Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Gary J. Bass (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0307266486 | ISBN-13: 978-0307266484 | Publication Date: August 19, 2008 | Edition: 1

Why do we sometimes let evil happen to others and sometimes rally to stop it? Whose lives matter to us? These are the key questions posed in this important and perceptive study of the largely forgotten nineteenth-century “atrocitarians”—some of the world’s first human rights activists. Wildly romantic, eccentrically educated, and full of bizarre enthusiasms, they were also morally serious people on the vanguard of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about the human rights crises of today.

Gary Bass shatters the myth that the history of humanitarian intervention began with Bill Clinton, or even Woodrow Wilson, and shows, instead, that there is a tangled international tradition, reaching back more than two hundred years, of confronting the suffering of innocent foreigners. Bass describes the political and cultural landscapes out of which these activists arose, as an emergent free press exposed Europeans and Americans to atrocities taking place beyond their shores and galvanized them to act. He brings alive a century of passionate advocacy in Britain, France, Russia, and the United States: the fight the British waged against the oppression of the Greeks in the 1820s, the huge uproar against a notorious massacre in Bulgaria in the 1870s, and the American campaign to stop the Armenian genocide in 1915. He tells the gripping stories of the activists themselves: Byron, Bentham, Madison, Gladstone, Dostoevsky, and Theodore Roosevelt among them.

Military missions in the name of human rights have always been dangerous undertakings. There has invariably been the risk of radical destabilization and the threatening blurring of imperial and humanitarian intentions. Yet Bass demonstrates that even in the imperialistic heyday of the nineteenth century, humanitarian ideals could play a significant role in shaping world politics. He argues that the failure of today’s leading democracies to shoulder such responsibilities has led to catastrophes such as those in Rwanda and Darfur—catastrophes that he maintains are neither inevitable nor traditional.

Timely and illuminating, Freedom’s Battle challenges our assumptions about the history of morally motivated foreign policy and sets out a path for reclaiming that inheritance with greater modesty and wisdom.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Bass, associate professor of international affairs at Princeton (Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals), makes the case with delightful wit, insight and scholarship that humanitarian military intervention arose not with genocide in Bosnia or Rwanda, but in Victorian times in parallel with democracy and the mass media. When Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire, Turkish troops committed atrocities viewed by reporters and letter writers whose accounts produced a torrent of outrage. Reluctantly, British leaders began pressuring the sultan, but the failure of this effort led to Britain's great naval victory at Navarino that assured Greek independence. Bass moves on to two other half-forgotten but ghastly crises: the 1860s Syrian upheaval in which Maronite Christians and Druze slaughtered each other, and the 1870s mass murders of Bulgarians by the Ottomans. Bass ends with the Armenian genocide during WWI. Readers may squirm at the slowness with which nations acted to oppose gruesome cruelties, but they will relish Bass's gripping account of bloodthirsty characters, bitter political infighting and cynical leaders, forced by public opinion into moral actions that did not serve their own national interest. (Aug. 20) ""
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From The New Yorker

This engaging history of nineteenth-century campaigns to stop atrocities in Greece, Syria, and Bulgaria is a corrective to the idea that humanitarian interventions are a product of the �dreamy interlude� between 1989 and 9/11. The compelling narrative, rich with accounts of parliamentary debate and battlefield confrontation, presents a world of familiar political and military concerns, from the pressure of non-stop media coverage to the importance of a clear exit strategy. Bass�s thesis that humanitarianism long preceded the crises of Bosnia and Rwanda is persuasive, but this history seems a less useful guide for future efforts than he supposes. Resulting policy recommendations add little to liberal internationalist orthodoxy, and the new ideas he suggests, such as dividing the world into spheres of influence, seem ill-suited to conflicts such as those in Zimbabwe and Darfur.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (August 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307266486
• ISBN-13: 978-0307266484
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.6 x 10.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #123,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Regarding the Suffering of Others, October 5, 2008

By 

Izaak VanGaalen (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Hardcover)

Humanitarian intervention was a term often heard during the 1990s. In the decade following the end of the Cold War military intervention in sovereign states to prevent ethnic cleansing and other kinds of mass murder came at a lower price. Liberal internationalists could excercise their collective conscience more freely as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. American and Nato intervention in Bosnia (1995) came late as a massacre was already underway. The intervention in Kosovo (1999) was timely, for an ethnic cleansing had surely been averted. (Another good book on this subject is Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (P.S.).) The interventions were possible because there was no great power willing or able to stop them. There was a convergence of realism and idealism. It was not only morally imperative but practical to reduce the suffering of others.

Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton, has given us a very thoroughly researched and elegantly written history of humanitarianism that goes back to the early 19th century. In the 1820s Byron and other philhellenes agitated for Greek independence from the Ottoman yoke. Arch-realists such as Metternich and Disraeli were afraid it would upset the balance of power in Europe. The Ottoman Empire, in their view, was keeping order among many restless nationalities in the East.

There was another movement for intervention against the Turks in the 1870s. This time it was led by British Prime Minister Gladstone who campaigned to save the Bulgarian Christians from Turkish atrocities. (In fact Tony Blair invoked Gladstone before the invasion of Iraq.) Bass here is very good at showing how the moral impulse to save others can be contaminated with imperialism and racism. The effort to save the Christians turned into a campaign to portray the Turks and Islam as something less than human. Gladstone was inclined to demonize things he knew very little about, a practice that one easily falls into when the enemy is brutal.

Bass points out the Western interventions on bahalf of rebellious peoples was not without long-term consequences. On the negative side, the realists were vindicated. Intervention in Eastern Europe set off a chain of events that ultimately led to World War I. Metternich and Disraeli had often warned that Europe would slide into chaos. On the positive side, Bass sees the origins of the more recent human rights consciousness that is both secular and universal. Even though many of the examples of humanitarian intervention given in this work were cases of saving Christians from Muslims, the groundwork for saving other human beings regardless of ethnicity or faith was laid. It must be noted that in the 20th century it was the West that came to the aid of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In the 21st century the victims in Darfur, Myanmar, and other places have not been so lucky. With the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the spreading global financial crisis, the realists once again control the agenda, and the interventionists are seated firmly on the sidelines. Bass has written an excellent history on the ebbs and flows of humanitarian intervention and the conditions under which it is possible.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freedom's battle (but is it applicable to the 21st century?), June 9, 2009

By 

Bruce Lilley (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Hardcover)

Well-written and entertaining description of the 19th-century conflict concerning the slow dissolution of the Ottoman empire through World War I, and Britain's response to various atrocities that occured as the subject people of the Empire fought for freedom. You will learn much about Britain's own internal conflicts resulting from being an colonial Empire, a democracy (of sorts) with an active free press, and Britain's desire to stop Russia from expanding to Contantinople and possibly blocking their route to Britain's own colonial subjects in India!. The last chapters focus more upon American isolationism and the Armenian genocide; isolationism won out, as everybody knows, tragically for the Armenians.

I agree with the New Yorker review above in that the examples presented are not really applicable to today's humanitarian problems, but it is a good history lesson and a good read nonetheless.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enthralling ,well-researched and extremely entertaining, November 3, 2008

By 

Paul Gelman "PAUL Y. GELMAN" (HAIFA , ISRAEL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Hardcover)

Gary Bass has written about a very relevant topic for our times : how and why various governments preferred to intervene in other countries' politics in order to prevent war crimes and genocides from happening.We learn that humanitarian intervention is definitely not a twentieth-century invention, and that the idea orginates at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
By dwelling on mainly three example ,Mr.Bass concludes that humanitarian intervention cannot in any case be equated with imperialism.Thus he describes in detail the plight of the Greek people who were under the Turkish yoke. Lord Byron is one of the main characters in the role of Robin Hood who has done his best in order to fight for the agonizing Greeks.
Finally,they won their independence after the famous battle of Navarino where the Turkish fleet did not have any chance of surviving against the British ships of war and was simply obliterated.Mr.Bass gives us a very fresh picture of what went inside the minds of the chief protagonists in this affair,namely:Castlereagh (who -in the end- took his own life),Canning and the bad guy Metternich who did not care at all about the plight of the Greeks(or any group which would endanger the political balance after the Congress of Vienna).
Next comes the story of rivalry and butchery that took place in Syria between the Christian Maronites and the Druze and the third episode-in my opinion:the best- researched one- is about the massacre of the Bulgarians in 1876 -an act committed by the Ottomans. The two outstanding figures here were again Britons: Disraeli,who dispatched the fleet against the Ottomans and Gladstone the eccentric British Prime Minister(who-we are told used self- flagellation after indulging in the pleasures of flesh).We also gain an insight about the whole Pan-Slavic movement from one of the giants of literature:Dostoevsky.
The shortest episode described in the book is about the horrible Holocaust
perpetrated against the Armenian people by the brutal and savage Turks. The novelty here is that the United States dropped its previous stand about non- interfering in the affairs of other nations( a relic from the Monroe Doctrine and John Quincy Adams times).The US had understood by now that as a world power committed to human rights she had no choice but to send in troops to problematic areas in the world, although the criteria for doing this were not well-defined,as Mr. Bass explains. He adds that the Great Powers were extremely careful when deciding to fight for other minorities' interests .The dictum by Nietzsche that"whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster" was highly observed in most cases.
Humanitarian intervention can effectively carried out only by democracies and this is important today because we all live in the age of terrorism.
This book is complemented by almost 100 pages of footnotes and I highly recommend it because its author has done a superb job of analyzing many other less known affairs pertinent to the topic, including a description of the press role.You will enjoy each page of it and his style of vivid writing makes this book a " must" for every intelligent reader.