Two sorts of sentiments inspire political action: hope and indignation. This book is largely the product of the latter sentiment, but the aim of its publication is to encourage the former. A brief and subjective overview of the political evolution of the past twenty years can explain the source of my indignation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union can be compared to the fall of Napoleon. Both were the product of major revolutions whose ideals they symbolized, rightly or wrongly, and which they defended more or less effectively while betraying them in various ways. If their natures were complex, the consequences of their fall were relatively simple and led to a general triumph of reaction, with the United States today playing a role analogous to that of the Holy Alliance nearly two centuries ago.1 There is no need to be an admirer of the Soviet Union (or of Napoleon) to make this observation. My generation, that of 1968, wanted to overcome the shortcomings of the Soviet system, but certainly did not mean to take the great leap backwards which actually took place and to which, in its overwhelming majority, it has easily adapted.2 A discussion of the causes of these failures would require several books. Suffice it to say that for all sorts of reasons, some of which will be touched on in what follows, I did not follow the evolution of the majority of my generation and have preserved what it would call my youthful illusions, at least some of them.
And so, when the Kosovo war began in 1999,1 found myself completely isolated. To the right, there were still a few realpolitikers who saw no good reason for France to wage war against Serbia, least of all to please Germany and the United States. But on the left, the concept of humanitarian intervention was accepted almost unanimously, even within organizations that had retained revolutionary labels, whether Trotskyist, communist, or anarchist. Even today (in August 2006), the movement against the occupation of Iraq is weak and opposition to the threat of war against Iran is weaker still.
In reaction to all that, in 1999 I began writing texts diffused mainly by the Internet, sometimes published here and there. But inasmuch as those texts were often polemic and linked to particular events, I decided, partly in response to various objections encountered in the course of debates, to bring together in a single book my arguments against Western interventionism and its humanitarian justifications. This book was written initially for a European public, but having lived and worked in the United States, I am convinced that it could also be of interest to an American public, for two reasons: for one, because it provides a glimpse of what is going on in Europe, especially in the progressive and ecological circles often idealized by the American left; and for another, because the ideological weaknesses of the movements of opposition to imperial wars are the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
One of the readers of the French edition of this book remarked to me that it was a critique of the left, but one not made from a right-wing viewpoint, which is a fairly good description of what I meant to do. Let us say that the intention here is to make a modest contribution to an ideological reconstruction of the left. Everyone admits that it is weak and, in my view, it is weak, partly because it has not come up with a proper intellectual response to the ideological offensive waged by the right after the fall of communism and has, on the contrary, much too thoroughly interiorized the arguments advanced by the right in the course of that campaign. In this preface, I want to make a few remarks explaining how the arguments made in this book fit into the broader perspective of what could be meant by an intellectual reconstruction of the left.
Historically, one can consider that the “left” represents roughly three types of combat:
• For social control of production, ranging from defense of workers to establishment of different forms of ownership of the means of production other than private.
• For peace, against hegemony, imperialism and colonialism.
• For the defense of democracy, of the rights of the individual, of gender equality, of minorities and of the environment.
Of course, it is perfectly possible to be “on the right” in one of those categories and “on the left” in another. In particular, a good part of the modern right defends “the free market,” that is, private ownership of the means of production, while professing moderately “left” positions in the third category mentioned above. Moreover, the isolationist, libertarian or “realistic” right often espouses quite anti-imperialist positions while maintaining views extremely opposed to those of the left on the other points. Besides that, there is a difference betweeen the old left, meaning the communist movement but also most of the rest of the left up until the mid-1960s, which emphasized the first two aspects while underestimating and sometimes completely ignoring the third, and the “new left,” which focused its main attention on the third aspect, all too often to the detriment of the first two.
Even if one recognizes the validity of the criticism that the new left addressed to the old left, it is possible to conclude that, on certain problems, the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. Concerning the first issue, that of social control of the economy, the movement against corporate globalization has been the sign of a reawakening to its fundamental nature. But, when it comes to the subject of this book, the reaction to hegemony and imperialism, the renewal remains feeble, even if the war in Iraq has shown just what sort of disasters result from the intervention policy.
To simplify, one can say that the new left has had the tendency, faced with Western intervention, to waver between two attitudes:
• that which I call humanitarian imperialism, which concedes much too much to the idea that our “universal values” give us the right and even the duty to intervene elsewhere and which opposes imperial wars weakly or not at all. The critique of these ideas is our subject here.
• cultural relativism, that is, the idea that there is no such thing as a moral position having universal value and in whose name one can objectively judge other societies and cultures (or our own).
This second position leads to opposition, on principle, to wars, but it seems to me hard to defend, even if the aim of this book is not to criticize it,3 but rather to sketch out a third position, which rejects intervention while at the same time accepting as desirable the objectives which it claims to pursue.
In fact, the origin of this debate goes back to the beginning of the colonial era: when the first Europeans arrived in distant lands, they discovered “barbarous customs”: human sacrifices, cruel punishments, binding of women’s feet, and so on. Violations of human rights, the absence of democracy or the fate of women in Muslim countries are the contemporary version of those barbarous customs. And, confronted with this phenomenon, there have traditionally been three types of reaction in the West. First, that of relativism which denies that there is an objective or universal standard which allows one to say that such customs are barbarous. Second, that of humanitarian imperialism, which uses the denunciation of those customs to legitimatize our interventions, wars and interference. And finally, the point of view that I defend here, which readily admits the barbarous nature of such customs, but considers that our interventions do much.) more harm than good, including in relation to the proclaimed goal of making barbarism recede. And it points out that there is a considerable amount of “barbarism” in our own “civilized” countries, especially when they interact with others. Insofar as the debate, especially in North America, all too often centers on the opposition between “cultural relativists” and “humanitarian imperialists,” this third position has a hard time being heard, or even understood for what it is. I hope that this essay, even if it doesn’t manage to win readers over to this way of seeing things, will at least help bring it into the debate.
Another problem is that, after the fall of communism, large parts of the left have lost any sense of direction or of purpose or have even entirely given up the very notion of historical progress. To combat that sentiment adequately would require another book, but a few remarks on the history of the 20th century may illustrate the lines along which to proceed.
On July 1, 1916, began the Battle of the Somme; on that single day the British suffered more than 50,000 casualties, out of which 20,000 died. The battle went on for four months, leading to about a million casualties on all sides and the war itself continued for another two years. In the summer of 2006, the Israeli army stopped its attacks on Lebanon after losing about a hundred soldiers; the majority of the U.S. population turned against the Iraq war after fewer than 3,000 died. That indicates a major change in the mentality of the West, and this reluctance to die in large numbers for “God and Country” is major progress in the history of mankind. From the neoconservative point of view, however, this phenomenon is a sign of decadence; in fact one of the positive aspects of the present conflict, from their perspective, is that it should strengthen the moral fiber of the American people, by making them ready to “die for a cause.”4 But, so far, it is not working. More realistic people, the planners at the Pentagon for example, have tried to replace waves of human cannon fodder by massive “strategic” bombing. This works only rarely; in Kosovo and Serbia it did succeed at least in bringing pro-Western clients to power in both places. But it clearly is not enough in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine or Lebanon. The only thing that might work, in a very special sense of course, would be nuclear weapons, and the fact that those weapons are the West’s last military hope is truly frightening.
To put this observation in a more global context, Westerners do not always appreciate that the major event of the 20th century was neither the rise and fall of fascism, nor the history of communism, but decolonization. One should remember that, about a century ago, the British could forbid the access of a park in Shanghai to “dogs and Chinese.” And, of course, most of Asia and Africa was under European control. Latin America was formally independent, but under American and British tutelage; military interventions were routine. All of this collapsed during the 20th century, through wars and revolutions; in fact, the main lasting effect of the Russian Revolution is probably the Soviet Union’s not insignificant support to the decolonization process. This process freed hundreds of millions of people from one of the most brutal forms of oppression. It is major progress in the history of mankind, similar to the abolition of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Still, it is true that the colonial system gave way to the neocolonial one and that most decolonized countries have adopted, at least for the time being, a capitalist form of development. That provides some consolation to the excolonialists (and disappoints expectations of the Western left that opposed colonialism). But such sentiments may reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of “socialism” in the 20th century and of the historical significance of the present period. Before 1914, all socialist movements, whether libertarian or statist, reformist or revolutionary, envisioned socialism, that is, the socialization of the means of production, as an historic stage that was supposed to succeed capitalism in relatively developed Western societies possessing a democratic state, a functioning education system and a basically liberal and secular culture. All this disappeared with World War I and the Russian Revolution. After that, the libertarian aspects of socialism withered away, most of the European socialist movements became increasingly incorporated into the capitalist system and its main radical sector, the communists, identified socialism with whatever policies were adopted by the Soviet model. But that model had almost nothing to do with socialism as it was generally understood before the First World War. It should rather be understood as a (rather successful) attempt at rapid economic development of an underdeveloped country, an attempt to catch up, culturally, economically and militarily, by whatever means necessary, with the West. The same is true of post-Soviet revolutions and national liberation movements. As a first approximation, one can say that all over the Third World, people, or rather governments, have tried to “catch up” either by “socialist” or by “capitalist” means.
But, if one recognizes that aspect, the whole history of the 20th century can be interpreted very differently from the dominant discourse about the “socialism that was tried and failed everywhere.” What was tried and actually succeeded (almost) everywhere was emancipation from Western domination. This has inverted a centuries-old process of European expansion and hegemony over the rest of the world. The 20th century has not been the one of socialism, but it has been the one of anti-imperialism. And this inversion is likely to continue during the 21st century. Most of the time, the “South” is strengthening itself, with some setbacks (the period surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union being a time of regression, from that point of view).
This has important consequences for both the Western peace movement and the old issue of socialism. There is some truth to the Leninist idea that the benefits of imperialism corrupt the Western working class—not only in purely economic terms (through the exploitation of the colonies), but also through the feeling of superiority that imperialism has implanted in the Western mind. However, this is changing for two reasons. On the one hand, “globalization” means that the West has become more dependent on the Third World: we do not simply import raw materials or export capital, but we also depend on cheap labor, working either here or in export-oriented factories abroad; we “transfer” capital from the South to the North through “debt payments” and capital flight; and we import an increasing number of engineers and scientists. Moreover, “globalization” means that there is a decrease in linkage between the population of the U.S. and their elites or their capitalists, whose interests are less and less tied to those of “their” country. Whether the population will react by adopting some pro-imperialist fantasies such as Christian Zionism or “the war against terrorism,” or whether it will rather increase its solidarity with the emerging countries of the South is a major challenge for the future.
On the other hand, the rise of the South means that there is no longer a preponderance of military force that allows the West to impose its will, the U.S. defeat in Iraq being the most extraordinary illustration of that fact. Of course, there are other means of pressure—economic blackmail, boycotts, buying elections, etc. But countermeasures are increasingly being taken also against those methods, and one should never forget that a relationship of force is always ultimately military—without it, how does one get people to pay their debts, for example?
The main error of the communists is to have conflated two notions of “socialism”: the one that existed before World War I and the rapid development model of the Soviet Union. But the current situation raises two different questions to which two different forms of “socialism” might be the answer. One is to find paths of development in the Third World, or even a redefinition of what “development” means, that do not coincide with either the capitalist or the Soviet model. But that is a problem to be solved in Latin America, Asia or Africa. In the West, the problem is different: we do not suffer from the lack of satisfaction of basic needs that exists elsewhere (of course, many basic needs are not satisfied, but that is a problem of distribution or of political will rather than one of production or of possibility). The problem here is to define a post-imperialist future for the Western societies, meaning a form of life that would not depend on an unsustainable relation of domination over the rest of the world. Whether one wants to call that “socialism” is a matter of definition, but it would have to include reliance on renewable energy resources, a form of consumption that does not depend on massive imports and an education system that produces the number of qualified people that the nation needs. Whether all this is compatible with the system of private property of the means of production, and a political system largely controlled by those who own those means, remains to be seen.
This establishes a link between the struggle for peace and the struggle for social transformation, because the more we live in peace with the rest of the world, the more we give up our largely illusory military power and stop our constant “threats,” the more will we be forced to think about and elaborate an alternative economic order. It is a great tragedy that among Greens, at least among the European ones, this link has been totally lost during the Kosovo and the Afghanistan wars, which most of them supported on humanitarian grounds. It is equally tragic that the opposition to the Iraq war in the United States has been virtually nonexistent and that the population has turned against the war almost entirely as a result of the effectiveness of the Iraqi resistance. As I try to argue in this book, this is partly due to the ideological misrepresentations that have spread widely throughout the left during the period of imperial ideological reconstruction that followed the end of the Vietnam war. The left must clarify its own ideas first and then try to explain to the rest of our societies that we must adapt to an inevitable loss of hegemony. But what I call here humanitarian imperialism is a major obstacle to that enterprise. Yet I don’t see any real alternative for the West, except to go back to the spirit of the Battle of the Somme, but this time armed with nuclear weapons.