1648 And All That

Peter Hitchens writes:

I am asked elsewhere to explain my opposition to liberal intervention in foreign countries. I am happy to set this out briefly, and answer any questions it may raise. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the grisly 30 Years War in 1648, was a great step forward in human wisdom. The parties accepted that dislike for another nation's regime was not sufficient reason for making war on it. They recognised that, in the absence of such a principle, horrors would follow (as they had for the previous three frightful decades).

Look in the background of many Brueghel and Bosch paintings and you will see, in the hellish miseries depicted, drawn-from-the-life accounts of what this war was like. Like all idealist enterprises, it was crueller than crime, because the perpetrators were convinced they were doing good, and so entitled to do anything in the cause.

Of course, as in the case of all good laws, there are attractive arguments against the Westphalia view, that national sovereignty should remain inviolate. The same can be said of the law against being tried twice for the same offence, casually cast aside in England some years ago, and now threatened in Scotland. That law, a crucial defence of liberty, can sometimes lead to dreadful injustices. But once it is dismantled in a temporary storm of outrage, then it is gone for good. And we are all then vulnerable to a state which can pursue us with repeated prosecutions until it crushes us.

But that brings us to the wonderful exchange in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons in which Sir Thomas More argues with his cousin, Roper, against such zealotry.

Roper: ‘So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law?’
More: ‘Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?’
Roper: ‘Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that.’
More: ‘Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?
‘This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's, and if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
‘Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.’

This argument, made by the wise since the days of Socrates, is always under attack from people who think (like Thomas Paine) that they are somehow special, a qualitative advance over their forebears. Thus, they, 'historic' or 'enlightened', can 'begin the world over again'.

And I will no doubt be told how callous I am to say (as I must) that interventions in such affairs as Rwanda and Sierra Leone are better not made, if that means that one day China, or the EU, or the USA can intervene here on some 'humanitarian' pretext to steal our independent right to order our own affairs. Say we one day got a government that wanted to restore national independence, to leave the EU, to halt mass immigration, to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights? The leader of such a government might quickly be portrayed on global TV stations as some sort of Milosevic figure. It wouldn't matter that this was untrue. He would be subjected to the equivalent of Dayton and/or Rambouillet, and replaced by Paddy Ashdown and an EU army, before we knew where we were.

The principle also operates the other way, a fact that pro-war persons such as Nick Cohen seek to obscure by claims that anti-war demonstrators, marching against the attack on Saddam Hussein ‘opposed the overthrow of a fascist regime’.

By the vacuous use of the word 'fascist' in this and other cases, the conventionally left-wing person attempts to make his individual choice of bad regime scientific and general. But in fact he does the opposite. The word in this instance means nothing. There is virtually no specific parallel between Benito Mussolini's Italian dictatorship and the regime of Saddam Hussein, either in its method of coming to power, its behaviour in power or its general political view. The word only makes sense if it is taken to mean 'bad, and currently disliked by the author'.

I might add that the habitual use of 'fascist' to describe nationalist, and sometimes racially murderous regimes is itself an oddity. Why not 'Nazi' or 'National Socialist', since the most prominent and destructive such regime was the German NSDAP? I will tell you. The term, as a general description of Axis regimes, was popularised by Soviet propaganda between 1941 and 1945. They could not use 'Nazi' because the Nazi-Soviet pact (1939-41) was still fresh in the memories of millions, and because 'Nazi' is (not coincidentally) short for 'National Socialist'.

The long-lasting influence of Soviet thought and terminology on the supposedly democratic Western Left (which in theory rejects any sympathy with the USSR) is an interesting subject, and one day I'll deal with it. But to return to Mr Cohen.

As I say in the relevant chapter of The Cameron Delusion, the marchers were not (as Mr Cohen claimed) 'opposing the overthrow of a fascist regime’. Indeed, they were not opposing the overthrow of any regime. They were opposing their own government's intention of attacking another country. Many of them (I wasn't taking part, owing to my principled disagreements with many of the marchers' other views) were fairly unsophisticated pacifists who would have opposed a genuinely just war. Many were more sophisticated. Some will have understood that governments often offer pretexts for wars that are not in fact the true reasons.

But if the marchers *had* been doing as Mr Cohen claimed, and it was and is the duty of this country to take military action against foreign regimes because it views them as wicked, then surely there are many other regimes against which we should now be fighting wars to the death. China, a vast police state with extensive slave labour camps, comes to mind. So does Zimbabwe. Any reader of the reports of Amnesty or Human Rights Watch could doubtless come up with several others. Indeed, if the wickedness of a government is a cause for war, then we really ought to reconquer most of Africa.

But of course this is not the true reason for our intervention, any more than the Western powers destroyed Serbia and extirpated what remained of Federal Yugoslavia, to save the poor Bosnians or the poor Kosovars from the wicked Serbs. These episodes, like that in Iraq, were preliminary assaults on national sovereignty, a concept rapidly vanishing under the threat of liberal intervention and under the increasing power of world courts of one kind and another. The revolutionary left have always loathed nations, rightly viewing them as conservative in nature. And this zest for invasions is the new foreign policy of those who grew up protesting against the Vietnam War. Just as the sexual, moral and cultural revolution is the new domestic policy of people who once supported state ownership and rallied for the striking miners.

Their aim was to alter the rules of great power conduct (see Mr Blair's famous 1999 Chicago speech. I wonder who wrote it?). And of course the easiest way to do this was by stirring the humanitarian instincts of the Western peoples by showing them horrors on TV, and saying these horrors could be ended by intervention. This worked with Sierra Leone and in Kosovo (though I remain proud that I opposed this intervention at the time, a stance which accustomed me to severe unpopularity among many of my own readers). But it ran into big trouble in Iraq, and is now, after many years of ignorant complacency, encountering difficulties in Afghanistan too.

The Second World War had already partly altered the rules, by allowing intervention on the grounds of genocide (as if this had been the reason for the war against Hitler when - as is often pointed out here - the allies did nothing to halt Hitler's genocide when they had the knowledge and power to do so). But this plainly wasn't enough if national sovereignty were to be abolished. The lessons of Westphalia had to be completely ripped up. And now they have been. And I for one don't feel any safer.