14 April 2006
A response to the Euston manifesto
My eye is drawn by the announcement in this week’s New Statesman of a new left-liberal grouping, based around the so-called Euston manifesto. (Read the manifesto here.)
Before commenting on the content of the manifesto, it is worth saying a little about its genesis. It is billed on the front cover of the magazine as “a manifesto from the pro-war left” (no need to say which war, you notice) and is introduced by an article by Norman Geras and Nick Cohen, who fell out with much of the left when they backed the American invasion of Iraq. This Manifesto sets out the terms on which they might repair those ruptured friendships.
The Manifesto itself is careful to say it is not based necessarily on support for the war (it has supporters who opposed it) but rather a belief that now that the war has been fought, it is necessary to ensure that Iraq can become a democracy. They want to stitch the country back together again, rather than abandoning it to the jihadists and Ba’athists again, although they do not say a lot about how this might be achieved. They say they are as keen to oppose tyranny and defend democracy as they are to reform that democracy itself (being from the left, one can rely on the latter point) but I have already given you the link to the Manifesto – its authors can explain it better than I can.
I have a lot of sympathy with it, as you might expect from a federalist. Democracy isn’t some quaint constitutional practice that happens to be followed in Europe and North America: no, it is a fundamental expression of human values that deserves to be adopted everywhere. Its features may vary from one country to another (the fact of that variation is in fact the definition of what a country is) but the right of people to govern themselves does not.
There is a hole in the Manifesto’s discussion of Iraq, though, namely the question of what happens next. How long should the occupation last? To be told, as we are sometimes, "as long as it takes" won't do: the crucial question is whether the presence of American forces in Iraq is itself a fuel for the insurgency or whether it is the only means of fighting it. The authors obviously reject the George Galloway view that the troops should come home as soon as possible, but I want to know more about what they think than this.
I think the reason that the Manifesto can’t deal with this question lies in its lack of a clear picture of how the world should work. Paragraph 10 of its statement of principles, “A new internationalism”, is still wedded to the traditional notion of sovereignty. Humanitarian interventions – the responsibility to protect – are defended in a world of sovereign states if a government acts “in appalling ways”, but it doesn’t really work. The problem lies in the need to establish motives of any interventions and the need to do so unambiguously, but in a world of sovereign states, that is hard to do. Think of all those who suspect that George W Bush’s motivation in Iraq is oil: what can he do to disprove this?
I go back to Joad’s “Why war?” where he explores the conditions in which force might be acceptable (pages 153-4 in the Penguin Special edition of 1939):
That the Use of Force Demands and is Justified only by the Existence of Law.
My deduction is that, though the use of force is always an evil, until such time as we are all of us prepared to act in accordance with the ethic of Christ, it is a necessary evil; necessary, in order to prevent the bad from preying upon the good, and the savage from inhibiting the pursuits of the civilized. A background of force within the State is, then, I should say, not only necessary but beneficial. It is beneficial only on one condition, that its use is governed by law; that the law is such as most men wish to obey; and that it is administered disinterestedly by impartial persons in the common interest. Now as between States there is no such law, there are no such impartial persons, and there is no general concern for the common interest. Therefore the conditions for the beneficent use of force do not apply. Hence, although I am prepared to support the use of the police force, my support does not extend to the army. If and when there is public law between States, I should be prepared to back it by force, as I am to-day prepared to back the State's law by force, for then the armies of the States would become the police force of the World State.
If the police are entitled to use force in order to enforce the law, then military action would be similarly acceptable in the equivalent circumstances at international level. I don’t want to see people carrying guns on my street but, if it comes to a shoot-out, I am not neutral as between the police and a bank robber.
But the police are only entitled to use force if they are enforcing the law: they are not permitted to take their firearms and uniforms and go out and rob banks themselves. As long as state sovereignty remains the rule at international level, it is going to be hard to trust any country that declares that it is fulfilling its responsibility to protect, particularly when that country explicitly declares its contempt for the existing international mechanisms of taking such action.
Before commenting on the content of the manifesto, it is worth saying a little about its genesis. It is billed on the front cover of the magazine as “a manifesto from the pro-war left” (no need to say which war, you notice) and is introduced by an article by Norman Geras and Nick Cohen, who fell out with much of the left when they backed the American invasion of Iraq. This Manifesto sets out the terms on which they might repair those ruptured friendships.
The Manifesto itself is careful to say it is not based necessarily on support for the war (it has supporters who opposed it) but rather a belief that now that the war has been fought, it is necessary to ensure that Iraq can become a democracy. They want to stitch the country back together again, rather than abandoning it to the jihadists and Ba’athists again, although they do not say a lot about how this might be achieved. They say they are as keen to oppose tyranny and defend democracy as they are to reform that democracy itself (being from the left, one can rely on the latter point) but I have already given you the link to the Manifesto – its authors can explain it better than I can.
I have a lot of sympathy with it, as you might expect from a federalist. Democracy isn’t some quaint constitutional practice that happens to be followed in Europe and North America: no, it is a fundamental expression of human values that deserves to be adopted everywhere. Its features may vary from one country to another (the fact of that variation is in fact the definition of what a country is) but the right of people to govern themselves does not.
There is a hole in the Manifesto’s discussion of Iraq, though, namely the question of what happens next. How long should the occupation last? To be told, as we are sometimes, "as long as it takes" won't do: the crucial question is whether the presence of American forces in Iraq is itself a fuel for the insurgency or whether it is the only means of fighting it. The authors obviously reject the George Galloway view that the troops should come home as soon as possible, but I want to know more about what they think than this.
I think the reason that the Manifesto can’t deal with this question lies in its lack of a clear picture of how the world should work. Paragraph 10 of its statement of principles, “A new internationalism”, is still wedded to the traditional notion of sovereignty. Humanitarian interventions – the responsibility to protect – are defended in a world of sovereign states if a government acts “in appalling ways”, but it doesn’t really work. The problem lies in the need to establish motives of any interventions and the need to do so unambiguously, but in a world of sovereign states, that is hard to do. Think of all those who suspect that George W Bush’s motivation in Iraq is oil: what can he do to disprove this?
I go back to Joad’s “Why war?” where he explores the conditions in which force might be acceptable (pages 153-4 in the Penguin Special edition of 1939):
That the Use of Force Demands and is Justified only by the Existence of Law.
My deduction is that, though the use of force is always an evil, until such time as we are all of us prepared to act in accordance with the ethic of Christ, it is a necessary evil; necessary, in order to prevent the bad from preying upon the good, and the savage from inhibiting the pursuits of the civilized. A background of force within the State is, then, I should say, not only necessary but beneficial. It is beneficial only on one condition, that its use is governed by law; that the law is such as most men wish to obey; and that it is administered disinterestedly by impartial persons in the common interest. Now as between States there is no such law, there are no such impartial persons, and there is no general concern for the common interest. Therefore the conditions for the beneficent use of force do not apply. Hence, although I am prepared to support the use of the police force, my support does not extend to the army. If and when there is public law between States, I should be prepared to back it by force, as I am to-day prepared to back the State's law by force, for then the armies of the States would become the police force of the World State.
If the police are entitled to use force in order to enforce the law, then military action would be similarly acceptable in the equivalent circumstances at international level. I don’t want to see people carrying guns on my street but, if it comes to a shoot-out, I am not neutral as between the police and a bank robber.
But the police are only entitled to use force if they are enforcing the law: they are not permitted to take their firearms and uniforms and go out and rob banks themselves. As long as state sovereignty remains the rule at international level, it is going to be hard to trust any country that declares that it is fulfilling its responsibility to protect, particularly when that country explicitly declares its contempt for the existing international mechanisms of taking such action.
Posted by Richard Laming at 18:54
The Iraqi situation is like a building, which is terminally unsafe as it was built on very weak or dodgy foundation. Any other opinions, expressed after the event, would seem like views of commercial firms suggesting patchy solutions like underpinning. These suggestions are beneficial to the firms and not necessarily for Iraq. The US politicians have retained the old ways of gunmen shooting down any opposition that may pose risk to their economy. They tend to forget that they could not kill all the native Americans or subjugate all their slaves, let alone winning a conflict outside the USA. President Bush was not worried about the rights and wrongs, as he had to go to war to get the oil supply secured. It may cost a lot of lives, mainly for the Iraqis. There is no sign of quelling the insurgency and trust of Iraqis in the US forces is rapidly decreasing. The Sunday Times article by an Iraqi lady tells the true story about the situation getting rapidly worse. Finally, the best thing an occupant of a building should do is to escape to safety, if the building shows signs of imminent collapse. Let the British soldiers do so at the earliest, since a civil war is brewing very fast. Most sensible leaders in the Middle East believe so and one hopes that our Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary wake up from the spells cast by Bush and Rice before it is too late!
Of course, according to the government, the war was lawful; but then according the bank robber's lawyer, robbing the bank is lawful, if not exactly in those terms, then in something similiar. Hence the need for some international adjudication. Which I for one thought that we had, but of course we don't for the bank robber can veto the verdict if he doesn't like what the judge is saying in this case.
What this points up is the need to reform the UN, something that Kofi Annan has made his culminating mission, though he seems not to be making much progress on the fundamentals.
So we have a conundrum, how should we persuade the bank robber - who pays for much of the court anyway -
to give up his veto? And what does democracy mean in this context? Should every state be given equal weight? Lesotho, say, with China, or Liechtenstein with the US? Should state votes be weighted by population? And what happens then to the votes of the people of Zimbabwe (or China?).
There must be a better way if only we could stop a moment to think of it.
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