Libya has re-framed the intervention debate

By Darrell Goodliffe

I opposed Iraq, continue to oppose our presence in Afghanistan but support UN Resolution 1973 (2011) and the international efforts to aid the rebels in Libya as they stand. I don’t intend to expand on that point here but to look at what can almost be described as a side-effect of this decision by the United Nations. It seems to me it is a ‘game-changing’ moment in the intervention debate.

In this debate there are two extremist camps. In the ‘red’ corner we have those who see all forms of intervention as bad because they are undertaken by powers regarded as ‘imperialist’ – a word that has pretty much lost all its meaning as a scientific term and now seems to be simply used as a catch-all insult that negates serious and sensible debate. At the other extreme – in the ‘blue’ corner – are the purist ‘liberal interventionists’ who would be quite happy to charge around the world effecting regime change anywhere and everywhere. Actually, since this comes at the point of a gun and not through democratic empowerment of people in these countries the description of this attitude as imperialist isn’t that wide of the mark. However, when it comes to the overarching political narrative this point of view is currently as popular as the ‘imperialist bashing’ one – Iraq and Afghanistan have seen to that. Indeed, it looked worryingly for a moment like it was going to stop any kind of action in the Libya situation as well.

Pragmatic interventionism, which nestles as something of a third-way between the two polar extremes, may well be where a new consensus emerges in the contentious interventionist debate and is the one that has finds its current expression in UN Resolution 1973 (2011). It’s a little politically uncomfortable but in some ways not surprising that a British Conservative Prime Minister in the form of David Cameron and a right-wing French President in the shape of Nicolas Sarkozy are currently the leading exponents of this approach. Sadly, pragmatism and adaptability are two political traits that the left lost a grip of a long time ago and, like some other concepts, it ceded them without much of a fight to the right. The left’s desire to bang its head constantly against the brick wall of the real world around it could leave it once again taking a back-seat on this issue, like it does so many others.

That would be a shame, because pragmatic interventionism in its defeat of bull-in-a-china-shop liberal interventionism has created a state of flux within this debate that we could use to further progressive goals. It could lead to the empowerment of institutions like the UN and a much more – in the longer term at least – even-handed application of international law as a result. For example, much finger-wagging by ‘whaddabouters’, from the ‘first camp’ in the interventionist debate, who have criticised intervention in Libya on the grounds of inactivity in other situations has focused on Bahrain. However, immediately after the Libya vote, the UN seems to have found its voice a bit more on this situation, with the General Secretary Ban-ki Moon calling the King of Bahrain:

“Ban also noted to the King that such actions could be in breach of international humanitarian and human rights law, according to information released by his spokesperson.”

Of course, that goes nowhere near far enough but the moral of the story is that empowering an institution yields positive results in other areas. The many problems the UN has will only be solved by through going process of democratisation which the left – were its head not firmly buried in the sand – could take a leading role in formulating. Furthermore, since this will involve nations like Britain giving up a pre-eminent status (expressed through their undemocratic Security Council veto), I would expect the right to block this agenda eventually on national sovereignty grounds thus leaving us with a serious opportunity to score some serious political victories. However, for us to make the most of this opportunity there is the small matter of removing our head from that aforementioned sand…