The Hindu : The fall of the monument

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Thursday, Jun 05, 2003

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The fall of the monument — I

By Jurgen Habermas

For half a century, the United States could count as the pacemaker for progress... With the war in Iraq, it has not only abandoned this role; it has also given up its role as guarantor of international rights.

ON APRIL 9, the entire world watched as American troops threw a noose round the neck of the dictator and, surrounded by jubilant throngs of Iraqis, pulled him off his pedestal. The apparently unshakeable monument tottered, and then finally fell. But before it crashed satisfyingly to the ground, there was a momentary pause before the force of gravity could overcome the statue's grotesquely unnatural, horizontal posture. Bobbing gently up and down, the massive figure clung, for one last moment, to its horror.

Just as an optical illusion, looked at long enough, will "flip" into a new form, so the public perception of the war in Iraq seemed to perform an about-face at this one scene. The morally obscene — the "shock and awe" inflicted on a helpless and mercilessly bombed population — morphed into the image of joyful citizens freed from terror and oppression in the Shiite district of Baghdad. Both images contain an element of truth, even as they evoke contradictory moral feelings and attitudes.

The matter is simple enough at first glance. A war in violation of international law remains illegal, even if it leads to normatively desirable outcomes. But is this the whole story? Bad consequences can discredit good intentions. Can't good consequences generate their own justifying force after the fact? The mass graves, the underground dungeons, and the testimony of the tortured all leave no doubt about the criminal nature of the regime. The liberation of a brutalised population from a barbaric regime is a great good; among political goods it is the greatest of all. In this regard, the Iraqis themselves, whether they are currently celebrating, looting, demonstrating against their occupiers, or are simply apathetic, contribute to the judgment on the moral nature of the war. But for us in Germany, two reactions stand out in the political public sphere.

On one side, pragmatic minds affirm the normative force of the factual. They rely on the powers of practical judgment and a healthy sense of the political limits of morality, which let them appreciate the consequences of victory. In their eyes, drawn-out arguments over the justification for war are simply fruitless. The war is now a historical fact. Others simply capitulate to the force of the factual, whether out of conviction or opportunism. They brush aside what they now see as the dogmatism of international law, reasoning that just this dogmatism, held captive by a sort of post-heroic squeamishness over the risks and costs of military force, has become blind to the true value of political freedom.

Both of these responses are inadequate. They both succumb to an emotional response to the supposed abstractions of a "bloodless moralism" without having grasped just what the neo-conservatives in Washington have actually offered up as their alternative to the domestication of state power through international law. Their alternative is neither political realism nor the pathos of freedom. Instead the neo-conservatives make a revolutionary claim: if the regime of international law fails, then the hegemonic imposition of a global liberal order is justified, even by means that are hostile to international law.

Wolfowitz is not Kissinger. He is a revolutionary, not a cynical technician of political power. To be sure, the American superpower reserves the right to take unilateral action, pre-emptive if necessary, and to employ all available military means to secure its hegemonic status against all possible rivals. But global power is not an end in itself for the new ideologues. What distinguishes the neo-conservatives from the "realist" school of international relations is the vision of an American global political order that has definitively broken with the reformist programme of the United Nations' human rights policies. While not betraying liberal goals, this vision is shattering the civil limits that the U.N. Charter — with good reason — had placed on their realisation.

At present, the U.N. is certainly not in any position to compel a non-compliant member state to guarantee democracy and the rule of law to its own citizens. And the highly selective enforcement of the U.N.'s human rights policy is itself the product of political realities: equipped with veto power, Russia need not fear any armed intervention in Chechnya. Saddam Hussein's use of nerve gas against his own Kurdish population is only one of the many chapters in the disgraceful chronicle of failures of a world organisation that has averted its gaze even from genocide. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the core mission of the U.N. — enforcing the prohibition against wars of aggression — eliminated the jus ad bellum and placed the sovereignty of individual states under new limits, thus taking a first decisive step on the path toward a cosmopolitan legal order. That core mission is now more crucial than ever before.

For half a century, the United States could count as the pacemaker for progress on this cosmopolitan path. With the war in Iraq, it has not only abandoned this role; it has also given up its role as guarantor of international rights. And its violation of international law sets a disastrous precedent for the superpowers of the future. Let us have no illusions: the normative authority of the United States of America lies in ruins. Neither of the two conditions for a legally permissible use of military force was fulfilled: the war was neither a case of self-defence against an actual attack or the immediate threat of one, nor was it authorised by a decision of the Security Council according to Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. Neither Resolution 1441 nor any of the 17 previous (and "spent") resolutions on Iraq can count as sufficient authorisation. The "coalition of the willing" confirmed this failure performatively as it initially sought a "second" resolution, but in the end refused to bring the motion to a vote because it could not even count on the "moral" majority of the Security Council not to veto. The whole procedure turned to farce as the President of the U.S. repeatedly declared his intention of acting without the U.N. mandate if necessary.

From the very beginning, the Bush Doctrine made it impossible to understand the military deployment in the Gulf region as a mere threat, for this would presuppose that somehow the threatened sanctions could have been averted. Nor does a comparison with the intervention in Kosovo offer an excuse. Of course, in the case of Kosovo too, there was no authorisation by the Security Council. But three circumstances of the intervention there offered legitimation: First, the intervention aimed at the prevention of ethnic cleansing, which was known at the time of the intervention to be taking place. Second, it was tasked with fulfilling the provision of international law for emergency aid, addressed to all nations. And finally, we can refer to the undisputed democratic and rule-of-law-character of all the members of the acting military coalition. Today, normative dissent has divided the West itself.

Already at that time, in April of 1999, a remarkable difference had become visible between the continental European and the Anglo-American powers over strategies for justifying military action.At the time of the intervention in Kosovo, I had attributed this difference to contrasting traditions of legal thought — Kant's cosmopolitanism on the one side, John Stuart Mill's liberal nationalism on the other. But in light of the hegemonic unilateralism that the leading thinkers of the Bush Doctrine have pursued since 1991, one suspects in hindsight that the American delegation had already led the negotiations at Rambouillet from just this peculiar viewpoint. Be that as it may, George W. Bush's decision to consult the Security Council certainly did not arise from any wish for legitimation through international law, which had long since been regarded, at least internally, as superfluous. Rather, it was desired only insofar as it broadened the basis for a "coalition of the willing," and soothed a worried population.

All this notwithstanding, we should not interpret the neo-conservative doctrine as the expression of a normative cynicism. Geo-strategic objectives such as securing spheres of influence or access to essential resources, which the doctrine must also meet, may well invite analysis in terms of a critique of ideology. But such conventional explanations trivialise what, until 18 months ago, was still an unimaginable break with norms that the U.S. had been committed to. We would do well, in other words, not to guess at motives, but to take the doctrine at its word.

(The writer is a Professor at the University of Frankfurt and leading representative of the Frankfurt School. Translated from the German by Max Pensky.)

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The fall of the monument — I