So what would be the normative-political case for the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC)? As Ledbetter notes, the defence industry never had a shortage of defenders, proponents, beneficiaries, and apologists. Various critiques of the MIC notwithstanding, numerous American commentators are now firmly united in the belief that their country needs a large defence budget in order to protect and project its identities and interests in the world. According to Maddow, this collective belief had a lot to do with the discursive and institutional success of the infamous “Team B” reports on Soviet power, which so profoundly enthused Ronald Reagan and his administration, leading to the gigantic military buildup in the 1980s. Maddow’s assessment is worth citing at length:

Although the attention spike and mainstream media attention on #Kony2012 has receded, not least thanks to Jason ‘Radical’ Russell’s own brush with infamy, the implications of muscular-liberalism-as-social-media-experiment continue to unfold. My feed at least continues to be peppered with anger towards Invisible Children from informed activists and scholars (although Norbert Mao, for one, takes a much more positive view and Jason Stearns makes a few qualifications of the anti-case worth reading). On Saturday, CEO Ben Keesey and ‘Director of Ideas Development’ Jedidiah Jenkins (formerly ‘Director of Ideology’: yes, really) released a short teaser video promising a sequel to #Kony2012 and declaring that the campaign was “working”. Staying stubbornly loyal to the understanding of foreign policy decision-making expressed in the original narrative, this was said to be because the people at the top were now being forced to respond to an issue they previously hadn’t cared about/known about, all thanks to the public pressure of predominantly young activist-citizens. The major consequence of this pressure being the introduction on March 12 of a Resolution in the US House of Representatives, sponsored by Jim McGovern (a Democrat) and Ed Royce (a Republican), to end Kony’s atrocities and bring justice to Norther Uganda. There’s now a Senate version of the Resolution too, taken by Keesey and Jenkins to dispel those loose accusations of ‘slacktivism’ against Invisible Children and its supporters.

But what does the Resolution actually ask for? Having reaffirmed previous declarations, it:

…calls on the Secretary of State and heads of other government agencies to undertake diplomatic efforts with partner nations focused on—
(A) expanding the number of capable regional military forces deployed to protect civilians and pursue LRA commanders; (B) enhancing cooperation and cross-border coordination among regional governments; and (C) promoting increased contributions from European and other donor nations for regional security efforts.

Now that’s a rather curious formulation of “diplomatic efforts”. Nowhere in the text is there any mention of the human rights records of the Ugandan or DRC armies, nor any suggestion that they are anything but (albeit junior) ‘partners’ in this military endeavour. The preamble makes repeated mention of ‘help’ to regional governments, and one line of text hints at problems (to “address shortcomings in current efforts”), but it is clear that these are deficiencies of coordination and military effectiveness, not of human rights concerns. The claims previously made in defence of the campaign (“we do not defend any of the abuses perpetrated by the Ugandan government or by the Ugandan army”) have rather evaporated in the transition to a formal Resolution, and Keesey and Jenkins make no complaint of that elision. Although recently rather keen to harness #Kony2012′s popularity, Human Rights Watch and others have long catalogued systematic abuses by the UPDF which match the Lord’s Resistance Army closely for brutality. The record of the FARDC (the army of the Democratic Republic of Congo) is worse still. Exact and proportional figures are hard to pinpoint, but there is no question that they are major (and quite possibly the main) perpetrators of rape, terrorism and atrocity in Eastern DRC.

All of this sets a brutal precedent. The vagueness of the call for action and policy detail, lost amongst the emotion ratcheting of being a ‘doer’ rather than a ‘sayer’, opened the door to any number of Liberal Saviour Hawk Military Industrial fantasies (to adapt Teju Cole). This is what groups like the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars warned of, a not-so-creeping militarisation of East and Central Africa. As apparently obvious as stopping Kony’s evil in a hail of righteous bullets cycles seems to Russell and Co., the cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency tends to be draped at each stage in stark aggressions, with those regional military partners enacting their own ‘invisible’ massacres as they go.

Conspiratorial ideas of Invisible Children as a front for the US government aside, there is clearly a whole set of non-humanitarian interests at play here. I doubt there is any real appetite, and certainly very little capacity, in policy circles for any kind of escalation of direct US military involvement in the area, but then ‘support’ and ‘advice’ for regional allies and proxies has more traditionally been the mark of foreign policy. What those exponential click counts will translate into in policy terms thus remains open, but the signs aren’t great.

Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1 (nearest tube Oxford Circus)

Panel with Editors David Chandler and Meera Sabaratnam, followed by publisher’s reception

All welcome

The 1990s was a weird decade for all kinds of reasons. The dice that were thrown into the air as the Soviet Union retreated landed in a particularly intriguing configuration for those politicians, public functionaries and academics from wealthy countries and institutions concerned with ‘peace’ and ‘development’. Their missions, marginalised for decades under concerns for national (i.e. military) security, were quite suddenly elevated as symbols of the new world order and installed as defining foreign policy priorities of wealthy states.

This would be an era in which the promises set out in the UN Charter in 1948 could finally be fulfilled, and various actors could reconcile their progressive self-images with their behaviour in the Third World. It promised the completion of a virtuous circle between peace, development, democracy, security and prosperity, to be achieved by international ’peacebuilding’. The pathology of armed conflict could, at least in principle, be gradually erased from social structures, via a series of curative interventions into state and society designed by experts. From the outset, these included the holding of multi-party elections, economic liberalisation, privatisation of state enterprises and public sector reform, amongst other campaigns such as the promotion of human rights, compliance with various international legal norms and practices. The broad political agenda, and the practices which ensued, have been collectively understood in the academic literature as ‘the liberal peace’.

Two decades on, what has been the record of the liberal peace? In some cases following UN-mandated peacebuilding interventions, such as Namibia, Nicaragua and Mozambique, there seemed to be happy endings. In others, such as Rwanda and Angola, there were distinctly unhappy endings. In others still, such as Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, there have perhaps been no real endings at all. Moreover, the liberal peace agenda morphed and mutated over this period, with the rather more expansive occupation-and-statebuilding operations in Iraq and Afghanistan extending its logic of interventionary reform into one of regime change and counter-insurgency.

Earlier scholarship set about debating whether this meant that the liberal peace was ‘too liberal’, advocating more long-term and penetrative reform, such as in Roland Paris’ notion of ‘institutionalisation before liberalisation’. Critical scholarship in this period often articulated the liberal peace as a neo-colonial attempt to introduce Western social and political norms via the back door. In this sense, it did not disagree with the interpretation that peacebuilding interventions were oriented towards liberal reform.

Many chapters in this volume however note that in many cases that many practices of ‘liberal peace’ intervention have been neither ‘liberal’ nor particularly peaceful. The increasingly obvious chasm between the projected objectives of interveners and their actual actions and effects not only forces a re-assessment of the record, but also pushes the debate about the politics and ethics of the liberal peace in different directions.

This includes, crucially, challenging rather than reproducing the self-representations of interveners. Rather than liberal, technically-efficient experts who have the power to produce outcomes in post-conflict environments, the stories that emerge from the re-evaluation in this volume place interveners as often improvisational, vacillatory and ineffectual, reliant on the power of their finanical clout to produce fragile forms of co-operation and compliance. Rather than a virtuous circle emerging between peace, development, democracy, freedom and security, these are mobile discouses which can present themselves as being in tension with each other in the present global order. Agents and supporters of intervention thus become involved in a complex set of re-articulations and re-justifications for maintaining intervention, which broadly shift responsibility for mission failure onto its intended beneficiaries.

The volume offers a set of different ideas about how to keep understanding and talking about the ‘liberal peace. For some contributors, its framework, although imperfectly executed, remains the only viable one for ultimately necessary interventions in post-conflict environments. For others, a much deeper and closer analysis of the broader social forces that underpin the logic of intervention is crucial. In yet other chapters, a case is made for starting with the agency and critiques articulated by the intended targets of intervention. In bringing together a diverse set of perspectives, the volume aims to demonstrate the political and analytic complexities that have emerged around one of the most uniquely ambitious, self-confident and unusual agendas of the last twenty years.

The norm against political assassinations has been in serious peril since the Bush administration first overtly conceded the strategic use of target killings, framed as a military act to weed out and eliminate high-level Al-Qaeda members, in 2002. This norm continues to deteriorate with Obama at the helm, who has stepped up the drones programme considerably since he took over from Bush junior in 2008. Today, there are roughly double the number of drone attacks per week in regions deemed terrorist hotbeds, specifically Pakistan. Since 2004, these drone strikes are reported to have killed between 1,579 and 2,490 individuals, whereby some analyses estimate the civilian casualty rate among these statistics to be as high as 20%. The vast majority of these deaths have occurred in 2010. While the policy originated as a programme to “capture and kill” a small number of high value terrorist leaders in the G.W. Bush years, the programme has expanded its remit considerably: up to 2,000 killings can hardly be described as a small number, no less if we accept that the total number of military leaders killed was a mere 35 since 2004.

Leaving aside the sovereignty issue that glaringly stares us in the face in a situation where the US decides to engage militarily within a non-war party, such as Pakistan or Yemen, this is a highly concerning development, as it represents not only the gradual erosion of the norm against assassinations but also the very acceptance of the ethics of the targeted killing of persons on a growing scale. There can be little doubt at this stage that the focused elimination, the killing of precarious individuals, has become a legitimated tool in the US security strategy. This marks a significant shift from the days when discussions among the Allies about assassinating Hitler in the height of WWII were considered, in fact, “unsportsmanlike”, as Ward Thomas highlights in his insightful book on the Ethics of Destruction. Where the norm against assassinations as an instrument of foreign policy or political security remained an effective obstacle to assassinations as recent as during the first Bush administration, we have now entered a new era in which it has apparently not only become legitimate to deal with an enemy by eliminating him or her, but, not least since the killing of Osama bin Laden, this has become a new way of doing justice.

The outpouring of elation over a sense of justice at Bin Laden’s killing at the hand of US special forces, and the merchandise (aside from countless t-shirts that range in their display from mild mannered to vulgar, there is a comic book in the making on the raid that killed Bin Laden, to be published later this year) and heroic narrative that is created in the wake of this particularly historic act undoubtedly fuels the wearing away of an old norm in favour of a new one. Long forgotten are the tedious and pesky voices that remind us that killing, without being given the opportunity of a fair trial and due process, is neither just nor justice in a national and international realm that prides itself to be the guardian of the rule of law. Enter the prevalence of an understanding of justice that favours the swift efficiency of death over the costly complications of a trial of high value targets. The ethical abyss that opens here is enormous.

In 2008, then-Senator Obama, in an impressive election speech vowed to re-instate the US as a legal society that had so shamelessly been eroded under the second Bush administration – his promise seems to have been somewhat premature. Obama’s stalwart exclamation that justice had been done in the wake of Bin Laden’s killing and the administration’s self-assured assertion of the lawfulness of Awlaki’s death-by-drone speaks more of a society cultivating a Wild West ethos than a functioning legal society. With the most powerful nation in the international community leading the way in both eroding a long established non-assassination norm and simultaneously establishing a “we have no choice” mentality in its political practices, the slope we have just embarked on may well prove to be too slippery to be sustainable.

While there was no shortage of critics to highlight that the assassination of Bin Laden essentially amounts to unlawful killing, the US, and the international community at large, remained steadfast that not only was the killing just but also legal. To date, scholars and legal professionals were at little pains to frame drone assassinations in terms of legitimate actions in the military engagement against legitimate military targets. Rarely were the assertions that drone strikes are entirely legal questioned in a lasting and active way. Too opaque is the reality of the practice and the procedures that lead to a strike, too vague and disputable the numbers of casualties occurred and too obviously ‘evil’ are the prominent targets that there remained a sustained and active critique of the drones programme as illegitimate. Today, this legality can and must be questioned anew, as Awlaki reportedly was not engaged in military fighting and the US has no other involvement in armed conflict in Yemen, but was simply extinguished as a potential threat of the worst kind.

Graphic via The National Post

The philosophy behind today’s assassination act speaks of a biopolitical motivation: to keep the population healthy and unscathed, it must be cured of its terrorist cancer. The biopolitical mandate which places its political focus on the health, welfare and survival of a population gives priority to mechanisms and means to secure precisely this political goal. For better or for worse. It is in this medical demarcation, that the unfolding of biopolitical exclusionary violence in the name of the protection of a population becomes salient in the discussion of violence in contemporary (Western) modernity. This line of analysis suggests that biopolitics inevitably creates a relational construct that finds its basis in opposing conditions: that which is killed justifies with its death the life of those who live. Therein, precisely, is the slippery slope. As Hannah Arendt reminds us in her considerations on the origins of totalitarian rule:

A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for – for the individual, or the family, or the people or the largest number – becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurement of religion or the law or nature have lost their authority. And this predicament I by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that the one fine day a highly organised and mechanised humanity will conclude quite democratically … that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.

The critical praise heaped on Tomas Alfredson’s version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy reflects more than the hunger of intelligent audiences for post-Inception thrillers. Nor can it be explained merely by the excessive parade of grand thesps (Benedict Cumberbatch and the under-rated Stephen Graham both wasted, the former with a sub-Sherlock performance and the latter with a paper-thin bit-part, given historical fidelity by bad hair alone). Its visual and affective qualities are seductive and occasionally beautiful, but then so is its submerged vision of espionage and realpolitik.

The antithesis of Bond and Bourne, Tinker, Tailor offers up the almost forgotten Cold War as the stage for its intrigues. Although the voices are softer and the principals older, there is a more deadly game afoot. As Kermode comments, there will be large swathes of the audience who don’t know the political context at all. Not that it matters, since the detail (Hungary, the parallels with Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt et al.) are but window-dressing for the appeal of George Smiley (silent, menacing, magnificent Gary Oldman). Contra the brashness of post-9/11 global political allegory-fictions, we are gently ushered into an epic game of chess, played by men. Men whose tools are wit, logic and cunning. Men from an analog age who use little pieces of card to alert them to potential break-ins.

Our contemporary operatives, even those of clear intellect and cunning are, like Bob Barnes in Syriana, always eventually compelled to revert to Hollywood expectations (explosions, gun fights, fisticuffs) to bring matters to their appropriate climax. Not in Tinker, Tailor. At one stage Smiley and co. require small handguns but, although drawn, they are never used. Barring the quasi-orgasmic final exchange between Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux, our other vivid encounters with slaughter and disembowelment are after the fact, still, frozen scenes, crowned by flies. As if painted by Goya. We gulp and turn away, but what beautiful mutilations!

And so Tinker, Tailor effects a certain nostalgia. At its surface, it tells a story of almost uncompromising duplicity (although, as Omar commented, wouldn’t it be the most satisfactory twist if Smiley was the mole after all?). There are no grand patriots apparent here, no chest-thumping for state and nation. In one scene (inserted by Alfredson but absent from the book) the collected employees of ‘the Circus’ (MI6) sing the Soviet national anthem to a Santa Claus wearing a Lenin mask. So people with an appropriate sense of the ironic and the ridiculous then. True, there is a kind of loyalty among the lower ranks, but it is characterised not by ideological vigour but by the quiet efficiency of the British Civil Service.

In spite of this putative disenchantment with reasons of state, there is a more subtle romanticism at play in Tinker, Tailor‘s political imaginary. For one, the Circus has not always been so hollowed out. As Connie Sachs reminisces to Smiley, “Englishmen could be proud then” (tellingly excised are the preceding lines from an older incarnation: “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves“). Not the kind of cultural malaise that could inspire via Jack Bauer, nor that which would substitute the craft of espionage with the gaudy baubles of techno-war and shock and awe. Not, in other words, like our American cousins. Instead, a burden of disappointment, of hands sadly, but necessarily, bloody with political realities. No way out. The weight borne by men, even as they see through the façade presented for mass entertainment and supplication. A more rarified kind of spy. A realpolitik of the mind, one you could even enjoy in an appropriately under-stated way, the whiskey clinking in your glass, the pall of smoke, the reports in simple manilla folders, the everyday procedures of care and security, the cautious collegiality, the inner distance from your multiple selves. A serious game.

This disavowed duty becomes more evident as Tinker, Tailor works on the inner lives of its players. For all their hyper rationalism, its would-be Machiavellis are moved, beneath their layers of pretence, by near child-like longings. Smiley, of course, for his ‘Ann’, her face always obscured to us (a psychoanalytically telling point in itself), her gift to him a locus of such emotional resonance that it may even be the unintended source for all that goes wrong after he surrenders it to Karla. Ricki Tarr, with his love-at-first-sight infatuation, one for which he will risk his life and willingly be used as a pawn. Esterhase, almost comically fearful of being sent back to Hungary, his mass of training and skill giving way like so much paper tissue at the lightest of suggestive threats from Smiley. Jim Prideaux, the loyal loner, who goes on a secret mission out of ‘duty’ despite knowing that there is a murderous risk in doing so (and knowing of Bill Haydon’s divided loyalties). Haydon himself, who betrays for motives beyond the space of reasons, namely that he has come to dislike the aesthetic of the West. The gay playboy whose charm covers for a void where political conviction or rational self-interest should reside.

In The Loop, by contrast, offers a far bleaker account of realpolitik. Where Tinker, Tailor smuggles its seductions in a narrative of moral vacuity, In The Loop covers its disgust in humour. The precipice of war is, if anything, more threatening, but those involved are, without exception, inadequate to their historical moment. The parameters are set not by tank manoeuvres, long-gestating intrigues or the rivalry between ideological visions, but by Blairite bland-speak, the exigencies of public relations and the personal rivalries of Ministers and their lackeys.

Although a scenario much more dependent on the question of information and who controls it, Smiley and his kind are conspicuous by their absence from the corridors of In The Loop. The decisive intelligence reports are cobbled together by interns, party hacks and minor political advisers. Instead of the tight intrigues of five chiefs in a padded room-within-a-room, we get tables packed with ‘room meat’, bureaucratic collectives who want to be near the celebrity and the action. Malcolm Tucker is briefed by 22-year olds while plans to prevent mass slaughter are undone by subsiding constituency walls. The decision space is absent that specialised knowledge required (so we imagine) for the decisive implementation of national interest. Toby, Simon Foster, Chad, even Malcolm, are full of the discourse of power, but without the experience and embodiment of any real contest. The comedic inversions of Gust Avrakotos in Charlie Wilson’s War.

Gust is, like Gandolfini’s General Miller in In The Loop, a figure both of stark humour and crucial analysis, foreshadowing what is to come. Like court jesters, both convey a truth avoided by those removed from realities of death. For Gust, it is that history is lubricated by blood and will not conform to your plans for it; for Miller, that the political fantasies of the democratic peace require more slaughter, and more treasure, than the chicken-hawks in power can grasp. Yet it is Avrakotos who cuts the more beguiling figure, and who stands as the brash American counterpart to Smiley. One who understands how it is that the world turns, and who can show you the place from where to move it.

There is never any question in Tinker, Tailor of the aptitude of our anti-heroes. Disillusioned, yes, but without doubt the best and the brightest. Fluent in the many dialects and manners of their Cold War battlegrounds, smarter than their political masters, abundant in education, products of a properly functioning class system even as they go astray. And although we bear witness to the degradation of official roles and official rationales, every gesture remains saturated with meaning. Smiley’s mistake in allowing Karla to take his engraved lighter being the most prominent example. Such a small thing, but with such consequences. Recalling that encounter in the best monologue of the film, Smiley comments that every fanaticism hides a deep doubt. What he doesn’t add is that the ephemera of doubt and duplicity themselves cover for the required sacrifice to reasons of state. As if by their very falsity they authorise the most brutal of means, even once their ideological ends are understood as a filthy sham.

It would be disingenuous to relate events in North Africa and the Middle East (or MENA) today without reference to the media. Here too, there are many possible angles to examine. I will focus on the institutional support that the media provide in shaping consensus in support of foreign policy. In this regard, so-called mainstream Western media and networks (BBC, CNN, Fox, RFI and the like) have played a significant role in generating domestic support for the Libyan campaign. The media find themselves in the contradictory positions of both providing sustenance to foreign policy rationales and reporting on government actions. In this role the media either wittingly or unwittingly assumed the position of justifying contradictory Western foreign policy aims while trying to satisfy the needs of their audiences (especially domestic constituencies and home governments) for information from the front. Consistently, the media often generate sympathy for foreign actors or entities that either support Western interests or have affinities for Western values.

This role is not without a cost, especially when foreign policy actions, including wars, fail to attain their objectives. When the outcome of foreign policy proves disastrous, Western media also have an inexhaustible capacity to either ignore their prior support for the underlying causes or to reposition themselves as mere commentators on events over which they had no control or could not prevent. Increasingly, these tendencies have spread around the world as evidenced in the techniques and styles that have propelled the Qatari-based Al Jazeera into prominence as key contender in the emergent game of production, circulation, and consumption of foreign policy-concordant images for their affective and ideological effects.

So it is not surprising that the backdrop and background scenarios for most reporting on the 2011 revolts in MENA are dimensions of Orientalism, of which they are many. But the most constant is one of autocratic ‘barbarism’. In this regard, the discourses and media techniques for creating and supporting sympathetic figures are just as constant (or invariable) as Western states rationales for intervention. The media-hyped stories of Oriental despotism that preceded Operation Desert Storm, when the US expelled Iraq from Kuwait, have provided the template. During that event, for instance, media feted their viewers with stories of invading Iraqi hordes storming through hospital only to disconnect incubators and let helpless infants die a slow death. These and many stories of heroic bids by US soldiers to prevent such barbarism were later discredited but not the other horrific stories which convinced US citizens of the need to wage war on Saddam Hussein’s occupying army. In the Libyan case today, one of the earlier images of the aura of impunity created by Gaddafi was that of a Libyan female lawyer who was allegedly raped by Gaddafi’s forces. There was also a reported event of military takeover of a hospital.

Obviously, the inclusion of rape among the actions constituting crimes against humanity is one of the greatest achievements of human rights advocates and no one should be excused for committing so vile an act against anyone even in wartime. So too is a military invasion of a hospital an inexcusable act. The point is the media environment in which reported events are readily accepted as truths or summarily discounted or received with skepticism based solely on an affective economy in which sympathies and antipathies are clearly aligned on either side of the conflict. Thus, before it was revealed that the Syrian lesbian blogger was actually in man living outside of Syria, the journalistic practice was to present any incriminating image from a ‘heroic’ Tech-savvy youth who uses Facebook, Twitter, or other social media against the unsympathetic regime as proof of the latter’s barbarism and/or ebbing legitimacy. So it is that the discussions of the creation, distribution (for example, via You-Tube), and interpretation of people-generated clips as symbols of the 2011 Spring will remain its hallmarks. The corollary to the related action is the preparation of Western constituencies for the inevitable: the interposition of the West in the MENA Spring as its necessary conscience and adjudicator of interests, values, and norms.

On this affected and affective terrain, it was predictable, if not inevitable, that the regime of Muhammar Gaddafi would fare worse than Middle Eastern regimes that figured prominently in Western strategic calculations. In a way, Libya under Gaddafi did too but in an antagonistic rather than supportive role. Given the longstanding involvement and entanglement with Libya, one would expect reporting to start with an initial skepticism about the motives, aims, and justifications of the intervening powers: France, Great Britain, and the US. These three leading members of the coalition against the Gaddafi regime have had continuous entanglement with Libya since the advent of the Gaddafi regime over a number of security-related issues. These include Libyan involvement in the downing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, the explosion of the French-owned UTA flight 772 over the Saharan desert, also attributed to Gaddafi, and the Reagan Administration’s bombing Libya to claim the right of access in the Gulf of Sidra.

To be sure, it is still possible to assign a neutral or positive value to the intervention in any MENA entity at the onset of upheaval. Yet, the history of Western entanglements in Libya should be obvious (or be restated), especially when the media cite the relations between the Gaddafi regime and African states as reason for doubting African neutrality in its approach to the conflict. This was not to be. The actual scenario that unfolded had two predictable parts. The first is one in which the media assumed neutrality and humanitarian motives on the part of the NATO coalition in order to shore up the legitimacy not only of the military intervention but all operational dimensions of the interventions, including specific targeting decisions. Conjointly, the media pointed to the multiple ways in which African states could be conflicted or were so compromised as to not be credibly neutral or objective in their attempted mediation of the Libyan crisis.

In short, the condition of possibility of the ideological justifications of Western intervention was and remains a unidirectional apportionment of blame in the political conducts of the domestic Libyan protagonists (Gaddafi bad; TNC good) but also the discrediting of any position that contrasted with Western objectives – for instance, mediation amounts to supporting Gaddafi or shoring up his power. The condition of possibility of this dualism is a reality of power that is apparent even to human rights organizations and humanitarian networks that are dependent symbolically and materially on Western power, money, and technology. In any case, the erasure of potential Western conflicts of interest necessarily underpins much of the discourses of supposed humanitarians, particularly among liberal cosmopolitan circles where historically human suffering everywhere has been highlighted conveniently to align with foreign policy.

Again, the reference to the past is not intended a priori to impugn official and non-official Western motives. It serves as caution to those who would align reason and rationality on the side of the West and passion and affect on the side of Africans in order to validate the wisdom of military intervention against the desire to foster new kinds of politics in Libya. Specifically, African leaders are no less credible as mediators because of past ties or associations of some member states of the African Union with the regime of Gaddafi. Nor did Western intervention become ‘indispensable’ because morally blemished Africans remained inactive. Such a view belies the fact for instance that, as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, South Africa endorsed Resolution 1973. That resolution also recognized that the actions of the Libyan government had been condemned by the League of Arab States, the African Union, and the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. A large number of African states, therefore, protested Gaddafi’s use of force, and the majority did not object to the establishment of the no-fly zone or the idea of an immediate cease-fire.

I know few people or constituencies in Africa that who would argue that the situation in Libya at the time of the insurgency was tenable or that it should have been allowed to persist. I also know few individuals who would pretend that an operation such as the one currently undertaken by the West could be carried out without mistakes or blemish. Yet, these are not arguments against global democracy and the reasonableness that is required to interpret international law, particularly UN Resolutions. Alas, no reputable media outlet provided a sustained investigation into why Africans might so stubbornly oppose Western intervention. In truth, Africans are accustomed to the tendency in the West to instrumentalize international processes in favor of supposed strategic interests. They are also accustomed to being blamed for the disastrous outcomes of Western interventions. One recalls a certain Congo crisis which was settled upon Western intervention, by the removal and assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the installation of Mobutu in his place. Thirty odd years later, Mobutu was forced to resign leaving Congo in a condition that observers liken today to a failed state, blamed in the media on African propensity to fight for resources (the story of dirty diamonds) and/or settle ‘entrenched inter-ethnic animosities’ through civil wars.

Africans are also accustomed to another certainty in Western interventions on the continent: this is that political reconciliation is required only when Western allies are on the losing end of political dynamics while a scenario of total victors and losers is preferred when the victors might be Western allies. Consider US foreign policy in Southern Africa. There in the 1980s, US allies – among them the apartheid regime in South Africa and anti-communist guerillas – seemed on the defensive and unable to gain power against progressive rivals: the Marxist regimes in Angola and Mozambique; the national liberation movement in Namibia, or SWAPO; and the African National Congress in South Africa. To buttress the position of its allies in the context, the US put forth policies such as Constructive Engagement toward Apartheid South Africa. The policy was built on the assumption that effective political settlement in South Africa required an ‘honest broker’ like the US to engage all parties – even in this case, a regime that was ideologically and politically bent on the total subordination of its local black population and the destruction of neighboring states.

In contrast, the US government and civil society groups – religious and businesses alike – provided money, guns, telecommunication equipments, and other technologies of war to anti-communist guerillas in Angola and Mozambique that refused to submit to electoral processes. Even as these groups failed to unseat their respective legitimate governments, the US pressured the latter into accepting political ‘compromises’ to crises created by the refusal of its own allies to participate in free and open elections organized by the departing colonial power: Portugal. The arguments advanced by the US then favored political inclusion in the interest of lasting peace, a position that comes close to the African position in Libya today. So it seems to an African observer of Western interventions in Africa that the strategic goals of those leading the interventions often supersede the internal domestic requirements of a viable constitutional order. In short, Western-friendly entities need not accommodate ‘unsympathetic’ opposing figures or entities: then, communists and, today, an assortment comprising Islamists and unfriendly autocratic ‘Arab’ and ‘Africa’ regimes. In contrast, friends of the West need not bother with democratic niceties as the price for peace. Enemies or adversaries do or they are eliminated from the scene in favour of friends.

The above formula has been the single most enduring constant in US interventions in Africa. It has also drawn a comparatively stark African aversion to the instrumentalization of international morality to ends that are anti-democratic in nature. To those who are undeterred by the idea that Africans may actually formulate coherent views of international morality, including an aversion to war, consider these facts. In 2003, even after dispatching Colin Powell to Africa to seek support for the war in Iraq, the US failed to enlist a single African leader in its efforts. This refusal came on the heels of great sympathy for the US following the 1998 US Embassy Bombings in East Africa and the attacks perpetrated against the US on 9/11. Further, for nearly four years, the US failed to find a single state among fifty three on the continent to host AFRICOM (the US military’s Africa Command) even though all African states endorsed the aims of US anti-terrorism programs. As of today, none of the countries enlisted in the US-initiated Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership, all of them poor and dependent on US aid, has endorsed military intervention in Libya.

In the meantime Africans will remain camped in a metaphorical global Tahrir Square. It is from there, in the public spaces allowed for legislating on behalf of the collective will, that they have succeeded best. In 1960, for instance, the Afro-Asian coalition that emerged from Bandung was sufficiently alarmed by events in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Portuguese colonies of Africa to endorse UN Resolution 1514, acknowledging the right of colonial populations to self-determination. This was the beginning of a quiet revolution at the UN. It was followed by the decisions of Ghana, Guinea, and Egypt (under the rubric then of the United Arab Republic) to dispense with Security Council resolutions in Congo. The most important of these revolutions was the appeal by African states to others to denounce the 1966 ruling by the International Court of Justice favoring colonial arrangements in South West Africa. In response, the UN General Assembly voted massively against the positions of both the Security Council and the International Court of Justice, while revoking the South African mandate over South West Africa, instituting in its place a ‘mandate’ under the UN Council for Namibia. Similar instances of delegitimization exist today in African perceptions of the legality of decisions by the International Criminal Court. The seeming arbitrariness and politicization of the recent indictments of a number of African leaders has once again led the African Union to collectively decide to ignore the ICC’s decisions. The AU’s solution for Libya, together with the emergent African attitude toward the ICC, suggest a continuation of an often-ignored public battle from the continent to restore a modicum of equality, justice and reasonableness to international interventions.

My concern stems from the fact that, in politics as in law, it is axiomatic that states are unequal in their endowments and capacities. But this should not be an argument against global democracy and the reasonableness that is required when interpreting international law, particularly UN Resolutions, to maintain a semblance of legitimacy in the international order. The dissenting opinion of Judge Kotaro Tanaka of Japan in the South West Africa case of the International Court of Justice might be helpful here in explaining why one would object to the current intervention in Libya. In contemplating the fate of international customary law in the postcolonial world, Judge Tanaka took inspiration from the New Haven School when he opined that “different treatment is permitted only when it can be justified by the criterion of justice.” According to him, “one may replace justice by the concept of reasonableness generally referred to by the Anglo-American school of law,’ but he insisted that the criterion for reasonableness does not logically lead to arbitrariness. In short, even a doctrine of reasonableness, which is required of entities that may disagree, does not do away with the question of the (lack of) legal basis for differential treatment in global politics of both the Libyan regime under Gaddafi (which is at the center of the crisis under consideration) and African states (for daring to aspire to a negotiated settlement in the hope of nurturing a different kind of politics in post-crisis Libya).

It is not accurate to say that the African Union has been indifferent to the conflict in Libya. If there has been silence in Africa, it has to do with the extent to which the ‘maverick’ Colonel (Gaddafi) has angered some of his peers over the years by interfering in the affairs of such states as Nigeria, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and others, with disastrous effects. Even when, as in Sudan and Uganda, officeholders have welcomed his entreaties, large segments of the populations have not appreciated them. Yet, regardless of their personal views of Gaddafi and their political differences with him, African elites and populations have yearned for a more positive, conciliatory, and participatory solution to outright regime change or the removal of Gaddafi preferred by the West. This variance, I surmise, comes from a positive understanding of postcoloniality that include forgiveness, solidarity, and democracy and justice, as exhibited in post-apartheid South Africa and post-conflict Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, and the like.

In opting for negotiated mediation and a new constitutional compact, therefore, the African Union (or AU) aimed to foster a different kind of politics in Libya – admittedly one that has escaped many of the states endorsing that position. As articulated by Jean Ping, the Secretary General of the AU, the Libyan crisis offered an opportunity “to enhance a self-nourishing relationship between authority, accountability and responsibility” in order to “reconstitute African politics from being a zero sum to a positive sum game” toward one “characterized by reciprocal behavior and legitimate relations between the governors and the governed.” Mr. Ping added two other dimensions to his vision. The first is an acknowledgement that events in Libya point to the fact that all Africans “yearn for liberty and equality’ and this yearning is “something more consequential than big and strong men.” The second is that Africa’s destiny should be shaped by Africans themselves based on an actualized “sense of common identity based, not on the narrow lenses of state, race or religion, but constructed on Africa’s belief in democracy, good governance and unity as the most viable option to mediate, reconcile and accommodate our individual and collective interests.”

Coming from a politician, these words may read like slogans. But the uniform refusal of the AU to endorse Western intervention tells another story. This story has multiple facets. The first is a convergence among multiple components of the African body politic toward the principle of consensus in decision-making – a practice that has a long history in Africa. Secondly, there is growing unease on the continent about the forms and foundations of outside (principally Western) intervention in time of crisis. In the case of Libya, many African leaders were unsure whether war – as opposed for instance to the interdiction of troop movements from all sides – was the appropriate response to Gaddafi’s and the opposition’s belligerence. Africans were also unsure about the moral and juridical foundations of the war itself, the selection of targets (including the destruction of infrastructure), and the wisdom of singling out one side for punishment (Gaddafi’s) and the other for unquestioned endorsement (the opposition).

The most important of African misgivings about Western intervention is the least reported in the media. This is the fear that, rather than promote democracy, the intervention would produce the opposite effects. The argument is that the West may be a beacon of democracy at home, but that there are few indications in the foreign policies of its constituent entities that they foster the growth of democratic cultures outside the domestic provinces of states. The most notable exceptions are US efforts in Japan after World War II. Otherwise, in regard to regions such as Africa, generations of Western policy makers regarded anti-colonialist and nationalist calls for domestic and global democracy as an implicit attack on Western interests. There was a simple explanation to the seeming paradox. In nearly all these instances, the postcolonial imaginary combined the need for domestic democracy with a desire for the total transformation of the inequities in dimensions of international existence: political, cultural, scientific, military, and otherwise. In the face of the resulting postcolonial challenges, the West and the then Third World alliance – of Afro-Asian and Latin American states – seemingly reversed roles in regard to the openness of the processes, mechanisms, and instruments of global governance. In their new roles, so-called Western democracies sought to stifle global democracy through opposition to transparency and inclusion at the United Nations (particularly at the UN Security Council) and transnational organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. By contrast, although still governed at times and in places by dictators and autocrats, third World entities relished in their role as advocates of global democracy (regarding the operations of the UN), political and economic pluralism (particularly at the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, and the Decolonization Committee), and cultural and religious tolerance (in proclamations regarding international coexistence and the designation of world heritage at UNESCO).

Now assembled in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), hegemonic Western states resisted radical changes in the international order through active campaigns against the leaders of the ‘guilty’ African states (or those that did not support Western designs) resulting frequently in political overthrow or regime change. To be sure, Western opposition to global democracy was often presented as necessary and understandable; but the arguments never convinced advocates of reform of global institutions in the Third World, the so-called Non-Aligned Movement, and other non-Western majority international organizations and forums. To the return to the earlier paradox, in conjunction with their opposition to global democratic reforms, hegemonic Western states went to inordinate lengths to subvert democratic processes and the rule of law in perceived unfriendly states Africa (from Algeria to South Africa), Latin America (from Central America and the Caribbean to Chile and Argentina), and Asia (from the smallest Pacific Island to Indonesia and the Philippines). In the end, although Western states could point to the fact that they remained governed domestically through consensual or agreeable constitutional arrangements; they were either unable or unwilling to contemplate the extension of their domestically allowed freedom and protected liberties to others, whether as representatives of incorporated political entities or as citizens of formerly colonized entities. In short, the actions undertaken by the West presumably to defend its interests and values stood in stark contrast with those values. Some would claims that those ‘protective’ or ‘pre-emptive’ actions ultimately undermined the long-term interests of the West in the regions and states of interventions.

The events in Libya today (both the revolt and the intervention) exemplify the domestic deficit at the national and global levels that anti-colonialists (and some postcolonial actors) have consistently denounced. The domestic democratic deficit is what has prompted street uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East (or MENA). The process of rectifying this domestic deficit in Libya is also undermined by the convergent actions of the Western coalition and the Transitional National Council, or TNC (the emerging authority in rebel-held areas). Not only is the Western coalition engaged in an active war against Gaddafi on behalf of the rebels, but the coalition has also fomented and condoned intransigence on the part of the rebels against a negotiated settlement. One idea, repeated reflexively by diplomats and reporters, is that negotiation under any circumstance means surrender to Gaddafi. Consequently, the TNC has thus far rebuffed all offers by the African Union to find a political settlement to the Libyan crisis. And offers to find a settlement have, unfortunately, been interpreted as efforts to preserve the Gaddafi regime.

The World Mapped Without The Non-Aligned Movement

The global democratic deficit is embedded in the structures and processes of international organizations as well as the institutions and traditions of self-interested entities bent on preserving their own power. To confront this power, as Gaddafi found out when he challenged Ronald Reagan, is to meet a fate not unlike Gaddafi’s answers to those who rebelled against him. Like the domestic democratic deficit, the global democratic deficit is behavioural and structural or institutional. The connection between the non-democratic behaviour of global hegemonic powers and the possibility of democratic politics at the domestic level is often direct. Take for instance the role of the West in the political culture currently brewing in the Libyan opposition. Since endorsing the TNC as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people, the Western coalition backing it has remained silent as the organization grows intolerant by the day not only toward Gaddafi, his family, and allies but also toward Sub-Saharan African migrants accused of sympathy with the regime. And, as stated previously, the TNC has not only excluded negotiation with Gaddafi or his allies; it has snubbed all efforts by the African Union to mediate a political settlement. To either the West or the TNC, there could be only solution: total and unconditional surrender of political opponents.

One wonders why the TNC would want to negotiate, compromise, or reconcile with allies of Gaddafi when the largest armies in the world are committed to eliminating these obstacles to their path to power. President Ahmadou Toumani Touré of Mali, an engaged democrat whose own behaviour in power contrasts dramatically with that of Gaddafi, gave an indication of his own sentiment about the situation in an interview granted to Radio France Internationale. Asked by the reporter why he would not join the West (again dubbed during the interview as the International Community), Touré gave the following answer, which I paraphrase: ‘We are asked to promote democracy in Libya against a man who holds power at the barrel of the gun and you want me to unseat him at the barrel of the gun and seat another group in his place. If Gaddafi’s unwillingness to negotiate and compromise is the problem today why is the other side relying on forced removal?’ Indeed, the current intransigence of the West and the TNC reveal a culture of intolerance that unsettles Africans of all political persuasions – and not just dictators who are destined to the dustbin of history.

It is difficult today to pretend that the Western coalition has acted reasonably in Libya. Having sidelined Africans and blamed Gaddafi for all obstacles preventing conflict resolution, France, Britain, and the US can proceed to install the TNC as the new Libyan government. They are counting on the widespread sympathy for the Arab Spring to be absolved later of all sins of commission and omission. I doubt, however, that all will be forgotten. Since the UN Libyan resolutions were approved, NATO strikes have exceeded the initial mandate which was aimed at blocking Gaddafi’s aggression again civilians. But NATO has not only converted this mission into one conjoined with the rebellion to unseat Gaddafi, its bombs have also targeted some of the nation’s infrastructure. The Western coalition has also openly embraced the idea of assassinating the Libyan leader as policy. For its part, France had delivered weapons to the so-called resistance, despite the putative weapons embargo stipulated by the UN. Great Britain sent Special Forces on the grounds to aid the rebellion at its onset. Finally, having unleashed a conjoined and combined attack with the rebels against Gaddafi, the Western coalition has encouraged participant and non-participant states to recognize the TNC as legitimate representative of the Libyan people. This recommendation also seems to belie the fact that the tribal and clan make-up of Libya suggests that Gaddafi has partisans who may not be represented by the TNC. Meanwhile, while NATO bombs loyalist forces and their positions, the TNC advances militarily. For this reason, the TNC has expressed open contempt for the idea of a cease fire followed by negotiation. Together NATO and the TNC are engaged in a strategy for total military victory.

These actions are not merely troublesome. They are indicative of a world order that appeals to reasonableness to give legitimacy to authoritarianism, discrimination, and partiality in the interpretation of the law and the application of international morality. If the Western coalition succeeds in subverting the spirit of the MENA Spring, which in my understanding included a return of power to the people and the restoration of the dignity of the collective, nothing would prevent it and its local allies from dispensing with other requirements of public life: democracy, the rule of law, and the ethos of pluralism. In addition, who would control the institutional processes that are supposed to help states heal from civil conflict? Who knows whether there would trials of those who ruled Libya for forty years and if so, whether those who just recently defected to the rebellion would be included and on what side? Whose military actions will be prosecuted as war crimes or crimes against humanity? Which lives lost will be deemed innocent and therefore worthy of memorialising? Which interests will be worthy of attention and protection? Only time will tell. The most important question bearing on global governance and international peace, however, is what lesson does the West wish to send to Africans by subverting the authority of the UN and side-lining Africa from a major historical event located in North Africa, and territorially contiguous and historically connected to the sub-Saharan countries of Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad? In other words, how is the NATO coalition in Libya remaking the world and why? Again, time will tell.

It remains that the idea embraced by the Western anti-Gaddafi coalition that one can be excluded from the political compact simply because of one’s location or association within an undemocratic regime would lead to a nightmarish scenario. This is understood by generations of activists who have fought for human rights, constitutionalism, and democratic inclusion as well as humanitarians who have tended to the social calamities caused by endless civil wars. So too do Africans. Congolese, for example, may recall that prior to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the US and its European allies had insisted that the elected Prime Minister negotiate with the secessionist Moise Tshombe in contravention of all applicable norms of self-determination and national sovereignty. Mozambicans and Angolans, too, might recall that, while financing the murderous armed bands of UNITA and FRELIMO, the US insisted that the legitimate governments of these countries accommodate these insurgent militia groups. Above all, nationalists in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya before them would definitely recall official lectures from Western chanceries on the need to forgive, reconcile, and negotiate new political compacts as a means to lasting peace. Western cynics might argue today these actions were all constitutive of geopolitics at the time and that the US and its Western allies were merely protecting the interests of local allies. Despite the instrumentalism underlying these US positions, which I discuss in the next section, Africans of goodwill took the call to negotiation as an opportunity for new kinds of politics. A welcome development!

In Libya today, it takes a insidious disingenuousness to deny the utility and legitimacy of forgiveness, reconciliation, and negotiated political compacts when the end is to develop new kinds of politics at the end of the revolution. It is even more contemptuous for the media to lampoon the principal African negotiator appointed by the African Union, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa, for aspiring for a negotiated settlement. In doing so, the military intervention-supporting Western media seem to have succumbed to a momentary but necessary memory lapse. It is after all Zuma’s African National Congress under the leadership of Nelson Mandela that brought racially-divided South Africa back from moral death under apartheid to the much celebrated rainbow nation. One would expect Western leaders, and the media that reflexively repeat their opinions without questions, to allow that the historic heirs to generations of South Africans to whom the West sent liberal constitutionalists for guidance might legitimately resent Western advice to Gaddafi’s opponents today to reject the art and wisdom of forgiveness, toleration, and the rule of law. Ordinarily, these faculties and capacities might seem more germane to a post-conflict culture of coexistence than the current positions taken by the West and the TNC: to demand the surrender of the other side as preconditions to any settlement.

The oblivion of commentators to these possible African objections has been less than helpful to understanding the actualized Western intervention itself; emergent African ideas on democracy and security; and the actual place of international morality in international affairs. Underlying the African apprehension to military intervention is a long-standing tension between international organizations that represent Africa, on one hand, and self-identified representatives of the West, on the other, over the meaning of international community as well as the source, nature, and proper means of implementation of the collective will. The dispute over the meaning of international community and the collective will has been particularly salient in Africa because, as a political space, Africa has been more subject to military interventions than any other geopolitical space in the modern era. These interventions have reflected contemporaneous relations of power, permissible morality, and objects of desire: from proselytism to fortune-seeking, trade, extraction of raw material, and the strategic pursuit of hegemony. Indeed, it is hard to remember a time since the onset of the slave trade when there was no open conflict between the majority of its states and the West over some dimensions of global governance that implicated the notion of the commons or international community.

The postcolonial era has not brought about any change to this situation. Since the end of World War II and the institution of the United Nations system, the plurality of African political entities have confronted self-appointed representatives of the West over the ethos of UN procedures (involving transparency and open access to the channels of decision-making) and the mechanisms of dispute mediation (including the determination of the principles and applicability of humanitarian interventions in a number of cases). One need only recall the political, legal, and military confrontations between African states and former Western colonial powers over Apartheid South Africa’s mandate over South West (which involved the legality and morality of colonial trusteeship); the French war on Algeria (which involved the legality and legitimacy of settler colonialism); the wars of decolonization in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique (which involved the principles of majority rule through open elections which communists might win); the unilateral declaration of independence by the white minority in Southern Rhodesia (which involved the principle of white-minority rule in postcolonial Africa); and the legality and morality of apartheid (which involved the principle of self-determination and majority rule). The underlying antagonisms contaminated deliberations throughout the UN system (particularly General Assembly proceedings) and involved all major issues from the Palestine Question to the Law of the Sea to other matters of trade and intellectual property. They reached a climax at the time of exit of the US and Great Britain from UNESCO, which was then directed by Ahmadou Mathar Mbow, a Senegalese diplomat and statesman.

These and other contests have shared a few singular features. One is a Western insistence on representing the essential core and therefore will of something called international community. In any case, the label of international community has often been reserved for Western entities in relations to others, who remain the object of intervention on behalf of the international community. This is to say that the term ‘international community’ has had political functionality in relations of power and domination in which Europe (and later The West) subordinated ‘Africa’. The relevant tradition can be traced back to the opening moments of the modern era, particularly during the ascension of The West to global hegemony. While it has undergone changes over time, the embedded imaginary of international community and its will have been built around artificially fixed identities and politically potent interests. Accordingly, the identity of the West, and therefore the international community, flows from a theology of predestination, formally enunciated as the Monroe doctrine in the US or the Mission Civilizatrice in France.

The primary requirement for enacting this identity and theology was that other regions of the world had to surrender their sovereignty to the West under treaties and practices of capitulation, protectorates, mandates, and formal colonial rule. The accompanying institutions proceeded from favorable military and economic relations with others. They were followed by the constitution of local networks whose endorsement of the colonial project gave it legitimacy as consent. In this manner, consent and legitimacy coexisted with subordination and asymmetric power. Today, networks of states and civil organizations have given legitimacy to the reality of the power of the West to legislate, execute, and adjudicate the will of an international community all at once. Indeed, it seems even some intellectuals and journalists today implicitly designate the West as ‘International Community’ and to oppose it to ‘Africa.’ Although it often seems like a simple linguistic slippage, this conflation of the West with the International ascribes universal properties and therefore higher moral qualities and faculties to the West and, by contradistinction, the opposite to Africans. All that proceeds from this contrast is fair then, no matter the transgression or violence.

The presumed exclusive universality of Western faculties, science, technology, and culture often masks an accompanying violence. This violence occurs whenever the West positions itself as necessary provider of value and adjudicator of all relevant interests and an African entity challenges this claim. In the event, the West has relied on a combination of military, economic, and cultural power disguised through linguistic devices, techniques, and symbols couched in the seemingly neutral language of diplomacy and mediation. Unfortunately for the West, the modes of significations of imperialism and their regimes of moral solicitation often reveal the centrality of the modern technologies of violence (of death in particular) to the extant forms of intervention. The realities may be occasionally lost on outside observers but they need no translation in Africa. There, it is understood that the figurations and configurations of diplomatic significations as well as their legitimacy hinge on an acceptance of the interests of the West by others.

This is to say that today, just as in the past, the contours of every encounter and dispute between the figurative West and Africa must necessarily be determined by the terms, significations, and values assigned to them by the West. Take the Congo Crisis, for instance. In the 1960s, just months after declaring independence from Belgium, Congo Kinshasa slumbered into a deep crisis. The crisis has multiple causes and dimensions but they can be encapsulated by a three-way dispute between Patrice Lumumba, the elected Prime Minister; Moise Tshombe, the designated President; and an army officer named Joseph Desiré Mobutu. Then, as now, Western powers pushed for a number of UN Security Council resolutions as bases for resolving the conflict. These powers authored UN Security Council resolutions 143; 145; 146; and 157 which among other things authorized peacekeeping activities by a multinational force in the former Belgian colony. The initial resolution spoke of stabilizing a chaotic political situation on behalf of the people of Congo but the implementation suggested a desire by Western powers to instill a new order that would undermine the exercise by the Congolese people of the principle of self-determination. Specifically, Western powers sought to subordinate peacekeeping to Cold War calculations in which Patrice Lumumba, the nationally elected Prime Minister, would be elbowed out of power in favor of the designated President, Moise Tshombe and his allies: the Belgium-allied army officer, Mobutu, and the secessionist leader of the resource-rich Katanga, Joseph Kasavubu.

As events unfolded, it soon appeared to the governments of Egypt, Ghana, and Guinea that the bland and neutral language of UN resolutions masked other motivations: to protect client elites and to institute a particular social and economic order deemed necessary by those small elites and external powers. On the ground, Western powers quickly moved from the initial aim of the mission (ensuring stability and self-determination) to support of the leadership of an unelected clientele. In reaction, Egypt, Ghana, and Guinea ordered their troops to disobey UN orders and to support the elected prime minister and head of government, Patrice Lumumba. The African states denounced Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the UN, and the Eisenhower Administration, for subverting UN procedures and mandates in an open attempt to subordinate the postcolonial desire for self-determination to Cold War contentions. Similar scenarios unfolded in Rhodesia (under the US so-called Tar Baby option) as well as during the South West Africa dispute and the anti-apartheid struggle (under US Constructive engagement policy). In these and other contexts, the principle of African self-determination was subordinated by the West to extraneous considerations including Cold War calculations and the desire to protect the interest of local allies. Thus in Southern Africa, for instance, the Nixon and Reagan administrations sought to devised political arrangements that would maintain white minority control of the economy upon the end of the Ian Smith regime in Zimbabwe and that of Apartheid in Namibia and South Africa.

There are parallels between those contestations and today’s disagreement between the African Union and the West over Libya. Granted, Gaddafi is not Lumumba or Mandela. This is not the point. The point is whether Western powers are at this moment in history constitutively disposed toward global democracy and, subsequently, whether they can be trusted to adhere to the formal procedures and norms of international organizations; to comply with their own self-ascribed mandate as stipulated by their own resolutions; and to be accountable to others for their own transgressions. To the extent that my memory serves me well, I do not recall any Western actions in Africa that have been subjected to the established rules of democratic consultation, political transparency, or even accountability. Nor, it seems, can any of the African leaders today, who did not want to endorse another open-ended mandate against a state whose behavior they could not control and from a Western military organization that has not generally been accustomed to external examination.

Nothing from the ground war and the politics of intervention in Libya today ensures that the unfolding of events will produce different outcome than they did in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa. Once again, intervention began with admirable pretenses based on an otherwise unimpeachable resolution. To wit, the mandates of this spring’s UN Security Council Resolution 1973 are: 1) the ‘immediate establishment of a cease-fire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians’; 2) ‘the need to intensify efforts to find a solution to the crisis which responds to the legitimate demands of the Libyan people,’ aided by a Special Envoy to Libya and the Peace and Security Council of the African Union; 3) compliance by ‘Libyan authorities comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, human rights and refugee law’; 4) the protection of ‘civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory,’; and 5) the recognition of the primary responsibility of ‘the League of Arab States in matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security in the region.’ These measures were to be complimented with the enforcement of a no-fly zone and an arms embargo.

The dimension of the resolution seldom discussed outside Africa is one that disenfranchises Africa from the processes and mechanisms of dispute settlement in Libya. To be sure, the UN resolution recognizes that the actions of the Libyan government had been condemned by the League of Arab States, the African Union, and the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. But its authors trampled upon international conventions by determining that all concerns be directed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States in recognition of the ‘the important role of the League of Arab States in matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security in the region.’ In other words, the Western coalition had the power to decree the law and prescribe its interpretation, but also could negate the efforts of those working for a ceasefire and peaceful resolution.

From the perspective of the Western coalition, the sin of African states was one of gullibility: to have believed that the first three mandates of the resolution mattered. Africans, in other words, could not understand that the task at hand was to remove Gaddafi and that resolutions merely make references to mediation to appease equally gullible domestic constituencies and the media. What is even more telling is that the Western coalition, all of them former colonial powers, decided unilaterally and as a matter of sovereign right that Libya was an Arab, not an African state and hence, the African Union had no authority over the North African region. These actions were not merely contemptuous of Africa and Africans. (Africans are used to that.) From an institutional perspective, the scale and speed with which the West dispensed with decades-old UN procedures of integrating regional organizations into dispute resolutions was extraordinary.

It appears today however that Resolution 1973 has only vague bearing on the current course of Western intervention. Whereas it was proposed as an element of the resolution of the conflict between Gaddafi and his opponents, the implementation of this UN act has become less than satisfactory to African leaders on the whole. As a result, Africans became skeptical of not only the scale and nature of Western intervention but also the justifications offered by the coalition acting against the Libyan regime. The first justification at the time of intervention was that the situation in Libya presented a unique danger for the civilian populations. Western media commentators echoed the running sentiment that Gaddafi could not be trusted to deploy tanks around cities and towns because he would be tempted to totally obliterate them. Yet, only a few years ago, the Western media treated their African listeners to arguments on Gaddafi’s pragmatism. The occasion was the Libyan leader’s decision to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Then, there was no question that Gaddafi was capable of exercising judgment and restraint. The more disingenuous argument to date has been that Gaddafi’s regime was less trustworthy than those of Yemen and Bahrain (and lately, Syria) on the use of military violence against civilians. It is clear to any observing commentator today that state violence in Yemen and Bahrain more directly transgress international humanitarian conventions that prohibit targeting people because of their ethnicity (rival tribes in Yemen) or religion (Shi’i Muslims in Bahrain).

The other justification for intervention was that Gaddafi attacked unarmed civilians. In the initial moments of the revolt, a peaceful demonstration was indeed met by certifiably criminal state power. However, the revolt in Libya did not remain nonviolent to anywhere near the same degree as events elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East. In Libya, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, EU member states and the US encouraged the so-called democratic movement in Libya in its transformation into an armed insurgency centered on Benghazi. As the insurgency grew, it took over towns upon towns in its failed march on Tripoli. It did not concern the Western coalition that the insurgent were attacking city dwellers. It sufficed that the victimized urban denizens were described as supporters of the Gaddafi regime. In short, whereas adversaries of Western-allied regimes received unmitigated signals from the West to refrain from violence (an injunction often ignored in some cases), Libyan insurgents were hailed as brave and heroic when they attached supposed supporters or assets of the regime. The seeming contrast with Western responses to like repression in the same region arising from the same concerns is not happenstance or a momentary lapse from consistency. It is the way the West has conducted foreign policy since its ascent to hegemony at the beginning of the modern era.

As I indicated in my last post, the decision by the African Union (or AU) to not endorse the current military campaign in Libya has been mistaken by many observers and commentators alternatively as a sign of African leaders’ antipathy to political freedom and civil liberties; a reflexive hostility to former colonial powers, particularly France and Great Britain; a suspicion of the motives of the United States; and more. The related speculations have led to the equally mistaken conclusion that the African Union is out of step with the spirit of freedom sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa (or MENA). The absurdity of the claim is that the only entity that imposed any outline of solution agreeable to Gaddafi has been the African Union and this is that Gaddafi himself would not be part of any future leadership of the country. But the AU has insisted on an inclusive negotiated settlement. The purpose of this series of essays is not therefore to examine the meaning and implications of the absence of ‘Africa’ on the battlefield of Libya, but to point to the larger geopolitical implications of the intervention for international order, global democratic governance, and the promotion of democratic ideals and political pluralism in the region undergoing revolution and beyond.

To begin, it is not just ‘Africa’, ‘African indecision’, and ‘African non-Normativity’ that are at stake in the characterization of African actions or inactions. Much of what is construed as ‘lack’ or ‘absence’ in Africa is also intended to give sustenance to the idea of the indispensability of the West – composed on this occasion by France, Great Britain, the United States, and tangentially Canada – to the realization of the central ends of the MENA Spring. The myth of the centrality of the West to the imaginary of freedom everywhere is inscribed in the name given to the events under description. In the US at least, the Arab Spring evokes many other ‘Springs’ all located in the West (including the 1968 Prague Spring or the 1989 collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states). Likewise, ‘Jasmine’, the emblem of the Tunisian revolt has been advanced as evocative of the Ukrainian ‘Orange’ and other colour-coded European events. These allusions have justifications but they are seldom evoked comparatively to elucidate the originality and specificity of the MENA revolutions. In this latter regard, even the suggestion of an Arab Spring assumes that the majorities in the countries involved are Arab. This is not always the case in North Africa but Orientalism obliges!

The fact is that the ongoing revolutions in MENA are at once specific and universal in their own ways. Indeed, despite the distance in time, today’s so-called Arab Spring was preceded by equally momentous events in that region in the modern era, including the revolts of 1916 to 1919 (against Ottoman rule) and 1936 to 1939 (against Western imperialism); popular rebellions in Iraq and Lebanon in the 1980s (against domestic autocracy and confessional domination); the Palestinian intifadas of the 1980s and 1990s (against Israeli occupation). These events were interspersed with the struggle for decolonization (beginning with opposition to the colonial mandate sanctioned by the League of Nations); the 1950s rise of Arab nationalism including Ba’athism, the 1953 Suez Crisis (which asserted against post-Lockean notions of native rights to property that of indigenous peoples’ claims over their environment and resources). Nasser’s gesture was replicated later in a wave of nationalization of natural resources leading, inter alia, to the rise of the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC).

These events and subsequent ones – including but not limited to the 1980s anti-communist revolution leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall and today’s tumultuous events in MENA – influenced parallel events in Africa just as events in Africa added to contemporaneous revolutionary fervours. Yet, most would agree that it was during anti-colonialism and the struggle for self-determination that ‘Africa’ gave sense and meaning to ‘national’ freedom. The struggle for national self-determination occurred in phases over the course of four decades. As noted previously, the first phase of the struggle for national self-determination was the 1950s mobilization against colonialism which was punctuated by events such as the Mau Mau revolt against British rule in Kenya, the 1950s uprisings in Madagascar against French rule, and the onset of the Algerian revolution. The second phase was the 1960s so-called transfer of power. This phase was characterized by a number of violent and non-violent confrontations between colonial overlords and anti-colonialists. The 1970s followed with wars of independence in the former Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique as well as in white-minority ruled territories of Southern Rhodesia and South West Africa. The 1990s globalized struggle against apartheid in South Africa marked the end of the official or formal phases of decolonization and self-determination.

Predictably, the imaginary of freedom drew on a wide range of ideas including derivatives of Western ideologies extending from liberalism to Marxism; political practices flowing from international and transnational networks and movements; ethical principles including African solidarity, political pluralism, and international justice and coexistence; etc. The linguistic and moral postulates resulting from these events entered into the political discourses, if not habits and symbolic repertoires, of generations of African elites. In a way, the long African struggle for freedom was inspired and shaped by longer historical trends. On the positive side, there were the slave revolts of the New Worlds; the bourgeois revolutions in the US and France and the anti-slavery retort in Haiti; the 19^th-century peasants’ and workers’ revolts in the Western world; the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution; 20^th century women’s liberation movements, the 1950s advent of a new Pan-Africanism, the 1980s anti-communist revolution leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The effects were palpable internationally. Already in 1960, African entities endorsed Khrushchev’s UN General Assembly resolution 1514, establishing self-determination as an essential principle of international relations. Consistent with Pan-African solidarity and anti-colonialism, African states also provided logistics and support to freedom movements from Algeria to South Africa via the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique. Already in the 1950s, Ethiopia and Liberia challenged Western practices of trusteeship in the context of the expired League of Nations Mandate granted to South Africa (now under apartheid) over the formerly South West Africa (now Namibia). This challenge by Liberia and Ethiopia to the mandate of the so-called international community fundamentally altered international jurisprudence regarding international custom developed during the era of imperialism. Finally, Africa states made the elimination of white-minority rule in Southern Africa (particularly in Rhodesia and South Africa) the ultimate test of racial justice in the international system and, in this regard, confronted the West over the matter.

The collapse of the Soviet empire too triggered political soul-searching that led to the 1990s ‘sovereign national conferences’ which cast disrepute on single-party regimes and authoritarian rule mostly in Francophone Africa. The so-called forces vives – mostly youth, women, and labour organizations – that ushered in these conferences did not necessarily succeed in bringing about democracy but they preceded today’s technology-savvy ‘Arab’ youth in demanding an end to authoritarianism, freedom of expression, and multi-party democracy. The national conference movements, like other modern revolutions in Africa and the Arab World, sought to ‘exorcize’ all corrupting influences in public life, whatever their origins and sources. The national conference movement began like the Tunisian uprising with public discontent over the state of the economy (particularly rising youth unemployment) and politics (specifically the absence of democratic participation). However, the immediate cause of the revolt was the implementation of structural adjustment programs mandated by the International Monetary Fund and endorsed by the World Bank. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any popular democratic movement in Africa, including North Africa, which did not challenge contemporaneous juridico-political regimes and their moral and economic bases.

Based on authoritative Western proclamation of abiding support for freedom, one would be tempted to think that Western governments and officials uniformly endorsed African movements for freedom. That would be a mistake. First, Western discourses in these regards are a tale of purposeful recollection, amnesia, and discounting. How do we explain that the absence of the national conference movements in the larger (i.e. outside specialized) debates on democracy? Could it be that the tone and content of these gatherings did not vindicate Western perceptions of self as provider of models of social and economic justice? Even today, the operative Western accounts of the 2011 Spring focus on street rejection of authoritarianism while omitting the deeper dissatisfaction with the neoliberal economic model. Yet, it is the execution of the latter that so accentuated the despair to the likes of Mohammed Bouazizi as to push them to self-immolation. This suicide in turn brought millions out to the street. With such accounting manoeuvres Western observers, commentators, and others have parsed the motivation and desired ends of the current revolutions so as to eclipse the demands for economic justice and cultural/communal affirmations that have accompanied the one on political participation.

Second, the actual roles played by the West have not be straightforwardly progressive. The dominant feature of Western intervention today has been to actively shape the demands of the freedom movements away from demands for economic and social justice and toward formal and controlled democracy. Thus, even as Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali quickly folded their tents and left the stage, the US, France, and some of their allies moved just as quickly to ensure that their replacements remained loyal to the international status quo ex ante. Despite its posture as guardian of normativity in the post-Cold War era, the European Union has followed the US in its attempt to protect Arab allies as well as security interests in the emergent world. Hence, the ambivalent responses to counter-revolutionary state violence in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria in contrast to Libya although their respective governments have uniformly turned old security schemes into deadly machines against protesters.

These contrasting responses show that the West is a dubious handmaiden of freedom. They are also suggestive of the revolutionary potential of the present movements to upset existing geopolitics. In North Africa today, the words khalas and Kefayah have emerged as terms indicating both dissatisfaction with extant autocratic governments and anticipation of a new democratic order. Subsequent processes have focused on the departure of presiding heads of state and their ruling parties. In our highly mediatized world, the dramas of disavowal and removal of individual rulers and the subsequent disbanding of their instruments of power have captivated the globe in a manner not witnessed since the 1989 downfall of communist regimes in the Soviet Bloc. As in 1989, there is near-universal relief that autocratic, authoritarian, and dictatorial forms of government are on their way to extinction and that the leaders of these regimes are ceding power. There is also near-universal empathy and spiritual communion with the young activists whose defiance and technological talents are displayed in this great adventure.

Three trends have marred this initial enthusiasm. The first, evident in Tunisia and Egypt, is that the transfer of power has not resulted in the transformation of politics consistent with the desire expressed in the streets (now symbolized by Tahrir Square) for popular democratic sovereignty. Such a turn would require the transformation of the structures of society, politics, and the economy, and the subsequent introduction of new institutions of governance consistent with democracy and social justice – not necessarily the sort of punitive justice about to be meted out against former rulers and a few of their cronies. The second distressing trend is the refusal of the leaders of Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria to heed the call for change and therefore to leave public office. The result of this refusal to cede power has led to bloodshed – and in the case of Libya might lead to civil war. The third trend – that most concerns me – is the apparent instrumentalization of the Arab Spring by outside powers.

I focus here on the external ideological battle already underway to control the central message and historical import of the Arab Spring. This parallel battle is taking place not only on the public squares where young people are challenging old regimes, but also in chanceries, newsrooms, and academic institutions in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. It is in these spaces that the perceptions of the Arab Spring are fashioned for the purposes of policy regarding the modes of intervention, the use and targets of violence, and the degree and extent of force to be deployed. However, the actors in this larger drama do not have equal capacities, interests, or values although they may all proclaim to advance the same ideals of freedom, justice, and peace. The outcome of these contests for power will affect the future of international law and forms of sovereignty, democratic governance, and justice to a greater degree than anything to be expected from the streets of MENA alone.

To shore up their interests in this context, the former patrons of the now discredited regimes – the US, Great Britain, and France – have rushed in the unfolding dramas under different guises. In the ideological instance, these states have presented themselves as arbiters of the legitimacy of the outcomes. To be sure, they were neither invited in this role nor expected to play it fairly. Notwithstanding Orientalist theses, the trajectory of modern autocratic rule in the MENA meshes well with Western involvement in the two regions. From this perspective, the three Western states backing the insurgency in Libya today have merely smuggled old antagonisms onto new discursive and strategic terrains. Indeed, one of the most striking parallels in the struggles for freedom in the Middle East is the degree to which Western powers have been involved in the region throughout the modern era. Throughout this long involvement, these powers alternated between peace and hostility with different political entities of the region, selectively supporting some leaders and opposing others. The degree to which the West was willing to use violence to suppress dissent or support causes was founded upon a blend of political pragmatism, theological animus (veering from open to subtle forms of Islamophobia), and commercial and security interests. For instance, before formal Western trusteeship and colonialism, European powers and American colonies entered into formal and informal agreements with North African political entities. The Barbary Treaties, which the US signed with political entities on the Coast of Barbary, now North Africa, are illustrative in this regard. Yet, as Western powers became more and more dominant, they were no longer satisfied by the terms of treaties already favorable to them. One of the many examples was the confrontation over the Gulf of Sidra between the Reagan Administration and the regime of Muhammar Kaddafi (or Gaddafi)

The second feature of the relationship between the West and North Africa flows directly from theological animus, still on display today in regard to Turkey’s admission to the European Union. This animus is leftover from the Crusades whose outcomes still remain etched in the memories of vast constituencies in Europe and the West. To these constituencies, including Christian fundamentalists, the 1492 defeat of Moors in Spain continues to be narrated as the beginning of the coming restoration of the former Christian dominion. Later, during the Arab revolt of 1916-1918, against Ottoman rule, a coalition of Western states instrumentalized international morality through the mandate system to advance parochial commercial and security interests in the region. The mandate system both affirmed ongoing intra-Western accords (including but not limited to Sykes-Picot) and established the context for additional ones.

This animus accounts for the negative connotations imputed to things Arab, which now stand for non-normative behaviour. This animus nourishes the Orientalist imaginary to some extent.