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CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
- State University of New York Press
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CHAPTER ONE Introduction Humanitarian intervention is not working. From Somalia to Bosnia to Rwanda to Kosovo to East Timor, the attempt by states to address complex humanitarian emergencies by means of military force has not been successful. The trauma of these failures has been further compounded by the often genuine moral urge that accompanies the decision to intervene. While it is probably impossible to act in a purely altruistic manner, many interventions have been undertaken by states with very limited national interests in the regions at stake. A genuine dilemma thus arises—why are actions based on morality producing such immoral results? Why does political conflict seem to consistently interfere in attempts to provide aid, end ethnic conflict, or restore democracy? This book is an attempt to answer this question. My answer begins with a deductive interpretation of military intervention which is then explored through three case studies: the American and British intervention in Bolshevik Russia in 1918; the British, French, and Israeli intervention in Egypt in 1956; and the American and United Nations intervention in Somalia in 1992–3. These three interventions are rarely categorized together. Their goals range from humanitarian to geostrategic, and the states involved range from great to medium powers. But they share one key feature: they all failed in their professed goals, with the troops in each case being ignominiously recalled. My explanation of these failures does not fall into the typical “lessons of intervention” category, however. In essence, these interventions, along with many others, fail because of a conflict between political agents who embody and enact divergent normative visions of international and domestic order. In other words, the failure of intervention results not from an amoral or immoral power politics, but from an excess of normative politics. What exactly is a normative conflict? These three interventions produced conflict on numerous levels. The failure of the British and American 1 intervention resulted from conflicts between the two allies, conflicts between the White forces and the allies, conflicts within the democratic systems of both Great Britain and the United States, conflicts between allied soldiers and the political leaderships, and conflicts between the intervening soldiers and the Russian peoples. The failure of the British and French intervention resulted from conflicts between the British and French and the Israelis, conflicts between the three intervenors and the Americans , conflicts between the intervenors and the government of Egypt, and conflicts between soldiers and Egyptian citizens. The failure of the American and United Nations troops in Somalia resulted from the conflicts between the United States forces and the United Nations (UN), conflicts between aid workers and soldiers, and conflicts between the Somali leaders and American forces. In all three cases, the conflicts that caused these interventions to fail did not exist in any one place; they were both domestic and international. These conflicts have been explained by an inequality in power in the international system, by an inadequate attention to alliance politics, or by a failure to understand the politics of the target state. One explanation that has not been offered, however, focuses on norms, or rules and ideas about how the world should function. Admittedly, when viewed in hindsight, the motivations for the Russian and Egyptian interventions hardly seem concerned with normative issues. And there is no shortage of attempts to argue that the intervention in Somalia had no normative grounding but was simply an imperial adventure to secure access to oil in the Persian Gulf. Nevertheless, in reading the documents from each intervention, one is struck by the continued reference to moral norms as the justification for action. Woodrow Wilson believed that the norms of the American political system, liberal democracy and capitalism, were preferable to the norms embodied in communism. Anthony Eden and Guy Mollet believed that the norm of colonialism retained some moral purpose, especially when compared to the “radical” policies of Gamal abd al-Nasser. And George Bush believed that feeding Somalis and protecting them from warlords was a norm worthy of the United States. But how can norms cause conflict? They cause conflict because in the competitive world of international politics, agents—primarily states— employ their histories and ideals in order to secure for themselves a prominent position in the international system. This form of conflict, one that results from the way states narrate themselves, is the primary reason for the failure of intervention. For, as I will demonstrate later in this chapter , narration is an important part of the ways in which states act...