Part of the problem is that there is no accepted hierarchy of rights and there is a tendency to conflate various types of rights. What we have is a cafeteria approach to rights, where the assortment selected on any given day can vary according to taste.

An anarchist might place individual human rights at the very top of the list. These must be preserved and cannot be violated. But this position is routinely rendered meaningless by rich and powerful elites being able to grab control of the state and use its powers against the rights of all who oppose the agenda of those elites. The favorite justification for so doing is to preserve "order", which, after some time, devolves into preserving a social order, and the political order through which that social order acts and the virtues of continuity and stability usually come to be emphasized.

The idea of self-determination seems largely derived from cultural and linguistic nationalism. Each ethnic group is entitled to select its own form of government. This is challenged by the de-facto intermixing of ethnicities within defined geographic locations and the lack of any standard for the sort of government that is suitable for a particular people or collection of peoples. Often the result is rule by the most determined and/or sophisticated user of some combination of violence and rhetoric, as in Libya.

Non-violence is great as a social goal, but weak as a guiding principle. It is, on its own, helpless against determined violence exercised without conscience. The best that can be achieved would seem to be to have as a goal a society in which there is the least level of violence possible. Post WWII Japan ranks high on this scale. But this was made possible by the existence of the USA as the military guarantor of Japan's independence and there are costs to that arrangement.  

When we allow the "principle" of self-determination and national sovereignty to trump the principle of universal human rights we set the stage for debacles such as the various genocides of the 20th century. So self determination and national sovereignty is supported most by those who fear they might have to violate the rights of their citizens in order to remain in power.

A state run in the interests of its elites, be they hereditary nobility or financial elites, and comes to value the institutions that serve their interests. Only fortuitously do their actions seem to conform to any collection of principles. An excellent discussion of this problem in terms of "the real" vs. "the ideal" is provided in E.H. Carr's The 20 Year Crisis.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Thanks, Zwackus, for continuing a discussion that I tried to begin in my diary and hoped to develop further at some future stage. I think part of the problem is that people sometimes look for moral or political absolutes which can be applied rigorously and consistently across all situations and thus arrive at a coherent doctrine of world Governance. There may be a movement in that direction - and it is one I would support - but it is very far from the reality of where we are now.

First some historical context:  Medieval wars often involved battles between relatively small armies and left civil societies relatively unscathed  One Monarch/ruler might be replaced by another, and there could be great economic disruption as an army rampaged across a countryside seeking food and women to sustain a rapacious army, but it didn't necessarily involved a systematic attempt at genocide - the attempt to completely wipe out an indigenous population and replace it with an invading one. The officer class/nobility of different countries were often just engaged in a battle over who should own/rule what. Royal intermarriages, shifting diplomatic alliances, an emergent common interests in trade could mitigate the conflicts and even a war might only replace one ruling class with another.

Then a few things happened.  Populations rose exponentially.  Lebensraum became an issue for some. Technology hugely increased the scale of slaughter possible and also gradually blurred the distinctions between combatants and civilians. The twentieth century saw two world wars of unparalleled scale and systematic attempts at civilian genocide - by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and a variety of smaller scale despots.  Institutions like the League of Nations, International Courts of Justice and UN emerged to try and put some order to international relations and limit the scope of repression and war.  An emerging body of international law, generated by Treaties, International Courts and International organisations began to emerge - and became, haltingly, and selectively, more enforceable.

All of these things limit the absolute right of a Sovereign or a state to do absolutely what it pleases.  The concept of "human rights" as distinct from the rights of citizenship that might or might not be conferred by individual states emerged.  Thus the right of "National Self-Determination" became ever more constrained.  The world might be made up of more or less independent Nation states but all were, to a greater or lesser extent subject to International Law - usually in inverse proportion to their military and economic strength.  And all of this implied - if it were to be more than just paperwork or window dressing - that there were ways of enforcing such laws.

Thus there emerged a range of measures - ranging from diplomatic pressures, economic sanctions, arms embargoes, clandestine actions, media/propaganda wars, threats of prosecution for "war crimes" etc. - which could place some limits of State Sovereignty short of the absolute sanction of military intervention and formal war.  However whilst these changed the nature of international relations, they didn't entirely replace the age old practices of wars of conquest or domination where the powerful states subjugated the weaker.  Whatever change there was, was gradual.

A few factors accelerated the trend:

1. The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction if all out nuclear war broke out.

2. Increased economic interdependencies as the world economy globalised

3. The recognition that wars were an economically inefficient means of dominating a territory or natural resources

4. Increased awareness of the limits of the biosphere and our increasing footprint which threatened to undermine the sustainability of the international system as a whole

5. The gradual replacement of an international system of nation states with a system of global corporations which frequently have more power than several individual states put together and which increasingly determine the context within which all states must operate - hence no Tobin taxes, low corporate taxation, private armies of "contractors" not subject to the laws of war

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Moreover there isn't a clearly distinct Global Judiciary whose decisions are clearly and invariably enforceable. Decisions are enforced only is it is in the interests of major players with the power to do so.  The USA routinely flouts Treaty obligations with impunity. Military interventions as in Libya are the exception rather than the norm.  Many would argue that a law selectively enforced is no law at all.  Others argue that it is better than no law at all.  But clearly enforcement is costly and which Nation wants to put its soldiers at risk unless it is clearly its its self-defined national interest?  This inconsistency undermines the legitimacy of the international system, but is it not better than nothing, and a welcome sign of progress?

Countries such as Israel and Apartheid South Africa are/were particularly vociferous in their complaints of Double standards. Whatever their failings, weren't Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Rwanda etc. far more egregious violations of human rights? Objectively yes.  But if you claim to be a "western democracy" upholding "western" standards, you will also be judged by those standards.  So there is a value in setting international norms and standards for human rights and Governmental conduct which can gradually be applied more generally across a wider sphere.

It would be silly to deny that this movement for Greater global governance isn't also being used by major players to further their interests.   But perhaps even sillier to deny that a movement towards higher global governance standards isn't necessary and good - whatever its limitations at any one point in time. History hasn't ended. Wars will continue to be fought.  Military and Economic might rather than justice will still determine the outcome of conflicts in many cases. Self interest and Greed hasn't been abolished.  But a generalised movement towards higher standards of global governance together with a greater array of non-violent tools for enforcing them cannot but be welcomed - in my view - whatever the merits of a specific intervention in a specific conflict.

Index of Frank's Diaries

... is a lot easier to make in principle than it is in practise.

In practise, the case for liberal intervention has to overcome not simply the principled objection to violent conflict resolution, or the objection that it interferes with the right of people to self-determination. It also has to make the case that the intervention will actually support the principles of liberal intervention. To that end,

• The intervening power must argue convincingly that the destruction and misery it visits upon the targeted country is at worst proportional to the future atrocities prevented by the intervention. This bar is not easy to clear if your principal military doctrine involves terror bombing (as all Atlantic powers' military doctrines have, in various guises, since at least the second world war).

• The intervening power must either be prepared to annex the target country wholesale (and grant its inhabitants full political rights as citizens) or make a compelling case that an intervention will strengthen indigenous political structures that are preferable to the political structures that caused the crisis provoking intervention. Replacing a despot with a civil war, a Balkanized patchwork of warlords or another despot does not really qualify.

• The intervening power must make a credible case that it is able to carry out a decisive intervention. If the intervention ends up simply prolonging a futile conflict, it confers no benefits.

Further, a doctrine of liberal intervention (as opposed to ) faces two additional objections, related to the credibility of the claim that it is actually a doctrine of liberal intervention, as opposed to a doctrine of aggressive colonialism:

• A power that adopts a doctrine of liberal intervention must have a record of even-handedness in its treatment of human rights violations. In particular, it must pressure any client states it has to observe human rights. If a power does not care enough about human rights to force the states that it has economic or cultural power over to refrain from violations, then it is incredible that it would sacrifice blood and treasure to secure human rights by force of arms.

• The sort of military organisation and equipment that is required for liberal intervention is identical to the sort of military organisation and equipment that allows one to launch colonial expeditions. A power that adopts a doctrine of liberal intervention must therefore be able to credibly argue that the armaments it procures are for use in liberal intervention, rather than colonial mischief. This is not easy to argue when one has (as all powers currently capable of projecting military force a significant distance beyond their borders have) an unbroken history of colonial mischief.

At present, none of the powers that lay claim to the mantle of liberal intervention fulfil even one of these criteria. Until and unless they do, the finer points of principle are perhaps not the most relevant point of departure for the discussion.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

Thanks to all for an interesting discussion. I agree with much of what has been said. But I'd like to add one quick point that (I think) hasn't been made yet.  The notion of human rights, appealing as it may be on the surface, is deeply flawed: not only is it hard to agree on why they might be but whatever we end up will always be limiting. If your list of rights does not include X, then is X ok? To draw a fence around a set of morally protected goods is a dodgy practice. Might be good as an instrumental device (a political slogan to rally people around a cause) but philosophically the notion is a mess. I wouldn't go as far as Alasdair MacIntyre and deny the very existence of rights, but I believe that rights are, at most, the corollaries of a moral system and not its foundations. So then why do we need rights? What's wrong with duty, or virtue, or utility, or categorical imperatives? Take your pick. Rights are like money: they are created for a purpose. So let's stick to the purpose.

Is there a price to pay for appealing to rights? I believe there is one, which the demonization of the enemy. A violator of human rights is, de facto, a subhuman. That's why all  modern western wars are  "just." The enemy is never just "against our interests": it is always evil. Communism was evil, so it was OK to kill 3 million Vietnamese. Saddam was evil, so it's fine if we slaughtered 100K+ Iraqi civilians. Note that this is NOT optional. It's not self-flattery. Because if you remove that protection clause (ie, just-war) then we become "just fucking war criminals."  But, in fact, in Vietnam, we were "just fucking war criminals." Same with Iraq. But a rights theory is what allowed Madeleine Albright to say that the sanction-induced deaths were all "worth the price." When you fight Satan, no price is too high.

Never mind that Gaddafi was cavorting with Sarko and Blair not long ago. Today he's not just a baddie past his expiration date: he's a genocidal evil monster -- the new Hitler. A title he shares with Ahmadinejad. Milosevic was our earlier Hitler. It's wrong to think that we call all our enemies Hitler out of political expediency. We do because it's in the logic of rights-based liberal interventions. We never intervene to engineer a peace resolution between opposing  parties. No, we take sides and declare our side noble and the other pure evil. Milosevic was Hitler and Kosovo was the land of Mother Teresa. It is an outlandish concept that a country, the US, that has killed more innocent Muslims in the last 10 years than all other nations on earth put together should be the one lecturing the world about preventing genocide in Libya. This collective blindness we see everywhere is the result of a rights-based approach to interventions. It so happens that demonizing the enemy (the necessary consequence) often coincides with age-old racism (look at those barbarians!) and entail a huge dose of hypocrisy. Our new Hitlers often were our drinking buddies years earlier.  And I won't get into the lies. "We stopped Gaddafi from killing 100,000!" Yeah, right.

Final point: demonization in war is a terrible thing to do because that's what leads to total war. After all, against evil, no holds barred. Shock and Awe could not have happened if Saddam had not been convincingly labeled as the new Hitler.

Thanks, all, for your interesting comments. I don't want to overstate my case against human rights. In the context of war, I didn't mean to imply that they're the reason for the modern western concept of war: they just tag along for the ride and are supervened by something deeper. After WWII, western wars could only be launched on humanitarian grounds, so a rights theory was developed (UN declaration) in conjunction with a revival of just-war theory (Walzer, etc). One turns to Clausewitz or Karl Schmitt for wisdom with some trepidation, but still they were on to something when they highlighted the benefits of conducting war as a violent form of political bargaining. That's how medieval wars were fought all the way through Napoleonic wars and there's something to be said about the ability of combatants to fight to the death and then, once it's over, go back to treating one another as equals.  Just think of how leniently Napoleon and France were treated afterwards.  This is unthinkable today. The US punished Vietnam for winning the war by slapping sanctions on that impoverished country for two decades. The concept of rights dovetailed the pursuit of imperialistic aims with astonishing consistency. (Until Gaza '09, Walzer had called all of Israel's wars just.)

Have rights played a useful role? It's hard to think of any. Better treatment of prisoners? But that preceded WWII and the renewed emphasis on rights. In fact, that's a 19c concept. Today's war prisoners are killed or end up in Gitmo. Modern warfare takes no prisoners. (See Iraq war I.) Is that better?

If a million kids are starving because of some conflict I am all for intervention, but I don't see what rights have to do with it. Right to life? You're going to tell me that kids should not starve to death because they have a right to life. It's doubly absurd. First, because the reason why kids should not starve to death speaks for itself. Would you feed your own child because of her right to life? Of course, not. So to extend this principle to starving kids via the categorical imperative is much more powerful than via imaginary rights. Second, because the right to life (article 3 of the UN declaration) is an absurdity. No society honors that right or even seeks to honor it. (If you have an army, even only for self-defense, you de facto violate that right. If you have hospitals that provide "end of life" care, you violate that right, etc.) Perhaps one could claim a right of not being killed unjustly but that's different.

Which points to the eminently ridiculous 1948 declaration, which also features the right to work and leisure. Who's not for it? Great, but it's no more than a snapshot of the dominant moral sentiment of the day. Lovely, but it's thin stuff.  

Rights can be useful to shame moral miscreants. So maybe indeed one should worry about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But I don't accept the analogy with the law. Laws are intentionally ambiguous and vague and malleable. There's an indisputable logic behind that. But rights have neither the force of law nor their contingency. Rights are presented as first-principles not as normative devices. To break the law is failing to be a good citizen but to violate a human right is failing to be a human.    And therein lies the danger. One postulates the existence of stellar objects that don't exist anywhere -- and cannot be inferred from natural law (even though the concept of rights is ultimately a Christian derivation) -- and use them as a bludgeon to enforce one's definition of  humanhood. Just saying there are better ways of doing it, which are slightly less "totalitarian" in spirit than a rights-inspired discourse.

does anyone have the right to judge the actions of a group or sovereign entity to which one has no direct connection?  Do they not have the right to determine their own actions and behaviors, without judgment from the outside?

Yes, certainly. For a start, who decides the perimeter of the "group or sovereign entity"?  You have left this deliberately vague. If my neighbour's family constitutes a "group or sovereign entity", of which the man of the house arbitrarily designates himself as the absolute monarch, am I forbidden to judge if he beats his children, or to intervene? One thing's for sure in this example: if one of the kids asks for my help, I will help.

This is one criterion for deciding the correctness of an intervention : in the case of Libya, the intervention was ardently desired and requested by the spontaneous insurrection.

Secondly, what's this idea of a "direct connection"? Can I judge and intervene only if it's my brother beating his children? Am I disqualified if my neighbour belongs to a different ethnic or religious group? I think not.

To make it clear where I'm coming from :
It may be that my idea of the existence of autonomous human beings with individual rights is a mere western bourgeois arbitrary cultural construct. Regardless, it's a damn good construct, and I have the outrageous arrogance to postulate its universality (in fact, I would argue that the arrogance is on the side of those who would pretend that it is an exclusively western bourgeois arbitrary cultural construct, whereas in reality it is spontaneously reinvented by anyone who is free to think for themself). When Arab bloggers or Chinese intellectuals claim human rights for their fellow citizens, they are not indulging in me-tooism but proclaiming universal truths.

This does not mean that we are going to install human rights by military means (as was the proclaimed intention of the US intervention in Iraq). In all likelihood, the outcome in Libya, once the insurrection has won, will not be optimal from a human rights point of view. Likewise in Tunisia or Egypt, where outside intervention was not requested. That's the self-determination thing, and the more or less inevitable result of any revolution (captation of power by the existing or emerging elite). We can only do what we can to help civil society in these countries.

I am no doubt a hopeless romantic, but I believe there is a real change of paradigm behind the Arab spring. Internet connectivity leads to spontaneous consciousness-raising and oraganisation; it also reduces the relevance of arbitrarily constituted groups or sovereign entities. A global civil society is being constituted, and we are part of it. It may well be that our governments intervened primarily to protect their access to oil (from their hypothetically cynical point of view, a liberal democracy is neither better nor worse than Gaddafi, as long as the infrastructure is preserved), but insofar as they are ALSO doing it at the behest of global civil society, which will judge the result by its own criteria, the intervention constitutes an interesting, and promising, precedent.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

I do not believe in "Liberal intervention" for "humanitarian reasons"...sorry. It is the case that governments are presenting it as "humanitarian intervention" and people would believe it for some reason...probably because we want to see ourselves as "good guys" if possible.
Military intervention is never "humanitarian" even if there was will to be...Cause one have to make a choice which side to take and while we are saving some people we are killing others. When you have lunatics in power who will not restrain from mass killings it really looks like something has to be done (at least western public opinion goes this way). But it is always some hidden reason for military intervention...follow  the money.


Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind...Albert Einstein

I found two articles with the same title:

One Hundred Years of Bombing Libya
by Paul Doolan

...most people seem to be unaware that this year marks an important centenary in aeronautics, for it is exactly 100 years ago that humans first bombed other humans from airplanes. Should we be celebrating this example of human ingenuity?

Already in the late 19th century some were becoming nervous that developments in balloon and dirigible technology meant it was only a question of time before humans took warfare to the skies. Delegates from various states met in The Hague in 1899 and signed a declaration banning the militarization of the air. Ominously the biggest global power, Great Britain, refused to sign. In 1903 the first airplane flight took place, and within six years a pilot flew across the English Channel. In the meantime it was writers such as Jules Verne who, in their science fiction novels, created nightmare scenarios with death falling from the sky. In 1907 H. G. Wells published his prophetic The War in the Air.

Lieutenant Guilo Cavotti was a future oriented, risk taking, innovative Italian pilot. One day he took off on his plane, equipped with a Danish "Hassen" hand grenade. When he spotted the enemy he lobbed the grenade at them, to great effect, and thereby introduced aerial warfare to human kind. The time was 100 years ago. The place was Libya. His exploits constituted an opening salvo in Italy's 1911 attack on Libya. One hundred years later, almost as if it is to mark the centenary with near poetic symmetry, Italy is active once more as part of the coalition that is attacking from the skies over Libya again. The Libyan theatre of 1911 was also the place of the first aerial photo and the first ever night bombing raid.

The public in the "civilized" countries expressed anger at the Italian outrages. But two years later Spanish planes bombed upstart Moroccans. By 1919 Britain had become the first power to create an independent airforce - the Royal Air Force. Within the year they were dropping bombs in, again, irony of irony, Iraq and Afghanistan. The first town to be destroyed by aerial bombardment was not Guernica in 1937, as our Eurocentric histories claim, but the Moroccan town of Chechaouen, bombed by the Spanish in 1925.

100 Years of Bombing Libya
By Mark Almond

... On 1st November, 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped the first bomb from an aeroplane. According to the Ottoman authorities it hit the military hospital in Ayn Zara in the Libyan desert. The Italians strongly denied targeting an installation protected by the Geneva Convention. Modern aerial warfare and the propaganda battle which has accompanied it ever since was underway from the start.

Lt. Gavotti's four bombs were modified hand grenades, but soon the Italians had learned how to drop incendiary bomb and shrapnel bombs - what we would now call cluster munitions.

On 1st November, 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti dropped the first bomb from an aeroplane. According to the Ottoman authorities it hit the military hospital in Ayn Zara in the Libyan desert. The Italians strongly denied targeting an installation protected by the Geneva Convention. Modern aerial warfare and the propaganda battle which has accompanied it ever since was underway from the start.

Lt. Gavotti's four bombs were modified hand grenades, but soon the Italians had learned how to drop incendiary bomb and shrapnel bombs - what we would now call cluster munitions.