GLOBAL DIALOGUE Volume 7 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2005—Humanitarian Intervention

War in Our Time? The Redefinition of Peace, and the Relegitimisation of War

PAUL ROBINSON

Paul Robinson is assistant director of the Centre for Security Studies at the University of Hull. He is the author of The White Russian Army in Exile (OUP, 2002), and editor of Just War in Comparative Perspective (Ashgate, 2003).

hen Neville Chamberlain announced “peace in our time”, everybody knew what he meant (even if he did turn out to be wrong). He meant that there would be no war. Britons of that era, still recovering from the shock of the First World War, would not have doubted that the absence of war was a supreme good, perhaps the supreme good, and surely in itself one of the most vital goals of foreign policy. This no longer seems to be the case. Among those who urge armed intervention around the globe, a new (or, rather, a revived old) philosophy is gaining ground in which peace is not really peace if it leaves injustices unremedied. In their eyes, war must eliminate such injustice before we can arrive at “true peace”. Peace is being redefined, and war is back in favour.

Today’s discussion about humanitarian intervention is really a discussion about war. Like other modern euphemisms for war—“peace enforcement”, “police actions”, “operations other than war”—the expression “humanitarian intervention” masks the true character of what it describes. When we discuss whether to legitimise it, we are in truth discussing whether to legitimise war. Put in those blunt terms, the arguments in favour suddenly seem less attractive.

War: From Blight to Boon

The drive to make war a legitimate tool of foreign policy is a new and surprising one. For centuries, most people have rather sought to eliminate war as a political tool. War, it was felt, was a blight on human existence, which consistently brought more misery than good. Now, however, there is a strong body of opinion which believes that war can play a positive role in shaping the world for the better. Peace (in the sense of an absence of war), it seems, is no longer the primary goal.

Westphalia

There is a mistaken tendency to see this shift in opinion which has been taking place since the end of the Cold War as marking the end of the so-called Westphalian international order, and the creation of a new system in which the rights of individuals matter more than the sovereignty of states. Supposedly, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 established the theory of cuius regio, eius religio (“whose region, his religion”): in other words, the internal system and ideology of a state were entirely its own affair, not the concern of outsiders. This, ran the idea, created an international order based on sovereign states which did not intervene in one another’s internal concerns, however badly they treated their citizens. In reality, though, the Westphalian system never truly existed in the sense that people imagine it. From 1648 onwards, there was no shortage of states willing to interfere in the internal affairs of others, and Western states in particular carried out numerous interventions before the twentieth century (most noticeably on behalf of Christian communities being oppressed by the Ottomans).

The Presumption against War

The real change in recent years is not, therefore, the collapse of the Westphalian system and a new concern for the rights of individuals. It is, rather, the shift from the ideology of Neville Chamberlain (that war is something to avoid at all costs) to the ideology of Tony Blair (that war is a useful tool for reshaping the world). This involves retreating from the consensus established in the twentieth century that there should be a presumption against war, and that the only justification for war could be self-defence. This consensus was the result of the experiences of the two World Wars, as well as the result of the development of nuclear weapons. These taught humanity that it had developed such destructive potential that war could no longer be kept within manageable limits. War now threatened the very existence of the human race.

In these circumstances, the best solution was believed to be to outlaw the waging of war absolutely except in the most extreme circumstances. As a first step in this direction, the signatories of the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 pledged to renounce war entirely as an instrument of national policy. This proved too utopian a goal, so subsequent laws and agreements instead permitted war, but only in self-defence. Thus, the Nuremberg Tribunals declared that the “planning and waging of aggressive war” was the most serious of all war crimes (on the basis that all of the crimes of war can occur only because somebody has begun the war in the first place). The United Nations General Assembly subsequently (in resolutions 2131, passed in 1965, and 2625, passed in 1970) defined “aggressive war” as any war not fought in self-defence, and stated moreover that no political or other reasons could excuse such an act. This declaration supplemented the UN Charter, which, by consent of all members, prohibits war except when waged in self-defence or with the explicit sanction of the UN Security Council. The International Court of Justice further underlined this shift in the law of war by ruling that the right of intervention was a “manifestation of a policy of force, such as has, in the past, given rise to the most serious abuses”. Because of such judgements, some observers were by the early 1990s declaring the concept of intervention “obsolete”.¹

This twentieth-century development paralleled a fundamental shift in just war theory. Whereas once moralists discussed the theory in terms of jus ad bellum (the rules concerning when it is just to go to war), now they discussed it in terms of jus contra bellum (the rules against war). Western just war theory originated in the teaching of Catholic theologians such as St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and it is symbolic of the shift towards jus contra bellum that, since the Second World War, the Catholic Church has itself moved away from just war theory towards an ethic of peacemaking.

‘Meritorious’ War

In philosophical terms, this is quite a significant change. Just war theory (jus ad bellum), while seeking to limit the conditions in which war will occur, does not contain a presumption against war. Rather, as Paul Ramsey notes, “just war’s presumption favours the defence of ordered justice.”² This stance reflects the belief that people who suffer injustice do not enjoy true peace even if there is an absence of war. In such circumstances, war is the instrument by which justice is restored and thus real peace established. For just war theorists, justice is a higher good than the absence of war. For them, war can, therefore, be more than a “lesser evil” or a last resort used only in extreme circumstances. It can actually have a positive value. As Thomas Aquinas put it, “it is sometimes right and meritorious to make war … it is meritorious to wage a just war.”³

For the proponents of jus contra bellum, by contrast, war is something to be avoided at almost any cost, and the absence of war is a higher good than the enforcement of justice. For most of the past two millennia, jus ad bellum held sway. In the twentieth century, as discussed above, jus contra bellum gradually pushed it out. Far more than any disavowal of Westphalian non-intervention, it is the shift back to the older jus ad bellum which characterises the trend within Western states in the past decade. More and more people are coming back to seeing war not as an evil to be avoided, but as a tool for restoring justice. Waging war is once again becoming a “meritorious” act.

Lowering the Barriers

Crude questions of power have much to do with this. Jus contra bellum made political sense in an era in which the aggressive use of force was bound to create a reaction from enemies with, if not equal power, then at least sufficient power to inflict serious harm. The danger of escalation added a further inhibition on waging war. One could never be entirely sure that one would be able to keep violence within acceptable bounds, and avoid it escalating into highly destructive combat or even nuclear holocaust. It was better to set the barrier against war as high as possible, and to avoid giving war the glow of righteousness.

The collapse of the Soviet Union destroyed this logic, at least in the eyes of some. Now, Western states have unrivalled military power at their disposal. They can attack, invade, or destroy almost any enemy they wish, with high confidence that the cost to them will be small. NATO’s three-month military campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999 resulted in the loss of not a single NATO soldier. Even the approximately 1,500 deaths suffered by the Americans in Iraq since the invasion of March 2003 are, by historical standards, insignificant (a mere fraction of the casualties often suffered by each side in a single day in both World Wars). We also know that the targets of our attacks have no allies they can call upon to defend them. Our assaults will not result in world war, nuclear holocaust, or the like. The temptation to engage in such assaults has, therefore, increased.

Adding to that temptation is the sense that modern technology allows one to wage relatively harmless war. Some even argue that such technology makes military actions less destructive and costly in terms of human life than other forms of coercion such as economic sanctions, which can also kill. “Smart munitions” allow one to hit targets more precisely, so reducing “collateral damage”. This matters because if the justification of military action is to protect the innocent from oppression, it makes little sense to liberate them by killing them. If one can target their oppressors directly and solely, it becomes easier to justify such an action. For all the moral rhetoric surrounding humanitarian intervention, its attractiveness seems to be the product not entirely of moral reasoning but also of pure questions of power and possibility.

This is not the only problem with the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The primary argument of this article is, indeed, that the doctrine’s most fundamental flaw is that it undermines the principle of jus contra bellum and restores the ideas of jus ad bellum. The former remains the more valid principle. The arguments for making the barriers to war as high as possible, for having a presumption against war, and for denying war the status of a positive good, remain sound. They do so because of the nature of war itself as a means of action.

The justifications for humanitarian intervention are manifold. In part, they are to do with intentions: the very phrase “humanitarian intervention” stresses the benign motives of the act as a means of justifying it. In part, the justifications are also consequentialist: the harm done by war is to be outweighed by the good. Of course, the logic of utilitarian calculations is hard to defend (how exactly does one weigh, for instance, the deaths of ten thousand or more Iraqi citizens against the destruction of the despotism of Saddam Hussein?). But even if one is willing to accept both the intentionalist and consequentialist positions, the concept fails as an ethical construct because it ignores the question of means (quite deliberately, one might suspect, since the refusal to use the word “war” suggests a certain embarrassment regarding the means).

Means and Ends

“The means,” said Mahatma Gandhi, “are the ends in the making.”⁴ One does not have to accept this idea entirely to admit that means are a vital element in ethical decision-making. Even a devoted consequentialist should surely accept this, since if one can show that certain means regularly produce negative outcomes, then there must be a strong case for disavowing those methods. It is also surely beyond question that the manner in which one does something has an effect on the outcome. The problem with humanitarian intervention as a concept is that it brushes aside the issue of how the humanitarian ends are to be achieved, and shows no understanding that the chosen means—military force—are simply inappropriate for the pursuit of humanitarian goals. In fact, the problem with war is that it is an unsuitable means for the pursuit of almost any political objective, let alone a humanitarian one. Violence is something one can use to defend oneself, to protect oneself when there are no other options left because of the aggression of another, but those who imagine that they can use violence on the international scene to achieve specific ends at a proportionate cost are in general deluding themselves.

The idea that war, in Clausewitz’s phrase, is “a continuation of politics by other means”, assumes that politicians who go to war have a clearly defined goal, and use war as the tool to reach that goal because, for some reason, they have decided that war is the most appropriate means of doing so. But war is not a very rational activity—if one defines rationality as goal-orientated action. The goals pursued by anyone who begins a war are never singular, and are often self-contradictory. The causes of war are many, but they are only in part based on calculations of material loss and gain. One may fight because one wishes to gain something, but the reasons why one chooses to gain that thing through war are largely psychological. One fights not just because one wants something, but because it is important that one gain it by fighting. To a large extent, the aim of war is war itself.

Honour and Shame

So, let us imagine that the leaders of a Western state feel a genuine desire to help the downtrodden of the world, and in order to liberate them from oppression resort to armed intervention. In such a circumstance, one has to ask why violence is their chosen tool. There may be many reasons: a desire to be seen to be doing something, internal political pressures, the simple fact that armed forces exist and are thus the tools which happen to be at hand, or perhaps the psychological desire to live up to some ideal of the tough leader. The last is often the most important. Living up to the ideal of virtuous leadership saves honour and avoids shame. Thus, Donald Kagan comments, “The reader may be surprised by how small a role ... considerations of practical utility and material gain, and even ambition for power itself, play in bringing on wars and how often some aspect of honor is decisive.”⁵

One can see this logic at work in the resort to war in Iraq. For all his no doubt genuine desire to liberate Iraqis from despotism, British prime minister Tony Blair’s ultimate rationale for war was fear of personal shame: “I do not want it on my conscience that we knew the threat, saw it coming, and did nothing,” he told a conference of the Trades Union Congress in September 2002. Having threatened war, Britain was then compelled to follow through on its threats, or know national shame. “The quicker it is done the better,” one British official told the Guardian. “To back down now would be the worst result possible. We would have no credibility if Saddam Hussein was still in place.”⁶

The point of these quotations is that they show that for all the material logic of war—the pursuit of security (i.e., fears of weapons of mass destruction, or whatever), the desire to help others, and so forth—the actual decision to use force in any instance is dependent on matters such as the belligerents’ sense of honour. They fight because at a certain point their political goals become less important than that they fight. The fighting is an end in itself.

Victory above All

On top of this, in general, military means and political ends diverge once war begins. Once the bullets start flying, the people who decided to fight the war move into the background, and new people—primarily military men—replace them in the decision-making process. What matters then is not so much achieving the aim of the war, as “winning” it, achieving something called “victory”, which is calculated in purely military terms. War is a two-sided process. The enemy will do what it can to prevent one from achieving one’s objectives, and therefore one can achieve them only by first defeating the enemy in a purely military sense. Because of this, military priorities rapidly supersede political ones, making good strategy almost impossible. In a sense, therefore, humanitarian intervention is an impossibility, because as soon as one starts an “intervention” it ceases to be humanitarian in objective and becomes simply a matter of defeating the enemy.

Of course, in theory it is not impossible to match ends and means, and strategists endeavour to find ways of ensuring that this match takes place. But they are largely deluding themselves in believing that it is possible in practice. For we must remember that those who start wars do not do so solely to pursue some political end. They fight in order to fight. In these circumstances, persuading them to keep their eyes focused on their political goal is almost impossible.

The Wrong Tool

During a humanitarian intervention, there will be inevitable pressures to abandon the humanitarian objective in pursuit of victory, or at the very least to place military priorities above humanitarian ones. But that is not the end of it. The humanitarian objectives will be competing with other ones, often psychological in basis. It will therefore be doubly hard to fight in such a way as to achieve the humanitarian aim. So, for instance, in Yugoslavia, NATO chose to carry out an intervention to help Kosovo Albanians on the ground by means of aerial bombardment, a strategy which was incapable in the short term of protecting them, and which by inciting Yugoslav retaliation actually endangered the lives of those it was meant to protect. This was symptomatic of a general problem with the nature of war: war is by nature unsuited to pursuing aims other than simple, immediate self-protection.

In fact, there is ample evidence to suggest that war is always particularly unsuited to humanitarian aims—not simply because killing and humanitarianism are uncomfortable bedfellows, but also because the mismatch between means and ends is likely to be larger in “humanitarian” wars than in other ones. It is easier to approximate means and ends when something truly important is at stake. The incentive to avoid being sidetracked is then very strong. The incentive in humanitarian interventions, by contrast, is quite weak. It is almost inevitable that political leaders, however much they protest to the contrary, will care less for the suffering of others than for the survival of their own nation, and will be willing to sacrifice less for the former.

It is, therefore, no surprise that troops conducting supposedly humanitarian operations are instructed to place a high priority on “force protection” (i.e., on keeping friendly casualties low), whereas those fighting wars which affect vital national interests are more willing to suffer damage. Furthermore, where material self-interest is less apparent, there is more scope for psychological motives to come to the fore. Overall, the conclusion must be that humanitarianism is a weak motive, and will thus produce poor strategy—i.e., force is likely to be used in a way which contradicts the purpose of alleviating human suffering.

All this means that anything which serves to relegitimise war as an instrument of national policy is undesirable. For it encourages the use of a tool which inevitably does harm and which by nature is severely limited in its capacity to do good. Unleash war, and its internal logic means that you almost inevitably unleash destructive tendencies which are beyond your control. Those who start a war are like men who set a fire to clear fields for cultivation, and then find that the fire rages beyond the boundaries set for it, and burns down their homes and all their property. The ancients were in some respects correct to regard war as a god which controls men, for that is a more accurate description of the truth than the delusions of strategists that man can direct war. Allow Ares loose, and he will rule you, not vice versa.

This takes us back to the original point of this discussion: the recent shift from jus contra bellum to jus ad bellum, from a presumption against war back to an older presumption against injustice. The logic of war described in this article makes it clear that the presumption against war represents the better approach, and that it evolved for good reasons. The problem with the concept of humanitarian intervention is that it undermines this presumption. It paints on war the gloss of justice, portrays it as a positive act, not merely a necessary one, and thus encourages war and all its negative consequences. Most crucially, it not only encourages humanitarian interventions, but war as a whole. Once you undermine the presumption against war, war follows even in circumstances which would not meet the criteria of humanitarianism. If the reader will permit a few clichés, the idea of intervention really does “open Pandora’s box”, really is the start of the “slippery slope”, and really does represent “the thin end of the wedge”.

Kosovo as Precedent

If there be any doubt about this, one need only refer to the two major wars fought by Western states in the past decade: that conducted against Yugoslavia in 1999, and the Anglo-American–led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The former was a “humanitarian intervention”, the latter not. Although politicians used the human rights abuses of the Iraqi regime as part of their justification for war, these were not the primary reasons cited. Matters of national and international security played a more prominent role. This was a “pre-emptive” war fought, at least in terms of official rhetoric, to protect the world against the hypothetical threat of an alliance of rogue states, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction. Yugoslavia and Iraq were very different cases, but the latter was a product of the former.

To see this, one must go back again to the choice of means. There were many alternative means of dealing with Iraq—the strategy of containment, after all, seemed to be working well. Why, then, was war chosen? The answer in part is that the liberation of Kosovo had made war legitimate once again as a tool of policy. Those who saw the television pictures of Tony Blair mobbed by rapturous crowds in Kosovo as a liberator cannot but wonder what the impact on his imagination was. It can only have reinforced in his mind the attitude that he was correct to use force, and that violence is sometimes the answer.

The Kosovo conflict also gave war a new legitimacy in legal, as well as moral, terms. Prior to Kosovo, legal opinion was mostly of the view that humanitarian intervention was illegal, unless specifically sanctioned by the United Nations. But NATO attacked Yugoslavia without UN sanction, and in the full knowledge that had such sanction been sought Russia would certainly have vetoed it in the Security Council. This set an important precedent. Challenged that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal without a specific UN resolution, American and British officials responded by pointing to the example of Kosovo. Those who had accepted the attack on Yugoslavia on human rights grounds now found that they had no honest way of objecting to an attack on Iraq on legal ones.

Finally, NATO’s actions against Yugoslavia and the language of humanitarian intervention did play an important role in convincing many to support the attack on Iraq. They created the impression that human rights violations constituted sufficient “just cause” for war. This permitted those favouring war for non-humanitarian ends to usurp human rights issues for their own purposes.

This was especially true in the United Kingdom, where the issue of war against Iraq came before the House of Commons for a vote. As stated above, the primary motivation of the UK government was not humanitarian, but concern for national security. But the legitimacy given to humanitarian intervention persuaded some who might have opposed the war purely on security grounds to support it on human rights ones. A prime example is the Labour Member of Parliament Ann Clwyd, who made it clear that she saw the war as a positive action which would liberate Iraqis from oppression. Prior to the Kosovo experience it is almost unthinkable that a right-wing administration, such as that of George W. Bush in the United States, would have been able to gain support for aggressive military action (for primarily non-humanitarian goals) from her and other British left-wingers. But after Kosovo, this strange alliance became a fact, and thanks to it Tony Blair was able to gain a majority in favour of war in the British Parliament, a majority which otherwise would probably have been unattainable.

Indeed, one of the interesting phenomena associated with the Iraq War is the way in which alliances crossed traditional political divides. In the United Kingdom, the anti-war camp included much of the traditional Right (in fact, opinion polls showed that, despite the position of the parliamentary Conservative Party, Conservative voters were far more likely to be anti-war than Labour voters). The pro-war camp, on the other hand, included both some of the instinctively pro-American, pro-military elements of the political Right, and the Blairite neo-imperialists of the Left. The second half of this equation indicates the extent to which, thanks to Kosovo, war has now become the plaything of liberal human rights activists, while those who know something about the nature of war are in opposition to it. (In this regard it is extremely interesting that former British military officers interviewed in the media during 2002 and 2003 were almost entirely against the invasion of Iraq—prominent figures such as General Sir Michael Rose and Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden being notable examples.) This is clear evidence that the idea of humanitarian intervention has captivated a certain element of public opinion and has in turn led that element to reappraise its attitude to war in general. The result, sadly, has been more war.

Conclusion

The argument of this article has been that during the twentieth century, mankind gradually moved to raise the barriers against war, and to replace the idea of a “just war” with that of a presumption against war. The horrors of modern warfare were largely responsible for this change. The collapse of communism, however, left overwhelming power in the hands of Western states, which consequently have succumbed to the temptation to use that power, in the belief that the costs to them will be low.

The ideology of humanitarian intervention is part of this new desire to relegitimise the waging of war. That, though, is its weakness. For anything which relegitimises any type of war serves to make war in general more likely. Operation “Iraqi Freedom” was not a humanitarian operation, but it would not have been possible without the precedent set by humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. This might not matter if war was an efficient tool for the pursuit of humanitarian or other political goals. But it is not. On the contrary, the very nature of war militates against its being effective in this regard, and ensures that its negative side will nearly always outweigh the positive. The twentieth-century concept of jus contra bellum is, therefore, the correct one and superior to the medieval idea of “just war”. Since humanitarian intervention undermines this concept, it is an idea which needs to be rejected in full. Humanitarian intervention is war, and its result will not be a safer or better world, but only more war in our time.

Endnotes

1. Jarat Chopra, “The Obsolescence of Intervention under International Law”, in Subduing Sovereignty: Sovereignty and the Right to Intervene, ed. Marianne Heiberg (London: Continuum, 1994), pp. 37–9.

2. Paul Ramsey, Speak up for Just War or Pacifism: A Critique of the United Methodist Bishops’ Pastoral Letter “In Defense of Creation” (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1988), p. 54.

3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Question 40, Article 2.

4. Mahatma Gandhi, cited in Nigel Dower, “Violent Humanitarianism: An Oxymoron?”, in Human Rights and Military Intervention, ed. Alexander Moseley and Richard Norman (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), p. 77.

5. Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Anchor, 1995), p. 8.

6. Ewen MacAskill and Michael White, “Blair to Defy Anti-War Protests”, Guardian (London), 17 February 2003.