Print this post.PAUL TREANOR
Blair resigns. As announced by the Guardian (UK) on May 10, 2007. But not to be taken to a dungeon to await trial for war crimes, where he belongs. (Via Alex Watson, flickr)
Prime Minister Tony Blair will be remembered for foreign wars and his doctrines of military intervention. In January 2007 he even insisted that his successors should fight them too. Yet they played no role in his first election campaign, and the other ideologies of that early period remained in place, throughout his time in office…
the underlying political model of Blairism was, and is, the liberal democratic nation state
the global crusade for liberal democracy existed as a doctrine long before Tony Blair took office. He adopted it as a personal crusade during the Kosovo war, and continued in Afghanistan, and with the much larger invasion and occupation of Iraq.
neoliberalism became Britain’s dominant social (and moral) philosophy: it is not just a new name for ‘capitalism’.
society, and political culture, were transformed by the abandonment of equality as a political ideal and by acceptance of a permanent, almost hereditary, underclass. The core electorate (“Middle Britain”) came to dominate politics, excluding the non-voting, disadvantaged underclass from political life.
the Mazzinian nationalism of Blair’s first term – “our nation is the best nation” – became less prominent as his geopolitical ambitions expanded.
introduction
The only moral justification for a democracy is that it allows the citizens to elect a good government. If the citizens fail to do that, then democracy loses any moral legitimacy it had. In electing Tony Blair with a landslide majority, the British electorate elected an evil government. In June 2001, they did that for a second time, and in May 2005, for a third time. Neither the Blair government, nor the democracy that produced it, are legitimate. The mere fact that an evil or unjust government was democratically elected, confers no existence rights on that government.
(Via Alan Denning, flickr)
This article explains what Tony Blair and his government believed in, and the society they sought in Britain (and in other countries). It also says why they are wrong. The responsibility for that is not limited to Tony Blair himself, or to the members of his government. They implemented their ideology, and they should ultimately face some form of tribunal for that. Active members of the Labour party should also face judicial process: without them, Blair would have won no elections. But the primary moral guilt rests with ‘the British people’ themselves. The people, meaning those who voted for Blair (a minority of the total population), and ‘the people’ meaning the larger group, who acquiesced for years in a government which they should have resisted.
the underlying political model
Blair, like his Conservative predecessors, implemented a shared general vision of state and society – the liberal market-democratic nation state. Blairism, if there is such a thing, operates inside this older framework of nationalism and liberalism.
It is not simply a British issue: it is a view of the world, the whole world. And especially of Europe: Blair restated in October 2000 the ideal of a ‘Europe of the Nation States’…
Europe is a Europe of free, independent sovereign nations who chose to pool sovereignty in pursuit of their own interests and the common good, achieving more together than we can achieve alone…
Blair calls for Euro ‘superpower’, October 7, 2000
The headline is misleading, since Blair opposes a European superstate. He said that again, a few days before the post-Iraq G8 summit (Evian).
…we want a union of nations, not a federal superstate, and that vision is shared by the majority of countries and people in Europe. A European superstate would neither have the efficacy nor the legitimacy to meet the global challenge.
Blair’s rallying cry: no Little England, no Fortress Europe, May 31, 2003
The most important political feature of the nation state is that secession is extremely difficult. In a world of nation states, the formation of new states is almost impossible. Most people spend their lives in a political community with fixed values – simply because they were born there. This may be good for national tradition, but it is not good for innovation. Radical and extreme change, beyond the national values, is by definition impossible.
The nature of liberal societies makes this problem worse. Central to the European liberal tradition is acceptance of the result of process: in liberal philosophy, process justifies outcome. Liberalism is strongly anti-utopian, against ideal societies, in fact against ideals. In modern liberal societies, market forces and the democratic political process determine the form of society. If the market leads to income inequality, and the freely elected government decides not to redistribute incomes, then for liberalism that is the end of the matter. Liberal political and social philosophy therefore passively accepts existing liberal society, with all its wrongs.
Together, liberalism and the nation state are a recipe for a non-innovative society, in a non-innovative state. Think of what would be necessary, to abolish private ownership of cars in Britain, and confiscate the existing stock. Market forces will not produce such a car-free Britain, the political process will not produce it either, and the army would suppress any attempt to set up an autonomous car-free territory. The innovation is simply too much for the system. Liberal market democracy preserves the society that it created – for ever, apparently.
Innovation—social change—is essential to a healthy naturally evolving society, but impossible under the current system of so-called “liberal democracy”, which regards itself as the culmination of all human progress.
It is this conservatism which determines the ethics of secession in the liberal-democratic nation states. Nevertheless, innovation is an intrinsic good – certainly a greater good than democracy. There is no democratic right to conservatism. When a democratic nation suppresses innovation, that justifies innovative secession. In maintaining the territorial integrity of the nation state against such secession, all national leaders do wrong – even if no secession has yet been attempted.
crusade for global liberal democracy
The Kosovo war was historically unique in its success: the NATO won a war against a medium-sized industrial nation, without a single battle casualty. That success brought no peace to Kosovo itself, but it encouraged those who think that ‘the West’ should impose its values on the rest of the world. In the aftermath of the attacks in New York and Washington, Tony Blair followed President George Bush in asserting that these values themselves were under attack. In 2001 he proposed entirely new western interventions, in Africa for instance, and in 2004 he proposed a European intervention force targeted at Africa. It might appear in this climate, that Samuel Huntington was right, and that the ‘West’ is a unified civilisation crusading for its own values. In reality they are not ‘western’ values as such (I oppose them, but I am equally western). They are politically specific rather than culturally specific: the values of liberal market democracy.
Blair at The Hague International Criminal Court, unfortunately not as a defendant, but as a supporter of its hypocritical work. (The Lakelander, via flickr)
Inevitably, in this climate, colonialism and imperialism are being ideologically reassessed. After de-colonisation in the 1950’s, open praise of colonialism disappeared, for at least a generation. Today however, a de facto recolonisation of Africa (and parts of Asia) is a serious option for western foreign policy, as evident in occupied Iraq. There was a strong interventionist lobby even before the September 11 attacks, and Tony Blair already went further than other western leaders. He authorised a British intervention in Sierra Leone, and suggested intervention in the Congo, and later in Sudan. In 2002, former Blair advisor Robert Cooper advocated a new liberal imperialism. Cooper – who later wrote the proposed security doctrine for the EU – is part of a wider intellectual movement for a new imperialism, particularly in Britain and the United States. In Britain that includes an attempt to rehabilitate the British Empire, led by the historian Niall Ferguson, who wrote in a much-quoted article:
Political globalisation is a fancy word for imperialism, imposing your values and institutions on others. However you may dress it up, whatever rhetoric you may use, it is not very different in practice to what Great Britain did in the 18th and 19th centuries. We already have precedents: the new imperialism is already in operation in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor. Essentially it is the imperialism that evolved in the 1920’s when League of Nations mandates were the polite word for what were the post-Versailles treaty colonies.
Welcome the new imperialism, Niall Ferguson, October 31, 2001.
The ‘democratising imperialism’ would divide the world into western democracies and their protectorates. The protectorates would be governed as colonies: sometimes by appointed governors, sometimes by local pro-western elites. More important is what it does not include: no structural transfer of wealth to the protectorates, no full citizenship for their inhabitants, and above all no free movement to the new colonial motherland. The population of the protectorates would in effect be prisoners: living in poverty, governed from the West, but unable to travel there.
However…a Congo intervention would be comparable in scale to the US intervention in Vietnam, rather than to KFOR in Kosovo. Note these statistics: KFOR had over 40 000 troops in the first phase of the Kosovo occupation. Afghanistan and Iraq have more than 10 times the population of Kosovo, but the US and its allies were unable or unwilling to send 400 000 troops. West Africa has about 100 times the population of Kosovo. A general global recolonisation is not a short-term prospect, but there will be more cruel military interventions, and perhaps more Iraq-scale wars. Blair never saw sovereignty, mandate or legality as relevant: he believed his wars to be just because he believed that the invading force was morally superior. Blair supported a declaration by the 2003 Progressive Governance conference, which authorised unlimited military intervention, although it was dropped from the final communique:
“Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.”
In other words, when he finds it appropriate, Blair simply claimed a moral entitlement to rule over a foreign population. There is no geographical limit to this ‘democratising imperialism’.
Democratic crusaders don’t just support democracy – they regard its superiority as a moral absolute. For Tony Blair, the superiority of democracy is self-evident, beyond any questioning or debate or reasoning. He believes that there is a moral entitlement to enforce democracy, that any such action is inherently good, and that his moral entitlement is also absolute. In an interview in May 2003, Blair said that he would justify the Iraq war directly to God, after his death. And so the crusade itself becomes absolute, beyond debate or dissent. After the Istanbul bombings in November 2003, he declared: “no holding back, no compromise, no hesitation in confronting this menace, in attacking it wherever and whenever we can and in defeating it utterly”. In his logic, the opponents of his wars are morally worthless people.
The events themselves – the failures in Iraq – are therefore irrelevant to this ‘faith-based conquest’. In April 2004 – with deteriorating security in Iraq and no evidence of the weapons he used to justify the invasion – he re-asserted his belief in the absolute moral necessity of the war and occupation. He again appealed to a form of divine justification, in a March 2006 interview.
Blair, of course, is a product and an exponent of the neo imperialist mentality in today’s politicos: mendacious, opportunistic, and capable of witting criminality in the service of the global plutocracy.
a readiness to kill
The precondition for crusading military interventions is a readiness to kill, in support of your own values. The first air attack of the Iraq war was explicitly intended to kill Saddam Hussein: according to American military sources it did kill Ba’ath party leadership. The United States and Britain openly declared the Ba’ath party a target: in southern Iraq, British forces attacked local offices of the party. Later, as British troops secured control of urban areas, members of the party were arrested and interned. Iraqi TV was bombed several times, explicitly because of the content of its broadcasts, which were obviously pro-Saddam. In June 2003, a convoy of cars was attacked, and the occupants killed, simply because Saddam Hussein might have been travelling in it. All these actions are technically war crimes: soldiers are not supposed to target civilians, regardless of their politics, or what they write or broadcast. However they reflect the crusading logic of the war: a war of values is inevitably targeted against those with different values. Blair is a ruthless man, a necessity for crusading leaders. How many people in Britain would be ready to bomb a Labour Party office, or kill a pro-Blair journalist? A few IRA dissidents, perhaps, and they would be considered ‘hard men’ – pathological killers. But historically, the supporters of liberal democracy have been harder than the hardest IRA bombers. They believe, as Tony Blair obviously does, that their actions are unquestionably and absolutely right. They feel no guilt about killing, for instance, members of a clearly undemocratic party.
The Blair government has been unusually explicit about its readiness to kill its opponents: this is not the first time. During the Kosovo war, the house of Serbian President Milosevic was attacked, and a TV station in Belgrade. Minister Clare Short gave a cold-blooded argument for killing the journalists, and Blair himself advocated war to spread his values. (Short resigned in May 2003, not because she opposed the war in Iraq, but because she felt the occupying force should have a UN mandate).
At a heated press briefing at the Ministry of Defence, Clare Short, the international development secretary, said: ‘This is a war, this is a serious conflict, untold horrors are being done. The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it’s a legitimate target.’
Serb TV station was legitimate target, says Blair, April 24, 1999This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values….No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer. As John Kennedy put it “Freedom is indivisible and when one man is enslaved who is free?”
Tony Blair in Chicago, April 22, 1999
Now, the idea that you can kill innocent people, simply in order to enforce your values, is extreme by western ethics standards. That does not mean it never happened – there were many religious wars where it did – but the dominant (liberal) tradition in western philosophy rejects ‘crusades’. The reason for this philosophical suspicion is simple. If Tony Blair may legitimately kill any person X, Y, or Z in Belgrade or Freetown or Basra, to enforce his values, then why is it not legitimate for them to come to London, and kill Tony Blair for their values? Blair implicitly claimed, that he may kill Saddam because there is a moral case for that killing. And after complaints that the British Army had deliberately shot an 8-year-old child, Blair’s response was to declare in Parliament that people should be proud of the British Army. But with those standards, how could Blair consistently argue, that his own assassination is wrong?
Assassinations breed assassinations, atrocities breed atrocities, crusades make holy wars. Once a crusade starts, those who are not prepared to kill for their values, will be conquered by those who are. The horror of a general bloodbath – such as the wars of religion in Europe – had a fundamental influence on the development of liberal philosophy. (The early-modern wars of religion were far greater in scale than the mediaeval Crusades). That is why liberalism emphasises procedure, process, and peaceful argument. That is why it is so suspicious of utopianism, and of high social ideals: they are not compatible with compromise and consensus.
But liberalism is itself a set of values, although it tries to pretend it is value-neutral. A liberal crusade is logically feasible – and that is now a clear trend in political thinking in the west. That trend will be greatly reinforced by the assumption that the West is at war anyway, even if the target is officially “international terrorism”. Wars of conquest are inherent in any universal ideology, or universal religion. Nevertheless, when he was first elected, Tony Blair did not have a war-making image. In 1997 he could still act as a Prime Minister at peace (at least, forgetting Northern Ireland – and it usually is forgotten in assessments of British politics):
Mine is the first generation able to contemplate the possibility that we may live our entire lives without going to war or sending our children to war.
Tony Blair at the NATO-Russia Summit, May 27, 1997
But a few years later the image had completely changed. Blair was consciously seeking a Churchillian ‘war leader’ image, of resolute military action.
…70 percent of Serbia’s military oil has gone; over half its usable aircraft have been destroyed; more than a fifth of the armoured units inside Kosovo are down; yesterday was the most successful allied day yet in hits on targets and artillery in Kosovo; and 40 percent of surface-to-air missiles have gone. There has been massive damage to Milosevic’s infrastructure, but we must carry on and, if necessary, intensify.
Tony Blair in Parliament, May 12 1999
It is not simply image. Britain withdrew from ‘east of Suez’ when Blair was a teenager. Now Britain is back there: Blair started so many wars that the army was stretched to its limits…
Since Tony Blair took office a decade ago, he has committed British forces to action more often, and in more conflicts, than any Prime Minister since 1945… Not only has this crusade embroiled them in what one officer called the most intense fighting since the Korean War, more than half a century ago, it is stretching their depleted resources to the limit.
The Independent: Blair’s Bloody Legacy
No end to the military interventionism is in sight. The post-1989 illusion of a peaceful world has evaporated.