If anything is clear from the Kosovo crisis-and, for that matter, from the unhappy experiences of outside intervention forces over the past decade in places such as Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia-it is that ad hoc responses to state failure and humanitarian catastrophe are rarely successful. At the same time, the fact that there is now a willingness on the part at least of the Nato countries to intervene militarily in the internal conflicts of other nations represents a radical change in international affairs. The conflict over Kosovo, the first war ever waged by the Nato alliance, was undertaken more in the name of human rights and moral obligation than out of any traditional conception of national interest. Indeed, had strictly practical criteria been applied to Kosovo, Nato as a whole might well have taken the same tack its European members did in Bosnia and attempted to prevent the conflict from spreading, rather than trying, however half-heartedly, to reverse Milosevic's campaign of murder and mass deportation.
The long-term implications of this step in the post-cold war moralisation of international politics are not yet clear. Realists, whether they belong to the pure national interest school of a Henry Kissinger, or the "lead by moral example" of a George Kennan, are alarmed-as well they should be. It is now clear that 50 years of campaigning by human rights activists has had a profound effect on the conduct of international affairs. The old Westphalian system in which state sovereignty was held to be well nigh absolute is under challenge. As former UN secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar put it: "We are witnessing what is probably an irresistible shift in public attitudes towards the belief that the defence of the oppressed in the name of morality should prevail over frontiers and legal documents."
Human rights became an organising principle for action in the 1990s the way anti-communism had been throughout the cold war. But the means employed have never matched the high-flown rhetoric about ends. There have been times during the Kosovo crisis-as there were during the Bosnian war and the Rwanda emergency-when it has appeared that western involvement came about because western leaders no longer found it possible to get up at a press conference and say: "Sorry about the starving 'x's' or the ethnically-cleansed 'y's.' It's awful what's happening to them, but frankly they don't have any oil, nor are those who oppress them a threat to us. So you, Mr and Ms voter, will have to continue to watch the slaughter on the evening news until it burns itself out."
Of course, this is precisely what members of the policy elite in Washington, Brussels, Paris, London and Berlin say in private to one another all the time. But public language, along with public pressure, is often what drives policy. Commonplace expressions of realism in international affairs have become, to borrow the early Christian theological distinction between elite and mass Christianity, an esoteric language restricted to policy-makers when they are out of public view. It is the language of human rights and humanitarianism which now stands as the exoteric language of public discourse about such questions.
It is all but inconceivable that a responsible western leader could say of the Kosovars what Chamberlain said of the Czechs, that they were "a far away people of whom we know little"-even though, strictly speaking, this would be a simple statement of fact, all the rhetoric about Albania being in the "heart of Europe" notwithstanding. To be sure, a politician will occasionally flout the new moral bilingualism. When, famously, then secretary of state James Baker said of the break-up of Yugoslavia, "We don't have a dog in that fight," he was breaking the unwritten rule which held that representatives of the western democracies were always supposed to insist that they stood ready to defend high moral principles.
But for the most part, what human rights advocates would describe as the triumph of the categorical imperative of human rights-an imperative that, in extreme cases, is held to trump all other political or economic interests-and what realists might describe as the hyper-moralisation of international affairs, has taken hold as an operating principle in all the big western capitals on issues that concern political crises in poor countries. The fact that there is a human rights double standard where powerful countries like China are concerned does not mean that nothing has changed.
Some sectors of public opinion in the west have always viewed international affairs through a moral lens. US relations with China before the second world war, to cite one example, were highly influenced by the agenda of the missionaries. What is impressive is the degree to which these Christian missionary (and imperial) habits of thought find an echo in the secular human rights movement of the past 30 years.
had the consequences of this ascendancy largely been beneficial, and had the actions undertaken in the name of human rights and humanitarian imperatives been as successful as activists expected them to be, it would be possible simply to welcome the changed rhetorical and even moral circumstances in which international politics must be conducted. But from Somalia to Rwanda, Cambodia to Haiti, and Congo to Bosnia, the bad news is that the failure rate of these interventions approaches 100 per cent. Time and again, our moral ambitions have been revealed as being far larger than our political, military or even cognitive means. And there is no easy way out.
It is undeniable that the western television viewer does indeed see some scene of horror in central Africa or the Balkans and does want something to be done. But "something" is the operative word. Even in situations where the media pays intense attention over a long period of time, there has rarely been a consensus that military force should be used and a great deal of anxiety about involvement in an operation that may never conclude. Perhaps this is why, in western Europe at least, the prestige of "pure" humanitarianism increased so dramatically over the past 15 years. The humanitarian enterprise-giving help to people desperately in need of it-has seemed to cut through the complexities of politics and national interest. Here at last, it seemed, was something above politics. Of course, what the humanitarian movement painfully discovered over the past decade, starting in Bosnia and culminating in the refugee camps of eastern Zaïre-where aid helped not only people in need but those who had perpetrated the Rwandan genocide-was that there was no transcending politics. Aid undeniably did good things; a vaccinated child is a vaccinated child. But in some instances it also prolonged wars, distorted resource allocations and, as in Bosnia, where the humanitarian effort became the focus of western intervention, offered the great powers an alibi for not stopping the genocide of the Muslims. And Somalia demonstrated that what the west saw as a humanitarian intervention might well be understood by local people as an imperial invasion.
As the limitations of humanitarianism have become apparent, human rights have taken centre stage in the imaginations of those in the west who continue to believe in human progress. For western leaders, these distinctions have little resonance. The Clinton administration, like its European counterparts, routinely conflates human rights and humanitarian concerns. Kosovo is the most extreme example of this. Yet the categorical imperative of upholding human rights and that of getting relief to populations who desperately need it are often in conflict. The human rights activist seeks to halt abuses. Usually, this involves denouncing the states or movements which are violating the laws of war or the rights of their citizens. In contrast, the humanitarian aid worker usually finds that he or she must deal with the abusive government or rampaging militia if the aid is to get through safely.
So far, at least, there is no new synthesis between human rights and humanitarianism. Somalia in particular revealed the difficulty of engaging in an operation which was supposed to end a famine, but which ended up as a war between the foreign army deployed to help the humanitarian effort and one of the Somali factions. Americans were appalled to see soldiers killed in such circumstances, and their revulsion cannot be attributed solely to the pictures of a dead American soldier being dragged naked through the streets of Mogadishu, or to the trauma of Vietnam.
Soldiers are expected to die in a war, but the Somali operation was not presented as a war; it was presented as a humanitarian mission. And soldiers are not supposed to die in such circumstances. Even when the US government declared Mohammad Farah Aideed its enemy, and set out to hunt him down through the back alleys of Mogadishu, it did so using the language of police work. Aideed was a criminal, US officials kept saying. Casualties in war are understood to be inevitable, but casualties in police work are a different matter. There it is only criminals who are supposed to get hurt or, if necessary, killed, not the cops. The problem has not been some peculiar American aversion to military casualties. Rather, there has been a category mistake in the way such operations are presented to the public and, perhaps, even in the way they are conceived of by policy-makers. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that public pressure on Congress and the Clinton administration to withdraw US troops arises at the first moment an operation cannot be presented in simple moral terms or when the casualties or even the costs start to mount.
the emphasis, both in Bosnia and Rwanda, on tribunals and apprehending war criminals, has only further muddied the moral and political waters. It cements the conflation of war and crime. War against war crimes, which is how Kosovo was presented at the beginning of Operation Allied Force, must either be waged as the second world war was waged-that is, until unconditional surrender-or run the risk of seeming pointless when, as in most non-crusading wars, a deal is struck between the belligerents that leaves those who have previously been described as war criminals in power. The tensions of such a policy were apparent at the end of the Bosnian war when Slobodan Milosevic, who had been described by American officials, at least in private, as the architect of the catastrophe, was seen as the indispensable guarantor of the Dayton agreements. This pattern might be repeated in Kosovo, notwithstanding the public indictment of Milosevic for war crimes.
In our era, most conflicts are within states and have as their goal less the defeat of an adversary's forces on the battlefield, so much as the extermination or expulsion of populations. There are few wars which do not involve systematic violations of international humanitarian law, so thinking about war as crime is not only an understandable, but in many ways a rational response, to objective conditions.
And yet the emphasis on the Yugoslav and Rwandan ad hoc international tribunals and on the International Criminal Court (ICC), have created false hopes and false perceptions about what a human rights-based international order implies. It is all very well to talk about these laws, courts or imperatives, expressing the will of the "international community." In practice, however, the definition of this "community" is highly legalistic and consists of the states which sign various treaties and conventions and the activist non-governmental organisations which lobby them to do so. But a body of law that is the product of a treaty does not have the same authority as a body of law that is the result of long historical processes which involve parliaments, elections and popular debate. The ICC, as one of its defenders once conceded, is largely the concern of "hobbyists and specialists," who have constructed a legal system for a political and social system that is unlikely to exist in the foreseeable future. Presented as the product of some new global consensus, it is in fact the legal code of a world government.
But there is no world government. There is only world trade, and national governments. To say this is not simply to indulge in nostalgia for the Westphalian system or to deny that, in the west anyway, there has been a shift in consciousness towards believing that certain conduct by nations within their borders should not be tolerated whatever the current legal status of state sovereignty may be. Obviously, the power of nation-states to control their destiny is less today than it was 50 years ago. And in trade law, there has been a real ceding of sovereignty. But it is states which must still wage war, and only the state's inherent legitimacy can make it plausible both for young soldiers to kill and die, and for their fellow citizens to support or at least tolerate such a tragedy.
The problem with the human rights approach is less that it is wrong than that it is unsustainable in the absence of a world government, or, at least, of a UN system with far more money, autonomy and power than it is ever likely to be granted by its member states. A UN mercenary army organised along the lines proposed by Brian Urquhart might well have broken the back of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or the warlords in Somalia. And open-ended UN protectorates in these or similar places, backed up by military force and the mandate to use it, would theoretically have had a chance of restoring the broken societies over which they had taken control.
But leaving aside the question of whether such a move towards world government would be in humanity's best interest, no such option is available. The prospect, seemingly realistic in the late-1980s, that UN peacekeeping would become a central instrument of international peace and security has receded during the 1990s, with peacekeeping reduced to a more traditional role of post-conflict ceasefire monitoring and truce enforcement.
It is equally clear that the current ad hoc-ism is unsustainable. Kosovo has seen to that. The conflict there has revealed more than the fact that Nato was willing to bomb but not-at least not before preventing a second slaughter in the Balkans in one decade-to take the kind of military action which might have prevented the ethnic cleansing of most of the Kosovar population. In Pristina, before the Nato air war began, young Kosovars walked around wearing T-shirts with the Nike logo and their own gloss on the Nike slogan: "Nato," it read, "Just do it!" In a sense, this is what many constituencies within the human rights community had been saying as well. But neither the activists nor the Kosovars themselves imagined the kind of limited, hesitant, politically-hamstrung military campaign Nato would undertake. And yet this was the predictable, perhaps even the inevitable consequence of not defining that "it."
Was the province to be liberated by force? If so, was it to be turned into a Nato or an Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe protectorate? Or was it to be given its independence? These questions were never answered satisfactorily in Washington or in Brussels before the air campaign began. More gravely still, there is no evidence that plans for the Marshall Plan, which was clearly a sine qua non for regional stability even before the bombing started and the mass deportation began, had been worked out. The World Bank was barely consulted; the UN specialised agencies were caught flat-footed. And most western governments had to run to their parliaments just to get supplemental appropriations to pay for the war. Thus, on the political, economic and military levels, the west was improvising from the start.
But war, even war undertaken on human rights grounds, is not like jazz singing. Improvisation is fatal-as the Kosovars have learned. Just do it, indeed! A country which ran its central bank in this way would soon collapse. And yet it continues to be the implicit assumption of the Nato powers that they can confront the crisis of failed states by making it up as they go along. In Somalia, in Rwanda and in Congo, they chose to respond with disaster relief, which guaranteed that the political crises in those countries would continue, and also represented a terrible misuse of humanitarian aid. In Bosnia, the emphasis was on containing the crisis. In Algeria and Kurdistan, it has been either to ignore it or exploit it.
And yet in Kosovo (this almost happened in Bosnia), the west was finally hoist on the petard of its lip service to the categorical imperative of human rights. It was ashamed not to intervene, but it lacked the will to do so with coherence. Kosovo is ruined for a generation, whatever eventual deal is worked out, as Bosnia also has been ruined for a generation.
In the wake of Kosovo, this kind of geostrategic frivolity, this resolve to act out of moral paradigms that command the sympathy, but not yet the deep allegiance, of western public opinion-at least not to the extent that people are willing to die in order to see them upheld-will no longer do. To say this is not to suggest that there are obvious alternatives. The UN is incapable of playing the dual the role of succouring populations at risk while simultaneously acting like a colonial power and imposing some kind of order. The important third world countries seem to have neither the resources nor the ideological inclination to intervene even in their own regions, as Africa's failure to act in Rwanda in 1994 demonstrated.
The conclusion is inescapable. At the present time, only the west has both the power and, however intermittently, the readiness to act. And by the west, really one means the US. Of course, to say that the US could act effectively, if it chose to do so, as the world's policeman of last resort, is not the same thing as saying that it should. Those who argue, as George Kennan has done, that we overestimate ourselves when we believe we can right the wrongs of the world must be listened to seriously. So should the views of principled isolationists. And those on what remains of the left who insist that the result of such a broad licensing of American power will be a further entrenchment of US hegemony are also unquestionably correct.
But the implications of not doing anything are equally clear. Those who fear American power are-this is undeniable-condemning other people to death. Had the US armed forces not set up the air bridge to eastern Zaïre in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, hundreds of thousands of people would have perished rather than the tens of thousands who did die. This does not excuse the Clinton administration for failing to stop the genocide militarily; but it is a fact. Similar situations were found in Bosnia and even Somalia.
What is to be done? The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees cannot solve crises of such magnitude; these days, it is hard-pressed even to alleviate one without logistical help from Nato military forces. The humanitarian movement has even fewer means. And human rights activists, for all the valuable work they do in exposing violations of international law, are demanding a regime of intervention whose implications they have failed to think through.
Where does this leave us? One solution would be to revisit the mandatary system which was instituted after the Versailles Treaty. Its pitfalls are obvious. In practice, League of Nations mandates became thinly- disguised extensions of the old colonial empires, with trusteeships distributed more on strategic than on humanitarian grounds. But Woodrow Wilson's original idea, which was, as he put it, to take temporary control over certain territories in order "to build up in as short a time as possible... a political unit that can take charge of its own affairs," may be one way out of the current impasse. The unhappy experience of the UN in Cambodia suggests that an ad hoc imposition of a trusteeship is doomed to failure, if for no other reason than supervisory control is simply too diffuse and too subject to political pressure. Had the UN stayed in Cambodia for a generation, it might indeed have improved that unhappy country's prospects; by staying two years, it provided little more than a short respite. Haiti represents a similar failure to stay the course.
To insist on this point is not to bash the UN. The structure of the institution, above all the cross currents and conflicting interests which find their expression in the work of the Security Council, makes it the wrong organisation to administer a new trusteeship system. Regional organisations and great powers are far likelier to be able to devise a system of burden sharing. For all its faults (and the "imperialistic" interests involved), the Nigerian invasion of Sierra Leone has been a positive development. The problem was not that the Nigerians came; it was that once there, they had neither the will nor the money to follow up their military conquest with state reconstruction. Perhaps, if General Obasanjo really does represent a return to democracy in Nigeria, such efforts will begin.
Obviously, behind the scenes the Nato countries and, above all the US, would have to exercise some supervisory control over the trusteeships and underwrite efforts at nation-building. Funding would be politically controversial (most would have to come from the Bretton Woods institutions) and difficult to distribute wisely. But on balance, the costs would still be less than the astronomical figures which will be required to rebuild Kosovo, or, for that matter, were needed to deal with the humanitarian crisis in central Africa in the mid-1990s. Waste and mismanagement are facts of life. They should not become the impediments to actually dealing with the current disorder and tragedy in so much of the poor world.
It is likely that, were such a system to be put in place, the role of American power might diminish over the long term, although in the short run it would probably increase. For the most part, however, except in emergencies, or where the rapid dispatch of troops is required, other, mid-sized nations rather than the Nato powers could do the administration and policing. And a structure which involved this degree of burden-sharing between, small, medium and great powers might also serve useful purposes in other fields of international relations.
A mandatary system could take the insights of the human rights revolution into account without over-reaching itself; it could only be an improvement over the current system in which each crisis comes as a bolt from the blue; and it would not be constrained by the divisions which make any kind of serious action through the UN Security Council all but impossible.
Is this proposal tantamount to calling for a recolonisation of part of the world? Would such a system make the US even more powerful? Clearly it is, and clearly it would. But what are the alternatives? Kosovo shows how little stomach the US has for the kind of military action that its moral ambitions impel it to undertake. And there will be many more Kosovos. With the victory of capitalism well-nigh absolute, the choice is not between systems but about what kind of capitalist system we are going to have and what kind of world order that system requires. Our choice at the millennium seems to boil down to imperialism or barbarism. Half-measures of the type we have seen in various humanitarian interventions, and in Kosovo, represent the worst of both worlds. Better to grasp the nettle and accept that liberal imperialism may be the best we can do in these callous times.
Indeed, the real task for people who reject both Kissinger-realism and the utopian nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass deportation of the Kosovars than strengthen, however marginally, US hegemony, is to try to humanise this new imperial order. The alternative is neither liberation, nor the triumph of some global consensus of conscience, but, to paraphrase Che Guevara, one, two, three, many Kosovos.
