Shattered Illusions

Liberal Interventionism Is Dead and Timothy Garton Ash Has Just Buried It

By Conor Foley
Sunday September 07 2008 11:00 BST
Courtesy Of The Guardian

Timothy Garton Ash was one of the most articulate and influential advocates of "liberal interventionism" and so his effective recantation of the doctrine yesterday should not go unremarked. In a subtle re-branding exercise he declared instead for "liberal internationalism", which he defined in the following way.

Liberal internationalism does not mean marching into other people's countries and telling the locals what's good for them down the barrel of a gun. It means developing a set of norms and rules by which most states will abide, preferably made explicit in international law and sustained by international organisations. It posits some basic rights that belong to every human being on this planet, whatever her or his "culture", circumstances or rulers. It aims to strike a balance between the universal and the particular. It seeks to build peace between nations on these foundations.

Now contrast that with what he described at the time as an "excellent speech" by David Miliband from earlier this year in which the foreign secretary said:

... in the 1990s, something strange happened. The neoconservative movement seemed to be most sure about spreading democracy around the world. The left seemed conflicted between the desirability of the goal and its qualms about the use of military means. In fact, the goal of spreading democracy should be a great progressive project; the means need to combine soft and hard power. We should not let the genuine debate about the 'how' of foreign policy obscure the clarity about the 'what'.

And back to Garton Ash yesterday:

The essence of our new European way of doing things is something more like procedural integrity. The frontiers of existing states must be respected, but in exceptional cases territories within states may negotiate special autonomies or even vote to become independent, like Slovakia and Kosovo, or perhaps Scotland one day - but always by peaceful means, by negotiation and consent, with the sanction of national and international law. The how matters even more than the what.

That sounds pretty much like boring old-fashioned diplomacy to me. We already have a set of rules and norms by which most states will abide; it is called international law and one of the many reasons why the invasion of Iraq was wrong was that it violated this. At the time of the Iraq war, on 20 March 2003, Garton Ash was praising Blair's "magnificent speech to the British Parliament" and enthusing that he was "totally convinced that the Blairite vision of a new post-war order of world politics is the best one on the market". Yet yesterday he mocked the "characteristic incompetence" of Bush's foreign policy towards Georgia ("don't invade a sovereign country – that's what we do").

Interestingly, Garton Ash also quite pointedly did not support calls for Georgia and Ukraine to be brought into Nato – offering them EU membership instead. He confessed that "Europe is not good at doing stuff with tanks. But we do a thousand other things, each smaller, softer and slower than a tank". This is quite a climb-down from even a year ago when he was praising the strength and decisiveness of Blair's foreign policy.

In many ways the evolution of Garton Ash's thinking is probably a barometer of a wider mood swing among the liberal left. He supported military intervention in Kosovo without a UN mandate and was an enthusiast for the development of the "responsibility to protect" concept. He has railed against international inaction in Darfur, yet after the Burmese cyclone this May he concluded that "the responsibility to protect has to be exercised responsibly" and that ruled out western military action without a UN mandate.

The initial impetus for liberal interventionism came from a genuine belief that "something must be done" to help people suffering in far-off countries, but it fitted into a wider political narrative by which a section of the liberal left came to identify themselves. The humanitarian crises of the 1990s coincided with an intellectual crisis of confidence on the left which left many flailing around for something else to believe in. Blair, the humanitarian war leader, convinced them that, even as they gave up on the radical transformation of British society, there was a wider stage on which to play out their political vanguardism. It has taken two bloody conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan to shatter these illusions, but judging by Garton Ash's article we can finally conclude that liberal interventionism is dead and buried.