“Western powers usually legitimize military interventions in terms of a proclaimed commitment to some universalist norm or to some goal embodying such a norm. These declared goals can oscillate, but they are important because a central element of their foreign policy, particularly when it involves starting a war, is maintaining the support of their domestic population. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, people like to think of themselves as the guardians and promoters, through their states, of the most civilized, humane, liberal and democratic values in the world. It is true that they have short attention spans and are generally far more ignorant of the world outside their borders than the populations of many other countries, but at least the elected leaders of their states can run into domestic trouble if the declared norms and goals are not implemented or if implementation is carried through with such barbarity that they contradict other, more basic, norms and goals.”
—Peter Gowan, The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy, a 1999 article, my emphasis N.M
In my readings I have usually admired Peter Gowan’s sharp and radical analysis than Fred Halliday’s ‘moderate, liberal-leftist’ one – Halliday of The Middle East in International Relations as opposed the radical Halliday of the Arabia Without Sultans. Halliday’s stance on the Palestinian struggle, for instance, is a realist one – a stance that does not go beyond the rights-based liberal approach.
In the quote above, I do think that Gowan underestimated the resilience of ‘the elected leaders’, the level of passivity of ‘the domestic population’ – bar some students who have been repressed – and the power of the ingrained belief in the system of ‘liberal and democratic values’. After all, ‘we don’t have monsters and criminals like Bashar al-Asad, Saddam Hussein or Vladimir Putin’. And even when half of the population, according to polls, oppose this or that war/intervention, it does not change the state’s policy.
“In ‘strategic backwaters’, wrote Gowan in 2001, even real genocide can be casually covered or countenanced, as the experience of Rwanda has shown. Where delinquent states are pivotal to American strategic interests, on the other hand, they are vigilantly shielded from human rights pressures, as the cases of Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey or Indonesia, to name only the most flagrant examples, have long made clear.”*
Paradoxically, the very same population that upholds values of ‘freedoms’ and ‘human rights’ continue to support their imperialist regimes, which in turn support authoritarian and criminal regimes that deny freedoms and human rights to their population. Sadly, and often, the narrow interests and outlook and ‘values’ fostered by the nation state have the first and final say.
‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating, goes the proverb. Thus the ongoing Western-funded-Israeli barbarism proves again that Western ‘elected leaders’ do not run into ‘domestic trouble’. Both Bush and Blair were re-elected despite their crimes. Blair and his wife have gone into a bright and lucrative careers. So will Macron and Starmer. Joe Biden has begotten Kamala Harris.
‘Domestic leaders’ may not be re-elected, but largely not because of their imperialist crimes. Issues such as ‘our country’, cost of living, immigration, domestic crime …are much more important and decisive at the ballot box.
*Peter Gowan, Neoliberal Cosmopolitanism, New Left Review, Sep-Oct 2001.
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