Table Of ContentCosmopolitan dystopia
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In loving memory
Nada Milić
(1933–2015)
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Cosmopolitan
dystopia
International intervention
and the failure of the West
Philip Cunliffe
Manchester University Press
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Copyright © Philip Cunliffe 2020
The right of Philip Cunliffe to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 5261 0572 1 hardback
ISBN 978 1 5261 0573 8 paperback
First published 2020
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs
for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
COVER IMAGE: Women and children evacuated from the Islamic State
group’s embattled holdout of Baghouz arrive at a screening area held by
the US-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, in the eastern Syrian
province of Deir ez-Zor, on 6 March 2019. © BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty
Images
Typeset in Palatino and Gibson
by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby
Contents
List of figures vi
Preface and acknowledgements vii
Introduction: the rise of cosmopolitan dystopia 1
1 Inverted revisionism and the subversion of the liberal
international order 24
2 Through the looking-glass: the new critics of intervention 63
3 What should we do? The politics of humanitarian
exceptionalism 100
4 Failed states, failed empires and the new paternalism 146
Conclusion: waiting for the Americans 176
Notes 185
Bibliography 205
Index 221
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Figures
3.1 Mapping international exceptionalism 116
3.2 Locating cosmopolitan liberalism 132
vi
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Preface and acknowledgements
This is a book about the character of liberal international order
over the last thirty years of the post-Cold War era and how it
came to be characterised by repetitive military interventions that
effectively collapsed into an era of permanent war.
There are many ways in which this story could be told. For
example, both Emmanuel Todd and Yanis Varoufakis see the era
of permanent war as a function of the enormous and abiding
US trade deficit. Exemplary conflicts, they argue, were needed
to maintain the US position at the centre of the world system,
both in supporting confidence in the dollar as the global reserve
currency and by way of justifying a system of global ‘protection’
that ensured other states would provide the necessary inflow of
capital that would in turn allow the US to continue consuming
more than it produces. Drawing on Greek myth, Varoufakis
dubbed the massive scale of US borrowing the ‘tribute’ that was
paid to the Minotaur – the US – at the centre of the international
system.1 John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt see permanent
war as the outcome of ‘liberal hegemony’, a catastrophically over-
ambitious grand strategy born of US victory in the Cold War and
locked into place by a self-serving foreign policy elite.2 At the
grandest level perhaps, it is a tale that could be told in terms of
the contradictions of globalisation, which, by spreading growth
and development around the world market, has given rise to new
challengers who threaten to fragment and undermine that very
same global market.
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Preface and acknowledgements
However it is told, it must also at some level be a story about
our ideas of international order. In addition to trade talks and
global integration and so on, ‘liberal international order’ encom-
passes our ideas about the purpose and utility of military force
in international affairs, about the structure of political order and
authority, about the role and rights of the strong in relation to the
weak, and about the possibility and appeal of self-government in
both individual and collective terms. This is what merits casting
this discussion in terms of international political theory.
To explain, say, the disastrous intervention in Iraq purely
as a reverberation of deep, enigmatic structural forces such as
a global balance of power being recalibrated or shifts in trade
deficits, currency reserves, purchases of US Treasury bonds or
the changing pattern of Western states’ fossil fuel consumption
would not fully capture the awesomely irrational and criminal
scale of what happened to that country. Nor would such explana-
tions tell us much about the legacy of political structures and new
forms of authority that we will inherit from this era of permanent
war. The protracted torment of Iraq reaching back to 1991 seems
to me very clearly one of the greatest criminal acts of our times.
Yet it is never discussed alongside Rwanda or Srebrenica, both of
which are repeatedly (and self-servingly) identified as the worst
moments of our era and conveniently seen as sins of omission –
morality tales in which the failure of the West to intervene was
seen as the most important, overarching aspect of those atroci-
ties. To me, it seemed increasingly clear that military operations
which were supposed to have inaugurated either a new supra-
national global order or alternatively an expansionist American
empire built around a ‘civilising mission’ for democracy and
human rights embodied instead a ‘de-civilising mission’ that led
to regression and de-modernisation with the shattering of unitary
nation-states that had emerged from the era of Third World
revolu tions, alongside the dialling back of the markers of secular
progress, whether measured in terms of public infrastructure,
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Preface and acknowledgements
centralised nationhood, women’s rights, secular authority, ethnic
and religious pluralism, and so on.
Yet, apparently, sins of commission did not exist. Many
scholars, intellectuals and academics have insisted that the 2003
invasion of Iraq had no relationship to the broader pattern of
liberal interventions since 1992, while in the next breath insisting
that yet another military intervention in yet another Arab state,
Libya, was entirely justified and welcome in the very next year
after the US formally ended its post-occupation campaign in Iraq.
I lost count of how many conferences, panels and academic round-
tables I sat through to be reassured not only that, even while the
forces of Islamic State were ensconcing themselves on the shores
of Tripoli, the NATO bombing campaign had been blessed not
only by following the deepest principles of ‘just war’ theory as
enunciated by St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, but also that
the campaign conveniently conformed to the latter-day scriptures
of human rights and the writ of UN Security Council resolutions.
Exasperated by the blithe self-assurance of those arguing for yet
more war, I realised that the recurrent amnesia and casuistry
of debates around intervention had to be accounted for and not
merely refuted. What was it about these ideas that made it so easy
to split apart the most basic questions of cause and effect, to treat
every humanitarian crisis as if it were sui generis, and to act as if
intervention itself had no history? This is the question that I have
tried to answer in this book, and it is one that led me to consider
contradictions within liberal internationalism itself – contradic-
tions that have given rise, I argue, to a cosmopolitan dystopia.
Books about ideas arguably accrue debts more than other
kinds of book. The inspiration for the critique in this book came
from engaging with and (I hope) extending the work of several
thinkers, namely Jef Huysmans, Anne Orford, Jean Cohen and
Samuel Moyn. It was their work that provided the key insights
for understanding interventionism in terms of political excep-
tionalism and anti-utopianism, as well as changing forms of state
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