Fables of redemption in an age of barbarism - International Justice, War Crimes, and Terrorism: The U.S. Record

Social Research, Winter, 2002 by David Rieff

IMAGINE a world in which there were 27 major wars, tens of millions of refugees who have crossed international borders, some remaining in squalid camps, some constantly on the move, tens of millions more living rough after having been displaced within their own countries, and hundreds of millions moving, or attempting to move, from the poor world to the rich world in the greatest mass migration to be seen for centuries. Imagine a world in which more than a billion people lived on less than a dollar a day, in which a great plague, so far incurable, was already in the process of wiping about the most productive members of an entire continent while at the same time threatening, as it seemed poised to spread to other, more favored continents, to ravage parts of the world that had only recently begun to become prosperous. And imagine a world in which these challenges to order, decency, and even existential survival in its poorer reaches existed simultaneously alongside a few favored richer areas where the challenge was, at least according to sociologists and scholars, one of meaning--a postreligious, to some extent even postnational world, in which the best minds of the time questioned the authority even of reality itself, and for whom everything was open to a nihilistic "deconstruction" while, in society at large, the distinction between reality and spectacle or, more prosaically, public relations and public policy, was harder and harder to establish.

Doubtless both for better and for worse, there is no need to strain one's imagination to conjure up such a place because it already exists: it is the world in which we live in 2003. The more interesting question is why, given the undeniable horrors and confusions of this world--one suffering acutely from what Zaik Laidi has called a global "crisis of meaning ... a divorce of meaning and power (Laidi, 1998: 1)--so many decent people are so confident that the situation is improving? Why, instead of despairing do they point to what, in all sincerity, they appear to view as an epochal breakthrough in our collective moral imagination? The answer is not that they are hoping against hope, or that what is taking place is simply mass wishful thinking. Obviously, it is simply human to believe, at least until the evidence to the contrary is literally incontrovertible, that the time in which one was fated to be born, live, and die is more full of potential than the past. And it is normal, and perhaps, for most people, unavoidable to continue to feel that there is hope for the world in much the same way and for many of the same reasons that any sane person must continue to feel there is hope for himself or herself in personal life all along the route from swaddling clothes to winding sheet. But to say that it is normal is not the same thing as saying that it is likely to be true, though of course anything is possible.

What is more surprising is that in this world of slaughter and illusion, optimism has become all but de rigueur among decent, cosmopolitan people. It is almost as if they have come to believe that optimism and morality are synonymous, and that to doubt that the looming future will be better than the past, whether in international relations or private relations, is a kind of subversive, nihilistic undermining of what, in more naive and sexist times, we called the decent opinion of mankind. Obviously, it is an ahistorical myth to insist that the twentieth century was in any way uniquely barbarous; the history of colonial expansion, to go back only another century, should disabuse any intelligent person of that illusion. But by the same token, might it not also be an illusion to suppose that anything has changed so profoundly over the course of the past 50 years that would warrant the opposite claim: that we finally have the means at our collective disposal to rein in this abiding barbarism in some fundamental way?

To listen to the rhetoric of our contemporary global optimists, above all those who associate themselves with the human rights movement, one would not think so. Our world, they say, is, however slowly, in the process of being reshaped for the better. To be sure, they will concede that there have been setbacks. The 1990s was not just the first decade of the post-Cold War era, but witnessed the disgrace that was Bosnia and the hecatomb that was Rwanda. What became clear was that, far from being the moment when the millenarian ambitions that had undergirded the founding of the United Nations and the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the 1940s would at last be realized, our age was just as fraught with tragedy and risk as any other epoch in which a great empire falls. And by now, with the silly season of post-Soviet European and North American liberal moral triumphalism well and truly done with, no sensible human rights activist seriously contends that what Seyla Benhabib has called "a new and emergent paradigm of cosmopolitan right" (Benhabib, 2002: 561), let alone Kant's vaunted commonwealth of perpetual peace, is on the verge of being realized. Nonetheless, what such activists and scholars do claim is almost as startling. There have been setbacks, they concede, but the groundwork has already been laid for the eventual realization of just such a new global order--one that will be revolutionary in its moral and its legal implications.