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Title: Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention
ISBN: 0307266486
Author:
Gary J. Bass
Publicate Date: 2008-08-19
Publish: 2008-08-19
List Price: $35.00
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $18.90
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1: Enthralling ,well-researched and extremely entertaining
Gary Bass has written about a very relevant topic for our times : how and why various governments preferred to intervene in other countries' politics in order to prevent war crimes and genocides from happening.We learn that humanitarian intervention is definitely not a twentieth-century invention, and that the idea orginates at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
By dwelling on mainly three example ,Mr.Bass concludes that humanitarian intervention cannot in any case be equated with imperialism.Thus he describes in detail the plight of the Greek people who were under the Turkish yoke. Lord Byron is one of the main characters in the role of Robin Hood who has done his best in order to fight for the agonizing Greeks.
Finally,they won their independence after the famous battle of Navarino where the Turkish fleet did not have any chance of surviving against the British ships of war and was simply obliterated.Mr.Bass gives us a very fresh picture of what went inside the minds of the chief protagonists in this affair,namely:Castlereagh (who -in the end- took his own life),Canning and the bad guy Metternich who did not care at all about the plight of the Greeks(or any group which would endanger the political balance after the Congress of Vienna).
Next comes the story of rivalry and butchery that took place in Syria between the Christian Maronites and the Druze and the third episode-in my opinion:the best- researched one- is about the massacre of the Bulgarians in 1876 -an act committed by the Ottomans. The two outstanding figures here were again Britons: Disraeli,who dispatched the fleet against the Ottomans and Gladstone the eccentric British Prime Minister(who-we are told used self- flagellation after indulging in the pleasures of flesh).We also gain an insight about the whole Pan-Slavic movement from one of the giants of literature:Dostoevsky.
The shortest episode described in the book is about the horrible Holocaust
perpetrated against the Armenian people by the brutal and savage Turks. The novelty here is that the United States dropped its previous stand about non- interfering in the affairs of other nations( a relic from the Monroe Doctrine and John Quincy Adams times).The US had understood by now that as a world power committed to human rights she had no choice but to send in troops to problematic areas in the world, although the criteria for doing this were not well-defined,as Mr. Bass explains. He adds that the Great Powers were extremely careful when deciding to fight for other minorities' interests .The dictum by Nietzsche that"whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster" was highly observed in most cases.
Humanitarian intervention can effectively carried out only by democracies and this is important today because we all live in the age of terrorism.
This book is complemented by almost 100 pages of footnotes and I highly recommend it because its author has done a superb job of analyzing many other less known affairs pertinent to the topic, including a description of the press role.You will enjoy each page of it and his style of vivid writing makes this book a " must" for every intelligent reader.
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2: Regarding the Suffering of Others
Humanitarian intervention was a term often heard during the 1990s. In the decade following the end of the Cold War military intervention in sovereign states to prevent ethnic cleansing and other kinds of mass murder came at a lower price. Liberal internationalists could excercise their collective conscience more freely as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. American and Nato intervention in Bosnia (1995) came late as a massacre was already underway. The intervention in Kosovo (1999) was timely, for an ethnic cleansing had surely been averted. (Another good book on this subject is Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (P.S.).) The interventions were possible because there was no great power willing or able to stop them. There was a convergence of realism and idealism. It was not only morally imperative but practical to reduce the suffering of others.
Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton, has given us a very thoroughly researched and elegantly written history of humanitarianism that goes back to the early 19th century. In the 1820s Byron and other philhellenes agitated for Greek independence from the Ottoman yoke. Arch-realists such as Metternich and Disraeli were afraid it would upset the balance of power in Europe. The Ottoman Empire, in their view, was keeping order among many restless nationalities in the East.
There was another movement for intervention against the Turks in the 1870s. This time it was led by British Prime Minister Gladstone who campaigned to save the Bulgarian Christians from Turkish atrocities. (In fact Tony Blair invoked Gladstone before the invasion of Iraq.) Bass here is very good at showing how the moral impulse to save others can be contaminated with imperialism and racism. The effort to save the Christians turned into a campaign to portray the Turks and Islam as something less than human. Gladstone was inclined to demonize things he knew very little about, a practice that one easily falls into when the enemy is brutal.
Bass points out the Western interventions on bahalf of rebellious peoples was not without long-term consequences. On the negative side, the realists were vindicated. Intervention in Eastern Europe set off a chain of events that ultimately led to World War I. Metternich and Disraeli had often warned that Europe would slide into chaos. On the positive side, Bass sees the origins of the more recent human rights consciousness that is both secular and universal. Even though many of the examples of humanitarian intervention given in this work were cases of saving Christians from Muslims, the groundwork for saving other human beings regardless of ethnicity or faith was laid. It must be noted that in the 20th century it was the West that came to the aid of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
In the 21st century the victims in Darfur, Myanmar, and other places have not been so lucky. With the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the spreading global financial crisis, the realists once again control the agenda, and the interventionists are seated firmly on the sidelines. Bass has written an excellent history on the ebbs and flows of humanitarian intervention and the conditions under which it is possible.
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