Once Upon A Time In Westphalia

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes:

“For God’s sake do not drag me into another war,” said the Reverend Sydney Smith in 1823. “I am sorry for the Spaniards—I am sorry for the Greeks—I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Bagdad is oppressed . . . Thibet is not comfortable. . . . The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. . . . Am I . . . to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy?”

That witty and humane clergyman had lived through a time of troubles: the American rebellion followed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, strife over more than twenty years at terrible cost to the inhabitants of the countries where war was waged, from Spain to Russia. Although the price paid by England was slight by comparison, at least in human life if not in gold, those conflicts made the very question of war—whether and why it should be waged—as lively a topic in England as it is today in America, or should be.

This question is comparatively new. Once upon a time, the king declared war, his army fought it, the country paid for it, and that was that: no political problem arose. But the English civil war of the 1640s, the Glorious Revolution and the beginning of constitutional government meant that for the first time there could be open debate between a “Party of War” and a “Party of Peace.”

In the first years of the eighteenth century, the War of the Spanish Succession saw Jonathan Swift publish The Conduct of the Allies, denouncing the conflict, the way it was waged by the government in London, and in particular by the Duke of Marlborough, the general whose greatest victory gave its name to Blenheim Palace north of Oxford, where his descendant Winston Churchill would be born. Then, with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Englishmen for the first time could openly salute their country’s declared enemy. (Some might say that the English critic William Hazlitt’s adulation of Napoleon began another tradition: writers and savants fawning over distant tyrants.) And although in the aftermath of war there may have been an aversion to taking part in other people’s conflicts, a new and potentially dangerous doctrine could be seen in the making.

It was not until 1997 that Robin Cook, Tony Blair’s first foreign secretary, said that “our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension,” but he was only formulating a concept that found its origins in the early nineteenth century if not before. The English had persuaded themselves that their foreign policy was, and if necessary their wars were, justified by moral purposes, for the greater good of other countries where liberty and enlightenment should be spread.

One of Cook’s predecessors is George Canning, foreign secretary in the 1820s, who proclaimed himself “an enthusiast for national independence” and supported the new South American republics which had rebelled against Spain. As foreign secretary three times, Lord Palmerston called himself Canning’s heir, supported the forcible restoration of constitutional government in Portugal, acclaimed the new liberal tide throughout Europe, and blusteringly insisted that “a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.” This coincided with the rise of a newspaper-reading middle class that could be swayed by moral or emotional arguments.

And it was this new zeal for what would later be called liberal interventionism that Smith had in mind with his sardonic words. For the best part of two hundred years since, his successors have tried to argue against the use of force to make all men good, sometimes with success but too often without.

Ever since, noninterventionists have been subject to misrepresentation and caricature, as heartless cynics who would stand idly by rather than fight for right against wrong. But they do not deny the existence of suffering and injustice, they only ask whether right should, or can, anywhere and everywhere be imposed by force of arms. Two Englishmen, Richard Cobden and John Bright, both men of high moral integrity, gave this policy its first true political form. Both ran textile businesses based in Lancashire; both were of modest origin with a great social gulf between them and the patrician elite who still ruled the country even after the Reform Act of 1832 began the gradual extension of the franchise that would make the country a full democracy within a hundred years. Indeed, both were antagonistic to that ruling landed class. Business took them abroad, as far as the United States in Cobden’s case, and this gave them a knowledge and perspective then quite unusual. But they were always known as Englishmen, and provincial Englishmen at that. Cobden published his first pamphlet as “A Manchester Manufacturer,” and the “Manchester School” became famous not only in England but—das Manchestertum—across Europe.

Its principles were simple: opposition to government interference in either domestic or foreign affairs. The first great campaign Cobden and Bright fought together was in the Anti-Corn Law League against the protectionist tariff that kept out cheap foreign wheat to the detriment of the masses but in the interest of the landowners who still dominated Parliament, Commons as well as Lords. And this made the struggle for free trade a kind of class war, between the commercial and industrial middle class and the landed aristocracy. That battle was won with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and Cobden and Bright returned to their other great cause of pacificism: a useful old word, as opposed to “pacifist,” meaning not one who has an absolute conscientious objection to bearing arms or shedding blood—even Bright, a Quaker, didn’t claim that—but one opposed to waging war except when strictly and plainly necessary for the defense of the country.

By the time of repeal, both Bright and Cobden had become members of Parliament, where they continued the argument they had already made outside. In his first polemical writings Cobden argued that a bellicose foreign policy was unjustified by any real threat from Russia, the enemy of choice for saber-rattling demagogues at that time (and later). Then he expanded the theme more broadly. As he said in 1847: “In all my travels . . . three reflections constantly occur to me: how much unnecessary solicitude and alarm England devotes to the affairs of foreign countries; with how little knowledge we enter upon the task of regulating the concerns of other people; and how much better we might employ our energies in improving matters at home.” Or simplest of all, Cobden’s favorite toast at political dinners: “No foreign politics.”

Within a matter of years, this had ceased to be an abstract question: the Crimean War against Russia, ostensibly fought out of disinterested loyalty to Turkey, was the test case for Manchester noninterventionism. Cobden so despaired of this foolish and needless conflict that he retreated into silence once the guns began to fire. Bright did not. In opposition to the war, he delivered what have been called the greatest speeches ever heard in a parliamentary assembly. They remain astonishingly vivid—and acutely relevant—to this day.

As the war began, Bright set out what was and remains the case against battles fought for supposedly altruistic or idealistic reasons. “I come now to another point,” he said to the House of Commons: “How are the interests of England involved in this question? This is, after all, the great matter which we, the representatives of the people of England, have to consider. It is not a question of sympathy with any other State. I have sympathy with Turkey; I have sympathy with the serfs of Russia; I have sympathy with the people of Hungary, whose envoy the noble Lord the Member for Tiverton [Lord Palmerston, recently Foreign Secretary and soon to be prime minister] refused to see . . . I have sympathy with the Italians, subjects of Austria, Naples, and the Pope; I have sympathy with the three millions of slaves in the United States; but it is not on a question of sympathy that I dare involve this country, or any country, in a war which must cost an incalculable amount of treasure and of blood. It is not my duty to make this country the knight-errant of the human race, and to take upon herself the protection of the thousand millions of human beings who have been permitted by the Creator of all things to people this planet.

Those superb words had no effect at all. The fighting continued. As the casualties list lengthened, Bright delivered another speech, with a passage that belongs to English literature: “Many homes in England in which there now exists a fond hope that the distant one may return—many such homes may be rendered desolate when the next mail shall arrive. The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.” Once more his words could do nothing to turn the public against the war. Something else did. Over and again the same thing has happened: an honorable objection to war is ignored, and the pacificists then win the day, not through their own eloquence and logic but thanks to the way the war is conducted, or misconducted. That was true of the Crimean and Boer Wars, of Vietnam and of Iraq.

Having sunk to the depths of unpopularity, Cobden and Bright were rescued: by the charge of the Light Brigade; by William Howard Russell of the London Times with his reports of the sufferings of ordinary soldiers at Balaclava and in the disease-ridden hospital at Scutari; by Lords Cardigan, Raglan and Lucan, the aristocratic bunglers who commanded the British Army, just as Americans would one day be turned against the Vietnam War less by love and flowers and noninterventionist politicians such as Senator William Fulbright (or even Jane Fonda) than by the boastful incompetence of General Westmoreland. Indeed, such was the revulsion after the Crimea that England fought no other European war for nearly sixty years.

When Cobden and Bright first made their case in the 1840s and 1850s, it might have seemed remote to Americans, little knowing that their own country’s most destructive war was soon to begin, fought between Americans on American soil. But their two names were known on the other side of the Atlantic. Bright was an ardent opponent of slavery, and Cobden, on the strength of his travels, was one of the first to perceive that here was an enormously powerful economy in the making which might one day overshadow England and all of Europe. But America had no need at all to be taught the doctrine of noninterventionism by a Manchester businessman: it was the very heart and soul of the republic, its reason for being. Nowadays, American politicians, left and right, neocon and liberal, are incurably addicted to invoking the Founding Fathers; you might wonder whether they have ever read any of them. See two of the greatest utterances by presidents, and then see how long it has been since anyone in the White House has taken them to heart and acted upon them.

In 1796, George Washington bade farewell as first president, with an explicit affirmation that the newborn republic had no wish to take part in the quarrels of others: “Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations, cultivate peace and harmony with all; religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . . Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humour or caprice?”

He also gave what sounds like a clear warning to his recent successors, when dealing with Southeast Asia or the Middle East: “nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that in place of them just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation, which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. . . . A passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.”

Rather more than four years later, Thomas Jefferson echoed Washington in his inaugural speech: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political: Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” For very many years, the United States did in fact follow those principles. Attempts have been made, perhaps more ingenious than convincing, to show that there was an aggressive and interventionist vein in American policy from the beginning—Robert Kagan has done his best to prove this in his book Dangerous Nation, without convincing some of us—but the fact remains that no American troops set foot on European soil for more than 140 years after the Declaration of Independence. The heirs of Washington and Jefferson really did follow their precepts. There were no passionate attachments, nor any permanent “inveterate antipathies against particular nations”—except maybe one. For all the quaint notion of an immemorial “special relationship,” the United States was not only detached from but also frequently hostile to England throughout the nineteenth century and into the next.

As to that rival, although Great Britain greedily and sometimes mercilessly expanded its empire during the same period, it was remarkably pacific in the sphere of European politics, in part because it was the only great power which could not in any conceivable circumstances make territorial gains on the Continent. When the twentieth century came and England did enter two great and historically decisive wars in 1914 and 1939, it was with the utmost reluctance. One London columnist, who was uneasy about the Iraq War and the way that Downing Street was taking Great Britain into it on flagrantly distorted claims, said that the government was obviously exaggerating the case for invasion, but that was what governments always did when these sorts of conflicts began. To the contrary, British governments and prime ministers have historically habitually exaggerated the case for peace—up to and notably including Neville Chamberlain. And that explains what happened to noninterventionism. It was seemingly tainted and discredited, in England as “appeasement” and in America as “isolationism.” Quite how these terms have been used and abused is another story for another day, but they doubtless conditioned policy after 1945—and after 1989, when NATO, instead of being shuttered once it fulfilled its purpose with the collapse of the Soviet empire, survived and was expanded and adapted to American interests, real or perceived.

Then came Tony Blair. He was a self-taught interventionist, having shown little interest in—or knowledge of—foreign affairs until he was converted, he tells us in his weird and rather horrific memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, by seeing Schindler’s List; if that dubious movie really was responsible for the Iraq War then Steven Spielberg has much to answer for. Blair long captivated many Americans as well as his compatriots, and in April 1999, he gave a celebrated speech in Chicago which supposedly outlined a new philosophy of liberal interventionism. It was hailed by people who may have known a little more history than Blair (which is not saying much) as the “end to Westphalia,” intending the Peace of Westphalia which itself had concluded the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War by establishing the principle of national sovereignty, as well as cuius regio, eius religio: the nation will follow the religion of its ruling prince (a principle silently adopted by both sides in Europe during the Cold War. Stalin and his successors were not going to attack Western Europe to impose Communism, and the West was not going to attack Russia and its dependencies to get rid of it).

In his grandiose, ill-informed and ultimately calamitous attempt to repudiate Westphalia, Blair outlined conditions to: “decide when and whether to intervene. . . . First, are we sure of our case? . . . Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? . . . Third, on the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations we can sensibly and prudently undertake? Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? . . . And finally, do we have national interests involved?” This was delivered in the context of Kosovo, the Western-led intervention against Serbia. Cobden and Bright would have been appalled. Whatever was said at the time, we now know this to have been a classic case of the law of unintended consequences. A report at the end of last year from the Council of Europe, an entirely detached and austere body, described Kosovo today as a gangster state, a hub of the drugs trade and also of human trafficking and young women sold into prostitution, not to mention illicit trade in human organs, although nothing like the bloodbath of Iraq.

Not that Blair is in any way penitent. At the time he left Downing Street in the summer of 2007, Timothy Garton Ash described him: he “bounds into the garden of 10 Downing Street, looking as if he’s ready for another 10 years there.” Asked what his legacy was—“What is the essence of Blairism?”—he gave an answer that “could not be clearer: ‘It is liberal interventionism.’” And Blair has expanded on this in his book. Such interventionism “requires a whole new geopolitical framework. It requires nation-building. It requires a myriad of interventions deep into the affairs of other nations. It requires above all a willingness to see the battle as existential and to see it through, to take the time, to spend the treasure, to shed the blood,” and he cannot be faulted when it comes to spending the treasure and shedding the blood, albeit someone else’s treasure and the blood of others.

Many liberals and conservatives alike, haunted by the ghost of “Munich” and appeasement, and dismayed by the savagery of the violence which accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia, as well as by Saddam Hussein’s brutality, accepted this without much reflection. They assumed that Great Britain, or the United States, had a duty or right to interfere with other nations, based on an assumption of superior virtue, of the kind once made by Palmerston, and latterly voiced by Madeleine Albright as secretary of state: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

But Cobden had answered that long ago. If it were really “the province of Great Britain to administer justice to all the people of the earth . . . then should we be called upon in this case to rescue the weak from the hands of their spoilers. But do we possess these favoured endowments? Are we armed with the powers of Omnipotence”? To intervene by force everywhere from Indochina to Latin America to Libya supposes even now that America is armed with powers of omnipotence, to a degree which not even many Englishmen thought true of their own country. Nor did Sydney Smith think we had these endowments, as he implied in those words which seem uncannily apt today. We may well be sorry for the Greeks or deplore the fact that Baghdad was oppressed and that Tibet is still not comfortable. Or as Bright might now say, we have sympathy for the people of Bosnia, of Afghanistan, of wherever may be next in the liberal-interventionist atlas. But do we have a duty to act as the knight-errant of the human race?

On occasion President Obama has been as hackneyed and predictable as Blair. In his Nobel Prize speech he spoke of “the service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform [which] has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will,” words which remind David Bromwich in the New York Review of Books of William Gladstone: “The high office of bringing Europe into concert, and keeping Europe in concert, is an office specially pointed out for your country to perform. . . . That happy condition, so long as we are believed to be disinterested in Europe, secures for us the noblest part that any Power was ever called upon to play.” But at least Gladstone knew and admired Bright, and made him a cabinet minister, before Bright resigned in 1882 to protest the deplorable bombardment of Alexandria. In any case, Gladstone was a bundle of contradictions. He had earlier asked, “Are we, or are we not, to go abroad and make occasions for the propagation even of the political opinions which we consider to be sound? I say we are not.”

Likewise, Obama also contradicts himself. In wiser recent moments he has said rightly that America cannot solve every problem in the world, and that it might be time to start nation building at home. Or as he might have said, “how much unnecessary solicitude and alarm America devotes to the affairs of foreign countries; with how little knowledge we enter upon the task of regulating the concerns of other people; and how much better we might employ our energies in improving matters at home,” not to say that the United States would serve the world better through the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education.

What the interventionists seem not to notice is that Cobden’s words do in fact explain how Soviet Russia imploded twenty years ago without a shot fired, and then this year how the Arab Spring has blossomed. This last will surely have more unforeseen consequences, but for ill or for good, the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia were spontaneous popular protests without any armed help from outside—whereas our latest spasm of liberal interventionism in Libya has not been a success. One day we might even hear a president, or prime minister, quoting Cobden’s prescription: “as little intercourse as possible betwixt the Governments, as much connection as possible between the nations of the world”—or even “No foreign politics”!