Amidst the Debris

Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order

Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada, Andrea Rigon, Bertrand Taithe, Rafia Zakaria, Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada, Andrea Rigon, Bertrand Taithe, Rafia Zakaria, Juliano Fiori, Bertrand Taithe

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781787383968
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787386679
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica globale

For many liberal commentators at the turn of the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union represented a final victory for Western reason and capitalist democracy. But, in recent years, liberal norms and institutions associated with the post-Cold War moment have been challenged by a visceral and affective politics. Electorates have increasingly opted for a closing inwards of the nation-state, not just in the democratic heartlands of Europe and North America, but also on the periphery of the world economy. As the popular appeal of the ‘open society’ is thrown into question, it is necessary to revisit assumptions about the permanence of its enabling political and ethical projects.

Previously promoted by the US and its allies as a necessary complement to liberal capitalist culture and the globalisation of markets, humanitarian multilateralism seems to have lost strategic currency. In this collection of essays, public intellectuals, scholars, journalists and aid workers reflect on the relationship between humanitarianism and ‘liberal order’. What role has humanitarianism played in processes of liberal ordering? Amidst challenges to liberal order, what are the implications for the political economy of humanitarianism, and for the practices of humanitarian agencies?

1

INTRODUCTION

HUMANITARIANISM AND LIBERAL ORDERING

Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada, Andrea Rigon, Bertrand Taithe, and Rafia Zakaria

Unveiling government spending plans for the coming year, on 25 November 2020, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak spoke of ‘tough choices’. With the UK under lockdown, as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic surged, the government was facing an ‘economic emergency’: the largest public deficit since the Second World War. And so it was unjustifiable, he asserted, to maintain government expenditure on foreign aid. Barely one percent of proposed borrowing, the £4 billion saved by cutting the aid budget from 0.7 percent to 0.5 percent of national income would make almost no difference to the government’s balance sheet. Yet the measure was of symbolic significance. Not least because it jarred against the promise of a three-year increase in defence spending. Five months after the government folded the Department for International Development into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the cut to aid was indicative of a suspension, if not an unravelling, of a political consensus that had held for more than two decades. Commitment to overseas aid had sat squarely in the common ground occupied by the progressive neoliberals of left and right in government since the 1990s. It had reflected a shared assumption of the compatibility between altruistic ethics and self-interested politics—and a shared understanding of aid’s strategic role in projecting Britain’s soft power, ordering international affairs, and promoting capitalist development.

A few weeks before the publication of Sunak’s spending review, Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. Presuming to speak for everyone, American novelist Francine Prose reproduced the expression du jour: ‘We can breathe again.’¹ ‘You know, the I can’t breathe?’ questioned Van Jones, CEO of the REFORM Alliance, during a poignant response to the election result, on CNN. ‘That wasn’t just George Floyd’—the black man whose murder by Minneapolis police had sparked international protests in June. ‘That was a lot of people that felt that they couldn’t breathe.’² ‘I can’t breathe’ had been adopted as a protest slogan by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014. But asphyxiation is a grim motif in America’s long history of white oppression of black people: hundreds of thousands of slaves died in the Middle Passage from drowning or lack of oxygen below deck; hanging was the most common fate for black victims of white lynch mobs, slave patrols, and the Ku Klux Klan, although many were killed by chokehold—a metonym for racist police violence today. With his talk of ‘very fine people on both sides’, his Muslim ban, and his characterisation of Mexicans as, ‘in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, racists’, Donald Trump pressed the boot of the American state further down on the necks of blacks and ethnic minorities; his departure from the White House seemed likely to offer them a reprieve. But in the moment of Biden’s victory, the historical experience of black asphyxiation, evoked by the June protests, was somehow conflated with anxieties about disruption of the normal order of things, about dissolution of the ideal of orderly progress. White liberals now renewed their hope of restoration of the normal order of things. But, if this order was less permissive of race-baiting and supremacist pageantry, if it was more humanitarian, if it offered a greater chance of avoiding climate catastrophe, it was also sustained by a racist division of labour, a racist system of legal justice, and a racist enterprise of civilisational expansion. With the death of George Floyd still at the forefront of political debate, the suggestion by white liberals that everyone could breathe again obscured continuities—discussed by Stephanie Reist in this volume—between Trumpism and the racial liberalism that predominated before his election in 2016. Despite centuries of whites using asphyxiation as a technique of domination, it was Joe Biden, an elderly white man, whose 1994 crime bill demonised a generation of black boys, who was now imagined as guarantor of (in the words of Achille Mbembe) ‘the universal right to breathe’.³

In his acceptance speech, Biden expressed determination to ‘restore the soul of America’.⁴ The white nationalist tattoos, Kek flags, and male tribalist furs on display as Trump supporters stormed Washington’s Capitol on 6 January 2021, offered a reminder of the dark side of the American soul, with which, one way or another, Biden will have to contend. But liberals outside the United States will hope that his project of restoration succeeds, with repercussions elsewhere, breaking the wave of popular authoritarianism that has washed across the West and beyond, over the last decade. The referendum vote in favour of Brexit, in June 2016, was decisive. In Europe and North America, new nationalist movements of the far right had been feeding off the discontent of the disenfranchised and the patriotic posturing of political elites, for a number of years. They had even achieved electoral success on Europe’s fringes. But the Brexit vote marks the moment when what Christophe Guilluy characterises as the ‘emergence of the periphery’—a moral rebellion by those priced out of bourgeois society, stoked by these nationalist movements and decadent sectors of capital—produced the first major shock to the very heart of neoliberalism’s transnational regime.⁵ As the British government has shifted rightwards since, authoritarian manoeuvres have been downplayed amid the posh-boy pleasantries of Tory chumocrats. Trump’s gaudy narcissism would of course be out of place in Westminster; Boris Johnson’s demagoguery is garnished with historical allusion and Ancient Greek verse. But there should be no doubt about the elective affinities of the two men. If Johnson is a protean politician, not much chewing is required before ingesting Marine Le Pen’s assertion that he serves as an inspiration for the Rassemblement National, in France; few eyebrows are raised when he is included in the parade of the so-called ‘nationalist international’.

Brexit exposed a cleavage in Britain’s political establishment, which has widened whenever the government threatens to topple liberal totems of the post-Cold War period. The decision to cut the aid budget provoked an angry reaction from the liberal wing of the Conservative Party, as well as from MPs across the Labour Party. A Foreign Office minister resigned. Former prime ministers David Cameron and Tony Blair warned against the measure, as if in defence of their condominium. Aid agencies inevitably protested too. Danny Sriskandarajah, CEO of Oxfam GB, argued that the cut risked ‘significantly undermining one of the UK’s genuine claims to global leadership’.⁶ For Kevin Watkins, CEO of Save the Children UK, it had ‘broken Britain’s reputation for leadership on the world stage’.⁷

Since at least the early nineteenth century, British claims to global leadership have rested partly on overseas humanitarian endeavours—not necessarily aid, as understood today, but the sentimental humanist activism with which it is most readily associated. The promotion of relief and reconstruction became one of Britain’s principal contributions to international ordering after the First World War, as it grudgingly adapted to imperial decline. As noted by Emily Baughan in this volume, Save the Children, established in 1919, developed close ties with the British state in its early years. And, despite its founding socialistic vision of civic diplomacy, it increasingly aligned itself with British foreign policy. In the decades following the Second World War, the organisation often performed the role of—in Baughan’s words—‘stretcher-bearer for the casualties’ of decolonisation and proxy warfare. But, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the relationship between aid agencies and the state became altogether more instrumental, not only in Britain, but across the West. In the moment of liberal democracy’s apotheosis, aid agencies were conscripted to assist in the periphery’s cultural conversion to Western capitalism and in the consolidation of a moral universe subject to American arbitration. During the 1990s, many of them cheered on and collaborated with Western military campaigns launched in the name of human rights and civilian protection—‘humanitarian interventions’, remembered by many contributors to this volume, most notably José Luís Fiori. Trading on a moralisation of politics in the West, many of the larger aid agencies grew rapidly. A steady increase in private and government funding accelerated the professionalisation of the aid industry. And so, as aid was more systematically integrated into Western strategies of liberal capitalist expansion, aid agencies became more dependent on governments and corporations. In his chapter in this volume, Gareth Owen, one of the longest-serving emergency operations directors in the aid sector, reflects on his experience of this entanglement. Concerned about the impact that the cut to British government aid could have on people affected by conflict and disaster, he nonetheless suggests that it could ‘force humanitarian agencies to delink from state power and adapt their financial models for the better’.

Owen’s chapter can be situated in a tradition of auto-critique by aid workers who question the sustainability, as well as the political implications, of expansionary financial models for multinational charities, even as they recognise the benefits of growth. But it differs from those analyses that would announce a crisis of humanitarianism on account of its pollution by politics, its betrayal by immoral leadership, or its intransigence in the face of modernising imperatives (innovation, professionalisation, technocratic efficiency, etc.). If these elements appear in his account, Owen sees the main challenges for humanitarianism today as intrinsic to its interdependencies with neoliberal political economy, and, more generally, with liberal order. In doing so, he gets to the nub of the first question that has animated the production of this volume—a question addressed directly in Jacinta O’Hagan’s chapter: How should we understand the relationship between Western humanitarianism, in its contemporary form, and liberal order?

Liberal Order

The merits of liberal order have never been so intensely debated as in recent years, during which its defenders—G. John Ikenberry, Joseph Nye, Francis Fukuyama, and Richard Haass, among the most prominent—have deemed it to be under threat.⁸ Indeed, perhaps the clearest illustration of what the proponents of liberal order have imagined it to be is provided by their description of a status quo ante that requires moral defence. Yet such a description tends to rely on selective histories. Nye, for example, overlooks the normalisation of civil conflict on the periphery when he writes of the ‘demonstrable success’ of liberal order in ‘helping secure and stabilise the world over the past seven decades’.⁹ It thus revives another debate: Has anything like liberal order ever really existed? In one of the most notable recent exchanges on this question, in Foreign Affairs—arguably the most notable mouthpiece for American liberal internationalism—political scientist Graham Allison seeks to demonstrate that liberal order is a myth by exposing the main claims of its defenders as ‘more wrong than right’.¹⁰ Elsewhere, historian and imperial nostalgist Niall Ferguson affirms that ‘liberal international order… is neither liberal, nor international, nor very orderly’.¹¹ Michael Barnett, author of the most widely read longue durée history of humanitarianism, writes: ‘Some might consider the 1990s as a highwater mark of the liberal international order, but my view is that the international order got closer to having a liberal quality but never quite passed the threshold.’¹² If such assertions are to bear scrutiny, they must be accompanied by a delimited conception of liberalism. The ‘boundary-work’ that enthuses liberal political theorists is not of primary concern in this volume. Moreover, it is by no means clear that bounding liberal ideas and practice gets us any closer to resolving the debate, since there remain intractable questions about the nature and origins of order.

This volume, then, takes the concept of liberal order at face value—as an object of the imagination of self-defined liberals, as well as some of their critics. But also as a dynamic normative construction in which the rhetorical deployment of ideas commonly associated with liberalism, by the powerful, plays a central role in the exercise of authority, the creation of institutions, the hierarchical organisation of potential rivals, and the suppression of threats. Until they undermine the strategic value of liberal discourse, actions that seem to contradict it can be understood as constitutive of this construction. This approach poses a challenge to the conception of order as a steady and peaceful state, which suspends the rupture that will eventually return disorder. It also differs from the conception of order as an organised group of institutions, adopted by John Mearsheimer, among other scholars of international relations.¹³ And it focuses attention instead on processes of ‘ordering’—in the inter-state system, but also within the nation-state, suggesting a certain fluidity between the two. As such, this volume is not exclusively concerned with ‘liberal international order’. Fernando Espada’s chapter, in particular, considers how ordering at home affects ordering abroad. Through discussion of the relationship of humanitarian politics and practice to processes of liberal ordering, the chapters in this volume contribute to an understanding of liberal order as a product of power relations and contestation, not necessarily of moral progress or rational evolution. While they are informed by different politics, they all maintain a critical distance from liberal order—indeed, from liberal ideology—without resorting to facile denunciation. Neither invective nor apologia, this volume critically interrogates conventional assumptions about our current conjuncture and the historical developments that produced it.

Attention to processes of ordering can contribute to an understanding of historical continuities. But to account for the historical specificities of liberal order, it is also necessary to recognise change. The contributors to this volume do not propose bold revisions of periodisation. Rather, they adhere to four established views on the genesis of liberal order, situating it in the aftermath of either the First World War, the Second World War, the crisis of the 1970s, or the Cold War. The combined effect is a sense that, notwithstanding the undulations and contingencies of History—the push and pull of the struggle for power and profit—liberal ordering became an increasingly prominent feature of world politics as the United States consolidated its global hegemony. Liberal order appears as inextricably tied to the American century, similarly bearing legacies of the age of empire it succeeded, in which liberal humanitarianism nonetheless also played a role in ordering—as noted by Bertrand Taithe in this volume.

It also appears as tied to global governance, under the tutelage of American power—to the establishment of international institutions, not least those of what, since the 1980s, aid workers have referred to as the ‘humanitarian system’. Anyone who attends a UN coordination meeting for an emergency response will recognise the importance attributed to the idea of order in the humanitarian system. The hierarchy of interventions is well defined; sessions are structured predictably; discussions, often limited to information-sharing, appear scripted, with disagreement more performative than substantive. Since war and disaster are chaotic—as the innumerable reports published every year by aid agencies testify—the sensible observer would presumably welcome orderly responses to the human suffering they cause. The significant energy invested in developing and reforming humanitarian institutions since the turn of the 1990s, within and beyond the UN, has produced more systematic and coordinated relief operations. But an emphasis on ordering emergency response has also cultivated a bureaucratic denial of politics, leaving humanitarian governance particularly beholden to the neoliberal zeitgeist.

In the main, the chapters that follow also suggest an association between liberal order and the rise of neoliberalism. This association is brought out by the conceptual history of ‘liberal international order’. Perhaps the earliest use of the term, with more or less the general meaning it is commonly given today, was in 1959, in an essay by German economist Wilhelm Röpke, a leading figure in what Quinn Slobodian has called neoliberalism’s ‘Geneva School’.¹⁴ As Nils Gilman has pointed out, it came into more common usage in the 1970s, as Western powers sought to define an attractive alternative to the New International Economic Order proposed by the Group of 77. It then became bound up with the neoliberal policies promoted by international economic institutions, which undermined the sovereign claims of non-aligned states.¹⁵

By the 1980s, neoliberalism had become not only a dominant technology of capital accumulation, but also the ideology of a newly emboldened Western bourgeoisie. The tensions within contemporary liberalism’s broad church render its conflati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Humanitarianism and Liberal Ordering
• Part One: The Politics of Humanitarian Practice
• Part Two: The Practice of Humanitarian Politics
• Part Three: Humanitarianism After Liberalism?
• Notes
• Index