Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy

Pitfalls, Possibilities and Paradoxes

David Chandler, Volker Heins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415400190
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134147106
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new volume moves beyond the limits of current debate to show how today's foreign policy is increasingly about values rather than interests and why ethics are now playing a central role.

Rather than counterposing interests and ethics, trying to find 'hidden agendas' or emphasizing the double-standards at play in ethical foreign policy, this book brings together leading international theorists, and a variety of stimulating approaches, to develop a critical understanding of the rise of ethical foreign policy, and to analyze the limits of ethical policy-making on its own terms. They deal with the limits of 'ethical foreign policy' both in the light of the internal dynamic of these policies themselves, and with regard to the often unintended consequences of policies designed to better the world.

This book also shows how the transformation of both the domestic and the international spheres of politics means that ethics has become a rallying point for non-state actors and experts who gather around values and norms in order to force institutions to justify their behavior. This process results from different structural changes and the transformation of the international system, the individualization of Western societies and the growing importance of expertise in the justification of decisions in risk adverse societies. It leads to a transformation of norms and to a redefinition of a global ethical framework that needs to be clarified.

This book will be of great interest to all students and researchers of foreign policy formation, politics and international relations.

1
Ethics and foreign policy

New perspectives on an old problem

Volker Heins and David Chandler

This book is concerned with ways in which political leaders and policy-makers in the post-cold war era have claimed to infuse their actions with moral considerations that go beyond, and help to redefine, the national interest of their respective countries. These claims have materialized in armed humanitarian interventions, human rights conditionalities in foreign aid allocation, changes in military ethics or voluntary attempts to repair the harm caused by predecessor governments. What exactly is controversial about such claims and ambitions? After all, few thinkers today would doubt the very possibility of sustained – and politically relevant – collective moral action in modern society. Almost everybody believes in morally inspired social movements that achieve some good at least sometimes. What remains controversial is the extent to which governments can transmogrify into moral actors in international society. Perhaps there is something inherent in states as representatives of particular, territorially delimited political communities which makes it inevitable that they will continue to play their part as monstres froids in a dangerous world.

For most writers the moral coldness of the state varies, depending on the extent to which the state perceives its moral duties as restricted to the territorial political community or as extending beyond these arbitrary, socially constructed, territorial bounds to encompass humanity more broadly. The relationship between ethics and politics is less conflictual as long as it plays out within a given political community bound together by mutual obligations. In a tradition that reaches from Hobbes to Hegel to Gramsci and Charles Taylor, the ‘ethical’ has actually been identified with the ‘political community’ and even with ‘hegemony’ (Taylor, 1979:84–95; Durst, 2005). The politics of introducing a strong moral dimension into international affairs suggests that the nature of global community has either been transformed with recent geo-political changes, including processes of globalization, or it suggests that our territorially bounded communities of fate can be reimagined or imagined differently once we rethink the meanings and dichotomies between ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ (see, for example, Falk, 1995; Linklater, 1981; Booth, 1991). Rather than a ‘realist’ sphere of anarchy, where the conflicting interests of separate political communities bounded by the sovereign state are seen as the fundamental fact, it is argued that in our modern globalized world, political communities are no longer restricted by the territorial boundaries of the sovereign state.

The dispute over the values and meaning of ethical foreign policy is thereby not essentially a normative one of what it means to be ‘ethical’. The point at issue is, rather, the boundary-drawing of the sphere in which moral action is held to be possible. The political question is to what degree political/moral community extends beyond the borders of the territorial state. Communitarians or realists argue that community is co-determinous with the boundaries of the state and therefore the government’s ethical or moral duties are restricted to the needs of the citizens of the state. At the other end of the spectrum, ‘Kantian’ international or cosmopolitan liberals would argue that we live in a global political community where ethical policy-making should put the interests of humanity in general in centre place. Between these two extremes of communitarian and cosmopolitan variants of ethical foreign policy lie a wide range of ‘sliding scale’ hierarchies of solidarity, denoting the sense of graduations of strength of political community which are reflected in views of the state’s differentiated international duties, shaped by a balance of self-interest and the needs of others.

The realist critique and its limits

From a strictly ‘realist’ point of view, the ambition to devise an ethical foreign policy, a policy declared to be based on the interests of others rather than on self-interest, is based on a false understanding of the ‘realities’ of international politics. Therefore, it can only be a self-deception – a chimera – to imagine self-interest in terms of ethical universals, or designed for the deception of others. This can either be a genuine error, expressed by those with universalist aspirations, or an act of manipulation and duplicity, an attempt to pursue national interests through ideological disguise. Far from being monolithic, the realist critique of ethical foreign policies can be set out succinctly in four different propositions:

1 Ethical foreign policies are bound to be ineffective and quixotic. They ignore the reality of politics without being harmful or beneficial to anybody.

2 Ethical foreign policies weaken the state and are harmful to the national interest. They ignore both the reality of politics and the consequences of this ignorance.

3 Ethical foreign policies are part of a smart ideological manoeuvre. They benefit the national interest by pretending to transcend it and by making everybody believe in this transcendence.

4 Ethical foreign policies are part of the problem they pretend to solve because they produce immoral behaviours and consequences.

These propositions about ethical foreign policies as quixotic, weakening, ideological or immoral recur across a wide range of realist texts. Max Weber, for example, regarded First World War pacifism as a quixotic attitude. In line with proposition 1, he characterized anti-war activists such as Rosa Luxemburg less as public enemies than as political dreamers to be confined to a ‘zoo’ (Weber, 1988:441). Similarly, when in 1997 Britain’s then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook made the announcement to introduce a new ‘ethical dimension’ into foreign policy, some commentators called him not a threat to his country’s interest, but a ‘buffoon’ with no sense of reality (Harris, 2001). In academia today, it is first of all John Mearsheimer (2001:22–7) who disdains the moralistic rhetoric of American foreign policy-makers without claiming that this rhetoric has been particularly harmful to the national interest.

Of course, many more realists are convinced that moral considerations actually weaken and damage the pursuit of vital state interests (proposition 2). In Chapter 53 of the first book of his Discourses, Machiavelli already warned against the disaster that looms when people are deceived by ‘a false appearance of good’ – una falsa immagine di bene (Machiavelli, 1960:249). Hans Morgenthau and others thought of President Wilson’s legalistic internationalism as both causally effective and disastrous in its consequences for post-First World War stability in Europe (see Kuklick, 2006:75). The distinguished US diplomat and historian George Kennan believed that liberal democracies were ill-equipped to follow a rational foreign policy because of the moralizing and debilitating effects of public opinion on decision-makers. Democracy, he concluded, is in danger of edging toward extinction like prehistoric dinosaurs which were equally unable to anticipate threats from their changing environment (Kennan, 1977:6).

Other realists have seen the moral sensibilities of the public as a tool for power politics. For them, deceiving people into believing that politics serves a moral good can be a successful power-enhancing strategy. During the cold war, official humanitarian aid was highly politicized by the governments providing it, as US President Nixon openly stated in 1968: ‘the main purpose of American aid is not to help other nations but to help ourselves’ (cited in de Waal, 1997:65). Along these lines, writers such as Carl Schmitt and E.H. Carr would have subscribed to proposition 3. Schmitt (1974:72) did not see the American ‘humanitarian ideology’ as a virus slowly weakening the real power of the US, but – from his ultra-conservative point of view – as a sadly effective weapon. Carr (2001:136) concurred when he called the invocation of utopia and ‘international morality’ a ‘convenient weapon’ of the powerful.

Both authors also shared the perspective summarized in proposition 4 according to which the injection of morality into foreign policy is detrimental to morality itself. ‘Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’, Schmitt famously declared, implying, of course, that cheating is unethical (Schmitt, 1976:54; see also Carr, 2001:152). Schmitt’s argument illustrates the apparent irony that many realists pretend to safeguard basic standards of moral conduct by taking morality out of politics. The flipside of this attitude consists in taking politics out of morality. Thus, during the cold war untainted ethical action was clearly associated with the non-governmental sphere. Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) gained a radical edge as they seemed to put the interests of people above the strategic concerns of the East/West divide by providing aid against the wishes of Western governments. Agencies such as Oxfam or Save the Children became popularly identified by their youthful pro-Third World appeal. The high-point of this type of NGO humanitarianism came with the Live Aid campaign to raise funds for the Ethiopian famine of 1984. Relief NGOs – including prominent US groups such as CARE or World Vision (see Heins, 2005a: 376–81) – did not (or, in the US case, no longer) seek to link Western aid to any kind of political conditions but wanted to assist the global poor exclusively on the basis of need.

We believe that none of these ‘realist’ criticisms that aim at keeping the worlds of morality and politics apart is completely off the mark. In various respects, however, the contributors to this volume differ from the realist research programme. First, in contrast to proposition 1, they contend that the development and implementation of ethical foreign policies have real consequences, very much unlike the attempt of Don Quixote to fight against the turning sails of windmills. The following chapters demonstrate the reality of ‘ethical dimensions’ in foreign policy which have either led to new mandates of state agencies including the armed forces or to certain restraints on institutional policies and practices affecting non-nationals. Neither the effects nor the overall context in which these new mandates and restraints are set have been much researched so far.

Second, we doubt that morally inspired foreign policies are necessarily harmful to the national interest. The main reason is that the ‘national interest’ has ceased to be a constant and self-evident guidepost for sovereign decision-making (Chandler, 2004: Ch. 3; Finnemore, 1996). It is far from being as static and knowable as realist writers have always assumed (Kennan, 1954:103). Rather, the ‘national interest’ has assumed characteristics of the ‘public opinion’ which was looked down on by realist scholars as an ‘ever changing entity to be continuously created and recreated by informed and responsible leadership’ (Morgenthau, 1985:168). Realism itself is a ‘vocabulary’ or an ‘outlook’ on politics rather than an empirical thesis on real-world politics (Kuklick, 2006:73, 88). In fact, many examples from recent history show that there is no way of insulating a robust national interest from various other legal, moral or reputational considerations which are, in turn, subject to multiple influences. This is true even in situations of emergency, in which we would expect the national interest to ‘override’ all other concerns (see, for example, McGreal, 2005; Ignatieff, 2004).

Third, we claim that ethical foreign policies are more than an ideological smokescreen used to divert attention from the true nature of state behaviour. Conversely, the false certainty of prevalent explanations about what drives foreign policy has diverted attention from the study of ‘ethical’ policy dimensions. We hasten to add that often ethical foreign policies do, indeed, benefit the states that are pursuing them, if only by raising what has been called their ‘moral prestige’ (Löwenheim, 2003) in international society. Yet this does not imply that ‘ideology’ is a useful concept in this context. Ethical foreign policies are based, rather, on ‘ideas’ that can be categorized like other ideas influencing foreign policy decisions as principled beliefs, causal beliefs and worldviews (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993).

Fourth, none of the authors of this volume would agree with Schmitt’s hard-boiled cynicism which led him to suspect that the invocation of our common humanity is just a dirty trick played on us by liberal imperialis...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Ethics and foreign policy
• Part I Geographies of ethical intervention
• Part II Theoretical issues
• Part III Techniques and tactics of ethical intervention
• Index