Suffering

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by Alan J. Kuperman

Nor is it clear why Rieff has chosen the present moment to sound the death knell for humanitarianism. The West now spends more money to care for more people in need than ever before. The essential cosmopolitan humanitarian ideal--the belief that all people everywhere, regardless of their social or political differences from each other, are entitled to compassion and the fulfillment of their basic human needs--has moved from utopian fantasy to an embedded political norm. The right of humanitarian intervention, a radical break from three centuries of international relations, is now taken so much for granted that political debate now focuses on whether there is a responsibility to carry Out such intervention. Remarkably, this is the context for Rieff's declaration that humanitarianism is dead.

It isn't dead, not least because Rieff exaggerates the extent to which humanitarian organizations have become pawns of governments. These groups do embrace government contracts where they can get them, usually in the high-profile emergencies that are also the ones pursued by Rieff and his media colleagues. But NGO coordination with governments and militaries in complex emergencies actually enhances the delivery of relief aid. These relief organizations also still perform vital work in dozens of lower profile cases, where they neither benefit significantly from nor are distorted much by Western governmental largesse and oversight. If Rieff is saying that such small efforts pale in significance to the higher-profile government-funded cases, then it is he, rather than any organization, that has stayed from the humanitarian ideal.

Nor is human rights advocacy contrary to humanitarianism. Who can deny that the primary causes of humanitarian emergencies are rapacious and incompetent governments that are unable or unwilling to protect their peoples' human rights? Since Rieff himself acknowledges that "most humanitarian emergencies have their origins in human rights abuses", it is frankly hard to understand his insistence that the two be decoupled. Admittedly, the promotion of human rights is no panacea, and can give rise to unintended consequences when carried out naively. But some form of such advocacy is unquestionably part of the long-term solution to alleviating human suffering. The challenge is how best to integrate humanitarian, human rights and traditional national interest objectives--not to pick between them as if they were mutually exclusive.

AT LEAST AS worrisome as the things Rieff gets wrong are the things he doesn't get at all. Among these, three stand out: the erosion of the norm of sovereignty, the logistical obstacles to effective humanitarian intervention, and the emerging challenge of moral hazard.

The norm of sovereignty persisted, after an admittedly shaky start, for over three centuries following its creation in the Treaty of Westphalia. During the past decade, however, it has been all but abandoned in the name of humanitarian intervention, with alarmingly little thought given to the unintended consequences. Supporters of this trend argue seductively that saving innocents from slaughter is more important than preserving a vestige of absolute monarchical rule. However, it is crucial to recall the historical logic in which the sovereignty norm arose. After decades of savage religious struggles, culminating in the carnage of the Thirty Years War, European statesmen realized that their pre-existing norm--waging war because one state did not like the domestic nature (usually the religion) of another--was a recipe for perpetual conflict. To avoid this fate, they agreed to reserve casus belli, the legitimate grounds for war, to the external actions of states. While this norm was sometimes breached over the centuries, it indisputably served as a brake on ideological wars.