The Liberal Defence of Murder

Richard Seymour

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781844678617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781689622
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A war that has killed more than a million Iraqis was a "humanitarian intervention", the US army is a force for liberation, and the main threat to world peace is posed by Islam. These are the arguments of a host of liberal commentators, including such notable names as Christopher Hitchens, Kanan Makiya, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, and Bernard-Henri L?vy.
In this critical intervention, Richard Seymour unearths the history of liberal justifications for empire, showing how savage policies of conquest-including genocide and slavery-have been retailed as charitable missions. From the Cold War to the War on Terror, Seymour argues that colonialist notions of "civilization" and "progress" still shape liberal pro-war discourse, concealing the same bloody realities.
In a new afterword, Seymour revisits the debates on liberal imperialism in the era of Obama and in the light of the Afghan and Iraqi debacles.

1

FORGING OLD EUROPE

It is curious how all roads in England – liberalism, pacifism, socialism, etc. – lead to the maintenance of the Empire.

– Jawaharlal Nehru¹

The tradition of imperial liberalism is almost as old and perplexing as liberalism itself. On the face of it, a doctrine that appears to stress human equality and universalism² ought to have nothing to do with a violent system of domination and exploitation. Yet, for many liberals, the virtues of empire were then very much as they are now for ‘liberal interventionists’: it promised pedagogy, cultural therapy, economic development, the rule of law, liberty, and even, sometimes, feminism. Later, it would become commonplace for imperial rule to be seen as the threshold for socialism too. To understand this is to grasp the deranging impact of centuries of organized white supremacy, and the increasingly triumphalist narratives that went along with it. It is also to touch on the strategies that European states elaborated for dealing with class conflict, and for integrating (or co-opting) dissidents.

Liberal Herrenvolk

Beginning with the subjugation of Ireland and the imposition of emerging capitalist property forms, the British colonization of the New World was soon underpinned by a slave-based labour system which gradually replaced the impressment and indenturing of domestic white labourers, and the extermination of native inhabitants of colonized land. Liberal ideas about the international order, drawing to a great extent on early-modern humanism and on Hugo Grotius in particular, provided a great deal of the ideological sustenance for the empire-builders. Grotius, the founder of international law avant la lettre, had been the Dutch republic’s most auspicious legal authority on the right to colonize, just as the republic was waging an offensive war to colonize the East Indies. As Locke would go on to argue, Grotius maintained that the rights of the state derived from a delegation and aggregation of the ‘natural rights’ of any individual in the ‘state of nature’ (putatively, the condition of human beings before states emerged). These included not only the right to liberty but a perceived corollary right to property. One consequence was to justify the Dutch Revolt, which had overthrown King Philip II of Spain, as a legitimate assertion of man’s rights. Another was to justify the wars waged by the United East Indies Company – since individuals bore the same rights as states, they could wield violence in much the same way in the absence of an authoritative state. Moreover, the Dutch had a perfect right to obtain property in the East Indies so long as they did not deprive others of their legitimately obtained property. Grotius’s famous argument for the ‘freedom of the seas’ was an attempt to prove that the Portuguese could not legally obstruct the Dutch colonists, since they could not legitimately own the seas. Further, since it was permissible in the ‘state of nature’ for individuals to punish others who are offensive and immoderate, so he maintained that it was permissible for Dutch colonists to punish those who frustrated their activities – so not only was colonialism justified; piracy, including the theft of bullion from Portuguese colonists, was also claimed as a natural right. And when the Dutch turned from sea-borne imperialism to territorial expansion, Grotius began to argue that the military intervention of colonialists into societies with customs deemed barbaric was just.³

John Locke, who devised the principles that would underpin the British polity and property relations following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688, also formulated the principles justifying the British empire as it colonized parts of the Atlantic coast of the Americas and the Caribbean islands, and was a member of the Board of Trade and Plantations for some of that time. The basis for his defence was a theory of property expressed in Two Treatises of Government, in which a person might rightfully appropriate a portion of land on the basis of having mixed his labour with it. Radicalizing Grotius’s conception of the right to acquire and defend property, Locke maintained that it was God’s command that the goods of the earth be captured and cultivated, rather than wasted. Peoples and nations which break the ‘law of nature’ are subject to private punishment, including war. Colonists should not ‘exterminate’ the natives of colonized territory, by any means, but they have a right to constrain and punish them to prevent them from appropriating property wilfully.⁴

Land, as the chief form of property, might thus be lawfully acquired in ‘barren’ territories where no sovereign authority operated, and where it was deemed that rational, industrious Europeans could make proper use of it. And, in circumstances where property was a nebulous concept, it was possible to appropriate according to one’s wants and deny others the ability to do so. Barbara Arniel writes, ‘From its inception, the natural right to property is defined in such a way as to exclude non-Europeans from being able to exercise it’. Locke’s participation in the slave trade perhaps seems odd for a philosopher of natural law and someone who had declared slavery to be ‘so vile and miserable an Estate of Man’ that ‘’tis hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for it’. However, this expressed Locke’s opposition to the enslavement of Englishmen, not of Africans. For Locke, colonial slavery could be justified in terms of ‘the state of war continued, between a lawful Conqueror, and a Captive’. Not only did Locke plead for slavery, he profited from it. As Bernasconi and Mann suggest, ‘to advocate, administer, and profit from a specifically racialised form of slavery is clear evidence of racism, if the word is to have any meaning at all’.⁵ Liberal theories of international order would continue to bear the marks of racism throughout the colonial period and beyond.

When, in the late eighteenth century, the British Empire faced serial challenges from its former colonists in the Americas, the turn to India and the East, with its devastating effects on local populations, produced the first serious efforts to curtail its excesses and even challenge its legitimacy. The mass challenge to slavery is well understood, and sometimes the British abandonment of slavery and efforts to suppress the trade are themselves treated as noble examples of proto-humanitarian intervention at work. Yet, as David Brion Davis has suggested, that view is susceptible to robust challenge:

If we take a quick snapshot of Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is not the first country we would choose in predicting the leader of a vast crusade to stamp out the slave trade and liberate hundreds of thousands, or, through its influence, millions of slaves … Inequalities of power had shaped British society like a vast pyramid, with the nobility and great landlords at the top, in control of a highly decentralised government … Before 1832, suffrage was limited to a tiny minority, mostly owners of very substantial property … In Ireland, a small Protestant minority exploited the country as if it were a plantation. In far-off India the British drew extraordinary wealth from systems of exploitative labour that were arguably as bad as the slavery in the West Indies but that received far less publicity. (Indeed, it was not until 1860 that it became illegal in India to own a slave.) In England itself, young men of the lower orders were vulnerable to being kidnapped by press gangs and forcibly conscripted into the navy, where the punishment of flogging was at least as common as on a slave plantation.⁶

Yet, despite certain reservations, and with growing regret and disillusion, the British state did suppress the slave trade (much to the annoyance of their former American colonists – see Chapter 2), and did not, as is commonly thought, stand to gain from more efficient labour as a result. Part of the explanation is that, although the anti-slavery movement was animated by sentiments of solidarity, the anti-slavery campaigners actively ‘concealed all humanitarian motives’ from the government when pushing for a Foreign Slave Trade Bill in 1806, and framed their argument in terms of profit and national self-interest. In doing so, they engaged with an elite that was increasingly optimistic about the prospects for a more efficient national economy through reform and social engineering – which is why the realization that slavery remained an extremely cost-effective form of surplus-extraction caused such consternation in the years that followed.⁷

Sankar Muthu has shown that, aside from criticism of the slave trade, the Enlightenment produced a brief, vivid critique of empire. Kant, Herder, and Diderot based their antipathy to empire on both a universalist humanitarianism and an insistence on respect for non-European cultures (the latter stance is often, in a confused way, condemned today as condescending ‘relativism’ that overlooks the negative aspects of those cultures). For example, Kant’s conception of humans as cultural agents, whose activities are determined by a range of socially and environmentally conditioned choices, allowed for a broad conception of rationality that underpinned his opposition to colonial domination. Since humans were not naturally ‘savage’ or ‘noble’, their forms of life could be understood as inherently rational. Dispensing with his early biological hierarchy of races (in which he concurred with Hume that ‘Negroes’ might well be mentally below par), he also rejected Locke’s conception of property, since ‘developing land is nothing more than the external sign of taking possession’ rather than a legitimate cause for doing so. He insisted in Toward Perpetual Peace on the rights of citizens of the world, as partaking of a ‘universal state of mankind’, and proposed, in place of imperialism, peaceful transnational relations between peoples. Importantly, not only did Kant oppose the means of empire (coercion), but he also criticized its ends (civilization, cultural transformation) on the universalist grounds of cosmopolitan freedom.⁸

Edmund Burke notoriously sought the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of British India, on account of the East India Company’s depredations in India. He saw its violence, repression and corruption as systemic and not incidental, rooted in the failure to see Indians as fully human – a lapse of the moral imagination. Bentham would lambast both the slave trade and the colonies (although, as in the case of India, he did not always favour self-government). As Jennifer Pitts has argued, rather than being based purely on the calculation of interests, Bentham’s criticisms embodied moral objections to the ‘manifest injury’ and ‘manifest oppression’ that empire necessitated. In contrast to much triumphalist thought about the superiority of British rule of law, he argued that the imposition of British law – so mediocre and vexatious in his analysis – on India was both unwise and wanton.⁹ Despite its many limitations, this body of thought provided the basis for future critiques of empire and the racist codes that legitimize it.

Yet, by the 1830s at least, the sceptical attitude to empire elaborated by Enlightenment liberals had been replaced by an almost uniform support for the colonial enterprise among those who advocated the extension of self-government domestically. For example, John Stuart Mill, an advocate of extending the franchise to the working class in Britain, argued in his 1854 essay, ‘On Liberty’, that some societies were in such a backward state that ‘the race itself may be considered as in its nonage’ – thus, as the equivalents of children, they may be considered exempt from the doctrine of liberty. Further: ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians’ – the sequel was crucial – ‘provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end’. Until such time as they were improved, ‘implicit obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne’ was their lot. Further to this humanitarian argument for colonial autocracy, which set a precedent that has not ceased to be imitated, there was the progressivist one: it was acceptable to use dominative relationships to nurture liberal democracies, since this would eventually result in a world composed of liberal-democratic states in which there would be no imperial powers. In ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’ (1859), he argued for a strict dichotomy between the legal and political standards one should apply to the ‘natives’ and those applicable to civilized nations. Though he was not a biological racist, and indeed condemned Carlyle’s vituperations regarding congenital racial difference, he partook of a cultural supremacism and a self-congratulatory civilizational discourse that authorized colonial domination. What is particularly damning is his complete lack of interest in the truth of his assertions about the ‘savage life’, despite his deep involvement in the empire and his access to wide-ranging empirical study.¹⁰

Alexis de Tocqueville, whose wisdom is often tapped for contemporary commentary on democracy, is not as well known for his writings on empire. Though sometimes critical of the British empire’s depredations in India, Tocqueville was nevertheless a great admirer of colonialism, and took part in several illuminating exchanges with John Stuart Mill on the topic. Perceiving colonies as an ideal solution to France’s domestic problems and as a route to national glory, he urged the conquest of Algeria on the French. Like Theodore Roosevelt after him, Tocqueville perceived the materialism and egotism of emerging bourgeois societies as enfeebling. Although he argued that war was destructive of democracy and that it encouraged authoritarianism, he nevertheless believed that it ‘enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character’. This may seem incongruent with Tocqueville’s liberalism and approval of American democracy. Yet, as Jennifer Pitts argues, Tocqueville’s support for colonialism throws his views on America into new relief – for instance, his sense that both Amerindians and African slaves were incapable of participating in democracy, and had to be excluded for it to thrive. Tocqueville constantly invoked the inferiority of indigenous peoples when justifying European colonialism. Thus, the coastal Arabs in Algeria were ‘half-savage peoples’ who ‘honour power and force above all else’. Tocqueville was not always as hostile in his depictions of the colonized, but he did partake of Orientalist discourses, in which Arabs were viewed variously as static, ungovernable, sensual, shrewd, and inconstant. And however critical he frequently was of the methods used in conquest, which he commented ironically were ‘more barbaric’ than those of the Arabs, he did believe that it was the duty of Europeans to civilize non-Europeans. And he came to see empire and the frontier as being fundamentally intertwined with progress and democracy, rather than as merely incidental facts about democratic states.¹¹

Like Mill, Tocqueville was directly involved in the building of empire. As a member of the French National Assembly, he was charged with drawing up a report with recommendations for French strategy in combating the resistance to colonial rule in Algeria. The report called for an uncompromising war, since ‘our domination of Africa must be firmly maintained’. At no stage whatsoever should the colonized be allowed to think of themselves as ‘our compatriots and our equals’. He generously stated, after visiting Algeria in 1846, that he did not wish to exterminate the natives. But he insisted that it was foolhardy to trust in the ‘goodwill of the natives’ or allow them a ‘regular government’, which they were not yet fit for. On grounds such as these, he would go as far as to advocate racial segregation for Algeria. Unlike Mill, who judged the colonies on the principle of utility, Tocqueville did not always feel obliged to qualify this with appeals to the amelioration of the colonized.¹² And whatever criticisms he had of the British, he was moved to remark, upon hearing of the Indian Rebellion: ‘I have never for an instance doubted your triumph, which is that of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: September 11 and Kriegsideologie
• 1. Forging Old Europe
• 2. Creating an Imperial Constituency
• 3. Neocons and Apostates
• 4. A Courageous Retreat
• Conclusion: The Apotheosis of Humanitarian Barbarism
• Afterword to the Paperback Edition
• Notes