[This article appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, pp. 625-638.]
The Ethos of Global Intervention
Dwight D. Murphey
Despite
the presence in the world of a great many particularist movements that would
split societies into smaller units, there is also a powerful drive toward
consolidation, powered primarily by an international leadership that has
adopted an ethos of global meliorism. In
effect, the philosophy is that “everyone’s business is our business.” Important voices in the
Key Words: International affairs, American foreign policy, world intervention, global meliorism, Davos culture.
Powerful opposing forces—some centrifugal and others centripetal—are contending for preeminence in the world today.
In a recent book Beyond
Westphalia?: State Sovereignty and International Intervention, Thomas Weiss
and Jarat Chopra interpret this as a continuation of the anti-colonial breakup
that followed World War II: “The decolonization process that began in
A centrifugal flying-apart into fragments occurs in movements that in many places passionately seek local autonomy, often even secession from the larger entity to which they have belonged. A short list of the areas in which local peoples have asserted themselves in a great many parts of the world would include the United Kingdom, Spain, Corsica, Italy, the Balkans, the Russian Federation, Canada, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, southern Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines and many parts of Africa.
The centripetal tendency, on the other hand, leads toward consolidation. It entails an all-encompassing outlook that is premised implicitly on the assumption that “everybody’s business is the world’s business,” and presumes a proper role for global policing and social welfare. Historian David Callahan speaks of an “internationalist project as a whole” that is backed by “elite liberal internationalist opinion.”[2] The past century has seen the growth—even though unevenly and with much interruption—of a “global community.” It often holds definite opinions about what is right and wrong, and is willing to take action to mold the world, as best it can, in the direction it finds desirable.
Cultural historian Samuel P. Huntington says “the term
‘universal civilization’” is used to speak of “the assumptions, values, and
doctrines currently held by many people in Western civilization and by some
people in other civilizations.” He
suggests that “this might be called the Davos Culture.” The name comes from a very tangible presence:
“Each year about a thousand businessmen, bankers, government officials,
intellectuals, and journalists from scores of countries meet in the World
Economic Forum in
The Davos meeting is, of course, just the most recent
sign of a consensus that has long existed among the global elite (and here I
use “elite” in a neutral sense that denotes those in the professional classes who
hold the most prominent positions). The
name “Davos Culture” is useful, but the consensus is much older and more
expansive than could possibly be suggested from a single annual gathering. Even those who point to the influence of the
Tri-Lateral Commission or the Council of Foreign Relations, which are
essentially parts of what
Ignatieff speaks of centuries during which “Europeans gradually came to believe in a myth of human universality… that human needs and pain are universally the same.” Part of this was “the Christian promise of the universality of salvation,” and it was reflected in “the jurisprudence developed by earlier modern natural law theorists [when they] sought to provide a universal natural law.”
It is possible to speak of all this as a gradual “lowering of the threshold of human compassion,” since more and more people have come to be included within the scope of benign sensibility. By no means should those who are critical of it think of it in limited, personalized terms. Such a broad-based change of sentiment among so many people of like mind, nurtured over the centuries, is hardly a “conspiracy.”
Even though universalism has been the historic tendency,
this doesn’t mean that there is necessarily a popular consensus in
Hedley Bull describes “a common intellectual culture” that exists “only at the elite level.”[4] A fair summary of the consensus within this “world community” would be that it is
- “social democratic,” but in a way that still allows it to be enthusiastically supportive of a global market economy;
- state interventionist in economic and social matters, despite its commitment to free trade;
- internationalist, increasingly subordinating national sovereignty;
- ready to see more and more issues as global rather than local;
- reformist;
- and action-oriented toward imposing its will where it can, despite many practical difficulties, double standards and blind spots.
The community is by no means laissez-faire toward world problems. Among other things, it hopes to relieve humanitarian crises, address the chaos within “failed states,” decide which secessionist movements deserve to succeed and which to fail (sometimes making a point of “self-determination” and sometimes not), protect “human rights” as those have become generalized within an international code of conduct, act at least selectively against “war crimes,” prevent genocides, protect the world’s environment, foster arms control, “stop bloodshed” by ending conflicts, encourage “multiethnicity,” maintain strategic balances of power, preserve “international stability,” and operate through international rather than national agencies.
An overlapping ideological climate prevails in the
This internationalist meliorism is conducting something
that differs in significant ways from the long twentieth century struggle to contain
Communist expansion as a militant totalitarian ideology. The vast global intervention and common
effort that went into the decades-long effort toward “containment” were
essentially defensive. A single people
could hardly be expected to stand up effectively on their own against the
subversion, the assassination squads, and the externally-armed and supplied
fifth-column movements that emanated from the
Writing in The Mises Review, David Gordon takes issue with the view I have just expressed. He asks, “given the weakness of socialism as a method of economic organization, were the Soviets in any position to maintain world hegemony?” and answers that “eventually, a socialist system must collapse into chaos.”[5] The demise of the Soviet Union after seventy-plus years demonstrated, of course, the wisdom of Ludwig von Mises’ insight into the economic unworkability of socialism,[6] although that insight needs to be combined with certain others, such as about the political difficulty of holding together widely disparate elements in a broad empire.
Gordon’s point should give reason to pause before anyone
worries about vast expansionist systems in the future, because they do indeed
have Achilles heels. But to have relied
on the premise that “the problem will take care of itself” as totalitarianism
marched through all of the continents of the globe would have placed the
non-Communist societies at ever-increasing risk. It is possible, of course, to look at it primarily
from the vantage-point of the
This is not the situation today. Since the collapse of the
It is most accurate to see the meliorist effort as resuming its original thrust. There were serious moves in its direction
before and even during the conflict with the totalitarian systems. It was a general world-improving spirit that
inspired the
The overall mindset that favors a universal policing and social servicing of the world has, however, been beset by considerable costs, frustrations and inadequacies. This has prompted important voices to call for restraint—although by no means for a general repeal of the mindset. This less-than-total universalism has become an important school of thought in itself. Here are some manifestations of it:
Casper Weinberger, the
After the Gulf War with
In an answer to a question during the 2000 presidential campaign debates, George W. Bush seconded the need for an exit strategy and at the same time argued that the United States should have priorities that would treat the Balkans and the Middle East, say, as more important than Rwanda when choosing where to intervene.
Insight magazine said about the two candidates, Bush and Gore, that they “agreed on four fundamentals that have to be met before deploying troops: (1) It must be in the national interest to do so; (2) the threat to be met must menace U.S. national security or important allies; (3) the objectives of the mission have to be clear and success assured; and (4) there has to be an exit strategy. The vice president added that the costs should be proportionate to the benefits.”[9]
In an interview just before taking office, Bush expressed
a restrained view toward aid to
It’s hard for
After the failure of the “nation building” intervention in Somalia, even U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote a supplement to his An Agenda for Peace that called for “scaled-down expectations and missions.”[11]
These concerns exist alongside the broad philosophy of meliorism; and since the concerns are based on practical, reality-based factors, they are bound to put limits on it. The result is that “the Security Council’s definition of what constitutes ‘threats’ to international peace is both expanding to cover virtually any subject and remaining selective in application,” according to Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst (emphasis added).[12]
Needless to say, there is considerable ambiguity in this
restrained position. The principal
thrust remains toward involvement in problems everywhere. In the early 1990s, a group of highly
influential people—who included Senators John McCain, Sam Nunn, and Pat
Roberts; Condoleezza Rice, later George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor
[and Secretary of State]; Brent Scowcroft; David Gergen; and executive
directors from Harvard University, the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, and
the
To return to the main point of this article, however, it
is well to keep in mind that there are many voices calling for an even more
sweeping view. Thus, Steven W. Mosher,
one of the
The Issue of Legitimacy
Legitimacy for the meliorist project is thought to stem from the collective consensus that underlies it. “What appears to be required to justify intervention, increasingly, is what might be called collective legitimation,”[17] according to Lyons and Mastanduno. Those who identify with this “world community” feel that they are already in command of a sort of world government that uses the United Nations and a vast web of international organizations (“IOs”), even though it is not yet fully institutionalized as a government as such. They lay claim to the various features of government: jurisdiction, coercive power, and legitimacy.
The concept of legitimacy-through-collective-will calls for serious reflection. Ironically, it is precisely the basis upon which lynching—a phenomenon of frontier-like communities acting upon outraged public opinion and not feeling themselves accountable to anything outside themselves—could be said to be “legitimate.” No enlightened person accepts that as morally supportable in a well-ordered society. The idea that a powerful group’s consensus validates itself reminds us of what, according to Thucydides, the Athenians told the Melians: “In fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”[18] In the absence of a universally-recognized sovereign power based upon a commonly-embraced moral and legal order, an international quasi-government is open to justifiable criticism by any given opponent on precisely the issue of legitimacy. This is, in fact, the view taken by many commentators in the non-European civilizations.
The will of the American elite is fully in evidence
within the international meliorist project (and again I use “elite” in neither
a favorable nor a pejorative sense).
This is so even though “action by the world community” is hardly
comparable to a well-oiled machine and the
The near-universal presence of the United States (its
“primacy,” to use Mosher’s term) is attested to by the fact that, according to Insight, “as of July 1998 the United
States had more than 200,000 troops stationed in 133 countries and territories
and another 20,000 sailors and Marines on Navy ships.” In late 1999 there were 6,000 in
This doesn’t rule out involvement by others. Callahan speaks of “a consensus… emerging among the major democracies that a sustained collective effort must be made to deal with humanitarian crises and failed states.”[22] On the world economic scene, action is taken through the major powers who have formed the Group of Eight.
As a moral oddity, the “world community” has sometimes
thrown open its cloak to include even the totalitarian states, such as in
quarantining
Nor does the “world community,” so called, rest easily
upon its throne. The offsetting rise of
ethnic, religious particularisms—the “centrifugal forces” I spoke of earlier—is
only the tip of the iceberg.
The Changed Mental Landscape of American Interventionism
From the beginning of American national existence until
1898, the
Wherever the standard of freedom
and independence has been unfurled, there will [
Seventy-six years later The Nation expressed the same outlook in an 1897 editorial that
opposed annexing
We are under the most solemn obligations to the civilized world not to diffuse our ‘happiness’ or our ‘life’ among other people in the old way. We have for one hundred years made known to all mankind… that when we spread we meant to spread…through knowledge and trade, and law and liberty, and brotherly kindness.[29]
This agreed with Andrew Carnegie’s comment two years
earlier that “the man in
There were, of course, dissenting voices. Walt Whitman wanted President Polk to send
60,000 troops to
In 1898, what had been a minority position became the
majority outlook, however. 1898 is thus
a watershed year in the history of the
These actions were different in kind from the continental
expansion of the
Even though many Americans have continued to uphold the
traditional view and even though the steps toward global intervention over the
past century have often been halting and uncertain, the prevailing American
assumption has been that almost anything that goes on in the world is Americans’ business if only it is
sufficiently dramatically brought to Americans’ attention and appeals to their
moral indignation. On
In 1943 while he was contemplating the formation of the
United Nations, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought “the real decisions
should be made by the
McDougall observes that President Harry Truman’s “Point
Four, though modest at the start, amounted to a promise to extend the New Deal and
Fair Deal to the world.” And he tells
how President Dwight Eisenhower became convinced of the need for a worldwide
drive against poverty by “the birth of the non-aligned movement in 1955 and the
Between approximately 1947 and 1989, much of this was
part of the strategy to contain Communism.
The global-meliorist underpinning was never absent, however, and served
as an underlay. But FDR was not thinking
of containment in 1943 when he included the
Conclusion
In this discussion we have noted the existence of a world-meliorist project and of American leadership within it. This is a project very different from American policy prior to 1898. Now that the Cold War is over, a reexamination of the premises underlying the opposing policies would seem to be appropriate.
[1] Thomas Weiss and Jarat Chopra in Beyond Westphalia?: State Soveignty and International Intervention, Gene M. Lyons and Michael Mastanduno, ed.s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 92.
[2] David Callahan, Unwinnable Wars: American Power and Ethnic Conflict (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997), pp. 201 and 178.
[3] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), p. 57.
[4] Bull is quoted by
[5] The Mises Review, Fall 2000, p. 15.
[6] Mises’ critique is based on an inability of a socialist economy to “calculate” because of the absence of a free-market price system. He was wise in seeing the impermanence of socialism, but it is doubtful whether a “lack of calculation” was the reason. The lack of incentives, the consequent lack of inventive dynamism, and the eventual loss of morale all seem stronger candidates. As the text suggests, there are still other reasons that contributed to the collapse of the social and political structure.
[7] Lyons and Mastanduno, ed.s, Beyond
[8] David Callahan recites the “Weinberger Doctrine” in his Unwinnable Wars, p. 42. He says that “Weinberger’s views, however, never represented a consensus view in the American government. Secretary of State George Schultz even went so far as to dispute them in public speeches.” The criteria set out by General Colin Powell after the Gulf War were somewhat different from Weinberger’s, although similar in spirit. (The Wichita Eagle, article on “Intervention,” June 20, 1999.)
[9] “Political Notebook” by Jamie Dettmer, Insight magazine,
[10] New
York Times report by David E. Sanger and Frank Bruni, Wichita Eagle,
[11] See Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst, ed.s, Learning from Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humanitarian Intervention (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 208, 211.
[12] Clarke and Herbst, ed.s, Learning from Somalia, p. 209.
[13] The prioritizing is apparent when it talks about preventing and, “if possible at reasonable cost, end[ing] major conflicts in important geographical regions” [emphasis added]. Elsewhere, it speaks of taking certain actions in “strategically important states.”
[14] The Report’s moderating of the call for universalizing democracy and human rights appears when, under “Less Important or Secondary” national interests, it list “enlarging democracy elsewhere or for its own sake.” It places in the “Just Important” category efforts to “discourage massive human rights violations in foreign countries as a matter of official government policy.”
[15] Steven W. Mosher, Hegemon: China’s Plan to Dominate the World (
[16] Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict With
[17] Lyons and Mastanduno, ed.s., Beyond
[18] Thucydides is quoted in Lyons and
Mastanduno, Beyond
[19] Friedrich Kratochwil in Beyond
[20] Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst in the book they edited, Learning From Somalia: The Lessons of Armed Humanitarian Intervention (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 241.
[21] Insight
magazine,
[22] Callahan, Unwinnable Wars, p. 46.
[23] Robert H. Jackson in Beyond
[24] Related by Jack Donnelly in Beyond
[25] Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: The Harvard University Press, 1999), p. x.
[26]
[27] Stephen D. Krasner in Beyond
[28]
[29] The Nation, Vol. 65, editorial at p. 468 (1897).
[30] Carnegie is quoted in Beisner, Twelve Against Empire, p. 169.
[31] Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land,
[32] Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing Inc., 1999), pp. 123-5.
[33] Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire, p. 125; McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 173.
[34] Beisner, Twelve Against Empire, p. 22.
[35] Murray Rothbard in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, John V. Denson, ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997), p. 203.
[36] See the editorials in The Nation: “The Momentous Decision” [about
[37] Quoted in Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire, p. 181.
[38] Eric A. Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 267.
[39]
[40] McDougall, Promised Land,
[41] McDougall, Promised Land,
[42]