We need to rethink resilience

'Resilience’ has become a policy buzzword in recent years, apparently important to everything from mental heath to national security, unemployment to climate change. Last year an all-party parliamentary group even called for resilience to be taught in UK schools in order to promote social mobility. Yet as Frank Furedi has recently noted, ‘despite all the acclaim heaped on the concept of resilience it is far from evident what it actually means’. Resilience, he observes, is ‘a highly contested concept’.

David Chandler’s latest book, Resilience: The Governance of Complexity, suggests that part of the reason for this contested and confusing usage of the term is that the assumptions articulated through the concept of resilience have changed radically over the past decade or so. ‘A concept that started out as clearly distinguishing the subject and its inner strengths and capacities’, he argues, has now become ‘a concept which emphasises the interrelationship between subject and object’.

In its ‘classical’ usage, the idea of resilience emphasised the ability of individuals or communities to withstand the challenge of disasters or other tragic events. It rested on a conception of the human subject as robust and capable – a Robinson Crusoe figure who could draw on his own inner resources to bounce back from external shocks. In ‘post-classical’ terms, by contrast, resilience is not so much a property of autonomous individuals as of the systems or processes in which we are all understood to be embedded. A disaster or other unexpected event is seen as an opportunity for learning about those systems – a potentially ‘creative moment’ when ‘problems are brought into clear view’.

From this perspective, inculcating resilience means increasing our ability to reflect on our complex interconnections with the world and to become more adaptable. Discussing the lessons of Hurricane Katrina, for example, leading resilience policy advocates Brian Walker and David Salt argue in their 2006 book Resilience Thinking that local communities should have ‘embraced the processes of natural change rather than attempted to control them for short-term returns’, and should have been ‘given responsibility to learn to adapt to the changes happening around them’.

As suggested by the preference for adaptation rather than attempted control, the overall lesson continually drawn by resilience-thinking is that modern, liberal understandings of politics and governance are problematic and obsolete. Chandler’s central argument is that resilience-thinking is emerging as ‘the first post-liberal or postmodern episteme’; the first ‘coherent, positive, alternative to modernist frameworks of the subject and the world’. It is ‘positive’ in the sense that, instead of lamenting the loss of modernist understandings of politics, resilience approaches take their breakdown as ‘a positive gain; a realisation of a truth of the world, which we were somehow blind to before’.

This new ‘truth of the world’ is the ‘complexity’ referred to in the subtitle of Chandler’s book. Complexity theory and other, overlapping theoretical trends such as actor-network theory, new materialism and post-humanism, are increasingly influential across the humanities and social sciences. Complexity approaches are not making an epistemological claim, about our inability to know and predict patterns of cause and effect which are nevertheless understood to operate deterministically, but an ontological one: that the world itself consists of intersecting complex systems or processes in which we are embedded and which produce unpredictable effects and outcomes. The interactions of complex life are not simply chaotic or disordered, but neither are they knowable according to any linear cause-and-effect models. Rather, order is an emergent property of self-organising complex systems, and is knowable only after the fact.

Chandler dissects several examples of how such theoretical approaches are being mapped on to more practical questions by policymakers and advisers. Former Conservative Party adviser Dominic Cummings was at the centre of media controversy in 2013 when his draft briefing paper on education was leaked by the Guardian. Yet his advice – that both ‘established political philosophies’ and the ‘standard social-science model’ were now untenable as guides to governance, because they could not cope with systems which are ‘complex, nonlinear, and have properties that emerge from feedback between many interactions’ – is fast becoming the new conventional wisdom. At the opposite end of the (extremely narrow) UK policy spectrum, Institute for Public Policy Research writers Graeme Cooke and Rick Muir note that ‘social problems are situated within complex systems that are unsuited to mechanistic interventions. Rather than attempting to engineer outcomes through “command and control”, governments should focus on crafting the conditions for a variety of agents involved in a given problem to solve it themselves.’

To some, this kind of thinking might sound like just another version of neoliberalism: obliging individuals to fend for themselves, distrusting state planning and celebrating self-regulating markets. While there is some common ground, though, Chandler makes a convincing case that resilience-thinking is a new development, going beyond neoliberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek. Where neoliberalism counterposed market and state, resilience-thinking rejects both market and state rationalities; where neoliberalism still assumed the possibility of an external vantage point from which to intervene in complex systems, for resilience theory we are all embedded in a world of complexity.

Perhaps the most significant shift is that whereas for neoliberal thought, complexity presented a limit to universalist liberal reason and top-down planning, resilience-thinking sees complex life not as a barrier but as a means of governance. This shift was enabled, Chandler argues, by the ‘assimilation of critical sociological thought’, particularly as developed by the post-1968 left in France and Italy. In its rejection of the deterministic dogmas of official Marxism, the autonomist Left replaced hierarchical and linear understandings of power with an idea of power as non-linear, relational and ‘emanating from below’. For such post-Marxist thinkers – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri spring to mind – there is no need for party or organisation, which would only be a barrier to the spontaneous self-activity of emergent social movements. Frameworks of democratic representation are disparaged in favour of participatory, ‘everyday’ democracy as enabling governance ‘through’, rather than ‘over’, society.

The assimilation of ‘critical’ perspectives leaves us in a bizarre situation where ‘critique…becomes the dominant discourse of power’. As Chandler explains, critique is the ‘mode of understanding’ of resilience-thinking: ‘it is critical of states (all forms of state power are seen to be a barrier to accessing the reality of complex life); it is critical of the market (its reductionist focus on profit and exclusion of “externalities”…); it is critical of universal, fixed and reductionist forms of thought (real complex life is fluid and ever changing).’ In such circumstances it is not enough simply to restate a modernist outlook, which is apt to appear quaint and nostalgic today. Instead, developing a genuinely critical response has to begin by engaging with the emerging new common sense of resilience-thinking, and by understanding how former assumptions about power and governance are being challenged and transformed today. That is Chandler’s significant achievement in this book.

Published today in October's Spiked Review of Books.

Films & Climate Change

'Bridging the Political Deficit: Loss, Morality, and Agency in Films Addressing Climate Change', coauthored with Hugh Ortega Breton is now available in an 'online first' version.

It's coming out in Communication, Culture & Critique in the autumn.

The article examines the emotional rhetorical strategies of 3 films—The Day After Tomorrow (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and The Age of Stupid (2009)—that attempt to create engagements with the 'post-political' problem of climate change. In all three films the experience of personal loss, the potential for future loss, and the emotions associated with loss are fundamental to affective engagement. The emotional loading of representations of environmental problems derives partly from concerns about human political agency and subjectivity. It is not so much that emotional or moral appeals are simply added on in order to bolster a political message, but rather that autobiographical narratives of loss and morality occupy the space once dominated by modernist forms of politics.

The End of Journalism Version 2.0

A new edition of this collection is out this month, with a chapter on 'Objectivity, Objectification and the End of Journalism' by Andrew Calcutt and me.

Academic Freedom

At the Palace of Westminster this evening, for a spiked debate on 'Academic Freedom in Illiberal Times'.

UPDATE: there's a write up of the debate in this week's Times Higher.

UPDATE 2: you can listen to an audio recording of the debate here (I make a brief appearance asking a question at about 56:50).

Battle of Ideas

At the Battle of Ideas this weekend -- this session was on 'Leveson One Year On', with (from left to right) Tim Luckhurst, Patrick Hayes, Viv Regan, George Brock and Roger Graef.

A Right to Offend

11am, Monday 21 October
Room B360
London South Bank University
Borough Road Building
103 Borough Road
London SE1

'Without the right to offend, free speech is a meaningless concept', argues Professor Brian Winston.

In recent years there have been a series of events -- from the Satanic Verses fatwa to the 'Hackgate' scandal -- that have brought into question the concept and practice of free expression. 

A Right to Offend provides an account of the current state of freedom of expression in the Western world, offering a deeper understanding of the increasingly threatening environment in which free speech operates and is defended, as well as how it informs and is central to journalism practice and media freedom more generally.

Brian Winston is Professor of Communications and holder of the Lincoln Chair at the University of Lincoln. A prize-winning documentary-maker, he was the founding chair of the British Association of Film, Television and Media Studies, and the founding director of the Glasgow University Media Group. Brian is a former governor of the BFI, and sits on the editorial board of the British Journalism Review. His numerous books focus mainly on documentary film, media technology, and freedom of expression.

This event is free and open to all, but booking is essential: please email cmcr@lsbu.ac.uk if you'd like to come.

The Wide Angle: Eco films & Emotionalism

My second appearance on The Wide Angle -- and another interesting conversation.

The Wide Angle: Comedy & the war on terror

I enjoyed taking part in this programme -- the first of a new series from WORLDbytes.

There Is No Such Thing As A Free Press

... And We Need One More Than Ever


Mick Hume

1pm, Wednesday 28 November

Centre for Media & Culture Research
London South Bank University
Room K305, Keyworth Building
Keyworth Street SE1

Are today’s media too free?  Do we need a new system of regulation and control to tame the tabloids? With the Leveson Inquiry into the ‘culture, practices and ethics’ of the press due to report this month, Mick Hume questions many of the assumptions underlying the current discussion of media freedom.

Mick Hume is editor-at-large of the online magazine spiked.  Formerly a columnist for The Times and editor of LM magazine (which he launched, originally as Living Marxism, in 1988) until it was forced to close in 2000 following a libel suit, Hume is also the author of Whose War Is It Anyway? (1997) and Televictims (1998).

His latest book, There Is No Such Thing As A Free Press ... And We Need One More Than Ever has been described as ‘splendidly non-conformist’ (The Guardian), ‘a rousing defence of free speech’ (The Sun), and ‘a masterclass in the writing of polemic’ (The Times) – and also as ‘shameless anti-Leveson propaganda’ (by Professor Brian Cathcart, co-founder of the Hacked Off campaign).

Join us for what promises to be a lively debate on the future of journalism post-Leveson.  This event is free and open to all, but registration is required: please email cmcr@lsbu.ac.uk if you’d like to come.

The New Culture Wars

One of the highlights of this year's Battle of Ideas festival was this session on 'The New Culture Wars', with (left to right) John Waters, Wendy Kaminer, Claire Fox, Frank Furedi and John Haldane.

Where did all the goodies and baddies go?

Published on spiked today...

One of the oddest aspects of the US government’s reaction to 9/11 was its almost immediate decision to consult Hollywood. From October to December 2001, the Bush administration initiated a series of meetings between Washington officials – most notably senior adviser Karl Rove – and entertainment industry executives and creatives, with the aim of forming an ‘arts and entertainment taskforce’.

According to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, the administration would ‘share with the entertainment community the themes that are being communicated here and abroad: tolerance, courage, patriotism’. Although Rove insisted that the goal was not to produce propaganda, he reportedly ‘invoked the industry’s role in the patriotic ardor of World War II’, and outlined a number of messages that entertainment products should try to convey, including: ‘Americans should support US troops and their families’, and ‘The war is a war against evil’.

The plan for an ‘arts and entertainment taskforce’ is reminiscent of the 2004 comedy Team America: World Police, directed by South Park’s Trey Parker, in which the elite ‘Team America’ counterterrorism unit is obsessed with actors and acting. The unit’s leader tells the main character, Gary, for example: ‘The team went on a mission without you, and without an actor they were like pigs to the slaughter.’ Gary’s thespianism ultimately saves the day, naturally, as the team defeats not only the terrorists and their state sponsors, but also armed antiwar celebrities who are equally convinced of the strategic importance of their ‘acting skills’.

Yet while there was something faintly ridiculous about the Bush administration’s concern with the world of entertainment in the wake of 9/11, this apparently trivial aspect of the ‘war on terror’ decade reveals something about the politics of the era.

A ‘void in meaning’

One reason for the official overtures to Hollywood was that, as Frank Furedi has argued, the job of combating terrorism was seen not as a matter of sober threat-assessment and patient information-gathering, but as a task of the imagination. If counterterrorism is understood in terms of ‘imagining evil’ and dreaming up nightmare scenarios, then seeking help from movie-makers would seem to make sense (1).

Just as important, though, was the fact that political leaders seemed to lack an adequate vocabulary through which to make sense of the attacks. As international relations scholar Jack Holland argues, an elite ‘failure to narrate’ – to place the attacks in a meaningful context and explain their significance – created a ‘void in meaning’ that exacerbated the disorienting impact of the disaster. Into this void stepped film and TV drama, not so much following an official propaganda line as joining the search for a meaningful response. Holland’s example is The West Wing, which aired a special episode on 3 October 2001 explicitly teaching the audience how to understand and respond to terrorism – in part by equating ‘Islamic extremists’ with the Ku Klux Klan and comparing the Taliban with the Nazis.

Critics have noted how another popular TV drama, 24, seemed to strike a chord with both political leaders and military personnel, including those involved in the interrogation of ‘enemy combatants’ at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre. The show’s protagonist – torture-happy counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer – figured in classroom discussions, think-tank deliberations and even election debates. As terrorism analyst Brigitte Nacos has pointed out, when New York police commissioner Ray Kelly announced the arrest of the would-be Times Square bomber in 2010 he couldn’t resist comparing himself with Bauer.

These shows tended to take a patriotic stance, but they hardly needed any prompts from the Bush administration to do so: in 24’s first season, starting in November 2001, it was the 1999 Kosovo conflict that provided the topical villains for Bauer to vanquish; while The West Wing had closely mirrored official foreign-policy positions well before 9/11. In turning to the ‘entertainment community’, US leaders were concerned less with imposing an official doctrine than with drawing on the imaginative resources of film- and programme-makers to help construct a meaningful narrative about 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’.

‘Spiritual failure’

By and large, however, Hollywood cinema did not come up with heroic tales to boost morale at home and improve America’s image abroad. In 2008, by which time several films dealing with the ‘war on terror’, and particularly Iraq, had been released, the New York Times reported that although the global popularity of US entertainment was greater than ever, America’s image in other countries had actually worsened since 2001. If Hollywood movies had any influence on those perceptions, it was surely a negative one.

Far from engaging in myth-making, recent war films have often tended to be highly self-conscious about misleading media images of war, most pointedly in Brian de Palma’s Redacted, which is made up of a patchwork of different perspectives. Hollywood has offered us images of torture and atrocity (as in Rendition or Redacted), plotlines focusing on US troops committing psychotic violence against civilians and fellow soldiers (In the Valley of Elah), and dark conspiracy stories in which the US government colludes in crime, violence and corruption (Syriana, Green Zone). As one critic puts it, such films ‘overwhelmingly focus on aspects of American failure – military, political, diplomatic and also spiritual failure’.

US audiences mostly stayed away from Hollywood’s liberal antiwar polemics. Sitting through Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, one of the few films to deal with the Afghan conflict, it is not difficult to see why. The film adopts a hectoring, didactic tone (personified in the Vietnam-era university professor played by Redford), casting the younger generation (his students) either as naive victims of US policy or as politically apathetic careerists.

Us and them

Filmmakers have had some difficulty in constructing compelling pro- or antiwar narratives. One problem has been the depiction of baddies. The first of Rove’s bullet-point messages to the industry after 9/11 was that ‘the war is against terrorism, not Islam’ – a point also highlighted in the internal editorial guidelines issued by the BBC in September 2001. Indeed, critics have noted that the depiction of Arabs and Muslims in US cinema has been more nuanced and even-handed since 9/11 (2).

Yet saying who the enemy was not proved to be much easier than saying exactly who the enemy was – especially when concerns about offending or inflaming Muslim opinion coexisted with fears of ‘homegrown’ Islamist terrorists. President George W Bush’s line, that the target was ‘evildoers’, was too simplistic even for an industry used to dealing in black-and-white tales of good vs evil: films like Traitor sought instead to understand the motivations and grievances of suicide bombers. In the process, of course, the baddies have often turned out to include CIA agents, oil companies, and unscrupulous and/or inept Western politicians.

The sense of ‘spiritual failure’ has meant that an even greater problem than how to portray the enemy other has been the question of how to depict the Western self. One of the more commercially successful Iraq war films, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, offers an image of heroism of sorts, but only in so far as the protagonist (a bomb-disposal expert) is a humanitarian, concerned with saving lives rather than waging war. Even then, the ‘hero’ is someone so psychologically damaged that he recklessly endangers his men and cannot return to normal civilian life.

Perhaps the most common overall theme in Hollywood’s version of contemporary war is that we are all victims – whether Muslims driven to desperate extremism by Western foreign policy, civilians caught up in random acts of violence, coalition soldiers suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, or TV audiences kept in ignorance by mendacious media. In highlighting trauma, vulnerability and victimhood, Hollywood has captured the spirit of the age, albeit in dispiriting fashion. No doubt that is not quite what US officials hoped for back in 2001, but neither does it offer any sort of inspiration to opponents of war.

(1) See Invitation to Terror: The Expanding Empire of the Unknown, by Frank Furedi, Continuum, 2007

(2) p38, Guilty: Hollywood’s verdict on Arabs after 9/11, by Jack Shaheen, Interlink Books, 2008

Porto

Just back from Portugal, where I was speaking at a conference on 'Selling Politics and War'.

Emotional Governance? No Thanks!

My review of Barry Richards's book Emotional Governance is published in the current issue of Media, War and Conflict. You can read it - and the ensuing exchange between me and Richards - here (pdf - free access until 30 April 2010).

The search for green meaning

For our confused and cut-off leaders, Copenhagen offered a chance to magic up some historic momentum

Politicians have tried to spin the Copenhagen summit into a good news story, while campaigners have decried the lack of a legally binding agreement. The apparent clash – dramatised in the physical blows between protesters and the Danish riot police – masks the fact that very little separated the stone-throwing crusties in the streets from the urbane suits inside Copenhagen’s Bella Centre.

In TV interviews at the end of the summit, for example, one commentator complained that there was ‘no agreement on a legally binding treaty’, while another interviewee vowed to ‘campaign around the world… for the legally binding treaty that is the obvious next stage from this’. There was little difference in the two reactions – though the first comment was made by Greenpeace UK director, John Sauven, who described Copenhagen as a ‘crime scene’ (1), while the second came from British prime minister Gordon Brown, who preferred to emphasise the progress that had been made.

‘I keep saying, I will lead a campaign so that we can have a legally-binding treaty following this’, promised Brown, and indeed he did keep saying it – in one five-minute interview he described himself no fewer than five times as ‘campaigning’ on the issue of climate change (2). Similarly, in the run-up to the summit, David Miliband toured European foreign ministries ‘using powerful climate change imagery to concentrate official minds’, as if he were an NGO activist rather than Britain’s foreign secretary (3). While the activists and campaigners are apt to think of themselves as taking a principled stand and putting pressure on sell-out politicians, the fact of the matter is that political leaders are delighted by the authority such ‘pressure’ bestows on them. If such pressure is not forthcoming, they go out of their way to encourage and, if necessary, simulate it.

Last month the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt reported on the ‘Power Shift’ campaign’s US convention, which attracted 12,000 climate activists from all over America. ‘Clearly this is a significant grassroots protest movement’, he observed, but it is also one ‘supported by the president of the United States himself’. The convention was addressed by senior administration personnel, and given advice on campaign tactics by President Bill Clinton’s former chief-of-staff. Rowlatt remarked that ‘the administration is wooing this army of activists to help push their policies through Congress’ (4).

Yet the campaigners are more than just a stage army for particular policies. They provide a vocabulary through which the elite can articulate a sense of purpose and meaning which is otherwise signally absent from today’s narrow and trivial political discourse.

President Barack Obama, for example, claimed to have ‘renewed American leadership’ at Copenhagen. Hailing the accord that he negotiated as a ‘meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough’, he said the summit marked ‘the beginning of a new era of international action’. In case anyone had missed the contrast with his unpopular predecessor, Obama noted pointedly that ‘the time has come for us to get off the sidelines’, since this was ‘an issue that demands our leadership’ (5). In advance of the summit, the language was even more grandiose, as leaders imagined how they would ‘change the course of history’ by negotiating a reduction in carbon emissions (6).

Seizing on climate change as an issue around which they can create the appearance of purposeful activity, it is political elites who are the most zealous campaigners, asking us to join up and pledge our support for their efforts to save the planet. Hence, in the months before the summit the British government attempted to re-present itself as some sort of activist group, launching the ‘Act on Copenhagen’ campaign which urged: ‘Pledge your support for an ambitious global deal here!’ because ‘We need your backing to help us negotiate’ (7).

Behaving like its own pressure group, the government urges us to urge them to act. At the same time, it also berates us for our apathy. Worrying that ‘there isn’t yet that feeling of urgency and drive and animation about the Copenhagen conference’, for example, David Miliband complained that, for the citizenry he wanted to be calling on him to act, ‘the penny hasn’t dropped that this climate change challenge is real and is happening now’ (8).

Miliband was speaking at the launch in October of the Science Museum’s ‘Prove it!’ exhibition – another ersatz ‘campaign’, this time inviting people to sign up to the statement: ‘I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.’ (9) Yet according to the museum’s director, the exhibition was created in direct response to a briefing from the Department of Energy and Climate Change, when ‘we realised that public interest had flattened out and yet here we were approaching the most historic negotiations in human history’ (10). In other words, it was official concern about a lack of public interest which produced a campaign in which the public would put pressure on officials.

Such is the bizarre relationship between the elite and the electorate today: they urge us to be less apathetic and to put pressure on them. The video produced by the Danish Foreign Ministry for the opening of the summit, depicting children of the world begging the delegates to ‘help the world’, provided a telling insight into the official mindset (11). What appears, at first glance, to be a campaigning film putting pressure on world leaders is really an elite wish-fulfilment fantasy, in which child-citizens across the globe put their faith in parent-politicians engaged in an heroic, planet-saving mission. Climate activists may think they are critics of officialdom, but they are simply fuelling the fantasy.

It seems unlikely that, in the long run, the elite’s search for meaning in green politics will be successful. The vision it offers – of caution and constraint, low ambition and no progress – is a negative, dystopian one which may evoke fear and conformity, but which will never inspire. It is the ideology of a demoralised society, for which, as one climate campaigner puts it, ‘the age of heroism is over’ (12). The elite will no doubt continue to campaign and cajole us about the climate, but they do so precisely because of their inability to engage people in any more positive, forward-looking project.

(1) Key powers reach compromise at climate summit, BBC News, 19 December 2009

(2) Gordon Brown hails climate change summit ‘progress’, BBC News, 18 December 2009

(3) David Miliband sets out to shock on global warming tour, Guardian, 7 September 2009

(4) Can Obama Save the Planet?, 25 November 2009, BBC2. Watch the clip on YouTube here

(5) Obama’s closing statement in full, BBC News, 19 December 2009

(6) See The cheap thrill of global warming, by Tim Black

(7) See the Act On Copenhagen website here

(8) Foreign Secretary David Miliband accuses public of climate change apathy, The Times (London), 23 October 2009

(9) See the Science Museum Prove It website here

(10) Foreign Secretary David Miliband accuses public of climate change apathy, The Times (London), 23 October 2009

(11) Watch it on YouTube here

(12) This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity, Guardian, 14 December 2009

Published today, 21 December 2009, at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/debates/copenhagen_article/7863/

The Politics of Recognition

‘Unjustified and unacceptable’. That is how British Foreign Secretary David Miliband describes Russian recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia, he insists, must ‘abide by international law as the basis for resolving this crisis’.(1) Similarly, President George W. Bush denounces recognition as ‘irresponsible’, urging Russia to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and to respect Georgia’s ‘internationally recognised borders’.(2)

Yet Russia is closely following rules made in the West.

Just a few months ago, there was a situation that was almost an exact mirror image of the present. In February, the US and Britain were among the first to recognise the formal independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo, having brought about its de facto independence from Belgrade by military force in 1999. Earlier this year, it was the Russians, together with China and India, who urged respect for ‘the framework of international law’ and condemned Kosovo’s declaration of independence as contravening the UN Security Council’s resolution on the status of the province.(3)

Back then, NATO responded to these protests by arguing that the situation in Kosovo was exceptional because of the atrocities committed by the previous Serbian regime in 1999. Taking a leaf out of NATO’s book, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev now accuses the Georgian government of committing ‘genocide’ against South Ossetian separatists. That might stretch credibility, but then again, so did NATO’s accusations of genocide in Kosovo. Post-war forensic investigations failed to corroborate NATO’s claims that 10,000 or 100,000 or even more had been killed by Serbian forces. The true figure appears to have been closer to 5,000 – a number which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, nor between ethnic Albanians and Serbs.(4)

Today, media reports are full of outrage at the suffering caused by Russia’s military offensive in Georgia. Yet NATO’s Kosovo campaign was far more destructive, and just as illegal. The 78-day war, conducted without UN authorisation, hit civilian and ‘dual-use’ targets such as factories, petrochemical plants, power stations and television facilities. NATO bombing caused significant civilian casualties, even among the ethnic Albanians it was supposed to protect, and included the use of indiscriminate munitions such as cluster bombs.

Afterwards, NATO governments pursued a policy of regime change in Serbia itself, and they continue to exert pressure on the country’s internal politics, using the stick of international war crimes trials and the carrot of future EU membership. Such is the West’s ‘respect’ for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of weaker states.

Indeed, for many years now the leading NATO powers have made a virtue of violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity that they suddenly seem so keen to defend in Georgia. At the end of the 1991 Gulf War the US-led coalition imposed ‘safe havens’ and ‘no-fly zones’ to protect the Kurds and other minorities, forcibly taking part of Iraq’s territory and airspace out of its control. These special zones provided the pretext for repeated Anglo-American bombing of Iraq throughout the 1990s. We know how that story ended, and it was not with respect for Iraqi sovereignty.

The conventional wisdom of the 1990s was that a ‘right to intervene’ took precedence over the previously established principles of sovereign equality and non-interference in a state’s internal affairs. The politics of recognition – deciding on which states were legitimate and where international borders would be drawn – was central to the development of this new doctrine. The rules of the game were established in the Balkans in the early 1990s, when Western governments took it upon themselves to decide which internal administrative boundaries would form the borders of new states, and which claims to sovereignty were illegitimate.

A number of internal economic and political developments created a tendency toward fragmentation, insecurity and the rise of nationalist politics in Yugoslavia in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the factor which tipped a volatile situation into outright civil war was Western support for secession and recognition of various republics. As US analyst Susan Woodward puts it, ‘Western intervention…provided the irreversible turning point in [the] escalation toward…war.’(5) In both Croatia and Bosnia, although recognition was presented as a measure to prevent war, in fact it made conflict much more likely, since the status of minorities had not been settled prior to independence. Indeed, it was widely predicted at the time that war was the most likely outcome of precipitate recognition.

This destructive policy was driven by a narcissistic desire to show that the West still ‘meant’ something. The US and European governments vied with each other to demonstrate their ‘ethical’ credentials, each attempting to assert its authority in the fluid post-Cold War international order. European, particularly German and Austrian, backing of Slovenian and Croatian claims to independence in 1991, and then US-led recognition of Bosnia the following year, meant that the leaders of these republics had little incentive to pursue a negotiated settlement with the federal Yugoslav state. By lending their backing to the secessionists, the meddling Western powers ensured the violent destruction of one state and the creation of new entities riven by internal divisions. If anyone has the right to lecture Russia about its ‘irresponsible’ recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, it is surely not NATO governments.

Today, all sides are playing a cynical game in the Caucasus. No doubt Russian leaders are exploiting the crisis to shore up their own domestic support and assert their regional authority. But at least Russia does have a legitimate claim to be defending its interests. As NATO pushes east, holding out the prospect of Georgian and Ukrainian membership, Russia is bound to feel threatened and to react. Western governments have no such rationale for their actions, either in the Caucasus now or in the Balkans in the 1990s. Now, as then, Western governments are drunk on their own rhetoric.

(1) UK urges Russia to 'abide by law’, BBC News, 26 August 2008

(2) West condemns Russia over Georgia, BBC News, 26 August 2008

(3) George Friedman, Georgia and Kosovo: A Single Intertwined Crisis, Stratfor, 25 August 2008

(4) UNMIK Office of Missing Persons and Forensics, Press Release, 3 February 2003

(5) Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1995, p198.

Published today, 28 August 2008, at: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5658/

An iron fist in a velvet glove

Ever since Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster conceived of Superman as a counter to the Nazi Übermensch in the 1930s, superheroes have always had an ideological meaning. The most recent comic-book hero to hit the big screen, however, seems to embody the search for meaning in contemporary US foreign policy.

Iron Man, the latest Marvel comic to be turned into a blockbuster, reworks a theme previously explored in the Spider-Man series – that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. The idea echoes an influential strand of thought about how American military muscle ought to be used in the post-Cold War era of ‘ethical’ foreign policy. This time, however, it is given added piquancy by the film’s overt military context: Iron Man does battle, not with a Green Goblin or a Doctor Octopus, but with terrorists in a cave in Afghanistan.

Our hero, Tony Stark (played with panache by Robert Downey Jr), is an arms manufacturer whose company supplies the Pentagon with high-tech weapons for use in the war on terror. If that strikes you as an unlikely hero-figure, you’d be right: at the beginning of the film Stark personifies all that liberals love to hate about macho America. He is brash, arrogant, and thoroughly irresponsible. When he wins an award, he doesn’t bother to turn up for the ceremony. When a female reporter confronts him about the ethics of the arms industry, he beds her and then dumps her the next day.

Personal charm and fabulous wealth allow him to get away with such bad behaviour most of the time. Stark’s sole buddy, US Air Force Colonel James ‘Rhodey’ Rhodes (Terrence Howard), is the only one who confronts him about his fecklessness. As the two travel to Afghanistan to demonstrate Stark Industries’ new missile system, Rhodey urges him to mend his ways. But as they prepare to leave it is obvious that Stark won’t listen: he dismissively waves Rhodey away, telling him to ride in the ‘hum-drum-vee’ not the ‘fun-vee’.

As in his personal life, so in his business. Stark’s military philosophy, which he traces back to his father’s work on the Manhattan Project, might be described as pre-emptive deterrence: make a really big weapon, use it once, and, he assures the top brass, the bad guys won’t dare to come out of their caves. The flaw in this logic is brought home to him in Afghanistan when he realises that terrorists have somehow gained access to his missiles, using them to attack the Humvee convoy in which he is travelling.

The terrorists take him captive and make an Iraq-style hostage video – but Stark manages to build a prototype Iron Man suit that enables him to escape. Equally importantly, while he is a prisoner Stark has a moment of moral revelation. He sees that his hedonistic lifestyle has been devoid of meaning and that his patriotic business dealings have had unintended consequences. On his return to the US, he announces that Stark Industries will cease manufacturing weapons while he tries to work out a more ‘responsible’ direction for the company.

When an incredulous Rhodey derisively asks Stark if he has turned ‘humanitarian’, Stark has no answer. But in secret he is working on a new project, redesigning and upgrading the Iron Man suit. Once perfected, this allows Stark to answer the question with deeds: as Iron Man he returns to Afghanistan, locates the terrorists’ HQ, and blows up their stockpile of Stark Industries WMD. He also manages to prevent a Srebrenica-style massacre when he comes across a village where, with evidently sinister intent, the terrorists are separating out the men from the women and children. Iron Man successfully avoids causing any collateral damage and takes out the bad guys while saving the civilians they are trying to use as human shields. A one-man ‘revolution in military affairs’, Iron Man is the humanitarian-military fantasy – of precision weaponry in the service of ‘ethical’ objectives – come true.

The only problem is the baddies. The terrorists belong to an al-Qaeda-ish group called The Ten Rings. As an organisation, The Ten Rings is even less plausible than Stark’s apparent ability to design and manufacture a miniaturised power reactor in a cave, using scrap metal, while under constant CCTV surveillance. These ‘foreign fighters’ include Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, Russian and Hungarian speakers with no discernible motivation in common aside from a cartoonish desire for world domination. In a sense, however, this implausibility is one of the film’s more realistic touches.

Without wishing to give the plot away entirely, it transpires that the terrorists are mere stooges and that the real villain of the piece is US corporate greed. This is realistic, not, of course, because the wacky 9/11 conspiracy theories are true, but because the conflict the film dramatises is a real one: it is essentially the US elite at war with itself. Just like in real life, there is no plausible set of baddies against whom to practice hi-tech humanitarian militarism. From Saddam to Milošević and back again, hate-figures have generally had to be puffed up in the media like pantomime villains. In the absence of the Soviet threat, the US elite has spent the best part of two decades struggling, like Tony Stark, to find a ‘meaningful’ direction for post-Cold War foreign policy.

The point of ethical interventionism, which Iron Man tries to rehabilitate after the debacle of Iraq, was always to make Western societies feel better about themselves. As a feel-good action movie, Iron Man does the job as well as it possibly could under the circumstances, helped by super-cool special effects and an enjoyable will-they-won’t-they relationship between Stark and his prim personal assistant, Miss ‘Pepper’ Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow).

In the comics, Iron Man’s arch-enemy was Mandarin – a super-villain of Chinese descent who, surely not coincidentally, wore ten rings. Assuming that the search for plausible baddies will continue, it will be interesting to see what they come up with for the sequel.

Iron Man (dir. Jon Favreau, Marvel Studios) is on general release.

Published today, Monday 12 May 2008, at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5132/

How the ’68ers became warmongers

From their days as denim-wearing radicals manning the barricades to politicians in positions of power, Bernard Kouchner and Joschka Fischer have been fighting fantasy battles against fantasy fascism.

The political evolution of the 1968 generation is often understood in terms of the journey that some older people take pleasure in predicting for the young: that from naive idealism to the realism of maturity.

In the case of leading ’68ers who have gone on to wield considerable influence – notably Joschka Fischer, foreign minister of Germany from 1998 to 2005, and Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister since 2007 – that journey also tends to raise a question: have political principles become compromised in walking the corridors of power instead of marching through the streets? These two men emerge as the key figures in Power and the Idealists, Paul Berman’s intellectual biography of the 1968 generation; Berman worries away at the question throughout.

It is posed particularly sharply by the divisions among former ’68ers over Iraq, when Kouchner and Fischer appeared to be on opposite sides. For Berman, wishing to rescue liberal interventionism from the wreckage of the 2003 invasion, it is supporters of the war like Kouchner who have remained ‘steadfast’ in their adherence to the spirit of 1968. Opponents such as Fischer are seen as having betrayed their former radicalism and grown too close to the establishment.

Famously, Fischer very publicly rejected US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s arguments for war with Iraq, telling him emphatically: ‘Sorry, I am not convinced.’ For Paul Hockenos, in Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic, this was a ‘symbolic’ moment which dramatised how the influence of the ’68ers had ‘contributed decisively to Germany’s remarkable transformation… into a healthy, democratic country’. Weaving together a biography of Fischer with an ‘alternative history’ of postwar Germany, Hockenos argues that while the ’68ers certainly changed as they grew older, in their ‘long march through the institutions’ they also changed the world around them, creating ‘a Germany that reflected the 1960s cultural revolution’.

Both Berman and Hockenos tend to romanticise 1960s radicalism and, in different ways, seek to carry its legacy forwards into the present. A critical appraisal of the careers of Kouchner and Fischer, however, suggests that their ‘radicalism’ has nothing to offer – not so much because they have compromised their principles, but because their politics were flawed to begin with.

Les Résistants

In the story of the 1968 generation as told by both these authors, the Second World War is even more important than opposition to Vietnam as a formative influence. Hockenos suggests that it was through confronting the Nazi past that the students of the 1960s defined their own political stance and, ultimately, reshaped contemporary German democracy. Questioning the values of their parents, the postwar generation asked themselves whether they would have been collaborators or resisters.

‘Vietnam is Auschwitz’, said the German anti-war activists. Hockenos presents this as a peculiarity of German politics, but Berman sees it as a much wider phenomenon. Inspired by Kouchner, the French ‘New Philosopher’ André Glucksmann, for example, declared himself an enemy of both ‘totalitarianism’ and famine: ‘[T]o all extreme dictatorships and catastrophes he attached a single name: Auschwitz.’ Indeed, in Berman’s telling, the entire student movement of the 1960s was at root motivated by a fear that Nazism had not been defeated. One may doubt whether that is really true, but it does seem to capture something about the politics of leading figures such as Kouchner.

Viewing everything through the filter of the Holocaust hardly makes for clarity about the present. Instead, as discussed below, it has led time and again to moralistic posturing in support of dubious causes. Part of the fascination with the Nazi era was that, as Berman notes, the 1960s students were trying to live up to the generation who had fought the historic anti-fascist battles of the 1930s and 40s. Compared with the wartime résistant generation, the student radicals suspected that they might be ‘the generation of the second-rate… résistants with nothing to resist’.

Berman is right that many ’68ers were on the lookout for a grand cause to equal that of wartime anti-fascism, but what he misses is that in their rush to get to the barricades many were also looking for a way to avoid the difficult business of politics. Thinking that the workers had been seduced by the consumerism of the postwar economic boom, many young radicals doubted that the romance of revolution was close at hand.

There were, to be sure, sporadic attempts to ‘go to the factories’. Fischer worked on the Opel assembly line for a time as part of one such exercise undertaken by his group Revolutionary Struggle. The organisation’s anarchist politics made little headway and the radicals came away complaining bitterly of ‘workers who absolutely must have a colour TV, the new car or bedroom’. Alternatives to the slog of building support and winning people over seemed far more attractive.

One such alternative was to look for a ready-made revolutionary vanguard in the national liberation struggles of the Third World. If one could somehow attach oneself to a movement elsewhere, its moral authority might rub off. This was the route taken by Kouchner in September 1968, less than six months after the squandered promise of the May événements, when he signed up as a Red Cross doctor in the Nigerian civil war.

Doctor to the World

In at least two key respects, Kouchner’s stint in Nigeria set the pattern for much of his subsequent career. Firstly, it afforded him exactly the opportunity he was looking for to replay the anti-fascist struggle with himself in the lead role. The Nigerian government, he thought, was committing genocide against the predominantly Ibo population of Biafra, a province which had declared independence in 1967, by imposing a blockade which caused widespread and appalling famine. Kouchner felt compelled to speak out against the ‘genocide by starvation’, but was prevented from doing so by the Red Cross’s traditional neutrality. To Kouchner, it seemed like a sinister echo of the organisation’s failure to expose the Nazi death camps. ‘By keeping silent’, he later recalled, ‘we doctors were accomplices in the systematic massacre of a population.’ (1)

Indeed, he could not keep silent: Kouchner established a Committee Against Genocide in Biafra to campaign on the issue. Yet while there was certainly terrible suffering in the region, there was no genocide. This should have been clear at the time, since there were seven million Ibo people living ‘without persecution in government-held regions’ (2). It looked like a genocide to Kouchner and other activists because they wanted it to. They fantasised that they were not stuck in the midst of a dirty civil war but rather were standing on the stage of History. This was their new anti-fascist struggle, to match the historic period that their parents lived through.

Kouchner repeated the performance in 1993, when he thought he had discovered more new Nazis committing genocide, this time in Bosnia. Again he felt compelled to speak out: his Doctors of the World organisation proclaimed that it could not ‘remain silent’ in the face of ‘mass executions’, and so it ran a $2million advertising campaign to publicise the Serbian concentration camps. One poster set photographs of Hitler and Serbian President Slobodan Milošević side by side, while another juxtaposed an image of a watchtower from Auschwitz with a contemporary picture of Bosnian Muslims being held in a detention camp.

Again Kouchner was seeing what he wanted to see. After the war, when Kouchner interviewed Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović, the topic of the camps came up again. ‘They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?’ asked Kouchner. ‘Yes’, admitted Izetbegović, offering the excuse that ‘I thought that my revelations [about the camps] could precipitate bombings’ (3). One wonders what Kouchner’s excuse might be.

The second notable feature of Kouchner’s experience in Biafra was that, while he posed as a lone rebel against authority, he was actually facilitating the exercise of political authority and military force by powerful Western states. His impatience with the Red Cross’s respect for Nigerian sovereignty led him to resign from the organisation and set up his own ‘Doctors Without Borders’ agency, a move which seemed rebellious, but which was perfectly in tune with French government policy. France had from the start covertly aided the rebels against the British-backed Nigerian regime, and had publicly announced its support for Biafran secession in July 1968 – before Kouchner left Paris (4).

Kouchner’s idea that humanitarian workers should be able to operate ‘without borders’ really came into its own after the end of the Cold War when, for a Western elite suddenly deprived of its enemy, humanitarian intervention seemed to offer a new sense of mission and purpose. As Richard Holbrooke observes in his preface to the 2007 edition of Berman’s Power and the Idealists: ‘Kouchner played an immense role in shaping a new view of intervention in the internal affairs of other nations.’ He should know: as a leading US diplomat, Holbrooke put Kouchnerism into action, calling for ‘bombs for peace’ against the Bosnian Serbs, presiding over the 1995 Dayton Accords which made Bosnia an international protectorate, and then helping to orchestrate NATO’s Kosovo war in 1999. Appropriately enough, when Kosovo also became a protectorate, Kouchner was chosen as its first governor.

Street-fighting green

In the mid-1990s, while Kouchner was agitating for tougher Western intervention in Bosnia, Fischer remained much more cautious, conscious of Germany’s barbaric role in the Balkans in the past. He was also, since 1981, a member of the Greens – the most pacifistic of parties in a country defined since 1945 by its renunciation of militarism – though he was not a pacifist himself.

In 2001, when Stern magazine published photographs from 1973 of Fischer beating up a policeman, questions were raised about whether he had sympathised with, or even participated in, the terrorism into which 1960s radicalism degenerated in the 1970s. Berman hangs nearly half his book on the Stern photos, excavating their background and talking through their ramifications. Yet in itself this was a storm in a teacup: Fischer had apparently shared the widespread sympathy for groups like Ulrike Meinhof’s Red Army Faction (RAF) – ‘our comrades in the underground’ – but had vocally rejected terrorism as self-destructive.

His rejection was reinforced in 1976 when another German terrorist group, the Revolutionary Cells, hijacked a plane and took it to Entebbe, Uganda. There, they separated out the Jewish passengers, who were to be executed if a list of demands on behalf of Palestinian prisoners were not met. According to Berman, this led to an epiphany for all honourable ’68ers, who had formerly been blinded by Marxism. Recognising that in opposing Nazism they had ended up like the Nazis, they righted themselves and adopted a properly liberal, ‘anti-totalitarian’ politics.

This was indeed a moment of disorientation and defeat for the 1968 left, though not in quite the way Berman retrospectively interprets it. The violence of groups like the RAF in Germany, the Weathermen in the US or the Italian Red Brigades was another attempt to avoid the arduous process of political struggle, in this case by replacing it with the ‘propaganda of the deed’. Although only a tiny number of people were directly involved, in a sense the actions of such groups sustained the illusion of forward momentum for a much wider section of the left. So long as Ulrike and Co went on bombing and kidnapping, one could imagine that there was an historic battle going on against the ‘fascist state’. As the violence sputtered out, the left’s own underlying weakness was exposed. By the time that a final, bloody spasm of German terrorist violence led to a security crackdown in autumn 1977, Fischer had dropped out of politics altogether. These were the ‘leaden years’ for the German left, and for Fischer too.

The fact that, when he returned to politics, he did so as a Green merits far more attention than it gets from these authors. Ecology is a world away from the progressive, human-centred politics traditionally associated with the left, yet Fischer apparently made the transition seamlessly, even casually. What Hockenos characterises as ‘the Greens’ claim to represent the hitherto unrepresented interests of the earth’s flora and fauna’ can be understood as another version of Kouchner’s self-aggrandising claim to speak in the name of the victims of tyranny and famine. Even better: since they were animals and plants, these ‘victims’ were literally voiceless and, unlike those greedy proles, they had no ambitions to own a colour TV.

As the Greens’ foreign minister of Germany from 1998, Fischer’s readiness to deploy the armed forces was remarkable even for a pugnacious ecologist like him. When he took office, German troops were already stationed abroad in Bosnia and Georgia. Under Fischer they were sent to no fewer than nine further countries and, most significantly, were deployed during the Kosovo conflict in an active war-fighting role for the first time since 1945.

Kosovo truly was, as Berman says, the ’68ers’ war. With a former member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as British foreign secretary (Robin Cook), a NATO Secretary-General who had once been an anti-NATO campaigner (Javier Solana), and a US president (Bill Clinton) who had avoided the draft and marched against the Vietnam War, Fischer was hardly exceptional. Nor were the terms in which he sought to reconcile his anti-militarist Green party with bombing: they were pure Kouchnerism.

In response to critics who reminded him that Germany had sworn ‘Never Again’, the foreign minister retorted that ‘Never Again Auschwitz’ took precedence over ‘Never Again War’. Fischer argued that he had discovered a new genocide and that, as a veteran anti-fascist in the former home of Nazism, he had a special responsibility to stop it. To prove his case, he even revealed secret documents outlining a premeditated Serbian plan, codenamed ‘Operation Horseshoe’, to commit genocide in Kosovo. It later transpired that the German government had faked the documents: the supposed blueprint for genocide had been fabricated, complete with an invented name and maps drawn up by the German Defence Ministry (5). Like Kouchner, Fischer made sure he saw what he wanted to see.

‘I am radical!’

‘Kouchner fumed… and fumed still more… His Gallic nostrils flared… Kouchner was apoplectic.’ In the space of 10 pages, in addition to this fuming, flaring apoplexy, Kouchner is ‘furious’ on four occasions, ‘beside himself’ three times, and ‘dumbfounded’ twice, not to mention also being ‘amazed’, ‘puzzled’ and ‘astonished’. The cause of this high drama is Iraq: Berman does his best to stir up some emotion to show that one can be – like Kouchner, and, not coincidentally, like Berman himself – Very Angry Indeed about the Iraq war, while actually supporting it.

Fischer, on the other hand, is seen by Berman as not emotional enough: his speeches about Iraq are ‘wooden’, sounding as if they were written by committee. Berman even joins in with Kouchner’s juvenile sniggering at Fischer’s conservative dress sense. ‘I think that he began to lose his way with his three-piece suits’, says Kouchner. ‘I looked at the three-piece suit of this former ultra-radical and I understood that he had chosen a road that allowed him to rise higher than me in the political hierarchy.’ What a sell-out, implies Kouchner, and Berman invites us to agree.

What Berman ostensibly objects to about Fischer is that in the run-up to the Iraq war he did not offer a ‘left-wing alternative’ plan for overthrowing Saddam. Except that he did: in February 2003 the German government, supported by France, proposed making Iraq an international protectorate, policed by thousands of UN troops (6). This debate is not just narrow, it is non-existent. When both sides agree with the idea of weak states being dictated to by the ‘international community’, then maybe what clothes people are wearing really is the only basis for an argument.

As it happens, Fischer’s clothes also hold a strange fascination for Hockenos, who doggedly tracks him through nearly half a century of wardrobe changes. The difference is that he thinks Fischer is pretty groovy: the future foreign minister appears in ‘a sweater and collared shirt’, in a ‘jeans jacket and a zippered seaman’s sweater’, and later, during his ‘corduroys and sandals’ phase, he is ‘relaxed and untroubled in a Norwegian ski sweater’.

All this talk about who was wearing what is symptomatic of the confusion that surrounds the idea of what it means to be radical. Kouchner’s usage of the term when he was governor of Kosovo is telling. A representative from the Serbian community came to complain about continual attacks by the majority Albanian population, and threatened to wreck the local peace agreements if the violence did not stop. In response, Kouchner leaned across the table and shouted in the man’s face: ‘Who do you think you are, threatening us? Pretending to be radical? I am radical! I was on the barricades before you were born. And I have never left the barricades!’ (7) Unfortunately, Kouchner continues to wield this sort of ‘radicalism’ from the Quai d’Orsay.

As for Fischer, he left politics in 2006 for a job at Princeton University. Hockenos remains starry-eyed about the man, describing him as one of ‘the greats of modern German politics’. He even fantasises that Fischer might make a comeback as ‘international spokesman and lobbyist for the global environment’. Self-appointed spokesman for everything, everywhere? Well, it would be very 1968, but let’s hope not. Forty years on, we deserve something better.

(1) Quoted in Famine Crimes, Alex de Waal, James Currey, 1997, p.76

(2) Condemned to Repeat?, Fiona Terry, Cornell University Press, 2002, p.43

(3) Srebrenica Revisited, Diana Johnstone, CounterPunch, 12 October 2005

(4) Business as Usual: Britain, Oil and the Nigerian Civil War, 1967—1970 (PDF), Yomi Kristilolu, African Economic History Workshop, 25 April 2007

(5) Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general, John Goetz and Tom Walker, Sunday Times, 2 April 2000

(6) Euro-occupation plan for Iraq, by Mick Hume, 10 February 2003

(7) A Statesman Without Borders, James Traub, New York Times Magazine, 3 February 2008

Published today, 25 April 2008, at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/5022/

Is THIS the most dangerous man in Europe?

France’s new foreign minister, Dr Bernard Kouchner, personifies the ‘right to intervene’ that was invoked in the ‘humanitarian military interventions’ of the 1990s and in post-9/11 arguments for ‘regime change’. It is a prescription for mayhem, and now that he has taken on a powerful role in a powerful state, we should keep a close eye on him.

Kouchner might relish being described as ‘dangerous’, as he is in the headline to this article. He has long cultivated the persona of a romantic iconoclast, an idealistic rebel who respects no frontiers. ‘My first rule’, he says, ‘is be illegal if you have to – in order to change the law’. (1) His critics, Kouchner manages to suggest de haut en bas, are plodding and conformist by comparison, mired in an old world of tired politics and conventional legality which he has already heroically transcended.

The image, familiar from countless emergency-room dramas, is of the insubordinate but brilliant medic who can save the patient – but only if he ignores the regulations and restrictions imposed on him by the pettifogging hospital bureaucrats. Yet the image is false. This doctor is not so much flouting authority as imposing it in a new and more insidious way. And in the process he tends to prolong and aggravate the ills he claims to cure. The rule he most consistently breaks is that most basic precept of medical ethics: first, do no harm.

What makes Kouchner dangerous is his promotion of le droit d’ingérence, the ‘right to intervene’. This idea – that it is legitimate to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states – became popular with Western governments in the 1990s. At the turn of the decade, Kouchner successfully used his office as minister for humanitarian action under President François Mitterrand to promote the doctrine, pushing for it to be codified in successive United Nations resolutions and for it to be enacted by the Western military in Iraqi Kurdistan and Somalia. By the end of the 1990s NATO was fully committed to the idea, adopting it as justification for the 1999 Kosovo bombing, and it has been wheeled out since to make ‘humanitarian’ arguments in favour of war-on-terror interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. No doubt Kouchner will seek to use his new position to pursue it further.

Such interference is always justified with the most stridently moralistic rhetoric, usually accompanied by claims about developing new standards of international law. Yet the ‘right to intervene’ does not herald a new dawn of humanitarian world order. Rather, by trashing the principles of sovereign equality and mutual non-interference on which the post-1945 UN system was founded, it plunges us into a world of might is right. Kouchner can justly claim to have invented the ‘right to intervene’, and his career offers an insight into where this idea came from and how it achieved such influence.

Le soixante-huitard

Kouchner is proud of being a soixante-huitard, one of those at the forefront of the May 1968 student revolt. Yet as Paul Berman’s intellectual biography of prominent 1960s radicals makes clear, their political consciousness was marked by a feeling of inadequacy, a sense that they lived in the shadow of that earlier, greater generation of leftists who had fought the historic anti-fascist battles of the 1930s and 40s. Kouchner was a little older than many leading figures of the era (he was 29 in 1968) and from a more conventional left-wing background than some, having been involved in the French Communist Party’s youth organisations. But this may have given him an even keener sense that, as Berman puts it, the wartime résistant generation were ‘series A’ while the 1960s students were ‘series B’. Kouchner and his comrades, Berman suggests, could never shake off the suspicion that they were ‘the generation of the second rate…résistants with nothing to resist’. (2)

In reality, there was plenty to resist and there were plenty of reasons not to be in awe of the old Stalinist organisations. Berman is right that many 68-ers were on the lookout for a grand cause to equal that of wartime anti-fascism, but what he misses is that few of them had any serious expectation of finding that cause at home. Blaming the consumerism of the post-war economic boom for what they saw as the embourgeoisement of the Western working class, many young radicals doubted that the romance of revolution was close at hand. Instead, they looked to the national liberation struggles of the Third World as offering a ready-made revolutionary vanguard. Africa, Indochina, elsewhere: that was where the real excitement lay.

It was in this spirit that a young Kouchner presented himself at the Cuban embassy in Paris in 1960, ready to go and fight in defence of Fidel and Che. The offer was politely refused. But in September 1968, less than six months after the squandered promise of the May événements, Kouchner was off, volunteering as a Red Cross doctor in the Nigerian civil war.

Bernard goes to Biafra

When he arrived, Kouchner thought he had found the grand cause that would allow him to replay the anti-fascist struggle: the Nigerian government was committing genocide against the predominantly Ibo population of Biafra, a province which had declared independence in 1967. The government imposed a blockade on the secessionists, producing widespread and appalling famine. Yet Kouchner was dismayed to find that the Red Cross respected Nigerian sovereignty and, in strict adherence to the principle of humanitarian neutrality, forbade him and his fellow doctors from speaking out against the ‘genocide by starvation’. It seemed like a sinister echo of the organisation’s failure to expose the Nazi death camps. ‘By keeping silent’, he later recalled, ‘we doctors were accomplices in the systematic massacre of a population.’ (3)

On his return to France, Kouchner established the Committee Against Genocide in Biafra, out of which emerged a new sort of relief agency, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Founded in 1971, MSF would be everything the Red Cross was not: no longer would humanitarian action be held back by respect for national sovereignty; no more would aid workers be constrained to silence in the face of atrocity. The story of Biafra, as Kouchner tells it, is an epic in which he plays the lead role. The truth is different.

Most importantly, while there was certainly terrible suffering, there was no genocide. As MSF’s own Fiona Terry has pointed out, this should have been clear at the time since there were seven million Ibo people living ‘without persecution in government-held regions’ (4). Similarly, Alex de Waal notes that by the time Kouchner arrived in September 1968, ‘there was a large amount of evidence that there would be no genocide’ (5). It looked like genocide to Kouchner and other activists because they wanted it to. They fantasised that they were not stuck in the midst of a dirty civil war but were standing on the stage of History.

Kouchner was not alone – others also declared that genocide was occurring in Biafra – which rather begs the question of why he felt it so urgent to speak out. He is well known for his advocacy of la loi du tapage (the law of hype) – using the media to whip up public concern – and Biafra was indeed the first televised famine. Yet the cameras preceded Kouchner in Biafra, rather than following him there. Why was it imperative to break the Red Cross’s silence? Where, furthermore, was the bravery of questioning Nigerian sovereignty? The French government (which from the start had covertly aided the rebels against the British-backed Nigerian regime) publicly announced its support for Biafran secession in July 1968 – before Kouchner left Paris.(6)

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, as he flounced out of the Red Cross, Kouchner was not swimming against the tide but going with the flow. The extent to which he was prepared to do so only became clear later, when he again angrily resigned – this time from his own organisation, MSF, to found another, similar but smaller, agency: Médecins du Monde (MDM).

Bernard and the Boat People

Like MSF, MDM was also born out of an ad hoc Kouchner-led campaign: ‘A Boat for Vietnam’. Sceptics wondered at the time if it might not be better titled ‘A Boat for St.-Germain’, since it seemed to be more about buoying the morale of Left Bank liberals and leftists than achieving anything more practical. (7) Undeterred, in 1979 Kouchner set off in his ‘sea-borne ambulance’, L’Île de Lumière, and started scooping Vietnamese refugees out of the South China Sea. His MSF colleagues thought it was no more than a pointless media stunt and refused to play along, but Kouchner insisted that the gesture was worthwhile because it might provoke action by other, more powerful forces. ‘It is not so much that humanitarians must learn to be political’, he later explained, ‘as that states must learn to be humanitarian’ (8).

Kouchner knew which way the wind was blowing. In his 1977 inaugural address, US President Jimmy Carter had already explained America’s ‘unique self-definition’ in terms of a ‘special obligation’ to take on the ‘moral duties’ of humanitarianism and human rights. (9) To a US elite still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, Kouchner’s little media stunt looked great. When he saw the Île de Lumière bobbing about, the president was so impressed that he sent the US Navy to take over the job of rescuing the ‘boat people’. Despite having only recently devastated South East Asia, by ‘learning to be humanitarian’, the US could hope to re-moralise Western foreign policy. Kouchner had helpfully rewritten the script so that the US military could pose as the saviour of the Vietnamese.

In the context of the Cold War the scope for these ideas was limited, but when the Berlin Wall came down a decade later, the ‘right to intervene’ really came into its own. Now everyone could see the point of Kouchner’s media stunts: for a Western elite suddenly deprived of its Cold War enemy, humanitarianism seemed to offer a new sense of mission and purpose.

When the call came, Kouchner was ready. As the 1991 Gulf War victory threatened to turn sour because it left the ‘new Hitler’ Saddam in power, Kouchner co-authored a UN resolution mandating further military intervention to help the Iraqi Kurds. The ‘safe havens’ and ‘no-fly zones’ that were set up as a result provided the rationale for repeated Anglo-American bombing of Iraq throughout the 1990s. In 1992, when it appeared that ‘genocide by starvation’ was being repeated in Somalia, Kouchner was seen wading ashore with a sack of French rice over his shoulder and pressing for French involvement in a US-led ‘humanitarian invasion’ that killed thousands of Somalis. In 1993, Kouchner accompanied President Mitterrand on a dramatic personal visit to war-torn Sarajevo – and it was there, in the Balkans, that Kouchner’s ideas were exposed for what they were.

Bernard does the Balkans

Yet again Kouchner thought he saw new Nazis committing genocide, and in 1993 Médecins du Monde ran a $2 million advertising campaign to publicise the discovery. One poster set photographs of Hitler and Serbian President Slobodan Milošević side by side, while another juxtaposed an image of a watchtower from Auschwitz with a contemporary picture of Bosnian Muslims being held in a detention camp. MDM proclaimed that it could not ‘remain silent’ in the face of ‘mass executions’.

Some years later, when Kouchner interviewed Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović as he lay close to death, the topic of the camps came up again. ‘They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?’ asked Kouchner. ‘Yes’, admitted Izetbegović, offering the excuse that ‘I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings’ (10). At what point, one may wonder, did Kouchner know that the ‘revelations’ were false?

In Bosnia it became obvious that the incessant tapage of this self-styled ‘warrior for peace’ in fact meant agitating for war – or, as it was now called, ‘humanitarian military intervention’. Kouchner’s ambitions were realised in 1999, the year MSF won the Nobel Peace Prize, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia in the name of his droit d’ingérence. Predictably, the justification for this extreme measure was that there was genocide in Kosovo – another ‘revelation’ later shown to be untrue.

As reward for his ideological efforts, Kouchner was appointed the first UN governor of post-war Kosovo. His reign was a disaster – so much so that the Belgian branch of MSF withdrew from the protectorate in August 2000, complaining that Kosovo Serbs and other minorities were being ‘terrorised by constant and organised acts of violence’ under the noses of the international administrators. (11) Despite the violence reported by MSF, Kouchner describes his term in Kosovo as ‘the happiest time of my life’ (12). In those happy days, he recalls: ‘There were occasions when the Kosovars didn’t want to make a decision, which forced us to do so – and our decisions sometimes went against their will….Sometimes I was wrong. Sometimes I was absolutely biased. Sometimes I was absolutely oppressive. But I had to decide when they were unable to do so.’ (13) It evidently never occurred to Kouchner that the main reason the people of Kosovo were unable to take democratic decisions was that they were subject to the arbitrary rule of an un-elected foreigner.

It may seem paradoxical that this former would-be fighter for the Cuban revolution wound up in Kosovo wielding power like a colonial-style governor-general. Yet it was the logical outcome of Kouchner’s sans-frontiérisme.

The politics of sans-frontiérisme

Berman suggests that there may be a continuity between Kouchner’s early Marxism and his later sans-frontiérisme, the idea of ‘doctors of the world’ superseding the aspiration to unify the ‘workers of the world’. (14) It is true that Kouchner’s invasive humanitarianism claims to be internationalist, but the parallel is misleading. In place of solidarity among equals, Kouchner’s approach offers only pity for the suffering of victims. And what is envisaged for these child-like victims is not freedom and self-determination but the suffocating ‘protection’ of the ‘international community’.

Kouchner is unapologetic about his openly politicised approach to humanitarianism. Yet his political approach is premised on evasion: the evasion of the 1960s radical seeking a self-aggrandising role in somebody else’s struggle; the evasion of the do-gooder who substitutes moralism for political argument. Whenever it becomes obvious that Kouchner’s ‘right to intervene’ simply allows the Western military to operate without borders, objections are swept aside with an appeal to listen to the victims. Most recently, Kouchner lent his moral support to the 2003 Iraq invasion on just these grounds, calling for the ‘voices of the Iraqi people’ to be heard. (15)

Even in its own terms, sans-frontiérisme can hardly be said to have benefited those on the receiving end. From Biafra to the Balkans, Kouchneresque involvement has prolonged and exacerbated conflicts by encouraging local actors to seek the sympathy of more powerful outside sponsors. In Biafra, the secessionists’ strategy became oriented toward securing international sympathy (even to the extent of obstructing relief efforts), prolonging the war and the famine. (16) The pattern was repeated in Bosnia and Kosovo, where particular groups were persuaded that by playing up to the victim role they could precipitate Western military intervention. The result in all cases was to worsen conflict and suffering, and in no case did those on the receiving end of international charity achieve the genuine self-determination and independence they sought.

Ultimately, the outlook of this humanitarian doctor is shockingly misanthropic. For philosophical ballast, he invokes André Glucksmann’s ‘humanism of bad news’, an approach which ‘aspires to undo the worst, without trying to achieve the best’ (17). This dispiriting outlook is bad enough, but it turns out that for Kouchner the really ‘bad news’ is humanity itself. The ‘worst enemy of humanitarianism’, he has written, is ‘man himself’ (18). Perhaps that is why, in every situation, Kouchner is always ready to believe the worst.

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s appointment of Kouchner has been seen as something of a coup, bagging one of his most popular political opponents. No doubt it is a shrewd move in the context of French politics, but it may also indicate that Kouchner’s aggressive interventionism still holds some appeal for an elite wanting to appear purposeful on the international stage. Any state which sees the new foreign minister heading toward its borders would be well-advised to send him packing.


(1) Bernard Kouchner, The Future of Humanitarianism, 23rd Annual Morgenthau Lecture, 2 March 2004

(2) Power and the Idealists, Paul Berman, W.W. Norton & Co, 2007: p209

(3) Quoted in Alex de Waal, Famine Crimes, African Rights, 1997: p76

(4) Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, Cornell University Press, 2002: p43

(5) Famine Crimes, Alex de Waal, African Rights, 1997: p76—77

(6) Business as Usual: Britain, Oil and the Nigerian Civil War, 1967—1970, Yomi Kristilolu, African Economic History Workshop, 25 April 2007

(7) Power and the Idealists, Paul Berman, W.W. Norton & Co, 2007: p237

(8) Quoted in David Rieff, A Bed for the Night, Vintage, 2002: p97

(9) Quoted in Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Sutton Publishing, 2002: p120

(10) Srebrenica Revisited, Diana Johnstone, CounterPunch, 12 October 2005. The quotations are from Kouchner’s 2004 book, Les Guerriers de la Paix.

(11) Ethnic cleansing continues in UN-ruled Kosovo, under the eye of the international actors, MSF Press Release, 7 August 2000. Ironically, MSF invoked Kouchner’s own arguments against him, declaring that it could not be a ‘passive accomplice…or remain silent’.

(12) All the world’s his surgery, Robert Graham, FT Weekend Magazine, 17 January 2004

(13) The Future of Humanitarianism, Bernard Kouchner, 23rd Annual Morgenthau Lecture, 2 March 2004

(14) Power and the Idealists, Paul Berman, W.W. Norton & Co, 2007: p244

(15) Kouchner: Iraqi voices remain unheard, Harvard University Gazette, 20 March 2003

(16) Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat?, Cornell University Press, 2002: p42—43

(17) Power and the Idealists, Paul Berman, W.W. Norton & Co, 2007: p235

(18) Establish a Right to Intervene Against War, Oppression, Bernard Kouchner, Los Angeles Times, 18 October 1999

Published today, 4 June 2007, at http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3438/