by Joe Miller
I was pretty nervous when I showed up in Lisbon, Portugal, for the April 2003 meeting of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies.
I was a very junior scholar presenting at the biggest conference in my subfield. Perhaps more significantly, I was then an assistant professor at the United States Military Academy and my paper argued that some aspects of John Stuart Mill’s views on colonialism might be salvageable.
I had submitted the proposal for this paper the previous fall, and it wasn’t particularly controversial at the time.
The United States invaded Iraq three weeks before the conference. The war was deeply unpopular with Europeans and with moral and political philosophers, many of whom argued that it represented a return to the bad old days of colonialism.
And here I was, a West Point professor offering a sympathetic take on colonialism to a building full of European moral and political philosophers.
It was not a recipe for making a lot of friends.
Luckily, things went better than I’d feared. As the closing dinner (held in an 11th century castle) wound down, I found myself among a group of famous (by philosophy standards) philosophers discussing just war theory over port and cigars. That sounds too clichéd to be true, but here we are.
I went back to West Point and immediately started work on a new paper about Mill’s views on armed humanitarian intervention.
Armed intervention—that is, going to war on behalf of another country—can take three forms.
1. Intervention to aid another government in oppressing its own citizens.
2. Intervention to assist citizens in overthrowing a foreign oppressor.
3. Intervention to assist citizens in overthrowing their own oppressive government.
The first of these is always prohibited and the second is always permissible (though not always prudent).
The third case is the tricky one. Mill argues (rightly, I think) that there are instances when a country can justifiably invade another on humanitarian grounds. Mill also suggests (again, rightly) that such cases are extremely rare.
The crux of Mill’s argument is that people have the right to self-govern, so it is impermissible to intervene in a state whose citizens have established institutions for governing the state. That’s true even if those institutions are not free and even if the citizens have tried (but failed) to establish free institutions.
Mill says that people simply cannot be forced to be free.
They must seize freedom for themselves. A people who are unwilling to demand their own freedom are not yet ready to be free.
Indeed, history has shown that people who are handed freedom from the outside rarely keep it for long—an observation that is as true today as it was in Mill’s time.
But Mill’s prohibition on interfering with functioning states applies only to what he calls “civilized” states. “Barbarian” states, Mill says, deserve no such consideration.
Let’s be very clear here. Bad things usually happen when Europeans and Americans start throwing around terms like “civilized” and “barbarian.”
Mill was extremely progressive for a Victorian Londoner, but he nevertheless links race and barbarism in ways that are both morally and empirically wrong.
My paper argues that we can salvage something useful from Mill’s account when we decouple his definition of barbarism from his racist assumptions.
Mill describes a barbarian nation as one in which “there is little or no law, or administration of justice; no systematic employment of the collective strength of society, to protect individuals against injury from one another; everyone trusts to his own strength or cunning, and where that fails, he is without resource.”
A civilized country, by contrast, is one in which “the arrangements of society… are sufficiently perfect to maintain peace among them.”
Compare Mill’s description with the United Nations’ description of a failed state: one in which “national sovereignty has collapsed and has been replaced by endemic chaos, tribal or clan leadership rivalries, and the absence of any clearly defined sovereign regime.”
Mill’s barbarian state just is what we would today call a failed state. So, following Mill’s logic, failed states are candidates for armed humanitarian intervention.
Now, it might well be that it is imprudent to intervene even when it is morally permissible to do so. We should intervene only when there’s a good chance that we can make things better.
I supported U.S. armed intervention in Afghanistan. In 2001, Afghanistan was clearly a failed state – indeed, it’s the example the UN uses in describing failed states.
Whether invading Afghanistan was wise is a trickier question. It’s hard to argue that Afghani citizens are better off now than they were prior to 2001.
I still believe that we could have gotten better results had we not turned our attention to Iraq. I do acknowledge, however, that my counterfactual is unknowable.
Iraq, by contrast, was clearly not a failed state. It was a wicked state, to be sure, but it was hardly lacking in laws or in state capacity to enforce those laws. Indeed, much of the case for Iraq’s wickedness is that it enforced its laws by gassing its own citizens. That’s morally abhorrent, but it is not a sign of a failed state.
Invading Iraq was not a justifiable case of armed humanitarian intervention, nor was it justified as a preventative measure. The Bush administration simply lied about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
Thousands of people died in Iraq and thousands more suffered life-changing injuries. We spent trillions of dollars.
Present day Iraq is neither stable nor particularly friendly to the United States.
Although they have been pitched (after the fact) as instances of armed humanitarian intervention, Venezuela and Iran look a lot more like Iraq than like Afghanistan.
Iran and Venezuela are bad places with bad governments that enforce bad laws. But, like Iraq, there is no question that both states have institutions that are fully capable of enforcing the law within their borders.
Neither state meets the conditions for armed humanitarian intervention.
President Trump is right that the world would be a better place if the people of Iran (and Venezuela) rose up and overthrew the current regime in favor of a liberal democracy.
But Mill was right that you cannot simply bomb a functioning country into liberal democracy. The act itself is immoral and even if it weren’t, it’s almost certain to fail.
The people of Iran and of Venezuela (and Cuba and anywhere else) cannot truly be free until they reach out and grasp it on their own.
