules of war apply to all or they apply to none’. Schwartz (2004, pp. 286ff) begins his analysis by observing that just-war theory holds that just wars ‘must be a last resort, aimed at preserving the territorial integrity and security of a nation under attack, or under threat of an imminent attack’ which, would likely bring either large-scale loss of life or loss of territorial sovereignty in the absence of such a preemptive strike. The invasion of Iraq, according to Schwartz, was not an instance of preemptive war, as claimed by the US, but a case of preventive war; the latter involves a nation attacking a regime that has the potential to develop into a threat to the attacking state. This type of war, Schwartz argues, ‘has never been recognized as moral by the justwar tradition’.


Mellow (2006, pp. 296ff) proceeds in a similar manner but comes to an opposite conclusion: the war in Iraq does satisfy the criteria of just war, in his view. Although Saddam’s regime neither possessed weapons of mass destruction nor was it actively engaged in developing or intending to develop such weapons, the resort to war still met the conditions of just cause, last resort and proportionality. With respect to just cause, it was the ‘gravity of atrocities’ committed by the regime that constituted a sufficient just cause. Concerning the criterion of last resort, Mellow maintains that the war, combined with earlier attempts to target and destabilize the regime, ‘was the only approach that could reasonably be expected to, in the foreseeable future, overthrow the Iraqi regime’, and ‘therefore the last resort criterion was satisfied’. As for proportionality, Mellow asserts that it is the task of the opponents of the war to prove that it was disproportionate, and until such proof is provided we may consider that it was carried out in accordance with the criterion of proportionality. Boyle (2003, pp. 153ff) raises a broader question of whether a war against terrorist networks can ever be just. He argues that although justwar theory developed to govern rules of war among states, we can apply it to cases of polities’ response to terrorist actions by groups that are not themselves polities. Boyle focuses on the following three criteria of just war: right authority, just cause and right intention. Concerning right authority, Boyle argues that the ‘leaders of a sovereign political community have the responsibility, and so the authority, to respond in some way to terrorist acts against their communities’. With respect to just cause, Boyle asserts that ‘the justice of military defense against terrorism arises from the wrongfulness of the terrorist actions of harming innocents’ and ‘the political wrong of using the terror’. Finally, responding to terrorism satisfies the requirement of right intention, provided that the war aim is ‘concrete’, that is ‘the violence is justified only by an ongoing terrorist initiative’, and ‘only the violence needed for precisely that defensive effort is justified’. Here Boyle makes an argument similar to Schwartz’s; only preemptive war, and not preventive war, can be seen as just from the point of view of just-war theory. Other works focus on one particular requirement or aspect of just-war theory. For example, Ruby (2006, pp. 15ff) seeks to explore the way that the requirement of proportionality can be satisfied in practice by providing guidelines for what he terms ‘a moral targeting decision’, that is, a decision ‘in which a senior principal specifically determines whether foreseeable non-combatant and combatant casualty rates are proportional to the necessity of any given objective’. Ruby argues that to ensure moral targeting decisions, ‘national political leaders must suffer the costs


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of monitoring in terms of time and money’, and they must ‘provide not only detailed direction, but also constant oversight to ensure objectives are clear and subordinates carry out directions’. In addition to this, military officers ‘must ensure that their motivations align with those of their principals, and they must ensure that constraining doctrine for planning and executing combat operations is followed’. Once these variables are satisfied, Ruby maintains, ‘moral targeting decisions should be easily attainable’. Proportionality is also addressed by Brown (2003) in the context of the US military campaign in Iraq. His central argument is that policy-makers need to take into account the criterion of proportionality not only before the war, but also during the conflict. Because conflicts may evolve and situations may change, as has been the case in Iraq, the requirement of proportionality has to be re-evaluated continuously. Brown refers to O’Brien who argues that the ‘calculus of proportionality . . . is a continuing one’, and must ‘be reviewed at critical points along the process of waging the war’ (O’Brien 1981, p. 27). With respect to Iraq, Brown argues that ‘it serves admirably to illustrate the need to consider ad bellum proportionality in a continuous fashion’ (Brown, 2003, p. 178, italics in the text) for ‘in a conflict where so much is at stake, and the long-term, destructive force of war can be so severe, the proportionality of using armed force must be reconsidered at every juncture’ (p. 178). O’Driscoll (2006, pp. 416–7) examines the notion of punishment in relation to justwar theory and the War on Terror. In his view, Bush and Blair advanced a number of arguments for the war in Iraq which reflected the idea of punitive war, arguments which resonate with just-war theory, particularly ‘the notion that the prince is the minister of God on earth to execute His wrath upon evildoers’. This, his argument goes, suggests a revivification of certain classical understandings of punishment associated with the tradition of just war, a development that has escaped the attention of the literature, and which has significant implications for practice. According to O’Driscoll, certain modes of conduct are enabled and others restrained by the manner in which we seek to justify our wars; this is most apparent when we consider how framing just-cause arguments in strong, punitive terms diminishes expectations regarding adherence to jus in bello norms. O’Driscoll observes that this tendency towards a denial of jus in bello is evident in much of the discourse surrounding the war in Iraq and the War on Terror in general; it also appears in respect of the employment of dubious means of war, such as ‘coercive intelligence collection’ in various detainment facilities or the deployment of white phosphorus in centres of enemy activity such as Fallujah.


The key shortcoming of this body of literature is its profoundly ahistorical nature. No attention is paid to the social context within which just-war criteria were developed, to the fact that the writings of medieval theologians and ecclesiastics regularly referred to in these studies were part of a feudal order and its ideology, and to the reality that today we live in a totally different setting characterized by capitalist relations of production. The role of morality, and of ideas of justice and freedom defined in terms of individual negative rights in the context of global capitalism are not only not addressed but immediately denied by such analyses. Radical critiques Common to the analyses included in this category is that stated goals (destruction of terrorist networks, promotion of democracy and human rights, etc.) are interpreted as part of a cover-up for US interests and that country’s desire to create a ‘global empire’. Like the Realists discussed earlier, radical authors identify oil interests as an explanation for the War on Terror; they prefer to call these interests ‘imperial’, and add a few other elements to their critique – the selectivity of Western responses (an argument of a ‘why not North Korea?’ type), the hypocrisy of the US and British governments that claim to promote human rights but in reality suppress them, both at home and abroad, and civilian casualties that result from ‘liberation wars’. Such analyses are characterized by similar deficiencies to those that refer to humanitarian intervention as a strategy used by the West to ensure its imperial expansion. First, the concepts of ‘imperialism’, ‘empire’ or ‘hegemony’ are used in strictly behavioural terms, to mean the intentions or capabilities of agents (such as the US or even in a narrower sense, the Bush administration). ‘Imperialism’ is not examined as an outcome of capitalist production relations – which is expansionist by definition because it is driven by a constant need to valorise capital, which in turn requires markets and resources – but in a limited sense of the economic interests of states. In other words, the relationship between the policies of states and the economy is seen as contingent and external. Concerning the issue of human-rights enforcement, some references are made to the fact the US and the UK used the notion of human rights and democracy to justify the War on Terror, but these justifications are dismissed as a fig leaf for their imperialist intentions. There is no explanation as to what must be the case for the US and the UK to be able to use these notions in the way they do, and for these ideas to be defined in terms of political and civil liberties, and what the


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implications are of this for global capitalism. Furthermore, a number of such studies, even if implicitly, end up presenting al-Qaeda as some kind of a counter-hegemonic project against US imperialism (for example, Chomsky 2001; Cockburn, 2001). As Cottee observes in this respect, for these analysts the September 11 terror assault was a ‘wholly intelligible riposte for the crimes and injustices of American imperial statecraft’ and ‘far from being the ‘‘cowardly’’ or ‘‘crazed’’ assassins of Western civilization, the perpetrators were in fact the heroic adversaries of the world’s self-proclaimed superpower’ (2005, p. 122). For Stephen Shalom and Michael Albert of the ZNet archive the US invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was not ‘in Washington’s hip pocket anymore’, because ‘underneath Iraq is the world’s second largest reserve of oil, which the US government would like to control, particularly given the instability of Saudi subservience’, and because the US administration wanted to send ‘a loud message’ to those who would want to challenge the ‘American Empire’ (Shalom and Albert, 2002). Panitch similarly asserts that the American War on Terrorism has become the cloak for larger strategic imperial visions: the assertion of the right to maximum American unilateralism in order to penetrate and restructure other states, so as to effect the extension and consolidation of the American imperium in its political and military as well as its economic and cultural dimensions; the suppression thereby of many progressive domestic forces in other states, often in the name of spreading democracy and human rights; and the assertion of the American state’s exclusive claim to the legitimate use of weapons of mass destruction as the ultimate means of violence for policing the global capitalist order (Panitch, 2003, p. 233). Klare, another critique of American imperialism, also states that oil, while not prompting the American invasion of Iraq, ‘weighed in heavily with many senior administration officials’, who ‘all shared one basic assumption: that, when occupied by American forces, Iraq would pump ever increasing amounts of petroleum from its vast and prolific reserves’ (Klare, 2005; see also Klare 2005b). Chomsky characteristically gives the following explanation for the war against Iraq: ‘The real reason for the invasion, surely, is that Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, very cheap to exploit, and lies right at the heart of the world’s major hydrocarbon resources, what the State Department 60 years ago described as a stupendous source of strategic power. The issue is not


access, but rather control (and for the energy corporations, profit). Control over these resources gives the US ‘‘critical leverage’’ over industrial rivals, to borrow Zbigniew Brzezinski’s phrase, echoing George Kennan when he was a leading planner and recognized that such control would give the US ‘‘veto power’’ over others’ (Chomsky, 2006). In an earlier publication Chomsky makes the rather simplistic argument that we cannot use the term ‘War on Terror’ because those who conduct it have committed crimes in the past and are terrorists themselves: ‘The US is one of the leading terrorist states in the world. The guys who are in charge right now . . . destroyed Central America. They killed a million and a half people in southern Africa. We can go on through the list. So there’s no ‘‘War on Terror’’’ (Chomsky, 2002). Here Chomsky seems to forget, as do many other contributors to the ZNet archive, the fact that the terrorist attackers of September 11 did commit horrible crimes. Other ZNet contributors follow a similar line: Robert Fisk draws an analogy between the US and the Roman Empire (Fisk, 2006); Tariq Ali speaks of the US empire and the US colonial rule of Iraq (Ali, 2005); Walden Bello hopes for an imperial overstretch of the US in Iraq which would lead to a collapse of the American empire (Bello, 2004); John Pilger refers to the War on Terror as a euphemism for the accelerating imperial ambitions of the United States (Pilger, 2002); George Leaman states that the War on Terror is part of a US ‘imperialist project’ to secure continuing American supremacy on a global scale over the long term (Leaman, 2004, p. 234); David Seddon argues that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq constitute the US imperial attempt to reconfigure the world (Seddon, 2003, p. 193); Joseph Schwartz maintains that the war against Iraq is an ideological assertion of the right of the American Empire to use brutal force to restructure the globe in its own image (Schwartz, 2004, p. 297). In short, such analyses suffer from methodological individualism and ontological reductionism; they pay no attention to social structures and reduce everything to US interests. The analyses are also profoundly ahistorical; they make no attempt to enquire into the history of the concept of human rights, which these authors examine exclusively in terms of US foreign policy. There is also an absolute failure to take into account an internal relationship between human rights and their enforcement on the one hand, and the global capitalist economy on the other. Human rights The fact that the US and UK governments have used human rights as one of their justifications for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has been


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noted by a number of scholars, but the implications of this have remained unexplored. The analysis of human rights centres around violations during the war, particularly in terms of civilian casualties and the treatment of prisoners of war, as well as at home, in terms of the suppression of certain liberties and rights under anti-terror legislation. There are also studies that seek to establish whether the presence of a human-rights rhetoric in justifications for war, and the humanitarian outcomes of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, allow us to define the two operations as ‘humanitarian interventions’. Overall, once again we may observe the lack of analyses that link the invocation of human rights in the War on Terror with the development of the practice of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s; these are also not linked to analyses of a larger moral discourse which defines justice and freedom in terms of individual negative rights, and the implications of this for global capitalism are not examined. Herold (2002), for example, observes that the first 20 weeks of US bombing of Afghanistan resulted in between 3,100 and 3,500 civilians killed directly, another 4,000–6,500 civilians injured, many requiring prostheses, and an estimated 20,000 Afghan refugees dying of hunger, disease and cold in camps (Herold, 2002; see also Stele, 2002 and Conetta, 2002). Mertus and Hallward (2005) argue that when evaluating the pros and cons of such operations as the war against Iraq, ‘policymakers must consider the costs of the planned intervention in humanrights terms and must weigh these against the benefits’ (p. 99). In the case of Iraq, such an assessment was clearly not made because, as the two authors observe, US strategy ‘involved attacking Baghdad, a crowded city of five to six million civilians, all of whom would be affected drastically by this incursion’ and included the idea at the base of Pentagon war plans of ‘destroying everything that makes life in Baghdad livable’ (p. 99). Das (2005) starts her analysis by observing that the rhetoric of human rights was used by the Bush administration to justify the war in Iraq as ‘an obfuscation to divert attention from the fact that there were no stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in Iraq that could have justified the war’ (p. 113). This leads her to raise the following questions: ‘What is happening to democracy in the West?’ and ‘What is the fate of human rights here [in the West]?’ (p. 114). The analysis proceeds to an examination of the US Patriot Act, enacted on 26 October 2001, which included measures for enhancing domestic surveillance and security, and the military order issued by President Bush on 13 November 2001, which allowed for indefinite detention and trial by military


commissions rather than by military tribunals. Das cautions that this order brought into being a new entity – that of detainees – which lies outside the realm of both ordinary law and military law. According to Das, ‘states of emergency are productive of new entities that are in great danger of becoming normalized over a period of time’ (p. 115). The same issue is raised by Warbrick (2005) who states that the ‘observance of international legal standards of human rights should be an essential feature of any response to terrorism, even a war against terrorism’ (p. 989). This argument is echoed by von Schorlemer (2003) who observes that ‘there is a dangerous tendency to legitimize human-rights violations under the pretext of combating terrorism’, but, according to her, any effective action against terrorism ‘must respect international human rights standards and make use of existing legal mechanisms if derogations are seen as indispensable’ (p. 265). Joyner (2004) contends that in their response to the September 11 attacks the US and its allies must balance the rights of individuals with state security, and if this does not happen, ‘then those who would seek to damage freedom and democracy through acts of terrorism will have achieved a far greater success in the long run than what occurred on September 11’ (Joyner, 2004, p. 254; see also Neuman, 2003). Adams, Balfour and Reed (2006) focus on abuses of human rights at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and other sites, including Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The core of their argument consists in demonstrating the need to ‘punish the perpetrators of abuses and better train their replacements, as well as to think more deeply about the contradictions and challenges of the way we govern ourselves in the context of the global War on Terror’ (p. 692). The abuse of prisoners‘ rights is also analysed by Brower (2004), who highlights the damaging nature of these abuses for the international promotion of human rights in general, and for US credibility as a guardian of human rights in particular. He argues that in 2001, the United States maintained the image of a progressive, law-based society that became the victim of a treacherous terrorist attack. In 2003, the United States expected to project the image of a liberator, toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein. Today, the world associates the United States with the image of a hooded prisoner, standing on a box, attached to wires, waiting to die. Roth (2005) observes that the Bush administration’s use of torture and inhumane treatment at such facilities as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay has undermined one of the most basic global standards as to how governments can treat people under their control. Repairing the damage done to global standards, according to Roth, will require launching a


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genuinely independent investigation to identify those responsible and hold them accountable (Roth, 2005; also see Kettl, 2004). In another publication Roth addresses the question of whether the Iraqi war can be seen as an instance of humanitarian intervention. Roth argues that a threshold test of a humanitarian intervention is whether the intervention is necessary to stop ongoing or imminent mass slaughter. Although that test, he contends, might have been passed at the time of the 1988 genocide against the Kurds, there was no ongoing or imminent mass slaughter in Iraq in March 2003. This is decisive in undermining claims that the invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian intervention (Roth, 2006, p. 84). The question of whether the war against Iraq can be defined as an instance of humanitarian intervention is also addressed by Bellamy (2004). He observes that after the intervention both the American and British governments have relied on a post factum justification that the invasion was legitimate because the world is a ‘better place’ without Saddam Hussein. This, according to Bellamy, raises the important question of whether it is the ostensibly humanitarian ‘outcome’ of the intervention or the humanitarian motivations of the interveners that legitimizes the act of war (p. 217). Relying on just-war arguments, Bellamy argues that a truly humanitarian intervention is a war waged with humanitarian intentions (pp. 225–9), a criterion that the war in Iraq fails to satisfy. Winston (2005) advances a similar view. He argues that despite the fact that the US-led war against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq achieved humanitarian outcomes, we still cannot see it as a case of humanitarian intervention; before the intervention, there was no humanitarian emergency amounting to genocide, nor was there ethnic cleansing, which, according to Winston, are the preconditions for humanitarian intervention (p. 48). Chesterman (2004) asks a similar question in the context of Afghanistan. He observes that there was a shift in justifications for military action in Afghanistan, from reprisal, to selfdefence, to a War on Terror, and finally to a more general war against evil itself (p. 174). This means, according to Chesterman, that the war in Afghanistan is distinct from the traditional conception of humanitarian intervention, ‘but the politics bear suggestive similarities’ (p. 175). Operation Enduring Freedom, Chesterman maintains, like most of the incidents claimed as humanitarian intervention, in fact displayed a range of intentions – some clearly genuine, some merely asserted, others claimed after the fact. However, what is important is a recognition on the part of the participating states, and particularly the US, that to be effective, intervention cannot be purely military in character but has to involve stabilization and reconstruction efforts. This, according to


Chesterman, gives legitimacy to a military adventure undertaken for partly humanitarian reasons; the case of Afghanistan may therefore, at least in part, qualify as a case of humanitarian intervention (p. 175). The analysis of human rights in relation to the War on Terror has one key shortcoming; human-rights justifications by Coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are not analysed in the context of the late-modern GPE and particularly with reference to global capitalism. The concept of human rights is, for the most part, taken for granted. No attempt is made to examine its historical origins – which are inseparable from the development of capitalism – and nor is there adequate analysis of its development, which has taken place in a dialectical relationship with capitalist relations of production.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was two-fold: first, to demonstrate the inadequacies and shortcomings of existing analyses; and secondly, to examine the nature of a causal relationship between theory and practice, between the practice of human-rights enforcement and what academics say about it. Two major problems were identified: reductionism and a lack of a historical analysis. The reductionism of the reviewed approaches operates at two levels: methodological and ontological. Methodological reductionism manifests itself in what is often referred to as ‘methodological individualism’, that is, reducing explanations of social phenomena to the properties, interests or capabilities of agents and totally ignoring the role of the social structures within which agents operate and which play a causal role in shaping agents’ behaviour. As we have seen, studies of human-rights enforcement examine the practice in terms of the foreign policies of the states involved and of their explicit or hidden motives. No reference is made to the structure of the late-modern GPE within which states interact, and to what the conditions must have been for a global moral discourse to develop the way it has, that is, for justice and freedom to be defined in terms of individual negative rights, a view that lies at the core of human-rights enforcement. The failure to address these questions is directly related to the second aspect of reductionism – ontological reductionism. This results in an examination of human-rights enforcement in isolation from the economy, which sees it in exclusively political, legal, or military terms, with no conception of a relationship with global capitalism.


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It was also seen that the existing studies are profoundly ahistorical. In the case of technical-instrumental analyses, a historical approach to the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement is simply not attempted. In the case of legal studies, history is revisited only to ascertain the existence of similar practices in the past, with no attempt to explain them. Realists argue that states have always behaved the way they do today, namely pursuing their selfish interests at the expense of other states. Changes that the state-form has undergone, as well as transformations in the social context, are simply removed from the analysis. Among those who use just-war theory, contemporary humanitarianism is falsely seen as a linear evolution from medieval practices to modern humanitarian wars; this completely ignores transformations in the social context and the fact that just-war theory was part of a feudal ideology, whereas modern humanitarianism is part of an ideology specific to capitalism. History also poses significant problems to radical scholars; their approach is similar to that of the Realists, except that in addition to the concept of ‘national interest’ they employ the concept of ‘empire’. The history of humanitarian intervention, and the roots of the notion of individual rights which is at the core of contemporary humanrights enforcement, are simply ignored. As regards the second objective this chapter sought to achieve, namely, to discuss the relationship between the phenomenon of human rights enforcement and the way it is studied in academic literature, the analysis of the literature demonstrates that academic studies take for granted the appearance of separation of the phenomenon of humanrights enforcement from the functioning of a global economy. First, they do not problematize the fact that a developing global moral discourse in general, and the practice of human-rights enforcement in particular, advance values and ideals that are congruent with the functioning of global capitalism. Secondly, they fail to question the fact that this moral discourse privileges instances of human suffering from civil and political causes over suffering brought about by the functioning of the global economy. These shortcomings, in turn, have important implications for practice; namely, they contribute to a process of objectification and naturalization of global capitalism. Academic literature on human-rights enforcement is therefore part of this moral global discourse, part of practice, and it inevitably plays a role in a further construction of freedom and justice in terms of respect for individual negative rights which is not only compatible with capitalism, but is in fact directly related to its historic emergence and development.

2 Ideology and the History of Human Rights Enforcement

Introduction One of the deficiencies of the existing literature on post-Cold War human-rights enforcement identified in the previous chapter was its failure to approach this phenomenon historically. As we saw in Chapter 1, available accounts of the history of humanitarian use of force are predominantly descriptive; some of them, particularly those that involve the use of just-war theory, end up presenting it as a linear evolution from the religious humanitarianism of Middle Ages, through to humanitarianism as an exception to the rule of state sovereignty codified by the Peace of Westphalia, through to human rights-based humanitarianism as an exception to the UN Charter. This chapter will offer a different historical account of human-rights enforcement; it is an account which will historicize its development as opposed to offering a descriptive reporting, and will discuss it in relation to changes in the social context. It will show how transformations in social structures, particularly in the relations of production, have led to changes in the underlying assumptions of humanitarianism and how these assumptions have impacted back upon their respective social structures. In short, it will show the differences between humanitarian actions in terms of their causal relations with their social contexts in different historical epochs. An historical analysis will be developed using the notion of ‘ideology’ as a critical concept, or ideology in the ‘negative sense’ as Larrain describes it (Larrain, 1983). Used in this way the concept of ideology refers to ideas which express reality inadequately or distort it, but which do so not as a result of some deliberate political or class project, but because social practice presents itself to the participants in such a way as 72


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to encourage inadequate or incomplete interpretations. The concept of ideology in the negative sense will help us see profound differences between medieval humanitarianism and the modern practice of humanrights enforcement. This chapter will demonstrate how the medieval just-war tradition, based on religious solidarity, advanced a view of justice which was an integral part of the feudal social order, characterized by surplus extraction based on relations of personal and juridical dependence and carried out by means of politico-juridical coercion. The unequal relations between feudal lords and servants were cemented by a religious interpretation; that is, they were seen as an outcome of an incontrovertible divine will. This ideology was shared by both dominant and subordinate classes; it cannot be reduced to a political project by feudal lords to sustain their dominant position over serfs. Religion in the feudal society was therefore an ideology that helped to reproduce relations of inequality and domination. The humanitarianism of St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Innocent VI and other theologians and ecclesiastics was wholly premised on a religious interpretation of justice and just wars. It also reproduced the idea of the divine right of monarchs because it saw these rulers as God’s deputies on earth who could use force to punish sinners. In this sense it was part of the existing ideology and inevitably contributed to the reproduction of a divine interpretation of feudal social relations of inequality and power. In addition to this internal relation between justwar theory and feudalism, there were also occasional contingent ways in which this tradition played a causal role in respect to feudal society; most notable of these were crusades authorized by the Church. This further reinforced the role of religion in interpreting social relations as part of a divine plan and also contributed to the political power of the Church. The development of capitalism and a transformation of the method of surplus extraction from one carried out by politico-juridical means into one performed in the realm of the market by economic means such as a wage-labour relation gradually rendered political and legal inequality unnecessary for surplus to be extracted. This made possible the political emancipation of individuals and the eventual equality of their political and civil rights, with relations of exploitation and inequality now being shifted to the market. This process was accompanied by a development of a different ideology in the negative sense, namely, the appearance of individual freedom and equality which, in fact, is purely political and not economic. This ideology gradually penetrated the doctrine of just war and profoundly transformed its underlying assumptions, from


theological justifications for wars into justifications expressed in terms of individual rights. Beginning with Hugo Grotius, the 17th-century Dutch jurist and theorist of international law, the doctrine of just war gradually became integral to a new ideology specific to capitalism which defined freedom and justice in terms of individual negative rights and which has since then developed through a dialectical relationship with capitalism. In addition to being a part of the ideology of capitalism, the doctrine of just war expressed in terms of individual rights and freedoms also played a contingent causal role in the process of the international expansion of capital; it was used, among other arguments, as a justification for European colonial conquests. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued that the principle of non-intervention did not apply to uncivilized (meaning tyrannical) societies (Mill, 1859) and it was therefore not only legal but just to use force in order to transform them. With the development of the notion of human rights after the end of the Second World War, humanitarian intervention came to be understood as the protection of fundamental human rights, meaning the negative rights of individuals, thereby perpetuating its underlying ideological assumptions about justice and freedom. However, these values and the practice of humanitarian intervention were constrained by absolute interpretations of the notion of state sovereignty and a development of a Cold War ‘geo-political straightjacket’ which privileged considerations of international stability, especially in the light of a nuclear threat, over other values. This made humanitarian intervention a very rare occurrence according to some (for example, Wheeler, 2000a), or a completely nonexistent practice, according to others (for example, Hilpold, 2001). A doctrine of humanitarian intervention nevertheless developed and those few instances deemed to have taken place generated a widespread debate and a growth in supporters of humanitarian intervention, as well as opponents of it. In these debates both sides referred to humanitarian intervention as a practice of enforcement of fundamental human rights; this made a certain contribution to the development of the concept of human rights (Wheeler, 2000a), particularly the Western version that refers to the negative liberties of individuals. This process played a role in the international development of ideology and thereby was related to international capitalism; during the Cold War the Western capitalist states, led by the United States, presented themselves as the ‘free world’ in opposition to Communist societies, led by the Soviet Union. The essential element of this notion of freedom was respect for the negative rights of individuals. The ideological association of freedom and justice


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with respect for individual negative rights, which is now becoming hegemonic, therefore developed in this period – and the assumptions that now underpin humanitarian intervention were part of this ideology. In this period important foundations were also laid for the post-Cold War globalization of both capitalism and this ideology of freedom and justice, meaning respect for fundamental human rights, that is, the civil and political liberties of individuals. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first focuses on the feudal order, its ideology rooted in a religious interpretation of society and the way just-war humanitarianism, as part of this ideology, contributed to the reproduction of the feudal order. The second comprises an examination of the development of a new ideology with the rise of capitalism, an ideology of individual freedom and individual natural rights which amounted to political emancipation only and naturalization of the relations of exploitation and inequality in the market. The works of Hobbes, Locke and Kant were central to the development of the notion of individual natural rights; it will be demonstrated how their arguments are ideological and how they embody social assumptions characteristic of capitalism. In the third section we will see how, with the development of capitalism, the nature of humanitarianism was transformed with the development of a new ideology of les droits de l’homme or ‘the rights of man’. This section deals with what is usually referred to by scholars as the ‘pre-Charter period’. In the final section the development of humanitarian intervention in the so-called ‘post-Charter period’, stretching from 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989, is examined; in this period humanitarian intervention became defined as the use of force to protect fundamental human rights.

1

Feudalism, the ideology of divine right and just war

The pre-capitalist feudal structure of production was based on the personal and juridical dependence of producers on those appropriating the surplus of their labour; surplus-extraction was carried out by politicojuridical means. It was a society dominated by the land and a natural economy, in which neither labour nor the products of labour were commodities, as they would be in capitalism. The immediate producer – the peasant – was united to the means of production – the land – by a specific social relationship. The literal formula of this relationship was provided by the legal definition of serfdom – glebae adscripti or ‘bound to the earth’; serfs had juridically restricted mobility (Anderson, 1996,


p. 147). The peasants who occupied and tilled the land were not its owners; agrarian property was privately controlled by a class of feudal lords, who extracted a surplus from the peasants by means of extraeconomic coercion which took the form of labour-service, payment in kind or money (Hindness and Hirst, 1975, p. 223). Its result was a juridical amalgamation of economic exploitation with political authority – property was ‘politically constituted’, as Brenner (1993) puts it. As Laclau sums it up, the feudal mode of production is one in which the productive process operates according to the following pattern: the economic surplus is produced by a labour force subject to extra-economic compulsion; the economic surplus is privately appropriated by someone other than the direct producers; and property in the means of production remains in the hands of the direct producer (Laclau, 1977, p. 35). The feudal lord in his turn would often be the vassal of a feudal superior, and the chain of such dependent tenures linked to military service would extend upwards to the highest peak of the system – the monarch. Typical intermediary links in such a feudal hierarchy between simple lordship and suzerain monarchy – particularly in the early medieval epoch – were the castellany, barony, county or principality. In such a system political sovereignty was never focused in a single centre but was divided into particularist zones with overlapping boundaries, and with no universal centre of competence. The functions of the state were disintegrated in a vertical allocation downwards, at each level of which political and economic relations were integrated (Anderson, 1996, p. 148). There were no secular sovereign states in Europe; instead there were diverse Christian political communities which were seen as comprising a greater family of a Christian commonwealth (Boucher, 1998, p. 204). Political sovereignty in the feudal order was characterized by parcellization, and the existence of ill-defined entities and small principalities owing allegiance, ultimately, to the Pope. The feudal order was therefore an order of highly unequal class relations and involved the direct political exploitation of producers. Such an arrangement had an ideology in the negative sense which helped to sustain it; this ideology was constituted by a religious view of society, that is, a perception of society as having a divine origin and purpose. Society was viewed as an organism with each individual and each class performing a specific function ascribed by God. Each member of society was seen as having his/her own role; each must, therefore, receive the means suited to their function, and must claim no more. As a philosophy of society it attempted to spiritualize the material realm by


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incorporating it into a divine universe (Tawney, 1990, pp. 35–6). As Larrain puts it, in feudalism ideology assumes a religious form; the justification of personal dependence is found in a sacred order which is revealed by God and which consequently cannot be altered by man. Personal dependence upon, and loyalty to, the landlord is spontaneously expressed in the ideological submission to God, from which all subordination is modelled (Larrain, 1983, p. 38). Such a view of the existing relations of power and inequality as the outcome of a divine will was not a result of a deliberate policy by feudal lords to sustain their dominant position; it was shared by both lords and their servants. ‘The Christian accepted a world in which he was born and in which he lived, with its customs and duties’ (‘‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’’)’ (Scott, 1934, p. 173). As an old English hymn had it, ‘The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate’ (cited in Barrett, 1994, p. 253). The ideology, neverthless, inevitably served the interests of the feudal lords who benefited from the structure of feudal relations of production. There has developed a general consensus among scholars that the origins of the modern doctrine of humanitarian intervention go back to the writings of St Augustine on the issue of just wars in the fifth century, whose ideas were revived by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and laid the ground for a more general debate on what constitutes a just war (Brownlie, 1981; Fonteyne, 1974; Abiew, 1999; Nardin, 2002; Fixdal and Smith, 1998). Analysts then usually proceed to the post-Westphalian development of the doctrine, referring to such authorities as Grotius, Vattel, Pufendorf and others, and then move on to state practice in the 19th century, which they see as providing the first examples of modern humanitarian interventions. In what follows, such an evolutionary and descriptive approach will be questioned; the continuity it presents obscures important changes that humanitarianism underwent as capitalism replaced feudalism. In existing historical accounts, what remains hidden is the relationship between humanitarianism and the relations of production; this oversight is in part responsible for a general failure of scholars to study the relationship between contemporary human-rights enforcement and global capitalism. In medieval Europe, Christians lived in political communities and followed their rules, but they also had another world, a spiritual world.


While their actions had to conform to the laws of the society in which they lived, they also could not be at variance with religious principles (Hill, 1978; Tawney, 1990). There would rarely be a conflict between the two claims to obedience, but if Christian duty did clash with the duty of the citizen, there was the question of which one should prevail. For example, religion prohibited killing – ‘Thou shall not kill’ – but this rule was contradicted by the existence of capital punishment in every community. The resolution of such contradictions lay with the Church whose judgment in this case was that the taking of life was only permissible in the redress of a wrong or as punishment for a crime. In the case of waging a war the same dilemma applied and a solution to it was not an easy one for a Christian. To some, the Christian morality of forgiveness, piety, love and self-sacrifice seemed to be incompatible with violence or the use of force, and the New Testament appeared to confirm this: ‘Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt from him either’ (Luke, 6:29); ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged’ (Luke, 6: 37); ‘Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two’ (Matthew, 5: 41). The early Christian church leader, Tertullian (155–230), for example, said that Christians do not have to right to engage in military service because to do so would go against the word of Christ: Do we believe that a human sacrament may supersede a Divine one, and that a man may pledge his faith to another lord after Christ? And renounce father and mother and all that are nearest to him, whom the Law teacheth should be honoured and loved next to God, whom the Gospel also hath in like manner honoured, only not valuing them more than Christ? Shall it be lawful for him to deal with the sword, when the Lord declareth that he that useth the sword shall perish by the sword? And shall the son of peace act in battle, whom it will not befit even to go to law? Shall he administer bonds and imprisonment, and tortures, and punishments, who may not avenge even his own injuries (Tertullian, 1842, p. 176). Many Roman soldiers refused to perform their duties after adopting Christianity and opted for persecution and death rather than military service which, in their view, was incompatible with Christian faith. For example, in 298, during the reign of Emperor Diocletian, St Marcellus the Centurion declared at this pagan emperor’s birthday celebration: ‘I serve Jesus Christ the eternal King. I will no longer serve your emperors and I scorn to worship your gods of wood and stone, which are deaf and


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dumb idols.’ At his trial he said that it was ‘not right for a Christian man, who serves the Lord Christ, to serve in the armies of the world’ (quoted in Chu, 2004, p. 323). Because of his stand, he was executed. Three years before this, Maximilian of Numidia, 21 years old and subject to military service, had refused to be inducted for much the same reason. ‘I cannot fight for this world,’ he said. ‘I tell you, I am a Christian’ (Vanderpol, 1911, pp. 24–5). He too was executed. However, with St Augustine (354–430) there developed a view that there exist wars which do not go against the Christian faith, because they are wars that God Himself orders in order to punish those who have violated His laws. This is precisely the definition that Augustine gives to the concept of just war: a war that God Himself ordains (Eppstein, 1935, p. 74). In his introduction to a collection of Augustine’s writings Eppstein observes that the saint laid the foundations of a doctrine which developed throughout the medieval period without substantial modifications, most notably, in terms of ‘his insistence upon the direct intervention of God to ordain wars’ (p. 65). This is a crucial issue for the understanding of the just-war theory in medieval times and for contrasting it with contemporary humanitarian wars. There is, indeed, a major difference between defining a war in terms of God’s will and in terms of individual negative rights, and it lies not so much in the justifications themselves, but in their implications for the social context within which wars take place. Thus, Augustine was writing in a period when the beleagured Roman Empire was suffering from barbarian invasions. Faced with destruction and violence, and with the fact that the Empire was falling apart, Augustine set out to justify military action undertaken by the emperor against the barbarians to protect the state of Rome. In his writings Augustine is aware of the arguments that any military action is incompatible with the Christian faith, seeks to reconcile Christianity and wars by showing that the latter are not only not prohibited by God, but are in fact part of a divine will. In Contra Faustum Augustine attacks Faustus, a member of a Manichean sect to which he had himself belonged, for accusing the Old Testament of immorality and impiety by praising Moses and the people of Israel for conquering the Promised Land. He says that people should not be ‘surprised or horrified by the wars made by Moses’, for ‘in these he followed the divine will, not in anger but in obedience’, ‘nor did God rage when He commanded those wars: but He gave what was due to those that had earned it and put fear into them that deserved it’ (Eppstein, 1935, p. 69). To justify his assertion Augustine argues that it is not wars themselves that are


condemned by the New Testament, but unjust wars – that is, wars in which other than just goals are sought, wars that are conducted in a cruel and violent manner, or that are ordered by inappropriate authority. Augustine here develops the three fundamental criteria of just war – just cause, proportionality and legitimate authority. The desire for harming, the cruelty of avenging, an unruly and implacable animosity, the rage of rebellion, the lust of domination and the like – these are the things which are to be blamed in war: and often to punish these things justly wars are waged by the good against those who resist with violence . . . by God’s will and at some legitimate command (p. 69, emphasis added). The natural order of mortal things, ordained for peace, demands that the authority for making war and inflicting punishments should rest with the ruler. In obeying warlike commands soldiers should have an eye to peace and the common good. War begun at God’s command is waged justly in order to frighten or break down or subjugate human pride: it is not waged for human cupidity, it cannot be contrary to the incorruptible God or to His Saints. . . . Nor has anyone power over soldiers except him to whom power is given from above. There is no power except from the command of God (p. 70, emphasis added). The goal of a just war must therefore be peace, and it must be waged by a legitimate authority, meaning a ruler whose power is the result of divine will. Augustine effectively lays foundations for a theory of divine right of monarchs, which would be one of the key characteristics of medieval societies. Augustine was certainly not the first to advance such a view of political authority. However, his writings played an important role and exercised a very significant influence throughout the Middle Ages. As Haggenmacher notes, proclaimed by Saint Paul, the view that a monarch appears as an instrument of divine justice, was developed by several Fathers ‘most notably Saint Augustine’ (Haggenmacher, 1983, p.20). Having established the criteria for a just war, Augustine returns to his initial objective, namely, the protection of the Empire against barbarian invasions; he asserts that: ‘There was founded the State of Rome, through which it pleased God to subdue the whole world and to pacify it within a single political and legal society’ (Eppstein, p. 74). The protection of such a society willed by God becomes a legitimate reason for waging a war.


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The foundations laid by Augustine constituted the reference point for subsequent writings on war by medieval theologians and theorists; these included Saint Isidore (560–636), archbishop of Seville, who added to Augustine’s criteria of just war a requirement of formal declaration (Brie`re, 1938, p. 27); Saint Yves of Chartres (1040–1116) who propagated Augustine’s teachings, including his ideas about just war (Regout, pp. 47–8); and Gratian, a 12th-century canon lawyer from Bologna, whose attempt to systematize Augustine’s views on just war was the most elaborate one before Thomas Aquinas. In his Decretals, and particularly in Causa XXIII, Gratian states that ‘it is not a sin to serve as a soldier’ and that ‘soldiers can please God with warlike arms’, for they can wage a just war willed by God (Eppstein, 1935, p. 81). He further maintains that a just war must be formally declared, and must be waged for a just cause, which may include the following: to regain what has been stolen; to repel an attack of enemies; and to defend the fatherland from barbarians. ‘With the true servants of God,’ he writes, ‘even wars are pacific as they are entered upon not through cruelty or greed and have as their object peace, the repression of the wicked and the deliverance of the good (Eppstein, 1935, p. 89). In addition to this, Gratian puts forward the argument employed to justify crusades, namely, that to fight the infidels is also a just cause: ‘The enemies of the Church are to be coerced by war’ and ‘whoever dies in battle against the infidels is worthy to enter into the heavenly Kingdom’ (Eppstein, 1935, p. 82). Thomas Aquinas (1226–1274) developed the doctrine further. Following Augustine, he argues that a war to be just must satisfy three requirements. ‘In the first place,’ he states, ‘the authority of the prince, by whose order the war is undertaken’ (Eppstein, 1935, p. 83). For Aquinas, just as it was for Augustine, the authority of the prince has a divine origin and purpose, for ‘according to the word of the Apostle, ‘‘the Prince beareth not the sword in vain for he is the minister of God to execute His vengeance against him who doeth evil’’ ’ (p. 83). ‘In the second place,’ he continues, ‘there must be a just cause’ and then quotes Augustine’s argument that a just war is a war that avenges injuries and that it is ordained by God Himself (p. 84). ‘In the third place,’ according to Aquinas, ‘it is necessary that the intention of those who fight should be right’, and cites Augustine’s statement that ‘with true servants of God wars are pacific, not being undertaken through cupidity or cruelty, but through the love of peace’ (p. 84). ‘Those who wage just wars,’ he maintains, ‘have peace for their object’ and ‘they are only against that peace which the Saviour did not come to bring’ (p. 89). Aquinas further elaborates the doctrine of just war by raising three more questions about


its conduct: whether it is lawful for clergy and bishops to fight; whether it is lawful to use ambushes in war; and whether fighting may take place on feast days. To the first he answers that, ‘by the authority of their superiors, clerics may join in war but not by taking up arms but by encouraging other men to fight in a just cause and by affording spiritual help to those who fight justly, exhorting and absolving them, and by other like spiritual help’ (p. 86). As for the use of ambushes, Aquinas argues that those who wage a just war may make use of military stratagems such as keeping themselves and their places hidden; all the same, he contends that it is never permissible to lie to your enemy or to break a promise made to him (p. 85). Finally, with respect to fighting on holy days, Aquinas states that if there is a real necessity, it is lawful to fight on a holy day, but only if it is absolutely necessary (p. 85). Another thinker who contributed to the development of the doctrine of just war was Francisco de Vitoria (1480–1546), a Spanish theologian. Vitoria develops what he calls ‘three canons of the ethics of war’: first, a war should be used as a last resort, when no other alternative is available, and a prince faced with a dilemma of whether to wage a war should always remember that ‘others are his neighbours’ whom ‘God has created and for whom Christ died’, and should therefore wage war ‘only under compulsion’ (Eppstein, 1935, p. 106); secondly, ‘a just war must not be waged so as to ruin the people against whom it is directed, but only so as to obtain one’s rights and the defence of one’s country and in order that from that war peace and security may in time result’ (p. 106); thirdly, when victory has been won, it ‘should be utilized with moderation and Christian humility’ (p. 106). At the same time Vitoria warns that Christian princes fighting each other must always bear in mind the fact that they belong to a common Christendom and in cases where waging a war seems just but at a risk of putting Christendom itself in danger, such a war should be avoided: ‘If for instance, the Spaniards made war upon the French – a war undertaken in other respects for just reasons, and to the advantage of the Spanish Kingdom, and yet was waged with greater evil and loss to Christendom as a whole (say, the Turks took advantage of it to occupy Christian districts) – such a war ought to be stopped’ (p. 107). For Vitoria peoples outside Christendom were subject to different rules and different treatment, just as for some 19th-century thinkers, most notably John Stuart Mill, as we will see below, ‘uncivilized societies’ would be outside the legal framework of international law. Vitoria therefore effectively justified the Spanish colonial conquest of Americas, just as Mill’s arguments would play a role in the British colonial expansion in the context of capitalism. Vitoria begins by admitting that the failure of the


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Indians to receive the faith, provided they allowed it to be preached, ‘furnishes no lawful ground for making war on them and seizing in any other way their lands’ (Scott, 1934, p. 155). However, because the Indians engaged in acts that ‘prevented the Spaniards from freely preaching the Gospel,’ the use of force by the Spaniards was justified ‘until they succeed in obtaining facilities and safety for preaching the Gospel’ (p. 155). Furthermore, it might happen that native rulers subject the converts to force to make them return to idolatry; this also justified the Spanish use of force ‘not only on religion, but on human friendship and alliance, inasmuch as the native converts to Christianity have become friends and allies of Christians’ (p. 156). For Vitoria, the authority of the Spaniards was that of ‘the doctors’ and he refers to Aquinas’s statement that ‘the Church could free all Christian slaves who are in bondage to unbelievers even if that bondage was in other respects lawful’ (p. 156). Finally, Vitoria argues that when ‘a large part of the Indians’ had been converted to Christianity, ‘the Pope might for a reasonable cause, either with or without a request from them, give them a Christian sovereign and depose their unbelieving rulers’ (p. 156). Here Vitoria reiterates arguments that had been developed by a 13th-century canon lawyer, Sinibaldo Fieschi, who wrote as Pope Innocent IV (Nardin, 2002). Innocent IV argued that the Pope was concerned with infidel as well as Christian souls and, therefore, had authority to act when infidels practiced idolatry or when infidels interfered with Christian missionaries and their right to preach. The Pope’s authorization to use force against the infidels in such cases would be just and the wars thereby waged would be just wars (Muldoon, 1979, pp. 10–11). To sum up, the medieval doctrine of just war was based on a religious view of justice and conceived just wars as wars willed by God. It also saw the authority of princes as being based on divine origins and purpose. It was clearly an integral part of the feudal order and that order’s ideology in the negative sense which consisted of interpreting social relations as being an outcome of a divine plan. Feudal society, with its hierarchies and relations of domination, was perceived as an organism with each individual occupying a place assigned by God, and which therefore could not be questioned. The just-war doctrine embodied and reproduced these assumptions and thereby inevitably played a causal role in sustaining feudal relations of power and inequality.

2

Capitalism and the ideology of individual rights

Beginning with the late-16th and early-17th centuries profound transformations of social relations took place in Europe, starting in England with


an emergence of agrarian capitalism and later spreading to the rest of Europe (Wood and Wood, 1997, pp. 5–26; Wood, 2002; Brenner, 1993; Hill, 1978). What was characteristic of the developing capitalist order is the role played by the market. As Wood points out, capitalism is a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labour-power is a commodity for sale on the market, and where all economic actors are dependent on the market. This is true not only of workers, who must sell their labour power for a wage, but also of capitalists, who depend on the market to buy their inputs, including labour-power, and to sell their output for profit. This distinct system of market dependence means that competition and profit-maximization are the fundamental rules of life (Wood 2002, p. 2). In capitalism, the market is not an opportunity – as classical economic theory wrongly declares – but a compulsion. And it is with the development of the market that the function of surplus extraction is gradually changed from one based on politico-juridical means into one carried out through economic means. It now takes place in the market through a wage-labour relation in ways determined by the separation of the producer from the conditions of labour and by the appropriator’s absolute private property rights within the means of production. Direct ‘extra-economic’ pressure or coercion simply become unnecessary to compel the labourers to sell their labour; structural conditions force them to seek paid employment. In other words, as producers lose ownership of the means of production, labour-power becomes a commodity, a very special commodity that makes capitalism possible, as Marx observes (Marx, 1976, p. 270). With the commodification of labour all production becomes production for the market, and with this the commodity and money become fully developed and dominant forms within society. Thus, in capitalism it is no longer political or legal coercion but economic need that supplies the immediate compulsion forcing the worker to transfer surplus labour to the capitalist in order to gain access to the means of production (Wood, 1995, pp. 28–9). The differentiation of the economic sphere in capitalism, then, can be summed up in the following way: the social functions of production and distribution, surplus extraction and appropriation, and the allocation of social labour are, so to speak, privatized; these processes are achieved by non-authoritative, non-political means. In other words, the social allocation of resources and labour does not, on the whole, take place by means of political direction, communal deliberation, hereditary duty, custom or religious obligation, but rather through the mechanisms of commodity exchange.


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‘The powers of surplus appropriation and exploitation do not rest directly on relations of juridical or political dependence but are based on a contractual relation between ‘free’ producers – juridically free and free from the means of production – and an appropriator who has absolute private property in the means of production’ (Wood, 1995, p. 29). The previously political function of surplus extraction is therefore now performed by economic means; the realm of the political becomes confined to the state apparatus, to the provision of legal forms, coercive institutions, public goods, and the security to guarantee private property (Rosenberg, 1994). Such roles are performed by the state and political functions acquire autonomy and become functions of a separate specialized public political sphere. Thus, a division of labour develops in which the two moments of capitalist exploitation – appropriation and coercion – are allocated separately to a private appropriating class and a specialized public coercive institution, the state. On the one hand, the ‘relatively autonomous’ state has a monopoly of coercive force; on the other hand, that force sustains a private ‘economic’ power which invests capitalist property with an authority to organize production itself. The two realms are interrelated in that the political guarantees the persistence of economic relations of production, relations of class, property ownership and surplus extraction, and it in turn is shaped by the economic and takes such a form as to guarantee the persistence of the relations of production. Such a method of surplus extraction gradually makes political emancipation and political equality possible, because political coercion is no longer essential for surplus to be extracted from the direct producers. Marx argues that political freedom and the political independence of producers are even necessary for labour to be a commodity; that is, its possessor must have it at his disposal, he must be the free proprietor of his own labour-capacity, hence of his own person. He and the owner of money meet in the market, and enter into relations with each other on a footing of equality as owners of commodities, with the sole difference that one is a buyer, the other a seller; both are equal in the eyes of law (Marx, 1976, pp. 270–1). Capitalist production therefore renders possible, and may even be said to require, individual political freedom and private property. This allows for the development of a political philosophy that breaks with the tradition of divine right and that emphasizes the natural equality of


individuals, the equality of their natural rights and their consequent power to establish and change political authority. However, what is crucial is that political and civil liberty and equality are presented as the liberty and equality, while the fact that there exist exploitation and inequality in the market is increasingly taken for granted and naturalized. As a result, there develops a new form of ideology, namely, the view that individuals are by nature free and equal, that they have natural rights to life, liberty and property and that political authority must guarantee these rights. Such a view is ideological because capitalism is based on inequality of property, on unequal possession of the means of production and on exploitation in the market of those who do not possess by those who do. It renders less visible, and thereby contributes to the reproduction of, relations of power and inequality in the economy and thereby to the reproduction of capitalism. Such an ideology first appears in the writings of social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, while the foundations of its internationalization were laid by Immanuel Kant. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) laid the foundations for modern liberal thought, especially for the modern conception of the relationship between political authority and the individual; he is ‘the founder of the modern tradition of individual rights, the first philosopher to replace fully the concept of justice with the idea of rights’ (Douzinas, 2000, p. 69; see also Townshend, 2000, p. 55; Habermas, 1999, p. 54; Strauss, 1953, p. 182). Based on a belief that men are moved by ‘appetites and aversions, hopes and fears’ (Hobbes, 1904, p. 35) towards external objects and endlessly desire power over others in order to secure their possession, Hobbes argues that in a pre-societal condition – a hypothetical state of nature – with no common power to restrain individuals, every man would be constantly vulnerable to violent invasion of his life and possessions, and no commodious living would be possible (p. 84). Having made these assumptions Hobbes asserts that each individual in the state of nature has a natural right, which he defines as follows: ‘the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life; . . . By Liberty, is understood . . . the absence of external Impediments: which Impediments may oft take away part of a man’s power to do what he would’ (pp. 86–7). To ensure the security of their rights, individuals in the state of nature are compelled to seek better means of preserving their existence, which, according to Hobbes, lie in the formation of a Commonwealth whereby men would give up the rights they possess in the state of nature and would ‘conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of Men, to


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beare their person . . . This is more than Consent or Concord; it is a real Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person, made by Covenant of every man with every man’ (p. 118). The Sovereign so created by individuals is responsible for commodious and peaceful living, that is to say, for the safety of people and their property in themselves and their possessions: ‘Of things held in property, those that are dearest to a man are his own life & limbs; and in the next degree (in most men) those that concern conjugall affection; and after them riches and means of living’ (p. 248). Hobbes based social order, for the first time, not upon the will of God but on the individual, and not on his duty assigned to him by God but on a natural right (Hampsher-Monk, 1992, p. 3). For Hobbes ‘a natural right is not to be sought in the harmonious order of the political community but its opposite, the natural characteristics of a Crusoe-like figure’ (Douzinas, 2000, p. 71). The state ‘has the function, not of producing or promoting a virtuous life, but of safeguarding the natural right of each’ (Strauss, 1953, pp. 181–2). By asserting that all individuals in the state of nature have equal rights, Hobbes lays a foundation for political equality. As Ryan states, ‘for Hobbes, each of us has the natural right and the natural duty to preserve oneself. This right is an equal right’ (Ryan, 1996, p. 220). However, Hobbes talks of political equality and equality of political rights only, and takes the existence of economic inequality for granted: ‘safety of the People, requireth . . . that Justice be equally administered to all degrees of People, that is, that as well the rich, and mighty, as poor and obscure persons, may be righted of the injuries done to them’ (Hobbes, 1904, p. 250). However, ‘although all equally enjoy peace, yet the benefits springing from thence are not equall to all; for some get greater possessions, others less’ (Hobbes, 1949, p. 148). He also accepts the new capitalist means of surplus extraction – the wage-labour relation. In Leviathan Hobbes notes in passing that ‘a man’s Labour also is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing’ (Hobbes, 1904, p. 175). He also argues that a worth of man depends on the way his power can be measured: ‘The Value, or Worth of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power’ (p. 55). Hobbes thus lays foundations for the ideological view of freedom and the equality of individuals which is confined to the political and which naturalizes relations of inequality and exploitation in the economy, relations that are necessary for the continuous production and reproduction of capital. Hobbes establishes a fertile ground for the subsequent liberal philosophers, and it is John Locke (1632–1704), the patron saint of


Western liberalism (Townshend, 2000: 62), who casts upon it the key tenets of political theory on which modern society is based. Locke, like Hobbes, bases his theory on the notion of the pre-social state of nature and conceives of the political state as arising out of a social contract to guarantee the natural right of individuals to property: ‘The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property; to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting’ (Locke, 1884, p. 220). By ‘property’ Locke, like Hobbes, means not only possessions but also life and liberty (p. 234). A social contract to form a state is necessary, because in the state of nature there are transgressors and offenders who threaten the life and possessions of others. In the case of the distribution of property, Locke initially sets limits to its individual accumulation in terms of ‘the bounds of Law of Nature’. He states that a man possesses a right to his life and labour, which allows him to appropriate the earth and the fruits that were originally given to mankind in common, by ‘mixing his labour with them’, provided he leaves enough for others, ‘for this ‘‘labour’’ being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others’ (p. 204). However, later Locke removes this limit to accumulation of property through the invention of money, which allows an individual ‘to rightfully and without injury possess more than he himself can make use of by receiving gold and silver, which may continue long in a man’s possession without decaying for the overplus’ (p. 207). With the introduction of money, all restrictions upon the right of property are relaxed and ‘civil law allows the possessive individual to amass as much property as he wishes because capital accumulation works for the common good’ (Douzinas, 2000, pp. 82–3). Locke in his doctrine ‘in effect legitimated the unlimited accumulation of capital’ and Locke’s ‘astonishing achievement was to base the property right on natural right and natural law, and then to remove all the natural law limits from the property right’ (Macpherson, 1964, p. 199). The resulting inequality of possessions is justified by Locke on the grounds of differences in rationality among individuals: God gave the world to men in common, but since He gave it them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and rational (and labour was to be his title to it); not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious (Locke, 1884, p. 207).


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The ‘industrious and rational’ could rightfully acquire all the land, leaving the rest the only option of selling their labour to stay alive. Thus, on the one hand he conceived of society as composed of ‘equal undifferentiated beings’. On the other hand, however, some men to him – men of property – were more rational than others – men without property. The latter were less rational because of their economic position resulting from the ‘free’ alienation of their labour, and they required the discipline of supernatural sanctions as well as legal ones. This contradiction, as Macpherson argues, ‘can only be explained with reference to a society where political equality is possible with economic inequality’ (Macpherson, 1964, p. 247), or a capitalist society. As such, the greatness of Locke‘s liberalism lay in its assertion of the existence of the free rational individual as the criterion of the good society; its ’tragedy was that this very assertion was necessarily a denial of individualism to half the nation’ (p. 262). Furthermore, Locke also takes for granted the existence of wage labour, which is a necessary attribute of capitalist production: Thus, the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property without the assignation or consent of anybody. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them (Locke, 1884, p. 205). Here Locke assumes that the ‘turfs’ that a servant had cut were the property of the master, because the servant’s labour was the master’s ‘labour’. This could only be so if there existed a prior wage-labour relation, entitling the master to claim ownership of the labourer’s labour. This led Macpherson to conclude that Locke laid ’the moral foundation for bourgeois appropriation’ (Macpherson, 1964, p. 221). Locke insists that a man’s labour, which was his own, and contractually alienable for which he owed nothing to society, could be ‘infinitely’ purchased by the ‘master’. No longer did labour and property necessarily entail social functions and obligations. As such, Locke, like Hobbes, develops an ideological theory of freedom and equality which amounts to equality of individual negative rights, while preserving economic inequality and naturalizing the functioning of the capitalist method of surplus extraction through a wage-labour relation. If Hobbes and Locke developed the idea of individual rights within a state, it was Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) who laid the philosophical


foundations for their universalization. He grounds his view of individual rights on pure reason, which is theorized as independent of any particular social context. Kant’s fundamental assumption is that the truth value of judgments which lay claim to universality and necessity cannot be grounded empirically (Allison, 1983, p. 78) but can only be arrived at by pure reason. Kant thereby posits the possibility of rational thinking independent of historical and social environment, independent of ‘the empirical constitution of the subject’ and of ‘the evolution of man, and social experience’ (Hoffe, 1994, p. 38). He introduces a sphere of the transcendental (Adorno, 2001, p. 22), of a priori knowledge, which holds good for all future experience, that is, knowledge which is from the start valid under all circumstances. For Kant, the concept of right is based on universal moral reason, or to be more accurate, it is not in conflict with it. In Metaphysics of Morals Kant states that a right is: the sum total of those conditions within which the will of one person can be reconciled with the will of another in accordance with a universal law of freedom [and in which] every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual’s will to coexist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right (Kant, 1991b, p. 133). Having defined the notion of right, Kant uses the idea of the state of nature, which, he argues, individuals have to abandon and institute political authority to guarantee their rights. His use of the notion of the state of nature is not exactly the same as was employed by Hobbes and Locke, for it is not assumed as a hypothetical situation to justify the state on practical and pragmatic grounds, but is arrived at by reason. That is to say, if history were made alone then the original contract would be precisely the path taken by human beings, for it alone would agree with the rational concept of right. This is so because the security of individuals cannot be guaranteed without a state and its political and legal institutions: ‘the first decision the individual is obliged to make, if he does not wish to renounce all concepts of right, will be to adopt the principle that one must abandon the state of nature in which everyone follows his own desires, and unite with everyone else . . . in order to submit to external, public and lawful coercion’ (p. 137). Kant believes that had it ever existed, that is, had a state of nature as a society which is ‘devoid of justice’ existed, people would have to leave it to form a civil society and those who would not want to do so would be obliged ‘to use


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force to impel the others to abandon this state for a state of right’ (pp. 137–8). The state so created is based, according to Kant, on the following a priori principles: ‘the freedom of every member of society as a human being; the equality of each with all the others as a subject; and the independence of each member of a commonwealth as a citizen’ (Kant, 1991a, p. 74). In his discussion of equality Kant explicitly advocates an arrangement where it amounts to political equality, or equality before the law, and it is consistent with ‘utmost’ economic inequality: the uniform equality of human beings as subjects of a state is, however, perfectly consistent with the utmost inequality of the mass in the degree of its possessions . . . Thus the welfare of the one depends very much on the will of the other (the poor depending on the rich), the one must obey the other (as the child its parents or the wife her husband), the one serves (the labourer) while the other pays, etc. Nevertheless, they are all equal as subjects before law’ (pp. 74, 76). If all these categories of individuals are equal before law, they are not equal in terms of their powers to make the law. Only ‘active citizens’, that is, those who possess property and can support themselves, can participate in the law-making process, while those who have no property do not have such powers for they do not possess ‘civil personality’: ‘apprentices to merchants or tradesmen, servants who are not employed by the state, minors . . . women in general and all those who are obliged to depend for their living (i.e. food and protection) on the offices of others . . . all these people have no civil personality’ (Kant, 1991b, p. 139). In other words, Kant not only accepts as natural that equality before law coexists ‘with the utmost inequality . . . of possessions’ but also takes for granted the possibility of labour being a commodity; ‘the one serves (the labourer) while the other pays’ (Kant 1991a, p. 75). Thus, in Kant, as in Locke and Hobbes, we again discover arguments concerning individual freedom and equality couched in terms of rights which amount to political freedom and formal equality before the law, and which are ideological because they objectify and naturalize relations of inequality and exploitation in the economy. As far as Kantian foundations for the internationalization of the notion of rights are concerned, not only does Kant develop inherently universalizable moral claims (that is, based on universal reason and therefore valid under all circumstances), but he also explicitly argues for


the internationalization of his concept of right in order for peace to exist, in particular in his Perpetual Peace (1991c). The first definitive article for perpetual peace that Kant puts forward is that the constitution of every state must be republican, for it is the only constitution which derives from the idea of the original compact, and on which, therefore, all juridical legislation of a people must be based (Kant, 1991c, p. 99). ‘This constitution is established, firstly, by principles of the freedom of the members of a society (as men); secondly, by principles of dependence of all upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and, thirdly, by the law of their equality (as citizens). The republican constitution, therefore, is, with respect to law, the one which is the original basis of every form of civil constitution’ (p. 99). Kant here lays the foundations for the internationalization of an ideological view of freedom and equality, that is, freedom and equality confined to the realm of the political and objectifying and naturalizing economic inequality, a view which today is at the heart of a global moral discourse in general, and of human-rights enforcement in particular. It should be noted that with bourgeois revolutions and victory of the new order in the struggle against the old feudal order, the notion of natural rights became the foundation of constitutions of capitalist states. Thus, the US Declaration of Independence (1776) states the following: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government. The Declaration and the Lockean theory are virtually identical. Likewise, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) states that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ and proclaims as inalienable such rights as the right to liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression, and explicitly states that ‘property is a sacred and inviolable right and no one may be deprived thereof ’. Thus, under their assertion of the rights of liberty and equality these constitutions preserved inequality in property and possession, and naturalized the relations of power and exploitation in the sphere of


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production. As Marx argued in respect of these rights, the freedom they guarantee is not complete, for it endows man ‘with an unreal universality’ (Marx, 1997, p. 192). This is so because in the realm of the economic, man continues to be ‘the plaything of alien powers’ (p. 192). These alien powers reside in the structure of the capitalist process of production which compels individuals who have no means of production to sell their labour power: the labourer comes out of the process of production other than he entered. In the market he stood as the owner of the commodity ‘labour power’ face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer . . . The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no ‘free agent’, that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell it (Marx in Lukes, 1985: 53). Rupert develops this argument further and states that: capitalism’s structural separation of the economic from the political may have crucial ideological effects: for it enables the wage relation to take on the appearance of a voluntary exchange between abstract individuals in the market, while, at the same time, the state may appear as a class-neutral public sphere in which abstract individuals may interact as formally equal citizens pursuing an instrumental politics of self-interest (Rupert, 2000, p. 3). Thus, capitalism ‘makes possible a form of democracy in which ‘the formal equality of political rights has a minimal effect on inequalities or relations of domination and exploitation in other spheres’ (Wood, 1995, p. 224), or as Marx puts it, ‘the ideological effect of these rights [is] reproducing . . . domination’ (Isaac, 1987, p. 176). We will see how this new ideology gradually penetrated humanitarianism and thereby fundamentally transformed it. In the next section we examine the doctrine and practice of humanitarian intervention in what scholars usually refer to as the pre-Charter period, that is before the UN was established.

3

Ideology and humanitarianism in the pre-Charter period

The development of capitalism and the transformation of the relationship between people and political authority was accompanied by another development – the emergence of the notion of state sovereignty


and modern conceptions of international relations and international law. The development of a system of sovereign and secular nation-states is usually traced to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. As Brownlie observes, large, well-organized political units, monarchic and national in form, secular in government, and commercial, dynastic and colonizing in interest, gradually replaced ill-defined entities and small principalities which were feudal in structure and owed allegiance to Pope and Emperor, and which had limited interests and strong religious animosities (Brownlie, 1981, p. 11). The Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War and codified the European pattern of territorial entities ruled by sovereigns equal between themselves (Abiew, 1999, p. 28). As the Swiss legal theorist Emerich de Vattel put it in the 18th century, ‘just as a dwarf and giant are equally men, small and large republics are equally sovereign states’ (quoted in Boucher, 1998, p. 261). Different institutions gradually evolved to maintain order and stability in a system of international relations, which included the concept of a ‘balance of power’ to prevent the rise of a powerful state and to contain aggression as well as international law, and international conferences to settle major differences and diplomatic practices through which states would be encouraged to negotiate differences among themselves (Watson, 1984, pp. 23–5). With the development of the modern notion of sovereignty the question emerged as to whether it was absolute or whether there were exceptions to it. There gradually developed a body of opinion that one such exception was the use of force to protect natural rights of individuals; here lies the foundation for the modern doctrine of humanitarian intervention, at the core of which is the idea of individual rights and freedom from oppression (meaning political freedom) and the idea of the state as the guarantor of these rights. As Abiew puts it, ‘the question of when humanitarian intervention is permissible became secularized in the principle of lending lawful assistance to peoples struggling against tyranny’ and Grotius and Vattel, as well as other ‘publicists around the period in which Grotius and Vattel were writing formulated the rules of international law in terms of the recognition of natural rights’ (Abiew, 1999, pp. 34, 36). This transformation in the underlying assumptions of humanitarianism did not take place overnight. In fact, it was only in the 19th century that various legal authors explicitly defined humanitarian intervention as an exceptional use of force to protect individual rights and liberties, while state practice even in the 19th century still ‘lagged behind’ – the few cases of intervention that took place made reference to ‘humanity’


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and respect for religious minorities, and not to rights. Nevertheless, the foundations for the ideological conception of freedom embedded in human-rights enforcement today were laid in this pre-Charter period. Let us now look in detail at this transformation in the assumptions of humanitarianism, and then see what implications it had for the developing international order, underpinned by the expansion of capital. The following statement by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) has been called ‘the first authoritative statement of the principle of humanitarian intervention’ (Lauterpacht, 1946, p. 46). In it we can discern the beginning of a new view of humanitarianism: There is also another question, whether a war for the subjects of another be just, for the purpose of defending them from injuries by their ruler. Certainly it is undoubted that ever since civil societies were formed, the rulers of each claimed some special rights over his own subjects . . . But . . . if a tyrant . . . practices atrocities towards his subjects, which no just man can approve, the right of human social connection is not cut off in such a case. . . . It would not follow that others may not take up arms for them’ (in Abiew, 1999, p. 35). Although implicitly and only tentatively, in Grotius we begin to see a different view of relations between political authority and its subjects. It is atrocities by a tyrannical ruler that ‘no man can approve’, and not rebellion of subjects, as Aquinas maintained, that are seen as providing a just cause for the use of force. Here it must be emphasized once more that in Grotius we do not find a clean break with the older tradition of just war. In fact, Grotius, like Vitoria before him, also justified the use of force against those who obstruct the teaching of Christianity and against those who persecute upholders of the Christian faith (Boucher, 1998, pp. 215–17; Abiew, 1999, p. 27–8). The cannibals of the East Indies and the Americas, who for Grotius were little better than beasts, could justifiably be punished by Europeans (Boucher, 1998, p. 215). However, as has been argued by a number of scholars, the reading of the Law of Nations as beginning with the individual is nevertheless first found in Grotius (Lauterpacht, 1946, p. 243; see also Remec, 1960; and Vincent, 1990). Lauterpacht took it to be one of the major features of Grotius’ scheme that it endorsed the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual in a way similar to Locke (Lauterpacht, 1944, pp. 24–5). As Vincent argues, for Grotius human beings sought to live tranquilly and in peace, and ‘personal security, property, contracts, and the like were necessary to the achievement of this tranquillity . . . No society whatever could be


preserved without the recognition of rights . . . and the warfare that was a feature of this society was never to be undertaken except to assert rights’ (Vincent, 1990, p. 244). More explicit changes in the doctrine of just war may, however, be found in another writer of the period, Emerich de Vattel (1714–67). Vattel did not believe that religious differences were a just cause of war and thought that European nations which subjected the American Indians to avaricious rule on the pretext of teaching religion and civilizing them based their claim upon ‘unjust and ridiculous grounds’ (quoted in Boucher, 1998, p. 259). His position was that the rule of sovereignty is absolute and, the way he asserts it, already embeds assumptions of the new relationship between political authority and subjects, a relationship no longer based on divine right but on the will of the people: The Sovereign is one to whom the Nation has entrusted the empire and the care of the government; it has endowed him with his rights; it alone is directly interested in the manner in which the leader it has chosen for itself uses his power. No foreign power, accordingly, is entitled to take notice of the administration by that sovereign, to stand up in judgment of his conduct and to force him to alter it in any way. If he buries his subjects under taxes, if he treats them harshly, it is the Nation’s business; no one else is called upon to admonish him, to force him to apply wiser and more equitable principles (quoted in Fonteyne, 1974, p. 214). However, having stated that no foreign power is entitled to interfere with the sovereign in the exercise of the rights granted to him by the people, Vattel states that ‘if the Prince, attacking the fundamental laws, gives his people a legitimate reason to resist him, if tyranny becomes so unbearable as to cause the Nation to rise, any foreign power is entitled to help an oppressed people that has requested assistance’ (p. 215). In this statement we can again see the elements of the ideology of capitalism, that is, its particular view of what constitutes oppression and freedom from it. It is political oppression that Vattel is identifying, and it is the idea that tyranny on the part of rulers is illegitimate, and that the subjects are entitled to resist the authority of such a ruler, that is at the heart of his argument. This particular conception of what constitutes a just cause for the use of force subsequently became explicit in the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. A body of international law that developed in the 19th


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century discusses humanitarian intervention in these terms – that is, in terms of individual rights and freedom (meaning political and civil freedom or freedom from political oppression) – or in ideological terms. For example, in 1874, the Swiss legal scholar J. K. Bluntschli observed that ‘one is authorized to intervene to ensure respect for the individual rights that have been recognized as necessary . . . whenever they happen to be violated in the struggles between citizens of a single state’ (Bluntschli, 1874, p. 73, emphasis added). In other words, we can see how it is the notion of individual rights that Bluntschli explicitly invokes. One year later T. S. Woolsey asserted that ‘Interference . . . can be justified . . . on the following ground: . . . that some extraordinary state of things is brought about by the crime of a government against its subjects’ (Woolsey, 1875, p. 73). Once again, a particular view of the relationship between political authority and citizens is embedded in this statement. Rather than any reference to the divine right of rulers there is a view that condemns political oppression of citizens by their government. The same can be seen in the Italian writer Pasquale Fiore’s statement a few years later: the violation of international law can also be a consequence of events occurring inside a state, and which results in the direct violation of international law. Let us assume, for instance, that a prince, in order to put down a revolution, violates all the generally accepted laws of war, has prisoners executed, authorizes destruction, looting, arson, and encourages his supporters to commit those odious actions and others of the same kind . . . Inaction and indifference of other states would constitute an egocentric policy contrary to the rights of all (Fiore, 1885, pp. 521–2). At the beginning of the 20th century humanitarian intervention was also defined as protection of les droits de l’homme or ‘the rights of man’, which is another term for individual (natural) rights. For example, the the French legal scholar Paul Fauchille argued that humanitarian intervention is allowed under international law in cases of abuses of les droits de l’homme conceived of in a Lockean way as rights which belong to man by nature even before he enters political society, in particular the rights to life and liberty: ‘What kind of acts could justify humanitarian intervention? It is the acts violating the rights of man, that is to say, the rights which belong to a man by nature even before he becomes a member of a political society. These rights are: a right to life and a right to liberty’ (Fauchille, 1921, p. 570, my translation, emphasis added).


The same view is expressed by Rougier: This theory affirms the existence of a legal norm, applying to the governing as well as the governed and superior to national and international law. This norm places under protection rights of an individual or what is called the ‘rights of man’. It evaluates the power of the governing in terms of protection of these rights and if they abuse these rights, a foreign state may intervene (Rougier, 1910, p. 489, my translation). Finally, we may quote Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, who declared there that: ‘The right of humanitarian intervention, in the name of the Rights of Man trampled upon by the State in a manner offensive to the feeling of Humanity, has been recognized long ago as an integral part of the Law of Nations’ (quoted in Aroneánu, 1955, p. 127, emphasis added). Constituting the core content of the droits de l’homme or the rights of man (protection of which is a legitimate reason for violation of the rule of sovereignty and non-intervention) are the fundamental political rights of individuals such as the rights to life, liberty, freedom from oppression and illegal persecution that are seen by scholars as providing a just cause for the use of force (Rougier, 1910, p. 517; Fonteyne, 1974, pp. 230–1). And it is this view that constitutes the basis of humanitarian intervention today. Here we must acknowledge that not all scholars readily embraced the possibility of violation of the rule of state sovereignty in this way. The Italian jurist Count Mamiani, for example, argued that ‘the actions and the crimes of a people within the limits of its territory do not infringe upon anyone else’s rights and do not give a basis for a legitimate intervention’ (quoted in Fonteyne, 1974, p. 215). Another Italian scholar, active in the late 19th century, Giuseppe Carnazza-Amari, asserted that ‘neither can one justify intervention in the case where the local government does not respect the most elementary laws of justice and humanity’ (pp. 215–6). A French legal scholar of the same period, Paul Pradier-Fode´re´, similarly stated that intervention to assist subject of another state ‘is illegal because it constitutes an infringement upon the independence of states . . . The acts of inhumanity, however condemnable they may be, as long as they do not affect nor threaten the rights of other states, do not provide the latter with a basis for lawful intervention, as no state can stand up in judgment of the conduct of others’ (p. 216). However, in the period immediately preceding the First World War, it seems that the majority of


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legal scholars were of the view that humanitarian intervention, understood as protection of fundamental individual rights or the rights of man, was legal (for example, Flećhe`re, 1894, p. 415; Borchard, 1922; Oppenheim, 1905; Rougier, 1910). Stowell, for instance, notes that the right to intervene to stop abuses of its subjects by a government became an accepted customary law: ‘International practice prohibits it [humanitarian intervention] . . . except in cases of inhumane treatment of individuals who are subjects of another state, which is marked by repeated and continuous abuses of certain individual rights recognized by the entire community of civilized states’ (Stowell, 1932, p. 141, my translation). As regards state practice, some scholars argue that the 19th century provides us with a few examples of humanitarian intervention. Mandelstam argued in 1923 that the late 19th century witnessed ‘the victory of the principle of humanitarian intervention over the rigid dogma of non-intervention’ in state practice (Mandelstam, 1923, p. 391; see also Stowell, 1921). Instances of state intervention usually seen as examples of humanitarian intervention in the 19th century include different cases of the use of force by European powers against the Ottoman Empire following the massacres of Christians. Although waged for the purpose of religious freedom, they were not justified on religious grounds in the manner of Vitoria or Innocent IV, but on the grounds of humanity (Mandelstam, 1923; Stowell, 1932; Ganji, 1962; Fonteyne, 1974; Abiew, 1999; Kolb, 2003). As Abiew observes, the doctrine as practised in the 19th century ‘was mainly concerned with the rights of Christians, although secularization of religious belief led to basing such intervention on behalf of the dignity of man’ (Abiew, 1999, p. 47). Although Abiew further argues that in these interventions ‘the Great Powers sought to protect individuals and groups of individuals against their own states’ (p. 48) this was not really the case for there was still no official mention of individual rights; this may be explained by the important role played in all of these actions by Russia, which, although it had a few years earlier (1861) abandoned serfdom, was a country where the idea of natural rights was still hardly acceptable to the Tsar. As regards the examples of such interventions, first there was also a military action by France, Great Britain and Russia in Greece in 1829 to stop massacres by the Sublime Porte, which resulted in the independence of Greece in 1830. The intervention was mainly carried out by Russia and some scholars contend it was not at all humanitarian but aimed at obtaining certain concessions for Russia from Turkey (see Brownlie, 1981). Nevertheless, the powers involved stated that their action was


dictated ‘no less by sentiments of humanity, than by interest for the tranquillity of Europe’ (in Ganji, 1962, p. 22). As Moskowitz observes, the intervention was an ‘occasion . . . on which the doctrine of ‘‘humanitarian intervention’’ has been invoked on behalf of nationals or inhabitants of foreign countries felt to have been subjected to practices which shock the conscience of mankind’ (Moskowitz, 1958, p. 16; see also Lillich, 1967, p. 332; Reisman and McDougal, 1973, p. 180). Another case often invoked by scholars is the 1860 intervention by France in Syria following the massacre of thousands of Maronite Christians by the local population with the complicity of Turkey (Stowell, 1921). France, Great Britain, Prussia and Russia met with Turkey at the Conference in Paris and signed an agreement which gave France a mandate to intervene in Syria to restore order in the area, and 6,000 French troops were sent in. As Rougier, a contemporary, observed, ‘the Syrian intervention was thus a humanitarian intervention aimed at enforcing execution of a convention’ (Rougier, 1910, p. 474; this view is also shared by Brownlie, 1981, p. 340). There was also an action by European Powers in Crete in 1866–8. Following several years of persecution and discrimination at the hands of the Turkish authorities in the island, the Christian population of Crete organized a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire and proclaimed a union with Greece, which was brutally repressed. The European Powers called for the establishment of an International Commission of Enquiry to investigate the issue, but Turkey refused, claiming that it was a matter of domestic jurisdiction. Nevertheless, under pressure from the European states, and with Britain acting as a neutral mediator, the Sultan later promulgated a new Constitution which ameliorated the position of Christians and intervention was thus avoided (Ganji, 1962, p. 9). Thus, although it ended up being a purely diplomatic intervention, it was still carried out at least partly for humanitarian purposes and was backed by a threat to use force (Fonteyne, pp. 210–11; Abiew, 1999, p. 51). European Powers also acted in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria in 1876–8 following Turkish oppression of the Christian populations, described by an observer as ‘the most heinous crimes that had stained the history of the century’ (John Morley, quoted in Stowell, 1921, p. 127). Following a declaration of war by Serbia and Montenegro in 1876 in support of the oppressed Christian populations of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria, the European Powers met with Turkey at the Conference in Constantinople. After Turkey’s refusal to improve the position of Christians, Russia declared war with the consent of Austria, Prussia, France and Italy. The war ended in 1878 with the Treaty of Berlin which

Ideology and the History of Human Rights Enforcement 101

established local autonomy for a Christian government under Turkish suzerainty in Bulgaria, and for the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. It further reaffirmed the independence of Montenegro, Romania and Serbia, and imposed specific obligations of religious and racial non-discrimination upon Turkey (Ganji, 1962, p. 33). It has been consistently argued above that a historical analysis of humanitarian intervention has to contextualize and, in particular, examine its relationship with, the economy. It can be argued that in this pre-Charter period the foundations were laid for the ideological construction of humanitarian intervention in terms of negative individual rights. In this respect, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and scholarly and political debates around its existence and use were an integral element of the developing capitalist order and of its ideology. That is to say, the doctrine and practice of humanitarian intervention may be said to have made a contribution to the development of capitalism, particularly in terms of its ideological association of freedom with formal emancipation of individuals and objectification of economic inequality and exploitation in the economy. In addition to this, there existed some form of contingent relationship between the internationalization of capital and humanitarian intervention during the colonial expansion of the capitalist European states. The creation of an international economy was largely a product of the 18th and 19th centuries, when states increasingly instituted markets built on the principles of free trade, spread through the world by Britain through its naval, commercial and financial supremacy. The period roughly between 1845 and 1875 is referred to by some political economists as Pax Britannica or British hegemony (Cox, 1993, p. 60; Gill, 1993; Arrighi, 1993). Britain was the key state promoting the idea of an international self-regulating market, an initiative originated in institutional moves by British capitalists to promote machine production and its need for expanding inputs and market outlets (Polanyi, 1944). The 1834 Poor Law Act eliminated local parish support for the working poor and promoted labour mobility, thereby instituting a labour market. The Bank Act of 1844 instituted a central banking system, establishing fiduciary money to manage currency values relative to the gold standard and to stabilize the business environment. The Corn Law in 1846 encouraged cheap grain imports from the New World and thereby reduced the cost of wage foods. ‘Together, these measures instituted the markets in labour, currency, and land that underpinned Britain’s prodigious commercial expansion on a global scale’ (McMichael, 2000, p. 103).


The international expansion of capital in search of commodity markets and industrial inputs stimulated colonial conquest in Africa, Asia and Latin America and an integration of colonies into the international economy as suppliers of inputs such as minerals, raw materials and agricultural products, and as market outlets for commodities produced in the colonial powers, particularly Britain and France (Barratt Brown, 1993, p. 17). This international division of labour still largely characterizes the world economy today. In this context the developing doctrine of humanitarian intervention may be said to have played a role in facilitating the international expansion of capital. Colonization was constructed and justified as a civilizing mission, and part of what distinguished ‘civilized’ nations from ‘barbarians’ implied the presence of individual liberties in the former and their absence in the latter. This is apparent if we look at what John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), one of the key figures in Western liberal philosophy, and also a direct ‘manager’ of colonial expansion as a senior official in East India Company, wrote about international intervention. Mill begins by confirming the absolute nature of sovereignty and of the principle of non-intervention, but having done this denies sovereignty to some nations on the grounds that they are uncivilized; part of what he describes as uncivilized is implicitly related to the denial of individual liberties to subjects by tyrannical rulers. Mill states that ‘to suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into’ (Mill, 1859, p. 167). In other words, the principle of sovereignty and non-intervention which constitute the foundation of developing international customs does not apply to barbarians. This is so because in the first place, the rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate. They cannot be depended on for observing any rules. Their minds are not capable of so great an effort, nor their will sufficiently under the influence of distant motives. In the next place, nations which are still barbarous have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners . . . The sacred duties which civilized nations owe to the independence and nationality of each other, are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are either a certain evil, or at best a questionable good (pp. 167–8).


But what exactly makes civilized nations civilized and barbarian societies barbarian? For Mill barbarian societies are tyrannical, where individuals have no rights and are not free. He implicitly invokes the developing doctrine of a just war, which embodies assumptions of a relationship between political authority and subjects based on individual freedom and rights. For example, when he develops arguments in support of military rule of barbarian territories by the British government, he cites examples of what happened when such a rule was ended and local princes took over. He argues that in the case of, for example, the native states of India, the result was the establishment of tyranny by ‘an Asiatic despot . . . so oppressive . . . as to desolate the country’ (p. 169), and that ‘England was morally accountable for a mixture of tyranny and anarchy’ (p. 170) since the country let it happen by allowing the local princes to rule. We can clearly see similarities between Mill’s statements here and the modern rhetoric of anti-oppression associated directly with the abuse of fundamental human rights. Similar arguments restricting the applicability of the norms of international law to civilized states were made by some legal scholars in relation to humanitarian intervention. In fact, as Fonteyne observes, ‘the right to intervene for humanitarian motives was to be restricted to the relations between ‘‘civilized’’ and ‘‘non-civilized’’ nations’ (Fonteyne, 1974, p. 219). For example, de Martens argued that ‘vis-a`-vis non civilized nations . . . intervention by the civilized powers is legitimate, when the Christian population of those countries is exposed to persecutions or massacres. In those circumstances, it is justified by common religious interests and humanitarian considerations. . . . These motives are not applicable to the relations between civilized powers’ (quoted in Fonteyne, 1974, p. 219). In this statement, as in the arguments of Mill, it is explicitly stated that no humanitarian intervention is allowed between civilized states, but only by civilized countries into noncivilized societies. As it was stated at the time of the colonial expansion of the ‘civilized’ states into the ‘non-civilized’ world, such a doctrine may be said to have contributed to its legitimation. Mill was by no means the first liberal philosopher to justify colonialism, however. Almost two centuries before, John Locke, in his discussion of property, argued that land was given to individuals to use it efficiently; the American Indians, according to Locke, fell short of adequately discharging this obligation. They still lived in a state of nature and failed to add to the common stock of mankind by improving the productivity of their land. In so doing they had no claim on vast territories in the Americas that were still to be looked on as ‘waste’.


However, his stricture does not apply if indigenous inhabitants use their resources efficiently. The same applies to Vattel, who argued that God placed the Earth at the disposal of the human race for their habitation and subsistence, and that land is the exclusive property of nations inhabiting it. Such rights, however, depend upon the efficient use of land, the cultivation of which is ‘an obligation imposed upon man by nature’ (in Boucher, 1998, p. 258); peoples who persist in refraining from cultivation (in particular the American Indians) do not have the same rights as those that do cultivate the land. Such unimproved lands remain the common property of mankind, and all nations therefore have an equal right to claim them by first possession ‘so far as they can make use of it’ (p. 258). However, Vattel, like Locke, nevertheless sees the seizing of territories as being of ‘dubious legality’ (p. 258). Mill removes this qualification by introducing the distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘non-civilized’ nations, with the latter being associated with tyranny and the suppression of natural rights. Apart from such contingent and implicit links, the relationship between international capitalism and humanitarian intervention in this period is still largely marginal. The norms that underpin the developing doctrine are still national, and embodied in the constitutions of the capitalist states. Their international development had to wait until the end of the Second World War, after which the notion of natural rights as human rights enters the realm of the international. There were some manifestations of international concern with individual rights before the establishment of the UN in 1945 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. However, in this period international concern with individual rights ‘was limited mainly to some work of the International Labour Organisation on workers’ rights and certain provisions in the treaties of the League of Nations for the protection of minorities’ (Freeman: 2002, p. 32), although these applied only in a few states (Donnelly 1989, p. 210). Nevertheless, it may be argued that the development of a doctrine of humanitarian intervention which embodied the ideology of freedom in capitalism made some contribution to the reproduction of national capitalism simply by contributing to further development of this ideology.

4

Ideology and humanitarian intervention in the post-Charter period

This section will examine the development of humanitarian intervention from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War


in 1989. After the Allies’ military victory in 1945 the international capitalist order was reconstructed by the United States: economically, the US financed western European and Japanese economic recovery and the creation of international monetary and trading systems; politically, the US undertook to contain the spread of communism through the establishment of NATO. Its purposes were to maintain existing political and economic relationships and to fortify a ‘free world’ against communist influence (Hanson, 1993, p. 95). With the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) the ‘free world’ gradually became understood as the world of respect for human rights, meaning mostly the negative rights of individuals. The practice of humanitarian intervention during this period became associated with the protection of these fundamental human rights, meaning the political and civil rights of individuals or what had been known as ‘the rights of man’, thereby perpetuating the practice’s underlying ideological assumptions concerning justice and freedom. However, these values and the practice of humanitarian intervention were constrained by three developments: a further development of the rule of state sovereignty, now codified in the United Nations Charter, and an emergence of a Cold War ‘geo-political straightjacket’ which privileged considerations of international stability, especially in the light of the nuclear threat, over other values; and an opposition to the notion of human rights, in particular to its Western version, meaning individual negative rights, by the Third World and socialist/communist states. This made humanitarian intervention a very rare occurrence according to some, and a completely absent practice according to others. The doctrine of humanitarian intervention, nevertheless developed. The few examples of humanitarian intervention deemed to have taken place generated a widespread debate and a growth in supporters and opponents of humanitarian intervention. In these debates both sides referred to humanitarian intervention as a practice of enforcement of fundamental human rights, and this contributed to the development of the concept of human rights (Wheeler, 2000a), in particular of its Western version meaning negative liberties of individuals. In this way, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention, and the debates around it, played a role in the further international development of ideology in the negative sense and thereby, although still marginally, were related to international capitalism. In this period important foundations were laid for the post-Cold War globalization of capitalism and for the ideology of freedom and justice as respect for fundamental human rights, meaning civil and political liberties of individuals. This section will explore in


more detail the nature of the doctrine and the practice of humanitarian intervention and their relationship with the postwar international political economy. After the Second World War the US threw itself into the effort to create a stable world economy, as important economic interests in the United States (industry, finance, agriculture) realized that they had a vital stake in a prosperous world economy (Gilpin, 2000, p. 55). First, it financed the post-war European reconstruction through the European Recovery Programme or, colloquially, the Marshall Plan, named after George Marshall, the US Secretary of State. Starting in 1948, it was immediately welcomed by most western European countries; Europe’s reserves of hard currency were running short and there would have been severe shortages of food and raw materials, not to mention the capital goods to re-equip industry and the economic infrastructure that only North America could still supply (Strange, 1998, p. 112). From 1948 to 1951 the US dispersed to its European allies approximately two per cent of its annual GNP each year. By 1952, some $17 billion in Marshall Plan aid had been distributed to European economies (Urwin, 1996, pp. 273–4). There emerged a form of a consensus in Western Europe, the US and Japan concerning the development of a liberal world economy; free trade and minimum protectionism and discrimination were emphasized because trade barriers were seen as responsible for the outbreak of the war. This consensus was embodied in the Bretton Woods system, set up in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference, largely by the US and Britain. Several unifying principles were embodied in the Bretton Woods system: 1. Commitment to trade liberalization via multilateral negotiations and the principle of non-discrimination; 2. Agreement that current account transactions should be free from controls, but that controls on the freedom of movement of capital were permissible; and 3. Agreement that exchange rates should be fixed using the US dollar (which was a ‘gold standard’ currency for central banks) as a reserve currency (Gilpin, 2000). Two international institutions were created at Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF was established to control currency devaluations and to lend on a short-term basis currency to countries whose own currencies no longer competed in the international money markets. The World Bank was created to


provide conventional loans to countries unable to obtain credits or loans from other sources (Hanson, 1993, p. 94). As the 1984 World Development Report by the World Bank sums it up: The central elements of the system outlined at Bretton Woods were the establishment of convertibility of currencies and of fixed but adjustable interest rates, the encouragement of international flows of capital for productive purposes . . . the creation of the Bretton Woods twins – the IMF and the IBRD or World Bank. . . . The participants were determined to design an international economic system where ‘beggar thy neighbour’ policies, which characterized the international economic community when World War II began, did not recur (quoted in Miller, 1986, p. 142). The largest contributor to the IMF and the World Bank was also the United States. Because the Bretton Woods actions and policies are decided on the basis of weighted votes according to contributions, the United States was in virtual total control of these bodies. Also in 1947, under Bretton Woods, came GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which was designed to manage the international trading system through multilateral negotiations to avoid protectionism and discrimination. GATT, as Rosecrance describes it, marked the transition from a ‘military-political world of territorial states to the peaceful, trading world of market-oriented states’ (Rosecrance, 1986, p. 137). In place of mercantilist economies, in which each nation manipulated trade and exchange, came a trade-oriented international monetary system (Hanson, 1993, pp. 95–6). In addition to the above multilateral institutions the United States created some of its own, such as the American Export-Import Bank (Exim Bank), the Foreign Credit and Insurance Corporation (FCIC), the Agency for International Development (AID), and the International Trade Administration (ITA). Exim Bank, FCIC and AID were created mainly to guarantee loans made by private lending institutions to American corporations investing overseas, that is, to decrease the risk of foreign investment and thereby increase American investments and holdings abroad (Szymanski, 1981, p. 241). ITA was set up to encourage foreign investment by American firms through informational services that included identifying the markets within foreign countries, orienting American businesses about politics and customs, establishing buyer-seller


contracts, and advising about legalities, taxes and the like (Hanson, 1993, p. 96). Although there developed a consensus among the capitalist states to liberalize international trade, it was recognized that free trade would create losers as well as winners and, therefore, governments were allowed to pursue their own economic stabilization and social welfare policies, such as full employment and social insurance systems. These measures took different forms in different countries (the Full Employment Act of 1946 in the US, ‘indicative’ economic planning in France, the social market in Germany, Japanese commitment to lifetime employment and export-led growth, and so on); all had in common a Keynesian view that the state was responsible for regulation of the economy to provide for social welfare, a view which would give way to policies of privatization and deregulation from the late 1980s. The relationship between states and capital was still characterized by the capacity of governments to control the operation of the economy and capital movements. This was true of even the Third World states which benefited during the Cold War from assistance of either the US or the USSR and were able to control their economic development. In the post-Cold War world, as we will see below, capital would acquire the upper hand vis-a`-vis the state/society complex. In addition to this, the capitalist production itself was contested, albeit from within an international capitalist system, by states pursuing noncapitalist development, in particular the USSR. The socialist/communist bloc grew from a single multinational state in 1917 to as many as 26 allied states in 1988, comprising a third of the world’s area and population and a quarter of its total production (Kornai, 1989). As Szymanski observed in 1982, a large proportion of the world population lived in socialist states and there were victories of socialist nationalliberation movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. World capitalism was potentially weakened by the growing number of socialist states and their successes in building socialism (Szymanski, 1982). Furthermore, the socialist/communist states also attempted to develop alternative arrangements for international trade. For example, within COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) socialist/communist states endeavoured to establish an ‘international socialist division of labour’ (Brine, 1992, p. xvi) among socialist/communist centrally planned economies (Wallace and Clarke, 1986, p. 5) ‘permeated by a spirit of socialist internationalism and comradely mutual assistance’ (Manjulo, et al., 1985, p. 19). It was claimed that, unlike the relations based on inequality and exploitation that characterized the


capitalist system of production and exchange, COMECON economic relations, ‘between the socialist states and developing countries . . . were built on the foundations of true justice and equality’ (p. 19). Although such attempts failed, they still constituted an important challenge to capital, and contributed to the development of economic policies by capitalist states which emphasized the social welfare of citizens aimed at frustrating the development of revolutionary socialist movements. In terms of the political structure of the postwar world, the United States led negotiations with the USSR at a series of conferences during and after the war which resulted in the creation of the United Nations (UN), where the US and the USSR, along with France, Britain and China, would constitute the permanent members of the key governing body, the Security Council; each had the power of veto on any UN decision. The UN Charter became the foundation of the new international order, and codified the principle of sovereignty and non-intervention as the basis of the new international order. However, already in 1947 the US declared its political aim of the containment of the international spread of communism and the protection of the ‘free world’, to be secured by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a military alliance of the capitalist states. The policy of the containment of communism (the Truman Doctrine), was proclaimed by President Truman on 12 March 1947: I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. . . . The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedom. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world – and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation (quoted in Commager, 1958, pp. 525–6). It can be seen how much emphasis is put on the term ‘free’ by Truman. This in fact means politically free; that is, we can already see how the ideological conception of freedom whose foundations were laid by social contract theorists in the 17th and 18th centuries is beginning to play an important international role in the postwar period. Indeed, it has been called the ‘ideological cement’ of the developing postwar capitalist world order (Rupert, 2000, p. 26). This political leadership of the Western capitalist world in its struggle against communism was an important element in the US post-war


hegemony. As Cox sums it up, the US founded a new hegemonic world order similar in basic structure to that dominated by Britain in the mid-19th century, but with institutions and doctrines adjusted to a more complex world economy and to national societies more sensitive to the political repercussions of economic crises (Cox, 1993, p. 60). This ideological view of freedom (as freedom from political oppression and respect for individual political and civil rights) became an international legal norm with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The Declaration, in articles 2 to 21, restated almost verbatim, as the ‘equal and inalienable rights of all members of human family’, rights asserted in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; the right to life, liberty, and the security of the person; the right to own property; freedom from slavery or involuntary servitude; freedom from torture and from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile; the right to a fair and public trial; freedom from gender, racial, and equivalent forms of discrimination; freedom from interference in privacy and correspondence; freedom of movement and residence; the right to asylum from persecution; freedom of thought, conscience, and religion; freedom of opinion and expression; freedom of peaceful assembly and association; and the right to participate in government, directly or through free elections. In addition to these negative rights, the Declaration, in articles 22 to 27, included economic and social rights ‘that had been won in several industrial countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (Freeman, 2002, p. 36); these included the right to social security; the right to work and to protection against unemployment; the right to rest and leisure, including periodic holidays with pay; the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of self and family; the right to education; and the right to the protection of one’s scientific, literary, and artistic production. However, in spite of this, the dominant conception of human rights, up to the present day, is that it is political and civil rights which constitute human rights (Pollis, 2000; Donnelly, 1999; Abiew, 1999). The UN General Assembly later also adopted two Covenants on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (G.A. res. 2200A (XXI), 1966), which came into force on 23 March 1976, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (G.A. res. 2200A (XXI), 1966), which came into force on 3 January 1976. These covenants imposed legal obligations on states to respect the human rights of their citizens, although a number of developed states, most notably the US, did not sign the Covenant on


Social and Economic Rights, refusing to recognize them as truly human rights (D. Harris, 1998, p. 625). With the development of the notion of human rights, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention came to be defined by international lawyers as the international use of force in cases where governments abuse the fundamental human rights of their citizens, in terms of their key political and civil rights. For example, Lauterpacht stated in the eighth edition of International Law: A Treatise in 1955 that there is a substantial body of opinion [referring to scholars discussed above, including, Grotius, Vattel, Rougier, Stowell, Fauchille and Bluntschli] and of practice in support of the view that there are limits to [state sovereignty] . . . and that when a State renders itself guilty of cruelties against and persecution of its nationals in such a way as to deny their fundamental human rights and to shock the conscience of mankind, intervention in the interest of humanity is legally permissible (Lauterpacht, 1955, p. 312, emphasis added). We can see how Lauterpacht uses the new term ‘human rights’ to mean what had earlier been referred to as the rights of man or les droits de l’homme. The same applies to works on humanitarian intervention by other leading scholars in international law. In 1967 Lillich discussed the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention as a practice ‘to protect human rights’ (Lillich, 1967, p. 210). In 1969 McDougal and Reisman, in analysing the UN Charter, interpreted it as having ‘a cumulative effect in regard to the basic policies of the customary institution of humanitarian intervention’ in terms of creating ‘a responsibility for the active protection of human rights’ (McDougal and Reisman, 1969, p. 444). The same position was expressed in 1969 by Moore who argued that humanitarian intervention is allowed when there is a threat ‘to fundamental human rights, particularly a threat of widespread loss of human life (Moore, 1969, p. 264; see also Perez-Vera, 1969, p. 418). In the 1970s Fonteyne asserted that humanitarian intervention is allowed in ‘cases of extreme violations of human rights’ such as the right to life and freedom from torture (Fonteyne, 1974, pp. 257, 258). And Brownlie defined humanitarian intervention as the ‘threat or use of armed force by a state, a belligerent community, or an international organization, with the object of protecting human rights’ (1974). As Scheffer has more recently argued, the view that humanitarian intervention is a legitimate exception to the rule of state sovereignty when human rights are abused is now a ‘classical view’ (Scheffer, 1992).


After the Second World War there developed a distinction in international law between human-rights law and humanitarian law. The former deals with abuses practised during peacetime, and the latter governs the conduct of wars. Thus, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention was also often associated with international humanitarian law (four Geneva conventions on the treatment on combatants and noncombatants during armed conflicts adopted in 1949 and two additional protocols adopted in 1977) and not just human-rights instruments (see Fonteyne, 1974). However, such a distinction was rather superficial because humanitarian law instruments dealt with crimes that were designated as abuses of human rights (political and civil rights) by the human rights instruments. For example, the Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field stipulates in Article 3 that the wounded and sick shall be protected from the following acts: a. violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; b. taking of hostages; c. outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; d. the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. It then refers to these provisions as rights of persons who are wounded and sick (articles 6 and 7). The same rights are guaranteed by the other three conventions: the Convention (II) for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea (Article 3), the Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Article 3) and the Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (Article 3). Furthermore, the additional protocol to the Convention relative to the protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War refers to the four Geneva Conventions as human rights instruments. Thus, Article 72 states that the foregoing provisions ‘are additional to the rules concerning humanitarian protection of civilians and civilian objects in the power of a Party to the conflict contained in the Fourth Convention . . . as well as to other applicable rules of international law relating to the protection of fundamental human rights during international armed conflict.’


The second additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and relating to the Protection of Victims of NonInternational Armed Conflicts opens with a preamble which makes an explicit reference to human rights: ‘Recalling that international instruments relating to human rights offer a basic protection to the human persons’. Thus we can see that the distinction between international humanitarian law and human rights is rather blurred and, as will be seen in Chapter 4, is now gradually disappearing as humanitarian interventions in the post-Cold War period are mostly defined and interpreted by participants in terms of human-rights protection and enforcement. The debate on the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention continued during the Cold War in a way similar to the previous debates; that is, among those who argued that it was an accepted state practice, and those who denied the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. The UN Charter did not provide for humanitarian intervention. On the contrary, Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter stated that ‘all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations’. Nevertheless, numerous scholars argued that humanitarian intervention was part of customary international law and therefore constituted a legitimate exception to the rule of state sovereignty (see Fonteyne, 1974 and Abiew, 1999). The preamble of the UN Charter declares the determination of the peoples of the world ‘reaffirming faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in equal rights of men and women . . . to ensure, by the acceptance of these principles and methods that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest’. On the grounds that the preamble explicitly referred to protection of fundamental human rights as the goal of the UN, and that force shall be used in the common interest, some legal scholars argued that humanitarian intervention is implicitly allowed by the Charter. For example, shortly after the Charter’s adoption, Lauterpacht observed that ‘the correlation between peace and security and observance of fundamental human rights is now a recognized fact. The circumstance that the legal duty to respect fundamental human rights has become part and parcel of the new international system upon which peace depends adds emphasis to that intimate connection’ (Lauterpacht, 1950, p. 186). McDougal and


Reisman later argued that even Article 2 (4) is not against the use of coercion to protect human rights because since a humanitarian intervention seeks neither a territorial change nor a challenge to the political independence of the state involved and is not only not inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations but is rather in conformity with the most fundamental peremptory norms of the Charter, it is a distortion to argue that it is precluded by Article 2 (4). In so far as it is precipitated by intense human rights deprivations and conforms to the general international legal regulations governing the use of force . . . it represents a vindication of international law, and is in fact, a substitute or functional enforcement (McDougal and Reisman, 1973, p. 177; see also Mullerson, 1997, p. 156; there were, of course, opposing views of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention; these were discussed in Chapter 1). In the realm of state practice, the doctrine of humanitarian intervention was not implemented explicitly during the Cold War (O’Donovan, 1992; Chandler, 2002; Hilpold, 2001). Because all international matters touched upon the interests of either superpower, humanitarian intervention by the UN was impossible because of their right of veto in the Security Council. It was similarly dangerous for states to undertake unilateral military action in the environment of the Cold War ‘geopolitical straightjacket’ (de Waal, 1997). In addition to this, state sovereignty constituted the foundation of international order. The principle of non-intervention was an important mechanism to secure stability during the Cold War, in particular in the light of the constant threat of nuclear warfare. The notion of human rights managed to somewhat relativize the rule of state sovereignty only towards the end of the Cold War, particularly with the emergence of international NGOs such as Amnesty International. Moreover, the idea of human rights was itself a very contested concept, in particular in its Western version as the negative rights of individuals; this version was challenged, on the one hand, by the socialist/ communist bloc as a capitalist construct, and by Third World states on the grounds of culture. The USSR and its socialist allies were characterized by systems that could hardly accommodate the idea of individual rights, because their very basis was collectivism and a corresponding rejection of individualism. They were explicitly opposed to capitalism, in particular


to private ownership of the means of production and to private property more generally, and emphasized the duties (rather than the rights) of individuals in relation to the collective. For example, the USSR constitution of 1964 stated that ‘the economic foundation of the USSR is the socialist system of economy and the socialist ownership of the instruments and means of production, firmly established as a result of the liquidation of the capitalist system of economy, the abolition of private ownership of the instruments and means of production, and the elimination of the exploitation of man by man’ (Article 4). As well, ‘socialist property in the USSR exists either in the form of state property (belonging to the whole people) or in the form of co-operative and collective-farm property (property of collective farms, property of co-operative societies)’ (Article 5). The Constitution also stated a number of duties that individuals owed to the state, rather than their rights: ‘to safeguard and fortify public, socialist property’ (Article 131); ‘to perform public duties’ (Article 130); and to ‘defend the country’ (Article 133). The USSR was thus opposed to the Western reading of human rights, particularly as advocated by the United States, and emphasized instead the economic and social rights of individuals as well as collective rights. During the Cold War, therefore, there was a continuous exchange of critiques between the US and the USSR; American statesmen accused socialist countries of repressing civil and political liberties in the USSR and its allies, while the USSR in turn accused the West of the economic exploitation of workers and advocated the international development of social and economic rights (Rosas and Helgensen, 1990, p. 1; Hunt, 1996, p. 7). Third World states’ critique of the Western notion of human rights focused on its emphasis of the primacy of the individual over society. It was argued that such a view of the relationship between the individual and the community was foreign to non-Western cultures which emphasized instead individual duties as opposed to rights. An example was the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights adopted by the Organisation of African Unity in 1979. Soon after independence the majority of these countries faced economic problems and poverty. Particularly affected were states that were integrated into the world economy as exporters of primary products, such as former African colonies. In this context they followed the USSR in arguing that economic and social rights were more important than political and civil ones; emphasis on these rights underpinned their demands for the transformation of the terms of trade and investment, transfer of technology from the developed states, increases in aid and


other economic and social measures. These demands reached their peak in the 1970s in an initiative known as the New International Economic Order (NIEO) articulated within the framework of UNCTAD and the Group of 77 (Bedjaoui, 1979, p. 12; Moss and Winton, 1976). In the post-Cold War period such radical opposition on the part of the Third World countries dramatically reduced, as we will see in the next chapter. Despite these obstacles to the development of humanitarian intervention during the Cold War, three cases of state intervention can be, and have been seen as humanitarian: the Indian intervention in East Pakistan in 1971; the Tanzanian intervention in Uganda in 1979; and Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in 1978. In March 1971, after demands for the autonomy of East Pakistan, the (West) Pakistan army moved into Dacca in March 1971 ‘unleashing a reign of terror’ with ‘mass murders and other human rights atrocities’ (Abiew, 1999, p. 113; see also ICJ, 1972, p. 24–27; Tesoń, 1988, 1977, pp. 179–88; Nanda, 1972). The result was the death of at least one million people and the influx of more than ten million refugees into India (Tesoń, 1988, p. 182). This put a severe strain on the Indian economy and, after appeals by India to the international community failed to result in any action, a war was declared by India in December 1971. After only 12 days the Pakistan army surrendered (ICJ, 1972, p. 44); the defeat resulted in a release of political prisoners, the return of refugees to East Pakistan, and the establishment of the state of Bangladesh. Although clearly having humanitarian outcomes, the intervention was justified by India on the grounds of self-defence; it claimed that Pakistan had committed an act of aggression. Nevertheless, many scholars believe that this intervention was humanitarian, not the least because in the aftermath of the action, the Indian representative at the Security Council stated that ‘Genocide and oppression were a reality. The extinction of all civil rights was a reality . . . The Security Council was nowhere a reality’ (cited in Abiew, 1999, p. 115). The fact that civil rights, oppression and genocide were mentioned as reasons for the intervention, it is argued, make this action by India an example of humanitarian intervention (Wheeler, 2000a; Abiew, 1999; Fonteyne, 1974; Rontzitti, 1985). It was undertaken ‘for the protection of Bengalis from gross and persistent violations of human rights by the Pakistani army’ (Abiew, 1999, p. 114). Other analysts, however, argue that India initially claimed self-defence as its only justification, following preemptive airstrikes by Pakistan; a few humanitarian arguments appeared only later (Brownlie, 1973, p. 139; Frank and Rodley, 1973, p. 276). As the East Pakistani Staff Study concluded, ‘India claimed to have acted


first in self-defence, and secondly, in giving support to the new government of Bangladesh which she recognized when hostilities began . . . If India had wished to justify her action on the principle of humanitarian intervention she should have first made a pre-emptory demand to Pakistan that positive action be taken to rectify the violations of human rights. As far as we are aware no such demand was made’ (quoted in Behuniak, 1978, pp. 176–7). It has also been pointed out that India was interested politically in the secession of East Pakistan and thus seized the opportunity to curtail Pakistan’s power and to diminish its territory (Verwey, 1985; Bazyler, 1987). The Tanzanian intervention in Uganda in 1979 brought to an end the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin, notorious for its gross human-rights violations (see Amnesty International, 1978). In fact, the trigger for the Tanzanian action was the Ugandan occupation of part of Tanzanian territory in the District of Kagera (New York Times, 1978, p. 15). In February 1979 the Tanzanian army and Ugandan rebels launched a fullscale invasion in Uganda and removed Amin from power. Tanzania did not invoke humanitarian grounds during the action, and made its few references to human rights only after the war was over. Its Foreign Ministry, for example, referred to the fall of Idi Amin as ‘a tremendous victory for the people of Uganda and a singular triumph for freedom, justice and human dignity’ (quoted in Abiew, 1999, p. 122). According to some scholars, this statement, as well as the Amin government’s systematic violations of human rights, make this intervention humanitarian, even if only post factum: ‘The sheer brutality of Idi Amin’s regime . . . and the limited intervention by Tanzanian forces (that is, not pursued for the purpose of aggrandizement) indicate that, on balance, the Tanzanian intervention in Uganda can be justified on humanitarian grounds’ (Bazyler, 1987, p. 591). Or, as Tesoń remarks, ‘the widespread feeling that the human rights cause had been served caused the international community to refrain from criticizing the Tanzanian intervention’ (Tesoń, 1988, p. 167). Finally, when some states expressed criticism of the action (for example, Nigeria and Sudan, on the grounds of interference in the internal affairs of Uganda), Ugandan President Godfrey Binaisa (who had taken over after the overthrow of Amin) replied that states must not ‘hide behind the formula of nonintervention when human rights are blatantly violated’ (quoted in Abiew, 1999, p. 124). The intervention of Vietnam in Cambodia in 1978 also put an end to massive violations of human rights; this time by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime (Bazyler, 1987). ‘The enormity of the human rights


violations . . . was of genocidal proportions’ (Abiew, 1999, p. 127). In December 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Pol Pot regime. Once again no explicit humanitarian justification was invoked. In the debate in the UN Security Council, Vietnam offered a rationale for the intervention which claimed the right of self-defence (Abiew, 1999, p. 128). Much international reaction was negative, condemning Vietnam for violation of the state sovereignty of Cambodia. This reaction was shaped by Cold War rivalries; China and the US supported Cambodia’s sovereignty, while the USSR supported Vietnam, which was its ally. Nevertheless, a number of scholars still regard this intervention as humanitarian. The Pol Pot regime had killed between one-quarter and one-third of the Cambodian population, so a moral justification for humanitarian intervention certainly existed (Bazyler, 1987). As Leifer argues, Vietnam’s action was ‘a perfect candidate for humanitarian intervention’ (Leifer, 1993, p. 131). As argued above, an historical analysis of humanitarian intervention has to contextualize it; the question therefore is what the relationship was between the doctrine of humanitarian intervention and the international system that developed during the Cold War. First, the impact of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention was marginal. It made some contribution to the development of the notion of human rights during the Cold War, because debates surrounding the doctrine of humanitarian intervention defined it as the enforcement of fundamental human rights, meaning negative rights (Wheeler, 2000a). The doctrine of humanitarian intervention and the three cases discussed above therefore constituted part of the developing ideology that conceived freedom and justice in terms of the political and civil emancipation of individuals. Throughout the Cold War, the Western world, led by the US, presented itself as the ‘free world’; this ‘freedom’ in fact was confined only to political and civil emancipation and respect for the negative rights of individuals – which were said to be under threat in non-Western countries. Although it was indeed the case that many socialist states practised gross violations of human rights while most Western states did not, it was nevertheless ideological to present the West as free. This ideological association of freedom with civil and political rights was in part reproduced in the contemporary accounts and subsequent academic debates about humanitarian intervention in the context of the three cases of humanitarian intervention discussed above. However, in spite of this, the impact of humanitarian intervention during the Cold War was negligible. As will be seen in the next chapter, this situation changed after the ‘geo-political straightjacket’ of the Cold


War disappeared and the notion of individual negative rights gradually became global. This expansion occurred geographically and also as a non-territorial norm by which agents are evaluated and to which they increasingly tend to conform, at least formally or officially. Those who do not now tend to be coerced by means of humanitarian intervention (provided, of course, that this does not interfere with the interests of important states or capital).

Conclusion With the help of Marx’s concept of ideology in the negative sense this chapter has shown how humanitarianism, presented by existing analyses as a linear evolution, in fact varied in different social settings. In the feudal order it was part of an ideology that consisted in interpreting social relations as having a divine origin and meaning, an ideology that contributed to the reproduction of feudal relations of power and exploitation. With the development of capitalism, a new ideology appeared, one that emphasized individual freedom and rights, and which objectified relations of inequality and exploitation in the economy. Humanitarianism gradually became part of this new ideology, clearly distinguishing it from medieval just-war theory; an account of this transformation is completely missing from existing studies of humanitarian intervention. With the development of international capitalism the relationship between humanitarian intervention and capital was still marginal. In the pre-Charter period the doctrine of humanitarian intervention played some role in colonial expansion. In the post-Charter period, it was part of the developing ideological association of respect for human rights (negative rights) with justice and freedom in capitalist societies, or the ‘free world’, led by the United States. The analysis of the relationship between humanitarian intervention and capital in this chapter will help make sense of the role it plays today in the context of global capitalism. The ideological association of respect for human rights (meaning the civil and political liberties of individuals) with justice and freedom is now gradually becoming global. While not practised everywhere, it is nevertheless hegemonic; that is, it constitutes a norm or a basis upon which the behaviour of agents is increasingly evaluated, and to which the agents find it necessary to conform, at least officially. Human-rights enforcement, which is premised on the notion of human rights understood in this way, is accordingly being transformed


from the exception to the rule. It now plays an important role in the further development of this global ideology and, as I will argue in the final chapter, plays a crucial role in providing the developing global order with a quality of moral and intellectual leadership; that is, it contributes to the formation of a new global hegemony. These arguments will be based on a number of assumptions concerning globalization (and what is global about it), as well as hegemony. These two concepts will be developed in the next chapter.

3 Globalization and the Development of a New Form of Global Hegemony

Introduction In the previous chapter, the development of humanitarian intervention was historicized and was examined in relation to its social context up to the end of the Cold War. This chapter deals with the fundamental transformations that have characterized the realm of the international in recent years, and will set the ground for the discussion of humanrights enforcement in the post-Cold War period in relation to a developing new global order – which is the task of the next chapter. This chapter begins by examining the process of globalization and develops a particular understanding of it; namely, not only as referring to quantitative increases in interdependence and interconnectedness, as it is usually understood, but also in terms of qualitative transformations. These take place in the way agency is conditioned and disciplined; that is to say, it is the transformations at the level of causation, from territorial geographical place to non-territorial or n-dimensional space. Here ‘global refers to a space of causal power in the world’ (Maclean, 1999b, p. 182) which is no longer capable of being described in exclusively territorial terms. More precisely, it will be argued that globalization can be understood as the development of a particular set of interrelated economic and political standards, which constitute a basis upon which agency is evaluated and disciplined, and to which agency increasingly tends to conform even without direct influence, persuasion or coercion. For example, a state form today is expected to be an efficient market economy, with guarantees of private property, a good investment rating and reasonable economic growth, which is achieved through neoliberal structural reforms such as deregulation, reduction of public spending, 121


privatization of various state functions, and liberalization of trade. It is also increasingly expected to be a formal democracy, with a developed civil society and a good record of human rights (political and civil rights, or fundamental human rights) – although a relative neglect of these political elements may be tolerated if the above economic requirements are fulfilled. As Donnelly puts it, ‘regimes that do not at least claim to pursue rapid and sustained economic growth (‘‘development’’), popular political participation (‘‘democracy’’), and respect for the rights of their citizens (‘‘human rights’’) place their national and international legitimacy at risk’ (1999, p. 608). Another example is the developing model of a business firm, which is today expected to be socially responsible, taking into consideration the interests not only of shareholders, but also of stakeholders; this often involves the promotion of human rights outside the confines of the business – making contributions to women’s rights or to elimination of child labour, for example. This is not to say that all firms everywhere engage in such practices, although most of the large and medium-sized ones increasingly do. Nor is it to dismiss the fact that they may engage in such policies to pursue some selfish interests. It is only to point out how such a dominant standard is developing and how firms increasingly find it necessary to conform to this standard, at least officially. This, in turn, further contributes to the development of this global standard. As will be argued below, this involves the establishment of a qualitatively new global hegemonic order, which is different from previous international hegemonies in that it has no single hegemonic state and is based on non-territorial causation. The emergent hegemonic order, on the one hand, privileges the interests of transnational capital over the interests of the state/society complex, which results in growing inequalities among and within states. However, on the other hand, this hegemony is developing a set of moral values, central to which are the notions of justice and freedom predominantly understood as respect for individual negative rights. These values are ideological and compatible with the dominant position of transnational capital. Within this hegemonic structure, interaction among states and other actors may take unequal forms (for example, in terms of trade barriers), and some states (in particular the OECD countries) benefit from the existing situation more than others do. However, their dominant position, as well as the subordinate position of the Third World states, cannot be reduced solely to the intentions or capabilities of the former and the respective weaknesses of the latter. It may be better seen as a result of the development of certain global standards on the basis of which the

Globalization and a New Global Hegemony 123

developed states gain their advantages in relation to the developing countries, and reproduce the latter’s subordination. The same applies to human-rights enforcement, as will be argued in the next chapter. By undertaking humanitarian military actions, powerful states may pursue certain other than humanitarian interests. However, their action is not reducible to these interests alone, nor to the states concerned, but may better be seen as a mediation of an increasingly consented to and normalized norm, namely the respect for human rights, understood as the negative rights of individuals. Furthermore, by undertaking humanrights enforcement actions, the states concerned may produce the unintended consequence of contributing to the development of a Gramscian moral and intellectual leadership and thereby further mediate consent within a developing hegemonic structure. Gramsci’s category of hegemony has already been used to analyse the developing order by a number of scholars, in particular those making up what is known as the neo-Gramscian approach to international relations or international political economy. Despite differences, what is common to them is their emphasis on the hegemonic position of transnational capital in the late-modern GPE, ensured by a transatlantic ruling class (van der Pijl, 1999) or transnational social forces related to transnational capital (Gill, 1995). This chapter will develop these insights in two ways: 1. A stress on the structural dimension of the developing hegemony and an emphasis that the hegemony of transnational capital is not reducible to its particular agents, but is a result of the globalization of certain economic policies and institutions, their increasing de-territorialization and de-historicization or normalization and their taking for granted, by dominant and subordinate actors alike (see Manokha, 2004; 2005); the position of transnational capital is hegemonic because conditions for its continuous production and reproduction are becoming increasingly objectified and taken for granted. 2. A development of a dimension so far neglected in the analyses of hegemony, namely the idea of moral and intellectual leadership which is central to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony; human rights policies of different actors in general, and human-rights enforcement in particular, may be said to have the unintended consequence of mediating a system of moral and intellectual leadership in the emergent hegemony, thereby contributing to the hegemonic position of transnational capital.


These arguments will be developed in this and the next chapter. This chapter is divided into two sections: the first deals with the process of globalization; the second develops the notion of hegemony. This will prepare the ground for contextualizing human-rights enforcement in the next chapter.

1

Globalization

The existing analyses of globalization tend to conceive of it in largely empirical terms, as quantitative increases in transborder economic, political, social and cultural interaction. The question that arises in relation to such views is what is then ‘global’ about globalization; that is, what is qualitatively new about the late-modern world which can no longer be expressed using the terms ‘international’ or ‘transnational’, and which, therefore, warrants the use of a new term ‘global’ (Maclean, 1999a, 1999b)? If we are dealing with quantitative changes only, albeit spectacular ones, we may continue using terms other than ‘global’. There also exist critical writings on the globalization thesis, but the critics challenge it on strictly empirical grounds; what is common to such views is an assertion that comparable transborder interactions had already taken place before and there is therefore nothing new about the late-modern world (Hirst and Thompson, 1996). This chapter develops a different view of globalization, which argues that important qualitative changes are now taking place; these can no longer be properly described as ‘international’. These transformations are related to the nature of causation and causal power in the world, which is becoming increasingly non-territorial or ndimensional, incapable of being located in a particular geographical place. It is a process of increasing normalization and de-historicization of relations and institutions that were previously contested, and often directly linked with coercion and military state power; these included free trade, private property, privatization and deregulation, and justice conceived of in terms of political and civil rights of individuals. These notions today are losing their previous historical location and territorial attachment, and becoming standards by which agents are evaluated, and evaluate themselves, and increasingly tend to conform to these standards (at least officially, as is often the case with human rights). What is global about these notions is not only the growing geographical extent of their development, but also their causal power in relation to agents, whatever their location. This causal power is no longer reducible to particular territorially located actors, although it is constantly mediated by them.


Discussions of globalization usually begin with attempts to establish when it started. John Maclean, whose view of globalization this analysis develops, argues that such a question is unanswerable and redundant; asking when globalization began is like asking when did capitalism begin, or when did life itself begin (Maclean, 1999a; 1999b). Instead, we have to ‘ask what conditions were historically necessary for it to occur’ (1999b, p. 187). Although it is true that globalization (understood as a creation of the non-territorial or n-dimensional norms that condition agency) does not have a linear history, but instead a complex set of historically related processes with different velocities, I would nevertheless agree with those authors who argue that globalization is integrally related to the historical process of capitalist social development (Solomon and Rupert, 1999; Rupert, 2000). As Gill argues, globalization is the latest phase in a process that originated before the Enlightenment in Europe, and accelerated in the 19th century with the onset of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of the integral nation-state (Gill, 1995, p. 400). In this view, globalization is inseparable from the capitalist expansionist tendency, and for globalization to occur, one of the necessary conditions was the development of transnational dimensions of capital accumulation, in particular of production, distribution and consumption (see also Maclean, 1999b, p. 189). In this sense, as Palan notes, Marx’s analysis of capital, of its expansionist tendency that imposes itself spatially (penetrating new and distant markets) and also deepens its grip on social life, may form ‘the background of an holistic account of diverse developments, from the colonialism of 19th-century capitalism to the formation of the Bretton Woods system in the 20th century and the rise of globalization towards the 21st century’ (Palan, 2000, p. 11). However, Marx’s approach provides us only ‘with a strong hypothesis of the longterm trajectories of capitalism’ (p. 16, emphasis added) and gives us tools to understand the key driving forces behind long-term processes. As regards particular historical formations and institutions, it is also necessary to look for contingent factors or forces, or a particular historical coincidence of the effects of various processes. With respect to globalization understood in terms of an increasing non-territorialization of causation, the key mechanism behind its development is the tendency towards the constant expansion of capital. However, in terms of immediate or conjunctural causes of globalization, the following interrelated factors can be identified: 1. Economic transformations: the development of stateless forms of capital accumulation and global firms; rapidly increased mobility


of capital; transformation of the state/firm relationship; and a shift of the former socialist/communist states to a capitalist market economy; 2. Political transformations: increased privatization of state functions; transformation of the role of the government in public policymaking; a decline of mass parties and a breakdown of class politics; the collapse of socialism/communism and a relative shift of the former socialist/communist states towards formal democratization, the development of civil society and the ascendance of individual rights; 3. Development of global governance (facilitated by the end of the Cold War): codification/institutionalization of the above economic and political developments, and their further stimulation; 4. Dramatic developments in information and communication technology which have played a role in contributing to all the above three processes. Arguing from a long-term Marxist perspective, all these developments may be understood in terms of capitalist development. However, the fact that these historical developments have coincided in this particular form, and that they have resulted in a development of a global, meaning non-territorial, hegemony, is clearly a matter of an historical contingency. Thus, for example, from a Marxist point of view, socialism/communism was bound to collapse because it was born into an already existing international capitalist system. However, it may have existed longer had Mikhail Gorbachev not started his Glasnost and Perestroika reforms, or if someone else had been chosen as the Party Secretary. The same applies to the end of the Cold War, whose outcome could have been different had, for example, a real, ‘hot’, war broken out between the two superpowers. It can be similarly argued that the development of the internet and other information technology, which played such a crucial role in all the above developments, was stimulated by the capitalist need to expand, which, in turn, was a necessary condition of research and of these developments in technology (Maclean, 1999b, p. 196). However, development of technology in this particular way and to this extent and at this particular time was never predetermined (although it was always encouraged) by capital. Although globalization is a an outcome of a set of complex processes with different historical velocities, the time-frame of the coincidence of several historical developments leading to globalization may be identified; this time-frame starts roughly with the end of the Cold


War. Let us look at these processes in more detail. We will examine the first three developments, whereas the contribution of technology will not be discussed as a separate category for it cuts across all the others, and will therefore be mentioned occasionally in the discussion of the three categories, and in subsequent arguments. Economic transformations The internal constitution of the capitalist system is marked by separations and contradictions which make crises an inherent characteristic of capitalism. Liberal economic theory presents capitalism as a society where pursuit of individual selfish interests leads to the advancement of a general social good. This fiction obscures not only the inequality of possessions and numerous relations of power and inequality that exist in the economy, but also the way private decisions of individual economic agents aimed at securing their interests and ultimate self-preservation may be in contradiction with collective interests, thereby undermining macroeconomic stability and provoking crises. For example, enterprises experiencing downturns in sales may take a rational decision to reduce their spending. This, however, may negatively affect other enterprises, especially their suppliers of primary commodities or intermediate goods, which will also experience reductions in sales, and then in turn reduce their spending. The overall outcome of these private decisions may be a downturn in the aggregate investment level and a disruption of the macroeconomic equilibrium. In addition to this, such actions may also result in an increase in unemployment as enterprises seeking to reduce costs will lay off some of their workers which, in turn, will lead to a further reduction in overall consumption and further affect the sales levels of firms. Shareholders of firms that experience difficulties may in their turn decide to sell their shares, but such an action by many shareholders at the same time may lead to a stock exchange crisis. Banks, faced with bad debts and worthless shares, may decide to reduce the amount of credit that they make available to enterprises, which in turn may result in further negative consequences for enterprises already faced with financial difficulties. At the core of this inherently fractured and contradictory structure resides a fundamental separation of production and consumption (Meszaros, 1995). In capitalism production of commodities and services is carried out not to satisfy particular existing needs, but exclusively for sale and profit. That is to say, commodities and services are produced not for their use-values but for their exchange-values. On the one hand, this separation provides capitalism with great dynamism compared to earlier


social formations, in which people produced to satisfy their immediate needs and no more. On the other hand, the ultimate viability of the system depends on a constant adjustment and coordination between production and consumption. Such an adjustment, however, is rendered difficult by an ever-present potential contradiction between the interests of workers – who are also consumers – and the interests of capital. On the face of it, the interests of the two seem compatible: workers who need a source of income are employed by enterprises for a wage, which they then utilize to purchase commodities and services produced by firms. This compatibility of interests, however, is possible only so long as firms make profits. When profits fall for one reason or another – for example, markets are saturated with similar products – enterprises are forced to cut their costs, and reduce wage bills. To extricate itself from the difficulties of profitable expansion and accumulation, capital needs to reduce the ‘labour costs of production’, but by doing so capital simultaneously undermines the vital conditions of its own expanded reproduction because rises in unemployment lead to a reduction in overall demand and consumption. To avoid constant disruptions and failures, the capitalist production structure necessarily requires some form of regulation and control. This role has traditionally been performed by the nation-state, and in the period from the end of the Second World War until the early 1970s, it was achieved rather successfully. This period was characterized by a regime of accumulation and regulation known as ‘Fordism’, a concept elaborated particularly in the work of the French Regulation School (Aglietta, 1976, 1998; Boyer, 2000, 2004; Lipietz, 1985; Jessop, 1999, 2001). Fordism was based on four key foundations: 1. A capital-labour compromise which resulted in the sharing of productivity gains and rapid rises of wages; 2. Active fiscal and monetary policies whose central objective was to maintain a constant progression of demand; 3. A welfare state which established social protection systems based on what may described as solidarity between social classes on the one hand, and generations on the other; and 4. State-regulated financial systems which ensured the accumulation of industrial capital through credit provided with low interest rates and controlled by state authorities (Boyer, 2004, pp. 61–8). As a regime of accumulation Fordism involved the synchronization of mass production and mass consumption and a cycle of growth which


comprised the following elements: rising productivity based on economies of scale in mass production; rising incomes linked to productivity; increased mass demand due to rising wages; increased profits based on full utilization of capacity; increased investment in improved mass production equipment and techniques; and a further rise in productivity. This regime of accumulation was marked by a specific mode of regulation – a welfare state – which managed aggregate demand so that the capital-intensive investments of Fordist firms were worked close to capacity. It also controlled finance and generalized mass consumption norms so that most citizens could share the prosperity generated by rising economies of scale (Jessop, 2001, pp. 35–6; Aglietta and Breton, 2001, p. 434). The dominant economic paradigm at the time was the Keynesian view that state intervention in the market was necessary to offset nominal rigidities, particularly in the labour market, through government spending. Governments in western Europe, North America and Japan engaged in inflationary policies that were aimed at stimulating demand in order to increase consumption and thereby fuel output and growth. In addition to this, trade unions were well organized and their collective bargaining power was recognized by enterprise management, while the former in turn recognized the latter’s right to control the labour process and corporate strategy. As a result, the continuous rise in productivity was matched by integration of the majority of wage-earners into societies for life through mass consumption and the creation of diverse social-protection systems (Boyer, 2000, p. 280). The international structures of trade and finance were based on the internationalization of this ‘negotiated compromise between the factions of capital and labour in a range of capitalist states’ (Gill, 2003, p. 87); there emerged a form of a consensus among governments in North America, western Europe and Japan concerning the development of a capitalist world economy that was marked by significant state intervention into the functioning of the market. States were allowed to pursue inflationary economic stabilization and social-welfare policies and this consensus was institutionalized in the framework of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The IMF was established to control currency devaluations and to lend currency on a short-term basis to countries whose own currencies no longer competed in the international money markets. The World Bank was created to provide conventional loans to states unable to obtain credits or loans from other sources (Hanson, 1993, p. 94). GATT was


designed to manage the international trading system through multilateral negotiations (Gilpin, 2000). Central to the established international order ‘were the notions of the ‘‘mixed economy’’ which allowed for a range of national policies to be practiced in a relatively expansionist, stable structure’ (Gill, 2003, p. 87). The overall product of this international institutional environment was high economic and social stability, which was particularly conducive to the accumulation of industrial capital and growth in output. However, as noted earlier, a compatibility of interests between capital and labour is only possible when firms make sufficient profits to be able to share them with their employees. Concessions and benefits to labour ‘could be conceded by capital so long as they could be assimilated and integrated by the system as a whole and turned to its productive advantage in the course of its self-expansion’ (Meszaros, 1995, p. 40). When, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the productivity of capital and the rates of profit made by enterprises started to decline, the Fordist economic and social equilibrium began to fall apart (Mazier, Basle and Vidal, 1999, pp. 31–7). The postwar rises in the productivity of capital were made possible by the destruction of the equipment and infrastructure during the war in Europe and Japan, and, earlier, by the Great Depression, a recession in 1938 and a war effort which privileged the satisfaction of immediate needs over fixed capital investment in the United States (Joshua, 2006, pp. 45–116). In all core capitalist political economies fixed capital assets had to be replaced or renewed; in Europe and Japan, roads, communications and houses needed to be rebuilt. In the postwar years there were numerous opportunities for productive investment in capital goods and equipment, which in turn encouraged technological innovation and allowed significant gains in productivity over an almost 30-year period. However, when the process of rebuilding and reconstruction was completed, and innovation in equipment achieved the highest possible level given the existing state of technology, the rates of profit that characterized the ‘Thirty Glorious Years’ began to decline (Dumeńil and Levy, 1996). In addition to this, towards the end of the 1960s, the regulatory power of inflation was increasingly undermined as economic actors, in anticipation of inflationary economic policies, started to form their expectations accordingly and to include inflation considerations in their wage and price setting. The Keynesian paradigm of fiscal regulation of economic activity which seemed to have solved capitalist contradictions turned out to be an ineffective tool of economic policy in situations where inflation is anticipated by agents; this was described in the


Rational Expectations theory which developed in the 1970s (Lucas, 1973). In such situations inflationary dynamics may go out of control and result an inflationary spiral threatening the stability of the system. Furthermore, different rates of inflation in different countries were ultimately incompatible with an international regime of fixed exchange rates, which was finally abandoned in 1973 and replaced by a regime of flexible exchange rates. The decline of productivity gains and significant falls in profits without a corresponding decline in wages and social benefits could not be sustained. The interests of capital and labour were no longer compatible. Faced with this crisis the Reagan government in the US and the Thatcher government in the UK, soon followed by other developed countries, initiated fundamental economic reforms at the core of which lay two principal objectives: the containment of inflation and the reduction of public debt. To cope with rising inflation, which was severely amplified by two oil-price shocks, the US Federal Reserve doubled interest rates in 1979, an event described by Dumeńil and Levy as ‘the coup of 1979’ (Dumeńil and Levy, 2003, p. 30; see also Dumeńil and Levy, 2000). To finance public debt governments could no longer count on national investors alone; they had to attract international investors, particularly institutional investors, to purchase government bonds and obligations. In the 1980s, policies of financial liberalization and deregulation were implemented in advanced capitalist states, and financial markets gradually replaced banks as the key sources of credit for both governments and enterprises. The Fordist regime of ‘administered indebtedness’, with national banks providing enterprises with credit on favourable terms, was replaced by a ‘regime of liberalised financial markets’ (Aglietta, 2005, p. 8). These reforms, coupled with developments in information and communication technologies, have gradually resulted in the creation of an integrated, 24-hour global network of financial markets. In the Fordist period the function of the international monetary system was limited to the financing of international trade and ensuring balance of payments. However, with the liberalization of financial markets – their external opening: allowing foreign investors access to national capital markets; and their internal opening: removal of boundaries between different types of markets (short-term capital markets, long-term capital markets, foreign exchange markets, etc.) – international financial flows experienced spectacular quantitative growth and profound qualitative transformations.


The global financial marketplace is now characterized by the dominance of financial dealings only indirectly related to investment in the global economy (Plihon, 2004). Most financial operations involve creation of profit through transformation of financial instruments from one form into another. To use Marx’s distinction between two circuits of capital (Marx, 1978), productive – M-C-M’ (where M is money capital, C is commodities produced and M’ is money capital that is obtained after the sale of commodities), and financial – M-M’ (where initial investments M result in an immediate increase of value M’) – it is the second that totally dominates global financial markets today. The last 10 to 15 years have seen the development of what Boubel and Pansard (2004) call ‘zinzins’ or institutional investors; these include pension funds, mutual funds or insurance companies, which manage the financial assets of individuals or enterprises. According to the OECD, in 2001 mutual funds held 35 per cent of third-party assets, pension funds and insurance companies held 30 per cent and 26 per cent respectively; the rest were managed by other investors, most notably speculative hedge funds. Their total financial assets amounted to $27,000 billion in 2000, which surpasses the GDPs of the major industrial economies combined (OECD, 2002). Particularly impressive has been the growth of hedge funds, which held a total of £380 billion in 1998 and $1.2 trillion in 2006 (Aglietta and Berrebi, 2007, p.105). These reforms were accompanied by policies of privatization and denationalization of state-owned enterprises. To achieve more efficiency in enterprise management and to raise funds, governments in advanced capitalist economies embarked upon a massive sale of shares in these bodies to private investors. A combined effect of privatization and the development of integrated and liberalized financial markets has been the development of what some analysts refer to as ‘shareholder capitalism’ (Chesnais, et al., 2001), that is, a form of capitalism in which the key role in production of commodities and services is played by financial markets. These markets perform a triple role: they contribute to the financing of enterprises, allowing private investors to acquire shares of enterprises; they allow these enterprises’ continuous evaluation by determining the value of stocks; and they contribute to enterprises’ restructuring as shares, which now serve as a currency with which shares in other enterprises can be acquired. Shareholders are mostly concerned with immediate or short-term gains – an immediate transformation of M into M’. This is particularly true of institutional investors such as pension funds, mutual or insurance companies, and hedge funds.


Shareholder capitalism therefore compels managers of enterprises to adopt policies leading to increases in shareholder value. Such policies include restructuring and reduction of costs; these often translate into policies directly affecting labour, such as wage policy reforms or job cuts, as well as mergers with other corporations or their acquisitions. We may note in passing that those who suggest that shareholder capitalism allows workers to possess shares of corporations where they are employed, which, it is argued radically transforms the relationship between capital and labour (for example, Minc, 2000), are deeply mistaken: workers who hold shares in their corporations cannot have it both ways because as employees they seek higher wages and security of employment, whereas as shareholders they demand the highest possible return on their shares, which often means reduction of labour costs and downsizing. At the international level these neoliberal reforms were institutionalized in the framework of organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, as well as the World Trade Organization (which succeeded GATT in 1995); together these are commonly known as the ‘Washington Consensus’, a term coined by the British economist John Williamson (1990). The term refers to a set of neoliberal policies which include: fiscal discipline (public spending restraints and reduction of taxes); financial liberalization (removal of control on financial transactions and capital movements, setting of interest rates by the market and the abandonment of administered interest rates); trade liberalization (relaxation and removal of trade barriers and tariffs); privatization of state-owned enterprises; deregulation (removal of all obstacles to free competition); and protection of property rights (private and intellectual property rights). Over the last 15 to 20 years these organizations have made their financial aid and loans conditional on the adoption of these policies by recipient countries. Together, these developments have resulted in increasingly transnational forms of production and accumulation of capital; national policy-making processes are dependent on variables and factors that are not under the control of state governments. As Meszaros has argued, ‘the present-day articulation of capital as a global system . . . confronts us with spectre of total uncontrollability’ (Meszaros, 1995, p. 7). In this setting, transnational capital, both industrial and financial, has acquired a relative power over the state/society complex. In the case of industrial capital, in a global environment where, as Milton Friedman has observed, it has become possible ‘to produce a product anywhere, using resources from anywhere, by a company located anywhere, to be


sold anywhere’ (quoted in Naisbits, 1994, p. 19), the number of transnational corporations has increased dramatically, from 3,500 in 1960 to 40,000 in 1995 (UNCTAD, 1996), to 60,000 in 2001 (UNCTAD, 2001) and to 700,000 (with 69,000 subsidiaries) in 2004 (UNCTAD, 2005). In 2000 such companies employed twice as many people as they had done in 1990 and they accounted for about 25 per cent of world production and 70 per cent of world trade, while sales were equivalent to almost half of world GDP (Held and McGrew, 2000, p. 3; UNCTAD, 2001, p. 5). The largest 350 corporations have sales that equal one-third of the GNP of the OECD industrial countries and own more than 25 per cent of the world’s stocks and assets (J. Harris, 1998, p. 27). The power of these corporations has two aspects: behavioural and structural. The former refers to their sheer financial power, which they can use to influence government policies via lobbying, political party sponsoring and outright corruption, particularly in the developing world. The latter concerns their increased mobility and transnational nature compared to immobile territorially based states. Corporations may fairly easily relocate their activities if the terms of investment offered by a host country become less attractive compared to those offered elsewhere. Today national governments are increasingly compelled to compete to attract and retain foreign direct investment, which in turn means adopting neoliberal policies and abandoning social-democratic models of social protection (Held et al., 1999, p. 4). There has developed a ‘competition among national governments through industrial policies aimed at creating the most favourable conditions for foreign investment (friendly corporate law and fiscal policy, good infrastructures, flexible labour force, efficient public administration)’ (Martinelli, 2003, p. 303). Beck calls this state of affairs the ‘imperialism of marching out’: When we inquire into the transnational corporation and the nature of its power, we find that it is no longer the imperialism of marching in, but instead the imperialism of marching out. It is the withdrawal of cooperation, the banishment of a state from the cooperative economic network that is now essential to its existence [which] is a terrible threat (Beck and Willms, 2004, p. 49). Financial capital further erodes the power of nation-states. The global financial network is under no state’s control and constantly poses a range of threats to national economies. On the one hand, as is the case with industrial capital, there is an ever-present threat of withdrawal of funds from national capital markets, which may result in a range of


crises. Hence, the international mobility of financial capital can swiftly force governments that deviate from policies seen as suitable by the ‘market’ to change course (Gill and Law, 1993, p. 107). Different institutional and private financial investors may therefore move their funds elsewhere should a state adopt policies that are not seen as appropriate from the point of view of financial capital. In addition to this, the setting of currency exchange rates is now de facto removed from government; they are set by the market whose daily turnover today exceeds $1.9 trillion (BIS, 2005) and occurs in real time, via the ‘information standard’ (McMichael, 2000, pp. 110–11). Finally, states may be victims of financial speculations and stock exchange bubbles and crashes which, through a domino effect, affect the entire world, as the financial crises in Mexico (1994–95), Asia (1997) and Russia (1998) demonstrated. The power of industrial and productive factions of capital is reinforced by the proliferation of the offshore economy – the emergence of capital markets which have very different legal and fiscal conditions from those of states in which they are located (Palan, 1998). In recent years there has been a rapid development of offshore operations; this has consisted of four processes (Cameron and Palan, 1999, pp. 278–9): 1. Broadening of the Euromarkets into a series of interconnected ‘stateless’ financial markets which together intermediate an estimated 80 per cent of all international banking transactions; 2. A parallel rise in the number of tax havens, through which an estimated half of the global stock of money is either residing or passes through; 3. A dramatic rise in the number of export-processing zones and freetrade zones. These benefit from greatly reduced taxation, import duties and other regulations; approximately one quarter of the world’s manufacturing takes place in such zones; and 4. An extension of ‘flagging out’, a practice developed in the shipping industry. It consists of the formal registration of an institution located in one place in the legal jurisdiction of another; flying a ‘flag of convenience’. It applies to such spheres of activity as aircraft leasing, telecommunications, internet casinos, internet pornography and internet shopping. The increasing uncontrollability of capital and its growing power with respect to the state/society complex is a logical outcome of a ‘structural mismatch’ between national states and capital’s global aspirations (Meszaros, 1995, pp. 67–70). After the destruction caused by the Second


World War in Europe and Japan, and the severe economic downturn brought about by the Great Depression followed by a recession of 1938 in the US, there were numerous opportunities for the valorisation of capital at the national level in Western capitalist political economies. The Fordist order, with its significant state intervention into the functioning of the economy, was structurally possible because there was room for capital’s self-expansion within state borders. However, when the period of recovery ended, the contradiction between national states and the irrepressible drive of capital to articulate and consolidate its material reproductive structures in the form of a fully integrated global economy became apparent – and manifests itself today with increasing force. Powerful states, most notably the US, attempt to overcome this structural mismatch and promote the interests of capital worldwide by various diplomatic, political and occasionally military means. But even the US is powerless when it comes to dealing with global financial markets, as the stock exchange crisis of 2000 demonstrated (Aglietta, 2005). These economic processes have been seen as the key elements in the process of globalization (understood in terms of quantitative increases in movements of capital and goods) and the development of a global economy; both have rendered the world more interdependent (Woods, 2000; Mittelman, 2000; Sklair, 2002). In the next sub-section we will examine parallel political transformations. Political transformations The focus of public policy has shifted towards the relative capacities of different states to promote a favourable investment climate for transnational capital by providing a much more circumscribed range of public goods described as ‘immobile factors of capital’ (Reich, 1991, p. 264), and to promote export-oriented development. These public goods include: human capital (skills, experience, education and training in the work force); infrastructure (from public transportation to hightech ‘information highways’); support for new technology; provision of those public services necessary for a good ‘quality of life’ for new elites and middle managers, such as high-quality and secure housing; and the maintenance of a public policy environment favourable to investment and profit-making by potentially ‘footloose’ companies (whether domestic or foreign-owned) (Cerny, 2000a, p. 28). In terms of the export-orientation of economies, the model of accumulation, based on domestic market expansion, has fully made way for the neoliberal model, based on liberalization and integration


into the global economy, a laissez-faire state, and ‘export-led development’ (Green, 1995; W. Robinson, 1998). Common policy shifts across the world include closer integration with flows of trade, investment and finance, and development models that states adopt today are all exportoriented, as even Third World countries reject import substitution industrialization and embrace export promotion industrialization, thereby integrating their economies more and more closely into the global economic order (N. Harris, 1986; Haggard, 1990). Even socialliberal economists nowadays regard the battle to retain the idea of the ‘national economy’ to be lost, and see states as condemned to merely tinkering around the edges of national economic policy (Reich, 1991). There has been a change in the character of the state’s domestic tasks, roles and activities following the privatization of state functions and the resulting transformation of the state/firm relationship. In particular, the aim of social justice through redistribution has been challenged and profoundly undermined by the marketization or commodification of the state’s economic activities (and of the state itself), resulting in a ‘destatization of the political system’ ( Jessop, 1997, p. 574). The result is a ‘privatization of the public sphere’, not just in the sense of the selling of state agencies and their downsizing or contracting out of public services and functions, but in the deeper sense of transforming policy functions that had previously been thought of and accepted as intrinsically belonging to the public sphere into essentially private phenomena in the wider global context (Cerny, 2000a, p. 24). Many basic public services and functions, such as the provision of environmental health protection, street lighting, garbage collection, police protection, certain kinds of transportation or energy infrastructure, as well as such coercive functions as the military and prisons systems which have until now been at the bureaucratic heart of the modern industrial/welfare state, have been disaggregated and commodified in a range of experimental ways (W. Robinson, 1996, p. 15; Cerny, 2000a, p. 25; Singer, 2003). Most notable is the process of privatization, outsourcing and subcontracting of the coercive functions of the state. Beginning in the early 1990s, the world has witnessed a rapid development of private military companies (PMCs), corporate bodies providing various military services such as combat operations, strategic planning, intelligence gathering and analysis, operational support, troop airlifting, troop training and military technical assistance (Avant, 2000; Brayton, 2002; Singer, 2003). The process of subcontracting of military services has gone furthest in the US where in the period 1994–2002 the Pentagon and the Department of State entered into more than 3000 contracts with PMCs,


the total value of which was more than $300 billion (ICIJ, 2002). In the UK and Israel various military services, particularly military training, have also been widely outsourced (Campbell, 2002). In 2002 there existed at least 90 PMCs that had operated in more than 110 countries (ICIJ, 2002); the revenue from the global PMC market was projected to rise from $55.6 billion in 1990 to $202 billion in 2010 (Peterson and Van Niekerk, 2002). Another element in the process of privatization of state coercive institutions has been the privatization of prisons. Today there are more than 100 private prisons in the US, 11 in the UK, seven in Australia and one in New Zealand. Private prisons have also opened in South Africa and Canada (Roth, 2004, pp. 4–24). Some police functions have also been privatized, mostly in the United States, where in neighbourhoods in which the government fails to provide law-enforcement services, private companies fill the vacuum (Munk, 1994). In addition to this, state police agencies increasingly rely on private security personnel to perform tasks they prefer not to do. For example, private security companies have provided security and shelters for the homeless in New York City (Chaiken and Chaiken, 1987; Lyons, 1996). The adoption of such policies has changed the nature of national politics and has challenged the political effectiveness of liberal democratic political systems (Cerny, 1999; Sklair, 2002). On the one hand, state governments are more and more dependent on corporations and their investment choices. As Beck observes, ‘wherever lots of corporations invest, there national economies flourish, and the parties and governments that facilitate that investment grow and blossom’ as they are ‘living off the political side effects of global corporate investment policies’ (Beck and Willms, 2004, p. 218). However, their legitimacy is liable to be uprooted at any moment by strategies conceived and implemented in remote corporate boardrooms. As Beck further argues, ‘politicians, governments and parties are thus forced not only to accept but more and more to justify to a furious public the consequences of decisions which they had little or no hand in making. Mobilizing consensus for decisions taken elsewhere has become in many ways the central task of national politics’ (p. 218). On the other hand, we can observe ‘the breakdown of class politics’ (Clark, 2003) and the ‘decline of mass political parties’ (Kavanagh, 1997, p. 177). To quote Beck once more: the mass political parties in the Western democracies, for a long time the paragons of a successful combination of citizen interests and opinions, have come into disrepute in recent years . . . In all ‘participation democracies’ the party of non-voters is the only party


that can record robust growth . . . The zero-sum game of power among the established competing parties no longer works; setbacks of the governing party are no longer expressed in increased votes for the opposition (Beck, 1997, p. 142). At the same time, the weakening of the connection between corporations and their territories of origin and the establishment of globally integrated production chains have had an impact on collective bargaining, a process which is no longer the characteristic of developed wage societies (Dunford, 2000, p. 158). As Harris notes, ‘globalisation has resulted in a changing relationship between labour and capital. The deconcentration of manufacturing, coupled with its flexibility, has led to the weakening of unions and the strengthening of capital’ (J. Harris, 1998, p. 27). Enterprises have escaped from the national constraints that formerly shaped the path of accumulation, and increasingly are able to set the agenda ‘without any longer being subject to the constraints that formerly channelled . . . capital accumulation in the direction of social progress’ (Aglietta, 1998, p. 67). Neocorporatist wage bargaining and full employment policies are under challenge everywhere in the face of international pressures for wage restraint and flexible working practices (Cerny, 1999, p. 28). As Robinson argues, the structural power of fully mobile transnational capital is superimposed on the direct power of nation-states . . . states are transformed into transmission belts and filtering devices for the imposition of the transnational agenda. Transnational capital requires nation-states to perform three functions: 1. adopt fiscal and monetary policies which assure macro-economic stability; 2. provide the basic infrastructure necessary for global economic activity, and; 3. provide social control, order and stability (W. Robinson, 1996. pp. 18–19). Furthermore, with the collapse of the socialist/communist alternative, the politics of radical reform, or what Beck calls ‘rule-altering politics’, is giving way to ‘rule-directed politics’, that is, politics that operates within the existing rule system. Today, political activity is but ‘a rule-directed wrestling match of parties over the feed troughs and levers of power with the goals of economic growth, full employment, social security and changing of governments in the sense of changing personnel or parties’ (Beck, 1997, p. 135). As Durant and Legge have observed in this respect, privatization is ‘no longer the exclusive domain of conservatives . . . Even political parties


associated in the past with nationalizing industry (such as the Socialists in France, the ‘old’ Labour Party in Great Britain, and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional in Mexico) are increasingly forced to embrace ‘government load shedding’ in some form (Durant and Legge, 2002, p. 307). Today, national governments and political parties of both Left and Right adopt similar economic policies ‘in response to the globalization of markets, the terms of political or economic integration of regions (cutting deficits to acceptable levels for entrance into the European Union under the Maastricht Treaty, and becoming competitive under the North American Free Trade Agreement) and pressures from international lending institutions to invigorate their economies (such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund)’ (p. 307). Within the category of rule-directed politics we may also include the development of new issues such as the politics of identity, the rights of sexual minorities, environmental and ecological issues, the politics of consumption (Clark, 2003, pp. 17–19), and the development of political parties engaging in this form of ‘new politics’. Fuchs and Klingemann, for example, provide the following examples of such parties: ‘in Germany – Green and Alternative List; in the Netherlands – Green Left and D66; in Britain – Ecology; in France – Left Radicals (MRG) and Ecologist; in Italy – Green’ (1995, p. 257n). Today, political debates are increasingly centred on such issues as, for example, gay marriage in Spain and France or the question of wearing the headscarf for female students in educational institutions in France. State sovereignty is being transformed both from without (in the light of the need to adopt policies favourable to capital) and internally, in the sense of privatizing the public sphere, a process which results in the development of a ‘new sovereignty’ (Palan, 1998). The most extreme examples of such transformations of sovereignty is the way that states that create tax havens essentially sell sovereign citizenship to wealthy individuals, or more usually to firms wishing to minimize or even eliminate their exposure to regulations in those states where they are based. In shipping, the ‘flagging out’ system has resulted in the sale by states such as Panama, Sierra Leone, Singapore or Hong Kong of their relatively light safety and taxation regimes to foreign shipping owners for many years (Cameron and Palan, 1999, p. 279). As Berger sums it up, ‘the nation states under the new order have lost their economic independence, their political initiative and their sovereignty. . . . The new task of the nation states is to manage what is allotted to them, to protect the interests of the market’s mega-enterprises and, above all, to control and police the redundant’ (Berger, 1998, p. 3).


With the collapse of socialism/communism and a rapid adoption by the former socialist/communist countries of capitalism, the process of their formal democratization and a development of political systems based on representative democracy (although in some cases, such as Belarus, Russia and some Central Asian countries, only superficially), the development of civil society, as well as an institutionalization of previously rejected individual human rights, have taken place (Makeshin, 2002; Grugel, 2003; Wejnert, 2002). This, as will be argued below, has played an important role in the process of the globalization (that is, the de-territorialization and de-historicization) of human rights, understood predominantly as political and civil freedoms; the criticism of human rights as a bourgeois construct, which the USSR and its allies advanced, is disappearing. The link between the idea of individual negative rights and capital which, during the Cold War, was constantly exposed by the non-capitalist states, is now much less often emphasized; this contributes to the process of de-historicization of human rights. If in the past states that abused human rights answered criticisms by challenging the concept of human rights itself, today, as a study by Cohen has shown, they do so much less often; they prefer to simply deny the allegations (see S. Cohen, 1996, pp. 517–20). Such a globalization of human rights has also created a more favourable environment for the development of the practice of human-rights enforcement. These arguments will be further developed below. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR were perceived as a liberation by many societies in Eastern and Central Europe, including the former Soviet Union republics (The Guardian, 1999d, p. 2). The ideological foundations that were laid during the Cold War, that is, the presentation of the capitalist world as the ‘free world’ and the perception of formal democracy and human rights as equivalent to justice and emancipation, in particular by the former dissidents (who came to play an important role in the post-Communist societies, as for example, Havel in the Czech republic, Walesa in Poland or Solzhenitsyn in Russia (p. 2), played an important role in the movement of these societies towards formal democratization and human rights (to a different extent in each case) with the break up of the Soviet bloc. This process has been very rapid in the Eastern and Central European countries, as well as the Baltic states, while countries that emerged from the collapsed USSR have taken longer to implement such policies. Nevertheless, at least officially, they have all embraced democratic institutions and individual human rights. In this respect the USSR and other countries that pursued socialism/communism were structurally unable to embrace the idea of


negative human rights of individuals because they were based on collective ownership of the means of production and the condemnation of private property and capital accumulation by individuals, and emphasized instead the duties of individual citizens to society and the state. With the adoption of capitalist economic policies, institutionalization of private property and private ownership of the means of production and encouragement of business activity (Blasi, Kroumova and Kruse, 1997, p. 27), such a structural constraint was removed and in principle allowed recognition of individual rights. While the 1964 Constitution of the USSR (see pp. 115 above) rejected the notion of individual rights, the Russian Constitution of 1993 institutionalized capitalist relations of production and the notion of individual rights; this is also true of other former socialist/communist countries. For example, Lipset’s detailed study of former socialist regimes in Africa documents how, with the collapse of the USSR, governments in Zambia, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Tanzania started to abandon socialist state-planned economies in favour of capitalist market economies (Lipset, 1991, pp. 203–204; Maclean 1999b). These economic and political transformations have been institutionalized and further stimulated by various international institutions and organizations, both public and private; this ensemble is generally referred to as global governance, which will be dealt with below. Particular attention will be paid to the role of human rights in the global governance framework. The development of global governance Global governance is a concept which has received substantial attention in academic literature in recent years. This attention to global governance can be explained by a growing realization on the part of academics and practitioners that the world today is ‘governed’, even though it is short of a global state or having a global government (Rosenau and Czempel, 1992). However, this literature rather mistakenly sees different international organizations, firms, transnational classes or NGOs as originators of particular norms and policies, rather than their mediators. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for scholars to describe the history of global governance as beginning with diplomatic conferences and the establishment of early international organizations such as the World Postal Union, a process that has increased dramatically in recent years, particularly with the end of the Cold War (Speth, 1997; Grugel, 2003; O’Brien et al., 2000; Sklair, 2002). In this view, there is not very much global about global governance, except for its geographical reach;


the term ‘international governance’ could still be used. However, as will be argued below, global governance is indeed global in that it mediates global, that is, non-territorial or hegemonic, norms. But first, global governance as it is traditionally understood will be examined; in particular how different state and non-state public and private entities that constitute global governance have contributed to the economic and political transformations discussed above. Global governance is usually described as a multilayered process of social co-ordination with a public purpose which includes state and non-state actors, actors both public and private, national and multilateral (Pierre and Peters, 2000; Speth, 1997; Held, 1995). It is a form of ‘complex multilateralism’ (O’Brien et al., 2000: p. 206) or ‘plurilateralism’ (Cerny, 1993, p.1) which involves states, inter-state organizations, a multiplicity of private associations and networks, as well as business firms (Grugel, 2003, p. 253). As O’Brien and others have observed, the key elements of global governance today are the institutions responsible for managing the global economy; the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank (O’Brien et al., 2000, p. 2). However, other scholars contend that states are also important elements in the global governance structure, in particular the United States (Gilpin, 2001; Hasenclever, Mayer and Rittberger, 1997). Others have pointed out the importance of such institutions as the Administration of International Commercial Disputes, the Chamber of Commerce in Paris, the American Arbitration Association, the London Court of International Commercial Arbitration and bond-rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s (J. Harris, 1998, p. 33). What emerges from these developments is a structure which is best described as ‘nebuleuse’ (Cox, 2000); that is, it is a structure whose contours are not easily identifiable. It is non-territorial, as has been observed by some scholars; but here non-territorial means stateless or transnational/supranational, and not non-territorial in terms of mediating n-dimensional norms, as it will be described below. ‘Given the absence of a world government, the concept of global governance provides a language for describing the nexus of systems of rule-making, political co-ordination and problemsolving which transcends states and societies’ (Held and McGrew, 2002, p. 8; see also Scholte, 2000b). As Maclean observes in relation to the existing literature on global governance, what is central to it is a realization that what is political and authoritative in international relations can no longer be comprehended through the traditional idea of the sovereign territorial state as the basic unit of political


organization and primary location of political agency. These arguments do not entail the view that the state is disappearing, obsolete or no longer important; only that it is transforming (Maclean, 1999b, p. 187). In terms of the economic changes discussed earlier, global governance institutions such as the OECD, IMF, World Bank and WTO, and groupings of dominant states (G8) have been responsible for the neoliberal shift in economic state polices (Overbeek, 2000; Gill, 1993; 1995; Cox, 1993; 1999; 2000). The policies of these entities, as McMichael observes, focus on the freeing of markets and subordinating nation-state policies to the interests of capital (McMichael, 2000, p. 111). The key theme that runs through policies advocated by these bodies, as Gill argues, is that the privatization and transnationalization of capital are either inevitable or desirable from a broad social viewpoint. Free trade, free competition and free exchange (global capital mobility) are equated with economic efficiency, social welfare and unlimited social progress, in particular in the World Bank and IMF reports (Gill, 1995, p. 406). The IMF has been responsible for formulating and administering its Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), which set conditions for financial aid to the post-communist countries and developing countries in the Third World. SAPs force states to liberalize their trade relations, privatize previously state-owned enterprises, decrease social spending and reduce the public sector; they also require that states provide a secure political environment for international investment. Such policies benefit transnational capital because they open up a greater and greater number of countries to its activities, and force them ‘to tear down all barriers to the movement of goods and capital and to create a single unified field in which global capital can operate unhindered across all national borders (Robinson, 1998). Similar policies are advocated by the World Bank. The WTO, as discussed above, is committed to the liberalization of trade. Free trade is presented as a panacea for development and prosperity for all states, although free trade clearly privileges the more developed economies. Furthermore, the WTO has carried to its ultimate conclusion the negotiation of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), and Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs), which started within the final stages of the Uruguay Round of GATT (1986–1993), and which represent a ‘devastating political change which increases inequalities in the international system quite markedly’ (Farrands, 1996, p. 183). These agreements have in particular dealt a blow to states such as India


in terms of their ability to produce generic drugs at a low cost, and have affected poorer countries’ ability to purchase the needed drugs; this has resulted in an increase in deaths from curable or preventable diseases (The Guardian, 2003b, p. 8; Sell, 2002). In addition to the promotion of neoliberal economic policies, different global governance institutions have also engaged in the worldwide spread of political reforms, most notably the promotion of democracy and human rights. Let us now examine these policies, particularly those related to human rights. The IMF and the World Bank have in recent years developed a set of political standards known as ‘good governance’; these include democracy, and civil and political rights (Hoogvelt, 2001). It has been noted by some analysts that these institutions, whose mandates seem to be unrelated to human rights, have integrated these concerns and acted on them in ways unthinkable ten years ago’ (Chandler, 2002, p. 8; see also Bradlow and Grossman, 1995). Or, as van Boven observes, the Bretton Woods institutions ‘are gradually becoming more receptive to human rights concerns in the awareness that adverse human rights conditions are not conducive to economic development’ (van Boven, 2001, p. ix). In other words, these institutions have realized that abuses of political and civil human rights may hinder economic development – which is, after all, their core concern. In their policies we can see how the negative rights of individuals are clearly privileged; the guarantee of the social and economic rights of their citizens does not figure in the IMF’s conditionalities, however. Why have these primarily financial bodies included the promotion of human rights in their agendas? The inclusion of human rights in the IMF agenda was started under Michel Camdessus, the former managing director of the IMF (Camdes¨ hler, sus, 1998a and 1998b). It was developed by his successor Horst Ko who stressed on a number of occasions that the IMF must play a role in developing ‘global ethics’ and human rights: ‘The IMF is deeply committed to playing an active part in . . . building bridges through dialogue, cooperation, and inclusion, to create a sense of global ethics . . . ¨ hler, 2002a). On another occasion, and respect for human rights’ (Ko ¨ hler stated that ‘a global economy needs global ethics, reflecting Ko respect for human rights . . . [and] In my understanding, the Bretton Woods Institutions – the IMF and World Bank – are part of the workforce ¨ hler, 2002b). Note that Ko ¨ hler sees to make a better globalisation’ (Ko human rights as an ‘ethical’ concept; this issue will be further dealt with in the next chapter in the discussion of moral and intellectual leadership in the emerging global hegemony.


In relation to the World Bank, note the following remark by Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who said that ‘it is important to recognize when there has been a defining moment for the international promotion and protection of human rights. One such moment, I believe, was when the World Bank Group recognized that it had an express role to play in the promotion and protection of human rights’ (M. Robinson, 1998). The World Bank officially acknowledged the importance of all types of rights, including social and economic ones, but maintained the separation and privileging of political and civil rights over positive rights, equating the latter with development, without which its ultimate goal, that is, negative rights, cannot be achieved: Unfortunately, however, public discourse on human rights and development too often ignores their fundamental two-way relationship. The world now accepts that sustainable development is impossible without human rights. What has been missing is the recognition that the advancement of an interconnected set of human rights is impossible without development. Enlightened legislation and vigorous civil society are essential. But they are not enough. Human rights are in a sense both the design and the product of people organized through government (World Bank, 1998, p. 2). Note that the question of why the majority of states are unable to guarantee social and economic rights of their citizens is not raised here. It is relegated to a realm of development and economics; that is, it is treated as the starting point or an objective condition of life. Solutions are technical-instrumental (for example, economic aid) or consist of the further implementation of structural adjustment programmes. This issue will be addressed in the next chapter in the context of the ideological nature of human rights in the discussion of moral and intellectual leadership. It will be argued that although support for social and economic rights is potentially disruptive to global capitalism, it nevertheless tends to accept the prevailing structure of economic relations, emphasizing problem-solving solutions rather than radical change. Another entity of global governance that has played an important role in promoting human rights is the UN. There is no space here to do justice to all the UN policies and programmes in this respect, which would require a book of their own – and have done (for example Pease and Forsythe, 1993; Evans, 1998; O’Brien et al., 2000; Freeman, 2002; Abiew, 1999). Suffice to say, in the post-Cold War period the UN has greatly enhanced the scope of its human-rights-related activities, in particular


with respect to their enforcement, as the veto obstacle that had marked UN Security Council activities during the Cold War was reduced. In addition to the removal of this Cold War ‘straight-jacket’ (de Waal, 1997), developments in information and communication technology have made responses to human-rights abuses easier to mobilize, as information on and images of massacres and other abuses are now transmitted all over the world, often in real time. As the former UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook observed: the revolution in information and communication technology has transformed our knowledge of what happens in other continents. . . . Today, no country is too far away for us not to know instantly, and often to see on our TV screens in graphic detail, what conflicts or violations of human rights have taken place . . . The fact that we are witnesses in our sitting rooms to those events requires us to take responsibility for our reaction to such grotesque breaches of human rights . . . The right to enjoy our freedoms comes with the obligation to support the human rights of others (Cook, 1997b). It is ‘never so easy to torture, persecute or kill human beings when the world is watching’ (Katz-Lacabe and Lacabe, 2000, p. 68). Nevertheless, it needs to be acknowledged that, despite such developments, the UN failed to stop the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Various cases of humanrights enforcement by the UN and other actors will be dealt with in the next chapter in an examination of the question of whether they can be said to constitute an element in the moral and intellectual leadership in the context of an emerging global hegemony. The following are the more significant developments in the UN’s role in the globalization of human rights. The World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, organized by the UN in 1993, at which the Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) was created, laid institutional foundations for partnership with NGOs. This was soon followed by partnership with businesses within the framework of the Global Compact launched by the then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000. The creation of the OHCHR has streamlined UN human-rights policies and improved the efficiency of their implementation (The Economist, 1998b, p. 5). Another important development was the establishment by the UN Security Council of two international tribunals to hold trials for crimes against humanity and genocide in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. Though these two tribunals were ad hoc and temporary, proposals were


soon made for the creation of a permanent court that would deal with gross violations of human rights, crimes against humanity and genocide. Such proposals in time materialized in the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), within the framework of the UN. On 11 March 2003, 18 judges were sworn in ‘as the most important human rights institution the world had seen in half a century was formally inaugurated’ (The Guardian, 2003c, p. 14). It is, however, important to note that a number of countries, including the United States, have not joined the ICC. (The question of power and state interests in relation to human rights and humanitarian intervention is dealt with in the next chapter.) It must be acknowledged that the UN sees all types of rights as human and stresses their indivisibility. As the OHCHR statement stipulates, the UN ‘bases itself on the principle that human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. All rights – civil, cultural, economic, political and social – should be given equal emphasis, and promoted and protected without any discrimination. The realization and enjoyment of all rights for women and men must be ensured on a basis of equality’ (OHCHR n.d. (b)). This, however, does not lead to questioning the existing economic structure, the history of its establishment, directly linked to military force, the process of colonization, and the post-colonial international division of labour. The UN approach to social and economic rights does not seek to establish why it is that so many states are incapable of catering for the basic social and economic needs of their citizens; instead it focuses on development and aid. For example, Agenda 21, adopted at the UN Conference in Brazil in 1992, sets the minimum percentage of aid at 0.7% of the GDP of the developed countries annually. This is a minor, problemsolving measure. Although it has a potential to deliver slight short-term improvements, it falls short of questioning the dominant position of a few countries and the subordinate position of the majority of states in the world. In addition, even this minute percentage fails to be reached by many developed countries. The advocacy of social and economic rights similarly falls short of offering a radical alternative to the existing order; nor does it really question the rule of capital, private property, private ownership of the means of production, wage labour and capital accumulation, all of which are at the heart of the mechanism of capital’s reproduction. The fact that these are taken for granted, or naturalized, further contributes to their globalization. Furthermore, the discussion of underdevelopment associated with the failure of many states to guarantee positive rights is conducted in abstract economic terms; little


reference is made to the history of the existing international division of labour, established through force, which disadvantages poor countries. Nevertheless, social and economic rights should not be discarded as a solution; their implementation would require significant structural transformations in international relations, which if undertaken, would bring about significant improvements. However, this is difficult, especially in light of opposition by developed states, most notably the US. In addition to these international organizations, states, in particular the US and the UK, have been important actors in developing civil and political rights as key elements of global governance. After the Cold War, especially during the presidency of Bill Clinton, human rights were declared to be at the core of American foreign policy: ‘Advancing human rights must always be a central pillar of America’s foreign policy’ (Clinton, 1997). Clinton later restated this determination as follows: ‘We will never relinquish the fight to move forward in the continuing struggle for human rights’ (Clinton, 1998). The rights that the US deems as human include freedom from ‘torture, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and discrimination against women and children’ (Clinton, 1998), as well as ‘killings, rape, disappearances and arbitrary detention’ (Christopher, 1994). The UK has also emerged in recent years as another key state in terms of the international promotion and protection of human rights, especially after the coming to power of the Labour government in 1997 and the proclamation of an ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’, launched by the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in the first ten days in office: ‘Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. The Labour Government will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy and will publish an annual report on our work in promoting human rights abroad’ (Cook, 1997a). He reiterated this commitment later on a number of occasions (for example, Cook, 1997b; Cook, 1998); this was in turn confirmed by other members of the cabinet (for example, Hain, 2000; Battle, 2001). One of the key contributions by states to the further globalization of human rights has been their engagement in the practice of humanitarian intervention; this will be discussed in the next chapter in the context of moral and intellectual leadership. In addition to international organizations and states, private actors play an increasingly important role in global governance; these include NGOs and business firms that have in recent years engaged in humanrights promotion and advocacy. As the Cold War ‘geo-political straightjacket’ disappeared, human-rights advocacy groups seized the opportunity to influence the international agenda (de Waal, 1997,


p. 133, Gordenker and Weiss, 1996, p. 24). During the Cold War, as the former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali observed, ‘it was not possible to have any contact with non-governmental organizations in the Soviet Union, for example, because this would be seen as neoimperialist intervention’ (Crossette, 1995, p. 3); in the post-Cold War era, however, ‘throughout much of the Third and former Second World, the decline of oppressive regimes and the rise of democracy since the end of the Cold War has tempered the former automatic hostility by governments toward the activities of local and international NGOs’ (Gordenker and Weiss, 1996, p. 30). Today, facilitated by developments in information and communication technology, an ever-growing army of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), advocating, monitoring and lobbying for human rights, led by bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have become serious participants in international affairs. Linked with these larger international groups, and often sponsored or encouraged by them, are thousands of indigenous NGOs in poorer countries, gathering information on particular issues and pressing their governments to live up to international standards (The Economist, 1998a, p. 3). These bodies participate in setting agendas for international organizations, state governments and corporations (Speth, 1995). ‘Over the past 20 years hundreds of human-rights NGOs have been formed to document and publicize abuses, proselytize for legal change, chivvy governments, deliver aid and arouse public opinion’ (The Economist, 1998c, p. 13). The human rights NGOs also often explicitly call for humanitarian intervention in cases of grave violations of human rights. Finally, businesses and corporations have in recent years started developing codes of good business practice, and now often adopt other measures and policies which are associated with ethical business practice in general, and human rights in particular (ILO, 1998). An important role in this development was played by NGOs, which in the late 1990s organized massive protests against famous brand names such as Nike, Reebok, Adidas and others to stop abuses of human rights and workers’ rights in sweatshops in developing countries (The Economist, 1998c, pp. 13–14, The Economist, 1998a, p. 3). However, what is important to note here is that NGOs did not demand that corporations begin promotion of human rights and participate in campaigns with NGOs, state governments and international organizations such as the UN. This is nevertheless happening, however, as businesses acknowledge their


commitment to human rights; this once again shows how human rights are becoming a form of global standard on the basis of which agents are evaluated and evaluate themselves. Here it needs to be stressed once again that firms, like other actors, may engage in the promotion of human rights in pursuit of self interest, such as profit maximization or improvement of image. However, the fact that they may gain such advantages does not explain fully why so many firms have found it necessary to acknowledge the importance of human rights, nor why they have chosen to support human rights over other values. In short, firms can better be seen as mediators of developing global norms, thereby contributing to these norms’ further globalization. Moreover, as will be argued below, an unintended consequence of their actions is a contribution to the development of moral and intellectual leadership in the context of a developing global hegemony. Apart from making declarations that human rights are central are their activities, firms have participated in concrete actions and campaigns related to human rights. For example, in April 1999, the chief executive officers of Reebok, Levi-Strauss and Philips sent a joint letter to Jiang Zemin, the President of the People’s Republic of China. In it they expressed their concern ‘about the arrest and detention of Chinese citizens for attempting peacefully to organize their fellow workers or to engage in non-violent demonstrations’ (quoted in Bennett, 2002, pp. 401–2). Another example is that of Anita Roddick of The Body Shop International, the cosmetics corporation, who reported the successes of a human rights campaign organised by The Body Shop International and Amnesty International in 1998: To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Body Shop in partnership with Amnesty International undertook the ‘Make your Mark’ campaign . . . We collected over three million thumbprints in 34 countries in support of 12 remarkable human rights campaigners who defend fundamental human rights, often in dangerous and threatening conditions (Roddick, 2000, p. 176). In 1999 at the suggestion of Bill Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International/USA, Paul Fireman, the CEO of Reebok, wrote a letter to President Habibie of Indonesia urging the release of Dita Sari, a 26-year-old activist who was serving a five-year sentence for non-violent activities defending human rights. In an article in the Asian Wall Street Journal, Fireman explained his action: ‘I did it because Ms Dita Sari’s


imprisonment made it difficult for Reebok to honour our commitment to respect the human rights, including the right to organize, of the nearly 30,000 workers in Indonesia who produce our footwear’ (Fireman, 1999). Dita Sari was released on 5 July, thanks to a broad campaign by trade unions, human rights groups, and others. Examples of similar human-rights promotions, as well as declarations and commitments to do so in the future, can today be found in the policies and statements of many global enterprises, including Nike, Adidas, Fila, Puma, Shell, BP and Esso (see Manokha, 2004). Finally, thousands of firms have joined with the UN by becoming parties to its Global Compact, central to which is the promotion of human rights. Given these developments in global governance it is necessary to explore once more the question of what is ‘global’ about both global governance and the process of globalization more generally (with the exception of quantitative empirico-geographical changes). Globalization as de-territorialization and de-historicization This section will add to the existing approaches to globalization (and to existing analyses of hegemony). In the late-modern GPE, the abovementioned economic and political developments in the post-Cold War period have resulted in the development of increasingly objectified and taken-for-granted standards in terms of which agents are evaluated and increasingly tend to evaluate themselves. These standards were in the past linked to particular territorial locations and interests, but are now gradually losing such connections. Thus, as indicated earlier, there has developed a kind of matrix signifying what a state form is today expected to be. Such a matrix presupposes that a contemporary state form comprises an efficient market economy, private property rights, a good investment rating and a reasonable level of economic growth, all of which should be achieved through neoliberal structural reforms such as deregulation, reduction of public spending, privatization of various state functions and liberalization of trade. It is also increasingly expected to be a formal democracy, with a developed civil society and a good record of human rights (political and civil rights, or fundamental human rights). Elements of such an argument can be found in scholarly observations on the late-modern world. For example, Paris, in discussing the postconflict reconstruction adopted by various multilateral institutions in the post-Cold War period, writes: A single paradigm – liberal internationalism – appears to guide the work of most international agencies engaged in peacebuilding. The central


tenet of this paradigm is the assumption that the surest foundation for peace, both within and between states, is market democracy, that is, a liberal democratic polity and a market-oriented economy . . . The eight postconflict peacebuilding operations undertaken since the end of the Cold War . . . have all promoted free and fair elections, the construction of democratic political institutions, respect for civil liberties, and market-oriented economic reforms (Paris, 1997, pp. 56, 63). This statement, although made with reference to an instrumental critique of post-war reconstruction policies, assumes the development of a certain matrix or model applied to various post-conflict situations by different actors, but which is not really reducible to these actors. This argument, however, is not developed. Similar is an observation made by McMichael with reference to IMF structural adjustment programmes, which, in his view, ‘become standardized and continue to be imposed on indebted states by the IMF, with little regard for the specific circumstances of each country, and in the application of financial rather than social criteria’ (McMichael, 1999, p. 111, emphasis added). In other words, McMichael notes the emergence of economic standards which are increasingly taken for granted and normalized, and which actors such as states, firms or the IMF mediate. Today, as Donnelly observes, states that do not at least claim to pursue rapid and sustained economic growth, democracy, and respect for human rights place their national and international legitimacy at risk. These notions, Donnelly argues, ‘have become hegemonic’ (Donnelly, 1999, p. 608). A similar observation was made by Le Monde Diplomatique several years ago; the journal noted that the policies of privatization and deregulation have attained the status of ‘common sense’ (Le Monde Diplomatique, 2004, p. 8). This ‘common sense’, can be described as the following ‘logical progression’: To compensate for budget deficits, it is necessary to privatize. To sell public enterprises at good prices, it is necessary to attract foreign investors. To attract foreign investors, it is necessary to reduce salaries and ‘charges’ [meaning various worker benefits and taxes] . . . We open up borders because we are not protectionist, we privatize because we opened up borders, we sacrifice jobs and public service because we privatized (author’s translation) (p. 8). The world is therefore experiencing a development of increasingly normalized, de-historicized and de-territorialized economic standards and policies; these are global in their causal power in relation to states


and other territorial actors. They may be mediated by different actors (states, international governmental and non-governmental organizations, firms, transnational classes or elites), but they are no longer reducible to these actors’ intentions, agendas or interests. They are gradually losing previous historical links with different ‘subjective’ interests (such as capital and state interests) and can therefore no longer be properly described in territorial terms. For example, free trade was historically related to the expansion of European capital and based on military coercion, in particular British naval power. During the Cold War, free trade, as we saw in the previous chapter, was subject to various qualifications, even within the framework of GATT. There also existed numerous alternatives to both GATT and the notion of free trade; these included import substitution industrialization, attempts by socialist/communist states to establish trade relations based on socialist solidarity within the framework of COMECON, and protectionist policies in various Third World states designed to develop competitive industries. In short, free trade was contested and linked with particular economically developed territorial states and their interests. Today, such a relationship is gradually disappearing; one manifestation of this are the negotiations at the World Trade Organization, the successor to GATT. Here developing countries no longer challenge the unequal benefits resulting from free trade, as well other aspects of inequality in international trade and investment. Rather, it is more often the position of the developed nations – which continue subsidies and other protectionist measures, in particular with respect to agriculture – that is, contested by the developing political economies. As The Independent reported on the WTO negotiations: Poorer countries want greater access to Western markets for goods such as textiles and agriculture, an end to farming subsidies in the US, EU and Japan, and the right to break drug patents . . . The US is looking for greater access and progress in opening up the developing world to services such as banking and telecoms but wants no undermining of intellectual property law. The EU, as well as defending its Common Agricultural Policy, wants the right to block the import of foods it deems unsafe and wants to set ‘core’ standards on labour conditions and environmental protection (The Independent, 2001a, p. 14). Free trade itself is therefore becoming an increasingly normalized basis for the evaluation of state policies, and is gradually losing its previous territorial attachment and historical relationship with military power


and capital. This normalization is reproduced even in the traditional Leftist press; the allegedly radical Morning Star, for example, has challenged the protectionism of the developed countries rather than free trade: The agricultural products of developing countries continue to be undercut by artificially cheap, subsidized imports from the West. When industries in the West were in their infancy, they were not exposed to this kind of pressure and, consequently, developed to the extent that we in the West enjoy a standard of living that far outstrips that of developing countries (Morning Star, 2001, p. 7). The same applies to anti-globalization protesters, whose ‘frustration stems from a feeling of being disenfranchised, an inability to control the activities of multinational institutions and companies whose activities they dislike and . . . the protectionist racket run by the EU under the guise of the Common Agricultural Policy’ (Daily Telegraph, 2001a, p. 23). Antiglobalization protests within the framework of global civil society and possibilities of counter-hegemony will be further discussed in the concluding chapter. Policies of privatization and deregulation provide another example of this normalization process. These measures were initiated in the 1980s by the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in Britain and the US respectively. Today, at the level of the international, these states continue to advocate such policies – in particular in their relations with developing political economies, and as preconditions for aid, as radical political economists have shown. However, in terms of causation, privatization and deregulation can no longer be properly described in geographical terms; even when there is no such action on the part of these states – or on the part of the IMF and the World Bank which embodied privatization and deregulation in their structural adjustment programmes – developing countries often themselves ‘freely’ adopt such policies. This process has been observed by Robinson in his analysis of the Latin American economies (W. Robinson, 1998). In Africa similar developments can be noted. For example, in Ethiopia in mid-1996, the government adopted a medium-term (three-year) adjustment programme, supported by the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF), by the World Bank and by other multilateral and bilateral donors. It involved such structural reforms as the ‘opening of foreign exchange bureaux within the banking system, allowing exporters and recipients of private remittances to open foreign currency


deposit accounts’ and ‘the elimination of controls on retail prices of fertilizers and lowering of the maximum import tariff rate and a reduction in the number of tariff bands’ (IMF, 2001b). These policies were elaborated for the Ethiopian government by the IMF experts. However, in a more recent statement of objectives and strategies, it was the government of Ethiopia itself that stated that its aims included ‘economic growth with macroeconomic stability’ coupled with ‘more extensive integration of Ethiopia into the global economy’, the focus of which is on ‘the further liberalization of foreign trade in goods and services, and a further reduction in import tariffs and removal of all restrictions on external current account transactions’ (IMF, 2001b). A similar situation developed in Ghana, which has also pursued a threeyear Enhanced Adjustment Programme, and which recently stated that its economic objectives were to continue these reforms and pursue further liberalization of trade, in particular in cocoa, and privatization (IMF, 2001c). Concepts such as economic efficiency and sustained economic growth, which are directly related to policies of liberalization of trade and privatization, can now be seen to have moved to the category of objective concepts. This is particularly well illustrated by the emergence of the global science of economics, a discipline that is global not only in the sense that it is taught everywhere and in the same way, but also in that it mediates these global categories. Furthermore, it also naturalizes and objectifies such institutions as private property, private ownership of the means of production, production of commodities for their exchange value and not use value, wage labour, accumulation of capital, and so on, which are embedded in a rather neutral notion of ‘market economy’ operated by the science of economics, which of course means capitalist economy. All these were in the past seen as related to the interests of capital, in particular when socialism/communism was still in existence. Today, they are becoming global, meaning non-territorial; they have lost their historical and territorial origins, as well as their subjective nature, and now constitute objective, taken-for-granted conditions of the world. A more detailed discussion of the discipline of economics will be pursued in the next chapter in the discussion of the intellectual part of Gramsci’s category of moral and intellectual leadership. The development of such global standards becomes even more apparent if the focus shifts to what is not practised in the world, that is, to the absence of radical alternatives and resistance. With the failure of the USSR came a widespread rejection of socialism (and Marxism) as both an intellectual system and a basis for political and economic


organization. This took place not only in the former Soviet states and the communist political economies of Eastern and Central Europe, but also in Tanzania, Angola, Jamaica, Nicaragua and Syria; there was also a partial privatization and marketization of the economy in China. Equally important has been the gradual transformation of forms of socialism developed in the advanced political economies of Western Europe after the Second World War (Maclean, 1999b, p. 192). Not only has the socialist/communist alternative been widely abandoned; after its fall it also became clear how extensive the totalitarian oppression practised by many socialist/communist states actually was (see particularly Courtois, et al., 1999). Today, in the absence of the discredited socialist/communist alternative, fragmented protests organized by single-issue movements in the realm of civil society do not pose much threat to the global political economy. (The issue of protests in the realm of civil society will be examined further in the concluding chapter in the discussion of possibilities for counterhegemony.) With the end of the Cold War the content of North-South relations was also transformed as the previous rationale for cooperation between subordinated political economies, together with their leverage in the context of Cold War rivalry, disappeared. Most significant today is the apparently increased passivity of underdeveloped political economies; demands for large-scale structural change in the global political economy have declined. In the 1970s, huge, potentially transformative demands were articulated in rapid succession through international organizations; these included calls for a New International Economic Order and an International Seabed Authority. None was realized, although minor concessions were made by the advanced political economies. Since the early 1980s no such concerted demands have emerged from underdeveloped political economies. Specific threats to stability, such as attempts by Mexico and Argentina to unilaterally renege on their international debts, were also seen off (Maclean, 1999b, pp. 192–3). The current situation is one in which previously ‘subjective’ interests – that in the past depended on covert coercion and overt military force and that were seen as linked with certain power interests – are gradually becoming seen as objective, taken-for-granted conditions of the latemodern world. In short, they are becoming global. The distinction between domestic and international/global – the former referring to law and order and the latter to anarchy, as traditionally assumed in IR/IPE theory – is now unsustainable; the domestic is now causally dependent


on the global. In France, for example, the dismantling of social security systems, reforms in health insurance, privatization of the state telecommunications provider France Te´lećom and the state gas and electricity supplier EDF-GDF (Morning Star, 2002a, p. 2; Le Monde Diplomatique, 2004, pp. 8–9) cannot be seen as an issue of domestic politics only, without reference being made to the global. Nor can domestic conditions fully explain the fact that it was the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin that ‘privatised more state enterprises than all of the previous governments put together’ (Observer, 2000a, p. 4; The Independent, 2000a, p. 23). In the same way, the privatization of electricity networks in the US, which was blamed for an unprecedented power failure in California in 2003 (The Guardian, 2003a, p. 20; Morning Star, 2003a, p. 10) cannot be seen as a purely local issue. Nor can policies of privatization in Russia, despite the strong opposition of the Left and in the absence of IMF conditionalities, or its long-running attempts to join the WTO (Izvestia, 2003, p. 2), or the abolition of employment security for public-service employees and their downsizing in Switzerland, Italy and New Zealand (Le Monde Diplomatique, 2004, p. 8) be de-linked from the global context. It must be stressed that not all agents are equally affected by the above processes. In fact, as indicated above, some actors, in particular developed industrial countries, benefit from the opening of markets and policies of privatization and deregulation in less developed states. Furthermore, sometimes they force the latter to pursue such policies, usually making aid and loans subject to the implementation of such policies. For example, the African Growth and Opportunity Act adopted by the US House of Representatives in 1998 stipulates that African countries must comply with IMF rules which require the privatization of their assets through divestiture; they must agree to World Trade Organization rules such as tariff cuts and the removal of import restrictions; and they must adopt currency and investment deregulation which allows foreign investors to establish ownership over natural resources in the continent. As some observers have remarked, the Act poses significant threats to Africa’s long-term interests in sustainable economic development and democracy-building (Observer, 2003a, p. 26; Morning Star, 2003b, p. 3). Nevertheless, African states tend to implement such policies, increasingly without persuasion or influence on the part of the US or the IMF. That is to say, strictures imposed by developed states can no longer be reduced to their interests – although these, as always, count – nor to their capabilities; they are mediations of the developing global norms.


In addition to the development of the above global economic standards, it can also be observed, as Donnelly has (1999, p. 608), that there has been a corresponding development of global political standards such as democracy and human rights. It was shown in the section on global governance above how various actors develop policies aimed at the promotion and protection of human rights. However, these notions are no longer reducible to such actors; that is, they can no longer be located within a particular territory because they have become increasingly objectified. Although the dominant view of what constitutes human rights, that is, political and civil rights of individuals, is still often referred to as ‘Western’, it can now be seen that this view is gradually becoming a de-historicized and de-territorialized standard, no longer associated with bourgeois interests but treated as something objectively true. As Beck has observed, the principles of democracy and human rights are ‘proclaimed today like the Ten Commandments . . . they belong to the protected realm of secular religion. Calling them into question is tantamount to a taboo. . . . They are treated as if they were eternal’ (Beck, 1997, pp. 7, 18, emphasis added). If, in other words, during the Cold War the notion of human rights was opposed on cultural grounds (in particular by non-Western states), as well as on ideological grounds (in particular by the socialist/communist states), today such a critique has significantly decreased. We have already seen above how the former socialist/communist states have proclaimed human rights respect as one of their priorities. Even if in some cases this may be false in practice, what is important is that the concept of human rights itself is no longer challenged. In the case of non-Western states a similar tendency may be observed. For example, African countries, within the framework of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), originally proposed a variant view of human rights, which was enshrined in the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (1981) and which emphasized individual duties in relation to community as well as rights. For instance, it recognized the right to private property but stipulated that should the need in the community arise, it must be forfeited (Article 14). It also stipulated individual duties towards family, society and the state, and predicated the rights and freedoms of each individual ‘upon due regard to collective security, morality and common interest’ (Article 27). Today, however, the African view of human rights is becoming increasingly similar to the traditional Western idea of human rights. This does not mean that African states are effectively implementing those rights; in fact, for the most part abuses continue. What is


important, however, is the weakening of the critique of the Western notion of rights, and increasing signs of acknowledgement of human rights, at least officially. In 1990 The Independent observed that, with the decline of communism, African states found it necessary to acknowledge their respect for human rights; not least because receiving aid was often made conditional on a commitment to them: ‘In case after case one finds African regimes who are aware of the competition for aid from Eastern Europe – and afraid of what human rights campaigners in Washington are saying about them. For both the IMF and the World Bank have their headquarters in Washington and respond to its currents’ (The Independent, 1990, p. 17). In 1991 at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe, ‘Commonwealth leaders set an agenda for action by the Commonwealth Secretariat, which listed among its priorities such issues as the promotion of democracy, human rights and the rule of law’ (The Independent, 1993d, p. 15); they restated these objectives at a subsequent summit in Cyprus in 1993 (p. 15). At the OAU Ministerial Meeting on Human Rights in Mauritius in 1999, the Declaration and Plan for Action acknowledged that observance of human rights is a ‘key tool for promoting . . . sustainable development’ and ‘emphasized that respect for Human Rights . . . constitutes one of the fundamental bedrocks on which development efforts should be realized.’ There was no mention of peoples’ rights and there was no critique of the notion of political and civil rights. In July 2000, when it was decided by the member states that the OAU would be transformed into the AU (African Union), the Constitutive Act of the new organization made human rights one of its key elements. It stated that the AU would function in accordance with such principles as ‘respect for democratic principles, human rights, the rule of law and good governance’ (Article 4 (m)). The AU’s commitment to human-rights promotion and protection was reconfirmed at its summit in July 2003 by virtually all speakers. They included Amara Essy, Interim Chairperson of the Commission of the AU, who called ‘for the amelioration of democratic process and observance of human rights’ (Essy, 2003, pp. 4–5), using human rights to mean political and civil freedoms, as well as Thabo Mbeki, the former chairperson of the AU (Mbeki, 2003, p. 3), who made ‘repeated references to human rights and democracy’ (Daily Telegraph, 2002a, p. 15). As The Times reported, the transformation of the OAU into the AU was marked by ‘an unprecedented commitment to democracy and human rights’ (The Times, 2002, p. 16).


Another example is Mercosur, a regional organization created by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay in March 1991 and extended in 1996 to include Chile and Bolivia. Mercosur was established as a purely trading bloc, with no political functions. However, in 2000 Mercosur adopted the Charter of Buenos Aires on Social Commitment in Mercosur, Bolivia and Chile, where respect for human rights (meaning mostly negative rights of individuals and their political freedoms) is recognized as a priority. The signatories affirmed their commitment to ensure the strict enforcement of legal provisions prohibiting discrimination and guaranteeing equal rights, treatment, and opportunities for all, without distinction or exclusion of any kind. To promote the growth of their societies on the basis of equality between men and women in social, political, economic, and cultural life . . . and . . . to assure that migrants can fully exercise their human rights and that they are accorded dignified, fair, and non-discriminatory treatment (OHCHR, n.d. (a)). These commitments were reconfirmed by the signatories of the Charter in October 2001 at the Subregional Workshop on the Application of International Human Rights Standards by the National Courts of Mercosur. In terms of concrete measures, it is worth singling out Mercosur’s action in April 2003 to force Cuba to observe human rights (individual negative rights). Argentina, on behalf of Mercosur, requested that the United Nations evaluate the human-rights situation in Cuba. Paraguay, which held the presidency of Mercosur until June 2003, also requested the UN Human Rights Commission to send a mission of human-rights observers to Cuba for the assessment of the human rights situation (BBC Monitoring Service, 2003). Another example is provided by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), founded by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand in 1967, which has since evolved into a regional organization that operates on a largely informal basis. Beginning in the mid-1990s ASEAN has been declaring its intention to incorporate human rights into its agenda and establish its own human-rights mechanism. This, once again, does not mean that the ASEAN members suddenly started respecting human rights in practice, for they did not. The question is why did they find it necessary, like Mercosur countries, to state their acknowledgment of the importance of human rights; this points to a development of a global standard to which agents feel they


have to conform, at least officially. Thus, in 1993, a Joint Communique´ of the 26th ASEAN Ministerial Meeting held in Singapore declared that: the Foreign Ministers agreed that ASEAN should coordinate a common approach on human rights and actively participate and contribute to the application, promotion and protection of human rights . . . They stressed that the violations of basic human rights must be redressed and should not be tolerated under any pretext . . . In this regard . . . they agreed that ASEAN should also consider the establishment of an appropriate regional mechanism on human rights (ASEAN, 1993). In the same manner, the Inter-Parliamentary Organization of ASEAN stated that ‘it is likewise the task and responsibility of member states to establish an appropriate regional mechanism on human rights’ (ASEAN 1993). The Working Group for an ASEAN Human Rights Mechanism was established in 1996, along with national working groups in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines (Medina, 2002). Human-rights promotion has also been acknowledged by ASEAN in its external relations with other regional blocs. For example, in December 2000 at the 13th ASEAN-EU Ministerial meeting, the two parties reiterated their commitment to promote human rights. They also condemned human-rights violations in Burma and Laos and expressed support for efforts taken by the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy, Razali Ismail, to help break the political deadlock in Burma (BBC Monitoring Service, 2000). In July 2003 ASEAN foreign ministers met Razali to discuss the human-rights situation in Burma and to seek a means to force the Burmese government to release opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi (Bangkok Post, 2003). Similar examples can be found in statements made by states within frameworks of other regional organizations such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) (Morning Star, 2003c, p. 2; Daily Telegraph, 2002b, p. 11). In September 2001 the SADC dispatched a mission composed of five heads of state to Zimbabwe to force President Mugabe to stop violations of human rights. President Muluzi of Malawi stated the following: ‘We came here to discuss the issues of political violence, human rights abuses . . . and intimidation’ (quoted in The Guardian, 2001, p. 21). The mission was also marked by anger expressed by the South African leader Thabo Mbeki, who walked out from the meeting when Mugabe’s supporters aimed to justify the Zimbabwean leader’s actions (p. 21).


Many states have established national human rights institutions (NHRIs), which are government agencies whose purported aim is to implement international norms domestically. These institutions have expanded considerably since the early 1990s; they have quadrupled in number since then and now exist in almost 100 countries (Cardenas, 2003, p. 23). Even if this activity amounts to only formal declarations, it is nevertheless an important factor in furthering the globalization of the previously Western view of human rights; it has contributed to its naturalization and has enabled other actors to mediate it (whether for good or selfish reasons). ‘Regimes that do not at least claim to . . . respect the rights of their citizens (‘‘human rights’’) place their national and international legitimacy at risk’ (Donnelly, 1999, p. 608). ‘Human rights’ is becoming increasingly global – a de-territorialized and de-historicized standard with which agents feel they have to comply, or at least claim to do so. The same applies to humanitarian intervention, as will be argued in the next chapter, by undertaking which, states may pursue certain other than humanitarian interests. But their actions are not reducible to these interests and constitute the mediation of an increasingly global norm. Furthermore, by undertaking different policies aimed at human-rights promotion, including humanitarian intervention, agents produce an unintended consequence of contributing to the development of a moral and intellectual leadership and thereby further mediating the hegemonic position of transnational capital. If the development of national capitalism was followed by the development of national individual rights, and the development of international capitalism led to the development of an international human rights discourse, the development of global capitalism has been accompanied by a parallel globalization of human rights. This is not to imply determinism; rather, it is to point to an internal relationship between the two, which has already been addressed in previous chapters, and will be taken up again in the next. Such arguments about the way that the possibilities for agency in the late-modern world are decreasing lead directly to a discussion of power and hegemony.

2

Global hegemony

A distinction can be made between power based on coercion and repression, and power based on consent and moral and intellectual


leadership – or hegemony, as Gramsci pointed out. As he put it, ‘the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘‘domination’’ and as ‘‘intellectual and moral leadership’’. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to liquidate, or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can and indeed must, already exercise ‘‘leadership’’ before winning governmental power’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 57). Gramsci developed his analysis in a national setting. Nevertheless, his notion of hegemony, which is a specific understanding of the nature of power, may be used to analyse the realm of the international – a realm marked by different power relations, as IR theory has traditionally asserted, and as radical political economists have also argued. Such an application of Gramsci’s category of hegemony to the study of the international has already been attempted in IR/IPE by a number of scholars, in particular those comprising the so-called neo-Gramscian school. The argument about the development of hegemony presented below complements their arguments in two ways: 1. On the one hand, what may described as a structural dimension of the developing hegemony is stressed; this emphasizes that hegemony of capital is not reducible solely to its particular agents, but is a result of the globalization of certain economic policies and relations, their increasing normalization and their being taken for granted, by dominant and subordinate actors alike. In short, the position of transnational capital does not yet enjoy Gramscian consent and rather resembles domination or power based on negation. It is nevertheless hegemonic because conditions for its continuous production and reproduction at the expense of the state/society complex are becoming increasingly normalized and taken for granted. 2. On the other hand, the notion of moral and intellectual leadership, which is central to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, will be developed. This has so far been largely neglected in the analyses. The human-rights policies of different actors in general, and humanrights enforcement in particular, may be said to have an unintended consequence of mediating a system of moral and intellectual leadership in the emergent hegemony, thereby contributing to the hegemonic position of transnational capital. The neo-Gramscians argue that since the 1970s there has been a shift in the global political economy towards a neoliberal, disciplinary world


order, culminating in the emergence of a hegemony, with transnational capital attaining hegemonic status in relation to the state/society complex. The restructuring of production from Fordism to post-Fordism, the reconfiguration of material power relations and the redistribution of wealth, the internationalization (Cox, 1993) or globalization (Gill, 1995) of state capital and the growing supremacy of transnational capital, coupled with the growing power of neoliberal ideas and their application in the practices and organizational forms of key social institutions (the state, the market) all constitute a period of transition from what the neoGramscians (Cox, 1993, 1999; Rupert, 1995; Gill, 1995) perceive as a relatively stable post-Second World War world order, whose key feature was US hegemony, to a new world order. The term hegemony is used by the neo-Gramscians to refer to ‘the condition of a world society or state system in which the dominant state and dominant social forces sustain their position through adherence to universalized principles which are accepted or acquiesced in by a sufficient proportion of subordinate states and social forces’ (Cox, 1993, p. 264). The neo-Gramscians therefore use Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, developed from his analysis of national social formations, and particularly Italy (Gill, 1993, p. 3), to study world orders. Such an application is not only legitimate but proves to be an important addition to the study of power relations in the world; the concept of hegemony describes a particular form of power, and the concept of power has always been central in IR. Hegemony is power which is based on consent and which is ethical, as opposed to power based on coercion, force or domination (Augelli and Murphy, 1993, pp. 127–8). As Cox puts, ‘hegemony is . . . one form of power [and it has] a wider applicability to relations of dominance and subordination, including relations of world order’ (Cox, 1993, p. 52). Or, as Arrighi argues, ‘by applying Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to inter-state relations we can tell a story of the rise and decline of world power that accounts . . . for the evolution and supersession of the modern worldsystem’ (Arrighi, 1993, p. 148). In addition to this, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony allows the separation of economy and polity to be overcome, because world power relations are examined in relation to production (Cox, 1986; 1993; 1999; Gill and Law, 1993). The neo-Gramscian thesis is that today we are witnessing a development of a new form of rule based on consent. It is a rule of transnational capital which is institutionalized in a variety of multilateral organizations under pressure from transnational corporate interests, in ‘organic’ intellectuals, such as their allies in government, and in a variety of networks that evolve


policy guidelines and propagate the ideology of globalization. This is the ideology of neoliberalism, which treats the dominance of economic forces over states as both necessary and beneficial; states have no role other than ensuring the working of market logic (Cox, 1996). This structure of power is sustained from outside the state through a global policy consensus and the influence of global finance over state policy, and from inside the state by those social forces that benefit from it (those segments of society that are integrated into the global economy). Competitiveness in the world market has become the ultimate criterion of state policy; this justifies the gradual removal of the social protection built up in the era of Keynesianism and the welfare state (Cox, 1999, p. 12). According to Gill, there has developed a form of ‘new constitutionalism’, that is, ‘the institutionalization of disciplinary neoliberalism at the macro-level of power in the quasi-legal restructuring of the state and international political forms’ (Gill, 1995, p. 412). One of the key features of this ‘new constitutionalism’ is the accountability of governments, not to their electorates, but to ‘material forces and the sentiments of investment managers in the bond markets, as well as to the conditionality of the Bretton Woods organizations’ (p. 412). In short, ‘the new constitutionalism can be defined as the political project of attempting to make transnational liberalism, and if possible liberal democratic capitalism, the sole model for future development’ (p. 412). This process is further stimulated by the decline of class and radical politics, as well as the weakening of the power of trade unions; enterprises are increasingly locating production in a range of countries, which makes trade union organization and bargaining more difficult (Cox, 1999; see also Beck, 1997). Moreover, privatization agreements sometimes explicitly include provisions reducing the role of trade unions in the management of enterprises. This was, for example, the case with France Te´lećom; the text of the privatization agreement stipulated that trade union representatives who had previously participated in board meetings would no longer be able to do so (Le Monde Diplomatique, 2004, p. 9). In addition to this, in industrialized countries, trade unions, which historically preferred parties of the Left (socialist, social-democratic, and communist parties, since both trade unions and left-wing parties originated from the same 19th-century labour movement), are now no longer so closely attached to such parties; the parties themselves also increasingly embrace the policies of privatization and deregulation traditionally advocated by right-wing parties (Fuchs and Kingemann, 1995, pp. 229, 241). Neo-Gramscians therefore see the current state of affairs as a project or an attempt – that is, a deliberate conscious policy on the part of some


concrete transnational forces or transnational ‘organic’ intellectuals led by capital – to establish and maintain hegemony. These transnational forces refer to the agents of transnational capital, which include, according to Gill, a nucleus which comprises elements of G8 state apparatuses and transnational capital (in manufacturing, finance and services), and associated privileged workers and smaller firms (contractors or suppliers, import-export businesses, and service companies, such as stockbrokers, accountants, consultancies, lobbyists, educational entrepreneurs, architects, and designers) (Gill, 1995, pp. 400–1). Robinson argues, similarly, that the agent of the global economy is transnational capital, ‘organized institutionally in global corporations and in supranational economic planning agencies and political forums’, such as the IMF, the Trilateral Commission and the G8 forum, and ‘managed by a class-conscious elite based in the centres of world capitalism’ (W. Robinson, 1996, p. 16). This transnational elite has ‘an integrated global agenda of mutually reinforcing economic, political, and cultural components that, taken together, comprise a new global social structure of accumulation’; moreover, ‘this denationalized bourgeoisie is class conscious, and conscious of its transnationality’ because it oversees ‘the sweeping economic, political, social and cultural changes involved in globalization, including free market reform’ (W. Robinson, 1996, pp. 16, 18). Van der Pijl identifies what he calls ‘a transatlantic ruling class’ as the agent of transnational capital and of the developing hegemony (van der Pijl, 1984; 1999). He examines the strategic options available to dominant groups by introducing the notion of ‘concepts of control’: Concepts of control are frameworks of thought and practice by which a particular world view of the ruling class spills over into a broader sense of ‘limits of the possible’ for society at large . . . A concept of control strategically articulates the special interests of an historically concrete configuration of classes and states with the management requirements of the order with which those interests are most immediately congruent (van der Pijl, 1999, p. 51). The concepts of control are typically held by fractions of capital, based on their function in the overall process of reproduction and related to the historical conditions under which these fractions rose to prominence. In capitalism, the division between production and circulation makes available two fractional perspectives: that of productive capital and that of money capital. Implicated in production are different


technical issues surrounding the creation of use value, while intrinsic to circulation is the free movement of goods and capital. The productivecapital concept of control constructs an interest from the position of the industrialist, who wants to subordinate the orthodoxy of the market mechanism to a strategy better suited to the real socialization of the productive forces. The money-capital concept of control posits a system of harmony and progress as long as, through the price mechanism, the rate of profit remains the exclusive regulatory device (pp. 50–63). These fractional points of view provide a basis for definite political projects; that is, deliberate attempts on the part of capital, by developing and using ‘organic intellectuals’ in universities, government commissions and policy-planning groups, to develop hegemonic orders. Capital therefore goes beyond its fractional interests and makes its control ‘comprehensive’, that is, it develops ‘an effective vector of class formation within and beyond the bourgeoisie’ (van der Pijl, 1984, p. 12) and a more general interest is constructed. Moving ahead from this analysis, what needs to be emphasized is that the developing hegemonic order may better be seen not as a deliberate attempt or project on the part of some concrete, identifiable and territorially located actor, be it a state, a fraction of transnational capital or an international organization, but as an order in which the position of some actors is hegemonic because the conditions of their hegemony have become global; that is, they have become increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized, taken for granted and seen as objective conditions of the world. Such a view is further supported by the observation that in the late-modern world the position of transnational capital in relation to the state/society complex does not quite resemble what Gramsci would call a rule based on consent. Rather, it looks more like a rule based on negative power, particularly in the light of the antiglobalization protests (to be discussed in the next chapter), which identify (rather mistakenly) transnational capital or transnational corporations as their key targets. However, transnational capital is nevertheless hegemonic because it is the conditions of its hegemony that are consented to, or to be more accurate, increasingly taken for granted. It is because of globalization, that is, de-territorialization and de-historicization of free trade, privatization and deregulation, as well as private property and production for profit, wage labour and accumulation of capital and other policies on which production and reproduction of capital are based, that the position of transnational capital may be described as hegemonic. This aspect of the developing world order has remained unacknowledged in existing analyses, including those advanced by radical critics;


these, as we saw in Chapter 1, tend to identify particular agents as sources of hegemony and of the subordinate position of developing states. In other words, a distinction between purposive behaviour and unintended consequences is absent from these analyses; their conception of the agent/structure relation privileges agents, because the analysis is mostly agent-based, as was seen in Chapter 1. In short, the identification of a situation in which not only dominant but also subordinate agents may be objects of structural power – of standards that have become normalized and objectified – is absent. This issue will be addressed below, with particular reference being made to the function of moral and intellectual leadership, at the core of which, it will be argued, lies the notion of human rights. This function is exercised by agents that are substitutable; they include not only dominant actors, but also subordinate actors. What is important to note here is that this hegemony cannot be described as international or transnational, because its foundations cannot be reduced to a particular territorially located hegemon such as a state or international organization. Although there exists a multiplicity of such actors constituting global governance, they increasingly mediate a set of standards which are becoming global, meaning de-territorialized and de-historicized, stripped of their original links with particular subjective interests and increasingly seen as objective conditions of the world by both dominant and subordinate agents. Within this hegemonic structure interaction among states and other actors may take unequal forms. For example, as we have seen, in terms of trade barriers, or in terms of ‘drainage of surplus from the South to the North’ (W. Robinson, 1996, p. 22) in the form of debt service which in 1992 ‘was two and one-half times the amount of northern development aid, and $60 billion more than total private flows to developing countries’ (p. 23); some states (in particular the OECD countries) clearly benefit from the existing state of affairs more than others. However, to repeat, it is no longer possible to see these states, their interests and capabilities as the only sources of this inequality. Such a state of affairs may better be seen as a result of the development of certain global standards on the basis of which the developed states gain their advantages with respect to the developing countries, and reproduce the latter’s subordination. As Maclean observes in relation to the privileged position of the US in the world today, it is because of ‘the close correspondence between originally ‘‘subjective’’ American interests, and those which occupy the content of what presents itself as the objective, natural, or taken-for-granted conditions of the global political economy


as a whole, for the USA and other dominant agents, as well as subordinated agents’ (Maclean, 1999a, p. 61). In other words, subordinate countries reproduce their own subordination themselves by conforming to policies that have become naturalized. We saw examples of this with respect to free trade negotiations and privatization. Furthermore, the developed political economies are themselves subject to the power of developing global standards, although to a much lesser extent than the subordinate states. As Gill notes, the neoliberal policies which emphasize market efficiency and discipline also constrain significantly the choice of options for economically powerful countries: ‘Even the autonomy of the United States, Japan, and the European Union is constrained in matters of macroeconomic policy by the globalisation of finance and production. Smaller and less self-sufficient states tend to be correspondingly more sensitive and vulnerable to global financial pressures’ (Gill, 1995, pp. 412–13). Or, as Arrighi points out, ‘although the US state still has some privileged access to its services and resources, the main tendency of the last 30 years has been for most states, including the US, to become the servant rather than the master of extraterritorial finance’ (1998, p. 69, emphasis added). A similar argument is made by Robinson who observes that globalization ‘made it structurally impossible for individual nations to sustain independent, or even autonomous, economies, policies and social structures’, whether they are ‘developed or underdeveloped’ (W. Robinson, 1996, p. 15). Indeed, we may note how neoliberal policies of privatization in developed states have led to an increasing development of the marginalized categories of the population, of those who become victims of neoliberalism (Cox, 1999). Developed states may also be significantly affected when corporations pull out or outsource their activities to countries with cheaper labour. In addition to this, as discussed above, developed states are also forced to adopt policies of public-sector downsizing, privatization of state telecommunications, energy, gas enterprises, and health and education systems. The hegemonic consent developing in the late-modern world is therefore not exactly Gramscian. Gramsci wanted to account for the passivity of the proletariat in the Western capitalist state; he explained such a passivity through his notion of hegemony whereby the dominant class creates structural conditions that make the proletariat passive, through making concessions of an economic-corporate nature without touching the essential. In the late-modern world, however, such a passivity on the part of the subordinate actors cannot be seen in these purely Gramscian terms, because their subordinate position is


reproduced not so much because special conditions have been created by a particular agent, but because such conditions are becoming global, that is, increasingly losing their historical and territorial attachment and increasingly becoming taken for granted by both the dominant and subordinate agents. Gramsci’s notion of consent therefore takes on a different meaning; it does not imply an acceptance of the dominant position of the ruling classes, but rather a normalization and taking for granted of conditions which make the dominant agents dominant and the subordinate agents subordinate. In the late-modern world, as will be seen in the next chapter, there have emerged protests against transnational capital and what are seen as its agents – the WTO and the Bretton Woods institutions. However, the conditions of the hegemonic position of transnational capital largely remain unchallenged. In this respect what is crucial is that the function of the moral leadership, as will be argued in the next chapter with reference to human-rights enforcement, is exercised by an agency which is substitutable and may be dominant and subordinate actors; these may be developed states and their organizations (the US or NATO), developing countries and their organizations (Nigeria or the African Union), transnational firms, or the NGOs which oppose them. It will be argued that such a mediation of moral leadership can be accounted for by the notion of ideology in the negative sense (which is also missing from the existing analyses of hegemony), and a process of globalization of human rights more generally. Particular emphasis will be put on the way the states and international organizations engaging in human-rights enforcement contribute to the development of moral leadership in the context of the developing global hegemony. The neo-Gramscian treatment of intellectual leadership and of ‘organic’ intellectuals will also be expanded to include the work of academics and social scientists in general, and those working on humanitarianism in particular.

Conclusion This chapter has developed an analysis of the post-Cold War world in order to contextualize the development of human-rights enforcement. It has highlighted the economic and political transformations that the late-modern world is undergoing, in particular the process of globalization, which does not only refer to quantitative transformations, but also to a development of a qualitatively new form of causation. Certain policies and institutions are becoming global, meaning increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized, losing their original links with


coercion and subjective interests, in particular those of capital, and are increasingly seen as objective conditions of the world by participants – both dominant and subordinate agents. A particular form of hegemony is developing in the late-modern world, a hegemony which is global and cannot be described as international, because it is based on global, non-territorial standards which govern the late-modern world, which are mediated by different actors but which are no longer reducible to those actors’ intentions or capabilities. This hegemonic structure privileges the interests of transnational capital, but it is not reducible to a deliberate project of its agents; rather, it is increasingly a result of the objectification of certain conditions that make transnational capital hegemonic. Within this hegemonic structure there exist different power relations among actors, especially between developed and undeveloped countries, as the radical critics discussed in Chapter 1 argue. However, these relationships are based on the mediation of certain increasingly global standards which favour more developed states, but which are not reducible to their intentions or capabilities. For example, powerful states may be able to afford to keep their own trade barriers while forcing developing countries to open up their economies. However, this is achieved through mediation of an increasingly globalized notion of free trade, which is less and less contested by Third World countries, as it had been in the past. They do challenge the developed states over the latter’s protectionism but they no longer challenge the free trade structure itself. The existing applications of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to the latemodern GPE may be improved by de-emphasizing the role of agents and pointing to the development of structures which condition the behaviour of not only the subordinate agents – as Gramsci’s notion of hegemony implies – but also the actions of the dominant actors themselves. Furthermore, the function of the moral and intellectual leadership which Gramsci designated as a necessary condition of hegemony is neglected in the existing analyses of hegemony. Moral and intellectual leadership, as will be argued in the next chapter, is also not reducible to dominant agents pursuing an intention to cement consent, but is exercised by a form of agency which is substitutable.

4 Human Rights Enforcement and the Moral and Intellectual Leadership of Hegemony

Introduction The previous chapter provided an overview of the structure of the latemodern GPE. It was argued that this is characterized by a development of a new form of hegemony which is global, meaning based on increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized sets of relations, institutions and values, mediated by agents but not reducible to their individual intentions or capabilities. This chapter will examine a range of cases of post-Cold War human-rights enforcement and their relationship with this emerging hegemonic structure. In doing so, the aim is to contextualize these cases, develop a holistic analysis of them, and uncover their causal relations with the structure of the late-modern GPE. In the earlier analysis of the historical development of military humanitarianism the causal relations between the feudal order and a medieval just-war tradition were first analysed. This tradition, based on religious interpretations of justice and solidarity, was part of the ideology of the feudal society and contributed to its reproduction. With the development of capitalism and of a new form of ideology — the ideology of individual rights — the just-war tradition was gradually transformed into a doctrine of the protection of individual freedom from oppression and tyranny; it subsequently developed as part of the ideology of capitalist society. However, it was also noted that its impact on the international development of capitalism was rather marginal, largely because the practice of humanitarian intervention was always seen as a rare exception to the rule of state sovereignty on which the international order was based; in addition, the values that underpinned it – individual rights – were far from universally shared. 173


During the Cold War the strategic international setting made it virtually impossible to use humanitarian force. With the end of the Cold War, and the economic and political transformations that accompanied it, a more favourable context emerged for human-rights enforcement to develop. With the rise of a global form of capitalism, that is, a capitalism based on de-territorialization and de-historicization of its foundations and the mechanisms of its reproduction, came a parallel globalization of the notion of human rights, understood predominantly as the negative rights of individuals. Human rights are also therefore increasingly becoming de-historicized and de-territorialized, losing their initial association with bourgeois interests and bourgeois revolutions. This globalization of human rights allows human-rights enforcement to develop as part of the emerging global order, and not in opposition to it. The core of the argument developed in this chapter consists in demonstrating that post-Cold War human-rights enforcement is an important element in a developing system of moral and intellectual leadership within an emerging global hegemony. An analysis of Gramsci’s writings reveals that the moral side of moral and intellectual leadership involves the development of what he defines as ‘the most universal concepts’ (Gramsci, 1957, p. 5); these are universalizable moral values and ideals that should help the dominant social forces win the consent of subordinate groups. Although Gramsci’s work in general, and his concept of hegemony in particular, are often seen as an example of a ‘superstructural’ Marxist analysis, developed in opposition to a determinist reading of Marx, Gramsci makes it clear that moral values developed by hegemonic social forces may not contradict the economic foundations of a hegemony, that is, its material relations; they must necessarily be compatible with the existing relations of production. The notion of human rights understood as political and civil liberties satisfies these two criteria. On the one hand, the notions of justice and freedom, with which the idea of human rights are associated, and the global discourse of liberation from oppression and tyranny, are intrinsically morally appealing. On the other hand, as was seen in Chapter 2 in the discussion of the ideas of Hobbes, Locke and Kant, the idea of individual political freedom is compatible with, and even necessary to, the functioning of capitalism and the continuous production and accumulation of capital. This compatibility will be further illustrated by looking at post-intervention developments in Bosnia and Haiti which demonstrate that the justice and freedom that human-rights

The Moral and Intellectual Leadership of Hegemony 175

enforcement delivers today lead to the adoption of neoliberal market reforms, liberalization of trade, privatization and deregulation. Concerning the intellectual side of moral and intellectual leadership, Gramsci observes that its purpose is to ensure that subordinate classes and groups accept the existing order ‘without criticism’. This is the task of ‘organic’ intellectuals; in the previous chapter the role of neo-Gramscian examples of such ‘organic’ intellectuals (economists, managers, financial analysts and business consultants, stockbrokers, accountants, insurance agents, etc) was discussed. However, Gramsci points out that such ‘organic’ intellectuals are themselves formed in the educational system; the role of academics, social scientists and philosophers in the development of a hegemonic intellectual leadership is therefore highly important. In this chapter it will be argued that today social science, in particular through such disciplines as economics, business studies, management studies, as well as IR and its subfields, does play an important role in the formation of ‘organic’ intellectuals for a neoliberal world order. The relationship between theory and practice, discussed in Chapter 1, will be revisited; again it will be seen how problematic the dominant categorical separation of the two spheres is. Furthermore, the literature on human-rights enforcement, also examined in Chapter 1, must also be seen in terms of Gramsci’s notion of intellectual leadership, because its technical, reductionist and ahistorical nature contributes to a further objectification and naturalization of the foundations of an emerging global hegemony, and to these foundations’ taken-for-granted, de-historicized and de-territorialized nature. This chapter is structured as follows: the first section discusses postCold War cases of human-rights enforcement as elements in the moral leadership of a developing global hegemony. Particular attention will be paid to their high moral appeal, and the contribution of each case to the process of globalization of negative individual rights, as well as to the development of a global conception of justice and freedom as comprising respect for individual political and civil rights. Next to be examined will be immediate post-intervention developments in Haiti and Bosnia; these further illustrate the compatibility of such a view of freedom with the economic foundations of an emerging hegemony. They also exemplify the contribution of human-rights enforcement to the normalization and objectification of neoliberal policies. The second section will deal with the intellectual side of the moral and intellectual leadership of an emerging hegemony. Particular reference will be made to the literature on human-rights enforcement.


1

Moral leadership and human-rights enforcement

The moral or ethical dimension of a hegemonic order is repeatedly emphasized by Gramsci. He argues that to establish hegemony the dominant social classes or forces need to create ‘a new moral order’, that is, ‘to elaborate the most universal concepts’ (Gramsci, 1957, p. 5). This involves the development of certain universalizable values and their spread through various institutions, in particular educational institutions, in order to consolidate the consent of the ruled. Such values aim at producing subjects, that is, moulding their moral behaviour so that they assimilate morality which is compatible with the existence of a hegemonic formation, and particularly with its economic foundations. For example, as Gramsci puts it in relation to the worker, such a system of moral values, once established, ‘influences his moral behaviour and the direction of his will in a more or less powerful way’ and ‘produces a state of moral and political passivity’ (p. 67). He further argues, in relation to the moral dimension of a hegemony, that ‘the development of the concept of hegemony represents a great step forward in philosophy as well as in practical politics, because it involves and presupposes an intellectual unity and an ethic conforming to a conception of reality which has surpassed common sense’ (p. 67, emphasis added). Gramsci therefore observes that the exercise of political power (and here he clearly follows Machiavelli) must create a moral dimension. Such a dimension is developed by the governing forces and its agents, who define what is morally right and just, and the values that subordinate groups assimilate. A particular form of justice and morality, compatible with the exercise of power by the dominant social forces, must therefore become universal. Here it is important to stress that, for Gramsci, material relations lie at the foundation of any hegemonic formation; it is the dominance of the hegemonic social forces in the relations of production that constitutes the premise of any hegemony, and moral values must necessarily be congruent with the economic structure. As Gramsci puts it, hegemonic moral values may not ‘touch the essential’, that is, the relations of production: Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed – in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise


cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity (Gramsci, 1971, p. 161). Drawing on these arguments by Gramsci it may be concluded that moral leadership has two aspects: on the one hand, it must contain universalizable moral values, and on the other it must be compatible with existing economic relations. In the late-modern GPE the development of a system of moral leadership in the context of an emerging global hegemony can be observed; at the heart of this system lies the notion of human rights, meaning the negative rights of individuals. It was seen in Chapter 3, in the examination of political developments and the growth of global governance, how various actors engage in different practices aimed at the promotion of ‘human rights and democracy’. What is central to this formula is a particular view of justice and freedom which is largely confined to civil and political emancipation and the equality of individuals, their rights to elect their governments, to organize parties and political movements, to enjoy different political liberties and rights and be free from torture, unlawful persecution, discrimination and so on. These freedoms and rights, to use Gramsci’s words, do not ‘touch the essential’; they are clearly compatible with the existence of global capitalism in its neoliberal form, and they possess a strong moral appeal. In fact, Gramsci himself, in his analysis of Fordism, pointed towards political and civil rights, in particular the right to vote and to form trade unions, as elements of a hegemony of the bourgeoisie in Western industrial societies. In Henry Ford’s adoption of mass-production techniques, the economic-corporate sacrifice was a high-wages policy, which was accompanied by the winning of political rights by workers, which in turn enabled working-class citizens to express claims to goods and services and encouraged socialist parties to deploy populist strategies in the competition for an electoral majority (pp. 310–13). As Carroll has rightly observed, for Gramsci the advent of democratic capitalism signalled a shift in the balance of class forces, yet it also established a highly persuasive organization of consent to the leading role of capital in national states. Hegemony became embedded in a set of institutions which enabled workers to struggle for redistribution of the social product, but constrained their


struggles within state-sanctioned channels of electoral politics and industrial relations (Carroll, 1990, p. 395, emphasis added). Thus, on the one hand, the concept of human rights today is explicitly associated with morality, civilized behaviour, liberation, freedom, duty and moral obligation. Examples are numerous. For instance, the former US President Bill Clinton, speaking in front of human rights activists, stated the following: As human rights advocates, defenders, and educators, more than anyone else, the people in this room and those whom you represent give life to the words of the Universal Declaration: ‘you shine the light of freedom on oppression, speak on behalf of the voiceless, spark the conscience of the world . . . [in your] tireless commitment to justice and equality’ (Clinton, 1997, emphasis added). President George W. Bush, when reasserting the US commitment to promoting and defending negative human rights wherever they are abused, made a similar moral pledge: ‘Across the globe, we will continue to stand with those who fight for fundamental freedoms, whether they be democracy activists in Cuba, university faculty and students in Iran, opposition leaders in Zimbabwe, journalists in Belarus, or the people of North Korea who have never known freedom’ (Bush, 2002b, emphasis added). On the other hand, as was seen in Chapter 2, the negative rights of individuals is an ideological concept; not only is it compatible with the operation of capital, but it has in fact contributed to capital’s historical national and international development. In an age of global capitalism, it is now contributing to a further objectification and naturalization of the economic foundations of capitalism. However, it must be stressed that, in contrast to Gramsci’s view of moral leadership as a conscious attempt on the part of the ruling classes to maintain their hegemonic position through the universalization of certain moral values, the developing system of moral leadership is not reducible to transnational capital and its agents; instead, it is mediated by substitutable agents constituting global governance, including subordinate agents. That is to say, it may be agents such as firms and the transnational business elite more generally representing the interests of capital, but it may also be agents such as NGOs and civil society activists representing the interests of the subordinate actors or even the subordinate actors themselves such as the Third world states or their organizations, for


example, ECOWAS. The development of moral leadership can therefore be seen as an unintended consequence of their activities, which can in part be explained by the ideological nature of the notion of human rights, because it indeed appears that human rights so constructed deliver freedom, justice, human dignity and equality. It is not directly apparent that such forms of emancipation are partial, with the relations of exploitation and inequality in the realm of the economy continuing to exist. Contrary to Gramsci’s view, therefore, such a moral leadership is a result of the globalization of the notion of human rights; that is, its development as an increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized standard on the basis of which agents are evaluated and also evaluate themselves, and which, to use Gramsci’s terms, ‘has surpassed common sense’ (1957, p. 67). It is nevertheless important to reiterate earlier assertions that it may well be the case that the human rights policies of different actors, including humanitarian intervention, might involve selfish interests or goals. Douzinas, for example, observes that human rights may be used as a ‘discourse of state legitimation or as the empty rhetoric of rebellion; it can be easily co-opted by all kinds of opposition, minority or religious leaders, whose political project is not to humanise oppressive states but to replace them with their own equally murderous regimes’ (Douzinas, 2002, p. 117). Or, as Martz puts it, ‘human rights have been among the most honoured and dishonoured concepts to be found nestling in the annals of the Western hemisphere’ (Martz, 1992, p. 43). The practice of human-rights enforcement, as was seen in Chapter 1, is approached by both Realist and radical critics as serving various state interests, such as economic or strategic considerations. It may be added that the humanrights policies of some business firms might in fact aim to improve their own image and competitiveness. However, even if this is the case, neither the causes nor the consequences of such actions can be reduced to the intentions and properties of the actors involved. On the one hand, it is the development of global capitalism and a parallel globalization of human rights, meaning their increasing de-historicization and de-territorialization, which enables some actors to use coercion with respect to other actors with reference to this global standard. On the other hand, the actions carried out in the name of human-rights promotion and protection have an unintended consequence of contributing to a further globalization of human rights and a further development of a particular notion of justice, freedom and morality which implies only civil and political emancipation of individuals. In short, although human-rights enforcement is a practice of coercion, it plays a role in simultaneously contributing to consent, meaning the


further de-territorialization and de-historicization of conditions of hegemony. In Gramsci’s writings such a possibility of coercion playing a role in cementing consent is in fact envisaged in his discussion of law enforcement and punishment of criminals, which, Gramsci argues, must have a ‘moral import’: . . . the State must be seen as an ‘educator’, in that it aims precisely to create a new type and level of civilization; . . . it works according to a plan, it presses, it arouses, it urges, and it ‘punishes’, since, when the conditions are created in which a certain way of life is ‘impossible’, ‘criminal action or omission’ must have a punitive sanction, with a moral import, and not only a judgment of general dangerousness (Gramsci, 1957, pp. 187–8, emphasis added). In addition to having some form of ‘moral import’, coercion plays a role in contributing to consent in that in a hegemonic formation coercion is always justified on the basis of values that normally constitute consent: ‘the attempt is always made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion – newspapers and associations’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 80). In what follows we will see a strong form of ‘moral import’ in postCold War cases of human-rights enforcement. The post-Cold War evolution of humanitarian intervention, from a series of UN-authorized actions to the NATO intervention in Kosovo, unauthorized by the UN, and the development of a ‘Clinton doctrine’ and a ‘Blair doctrine’, will be discussed. Following this, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their part in the War on Terror, will be discussed; both involved numerous references to human rights. Operation Provide Comfort We begin with a case that was crucial in terms of laying foundations for the post-Cold War use of military force to protect human rights. Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq was undertaken primarily by the United States, the UK and France, who relied on UN Security Council Resolution 688 as justification. After the end of the 1990 Gulf War, the Kurds of Iraq, who had organized an uprising during the war, faced a campaign of violent repression by the government of Saddam Hussein. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds managed to flee from Iraq into Turkey and Iran, but hundreds of thousands more were trapped in the mountains, vulnerable to both Saddam’s forces and terrible weather conditions.


Without basic necessities hundreds of them died each week from cold and hunger; those who had fled Iraq perished from disease in refugee camps (Financial Times, 1991a, p. 6; 1991b, p. 4; 1991c, p. 6). The Iranian government estimated that 1000 Kurds were dying each day at the Iranian border alone (The Independent, 1991a, p. 1). Turkey and Iran requested the UN to take action and on 5 April 1991, the Security Council passed resolution 688. This resolution condemned the Iraqi repression of Kurds; it designated the repression as a violation of human rights and it asked member states to provide security and relief for the Kurds in northern Iraq. The resolution stated that the Security Council, ‘gravely concerned by the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts of Iraq, condemns the repression of the Iraqi civilian population . . . and . . . demands that Iraq . . . immediately end this repression . . . to ensure that the human and political rights of all Iraqi citizens are respected’ (S/RES/0688 (1991)). Following the resolution, a coalition of 13 nations was formed with additional material contributions from 30 countries working under the command and control of the Coalition Task Force to ensure relief supplies to the Iraqi Kurds; it was ‘the largest relief operation in history’, in the words of US officials, with hundreds of American military lorries and dozens of transport helicopters setting up a ‘food bridge’ to the refugee camps for the feeding of more than 700,000 people a day (Sunday Times, 1991). Although many states ultimately contributed to Operation Provide Comfort, the primary countries involved were the US, the UK and France, who together provided 13,000 troops to carry out the operation. Other participating states, such as Canada and Germany, also made important contributions. The operation was relatively efficient; for example, after 23 days of action, a daily mission report stated that ‘a total of 1,954 missions have air-dropped 8,713 tons of supplies’ (The Independent, 1991b, p. 8). Operation Provide Comfort lasted for three months and ended on 22 July 1991. It was succeeded by another operation, codenamed Poised Hammer, which largely involved maintaining a contingent of troops in Turkey which would be ready to act should Iraq restart repression of Kurds; it also maintained safe havens above the 36th parallel from bases in Turkey and the Gulf ‘threatening to use force against Iraq if human rights are abused’ (Financial Times, 1991a, p. 6). As one of the British officials involved in the operation put it, Operation Poised Hammer ‘would be acting as a kind of tripwire for human-rights abuses’ (Financial Times, 1991b, p. 4). This action by the UN Security Council, in particular resolution 688, is seen as a landmark event in the evolution of the practice of


humanitarian intervention (Sandholtz, 2002; Chandler, 2002; Murphy, 1996). It brought to the fore the ‘legal conflict . . . between the protection of human rights and a rule barring interference in a state’s internal affairs . . . that old problem with everything which refers to human rights’, as the former UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar put it (Financial Times, 1991c, p. 6). This dilemma was resolved by the UN in favour of human rights; for the first time the UN had actually acted to guarantee the fundamental human rights declared in the UN Charter. As Financial Times analysts suggested at the time, resolution 688 ‘could change international law’ because ‘it was the first time the UN Security Council has authorized members to intervene in a country to save lives’ and to threaten ‘to use force if human rights are abused’ (Financial Times, 1991c, p. 6). And this indeed happened. As Chandler observes, ‘the international regulation of Iraq, in which sovereignty was subordinated to human rights concerns, was subsequently seen as a legal precedent for universal human-rightsbased intervention. This was acted upon the following year when the UN authorised . . . United States intervention in Somalia’ (Chandler, 2002, p. 9; see also Murphy, 1996, pp. 172–4; Makinda, 1993). In addition to human-rights rhetoric, the operation to save the Iraqi Kurds also involved a significant degree of other forms of ‘moral import’, to use Gramsci’s expression. For example, when the operation was about to end The Guardian described the forces that participated as ‘the armies of mercy’ which in three months ‘rescued the Kurds from a hideous fate – death and disease in the mountains, and massacre and repression in their own towns’ (The Guardian, 1991a, p. 21). When the operation officially finished, US troops pledged to come to the rescue of the Iraqi Kurds immediately if the Iraqi forces resumed their repressive activities. As the overall commander of Operation Provide Comfort, US General John Shalikashvili, put it, ‘We’ll just be a phone call away’ (quoted in The Independent, 1991c, p. 10). Kurdish officials, in turn, stated: ‘We believe in the power of the United States. They rescued us. If anything happens, they will be there in minutes’ (p. 10). This actually proved to be the case, even if not exactly as pledged by General Shalikashvili – US troops launched a missile attack on 3 September 1996 against Iraqi military targets which followed reports of an Iraqi massacre of Kurds in the city of Irbil in northern Iraq (The Independent, 1996a, p. 8). The following day, after 27 long-range missiles smashed into air-defence installations in Iraq, President Clinton stated the missile strike was undertaken ‘to make Saddam pay a price for his latest brutality’ (quoted in The Independent, 1996b, p. 8). The US attack


was fully supported by the UK. The Prime Minister, John Major, stated that Iraq was guilty of extensive human-rights violations against the Kurds which had to be stopped: The United States has our full support and I hope and believe others will support them as well. They are certainly right on this issue. Saddam Hussein has a human rights record in Iraq that is absolutely atrocious. We saw very directly in 1991 precisely what this man meant to the Kurds in the north. We saw that with the large number of dead Kurds, the large number of Kurds who were maltreated, the large number of Kurds who did freeze to death on the mountains. What we are concerned about is any external threats he produces and repression of his own people – and it’s against that that the United States acted (The Independent, 1996b, p. 8). After the attack President Clinton also announced an extension the no-fly zone in southern Iraq northwards, from the 32nd to the 33rd parallel, which effectively took the zone to the suburbs of Baghdad in order to ground Iraqi aircraft at the Habanniyah and Kut airbases (The Guardian, 1996a, p. 1). This case of human-rights enforcement can be seen as an important element in the development of moral leadership in the post-Cold War GPE. On the one hand, it was carried out to stop human-rights abuses and was therefore an element in the developing global human-rights discourse (even if, to repeat, it might have involved other state interests). On the other hand, it also set a precedent for the further evolution of humanitarian intervention. Resolution 688 also played a role in constructing the case for the war against Iraq as part of the War on Terror. In the pre-war period the UN, in resolution 1441 of November 2002, in addition to statements on weapons of mass destruction, deplored Saddam Hussein’s failure to comply with the demands on human rights made by resolution 688 (S/RES/1441 (1991)). Operation Restore Hope In 1992–3, the UN Security Council authorized humanitarian intervention in Somalia. Following reports of massive violations of human rights and widespread famine resulting from a civil war that had raged in Somalia since January 1991 (Amnesty International, 1992; 1993; 1994; BBC World Service 2000; Financial Times, 1992a; 1992b; 1993a; Independent, 1992a, 1993a; HRW (Human Rights Watch), 1992; 1993), the UN Security Council first established a peacekeeping force,


UNOSOM (United Nations Operation in Somalia), under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. In December 1992, it authorized a US-led military force, UNITAF (United Nations International Task Force), under Chapter VII: Expressing grave alarm at continuing reports of widespread violations of international humanitarian law occurring in Somalia, including . . . deliberate attacks on non-combatants . . . and impeding the delivery of food and medical supplies essential for the survival of the civilian population . . . Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, authorizes the Secretary-General and Member States . . . to use all necessary means to establish as soon as possible a secure environment for humanitarian relief operations in Somalia (S/RES/ 794 (1992)). Following this resolution a US-led multinational force comprising 24,000 US troops and 13,000 troops from other states landed in Somalia in mid-December 1992. In May 1993, UNOSOM and UNITAF were replaced by a UN mission with a broader mandate (UNOSOM II) under UNSC resolution 814. UNOSOM II had a mandate which authorized it ‘to assume responsibility for the consolidation, expansion and maintenance of a secure environment throughout Somalia’ and, in support of these objectives, to take ‘appropriate action against any faction that violated or threatened to violate the cessation of hostilities’ (S/RES/814 (1993). The mission, however, failed after the US forces withdrew from Somalia following the death of 18 US Rangers in a battle in Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993. In the above resolutions the Security Council did not explicitly refer to human rights, but instead used international humanitarian law as the basis for authorizing force. However, the situation in Somalia before, during and after intervention was widely seen as constituting large-scale abuse of human rights, in particular political and civil rights; this was especially emphasized by NGOs such as Africa Watch and Human Rights Watch (Amnesty International, 1992, 1993, 1994; HRW (Human Rights Watch), 1992 and 1993). For example, Human Rights Watch in its 1992 Report blamed the US, as well as the UN, for not seeing ‘the enormity of the human rights disaster in Somalia . . . until well into 1992’ (HRW (Human Rights Watch), 1993). In the following year a Human Rights Watch report acknowledged the fact that Somalia had received international attention and that Operation Restore Hope had started to improve the human-rights situation. However, the report noted, torture,


mass killing of civilians, rape and mutilation resulting from the interclan war were still continuing. Amnesty International ‘described Somalia as a human rights disaster’ (Financial Times, 1992a, p. 3; The Guardian, 1992, p. 8) and appealed ‘to the international community to help in the search for effective solutions to Somalia’s human rights crisis, in order to help bring an end to the horrendous pattern of gross human rights abuses which not only continues but threatens to persist for months or years in a cycle of revenge killings’ (Amnesty International, cited in The Independent, 1992a, p. 10). Already in April 1991 Amnesty International ‘submitted information about its concerns in Somalia for United Nations review under a procedure established by Economic and Social Council Resolutions 728F/1503 for confidential considerations of communications about human rights abuses’ (Amnesty International, 1992, p. 233). Amnesty International documented the following violations of human rights in Somalia: thousands of unarmed civilians were deliberately killed by political groups fighting in the civil war . . . since 1991. Most captives were summarily executed. At least two political armed groups tortured and mutilated prisoners. Some of the other armed groups imprisoned civilian opponents. . . . For example, the Somali National Front (SNF) and the United Somali Congress (USC) forces killed, tortured and committed other gross violations of human rights abuses against members of the Hawiye and Rahanwein clans (Amnesty International, 1993, pp. 258–9; see also Amnesty International, 1994, pp. 262–3; Amnesty International, 1997). The war in Somalia was described as constituting abuses of human rights by the Somalis themselves. For example, Yusuf Omar Al-Azhari, an official of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, which controlled a large swathe of northern Somalia, called for ‘the establishment of a human rights court to try Somali war criminals’ (Financial Times, 1993a, p. 4). In fact, immediately after its deployment, the UNOSOM II mission established an Office of Human Rights, a special team of international specialists, in cooperation with the Somali police, to investigate massive violations of human rights (HRW (Human Rights Watch), 1995). Operation Restore Hope is now commonly referred to by academics as an intervention for human-rights purposes (for example, Clark and Herbst, 1996, 1997; Chandler, 2002). Humanitarian intervention in Somalia was therefore an important element in the process of globalization of human rights. In addition to


this, it also had a significant degree of ‘moral import’. For example, right from the start, the mission in Somalia was presented as a moral duty. The then US President George Bush Sr went as far as calling it ‘God’s work’ when he addressed sailors aboard the USS Tripoli: ‘This is a human suffering situation. It’s God’s work and you are doing it well. . . . It is a wonderful, wonderful mission of mercy, and I am just so very proud’ (The Independent, 1993b, p. 13). Operation Restore Hope was later endorsed by President Clinton, whose administration, inaugurated in January 1993, pledged to continue ‘the mission of mercy’ that George Bush had started; the rhetoric of the new administration also referred to moral values and a moral duty to stop human suffering in Somalia and put an end to massive violations of human rights. For example, Warren Christopher, Clinton’s first Secretary of State, said in a speech in May 1993: I salute former President Bush for launching Operation Restore Hope – a military mobilization for a mission of mercy in Somalia. What a proud moment it was to see American soldiers help feed starving children in a place far from our shores but clearly close to our hearts. Certainly America was not alone in that effort. Other nations – including many in Africa – were instrumental in providing relief. While serious problems persist in Somalia, the efforts of the international community have alleviated the worst suffering and provided the opportunity to rebuild that nation . . . and to stop massive human rights violations (Christopher, 1993). The Somali operation broke further ground for the development of humanitarian intervention. In the same speech Christopher stated that ‘President Clinton has made it clear that promoting democracy and human rights is a pillar of American foreign policy. . . . It is democracies – not dictatorships – that offer the best means to defend human rights . . . the Somalia experience demonstrates that the international community can respond compassionately and effectively to human rights violations in the future’ (Christopher, 1993). Importantly for this analysis, when talking about human rights (meaning exclusively political and civil rights) and their protection, Christopher equated respect for these rights not only with freedom, but also with free markets: ‘The Clinton Administration will provide strong and visible support for the movement to freedom in Africa – the movement toward democracy, human rights and free markets’ (Christopher 1993). In the dominant international discourse, this is


what it means to be free; that is, respect for political and civil rights is associated with neoliberal capitalism. Below it will be seen how the interventions in Bosnia and Haiti were also followed by development packages which emphasized free trade, privatization and deregulation. Overall, we can see how Operation Restore Hope further contributed to the development of what may be described as a form of moral leadership, central to which is the notion of justice and freedom defined as respect for human rights. In fact the operation did not succeed, and this failure had an immediate negative effect on the further development of post-Cold War humanitarianism – the inaction during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, because the US was reluctant to commit troops after what had happened to its Rangers in Somalia. Nevertheless, the Somalia episode was an important step in the development of humanitarian intervention as a practice aimed at the protection of human rights and in further relativizing the notion of state sovereignty.

Humanitarian force in Bosnia-Herzegovina Between 1992 and 1995 the UN Security Council passed several resolutions authorizing humanitarian operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, following the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the ensuing ethnic conflict, which was marked by large-scale human-rights violations against the Bosnian Muslim population by Bosnian Serbs and Croats. The UN’s initial response was to issue resolution 713 in September 1991, which imposed an arms embargo on Serbia, and the later resolution 757 of May 1992, which imposed a general economic embargo on Serbia. But even more important were the subsequent resolutions 770, 787 and 836. In resolution 770 the Security Council requested the member states to take all the necessary arrangements to deliver humanitarian assistance to Bosnia and ensure international access to prison camps: Deeply concerned by reports of abuses against civilians imprisoned in camps, prisons and detention centres; . . . [the UNSC] Calls upon States to take . . . all measures necessary to facilitate the delivery by relevant United Nations humanitarian organizations and others of humanitarian assistance to Sarajevo and wherever needed in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina; demands that unimpeded and continuous access to all camps and detention centres be granted immediately to the International Committee of Red Cross and other relevant humanitarian organizations and that all detainees therein


receive humane treatment, including adequate food, shelter and medical care (S/RES/770 (1992)). In resolution 787 the UN Security Council expressed concerns about violations of human rights and humanitarian law in Bosnia, and asked member states to take necessary measures to ensure the implementation of embargoes imposed by earlier resolutions 713 and 757: Noting with grave concern the report of the Special Rapporteur . . . which makes clear that massive and systematic violations of human rights and grave violations of international humanitarian law continue in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina . . . Acting under Chapters VII and VIII of the Charter of the United Nations, calls upon states . . . to use such measures . . . as may be necessary . . . to halt all inward and outward maritime shipping in order to inspect and verify their cargoes and destinations and to ensure strict implementation of the provisions of resolutions 713 (1991) and 757 (1992) (S/Res/ 787 (1992)). Finally, resolution 836 of the Security Council explicitly authorized the use of force to protect safe areas in Bosnia and to deter possible attacks against the safe areas: Reiterating its alarm at the grave and intolerable situation in the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and . . . reaffirming once again that . . . any practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is unlawful and totally unacceptable; . . . [the UNSC] decides to extend to that end the mandate of UNPROFOR [United Nations Protection Force] in order to enable it in safe areas . . . to deter attacks against the safe areas . . . Authorizes UNPROFOR . . . to take the necessary measures, including the use of force, in reply to bombardments against the safe areas by any of the parties . . . all necessary measures through the use of air power in and around the safe areas in the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to support UNPROFOR in the performance of its mandate (S/RES/836 (1993)). In these resolutions the UN Security Council continues to maintain a distinction between humanitarian and human-rights law. This distinction, however, as was argued earlier, is a one of form and not content; both these branches of law deal with political crimes and suppression of


civil rights. In addition to this, the UN action was overwhelmingly seen as human-rights protection by various actors, as will be seen shortly. UNPROFOR, a multinational military contingent established to protect the safe areas by the UN Security Council, made an important contribution to the protection of the safe areas, but failed to prevent the fall of Srebrenica and the massacre that followed. Overall, the international community’s response was inadequate in terms of preventing massacres, but it was nevertheless another important step in the post-Cold War development of the practice of humanitarian intervention, largely understood as the protection of human rights. It also was an important building block in the further development of moral leadership in the late-modern world; this was particularly so in the case of the pledges and condemnations that identified human-rights abuses such as torture, rape and summary executions as acts of injustice and barbarity and that called for human-rights enforcement. For example, in 1995 the French President Jacques Chirac said that passiveness in the face of Serb attacks was turning Western forces into ‘accomplices to barbarity’; this situation, he said, compared to the Holocaust and he called upon ‘the large Western democracies to get a grip on themselves and to impose respect for human rights and international law’ (quoted in The Times, 1995). Here, Chirac explicitly equates abuses of human rights with barbarity, and links respect for them in Western democracies with justice and civilized behaviour. A similar outlook is apparent in UK Prime Minister John Major’s statements on Bosnia; he said that ‘the NATO forces, the most powerful army in the world’ had to ‘uphold what the democracies stand for in Bosnia and oppose naked aggression and the fascist assault on human rights’ (Sunday Times, 1995). The Independent described this rhetoric by Western leaders during the conflict as ‘grandly moralistic’ (1993c, p. 19). The situation in Bosnia was also described in terms of human rights violations by NGOs, political leaders and the media (for example, Amnesty International 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996; BBC World Service, 2000; US Department of State, 1994; Financial Times, 1992c, 1992d, 1992e, 1992f;). The massacre in Srebrenica was later referred to by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as a large-scale human-rights violation (Annan, 2000a, 2000b). American and British perceptions of the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war were similar (US Department of State, 1994; Financial Times, 1992c, p. 2). In August 1992, the US and the UK called for an


extraordinary session of the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Commission, to ‘examine the dangerous deterioration of the human rights situation in the former Yugoslavia’ (Financial Times, 1992d, p. 16; Financial Times, 1992e, p. 2; Financial Times, 1992f, p. 1). A US-drafted resolution describing the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina as ‘gross violations of human rights’ won broad support among the 53 members. The UN Commission on Human Rights unanimously condemned ‘widespread, massive and grave’ human-rights violations and the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’; it appointed Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the former Prime Minister of Poland, as a special investigator to compile evidence on human-rights abuses in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. In his report to the Commission in September 1992, Mazowiecki documented numerous violations of human rights and made the following recommendations: an extended mandate for UNPROFOR to report on, stop and assist victims of human-rights abuses throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina; the establishment of an international war crimes tribunal to investigate mass human-rights violations; and the stationing of human-rights monitors throughout the former Yugoslavia (Financial Times, 1992g, p. 14). In February 1993 Mazowiecki said he was prepared to resign if concrete measures were not taken to prevent human-rights abuses in former Yugoslavia (Financial Times, 1993b, p. 3). In April 1993 General Lars-Eric Wahlgren, the UN protection force commander in the former Yugoslavia, said that he had ordered his men ‘to use force if necessary to prevent human-rights violations’ (p. 3). It is not only what was done and said by the international community with respect to the humanitarian use of force in Bosnia that has contributed to the further development of the practice of humanitarian intervention and moral leadership after Bosnia – but also what was not done. The response of the international community to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia is generally seen today as a failure (for example, see Annan, 2000a). However, this failure, like the failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994, played a role in stimulating a number of commitments and pledges on the part of state leaders and representatives of international organizations, such as the UN or NATO, not to repeat such mistakes and to act more assertively in the future (Annan, 1999; 2000a). They also played a role in shaping the justifications given for NATO’s action in Kosovo and the development of the Clinton Doctrine, as will be seen below. The action in Bosnia, as well the operations in Iraq and Somalia discussed above, were therefore groundbreaking in that they put human rights (understood exclusively as political and civil freedoms) above the


notion of state sovereignty. They were also influential in terms of transforming the role of the UN (which would, however, be undermined later during the Kosovo operation). As The Guardian remarked at the time: The UN’s humanitarian role has changed dramatically since the end of the cold war. The watershed came in April 1991, when Security Council resolution 688 condemned Iraq for its treatment of the civilian population and set up safe havens with an air-exclusion zone. This was followed by resolution 770 which provided UN military protection for humanitarian convoys in Bosnia. Then came resolution 794 which authorised UN troops to use ‘all necessary means’ in Somalia to secure the unimpeded distribution of aid, and, finally, the authorization of NATO close support air strikes against the Serbs (1994a, p. 16). These resolutions were also crucially important in terms of the development of post-Cold War moral leadership, which has the promotion and protection of these individual negative liberties at its heart. Operation Restore Democracy, Haiti The Haitian government of democratically elected President JeanBertrand Aristide was overthrown by the military on 29 September, 1991; Lieutenant General Raul Cedras became the new head of the Haitian government. Following the coup, political repression by the Haitian military against Aristide supporters resulted ‘in over 3000 deaths, widespread violations of human rights and caused thousands of Haitians to flee the country’ (Financial Times, 1994a, p. 5). In July 1994 Cedras ordered 104 UN observers out of the country because they were reporting increasing human rights abuses – including political murders and rape (Financial Times, 1994b, p. 9). The UN Security Council immediately condemned the Haitian regime’s expulsion of an international human rights mission; later, resolution 940 proposed by the United States, authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, prescribed the use of ‘all necessary means’ to stop violations of human rights (this time explicitly meaning only civil rights) in Haiti and to restore a ‘democratically elected president’. Resolution 940 stated the following: Gravely concerned by . . . the continuing escalation by the illegal de facto regime of systematic violations of civil liberties, the desperate plight of Haitian refugees and the recent expulsion of the staff of the International Civilian Mission . . . Reaffirming that the goal of the


international community remains the restoration of democracy in Haiti and the prompt return of the legitimately elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide . . . Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, [the UNSC] authorizes Member States to form a multinational force under unified command and control and, in this framework, to use all necessary means to facilitate the departure from Haiti of the military leadership . . . the prompt return of the legitimately elected President and the restoration of the legitimate authorities of the Government of Haiti’ (S/RES/940 (1994), emphasis added). A US-led force codenamed ‘Operation Restore Democracy’ was then established. It consisted of more than 15,000 US troops and a symbolic group of soldiers from other countries, including Bangladesh, Barbados, Guyana, Ghana and the UK. The success of the US action was crucial for the subsequent development of the practice of human-rights enforcement in general, and for US readiness to commit troops in particular. First, UN Security Council resolution 940 set the important precedent of conferring upon one state such vast powers of enforcement. As a 32-nation group of Latin American and Caribbean nations argued during the UN debates, it was unprecedented in giving the US such a free hand in rebuilding ‘rogue’ and ‘failed’ states such as Haiti (The Independent, 1994, p. 7). Furthermore, the resolution set no deadline for Haiti’s military rulers to leave, thus allowing the US to invade immediately if it wanted to; this complied with the US insistence that any final decision about an invasion should rest with President Clinton (p. 7). In addition, the operation ‘restored democracy, human rights and rule of law in Haiti’ (Amnesty International, 1996, p. 166), which added to the Americans’ determination to carry out such missions in the future (Clinton, 1996). This operation, like the operations discussed earlier, was accompanied by a strong moral rhetoric, at the heart of which was the notion of human rights, meaning political and civil rights. Various US officials repeatedly described the existing military rulers in Haiti as ‘murderers, rapists and thugs’ (The Guardian, 1994b, p. 5) and characterized the US mission as bringing an end to brutality and restoring justice and freedom. An unnamed US official stated that ‘America has a duty to encourage other nations to enjoy the privileges that are now taken for granted in the US [civil and political rights]’ and to fulfill its ‘global responsibilities . . . in Haiti’ (quoted in the Mail on Sunday, 1994, p. 7). As The Guardian observed in this respect, ‘the humanitarian case against a


regime accused of killing over 2,000 political opponents in the past three years knocks at an open door. It has been put in the most vivid terms, with colour photographs handed around by the President himself to illustrate the junta’s atrocities. ‘‘We can’t ignore a cruel regime,’’ said one senior Washington official, ‘‘that kills priests and babies’’’ (1994c, p. 23). After the successful completion of Operation Restore Democracy President Clinton made the following morally appealing statement: Our actions ended a reign of terror that did violence not only to innocent Haitians but to the values and the principles of the civilized world. We renewed hope in Haiti’s future where once there was only despair. We upheld the reliability of our own commitments and the commitments that others make to us . . . The democratic government has been restored. Human rights are its purpose, not its disgrace . . . After so much blood and terror, the people of Haiti have resumed their long journey to security and prosperity with dignity . . . The people of Haiti know it’s up to them to safeguard their freedom. But we know, as President Kennedy said, that democracy is never a final achievement. And just as the American people, after 200 years, are continually struggling to perfect our own democracy, we must and we will stand with the people of Haiti as they struggle to build their own (Clinton, 1996, emphasis added). Again elements of what may be described as a form of moral leadership can be seen, with the central role played by pledges to promote and protect civil and political human rights. The case of Haiti was therefore another important instance of the development of this moral leadership in the late-modern world; it also laid further foundations for similar actions in the future. To reiterate, even if this operation might have involved other US goals and interests (in fact, Haiti became one of the major consumers of US rice after the operation), the US nevertheless reacted to a brutal dictatorship marked by grave human rights violations and ousted it. Humanitarian intervention in East Timor In 1999 the UN authorized the use of humanitarian force in East Timor. In August 1999 an overwhelming majority of the population of East Timor – 78.5% – voted for self-determination and independence from Indonesia. Following the vote, Indonesian military-backed militia and paramilitaries went on a terror campaign that resulted in massive abuses of human rights, executions and death among the East Timorese


population, as well as some 200,000 to 300,000 refugees (The Independent, 1999a, p. 11; The Guardian, 1999a, p. 20). The escalation of violence was immediately condemned by different countries and international organizations; in September 1999 the US imposed a partial arms embargo on Indonesia and terminated military cooperation with that country ‘because of human rights abuses’ (The Independent, 1999b, p. 25). The European Union also imposed an arms embargo on Indonesia in order to put pressure on its military to take full responsibility for the massive violations of human rights in East Timor. The embargo banned all sales of arms, munitions and military equipment. EU foreign ministers also agreed to suspend all military cooperation with Indonesia (The Herald, 1999, p. 12). Mary Robinson, the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner, demanded a war crimes tribunal to investigate and try those responsible for ‘gross, blatant and terrible violations of human rights’ in East Timor (The Times, 1999a). Despite these measures the situation deteriorated; this led to the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1264 which condemned violations of human rights in East Timor and authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter the establishment of a multinational force. The resolution stated the following: Expressing its concern at reports indicating that systematic, widespread and flagrant violations of international humanitarian and human rights law have been committed in East Timor, and stressing that persons committing such violations bear individual responsibility . . . Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations . . . [the UNSC] Authorizes the establishment of a multinational force under a unified command structure . . . to facilitate humanitarian assistance operations, and authorizes the States participating in the multinational force to take all necessary measures to fulfil this mandate (S/RES/1264 (1999)). The operation was carried out by a multinational force, of which Australia contributed two thirds; other contingents came from Britain, the US, New Zealand, Italy, Portugal, France, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines (The Times, 1999a). The operation succeeded in stopping violence and in forcing the Indonesian military to leave the territory; this ended 24 years of direct control. As in the cases discussed above, the operation in East Timor was accompanied by different moral statements, claims and pledges that referred to the barbarity and brutality of the Indonesian militia in East


Timor and the duty of the international community to intervene (The Herald, 1999; The Independent, 1999b). The Times described the Australian decision to take military action as a ‘moral high ground’, because this decision had adverse economic consequences for Australian companies: ‘Australia’s Liberal-National coalition Prime Minister, John Howard, is already paying the diplomatic price for taking the moral high ground. Jakarta has cancelled a four-year-old bilateral defence co-operation pact. Australian companies are winding down operations in Indonesia in the face of anti-Australian protests’ (The Times, 1999b). This action and its relative success, according to the UN SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan, was an important indication that, contrary to the view of sceptics, the UN was not ill-suited to a world of ethnic wars and intra-state violence and could act ‘promptly and effectively’ to protect human rights (Financial Times, 1999, p. 5). It also reinforced international determination to use force to protect human rights; this was expressed by a number of state officials. For example, President Clinton, in his address to the UN General Assembly, stated the following: ‘We cannot do everything, everywhere. But just because we have different interests in different parts of the world does not mean we can be indifferent to the destruction of innocents in any part of the world’ (The Guardian, 1999b, p. 15). Similar views were expressed by Lionel Jospin, the former French Prime Minister (Financial Times, 1999, p. 5), and Robin Cook, the former UK Foreign Secretary; the latter observed that . . . wars in the past decade have claimed an estimated five million lives. More than at any time, these wars have violated civilians, not borders. Dealing with these conflicts has presented the UN, and the international community, with enormous difficulties. To cope with that problem there should be a clear Framework for Intervention, defined and qualified by formal criteria and principles. Humanitarian intervention could in itself serve as a deterrent to future conflicts (Cook and Campbell, 2000, p. 19). Thus, we see again how another individual case of humanitarian operations contributed to the development of what has been described as a form of moral leadership in which the commitments of different actors to further engage in the promotion and protection of human rights is understood predominantly as protecting the political and civil rights of individuals. The cases discussed so far in this chapter have involved mainly Western states. The two cases that follow are crucial for understanding


the way the notion of human rights is becoming global in the sense of being an increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized norm which is mediated by different actors and is no longer reducible to the intentions and interests of Western states. ECOWAS intervention in Liberia On 24 December 1989 a small group of rebels led by Charles Taylor ^ te d’Ivoire. The crossed into the remote Nimba county of Liberia from Co rebel group’s strength grew so rapidly that within months it had entered the Liberian capital, Monrovia. The success of Taylor’s NPFL (National Patriotic Front of Liberia) was largely due to the brutal nature of the Liberian regime, led by President Samuel Doe; this regime was marked by ‘extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions and other extensive abuses of human rights’ (The Times, 1990). According to a 1991 US government estimate, fighting between the rebel forces and government troops led to the deaths of between 10,000 and 13,000 people (USAID, 1991, p. 1). Some estimates run as high as 30,000 (Washington Post, 1991). The war was also marked by widespread human-rights abuses, practised by both sides. For example, in response to the rebel invasion in 1989, Doe’s soldiers launched attacks on civilians of the Gio and Mano ethnic groups in Nimba county, intensifying the anger of the people of the area and adding fuel to the rebellion. The NPFL then launched its own attacks against civilians of the Krahn and Mandingo ethnic groups (President Doe was from the Krahn group) (Africa Watch, 1990). Meanwhile, the NPFL itself split, and Prince Johnson, a guerrilla commander, broke away to found the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia (INPFL). In September, Johnson’s group hunted down President Doe and tortured and executed him (Africa Watch, 1990, p. 9). In April 1990, in response to this rapidly deteriorating situation, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) sent in a military force of 7000 troops, known as the ECOWAS Monitoring Group (ECOMOG), led by Nigeria. The force secured Monrovia and placed Amos Sawyer, a long-time opponent of Doe’s regime, as president of the Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU). In November 1990, after a prolonged effort, ECOWAS arranged a ceasefire among the contending factions (Copson and Sharpe, 1994, p. 56). However, despite the this accord, ECOMOG was unable to move decisively beyond the capital, which left most of the country still in the hands of Taylor’s NPFL. In October 1992, ECOMOG imposed a tough blockade on the Taylor-held zone and launched a military offensive, but the rebel leader refused to capitulate (Copson and Sharpe, 1994, p. 57).


In the years that followed the Liberian crisis continued to simmer. Despite the presence of some 12,000 troops from ECOWAS, various attempts at a political solution proved ineffective, and numbers of civilian casualties and refugees continued to mount. Finally, under ECOMOG’s supervision, open elections were held in August 1997, and Charles Taylor won an overwhelming victory. Evidence suggested that large numbers voted for him not in spite of his brutality but because of it: he was seen as the person willing to use all ‘necessary’ measures to ensure stability at long last for the beleaguered country (Garrett, 1999, p. 157). This ECOWAS intervention was justified explicitly on human-rights grounds: in a statement explaining the intervention, ECOWAS spokesmen emphasized that the move was designed ‘first and foremost to stop the senseless killing of innocent civilian nationals and foreigners, and to help the Liberian people to restore their democratic institutions. ECOWAS intervention is in no way designed to save one part or punish another’ (quoted in Greenwood, 1993, p. 37). Such a justification was echoed by the reaction of George Bush Sr’s administration which praised the willingness of ECOWAS to take the lead in dealing with the Liberian crisis and ‘stopping massive violations of human rights’ (quoted in Wippman, 1993, p. 159). The Independent reported in 1992 that the US ambassador to the United Nations, Edward Perkins, strongly supported ECOMOG as ‘virtually the only force in Liberia unblemished by serious human-rights abuses’ and not motivated by ‘personal aggrandizement’ (The Independent, 1992b, p. 17). Virtually all the other African states outside ECOWAS also lent their support. For example, President Museveni of Uganda and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe ‘explicitly approved of the intervention on human-rights grounds’ (Sandholtz, 2002, p. 214; see also Wippman, 1993, p. 181). In November 1992 the UN Security Council retroactively supported the intervention by ECOWAS in resolution 788; this imposed an arms embargo on Liberia and, under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, endorsed ECOMOG’s use of force: Noting that the deterioration of the situation hinders the creation of conditions conducive to the holding of free and fair elections . . . Recognizing the need for increased humanitarian assistance . . . Commends ECOWAS for its efforts to restore peace, security and stability in Liberia . . . [and] Decides, under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, that all States shall, for the purposes of establishing peace and stability in Liberia, immediately implement a general and complete embargo on all deliveries of weapons and military equipment to Liberia (S/RES/788 (1992)).


Having said all this, it must be recognized here that the human-rights rhetoric of the Nigerian-led ECOMOG force was quite suspect. As The Guardian observed: ‘Nigeria’s presentation of itself as the saviour of democracy’ is rather ironic for ‘it is subject to international sanctions for its own abuse of democracy and human rights’ (The Guardian, 1997, p. 17). And as one Western diplomat put it, nobody can be ‘fooled that Nigeria is acting purely on altruistic motives to help its troubled neighbours, especially in view of its track record’ (p. 17). Furthermore, evidence of the dubious business activities of ECOMOG was exposed in 1995, when the US State Department’s annual human-rights report accused the force of ‘systematic looting’, even of ‘entire buildings for scrap to be sold abroad’ (The Independent, 1996c, p. 13). However, to reiterate earlier arguments made in this book, humanitarian intervention by ECOWAS cannot be reduced to such interests; it involved mediation of an increasingly global norm of human rights, which in the post-Cold War world has gradually become a legitimate reason for the use of force. The ECOWAS action was, as such, an important landmark in the post-Cold War development of the practice of humanitarian intervention (Murphy, 1996; Sandholtz, 2002); not only was an appeal to protecting human rights used explicitly as a justification by ECOWAS for its intervention, but the intervention was also interpreted in this way by many other states, in particular the US and France (The Independent, 1996c, p. 13). Furthermore, the UN response to the Liberian crisis was very similar to its response to the Iraqi and Bosnian emergencies; this put Liberia in the same category as other post-Cold War actions that were seen as exemplifying the revival of the UN as an effective human-rights enforcement mechanism. For example, The Independent reported that Security Council resolution 788 ‘imposed an arms embargo [on Liberia] under the same UN provisions used to punish Yugoslavia and Iraq’ (1992b, p. 17). Moreover, the ECOWAS action in Liberia, along with its intervention in Sierra Leone in 1991 (see below), set an important precedent for UN-unauthorized humanitarian intervention being undertaken by regional bodies – a scenario which would be repeated in 1999 with the NATO intervention in Kosovo. The ECOWAS action in Liberia was therefore another important step in the development of moral leadership in the context of a developing global hegemony. ECOWAS intervention in Sierra Leone In March 1991, fighters of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched a war to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone’s army


first tried to defend the government, with the help of the ECOWAS Military Observer Group (ECOMOG), a military force dispatched by ECOWAS following the beginning of the civil war. However, the following year the army itself turned against the government and overthrew it. Despite the change of government, the RUF continued its attacks. The ECOWAS contingent attempted to negotiate a settlement to the conflict and return the country to civilian rule, and supervised parliamentary and presidential elections in February 1996. The army relinquished power to the winner of the Presidential elections, Ahmed Kabbah. However, the RUF did not recognize the results and the conflict continued, leading to more human-rights abuses and violence, and later to yet another military coup d’e´tat in May 1997. This time the army joined forces with the RUF and formed a ruling junta. President Kabbah and his government went into exile in neighbouring Guinea. Reacting to the overthrow of the democratically elected President Kabbah, ECOWAS sent more troops to Sierra Leone as ‘a purely humanitarian operation’ (The Guardian, 1998a, p. 1) to quash the coup and ‘to restore democracy and human rights’ (The Guardian, 1997, p. 17). In February 1998, ECOWAS troops launched a massive military attack on rebel/army junta forces; this led to the collapse of the junta and its expulsion from Freetown, the Sierra Leone capital. On 10 March 1998, President Kabbah was returned to office (The Independent, 1999c, p. 11; see also Sarooshi, 1999, pp. 267–8). As was the case with the ECOWAS intervention in Liberia, the ECOWAS action in Sierra Leone was approved retroactively by the UN Security Council. First, in its resolution 1132 in October 1997, the UN Security Council supported the efforts of ECOWAS and established an arms and oil embargo on Sierra Leone, authorizing ECOWAS to enforce it: Expressing its full support and appreciation for the mediation efforts of the ECOWAS Committee . . . Gravely concerned at the continued violence . . . and the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Sierra Leone . . . acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations . . . decides that all States shall prevent the sale or supply to Sierra Leone . . . of petroleum and petroleum products and arms and related mate´riel of all types . . . authorizes ECOWAS, cooperating with the democratically-elected Government of Sierra Leone, to ensure strict implementation of the provisions of this resolution relating to the supply of petroleum and petroleum products, and arms and related mate´riel of all types, including . . . by halting inward maritime


shipping in order to inspect and verify their cargoes and destinations (S/RES/1132 (1997)). Then, on 22 October 1999, the Security Council adopted resolution 1270 which authorized the establishment of UNAMSIL (United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone), a contingent which eventually included 17,500 military personnel from many countries, with a significant contribution made by ECOWAS – 6200 troops (Independent, 2000b, p. 17) – to ensure the security and protection of human rights. Resolution 1270 stated the following: Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, [the UNSC] decides that in the discharge of its mandate UNAMSIL may take the necessary action to ensure the security and freedom of movement of its personnel and, within its capabilities and areas of deployment, to afford protection to civilians under imminent threat of physical violence and . . . to promote peace and national reconciliation and . . . respect for human rights in Sierra Leone . . . and to support the operations of human rights officers and civil affairs officers (S/RES/1270(1999)). The UNAMSIL force later had its mandate extended until March 2003 by UN Security Council resolution 1436 (S/RES/1436 (2002)) and then until 31 March 2004 by resolution 1508. Resolution 1508 once again reconfirmed the mandate of UNAMSIL as a force established to ensure the rule of law and the protection of human rights in Sierra Leone: Reiterating the importance of the effective consolidation of stability and State authority throughout Sierra Leone . . . and full respect for human rights and the rule of law, paying special attention to the protection of women and children . . . the mandate of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) shall be extended for a period of six months from 30 September 2003 . . . and [the UN] welcomes the intention of the Government of Sierra Leone to establish a Human Rights Commission (S/RES/1508 (2003)). Once again, it may be argued that the credibility of the humanitarian and human-rights intentions of the Nigerian-led ECOWAS was doubtful given Nigeria’s record on human rights. However, this ECOWAS action, as well as its intervention in Liberia, made an important contribution to a further globalization of human rights and a further


development of the practice of human-rights enforcement. The actions set yet another significant precedent of a regional organization acting without a UN mandate for the declared aim of protecting human rights and democracy, a precedent which would be followed by NATO in Kosovo. This is not to say that NATO would have found it more difficult to act without these ECOWAS interventions; what is important is that NATO’s action in Kosovo was explicitly put in the same category as the ECOWAS interventions by different leaders. This added to its legitimacy. For example, in his address to the UN General Assembly, President Clinton stated: ‘NATO acted in Kosovo to stop a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing in a place where we had important interests at stake and the ability to act effectively. The same considerations brought Nigerian troops and their partners to Sierra Leone, and Australians and others to East Timor’ (quoted in The Guardian, 1999b, p. 15). Robin Cook, the former UK Foreign Secretary, later observed that the UK played a pivotal role in support of UN operations in Kosovo, East Timor and Sierra Leone (Cook and Campbell, 2000, p. 19). Paddy Ashdown, then the leader of the UK’s Liberal Democrat Party, argued in a speech to a Me´decins du Monde Conference in Paris that a new doctrine for a new world was developing in which human rights prevailed over the rule of state sovereignty and where the responsibility for human-rights enforcement ‘falls on regional security organizations – NATO in Kosovo, or ECOWAS in Sierra Leone – which, in turn, means one of the UN’s tasks ought to be to encourage the cohesion of regional structures’ (Ashdown, 1999, p. 4). NATO’s Operation Allied Force in Kosovo Kosovo, a region in southern Serbia mostly populated by ethnic Albanians, enjoyed a high degree of autonomy within the former Yugoslavia. In 1989, the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic altered the status of the region, removing its autonomy and bringing it under the direct control of Belgrade. During 1998, open conflict between Serbian military and police forces and Kosovo Albanian forces resulted in widespread violations of human rights. The Guardian, for example, reported that the Kosovo Albanians were ‘systematically purged from the administration, the police, and the education system’ and described the situation as ‘a naked violation of human rights’ (1991b, p. 1). The international community responded to these violations by the Serbian military with a series of diplomatic initiatives. The UN Security Council passed resolution 1199 which expressed deep concern about violations of human rights and excessive use of force by Serbian security


forces and the Yugoslav army, and called for a ceasefire by both parties to the conflict (S/RES/1199 (1998)). The European Union imposed an airtravel sanction against Yugoslavia to force Belgrade to abandon ‘its crackdown in the Serbian province of Kosovo’ (The Guardian, 1998b, p. 15) and ‘to punish Serbs for their gross violations of human rights’ (The Independent, 1998a, p. 5). A six-nation Contact Group (France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States) was established by the 1992 London Conference on the former Yugoslavia whose efforts culminated in initial negotiations at Rambouillet near Paris from 6 to 23 February 1999, followed by a second round in Paris from 15 to 18 March of that year. At the end of the second round of talks, the Kosovo Albanian delegation signed the proposed peace agreement, but the talks broke up without a signature from the Serbian delegation. Immediately afterwards, Serbian military and police forces stepped up the intensity of their operations against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, moving extra troops and tanks into the region in a clear breach of compliance with the agreement. Tens of thousands of people began to flee their homes in the face of this systematic offensive accompanied by such violations of human rights as torture, rape and summary executions (The Times, 1999c). On 23 March 1999 the order to carry out air strikes was given and the NATO Operation Allied Force began. In a statement issued at the Extraordinary Ministerial Meeting of the NATO Council it was stated that the crisis in Kosovo ‘represents a fundamental challenge to the values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, for which NATO has stood since its foundation’. The statement condemned ‘appalling violations of human rights and the indiscriminate use of force by the Yugoslav government’ and asserted that ‘these extreme and criminally irresponsible policies made necessary and justify the military action by NATO’ (NATO, 1999a). NATO described the following acts by the Yugoslav military as violations of human rights: ‘organised persecution involving mass executions; exploitation of civilians as human shields; rape; mass expulsions; burning and looting of homes and villages . . . and many other abuses of human rights’ (NATO, 1999a). Thus, it was abuses of political and civil rights that the NATO airstrikes were designed to protect; the aim of the air strikes as protection of these human rights was repeated by NATO officials on an almost daily basis during press briefings (NATO, 2001). On 24 March, NATO forces began air operations over the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On 3 June, President Milosevic finally


accepted peace terms presented by the EU envoy President Martti Ahtisaari and the Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin. With the authorization of the United Nations, NATO and Russian forces deployed into Kosovo to begin the task of restoring peace to the province. By 20 June, all Serb forces had left Kosovo and responsibility for security in the province had passed into the hands of KFOR, the international peacekeeping force (MoD, 2002). The Kosovo case has been crucial in terms of the further globalization of the notion of human rights and the further development of the practice of human-rights enforcement; it also laid the foundations for the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq being pursued without UN authorization. It was related to the contemporaneous development of the so-called ‘Clinton’ and ‘Blair’ doctrines; both have been described as messages ‘that violations of human rights will not go unopposed’ (George Robertson of NATO, quoted in The Independent, 2000c, p. 2). The formulation of the ‘Clinton doctrine’ has been traced by analysts to the US President’s speech to KFOR at Skopje Airport, Macedonia, on 22 June 1999 (Brown, 2000; Klare, 1999; Krauthammer, 1999). In this speech Clinton said: Never forget if we can do this here, and if we can then say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa, or Central Europe, or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it’s within our power to stop it, we will stop it (Clinton, 1999). When asked directly about the matter by Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Clinton later confirmed that, in his view, a new Clinton doctrine was emerging: I think there’s an important principle here that . . . if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing. People . . . ought not to be subject to slaughter because of their religious or ethnic or racial or tribal heritage. That is what we did, but took too long in doing, in Bosnia. That is what we did, and are doing, in Kosovo. That is, frankly, what we failed to do in Rwanda, where so many died so quickly – and what I hope very much we’ll be able to do in Africa, if it ever happens there again (quoted in Brown, 2000).


The development of the Clinton doctrine was confirmed by National Security Advisor Sandy Berger who, when asked if there was such a thing, replied: I instinctively resist doctrine, but I think it is a principle that we have established in Kosovo: there are some activities that governments engage in, such as genocide or ethnic cleansing, that we cannot ignore. That doesn’t necessarily mean we have a military response in every situation. We have to have the capacity to act, as the President has indicated . . . Where there is genocide or ethnic cleansing, where we have the capacity to act as we did here with NATO, where we have a national interest, I believe we should act (quoted in Brown, 2000). The Clinton doctrine has been described as ‘more ambitious than any of its predecessors, committing American power not only to defend vital national interests in a specific region but to protect human rights wherever and whenever they are violated’ (Daalder, 1999). Some analysts have argued that, during the Kosovo crisis, there also developed a ‘Blair doctrine’ (The Times, 1999g). This has been traced to the British Prime Minister’s speech in Chicago at the 50th anniversary of NATO in April 1999. The Guardian, for example, reported that ‘in Chicago six weeks ago, he enunciated a Blair doctrine proposing the Kosovo intervention as paving the way for others. He sketched out an idea of ‘‘international community’’, under which ‘‘we cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure’’ ’(1999c, p. 18). A more recent report in the same paper stated that the Blair doctrine is based on the assumption that the existing thresholds for intervention (an imminent threat to international peace or a grave humanitarian crisis) are too high to deal with many of the challenges we currently face. There are good reasons for agreeing with this view, but only if it is followed to its logical conclusion. A broader legal basis for intervention should herald the beginning of a more principled and consistent approach to dealing with human rights violations and breaches of international law (The Guardian, 2004a, p. 20). Or, in the words of another British daily, ‘the Prime Minister proposed something called ‘‘the Blair doctrine’’, under which democracies like


Britain might intervene militarily in other countries, confronting dictators and solving human rights crises’ (Daily Mail, 1999, p. 12). In addition to the Clinton and Blair doctrines, another important outcome of Kosovo intervention was the reformulation, at a meeting to celebrate NATO’s 50th anniversary, of the Alliance’s Strategic Concept; this would allow NATO to act beyond its borders to protect human rights. The heads of state of the NATO member countries initially stated that ‘the crisis in Kosovo represented a fundamental challenge to the values for which NATO has stood since its foundation: democracy, human rights and the rule of law’ (NATO, 1999b). It was then proclaimed that its new Strategic Concept would make the enforcement of human rights one of the NATO’s core goals. The Concept declared: The security of the Alliance remains subject to a wide variety of military and non-military risks which are multi-directional and often difficult to predict. These risks include uncertainty and instability in and around the Euro-Atlantic area and the possibility of regional crises at the periphery of the Alliance, which could evolve rapidly. Some countries in and around the Euro-Atlantic area face serious economic, social and political difficulties – ethnic and religious rivalries, territorial disputes, inadequate or failed efforts at reform, the abuse of human rights, and the dissolution of states can lead to local and even regional instability (NATO, 1999b). NATO’s commitment to human rights promotion and protection was restated on a number of subsequent occasions. For example, speaking in Ukraine in January 2000, Lord Robertson, the then Secretary-General of NATO, stated: If they [Yugoslavian government] had embraced democracy, ethnic tolerance and human rights, Yugoslavia would not have ended up where it is now: a fraction of its former size, a pariah state, poor, and basically at war with itself. And neither NATO nor Ukrainian soldiers would have to put their lives on the line, as they are doing today, in helping the people of Kosovo to regain a life in decency and security (Robertson, 2000). On another occasion Lord Robertson referred to NATO as ‘the World’s Guardian Angel – an Alliance of free nations united by the fundamental values of human rights, freedom before the law and democratic choice’ (Robertson, 2002).


The intervention in Kosovo was of paramount importance for its contribution to the development of moral leadership in the context of an emerging hegemony. The war was accompanied by numerous statements explicitly defining the operation in highly morally appealing terms. For example, Tony Blair described the NATO action as follows: ‘This is a moral conflict. Ours is a moral cause’ (quoted in the Daily Mail, 1999, p. 18). On another occasion he explicitly stated that protecting human rights was a moral issue: ‘there is a moral imperative for intervention where there is systematic abuse of human rights’ (quoted in The Times, 1999d). Robin Cook said that the intervention was justified because President Milosevic ‘had a worsening human rights record’, which meant that his country forfeited the right to sovereignty ‘on moral and political grounds’ (quoted in The Guardian, 1998b, p. 15). The same view was expressed by George Robertson in 1999 (when he was still a UK defence minister); he stated that ‘an evolving international human rights law has come to embody the moral imperative of combating crimes against humanity, irrespective of power games in the Security Council’ (The Independent, 1999d, p. 19). In France, the National Assembly backed NATO’s intervention, arguing ‘that Europe had a moral duty to stop Belgrade from violating the human rights of the ethnic Albanian majority’ (quoted in The Times, 1999e). The Independent called for humanitarian intervention in Kosovo and described it as ‘a moral imperative’ (The Independent, 1998b, p. 3). And the Mail on Sunday reported that a survey of British public opinion just a few days after the commencement of air strikes revealed that ‘almost nine out of ten people believe that Britain has a moral duty to intervene in Yugoslavia’ (Mail on Sunday, 1999, p. 1). The NATO intervention in Kosovo, building on the previous cases of humanitarian intervention examined above, made human-rights enforcement part of a new global order. As the then Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown argued, ‘a new doctrine for a new world is developing where human rights prevail over the rule of state sovereignty’ (Ashdown, 1999, p. 4). Or, Mary Kaldor put it at the time, Kantian morality is now becoming global: Immanuel Kant pointed out in 1795 that the global community had shrunk to the point at which ‘a right violated anywhere is felt everywhere’. . . The world is much closer to the Kantian vision now . . . The new wars, such as those in Bosnia, Kosovo or Rwanda . . . violate the laws of war as well as the growing body of law on human rights. The international community has a responsibility to intervene to


prevent this kind of violence. Sovereignty is less absolute than in earlier times. Just as we now consider it right to intervene in families to prevent domestic violence, so it has to become normal to override state sovereignty in cases of large-scale violations of human rights (Kaldor, 1999, p. 33). From the discussion of Kant in Chapter 3 it was seen that this kind of morality is compatible with the functioning of capitalism. This compatibility will be made clear again below in the discussion of the post-intervention situations in Bosnia and Haiti. But before that it is necessary to examine the anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan and the war on Iraq. The War on Terror: Military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq The legal, political, normative and technical precedents set by the cases of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s prepared the ground for the War on Terror of the early 2000s, particularly in terms of reinforcing the moral and political legitimacy of using force to protect human rights without UN authorization. It has been noted that some critics of these military campaigns, as was seen in Chapter 1, pointed out that human rights were invoked by the coalition leaders only after no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and when it was necessary to justify and legitimize the war on different grounds. However, it will be argued here that the rhetoric of human rights was used in presenting the case for military intervention in both Afghanistan and Iraq from an early stage. In response to the 11 September 2001 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, on 8 October 2001 US-led coalition forces launched a military operation against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Although most of the justifications for this military action were based upon attacking a regime said to have provided significant support to al-Qaeda, human rights abuses in Afghanistan were also invoked right from the start. For example, before the intervention in Afghanistan, George W. Bush stated that the attacks of 11 September were attacks on human rights: The terrible tragedies of September 11 served as a grievous reminder that the enemies of freedom do not respect or value individual human rights. Their brutal attacks were an attack on these very rights . . . The heinous acts of terrorism committed on September 11 were an attack against civilization itself, and they have caused the world to


join together in a coalition that is now waging war on terrorism and defending international human rights . . . Respect for human dignity and individual freedoms reaffirms a core tenet of civilized people everywhere (Bush, 2001a, emphasis added). This statement reveals how strongly human rights (that is, the negative rights of individuals) are embedded in the dominant view of what constitutes justice in the late-modern world. The US military action following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center did not necessarily require human rights rhetoric as justification; it was not human rights that the terrorists attacked but US citizens and the military response could have been justified on the grounds of self-defence alone. Nevertheless, we can see above how George W. Bush insisted that it was ‘international human rights’ that the US and its allies were defending, rights that he equates with ‘civilization itself’. A similar argument was made by the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who asserted that the terrorist attacks of 11 September were not just attacks against the US but against Western civilization, similarly equating ‘civilized’ behaviour with human rights, explicity meaning civil and political rights of individuals: ‘the attacks on New York and Washington are attacks on our civilisation, of which we are proud bearers, conscious of the supremacy of our civilisation, of its discoveries and inventions, which have brought us democratic institutions, respect for the human, civil, religious and political rights of our citizens, openness to diversity and tolerance of everything’ (quoted in The Guardian 2001b, p. 3). In preparing the case for war in Afghanistan, Bush stated: In Afghanistan, we see al-Qaeda’s vision for the world. Afghanistan’s people have been brutalized . . . Women are not allowed to attend school. You can be jailed for owning a television. Religion can be practiced only as their leaders dictate. A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough . . . The Taliban regime is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists (Bush, 2001b). When the order to invade Afghanistan was given, the US President declared that the war was waged not only to ‘destroy terrorist camps’ but also to help ‘the oppressed people of Afghanistan’, the ‘starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan’ (Bush, 2001c).


The War on Terror was started by the US because it was ‘a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom’ (Bush, 2001b). A strong case for war in Afghanistan for abuses of various political and civil rights by the Taliban regime was also made by Tony Blair in a speech at the 2001 Labour Party conference: Look for a moment at the Taliban regime. It is undemocratic . . . There is no sport allowed, or television or photography. No art or culture is permitted. All other faiths, all other interpretations of Islam are ruthlessly suppressed. Those who practice their faith are imprisoned. Women are treated in a way almost too revolting to be credible. First driven out of university; girls not allowed to go to school; no legal rights; unable to go out of doors without a man. Those that disobey are stoned (Blair, 2001). He then went on to argue that there was no alternative to a military solution for bringing freedom and justice to those whose political and civil rights are violated: There is no diplomacy with bin Laden or the Taliban regime . . . The action we take will be proportionate; targeted; we will do all we humanly can to avoid civilian casualties . . . When we act to bring to account those that committed the atrocity of September 11, we do so . . . because it is just . . . This is a fight for freedom. And I want to make it a fight for justice, too. Justice not only to punish the guilty. But justice to bring those same values of democracy and freedom to people round the world (Blair, 2001). George W. Bush and Tony Blair were also joined by their spouses in an effort to justify the war against the Taliban. America’s First Lady, Laura Bush, condemned ‘the Taliban’s brutal regime’ and asked Americans ‘to commit themselves to securing dignity and opportunity for the women and children of Afghanistan’ (quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 2001b, p. 24). ‘Only the terrorists and the Taliban,’ she stated ‘threaten to pull out women’s fingernails for wearing nail polish’ (p. 24). Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, followed Laura Bush as she hosted a gathering of Afghan women refugees at Downing Street in an attempt ‘to lift the veil and show what has been happening to women in Afghanistan under the Taliban’ (p. 24). After the Taliban had been deposed, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) issued a report in which it praised the war for its human rights success; the defeat of the Taliban, it said, brought about a


‘remarkable advance for the cause of human rights. Core rights, including freedom of expression and women’s rights, are now better respected than for a generation’ (quoted in The Independent, 2002a, p. 15; see also The Independent, 2002b, p. 6). President Bush made a similar point: ‘we have freed the people of Afghanistan from one of the most repressive regimes in the history of mankind. Not only are we steadfast in our desire to defend that which we believe, we also are willing to commit resources to free a nation’ (Bush, 2002c). On another occasion, Bush stated that in Afghanistan ‘women were given no rights. Young girls did not go to school. It was a barbaric regime . . . People are [now] free in that country’ (Bush, 2004a). Respect for human rights was stipulated in December 2001 in a postwar Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions, known as the Bonn Agreement, signed by a number of prominent Afghans under UN auspices in Bonn, Germany. The agreement states that the parties are determined to promote ‘respect for human rights in the country’, and to this end ‘the Interim Administration shall, with the assistance of the United Nations, establish an independent Human Rights Commission, whose responsibilities will include human rights monitoring, investigation of violations of human rights, and development of domestic human rights institutions’. The Afghan Constitution, adopted in 2004, guaranteed a range of human rights, such as those to life and liberty, to privacy, of peaceful assembly, of freedom from torture and of free expression and speech. As George Bush said: ‘The people of Afghanistan are a world away from the nightmare of the Taliban. Citizens of Afghanistan have adopted a new constitution guaranteeing free elections and full participation by women’ (Bush, 2004b) and ‘a new constitution that protects the right of all Afghan citizens, including women . . . establishes a foundation of modern political rights, including free speech, due process, and a vote for every citizen (Bush, 2004c). In the case of Iraq, the key justification for war was the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein’s regime. However, as in Afghanistan, human-rights rhetoric accompanied these justifications right from the start. For example, speaking at the UN General Assembly before the war on Iraq, President Bush explicitly mentioned human-rights abuses in his critique of the Iraqi regime: Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and the regime’s repression is all-pervasive. Tens of thousands of


political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents – and all of these horrors are concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state (Bush, 2002a). The US Department of State stated that ‘Saddam Hussein is one of the worst tyrants of the past 50 years’ and that ‘Saddam Hussein’s regime is comparable to the World War II-era Soviet Union under Stalin and Nazi Germany under Hitler’ (US Department of State, 2003). Reference to human-rights abuses by Saddam’s regime was also made in a report prepared by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 2002, when preparation for war against Iraq was under way. The report begins: Iraq is a terrifying place to live. People are in constant fear of being denounced as opponents of the regime. They are encouraged to report on the activities of family and neighbours. The security services can strike at any time. Arbitrary arrests and killings are commonplace . . . These grave violations of human rights are not the work of a number of overzealous individuals but the deliberate policy of the regime (Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK), 2002, p. 4). According to the British MP Tony Benn, this FCO ‘dossier of human rights abuses by Saddam’ was prepared to ‘to whip up the hatred to fever pitch’ and was an important element in justifying war against Iraq (Morning Star, 2002b, p. 7). Tony Blair, speaking on 10 September 2002, similarly referred to the denial of individual freedoms in Iraq: ‘Our quarrel is with Saddam, not the Iraqi people. . . . We want the people to be free to live fulfilling lives without the oppression and terror of Saddam’ (quoted in Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK), 2002, p. 3). The same argument was made by the UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who stated that the abuses of the Iraqi regime ‘extend far beyond its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in violation of its international obligations; [they include] torture, rape and other horrific human rights abuses’ (quoted in the Daily Mail, 2002, p. 2). And in debates in the House of Commons preceding the war, Ann Clwyd MP, who had been appointed Tony Blair’s human-rights envoy to Iraq, ‘implored fellow MPs to back the war against Saddam on humanitarian grounds’ (Observer, 2003b, p. 11).


Once the war was under way, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair made the following remarks in a joint statement: The future of Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people. After years of dictatorship, Iraq will soon be liberated. For the first time in decades, Iraqis will soon choose their own representative government. Coalition military operations are progressing and will succeed. We will eliminate the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, deliver humanitarian aid, and secure the freedom of the Iraqi people. We will create an environment where Iraqis can determine their own fate democratically and peacefully (Bush and Blair, 2003) After Saddam was captured Bush stated that Saddam would be charged with human-rights abuses (The Independent, 2003, p. 1) and labelled him a ‘disgusting tyrant’ who should face the ‘ultimate penalty’: ‘He is a torturer, a murderer, and they had rape rooms, and this is a disgusting tyrant who deserves justice – the ultimate justice’ (quoted in the Daily Express, 2003, p. 27). In a 2004 speech Bush stated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not to fight terrorism, but liberate the oppressed: ‘America went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan not to fight al-Qaeda or to hunt out and destroy a dictator’s weapons of mass destruction, but to improve their sorry lot in life’ (quoted in The Guardian, 2004b, p. 22). He continued: Just think about it. More than 50 million men, women and children have been liberated from two of the most brutal tyrannies on earth – 50 million people are free. And for 25 million women and girls, liberation has a special significance. . . . [The Taliban regime in Afghanistan] was incredibly barbaric and Afghan women are far better off with its departure. . . . [In Iraq too] every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed. He is a barbaric person (p. 22). It was observed in The Guardian that ‘after September 11 2001, images of burka-clad women in Afghanistan flooded the media, providing a backdrop to Bush’s drive to war. To judge by his rhetoric, the US bombing of Afghanistan was motivated not by revenge for the strikes on the US, but by a wish to liberate women and girls from the sexist Taliban. ‘‘The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women,’’ declared the first lady, Laura Bush, in a special radio broadcast. Then, as he laid out his case for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq,


the president made a point of mentioning Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party’s grim record of abuse and rape of women’ (The Guardian, 2004c, p. 6). We can therefore see an unquestionable continuity between the War on Terror and the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. This continuity resides in the idea of the promotion and protection of human rights, of the liberation of people from political oppression and tyranny, and the bringing to justice of those who had perpetrated atrocities and violated individual rights. In the statements made by the coalition leaders about Afghanistan and Iraq – as was the case with the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s – we can see a sense of a mission, a mission to save people from abuses and crimes. In all the postCold War cases of human-rights enforcement there has been an immense degree of ‘moral import’; in all these cases the values promoted and projected have been congruent with the operation of global capitalism in its neoliberal variety. In other words, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, like the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, constitute a continuous development of a Gramscian system of moral leadership in the context of an emerging global hegemony, and have contributed to a further globalization of human rights, that is, their de-historicization and de-territorialization. In the historical analysis in Chapter 2 it was shown how the doctrine of humanitarian intervention defined in terms of individual rights constituted part of the ideology of capitalism and how it contributed to the objectification and naturalization of capitalism’s foundations. The way the post-Cold War human-rights enforcement contributes to the de-territorialization and de-historicization of the economic foundations of an emerging hegemony can be illustrated today with reference to post-intervention policies in Bosnia and Haiti. These demonstrate that today, liberation from oppression also means the adoption of neoliberal economic policies. The following analysis will further reinforce the argument made earlier that human-rights enforcement is compatible with the economic foundations of a developing global hegemony and that it can be seen as an important element in a developing system of moral leadership. Haiti and Bosnia: post-intervention economic reforms In the late-modern GPE human-rights enforcement operations contribute not only to a further globalization of human rights, but also to a reproduction of the economic foundations of an emerging hegemonic structure. Today liberation from oppression may be directly associated


with free trade, privatization and deregulation, and the cases of Haiti and Bosnia demonstrate how the post-Cold War phenomenon of human-rights enforcement may be seen as constituting Gramsci’s moral leadership, thereby contributing to a development of a global hegemony. With the return to power of President Aristide in 1994 after the intervention in Haiti, the IMF, World Bank and the United States government drafted a plan for the country’s economic development. This plan pledged millions of dollars in aid and loans even before Aristide actually assumed power. However, an examination of the economic programme prepared for Haiti reveals that these funds were tied to an extreme version of neoliberal economic reforms; Haiti would not receive the promised aid and loans unless it agreed to privatize Haiti’s rice market and sugar refineries to service its external debt (accumulated by previous military regimes) which effectively meant paying a lion’s share of the promised funds immediately back to the IMF and the World Bank. The Guardian reported in September 1994 that the Clinton administration pledged $25 million to help Haiti catch up on repayment of its existing debts, and was seeking similar contributions from its allies. American Treasury officials foresaw little difficulty in raising their target of $81.7 million; the total would be enough to service, until the end of 1994, the $554 million Haiti had borrowed from the World Bank, the IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank (The Guardian, 1994d, p. 9). The Aristide government had virtually no choice but to accept all the conditions in order to receive the needed aid package from the US as well as a $31 million stand-by loan from the IMF; it agreed to the repayment of the Haitian debt and the implementation of the IMF economic reforms. The nature of these reforms was revealed in the IMF press release confirming the approval of the $31 million stand-by loan. The IMF, in a now common association of dictatorship with economic inefficiency, blamed the military junta for the economic problems of Haiti and argued that the return of democracy provided an opportunity for economic recovery (IMF, 1995a). To this end, Haiti would have to implement the following ‘standardized’ measures: ‘to reduce the role of the public sector, liberalize the trade regime, and eliminate regulations and restrictions that impede private investment’ (IMF, 1995a). Haiti also accepted a simplified tariff regime, a new petroleum pricing policy with automatic adjustments for changes in import costs, the first phase of a public enterprise divestment plan incorporating the sale or lease of a cement plant and a flour mill,


and the reform of the state electricity company. In addition, with technical assistance from the IMF and the World Bank, the authorities agreed to work on a programme of ‘public-sector restructuring, a redefinition of the role of the state, a monetary policy and bank supervision, a foreign investment policy, and business deregulation’ (IMF, 1995a). As the Washington Post reported, ‘since the reestablishment of democracy following a US military intervention, Haiti has been receiving around $125 million a year in international assistance, much of it contingent on an IMF seal of approval (2000, p. 1). Thus, in October 1996, the IMF expressed satisfaction with the way Haiti had implemented the recommended structural adjustment and approved a three-year credit for Haiti under the enhanced structural adjustment facility (ESAF), equivalent to about $131 million; this was intended to support the government’s economic reform programme for 1996–99 (IMF, 1996). This credit was dependent on the Haitian government accepting further reform of the public sector and of agriculture. The reform would focus on public administration – including the introduction of a modern system of budgeting, expenditure control, accounting, and auditing; the decentralization of government functions and reinforcement of local administrations; and reforms aimed at strengthening the calibre of the civil service. The major public enterprises and the state-owned banks would be restructured, while a national institute for agricultural reform, created in 1995, would formulate and help implement a comprehensive land reform over the next several years (IMF, 1996). In September 1998 the IMF admitted that, following trade liberalization, ‘Haiti’s external current account deficit widened with the recovery of imports’ (IMF, 1998a); the reforms were nevertheless encouraged to continue, supported by the following typically neoliberal policies: resisting pressures for substantial wage increases, eliminating fraudulent wage payments, tightening the procedures for the hiring of government employees, and cutting capital outlays with low returns, while still maintaining adequate budgetary allocations for social spending; prompt action to tighten credit conditions through open market operations and to restrain credit expansion by the stateowned banks; downsizing the civil service; rapid restructuring and privatization of the main public enterprises; rapid restructuring of state-owned banks; the phasing-in of financial sector regulations consistent with international standards, and the strengthening of supervision over financial intermediaries (IMF, 1996).


As was argued earlier, while bodies such as the IMF may try to influence states to adopt certain policies using direct overt or covert coercion, sometimes these states themselves ‘freely’ adopt such policies. Haiti provides a good example of this in the way its government responded to Hurricane George, which hit the country in September 1998. In a letter to Michel Camdessus, the then Director of the IMF, the government of Haiti asked the IMF for help in dealing with this natural disaster; it backed up its request by stating that it had adopted an economic policy for the fiscal year 1998/99 comprising the following measures: the wage bill will be kept under control by tightening hiring procedures and the government will abstain from granting across the board wage increases to civil servants; the government will conclude the downsizing of the civil service by mid-December 1998; the government will not impose restrictions on payments and transfers for international transactions, introduce new or intensify trade restrictions for balance of payments purposes, resort to multiple currency practices, or enter into bilateral payments agreements incorporating restrictive practices with other IMF members (IMF, 1998b). These policies were therefore ‘freely’ chosen as developmental policies by the government of Haiti. In November 1998 the IMF approved Haiti’s request for emergency financial assistance related to natural disasters and provided about $21 million, expressing its satisfaction with the government plan: ‘The implementation of Haiti’s economic program for 1997/98, which was monitored by IMF staff, was satisfactory despite difficult circumstances. A prudent fiscal policy was put in place, credit policy was tightened, and structural reforms covering the civil service and the financial system were undertaken’ (IMF, 1998c). The results of these structural adjustment programmes in Haiti were, however, close to disastrous. By 1996 the IMF economic programme was already being referred to by the people of Haiti as a ‘Death Plan’, because it effectively destroyed Haiti’s peasant economy, in particular its rice production (The Guardian, 1996b, p. 4). In 1996 the adverse impact of the free-market reforms was actually acknowledged by the World Bank: ‘the two-thirds of the country’s workers based on the land are unlikely to survive the free-market measures imposed by the bank’ (quoted in The Guardian 1996c, p. 15). Nevertheless, the reforms went ahead and, as a result of the adopted measures, Haiti ‘has been paying $60m a year in


debt servicing’ (Observer, 2001, p. 6). In addition, ‘the country was flooded with cheap US imports. Local production collapsed, along with tens of thousands of rural livelihoods. Self-sufficient a decade ago, Haiti today spends half of its export earnings importing US rice’ (The Guardian, 2002, p. 9: see also McGowan, 1997, pp. 24–5). As the Washington Post reported, over the past two decades, a period of growing IMF tutelage over the Haitian economy, exports of American rice to Haiti have grown from virtually zero to more than 200,000 tons a year, making the povertystricken country of 7 million people the fourth-largest market for American rice in the world after Japan, Mexico and Canada. According to US and Haitian economists, the result has been a massive shift in local consumption habits, with many Haitians now choosing cheap imported rice at the expense of domestically grown staples, including rice, corn and millet (2000, p. 1). According to the website of Global Exchange, a Third World advocacy group, ‘the IMF forced Haiti to open its market to imported, highly subsidized US rice and at the same time it prohibited Haiti from subsidizing its own farmers. Haitian farmers have been forced off their land to seek work in sweatshops, and people are poorer than ever’ (quoted in the Washington Post, 2000, p.1). Furthermore, ‘roughly 50 per cent of Haitian children younger than five suffer from malnutrition. Billions of dollars in international assistance have done little to improve conditions in the countryside, where two out of three Haitians live. Per capita income has dropped from around $600 in 1980 to $369 today’ (p. 1). However, to reiterate and reinforce an important argument of this book, although in this case the US benefited directly through gaining access to the Haitian rice market, the Haitian reforms cannot be reduced solely to US power or solely to the IMF. Rather, the US mediated the power of hegemonic economic policies which have become global standards of state development; these include privatization of public services, budget austerity, trade liberalization, deregulation of industry, and labour market ‘flexibility’. These measures are general conditions of aid and loans, and are imposed by the IMF and World Bank on all countries seeking assistance. Of course, this ultimately benefits ‘rich elites and companies in the export sector, while increasing poverty and accelerating environmental degradation’ (TWT, 2003). A roughly similar scenario unfolded in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Since the intervention, it has been what may be described as an international


protectorate, operated through the executive management of external actors: the Office of the High Representative (OHR) of the Peace Implementation Council (PIC); the United Nations; the missions of both the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union (EU); the International Management Group (an EU-funded body that undertakes reconstruction evaluations); aid agencies; and international financial institutions (IFIs) (Paris, 1997, p. 55). According to Pugh, these bodies ‘provide executive governance that reflects the values and norms that dominate the global economy’ such as ‘wide-ranging laws and amendments concerning privatization, wages, and financial operations designed to maintain market reforms that would meet the demands of the IFIs for the privatization of public enterprises and socially owned assets’ (Pugh, 2002, pp. 467–8). An examination of policies implemented by the external governing bodies in Bosnia reveals an emphasis on such policies as privatization, deregulation, liberalization of trade and shrinking of the public sector. Thus, in December 1995 at the Peace Implementation Conference in London it was decided that Bosnian economic reconstruction would require ‘policies which foster the creation of a market economy and an open trading system’ (OHR, 1995). In June 1996 a $5.1 billion priority reconstruction programme was prepared by the European Commission, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank and endorsed by Bosnia and Herzegovina; pledges of financial support totalling $1.8 billion were obtained through two donors’ conferences held in Brussels designed to meet the reconstruction needs of the country in the first year (OHR, 1996a). In December 1995 Bosnia and Herzegovina also became a member of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the EBRD and received a drawing equivalent to about $45 million from the IMF (IMF, 1995b). The accession to these institutions required, as was the case in Haiti, servicing of Bosnia’s external debts to multilateral institutions. The IMF press release confirming the accession of Bosnia and Herzegovina stated that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s membership in the IMF was made possible partly by the clearance of its outstanding arrears, arising from its share of the liabilities and assets of the former Yugoslavia in the IMF totalling about $37 million (IMF, 1995b). In December 1996, at another Peace Implementation Conference in London, it was proclaimed that the ‘successful economic development of Bosnia and Herzegovina will depend on the adoption of market-based economic policies and the establishment of effective institutions’ such as ‘significant privatization of publicly-owned companies’, establishment of ‘a sustainable fiscal


framework which addresses revenue and expenditure responsibilities for all levels of government, including external debt obligations’ and ‘a foreign trade policy with the aim of promoting an open trading policy and encouraging inward investment’ (OHR, 1996b). The adoption of these policies was reconfirmed at a Ministerial Meeting of the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council at Sintra in Portugal in May, 1997; this stressed that the Bosnian economy would be ‘an open and dynamic free market economy, open for trade and contact, across all its borders and in all directions’ (OHR, 1997). In May 1998 the IMF approved a 12-month standby credit for Bosnia and Herzegovina for an amount equivalent to about $81 million, in support of the government’s 1998–99 economic programme. The approved credit was accompanied by policy prescriptions which emphasized the acceleration of the transition to a market economy through structural reforms: reinforcement of fiscal discipline; banking reform; the initiation of enterprise privatization; pension and health system reform; implementation of a simplified customs tariff system; and exchange and trade liberalization (IMF, 1998d). All of these measures were embodied in a Declaration of the Peace Implementation Council in December 1998, which stated that Bosnia and Herzegovina ‘must abandon the statist economic attitudes of the past, pressing ahead with privatization and creating an environment which encourages enterprise’ by implementing such measures as ‘the establishment of a market economy; privatization, in a transparent and apolitical manner, of state-owned industries, banks, as well as small businesses and public utilities; and the establishment of properly functioning capital markets and banking institutions’ (OHR, 1998b). These measures, as Cox has noted, were not always welcomed by the Bosnian authorities because it was feared that they would produce adverse outcomes. However, essential state laws to implement the above policies were nevertheless ‘passed following threats of suspension of economic aid by the PIC’ (Cox, 1998). In 1999, the IMF, satisfied with the progress made by Bosnia and Herzegovina, approved another credit of about $23 million which was accompanied by further policy prescriptions. Commenting on the Executive Board discussion on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Stanley Fischer, the First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, acknowledged that Bosnia and Herzegovina had ‘made important progress toward a sustainable market economy’ but urged the authorities to do more, particularly in terms of the elimination of ‘discretionary tax and customs tariff exemptions, including for foreign investors’, and ‘transparency in the


payment of social benefits’ (IMF, 1999). In the year 2000 the World Bank assessed of the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and encouraged the countries to accelerate the reforms aimed at building a market-oriented economy, in particular in relation to privatization: ‘The key reform measures needed are a transparent and predictable enabling environment, accelerated privatization, continued banking sector reform and labour market reforms to help create productive employment opportunities’ (World Bank, 2000, p. iv). At present, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains dependent on IMF credits and continues to follow the Fund’s policy prescriptions. In February 2004, the IMF approved the disbursement of a $18 million loan. Following the Executive Board discussion, Anne Krueger, the First Deputy Managing Director and Acting Chair, said that although the authorities had already taken steps to invigorate corporate restructuring and the privatization of state enterprises, they still needed to resolve state-enterprise debt issues and to induce more efficient labour markets (IMF, 2004). The Haitian and the Bosnian cases recall an observation with which this study began; namely that, on the one hand the late-modern GPE is characterized by a development of a global moral discourse, at the heart of which lies the idea of individual human rights, while on the other hand global capitalism in its neoliberal form continues to adversely affect the lives of millions of people. In this chapter it has been seen how the practice of human-rights enforcement can be said to provide an emerging global hegemony with a quality of moral leadership. It satisfies the two criteria of moral leadership that we can infer from Gramsci’s writings; it contains universalizable values with a strong moral import, and it is compatible with the economic foundations of a developing global hegemony. The cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Haiti illustrated clearly the compatibility of human-rights enforcement with neoliberalism; they also demonstrated how the practice of human-rights enforcement contributes to a further objectification and naturalization of neoliberal economic policies. Freedom, human rights and democracy in the current context mean not only political and civil liberties, but also economic liberalization, free markets and free trade. Human-rights enforcement therefore fulfils the key role that a Gramscian moral leadership must accomplish: the development of consent with respect to the production relations which constitute the basis of any hegemony. The intellectual side of moral and intellectual leadership in the context of a developing global hegemony remains to be explored.


2

Intellectual leadership and human-rights enforcement

Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, understood as a rule based on consent and mediated by moral and intellectual leadership, gives us tools to understand better the way power structures produce agents, that is, the way they result in the objectification or taking for granted of certain relations or institutions by agents and the way they set the limits of the possible for the agents. As already noted above, hegemony is a structure in which a range of existing social relations ‘surpass common sense’, and in which subordinate groups, in their perception of the existing order, reach a state of ‘political passivity’. It has been seen in the previous section how moral leadership contributes to a development of such a consent; that is, how the economic foundations of a hegemonic order can be objectified and naturalized by a system of moral values and ideals. Gramsci, however, insists that hegemony requires not only moral, but also intellectual leadership; in his writings the category of ‘intellectuals’ plays a significant role in terms of explaining precisely how hegemonic formations ensure that certain social relations and institutions become taken for granted to such an extent that they surpass common sense, and how subordinate classes become passive with respect to these social relations and institutions. For Gramsci, the category of ‘intellectuals’ refers to all those who command some form of respect or authority in civil society and who are in a position to address some form of audience – and who can be ‘organizers of masses’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 6). In his analysis of capitalist society Gramsci identifies priests, lawyers, notaries, teachers, doctors, industrial technicians, trade union leaders and academics (pp. 5, 14) as society’s ‘intellectuals’. Gramsci also draws a distinction between ‘organic’ and ‘traditional’ intellectuals (pp. 6, 10). ‘Organic’ intellectuals are all those intellectuals whom the class that becomes dominant in relations of production creates alongside itself as organizers of new culture, the legal system, the political system, and the like (pp. 5–6) to perform the role of ‘subaltern officers in the army’ (p. 14) and ‘leading of a mass of men to think coherently and in a unitary way about present-day reality’ (Gramsci, 1957, p. 60) and ‘to accept it without criticism’ (p. 66). In an often quoted passage Gramsci asserts that every social group, coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not


only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc (p. 6). ‘Traditional’ intellectuals are those intellectuals that are already present and whom ‘every ‘‘essential’’ social group which emerges into history out of the preceding economic structure, and as an expression of a development of this structure, has found . . . already in existence’ (pp. 6–7). In this view, the task of the emerging dominant class becomes not only ‘to elaborate its own ‘‘organic’’ intellectuals’ but also to ‘assimilate any stratum of ‘‘traditional’’ intellectuals’ (p. 6). The same category of intellectuals may be organic in one social formation and traditional in another (just as the same ideas may be ideological in one social setting and progressive in the other, as has been argued above in reference to the negative concept of ideology). For example, whereas in feudalism the ecclesiastics, who ‘held a monopoly of a number of important services: religious ideology, that is the philosophy and science of the age, together with schools, education, morality, justice, charity, good works, etc, . . . [were] organically bound to the landed aristocracy’ (p. 7), in capitalism the bourgeoisie had to ‘assimilate’ them as much as possible in such a way that their traditional authority not only does not undermine its rule, but serves it (pp. 7–8). Overall, the point to note here is that for Gramsci ‘all men are intellectuals . . . but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals. Thus, because it can happen that everyone at some time fries a couple of eggs or sews up a tear in a jacket, we do not necessarily say that everyone is a cook or a tailor’ (p. 9). In other words, we all engage in some form of a ‘deliberative activity’, but not all of us engage in developing ideas explicitly aimed at either preserving or changing social orders. With respect to a developing global hegemony, it was seen in the previous chapter that neo-Gramscian scholars identify the following professions as ‘organic’ intellectuals: economists, managers, financial analysts and business consultants, stockbrokers, accountants and insurance agents. What needs to be added to these is a category of academics whose role is of paramount importance because it is through educational institutions that organic intellectuals ‘of various levels are elaborated’ (Gramsci, 1971, p. 10). In other words, ‘scholars, scientists and theorists’ are not only one of many ‘organic’ intellectuals, but they are also their educators (pp. 7, 10–11, 12). They provide a hegemonic


social force and its organic intellectuals ‘with a coherent and systematic philosophy’ (Gramsci, 1957, p. 90). Gramsci’s focus on academics is underpinned by his rejection of the categorical separation of theory and practice, by his realization that theory can either help sustain the existing order, or can assist in transforming it. Here we return to the critique of academic literature presented in Chapter 1, particularly to the problems posed by a positivist approach to the study of social relations as existing ‘out there’, independent of the observer. In his analysis of the role of academics Gramsci explicitly speaks about ‘unity of theory and practice’ which, for him, manifests itself in the role that social scientists perform in society as ‘specialists in conceptual and philosophical ideas’: the unity of theory and practice is an aspect of the political question of the intellectuals; . . . there is no organisation without intellectuals, that is, without organisers and leaders, in other words, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus being distinguished concretely by the existence of a group of people ‘specialised’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas (Gramsci, 1971, p. 334). As a philosopher of praxis whose explicit aim is to study society in order to transform it, Gramsci argues that in a development of an alternative social order, particularly in the period of transition immediately following an overthrow of the old order, the role of academics in creating new ‘organic’ intellectuals cannot be overestimated: . . . the problem of the identity of theory and practice is raised especially in the so-called transitional moments of history, that is, those moments in which the movement of transformation is at its most rapid. For it is then that the practical forces unleashed really demand justification in order to become more efficient and expansive; and that theoretical programmes multiply in number, and demand in their turn to be realistically justified, to the extent that they prove themselves assimilable into practical movements, thereby making the latter yet more practical and real (Gramsci, 1971, p. 365). In this respect, what will be addressed here is the role of social scientists, academics and philosophers in the context of the developing global hegemony. It will be argued that social science plays a crucial role in the


process of objectification and naturalization of the underlying foundations of an emerging global hegemony. However, it must be emphasized that such a role performed by academics cannot be seen in strictly Gramscian terms, as an outcome of a deliberate political project of a particular class whose aim is to establish its hegemony. It must instead be seen as an unintended consequence of the way social scientific knowledge is structured, particularly the dominance of positivist epistemology that underpins the majority of social scientific studies. In very broad terms it results from treating existing society as a naturelike phenomenon and not as a product of historical human activity and interaction. The supremacy of positivism has two major consequences. On the one hand, approaches and theories that do not conform to the positivist requirements of scientific research – to study social reality in a value-free manner as it is, and not as it ought to be – are marginalized as normative and therefore unscientific. As Maclean has argued in this respect: ‘this distinction between is and ought is at the centre of both academic and social practice, disciplining emancipatory academic projects and social practices alike’ (Maclean, 1999b, p. 190). In other words, theories and approaches which reject the positivist belief in the possibility of value-free social scientific knowledge as ideological and which explicitly define their objectives in terms of studying society in order to change it, have been underprivileged and discarded as examples of ‘bad’ science. The positivist treatment of social reality as it is, as was argued in Chapter 1, also objectifies it; this inevitably contributes to the reproduction of a status quo – of what is – and thereby serves the interests of those whose position is dominant in practice. Empiricism is an approach that, as Bauman (1976: p. 16) argues, would ‘harmonize’ with any social structure simply because it accepts social reality as given, as the starting point, and claims to treat it in an objective (meaning value-free) manner. Lukacs has argued that positivist social science was encouraged by what he calls ‘reification’ in capitalism. His starting points are the apparent autonomy of the economic system, ‘commodity fetishism’ and, modelled on this, the reified culture of capitalism in general. The autonomy of the system is that aspect of reification by which the system constitutes a logically coherent, law-governed world of social objects: ‘The structure of commodity relations [can] be made to yield a model of all forms of objectivity of bourgeois society together with all the forms of subjectivity corresponding to them’ (Lukacs, 1971, p. 83). On this basis, Lukacs then explains formalistic rationality in philosophy, science, law, politics and other social sciences (Feenberg, 1981, p. 84). In capitalism,


the productive system faces the individual as a completed and independent object world, which imposes its own rhythm and order on his labouring activity. Thus the activity of the individual subject in capitalist society is not the transformation of reality but conformity to it – especially to its laws – in order to realize its potential benefits for the individual (p. 95). For Lukacs, reified or instrumental thought arises from this confrontation of individual and reality, because ‘capitalism tends to produce a social structure that in great measure encourages such views’ (Lukacs, 1971, pp. 5–6). As a result, such reified science renders the object of its analysis ahistorical: . . . when ‘science’ maintains that the manner in which data immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific conceptualisation and that the actual form of these data is the appropriate starting-point for the formation of scientific concepts, it thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of ‘science’ (Lukacs, 1971, p. 7). Consequently, reified science ‘obscures the historical, transitory nature of capitalist society’, and ‘its determinants take on the appearance of timeless, eternal categories valid for all social formations. This could be seen at its crassest in the vulgar bourgeois economists’ (p. 9). Here Lukacs anticipates Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason; In Dialectic of Enlightenment they argue that the development of capitalism institutionalized economic growth and led to the systematic exploitation of new forms of knowledge, such as economics, operational research, business studies, and so on. For them science becomes transformed into an important productive force (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997, pp. 3–42). This is already apparent in the work of Adam Smith, who observed how the economy of his contemporary society operated and worked out what was required to make it function more smoothly. In Smith we find the Enlightenment desire to establish laws and regularities in the social world in order to be able to control it. Smith gives such an instrumental direction to the role of political economy when he considers it to be ‘a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator’ (Smith, 2000, p. 455). Today the instrumentality, reification and ahistorical nature of social science, and the way they contribute to the development of Gramsci’s ‘organic’ intellectuals, are most apparent in the science of economics


and its various sub-fields. It has already been argued in Chapter 3 that economics is now a global science; not only is it taught everywhere and in the same way, but it is also based on, and further objectifies, the foundations of capitalism. To develop this argument further, economics textbooks often begin with an idyllic picture of harmony and mutually beneficial exchange between individuals possessing different ‘factors of production’; that is, land, capital, and ‘human capital’. Inequalities of property and the fact that some individuals possess nothing except their ‘human capital’ – their labour – is taken completely for granted and naturalized. The market, which makes possible the exchange of these factors of production, is presented as a realm of equality and opportunity, thereby completely distorting reality; the fact is that for the majority of individuals it is an imperative, and that in order to survive they must sell their labour power on the market for wages. Wages are presented as a just compensation for the employee’s work, which hides the fact that surplus value is extracted and appropriated by the employer. In economics textbooks, poverty does not exist. For example, when Olivier Blanchard, in his textbook on macroeconomics (Blanchard, 2006, p. 45), discusses the issue of consumption, he declares that when an individual loses his job his consumption still continues because individuals simply must consume in order to survive. How is that achieved when a person is unemployed? The answer that Blanchard provides is that the individual simply ‘dissaves’ (!). It is a shame that so many poor people in the world have not been able to buy his book and learn that dying of hunger is simply impossible and that when one has no source of income to buy food it is just necessary to start spending savings. Economists also render capitalist production ahistorical; that is, they treat capitalism as something that has always existed and will always exist, simply because it reflects the essential nature of human beings as rational animals seeking to maximize their utility. It is a tendency which goes back to Adam Smith’s dictum that there is a ‘certain propensity in human nature to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another, which is common to all men’ (Smith, 2000, p. 14). The image of a society of egoistic individuals pursuing their self-interest – in itself a morally dubious picture – is immediately complemented by an assertion that by behaving in such a way individuals end up producing benefits for society as a whole: ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest’ (Smith, 2000, p. 15).


The same argument is advanced by Hegel, who is not usually quoted in economics texts, but whose argument illustrates how deep-seated this belief in equal benefits provided by the market mechanism is: . . . by a dialectical advance, subjective self-seeking turns into mediation of the particular through the universal, with the result that each man in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account is eo ipso producing and earning for the enjoyment of everyone else. The compulsion which brings this about is rooted in the complex interdependence of each on all, and it now presents itself to each as the universal permanent capital (Hegel, 1942, p. 12). The fact that a society where individual interests prevail in such a way is a historically specific capitalist society is ignored by Hegel. Individual self-love and a propensity to exchange are declared natural and universal characteristics of ‘man’ as a species. As a result, the science of economics ends up constructing a model of capitalist economy as a very complex self-governing mechanism with its own laws. This approach is technical-instrumental right from the start. The existence of a capitalist market is not questioned; the task of economics is to understand this complex whole in order to be able to regulate different aspects of its operation. Because of the complexity of a capitalist market, different sub-fields of economic knowledge are required: microeconomics and macroeconomics, international economics, financial markets and international finance, banking, business studies, management and business administration, and many others. These scientific disciplines every year produce tens of thousands of graduates across the world; these immediately become ‘organic’ intellectuals for whom the foundations of capitalism, such as private property and wage labour, production of commodities for their exchange value and not their use value, accumulation of capital for its own sake and the like ‘surpass common sense’, to use Gramsci’s expression. In this respect it is worth noting van der Pijl’s argument concerning the role of higher education in relation to ‘organic intellectuals’ or ‘cadres’ as he refers to them: ‘universities, polytechnics, business schools . . . can be argued to constitute the reproductive apparatus of the cadres [who] . . . must assume their professional tasks with conviction and determination’ (van der Pijl, 1999, pp. 154–5). And, indeed, so they do. Here it needs to be acknowledged that positivism, although still dominant, is rivalled by ‘normative’ approaches; in particular by new


normative theory in IR, which has developed in opposition to both empiricism and Realism. However, these new normative approaches maintain the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, because they are largely underpinned by a neo-Kantian belief in pure reason and a possibility of a moral philosophy independent of social context. This is made explicit in the definitions given by scholars developing the so-called ‘normative approaches’ to what they mean by ‘normative theory’. Frost, for example, poses the question as to ‘what ought to be done in international relations’ which already implies the traditional distinction distinguishing feature of normative claims – that is, the use of ‘ought’ as distinct from ‘is’ (Frost, 1986, p. 2). Brown argues that normative theory is ‘that body of work which addresses the moral dimension of international relations’ (Brown, 1992, p. 3) and remarks that it is possible to have theory which is not normative (p. 3). The implication of this, as Maclean argues, is that ‘academic practice hinges upon the security of reproducing objectivity and impartiality through the logical distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ in the world. This allows some of the everyday struggles appropriating the ‘is’ of social practice to be legitimated by recourse to an apparently disinterested, impartial set of expert knowledge’ (Maclean, 199b, p. 190). A similar argument is made by Steve Smith who observes that epistemological debates are debates about political power, and the is/ought dichotomy that privileges empiricist forms of knowledge has important consequences for practice: ‘But note that a failure to come up to the (positivist) mark will result in reflective work being confined to the margins . . . Positivism operates . . . as the implicit ‘‘gold standard’’ against which all approaches are evaluated. But the stakes are also high because of the links between theory and practice [for] international theory underpins and informs international practice’ (Smith, 1996, p. 13). It was argued in Chapter 1 that the review there of academic literature was part of the substantive research for this project; that is, it was part of the practice of the human-rights enforcement that was being studied. Bearing in mind the arguments made so far concerning the development of a global hegemony, based on increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized foundations, and the role of human-rights enforcement actions in providing this hegemony with a quality of moral leadership, it is now necessary to add that academic literature on human-rights enforcement can also be seen as part of a system of intellectual leadership within the context of a developing hegemony. In other words, this literature contributes to the ‘production’ of organic intellectuals who do not question the foundations of the existing


order, or who approach in a particularly instrumental and technical manner. The earlier analysis of literature on human-rights enforcement revealed two major shortcomings; reductionism and a lack of a historical analysis. The reductionism of existing approaches to post-Cold War human-rights enforcement operates at two levels: methodological and ontological. Methodological reductionism, or ‘methodological individualism’, results in a problem of reducing explanations of human-rights enforcement to the interests and capabilities of the states involved, totally ignoring the structure of the late-modern GPE within which states interact. The second aspect of reductionism – ontological reductionism – resides in the examination of human-rights enforcement in complete isolation from the economy, as an exclusively political, legal or military issue, with no relationship with global capitalism. We also saw that existing studies are profoundly ahistorical; historical analysis is either not attempted at all, as is the case with technical instrumental studies, or it is done in a narrowly descriptive manner as reporting of past events without explaining them. These deficiencies are characteristic of the ‘globalized academic knowledge’ identified above, which treats social reality in an increasingly instrumental manner – as it is – without attempting to examine its historical origins. In other words, the literature on human-rights enforcement contributes to a development of what may be described as a form of ‘uncritical’ thinking about the late-modern world; it is an understanding of social relations which results in what Gramsci refers to as ‘moral and political passivity’. The dichotomies that characterize the existing approaches to human rights enforcement, their reductionism and ahistorical character, contribute to a development of a worldview which is marked by compartmentalization and instrumentality. That is to say, social relations are not grasped in their entirety; rather, they are approached in a way that breaks them down into discrete categories, each of which may in turn be further subdivided into more discrete and specialized fields. Thus, the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement is studied as a strictly political or legal issue, and is often later reduced to foreign-policy analysis of a particular state, or an issue of customary international law. By adopting such a compartmentalized approach, the existing literature makes it impossible to locate the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement in relation to social totality. It thereby immediately forecloses possibilities of a radical form of knowledge – that is, of a form of knowledge that seeks to understand the existing order in order to change it.


The ahistorical nature of existing studies immediately removes from the analysis a possibility of linking the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement with the development of capitalism and with the very specific interests that the notion of individual rights emerged to serve. In fact, there exists a body of literature on human rights which traces the origins of the concept to bourgeois revolutions; an indication of a relationship between human-rights enforcement and capitalism is therefore quite apparent. However, because the approaches to humanrights enforcement are so compartmentalized, they fail to go beyond an analysis of specific conflicts and interventions taking place at present; they also set themselves predominantly instrumental objectives. As a result, numerous analyses, particularly those included in the category of ‘strategies’, take human rights and the practice of their enforcement for granted – as given – and simply seek to make them more efficient. It is important to stress that technical-instrumental literature seeking to protect the human rights of oppressed people does make an important contribution to the development of better techniques of intervention. There is no doubt that it is a noble and commendable endeavour. Its problematic nature is revealed when it is examined in relation to social totality. To recall, the starting point for this study was an attempt to establish the relationship between the practice of human-rights enforcement on the one hand, and the late-modern GPE characterized by massive poverty and inequality on the other. After a holistic and historical analysis it can be concluded that each individual case of enforcement may achieve important results in saving people from torture and mass murder; however, examined in relation to a global capitalist system, each of these cases is problematic in that it supports the continuance of this system. The same applies to the literature attempting to improve techniques and strategies of enforcement. Taken in isolation, each such work makes an important contribution to identifying mistakes made in past interventions and in developing better capacities for the humanitarian use of force. However, hundreds of such works examined in relation to the late-modern GPE inevitably contribute to the development of a world outlook which is reductionist and compartmentalized, which fails to grasp social totality and which forecloses avenues for a transformational approach to the structure of the late-modern world. Now, ‘organic’ intellectuals have so far been defined as those individuals in professions that can be said to facilitate the operation of global capital – financial analysts, accountants, stockbrokers, managers, etc; it has been suggested that these are ‘produced’ by social sciences


such as economics, management, business studies and related disciplines. These ‘representatives’ and ‘personifications’ of capital are usually contrasted with civil-society activists who, in recent years, have positioned themselves explicitly in opposition to transnational capital and have organized protests against different agents of capital – most notably individual multinational corporations, Bretton Woods institutions, the WTO and the G8. ‘Washington DC, Prague, Seattle, Davos, and wherever ‘‘the money men’’ meet have mobilized a broad coalition of groups, activists, and lay individuals’ (Desai and Said, 2001, p. 51). ‘Over the past five years,’ observes Mosbacher, ‘the Western world has seen the rise of new protest movements to counter some international financial summit or around some symbolically important day such as the first of May’ (Mosbacher, 2002, p. 12). On the face of it, the late-modern world appears to have developed hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces, the latter being associated with a global civil society composed of a multiplicity of NGOs and social movements. However, bearing in mind the analysis of the theory and practice of human-rights enforcement so far, such a view of the counter-hegemonic potential of these civil society entities is imprecise and overoptimistic. In fact, these entities could be included in the category of ‘organic’ intellectuals in a developing global hegemony because as Cohen and Rai observe, civil society protesters aim ‘at partial change to try to offset current injustices and inequalities’ (2000, p. 2), without questioning the totalizing logic of capitalism which subjects everything to profit considerations. Thus, they propose such measures as the ‘Tobin tax’ on international transactions of capital, the development of fair trade, increases in aid to developing countries, the cancellation of the Third World debt, the cancellation of TRIPs and TRIMs agreements, and so on. Such measures, as Anderson argues, ‘do not attack capitalism as a system or general idea’, but only focus ‘on cases of abuse, cases which result, allegedly, from the actions of particular global corporations: the abuse of the environment, the low pay of workers in the ‘‘South’’, child labour, the exploitation of women, the degradation of cultures and the imposition of lifestyles through brands’ (D. Anderson, 2002, p. 7). The same argument is made by Allman who asserts that ‘behind most of these voices of discontent, there is a tacit acceptance of capitalism and its handmaiden, liberal democracy’ (Allman, 2001, pp. 137, 138). This acceptance also manifests itself in the nature of the demands put forward by the activists. What they have in common is using human rights in the broadest possible sense to demand changes: workers’ and children’s rights at multinational corporations’ sweatshops in South East Asia, a right to development for poor states, a right to be free from


poverty, a right to basic necessities of life, and so on. As mentioned above, these rights are different from the dominant conception of human rights as negative individual liberties – and they do have counterhegemonic potential in that they emphasize the economic and social rights of millions of people, which is another way of challenging the existing order. However, these rights can fulfil their counter-hegemonic potential only in conjunction with demands for a fundamental transformation of the developing order. Though they can be used to point out massive inequalities and human suffering, and be the basis for a call for concerted global action against social evils, they cannot solve these problems by themselves. Unfortunately the bulk of civil society actions can be summed up as a series of demands for the recognition of these rights and for them to be respected. Demanded in this manner, they not only fail to pose any credible threat to a developing global hegemony, but in fact further objectify its underlying foundations. Thus, calls for the basic necessities of life for all the poor in the world firstly take for granted the existence of poverty without attempting to find its root causes in the functioning of global capitalism – and thereby further naturalizes it – and secondly accepts enormous inequalities between the rich and the poor by simply calling for minimal improvements in the lot of the world’s have-nots. Furthermore, demands for minimum wages and decent working conditions take for granted and further objectify the key mechanism at the heart of capitalist production – a wage-labour relation. In the current setting, such profoundly ‘problem-solving’ demands have crucial consequences for the late-modern world and a formation of a global hegemony. They lie in channelling protests and opposition movements in a manner that is compatible with the existing global structure: on the one hand, they are inherently reformist, and the reforms they seek in fact amount to slight improvements and adjustments; on the other hand, they are directed at individual actors and agents, such as corporations or international financial institutions, rather than the structure of the late-modern GPE as a whole. This makes the developing hegemony a very solid structure in which opposition is ordered in such a way that it is not only compatible with its existence but in fact objectifies its foundations. What order can be more difficult to challenge than an order in which there is an appearance of confrontation and heterodoxy of opinion, often taking the form of massive gatherings at different summits and forums and even occasional outbreaks of violence? Therefore the category of ‘organic’ intellectuals today may be said to include not only those professions that explicitly facilitate and directly


benefit from the operation of transnational capital, but also those who work for different NGOs, international development agencies and different human-rights bodies. They too are ‘organic’ intellectuals because they contribute to a further consolidation of an emerging global hegemony by focusing on partial and single-issue improvements, without questioning the structure of the late-modern GPE. They clearly take for granted and objectify the most important foundations of global capitalism, and fail to challenge it as a totality of social relations. In this respect, the body of literature on human-rights enforcement examined in Chapter 1 plays exactly the same role in the development of ‘organic’ intellectuals as do disciplines such as economics, management or business studies. What these sciences take for granted, naturalize and de-historicize is similarly taken for granted, naturalized and de-historicized in the literature on human-rights enforcement. By contributing to the development of a human-rights discourse, it similarly plays a part in the production of individuals for whom private property (a universally recognized human right) and paid employment (also a human right, although not as universally recognized) are a natural condition of life that have ‘surpassed common sense’. And by providing a largely ahistorical and reductionist analysis the literature makes a contribution to the development of uncritical thinking and a state of ‘political passivity’, to borrow Gramsci’s term. To sum up, the body of academic work on human-rights enforcement constitutes part of a system of intellectual leadership in the context of a developing global hegemony.

Conclusion In this chapter we have placed the phenomenon of post-Cold War human-rights enforcement within a structure of the late-modern GPE, which is characterized by the development of a new form of hegemony which is global, meaning non-territorial; it is based on a set of increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized foundations, divorced from interests and places to which they used to belong. In the first part of this chapter the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement was shown to be part of a system of moral leadership in the context of this global hegemony. From Gramsci’s analysis we inferred that moral leadership is marked by two characteristics: on the one hand, it contains universalizable and morally appealing values and ideals; and on the other, these values must be congruent with the economic foundations of a hegemony.


The analysis of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s and of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the War on Terror in the 2000s demonstrated that the interventions clearly possessed these two characteristics. Each case was accompanied by a strong moral rhetoric of condemnation of different types of human-rights abuses and of the salvation, liberation and emancipation of the victims. At the same time, based on a historical analysis of the notion of individual rights and its relationship with capitalism, it could be seen that the moral values at the heart of human-rights enforcement missions that amount to a respect for negative individual liberties are not only compatible with the key economic foundations of an emerging hegemony, but presuppose and objectify them. In addition to this, the immediate post-intervention policies in Haiti and Bosnia revealed that, in the current context, human-rights enforcement is not only about political liberation and rescue from persecution, but also about the dissemination of neoliberal economic policies. Therefore, post-Cold War human-rights enforcement constitutes an important element in a system of moral leadership in the context of a developing global hegemony. The second part of this chapter explored the intellectual dimensions of Gramsci’s concept of moral and intellectual leadership, and the role played by the theory of human-rights enforcement in such intellectual leadership. It was observed that Gramsci points to an important role played by academics and social scientists in the formation of ‘organic’ intellectuals, who assimilate hegemonic ideas and spread them in the realm of civil society. Sciences such as economics, management, business studies and their sub-fields can be said to ‘produce’ such ‘organic’ intellectuals today who contribute to a complete de-historicization and objectification of the core assumptions and mechanisms specific to capitalist relations of production. The category of ‘organic’ intellectuals was then extended to civil society activists who are traditionally seen as constituting a counterhegemonic project. However, it was seen that their demands, often phrased in terms of human rights, particularly economic and social rights, focus on discrete or separate issues and individual actors such as corporations or international financial institutions, without questioning the structure of global capitalism. Anti-globalization protesters, similarly to those ‘organic’ intellectuals that directly facilitate the operation of transnational capital – financial analysts, business consultants, stockbrokers, accountants, insurance agents, etc. – help further naturalize and objectify the underlying foundations of capitalism – private property,


wage labour, production of commodities for their exchange value and not their use value, accumulation of capital for its own sake, and so on. The literature on human-rights enforcement, through its ahistorical and reductionist nature, similarly contributes to the development of uncritical thinking, which is incapable of grasping social totality in its entirety and of subjecting it to a critical evaluation as a whole. The knowledge thereby produced is compartmentalized and instrumental, and seeks to make single-issue adjustments and improvements, without questioning the structure of the late-modern GPE. Thus, the body of literature on human-rights enforcement contributes to the objectification of the key foundations of a developing hegemony and can therefore be seen as an element in its intellectual leadership.

Conclusion: A Noble Practice in an Ignoble Context: Unintended Consequences of Human Rights Enforcement for the Late-modern World

Informed by Marxist methodology which rejects the dominant categorical separation of theory and practice, this study has sought to establish the content of the concept of human-rights enforcement by uncovering the complex set of relations in and through which it is constituted – theoretically and substantively. The study began with a review of academic writing on humanitarian intervention and the War on Terror; the aim of this was two-fold: to identify deficiencies and shortcomings on the one hand, and to examine a relationship between this body of literature and the substantive phenomenon of human-rights enforcement on the other. The analysis in Chapter 1 demonstrated that the existing literature on post-Cold War human-rights enforcement suffers from two major problems – reductionism and ahistoricism. The phenomenon of human-rights enforcement is reduced to the capabilities, interests and intentions and individual states on the one hand, and to an exclusively political, legal or military domain on the other. In short, there was lack of a holistic analysis which would examine humanitarian interventions and the War on Terror in terms of a relationship between agents and structures, and with respect to social totality. Based on Marx’s method, this study particularly highlighted in the literature the separation of human-rights enforcement from the functioning of the global capitalist economy. Existing analyses are also profoundly ahistorical – they either ignore the historical development of human rights and the practice of their enforcement, or present it as a linear and chronological evolution from medieval just-war theory, overlooking the changes that have taken place in the social context over time. Finally, it was argued that the existing literature is part of practice; it plays a role in constructing human-rights enforcement as a phenomenon 236

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completely separate from global capitalism, and contributes to a development of a global moral discourse which equates freedom and justice with individual negative liberties. The analysis of the deficiencies of available studies pointed to a need for a historical and holistic analysis. Chapter 2 dealt with the history of humanitarianism. Using Marx’s concept of ideology in the negative sense, it was demonstrated how humanitarianism, presented by existing analyses as an unproblematic evolution, has actually changed over time in different social settings. In the feudal order humanitarianism was part of an ideology which consisted in interpreting social relations as Godordained and as having a divine meaning and purpose, which therefore no man could question, and which necessarily contributed to the reproduction of feudal relations of power and exploitation. With the development of capitalism, a new ideology emerged, an ideology of individual freedom and rights, which objectified relations of inequality and exploitation in the economy. This new ideology gradually penetrated military humanitarianism and thereby fundamentally transformed it: from a practice that contributed to the reproduction of feudal social relations it became a practice that helped sustain capitalist relations of production. This profound change in the causal powers of humanitarianism is completely lost in the existing studies of human-rights enforcement. With the development of international capitalism in the pre-Charter period the doctrine of humanitarian intervention played some role in colonial expansion. In the post-Charter period, it was part of an ideological association of respect for human rights (negative rights), with justice and freedom guaranteed in capitalist societies, or the ‘free world’ as it was presented under the leadership of the United States. This laid the foundations for a retrospective moral legitimation of the global capitalist order; that is, for its supremacy over the former socialist/ communist societies where these human rights were massively violated. In the post-Cold War period human-rights enforcement developed more fully. A set of economic and political transformations undergone in the late-modern world was examined, in particular the process of globalization. It was argued, following the work of Maclean, that this process involves not only quantitative transformations, but also the development of a qualitatively new form of causation, which is nonterritorial. It was seen how certain policies and institutions are becoming global, meaning increasingly de-territorialized and de-historicized; they are losing their original links with coercion and subjective interests, in particular those of capital, and they are increasingly seen as objective


conditions of the world by the participants, both dominant and subordinate agents. The arguments of the neo-Gramscians were then elaborated, in relation to the development of a new form of hegemony, which, it was argued, is global and cannot be described as international; it is based on global, non-territorial standards which govern the late-modern world, which are mediated by different actors necessarily located on some territory, but which are no longer reducible to their intentions or interests. This hegemonic structure serves the interests of transnational capital, but it cannot be understood exclusively in terms of actions of its ‘organic intellectuals’ – managers, financial analysts, lobbyists, etc. – as the neo-Gramscian analysis contends; rather it is the result of the objectification of certain specific conditions on which this hegemonic structure is based. It was also argued that within this hegemonic structure there may exist certain power relations among actors, as the Realists and radical critics discussed in Chapter 1 argue. However, these relationships are based on the mediation of certain increasingly global – that is, non-territorial – standards such as free trade or economic liberalization, which favour more developed states. In addition to this, powerful states may be able to keep their own trade barriers while forcing developed countries to open up their economies. It was therefore argued that the existing applications of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to the late-modern GPE may be improved by de-emphasizing the role of agents and pointing to the development of structures which condition the behaviour of not only the subordinate agents – as Gramsci’s notion of hegemony implies – but also the actions of the dominant actors themselves. Bearing in mind the arguments concerning the development of a global hegemony developed in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 sought to contextualize the phenomenon of post-Cold War human-rights enforcement; it aimed to examine the relationship between the developing global hegemony and human-rights enforcement. It was first seen how human-rights enforcement can be said to be part of a system of moral leadership in the context of this global hegemony. Gramsci’s notion of moral leadership is characterized by two dimensions: on the one hand, it must contain universalizable values with a strong ‘moral import’, and on the other hand, these values must be compatible with the economic foundations of a hegemony. The overview of post-Cold War cases of human-rights enforcement demonstrated that they clearly possess these two characteristics. It was seen how they were accompanied by a strong moral rhetoric and how, at the same time, the values that they promoted – a respect for negative


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individual liberties – are not only compatible with the key economic foundations of an emerging hegemony, but in fact presuppose and objectify them. We then looked at the intellectual dimension of Gramsci’s concept of moral and intellectual leadership, and the role of the theory of humanrights enforcement in intellectual leadership. Sciences such as economics, management, business studies and their sub-fields were first examined, and it was seen how they can be said to ‘produce’ ‘organic’ intellectuals today and how they contribute to a complete de-historicization and objectification of the core assumptions and mechanisms specific to capitalist relations of production. The investigation of the category of ‘organic’ intellectuals was then extended to civil society activists who are traditionally seen as constituting a counter-hegemonic project. We saw that their demands, often expressed in terms of calls for respect for human rights, most notably economic and social rights, identify various individual agents such as multinational corporations, Bretton Woods institutions or the WTO as sources of problems, without questioning the structure of global capitalism. It was argued that anti-globalization protesters, like the ‘organic’ intellectuals that facilitate the operation of transnational capital, produce the unintended consequence of further naturalizing and objectifying the core foundations of capitalism; these include private property, wage labour, production of commodities for their exchange value and not their use value, and accumulation of capital for its own sake. It was then maintained that the body of literature on human-rights enforcement, because of its ahistorical and reductionist nature, contributes to a development of uncritical thinking, which is incapable of grasping social totality in its entirety and of subjecting it to a critical evaluation as a whole. This compartmentalized and instrumental form of knowledge-seeking, that seeks to make single-issue adjustments and improvements without questioning the structure of the late-modern GPE, similarly contributes to the objectification of the key foundations of a developing hegemony and can therefore be seen as an element in its intellectual leadership. Together, these arguments enable us to answer the question with which this study started; namely, is there a causal relation between the practice of human-rights enforcement and a more general global moral discourse that has developed in the last 10 to 15 years, at the heart of which lies the idea of the promotion of protection of individual political and civil liberties on the one hand, and the sustenance of global capitalism, with all its disastrous consequences, on the other?


There is indeed a relationship of mutual causality between these two phenomena. This study, through an historical and holistic analysis, has demonstrated its origins, historical development and the form it takes today. The phenomenon of post-Cold War human-rights enforcement constitutes an important element in a system of moral and intellectual leadership in the context of a developing global hegemony. This hegemony is a structure of power based on non-territorial causation and on increasingly de-historicized, objectified and naturalized foundations – a structure of power that serves the interests of capital, but which is not reducible to it. Such a conclusion must not be seen as a condemnation of the global human-rights movement, nor of the use of force to protect people facing slaughter. All those activists who devote their lives to saving strangers – very often risking their own lives – as well as all those who are appalled by the human suffering and misery that affects the majority of the world’s population today – and who organize anti-globalization campaigns and protests – deserve the utmost respect for their courage and sacrifices. It would be cynical, contemptuous and ungrateful to dismiss their efforts as irrelevant or useless simply because we have managed to establish a causal link between them and a global form of capitalism. The problem lies not in what they do, but in how the structure of the late-modern GPE renders their actions problematic. The world we live in is highly irrational – countries suffering from famine may actually be net exporters of food; there is enough food produced to feed everyone in the world, but it is not available to those who are hungry and developed countries prefer to destroy their agricultural surpluses rather than give them away; there are drugs that can now treat many formerly lethal diseases, but they are inaccessible to those in poor countries. The origins of these striking irrationalities lie in the way the capitalist economy is organized: production is categorically separated from consumption. That is to say, commodities are produced not for their use value, but exclusively for their exchange value, that is, for sale on the market. And it is the market’s imperatives that regulate the process of production, as well as of distribution. It is a system that excludes more and more people. As said earlier, there are brave and devoted individuals who today refuse to be disinterested bystanders of such a marginalization and exclusion, and seek to challenge it. There are also those who are appalled by the existence of tyrannical regimes where individual life and human dignity are not respected and where people can be arrested, tortured, put in a concentration camp and murdered. And in recent years there has


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developed a practice of human-rights enforcement which, even if undertaken for reasons that might not necessarily be humanitarian and with often mixed results, is rendering the rule of state sovereignty increasingly less absolute and more and more conditioned by respect for human rights. However, this determination to promote and protect human rights takes place within the confines of the global capitalist structure of production, and, as this study has illustrated, has an unintended consequence of contributing to its sustainability and reproduction. This book provides a solution to an impasse that has characterized critical literature on the subject of human-rights enforcement. This impasse has to do with a problem of methodological individualism; that is, of interpreting the actions of agents and the outcomes of these actions exclusively in terms of the agents’ intentions, interests and capabilities – of explaining everything only by looking at the actors involved. The fact is that: a) agents necessarily exist and operate within structures which set limits on options available to them and on what they perceive as normal or imperative in each particular situation, and b) agents, in the course of their rational and purposeful activity, may produce outcomes that were not intended, and which may contribute to the reproduction of these structures. Thus, in the literature on human-rights enforcement, if State A intervenes in State B and justifies its action by reference to humanrights motives, but at the same time ends up achieving certain otherthan-humanitarian results, then the phenomenon of human-rights enforcement is seen as nothing more than either a foreign policy tool or an imperialistic strategy. What such a view totally ignores is that even if the states involved do achieve these results – for example, access to resources such as oil, or free access to markets for their manufactured goods or services – it does not explain human-rights enforcement. Furthermore, at times such outcomes may be missing as, for example, in Somalia or East Timor, and we then end up with a puzzle that the existing literature, constrained by its reductionism and ahistoricity, cannot resolve; namely, what are human rights after all? What this study has sought to demonstrate is that, indeed, sometimes states may act for selfish reasons and at times they may be driven by humanitarian motives. By focusing on particular substantive examples of interventions – that is, exclusively on empirical information, as insisted


upon by the positivist orientation in social science, which this study has rejected – we can never arrive at any sensible conclusion about humanrights enforcement. What is necessary is to examine those structures that are not available for empirical observation but which are nevertheless real in terms of their causal powers and observable outcomes. The structure of the late-modern GPE, as the preceding chapters have demonstrated, is characterized by the development of certain global standards in terms of which agents are evaluated and/or disciplined by other agents. The development of these standards, their globalization – their de-territorialization, de-historicization and objectification – cannot be explained solely in terms of the actions and policies of particular agents. Even if the neoliberal agenda is promoted by particular, territorially located and identifiable organizations, such as the Bretton Woods institutions or the WTO, this agenda cannot be reduced exclusively to these bodies alone. Neoliberal policies are increasingly becoming global and are more and more likely to be adopted by states without coercion, that is, ‘freely’; this applies to both developed and developing political economies. The same applies to human rights. Even if they are advocated and at times enforced by specific organizations or states, they cannot be reduced entirely to the intentions or agendas of these actors. Human rights is becoming a global benchmark against which states, as well as non-state actors – particularly business enterprises – can be assessed; they are increasingly recognized, acknowledged and implemented by agents who feel obliged to conform to these criteria. What is crucial to note in this respect is that states, both developed and developing, find themselves in an environment that is highly competitive. In order to achieve economic growth, combat unemployment and ensure social cohesion, governments need to compete for investment, for markets and for resources. While all developed political economies have adopted antimonopoly legislation at home, in their foreign policies they do everything possible to ensure that their corporations attain a monopoly status internationally. Some political economies are more powerful than others and can use different political and even military means to achieve their goals. One such means, as has been observed on numerous occasions, might be human rights. As a number of scholars, particularly the Realists and radical critics, have pointed out, the United States has highly selective human-rights policies; the US more than once has managed to benefit economically from human-rights policies. However, as has been repeatedly emphasized throughout this book, this does not explain human rights, nor their enforcement. The question that such analyses fail to ask is


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why is human rights – and not some other concept – used in such a way. This requires a historical analysis of this notion, as well as a structural or holistic approach to it, which this study has sought to provide. In addition to this, and this is the key argument made in this book, these policies of human-rights promotion, protection and enforcement, whether undertaken for benevolent or selfish reasons, do produce unintended consequences that help sustain global capitalism in its neoliberal form. This outcome arises not only when there is a direct empirically observable link between human-rights enforcement and the adoption of neoliberal policies, as was seen in the cases of Haiti and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is produced simply because human rights is a concept that is not only compatible with capitalism, but that presupposes and objectifies capitalism’s core foundations. Furthermore, in the current global setting, the human-rights policies of numerous international actors and forces – including the practice of their enforcement – contribute to the development of a system of moral and intellectual leadership in the context of a developing global hegemony. What does this all mean for the practice of human-rights enforcement in particular, and their promotion and protection in general? Does it mean that because we have established such a causal link we now should abandon these policies and let torturers and executioners go about their business freely, simply so as not to reproduce global capitalism? The answer, of course, is no. To repeat, this study has not been critical of the practice of human-rights enforcement, nor of the multiplicity of humanrights policies pursued by different state and non-state actors, but of the global context within which they exist. It is the structure of the late-modern GPE, with its massive inequalities, poverty and human misery affecting millions of people, that poses problems. There is a relationship between human-rights enforcement and this structure, a relationship of mutual causality that promotes freedom and justice defined in such a way as to be compatible with the existence of global capitalism in its neoliberal form, and that contributes to a further objectification of capitalism’s foundations. When human rights are flagrantly abused it is our duty to stop them, using force if necessary. However, we must not privilege human suffering from political causes over suffering brought about by the functioning of the global economy. We must accept that the extent of misery and death produced by the operation of global capitalism in its neoliberal form is hundreds of times greater than that caused by all the dictators in power today put together. Not only does it affect living generations, but it condemns to poverty and misery generations to come.


Such a system needs to be challenged, but challenged not on its terms, that is, not in terms of demands for basic necessities or minimum wages, for such demands accept its core foundations – wage labour, production of commodities for their exchange value and not their use value, accumulation of capital for its own sake. It must be challenged in a way that would transcend it. The assumptions of liberal political and economic theory that men are by nature selfish need to be rejected; alternative value systems are not only possible but have already existed. For example, European explorers as late as the 18th century were struck in the newly discovered lands in the Pacific by the total absence of possessive value systems. And it is the contrast between these societies and the European societies that led one of the key thinkers of the French Enlightenment, Denis Diderot, to indicate the basic contradictions of the socioeconomic system dominant in Europe; ‘the distinction of yours and mine’, the opposition between ‘one’s own interests and the general good’, and the subordination of the ‘general good to one’s own particular good’ (Diderot, 1956, p. 482). Furthermore, the fact that the socialist/communist states failed does not mean that capitalism is the only viable system of social production and reproduction. Fukuyama is wrong; we are not at the end of history. On the contrary, we must challenge the global capitalist system, its highly competitive and – in the context of weapons of mass destruction capable of annihilating the entire civilization, as well as the destruction of the environment to which it leads – its potentially explosive structure. Unless we do, we may see the end of history – literally.

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UN Resolutions Cited in the Text Resolution 687

Resolution 678

Resolution 688

Resolution 794

Resolution 814

Resolution 713

Resolution 757

Resolution 770

Resolution 787

Resolution 836

Resolution 940

Resolution 1264

Resolution 1132

UN reference: S/RES/687 (1991), 3 April 1991, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/ 596/23/IMG/NR059623.pdf?OpenElement UN reference: S/RES/0678 (1990), 29 November 1990, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/ NR0/575/28/IMG/NR057528.pdf?OpenElement UN reference: S/RES/0688 (1991), 5 April 1991, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/ 596/24/IMG/NR059624.pdf?OpenElement UN reference: S/RES/794 (1992), 3 December 1992, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N92/772/11/ PDF/N9277211.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/814 (1993), 26 March 1993, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N93/226/18/ IMG/N9322618.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/713 (1991), 25 September 1991, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/ NR0/ 596/ 49/IMG/NR059649.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/757 (1992), 30 May 1992, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/ 011/16/IMG/NR001116.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/770 (1992), 13 August 1992, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N92/379/66/ IMG/N9237966.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/787 (1992), 16 November 1992, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N92/723/03/ IMG/N9272303.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/836 (1993), 4 June 1993, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N93/330/21/ IMG/N9333021.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/940 (1994), 31 July 1993, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N94/312/ 22/PDF/N9431222.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/1264 (1999), 15 September 1999, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/ 264/81/PDF/N9926481.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/1132 (1997), 8 October 1997, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N97/267/13/ PDF/N9726713.pdf?OpenElement 276

UN Resolutions Cited in the Text 277 Resolution 1270

Resolution 1436

Resolution 1508

Resolution 1199

UN Reference: S/RES/1270 (1999), 22 October 1999, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/315/02/ PDF/N9931502.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/1436 (2002), 24 September 2002, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N02/603/ 05/PDF/N0260305.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/1508 (2003), 19 September 2003, available at http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N03/ 525/52/PDF/N0352552.pdf?OpenElement UN Reference: S/RES/1199 (1998), 23 September 1998, available at http://www.un.org/peace/kosovo/98sc1199.htm


Index Afghanistan see War on Terror African Union 160 agent/structure relationship reductionism in existing literature 9–10, 26, 34, 49, 64, 70, 286 and the political-economy approach 14–17, 22–3, 153, 163–8, 236–8 Aquinas, Thomas 14, 41–3, 61, 73, 79, 81–2, 83 ASEAN 161–2 Augustine 14, 20, 41, 43, 61, 73, 79, 81–3 Blair, Tony 3, 49, 63, 209, 212–15 Blair doctrine 180, 203–5 Bush, George W. 2–3, 207–18 capitalism emergence of 11–12, 20–1, 74, 83–4 the capitalist form of surplus extraction 73, 84–5 and ideology of individual rights 21, 73–4, 85–93 Chomsky, Noam 10, 51, 65, 66 Clinton doctrine 2, 180, 204–6 Corporate social responsibility 5, 10, 122, 151–2 Cox, Robert 18, 110, 166–9, 170 ECOWAS 2, 30, 162, 196–201 English School 13, 35–38, 47 feudalism the feudal form of surplus extraction 20, 73, 75–6 religion as feudal ideology 14, 16, 43, 73, 76–7 and just war 17, 20, 43, 64, 70, 73, 79–83 Fordism 128, 165, 178 global governance 127, 142–52, 159, 169, 178

global moral discourse 5, 6–7, 18, 27, 32, 70, 92, 222, 239, 241 globalization as de-territorialization and dehistoricization 21, 121, 169 as increased interdependence 50, 124–63 see also hegemony Gill, Stephen 166, 167–8 Gratian 81 Grotius, Hugo 21, 41, 74, 78, 94–5, 111 Gramsci, Antonio 22, 23, 27, 47, 50, 124, 164, 171 hegemony the emergence of global or ndimensional 122, 152, 164, 169–73; and human-rights enforcement: moral leadership and human rights enforcement 23, 27, 120, 124, 128, 176–221; intellectual leadership and human rights enforcement 23, 121, 124, 164, 221–34 Gramscian meaning of 22–3, 47, 123, 174 Hobbes, Thomas 11–12, 32, 86–7, 90–1 human-rights enforcement defined 4 humanitarian intervention cases during the Cold War: East Pakistan/Bangladesh 116–17; Tanzania 117; Uganda 117–8 cases after the Cold War: BosniaHerzegovina 187–91; Haiti 191–3; East Timor 193–5; Kosovo 201–7; Liberia 196–8; Sierra Leone 198–201; Somalia 183–6 and global hegemony: see hegemony existing literature on humanitarian intervention: strategies and techniques 28–32; national interests

279

280 Index humanitarian intervention – continued 32–5; sovereignty and law 34–46; radical critiques 46–51 ideology: distinction between negative and positive meanings 15–16, 72–3; and feudalism see feudalism; and just war see just-war theory; and individual rights 73–4, 86–94 intellectual leadership see hegemony Iraq see War on Terror Just-war theory in existing literature 13–14, 41–4 as part of feudal ideology 17, 20, 43, 62, 69, 74, 79–83 as part of the ideology of capitalism 93–103 Kant, Immanuel 76, 86, 89–92 Larrain, Jorge 15–16, 72, 77 Locke, John 75, 86, 87–90 Lukacs, Georg 227–8 Maclean, John 15, 21, 23, 25, 48, 143, 157, 158, 159, 170, 224 Marx, Karl 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 92, 93, 119, 125, 132 Mercosur 161–2 Meszaros, Istvan 13, 126, 133, 135 moral leadership see hegemony

NATO 2, 26, 34, 39, 42, 47, 48, 50, 51, 172, 203–9 neo-Gramscian approach to IR 22, 124, 164–8, 171 neoliberalism the development of 129–35 and global poverty 4–5 Pilger, John 48, 50, 51, 66 Rawls, John 44–5 Realism 32–5, 55–8 Smith, Adam 6, 11, 12, 226, 227 theory/practice dichotomy 18, 23 Tertullian 78 Vattel, Emerich de 41, 94–6 Vitoria, Francisco de 41, 82–3, 96 Walzer, Michael 45–7 War on Terror Afghanistan 207–11 existing literature on the War on Terror: strategies and techniques 53–5; national interest 55–9; legal approaches 58–61; just-war theory 61–4; radical critiques 64–7; human rights 66–70 Iraq 211–16 Weber, Max 9 Westphalia, Peace of 72, 94 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 20, 48, 84–5, 94

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Globalization and Human Rights in the Developing World (Global Ethics)

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The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global

Macroeconomics in the Global Economy

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The Political Economy of Human Rights Enforcement: Moral and Intellectual Leadership in the Context of Global Hegemony (Global Ethics)