Liberal imperialism

Liberalism as the practice of “lesser government”

For a long time, the historiography of liberalism was conceived as an attempt to identify all the characteristic theses of this school of thought (affirmation of the axiological primacy of freedom, promotion of individuality, defense of private property, attachment to the rule of law, etc.), to trace its evolution through the evocation of its most representative figures (classically, from Hobbes to Rawls), and to recall its most significant battles (among others, in favor of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience, the recognition of a whole series of fundamental and inalienable rights, or an ever broader integration into public life of groups that had been unjustly excluded). More recently, a competing perspective, initiated by Michel Foucault, has developed, which understands liberalism no longer as a doctrine more or less systematically constituted and historically identifiable as such, but as a practice of government based on the principle of self-limitation of power, the exercise of which would always be haunted by the risk of doing too much, which would have progressively structured the different fields (legal, political, economic, educational, medical, etc.) of modern human activity.

JS Mill: from the “right of intervention” to the “principle of non-intervention”

The fruitfulness of such a perspective is found in Aurélie Knüfer’s book, Intervention and Liberation from Edmund Burke to John Stuart Milla striking illustration. Its guiding thread is the analysis of the evolution of John Stuart Mill’s positions on international relations: initially, in the context of the “Spring of Nations” of 1848, “promoting a right of intervention, in order to help “liberalism in struggle””, he then moved, at the end of the 1850s, “to the affirmation of a “principle of non-intervention”” (p. 22). The investigation proceeds on two fronts, one historical – by situating Mill’s contribution in the liberal corpus, from the theorists of the law of nations to Cobden, passing, among others, by Burke, Godwin or Constant -, the other conceptual – by re-inscribing, both for Mill and for the different figures of the liberal tradition invoked, the specific theme of political or military interference in the more general framework of a reflection on intervention as the matrix of governmental action. In doing so, the work philosophically expands on Michael Walzer’s now classic analysis of Mill’s non-interventionism and theoretically enriches both the secondary literature devoted to “liberal imperialism” and its extensions in utilitarianism, as well as Millian studies, in English and, unfortunately much rarer, French.

The French Revolution and the New Horizon of Intervention

The proposed historical-conceptual itinerary finds its origin in a very detailed question: why, in his “Defense of the French Revolution of February 1848”, does Mill, who recognizes the right of free peoples to intervene in favor of those who suffer the yoke of despotism, refrain from supporting his position by mobilizing the argumentative scheme of the “just war” developed by the theorists of classical natural law (Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, Vattel)? Because, suggests A. Knüfer, the horizon in which Mill situates the “liberating intervention” is no longer only that, legal and therefore restricted, from respect for national sovereignty or the invocation of a right to resistance, but rather that, policy and thereby universal, of a struggle, common to humanity despite its local variations, between the partisans of liberty and those of despotism. It would therefore be a bias in favor of certain ideas which would justify that theopiniona new form of collective subject, supports this or that people in its emancipation from an oppressive power.

This “polemical” perspective of intervention, A. Knüfer emphasizes, Mill would share with Burke and Godwin, who, if they oppose each other in almost all other respects, nevertheless agree in seeing in the French Revolution and the ambition it carries for the universalization of its principles the striking manifestation of a new ethical-historical conjuncture. The convergence, however, stops there: unlike Burke, who, initially a supporter of a “restorative intervention” of the monarchy in France, judges that revolutionary doctrines have altered morals there too much for the enterprise to be viable, and Godwin, whose optimism makes him hope that a diffusion of these same ideals will end up convincing a very large majority of humanity, thereby making any interference useless, Mill would campaign for an almost unreserved application of a right of assistance to peoples in struggle. But in doing so, he ignores “the possibility of a contradiction between the use of force and freedom, or even the idea that peoples might not be truly willing or ready to be free” (p. 165). Now, as A. Knüfer rightly insists, the adoption, in the “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” of 1859, of a position – that of “non-intervention” as a general rule – symmetrically inverse to that of 1849, is based precisely on a careful consideration by Mill of the historical context in which political or military intervention takes place, of its appropriateness and its own temporality, and of the processes of liberation that it presupposes and requires among the populations concerned. But how can we explain this reversal?

Varieties of intervention

The failure of the Spring of Nations certainly has a lot to do with it. But Mill’s evolution was also dependent on a deepening of his reflection on the differentiated principles in which intervention is specified according to its fields of application. This “equivocal” character of intervention is particularly well highlighted by A. Knüfer in the second part of his work. Now, what emerges from this review of the different modalities of intervention is that, for Mill, if it is indeed the laissez-faire which must most often be imposed in the economic register (that addressed by the Principles of political economypublished just one year before his 1849 column), the principle of limitation at least of the exercise of power (central problem of Of freedom (1859)) is much more difficult to establish in the social and political sphere, because governmental paternalism remains constantly on the lookout and the “tyranny of the majority” increasingly threatens minority groups and strong individuals. Certain exceptions to non-intervention are necessary, as in the case of parental authority or the civilizing guardianship of “barbarian” populations.

There remains, as indicated by his opposition to the project of bringing polygamous Mormons to reason, by force if necessary, Mill’s presumption that intervention is generally to be proscribed when it could undermine the freedom of the individuals or communities concerned. Obviously, the difficulty here is to gauge the nature and probability of this risk, in order to then determine in which situations the decision to intervene will be appropriate. Such a prudential analysis, A. Knüfer rightly emphasizes, requires, on the one hand, “a reflection on the nature and function of the principles” (p. 222) mobilized, economic liberalism being ordered above all to a logic of efficiency and satisfaction while political liberalism aims at the independence and respect of the individual; but also “their inscription in a particular historical context” (pp. 222-3), which will mobilize strategic considerations as much as a certain philosophy of the collective development of humanity. This double necessity, A. Knüfer shows, was already perfectly illustrated by the tension that runs through the work of Benjamin Constant, a resolute follower of the general principle of non-intervention, but who, as a spectator of the fight of the Greeks against the Ottomans, saw there a struggle that was both political and religious, which engaged the future of Europe and which therefore required Christian nations to engage in it.

A casuistry

This dilemma—to intervene or not to intervene—Mill confronts directly in his 1859 casuistic essay, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention.” Adopting non-interference as the default position, he nevertheless admits a certain number of exceptions. Like the theorists of the law of nations, he recognizes the legitimacy of defensive wars in response to external aggression. He also allows for the possibility of interference in order to put an end to a civil war that would lead to “abuses repugnant to humanity” (p. 447), thus prefiguring the “responsibility to protect” that guides the contemporary logic of so-called “humanitarian” interventions. But the colonial enterprises of civilized nations are also tolerated, provided that their conduct towards “barbarian” populations is in accordance with “the universal rules of morality between men”, like that of England in India, Mill being in this case, asserts A. Knüfer, at best the victim of “total blindness (…) with regard to the violence of English imperialism”, at worst guilty of “a deliberate desire to give a fallacious image of it” (p. 371).

The fact remains that “barbarism” is a threat that also threatens nations that believe themselves to be civilized, and that would justify intervention, as Mill advocates against the slave states of the American Confederation. In the same way, a “counter-intervention” aimed at liberating “a people struggling against a foreign yoke or against an indigenous tyranny supported by foreign arms” is “always just, always moral, if not always prudent” (pp. 450-1).

Non-intervention, a paradoxical tool for emancipation

Yet when it comes to considering the case of a “conflict (which) opposes only the people to native leaders, and to the native force which these leaders can enlist for their defense”, Mill considers that the “legitimacy of intervention” is not, “as a general rule” (p. 448), established. Why? Not out of pacifism of principle, since “non-intervention” has as a condition of effectiveness the possibility of a “counter-intervention” keeping foreign powers at a distance.

It is therefore not a question of waging war on war. If non-interference is, in this specific case, the relevant principle, it is because the struggle for emancipation, and all the gradations in the conflict that it can experience, from the least violent to the bloodiest, would be the process through which one gains “the aptitude for freedom” (p. 400), that is to say the set of intellectual, moral and emotional dispositions that will ensure the sustainability of freedom in a just regime, that is, for Mill, a representative democracy. It is this agonistic dimension of emancipation, and the need for a people aspiring to it to experience it – so often tragically – for themselves, which would explain that, for Mill, the “principle of non-intervention” must be understood not as a selfish renunciation of helping oppressed populations, but rather as an encouragement for them to free themselves.

Of course, for those who remember the civil wars of XX^e century, such as the Spanish Civil War, the Greek Civil War or the Lebanese War, the price to pay will seem horribly heavy. But recent attempts at liberating interventions in Libya or Syria, and their more than mixed results, seem to show that Mill’s position, whose radical nature is perfectly explained by A. Knüfer, has the advantage of reminding us that if we must be wary of “armed missionaries”, it is not only because their motives are not always pure, but also because, even if they were, self-determination cannot be delegated.