War Will Set You Free, A History Boy, 23/12/2015

Here's another story that helps explain how influential Antonio Negri's thinking was for me. I had a prof at Memorial who was particularly wonderful to work with – a specialist in, among other things, theory of international law and organizations. 

N introduced me to the philosophical theory surrounding humanitarian intervention, justifying when it was necessary and when to use different means of intervention. Economic or personally targeted sanctions, asset seizure of political or military leaders, and outright invasion and regime change.

Yes, in 2006, I was introduced to a philosophy that justified military invasion and the total political regime change of a country. It feels weird to say this in the context of the modern left, where voices like Stop the War have become elder states-organizations growing past their prime.

The left united in opposition to Slobodan
Milosevic's war on Yugoslavia and Serbia's
Muslim population, and so did the great
powers of the modern West. Those were
the days, weren't they?

It’s a serious generational break in the popular left, the left of the masses, ordinary folks working on activism together. The left used to advocate for humanitarian intervention, that a military force would invade a country and act as peacemakers to defend civilians from massacres, ethnic cleansing, and total genocide.

There was a popular left-wing movement across Europe and North America in the 1990s advocating United Nations or NATO military action against Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavian and Serbian government.

Then George W Bush led the public relations blitz to invade Iraq, ostensibly to liberate the Iraqi people from Stalinist authoritarianism and let them build a democracy, to dismantle Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and to punish his regime for cooperating with Al Qaeda in the Sept 11 attacks.

So, in reverse order: a hugely improbable lie, a mildly believable lie, and an insane ideology.

Yet humanitarian intervention and its core principle, the international accord on the responsibility to protect, were cornerstones of progressive politics in the international arena for a generation. The United Nations was supposed to be the arena to settle conflicts between states by peaceful means, and UN peacekeeping forces were supposed to protect vulnerable populations from slaughter.

Bush and the Iraq invasion changed all that. There would always be skepticism on the left of any Western country’s attempt to use military means to protect or defend people at risk of violence. 

“Colonialism! Imperialism! Secret agendas! It’s all about oil!” They sound ridiculous, but they’re what’s replaced advocacy for Western protection of the vulnerable. The attitude of Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, two examples I've read while researching Utopias, that American military power was a force for liberation, is well and truly dead forever.

When I was learning the philosophy behind international law’s concept of responsibility to protect and the architecture of humanitarian intervention, it was 2006. My experiences watching the Iraq invasion, occupation, mass murders, civil war, and its fallout in the Western left made me suspicious of the idea. 

R2P mandates a massive military blitz to stop massacres
like the attempted genocide in Kosovo.

But I couldn’t fully articulate why until I read Antonio Negri. Humanitarian intervention and the philosophy of responsibility to protect is a very noble idea in its motivation. But it’s very dangerous in its execution.

It normalizes the level of violence required to invade a country and decimate a national army, which was needed to put down the Serbian massacres and ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Kosovo. It makes invading a country into an ordinary police action.

And it justifies such violence as a means of achieving peace. That’s what just war theory does, and I've never been able to contain my inability to take just war arguments seriously. 

It's as if splitting hairs about how many civilians are permissible collateral damage or the relative level of aggression among belligerents can justify when to bring a multi-billion dollar army to battle. It all seems Strangelovian to me. 

Negri helped me finally understand that the only rational response to violence is not more violence, but an end to violence. And he helped me understand that conventions about military humanitarian intervention normalize and justify wars that may not even really be justifiable, even on their own logic.

When Responsibility to Protect was first officially formulated, it was a beacon of hope. Its supporters never saw its dangers.

The Responsible Leviathan, Research Time, 15/05/2014

There’s a curious point in Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War, where he reflects on the philosophy of the Responsibility to Protect. This concept is a fascinating idea in itself, not only for its conceptual complexity, but because it’s probably the first serious philosophical concept to emerge from multilateral and multinational political conversations. I don’t think I could ever write on this concept myself, because of the sheer amount of work that I’d need to do to be taken seriously. Unless I had a head start of something like forty years, I’d never be able to read absolutely everything that has been produced on R2P. I’m rarely intimidated by anything in philosophical scholarship, but R2P has done it.

However, Bérubé makes a fascinating assessment of the centrepiece of R2P, the notion that, when a sovereign government commits terrible violence against its people, it loses its claim to sovereignty. Because so much of his book is based around an extended critique of the political writings of Noam Chomsky, Bérubé mostly focusses on attacking how Chomsky has misunderstood so much of this idea. Essentially, Chomsky is one of the most articulate opponents of R2P on the grounds that it is a humanitarian mask on the bog-standard military imperialism of the near-omnipotently powerful United States as it forces its corporate capitalism down the throats of the world. 

Who knew the United Nations would end up following
principles of Thomas Hobbes so well?

So Bérubé unfortunately ignores the most intriguing element of his reading of R2P to engage with Chomsky, when a discussion of how R2P, this defining concept of liberalism in international politics, is a pure Hobbesian doctrine. This makes for a wonderful collision, given that Hobbes is so frequently portrayed as an arch conservative. The reason for his conservatism is, for one, his actual conservatism as a staunch monarchist, having lived through the English Civil War. But the more widespread philosophical reason for Hobbes’ conservative reputation is his conception of the legitimacy of government as grounded in the people’s literal surrender of their will to a sovereign who rules over them absolutely.

Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben take up this idea of sovereignty in their own ways, which Bérubé briefly mentions before moving on again, because he apparently considers yelling at Noam Chomsky more important than formulating a genuinely interesting philosophical idea in much detail. Schmitt is a theorist of the fascist right, and Agamben of the radical European left, but they agree* on a conception of sovereignty which defines that figure as the controller of the power to make someone an exception to civil society, the rule of law, the basic regime of human rights, and even the community of humanity itself. An illustration relevant to Bérubé’s inquiry is how George W Bush became such a sovereign when he exercised the powers of indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition of enemy combatants. 

* Well, they don’t agree, so much as Agamben is following in the tradition of Schmitt, picking up his conception of sovereignty and developing it in wildly different directions. 

In both Schmitt’s and Agamben’s thinking, the sovereign is a genuinely absolute power. The sovereign possesses the power to cast someone out of their personhood for entirely idiosyncratic reasons, and this power is built into the essential structure of state governance. Their own difference is that Schmitt is quite happy about this, while Agamben is horrified. 

But this isn’t Hobbes’ conception of the sovereign. For Hobbes, unlike Schmitt and Agamben, the sovereign can be made illegitimate, and therefore it is justified to revolt against him and remove him from power. The sovereign, in Hobbes’ thinking, is a product of a solemn contract among all citizens, that they enter this arrangement where one person or institution has an overall monopoly on force for the sake of mutual protection. 

In other words, the Hobbesian sovereign has a responsibility to protect his citizens. The legitimacy of a government is founded not literally on the superior force of arms, but on a promise. Where the sovereign power fails or mocks that responsibility, he has lost his right to govern. Whether an internal revolution or an international invasion removes him from physical power after that failure, such an act is legitimate, because the promise has been broken.