Freedom's Battle

by Bass, Gary J.

• ISBN13: 9780307279873
• ISBN10: 0307279871
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2009-10-13
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

Why do we let evil happen? Why do we sometimes rally to stop it? Whose lives matter to us? These are the key questions posed by Gary Bass in this provocative look at the forgotten world of the first human rights activists. Bass, a rising scholar at Princeton, illuminates the cultural and political landscapes of the nineteenth-century "atrocitarians," as these activists were known, and shows us how a newly emergent free press exposed British, French, and American citizens to atrocities taking place beyond their shores, and galvanized them to action. Wildly romantic, eccentrically educated and full of bizarre enthusiasms, they were also morally serious people on the vanguard of a new political consciousness. Their legacy hasmuch to teach us about our world's current human rights crises.

Author Biography

Gary J. Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. A former reporter for The Economist, he has written often for the New York Times, and has also written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Humanitarinism or Imperialism?	p. 2
Media and Solidarity	p. 25
The Diplomacy of Humanitarian Intervention	p. 39
Greeks	p. 45
The Greek Revolution	p. 51
The Scio Massacre	p. 67
The London Greek Committee	p. 76
Americans and Greeks	p. 88
Lord Byron's War	p. 100
Canning	p. 111
The Holly Alliance	p. 117
A Rumor of Slaughter	p. 123
Navarino	p. 137
Syrians	p. 153
Napoléon the Little	p. 159
The Massacres	p. 163
Public Opinion	p. 182
Occupying Syria	p. 190
Mission Creep	p. 213
Bulgarians	p. 233
The Eastern Question	p. 239
Pan-Slavism	p. 242
Bosnia and Serbia	p. 248
Bulgarian Horrors	p. 256
Gladstone vs. Disraeli	p. 266
The Russo-Turkish War	p. 297
The Midlothian Campaign	p. 305
Conclusion	p. 313
Armenians	p. 315
The Uses of History	p. 341
The International Politics of Humanitarian Intervention	p. 352
The Domestic Politics of Humanitarian Intervention	p. 367
A New Imperialism?	p. 376
Notes	p. 383
Acknowlegments	p. 483
Index	p. 487
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction

The president of the United States, in his State of the Union speech, gave a grave warning to the American people. He noted that overseas "there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror" that the United States had a duty to step in. "In extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper." In a few cases, depending on "the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it," the president argued, "we could interfere by force of arms . . . to put a stop to intolerable conditions." This was an explicit call for using U.S. troops to save foreigners. It was not from Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter—the two presidents who claimed to make human rights a centerpiece of their foreign policy. The president was Theodore Roosevelt; the year was 1904; his example was Cuba, where Roosevelt had famously put his own neck on the line against Spanish atrocities. 1

This was familiar rhetoric. Roosevelt's audience would not have been scandalized or confused by his words on this formal occasion. The president of the United States gave a ringing message about what we today would call humanitarian intervention, in ways that would be stunning almost a century later, and nobody thought too much of it. Something has been lost since then. The tradition of humanitarian intervention once ran deep in world politics, long before Rwanda and Kosovo came to the world's fitful attention. Over a century ago, it was a known principle that troops should sometimes be sent to prevent the slaughter of innocent foreigners. That principle has recently reemerged with fresh strength in the aftermath of the Cold War, but it is anything but new.

Human rights policies are usually thought of today as being largely an innovation of the Carter presidency, making another appearance in the Clinton administration—or, at most, going back to Woodrow Wilson. Before that, on this account, international politics were run by hard-nosed diplomats, unsentimental about foreign lives and liberties but dedicated to maintaining the balance of power. The fate of the world was worked out at lordly conferences in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, behind closed doors thick enough to shut out the hubbub of mass opinion. This common belief that humanitarianism has no real historical standing has been used powerfully to oppose U.S. and European missions abroad.

But in fact, the centurybeforeWilson's presidency was anything but an age of unbroken realpolitik. Especially in Victorian Britain, this was a period rich in what we today would recognize clearly as human rights rhetoric, all the way up to the highest levels. This was the time of the antislavery campaign in Britain, and then of the mass uproar against vicious Belgian colonial rule in the Congo. It was the era of philhellenism in Britain and pan-Slavism in Russia, of liberal sympathy for the national minorities crushed by the Ottoman and Austrian and Russian empires, of intrusive and sovereignty-defying treaties to safeguard minority rights, of French solicitude for Syria's Christians, and of wild popular convulsions in British politics on behalf of the Bulgarians. The most magical names—from Byron to Dostoevsky—entered the lists on behalf of foreign suffering. 2

These emotional pleas were a regular feature of international politics throughout much of the nineteenth century, resulting in several important military missions. The basic ideas go all the way back to Thucydides, who, horrified at bloody ancient civil wars, hoped for the endurance of "the general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress." As early as 1625, in his classicDe Jure Belli et Pacis, Hugo Grotius argued,

If the Injustice be visible, as if aBusiris, aPhalaris, or aThracian Diomedesexercise such Tyrannies over Subjects, as no good Man

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Excerpted from Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention by Gary J. Bass
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