The Case for Strategic Traditionalism

War, National Interest and Liberal Peacebuilding

Bibliographic Data

ID12537201
AuthorsC Dale Walton (0000-0002-6025-1552, Schlumberger (Ireland), corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume16
Issue5
Pages717-734
Publication date2009-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Peacekeeping (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1353-3312 • E-ISSN: 1743-906X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13533310903303354
OpenAlexW2158977863
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Liberal peacemaking and peacebuilding are an inherently dangerous enterprise, which should be approached with great caution. This was demonstrated by numerous problematic liberal peacebuilding efforts in the 1990s and 2000s, events that underlined the view that there has been no fundamental global change in attitudes toward the use of violence for the attainment of political ends. As a result, Western leaders are likely to be much less inclined to undertake large-scale and/or difficult peacebuilding missions in the future. This is a desirable trend, as peacebuilding efforts undertaken by democracies should be guided fundamentally by national interests rather than humanitarian goals. Notes For example, in a July 2009 speech in Ireland on peacekeeping, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon noted that 'nearly 500 Irish men and women are stationed in the Middle East and across Africa in support of UN-mandated missions' and paid tribute to the 90 Irish citizens who had died in such operations. Absent from the speech, however, was any indication of a tangible benefit that Dublin has in the past or will in the future receive as compensation for its efforts – save for the Secretary-General's assurance that Ireland is 'an integral part of our mission to build a better world for all'. 'Address on UN Peacekeeping', 7 July 2009, UN News Centre, accessed at www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/sgspeeches. There are many thoughtful discussions of national interest and its relationship with military power, such as Bernard Brodie, War and Politics, London: Macmillan, 1973; John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: Norton, 2001; Hans J. Morganthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, for example, proposed that, if actually implemented, this concept would radically change the character of the international system: 'While the state whose people are directly affected has the default responsibility to protect, a residual responsibility also lies with the broader community of states. This fallback responsibility is activated when a particular state is clearly either unwilling or unable to fulfill its responsibility to protect or is itself the actual perpetrator of crimes or atrocities; or where people living outside a particular state are directly threatened by actions taking place there ... The substance of the responsibility to protect is the provision of life-supporting protection and assistance to populations at risk. This responsibility has three integral and essential components: not just the responsibility to react to an actual or apprehended human catastrophe, but the responsibility to prevent it, and the responsibility to rebuild after the event'. The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Ottawa: International Development Research Center, 2001, accessed at www.iciss.ca/pdf/Commission-Report.pdf), p.17, original italics. Nor was there a time of near universal peace in the distant past. As we have learnt more about human prehistory (and the history of peoples such as the Native North Americans), it becomes increasingly obvious that the belief that 'pre-state' societies generally are peaceful and that humans only become warlike once they construct complex governing structures with a martial elite is deeply incorrect. See e.g. Steven Le Blanc with Katherine E. Register, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage, New York: St Martin's Press, 2003; Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization:The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. On this question, interesting perspectives are provided in Phillipe Delmas, The Rosy Future of War, trans. Christopher Atamain, New York: Free Press, 1999 [1995]; Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century, London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 2005. At least in the West, this does represent a significant change from a century ago – in the pre-1914 period there was substantial support for the notion that warfare, in general, was beneficial to civilization. See e.g. Friedrich von Bernardi, Germany and the Next War, trans. Alan H. Powles, New York: Longmans, Green, 1914 [1912]. Individuals who participated in the genocide discuss their personal perspective in Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers of Rwanda Speak, trans. Linda Coverdale, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005 [2003]. For an exploration of this point, see Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Clausewitz and African War: Politics and Strategy in Liberia and Somalia, London: Frank Cass/Routledge, 2005. It should, however, also be noted that in some cases ill-conceived peacebuilding efforts can make a tragic situation semi-permanent. Some conflicts, whether civil or among states, burn hot but quickly, allowing one side to win and proceed to establish peace on its terms. Particularly in civil wars, this outcome may be desirable. For instance, Americans should be immensely thankful that in the mid-nineteenth century no entity similar to the UN existed. Such an organization surely would have demanded ceasefires, made endless diplomatic démarches and placed other impediments to the best plausible resolution of the conflict. Free from outside pressure for delay, Americans were able to get on with the terrible bloodletting of their Civil War, with the resulting military destruction of the Confederacy and reunification on Washington's terms – and these were the necessary conditions for reliable long-term peace and security on the North American continent. One of the tragedies of the human experience is that throughout history most people have gone through their lives under a real threat of violence, up to and including enslavement or death by torture – a threat that usually has been most acutely presented by neighbouring polities. Such violence often was (or, sadly for those who still suffer in such conditions, is) unpredictable. To those living in fluid, loosely structured political orders, such as most tribal groupings, raiding was a permanent danger – 'peace' as a stable, formal condition that can only be broken for legally defensible reasons simply was not a relevant concept to those living in such societies. Even if an agreed condition of non-aggression existed with neighbours, the threat of betrayal was always likely; indeed, the surprise attack is a particularly acute temptation for the leader of a small tribe or similar grouping. Under the right conditions, even a somewhat stronger – and, hence, extremely dangerous – group can be utterly destroyed in a short engagement, its wealth seized and its surviving members enslaved, forcibly married or otherwise absorbed. At the very core of the justification for the organized state is the provision of protection against external threat – the amelioration of insecurity for the benefit of citizens. However, at most times, most states have proved only a modest degree of security to the citizenry. People living on frontiers were especially vulnerable, but even the core of a powerful polity did not guarantee safety; the residents of cities as different as Baghdad in 1258 and Berlin in 1945 have suffered (and often died in great numbers during) brutal sackings. This danger is explored in many works, including Graham Alison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, New York: Times Books, 2004, and Michael Levi, On Nuclear Terrorism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Even this, however, is arguable. For a sceptical view regarding the power of the CNN effect, see Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy, and Intervention, London: Routledge, 2002. A case for recognizing the independence of Somaliland is made in J. Peter Pham, 'Last Domino Standing: On the Fate of Somaliland', World Defense Review, 11 Dec. 2008, accessed at http://worlddefensereview.com/pham121108.shtml. Some states metaphorically, or even literally, wall these quarters off, leaving their inhabitants to suffer their fate while the rest of polity enjoys a reasonable degree of order – the 'Brazil Option'. This, however, requires an authoritative (and ruthless) police apparatus, and, at least from recent experience, it appears usually to be a course of action available to middle-income countries with a reasonably broad middle class. The latter produce the wealth necessary both to pay for policing and to provide some government assistance, which, minimal though it may be, presumably helps to dampen chaos in the favelas. The phrase comes from an interview between a journalist and an anonymous Bush administration official: 'The aide said that guys like me "in what we call the reality-based community", which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality ... We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do"'. Ron Suskind, 'Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush', New York Times Magazine, 17 Oct. 2004, accessed at www.nytimes.com. As Michael Barnett points out, '[L]iberal peacebuilding might inadvertently be doing more harm than good. In their efforts to radically transform all aspects of the state, society, and economy in a matter of months (and thus expecting conflict-ridden societies to achieve what took Western states decades), peacebuilders are subjecting these fragile societies to tremendous stress'. 'Building a Republican Peace: Stabilizing States after War', International Security, Vol.30, No.4, pp.83–9. That of course is quite different from turning back the sort of moral challenge to a sitting government presented by dissident poets and democracy marchers. In 1989, the various Communist parties of East Central Europe probably could have maintained power if their leaders had the stomach to spill the blood necessary and if, in turn, the military, intelligence and police rank and file were willing to carry out the task: a sufficiently vigorous application of terror might well have choked off the nascent democracy movement. Fortunately, most Warsaw Pact leaders, deprived of Soviet support and uncertain whether their own security apparatus actually would be willing to inflict mass violence on the populace, handed the keys of the state to their opponents and went into retirement, hoping that by doing so they might discourage their successors from inquiring too closely into previous crimes. This is notably true for the United States. War between democracies may be rare (or, if one defines 'democracy' narrowly enough, perhaps non-existent), but this does not necessarily mean that democracies invariably are friendly towards each other. For instance, the current governments of Bolivia and Nicaragua both came to power by election but are fundamentally hostile to the United States. Even governments that cooperate with the United States on many issues often find it expedient to undermine US foreign policy – this is true of countries as varied as France, Brazil, Pakistan and South Africa. The argument that the international system is unlikely to develop in a bipolar fashion in coming decades is elaborated in C. Dale Walton, Geopolitics and the Great Powers in the Twenty-First Century: Multipolarity and the Revolution in Strategic Perspective, London: Routledge, 2007. It is, however, important to note that, given its ethnic and religious divides, Iraq was a particularly combustible entity. Even if the Bush administration had been composed entirely of realpolitik advocates, it is arguable that a large-scale civil conflict was inevitable in Iraq once the regime was overthrown. The Iraqi case probably was not one in which the invading power could slot in a new dictator to replace Saddam. However, it is not unimaginable that an effective solution to the problem of stabilizing Iraq in 2003 was impossible – it is difficult to say, especially as the United States did not fully explore alternatives to the 'rapid democratization under occupation' policy. For all its championing of the sanctity of sovereignty, China had no compunction about launching a punitive expedition against Vietnam in 1979. This, in turn, was related to the fact that Vietnam itself had already turned Laos into a puppet state and occupied Cambodia – actions that were violations of sovereignty. When assessing peacebuilding in Kosovo, it also is important to consider the impact of operations there in other parts of the Balkans. On the link between events in Kosovo and Macedonia, see Robert Hislope, 'Between a Bad Peace and War: Insights and Lessons from the Almost-War in Macedonia', Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol.26, No.1, pp.129–51. The ability to grapple successfully with paradox is vital to proper strategic decision-making, as Edward N. Luttwak explains, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, rev. edn, New York: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. Colin S. Gray, 'No Good Deed Shall Go Unpunished', in Ken Booth (ed.), The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimensions, London: Routledge, 2000, p.302

Irish · Peacebuilding · Peacekeeping · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Development and Aid · Law · Peacebuilding and International Security · Public Administration

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