Europe's recent foreign policy stances on internal conflicts within nation states is marked by a strange combination of Cold War modes and post-Cold War modes. If one follows Europe's policy stances, actions and attitudes on this question from 2000 onwards, one can discern a kind of schizophrenia. Not always very comfortable with US efforts to " police " global political morality, it has nevertheless extended military support for the US " policing " agenda. While neoconservative elements have been exceedingly vocal inside the US, at least until very recently, it is not clear how far the US neoconservatives have been able to plant their ideas and their worldviews on European policy framers and European opinion makers.
It is the US that has been the most enthusiastic proponent and executor of the neocon agenda and several European countries have extended support, sometimes half-hearted, possibly due to compulsions having to do with overall security perceptions. Both the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war started by George W. Bush were primarily wars of the US establishment and in many ways, wars for the US establishment. Europe did not experience anything approaching the Sept 11, 2001 events in scale and European countries did take this fact into consideration while deciding the extent to which they would support the US-led initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The European participation in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars stemmed from a combination of security concerns and idealism, although the idealism may have been misinformed and was most probably based on misleading and highly faulty intelligence.
The enthusiasm with which some European governments ( the French administration of Sarkozy, in particular ) decided to adopt military means, along with the US, to intervene in the internal conflicts in Libya during the Arab Spring revolts meant that like the US, some influential parts of the European establishment had begun thinking and acting like the US in that they were militarily intervening in foreign countries not based on security concerns, but based on an imprecise and possibly naive notion of idealism, an idealism of the kind that misses the complexity that constitutes the real world and tends to oversimplify matters to fit certain theoretical frameworks. With the recent conflicts in Syria, this imprecise and naive notion of idealism ( that can easily lead to ridiculously non-ideal consequences unless used with caution and unless based on a very careful assessments of the facts ) has once again surfaced, for example, through the statements of Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary General. The problem with Syria, as with other cases in the Middle East ( although it is not acknowledged in a whole lot of the conformist discourse that permeates Western and US media and intelligent opinion ), is that the justification for intervening in a civil war is not very apparent. Even when the fear of possible use of chemical weapons is used by the likes of Mr. Rasmussen to talk about non-UN-sanctioned intervention in Syria, it is not clear what exact moral argument is being used, or if there is any moral argument. Since both sides in the Syrian Civil War have resorted to violence to achieve their aims, what is the exact moral argument being used when the bogey of chemical weapons is being used as a justification ? Surely, if the US establishment and significant parts of the European establishment are publicly subscribing to the view that chemical weapons use can be a triggering point for non-UN sanctioned-NATO-intervention in Syria, there must be other triggering points too, if one starts using the destructive power of arsenals as the criterion for intervention. Since national security is not a justification for intervening in Syria ( Syria does not pose a national security threat to the US or to European nations ) and since the validity of arguments based on things like chemical weapons is questionable, one is led to wonder if there are parts of the establishment in the US and in Europe who are trying to push the US and European militaries as well as the US and European political systems into new international paradigms. Recent history is replete with instances where those who shout loudest about freedom have often done significant damage to the cause of freedom. All too often, superficial public discourse has been the basis of the deployment of military forces inside countries. It is time for the international community to take note of the tenuous nature of the arguments underlying the public statements of the establishment in US and in Europe and to come up with solutions to the Syrian crisis that have a truly international flavor and that do justice to the causes of freedom, international rules and international harmony and that take the existing complexities of disputes into consideration.
by C. Jayant Praharaj ( send comments to [email protected] )
It is the US that has been the most enthusiastic proponent and executor of the neocon agenda and several European countries have extended support, sometimes half-hearted, possibly due to compulsions having to do with overall security perceptions. Both the Afghanistan war and the Iraq war started by George W. Bush were primarily wars of the US establishment and in many ways, wars for the US establishment. Europe did not experience anything approaching the Sept 11, 2001 events in scale and European countries did take this fact into consideration while deciding the extent to which they would support the US-led initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The European participation in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars stemmed from a combination of security concerns and idealism, although the idealism may have been misinformed and was most probably based on misleading and highly faulty intelligence.
The enthusiasm with which some European governments ( the French administration of Sarkozy, in particular ) decided to adopt military means, along with the US, to intervene in the internal conflicts in Libya during the Arab Spring revolts meant that like the US, some influential parts of the European establishment had begun thinking and acting like the US in that they were militarily intervening in foreign countries not based on security concerns, but based on an imprecise and possibly naive notion of idealism, an idealism of the kind that misses the complexity that constitutes the real world and tends to oversimplify matters to fit certain theoretical frameworks. With the recent conflicts in Syria, this imprecise and naive notion of idealism ( that can easily lead to ridiculously non-ideal consequences unless used with caution and unless based on a very careful assessments of the facts ) has once again surfaced, for example, through the statements of Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO Secretary General. The problem with Syria, as with other cases in the Middle East ( although it is not acknowledged in a whole lot of the conformist discourse that permeates Western and US media and intelligent opinion ), is that the justification for intervening in a civil war is not very apparent. Even when the fear of possible use of chemical weapons is used by the likes of Mr. Rasmussen to talk about non-UN-sanctioned intervention in Syria, it is not clear what exact moral argument is being used, or if there is any moral argument. Since both sides in the Syrian Civil War have resorted to violence to achieve their aims, what is the exact moral argument being used when the bogey of chemical weapons is being used as a justification ? Surely, if the US establishment and significant parts of the European establishment are publicly subscribing to the view that chemical weapons use can be a triggering point for non-UN sanctioned-NATO-intervention in Syria, there must be other triggering points too, if one starts using the destructive power of arsenals as the criterion for intervention. Since national security is not a justification for intervening in Syria ( Syria does not pose a national security threat to the US or to European nations ) and since the validity of arguments based on things like chemical weapons is questionable, one is led to wonder if there are parts of the establishment in the US and in Europe who are trying to push the US and European militaries as well as the US and European political systems into new international paradigms. Recent history is replete with instances where those who shout loudest about freedom have often done significant damage to the cause of freedom. All too often, superficial public discourse has been the basis of the deployment of military forces inside countries. It is time for the international community to take note of the tenuous nature of the arguments underlying the public statements of the establishment in US and in Europe and to come up with solutions to the Syrian crisis that have a truly international flavor and that do justice to the causes of freedom, international rules and international harmony and that take the existing complexities of disputes into consideration.
by C. Jayant Praharaj ( send comments to [email protected] )