History and Hope: The International Humanitarian Reader

Humanitarian Action in a New Barbarian Age

Humanitarian Action in a New Barbarian Age David Rieff If the hope for human progress and for a better world can be said to rest on anything , it rests on the great documents of international law that have been promulgated since the end of the Second World War. These include, first and foremost, the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But while these documents offer a global vision of what the world might become if humanity is lucky, they remain more hope than reality. In contrast, the corpus of international humanitarian law, that is, the rules governing armed conflict, have actually proved its utility again and again over the course of the past half-century. The four Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, the Genocide Convention, and, more recently, such initiatives as the Rome Treaty banning landmines, are no mere pious sentiments. They have saved innumerable human lives. Think, for example, of the fact that since the adoption of the international treaty that banned the use of poison gas as a weapon of war, gas, so ubiquitous in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I, has probably only been used a handful of times since. Norms, it seems, can sometimes influence realities. That said, it would be a misreading of history, and, perhaps, a culpable exercise in self-flattery as well, to make a fetish of the law and imagine that realities will invariably or inevitably migrate toward norms. Despite the more grandiose claims of human rights activists, as well as of distinguished philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, the record is more mixed: Over the course of the past half-century, there are examples where they have and examples where they have not. The full legal emancipation of African Americans in the US civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s is an example of a law-based reform or, to put it differently, a normative transformation that did end up transforming American social reality even though at least a significant minority and possibly even a majority of Americans were against such decisions as Brown v. Board of Education when they were first handed down. And yet, in contrast, normative changes related to the status and treatment of children encapsulated in the UN Convention on the Rights of the 169 CH13_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p169-176.indd 169 CH13_2012_016_FUP_Cahill_p169-176.indd 169 2/13/13 9:53 PM 2/13/13 9:53 PM DAVID RIEFF 170 Child have had limited impact outside the developed world despite the best efforts of many dedicated activists and political figures. In other words, the record is mixed. Those who believe that human progress is inevitable often describe this as a matter of “two steps forward, one step back,” as the former head of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, did in his history of the human rights movement. This is not to say that no progress has been made or that it is unreasonable to expect that more will be made in the future. To the contrary, even among those of us for whom the Classical Greek vision of history as cyclical seems to conform better to the realities of our sad world than the Christian, Marxist, or, indeed, liberal expectation that progress in the moral order of the world is as bound to take place as progress in scientific understanding, would hardly want to do away with the notion of progress altogether. As the great liberal realist, Raymond Aron, once put it, “if one is not [an advocate of progress], what is left?” Humanity, he added, had no hope for survival “outside of reason and science.”1 Aron’s conclusion in large measure amounted to insisting that one had to be optimistic in spite of what one knew—“despite the twentieth century, I remain an advocate of progress,” was the way he put it. This is not to be confused with the more self-congratulatory fables that have captured the imagination of far too many decent people in the contemporary world, and that revolve around the notion that a “revolution of moral concern”—the phrase is that of the Canadian writer and erstwhile politician, Michael Ignatieff— began in the aftermath of World War II, gave risetotheUnitedNationssystemaswellastothetransformationofboththeconcept of state sovereignty and the reach of international law. For those who believe in its reality, this revolution has no downside, no tragic element to it (unlike all previous revolutions in human history, whether economic, like the Industrial Revolution, or political, like...