British Foreign Policy and the Anglican Church

BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY AND THE ANGLICAN CHURCH

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British Foreign Policy and the Anglican Church Christian Engagement with the Contemporary World

Edited by TIMOTHY BLEWETT, ADRIAN HYDE-PRICE & WYN REES Launde Abbey, University of Bath, and University of Nottingham, UK

© The contributors 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The contributors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data British foreign policy and the Anglican Church : Christian engagement with the contemporary world 1. Church of England – Influence – Congresses 2. Christianity and international affairs – Congresses 3. International relations – Moral and ethical aspects – Congresses 4. Great Britain – Foreign relations – 1997 – Congresses I. Blewett, Timothy II. Hyde-Price, Adrian G. V. III. Rees, Wyn, 1963– 261.8’7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British foreign policy and the Anglican Church : Christian engagement with the contemporary world / edited by Timothy Blewett, Adrian Hyde-Price & Wyn Rees. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7546-6035-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7546-6037-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Church and state – Church of England – History – 20th century. 2. Christianity and politics – Church of England – History – 20th century. 3. Church of England – Doctrines. 4. Great Britain – Foreign relations. 5. Christianity and international affairs. I. Blewett, Timothy. II. Hyde-Price, Adrian G. V. III. Rees, Wyn, 1963– BX5157.B74 2007 261.8’708828342–dc22 2007010219 ISBN 978-0-7546-6035-4 (HBK) ISBN 978-0-7546-6037-8 (PPK) Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents List of Tables List of Figures Notes on Contributors

PART 1 1

2

4

5

6

7

8

3

Christian Ethics and the Dilemmas of Foreign Policy Adrian Hyde-Price

9

THE MILITARY INSTRUMENT

The Continuing, Crucial Relevance of Just War Criteria Richard Harries

31

Balance of Consequences: Towards an Ethical Standpoint on the Iraq Intervention of 2003 Richard Bonney

37

Three Parables About War Charles Jones

55

British Military Intervention Since 1990 Tim Cross

73

The Church and the War on Terror Richard Lock-Pullan

89

UK Arms Sales and the Church of England Wyn Rees

PART 3 9

THE ETHICAL CONTEXT

Introduction Tim Blewett

PART 2 3

vii ix xi

105

BRITAIN AND THE LESS DEVELOPED WORLD

Waiting for Jubilee: The Campaign for Debt Cancellation Timothy Jones

119

vi

10

Index

British Foreign Policy and the Anglican Church

The Challenge of Aid Fletcher Tembo

135 155

List of Tables 9.1

Long-term external government debt

120

9.2

Comparison of debt payments and education spending in eight African countries, 1996

121

The impact of trade liberalisation in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) 1987–1989 to 1997–1999

122

9.4

IMF and World Bank voting shares

125

9.5

Donor contributions to the International Development Association

127

9.6

The history of debt relief

129

9.3

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List of Figures 10.1

Aid volumes from 1983 to April 2004

136

10.2

The long-term trend in aid as a percentage of GNI for the United Kingdom

137

10.3

Battles for more and better aid from taxpayer to the child

138

10.4

The old and new poverty reduction agendas

139

10.5

Accountability in the Poverty Reduction Strategy context

152

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Notes on Contributors The Reverend Tim Blewett is Warden of Launde Abbey, the Retreat House for the Diocese of Leicester. He is currently a member of the Royal Army Chaplains Department and has served as a chaplain in Bosnia and Iraq. Richard Bonney is a Professor of History at the University of Leicester and Chairman of the Europe–Islamic World Organisation. Tim Cross recently retired as a Major-General in the British Army. The Right Reverend Richard Harries has recently retired from being the Bishop of Oxford. Adrian Hyde-Price is Professor of International Politics in the Department of European Studies and Modern Languages at the University of Bath. Charles Jones is a Reader in Politics at the University of Cambridge. Timothy Jones works for the World Development Movement. Richard Lock-Pullan is a Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. Wyn Rees is Professor of International Security in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. Fletcher Tembo works for World Vision.

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PART 1 The Ethical Context

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Chapter 1

Introduction Tim Blewett

There are people who regard it as frivolous, as some Christians think it impious for anyone to hope and prepare for a better earthly future. They think that the meaning of present events is chaos, disorder, and catastrophe; and in resignation or pious escapism they surrender all responsibility for reconstruction and for future generations. It may be that the day of judgement will dawn tomorrow; in that case, we shall gladly stop working for a better future, but not before. Dietrich Bonhoeffer1

In this collection of essays the reader will be introduced to a number of key issues within the ethics of international relations and within the relationship between the Church and British foreign policy. The essays arise out of a conference held at Launde Abbey, the beautiful Tudor – Elizabethan Retreat House belonging to the Diocese of Leicester. It was sponsored by the University of Leicester and convened under the leadership of Professor Adrian Hyde-Price (University of Leicester), Professor Wyn Rees (University of Nottingham) and the Reverend Tim Blewett (Warden of Launde Abbey). The conference brought together politicians (most notably Hilary Benn, MP, Secretary of State for International Development), church leaders, military personnel, members of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and nongovernmental organisations, academics and others to discuss the ethics of British foreign policy and how far it is shaped by the underlying influence of Christian values and, more directly, by the influence of the Church of England. The engagement of the Church of England with British society is central to the way that this Church has come to understand itself. The Church of England has often seen itself as the conscience of society and has been looked to in this guise throughout history to a greater or lesser extent. For the Church, faith cannot be compartmentalised because that would be mere religion with nothing to say, as it would see God anaesthetised and made powerless to speak into a world of history. The faith of the Church demands therefore that the Church should be fully integrated into society, helping society both to think through the ethics of what it is doing and also to act upon a higher ethical teaching. For the Church of England to fail to speak into the milieu of the political stage – including into the world of Britain’s international relations and foreign policy – would be to fail to fulfil its own vocation. The Church of England has this voice by being both intimately involved with society as the national Church, with its geographic networks of parishes across the country and a stake in every community, and by being ‘in touch’ with the various arms of 1

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (SCM, 1971), pp. 15–16.

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the State from Government and Members of Parliament to the military, from local government to British embassies. The Church of England, like other Christian churches, has also published reports and made statements on a wide range of international issues from globalisation to Darfur, from international social justice to Israel–Palestine and the rights of Christians throughout the Middle East. With its ‘excellent relationships with development agencies such as Christian Aid and CAFOD, and with those mission agencies active in development’2 not to mention its relationships with the international Church, both Anglican and of other denominations, what the Church of England says has to be taken with some seriousness by the British government of the day. However, with the decline in Church attendance, the influence of the Church has been reduced and to a certain extent marginalised by some sections of society except at moments of heightened international tension or national crisis. There has also been, amongst some areas of society, the desire to sideline the Church on the understanding that private beliefs should not enter public debate. Thus, over the last 50 years or so, the level of seriousness with which the Government of the day needs to listen to the Church has reduced. Added to the decline due to the growth of secularism, the Church itself has sometimes lacked confidence in voicing its opinion, due to the way in which the Church has understood its own history. With hindsight the Church has sometimes perceived itself as having become a vehicle for supporting oppression by the British state rather than for furthering the liberation of those in need. It has been said the Church has ‘often ended up as the [midwife] of exploitation’.3 This, however, is not a reason for the Church to stay silent now, for if it fails to speak then it may also end up supporting oppression and, by leaving a moral vacuum, allow foreign policy to become self-serving by default. It is also not what the nation wants as, even in the recent past, the Church of England has been looked to for a moral lead or as a focus for feelings and emotions at times of national crisis or tension. Indeed when the Church has not been perceived to give a moral lead in times of crisis it has been criticised. For instance, at the time of the First Gulf War the Bishops of the Church of England were accused by a number of commentators of having nothing important to say.4 The need for the Church of England to speak out to the nation can be seen sharply through three events within the last 25 years. Firstly, in 1982 Robert Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury, is said to have annoyed Margaret Thatcher by preaching a sermon that was not sufficiently triumphalistic at the service of thanksgiving for Britain’s victory in the Falklands, held at St. Paul’s Cathedral. At one level there was no need for such a service, yet the nation wanted it and it gave Robert Runcie the opportunity to speak of the long term view: ‘War is a sign of human failure, and everything we say and do in this service must be in that context’.5 The sermon caused difficulties between the Church and Government ‘for though he did praise 2

Charles Reed, Development Matters: Christian Perspectives on Globalisation (Church House Publishing, 2001). 3 M. Taylor, Not Angels but Agencies: The Ecumenical Response to Poverty – A Primer (SCM/WCC, 1995), p. 30. 4 The Guardian, 1 November 1990, p. 6. 5 Robert Runcie, Sermon preached at St Paul’s Cathedral, 26th July 1982.

Introduction

5

the courage – and the restraint – of those who fought, he angered some Conservative members of Parliament by not sounding a fanfare of triumph’.6 Secondly, the Jubilee 2000 Campaign against world poverty brought the relationship between the Church of England and British society clearly into focus. The raising of awareness of issues around debt relief and the impact of debt upon individuals in the developing world came primarily out of the Church or church organisations. Thirdly, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, objected to the Iraq War in 2003 adding to the pressure upon Tony Blair and his government. His voice helped to swell the numbers of those protesting against the possibility of war and the numbers of those involved in debating the morality of the Iraq War and war in general. The Church has thus been able to act as a focus for both church and secular organisations, giving their voice added weight when addressing the media and other areas of British society. The relationship between the Church of England and British society can, however, be a difficult one on occasions as there are no set rules and there is great potential for ambiguity and misunderstanding. The ambiguities within the relationship can create tensions on both sides, especially in a world of politics that calls for media statements and quick responses. The Church tries to take a longer term approach in which the will of God can be discerned. Archbishop Rowan Williams looks with other Church leaders and theologians to the ‘priority of divine freedom and divine initiative, God’s capacity to be anywhere and everywhere. And if that is so’, he goes on to say, ‘it is also God’s freedom to show who and what God is, not in religious places but in the stuff of human relation, and in the stuff of the material world’.7 This desire is often a far cry from the world of Realpolitik in which self-interest can often be more important than any ethical stance. The Church of England, along with the other Christian denominations in Britain, has been able to give both a lead and a continued response to questions within the public realm. This is possible as it can draw upon a long historical tradition in which ethical questions have been debated. History has shown how both the world of politics and international relations would benefit from listening attentively to what Christian tradition has to offer. Indeed this ability to take the long term view is in itself a reason why the Church should engage in both foreign policy and international relations issues. It should, however, be understood that the Church of England does not necessarily speak with one voice even at moments of national crisis or tension. It does have an underlying voice of consensus which informs the day to day decisions of individual politicians through political lobbying by the Church or church agencies. This can be seen in the many reports that the Church of England has published over the years. For instance, the Church of England has contributed to the debate on war and peace and the use of force on the international stage in the following reports: Force in the Modern World, Christians in a Violent World, The Church and the Bomb and Peacemaking in a Nuclear Age. The direct influence of the Church has been enhanced by its indirect effect through the personal faiths of individual politicians. This can be seen most recently in the ‘conviction politics’ of Margaret Thatcher; in such politicians as Tony Blair 6 7

M. Duggan, Runcie: The Making of an Archbishop (Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), p. 226. Rowan Williams, Christian Imagination in Poetry and Polity (SLG Press, 2004), p. 41.

6

British Foreign Policy and the Anglican Church

or Gordon Brown and their response to the Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History campaigns; or in Tony Blair’s approach to the Iraq War. Although modern politicians no longer use biblical imagery in the way that Lloyd George did,8 Margaret Thatcher, along with some of her closest colleagues, tried to relate policies to principles which involved reference to theory and also to religion as she ‘took religion seriously, read her Bible and enjoyed discussion of theological themes’.9 The Labour government of the late 1990s, and Robin Cook in particular, called for an ethical foreign policy in which human rights for all were put centre stage.10 Tony Blair justified the NATO bombing of the Yugoslav Republic in the spring of 1999 as a ‘just and moral cause’ and the war as ‘a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values’.11 Also, at the Chicago Economic Club at the height of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 Tony Blair outlined his justification for military action largely by setting out criteria and conditions that drew heavily upon the just war theory.12 It is obviously difficult to say whether such statements come out of Britain’s Judaeo-Christian heritage or whether they are underpinned by the politicians’ own faiths and belief systems actively supported by the Church. It should though be recognised that, at the very least, a number of politicians of different political parties have been influenced by Christian thinking and ethics and this influence seems to go beyond mere appropriation of Christian ethical ideas to suit political necessities. The personal faith of leading politicians underpinned by a historic JudaeoChristian influence on society has helped the Church of England to influence British foreign policy and its international relations to some extent. This can be seen in how the Church has helped push development issues up the agenda of the British government. These policies are informed by a continuous debate between Church and society that, if it is to be sustained, needs the Church to maintain its confidence in the wealth of Christian tradition. It needs to recognise that it has the support of allies amongst leading politicians whilst maintaining a distinctive voice on the political issues of our day. It is hoped by the editors that this book will help in that on-going debate, encouraging the Church of England to continue its critique of British foreign policy and its role in international relations. This is important if the nation is to move beyond a ‘culture of suspicion’, to use Onora O’Neill’s phrase,13 to a greater understanding of the ethics and moral justification of what we do as a country on the international stage and if British foreign policy is to avoid slipping into a moral and spiritual vacuum. This development in understanding will not be achieved by lobbying or by report writing – even though these activities are important – so much as by the Church being involved in society and expressing its views. By the Church’s presence amongst policy 8 A. Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform? War, Peace and the English Churches 1900–1945 (SCM, 1986), pp. 26–9. 9 D. Forrester, Christian Justice and Public Policy (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 27. 10 ‘British Foreign Policy’ opening statement by Robin Cook, Foreign and Commonwealth Office Mission Statement Daily Bulletin, 12 May 1997, p. 2. 11 The Sun, 4 June 1999, p. 1. 12 T. Blair, Doctrine of the International Community speech, 22 April 1999, p. 3. 13 Lecture 1, Point 5, Some New Suspicions of the Reith Lectures, 2002.

Introduction

7

makers, practitioners and all those who are affected, it will have a direct impact upon British foreign policy. It is hoped that this book will add to that impact as it will encourage people of different backgrounds to think through the Church’s role in the evolution of British foreign policy and in its moral and ethical underpinning. In doing so people will be encouraged to have a vision for a better future for Britain, and for the world, that goes beyond just solving the problems of this country, to a future order where we do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with our God: He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?14

14

Micah 6.8, New Revised Standard Version.

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Chapter 2

Christian Ethics and the Dilemmas of Foreign Policy Adrian Hyde-Price

The Sermon on the Mount is the last word in Christian ethics. Everyone respects the Quakers. Still, it is not on these terms that Ministers assume their responsibilities of guiding states. Their duty is first so to deal with other nations as to avoid strife and war and to eschew aggression in all its forms, whether for nationalistic or ideological objects. But the safety of the State, the lives and freedom of their own fellow countrymen, to whom they owe their position, make it right and imperative in the last resort, or when a final and definite conviction has been reached, that the use of force should not be excluded. If the circumstances are such to warrant it, force may be used. And if this is so, it should be used under the conditions which are most favourable. There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win. These are the tormenting dilemmas upon which mankind has throughout its history been so frequently impaled. Winston S. Churchill1

This chapter explores the ‘tormenting dilemmas’ facing Christians as they seek to formulate foreign and security policy in a world still disfigured by war, conflict, oppression and injustice. International politics is a realm of tragedy, in which moral and ethical dilemmas abound, and secular or religious schemes for a perpetual peace conflict with the ‘self-help’ logic of a competitive international system. Christianity offers an eschatological vision of the transcendence of state rivalry and the arms race through the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. The problem, however, is what role Christian ethics can play in shaping foreign and security policies in an unredeemed world. This chapter outlines five Christian responses to the ethical and moral dilemmas of political action in an unredeemed world: pietism, the ‘theology of hope’, pacifism, liberal Catholic and Protestant theology and Christian Realism. Arguing that the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr provides the firmest conceptual foundations for an ethical foreign policy in an anarchic international system, the chapter concludes by outlining a non-eschatological ethics drawn from Realist international theory, the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr and the political philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. The Tragedy of International Politics Any discussion of contemporary foreign and security policy must begin with the unhappy observation that war and conflict have been perennial features of the human 1

p. 320.

Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1948),

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condition. The vision of peace with justice has burnt brightly in the hearts of men and women over the millennia, but the recurrence of war has repeatedly mocked these dreams and aspirations. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the prospects for a stable peace are, at best, uncertain and, at worst, illusory: this is the tragedy of international politics.2 Faced with the tragic realities of international politics, many individuals have responded by giving voice to humanity’s deep-seated longing for peace, harmony and cooperation. Western political thought is replete with utopian and reformist schemes for taming war and building a stable peace order. The Christian Just War tradition sought to constrain and ‘civilise’ the conduct of warfare in Medieval Christendom; at the time when the modern states’ system was still in its infancy, Grotius looked to international law as the foundation of an international society of states; the Eighteenth Century ‘Age of Reason’ witnessed a veritable profusion of schemes for perpetual peace, most notably Kant’s advocacy of a foedus pacificum; the nineteenth century saw a number of attempts to establish a Concert of the great powers and to curb the arms race; and in the twentieth century, ambitious proposals for a cooperative international order based on law and institutions were drawn up after both world wars. Whilst Christians were often influential in advocating and supporting these pragmatic schemes for a more cooperative international order, however, the JudeoChristian tradition offers a much more radical solution to the ‘tormenting dilemmas’ that so pre-occupied Churchill. Biblical prophecy embodies a radical eschatology that promises a resolution and transcendence of the tragedy of international politics through the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. The most powerful and poetically moving expression of this radical eschatological can be found in the Book of Isaiah, in which the prophet offers an irenic vision of a world in which, ‘in the days to come’, nations and peoples shall ‘beat their swords into plowshares’ and their ‘spears into pruning hooks’. Isaiah’s irenic vision continues to inspire and unsettle us because of its poetic imagery and because ‘it is totally out of harmony with the reality of our world, yet fully in harmony with what we would like the world to be’.3 Erich Fromm, a leading member of the Frankfurt School who sought to integrate Freudianism and Marxism, wrote that he had been deeply touched by the Jewish messianic traditions of the ‘end of days’ he had grown up with. ‘The vision of universal peace and harmony between nations touched me deeply when I was 12 or 13 years old’.4 We live in a world in which fear, conflict and insecurity are pervasive and yet yearn for a world of harmony, cooperation and trust. The gap between the realities of power and our dreams of cooperative harmony is a reflection of the tragedy of international politics. Isaiah’s glorious vision of the future of Judah and Jerusalem is one which shall come to pass ‘in the days to come’ (‘in the latter days’). In the Old Testament, this phrase tends 2

Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics. Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001). 3 James C. Craigie, Twelve Prophets, vol. 2 (St. Andrews: St. Andrews Press, 1985), p. 32. 4 Quoted in James Bentley, Between Marx and Christ. The Dialogue in GermanSpeaking Europe 1870–1970 (London: Verso, 1982), p. 85.

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to denote ‘an unspecified future time, a prolonged period rather than an actual date, when situations that have remained in place for years, if not for centuries, will be reversed or replaced’.5 It is therefore clearly grounded on the Judeo–Christian eschatological tradition that sees history as a process leading inexorably to a specific end. The vision is thus one of future transformation in an unspecified time to come and not necessarily a call for political action today. It is also a vision of divine realities outside of human history or human possibilities (a theme developed in the writings of Niebuhr). The agency for this eschatological vision is not mankind, but God. In the days to come, ‘the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills’. The vision is thus of the Kingdom of God on earth. This act will be followed by a mass pilgrimage to ‘the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths’. In the latter days, Jerusalem will become the place to worship, thus establishing the Lord God of Israel as the God of the nations. Other gods and other forms of worship will be discarded, and with the spread of the ‘word of the LORD from Jerusalem’, the established structures and procedures of international politics will be transformed. God shall ‘judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples’. As the nations and peoples place themselves under the authority of God, a deep and pervasive peace will spread over the earth: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

This peace will not be a negative peace, the mere absence of war, but will be a positive, perpetual and stable peace. It will be based not on unilateral or even multilateral disarmament, but rather on omnilateral disarmament, covering the whole spectrum of instruments of war. In Micah (4.4), the passage ‘nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’, is followed by the promise that: … they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken.

This deep and lasting peace will make it possible for the humble peasant and the ordinary citizen to produce their crops in a secure environment, in which fear will no longer drive the search for security. This promise of a peaceful and secure world is given by God, using his military title ‘The LORD of hosts’ (‘hosts’ being Angels arrayed for battle).

5

David Prior, The Message of Joel, Micah and Habakkuk (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988), p. 148.

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If the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth will be the final and irrevocable guarantee of a just and durable peace, it is clear from other prophets that the ‘end of days’ will be a time of violence, suffering and pain. Indeed, Joel reverses Isaiah and Micah’s irenic prophecy and calls for the nations to prepare for a holy war by total mobilisation of all: Prepare war, stir up the warriors. Let all the soldiers draw near, let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weakling say, ‘I am a warrior’.

Political Action in an Unredeemed World Despite the promise of a divine peace to come, the problem for Christians remains: how can Christian ethics and biblical prophecy serve as a guide to foreign and security policy in an unredeemed world prior to the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth? Few today would rely on the Bible to provide answers to contemporary international problems such as nuclear proliferation, conflicts in the Middle East or failed states. This was not always the case, however. In our overwhelmingly secular age, it is worth reminding ourselves that there was once a time when Biblical prophecy was widely used to diagnose – and more importantly, prescribe solutions to – the ills of the world. This was mid-seventeenth century England, a time of revolution, social turmoil and civil war. By the late sixteenth century, the translation of the Bible into vernacular English and the invention of the printing press had broken the power of the established Church hierarchy and made possible the widespread study of the Holy Scriptures by previously marginalised social groups such as artisans and women. In an age wracked by acute social and political conflict, these groups and individuals looked to the sacred texts to provide them with concrete solutions to their own immediate problems. Biblical images provided the language with which most people comprehended the world around them. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the Bible had become central to all intellectual life, providing a point of reference not just for religious questions but also political, economic and social issues, as well for discussions of as the arts, literature and science. In the words of the radical separatist Robert Browne in 1590, ‘the word of God doth expressly set down all necessary and general rules of the arts and all learning’.6 The problem, of course, was how to interpret the scriptures. During the Civil Wars which swept the British Isles in the mid-seventeenth century, the Bible was used to justify a range of political actions, from the divine right of kings to regicide and

6

Quoted in Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1993), p. 31.

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radical social egalitarianism.7 However, there was also a strong belief in providence and God’s active intervention in the daily lives of individuals and nations. God’s work was seen as being carried out by human agency. Cromwell himself was probably the first and last British ruler to be widely compared to Moses. Cromwell’s ‘New Model Army’ was seen as an instrument of God’s work, its victories a sign of God’s blessing. Hence the Roundhead admonition, ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, this belief in divine providence became harder to sustain. Which human agency was doing God’s work? How were Biblical prophecies to be correctly interpreted? The result was a weakening of the authority of the Bible as a guide to concrete political action. Passages that served as a radical call for action in the 1640s and 1650s were now taken to refer to the afterlife. Christ’s Kingdom was not to be the work of human agency in the here and now, but was to come through divine intervention at the ‘end of days’. ‘Because the Bible could be all things to all men, a book for all seasons’, Christopher Hill has written, ‘it ultimately lost its usefulness as a guide to political action’.8 As Michael Oakshott has written, the declining utility of prophetic vision as a guide to concrete action arises from the fact that ‘Scripture is an artifact’: It is, in the first place, an arbitrary selection of writings called canonical by the authority that recognised them. And secondly, it is nothing apart from interpretation … Nothing can be more certain than that, if the law of God is revealed in Scripture, it is revealed only in an interpretation of Scripture. And interpretation is a matter of authority; for, whatever determines everything is the decision, whose reasoning shall interpret?9

In the light of the ambiguity that surrounds many Biblical passages and given the absence of a legitimate interpreter of the Holy Scriptures, the question remains: how should we respond to Isaiah’s irenic vision? Does it have relevance to our lives and to the world in which we live? Or is it no more than a beautiful dream and a promise for a time to come in the dim and distant future? Religions, Reinhold Niebbuhr once wrote, fall into two broad categories, the ‘mystical’ and the ‘prophetic’. The former emphasises humility before a transcendent God and is spiritually inwardlooking and pietistic; the latter is out-ward-looking, emphasises the immanence of God, and celebrates the eschatological implications of prophecy.10 The mystical and the prophetic represent ‘ideal types’: in reality, theological responses to Biblical prophecy are much more diverse. In the following section, we shall examine five 7

It is also significant that reference was made primarily to the Old Testament rather than the new. Cromwell himself was often seen as a latter-day Moses leading the ‘chosen people’ – the English-speaking Protestant nation – to the promised land. This point was made by Karl Marx in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte who noted that ‘Cromwell and the English People … borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the Old Testament ... When the bourgeois transformation had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk’. Quoted in Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, p. 40. 8 Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, p. 415. 9 Michael Oakshott, ‘Introduction to Leviathan’, p. 269. 10 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 43.

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broad approaches: pietism, the theology of hope, pacifism, liberal Christianity and Christian realism. Interestingly, these theological positions have their counter-parts in the major schools of International Relations theory. Christians and Political Action ‘Render unto Caesar …’: Pietism and the Separation of Religion and Politics One approach to Biblical prophecy is to argue the vision of a transcendental peace is grounded on an eschatological understanding of history. In Isaiah, the establishment of the Lord’s house in the ‘highest of the mountains’ in the ‘days to come’ is the catalyst for complete and universal disarmament. God will ‘judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples’, and consequently ‘they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks’. The point of this argument is that the agency for this radical transformation in international politics is seen to be spiritual not human. In theological terms, this has given rise to the belief that the Kingdom of God is a transcendent ideal outside of human history.11 The statement attributed to Jesus, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18.36) does not mean that Christians should abandon politics altogether, but it does suggest that concrete political programmes should not be based on Biblical prophecies about the coming of the Kingdom of God.12 The German Protestant theologian Karl Barth, for example, refused to identify the work of God with the work of men. Political and social evils, he maintained, were the necessary product of man’s sinful nature and the human effort to eradicate them was therefore futile.13 God himself, not men, would inaugurate his Kingdom. This did not, however, mean that Christians should not espouse a social programme or even endorse the socialist project.14 The eschatological character of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, coupled with the conviction that the agency for mankind’s redemption is spiritual not human, can lead to the conclusion that religion and politics should be separate. The well-known injunction of Jesus to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ implicitly suggests a necessary

11

See Michael Cartwright, ‘Biblical Argument in International Ethics’, in Nardin and Mapel, (eds), Traditions of International Ethics, pp. 270–96 (p. 287). 12 Bentley, Between Marx and Christ, p. 162. 13 ‘Asceticism and movements of reform have their place as parables and as representations, but in themselves they are of no value. In no sense can they ever be even a first step towards the Kingdom of Heaven. There is but one good and one evil, one pure and one impure. Before God everything is impure; and therefore nothing is especially impure’. Karl Barth quoted in Robin Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 44. 14 Quoted in E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, second edition (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan), p. 94. Niebuhr commented that Barthe’s theology was ‘too “eschatological” and too transcendent to offer any guidance for the discriminating choices that political responsibility calls us to’. Quoted in Bentley, Between Marx and Christ, p. 79.

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separation between the religious and the moral on the one hand and the political on the other. Kaiser Wilhelm II expressed this view in his letter to a ‘troublesome priest’, Adolf Stöcker, in 1896: ‘Pastors should concern themselves with the souls of their parishioners, should promote charity, and should keep out of politics’.15 British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin expressed the same sentiment in 1926 when he asked a group of bishops who were attempting to mediate a coal strike whether they would like it if the Iron and Steel Federation attempted a revision of the Athanasian Creed.16 Niebuhr noted that Martin Luther ‘turned on the peasants of his day in holy horror when they attempted to transmute the “spiritual” kingdom into an “earthly” one by suggesting that the principles of the gospel had social significance’.17 The view of the nineteenth-century liberal German pastor who argued that ‘We do not consult Jesus when we are concerned with things which belong to the domain of the construction of the state and political economy’18 finds its contemporary echo in the words of Alaistair Campbell (Tony Blair’s former spin doctor) who told reporters that New Labour didn’t ‘do God’.19 A similar separation of politics and religion was made by Friedrich Naumann, an influential German liberal nationalist. He consciously broke with the Christian socialist beliefs of his youth and adopted a more hard-nosed morality which separated Christ and Christian teachings from the realm of politics altogether. ‘One cannot wish to construct the whole of human development on sympathy and brotherly love. There are things that elude the grasp of the Christian religion. The world remains the world and power comes before compassion’. Naumann became a passionate enthusiast for the German navy, a position he justified in terms of his citizenship of the German state rather than his Christian values. Although Christians individually were called on to love their enemies, he argued, ‘the struggle for existence has taught the nations to be armour-plated beasts’.20 A more principled pietism was developed around the same time by the influential Protestant theologian of Wilhelmine Germany, Adolf Harnack. He argued strongly that the Christian gospels were essentially non-political. The gospel of Jesus was: the joyous news to the poor and with them to the peaceable, the meek, and those who are pure in heart; it is the news that the kingdom of God is near, that his Kingdom will soothe the sorrows of the distressed, bring justice and establish their childhood in God in addition to giving all good things.

15

Quoted in Bentley, Between Marx and Christ, p. 28. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, p. 105. 17 Niebuhr quoted by Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 94. 18 Quoted by Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 94. 19 Quoted in ‘Abortion is suddenly an issue in British Election’, International Herald Tribune, 24 March 2005. On the relationship between Tony Blair’s political and religious convictions, see Antony Seldon, Blair (London: Simon and Schuster, 2004), pp. 515–32. Seldon notes that few British Prime Ministers ‘have been so influenced by their faith’ and that his ‘relationship with God is more important than any other’ (515). 20 Quoted in Bentley, Between Marx and Christ, p. 22. 16

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The gospel brought with it a new order of life ‘above the world and politics’.21 The problem with such attempts to separate politics and religion, as E.H. Carr noted, was that ‘it is not ultimately satisfying’. The attempt ‘to keep God and Caesar in watertight compartments’, he argued, ‘runs too much athwart the deep-seated desire of the human mind to reduce its view of the world to some kind of moral order’.22 The view that religious belief is a private matter that is best left out of the political arena runs up against the view that religious conviction should inform an individual’s behaviour towards his fellow human beings. This in turn suggests that religious understandings of morality will shape one’s approach to the dilemmas and choices of political life, a view exemplified in the ‘theology of hope’. The ‘Theology of Hope’ A second response would be one inspired by a ‘theology of hope’, which has been described as ‘one of the most fruitful intellectual concepts of the twentieth century’.23 The ‘theology of hope’ involves the conviction that faith in the future kingdom of God must manifest itself in concrete political and social action in the present. This view echoes the spirit of mid-seventeeth-century England in its belief that the Bible prescribes clear courses of action to do God’s work in the here and now. It is a belief that sees human agency as the instrument of God’s will to redeem the world and bring about His Kingdom on earth. In some versions, this involves prefiguring the Kingdom of God on earth by using political action and the force of moral example to bring about Christian-Judeo teachings such as ‘Thou shalt not kill’. The ‘theology of hope’ emerged in its modern version as a response to the social question generated by industrial capitalism. In some countries, this gave birth to a reformist Christian socialism; in others, to a socially-orientated ‘Christian democracy’. In Germany, however, as James Bentley has argued at length, it generated a distinctive intellectual cross-fertilisation between Christians and Marxists. It is this German dialogue between the two traditions that gave rise to an eschatological vision of Christianity that saw the poor and oppressed as the instruments of God’s will. Jürgen Moltman for example, paraphrasing Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerback, articulated this perspective in the following formulation: ‘The theologian is not concerned merely to supply a different interpretation of the world, of human history and of human nature, but to transform them in expectation of a divine transformation’. For Moltman, reconciliation with God did not involve merely individual and personal salvation, but ‘the realisation of the eschatological hope of justice, the humanising of man, the socialising of humanity, peace for all creation’.24

21 22 23 24

Quoted in Bentley, Between Marx and Christ, p. 37. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 94–5. Bentley, Between Marx and Christ, p. 59. Quoted in Bentley, Between Marx and Christ, p. 59.

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Pacifism At its most radical, the Christian Gospels can be seen implying a pacifist response to war and armed conflict: this is the interpretation of the Historic Peace Churches, including the Quakers. There had been individual pacifists before them, but the Quakers, or Society of Friends, were the first organised body to proclaim pacifism and abstention from politics as a principle.25 This rejection of the ‘carnal sword’ came about primarily as a reaction to the 1660 Restoration, and was accompanied by a rejection of politics and a retreat into nonconformist pietism and dissent. But it is important to note that many of the early Quakers and Puritans advocated military force not only to overthrow the Monarchy and advance the protestant cause at home, but also as an instrument for intervention to support protestants abroad. Radical Puritans called on Cromwell to lead his victorious armies abroad to defeat the Antichrist (the Pope), to burn Rome and to liberate Palestine from the Turks for the Jews.26 The New Model Army, it was claimed, was ‘bound by the law of God … to aid the subjects of other princes that are either persecuted for true religion or oppressed under tyranny’.27 The basis of a principled pacifism is the belief that in an unredeemed world, all political options involve doing evil to a greater or lesser sense.28 Because of original sin, it is impossible to achieve goodness by human agency. The only agency to achieve the Kingdom of God is spiritual, not human. Rather than becoming implicit in political choices in ‘Babylon’, the duty of Christians is to focus on spiritual redemption and await the coming of God’s Kingdom by divine intervention.29 Despite their very different attitudes to the use of military force, the Historic Peace Churches and liberation theology share one attribute in common: this is the belief that the scriptures call for radical and life-changing responses which generate a new way of being. The case of the Quakers illustrates this: either revolutionary politics and military intervention abroad, or a renunciation of politics and pacifism. Either way, what both positions share is a rejection of the status quo and existing institutions and practices. Reinhold Niebuhr captured this duality well in this observation that ‘Religion draws the bow of life so taut that it either snaps the string (defeatism) or overshoots the mark (fanaticism and asceticism)’.30 In this sense, Quaker pacifism and Christian Liberation Theology share a common attribute: despite their very different approaches to the use of coercion and force, both involve a rejection – either by defeatism or fanaticism and asceticism – of what they regard as an unjust, 25

Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, p. 422. Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, pp. 302–3, 310–11. 27 Quoted in Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, p. 303. See also p. 313 for a justification of the conquest of the Spanish West Indies by Cromwell’s navy in terms of ‘avenging the blood … of the poor Indian … so unjustly, so cruelly and so often shed by the hands of the Spaniards … All great and extraordinary wrongs done to particular persons ought to be considered in a manner done to all the rest of the human race’. 28 See Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, p. 93. 29 On the metaphor of ‘Babylon’, see Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, p. 163. 30 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 47. 26

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violent and unredeemed world. Both deny the legitimacy of the existing status quo and both seek to overcome it by denying its accepted institutions and practices. This way of thinking has its corollary in both Peace Studies and Critical International Relations theory. In Robert Cox’s terms, it amounts to a rejection of ‘problem-solving theory’ in favour of ‘critical theory’. Ken Booth’s notion of ‘security as emancipation’ is a prime example of this pattern of thought. Yet this notion of seeking to change reality and not to work within the parameters of the status quo is also found in more radical versions of liberalism. Indeed, critical theory shares much more in common with neo-conservatism than either school of thought would care to admit. Both seek to use radical means to transform the status quo. Liberal Catholic and Protestant Theology If both pacifism and liberation theology represent radical responses to Biblical prophecy, the mainstream Catholic and Protestant churches have responded in a much more moderate, ‘reformist’ manner. The liberal Christian perspective seeks reform not revolution, gradual solutions rather than radical manifestos promising dramatic change. It seeks to ameliorate injustice through piecemeal social engineering, rather than the draconian measures to root out and eradicate the perceived causes of injustice. This ‘Constantinian’ theology, as José Miguez Bonino characterises liberal Catholicism, suggests in effect that ‘whenever an alternative emerges, the Christian ought to work for the best possible solution, the most just and generous one, short of endangering the existing order’.31 In terms of international politics, mainstream liberal Christianity identifies with policies that seek to strengthen the UN system and international law, and to work for arms controls and gradual disarmament. Christian churches are often active in efforts to mediate international conflicts and to facilitate dialogue between conflicting parties. Above all, liberal Christian perspectives seek to strengthen the influence of normative and ethical principles in international politics and to constrain the operation of Realpolitik. This approach rests on the implicit assumption that there are no fundamental or ineluctable causes of conflict in the international system: consequently, peace and cooperation are possible if states act reasonably and try to accommodate the interests and identities of others. Mainstream liberal Christianity’s approach to issues of war and peace is epitomised by the tradition of ‘Just War’ thinking. Rather than rejecting war per se, as do the Historic Peace Churches, liberal Catholicism and Protestantism have developed a set of principles governing the use of force. These cover both Jus ad bellum, or just recourse to war, and Jus in bello, or just conduct of war. In Niebuhr’s view, Liberal Christianity embodies much of the ‘evolutionary optimism of the eighteenth and nineteenth century’, and has resulted in a ‘religious idealism … saturated with sentimentality’. He was critical of the liberal-idealist view that social justice could be achieved by the religiously-inspired philanthropy of the wealthy, or that peace could be brought about by international organisations and agreements – which in his time meant the League of Nations and the Kellogg 31

Quoted in Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, p. 213.

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Pact. ‘In spite of the disillusionment of the World War’, he argued, ‘the average liberal Protestant Christian is still convinced that the kingdom of God is gradually approaching, that the League of Nations is it partial fulfilment and the Kellogg pact its covenant …’. Liberal Protestantism, Niebuhr maintained, was ‘on the whole, the religion of the privileged classes of Western civilisation’, and its failure to recognise and acknowledge the ‘cruelties of economic and political life’ left it with a taint of hypocrisy and sentimentality. It was therefore not surprising, Niebuhr argued, that liberal Protestantism’s ‘espousal of the ideal of love, in a civilisation reeking with social injustice, should be cynically judged and convicted of hypocrisy by those in whom bitter social experiences destroy the sentimentalities and illusions of the comfortable’.32 Given his disillusionment with liberal Christianity, Niebuhr devoted his life’s work to developing and articulating a more ‘realist’ interpretation of scripture. Christian Realism Christian Realism emerged from the reflections of Protestant theologians in the US on the social forces that shape and limit human possibilities, and on the gap between the Biblical vision of God’s Kingdom and the realities of modern industrial society. It draws on, and seeks to integrate, three distinct sorts of ‘realist’ thinking: political realism, moral realism and theological realism. Although it did not originate with him, Christian Realism has come to be associated almost exclusively with the work of Reinhold Niebuhr.33 Christian realism can be seen as an attempt to address the tension between good and evil in the world, between the love of God and original sin. Unlike either the Historic Peace Churches or Liberation Theology, it does not seek to escape from the complex demands of collective life by either pietism or fanaticism, but rather to engage with the moral and ethical dilemmas of an unredeemed world. It regards the human condition as essentially tragic, and seeks to engage with the dimensions of tragedy. It is also an attempt to address the tension between the individual moral codes of Christianity and the dynamics of social life. It recognises the limits of purely moral solutions to political problems, and argues that Christian behaviour must take into account not just religious norms and ideals, but the broader social, economic and political factors that offer resistance to the implementation of the religious imperative of altruistic love (agape). Above all, it is about how to live in the time before ‘the end of days’, in other words, before the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. A central plank of Christian Realism is the argument that the ethics of the Gospel cannot provide a social ethics for human collectivities such as classes or nations:34

32

Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 52. Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, pp. 1–31, 241. 34 In doing so, Christian Realism draws heavily on the teachings of Martin Luther: ‘Hence a man who would venture to govern an entire country or the world with the Gospel would be like a shepherd who should place in one fold wolves, lions, eagles and sheep together and let them freely mingle with one another and say, Help yourselves, and be good and peaceful among yourselves; the fold is open, there is plenty of food; have no fear of dogs or clubs. The sheep, forsooth, would keep the peace and would allow themselves to be fed and governed 33

20

British Foreign Policy and the Anglican Church The ethic of Jesus does not deal at all with the immediate moral problem of every human life – the problem of arranging some kind of armistice between various contending factions and forces. It has nothing to say about the relativities of politics and economics, nor of the necessary balances of power which exist and must exist in even the most intimate social relationships.35

‘The gospel’, Niebuhr argued, ‘is something more than the law of love. The gospel deals with the fact that men violate the law of love. The gospel presents Christ as the pledge and revelation of God’s mercy which finds man in his rebellion and overcomes his sin’.36 Contrasting the classical Reformation emphasis on the sinfulness of humanity with the ‘Renaissance faith in man’, Niebuhr argued that: The New Testament does not … envisage a simple triumph of good over evil in history. It sees human history involved in the contradictions of sin to the end. That is why it sees no simple resolution of the problem of history. It believes that the Kingdom of God will resolve the contradictions of history; but for it the Kingdom of God is no simple historical possibility. The grace of God for man and the Kingdom of God for history are both divine realities and not human possibilities.37

The significance of this is that Niebuhr locates the Kingdom of God as a transcendent ideal outside human history.38 Niebuhr was particularly concerned to reject idealist claims that the Christian Church should be pacifist. He argued forcefully that ‘there is not the slightest support in Scripture for this doctrine of non-violence’.39 He also argued that conflict was inevitable in the world given human nature and original sin. Pacifists, he argued, do not seem to realise that ‘sin introduces an element of conflict into the world and that even the most loving relations are not free of it’.40 He argued that ‘The injunction “resist not evil” is only part and parcel of a total ethic which we violate not only in war-time, but every day of our lives, and that over conflict is but a final and vivid revelation of the character of human experience’.41 Niebuhr’s towering intellectual achievement was to confront the realities of political life and the dilemmas facing states in an anarchical international system. He recognised that powerful nations, at times, could ‘prevent anarchy by effective imperialism’, but the peace so gained ‘is always an uneasy and an unjust one’. Powerful nations could also ‘organise a crude society of nations’, in the same way that ‘powerful classes organise a nation’, but in each case, ‘the peace is a tentative one in peace, but they would not live long; nor would any beast keep from molesting another’. Luther quoted in Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, pp. 165–6. 35 Niebuhr quoted in Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, p. 6. 36 Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist’, in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr. Selected Essays and Addresses, edited by Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 102–19 (p. 111). 37 Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist’, p. 113. 38 Cartwright, in Nardin and Mapel (eds), Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 287. 39 Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist’, p. 107. 40 Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist’, p. 109. 41 Niebuhr, ‘Why the Christian Church is not Pacifist’, p. 108.

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because it is unjust’. The conclusion he drew from this analysis was bleak: society, he argued, ‘is in a perpetual state of war’ and no amount of ‘moral goodwill’ or rational ‘social intelligence’ could bring about peace with justice.42 Consequently: … it is safe to hazard the prophecy that the dream of perpetual peace and brotherhood for human society is one which will never be fully realised. It is a vision prompted by the conscience and insight of individual man, but incapable of fulfilment by collective man. It is like all true religious visions, possible of approximation but not of realisation in actual history.43

The Ethics of Christian Realism Niebuhr’s pessimistic conclusions about the prospects for a perpetual peace might be seen as providing a justification for an amoral, if not immoral, Realpolitik. Nothing could be further from Niebuhr’s aim, however. Christian Realism does not suggest that moral imperatives have no place in international politics; rather, it seeks to identify the constraints on political action, and therefore the scope for moral and ethical choices. Christian Realism eschewes idealist reflections on a utopian world order in preference for an examination of ‘the extent to which moral behaviour is heavily constrained by the dynamics of political life’.44 Acting effectively requires knowledge of existing circumstances together with the power to act. A clear understanding of the nature of international politics is thus a necessary precondition for making informed moral choices between alternative courses of action. Christian Realism seeks to base ethical action on a clear understanding of the constraints of political, economic and social structures in an unredeemed world. From this starting-point, a Christian realist approach to moral and ethical behaviour can be developed. Morality involves choice. Where there is no choice, where behaviour is predetermined, there can be no morality. To make moral decisions, one must have choices between alternative courses of action. The moral life, Oakshott argues, ‘appears only when human behaviour is free from natural necessity; that is, when there are alternatives in human conduct’.45 In international politics, the range of alternatives is constrained by the structure of the international system. ‘Men make their own history’, Marx famously argued in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, ‘but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’.46 Much the same can be said for the state as an international actor, which makes its own history under circumstances directly 42

Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 14. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 16. 44 Andrew Hurrell, ‘Norms and Ethics in International Relations’, in Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse and Beth Simmons (eds), Handbook of International Relations (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 137–54 (p. 137). 45 Michael Oakshott, ‘The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 295–350 (p. 295). 46 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), p. 96. 43

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encountered, given and transmitted from the past’. In this sense, states are ‘situated actors’ located within distinct structural contexts that define the range of potential strategies and opportunities available to them.47 Foreign policy options are either enabled or constrained by the ‘strategic selectivity of structure’ which thereby ‘shapes and shoves’ – but do not determine – state behaviour. Anarchy and the Tragedy of International Politics The task of political analysis is to identify the ‘parameters of the possible’, i.e., the structural constraints of the international system which ‘shape and shove’ state behaviour. Within the discipline of International Relations, Realists argue that it is difficult, if not nigh on impossible, to transcend the structural limits of anarchy. The only conceivable means of achieving this is through one state emerging as a global hegemon – a development highly improbable because of what John Mearsheimer terms the ‘stopping power of water’48 – and one which, as Kenneth Waltz has argued, would be a recipe for global civil war were it to arise.49 Realists thus assume that states will remain the primary actors in the international system for the foreseeable future and that, consequently, anarchy not hierarchy will remain the dominant ordering principle of the international system. Anarchy and the unequal distribution of power in the international system place constraints on projects to achieve perpetual peace, international harmony and institutionalised cooperation. ‘To achieve their objectives and maintain their security, units in a condition of anarchy – be they people, corporations, states or whatever – must rely on the means they can generate and the arrangements they can make for themselves’.50 Because international politics is a self-help realm, Realists remain sceptical about liberalidealist claims that international organisations, international law or democratic governments can provide durable and dependent foundations for a stable peace order, regardless of the structural distribution of power. Nonetheless, realist scepticism about the prospects for transcending the structural constraints of a self-help system is not incompatible with a political and ethical commitment to limiting aggression, conflict and injustice. Realists are certainly sceptical about ambitious projects for large-scale social and political engineering and of ‘rationalist’ schemes to establish utopian peace orders designed without reference to the structural dynamics of the international system.51 They are also 47

The concepts of ‘situated actors’ and the ‘strategic selectivity of structure’ are taken from critical realism. See Colin Hay, Political Analysis: A Critical Introduction (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 116–17, 122–6. 48 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 44. 49 ‘The prospect of world government would be an invitation to prepare for world civil war’. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 112. 50 Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 111. 51 A prime example is the ‘political reformers of the time of Louis XIV’, who invented rational plans for European peace based on pure intelligence but no practical understanding of diplomacy and statecraft. Michael Oakshott, ‘Rational Conduct’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 99–131 (p. 113).

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painfully aware of the often tragic nature of international politics, and of the danger that noble intentions can generate unintended outcomes.52 They are not therefore favourably disposed towards radical political programmes based on abstract ideals such as ‘emancipation’, cosmopolitan order or perfect justice. As Reinhold Niebuhr observed, the concern of ‘collective man’ cannot be ‘the creation of an ideal society in which there will be uncoerced and perfect peace and justice, but a society in which there will be enough justice, and in which coercion will be sufficiently non-violent to prevent his common enterprise from issuing into complete disaster’.53 ‘Policy’, in Michael Oakshott’s words, ‘will not the imagination of some new sort of society, or the transformation of an existing society so as to make it correspond with an abstract ideal; it will be the perception of what needs doing now in order to realize more fully the intimations of our existing society’.54 Whilst the anarchic nature of international politics places constraints on utopian schemes to transcend the existing global order and ‘domesticate’ international relations, this does not absolve statesmen and women from weighing ethical issues in the balance when they consider alternative policy options, however constrained. Realists draw attention to the enduring constraints of structure on the behaviour of states. But structures ‘shape and shove’, they do not determine behaviour and outcomes – not only, Waltz argues, because ‘unit-level and structural causes interact, but also because the shaping and shoving of structures may be successfully resisted’. ‘With skill and determination’, he continues, ‘structural constraints can sometimes be countered’.55 As ‘situated actors’, states are constrained by structural pressures, but their behaviour is not determined mechanically by systemic forces. Because they can chose between alternative courses of action, states can still make moral choices. In this light, Niebuhr’s admonitions concerning the implications of political realism for individual moral behaviour have resonance for states’ ethical choices: ‘No political realism which emphasises the inevitability and necessity of a social struggle, can absolve individuals of the obligation to check their own egoism, to comprehend the interests of others and thus to enlarge the areas of cooperation’.56

52 ‘How often have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended up by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired?’. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, brief edition, revised by Kenneth Thompson (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 6. 53 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 16. 54 Oakshott, ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 384–406 (p. 397). 55 Kenneth Waltz, ‘Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to my Critics’, in Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 322–46 (pp. 343–4). 56 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 180.

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Non-Teleological Ethics and the Idioms of Moral Conduct Within the discipline of International Relations, liberals are optimistic about the inevitability of progress; critical theorists, as heirs to the secular eschatology of Marxism, believe in the ‘utopian realism’ of ‘emancipation’. Whether in its more moderate ‘English school’ guise, or in the more radical form of critical theory, liberalidealists share a common belief that moral behaviour is associated with ‘rationalist’ politics and teleological political action.57 Realist ethics, by contrast, are non-teleological in character; realists seek to examine ‘the extent to which moral behaviour is heavily constrained by the dynamics of political life’, rather than musing on abstract schemes for a ‘just world order’. Given the assumption that anarchy will remain the dominant ordering principle of international politics and that tragedy is inherent in the structure of the international system, a realist ethics cannot be based on a conception of moral behaviour that consists in working to achieve a particular telos (a ‘single substantive purpose’) – whether rationally determined or revealed by religious prophecy.58 Realists follow Michael Oakshott in rejecting ‘the illusion that in politics there is anywhere a safe harbour, a destination to be reached or even a detectable strand of progress’.59 This non-teleological ethics implies a distinctive approach to statecraft: one that seeks to navigate the shifting tides of international politics, conscious of the ebb and flow of systemic forces, rather than seeking to transcend the tragic dilemmas of a self-help realm through the establishment of a world government or a cosmopolitan political order: In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.60

What is the basis of morality in this non-eschatological and non-teleological understanding of international politics? Here Michael Oakshott’s reading of Hobbes is apposite. Oakshott argues that there are three ‘idioms of moral conduct’: a morality of communal ties; the morality of the common good; and the morality of individuality. The third idiom of moral conduct is the one most appropriate to a Realist ethics – a ‘morality of individuality’. This involves give and take, mutual accommodation and a pursuit of ‘enlightened’ self-interest. ‘In general’, Oakshott argues, ‘moral activity may be said to be the observation of a balance 57

See for example, Mervyn Frost, ‘Tragedy, Ethics and International Relations’, International Relations, vol. 17, no. 4 (2003), pp. 477–95. 58 Oakshott, ‘Logos and Telos’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 351–60 (p. 358). Oakshott defines ‘rational’ activity as ‘behaviour in which an independently premeditated end is pursued and which is determined solely by that end’; ‘Rational Choice’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 99–131 (p. 102). 59 Michael Oakshott, ‘Political Education’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 43–69 (p. 66). 60 Michael Oakshott, ‘Political Education’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 43–69 (p. 60).

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of accommodation between the demands of desiring selves each recognised by the others to be an end and not a mere slave of somebody else’s desires’.61 It corresponds to Max Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’, which specifies that one should consider the consequences of one’s actions for others and behave accordingly.62 In Oakshott’s ‘morality of individuality’, the agents are individual human beings, but the moral sentiments expressed apply equally well to international politics where the primary actors are states;63 in the morality of individuality, he argues: human beings are recognised … as separate and sovereign individuals, associated with one another, not in the pursuit of a single common enterprise, but in an enterprise of give and take, and accommodating themselves to one another as best they can: it is the morality of self and other selves. Here individual choice is pre-eminent and a great part of happiness is connected with its exercise. Moral conduct is recognised as consisting in determinate relationships between these individuals, and the conduct understood to be characteristic of human beings. Morality is the art of mutual accommodation.64

A ‘morality of individuality’, applied to the realm of international politics, thus provides the basis for a non-teleological ethics characterised by three principles: prudence, scepticism and reciprocity. Christian Realist ethics are prudent in that they are circumspect and modest; they seek not perfection but the lesser evil, the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, ‘present laughter to utopian bliss’.65 Prudence entails not only restraining those of evil intent, but also those who intend only good, yet whose pursuit of justice and the summum bonum threatens to destroy what order, security and justice does exist in the international system.66 Realist prudence thus seeks to guard against the zealous pursuit of utopian visions at the expense of order and security. This prudence gives rise to scepticism about the human capacity 61

Oakshott, ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 488–542 (p. 502). 62 In his lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation’, Max Weber distinguished between an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ and an ‘ethic of responsibility’. The former linked ethical behaviour to a distinctive teleos, and believed that if ‘an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor’s eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God’s will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil’. An ethic of responsibility involved the consideration ‘of precisely the average deficiencies of people’ and an unwillingness to burden others with the results of their actions as far as they could be foreseen. Quoted in Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Transatlantic Agenda: Vision and Counter-Vision’, Survival, vol. 47, no. 4 (Winter 2005–2006), pp. 19–38 (p. 22). 63 Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 140, 226. 64 Oakshott, ‘The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 295–350 (p. 297). 65 Oakshott, ‘On Being Conservative’, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, pp. 407–37 (p. 408). 66 ‘There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action. Realism, then, considers prudence – the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions – to be the supreme virtue in politics. Ethics in the abstract judges action by its conformity with the moral law; political ethics judges action by its political consequences’. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, p. 12.

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to achieve universal peace or perfect justice through political action.67 Christian Realists are sceptical about the possibilities of, and potential for, political action to produce the ‘good life’ in an unredeemed world, and sceptical about the prospects for progress in the human condition, either through scientific and technological innovation, economic interdependence or ‘rational’ political action. For Christian Realists, politics more often than not involves choosing between the lesser of two evils.68 Finally, realist ethics are based on reciprocity in that they call for compromise, restraint, mutual accommodation and ‘give and take’ between sovereign political communities, each with their own vision of the summum bonum. This conception of international politics as an arena for competitive interest-based politics accords with Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’.69 By emphasising the importance of reciprocity, statesmen and women ‘may save themselves from the temptation to believe that they have a special commission for the reform or punishment of a recalcitrant world’.70 Conclusion This chapter has argued that the Christian Realist tradition provides firm ethical and moral foundations for addressing the dilemmas facing British foreign policy in the early twenty-first century. Contrary to received opinion, realism does indeed provide firm foundations for ethical thinking about international politics. It is not, as its critics allege, amoral or immoral. Liberals imply that an ethical foreign policy must involve a commitment to strengthening international society, the rule of law and multilateral institutions; critical theorists maintain that an ethical approach involves seeking to transcend international anarchy and achieve security through ‘emancipation’; cosmopolitan theorists identify ethical action with the pursuit of a cosmopolitan global order. All three variants of liberal-idealism associate ethical behaviour with teleological and ‘rationalist’ politics, and hold to a ‘morality of the common good’ and an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’. Realist ethics, on the other hand, are based on a ‘morality of individuality’, not a morality of communal ties or of the common good. They incorporate an ‘ethics of responsibility’ and are characterised by prudence, scepticism and reciprocity.71

67

Michael Loriaux, ‘Realism and Reconciliation: France, Germany, and the European Union’, in Ethan Kapstein and Michael Mastanduno (eds), Unipolar Politics: Realism and State Strategies After the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 354–84 (pp. 375–9). 68 ‘We are men, not God; we are responsible for making choices between greater and lesser evils, even when our Christian faith, illuminating the human scene, makes it quite apparent that there is no pure good in history; and probably no pure evil either. The fate of civilisations may depend on these choices’. Niebuhr quoted in Robin Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, p. 73. 69 Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Europe After Napoleon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), pp. 144–5. 70 David Clinton, The Two Faces of National Interest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994) p. 258. 71 Lawrence Freedman notes that the pragmatic approach embodied in Weber’s ‘ethic of responsibility’, which embodies ‘a concern for the foreseeable consequences of actions,

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Christian Realists therefore recognise that ethical behaviour will always be constrained by the ‘strategic selectivity of structure’ and that there is no easy escape from Churchill’s ‘tormenting dilemmas upon which mankind has throughout its history been so frequently impaled’. ‘Politics’, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, ‘will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises’.72 The role of the moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to act as the ‘regulative principles’ of moral and political choice.73 Although, for the most part, they cannot be met in practice, they establish the parameters of ethical behaviour and, more importantly, pull the choices in certain directions. Prophetic injunction can thus serve to ‘shape and shove’ international outcomes. ‘The prophetic stance’, Glenn Tinder has written, ‘presupposes a disposition to attack concrete, visible injustices. To pursue the ideal of perfect justice is to ignore our fallenness; but to attack injustices in the world around us – injustices we must either attack or tacitly accept – is essential to the integrity of prophetic hope’.74 Biblical prophecy, epitomised by Isaiah’s irenic vision, is thus an injunction to work for peace and justice in an unredeemed world. As Niebuhr observes, it is ‘like all true religious visions possible of approximation but not of realisation in actual history’. For some time to come, therefore, the concern of ‘collective man’ cannot be ‘the creation of an ideal society in which there will be uncoerced and perfect peace and justice, but a society in which there will be enough justice and in which coercion will be sufficiently non-violent to prevent his common enterprise from issuing into complete disaster’.75 Niebuhr, however, leaves us with one further paradox: in order to mobilise the energy and enthusiasm necessary to overcome entrenched vested interests and achieve the desired reforms that can approximate the prophetic vision, it is necessary to nurture and encourage a ‘sublime madness in the soul’ that only an illusory belief in perfect justice and universal brotherhood can ignite. ‘Nothing but such madness will do battle with malignant power and “spiritual wickedness in high places”’. But such sublime madness generated by an illusion can result in ‘terrible fanaticisms’.76 This is the paradox with which Niebuhr leaves us, a paradox with no obvious resolution and which underscores the enduring tragedy of the human condition.

represents the best traditions of statecraft’. Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Transatlantic Agenda: Vision and Counter-Vision’, Survival, p. 22. 72 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 5. 73 See Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, p. 26. 74 Glenn Tinder, quoted in Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism, pp. 167–8. 75 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 16. 76 Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 181.

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PART 2 The Military Instrument

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Chapter 3

The Continuing, Crucial Relevance of Just War Criteria Richard Harries

The phrase ‘Just War criteria’ is unfortunate and gives rise to understandable antagonism in those who see war as the worst of all possible evils. In fact, what it is trying to suggest is that in a tragic world war may sometimes be a tragic necessity as the least bad of possible courses of action. It is to be sharply contrasted with a crusade mentality that works on the assumption that one side is fighting God’s enemies on behalf of God. Those who properly understand the spirit of Just War thinking will not think like that. Reinhold Niebuhr captured that spirit very well in the prayers he wrote during World War II. They lacked any sense of self-righteousness and expressed a consciousness that though evil had to be fought evil was not confined to one side. For example: We pray for the victims of tyranny, that they may resist oppression with courage. We pray for wicked and cruel men, whose arrogance reveals to us what the sin of our own hearts is like when it has conceived and brought forth its final fruit.1

The Duke of Wellington also understood that tradition when he remarked after the Battle of Waterloo that there is only one thing sadder than winning a battle and that is losing it. However, often misunderstood or misused, the criteria remain of crucial, continuing relevance. For, unless one is an absolute pacifist, judging that war under all circumstances is wrong, we all have to make judgements about particular wars. We say that some are morally justified and others not. The criteria on the basis of which we make that judgement will, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, be Just War criteria. We will be like Monsieur Jourdin in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme who suddenly realised he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. This crucial, continuing relevance has received striking vindication in the recent and authoritative UN document, The High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. Whilst continuing to affirm the right of national self-defence under article 51, it argued that other uses of military force need to be authorised by the Security Council and that the Council must always take into account at least the following basic criteria of legitimacy: seriousness of threat, proper purpose, last resort,

1

Quoted in Richard Harries, Praying Round the Clock (Mowbray 1983), p. 96.

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proportional means and balance of consequences.2 These, in only slightly different terminology, are the traditional criteria of Just War thinking. At the time of the 2003 Iraq war, the American Roman Catholic George Weigel fiercely criticised certain church statements for what he considered their wrongful appropriation of the tradition, one which, he argued, was primarily there for those who are responsible for a nation’s security.3 It is indeed true that those who bear office have the awesome responsibility of making decisions about the use of military force and sometimes they will be possession of facts not publicly available. Nevertheless, the Christian churches have a clear responsibility to draw attention to the criteria and urge that they be taken fully into account. Moreover, it is also right that in appropriate ways the church expresses a judgement about whether or not those criteria have been met. For George Weigel to claim that ‘There is a charism of political discernment that is unique to the vocation of public service’ is, as Rowan Williams has pointed out ‘A startling theological novelty’.4 Those called to public office may indeed have a vocation to serve in that way and they can certainly pray for the grace, or charism of the spirit in order to have the gift of discernment, but this is in no way guaranteed by the calling itself. The ‘Just War’ tradition falls into two main parts, the moral considerations that have to be taken into account before a military action is launched in the first place and secondly, the moral conduct of the action once it has been initiated. The principle criteria for the second part, the principles of proportion and discrimination, were the key ones that needed to be considered at the time of the nuclear stand off during the Cold War.5 These remain of the utmost significance, nevertheless in this essay it is only part one which is being considered, because it has been these criteria which were relevant when considering the two recent wars against Saddam Hussein and the military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The first criterion that has to be considered is that of lawful authority. In Christian tradition, this is the highest appropriate authority. During the Middle Ages it meant that war between two local princes could not be regarded as legitimate, because there was a higher authority, the emperor to whom appeal could be made. Over the last two centuries in Europe it is the nation state that has reigned supreme, and each nation has had to be judge and jury in its own cause about the moral legitimacy of war. Since World War II however, there has been the United Nations with its growing authority, at least in theory if not always in practice. If we take seriously the rationale behind traditional Christian thinking on this criterion, it is to the UN we must look for final legitimacy. George Weigel has written about the Security Council of the UN: What kind of moral logic is it to claim that the US government must assuage the interests of the French foreign ministry and the strategic aims of the repressive Chinese government – both of which are in full play in the Security Council – in order to gain international 2

Report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, a Report to the UN General Assembly (New York, December 2004), p. 57. 3 George Weigel, ‘Moral Clarity in a Time of War’, Ethics and Public Policy Center, p. 10. 4 Rowan Williams, ‘Just War Revisited’, lecture to the Royal Institute for International Affairs, Chatham House, p. 8. 5 Richard Harries, ‘Application of Just War Criteria in the Period 1959–89’, in Richard Sorabji and David Rodin (eds), The Ethics of War (Ashgate 2006), chapter 12.

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moral authority for the war against terrorism and the defence of world order against outlaw states with weapons of mass destruction?6

But no one has ever suggested that the Security Council operates in the stratosphere above the play of national interests. It is an arena in which national interests are played out in relation to one another in order that a consensus might be arrived at which is truly in the interests of the international order as a whole. No one pretends that the present work of the UN is satisfactory. But this should be taken not as a call for its abandonment but for its strengthening so that it can perform its proper task. It is in relation to this criterion that we can see that law and morality do not always neatly overlap. A course of action might be construed to be legal, on a particular interpretation of the law, but still not morally legitimate. In relation to the 2003 Iraq war for example, a case was made by both the US and British governments that it was legal on the basis of previous UN resolutions. However, the failure to achieve a second UN resolution, and in particular the refusal of France and Germany to see military action at that stage as morally legitimate, indicated a lack of that wider international consensus which alone gives moral authority to military action. The converse can be seen if we examine the 1999 Kosovo operation. This did not have a specific authorisation from the Security Council but, as Michael Quinlan has pointed out, it differed from the Iraq instance in at least four pertinent respects: It was directed to halting an immediate and manifest humanitarian outrage in full swing; it was not a regime changing invasion; it was supported by the great majority of countries in the region, and a wide international grouping of major countries, and validated soon afterwards by the United Nations itself; and the UN Secretary General, not long before, had publicly recognised that the Kosovo situation was a threat to international peace and security (was thrusting huge numbers of destitute refugees out into neighbouring countries which already had formidable ethnic and economic problems of their own).7

The second criterion is that there must be just cause. Just cause in the Christian tradition has never been confined to wars of self-defence and easily encompasses the idea of international humanitarian intervention if properly authorised by the Security Council. The great Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria in the sixteenth century, one of the founders of the Just War tradition wrote that ‘There is a single and only just cause for commencing a war, namely a wrong received’.8 He also stressed that the war had to be waged for the common good, not just the good of an individual nation. It is also true that the concept of punishment of wrong was also to the fore in the Just War tradition and recently Oliver O’Donovan has revived this element.9 However, it does not seem apparent or helpful to think of conscripts in Saddam Hussein’s army being rightfully punished by the US and coalition forces military action against them. Morally based military action is not essentially dissimilar from 6

George Weigel, ‘Moral Clarity in a Time of War’, p. 9. Michael Quinlan, ‘Justifying War’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 58, No. 1, March 2004, p. 10. 8 Francisco de Vitoria. 9 Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge 2003). 7

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the action of the police within a nation. The police take action, sometimes action with the use of force, in order to maintain public order. The question as to whether people are in fact guilty and deserve to be punished comes later and is the responsibility of the judicial system. This distinction has, rightfully, come to the fore in recent years in the international sphere, with the way that political and military leaders can now be bought to trial by the International Criminal Court or other international tribunals. They can be rightly punished, but they are in a very different category from ordinary soldiers who abide by military law and the Geneva Conventions. The key issue under just cause in the modern world is the legitimacy or not of pre-emptive or preventative military action. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably and there is some confusion over terminology. However, here we distinguish pre-emptive military action when the threat is immediate and serious, from preventative war, when the threat is less serious and not immediate. As Hugo Grotius, another great founder of the ‘Just War’ tradition, as well as international law, argued ‘The danger must be present and ready instantly to fall upon us’.10 The example he gives is of a drawn sword or a weapon snatched up. Clearly these are matters of judgement so the recent report of the High Level Panel of the UN rightly stressed that ‘If there are good arguments for preventative military action, with good evidence to support them, then the case should be put to the Security Council, which can then authorise such action if it chooses to’. They recognise that the changed security environment following 9/11 might make it necessary to ‘Adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries’. But they stressed that responding to this threat should not be done unilaterally but with the support of the wider international community focused in the Security Council. The third criterion, of last resort, is clearly also very much a matter of judgement and is closely linked into the discussion about pre-emptive and preventative military action. Clearly what counts as last cannot be understood in a purely temporal sense. Britain could have gone on pursuing the issue of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands with the UN for a great deal longer. But if they had done this, there is no doubt that the Argentineans would have strengthened their hold on the islands and dislodging them would have been even more difficult, if not impossible. As Michael Quinlan has put it: It would be unreasonable to demand that every conceivable non-military instrument must have been exhaustively tested irrespective of judgement about ethicacy. The coalition could not be expected, for example, to spend six months on a trial of dropping exhortatory leaflets on Baghdad. The second aspect is that in conflict settings time is rarely neutral. As it passes options with their consequences will often change, becoming narrower, more difficult, more costly in several ways, or not available at all. The early application of force may do more good and less harm than delay until the situation has grown worse, as in the middle 90s in former Yugoslavia.11

10

Hugo Grotius, Rites of War and Peace, as quoted in James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason and the Limitation of War. Religion and Secular Concepts (Princeton, 1975), p. 215. 11 Michael Quinlan, ‘Britain’s War Since 1945’, in The Ethics of War, Chapter 13, p. 235.

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George Weigel has again criticised church leaders, in particular American Roman Catholic Bishops, for interpreting the Just War tradition as expressing a presumption against violence. He argues, that it should be understood as a tool of statecraft for public officials, guiding them in their proper use of force. It is indeed the latter when properly informed by Christian statements as argued above. However, the criterion of last resort certainly indicates that there is presumption against violence. In other words, if it is possible to solve the conflict by non-violent means, there is a strong moral obligation to do so. The fourth criterion is that a judgement must be made that the evils unleashed by war do not in fact outweigh the evils that would have to be endured if the military action was not initiated. This is very much a matter of political and military judgement and church leaders certainly have no monopoly of wisdom in this sphere. All kinds of questions arise, for example about the timescale. When a Chinese official was asked whether he thought the French Revolution was a good thing he apparently replied, ‘It’s too early to say’. Then there is the question about from whose point of view the consequences for good or evil are to be evaluated. Vitoria stressed, as mentioned above, that war must be waged in the interests of the common good, the international community as a whole, not simply the interest of a particular state. The Christian tradition has always emphasised also that it’s not enough to see war as a matter of righting an injustice, it must also be waged in the name of a better order. In other words is not just jus ad bellum but jus post bellum. One of the conspicuous failures of the 2003 Iraq war, as now pointed out by many informed people, is the total failure to plan properly for the situation after the invasion. The last criterion, in fact an extension of the previous one, is that there must be a reasonable chance of success. A great deal depends on what we regard as success. This is particularly crucial in relation to counter terrorism. In recent years some people have argued that the whole Just War tradition is outmoded in the struggle against terrorism. This is certainly not the case if military force has sometimes to be used, as it is being used at the moment. The traditional criteria apply whether the threat is a traditional nation state or an international terrorist group. However, the crucial point is that combating terrorism is only secondarily a matter of using appropriate military force. Primarily, it is a battle to win hearts and minds. A terrorist group will only succeed if it succeeds in winning and retaining the loyalty of that wider constituency in whose name they claim to act. They cannot win great military victories. They can threaten, bomb and disrupt but the nature of their operations makes it impossible for them to gain and retain control of a whole nation. They can only do that if they can stay in existence long enough and be enough of a nuisance until their political goals are achieved. That depends on retaining the loyalty of that wider constituency. This was a lesson which was proved time and again in the struggle of liberation movements and guerilla bands after World War II and it is no less relevant now in the struggle against fundamentalist terrorism. This is why situations like that of Guantanamo Bay or abuse of prisoners in Iraq is so disastrous, as are unsolved political tragedies, like that of Israel and Palestine. They all tend to politicise moderate opinion and to give at least tacit support to terrorist groups. Success in the long struggle against terrorism is a matter of winning hearts and minds and whether a military action is appropriate or not must always bear that in mind.

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It is for considerations such as these that those most versed in the Christian ‘Just War’ tradition both in Britain and the US, who on the basis of it supported the 1992 Gulf War which expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, and which supported the intervention in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had taken hold and were sponsoring international terrorism, found that they could not support the 2003 Gulf War. Whilst it is almost inevitable that military action of one kind or another will be needed against terrorist threats in the future, it must never be forgotten that the primary strategic objective is to win hearts and minds. This was the thrust of a report by a working party of Church of England bishops, Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11.12

12

Church of England, Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11 (Church House, London).

Chapter 4

Balance of Consequences: Towards an Ethical Standpoint on the Iraq Intervention of 2003 Richard Bonney

The December 2004 Report of the UN High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, entitled A more secure world: our shared responsibility argued that ‘in considering whether to authorize or endorse the use of military force, the Security Council should always address – whatever other considerations it may take into account – at least the following five basic criteria of legitimacy’:1 1. Seriousness of threat. Is the threatened harm to State or human security of a kind, and sufficiently clear and serious, to justify prima facie the use of military force? In the case of internal threats, does it involve genocide and other large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law, actual or imminently apprehended? 2. Proper purpose. Is it clear that the primary purpose of the proposed military action is to halt or avert the threat in question, whatever other purposes or motives may be involved? 3. Last resort. Has every non-military option for meeting the threat in question been explored, with reasonable grounds for believing that other measures will not succeed? 4. Proportional means. Are the scale, duration and intensity of the proposed military action the minimum necessary to meet the threat in question? 5. Balance of consequences. Is there a reasonable chance of the military action being successful in meeting the threat in question, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction? In their own report of September 2005 entitled Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11, the Bishops of Oxford, Coventry, Worcester and Bath and Wells argue, in effect, that these five principles provide a Christian just war theory in modern dress: ‘it is difficult to find a more ringing endorsement by a body

1

A more secure world: our shared responsibility. Report of the UN High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (Dec. 2004: A/59/565), para. 207, pp. 57–8. <www.un.org/secureworld/> All URLs consulted in 2006, mostly in July 2006.

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that is multi-cultural and multi-religious’, they argue, ‘of the continuing validity of Christian thinking about the morality of warfare’.2 Though the four Bishops provide a short paragraph in their report on what they term ‘the dilemma posed by post-conflict Iraq’,3 they fall short of a full consideration of the issues arising from a Christian ethical consideration of Jus Post Bellum. It has been argued elsewhere that these need to include the principle of repentance, requiring a sense of humility and remorse by the victors for the suffering and death that was brought about even in a just struggle; the principle of honourable surrender (not demeaning the vanquished or being punitive in intent); the principle of restoration (the removal of the instruments of war from the fields of battle and assistance to the losing nation in repairing the basic infrastructure of the society); finally, the need to re-establish civil society (extending the principle of restoration to encompass not merely the basic infrastructure but also the human infrastructure for peaceful communal life).4 In the tenth of their 13 Christian principles for ‘a world characterised by power and violence’, the four Bishops argue that: the churches have a special responsibility in the area of reconciliation. In a world where right is rarely wholly on one side, the Churches have a particular role to play in articulating the faults, wrongs and inconsistencies of all parties to a dispute, including those of the country to which the Church belongs.5

On any one of the UN High-Level Panel’s five basic criteria of legitimacy, it is possible to argue that the Iraq intervention was illegitimate. The first four principles have been considered in much of the literature on the subject. What has escaped attention is an adequate discussion of the principle of ‘balance of consequences’. Were the proponents of intervention in 2003 entitled to believe that the consequences of action were likely to be no worse than the consequences of inaction? It is clear that they deluded themselves on the seriousness of the threat by claiming that it was ‘actual or imminently apprehended’. We must assume that because of this mistaken threat perception, they decided that inaction posed an unacceptable danger for mankind. Within a year of the Iraq intervention, Samuel Berger (National Security Adviser to President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001) argued that: Iraq … will require a generational commitment by the international community. Regardless of whether the war was justified, everyone now has a profound stake in Iraq’s success. The disintegration of that country along ethnic and religious fault lines would destabilise the Middle East and energise radical movements that threaten the world. A stable and democratic Iraq, on the other hand, would stimulate reform throughout the region. Attaining the latter outcome will require continuous involvement in Iraq’s reconstruction and political development, as well as a proactive military posture that does not leave 2

Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11 published by the House of Bishops of the Church of England (September 2005), 21. <www.cofe.anglican.org/ news/pr6305.html>. 3 Ibid. pp. 26–7. 4 Richard Bonney, ‘Impossible to reconcile? Christian Just War Theory and the Second Iraq War’, Encounters. Journal of Inter-cultural Perspectives, 9 (March 2003), pp. 69–91 at p. 81. 5 Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11, p. 74.

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foreign troops hunkered down in bases and barracks, delegating security to an ill-prepared Iraqi security force. But that level of involvement will be unsustainable – and will be considered illegitimate by ordinary Iraqis – unless it is viewed as a truly international, rather than exclusively American, effort.6

This was a year after the Iraq intervention. What was known in 2003 itself? In February of that year, three State Department officials warned the Under Secretary of State that ‘a failure to address short-term public security and humanitarian assistance concerns could result in serious human rights abuses which would undermine an otherwise successful military campaign, and our reputation internationally’.7 From January to April 2004, Larry Diamond served as a Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. He is thus well informed to assess what went wrong in Iraq.8 The State Department’s plans for post-war Iraq were brushed aside by ‘a small group of Pentagon officials’ who, ‘instead of preparing for the worst’, assumed that Iraqis would welcome the invasion as a liberation. Diamond continues: … with Saddam’s military and security apparatus destroyed, the thinking went, Washington could capitalise on the goodwill by handing the country over to Iraqi expatriates such as Ahmed Chalabi, who would quickly create a new democratic state. Not only would fewer US troops be needed at first, but within a year, the troop levels could drop to a few tens of thousands. Of course, these naive assumptions quickly collapsed, along with overall security, in the immediate aftermath of the war … Administration officials repeatedly deluded themselves into believing that the defeat of the insurgency was just around the corner – just as soon as the long, hot summer of 2003 ended, or reconstruction dollars started flowing in and jobs were created, or the political transition began, or Saddam Hussein was captured, or the interim government was inaugurated. As in Vietnam, a turning point always seemed imminent, and Washington refused to grasp the depth of popular disaffection.

The Present Reality: Partition or Sectarian Civil War? One of the saddening, maddening and ultimately catastrophic verdicts on the Iraq intervention in 2003 was revealed by a little-noticed news story in the New York Times published on 17 July 2006. ‘In an about-face’, the headline reads for the story covering sectarian strife in Iraq, ‘Sunnis want [the] US to remain in Iraq’.9 The article argued that the pleas from Sunni Arab leaders had been growing in intensity since the eruption of sectarian violence in February. The Sunni Arab leaders still sympathised with the anti-US insurgency and considered that the Americans had helped strengthen the power of Iran, which backs the ruling Shi‘ite parties; but they 6 Samuel Berger, ‘Foreign Policy for a Democratic President’, Foreign Affairs (May–June 2004): <www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501faessay83306-p30/samuel-r-berger/ foreign-policy-for-a-democratic-president.html>. 7 <www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB163/index.htm>. 8 Larry Diamond, ‘What went wrong in Iraq’, Foreign Affairs (Sept–Oct. 2004): <www.foreignaffairs.org/20040901faessay83505/larry-diamond/what-went-wrong-in-iraq.html>. 9 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/world/middleeast/17sunnis.html?_r=1&th&em c=th&oref=slogin>.

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at least considered American military power in Iraq a ‘bulwark’ against Iranian intervention. Put another way, the news story virtually admitted that the Americanled intervention in Iraq had made matters so bad that, although everyone wanted American troops to leave, there was simply no prospect of an early withdrawal without either sectarian civil war breaking out, or the partition of Iraq, or both. In late July 2006, the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, visited London and Washington and made it clear that there had been a failure to contain the spiralling violence in Baghdad, which was claiming approximately 100 fatalities a day: 2,669 civilians had been killed in May and 3,149 in June 2006 alone. President Bush acknowledged that the ‘violence in Baghdad is still terrible’ and that more troops were needed, which would be moved from other, more peaceful, areas of Iraq. Analysts talked freely of ‘chaos’ in Baghdad, with a battle needed to retake the city neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry called the revised security plan for Baghdad ‘a stunning sign that the administration still isn’t being candid about Iraq’s escalating civil war and the failure of Iraqi security forces to stand up on schedule’. The Iraqi Prime Minister closed his address with the acknowledgement that he was most concerned about continuing sectarian violence but that ‘God willing, there will be no civil war in Iraq’.10 While President Bush has been prepared to concede that there remains an insurgency,11 but not a civil war, other American commentators in 2006 have had no compunction in talking about civil war in Iraq. For Stephen Biddle, writing in Foreign Affairs, most of the lessons of Vietnam are irrelevant for the Iraq conflict, since that conflict was a Maoist ‘people’s war’, not a communal civil war. In contrast: the pattern of violence in Iraq … is strongly correlated with communal affiliation. The four provinces that make up the country’s Sunni heartland account for fully 85 per cent of all insurgent attacks; Iraq’s other 14 provinces, where almost 60 per cent of the Iraqi population lives, account for only 15 per cent of the violence. The overwhelming majority of the insurgents in Iraq are indigenous Sunnis, and the small minority who are non-Iraqi members of al-Qaeda or its affiliates are able to operate only because Iraqi Sunnis provide them with safe houses, intelligence, and supplies. Much of the violence is aimed at the Iraqi police and military, which recruit disproportionately from among Shiites and Kurds. And most suicide car bombings are directed at Shiite neighbourhoods, especially in ethnically mixed areas such as Baghdad, Diyala, or northern Babil, where Sunni bombers have relatively easy access to non-Sunni targets.12 10 Jim Rutenberg, ‘Baghdad chaos pushes Bush to shift US troops’, New York Times (26 July 2006): , Michael R. Gordon, ‘Battle for Baghdad boils down to grabbing a slice at a time’, ibid.: Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Iraqi PM admits failure to contain growing violence’, The Guardian (25 July 2006): . 11 George W. Bush, speech to Freedom House, 29 March 2006. . 12 Stephen Biddle, ‘Seeing Baghdad, thinking Saigon’, Foreign Affairs (March–April 2006): . Though there was reasonable agreement with Biddle’s analysis, the

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Others, most notably, Daniel Pipes, have argued that while the six-week ‘victory [in 2003] remains a glory of American foreign policy’, the goal of achieving a ‘free and democratic Iraq’ is unachievable. ‘Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition’s responsibility nor its burden’, Pipes argues. ‘The damage done by Saddam will take many years to repair. Americans, Britons, and others cannot be tasked with resolving Sunni–Shiite differences, an abiding Iraqi problem that only Iraqis themselves can address.’ To the consternation of many, Pipes goes further, arguing that an outright ethnic and religious war would be ‘a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one’.13 Rejecting any notion of a Jus Post Bellum, Pipes argued on Australian television: Post-World War II, the American and other victors did not extract money from Germany and Japan [as had the victor powers in Europe in 1918], but gave them money and it worked. Germany and Japan were rehabilitated. Since 1945, 60 years now, the notion that the victor pays, rehabilitates has become an assumption. I have nothing against it. It worked very well in 1945 but I don’t believe it’s a legal and moral obligation. I believe when one goes to war, one goes to defeat one’s enemy, not to rehabilitate them … the Iraqis are adults they are not our wards. They will define their future. We can help them but it is not our burden to re-establish, to rehabilitate Iraq on a new basis … 14

Unlike analysts in the West, some Arab commentators deny that the US and British have made ‘mistakes’ in Iraq. On the contrary, they argue that the intervening powers have been relatively successful in achieving their long-term aim, which was to divide and rule and then partition the country. In the short term, sectarian tensions escalated to such a degree following the invasion that the Americans could justify their continuing presence on the grounds of acting as impartial arbiters. According to al-Jazeera, Hasan Nasr Allah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, has stated: the US has driven the situation in Iraq to a state where they offer themselves to Shi‘a as a guarantee [of protection] against Sunni, and offer themselves to Sunni as a guarantee against Shi‘a. They present themselves to Arabs as a guarantee against Kurds, and present themselves to Kurds as a guarantee against Arabs. Their plot is doing just fine. Look at the situation in Iraq nowadays: what could possibly happen that is more appropriate for separatists to say [than] that they have to split from Iraq to protect their community?15

Some commentators, such as Gareth Stansfield, go further and argue that partition, or ‘radical decentralisation’, should not be seen as a problem. ‘It is centralised Iraq

roundtable which followed predictably produced no consensus on what to do about Iraq. Larry Diamond, James Dobbins, Chaim Kaufmann, Leslie H. Gibb and Stephen Biddle, ‘What to do in Iraq: a roundtable’, Foreign Affairs (July–August 2006): . 13 Daniel Pipes, ‘Civil war in Iraq?’, New York Sun (28 Feb. 2006): . 14 Tony Jones, ‘Civil war likely in Iraq: Pipes’, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2 March 2006): . 15 .

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– starting with Britain’s creation of the modern state in 1921–1923 and reaching its nadir in nearly three decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship – that has failed and should be allowed to die’.16 The Wrong Choice of Paradigm: The remodelling of the Japanese Constitution in 1945 chosen as the exemplar for post-war Iraq ‘Let Freedom Reign!’17 President George W. Bush’s euphoric verdict on the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq back to the Iraqi people at the end of June 2004 no doubt reflected his view that the removal of a repressive dictatorship justified the invasion in 2003 on a quite different pretext. After all, he had completed his father’s unfinished business in the Gulf War of 1991. The Shi‘ites and Kurds, who had notoriously been abandoned to their fate after what had appeared a rallying call from President Bush senior to rebel, had finally gained their revenge on the Sunni majority who had exercised power with such brutality under Saddam. But what sort of freedom had the Coalition brought to Iraq and, in particular, had the consequences of military intervention been accurately predicted? Bob Woodward’s account of the drive towards regime change in Iraq has George W. Bush seeking to implicate Saddam Hussein in the 9/11 atrocity.18 In reality, there was little opportunity for freelance terrorist structures in Baathist Iraq and this issue failed as a casus belli, rapidly to be replaced by fear of Iraq’s potential to create weapons of mass destruction and, later, the assertion that Saddam’s alleged possession of WMD presented an imminent danger to the security of the Western powers. (In fact, as became clear after the occupation, even had Saddam possessed WMD, his preoccupation was almost exclusively directed eastward, towards Iran.) As the coalition forces were being assembled, Zalmay Khalizad, the president’s special assistant for Near East affairs (among others), presented a plan, modelled on the post-war occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government once Saddam was toppled. David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt covered the story for the New York Times on 11 October 2002, stressing the parallelism with MacArthur in 1945 and the need for military control to prevent anarchy: Administration officials said they were moving away from the model used in Afghanistan: establishing a provisional government right away that would be run by Iraqis … Instead … the administration is studying the military occupations of Japan and Germany. But they stressed a commitment to keeping Iraq unified, as Japan was, and avoiding the kind partition that Germany underwent when Soviet troops stayed in the eastern sector, which

16

accessed 19 July

2006. 17 ‘US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice gives confirmation of Iraqi sovereignty to US President George W. Bush (“Iraq is sovereign”), who then wrote, “Let Freedom Reign!”, during the opening session of the NATO Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, on 28 June 2004.’ Image at . 18 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York, 2004).

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set the stage for the cold war. The military government in Germany stayed in power for four years; in Japan it lasted six and a half years … 19

So MacArthur’s role in Japan was to become the model. Yet even a cursory reflection on the historical experience of the US military administration of defeated Japan, ought to have prompted the advisers of the President to appreciate that the differences between Japan in 1945 and Iraq in 2003 were so overwhelming as to vitiate any comparison except in the most superficial respects. Firstly, Japan had been at war since 1941 against the US and was exhausted and traumatised after two atomic bombs had been dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was no prospect of any military resistance, formal or informal, to the American presence. Secondly, Japan was united under the Emperor Hirohito. Regime change there might be for the Japanese, but they were absolutely determined to retain their ruler in some form or other. The fate of the emperor was the central issue for Japanese politicians and led directly to a far-reaching discussion of Japanese national identity and the all-important question of where sovereignty would reside. Thirdly, the Japanese politicians were ethnically and culturally homogenous, as was the society which they sought to govern. Consequently, they were able to evade awkward or bizarre American proposals, such as MacArthur’s wish to have the Emperor convert to Christianity. It is still the case today that Japan remains a monocultural society unaffected by mass immigration in a way which is quite different from Western Europe or the US. Fourthly, Japanese politicians accepted a degree of accountability for the aggressive militarisation of the 1930s. This consensus with the occupying power meant that the pacifist provisions within Article Nine of the Constitution were of secondary importance. The debates on this issue were not as contentious as might have been expected. There was a degree of optimism in a future world organised on the basis of negotiation and alliance systems rather than the naked exercise of force. Fifthly, and unexpectedly, MacArthur did not have the free hand for which he would have wished. The US agreed to share ultimate decision-making authorities with other allied powers in the Far Eastern Commission (FEC), which included France, Britain and the USSR. Each of these had veto power and the FEC itself was charged with setting policy for the post-war occupation of Japan. Thus, while MacArthur had a free hand on the ground, he ultimately had to answer to the FEC. These limitations compelled MacArthur to move as quickly as possible to establish a Japanese Constitution that suited the US MacArthur and his staff used a degree of duplicity that enabled them to present the FEC with a constitutional fait accompli. Finally, the conclusion to be drawn from the drafting of the Japanese constitution in 1946 is deeply ambiguous. One response might be triumphalism: according to this view, Americans, following the providential victory of their armed forces, brought democracy to Asia. As Moore and Robinson express this response, American power 19 , , , .

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might be said to have benevolently served the cause of universal democratisation. But as the two authors recognise, the constitution imposed in 1946 was largely drafted by American military officers. Virtually everyone in Tokyo suspected’ this in 1946. ‘It has also been generally known ever since. The Japanese people have had to live with this embarrassing reality. It has made their constitution vulnerable to right-wing fulminations, and it has left a sour taste.20

Moreover, institutional arrangements ‘cannot be transported from one culture or country to another with predictable effects’. It was thus by no means inevitable that the commitment to parliamentary government would have ‘the effect in Japan desired by the American framers’.21 Though Japan has lacked a competitive twoparty system for most of the last half century, the system has survived well: ‘that this transformation of ideas was ultimately accomplished was a major achievement, and it was profoundly a joint achievement. Neither side could have produced this constitutional revolution alone.’22 The Wrong Paradigm Demonstrated Post-invasion Iraq in 2003–2005 diverged from each of the six elements comprising the Japanese experience. Firstly, although Saddam’s forces were quickly dispersed by the coalition’s rapid military victory, this did not mean that they had been defeated. George W. Bush declared the ‘end of major combat operations’ while aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln off Iraq on 1 May 2003. In retrospect, this statement seems premature. Even as the Ba’ath party organisation disintegrated, elements of the secret police and army began forming guerilla units, since in many cases they had simply gone home rather than openly fight the invading forces. These began to focus their attacks around Mosul, Tikrit and Fallujah. In the autumn the jihadis began using ambush tactics, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices, targetting coalition forces and checkpoints. Saddam Hussein himself was captured on 14 December, but in the Spring of 2004 there were fierce uprisings based on Fallujah and Najaf. The insurgency has continued since, varying in severity. None of this is comparable to the acquiescence of the Japanese with US occupation following the surrender in 1945. There is little doubt that the strength of the insurgency, and the fact that at various times it has comprised both Sunni and Sh‘ia elements, took the Coalition by surprise. Presidential Envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer III admitted ‘the insurgents have proven better organised and more difficult to penetrate than we had expected’. Secondly, though regime change was relatively swiftly accomplished in Iraq, in the sense that the Ba’athist regime was swept aside, this did not confer legitimacy on the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) or the Iraq Interim Governing Council it appointed. The Emperor Hirohito had been retained, but his powers curtailed; 20 Ray A. Moore and Donald L. Robinson, Partners for Democracy. Crafting the New Japanese State under MacArthur (New York and Oxford, 2002), pp. 336–7. 21 Ibid. pp. 335–6. 22 Ibid. p. 337.

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this had secured Japanese compliance. In contrast, the whole purpose of the intervention was to oust Saddam Hussein, while his two sons were killed in July 2003. In all, over 200 top leaders of the former regime were killed or captured, as well as numerous lesser functionaries and military personnel. A pre-invasion Iraqi intelligence document had called for a strategy of organised resistance to be put into effect if and when Saddam’s regime collapsed. Before leaving for Iraq in May 2003, Bremer sent the Defence Secretary a copy of a RAND report estimating that 500,000 troops would be needed to stabilise post-war Iraq – more than three times the number of troops then deployed. In his memoirs of his 14 months in power,23 Bremer argues that the former Iraqi army had disbanded and could not be other than formally dissolved: ‘when Iraqi draftees had seen which way the war was going in 2003, they simply deserted and went home to their farms and families.’ Bremer left the de-Ba’athification policy to Iraqis on the Governing Council such as the former exile and Pentagon favourite Ahmed Chalabi. ‘Our de-Ba’athification policy had targeted only the top 1 percent of the party’s members’, he writes, ‘but under Chalabi’s direction, the Iraqi De-Ba’athification Council had broadened the policy, for example, depriving thousands of teachers of their jobs’. In retrospect, Bremer adds, he ‘had been wrong to give a political body like the Governing Council responsibility for overseeing the de-Ba’athification policy’. The unwarranted extension of de-Ba’athification not only deprived the interim governing regime of administrative experience; it also unnecessarily created Iraqis with a grievance against the new administration. Peter W. Galbraith writes: Contrary to the optimistic expectations of the war’s planners, the Iraqi police and government did not remain on duty, ready to report to the Americans. They vanished. This left the way open to looters, who stripped every significant public institution in Baghdad – with the exception of the US-protected Oil Ministry – of whatever they could carry away and set many on fire. Without orders or plans, the US occupation forces simply watched. The looting probably doomed the occupation before it started. With the ministries destroyed, the government could not function. The looting so much damaged the electrical system and other infrastructure that essential government services were not restored for most of the occupation period. This in turn provoked anger at Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority and helped foster the growth of the insurgency. As Iraqis watched their capital being destroyed, many concluded either that the US was too weak to prevent the looting or that it was so evil as to want Iraq destroyed, or both. If the US was weak, then resistance could succeed. If it was evil, resistance was imperative.24

Thirdly, whereas the Japanese politicians in 1945 were in ethnic and cultural terms united, as was the society which they sought to govern, nothing could be less true of the Iraq ruled by the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003, which was hopelessly split between Shi‘ites and Kurds seeking revenge for their treatment under Saddam, and the Sunni minority, largely left out in the cold during the American administration 23 L. Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell, My Year in Iraq. The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (New York, 2006). 24 Peter W. Galbraith, ‘The Mess’, review of Bremer, My Year in Iraq and George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq in New York Review of Books, 53/4 (9 March 2006), .

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and pursuing an insurgency which amounted to a continuing war of attrition. The old Iraqi army had been a Sunni Arab army. To reconstitute it would, as Bremer argued, have provoked strong reactions from Iraq’s Shi‘ite and Kurds; and it was in any case unlikely to have been loyal to Iraq’s new Shi‘ite-dominated political order. But since the Ba’athist army had already dispersed, Bremer’s decree dissolving it was quite unnecessary; to Sunni Arabs – including former officers who had no intention of returning to military service – it was an added, and gratuitous, humiliation. This sense of having no stake in the new regime was accelerated by the perception that the provisional authority was not even handed: such rebuilding of Iraq as has taken place – and this much less than was expected, with the end now in sight25 – has overwhelmingly been in Shi‘ite areas, not in the Sunni triangle. Unlike MacArthur in Japan, Bremer knew nothing about Iraq. He had never been there, did not speak Arabic, had no experience in dealing with a country emerging from war, and had never been involved in ‘nation-building’. During the two weeks he was given to get ready, he recruited a senior staff including several retired ambassadors, a former assistant secretary of state for administration and a high-powered Republican Washington lobbyist. Only one of his recruits had any background in the region. Crucially, when he flew into Baghdad on 12 May 2003, the capital had been without police or government for over a month and had largely been left in the hands of the looters. General Anthony Zinni, who had doubted the wisdom of the Iraq war, had wanted a much larger occupation force and a much larger administrative infrastructure. In a speech given on 12 May 2004, Zinni outlined ten mistakes underlying the military intervention and occupation of Iraq: • • • • • • • • • •

the belief that [the previous strategy of] containment as a policy doesn’t work the [new] strategy was flawed a false rationale for [obtaining] … public support [failure] to internationalise the effort we underestimated the task propping up and trusting the exiles, the infamous ‘Gucci Guerillas’ from London lack of planning the insufficiency of military forces on the ground the ad hoc organisation we threw in there a series of bad decisions on the ground.

In conclusion, the former commander of CENTCOM stated that he failed to understand: why there was an underestimation when you look at a country that has never known democracy, that has been in the condition it’s been in, that has the natural fault lines that it has, and the issues it has. And to look at the task of reconstructing this country, not only 25 Ellen Knickmeyer, ‘US Has End in Sight on Iraq Rebuilding. Documents show much of the funding diverted to security, justice system and Hussein inquiry’, Washington Post, 2 Jan. 2006: .

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reconstructing it, but the idea of creating Jeffersonian democracy almost overnight, is almost ridiculous, in concept, in the kind of time and effort that was given as an estimate as to what it would take.26

Balancing the Consequences: The Failure of Reconstruction and the Potential for Destabilisation in the Middle East What were the challenges of the Jus Post Bellum in the case of Iraq? In late August 2002, Vice-President Cheney spoke optimistically about a post-Saddam Hussein world. Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace … Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights of every ethnic and religious group are recognised and protected.27

In contrast, former White House counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke stated on 26 June 2004 that the invasion of Iraq was an ‘enormous mistake’ that was costing untold lives, strengthening al-Qaida and breeding a new generation of terrorists. ‘We did exactly what al-Qaida said we would do: invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country that wasn’t threatening us in any way’, Clarke commented, adding that ‘the hatred that has been engendered by this invasion will last for generations …’28 The UK government produced ‘A vision for Iraq and the Iraqi People’ in the eventuality of military action in 2003.29 This committed the UK government (and presumably the Coalition) to support the Iraqi people in their desire for: • • •

•

• 26

Peace: a unified Iraq within its current borders living at peace with itself and with its neighbours Prosperity: all Iraqis sharing the wealth created by its economy and its oil reserves, drawing on the talents and skills of its people Freedom: an Iraq which respects fundamental human rights, including freedom of thought, conscience and religion and the dignity of family life, and whose people live free from repression and the fear of arbitrary arrest Good Government: an independent Iraq respecting the rule of law, whose government reflects the diversity and choice of its population and helps rebuild Iraq’s security and provides its people with food, water and high quality public services, especially health and education International Respect: an Iraq respected by its neighbours which plays its full

. Speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention, 26 Aug. 2002: Cf. John Donnelly and Anthony Shadid, ‘Iraq War Hawks have plans to reshape entire Mideast’, Boston Globe (10 Sept. 2002): . 28 . 29 The document was published on 17 March 2003: . 27

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role as a member of the international community. The UK Government committed itself to help by: • • • • • • • • • •

Working to ensure any military campaign is as swift and carefully targeted as possible Working with the UN and international community to help meet the humanitarian needs and prioritise resources to feed and care for the people of Iraq Enabling Iraqis to establish their own effective representative government and encouraging UN involvement in the process Achieving a swift end to sanctions as soon as Iraq is in compliance with UN Security Council resolutions Supporting Iraq’s re-integration into the region and the wider international community, with actions including the reopening of land borders Seeking a fair and sustainable solution to Iraq’s debt problems Promoting increased aid from the international community Supporting an international reconstruction programme and helping Iraq make the transition to a more prosperous and dynamic economy Promoting investment in Iraq’s oil industry, managed transparently and fairly, and trade in open world markets, for the benefit of the Iraqi people Encouraging the renewal of cultural and educational exchanges with other countries.

In retrospect, the agenda looks more like a wish list than a serious programme for government. Most of the commitments have been found wanting. The Prime Minister stated that: we will help Iraq rebuild and not rebuild because of the problems of conflict, where if it comes to that we will do everything we can to minimise the suffering of the Iraqi people. But rebuild Iraq because of the appalling legacy that the rule of Saddam has left the Iraqi people.

The ‘pledge to the people of Iraq’ seems disingenuous. Tony Blair lacked the authority to prevent the abuses in the award of contracts which placed Halliburton and other US companies with which prominent members of the Bush administration had longstanding financial interests in the driving seat for Iraq reconstruction. In a speech on 8 August 2003, President Bush claimed that ‘in a lot of places, the infrastructure is as good as it was at pre-war levels, which is satisfactory, but it’s not the ultimate aim. The ultimate aim is for the infrastructure to be the best in the region’. US officials at the time promised a steady supply of 6,000 megawatts of electricity and a return to oil production output of 2.5 million barrels a day. However, the Washington Post reported on 2 January 2006 that oil production remained at 2 million barrels a day, still below the pre-invasion figure, while national electrical grid had an average daily output of 4,000 megawatts, about 400 megawatts less than its pre-war level. Iraqis nationwide received on average less than 12 hours of power a day. There was talk of a ‘reconstruction gap’, the difference between what Iraqis and Americans expected from the reconstruction effort at first and what was visible by 2006. Significant budget reallocations had occurred, including additional projects costs of nearly 25 per cent to

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provide for security. At least 1 billion dollars earmarked for electricity was shifted to the budget to build up Iraq’s army and police.30 There can be little doubt that the task of rebuilding Iraq has also been impeded by the frequency of government change and the failure of each interim regime to deliver on its promises for reconstruction,31 while the task of occupation, providing security and enabling reconstruction has lacked sufficient co-ordination on the American side, creating a vacuum in which abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib prison could occur.32 The promise to support Iraq’s re-integration into the region and the wider international community looks increasingly problematic in view of fears expressed in some quarters in the Middle East as to the emergence of a ‘Shi‘ite crescent’, which provides Iran with a potential coalition of international allies and potentially threatens a more general Sunni–Shi‘ite conflict.33 As Le Monde pointed out in an editorial on 19 July 2005, normalisation of relations between Iraq and Iran was imposed on the American occupation regime by al-Sistani.34 Though former president Khatami of Iran has denied the existence of a ‘Shi‘ite crescent’,35 the potential danger of such a realignment of forces has been argued by King Abdullah of Jordan. Abdullah told the Washington Post that the creation of a new Shi‘ite crescent would particularly destabilise Gulf countries with Shi‘ite populations. ‘Even Saudi Arabia is not immune from this. It would be a major problem. And then that would propel the possibility of a Shi‘ite–Sunni conflict even more, as you’re taking it [beyond] the borders of Iraq’, the king argued.36 There is no doubt that, although al-Zarqawi’s ferocious extremist assault on Shiites accelerated the breakdown of community relations between Sunnis and Shi‘ites in Iraq, the advent of majoritarian democracy has been a crucial factor. Political leaders played upon ethnic and sectarian identities to gain election in Iraq. As the Indian sub-continent discovered in the 1930s and 1940s, once this particular genie is unleashed, it cannot be put back in the bottle, though contrary to Egyptian 30 . 31 Kenneth M. Pollack, Director of Research, Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Brookings Institution, ‘Saving Iraq’, Testimony to US House of Representatives SubCommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, 11 July 2006: . 32 Daniel L. Byman, ‘Iraq: the march of folly’, Washington Post, 30 July 2006: . 33 Though he denies the likelihood of a ‘Shi‘ite crescent’, Kamran Taremi argues that important consequences follow from the Shi‘ite-dominated government in Iraq. Taremi, ‘Is a Shi‘ite crescent soon to slice through the Middle East?’, Daily Star (7 February 2005): http:// www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=12425>. 34 Translated at . 35 Ghassan Charbel, ‘Former Iranian President Khatami to Al-Hayat: “The Shi‘ite Crescent Doesn’t Exist …”’, Al-Hayat (19 June 2006): . 36 Robin Wright and Peter Baker, ‘Iraq, Jordan see threat to election from Iran. Leaders warn against forming religious state’, Washington Post (8 Dec. 2004): .

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President Hosni Mubarak’s comments in April 2006, most experts consider that Shi‘ite Arabs remain more loyal to the country in which they live than to Iran.37 Balancing the consequences: The Need to Clarify Roles and Responsibilities in advance to plan for a Jus Post Bellum In his collection of essays entitled Arguing about War, Michael Walzer argues that ‘we need criteria for a Jus Post Bellum that are distinct from (though not wholly independent of) those that we use to judge the war and its conduct’. Discussing the intervention in Iraq more specifically, he argues that having fought the war ‘we are now responsible for the well-being of the Iraqi people; we have to provide the resources – soldiers and dollars – necessary to guarantee their security and begin the political and economic reconstruction of their country’.38 In constructing a Jus Post Bellum, David E. Kellogg has stressed the importance of war crimes trials;39 in contrast, Kenneth R. Himes in essence argues for reconciliation and mutual forgiveness,40 both of which are extremely difficult to achieve when there have been substantial civilian casualties and the normal ordering of society has been permanently disrupted. Writing in the Journal of Social Philosophy in 2000, Brian Orend discusses the application of the concept of the Jus Post Bellum to a specific situation, the aftermath of the first Gulf War of 1991, concentrating on: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

just cause for termination of the war; right intention; public declaration and legitimate authority; discrimination; and proportionality.41

However, the difference between the first and the second Gulf Wars centres on the question of regime change and the consequences which flow from this; on this point, understandably, Orend is silent.

37

Lionel Beehner, ‘Shiite Muslims in the Middle East’, Council on Foreign Relations (16 June 2006): http://www.cfr.org/publication/10903/; ‘… the Shia are experiencing a revival fired by the interventions of the West in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have unleashed historic religious forces to fuel an age-old antagonism between the two sides [Sunni and Shia] that had not been anticipated by Washington or London. It is an antagonism that will determine the politics of the region for sometime to come as, long marginalised from power, the Shia are now clamouring for greater rights and more political influence’ [author’s italics]. Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The rise of Shia’, The Tablet (26 July 2006): . 38 Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven and London, 2004), pp. 163–4. 39 Davida E. Kellogg, ‘Jus Post Bellum: the Importance of War Crimes Trials’, Parameters (Autumn 2002), pp. 87–99: . 40 Kenneth R. Himes, ‘The case of Iraq and the Just War tradition’, Washington Theological Union: . 41 Brian Orend, ‘Jus post bellum’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 31 (2000), pp. 117–37.

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Recently, Dr Timothy L. Challans of the US School of Advanced Military Studies has taken up the issue precisely in the area of regime change.42 He argues that: there is a general trend in the Just War Tradition to assign political leaders the responsibility of jus ad bellum and military leaders the responsibility of jus in bello. The Just War Tradition along with its temporal division of jus ad bellum and jus in bello perpetuates this problem, because the former concerns itself with those matters occurring before the war (and hence remain political issues alone) and the latter with matters once the conflict begins (and hence remain military issues alone) …

There is a temporal continuum for a regime change operation – before, during and after – broken into phases … there is also a hierarchical continuum, spanning the different levels of conflict from the highest strategic level to the lowest tactical level and including the operational level in between that links the other two … The political and military domains overlap so significantly today that it no longer makes sense to view their overlapping as anomalous, but following Kühn the interdependency between the two should signal the need for a new paradigm. Political and military leaders influence ethical matters in both the political and military realms. Therefore, political and military leaders share moral agency in both the political and military realms at all stages of a regime change operation. Following this state of affairs, it may be time to address the issue of also assigning them moral responsibility … After a conflict begins, military leaders can continue to influence the political realm, and they often are a large part of the political realm during Phase IV of an operation – known as the post-conflict phase. The military is shouldering more of the moral burden of regime change operations than it deserves. It is taking on more of the moral responsibility without the commensurate moral agency. We are in this unfortunate situation right now because political leaders are not taking responsibility for the moral agency they are exercising. So, since agency crosses the traditional line between political and military leaders, then so should responsibility. Moral agency and moral responsibility should correspond. It is the planning system itself that needs improvement. The military leaders are doing the best they can with the system they are given. But the military should spend some time rethinking and retooling their planning systems so that America can better ensure that her military operations match the high moral standards in her rhetoric. The analysis is penetrating, but offers no solutions. Instead we have to turn to the discussion by Rear Admiral Louis V. Iasiello, who specifically addresses the moral responsibilities of victors in war and provides the most thorough discussion of the dimensions of post-war needs to date.43 Had this analysis been taken seriously by the military planners in 2002 and early 2003, many of the mistakes in Iraq would have been avoided. Iasiello distinguishes various tasks:

42 Timothy L. Challans, ‘Birth of a Nation: Planning for Regime Change Operations’, 2005 at: . 43 Louis V. Iasiello, ‘Jus post bellum. The Moral Responsibilities of Victors in War’, Naval War College Review, 57 (Summer/Autumn 2004): .

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British Foreign Policy in the Anglican Church A HEALING MIND-SET American military personnel are well prepared to fight wars and fulfil their responsibilities as warriors, but perhaps less so for their potential involvement in the highly sensitive and specialised post bellum environment. Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrate that it is not sufficient to train only specialised units (military police or civil affairs teams) for their critical role in the post bellum. All warriors should be trained for these post bellum operations. JUST RESTORATION While each post bellum operation must be crafted to address the specific challenges generated by a particular conflict, most scenarios appear to progress through three general, yet interrelated, stages: protectorship, partnership and ownership … Just restoration is complete when full sovereignty is returned to a once-defeated people and former enemies become allies. SAFEGUARDING THE INNOCENT The victors in war should focus special attention on children in the post bellum phase of war. Of equal importance is the direction of post bellum care to other at-risk groups and those who cannot easily care for themselves, most notably the sick, the elderly and some groups of women. RESPECT FOR THE ENVIRONMENT While some progress has been made in protecting the environment in war, the issue still begs our attention in post bellum planning. All sides in a conflict should assume responsibility for the protection of the environment in war and they should be held accountable for both the treatment of the environment during hostilities and the subsequent restoration of the environment after the fighting has ended. POST BELLUM JUSTICE If reconciliation is an essential of post bellum healing and the establishment of a just peace, is it better to offer alleged criminals amnesty or immunity from prosecution or to try them in tribunals or courts of law? The prosecution of suspected war criminals and political regimes should be treated as a critical dimension of any successful post bellum dynamic to further post bellum healing. WARRIOR TRANSITION Proactive programs [are needed to] ensure that those returning from war are physically, emotionally, and spiritually equipped to handle the responsibilities of citizenship outside the combat environment. THE LESSONS OF WAR Current geopolitical realities make it plain that the time has come to establish and develop a new major category of just war – jus post bellum. Just war theorists will eventually benefit greatly from an in-depth study of lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, and specifically the post bellum dimension of these complex operations. Outlining the moral guidelines or criteria for this dimension of warfare may ultimately save lives and enhance chances to secure a just and lasting peace for all.

Given the deeply pessimistic conclusions of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that America ‘can never make a total political withdrawal, though the size

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and location of the military presence [in Iraq] will vary’,44 Rear Admiral Louis V. Iasiello provides us with an appropriate conclusion, which does not pretend that the lessons have been perfectly learned to date, but argues the need for a continuing effort to learn them: Exploring the lessons learned may help nations avert future conflict and build a culture of peace. Warriors benefit from the experience of others who have been tried and tested in battle; their study of the action and decisions of others facing the fog and inhumanity of war may help them retain a moral and humane focus when they are called to serve in war.

44

Henry Kissinger, ‘How to Exit Iraq. At First, Iraqi Soldiers Should Augment US Forces, Not Replace Them’, Washington Post (18 Dec. 2005): .

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Chapter 5

Three Parables About War1 Charles Jones

The ‘just war’ tradition provides a robust and comprehensive framework for argument about war. It offers guidance on the declaration and conduct of war; it has exerted a profound influence on the law of armed conflict; it has been remarkably resourceful in accommodating the moral dilemmas arising out of irregular warfare, nuclear weapons and precision-guided munitions. Most of all, it appears to offer an arena within which those of many faiths and of none can meet on equal terms. The tradition, it is often said, is just that: a tradition and not a theory. Marked disagreements persist on particular questions, including the identification of legitimate authority, double effect and conditional deterrence. It is all too often reduced to a mere box-ticking exercise, to justify some specific instance of resort to force or military episode, when it ought rather to be thought of as a space for moral reflection. But at least the parameters of debate are secure, with pacifists and advocates of the unconstrained use of force consigned to the fringes. Something along these lines appears to be the dominant view in Britain and the US. It is mistaken. Indeed it is pernicious. It encourages complacency and shuts the door on a wide range of moral experience, both personal and collective, intrinsic to modern warfare. It leaves the Christian churches with some of their biggest guns in fixed emplacements, pointing the wrong way. It dissuades the secular mind from any profound consideration of its moral predicament by encouraging it to ride in the Christian slipstream. It allows pacifists and nihilists alike too easy a dismissal of rational approaches to warfare. Those engaged in the planning, authorisation and conduct of contemporary armed conflict are to limit the moral harm that they commit, and to which they – let alone their enemies – are exposed, just as they now routinely seek to address psychological and physical damage arising from the trauma of war. But if this is to be achieved, the silken warp of love, justice and authority with which ‘just war’ discourse has traditionally been woven needs an altogether tougher weft, spun from the full range of modern political and military experience rather than the more limited range of concerns that preoccupied St. Thomas Aquinas at the dawn of the modern international system. For it is in a version much indebted to Aquinas and his Spanish Dominican successors that the tradition is most often presented. They wrote at a time – broadly 1 Earlier versions of parts of this chapter have been read to the Imperial and Commonwealth Seminar of the Cambridge History Faculty (2004) the June 2005 conference on War and Cinema at the Centre for Research in the Arts and Social Sciences, Cambridge and published in Cambridge: the Magazine of the Cambridge Society, No. 57 (New Year 2006), pp. 8–10. I am grateful to all those who posed questions or offered comments.

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between 1200 and 1650 – when the monarchs of France, England, Spain and several other European countries were steadily establishing sovereign authority over consolidated territories at the expense of Pope and Emperor. The discovery, in the second half of this period, of orderly political communities in the Americas that had neither accepted nor – like the Ottomans – rejected the gospel, merely aggravated the position by confirming the autonomy of international relations from any single faith, and its technical anarchy, or lack of any supreme temporal authority capable of arbitrating between princes. In these circumstances, a doctrine of how armed conflict between sovereigns could be contained within the moral realm was sorely needed and this is what the later scholastic theologians attempted. Reduced to its bare bones, it runs like this. Justification of resort to war requires a formal declaration of hostilities – all other remedies having been exhausted – by a proper authority with a reasonable prospect of victory, moved by right intention to make good an injury or wrong of sufficient importance to outweigh the unavoidable evils that will result from the conduct of hostilities. Once engaged in warfare, combatants are enjoined not to attack non-combatants and to use no more force than is needed to achieve their objectives. Some of the bread-and-butter issues that constitute contemporary debate within the tradition leap from the page. They are daily on our lips. Where does legitimate authority reside in a world where many states have long since lost control of large tracts of their territory and armed groups flourish without any clear political programme or aspiration to secession or control of the state while permanent alliances or regional unions such as NATO or the European Union begin to acquire a measure of autonomy, even from their most powerful members, and uncertainty about the authority of the UN Security Council is aggravated by the pretensions of the US to a quasi-imperial regulatory role? How are we to regard collateral damage? Is it justified by the outcome of a military operation, or must it be the unintended outcome of attack upon a legitimate target, as in the Scholastic doctrine of double effect? And what of nuclear deterrence? May it be right to threaten to do wrong if by so doing one minimises the chance of ever having to carry out the threat? It is here, or hereabouts that the first step of a critique of the tradition might be taken. For St. Thomas, the very idea of legitimate authority was embedded in an Aristotelian concept of the perfect political community. By this he did not mean a polity without error, but one that was complete, in that it provided the conditions for individuals to live the good life. Within such a polity every adult had responsibility, by the exercise of prudence, for the conformity of behaviour to natural law; but the prudence of prince in this respect was uniquely important, for he alone was not subject to the regulatory check of positive law and he alone took responsibility for the whole polity rather than just a household, estate, or city. Few people today think in quite this way. Opinion is divided about both the extent of the perfect political community and the location of legitimate authority, whether in the United Nations Organisation, the multiplicity of sovereign states, a smaller number of great powers or regional hegemons, or the single remaining superpower. Double effect and conditional threat raise further problems for the secular mind. Christian thought about moral issues has always been more concerned with intention than outcome. War is no exception. Right intention, just as much as just cause, is a

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precondition of just resort to force. There is more. War was treated in very different ways by St. Thomas and by St. Augustine, who first introduced the concept of the just war into Christian thought at the turn of the fifth century, but both located their discussion of armed conflict within a broader discussion of love or charity. Oliver O’Donovan puts it most succinctly, remarking that it is ‘[I]n the context of war [that] we find in its sharpest and most paradoxical form the thought that love can sometimes smite, and even slay’.2 In short, legitimate authority and right intention, central concepts in the just war tradition, are deeply embedded in Christian theology and in one very specific, albeit central strand of theology. And since Western liberalism generally consigns religious belief to the private realm while seeking legitimate authority in the secular state or the UN, while the law of armed conflict deriving from the just war tradition has become universally applicable through a series of international conventions, the grounding of contemporary thought about war in Christianity prompts two urgent questions: ‘Can the tradition be successfully secularised?’ and ‘Is this all the Church has to say about war?’ Each of these questions is addressed to a quite distinct group: the first primarily to disbelievers and the second to the faithful. Natural law theorists may reason their way to a view of common morality, universal in incidence, providing a ground for the regulation of warfare. But for those who cannot quite swallow a secular version of legal naturalism there is a second, more secular route, which is to ground value in community, whether it be the national community or a universal community of humankind. The trouble with such views is that they seem constantly to be seeking some substitute for the divine authority that was once held to underpin political authority, whether it be through Hegelian recognition or organic nationalism; and such attempts look ever less convincing in the face of Nietszchean and post-modern critiques of metaphysics and social constructivist exposures of the imagined or invented character of supposedly organic or primordial nations. Worst of all, the vision of a single global community that might harbour a secular ethics of armed conflict is inchoate and poorly institutionalised, while any lesser form of communitarianism, such as that of Michael Walzer, can hardly avoid privileging the state of which one is a citizen, thereby admitting arguments from national interest or supreme emergency which run counter to the spirit of Augustine and Aquinas, substituting expediency for justice.3 Even if the problem of legitimate authority and political community can be solved, the secular thinker faces a second problem: the balance between intentions and outcomes. Recall Augustine’s maxim: ‘Love, and do what you will!’ If a Christian accepts this injunction, consequences are subordinated to virtue. To repeat, even war may be undertaken in a spirit of love. For the non-believer consequences may seem to be just about all there is and certainly not lightly to be disregarded. Conversely, there is no Lord to know the secrets of our hearts. Once again, separation of the tradition from its implicit theology poses problems. The question faced by the secular thinker wishing to deliberate within the just war tradition is how long the locomotive will go on running once the tender has been uncoupled. Will it reach some convenient downward slope where gravity takes over? 2 3

Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge 2003). Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York, 1977).

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(What kind of buffers lie ahead?) The question addressed to the Christian is very different. To continue the railway metaphor, the Christian needs to consider whether it might be prudent to send some goods by way of branch lines rather than entrust the whole lot to the express, just in case the main line gets blocked. For Christianity has many other resources for thinking about war besides the high discourse of justice and charity. Consider just three: trusteeship, the Passion and pilgrimage. Rather than develop this last thought in abstract terms it may be more helpful to do so within the framework of a strategy that offers a first step along the road to a new ethic of warfare, encompassing a wider range of experience, both political and personal, than the just war tradition. And this is to look to representations of warfare, in the novel and other literary genres, in cinema, in graphic art, through which modern creativity has sought to express the emotional and moral experience of warfare and combat. To do this is to encounter a wider range of virtues, vices and broader matters of value – such as secrecy, alienation and personal identity – than is customarily considered in contemporary debate about the ethics of war. As an empirical method, study of the representation of war and the development of the modern imaginarie is neutral in principle. It offers resources to both the religious and the secular thinker. This said, the remainder of this chapter is addressed primarily to Christians and explores some ways in which they might think about war outside the framework of the Just War through three parables. First, the way in which warfare engages and sometimes compromises human responsibility for the natural world and exposes tensions between nature, passion and discipline is considered through some narratives of the South African War of 1899–1902. Next, a treatment of the Passion narrative as metaphor for popular anti-colonial insurrection is offered through Gillo Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers. The chapter then concludes with a narrative of war as pilgrimage in the third and least known of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels, Mr. Standfast. The Horses Part of the case advanced here is that modern representations of warfare, both factual and fictional, have extended the moral vocabulary in ways that foster serious deliberation of the dilemmas of military service and command; part, that legalistic, formulaic and narrowly secular approaches to the ethics of war have been gaining ground over the past century in ways that threaten that ethical deepening. Narratives of the Boer War help advance both these claims. Contemporary accounts and some later histories light upon the disregard with which the British and their allies denuded farmland and squandered horses. Yet the 1978 Australian film Breaker Morant reduces a broader account of the experience of one Australian combatant to courtroom drama, editing out one of the most striking features of the book on which it was based, George Witton’s, Scapegoats of the Empire, in which lassitude, illhealth, the horses and the sheer wastefulness of war figure prominently. Who, aside from those personally engaged in hunting, racing, or eventing, gives much thought to horses these days? Part of the political force of the Countryside Alliance and most of the surprise it evoked in Whitehall stemmed from sharply contrasting answers to this question in Blair’s Britain. Horses are no longer involved

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in mundane transportation or warfare. More broadly, warfare has been mechanised to the point where mechanical and biological adaptation or enhancement even of the human body is now routine.4 Think only of night vision. As to landscape, it is far from inconsequential. Deserts and mountains still challenge human endurance and mechanical reliability. Yet technological ingenuity in the form of novel means of surveillance, protection of personnel and precision-guided munitions have done much to minimise the significance of the ground over which wars are fought. There has been, in short, a diminution in the natural limits to warfare and a corresponding growth in the risk of permanent harm to the environment from combat. All this must seem to Christians in stark contrast with God’s injunction to Adam, when He placed him in the Garden of Eden ‘to dress it and to keep it’.5 It was not yet so a century ago. The Second Boer War (1899–1902) was almost certainly the last war in which the British suffered far greater casualties among their horses than among the troops. When Field Marshall Lord Roberts, Commander in Chief of the imperial forces in South Africa, invaded the Orange Free State, 500 mounts of the 8,000 strong cavalry division commanded by Lieutenant-General John French were dead or useless after the first two days, before ever the enemy were ever engaged. By the time French reached the capital, Bloemfontein, two-thirds of the horses at his disposal were dead.6 In his authoritative history of the war, Thomas Pakenham estimated that 21,942 out of a combined force of 448,435 imperial and colonial troops died in the war: 5,774 in combat and a further 16,168 from their wounds or from disease. Compare this with an estimated loss of between 400,346 and 513,320 horses, mules and donkeys, ‘turning South Africa into [an] … imperial knacker’s yard’.7 Fatalities among the horses were a serious military issue. In the absence of mechanised road transport, and with the few railways that there were increasingly targeted by Boer irregulars, British logistics depended on them. Moreover the innumerable corpses, not easily gathered and burnt, posed a serious health risk, polluting watercourses.8 To make matters worse, the logistical and combat aspects of the horse shortage worsened as the war progressed. Initial Afrikaaner successes during the first two months were soon reversed as British and Dominion forces reached Cape Colony in strength. By August the major cities of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had been taken. Unable to match the British in conventional warfare, the Dutch or Afrikaaners fell back on irregular means. Raids on British communications and outposts increased in frequency toward the end of 1900. In October 1899 the British had ‘barely 14,000 mounted men’.9 Over the next two years hundreds of thousands of mounts were imported from as far afield as Argentina and Hungary.

4

Christopher Coker, The Future of War (Oxford, 2004). Genesis 2.15. 6 Byron Farrell, The Great Boer War (London, 1979), pp. 240–41. 7 Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London, 1979), p. 572; Farrell, The Great Boer War, pp. 240–41. Pakenham’s is the lower estimate. 8 Ibid. 9 Bill Nasson, The South African War, 1899-1902 (London, 1999), p. 150. 5

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Lord Kitchener’s response to the operations of the lightly armed and highly mobile Boer commandos was twofold. The first step was to drain the water in which they swam by moving civilians into concentration camps. But it was also in this late phase of the war that special mounted units were formed, designed to beat the Dutch at their own game by operating deep in hostile territory. The war became a highly mobile irregular struggle in which horses and their care were vital to success. One of these units, the Bushveldt Carbineers, was raised in Capetown early in 1901 to serve in the Northern Transvaal, working out of Pietersberg. Nominally commanded by British officers, it was in essence an Australian force, relying on the much more widespread familiarity of colonials than urbanised British recruits with life in the saddle and on the range. While it may be true that ‘the British, a horse-loving people, were horrified by the dreadful treatment of horses in South Africa’, they were also largely responsible for them.10 Those from Indian and colonial units were appalled. A recent official history quotes Captain Laurence Maxwell, of the Second Bengal Lancers, writing in March 1900 to his sister, about the conditions under which the remounts he had brought from India were being moved up to the front. ‘The horses are shoved into trucks just like cattle – he wrote – and with room enough to turn around and get mixed up higgledy-piggledy and kick and do all sorts of mischief.’11 The Australians, as is evident from Scapegoats, did not kill their horses by neglect or carelessness. They cared about them and cared for them. Not for them the heavy iron-framed English cavalry saddle. Indeed, the men of the Bushveldt Carbineers had been selected for the skill and familiarity with horses. George Witton, who served as a Lieutenant and was one of the three officers from the Carbineers sentenced to death in February 1902 for killing prisoners and a German missionary, had originally embarked for South Africa with the Royal Australian Artillery. All recruits had been subjected to a riding test before leaving Australia. Those that failed had been rejected. Witton’s memoir (his sentence was commuted) shows a consistent interest in and regard for horses. He describes the embarkation and rather precarious disembarkation of his unit’s 700 horses; he comments on the Hungarian re-mounts at Beira and notes the admiration of the Portuguese Governor for the condition of the Australian horses; he criticises the quality of the saddlery issued at East London by the British as ‘just the kind of equipment to cripple the rider and ruin the horse at the same time’; on arrival at Pietersberg, his principal duty was to oversee the care of the horses.12 Not only does Witton evidently care about the horses; so also 10

Farwell, The Great Boer War, pp. 240–41. H.S. Gaskell, who interrupted his medical studies at Edinburgh University to serve in South Africa in the Imperial Yoemanry, pays close attention to the horses (pp. 41, 42, 44, 51, 61, 66–7, 79, 81, and passim) and provides a horrifying description of the burden carried by the small American horses on which his unit was mounted and the incompetence of many of his fellow-soldiers. Loading the horse was two hours’ work. H.S. Gaskell, With Lord Methuen in South Africa (London, 1906), pp. 31–3. 11 Field Marshall Lord Carver, The National Army Museum Book of the Boer War (London, 1999), p. 140. 12 George R. Witton, Scapegoats of Empire: the Story of the Bushveldt Carbineers (second edition. Melbourne, 1907), pp. 5, 9, 10, 19, 40, 43; see also 16, 71 and passim. The history and development of this text is problematic in the extreme. Very few copies of a first

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did those who stood trial with him and were later shot by firing squad. Lieutenant Handcock had been a farrier. In the Bushveldt Carbineers he served as a Veterinary Lieutenant.13 Lieutenant H.H. ‘Breaker’ Morant, eponymous anti-hero of the film based on Witton’s book, was a breaker of horses. He took wild horses and brought them to the point where they were rideable. So much time has been devoted to the prominence of the horse in the Boer war and the contrast between British and colonial attitudes to the horse, because this theme, present in scholarly historical accounts of the war and in contemporary memoirs, is virtually absent from the later film. Breaker Morant, like the antecedent novel and play, is as much a gloss on Australian participation in the two World Wars and Vietnam as the literal treatment of events in the Boer War that it purports to be. Australian resentments bubble under the surface: Gallipoli, the loss of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales in December 1941, and the yet more ignominious fall of Singapore in February 1942, which resulted in the captivity thousands of Australians and left the country scarcely defended. When the condemned Australians in Breaker Morant are temporarily released to help the British regulars to repel a Boer raid on Fort Edward their valour earns no mitigation. High politics, it is suggested, trumps humanity and moral obligation among the British commanders. The contemporaneity of its implicit political target surely guided the editing of Scapegoats into Breaker and its relative neglect of opposition between natural Australian and artificial Briton. The horses fade into the background. Emphasis moves from the natural Australian of Witton’s almost certainly ghosted narrative to the passion of the film’s eponymous anti-hero. Passion and reason contend in Morant and the former triumphs. Nature precedes both and receives less attention in the industrial cultural product of a largely urban Australia than it did in Witton’s simpler (though hardly simple!) testimony of 70 years before. In formal terms, the courtroom frames the film but is merely the central episode in the book. The film gives an account of a harsh guerrilla war in which it was impossible to take prisoners. Though this had become routine, sanctified by direct orders from the British commanders, the eponymous hero, Lieutenant Harry Morant, and two other officers in the Bushveltd Carbineers are court marshalled in January 1902 for the unlawful killing, the previous August, of prisoners and of a German missionary who had witnessed some of the killings. Fearing German intervention and anxious to reach a negotiated settlement of an expensive and costly conflict, the British take steps to ensure conviction and subsequently execute Morant and Handcock. edition have survived. The memoir and the incidents to which it refers were little regarded by historians until a novel (Kit Denton, The Breaker) was published in 1973. This led in turn to a play (Kenneth Ross, ‘Breaker’ Morant (1978)), a film under the same title directed by Bruce Beresford in 1980 and starring Edward Woodward and a new edition of Witton’s memoir in 1982. There is still no agreement on the facts of the case and British official records have not been found. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_Morant. 13 The word ‘farrier’ is little known these days, as much because of the rise of professional vets as because of the marginalisation of the horse, but denotes a common horse doctor. In a statement to the court, Handcock declared: ‘I am a Veterinary Lieutenant. I have had a very poor education. I never cared much about being an officer; all I know about is horses, though I like to fight’. Witton, Scapegoats, p. 114.

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Witnesses who might have exonerated the accused are posted elsewhere; others with personal grudges against them are brought forward. A British officer denies under oath that orders to kill prisoners have been issued. The film takes the conventional form of a courtroom drama, exercising numerous tensions in the Witton narrative between law, morality and expediency. It has two main arguments. The first, and more legalistic, is that the British, having chosen to pursue the war by irregular means, were duplicitous in holding those who were the instruments of their policy to the standards appropriate to conventional warfare. The second argument is concerned with passion and morality rather than law. Morant, Handcock and Witton are unjustly condemned, yet they may be thought guilty men.14 Though Morant may indeed have been obeying orders, there is a strong suggestion that he was also motivated by revenge and moved by anger. What sparked the whole episode off was the death, on August 5th 1901, of Captain Percy Hunt, Morant’s senior officer and friend. Acting on false intelligence, Hunt had attacked what he believed to be a lightly defended farmhouse 80 miles from base. Encountering a force more than four times more numerous than his own patrol of 17 men, he nevertheless persisted until he fell wounded on the veranda of the farmhouse. When his body was subsequently recovered for burial, it was found to have been stripped and mutilated. This convinced Morant – so Witton tells his readers – that his brother officer and best friend had been brutally murdered; he vowed there and then that he would give no quarter and take no prisoners. He had ignored his orders [to this effect] in the past, but he would carry them out in the future.15

Australians are natural; the British are simply expedient; Morant ineffectually guards the passes between nature, discipline and passion. In manipulating the trial, the High Command bring to bear the passions of those involved like so many pieces of artillery. They rely on the resentment felt towards Hunt and Morant by those whom they alienated while restoring discipline among the Carbineers. They move key witnesses for the defence into administrative dead ground. More broadly, British vulnerability and failure in the war, just as much as the cynicism of military justice, arise from the distance of an industrialised Britain from nature. The poor state of health of British recruits, their ignorant mistreatment of horses, the removal of the Boer non-combatants

14 Opinions on this point still differ. Pakenham gives short shrift to the Bushveldt Carbineers. There is no suggestion in his brief account of any miscarriage of justice or British kow-towing to German diplomatic pressure. The episode is seen as simply the worst case of a process of reciprocal brutalization that characterised the later stages of the war (Pakenham, Boer War, pp. 538–9). Wallace quotes a letter of 21st October 1929 from Witton to his erstwhile defence lawyer, from which it appears that Witton believed that Handcock murdered the German missionary and that Morant knew of his intention. It may be, then, that Handcock and Morant were condemned and executed for a crime (killing prisoners) of which they were technically innocent, but acquitted of a capital crime of which they were guilty and that a kind of justice was done, though Wallace himself is unconvinced: R.L. Wallace, The Australians at the Boer War (Canberra, 1976), p. 370. 15 Witton, Scapegoats, p. 55.

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from their natural surroundings and the consequent desolation of the countryside all bespeak a gulf between the British and their natural environment, the consequence of more than a century of sustained urbanisation and industrialisation. Australians, on this reading, are not so much undisciplined as natural and passionate by turns. It is perfectly true that Harry Morant was a man who tamed or ‘broke’ horses. It is also emblematic and perhaps accounts for the perennial appeal of this episode – the merest detail in most of the general histories of the war – that his calling gives Morant a Janus-like character, looking both ways. He was English and set to marry an Englishwoman, Hunt’s sister-in-law-to-be, yet thoroughly at home in the Australian bush after 14 years working there. He is a poet and a reader, yet also a man of action. He stands literally at the point where the wild horse is brought into subjection – ‘the only Englishman capable of riding a buck-jumper like a native-born Australian’ – while, metaphorically, he ‘breaks’ the men under his command as one of those responsible for restoring discipline among the Bushveltd Carbineers shortly before the death of Captain Hunt. Yet Morant fails wholly to break himself, allowing revenge to supplant discipline when push comes to shove. And with Morant gone, in later mythic readings of the story, the bridge between natural Australia and artificial Britain is broken. By a further irony, the success of the film occludes Witton’s narrative, substituting courtroom for Veldt and passion for nature. The British, Witton told us, were no longer fit to watch over the Garden of Eden. The Australians, we come to suspect, may have been more Cain than Adam, more Jacob than Esau. The Thief at Christ’s Side Among the most celebrated of twentieth-century war films, winner of the Leone d’oro at the Venice film festival in 1966, banned until 1971 in France and not shown on network television there until 2004, Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1965 film is an ItalianAlgerian co-production made less than a decade after the events it portrayed, when wounds were still raw and many of the participants still active.16 Over the years, the film has acquired a curious and ironic didactic life, adopted by the Black Panthers for training purposes and more recently shown to members of the security and intelligence communities of the US, Israel and Northern Ireland to prompt discussion of how best to respond to contemporary insurgency and terrorism.17 Identification of The Battle of Algiers with the Christian Passion narrative is neither unprecedented nor speculative. Some interpreters have hinted strongly at it, yet perhaps been restrained from any clearer statement by the secular Marxistnationalist thought world of the period. Irene Bignardi, for example, writes of Pontecorvo’s identification with ‘the choral nature of the [Algerian] struggle’ but rapidly elides this into the banal Leftism of ‘sentiments and emotions felt in unison 16 Joan Mellen, Filmguide to ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (Bloomington and London, 1973) is still a good starting point. The literature has grown since and continues to grow. 17 Donald Reid, ‘Re-viewing The Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion’, History Workshop Journal, 60 (Autumn 2005), p. 110; for the detail about the Black Panthers see Irene Bignardi, ‘The Making of The Battle of Algiers’, Cineaste 25:2 (2000), p. 16.

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with the masses’.18 Mellen also notes Pontecorvo’s concern with the interplay of individuals and collective, but expresses it in exclusively Marxist dialectical terms.19 Closer to a religious interpretation was Joseph Morgenstern, reviewing the film in Newsweek, who commented that ‘rather than playing God … Pontecorvo and his team have chosen the scarcely less difficult role of witnessing angels’. True: and they explicitly cast the audience, too, in this role. However, The Battle of Algiers is not simply open to interpretation; there is also direct evidence of authorial intention in this matter of narrative structure and analogy with the Passion. The film opens with a lengthy quotation from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.20 This immediately marks it out, for all its Leftist sympathy with the Algerian nationalist cause and for Islam, as a narrative firmly embedded in the Christian tradition. Brought up in a cultivated middle-class household, persecuted as a Jew during the Second World War, a man of the secular Left who had hoped to become a composer in his youth and chose the music for his films with great care, Pontecorvo recognised the need for a more than secular approach to the Algerian struggle.21 There is a hint here of the motivation behind Otto Klemperer’s brief conversion to Christianity: necessary – he felt – if he were to conduct the St. Matthew.22 The quotation ends before the entry of the choir, so that the words remain implicit: ‘Come ye daughters, share my mourning. See him! – Whom? – The bridegroom, Christ.’ Yet the effect of these few bars is to establish not only a passion narrative but also a chorus to bear witness to the narrative, or perhaps two choruses: those daughters of Zion – the unnamed Arab women of the city of Algiers – and ourselves, the audience, who become witnesses through our implication in this form, with its conventional use of the chorale. It may assist an appreciation of the shape of the film to keep those opening bars in mind – prelude to a monumental and meticulously structured baroque masterpiece – and cut to an image from the very end of the film, when the battle for Algiers has been fought and won by the French and the film has traced the passion of freedom fighter and terrorist Ali La Pointe (the thief at Christ’s side?) and the Arab nation to its explosive conclusion. Two years have passed. Suddenly, no one knows quite why, not even the Arab leadership, Algiers explodes. The French have defeated the insurgency in the capital but are now about to lose the war and, with it, the country they have regarded as part of their own for more than a century. While the battle was fought between rational men, tacticians, presented to the viewer as bound by mutual respect amounting almost to collusion, the war is won by nameless women, those daughters of Zion: ululating insistently, witnessing without 18

Bignardi, ‘The Making’, p. 15. Mellen, Filmguide, pp. 9–13. 20 The film and the St. Matthew Passion. 21 For the care that Pontecorvo devoted to choice of music for the soundtrack see Bignardi, ‘The Making’, pp. 18–19 and Mellen, Filmguide, pp. 13–14 and pp. 24–32. 22 Daniel Barenboim interviewed Klemperer, ‘who became a Christian to conduct Bach’s St. Matthew Passion but eventually returned to Judaism’, reported in Nextbook: a gateway to Jewish Literature, Culture, and Ideas. http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/digest. html?date=2004.03 (accessed 5th April 2006). 19

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argument, ‘a presence of all voice rather than an absence of all words’.23 The war is won by an unstructured multitude, invisible through the fog, with whom communication is impossible. Demonstrations stream through the streets. A bewildered gendarme stands, megaphone to his mouth, shouting at the fog of tear gas into which the protesters have vanished. ‘Go home!’ he exclaims. (But it is our home!) ‘What is it you want?’ (How can you not know by now?) By this point we have moved from battle, with a clear competitive logic, to the more cosmic opposition of two forms of reason, instrumental and existential, which constitutes warfare proper. It would be quite wrong to contend that Pontecorvo’s film is solely or even principally a Passion narrative. Alongside the Passion of Ali la Pointe a quasi-Marxist dialectic unfolds in which stereotypically masculine clarity serves as thesis, equally stereotypically feminine deception and transgression as antithesis and complicity as a synthesis which immediately comes into fresh opposition with something in that fog and wailing which is no more than suggested: certainly not un-reason; perhaps the multitude, perhaps right, perhaps becoming, perhaps salvation.24 Take clarification first. The film shows a steadily escalating definition of European and Arab spaces within the city of Algiers and of the roles of the major protagonists. As attacks on the police and terrorist bombings increase, the Casbah is cordoned off. Barbed wire and checkpoints appear. The civil police give way to French paratroopers. Within the Casbah the revolutionaries respond by purifying their own ranks, securitising the rituals of everyday life and eliminating gangsters and drunkards. After clarification comes transgression. The barriers have been set up; the checkpoints manned. To continue the terrorist campaign the FLN must penetrate these clear lines. To do this, they must transgress in other ways too. Using women to carry bombs into the European quarter they not only breach traditional conventions about the distinction between combatant and non-combatant and women as nurturers but also break trust by exploiting the supposed respect of the French for women. One French soldier reprimands another in the very first checkpoint scene for having started too rough a search of the white shrouded figure, who, moments later, hands the pistol she had concealed about her to an assassin. ‘You must not touch their women’, he insists. More than this, these women who carry bombs must ‘pass’ in the sense of diminishing or concealing their Arab identity. One, the young woman who passes most convincingly, is first seen at home with her two companions, dressing to kill. Abandoning traditional clothing for the flared cotton skirts of the time, she next sets about dying and perming her hair. Her cover is a trip to the beach. Passing though the checkpoint, a carefree peroxide blonde, she flirts easily with a young French soldier as he and his companions eye the crowd for those who look suspicious. She is not out of place among the other young people in the Milk Bar. She begins to move with the music, almost dancing to the music of French youth, but uneasily, as she plants the bomb that will kill or maim those who could so easily have been her student friends had things gone differently.

23

Personal communication: Sara Crangle, 26 May 2005. This dialectical structure is spelt out and illustrated in some detail in my ‘Film as Struggle in an Algerian Passion: Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers’, forthcoming. 24

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Clarification-as-thesis is contradicted by transgression-as-antithesis. So, finally, comes complicity-as-synthesis: politically the most problematic and theologically intriguing aspect of this Italian-Algerian co-production. In the opening scene, the Judas figure who has just betrayed Ali La Pointe, the last remaining FLN leader in the city, is immediately comforted, protected and clothed. When he attempts suicide, he is restrained. Pontecorvo argues strongly for a traditional bond between warriors, rooted in their shared understanding of necessity, even in a new kind of war. The more likely outcome in fact, if General Paul Aussaresses is to be believed, would have been summary execution.25 The fictional Lieutenant Colonel Mathieu, orchestrator of the French operation, shares a bond with the tortured, but also with the enemy leadership and most of all Ben M’Hidi. Mathieu understands the logic of asymmetric warfare and the necessity of terrorism; it is the mirror image of the torture that he must employ against the FLN. Many French officers who served in Algeria had themselves taken part in irregular Resistance operations against the German occupying forces in the 1940s, not long before. Pontecorvo himself had fought as a partisan in Milan during the Second World War, as commander of the Third Brigade.26 This mutual understanding of a new breed of warrior is reinforced most strongly and repeatedly through the character of Mathieu: Mathhew, the apostle who had served Herod’s puppet state. His ambivalence is once again pointed up as he tells the journalists, Pilate-like, following the faked suicide of Ben M’Hidi in captivity: ‘You must ask the spokesman of the Minister of the Interior’. Pontecorvo suggests complicity between opposing forces. Then, finally, the audience is made complicit in the film in a number of ways. Three examples will do: the first two very specific, the third more general. Remember that young woman with the peroxide perm? The transformation scene, where she and her companions groom themselves for the triple bomb attacks on the French quarter, is shot from an oddly high angle. The audience look down on the three women, changing modestly because they are in each other’s company and only at the end of the scene as the youngest starts to treat her hair, looking directly at camera, does it become apparent that the audience is behind the mirror. The intrusion into the intimacy of the home and the scene of changing is not simply that of the self-effacing camera, but is suggestive of the two-way mirror, cliché of police interrogation scenes and almost Delphic emblem of false truth. ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall …’ The trick is repeated. Mathieu, newly appointed leader of the French paratroops brought in to suppress the insurrection after the police are deemed to have failed, shows his men a recently made police film. His ostensible aim is to demonstrate errors made by the police in the management of checkpoints. It is hard to watch that clip without darting to that familiar figure, picking her out as with a Judas kiss: the slight eye movement enough to betray her to an experienced observer watching you. In this way an audience comes to understand the temptation to inform, a little like the desire to jump from a high place. Finally, for evidence of the more general complicity of the audience, one must go back to the very start of the film once more. The hegemony of the Christian narrative is immediately established by the quotation from Bach. As audience, we are assumed 25 26

Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah (New York, 2002). Mellen, Filmguide, p. 12.

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to recognise this just as surely as we recognise the blonde terrorist, and, in doing so, to bring into play the entire imaginary resources of the Passion. The purpose is no longer transgression but the fusion of enemies: the implication of the audience in the representation they are witnessing, which becomes less entertainment than liturgy. A Presbyterian Pilgrim If Pontecorvo blends Marxist dialectic with the Passion narrative, John Buchan, his senior by a generation, blended established Romantic tropes with one of the most celebrated narratives of Christian pilgrimage, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.27 Best known for the first of his Richard Hannay adventures, the thrice-filmed Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan had serious political ambitions, served as a Member of Parliament and was later to die in office as Governor-General of Canada. He wrote the third of the Hannay novels as World War I and with it his war-work as a propagandist in the British Ministry of Information and a chronicler of the conflict for the Daily Mail, drew to a close. Mr. Standfast takes its title from a character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, perhaps – alongside the King James Bible, Waverley, and Robinson Crusoe – the most widely read narrative in English during the nineteenth century. Its central argument is that the outcome of conflict is now determined through the secret and shameful war of espionage and deception rather than the open and honourable war of the battlefield. The narrative device he employs to press home this message is the modelling, of what presents superficially as a thriller or novel of espionage, on Bunyan’s devotional text. In Pilgrim’s Progress Pilgrim himself first leaves home and family to travel through a world of temptations and dangers to salvation. In the second half of the book his wife and children follow. Adopting the same, two-part structure and playing with the stereotypes of his day, Buchan embarks on a game of Romantic inversions worthy of his literary hero, Sir Walter Scott, with Pilgrim-Hannay, adrift in the feminine secret world in the first half of the book and his male yet feminised opponent, the German spy von Schwabing, unable to survive in the masculine world of the battlefield in the second. The analogy between journeying, salvation and narrative and its attendant themes of landscape, identity and deception, or pretence, are immediately evident in the novel. Suddenly called back to England from the Western Front, Richard Hannay journeys from the Somme, by way of London, to the Cotswolds. There he meets Mary Lamington, a young woman who is able to give him orders in this secret war and with whom he falls in love. Like the novel as a whole, his initial journey is from the ‘real’ war of the Western Front, through the frustrations of the secret war, to embodiments of the ideal of England which alone can justify a new style of warfare. The same analogy between warfare and pilgrimage is pursued through abundant references throughout the novel to Pilgrim’s Progress, which has been adopted as a code book by the British agents, providing a secret language through which Mary

27

Buchan’s debt to and use of Pilgrim’s Progress is explored in Jeremy Idle, ‘The Pilgrim’s Plane-Crash: Buchan, Bunyan and Canonicity’, Literature and Theology, 13/3 (September 1999), pp. 249–58.

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and Hannay are able to filter their shared experience of the covert struggle.28 As Idle so elegantly puts it: the Progress in Standfast is a prize, a code-book, a good read, a fortune-telling device, a timeless anatomy of human folly, and inspiration to fight and die, a source of moral and theological comfort, and an English classic and reminder of the glory of the English countryside.29

For Buchan, with his Free Church background, it is not the rational public discourse of Thomistic readings of the ‘just war’ tradition, but the private confessional tradition of Baxter and Bunyan that provides the better context in which to consider the nature of modern warfare and its significance for the individual as personal struggle, akin to jihad. Yet any literal application of the analogy poses problems, as Buchan surely knows. To raise just one: the first part of the novel deals with the secret war, in which women as well as men are participants while the distinction between combatant and non-combatant is intentionally obscured. The second part deals with the open or ‘real’ war of front-line combat, still at that time an exclusively male preserve. Yet the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress relates the path to salvation of a man, Christian: the second, that of his wife and children. It is not simply that there is a conflict between secret and open war, but that there is doubt about which is more privileged in modern warfare, the feminine or the masculine. Buchan follows another of his literary heroes, Sit Walter Scott, when he sews doubt by inconsistent and contradictory inversion of the binary oppositions with which he constructs the symbolic world of his novel. The book is full of inversions – of sanity and madness, youth and age, male and female, clothed and naked, innocence and guilt. Yet constant inversion means that all are trumped by the master-themes of initiation, secrecy and identity. As faith moved from the public to the private sphere with the Reformation, so now, it seems, war moves from the public and rational world of Aquinas and the battlefield to an esoteric world in which nothing can be relied upon and everything is at risk in a struggle for salvation. Hannay despises pretence. He hates having to pretend to be opposed to the war as he works under cover as Cornelius Brand, an Afrikaaner pacifist, testing the moral temperature of Middle England and infiltrating the enemy intelligence network. ‘I detested my new part and looked forward to naked shame’, he declared (3). There is nothing worse than a fake. ‘The mass of faked china fruit’ at Fosse Manor comes under Hannay’s disapproving scrutiny as, much later, does the desk of his German arch-enemy, the Graf von Schwabing: ‘It’s a bad piece of fake empire and deserves smashing’ (162). Arriving in the oxymoronic Garden City of Biggleswick, Hannay finds a whole sub-culture that is incomplete or unreal because of its lack of contact with the reality of war (13). Its people ‘shut out the war from their lives’ (21). ‘It was their fashion – he noted – never to admire anything that was obviously beautiful, like a sunset or a pretty woman, but to find surprising loveliness in things which I thought 28 John Buchan, Mr. Standfast (London, 1919), pp. 14, 75, 81, 130, 135, 160, 168, 184, 185, 190, 196–7 and passim. My page references, the remainder of which are given in brackets in the text to avoid a string of ‘Ibids’, are to the 1994 Wordsworth Classics edition. 29 Idle, ‘Pilgrim’s Plane Crash’, p. 254.

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hideous’(19). His hosts, the Jimsons, dress inappropriately and appear younger than their age (16). The city is in one sense a wholly public place ‘where people lived brazenly in the open and wore their hearts on their sleeves’. But finding his room has been searched Hannay realises that this pretence of transparency conceals a mystery (18). In Biggleswick, the German spy-master, the Graf von Schwabing, who passes for an English pacifist, Moxon Ivery, is a pretence in several ways. He is identified by Hannay’s American comrade, Blenkiron, as ‘the superbest actor that ever walked the earth [with a face that] isn’t a face, it’s a mask’ (34). He is more specifically false in allowing Hannay and his companions to believe themselves to be manipulating him and his channels of information when, as Hannay suddenly discovers in the course of a London air raid, the reverse obtained (120–121). Pretence is associated with unreality and the unreal cannot be fought by ‘real’ or honest methods of combat, but only in its own terms. Thus even Fosse Manor, the Cotswold Manor House where Hannay is commissioned into the secret war and falls for Mary Lamington, is at heart unreal, even though placed in the most ‘real’ of landscapes, the Cotswolds being central to the idyll and ideal of Englishness for which Hannay is fighting. Hannay is repelled by the inappropriately young dress style of the over-intellectual Miss Wymondhams and the heavy make-up of Claire Wymondham, representative members of the disengaged haute bourgeoisie whom he encounters there (8–9). Mary herself is obliged to change out of her VAD uniform the moment she arrives home. ‘She may masquerade as she likes out-of-doors, but this house is for civilized people’; but the masquerade – the role of military nurse – is more real, though of course it is at the same time a pretence: the cover for Lamington’s intelligence work (9). Fosse Manor is a pretence, then, because the war has been shut out and because those within it who are really engaged in the war must pretend that they are not. Meanwhile Buchan plays with a second related inversion of innocence and guilt, as guileless pacifists are innocently drawn into the enemy espionage network and are therefore guilty even though, being unaware of what they are really doing, they remain innocent (117). Real and covert war are constantly juxtaposed in this most didactic and complex of Buchan’s novels, and in one of the few moments of sheer inventive brilliance in the book, fleeing from the police on the outskirts of the northern city of Bradfield, Hannay suddenly stumbles out of the covert war of Part 1 of the novel into a real battlefield in the middle of Yorkshire, only to perceive, moments later, that it is a re-enactment of combat for the cine-camera, though like enough to real warfare for the experienced officer that he is to take over direction and reduce the carefully planned mock battle to sheer chaos, covering his escape (112). Soon afterwards, finally reaching London, Hannay heralds the conclusion of Part 1 and the move back to the ‘real’ battlefields of Flanders. ‘The day of disguises is past’, he declares (125). And the first chapter of Part 2 is headed ‘I become a combatant once more’, as though the first part had not related a story of combat, albeit clandestine. Finally, the novel as a whole is an inversion, the two parts being reversals or mirror images of each other: the covert war and the war of the battlefield. The battlefield presents a mortal threat and the ultimate test of character. The climax of the book is the final massive German attack of the war: the Ludendorff Offensive, in which the physical cowardice of von Schwabing is exposed. Yet Hannay accepts

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that it is no longer battle but intelligence that holds the key to victory (167). This is to prove the very root of the twentieth-century spy novel, above all during the Cold War. Von Schwabing is ‘the big enemy, compared to whom the ordinary Boche in the trenches was innocent and friendly’. The burden of the tale is that in modern warfare ‘the whole world [is] one battlefield and every man and woman among the combatant nations … in the battle line’ (168). By his use of Pilgrim’s Progress Buchan fixes the attention of his reader on questions of salvation and identity, both personal and national. War is less about the implementation of justice by sovereigns than about the exercise of judgment by individuals under conditions of radical uncertainty. His is a profoundly Protestant response to Aquinas. Conclusion Christians can hardly remain indifferent to the discourse of nature, discipline and passion in the Morant episode or to the ambiguities of colonial sensitivity toward the disregard shown by industrialised warfare toward the natural world for which humankind was given responsibility in Genesis. They are surely bound to dwell upon, if not to accept, the audacious and considered analogy between Christ’s passion and the Algerian war of liberation as drawn by Pontecorvo. They should find no difficulty in accepting that war, for many individuals – Buchan’s Hannay, but also Waugh’s Guy Crouchback, Stephen Crane’s Henry Fleming, or even Henry Williamson’s largely forgotten John Bullock – is a pilgrimage: a journey towards salvation or self-discovery, in which the distinction between innocents and combatants has gone and the mantle of responsibility fallen upon every individual caught up in the dreadful process.30 To have made possible moral deliberation about war and inspired contemporary law of armed conflict is no mean achievement and not lightly to be discarded. Yet would not Aquinas himself have been open to the argument that a discourse of justice comes nowhere near exhausting what the Christian tradition has to say on the question of war, and that overtly rational discourse can never entirely displace parable in deliberations about war. A treasure house of material lies barely touched by those historians, strategists and ethicists who study war professionally and has yet to be felt in the peculiarly limited, legalistic and literally scholastic public discourse on war with which we are trying to steer our way through dangerous times. The three narratives examined here have been selected to explore how Christians might broaden the scope of their deliberation about modern warfare. Other texts which may appeal more readily to the secular mind include Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (1961), Powell and Pressburger’s film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Jean-Luc Godard’s Le petit soldat (1963), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre (1942), James Fennimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817). The list is a long one and each reader will have favourites. Lately, officers and defence officials in the 30

Evelyn Waugh, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1962); Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895); Henry Williamson, The Patriot’s Progress (London, 1930).

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United States and the British Isles have been watching The Battle of Algiers. What do they make of it? To some, at least, it will seem to depict breaches of the legal and moral constraints within which they aspire to operate, yet cannot. Yet its torturers and tortured, its terrorists and soldiers, do not stand outside the moral realm and more than Buchan’s implicit statement of war aims or his concern with deception do, or George Witton’s regard for innocent horses. If the objections of self-styled realists who throw up their hands and claim that all’s fair in love and war are to be overcome and war brought more firmly within reason, then the imaginative resources of modernity, both religious and secular, need to be more effectively deployed, perhaps to flank, perhaps to replace the just war tradition.

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Chapter 6

British Military Intervention Since 1990 Tim Cross

Introduction The world has changed enormously since 1990, yet in one sense at least nothing has changed; military campaigns continue in the same old places. A British Serviceman has been killed on operations every year since 1945, except one; 1969, just as the most recent troubles in Northern Ireland erupted. Of the 3,500 killed since 1945, around 380 have died since 1990 (as of October 2006). British military forces have been involved in the planning or execution of over 30 separate operational deployments since 1990 – in the preceding 45 years they were involved in only seven. And the tempo in the last few years has increased. The current Labour Government has deployed British troops to seven different countries for one reason or another; British servicemen and women find themselves back in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they were back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and they are still present in the Balkans after more than a decade and the Falklands Islands after 25 years. In the years following the end of World War II large numbers of British Forces continued to police the globe, deployed across the Middle and Far East as well as Africa and Europe. Economic and political pressures convinced British governments of all shades to steadily withdraw from Empire; from the Jewel, India, in 1947 after partition, followed by Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ in Africa in the 1950s/1960s and the Wilson government’s decision in 1967 to pull out East of Suez. British engagements in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Suez were all in one sense fighting withdrawals as Britain handed over to national governments. Others, like Korea and the Oman, were more about assisting governments resisting take over by insurgents or external forces. The result was that by the 1970s the defence effort of the UK was focussed almost exclusively on Western Europe, on deterring the Warsaw Pact (WP) from crossing the Inner-German border (IGB). There was of course Northern Ireland and a small retained ‘out-of-area’ capability, with a presence in Hong Kong, Cyprus and the Falkland Islands; but the vast bulk of British combat power was configured for the Cold War. The British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) was deployed in garrison towns across the plains of North-West Germany. First British Corps, part of the 493,000 strong regular and reserve UK Army, stood at the heart of the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG); Dutch, Belgian and German Corps stood alongside the British, who commanded the whole group. To the South, American and further German Corps operated under CENTAG, the Central Army Group. Both NORTHAG and CENTAG were supported by the Air Forces of all the NATO partners, with the Royal Air Force deployed in various ‘clutch’ airfields around the Rhine area of Germany and further

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forward at Gutersloh, all part of the Second Allied Tactical Air Force. Large, in-place forces, all preparing to fight a clearly defined enemy; mass, Clausewitzian, attritional warfare. In 1990 NATO had 23,000 main battle tanks and 4,884 combat aircraft ready to engage the estimated 51,714 tanks and 6,206 combat aircraft of the WP. Moving rapidly out of their garrisons and stations the intent was to respond immediately to any incursion across the IGB, fighting a covering force battle as far forward as possible and then conducting a main defensive battle from within defensive positions along the length of Western Germany – the General Deployment Plan (GDP). If required, a counter-stroke, to either destroy the WP forces or at least stop them moving up across the Rhine and into France and the Benelux countries, would be launched. If all else failed, then tactical nuclear weapons would be used – probably leading to an exchange of strategic nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction – the ultimate and essential intent of deterrence theory. The British Military focus in 1990 was thus still on industrial scale war-fighting, essentially in Europe where operations would have been conducted as part of a war of national survival. The Post-Cold War Landscape All this changed as events unfurled at the end of the decade. The collapse of Communism and the WP in Europe saw the end of all the Cold War certainties, freeing the nation from the immediate threat of nuclear war and opening up an era of unpredictability. The prospect of large scale, inter-state warfare receded, to be replaced by what became known as ‘Wars of Choice’, with governments free to choose whether or not to get involved in military action rather than have it imposed upon them through direct threat to their homeland. Foreign policy began to evolve into a far more complex and detailed ‘ethical’ business1 and military commanders saw the relative freedoms they enjoyed in the way they would have conducted their operations in a high intensity, war fighting battle-space slipping away. The intrusion of the media, numerous non-military players and domestic public opinion would quickly become a major factor in the planning and conduct of relatively small to medium scale ‘expeditionary operations’. Whilst there had been impassioned debate during the Cold War about the ethics of assured destruction, there were few who argued for anything other than the necessity for the West to defend itself against communism and the WP; many, including within the Church, were now released to debate the legitimacy of military intervention. The changes also freed the military from the tyranny of blinkered and narrow thinking. Seeing the world through the tainted glasses of BAOR military ‘practice’ – how operations were to be conducted in that one particular theatre at that particular time – had resulted in other, hard fought for operational doctrine being ignored. Training, which had concentrated on simply implementing the GDP, and equipment programmes, which had procured weapons geared to the nature of operations in Europe, had to be re-assessed. The military needed to think through the implications of a post-Cold War world, particularly how to train and prepare for a wide range of possible options. The time honoured ‘principles of war’ had

1

British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s call for an ‘Ethical Dimension’ to foreign policy being the most notable example.

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to be re-learnt and practised and the procurement programmes moved away from large ‘just-in-case’ stocks of materiel to a more responsive and flexible approach. These changes were immediately interrupted as the first ‘War of Choice’ erupted. The British military found itself deploying around 50,000 service personnel as a part of an international coalition to fight not a defensive campaign, in a temperate climate falling back over relatively short lines of communication in a well found and sophisticated infrastructure, but an offensive campaign against an unknown enemy in the harsh and unforgiving deserts of the Middle East. In many ways the 1990/1991 Gulf War was a classic large-scale war. An invader crossed an international border under the pretext of securing additional territory and resources. There was a clear-cut enemy, with defined borders and boundaries and an objective – the removal of the enemy from Kuwait. Justice and righteousness demanded that something be done; and it was. Most serious analysts saw the Iraq invasion as an unprovoked attack and a breach of international law. The United Nations Secretary General, the Security Council and the General Assembly found no difficulty in supporting military action and they responded surprisingly quickly; resolutions were passed demanding Iraqi withdrawal – if not, the use of necessary force was authorised. The vast majority of the British public, indeed world, opinion was supportive of military action and the Church generally was too; any objective analysis of the ‘Just War’ criteria concluded that the use of force was justified, albeit some argued for more time. Saddam Hussein achieved strategic surprise in Kuwait on 2 August 1990, leaving the West and the rest of the world flat-footed. Control of Kuwait’s oil and gas fields was worrying enough, but even more so was the implied threat to Saudi Arabia. The world united in its condemnation and reacted with speed. Within hours of the invasion the first United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) had been adopted and on 8 August President Bush (senior) announced the deployment of US forces to Saudi Arabia. The UK duly confirmed that it too would play a part in an international coalition – Operation GRANBY was thus born, one of the largest British military operations since the end of the Second World War. In the autumn of 1990 a large force of coalition troops, under US overall command, moved into the north of Saudi Arabia to establish a defensive posture. Operation DESERT SHIELD was designed to ensure that Iraqi forces could not move further south into Saudi Arabia to occupy the oil fields there; Operation DESERT STORM was designed to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The coalition was a collection of nations, including full NATO members, France, several Arab nations and contributions from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. The Royal Navy (RN) and Air Force responded quickly.2 The RN ARMILLA patrol, which had been deployed in the Gulf since the beginning of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq war, was strengthened and the RAF deployed Tornado F3 air defence fighters, Jaguar ground attack and Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft. By early 1991 the Army fielded a powerful armoured division, commanded by the then Major General Rupert Smith. There were strong RN and RAF contributions to both support 2

The Royal Navy in 1990 was 98,900 strong while the RAF had a complement of 130,300 – Regulars and Reserves.

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the land component and to fight the sea and air campaigns. First British Armoured Division consisted of two armoured brigades, the fourth and seventh and a very strong artillery group, all supported by logistic, engineering, communications and medical assets. On paper the Iraqi army was not only numerically strong but also battle hardened from a brutal eight year war with Iran and the general feeling was that they would fight hard and that the threat of high casualties would not deter them; there was also widespread concern about their chemical and biological capability. In the event they proved battle-weary and both operationally and tactically inept. The air campaign began on 17 January 1991. The ferocious bombing, with the latest precision-guided weapons, had a devastating effect on the Iraqi forces and it was followed by a blitzkrieg-type lightning land assault, launched on the 24 February. US marines moved into Kuwait from the South to fix the Iraqi forces in the occupied country, whilst the bulk of the coalition combat power swept through Iraq, by-passing Kuwait itself. The US and the UK armies, with a French flanking guard, all of which had moved inland from their initial positions along the coast of the Persian Gulf, broke through the thin crust of Iraqi defences to the west of Kuwait and moved to force an engagement with the Iraqi Republican Guard. Some serious fighting ensued but the coalition secured the Euphrates and, after 100 hours, the fighting ended. The War itself was thus relatively uncontroversial, although there was a debate about how far to go in dealing with Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi military. The coalition air force dealt severely with the Iraqi forces streaming north out of Kuwait City on the Basrah road – carrying with them the loot they had pillaged. Pictures of the carnage were beamed around the world and disquiet set in. With coalition forces hard up against the Euphrates and the bulk of the Iraqi forces encircled there was an impassioned plea from many to gainsay further killing. Bowing to the pressure the US President ordered a cessation of hostilities. This left Iraq free to re-assemble its forces and Saddam able to re-assert his power. The coalition disbanded, its job done. Although in the North a humanitarian force was assembled under the title of Operation Haven to help the Kurdish refugees who fled to the mountains as Saddam re-exerted his grip, a subsequent up-rising in the South of Iraq was brutally crushed with no intervention from the coalition. All in all this was unfinished business. Gathering the British contribution back in the UK, replacing equipment and other materiel, took more than a year and the British government began to seek the benefit of a peace dividend. As they did so, further debates ensued on the ethical issues associated with the idea of ‘Wars of Choice’; concerning the legitimacy of intervention and the real meaning of the concepts that emerged. The previous lexicon of military language – ‘Counter Revolutionary Warfare’, ‘Low Intensity Conflict’ and ‘Operations other than War’ – was now joined by ‘Peace Keeping’, ‘Peace Support’ and ‘Peace Enforcement’. It was against this backcloth that conflict developed in the Balkans. Events there had been obscured by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War; and not least by the war against Iraq. But by the early 1990s Yugoslavia was in the process of disintegrating and this would have enormous consequences for the security of the rest of Europe.

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The Challenges of Peace-making and Peace Enforcement The death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980 was the catalyst for the break up of Yugoslavia. Freed from his control, and with no natural successor, an increasingly ineffective presidency rotated among the six semi-autonomous republics. Slovenia – Catholic, western orientated and the smallest but wealthiest republic – made noises about cessation and Kosovo teetered on the edge of revolt. Slobodan Milosevic seized his opportunity. Taking up the cause of Serbian nationalism he gave a now notorious speech in 1989 before one million Serbs. It was delivered on the 600th anniversary of the Serb defeat by the Ottoman Turks at Kosovo Polje – the Field of Blackbirds. This was a site of deep spiritual significance to all Serbs; as they saw it, this was where they had held back the tide of the spread of the Muslim faith. Tensions rose and in June 1991 the US Secretary of State, James Baker, made his only visit to Belgrade. He wrongly concluded that there was no immediate danger because within four days both Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence and on June 27, Yugoslavian troops moved into Slovenia. This, the first of the Balkan Wars, was the shortest. Slovenia held out and secured her independence. Milosevic appeared to have decided that the secession of Slovenia would help facilitate a long-held dream of Serbia – namely a Yugoslavia under Serbian control. Croatia was not prepared to go along with such a plan. Notwithstanding the fact that there were hundreds of thousands of Serbs living inside Croatia, in long established areas like the Krajina, President Franjo Tudjman was determined to gain Croatian independence. The second Balkan War followed, with Ratko Mladic, the Serb military commander, launching an attack in August 1991 on Kijevo, an isolated Croat village in the Krajina. Germany pressed the EU for formal recognition of Croatia as an independent state.3 The ensuing debate was not well handled by the rest of the EU – the British did not even send their Foreign Secretary to the meeting. The US was largely uninterested, being content to leave things to the Europeans. Although they initially opposed the idea of an independent Croatia they did not do so with much vigour and indeed recognised the state themselves a few months later. Many now argue that the West’s collective decision hastened the outbreak of the wars that followed between Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The initial fighting between Croats and Serbs was brought to an end in early 1992, and the UN voted for its second largest peacekeeping force, the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR). But the tensions remained and UNPROFOR, composed of troops from 30 different nations – including a British infantry battalion and support troops – proved powerless. On 3 March 1992 Bosnia declared itself an independent nation, recognised as such by the US, EU and UN. Backed by Belgrade, the Bosnian Serbs demanded independence be rescinded; the Bosnian President, Izetbegovic, refused and brutal ethnic cleansing followed. Sarajevo the capital, a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural city often held up as a model of stability was besieged. All over the country check points went up as the ethnic groups barricaded themselves in. The 3

Links between Germany and Croatia went back to the Second World War, with harrowing incidents of brutality conducted by the Croats in death camps against both Jews and Serbs on behalf of the Nazis.

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UNHCR convoys, protected by British Forces amongst others, ran the gauntlet of fire as they attempted to keep the city and many other towns re-supplied. The fighting continued to escalate. At the end of November 1994 the Serbs attacked Croat and Muslim positions in western Bosnia using aircraft flown out of military airfields in Serb controlled parts of Croatia, breaking the UN ‘no-fly’ provisions and in early 1995 they resumed the shelling of Sarajevo and so called UN ‘Safe Areas’. NATO responded by bombing Bosnian Serb positions and UN peacekeepers were then held hostage as human shields. Srebrenica, one of three UN Safe Areas, along with Zepa and Gorazde, was captured by Mladic and thousands of Muslims were killed, many of them by cold blooded execution – the single biggest mass murder in Europe since 1945. Vicious ethnic cleansing escalated – 250,000 Serbs were ‘cleansed’ by the Croats in just three days from the Krajina in August 1995; Bosnian towns were placed under siege and massacres abounded. British officers found themselves commanding in impossible positions as Europe and the US disagreed on appropriate responses, and British forces, along with the other UN contingents, became increasingly frustrated and angry with their inability to seriously engage with those carrying out a continuous stream of war crimes. Finally, even the politicians realised that things could not continue. The UN announced in New York that serious NATO combat power would be used to support the land forces. After months of hard bargaining in the late summer and early autumn of 1995, the US envoy Richard Holbrooke finally brokered an accord, known as the Dayton Peace Agreement. NATO agreed to send 60,000 troops to Bosnia – the largest troop movement in Western Europe since World War II, supported by thousands more in countries like Italy and Hungary and off-shore in the Adriatic Sea. The order by SACEUR, General Joulwan, was the first troop-deployment order since NATO had been formed in 1949. As part of this movement some British troops simply changed their berets from the UN-blue to their normal regimental headdress and re-painted their vehicles from white to green/brown; they were re-assigned from the UN to the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR). But additional forces, including heavy weapons, main battle tanks, artillery and armoured personnel carriers were shipped in from the UK to reinforce the troop already there. The three (UK) Division, led by Major-General Mike Jackson, assumed command of a multi-national area of operations that stretched from the air and sea-ports of entry at Split on the Croatian coast right up into the heart of Bosnia via Kupres and Sipovo. The move north followed the rapid entry of the heavy weapons and a clear brief from General Jackson to the various Bosnian faction commanders that this was a force equipped with substantial military fighting power and that he was prepared to use it. In the jargon of the day this was no longer a peace keeping but a peace enforcement force, prepared to conduct whatever operations were necessary to enforce the Dayton Accord. This was no easy task. Richard Holbrooke acknowledges that Dayton had weaknesses.4 Two opposing armies were effectively left in place, one Serb the other the Croat-Muslim federation. No attempt was made to create a single army, or disarm the warring parties. The Serb portion of Bosnia retained its name – Republika Srpska – and, not for the first or last time, there was no real plan within Dayton to pull together a cohesive political or 4

Richard Holbrook, To End a War (Random House, 1998).

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civilian authority. Finally, there were two arbitrary time limits set for the military deployments; 12 months for the initial (IFOR) deployment, 18 months for the follow-on stabilisation force (SFOR). There were reasons for these weaknesses, but taken together they encouraged the Serbs to delay significant change and, perhaps, laid the foundation for what was to follow in 1998–1999 in Kosovo. The Fallout British troops thus deployed to the Balkans in the early 1990s with UNPROFOR, in 1995 as part of the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) and then returned again in 1996 with SFOR. They remain in place today, albeit in reduced numbers, as a part of the European Union-led mission (EUFOR). They, like others, quickly began to realise that these operations were a completely different business to earlier deployments: these were so-called ‘Complex Emergencies’. Importantly the military began to engage widely with associated actors such as UN Agencies – the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the World Food Programme (WFP); bi-lateral agencies like USAID and the Department for International Development (DFID) and of course non-governmental aid organisations such as OXFAM, CARE and World Vision. These players are an important part of modern campaigning, a complex web of actors that needed to be better understood. Nor was there a single entity of ‘baddies’ – rather a mix of uniformed soldiers along with militias and civilian groups, many of whom seemed to change allegiance on a regular basis! The deployment of UK forces was generally supported by the public and by the Church. The decision to move from a UN to a NATO force was driven largely by moral and humanitarian perspectives. After the massacres at Srebrenica and the fighting around Sarajevo and Mount Igman in late 1994 and early 1995, the world could no longer escape the truth of what was happening. There was an outbreak of moral outrage as the evidence of ethnic cleansing was displayed for all to see on the TV screens in their homes. The fear of taking casualties in someone else’s war was overtaken by a groundswell that ‘something must be done’. The inadequate responses from the United Nations were finally recognised for what they were, and public opinion led, as was becoming the norm, by an extremely vocal media, demanded more serious engagement in order to deal with the vicious and brutal ethnic cleansing. Yugoslavia had highlighted the dangers associated with disintegrating states that had been held together artificially. The UN clearly did not know how to respond, being unable to keep peace where none had been established and NATO took time to come to terms with the new demands being placed on it. As far as the UK was concerned, such situations were unpredictable events and were susceptible to media coverage that could sway Government policy and override common sense. The Challenge of Kosovo British forces continued to be deployed throughout the late 1990s in Bosnia, but by 1998 events elsewhere in the Balkans were to take centre stage. As noted above, Kosovo holds a special place in both Albanian and Serbian history, not least because of

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the significance of Kosovo Polje. Although it had enjoyed a large measure of autonomy under Tito, Milosevic asserted Serbian control over the province and imposed direct rule from Belgrade in 1989 after violent conflict had erupted between the Albanian Muslim majority and the Serb minority. Kosovar Albanians were removed from important appointments and Serbs assumed both political and military control. The Kosovar Albanians set up a shadow administration under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova and a Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) emerged. In March 1998 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1160, which imposed an arms embargo on all sides, but Belgrade’s use of indiscriminate and disproportionate force eroded any sympathy for their case and alienated the international community. The KLA, unstructured and disparate though it was, attracted growing support and weaponry from within Albania in particular, which was itself in turmoil with the collapse of the government in March 1997 and widespread looting of state buildings, including armouries. Milosevic rebuffed international diplomatic efforts and by mid-1998 NATO Defence Ministers had called for a range of options to support the diplomatic process. The violence escalated throughout 1998. Serbian forces conducted large scale ‘search and destroy’ operations against the KLA, who had effectively occupied Kosovo as a ‘liberated’ province. Between 23 August and 5 September major offensives took place in Suva Reka, Lipljan, Stimljne, Malisevo, Glogovac and Prizren with significant Kosovar Albanian casualties and population movements. By September something like a quarter of a million people had left their homes and 50,000 were facing winter in the open. On 23 September the UN Security Council adapted Resolution 1199, which noted the events, demanded a ceasefire, a withdrawal of those forces involved in the repression of civilians and the start of a constructive dialogue. Milosevic agreed to the deployment of an unarmed verification mission by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and a NATO aerial verification mission. Both of these activities were aimed at verifying compliance with UNSCR 1199. The UK played a leading role in both, with key individuals deploying with the OSCE, RAF aircraft assigned to the air mission and a military team moving into Macedonia. Notwithstanding this, the violence continued to escalate, reaching new levels by December 1998–January 1999. On 28 January NATO issued a ‘solemn warning’ to Milosevic and the Kosovo Albanian leadership, and international diplomatic and military pressure increased. On the 29th the ‘factions’ were summoned to talks at Rambouillet in France and the next day NATO was authorised to commence air strikes against targets on Yugoslav territory if necessary. On 11 February 1999 the UK announced the deployment of troops to contribute to a NATO peace implementation force (KFOR). The aim was to move quickly into Greece and Macedonia, receive, stage, onward move and integrate (RSOI), the UK’s contribution to the NATO led KFOR, and then move on up into Kosovo itself in order to implement whatever came out of Rambouillet. Events, as they so often do, were to overtake them. By mid-February 1999 British troops were settled into a number of locations around Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, and they had begun the process of bringing in large elements of both 101 Logistic Brigade and Fourth Armoured Brigade. As the armoured vehicles of the first battle group were being off-loaded at the port of Thessaloniki in Greece, the Rambouillet talks began to falter. By the end of

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February, over 2000 military personnel and several hundred vehicles were in theatre, but with the situation deteriorating it was clear that the operation was not going to be anything like as straightforward as originally thought. Ships and aircraft continued to flow into theatre, but by the end of March the NATO bombing campaign had started, following the complete breakdown of the talks. Reports indicated that the fighting inside Kosovo was escalating. By mid-March over 200,000 Internally Displaced Person’s (IDPs) were reportedly on the move. Several thousand people had also crossed Kosovo’s international borders into Albania and Macedonia; the refugee flows had started in earnest and the bombing campaign served only to exacerbate matters. There could be no doubt that the refugee crisis would get worse, so contingency plans were produced by the UK logistic brigade staff, who would be best placed to react to developments. On Thursday 1 April, the brigade commander drove out to look at several sites that the Macedonian Government were intending to develop as refugee camps. They were small and in poor locations, very close to the border with Kosovo. The governmentled reconnaissance was badly organised and chaotic, but the brigade commander was able to meet with some UN officials, in particular the head of the UNHCR mission to Kosovo, Jo Hegenauer and a representative from the US State Department, David Scheffer, appointed as an Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues. In essence, the commander explained that there was a need to construct major refugee camps around a grass airfield and range complex that had been discovered alongside the main road running from Pristina to Skopje, 10km south of the border crossing at Blace. The location was big enough to create manoeuvre space to deal with the refugees; it had a good river source for water and an excellent site for a logistics base. In the meantime, it was agreed, the Macedonian Government needed help to construct a small camp at Bojane, some 20km away. The following day, 2 April and Good Friday in the UK, the commander was contacted by the head of the UNHCR. Large numbers of Kosovar Albanians had been arriving at Blace over the last few days, by road and by train, and things were getting extremely serious; there was no shelter, food or medical cover and the tired and hungry people were in a bad way, indeed some were beginning to die. The UNHCR did not have the resources to do anything effective; could the British forces help? The commander immediately established a tactical headquarters (Tac HQ) at a location near the airfield and implemented the initial elements of the contingency plans. The initial task was to establish a focal point where they could work with the UNHCR, ferrying food, blankets and medical supplies up to the border. Field kitchens were starting to prepare chicken and rice; fresh food and operational rations were released and food was being moved forward by about 2300 hours, some nine hours after the call for help, on UNHCR vehicles loaded at the UK logistic base. The temperature was not much above freezing and it had been raining or sleeting for 36 hours. Images of the thousands of people crammed into the fields around the border crossing were beginning to be shown around the world; the scenes there were disturbingly chaotic, with no evidence of any co-ordinated response. Pressure was mounting on the Macedonian Government, from the US and the UK, as well as on the UNHCR, whose small team was self-evidently going to be overwhelmed. The Macedonian government still needed convincing that the situation

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at Blace could not be allowed to continue. There was a great deal of uncertainty but it was clear that the dam at the border would break at short notice and when it did a torrent of refugees would be released. No other organisation apart from the British brigade was in a position to help. There were two imperatives: a moral and a politicomilitary one. It was clear that the Macedonian Government needed KFOR’s strength, otherwise it would fall and NATO needed them to maintain their resolve if they were not to find themselves in the midst of a civil war and unable to deal with Milosevic. After a night of detailed planning construction work on the refugee camp started. The brigade engineers pulled aside the crop-spraying Antonov 1 aircraft, built a bridge across the fast flowing stream which ran alongside the airfield, opened up access tracks from the logistic base out onto the range and airfield and began to dig deep trench latrines. Elsewhere, amongst a myriad of other tasks, the logistic regiment, working with the UNHCR, continued to move supplies forward to the border; the medics began to prepare their reception centres and the first tents were set up. All of this was being done in a vacuum, as no specific orders had been received. Finally, at 0800 hours on UK’s Easter Sunday morning, the Macedonian Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr Boris Trajkovski, rang to say that they should indeed implement their plan. International pressure, particularly from the US, had worked. The tempo of work increased. Water purifying and pumping systems were set up, reception and registration areas were established. General Mike Jackson, now the KFOR Commander, visited and authorised assistance from other KFOR nations and small attachments from the German and Italian contingents arrived to help put up tents. At 1700 hours Macedonian police announced that the first refugees would be allowed across the border at 1900 hours. One of the sites, eventually known as Stenkovic 1, was ready to accept some and overnight several hundred arrived; around 30,000 were, however, estimated to be crammed into no-man’s land at Blace and the situation there continued to deteriorate. On Monday, 5 April, the dam broke. The UK Secretary of State for International Development, Claire Short, arrived with the UK Ambassador and a number of other officials; a large media presence was also gathering. Authorising DFID support, which was to prove absolutely invaluable, she asked to look around. As they were approaching the main airfield site, Stenkovic 2, a number of buses arrived crammed to bursting point with refugees. The pictures of Claire Short helping them off the buses became worldwide prime-time news. Work continued but no more refugees arrived. Then a large number of buses arrived after dark, each bus containing 80–100 refugees. As dawn broke the flow stopped, but by then around 20,000 refugees had been deposited. All through the night soldiers from the brigade put up tents, helped families into them, issued food and blankets and provided medical support; some, including a tiny baby, died but many other refugees, both young and old, were successfully treated by the multi-national medical facility. Night after night the buses arrived. It was only later that they realised that during the day these buses were being used to ferry children in Skopje to and from school and adults to and from work; as soon as it got dark they moved to the border to play a different trade. By 9 April, there were around 40,000 refugees in the two major camps; whilst some were being flown out there was little space left.

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Over 2,800 tents had been erected, 1,600 meters of water pipeline had been laid, tens of thousands of meals had been cooked and distributed, along with over 103,000 jars of baby food, 11,000 loaves of bread, 264,000 litres of bottled water and 430,000 bars of chocolate; 400 deep trench latrines had been dug and thousands of refugees had been treated in the medical facilities. Initially the NGO presence on the ground had been minimal. OXFAM arrived first and quickly became effective, playing a key role in the development of the water and sanitation systems. Other organisations arrived more slowly. The UN became more effective as the weeks progressed and the UNHCR and WFP teams were strengthened. For a few days the flow of refugees slowed and the various NGOs began to get organised. On Sunday 11 April, most of the medical support was handed over to Medicin sans Frontieres (MSF) and the Red Cross. Although British forces began to plan the hand-over of all aspects of the camps, the following week was still a demanding one. The camps had to be extended as more refugees arrived, policing and security became a problem and the temperatures began to soar. The ability of the various agencies to cope remained suspect and the UNHCR asked the military to stay on for a few more days. Finally, they withdrew over the period of the 17–19 April, leaving behind a military liaison team. After a gap of about 8 days, during which time the logistic brigade was immersed in the RSOI of the Second Battlegroup and the training programme of Fourth Armoured Brigade, their attention was directed back to the humanitarian aspects of the situation once again. Inside Kosovo, further waves of Kosovar Albanians were being rounded up and moved to the borders. The camps in Macedonia were full and the ones in Northern Albania, where NATO had deployed a further force, AFOR commanded by a British general, were overflowing. The Macedonian government was adamant that it would not allow additional camps to be built in their central and southern regions and so attention focused on southern Albania. Numerous meetings were held and reconnaissance trips conducted. Finally, UNHCR and headquarters KFOR agreed that the British should use their logistic brigade assets to establish a series of camps in the Korce region of Albania, around 40km south of Lake Ochrid. Dividing the brigade and the HQ, over such a distance – they would now have elements of the brigade in three countries, Greece, Macedonia and Albania – was far from ideal. The main HQ was heavily involved with military support to KFOR, particularly Fourth Armoured Brigade, and their primary mission was to support the UK move into Kosovo; nonetheless there seemed little likelihood of any such move in the short term – indeed they were beginning to plan forced entry options, which would inevitably take weeks to prepare and implement. The lead elements of the brigades Tac HQ thus deployed to Albania on 8 May. The problems were very different to those encountered in Macedonia over Easter. Although there was a time imperative it was not as urgent as before. The UNHCR and NGO presence was considerable and the emphasis was on developing sustainable camps, suitable for refugees to live in throughout the winter if necessary. It was, however, a demanding few weeks. Local politics was rife with corruption and there was criminality in abundance. The first few ‘situation reports’ back to HQ KFOR read more like a John Le Carré novel than a military update – particularly when rival gangs in Korce began open warfare and anti-corruption officials, appointed from

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Tirana, began to stir things up. Nonetheless, by 6 June and in very close concert with DFID, who were once again quite excellent, UNHCR and the NGOs, four substantial camps were constructed and other locations surveyed and planned; in all capacity for well over 60,000 refugees was created. Only 12–15,000 of those spaces were to be actually used as, once again, events were to turn; this time they turned for the better. At the beginning of June planning for offensive operations into Kosovo had begun in earnest and additional UK forces were deployed. At short notice, Fifth Airborne Brigade and a large RAF Support Helicopter force were flown in and configured to go north into Kosovo. In the end Milosevic conceded and agreed that KFOR could enter unopposed. Entry for the Force was 10 June, D-Day 12 June. In addition to providing military engineering, logistic and medical support the UK Forces repaired and ran a large part of the Kosovo railway system, established a fire-fighting capability in Pristina and a civilian criminal detention centre in Lipljan; a temporary, emergency refugee camp was also constructed just outside Pristina to enable several thousand Romany gypsies to be relocated. But by the beginning of August the tempo had settled into more ‘routine’ business. The Emerging Debate on Conditional Sovereignty Once again the British Army had demonstrated its enormous versatility. Entering the theatre of operations to conduct a peacekeeping mission, it had found itself in the middle of a NATO air campaign. Adapting itself to deal with a major refugee crisis, spread over hundreds of kilometres and operating in three different countries, it was then confronted with the distinct possibility of having to fight its way into a fourth country – through very difficult terrain – before finally conducting a peace enforcement operation mixed in with some not very well thought through ‘nation building’. In all of this they attempted, with lesser or greater success, to work with the various non-military organisations and agencies, who at the end were pouring into Kosovo. The deployment was a further turning point in the British understanding of the changing nature of conflict. In some respects there is nothing new in any operation, but many came away from the Balkans convinced that some serious thinking was needed if effective action was going to be orchestrated and executed in similar situations. And the church in particular found itself torn. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in an impassioned speech in Chicago in 1999, argued that intervention was more than just an interesting political debate; there was in fact a moral duty to intervene in situations where genocide or ethnic cleansing was going on. This was an important speech, coming as it did long before September 11. In effect Blair was arguing for an overturning of the Treaty of Westphalia where the whole concept of the sovereign state had been born. What Henry Shue amongst others has called ‘Conditional Sovereignty’ argues that a country can have freedom within its borders only as long as it does nothing to justify intervention by others. The idea that brutal dictatorships should not be left free to conduct genocide or ethnic cleansing rang true with many in the church and outside it; but the obvious question that followed is who amongst the community of nations has the wisdom to make the necessary judgement on where and when to

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intervene? Most, perhaps understandably, thought that the UN would be the arbiter, but that judgement soon proved to be somewhat naive. A collective doctrine – a more comprehensive approach – was certainly needed when it came to these interventions, particularly when it came to dealing with what the military termed ‘Phase Four Operations’ – the reconstruction and rebuilding of a nation after military intervention. There was not the time to prepare one, however, before the next conflict, one that was to give a nasty twist to the ethical debate. The Global War on Terror 11 September 2001 was clearly a turning point in international affairs. From it emerged the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’, which has been the driving force behind British operational deployments ever since and which has led to a ferocious and continuing debate on the morality of the West’s response to these and other suicide attacks. Whilst there was some early UK engagement in Afghanistan, the main response was directed first against Iraq and then subsequently against Afghanistan, post the removal of the Taliban regime by US forces. Military planning for operations against Iraq began in earnest in the autumn of 2002, with senior UK officers from all three Services attending numerous planning meetings at the headquarters of US Central Command in Florida. Initial options included an 800km move through Turkey, with entry into northern Iraq to secure the oilfields around Kirkuk and Tigrit, but the political climate in Turkey was not supportive and the emphasis moved south to Kuwait. Amidst the political uncertainties the UK gathered some 46,000 Servicemen and women, including a strong armoured division and deployed them to Kuwait in the early months of 2003. The diplomatic and political emphasis was on the implementation of the UN resolutions that had imposed strict conditions on Iraq, particularly those aimed at the removal of the perceived threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). After several years of inspections surrounded by prevarication and obstruction the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) was replaced in 1999 by the UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). In November 2002 the UN unanimously adopted UNSCR 1441, declaring Iraq to be in material breach of previous resolutions; it set out new inspection procedures, but once again Iraq was not inclined to co-operate. On 24 February 2003 the UK, US and Spain tabled a draft resolution but failed to gain consensus across the Security Council. They therefore decided to take unilateral action; military operations commenced on 20 March, with a coalition of 467,000 personnel from some 20 countries – although the vast bulk of the combat units came from the US The UK provided 33 RN ships and submarines, 115 aircraft and 70 helicopters, the 28,000 strong armoured division and appointed several senior officers into key positions in the various US headquarters. As in 1991 the military campaign was conducted under the umbrella of dominant air supremacy. The Euphrates was reached by the 22 March; Baghdad airport was seized by 4 April, with the famous tearing down of Saddam’s statue in central Baghdad beamed to the world on 9 April. On 1 May President Bush (junior) infamously declared an end to major combat operations. The campaign was followed by the formation of a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which established itself under Ambassador

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Paul Bremer in Baghdad in June 2003 and took over control of the reconstruction of Iraq from the short-lived Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Affairs under Jay Garner. Bremer immediately declared a culling of Ba’athists from the various government ministries and the disbandment of the Iraq armed forces – all those concerned were ‘sacked’ with no hope of early employment, other than taking up arms against the coalition. Bremer also slowed down the political discussions that Garner had initiated. Garner had intended to establish an interim Iraqi government by the summer of 2003; Bremer made it clear that no sovereignty would be handed over for a much longer time than that. Events since June–July 2003 have served to prove the error of these and many other decisions; they have also served to re-ignite serious debate on the overall failure of post-war planning and the sense of the intervention in the first place. UK troops continue to be deployed in Iraq, with withdrawal still some way off and an increasing danger of ‘Balkanisation’ – the splitting of the country into at least three separate states, Kurdish, Shia and Sunni. The final military intervention concerns Afghanistan, where the UK currently commands the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from its Headquarters in Kabul, with a brigade group deployed in Helmand province. The original intent was for the forces to deploy into a country purged of the Taliban in order to enable reconstruction. Whilst individuals have been engaged in operations for some time, preparations for this major deployment began in earnest in 2005, with around 8,000 personnel moving to the theatre in the spring of 2006. But it soon became clear that the original intent had been overtaken by events. Serious war-fighting erupted in Helmand province, with close quarter battles supported by both fixed wing aircraft and attack helicopters. Only time will tell how the deployment to Afghanistan will evolve, but it has been a timely reminder that, whilst the intention was to provide a secure environment to enable reconstruction, military deployments are always surrounded by uncertainty and risk – something politicians would do well to remember. Too many outside the military have forgotten that the sorts of conflict that both established empires over history and dominated the retreats from those empires, and the sorts of conflict that are evident all around the world today, are inherently dangerous. The military may call these operations ‘Low Intensity Conflict’, but they have a habit of escalating and may last for periods of time that exceed the tenure of the politicians that initiated them. Democracy cannot be force fed to the world. It emerges over generations, not in the lifetime of a political cycle; and the somewhat naïve approach to events in Iraq and Afghanistan should serve as a reminder of that. Where to From Here? The current mix of War Fighting, Nation Building and Humanitarian Support, which will dominate the military involvement in the ‘Global War on Terror’, is not new, although the complexity has certainly changed. The Laws of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Convention have been joined by the subtleties and nuances of Human Rights and other international laws and Service personnel need to possess an understanding of our own sovereign laws plus their responsibilities to agencies such as UNHCR

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and the International Red Cross. Like their predecessors, today’s Servicemen and women are having to learn that not all the people of one state or another, not all Serbs, Afghans or Iraqis are the enemy; that not all Muslims should be targeted. Such sweeping simplicity is almost always counter-productive. They have had to re-learn that the ‘enemy’ lives amongst the people, and must be separated therefrom, the bulk of whom are often more neutral or even friendlier than we at first believe. And learn too that this is a long and drawn out business. What is clear is that the ‘ethical/moral’ debate on intervention will intensify – and the churches must continue to be at the forefront of that debate. Conditional Sovereignty may have a certain appeal, but the reality is that Western politicians do not seem to be very clever at deciding when and where to intervene; the churches may not have all the answers but, some might contend, they do tend to understand the questions better than secular politicians. Together with others in the political and military arenas they need to work through the development of an overall national, indeed international ‘Campaign Plan’. How better to respond to the Fukuyama view of the ‘End of History’ and Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’?5 Terrorism is not new; the nature of it may have changed, and it may or may not now be a part of a wider struggle, but declaring war on it is like declaring war on evil; it may be a laudable idea but the bottom line is that evil is ever present. And even if it were possible to eradicate terrorism it certainly is not going to be achieved simply through the application of military power. Better solutions are required, and whether British military interventions should continue at the rate they have done over the last 16 years is at best debatable.

5

Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, New York, 1992) and Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996).

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Chapter 7

The Church and the War on Terror Richard Lock-Pullan

One of the most reflective religious books written in response to the events of 9/11 was written by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who was in New York on that terrible day.1 His book Writing in the Dust is a theologically informed and pastorally profound response asking what we are to learn from the events.2 The Archbishop challenges a concept of God that fits a human agenda – there is a need to pause, to learn to live in the face of the void. He argues against responding with violence as it is a communication of hatred, fear or contempt.3 He also says that if we classify things as evil and if we react without self questioning, ‘we change nothing’.4 Williams therefore challenges the sense of being in control and calls for creating a longing for a security that is shared. For Williams, Jesus refuses to fix an interpretation of judgement when faced by an adulterous and condemned woman, thus allowing people time to see themselves differently, providing judgement and release – an approach that tries to hold the moment longer, ‘long enough for some of our demons to walk away’.5 Sadly this did not happen; the responses to the fear engendered by the terrorists fed off those very demons. The scale of the events of September 11 2001 mean that much effort is now being spent on understanding its role in international relations.6 Currently there are huge opportunities for Christianity, and its associated disciplines, to enter the debate and help people to re-think their understanding of the role of religion in violence and international affairs and help promote policies that are in accord with their basic convictions. This is particularly true for the established Church, the Church of England, as it has a constitutional position from which to formally participate in the debate, symbolised by the role of the monarch and the place of the Bishops who sit in the House of Lords. The Church has used this position with letters to the

1

I would like to thank Rob Crowe and David H. Dunn for their comments on an earlier draft. Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: Reflections on 11th September and Its Aftermath (London, 2002). 3 Williams, Writing in the Dust, pp. 16, 18. 4 Williams, Writing in the Dust, p. 23. 5 Williams, Writing in the Dust, p. 81. 6 Daniel Philpott, ‘The Challenge of September 11 to Secularism in International Relation’, World Politics, 55 (2002): pp. 66–95, Fabio Petito and Pavlos Hatzopoulos (ed.) Religion in International Relations: the Return form Exile (Basingstoke, 2003), Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago, 2003). 2

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Prime Minister and submissions to parliamentary committees.7 However, it should be borne in mind that the Church of England has never been ‘a state church’ in the Lutheran model – it is not a department of government, even though Parliament still retains the right to determine the Church’s basic teaching, forms of worship and the prime minister makes the final selection of bishops. The Church thus has strictly limited constitutional powers but ‘extensive capacity to symbolise and address the nation’,8 albeit an increasingly secular and multi-religious one. The Church of England’s response to the ‘war on terror’ is embodied in the House of Bishop’s 2005 Report Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11.9 This chapter examines this 100 page report because it brings together many of the themes covered by other Church reports and tackles the question of the distinctive Christian perspective on the ‘war on terror’.10 After all, it was written in ‘the conviction that there is a distinctively Christian perception on these grave issues and that Christians have an important role to play both as individuals and through our institutions’.11 This chapter argues that the agenda and language of the Report is overly shaped by the agenda set by the White House, whilst being flawed in its analysis of the US and is anti-American in tone. It also lacks a UK dimension and is marked by a lack of theological distinctiveness, which is needed if the Church is to take a full role in the political debate on the war on terror. This is an ironic conclusion for a political scientist to draw, but the later section of the chapter will advocate the model of a ‘Critical conversation’ between the Christian tradition, faith presuppositions and the particular contemporary situation as the way forward for the church to develop a distinctive voice that can participate in the broader debate.12

7 e.g. Archbishop’s Letter to the Prime Minister, 25 June 2004, http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/news_item.2004-10-19.9713606593, Iraq – Submission to the International Development Affairs Committee (February 2003) Iraq – Submission to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee – House of Bishops; Iraq – Submission to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee – Public Affairs Unit; Church leaders meet Foreign Secretary (March 2003). 8 James A. Beckford, ‘Politics and Religion in England and Wales’, Daedalus, 120/3 (1991): p. 187. 9 Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11, A Report by A Working Group of the Church of England’s House of Bishops (London: September 2005). Available at http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/socialpublic/international/foreignpolicy/terrorism.pdf. 10 http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/socialpublic/international/foreignpolicy/. gives access to the various reports and statements, for example GS 1475 – Iraq – Would Military Action Be Justified? The Church’s contribution to the debate (2002) Joint Statement on Iraq from the Archbishop and Cardinal (February 2003) Emergency Synod Motion (February 2003). 11 Countering Terrorism, p. 5. 12 Stephen Pattison, ‘Some Straw for the Bricks: A Basic Introduction to Theological reflection’, in James Woodward and Stephen Pattison (eds), The Blackwell Reader in Pastoral and Practical Theology (Oxford, 2000), pp. 135–44.

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The War on Terror Unlike Rowan Williams’ advocacy of a pause, President Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, immediately declared a ‘war’ on terror, colouring the nature of the US response to the terrorist attacks, with the strong implication that his department would be the lead war agency.13 Rumsfeld’s response was based on the perception that the challenges of terrorism were ‘essentially military in character and that military power alone can deliver victory’.14 The calm debate Williams was advocating was thus swept up in a passionate response to do something from a government reeling from an enormous shock. As a result the language and aims of policy became focussed on the various strands of countering global terrorism, pre-emption and pre-eminence and the democratisation of the Middle East.15 The administration released a new National Security Strategy based on a sense of the US possessing unequalled strength and influence.16 The new age of religious-based terror was re-cast by the US administration into conventional terms, of threats from radical ‘rogue’ states and terrorists, but ones armed, or believed to be armed, with weapons of mass destruction. It dealt with the manifest outcomes rather than the causes. The war on terror was quickly realised with the invasion of Afghanistan to counter the terrorist bases there, but it soon moved onto being a debate over the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The White House thus defined quickly what the perception of, and response to, the events to 9/11 would be. This was reinforced with the language of fighting ‘evil’. The Bush administration’s response has shown a clear sense of identity, values and language as it rapidly cast the events of 9/11 as a war, both in military and moral terms. The enemy was cast in terms of being evil and the predominant actors against the US the ‘axis of evil.’ Briefly it was termed a ‘crusade’. The reference to evil is a distinctly American moral outlook and to understand Bush’s response is to understand a ‘complex set of ideas that makes America different’.17 This was not simply a rhetorical device, as the President saw evil as a noun rather than just an adjective.18 Sadly, as we will see, the Bishop’s Report fails to appreciate this. The broad scope of the issues involved in the age of terror has collapsed into a debate about Iraq. And this is important because the Church has missed a key opportunity to return to William’s perception of the broader issues of what policy towards the events of 9/11 should be, arguing that it should be reflective rather than

13

Rowan Scarborough, Rumsfeld’s War: The Untold Story of America’s Anti Terrorist Commander (Washington, DC, 2004). 14 Stephan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. (Cambridge, 2004) p. 2. 15 David H. Dunn, ‘Bush, 11 September and the Conflicting Strategies of the “War on Terrorism”’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 16 (2005): pp. 11–33. 16 White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Washington, DC, September 2002). 17 Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil: Taking George W. Bush Seriously (London, 2004), p. 5. 18 Singer, The President of Good and Evil, p. 2.

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simply reactive, that it should be long-sighted and that the causes are complex and multi-layered. Other churches have been successful in articulating this. The Broad Church Response The major Christian communities have been sharply critical of the invasion of Iraq. The late Pope, John Paul II, challenged Washington policy and stated that the war was a threat to humanity. He challenged ‘the culture of death’, the sense of fear that was pervasive throughout the world and he advocated a ‘yes to life’ with respect for life itself and individual lives, as ‘War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between States, the noble exercise of diplomacy: these are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences’.19 The Catholic Bishops in England and Wales, and in the US, also opposed the war. The World Council of Churches (WCC) has also consistently opposed the war in Iraq. The WCC is made up of 347 churches, denominations and fellowships from 120 countries (including the Church of England), representing 550 million Christians. Since 2002 the WCC Central Committee has called for sustained diplomacy towards Iraq, has rejected pre-emptive military action and has affirmed the role and importance of rule of international law. In 2003 it stated that ‘the war on Iraq was immoral, ill-advised and in breach of the principles of the UN Charter’ and was dismayed by the UN Security Council’s actions.20 By 2005 the Central Committee’s statement was explicit: ‘We reject assertions of the so-called “global war on terror” as justification for the war on Iraq.’21 There was a call to reconciliation and healing and the Central Committee appreciated the ‘principled and important opposition’ to the war in Iraq among churches in the world.22 In the UK a broad coalition of groups from British Churches and church organisations, including the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Relief and Development Fund, Pax Christi, the National Justice and Peace Network, the United Reformed Church [URC] Peace Fellowship, Christian Aid and the Religious Society of Friends, united to call on the Government to rethink the war against Iraq. They made an explicit link between the costs incurred of fighting the war and the need to fight poverty. Churches such as the URC called on the British government to distance itself from the US policy in invading Iraq. The Catholic Bishops called for reconciliation and justice.

19 Address of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to the Diplomatic Corps, Monday, 13 January 2003 http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/ speeches/2003/january/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20030113_diplomatic-corps_en.html. 20 5.4.2 Statement on the Iraq (2003), Central Committee, World Council of Churches, Minutes of the Fifty-Third Meeting, Geneva Switzerland, 26 August–2 September 2003, p. 50. 21 5.3.6 Statement on the Iraq Crisis: Enhancing Peace, Accountability and the Rule of Law (2005), Central Committee, World Council of Churches Minutes of the Fifty-Fourth Meeting, Geneva Switzerland, 15–22 February 2005, p. 60. 22 5.3.6 Statement on the Iraq Crisis, p. 61.

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Therefore there was widespread opposition to the invasion of Iraq by churches, mainly based on just war principles and a theology of the value of life. This trend was continued by the Church of England but was done so in far less forceful manner or from such a clear theological position, even though there were large British public demonstrations against the war and cabinet resignations. The Bishop’s Report Countering Terrorism The House of Bishops 2005 Report Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11 focuses on the invasion of Iraq.23 It argues that in the case of immediate threat anticipatory self defence is morally justifiable, whilst longterm preventative war is seen as more problematic. On these grounds most Bishops oppose the invasion. The Report also argues that there is a need to view American power dispassionately, though it is particularly concerned with the influence of apocalyptic Christianity on the US’s Middle Eastern political agenda. The Bishops call for democracy to be understood in ‘culturally sensitive ways’ in the region.24 In the appendix, Iran is used as a test case of the overall approach, calling for greater flexibility from the US and Iran in their relations. The fourth section is ‘Christian Principles of Continuing Importance and Applicability’ and outlines 13 principles for addressing a world characterised by power and violence from a distinctively Christian viewpoint. The Report looks to the example of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa as a model of what can be done and achieved.25 It was this distinctive area that the newspapers picked up on when the Report was released.26 The Bishop’s 2005 Report focuses on the invasion of Iraq and is very unclear about what terrorism is, as it simply leaps in and states that is has a political dimension. The Report from the Mission and Public Affairs Council of the General Synod, Facing the Challenge of Terrorism, is far more substantial.27 Published after the London bombings on July 7 2005, it outlines the changing nature of terrorism and how it lies between war and crime and that addressing the grievances that stimulate terrorism is a sensible response. The synod sees a collective responsibility for the state of the world and a commitment to ‘work for change in the light of the reign of God’.28 The vigour of this approach is not found in the Bishop’s report. The Church of England consistently argues for the ‘Just (or justifiable) War’ tradition and for relying on natural law – certain moral judgements can be agreed upon by all people of goodwill, whatever religious belief or lack thereof – as its basis. The Bishop’s 2005 Report continues in this tradition.29 This places the Bishop’s between 23

Countering Terrorism. Countering Terrorism, p. 5. 25 Countering Terrorism, p. 29. 26 Ruth Gledhill, ‘Bishops want to apologise for the Iraq war’, The Times, 19th September 2005. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1787421,00.html. 27 Facing the Challenge of Terrorism, A Report from the Mission and Public Affairs Council, http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/gs1595.rtf. 28 Facing the Challenge of Terrorism, 9. 29 Countering Terrorism, pp. 17–27. 24

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realists and pacifists with regard to the morality of war. From the ‘Just War’ criteria the first Gulf War was a model of clarity, whilst the invasion of Iraq and pre-emptive attacks are far more problematic.30 There is little on the invasion of Afghanistan. the Bishops made it clear earlier that it thought a conclusive argument had not been made for military action in Iraq.31 The Report thus goes on to condemn the invasion of Iraq, though the criticism is limited in its effectiveness by the lack of unanimity.32 The Archbishop of Canterbury was against the war, but The Bishop of Chester, the Rt Revd Dr Peter Forster, and earlier the Bishop of Hereford, broke ranks and stated that they were supportive of the Prime Minister and believed that the military action in Iraq is both ‘morally and legally justifiable’.33 This tempered response undermines the force and utility of the just war criteria, though disagreements of course don’t invalidate the criteria.34 The ‘Just War’ issue is dealt with elsewhere in this book, but here the relevant question is the crucial nature of the application of the criteria as that highlights the key issue of the nature of the hermeneutic (the interpretive framework) that the Church of England uses when addressing such questions. Terms of the Debate What is simply so remarkable about the interpretative framework that the Report uses is the extensive ground it concedes to secular analysts and White House policy. The Church of England, the House of Bishops stated earlier in their 2002 report, has a clear role ‘to raise those moral and ethical questions, which the Government needs to address before there is any recourse to war’.35 However, the 2005 Report Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11 asks an oddly conventional question in the Preface; ‘how can terrorism best be combated?’.36 This question presumes the usual agenda and therefore shapes the Report in a conventional manner. The Report does not ask the broader question of how the UK can live with terrorism, or what terror and the events of 9/11 say about the age in which we live and the church’s role in understanding and acting in it from that particular perspective of religion and violence. It does however recognise that churches have a particular role in the debate because of the link between religion and violence and the distinctive contribution in the work of reconciliation.37 It 30

Charles Reed, Just War? (London, 2004), pp. 62–138. Evaluating the Threat of Military Action Against Iraq. A submission by the House of Bishops to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s ongoing inquiry into the War on Terrorism http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/socialpublic/international/ foreignpolicy/iraqsubmissionfasc.doc. 32 Countering Terrorism, p. 3. 33 Accessed 16th May 2006> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ news/2003/03/25/wpope125.xml. 34 Michael Walzer, Arguing About War (New Haven, 2005), p xii. 35 Evaluating the Threat of Military Action Against Iraq. A submission by the House of Bishops to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee’s ongoing inquiry into the War on Terrorism http://www.cofe.anglican.org/info/socialpublic/international/ foreignpolicy/iraqsubmissionfasc.doc. 36 Countering Terrorism. 37 Countering Terrorism, p. 3. 31

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sees roles such as educating journalists and politicians in the theological components of religious fundamentalism as apt, but does not go further.38 It does not, for example, try to address what peace and security are and would be like in an age of terror. There is barely a mention of Guantanamo or Afghanistan. The shortcoming of adopting a US agenda is a natural outcome of arguing from a position of natural law, but that does not account for the use of terms and thinking such as ‘the immediate challenge of protecting lives has to be achieved at the same time as winning the hearts and minds of the Muslim world’.39 This approach accepts the American mindset that others must change and is explicitly American military doctrine, and not a Christian theological perspective. The Bishops are thus asking the wrong questions and should be articulating a more inclusive understanding of the task, closer to the Church’s recent report The Mission-Shaped Church, which argues that to be with people ‘suggests connections beyond geography and locality – connecting with people’s culture, values, lifestyles and networks, as well as with their location’.40 What is meant in Countering Terrorism, hopefully, is not ‘winning hearts and minds’ but the churches’ role in building good community relations and the excellent Muslim group and church relations that have developed,41 as well as advocating the values of love, tolerance and acceptance of difference. However, not only is the agenda and language of the Report set by the White House response, but the Report is anti-American in tone, showing a lack of understanding of US policy making and how the US position comes from a particular perspective rather than just the current administration. View of America There is a deep sense of anti-Americanism in the Report. It says that for many people it is American expansionism which constitutes ‘the major threat to peace’ rather than terrorism, without addressing the validity or otherwise of this point, though the Report is clear that there is no moral equivalence between Iraq and the US.42 Furthermore, the Report complains that the US only participates in alliances or organisations which enhance rather than limit its power.43 This is the natural behaviour of all states, and as the US bankrolls the UN to the tune of $428 million a year (whilst Japan contributes $346m, Germany $154m and the UK $109m) and is regularly criticised by its General Assembly, this is rather a cheap and flawed point to make.44

38

Countering Terrorism, p. 12. Countering Terrorism, p. 8. 40 Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context (London, 2004), p. 12. 41 Countering Terrorism, p. 14. 42 Countering Terrorism, pp. 4, 29. 43 Countering Terrorism, p. 36. 44 Figures from http://www.globalpolicy.org/finance/tables/ reg-budget/large05.htm. 39

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It is mistaken at other points in its analysis of the US. The US military is accused of trying to drive a screw with a hammer by using overwhelming force, which is counter productive as counter-terrorism is about winning hearts and minds.45 This is rather messy thinking because the issues of counter-terror and insurgency arose after the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this phase has been a clear failure in Iraq and the use by the military of direct kinetic force has been rightly criticised – most famously by a senior British officer in a US military journal.46 What this critique fails to see is that the US military out-thinks as well as out-slugs its opponent, and it has been developing this since the end of the Vietnam War.47 The Report seems to see the US military as a WWII-era huge machine that flattens all in its path, failing to recognise that the infrastructure of Iraq, for example, was damaged by the looting that followed. This is therefore faulty analysis. When the Report moves from anti-Americanism to genuine criticism it is much sounder. For example, the Report highlights the US complicity in much of the creation of problems with Iraq – supporting Hussein, selling him weapons and so on. It is here that the Church articulates a clear position for itself because it has a key role of publicly acknowledging the complicities that governments prefer to ignore or forget, and the church can express remorse for them. But this stands out in the Report because so much space is given to the prominence of the ‘far right’ in the US. The Report devotes much space to the millennialism and apocalyptic thinking that ‘shapes’ US foreign policy, in particular with regard to the Middle East. It criticises the crusading tone of right wing US rhetoric and sees fundamentalist evangelicals as having a great role in the debate.48 On this point the Bishops are comfortable and successfully challenge the particular readings of apocalyptic texts as a source of authority for imperialism – pointing out that the Book of Revelation is a critique of imperialism not an endorsement – but the Report is too narrow in its reading. Basically, the Report’s reading of policy and policy making overstates the case and relies far too much on Michael Northcott’s An Angel Directs the Storm, which emphasises the military imposition of free market Republican apocalyptic religion.49 Thus for example Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth has sold 40 million copies, making its theology of ‘rapture’ of the saved supposedly hugely influential, but the work of Jim Wallis and Sojourners or Rick Warren isn’t mentioned.50 Warren’s book The Purpose-Driven Life has outsold the Da Vinci Code by selling 25 million copies; 20,000 people attend his church each week, he has a quote on Starbuck’s

45

Countering Terrorism, p. 23. Aylwin-Foster, Nigel, ‘Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations’, Military Review, Nov–Dec 2005, pp. 2–15. http://usacac. leavenworth.army.mil/CAC/milreview/download/English/NovDec05/aylwin.pdf. 47 Richard Lock-Pullan, US Intervention Policy and Army Innovation: From Vietnam to Iraq (London, 2006). 48 Countering Terrorism, pp. 19, 40–46. 49 Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London 2004) and Countering Terrorism, pp. 43–6. 50 Sojourners website http://www.sojo.net. 46

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coffee cups and he speaks at Davos and at the Council on Foreign Relations.51 Such is the type of American evangelism that does not fit the image portrayed in the Report. More fundamentally, there is a lack of perspective, especially as, for many, it is the role of neo-conservatives rather than fundamentalist evangelical Christians that are the influential ideological group shaping policy.52 The report reveals a narrow understanding of the US and the role of religion in its public life. The fusion of religious thinking, the libertarian legacy of the post-Reformation breakdown of authority and the American Revolution have led to an ‘American synthesis’ which brings together evangelical Protestant religion, commonsense political reasoning and republican political ideology.53 For analysts of US foreign policy the important aspect is its distinctiveness and the fact that it provides an ethical framework and persuasive vocabulary for the nation.54 Virtuous foreign policy fighting evil is a real perception, not simply cheap rhetoric; it is not merely a product of the Christian new right, but is an enduring legacy of the Puritan mindset on American thinking55 – a mindset that produced Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations and which continues to shape the broad debate on foreign policy.56 Perhaps the challenge for the Bishops is that the US is prepared to be more forthright in its sense of self, its religion and role in the world and this goes against British reticence and European values. Some Americans, for example, see Europe as a dying civilisation which has lost any sense of religion at its core.57 This fits with a broader sense of American frustration with the European inability to address key moral issues, such as Bosnia or Kosovo, with any meaningful effectiveness.58 Europe uses secular moral language more than the US does, but from the US perspective does not deliver and avoids fundamental issues. This deep antagonism and lack of vision have helped exacerbate the tensions across the Atlantic which became very clear with the debate over Iraq. President Bush has placed his faith at the forefront of American diplomacy, alienating secularists such as Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, but using it to build bonds with fellow Christians such as Tony Blair.59 This raises large issues, which in this context includes the question of why the ire of the Report is directed at the US rather than at the UK government – in fact, 51 Andrew Gumbel, ‘The Man Who Put Conscience on a Coffee Cup’, The Independent, 17th May 2006, p. 27. 52 Halper and Clarke, America Alone. 53 Mark Noll America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 2002). 54 Noll, America’s God, pp. 3–18, 447–51. 55 Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (Edinburgh, 1998), pp. 1–40. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge MA, 1939), Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT, 1975). 56 E.J. Dionne Jr, Jean Bethke Elshtain and Kayla M. Drogosz (eds), One Electorate Under God: A Dialogue on Religion and America (Washington, DC, 2004). 57 George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (New York, 2005). 58 Gordon, Philip H. and Jeremy Shapiro, Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis over Iraq (New York, 2004). 59 Esther Kaplan, With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right (New York, 2005), pp. 8–33.

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why the whole Report does not focus on the Blair government rather than the Bush administration and its policy decisions. UK Policy In a book examining the role of the Anglican Church on British foreign policy, the Report is sadly lacking in providing a potential way forward on the war on terror. Apart from the crucial point that counter-terror legislation is contaminating the justice system, there is little direct guidance for Downing Street.60 Basically the problem is that the Report does not divide US policy from that of the UK; in fact it refers to the ‘international community’s war on terrorism’.61 There is no separate policy for the UK, or concern with how the UK could handle Anglo–US relations in themselves. It does not, for example, consider the ways in which British policy toward Northern Ireland has shaped its practice in Iraq, whilst Israel has influenced US practice and what the consequences of this are for both allies and their relationship. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has been more broad-ranging and far more ambitious in his approach to the war on terror than the President. Blair has looked beyond attacking al Qaeda and addressed issues concerning failed states, social cleavages and the quarrels that inspire jihadist groups – he has been internationalist. He also persuaded Bush to go to the UN and take some initiative on the Israeli– Palestinian dispute.62 This is consistent with Blair’s thinking on international relations as outlined before 9/11. In a key speech in 1999, at the height of the Kosovo crisis, Blair outlined a ‘doctrine of the international community’.63 He spoke of the post-Cold War era as a new age of globalisation, with an interdependence that challenged the principles of non-intervention in other countries affairs. He was clear that many of the problems came from Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as ‘Both have been prepared to wage vicious campaigns against sections of their own community’. He was articulate in his vision – ‘If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer’. An analysis that does not fully appreciate the differences of the Bush and Blair approach to the war on terror, as well as appreciating the role of values for both of them and hides behind references to the international community whilst being anti-American in tone, does not help the debate or improve potential policy. In fact, what is striking to the reader of the Report is its rather shapeless nature. The issue in hand is the ‘war on terror’ although this is never defined and the concerns are taken explicitly from the US agenda. One can ask why Iran is taken 60

Countering Terrorism, p. 31. Countering Terrorism, p. 53. 62 Lawrence D. Freedman, ‘The Special Relationship, Then and Now’, Foreign Affairs, 85/3 (May/June 2006): pp. 61–73. 63 Tony Blair ‘Doctrine of the International community’ speech at the Economic Club, Chicago, 24th April 1999. http://www.number10.gov.uk/ output/Page1297.asp. 61

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as a test case for a Christian approach rather than, for example, Guantanamo. Much broader approaches to the questions raised by the war on terror need to be discussed, as do broader issues concerning the use of UK military personal to support US policy, along with the whole perception of threat, the rights of citizens and what an acceptable peace would look like. For a country that has had its own long-running war on terrorism in Northern Ireland the confrontational American approach perhaps does not suit Britain or the overall situation best. Fear What the Report does claim is that Biblical insights can help understand how fear of enemies can be played upon and how this makes unwise policy.64 The issue of fear is crucial because tyranny and terrorism are both built on fear – it is a real rather than generated concern. How the two aspects of perception and actuality of fear are handled is vital. For the US, which has always had a propensity to insecurity and feelings of threat, the events of 9/11 were particularly extreme.65 But the debate is also taking place in a much broader western culture of fear, which is obsessively concerned about risks, and which latches on to one issue or another to embody it.66 The issue of fear raises the question of the nature of security. For theologians this is an issue of trust, faith, hope and covenant but in international relations the term ‘security’ is different to the everyday understanding of it.67 During the Cold War security was primarily seen in terms of military threats to the state. However, the discipline of international relations now has broadened its understanding of security, raising questions concerning the levels of analysis of what is being secured, by whom and against what.68 Fundamentally something is a security issue, ‘when an issue is presented as posing an existential threat to a designated referent object (traditionally, but not necessarily, the state, incorporating government, territory and society)’.69 On this basis the Church can contribute to the debate concerning what security now means and for whom and against what. It can argue for a different understanding of what security is. The Report partially attempts this when it outlines thirteen ‘Christian Principles of Continuing Importance and Applicability’ which are both ethical and theological, in a world characterised by power and violence.70 The key principles are that: decision makers are accountable to God; there is a shared common dignity; and that states can pursue their own interests in the pursuit of ‘The Good’. More principles flow from 64

Countering Terrorism, p. 4. Robert H. Johnson, Improbable Dangers: U.S. Conceptions of Threat in the Cold War and After (London, 1994). 66 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation, Rev Ed. (London, 2002). 67 Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO, 1998). 68 Buzan, Security. 69 Buzan, Security, p. 21. 70 Countering Terrorism, pp. 71–5. 65

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this, including: that politics has theological underpinnings and ethical imperatives seeking the common good; that the Church can’t pronounce authoritatively on morality of war; that democracy is desirable; and that religion is an ambiguous phenomenon. Principle nine (along with number one) makes an explicit Christian point that Christ is ‘our peace’: this leads to the duty of reconciliation; speaking truth to power; being alert to the politics of fear; and recognising the limits of religious readings of current events. The final point is about Iran – if some countries have nuclear weapons because the world is volatile then why should not other states? It is an extraordinary list. To illustrate this, the key principle of the Report on dignity and its consequences will be examined, followed by a consideration of how the language and concerns of the church can recast the debate on the war on terror in light of this. Rethinking the Approach In the principles noted above and throughout the Report much is made of the centrality to Christianity of ‘the understanding that human beings are made in God’s image and as such all individuals share an equality of basic dignity as fellow creatures’.71 This is rightly stressed but not enough is done with it. For example, the UN has a charter of Human Rights and the Report’s appeal to natural law show it is a view held by reasonably minded people. The developments in theology, especially since Vatican II in the 1960s and the growth of liberation theology, have brought the issue of ‘dignity’ to the fore in European theology in the work of theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann. However Moltmann’s point about dignity was far more robust than the Bishops’; ‘It is the duty of the Christian faith beyond human rights and duties to stand for the dignity of human beings in their life with God and for God’, a God who liberates from inward and outward inhumanity.72 The lack of force of the Bishop’s report, and potential ways forward, can be seen clearly by looking at the work of two theologians and one parish in England. Examples William Cavanaugh’s study Torture and Eucharist gives a fruitful example of how rethinking dignity as a theological concept leads to a different understanding and social practice.73 Cavanaugh’s study focuses on the experience of the Catholic Church in Chile during the period of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s military dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. Cavanaugh asks a very basic question – why is torture wrong? The usual responses to this question focus on torture being wrong because it abuses the rights of the individual, because all are made in the image of God so each has a right to personal integrity. This is the Anglican Churches’ position. For 71

Countering Terrorism, p. 50. Jürgen Moltmann, On Human Dignity: Political Theology and Ethics (London, 1984), pp. 20, 35. 73 William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford, 1998). 72

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the Catholic Church in Chile, however, the issue was particularly pressing because its ecclesiology (its theological understanding of itself as a church) meant that the government was responsible for a person’s body whilst the Church was responsible for their soul. In the context of the torture this was utterly inadequate because torture is a complete fusing of both. Cavanaugh’s way forward is to argue that torture in the Pinochet regime was a social strategy aimed at to making compliant citizens. Torture ‘atomizes the citizenry through fear, thereby dismantling other social bodies which would rival the state’s authority over individual bodies’.74 Torture was a form of ‘hearts and minds’ policy. Torture is thus not just a violation of individual rights or simply an attack on individuals but is actually a way of creating them. For Cavanaugh this highlights the problems with the emphasis on individual rights and dignity, because it treats the tortured as an individual. In terms of the issue of the Church and the war on terror, Cavanaugh’s next step is crucial; as he puts it ‘true resistance to torture depends on the reappearance of social bodies capable of countering the atomising performance of the state’.75 In Chile this was done by the Church’s eventual reappearance as body, in every sense of the word, in opposition to the social strategy of torture. For Cavanaugh this is done through the liturgy of the Church where individuals were incorporated into a body, the body of Christ, which is a political act as it is a different communal and public disciplining of bodies – it confronts the politics of the world. The liturgy is the ‘social imagination’ of a group whose vision organises the members into a set of coherent performances and is constantly reconstructed by those performances. In Cavanaugh’s study the Sebastian Acevedo Movement is a clear example of how this can be done.76 Prior to this movement the denunciation of torture had been primarily by words, but this movement used liturgy. Symbolic sites were chosen – places of torture, the courts etc. – and exactly at a prearranged time members of the Movement (sometimes 150 people) would appear out of the crowds, unfurl banners, pass out leaflets, block traffic, sing and recite litanies about forsaken prisoners and the failure of justice. The actions would be brief but it was an imaginative act, challenging the state’s disciplined imagination of what is and should happen – they challenged it by creating spaces of resistance where bodies belong to God not the state.77 They ‘unimagined’ the inevitability of violent disciplines, they called on members to share the suffering of those tortured and ‘disappeared’ and they challenged the residence of religion in the private. One can see embryonic versions of this in some churches’ response to the war on terror in the UK, responses which are broadly in accord with the Bishop’s appeal to build better local links between church and mosques and their perception of the Iraq invasion as unjustifiable, but which are boldly enacted and based on a clear theological position. For an example, one can look towards St. Margaret’s and All Hallows Church in Leeds and the work of the vicar Revd Ray Gaston and 74 75 76 77

Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, p. 2. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, p. 4. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, pp. 253–81. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, p. 275.

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his congregation. The area where the parish is situated gained national notoriety as the so-called bomb making factory for the London bombers of 7/7. However, the parish’s active involvement in the war on terror long predated that. The parish had demonstrated publicly against the invasion of Iraq and the vicar had been arrested and been to court for obstruction.78 The Parochial Church Council had already sent him out to Iraq on a fact finding mission, utilising its strong links with local mosques in that area of Leeds.79 After the London bombings it was quick to organise a public demonstration with the local mosques condemning the bombings.80 Ray Gaston clearly sees Jesus as a radical who challenged the Romans, anti-Roman Zealots and religious authorities. On this reading the requirement is to challenge the US (and the UK’s support for the US), challenge the terrorists, and to face ‘our own religious institutionalism where, like the High Priests, we fear what we might lose, rather than risk letting go and living in the hope of transformation’.81 It is a challenge to the culture of violence at all levels, and a way of re-imagining the debate, by creating communities, embodying different visions to that of the US, based on Christian theology. It is moving forward, visionary and reclaims the individual from public diminution. The Bishops should take up this mantle. As the leading theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it: Too often politics is treated solely as a matter of power, interests or technique … For finally what we seek is not power, or security, or equality, or even dignity, but a sense of worth gained from participation and contribution to a common adventure. Indeed, our ‘dignity’ derives exactly from our sense of having played a part in such a story.82

For Hauerwas, Christianity is not about following a set of rules or principles but depends on the character of people’s lives.83 It is a theology of virtue, heavily influenced by the work of Alasdair MacIntyre with his teleological scheme of looking at human nature as it is, developing instruction and practice which leads to ‘humannature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos’ as realised in community.84 Cavanaugh and Gaston have illustrated this, but Hauerwas – an American – has given a clear response to the events of 9/11, a response that clearly shows his focus. Hauerwas contrasts the two peoples who experienced apocalyptic events – America after 9/11 and Christians after the crucifixion. One community responded 78

For an account of the demonstrations http://www. allhallowsleeds.org.uk/community/anti-war.shtml. 79 http://www.allhallowsleeds.org.uk/projects/Iraq/visit. shtml. 80 For a report and pictures of the parish’s work on this see, http://www.allhallowsleeds.org.uk/events/050713.shtml. 81 Ray Gaston, ‘Time to Resist’, The Witness Magazine http:// www.thewitness.org/agw/gaston112502.html. 82 Stanley Hauerwas, ‘A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down’, in his A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, ID., 1981), p. 13. 83 Stanley Hauerwas, ‘Christianity: It’s Not a Religion, It’s an Adventure’, in John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (eds), The Hauerwas Reader (Durham, NC, 2001), p. 522. 84 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd Ed. (London, 1985).

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by raging against death, believing through the memory of their accomplishments that they do not have to die. The other community realise they do not get to write their own story and that a dangerous world is made all the more dangerous by ‘our unbridled desire for safety’.85 For Hauerwas the church is a people who embody an alternate to terror and are not captured by ‘powers fuelled by the fear of death’.86 He prays that the community goes on as if nothing has happened, not to deny the trauma of the event but live beyond it and not be beholden to it. The Bishops’ focus on the sense of dignity as an individual right is indicative of a much broader lack of communal and theological vision for living beyond the boundaries of the mundane. By not articulating a communal vision the Bishops are left too closely beholden to the agenda of those fighting the war on terror in fear. They need to articulate far more robust questions for the UK government, even though the Church has a tradition of failing to make strong and distinctive statements about the nature of war.87 Figures such as William Temple, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, show that the Church can be both accommodating and critical. In 1985 the Church’s Faith in the City challenged the political consensus on urban thinking and the Bishops could do the same now by domestically and internationally being far more robust in articulating their critique of policy and being much bolder in its distinctiveness.88 Currently British churches are failing to meet the challenges of a world after the Cold War and 9/11.89 Conclusion This chapter has examined the Report by arguing that its agenda and language is set by that of the White House, whilst being anti-American in tone and lacking a UK dimension. It conflates the UK, the US and the international community and is poor in its analysis of US thinking and policy making. The Report is marked in particular by a flawed methodology and a failure to define terms, focussing exclusively on Iraq. It is virtually silent on Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Fundamentally, the Report is marked by a lack of distinctiveness in argument, language and analysis, all of which are desperately needed if the Church is to play a full role in the political debate on the war on terror. This may seem overly critical, but it is a call to arms to the Bishops and the Church of England to engage in the crucial public debate in their own distinctive terms. The church is rightly trying to place itself between the crusading mentality and avoiding judgement, but it needs to be more robust and creative. Rowan Williams suggested that the sense of control needs to be surrendered and that the church has a key role in expressing this and articulating the hope it is built upon. It has begun 85

Stanley Hauerwas, ‘September 11, 2001: A Sermon a Year Later’, in his Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence (London, 2004), pp. 211–14. 86 Hauerwas, ‘September 11, 2001’, p. 214. 87 Alan Wilkinson, Dissent or Conform? War, Peace and the English Churches, 1900–1945 (London, 1986). 88 Archbishop’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, Faith in the City (London, 1985). 89 Reed, Just War?, p. 144.

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to draw on its resources to challenge the fearful approach to politics, but it needs to do so with far more ambition. Reinhold Neibuhr’s Christian Realism hangs over the Report in a diluted version and he famously wrote the ‘Serenity Prayer’. The prayer calls for the serenity to accept what can’t be changed, courage to change what can and the wisdom to tell the difference. The Bishops can challenge the terms of the debate on the war on terror and pose much tougher questions to the British government. They should be asking ‘what peace and security are you striving for with this policy?’ rather than ‘how do you combat terrorism?’ How to live with greater vulnerability, openness and faith in times of fear is an inherently theological question and the Church should treat it as such. The approach outlined here raises crucial questions concerning the priorities of the religious polis in the war on terror. Religion constitutes far more than private choice or a collection of individuals, and has its own emphasis, language and world view that is to various degrees in conflict with the powerful. It can be a site of resistance and cohesion due to the norms it creates. For example, it stresses dignity over economics – and rejects the view that people are commodities or simply individual units. This is a challenge to the predominant political liberalism. The reverse side of this, of course, is the danger of a closed religious reading that leads to suicide bombings. There are key questions concerning the role of violence and conflict resolution in religion that need to be explored further.90 For the British Christian community this issue needs to be placed within the growing de-secularisation of world and European politics in particular. It needs to contribute to the debate concerning the role of religion in an expanding European Union and the future of EU integration and identity,91 and about the basic values ‘security’ aims to defend there in a time of terror.

90 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (London, 1988), Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 3rd Ed. (Berkeley, CA: 2003). 91 Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein (eds), Religion in an Expanding Europe (Cambridge, 2006).

Chapter 8

UK Arms Sales and the Church of England Wyn Rees

Introduction The issue of arms sales or ‘transfers’ provokes controversy and extremes of debate. Arms sales involve a world that is largely closed to outside observation, one that is characterised by companies dealing with overseas countries, with arms fairs where weapons are exhibited and with government licences to ship weapons abroad. There are important ethical issues involved in the sale of arms for the simple reason that these are lethal instruments that may cause enormous levels of suffering in the hands of both legitimate and illegitimate actors. This chapter seeks to explore the attitude of the British government to contemporary arms sales. It will investigate how the UK approaches this issue and how it determines to whom to sell arms and what types of equipment to transfer. It also seeks to assess the influence the Church of England exerts in the field of British arms policy. An Ethical Debate There is a spectrum of opinion about the subject of arms sales. This spectrum is reflective of the fact that there are a variety of assumptions made about the ethics of using force in the contemporary world and about the legitimate rights of states. At the risk of simplification, three broad standpoints reflect the breadth of opinion concerning the sale of weapons. At one end of the spectrum is a view that rejects any right to use force. This is extrapolated from the environment of inter-personal relations and is applied to interstate relations. Within Christian opinion this is represented by pacifism based on the teaching of Jesus: that peacemakers are blessed and individuals are entreated to love their enemies. The New Testament declares that the Messiah has provided salvation and the gift of peace.1 To resort to force would amount to disobedience and would put at risk the attainment of a godly-based society on earth. Such a tradition, exemplified by the Quaker movement, regards the possession of the means of waging war as unconscionable. The use of violence only serves to beget further violence. According to such an absolutist view, a state should not invest in weapons of war and should certainly not sell weapons to other countries. In the

1

Robert Elford, ‘Christianity and War’, in R. Gill (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Ethics (Fourth Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 173.

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face of armed coercion, the pacifist tradition is to offer non-violent resistance and to seek to change the mind-set of the aggressor by de-legitimising their actions. The pacifist tradition, whilst morally strong, has not found acceptance amongst the majority of the leaders of the Church of England. It has been adopted by individual Christian activists and interest groups but not by the Church as an organisation. Instead, the Church of England has tended to adhere to a second body of Christian opinion that regards the world as a place in which sin is ever present and therefore the believer has to balance morality against the demands of prudence. Accordingly, weapons are regrettable but necessary instruments in order to preserve security. Employing violence, or threatening to use it, may be ethically justifiable in trying to overcome a greater evil. This view countenances states possessing arms for self-defence but not for any offensive military purposes. It argues the need for careful oversight of the circumstances in which force is exercised in order that the correct motivations may be ascertained. This approach is consistent with the Christian tradition of ‘Just War’ thinking that accepts that there may be conflicts in which the resort to the use of force is legitimate. Force may be employed if it meets the criteria of being proportionate, that it is used only as a last resort and is harnessed to good intentions. This second approach to the use of force tends to regard the sale of arms as an unjustifiable activity. This is because profit is being sought from the sale of weapons that inflict death and serious injury. The provision of arms may provoke a conflict and fuel existing tensions; therefore they should only be produced for national defensive purposes. The Church of England has adopted this position as its official policy, based on the recommendations of its Ethical Investment Advisory Group.2 The Church has little formal power to enforce its view. It has no input into the making of government policy on arms transfers and it is not consulted over whether to sell weapons to particular states. Although the British government has powers in relation to the Church of England, such as the appointment of Bishops, the Church has no constitutional powers to influence government policy. What the Church does have is its official status as the established religious body within the state. Leading bishops sit in the House of Lords, providing them with an important public platform from which to project their views. Similarly, the Archbishop of Canterbury is treated as a voice of authority within the country and possesses direct access to the media from Lambeth Palace. It is therefore a moral influence, rather than an input into policymaking, that the Church can mobilise. On matters such as the arms trade, where there is a moral issue at stake, the Church can use its position to help to shape the debate. Public opinion, and particularly the opinion of lay Anglicans, can be responsive to the views of Church leaders, especially when they declare themselves to oppose government policy. The power of the Church is therefore indirect; more one of constraint over a prevailing policy position. At the other end of the spectrum of the debate about arms sales is the pragmatic view that arms are legitimate goods to be traded across international boundaries. The lethal nature of these goods means that they must be treated with special care, but 2

Ethical Investment Advisory Group, ‘Church Investments and Armaments’, The Church of England, January 2005, [email protected].

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they are otherwise merely commodities. This is essentially the long-held position of the British government. Legal guidelines have been drawn up for national companies and special licensing agreements regulate the trade in weapons to specified countries. Arms are regarded as legitimate items for sale so long as two criteria are met: either the government has not barred trade with a particular customer or that the category of weapons are not unusually sensitive. Nuclear, chemical and biological arms are obvious examples of the latter category as well as ballistic missile technology or torture equipment. The UK as an Arms Exporter The sale of arms has been viewed by successive British governments as fulfilling three principal policy objectives. First, arms transfers have enabled the UK to develop close relationships with other countries. The selling of weapons denotes an attitude of friendship and trust, offering security to countries that may be in fear of their neighbours. This serves a foreign policy aim of building up allies in various parts of the world. It provides the vendor with influence over the policies of the recipient because a relationship of dependency is created. This dependency can be maintained for considerable periods of time due to the needs of servicing the equipment and the provision of spare parts. Conversely, refusing to sell arms to allies would only serve to damage relations with those countries and lead to other states filling the vacuum with their own sales. Second, arms transfers have an important economic dimension. Krause refers to British policy as being driven by ‘commercial pragmatism’ rather than any ideological considerations.3 Arms sales account for a disproportionately large part of UK exports – and thereby the balance of payments – due to the rapid shrinkage of the manufacturing base. Estimates of the level of employment supported by the defence industrial sector vary but in the late 1990s Evans put the figure at 140,000 jobs directly connected with arms production and 415,000 indirectly,4 whilst Towle calculates that between a third and a half of the 400,000 jobs are dependent upon exports.5 This ensured that leading defence manufacturers would be listened to by the government and that efforts would be made to promote the prospects for future arms exports. When representatives of the Church of England have criticised British arms sales decisions, government ministers have tended to respond that the clergy bear no responsibility for employment opportunities in manufacturing industries or the national balance of payments. Arms exports have contributed to the preservation of the UK high technology base. Weapon developments are regarded as integral to sustaining national research in advanced technologies: the defence sector involves cutting edge technologies such 3

Keith Krause, Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 144. 4 Brian Evans, ‘The Costly Game. A Study of the Arms Trade and Development’, Discussion Paper for Tearfund, 1997 (Accessed 8 July 2006). 5 Philip Towle, ‘Ethics and the Arms Trade’, Studies in Trade and Development No.1, The Institute of Economic Affairs, 1998, p. 15.

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as aerospace engineering, micro-electronics and composite materials. They ensure the capacity to act independently in times of peace as well as preserving the ability to increase production during a time of crisis. Relinquishing specialised production capabilities may mean that they can never be re-constituted. This helps to explain why national defence programmes may be authorised even when a particular item could be procured more cheaply abroad. A good deal of debate surrounds the issue of preserving a UK high-technology defence industrial base. Critics contend that investment in weapon technologies is a net drain upon the economy. They argue that programmes are capitally intensive and that technology from the civil sector can often be adapted more economically for defence needs. Furthermore, opponents point to examples where government investment in national defence projects resulted in costly failures. For example, before procuring the Boeing E-3 Advanced Warnings and Control System (AWACS) from the US, the UK tried to develop its own system based upon the Nimrod airframe. The project was eventually abandoned but not before some £800 million had been wasted. Thirdly, selling arms overseas adds to the prowess of UK armed forces. This is because exporting equipment has enabled Britain to achieve longer production runs and thereby reduce the unit price for items. The UK has needed arms exports to boost sales of equipment to offset the reduced domestic orders following the end of the Cold War. With a relatively small arms market for its armed forces, exports have helped to justify new production programmes and follow-on systems. Yet critics counter that this logic can become overly influential. In the case of a weapons programme such as the Typhoon fighter aircraft, the UK can be accused of continuing with a programme whose rationale disappeared with the end of the Cold War and now seeking overseas sales to ensure the financial viability of the project. British arms exports have found themselves in an increasingly competitive market. The end of the Cold War had the effect of reducing the overall size of the market and simultaneously flooding the second-hand arms trade with large quantities of military equipment stripped from the inventories of East and West. Competition has been compounded by the fact that so-called ‘second tier’ suppliers have entered the market and challenged the erstwhile dominance of the traditional arms exporters.6 The narrowing of the technology gap between western industrial states and countries such as Brazil, South Korea, Israel and South Africa enabled the latter to emerge as major producers of weapons that could be sold around the globe.7 These second tier states have sought to earn hard currency from arms transfers as well as develop high technology industries. Despite the increased competitiveness of the post-Cold War market, the UK has remained one of the leading exporters of weapons. In fact, the UK has been in the top five arms exporters, along with the other members of the United Nations Security 6

Richard Bitzinger, ‘Towards a Brave New Arms Industry?’, Adelphi Paper 356, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Oxford University Press, 2003. 7 David Mussington, ‘Understanding Contemporary International Arms Transfers’, Adelphi Paper 291, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 17. See also Joanna Spear and Neil Cooper, ‘The Defence Trade’, in Alan Collins (ed.), Contemporary Security Studies (Oxford University Press, 2006).

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Council. In the words of Cooper, ‘… (the UK’s) declared policy on arms sales is ... more permissive than that of a number of Western countries’.8 It has constructed a governmental infrastructure designed to assist British defence firms in marketing their products overseas. This consists of the Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO) that is responsible for helping to obtain defence contracts and then issuing the appropriate licences to ship arms to foreign countries. In addition, the Export Credit Guarantees Department of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) serves to underwrite agreements that might otherwise fall through and impact upon the British manufacturer. If a country defaults on its purchases then the burden falls not upon the defence contractor but upon the British taxpayer. Such support provided by the British government to the domestic arms industry has drawn criticism from a number of quarters. Some argue on commercial grounds that it is an unnecessary subsidy to arms firms that risks undermining good business practices.9 Others have criticised it as part of an unethical promotion of the sale of weapons. It has been this latter strand of opinion within the Church of England that led the Church Commissioners, the body responsible for managing its assets, to decide to implement an ethical investment policy. It was agreed that the Church would no longer invest in arms companies regardless of their potential profitability.10 This policy was designed to take the Church beyond the position of not investing in companies that sold arms overseas to a total ban on not investing in companies that produced weapons. A countervailing view from within the Church, that stake-holding enabled the Church to hold companies to account about their business practices, was put to one side. The result was that the Church liquidated its investments in such companies as General Electric (GE) and British Aerospace (BAe). An Ethical Foreign Policy The Labour government that came to power in May 1997 has been determined to assert that principle, rather than just commercial interest, underlies its arms sales policy. This stemmed from the criticism it had aimed at the previous Conservative government that the UK had hitherto sold weapons to unsavoury regimes around the world in pursuit of profit. Whilst in opposition the Labour Party had scored major points against the government of John Major by accusing it of selling weapons to the regime of Saddam Hussein that had subsequently threatened western security. When Robin Cook became Foreign Secretary he committed the UK to the pursuit of an ‘Ethical’ foreign policy that would impact upon the sale of weapons to clients overseas. In July of 1998 the British government published a White Paper entitled ‘UK Strategic Export Controls’ that sought to introduce greater transparency. The government announced that it would provide figures about arms transfers and 8

Neil Cooper, ‘The pariah agenda and New Labour’s ethical arms sales policy’, in Richard Little and Mark Wickham-Jones (ed.), New Labour’s Foreign Policy: A New Moral Crusade? (Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 150. 9 Paul Ingram and Roy Isbister, ‘Escaping the Subsidy Trap: Why Arms Exports are Bad for Britain’, BASIC, Saferworld and Oxford Research Group, 2001. 10 Ethical Investment Advisory Group, op. cit.

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authorise a committee of Parliament to look into questionable sales. Critics responded that the new procedures would not lead to any new inputs into decision-making on arms sales, it would only enable questions to be asked after a sale had gone through. Inspection after the event would be too late to affect the outcome. The pursuit of an ethical arms sales policy has raised questions over with whom the UK government should trade weapons. Few would question the government’s right to sell advanced weapons to other European allies or the US. Patterns of collaboration have developed between European countries: for example, in 2003 more than half of the arms transfers by the Group of Eight leading industrial states were amongst themselves.11 In addition, collaboration has evolved at the level of national arms companies and even Europe-wide arms firms have emerged, such as EADS and Thales. Commercial considerations have driven a process of developing major new weapons programmes on an international basis in order to achieve economies of scale. One such example is the development of the European Fighter Aircraft by the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain or the A-400M transport aircraft. However, the sale of weaponry to non-European allies causes much greater controversy. It raises questions about the impact of the purchases on the economies of the countries concerned, the nature of the political systems of recipient countries and their adherence to human rights, as well as the purposes for which the weapons will be used. The Church of England has sought to exercise influence over the issue of arms sales policy through a statement it issued on the subject of ethics and armaments. It declared that, ‘The Church recognises that arms ... are not like other goods, and that strict regulation is required … The Church advocates an export policy based on legitimacy, accountability, respect for human rights and the rule of law’.12 Concern has been expressed when the British government has transferred arms to countries with unstable regimes and with poor records on human rights. Saudi Arabia provides such an example: the policies of the House of Saud on the use of torture, the death penalty and the limited rights accorded to women, have long been incompatible with British values.13 The UK, nevertheless, has been engaged in its largest ever arms deal with the Saudi government, the so-called ‘Al-Yammamah’ project. This resulted from the fact that the US refused to sell their most advanced fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia because of the potential implications for Israel, so the regime turned to the UK as an alternative supplier. Traditionally, the argument has been that a state becomes reliant upon a weapons exporter if it enters into a purchase arrangement. However, in the case of the Al-Yammamah deal, the figures have been so enormous, approximately £40 billion over the life of the Tornado programme, that a relationship of mutual dependency was created. The Al-Yammamah contract was negotiated and initiated under a Conservative government, but it was taken up by Labour when they entered office. In 2005 the Blair government proceeded to offer a follow-on deal to the Saudis involving 72 of the new 11 Campaign Against the Arms Trade, ‘The G8, Arms Dealers to the World’, Briefing Paper, 2005, www.caat.org.uk/g8 (Accessed 12 July 2006). 12 Ethical Investment Advisory Group, op. cit. 13 S. Brittan, ‘The Ethics and Economics of the Arms Trade’, Royal Society of Arts Journal, August 2001, http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text87_p.html (Accessed 16 July 2006).

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Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft.14 This contract was put into question by allegations that bribes were paid to secure the deal. The UK Serious Fraud Office investigated British Aerospace’s involvement in the project but at the end of 2006 the government announced that the deal would proceed in the interests of national security. The high political salience of the contract, the jobs with BAe that are dependent upon these exports and the need to ensure good political relations with Saudi Arabia, all ensured that the British government would see the contract honoured. Another facet of the debate about to whom to sell arms, is the issue of transfers to very poor countries. The Church of England and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been especially critical of arms sales to developing countries on the grounds that this may further retard their development and may saddle them with heavy debts. Expensive and technologically advanced western goods are likely to present a significant burden to states that produce mainly primary products. This logic is borne out in a report from the British American Security Information Council that notes in 2003 that developing countries accounted for 59 per cent of arms transfer deliveries.15 Health care, education and welfare for the population are likely to be sacrificed in order to pay for weapon systems that have the effect of preserving the power of ruling elites. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, acknowledged indirectly the contribution of arms imports to the debt burdens of developing countries when in 2000 he added 22 countries to the list of those banned from receiving exports credits ‘for unproductive expenditure’.16 Determining the Types of Weapons As well as determining to whom arms might be sold, attention has focused on the types of arms made available. The shrinking size of the post-Cold War defence market ensured that the environment for defence exporters was increasingly competitive. This increased the influence of those countries purchasing arms and rendered it easier for them to obtain the most sophisticated equipment. For instance, Russian eagerness to obtain hard currency from arms transfers has made them willing to sell their most advanced weapons to other countries.17 Russia has sold its frontline Sukhoi SU-27 aircraft to the Chinese and MIG-29 aircraft to India. Such sophisticated arms 14

B. Hagelin, M. Bromley and S. Wezeman, ‘International Arms Transfers’, in SIPRI Yearbook 2006: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security’ (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2006), p. 459. See also The Economist, ‘Shifting Sands’, 2–8 December 2006, p. 34. 15 C. Lindborg and E. Mayhew, BASIC Notes: Occasional Papers on International Security Policy, 17 September 2004, http://www.basicint.org/pubs/Notes/BN040917.htm (Accessed 4 July 2006). 16 S. Brittan, ‘The Ethics and Economics of the Arms Trade’, op. cit. It is worth noting that Towle rejects the assumption that high defence spending detracts from economic growth. He cites the example of the Asian Tiger economies such as Taiwan and South Korea that have been able to industrialise rapidly whilst at the same time maintaining high levels of defence spending and drawing in arms imports. See Towle, ‘Ethics and the Arms Trade’, op. cit. 17 David Mussington, ‘Understanding Contemporary International Arms Transfers’, op. cit, p. 35.

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as these have the capacity to fuel regional arms races as neighbouring countries look to other states to provide equipment of comparable sophistication to offset these purchases. Taiwan and Pakistan have been keen to ensure that the arms acquired by China and India are matched by weapons that they procure from abroad. There is nearly universal agreement within the international community that the sale of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), or the delivery systems of ballistic missiles, is unacceptable. Such weapons could be deeply de-stabilising in many regions of the world and risk catastrophic destruction if war breaks out. Western states – who are the foremost suppliers of conventional arms – have exhibited a collective interest in preventing the spread of WMD that could be employed against their countries. For these reasons international regimes have been created to prevent the proliferation of WMD and to halt the spread of associated technologies. The ‘NonProliferation Treaty’, the ‘Nuclear Suppliers Group’ and the ‘Missile Technology Control Regime’ are examples of these arms control efforts. These regimes have been enforced with vigour and have proved reasonably effective in constraining the diffusion of sensitive technologies. Where arms sales have occurred in these types of weaponry, international opprobrium has been swift. For example, shipments of sensitive technologies to Libya were intercepted and impounded. Similarly, North Korea’s willingness to sell ballistic missile technology has contributed to its status as an international pariah. However, there is evidence of hypocrisy on the part of the west towards the issue of WMD. The US assisted the Israeli nuclear weapons programme because they regarded that state as a vital ally. This was contrary to US obligations under the nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. Similarly, the US issued little more than protests when it was revealed that the Pakistani scientist, A.Q. Khan, had sold technologies involved in the development of nuclear weapons. Khan was disgraced in Pakistan but it was hard to believe that his efforts had been unknown to the government in Islamabad. Nevertheless, the US needed the government of President Musharraf in their ‘War on Terror’ and were unwilling to destabilise an ally through the imposition of sanctions. Another category of weapon sales that attract international criticism are those that could be used by states for purposes of internal repression rather than external defence. Items that can be used against domestic populations, such as riot equipment, are regularly condemned when they are sold to authoritarian or militaryled governments. However, the situation is often more complex than it first appears because equipment is often capable of being used for multiple purposes. For example, armoured vehicles could be used for legitimate defensive purposes but could also be employed against domestic opposition. Furthermore, weapons sold to one country can then be re-exported to a much less desirable destination, thereby circumventing the end user certificates of the producer state. The UK has been subject to criticism for its sale of military systems to countries with poor human rights’ records. For example, the UK was the largest defence supplier to Indonesia during the 1980s and early 1990s and the Conservative government approved the sale of 24 Hawk jets to the government of President Suharto. This was in spite of the fact that the Indonesian military were accused of abuses of human rights in East Timor and the province of Aceh. When the Labour government came to power in May 1997 there was widespread unease when it took the decision to

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proceed with this controversial sale.18 The UK argued that it had secured assurances from the Indonesian government that British supplied equipment would not be used for purposes of internal repression – but it was forced to retract this position when evidence emerged of its weapons being used in this way.19 Other defence deals have returned to haunt the government. Past sales of arms to Zimbabwe have caused embarrassment to the British since the regime has been subject to international sanctions. An arms deal with the government of Malaysia, worth over £1 billion, became the subject of controversy when it was found to be linked to British aid policy that helped to pay for the building of the Pergau dam in that country.20 In 2001, the UK authorised the sale of a military air traffic control system for Tanzania despite the fact that it was opposed on developmental grounds by Claire Short, the Secretary of State in the Department for International Development.21 Towle makes the valid point that sophisticated weapon systems sold by western states are rarely the sources of casualties in contemporary conflicts.22 Most conflicts today are not inter-state wars but civil conflicts. These internal wars often kill large numbers of non-combatants who are the victims of unsophisticated small arms, either purchased from international suppliers or obtained illegally through the black market.23 The end of the Cold War resulted in the cascading of tons of small arms from central and east European countries to civil conflicts in various parts of Africa such as Angola, Congo and Uganda. Since 1997 the British Labour government has focused its efforts on controlling the international sale of small arms and particularly ‘pariah weapons’, such as landmines.24 Mines are left behind as the detritus of contemporary conflicts, in zones such as Afghanistan and Mozambique and cause death or permanent injury to civilians for decades to come. Diana Princess of Wales helped to highlight the suffering caused by these weapons by visiting Angola in January 1997 and associating herself with the issue. The UK government announced its own ban on land mines in May of 199725 and then participated in the so-called ‘Ottawa Process’, a treaty signed in December 1997, that committed 121 countries to destroy their stockpiles and end production. The UK government found itself in step with the Church and other campaigning organisations such as Christian Aid, Oxfam, Tearfund and Saferworld, over these issues. All have seen the targeting of particular categories of weapons as the most effective means to mobilise the international community against a problem blighting the lives of poor people in zones of past conflict. 18

Stephen Crawshaw, ‘A Crash Course in Diplomacy’, The Independent, 30 August 1997, p. 16. 19 The Campaign Against the Arms Trade, ‘Arms to Indonesia Factsheet’, http://www. caat.org.uk/publications/countries/indonesia-0604.php. (Accessed 6 July 2006). 20 The Economist, Addicted to the Arms Trade, 18 September 1999, p. 36. 21 Campaign Against the Arms Trade, ‘The G8, Arms Dealers to the World’, op. cit. 22 Towle, ‘Ethics and the Arms Trade’, op. cit. p. 24. 23 S. Wezeman, ‘The Future of the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms’, SIPRI Policy Paper No. 4, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, August, 2003, p. 8. 24 Cooper, ‘The pariah agenda and New Labour’s ethical arms sales policy’, op. cit. pp. 152–4. 25 Christopher Bellamy, ‘Britain quits a grisly trade’, The Independent, 22 May 1997, p. 1.

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Another category of weapons has received attention for different reasons. Man Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS) have been subject to particular controls because western governments have been fearful of the risks to commercial aircraft if these weapons reached the hands of terrorists. The UK is now adopting the same attitude towards other weapons that cause human suffering such as cluster bombs. These weapons, consisting of canisters with thousand of sub-munitions that litter a battlefield, remain within the UK inventory. It is striking how ethical and strategic considerations become attached to certain categories of weapons and not to others. The UK as an International Moderator of Weapon Sales Although the UK is one of the world’s foremost arms exporters, it nevertheless claims to be committed to regulating the trade. Critics contend that there has been an inherent tension between the UK seeking to maintain its role as a leading arms supplier and its self-appointed mission to constrain arms transfers. Evidence of this is the fact that the UK insists on export licences but rarely refuses requests. The argument is that the UK adopts a stance that is designed for public relations purposes and not to constrain the British arms industry. The UK maintains that its own arms sales policy is responsible. It sells arms only to legitimate state authorities and it refuses to sell arms to countries under an international embargo. Such embargoes result either from a country being party to a conflict – such as the UN embargo against the constituent parts of the formerYugoslavia during the conflict of 1990–1995 – or as a result of a country being regarded as an international ‘pariah’, such as the military government of Myanmar. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) records that there were 21 international arms embargoes in existence in 2005, nine under the auspices of the UN and 12 by other groups of states.26 During conflicts such as the IndoPakistan War of 1965, the UK observed the international embargo against funnelling weapons to either combatant. In the case of pariah regimes, such as apartheid South Africa or the Mugabe government in Zimbabwe, the UK refrained from arms transfer agreements. Yet the British government has sought to go further than just abiding by internationally agreed embargoes. In the early 1990s it argued that the global arms transfer market would benefit from greater transparency about the amounts and the types of equipment being traded. This would build confidence between states because it would lessen the fears that a country could amass a decisive military advantage over its neighbour by secretly acquiring weapons. It would also make it easier to enforce regulations about transfers because there would be more open source information on the industry.27 The UK Prime Minister John Major pressed for the creation of an arms register within the UN. This would be a purely voluntary undertaking by states to declare to the UN the weapons they sold abroad and the recipients record their imports. It was eventually agreed in January 1992 under UN Resolution 46/36L. 26

B. Hagelin, M. Bromley and S. Wezeman, ‘International Arms Transfers’, op. cit., p. 468. E. Surry, ‘Transparency in the Arms Industry’, SIPRI Policy Paper 12, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, January 2006, p. 6. 27

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Categories of equipment include tanks, artillery, armoured personnel carriers, combat helicopters and aircraft, warships over 750 tons and missiles with ranges exceeding 25km. In 2005 there were 120 country reports to the UN Register on Conventional Arms, illustrating its significance within the international community Nevertheless, the arms register has been subject to a variety of criticisms and according to Evans it has failed in its purpose.28 First, the register has been constrained by its voluntary nature. Second, there is no consistency over the categorisation of ‘arms’, so countries are supplying different types of data. Third, despite the high number of participating countries in the scheme, many African states are not involved and they are ones that are experiencing high levels of violence. Inflows of weapons into such conflict zones are usually taking place through the extensive black market and this is something outside the parameters of the register. This is exemplified by the fact that there are major discrepancies between the data provided for exports and imports.29 Fourth, the register does not cover local production of weapons and therefore, in the case of countries with large domestic defence industries, only a partial picture is provided.30 In an attempt to assert a more principled position, the European Union drew up a Code of Conduct on Arms Exports in May 1998. The British played a major role in gathering support for this EU initiative. The measures include taking various criteria into account when determining arms transfers, such as the human rights record of the proposed recipient and the sharing of information when an export licence has been denied. The Code of Conduct stipulates that arms should not be sold if there is the risk of them being used for purposes of internal repression. This is open to interpretation as most defence equipment could be turned upon the civil population if the government were so inclined. A more cynical interpretation of the EU Code of Conduct would see it as a set of guidelines for facilitating arms transfers by European states. With France, Germany and the UK all major competitors in the overseas sale of weapons, the Code provides an agreed criteria that will regulate the transfer market. With the European arms market fractured and competitive, and in the absence of a coordinated arms industry policy amongst EU states, it could be interpreted as a charter for preventing disagreements amongst the leading arms exporters rather than limiting the exports of weapons. There has been pressure from various quarters, including from within the Church of England, for the British government to go further in its efforts to regulate the arms trade. One initiative has called for the British government to bring into being an international arms trade treaty at the UN. A petition drawn up by Oxfam received the support of 11 diocesan bishops and four suffragan bishops of the Church of England.31 It remains to be seen whether the British government will be willing to place issues of principle above commercial interests in such a sensitive policy area. 28

Brian Evans, ‘The Costly Game. A Study of the Arms Trade and Development’, op. cit. B. Hagelin, M. Bromley and S. Wezeman, ‘International Arms Transfers’, op. cit., p. 471. 30 S. Wezeman, ‘The Future of the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms’, op. cit. p. 6. 31 R. Harden, ‘Leaders’ Plea: Limit Arms Trade’, Church Times, http:www.churchtimes. co.uk/80256FA1003E05C1 (Accessed 5 July 2006). 29

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Conclusion At the heart of British government policy towards arms sales, irrespective of the party in power, there is a tension. On the one hand, the UK wishes both to preserve and to enhance its status as a country with major influence in the world. In the words of former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, the British government seeks to ‘punch above its weight’ in international affairs. Consistent with this objective, the UK is one of the biggest arms suppliers in the world. It uses this instrument as a way to extend its influence over other countries, underpin its own military-industrial position and contribute to its balance of payments. According to the logic of this position, the UK would resist any measures that would meaningfully constrain its capacity to export weapons overseas. On the other hand, however, post-Cold War Conservative and Labour governments have sought to enhance their international respectability. They have wanted to increase their own moral authority around the world by appearing to promote ethical policies. They have sought to achieve this by formalising the guidelines under which UK arms companies are allowed to transfer their products overseas. In addition, the government has taken a leading role in securing new forms of restraint and control within the international arms transfer community. It is this tension in policy that enables the Church of England and other Christian organisations to exert influence, to contribute to the debate. Although this influence is patchy and usually post hoc, it is made possible by the ethical dimensions of the arms transfer issue. The Church offers ethical reflections on British policy. This allows it to point to areas where government policy is not adhering to the highest moral standards, where arms transfers are causing damage to less developed countries or are breeding corruption. It is into situations such as these that the Church, as an organised body of believers rather than as individuals, can inject its voice and hold the government to account. If the Church does undertake this self-appointed role, then who will fulfil it? This is not to claim that the Church of England is the only actor interested in arms transfer policy – there are academic commentators, specialised non-governmental organisations and occasionally the media are interested in high profile cases. But other interested actors are few and the Church is an organisations with the ethical legitimacy to question whether it is right for arms to be sold and in what circumstances. I am indebted to Dr Neil Cooper, University of Bradford, for his helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this chapter.

PART 3 Britain and the Less Developed World

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Chapter 9

Waiting for Jubilee: The Campaign for Debt Cancellation Timothy Jones

Introduction I know of a chicken farmer who once went to a witchdoctor to seek advice and the witchdoctor said, ‘pray’. He prayed, but the chickens continued dying. Then he said, perform these rituals, but the chickens continued dying. He gave so many other solutions, but the chickens all died. Then when he went to the witchdoctor and the witchdoctor asked, ‘How are the chickens?’ He said, ‘They are all dead’. The witchdoctor said, ‘how sad, I still had so many good ideas to suggest to you’. This is the relationship we have with the World Bank and the IMF, they have so many good ideas to suggest to us, but the chickens continue to die. – Norbert Mao MP, Uganda, March 2003

This chapter discusses the developing country debt crisis and the global campaign for debt cancellation. It is written in a personal capacity as someone involved in that campaign, having stood in a human chain at Birmingham in 1998, carried a white cross at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Prague in 2000 and yelled with a group of daleks to ‘exterminate the debt’ at the G7 Finance Ministers meeting in London in 2005. It is written also from the perspective of the World Development Movement (WDM), a UK secular campaigning organisation which fights for changes in the policies of international institutions, the UK government and UK companies in order to bring justice for the world’s poor. It is argued in this chapter that debt cancellation is about more than the need to provide money for poor country governments. Necessary though that is, it is also about the need to end the imposition of economic policies on poor countries by rich countries, through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. It is a campaign for a fundamental restructuring of the world economy, where debt cancellation can be used as a means to prevent the rich imposing their will upon the poor. The IMF and World Bank are two global institutions created in the aftermath of the Second World War whose stated aim is to maintain the global economic order. But in the last 25 years, due to the debt crisis of many developing countries, they have become the de facto ministries of finance for swathes of countries across the developing world, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. In order to receive aid, loans and debt relief, countries are required to implement economic policies determined by the IMF and World Bank. Such a process is fundamentally anti-development and anti-democracy; denying to poor countries and poor people the right to determine the economic, political and social make-up of their countries.

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The Evolution of the Debt Crisis Through the 1970s there was a large increase in developing country debt, primarily through private-to-government and government-to-government loans. Rising oil prices and low interest rates left private banks with large amounts of capital to lend out. They invested this capital in developing country governments, in the hope of higher returns, and based on the assumption that countries cannot go bankrupt. Bilateral government loans and loans from the World Bank were often made available with little thought as to how they could be repaid. The main consideration of many loans was to support elites in developing countries on the side of the west during the Cold War. Hanlon has identified US$500 billion worth of developing country debt that can be attributed to loans to dictators such as US$126 billion to President Suharto of Indonesia, US$22 billion to the apartheid regime in South Africa and US$13 billion to General Pinochet in Chile.1 At the start of the 1980s, the US increased the dollar interest rate, and concurrently, prices for many developing country commodity exports fell. In 1982, Mexico threatened to default on its sovereign debt, precipitating the developing country debt crisis. The high level of private commercial bank loans to developing countries left commercial banks overexposed with non-performing loans. The IMF, followed by the World Bank, made finance available to allow developing countries to continue to service their debts. In effect, large amounts of debt passed from being owed to private banks to being owed to the two International Financial Institutions (IFIs). The crisis at the start of the 1980s began a period of continuing indebtedness. The regions most drastically affected by the crisis were sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Both these regions saw total external debts owed by their governments higher than 200 per cent of their annual national income in 1990, and higher than 100 per cent until today. Table 9.1

Long-term external government debt 1970

1980

1990

2000

2004

All developing countries (US$ billion)

45

339

1,039

1,363

1,459

All developing countries (Debt/Gross National Income)

–

21

36

40

35

Sub-Saharan Africa (US$ billion)

6

42

144

160

165

Sub-Saharan Africa (Debt/Gross National Income)

–

69

222

181

125

Latin America

16

131

328

397

442

Latin America (Debt/Gross National Income)

–

192

240

162

134

Source:

1

World Bank, Global Development Finance 2005 (Washington DC, 2005), pp. 2–29.

J. Hanlon, Defining illegitimate debt (Oslo: Norwegian Church Aid, 2002).

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The requirement to service external debts imposed a large strain on the budgets of indebted developing country governments. Through the mid-1990s, sub-Saharan Africa countries were together paying US$15 billion in debt servicing each year, compared to receiving US$10 billion in international aid. Sub-Saharan Africa’s total external debt in 1996 of US$230 billion amount to 74.4 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s total GNP.2 Table 9.2

Country

Comparison of debt payments and education spending in eight African countries, 1996 Debt service payments in 1996 (US$ million)

Public expenditure on education in 1996 (US$ million)

Cameroon

510

249

Ethiopia

348

260

Kenya

840

640

Malawi

89

116

Mali

116

59

Senegal

290

168

Uganda

150

172

Zambia

254

77

Source: World Bank (1999), Global development finance: Country tables (Washington DC : World Bank) and UNDP (1999), Human Development Report 1999 (Oxford : Oxford University Press).

Debt servicing payments were often greater than other forms of public expenditure. In Table 9.2, of eight selected African countries, just two, Malawi and Uganda, spent more on public education in 1996 than they did on debt repayments. The debt crisis restricted the finance available to developing countries to invest in public services and infrastructure. The Cost of Debt: Economic Policies Across Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, the debt crisis began a period of structural adjustment policies advised by the IMF and World Bank. In return for the loans given by the two International Financial Institutions to enable countries to meet their debt repayment obligations, the IMF and World Bank demanded economic policy changes from the countries concerned, so-called ‘conditionality’. The structural adjustment policies demanded by the Bank and Fund were a standard set of stabilisation and free market adjustment measures. 2

World Bank, Global development finance: Country tables (Washington DC: World Bank, 1999). p. 38.

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Initially, the main consideration of the two IFIs was to restore macroeconomic stability. Shock therapy of high interest rates and large cuts in government domestic borrowing were used to rapidly cut inflation. These were followed by structural changes to the economy such as the elimination of price controls, privatisation of state enterprises, trade liberalisation and investment deregulation. Over time, other international aid givers, such as individual countries like the UK, began to make their aid conditional on implementing the same policies. International proposals for debt relief have also all required countries to be implementing IMF and World Bank economic policies. The justification for conditionality has been that such structural changes in a country’s economy are vital requirements in order to solve balance of payments problems, the initial cause of indebtedness. The IMF and World Bank also promised that such policies would lead to higher economic growth rates and ultimately reduce poverty. However, the results of the policies followed in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America over the period of structural adjustment have been a disaster. Between 1960 and 1980, GDP per capita in Latin America grew by 75 per cent. Between 1980 and 1998, it had risen just 6 per cent. In sub-Saharan Africa, GDP per capita grew by 36 per cent between 1960 and 1980, yet it actually fell by 15 per cent between 1980 and 1998.3 Table 9.3

The impact of trade liberalisation in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) 1987–1989 to 1997–1999

IMF trade restrictiveness index (1 = most open, 10 = most restricted)

Percentage change in US$1-a-day poverty level in LDCs (figures with every country treated the same, regardless of population)

Percentage change in US$1a-day poverty level in LDCs (figures weighted to account for more populous countries)

1

+ 24

+ 16

2

+5

+5

3

+4

+2

4

+3

+8

5

-1

-3

6

-1

-1

7

-4

-4

8

-7

- 10

9

0

0

10

+6

+5

Source: UNCTAD (2002), The least developed countries report 2002: Escaping the poverty trap (Geneva : United Nations).

3

M. Weisbrot, R. Naiman and J. Kim, The emperor has no growth: Declining growth rates in the era of globalisation (Washington DC : Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2000).

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Trade liberalisation has been specifically shown to have led to increased poverty levels. Table 9.3 above shows calculations by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) of whether, and how much, poverty has been reduced in different Least Developed Countries (LDCs) compared to their level of trade restrictiveness. Table 9.3 shows that, poverty has on average increased in those countries with the lowest trade barriers (those categorised in the top four least trade restrictive bands). In LDCs where government intervention is greater and policy is more trade restrictive, poverty has, on average, been reduced. But in the most closed LDC economies (i.e., those ranking ‘10’ on the IMF’s trade restrictiveness scale) poverty also increased. Neo-liberal economic theory argues trade liberalisation should lead to welfare gains, as a freer trade regime allows goods to be imported which can be produced at a cheaper rate abroad than they can be at home. Domestic resources of capital and labour can then be switched to work on products in which the country concerned has a comparative advantage. However, there are two main reasons why this theory fails in developing countries. Firstly, market failures mean the switch in resources from one product to another does not happen. In countries where unemployment is pervasive and there are high levels of capital flowing out of a country, resources are currently not being maximised, so there is no reason to assume they will switch from one productive process to another. In Zambia, for example, textile manufacturing has been one sector particularly badly hit by trade liberalisation.4 The lowering of tariffs on textile products and particularly the removal of all tariffs on used clothes, led to large increases in imports of cheap, second-hand clothing from industrialised countries. The Zambian textile industry could not compete with these imports and the sector has all but vanished. There were more than 140 textile manufacturing firms in 1991, but this had fallen to just eight by 2002. Employment in textile manufacturing fell by 30,000 from 34,000 to 4,000. At the same time, new employment opportunities were not created elsewhere. Total paid employment in Zambia fell from 544,000 in 1991 to 476,000 in 2000.5 Secondly, government intervention in trade has nearly always been required to enable a process of industrial development. Chang has shown,6 that over time, most currently industrialised countries have needed some form of trade protection to develop certain industries in order for them to build up the capital and skills to allow them to compete in the world market. Current rich countries such as the UK, US, Germany and Japan all used high level of trade protection in order to develop their industrial base. Similarly, more recent developers such as South Korea, Malaysia and China have also seen varying but high interventions in international trade. Stephen Lewis, the UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa says: What makes me nearly apoplectic … is that the Bank and the Fund were fully told about their mistakes even as the mistakes were being made. They were so smug, so all knowing, 4

N. McCulloch, B. Baulch and M. Cherel-Robson, Globalisation, poverty and inequality in Zambia during the 1990s (Brighton: University of Sussex, 2000). 5 A. Bigsten and B.K. Mkenda, Impacts of trade liberalisation in Zambia (Gothenbrug: Gotenborg University, 2001). 6 H-J. Chang, Kicking away the ladder: Development strategy in historical perspective (London : Anthem, 2002).

124

British Foreign Policy and the Anglican Church so incredibly arrogant, so wrong. They simply didn’t respond to arguments which begged them to review the human consequences of their policies. The fact that poverty became increasingly entrenched, or that economies were not responding to the dogma as the dogma predicted, made no difference. It was a form of capitalist Stalinism. The credo was everything; the people were a laboratory.7

Commodity Price Collapse African countries in particular suffered heavily through the 1980s and 1990s due to massive declines in the prices received for their main commodity exports. As production grew of most tropical commodities around the world, the prices paid by multinational food companies for tropical commodities fell. Robins has estimated that if prices for the top 10 tropical commodities8 exported from developing countries during the 1980s and 1990s had increased only in line with inflation, this could have yielded a staggering US$242.5 billion annually by 2002 – over three times the current global aid budget.9 The decline in commodity prices was also partly attributable to the programmes of the IMF and World Bank. For instance, in coffee producing countries, the World Bank and IMF advised governments to liberalise their coffee production markets. This involved measures such as eradicating controls on supply and on prices, disbanding state trading boards and actively encouraging increased production and exports. For example, in 1998, Côte d’Ivoire’s eligibility for debt relief was made conditional on the full liberalisation of the coffee sector by the 1998–1999 crop year.10 This was also backed up by a World Bank project that sought to increase productivity for all crops, including coffee, as well as stressing the requirement to fully liberalise the coffee sector.11 Perhaps the greatest ‘success’ has been in Vietnam where the World Bank has helped promote a massive expansion of coffee growing. In 1993, for example, the World Bank funded an agricultural rehabilitation project with an aim of diversifying export income through the expansion of coffee and rubber exports.12 Since the late 1980s, Vietnam has risen from a marginal coffee producer – producing less than 50,000 metric tons – to one of the World’s largest (by the late 1990s it was producing some 400,000 tonnes).13 During the same period, the World Bank and IMF were requiring other coffee producing nations – such as Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya – to liberalise their 7 S. Lewis, ‘Smug World Bank and IMF sabotaged poor countries’ development’, Embassy, Ottawa. 30/11/2005. 8 The top ten tropical commodities are: copra, palm oil, sugar cane, cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnuts, jute, cotton and rubber. 9 P. Robbins, Stolen Fruit: the Tropical Commodities Disaster (London: Zed Books, 2003). 10 World Bank, Cote d’Ivoire Decision point document, 06/03/1998 (Washington DC: World Bank, 1998). 11 World Bank, Second national agricultural services support project, project appraisal document (Washington DC: World Bank, 1998). 12 World Bank, Vietnam agricultural rehabilitation project, staff appraisal report (Washington DC: World Bank, 1993). 13 FAO, Commodity Review and Outlook 1998–1999, Rome (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, 1999).

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agricultural sectors and were encouraging increased coffee exports. For example, a study of Uganda by the World Bank in 1993 advised the Ugandan Government to plan for a greater share of the world coffee market. The study argued that Uganda ‘could double its coffee exports to perhaps five million bags, without significantly affecting medium-term international prices for Robusta coffee’.14 Unfortunately, the study did not seem to take into account the implications of increased production and exports being encouraged by the IMF and World Bank in other parts of the world. The result of the oversupply has been a price collapse and a crisis in coffee producing countries. According to a World Bank study in 2002: Coffee prices have declined sharply in recent years because of large increases in coffee production and exports from traditional exporters such as Brazil and new entrants such as Vietnam. Between July 1998 and June 2001, coffee export prices declined by almost 50 percent.15

The Governance of the IMF and World Bank The controversy surrounding IMF and World Bank programmes is heightened due to their control by rich countries. As Table 9.4 highlights, industrialised countries effectively control the IMF and World Bank through their voting shares on the Executive Boards of the two institutions. The G8 states hold 48 per cent of votes in the IMF, whilst industrialised countries as a whole hold 64 per cent. Table 9.4

IMF and World Bank voting shares

Region

IMF and IBRD voting share, averaged (%)

World population (%)

EU states

29.9

7.1

+ 22.8

North America

19.7

5.2

+ 14.5

Middle East and North Africa

8.6

4.9

+ 3.7

Latin America and Caribbean

7.7

8.5

- 0.8

East Asia (ex. Japan)

7.1

30.9

- 23.8

Japan

7.0

2.0

+ 5.0

Eastern Europe and Central Asia

6.5

6.7

- 0.2

Sub-Saharan Africa

5.5

10.3

- 4.8

Voting share to population difference

14 World Bank, Uganda – Agriculture, a World Bank country study (Washington DC: World Bank, 1993). 15 World Bank, Ethiopia – developing exports to promote growth, Sector report (Washington DC: World Bank, 2002).

British Foreign Policy and the Anglican Church

126 Region

IMF and IBRD voting share, averaged (%)

World population (%)

South Asia

3.5

23.8

- 20.3

Non-EU Western Europe

2.5

0.2

+ 2.3

Australasia

2.0

0.4

+ 1.6

Developed

61.2

20.7

+ 40.5

Developing and transition

38.8

79.3

- 40.5

Voting share to population difference

Looking at the difference between various regions’ percentage share of IFI votes and percentage share of the world’s population (see Table 9.4), EU states, the US, Canada and Japan are most over-represented within the IFIs, with the Middle East and North Africa, non-EU Western Europe and Australasia also over-represented. East Asia and South Asia are most under-represented, whilst sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe and Central Asia also receive less than their fair share of votes. When the IMF and World Bank were created through the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944, quotas were allocated to ensure a certain power distribution in the IMF. As Ariel Buira, Director of the G-24 Secretariat, outlines: The formula developed by R. Mikesell in 1943 had the political objective of attaining the relative quota shares that the US President and Secretary of State had agreed to give the ‘big four’ wartime allies, with a ranking which they had decided: Thus, the US was to have the largest quota, approximately $2.9 billion, the UK including colonies an amount about half the US quota, the Soviet Union a quota just under that of the UK; and China somewhat less.16

This was achieved through a confusing formula using various economic indicators. Mikesell states that when he was questioned on how the distribution of quotas had been reached: I … gave a rambling twenty-minute seminar on the factors taken into account in calculating the quotas, but I did not reveal the formula. I tried to make the process appear as scientific as possible, but the delegates were intelligent enough to know that the process was more political than scientific.17

The inequality of voting power that exists today is the result of a 60 year-old carveout based on post-war politics and a world dominated by colonialism. The voting rights in the Fund and Bank determine the make-up of the 24member group of Executive Directors, the day-to-day decision making body of the two institutions. By having over 2.5 per cent of votes in the IMF, the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia are able to have one Executive Director each. Other states have to band together and share an Executive Director. A group of 24, primarily Francophone, African countries share one 16 17

A. Buira (Undated), A new voting structure for the IMF, G24 Secretariat. A. Buira (Undated), The governance of the IMF, G24 Secretariat.

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Executive Director; a group of 19 primarily Anglophone African countries share another. In the World Bank, again the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, China, Saudi Arabia and Russia all have one Executive Director. Forty-six countries, on the other hand, have to share two Executive Directors between them. The UK is a key player in the governance of the IMF and World Bank. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown was made Chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) of the IMF since 1999. The IMFC meets to decide on overall strategic direction for the IMF. According to the UK Government, it is ‘the main forum for discussing IMF policies at the Ministerial level’.18 It has 24 members and meets twice a year at the Spring and Annual meetings. The UK also holds 4.96 per cent of the votes at the IMF, more than 43 African countries have in total. The Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, is the UK’s Governor on the Board of the World Bank; where the UK holds around 5 per cent of the vote. The Department for International Development currently gives 12 per cent of its aid to the International Development Association (IDA), the only part of the World Bank requiring funding from rich countries, which makes the UK proportionally the largest donor to the World Bank. When measuring the total amount of money given to IDA, the UK is second only to the US (see Table 9.1). Table 9.5 Country

Donor contributions to the International Development Association Contribution to IDA 2006–2009 (US$ billion)

Percentage of country aid

US

2.85

5.0

UK

2.73

11.6

Japan

2.72

10.2

Germany

1.70

7.6

France

1.47

5.8

Sweden

0.87

10.7

Italy

0.79

10.6

Canada

0.78

10.2

Netherlands

0.57

4.5

The Global Campaign for Debt Cancellation Through the 1980s, in response to the debt crisis and the imposition of structural adjustment policies, a global campaign began to develop for the debts of the poorest countries to be

18

HM Treasury, Growth for all: Towards a stable and fairer world. The UK and the IMF 2003 (London: HM Treasury, 2004).

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cancelled. WDM first called for poor country debts to be cancelled in 1986 and led a campaign targeting UK high street banks still holding debts in developing countries. The campaigns for debt cancellation beginning in rich countries were just the tip of an iceberg of protests in developing countries against the hardships imposed by structural adjustment policies. In countries affected by IMF and World Bank programmes, there were often widespread protests against economic liberalisation and the hardships it created, especially for the poor.19 In a set of reports between 1999 and 2002 WDM documented 238 separate incidents of civil unrest against IMF imposed economic policies involving millions of people across 34 countries. Many of those incidents ended with the deployment of riot police or the army, resulting in almost 100 documented fatalities, with arrests and injuries running into thousands.20 The global campaign for debt cancellation, particularly in the UK, reached greater prominence in the mid-1990s. The debt campaign in rich countries managed to reach a wide number of people through its message of a simple injustice – poor countries paying money to rich countries. Jubilee 2000, a coalition of development campaigns like WDM and aid agencies such as Christian Aid, Cafod and Oxfam, formed to coordinate efforts in the UK. When the G8 meeting of the heads of government of the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Canada and Russia, was held in Birmingham in 1998, 70,000 protestors assembled in central Birmingham, calling for the debts of the poorest countries to be cancelled. The main call of the Jubilee 2000 campaign was for the debts of 52 of the poorest countries to be cancelled in full, a total debt reduction of US$372 billion. Jubilee 2000 was also particularly successful in mobilising campaigners from within churches. The message of the injustice of debt repayments was able to be supported through using Old Testament guidance on the Jubilee year. Leviticus outlines that every 50 years debts were to be cancelled and lands returned to their original owners. Jubilee was a means to ensure that inequalities would not persist through many generations, and that all would receive liberty. The Jubilee year gave the campaign both a name and a way of reaching out to campaigners across churches. The outreach amongst Christian denominations, including the Church of England, accessed large numbers of people who attended demonstrations and engaged in other political actions such as lobbying their MPs and writing to the government. The church’s ability to mobilise large numbers of people was vital in pushing the issue of Third World Debt up the political agenda. However, the campaign never sought the fundamental changes in human relationships and ownership of the Jubilee year. Debt cancellation for poor countries would not restore the resources lost to poor countries through the history of slavery and colonialism, nor make the relationships between poor and rich equal in the way envisaged in Leviticus. Neither would it challenge the ownership by the rich of natural resources and the ecological implications of the use of such resources. Leviticus states: 19

D. Seddon, Free markets and food riots (Oxford: Blackwells, 1994). This research is produced in three reports. J. Woodruffe and M. Ellis-Jones, States of unrest: Resistance to IMF policies in poor countries (London: World Development Movement, 2000). M. Ellis-Jones, States of unrest II: Resistance to IMF and World Bank policies in poor countries (London: World Development Movement, 2002). M. Ellis-Jones, States of unrest III: Resistance to IMF and World Bank policies (London: World Development Movement, 2003). 20

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The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land (Levt. 25: 23–4).

The focus of the debt campaign in the UK was on cancelling debt as a means to provide poor countries with more money. For an organisation such as WDM, just as important was the need to release developing countries from the economic straightjacket imposed by the IMF and World Bank. The two campaigns were interrelated; if developing countries could be freed from indebtedness, they would have less need to follow IMF and World Bank programmes. And if debts were cancelled, developing countries would have greater resources to follow alternative economic policies. Yet the political response by rich countries to the campaigns has been to offer some form of debt cancellation, but to use the offer of debt cancellation as a means to further increase the control of the IMF and World Bank over the economies of indebted countries. What has been Achieved: HIPC and the G8 In 1996, the IMF and World Bank initiated a programme called the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative to allow some of the most indebted poor countries some debt relief. Following the protests in Birmingham and Cologne, in 1999 the G8 announced the HIPC programme would be expanded to be quicker and provide a greater level of debt relief. The UK government had been one of the key pushers of a new debt relief package, and with the agreement of the new HIPC programme, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown announced in June 1999: The debt package to be agreed this weekend will deliver quickly to more of the poorest countries a lasting exit from their unsustainable debt burdens and bridge the gap between what the HIPC initiative promised and its current reality.

The IMF and World Bank judged that 38 countries were eligible to qualify for the HIPC initiative, on the basis of a low national income and high indebtedness. For these countries, the two international institutions offered a cut in debt to 150 per cent of exports – widely regarded as an arbitrary figure. In order to get this relief, countries would have to implement specific economic conditions such as privatisation and trade liberalisation set down by the Bank and Fund. They would also have to implement a traditional IMF programme for at least a year. Table 9.6 Year

The history of debt relief Total number of countries given debt relief by this date

Average amount of debt cancelled for those given relief

1999

4

30 per cent

2000

4

35 per cent

2001

6

34 per cent

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Total number of countries given debt relief by this date

Average amount of debt cancelled for those given relief

2002

8

43 per cent

2003

9

45 per cent

2004

13

49 per cent

2005

18

49 per cent

Due to the onerous conditions of the IMF and World Bank, countries progressed slowly through the HIPC process. Four years after the Cologne G8, just eight countries had received debt relief, amounting to just 43 per cent of their external debts. Other countries had their relief held up due to a failure to implement typical IMF and World Bank conditions. WDM’s analysis in May 2003 of the conditions required of 26 countries by the IMF and World Bank revealed that at least 15 required countries to implement privatisations in public utilities or basic services such as energy, telecommunications, water and transport, whilst all mentioned a previous privatisation process as an important indication of a countries’ eligibility for debt relief. Eleven countries were required to continue a process of trade liberalisation, whilst 23 mentioned past efforts to liberalise trade as important.21 As well as specific conditions, in order to qualify for debt cancellation, countries have to be on an IMF programme, implementing further conditions and agree a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) with the IMF and World Bank. PRSPs continue to follow the same structural adjustment strategy as in the 1980s and 1990s. WDM’s analysis of 42 PRSPs completed by May 2005 finds that 90 per cent require a privatisation programme, including 64 per cent requiring water privatisation and 71 per cent require further trade liberalisation.22 In Malawi, for example, a condition of the IMF and World Bank programme was to liberalise the agricultural sector, through the privatisation of the state marketing board ADMARC. ADMARC had provided subsidies, assured farmers of agricultural inputs and maintained grain reserves in remote areas. With the restructuring of the agricultural sector, such systems began to be removed. The reforms were imposed by the IMF and World Bank without donors having undertaken a proper analysis of their potential impact and consequences, particularly on the poor. Subsidies for small farmers and the poor were reduced, price controls and regulations removed and the social functions of ADMARC went as its constituent parts began to be privatised. In 2002 a food crisis hit Malawi, with approximately 70 per cent of Malawian farming families without food and facing starvation. The crisis was reported as being caused by floods in 2001 that ruined the planting season. Yet there was an unreported

21 P. Hardstaff, Treacherous conditions: How IMF and World Bank policies tied to debt relief are undermining development (London: World Development Movement, 2003). 22 T. Jones and P. Hardstaff, Denying democracy: How the IMF and World Bank take from poor people (London: World Development Movement, 2005).

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side to the famine. Francis Ng’ambi from the Malawian NGO, the Malawi Economic Justice Network, reported that: the removal of price controls led to a price increase for maize of 400 per cent between October 2001 and March 2002. Private grain traders have followed the market signals all too well – they have hoarded supplies and made money out of food shortages. This spirit of profiteering has fuelled corruption in Malawi … Rather than ensuring that social aims are achieved through accountable government, the IMF, World Bank and other donors have pursued an agenda of austerity, deregulation and privatisation.23

Unsurprisingly, further privatisation of ADMARC slowed. Malawi has also failed to fulfil IMF and World Bank conditions concerning government spending and domestic borrowing. As of June 2006, Malawi has yet to qualify for debt relief. G8 100 Per cent Debt Cancellation In 2005, the UK once again held the G8 presidency, and the main meeting of the G8 leaders was held in Gleneagles. The UK government sought to get an extension of the HIPC debt relief agreement so that it could provide 100 per cent cancellation of the debts owed to the IMF and World Bank. Two weeks before the G8 meeting, at the G7 finance ministers meeting held in London, an agreement was reached to provide the finance to allow the IMF and World Bank to cancel 100 per cent of the debts owed to them by countries which had qualified for debt relief under HIPC. The agreement had to be negotiated with other member countries of the IMF and World Bank within the two institutions. At the beginning of December 2005 there was a formal announcement from the IMF agreeing to the G8 debt deal, involving the cancellation of US$4.8 billion in debts owed up to December 2004. In Spring 2006, the World Bank finally confirmed that the debts owed by the 18 countries which had qualified under the HIPC scheme would be cancelled on 1 July 2006. Unfortunately, unlike the IMF part of the deal, debts up to December 2003 (rather than up to December 2004) will be cancelled. This makes the deal worth US$37 billion over 40 years (rather than US$42 billion). To date, of the US$37 billion needed to pay for the initiative, only 60 per cent has been pledged by rich countries including the G8, leaving them US$14.8 billion short. Worse still, of this 60 per cent, only 10 per cent is a firm commitment. The remainder has first to be agreed by various national parliaments, budgetary processes and cabinets, with no guarantee it will happen. In other words, although the G8 announced 100 per cent cancellation to wide-acclaim, so far they have committed only 10 per cent of the money needed to finance it. If the remaining 90 per cent is not forthcoming, poor countries will effectively end up paying for their own debt cancellation through a reduction in their aid budgets. This is because the World Bank will have to foot the bill out of its own resources, so reducing the amount of money it has to distribute to them. 23

K. Owusu and F. Ng’ambi, Structural damage: The causes and consequences of Malawi’s food crisis (London: World Development Movement, 2002), p. 11.

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On top of the 18, a further 22 countries stand to benefit fully from the scheme in future, although only nine of them look likely to qualify in the next few years. And the same system of requiring countries to implement IMF and World Bank economic policies remains in place. At the international level, the demand to end the imposition of structural adjustment economic policies on poor countries has been met with silence. The international system led by the IMF and World Bank continues to use debt as a means to force countries to implement failed structural adjustment economic policies. Given the past record of such policies, the development prospects of the poorest countries in the world will remain hindered. And conditions also work to prevent the establishment of effective democracies. Little democratic space is created if economic policies are decided in Washington DC rather than national political institutions. Conclusion The debt cancellation provided to countries so far has been of undoubted benefit. Jack Jones Zulu, a campaigner with Jubilee Zambia and a member of the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection, has written: one can safely argue that Zambia’s 2006 national budget demonstrates that with debt relief in place and clear planning, it is possible to increase allocations to the social sectors. This year’s budgetary allocations to the social sectors stand at 30 per cent of the total budget – the highest in recent years. These increased allocations will go to areas such as recruiting personnel in the education and health sectors, infrastructure development, purchase of drugs, and provision of food supplements especially for people living with HIV and AIDS. The Government has pledged to recruit 800 medical personnel and slightly over 4000 teachers.24

Yet the conditionality of the IMF and World Bank has not changed. Jack Jones Zulu goes on to write: Jubilee-Zambia is thus very concerned that Zambia and indeed other poor countries must still continue to implement trade and economic liberalisation policies before they can receive debt relief from the multilateral creditors.25

As long as international aid, loans and debt relief are conditional on following the ideological economic policies of the IMF and World Bank, the rich will be continuing to use the debtor status of poor countries to determine what economic policies should be followed. Debt cancellation will not provide the liberation of removing the chains that bind people to the will of another. The UK government has been a key player in pushing for debt cancellation through the IMF and World Bank. It has successfully used the debt campaign to project itself as a government working internationally for the benefit of poorer countries. Yet the issue the UK government has addressed has been the need to provide more resources to poor country by governments, by releasing them from the burden of paying their 24

J.J. Zulu, Zambia after the HIPC ‘surgery’ and the completion point (Lusaka: Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection, 2006). 25 Ibid.

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external debts. The UK has not challenged the ideological system which lies behind the current policies followed by poor countries. Even on the issue of more resources for poor countries, the UK government’s spin has been better than its actual performance. Nigeria was one African country excluded from the HIPC and G8 debt deals, partly because its debt was far bigger than other African countries, so would have cost far more. Instead a deal was agreed with Nigeria in 2005, which cancelled some debt in return for immediate payment of the remaining proportion. The UK government received £1.7 billion from the Nigeria deal, more than its annual aid budget to Africa. Campaigning for debt cancellation has had an effect, but it has not led to a fundamental change in the world economy. The inequalities in power and wealth remain between rich and poor, and always would have remained even if all the debts had been cancelled, unconditionally. The larger goal of Jubilee and a rewriting of global power and wealth is beyond the capacity of current political systems and campaigns.

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Chapter 10

The Challenge of Aid Fletcher Tembo

Introduction And I appeal to NGOs and faith groups: to hold us accountable, to be the conscience of the world, to be the voice that guides us at this crucial road, to work together with no one ever subordinating their own objectives ... (Speech by Right Honourable Gordon Brown, then the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, at a conference on ‘Making Globalisation work for all – the challenge of delivering the Monterrey Consensus, London, 16 February 2004).

This chapter argues that the greatest challenge of aid is not necessarily how to have more of it so that Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are met by 2015. Instead, it is to have more of the kind of aid that is raised and delivered in the manner that goes beyond the historical charitable images and aims to becoming the instrument of justice. Here, aid is more than the financial transfers from rich countries to poor countries, through national government policies and budgets, to poor communities and individuals. As it changes hands from the taxpayer in the developed country, through policies and practices of their governments and those of the recipient government and other intermediaries to finally reach the poor in a particular local community, aid becomes the central mediating factor for different forms of relationships. Therefore, the guiding voice of NGOs and faith groups, in Gordon Brown’s call above, must also fundamentally be a voice for transforming these relationships, enabling greater voices of the poor and their governments towards eradication of poverty and its underlying causes. Without putting this important agenda on course now, come 2015, some of the MDGs will be achieved but will be followed by frustration with increasing poverty as aid levels fall again. Furthermore, the economic growth agenda, on which most economists and development planners have put their attention in order to construct an aid exit strategy post 2015, will fail to answer to the inequality and exclusion challenges. This aspect of the reality of aid received very little attention, if at all, in the talk about globalisation and poverty reduction within the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign and the associated 2005 ‘historic’ commitments by the G8 leaders and the multilateral aid agencies. The aid effectiveness debate post-2005 has also veered much into trying to sort out the increasing complexities of the aid architecture, with new donors such as China and India on board and foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The preoccupation in this case has mainly been with the challenges of managing aid with too many agencies that are uncoordinated and are allocating aid via government bureaucracies and to communities based

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on their own political preferences and terms.1 The other aid quality concerns that have received attention pertain to the capacity of developing countries to absorb increased aid volumes and deliver results in the context of their poor governance and corruption performance records. In this connection, the World Bank has developed its ‘Governance and Anti-corruption Strategy’,2 while most bilateral donors have also developed their own approaches to governance and anticorruption, often as part of their new aid conditionality positions. These concerns are justified on the basis of the imperative of moving towards achieving MDGs, in the context of the positive turn around in aid volumes, as reflected in Figure 10.1 below.

Figure 10.1 Aid volumes from 1983 to April 2004 Source:

Development Initiatives (www.devinit.org)

The graph above does not include 2005 but existing DAC records show a record rise of aid to 106 billion in 2005, which represents a rise to 0.33 per cent of the total Gross National Incomes (GNI) of the rich countries within the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), from 0.26 per cent in 2004. The promises by G8 countries and the European Union in 2005 also show positive projections towards the 2015 MDG mark. If we take one donor – the UK – for example, we find its record on aid as a percentage of GNI over the last 30 years and in the future as shown the graph in Figure 10.2 below. 1 2

S. Browne, Aid and Influence: Do Donors Help or Hinder? (London, Earthscan, 2006). World Bank, Washington DC, 2006.

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Figure 10.2 The long-term trend in aid as a percentage of GNI for the United Kingdom Source: Key

Development Initiatives www.devinit.org Black columns – 30 year performance to 2004; White in 1979 – highest level so far; White columns from 2005 onwards – current government targets; Black columns after 2005 – steps needed to be on track to meet target.

These aid volume and country aid absorption issues are relevant but in this chapter, I argue that we must locate the greatest challenge of aid as of power and relationships, which negatively impact on the poor countries and people down the aid chain. I take the focal point of discussion as the national development strategies in general, and Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) in particular, and the language of participation or ‘voices of the poor’ ascribed to it. The national development strategy process currently gives official legitimacy to all government aid actions, including country development priorities, donor harmonisation and alignment, as agreed in the Paris declaration for aid effectiveness signed by more than 80 countries in 2005. It is well stated in the Paris declaration that donor actions must be aligned with national strategies that have been developed through ‘broad consultative processes’.3 Country ownership is also the first of the 12 indicators for assessing performance of countries that were agreed in the Paris declaration. It is, however, assumed that the voices of the poor have been captured in the country ownership agenda (which is different from government ownership in that developing country governments are expected to involve their citizens) and all that is required if to fix the rest. I make the challenge of this premise the central focus of this chapter while well aware of the other battles that have to be fought in order to have aid that reaches the child in a community, as shown in Figure 10.3 below. 3

OECD (2005), p. 3.

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Figure 10.3 Battles for more and better aid from taxpayer to the child The relationship journey from the UK taxpayer, as shown in Figure 10.3 above (as an example), makes the case for ‘Connecting people, fighting poverty’ for World Vision. For the purposes of this chapter, I further phrase a direct justice-focused goal of ‘Connecting people, fighting injustice, and eradicating poverty’. Poverty eradication in this case is inclusive of changing the hearts and minds of all actors involved in the aid chain, transformation of unjust structures and processes and working towards restoration of empowering relationships and respect of the God-given dignity of the poor. Herein, dignity includes the poor realising expanded spaces for exercising their active agency in the transformation process itself, as part of their rights and responsibilities. The church is well placed to advocate for the realisation of this dignity, ‘based on hope’, because the church is found where people are, brings local relevance of development owing to its permanent presence in communities and the moral vision.4 The missing dimension of looking at aid as an instrument that shapes power relations in the chain must be taken as a critical dimension of the post-2005, MDG-focused campaign and call for action against poverty, with the church playing a central role. The chapter draws on the report of the World Vision case study research conducted in Zambia and Bolivia5 in order to argue specifically for the PRS agenda to move the voices of the poor from consultation to influence and from donor conditionality to 4 V. Samuel, ‘The World Bank and the Churches: Reflections at the Outset of a New Partnership’, in D. Belshaw, R. Calderisi and C. Sugden (eds), Faith in Development: partnership between the World Bank and the Churches of Africa (2001), pp. 237–43. 5 F. Tembo (ed.), ‘Poverty Reduction: are the strategies working?’, A World Vision UK report in partnership with World Vision Zambia and World Vision Bolivia (Milton Keynes, World Vision, 2005).

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accountability. The first part of the chapter locates the PRS debate within the original framework of the World Bank and then dwells on lessons from the research study that World Vision conducted in Bolivia and Zambia. I then briefly reflect on the role of donors before concluding the chapter with reflections on the role of the church. Poverty Reduction Strategies and the New International Development Compact Instituted by the major international financial institutions (IFIs), particularly the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), poverty reduction strategy papers (PRSPs) are prepared by developing country governments and citizens to serve as roadmaps for national development processes and policy reforms. The PRS approach aims to improve on past anti-poverty policy frameworks by ensuring that development activities are anchored to the priorities of the poor. This requires the active engagement with the poor, from a multidimensional understanding of their poverty, in the design and implementation of PRSs. This has to occur within the shift in the development paradigm from Structural Adjustment Programme (SAPs) approaches to Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) approaches, as the policy mechanism for managing the aid relationship between donors and recipient countries, shown in Figure 10.4 below.

Figure 10.4 The old and new poverty reduction agendas

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Ideally, the shift from SAPs to PRSs, as shown above, should give new meaning to both the giving and delivery of aid for fighting poverty because of its implicit governance impetus in concepts such as ‘broad-based participation’, ‘partnership’ and ‘country ownership’. This far, however, the PRS approach has both fervent critics and committed apologists. Certainly the success of the PRS approach in ensuring the participation of impoverished communities has been mixed at best. Various early PRSPs lacked parliamentary sign-off and did not engage government ministries responsible for social services, much less poor citizens. Furthermore, they failed to entrench accountability for poverty reduction and were not properly located within domestic and international policymaking arenas. That is, although PRSPs were intended to provide a unified, coherent road map for national development activities, in practice they have often been treated more as a planning exercise than as an actual guide for policy. Donor inconsistency in supporting PRSs and using PRSPs as a touchstone for planning and distributing aid has limited the utility of the approach. However, the first generation of PRSs made positive gains in building awareness of poverty issues within governments, highlighting the need to harmonise donor policies, and engage civil society in national development debates.6 More than 40 countries now have a PRSP under implementation. In these countries, PRSs are the main framework for the participation of poor people in the aid architecture. ‘Second generation’ PRSs have emerged in a growing number of countries, including Bolivia, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Nicaragua and Tanzania. Beyond the mechanics of the effective creation and implementation of PRSPs, there are a wide variety of positions on the place of PRSs in the post-Washington consensus. At one extreme, conservative commentators have argued that the World Bank should stick to financial rather than development issues. At the other end of the spectrum, Marxist critiques suggest that the World Bank’s commitment to poverty reduction is a real but secondary objective compared to facilitating capitalist accumulation and exploitation.7 A more tempered position, the ‘liberal’ approach conceives of the PRS process as a genuine improvement on previous development practice that provides a firm foundation for future gains. Different in degree rather than in type is the more critical stance generally associated with NGOs. Under this view, the PRS approach is valuable in principle, but in practice the World Bank is merely paying lip service to poverty reduction whilst prioritising efforts to deepen the hegemony of neo-liberalism, in the spirit of structural adjustment.8 In contrast, this chapter takes the view that while the World Bank is assuredly continuing with its neo-liberal agenda, the addition of poverty reduction and participation issues to its portfolio through the PRS approach suggests that a qualitatively different project is also underway. This chapter is concerned with how PRSs can increase aid effectiveness and help realise the promises set out in the new 6

ODI, ‘PRSP Annual Progress Reports and Joint Staff Assessments’, PRSP Monitoring and Synthesis Project, Briefing Note 9, September 2004 See . 7 P. Cammack, ‘What the World Bank Means by Poverty Reduction’, CPRC Conference Paper, Manchester, 2003 See . 8 J. Pender, ‘From ‘Structural Adjustment’ to ‘Comprehensive Development Framework’: Conditionality Transformed?’, Third World Quarterly, 22(3), 2001, pp. 397–411.

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international development compact by supporting an empowerment approach to poverty reduction. An empowerment approach to poverty reduction complements rights-based approaches to development. Rather than proceeding ‘from the top, down’, an empowerment approach starts with poor people at the grassroots, and endeavours to equitably engage all of the actors in the development process, including civil society organisations, local and national governments, donors and IFIs. The empowerment approach challenges donors’ current preoccupation with issues of absorption capacity and corruption by focusing on accountability, which should apply not only between lending and receiving governments, but also between donors, developing country governments and the poor (‘downward accountability’). This will create demandled forms of governance required for aid effectiveness. In the following sections, I discuss this approach in greater detail, from consultation to accountability. Consultation, Influence and Accountability within the PRS Approach: Insights from Bolivia and Zambia Maximising the potential of PRSs to increase accountability and the engagement of the poor depends on making radical changes to the PRS process, from the diagnosis of poverty to the reform of donor relations. Although the sluggish pace of change stands in stark contrast to the urgency of the problems, experiences in Bolivia and Zambia have yielded valuable insights into making the process of improving PRSs as efficient and inclusive as possible. Poverty Diagnostics: Understanding Poverty from the Perspective of the Poor The way in which poverty is defined within PRSs is critical to the creation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of viable poverty reduction policies and practices. Innumerable poverty reduction programs have failed because they were based on diagnoses of poverty divorced from the true concerns and experiences of the poor. A proper understanding of poverty that is rooted in the perspectives of impoverished communities can translate into a greater sense of ownership over the national development agenda. However, both Bolivia and Zambia drew up their initial PRSPs with the donor first in mind and the poor on the margins. In Bolivia, this resulted in the creation of a PRSP focused on poverty principally in terms of access to education, piped water, sanitation facilities and electricity. Support for the productive sector was virtually non-existent. In the second round of dialogues on the PRSP, however, it was noted that many poor Bolivians define poverty with greater emphasis on production and employment,9 hence a disjoint between the first and second consultation. Participatory poverty assessments (PPAs), used widely in consultations during the first generation PRSPs, are meant to play a critical role in avoiding this type of disjointedness. PPAs assert the right of poor people to define or ‘diagnose’ their own experiences of poverty and aim to provide more and better information on poverty 9

IMF, ‘Bolivia: Fifth Review Under the Stand-By Arrangement’, IMF Country Report No. 05/146, Washington, DC, 2005. See also E. Murillo, The use of liberated HIPIC resources (La Paz, 2005).

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and local coping strategies. PPAs are intended to complement household survey data gathered on income-consumption poverty, to offer a more nuanced qualitative understanding of the barriers to development. By 2002, 81 PPAs had been carried out in 50 countries and successive reviews have concluded that in certain circumstances PPAs can influence understandings of poverty within policymaking circles and, to some extent, change policy decisions.10 An IMF review of 2004 notes that participatory processes have improved diagnoses of poverty, especially in terms of its non-income aspects and links to vulnerability. Some government actors claim that their views have been transformed by their involvement in participatory processes. A leading Tanzanian policymaker, for instance, commented: We experts sometimes do believe that people don’t know their problems … (or) … the solutions to their problems. That has been proved wrong by the PPA. So they know their problems and they know their solutions. More interestingly, they are capable of analysing the policies that we prepare for them. They could even propose alternative policies; that is very exciting to me. We experts, we must sit down and listen to the people. They know what they are doing, they know what they want.11

While PPAs have proven particularly valuable in terms of highlighting the specific needs of vulnerable groups including children and young people, critics have begun to identify a growing range of problems with PPAs and their constitutive tools such as participatory rural assessments (PRAs). Employed through community meetings, PRAs may appear to reflect a consensus among community members on the dimensions of poverty and the prioritisation of local concerns, but the conclusion of a PRA may in fact have been achieved through the silencing of marginal groups such as women, children and migrants.12 Further, difficulties have emerged regarding the aggregation and analysis of the data collected through participatory exercises. Final poverty assessments have often failed to synthesise PPA data with household survey data, and it is not always clear that PPA data has had any influence on the policy recommendations included in these assessment reports. For example, whether the gendered understandings of poverty that emerge from PPAs continue to be influential as the data moves up the policy chain seems to be precariously dependent on whether the policymakers involved at each stage are personally concerned with gender issues and identify themselves as feminists. Successful PPAs are methodologically rigorous and are systematically integrated with other forms of policy-related knowledge, particularly quantitative data. The

10

J. Holland and Blackburn, ‘Whose Voice?’, Participatory Research and Policy Change (ITP, 1998). Also C. Robb, Can the Poor Influence Policy? Participatory Poverty Assessments in the Developing World (Washington, DC, World Bank, 2002). 11 World Bank, The Poverty Experts Video (Washington, DC, World Bank, 1996). 12 D. Mosse, ‘Authority, Gender and Knowledge: Theoretical Reflections on PRA’, Development and Change 25(3), 1994, pp. 497–526. See also F. Tembo, ‘Multiple Identities and Representations: Experiences in the Study of People’s Life-worlds in Rural Malawi’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Special 50th Anniversary Issue on Fieldwork in the Tropics: Power, Knowledge and Practice 24 (2), 2003, pp. 229–41 and F. Tembo, Participation, Negotiation and Poverty: Encountering the Power of Images (London, Ashgate, 2003).

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results of PPAs also need to be systematically integrated into the policy process, which depends on a favourable institutional context. That is, it appears that higher levels of decentralisation and lower levels of top-down policymaking are conducive to greater uptake of PPA findings, as are systems that allow for greater interaction between decision-makers and the public.13 However, even if these rules of ‘best practice’ are followed, it appears that PPAs cannot necessarily elucidate the more fundamental causes of poverty. Uncovering the meso- and macro-level factors that generate and sustain poverty in particular places and in particular ways requires multi-levelled, historical investigations that employ social theory to understand processes such as exclusion. In Bolivia, for example, the impoverishment and political marginalisation of indigenous groups requires historicised explanations that do not necessarily emerge from PPAs. In short, if the poverty diagnoses underpinning PRSs are to be reliable and insightful, they need to be grounded in the perceptions of poor people themselves. These perceptions need to be drawn out through in-depth, qualitative and theoretically informed research that engages with both the causes and characteristics of poverty. Explanations of the causes of poverty need to move beyond the local and show how the lived experience of poverty is tied into the broader economic and social processes that shape opportunities for development. From Understanding Poverty to Influencing PRSs: Consultations and Civil Society The PRS approach promises to integrate the perspectives of the poor, not merely in the initial data-gathering stage, but at each phase of the policy-making process. This focus on participation and empowerment has been applauded as a major improvement over previous approaches to development policymaking, yet have those responsible for PRSs actually found viable mechanisms to bridge the gap between participatory rhetoric and practical engagement?14 The typical mechanisms employed include consultative workshops or seminars at national and provincial levels, consultations on specific documents, participation in policy and budgetary working groups, involvement in monitoring and evaluation and direct advocacy. In most cases, the perspectives and concerns of poor individuals and communities are brought into the policy debate with the assistance of civil society organisations. The extent to which these consultations have influenced policy and placed the voices and interests of the poor closer to the centres of power remains subject to dispute. Reflections on this issue range from broad-brush ruminations on ‘deepening democracy’ to critiques of routinised consultations with hand-picked civil society groups. In practice, consultation processes and perceptions of their effectiveness differ from country to country and within the regions of each country, as illustrated by the cases of Bolivia and Zambia.

13 K. Brock and R. McGee (eds), Knowing Poverty: Critical Reflections on Participatory Research and Policy (London, Earthscan, 2002). 14 D. Booth, ‘Introduction and Overview’, Development Policy Review, 21(2) 2003, pp. 131–59. R. Driscoll and A. Evans, ‘Second generation poverty reduction strategies: New opportunities and emerging issues’, Development Policy Review 23 (1) 2005, pp. 5–25.

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After a faltering start, a civil society initiative known as Civil Society for Poverty Reduction secured a central role in Zambia’s national poverty reduction consultations. An umbrella network of several non-governmental groups, Civil Society for Poverty Reduction provided feedback on the first draft of the Zambian PRSP and created an alternative PRSP containing many recommendations that were incorporated into the final official document. Indeed, some three quarters of civil society concerns raised after the first draft of the PRSP were included in the final draft.15 In both Zambia and Bolivia, consultation processes took place at two levels, the national and the provincial, each with differing implications. In contrast to the Zambian case, the Bolivian consultation process benefited from the involvement of well-established civil society groups and, in particular, comparatively strong participation from diverse groups at the grassroots. Civil society engagement in the consultation process was visible through, for example, the Jubilee Initiative, the National Dialogue and the Productive Bolivian Dialogue. Public engagement in the process was legally supported under the 2001 Population Participation Law, which ‘recognises, promotes and consolidates the process of Popular Participation … in the judicial, political and economic life of the country’ (Law 1551, 2001: Article 1). Each of these initiatives brought in new social actors, such as the handicapped, elderly people, municipalities and small producers. The Zambian and Bolivian consultation processes represented valuable improvements on previous approaches to public participation and policymaking. Perhaps needless to say, however, both processes left major avenues open for improvement. The Bolivian case in particular highlighted the extent to which the success of consultation processes can vary depending on the region and the level at which the consultation took place. The main concerns in Zambia and Bolivia pertained to the intertwined issues of exclusion, the capacity and legitimacy of participating groups, inadequate information flows, and state-society relations. In the Bolivian case, problems of exclusion were exacerbated by the government’s desire to see civil society actors reach consensus through the consultation procedures. Communities were instructed to create a consensual plan, despite the obstacles to securing adequate voice for groups such as women and children within such a project. The push for consensus reveals a failure to understand the high level of differentiation and potential conflict within civil society groups. Although intended as an empowering experience, many participants felt used and disappointed by the consultation process and questioned the extent to which their proposals influenced the final document. Questions of exclusion in the Zambian process were closely tied to concerns regarding the capacity and legitimacy of the agencies involved in the consultations. Direct participation in PRS processes is closely shaped by poverty levels, whereby material problems prevent strong organisations from emerging at the local level. This leaves the poor reliant on civil society groups to represent them. However, not all civil society organisations are well-positioned or equipped to represent poor communities within policy discussions. The inclusion of civil society organisations 15

A. Folscher, The Design, Process and Achievements of Zambia’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, Lusaka, Report Prepared for Department for International Development Zambia, 2004.

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in the Zambian PRSP consultation process was often done on an ad hoc basis, with no transparent guidelines concerning those chosen as legitimate representatives of the poor, and little or no female representation. Suspicions emerged that the civil society organisations involved in the process were handpicked according to their uncritical stance on government and donor policy. NGOs based outside the capital were excluded, along with the media, producer associations and certain research institutions. Despite being one of the strongest pro-democracy forces in the country in recent decades, the Zambian unions were also excluded from consultations on the first PRSP. In both Zambia and Bolivia, parliamentarians were not systematically involved in the PRS process, demonstrating a contentious bias towards participatory rather than representative forms of democracy. Various commentators have argued for the need to strengthen those forms of democratic representation in the PRS process that are based on long-term accountability relationships to citizens. The capacity to participate in and influence the PRS process depends on reliable and well-managed flows of information between stakeholders. The ability of civil society actors to represent poor communities has often been undermined by the failure of governments to provide them with adequate information.16 Language barriers inhibited the flow of information in the Bolivian consultation process as civil society representatives generally had to present their proposals in Spanish instead of their native language. When civil society groups are invited to engage in budgetary processes without the knowledge and training necessary to engage in a technical debate, public participation can appear somewhat tokenistic. Training programmes to improve the capacity of communities and civil society groups to participate in political processes have been introduced in areas such as Bolivia’s high plateau municipalities, although few women attend the courses. PRS reviews need to examine the gains that have been made relative to previous forms of policy-making, rather than in more idealistic terms. From this point of view, the opening up of poverty reduction debates in Bolivia and Zambia, albeit through an imperfect process, represents a significant advance. In Zambia, for example, the frequency of interactions between the state and civil society organisations has intensified since the PRSP consultations and, as aforementioned, the majority of concerns raised by civil society organisations were integrated into the country’s PRSP.17 However, a recurring theme within PRS reviews is that the IMF may have effectively determined macroeconomic policy prior to the consultation process. If the PRS approach is to have greater leverage in setting national policy based on the concerns of the poor, it must be more firmly embedded in national policy processes. PRSs have at times been regarded as a donor requirement rather than as significant national projects through which the voices and concerns of the poor are 16

World Vision, ‘PRSPs and the 60th Anniversary of the World Bank and IMF’, Milton Keynes, World Vision UK, 2004, and F. Mutesa, ‘Consultancy Study on CSPR 2004 Advocacy Campaign, Final Report’, Research Report Commissioned by Civil Society for Poverty Reduction (CSPR), Lusaka, Zambia, 2004. 17 W. Eberlei, ‘Donor politics in Zambia: Promoting poverty reduction or fuelling neo-patrimonialism?’, Paper presented at Conference on Political Dimensions of Poverty Reduction: The Case of Zambia, Lusaka, 9–11 March 2005.

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made the basis of anti-poverty policy. The move in Zambia to link the next phase of poverty reduction strategising into an older national development planning approach promises to fuse the participatory principles associated with PRSs with a more nationalised and (at least previously) better-institutionalised policymaking process. While this bodes well for more anchoring national poverty reduction policies in an empowerment approach, it is once again essential to ensure that parliamentarians are part of this process in order to increase its traction and legitimacy. Action on a few key issues can help transform the PRS consultation process into an opportunity for the poor to truly influence national poverty reduction policy. First, following Bolivia’s example, civil society participation should be legally supported and bolstered by concerted efforts to engage the grassroots institutions of the poor. Second, the convenors of PRS consultation processes should seek varied forms of input, including from the media and marginalised groups, who should have the opportunity to self-represent. Rather than insisting on consensus, the process should embrace a differentiated analysis of the perspectives of poor and vulnerable groups. Consultation processes should take account of language barriers and access to information issues to ensure that these do not constitute an obstacle to genuine participation. PRSs should be better integrated into democratic processes, particularly by strengthening the role of parliamentarians and social sector ministries. Throughout the process, a patient and iterative approach must be maintained: developing more responsive forms of governance is a long-term process, but an essential one for both empowerment and accountability. Monitoring, Evaluation and Engaging the Poor in Accountability Downwards accountability is paramount in efforts to use aid and domestic public funds to achieve poverty reduction objectives. In the context of poverty reduction strategies, accountability may be understood as the responsibility among stakeholders to answer for the commitments they have taken on through the PRS process. Accounting for commitments is an ongoing process that requires consideration for local cultural contexts. In the PRS process, accountability applies internally amongst the different parts of the state (vertical accountability) and externally to actors and organisations outside the state, such as donors (horizontal accountability). Formal and informal mechanisms are used to advance these different types of accountability. The general movement within development practice is to see the integration of informal and horizontal accountability mechanisms with formal and vertical ones, as citizens gain the confidence and institutional means to call those in positions of power to account.18 Most debates portray accountability as principally a national

18

A. Goetz, ‘Reinventing Accountability – Making democracy work for the poor’, Paper for the launch of the Community of Practice on Social Accountability, World Bank, Washington, DC, 12 November 2003. I. Thynne and J. Goldring, Accountability and Control: Government Officials and the Exercise of Power, Sydney, Law Book Co., 1987. T. Smith, ‘The Comparative Analysis of Bureaucratic Accountability’, Asian Journal of Public Administration, 13(1), 1991, pp. 93–104.

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process connecting citizens and the state; paradoxically, within the context of PRSs, accountability to donors is often seen as the primary concern. In contrast, an empowerment approach to development demands greater emphasis on social accountability. Social accountability strives to involve civil society organisations in the pursuit of accountability, and is part of an outcome-driven, rights-based approach to development. Social accountability emphasises the need to integrate the formal/vertical and informal/horizontal forms of accountability by ensuring that PRSs explicitly reflect the needs and priorities of the poor; establishing effective mechanisms so citizens can make sure that government and service providers are answerable for public expenditure and service delivery; engaging citizens in monitoring the implementation of PRSPs; and insisting that the donor community must also be accountable to national governments and the domestic civil society organisations representing the poor. Increasing social accountability is a difficult if not daunting task for a variety of reasons. Integrating formal and informal accountability mechanisms is a challenge because many states lack even basic formal accountability systems such as budgetary oversight by parliamentarians. Organisational and professional values may be lacking due to poor training and economic pressures within the civil service, which can in turn encourage graft.19 As a formal accountability structure, decentralised government may support social accountability by making planning more locally responsive and ensuring that local people can bring their grievances straight to the officials responsible. However, most decentralisation programmes are uneven and result in the de-concentration of some administrative functions while control of policy design and public spending remains with national authorities, away from direct local influence. In Bolivia, the well-established ‘municipalisation’ process has in fact prompted a substantial redistribution of national revenue towards locally controlled spending. Nevertheless, social accountability is often undermined by the exclusion of certain constituents by municipal governments and the lack of capacity in poor municipalities in terms of planning and monitoring. Furthermore, there is a growing amount of evidence to suggest that the changes accompanying decentralisation can fragment some pro-poor forces, as was experienced by the Bolivian unions and the women’s movements in Uganda and Bolivia.20 Several innovative, informal, citizen-based accountability methods have been pioneered in countries undergoing PRS processes and applied alongside the more formal mechanisms discussed above. For example, in the Philippines a Citizen’s Report Card was developed as an instrument to improve governance and accountability. One form of citizen-led accountability action not often discussed

19

E.A. Brett, ‘Participation and Accountability in Development Management’, Journal of Development Studies, 40(2) 2003, pp. 1–29. 20 A. Goetz, ‘Reinventing Accountability – Making democracy work for the poor’, 2003, op. cit. and A.M.E Jeppesen, ‘Reading the Bolivian Landscape of Exclusion and Inclusion: The Law of Popular Participation’, in Webster, N. and Engberg-Pedersen, L. (eds), In the Name of the Poor: Contesting Political Space for Poverty Reduction (London, Zed Books, 2003).

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by PRS advocates is protest. The World Development Movement21 has helpfully catalogued the major protests launched in response to PRSPs, which have served to put accountability issues centre stage and engage the public in poverty reduction debates. Bolivia’s PRS process was shaped by public protests as well as by the establishment of Vigilance Committees. Initially involved in the PRSP consultation process, the Vigilance Committees evolved to take on a monitoring and accountability role after the completion of the first PRSP. The Vigilance Committees in different municipalities were networked with government departments to create a nationwide mechanism to monitor the use of funds and investigate complaints. While the Vigilance Committees arguably made an important early contribution to the development and monitoring of the first Bolivian PRSP, they are now in transition, with some communities rejecting the Committees due to concerns that they are overly technocratic, lack transparency and represent a parallel monitoring system rather than one that is properly established within state structures. Indeed, a danger for many informal accountability mechanisms is that they may by-pass the state system and therefore remain fragmented and unregulated. Establishing innovative informal accountability mechanisms that can be integrated into formal systems depends on the quality of relations between the state and civil society and the political leanings of local and national governments. Clearly in highly authoritarian regimes it is unlikely that citizen scrutiny will be easy to instigate and maintain. Many of the mechanisms at the heart of the social accountability agenda focus on budgeting. Budgeting is often seen as the most direct way of monitoring and ensuring accountability in poverty reduction activities and has therefore become one of the main targets for reform. Most current formal budgeting procedures under PRSPs suffer from a high degree of dissonance and fragmentation. Many governments lack a rationally planned, single coherent budget that can weigh up relative sectoral priorities. Because PRSs and national budget cycles work on different temporal and allocative logics, the priorities identified in PRSs are often not directly incorporated into national budgets. This perhaps inevitably limits their pro-poor impacts. PRSPs often include a number of uncosted items as a result of insufficient data. The continued emergence of unplanned costs further undermines efforts to establish budgetary support for PRS priorities. The formal monitoring of national budgets in many developing countries is bedevilled by a host of weaknesses, many of which predate PRSPs. Most importantly, there is a dire lack of public expenditure management systems and structures. Formal monitoring structures such as watchdogs and ombudsmen are either nonexistent or lack sufficient capacity. Additionally, parliaments are often sidelined in budget deliberations and the media may be unable to function as an independent monitor. This problem is a priority for many analysts, with the World Bank, IMF and other donors undertaking considerable efforts to help governments remedy these shortcomings. A more general problem, but one related to weak public expenditure management systems, is the difficulty of tracking the impacts of policy. In most

21

World Development Movement, States of Unrest II: Resistance to IMF and World Bank policies in poor countries, London, 2002.

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cases, there is no feedback mechanism to identify what does and doesn’t work, and what policy parameters could be strengthened or adjusted as a result. Just as genuine participation in PRS consultations requires access to information on the policy-making process, ensuring social or downwards accountability in budgeting depends on the provision of hard budget data and accessible contextual information to civil society organisations and poor constituencies. In the absence of adequate information and the participation of a diverse range of civil society actors with sustained commitment to poor communities, public involvement in budget planning and review can turn into a mere forum for special interest groups to lobby the government for tax privileges. There have been a number of notable experiments in public involvement in budget monitoring and accountability. Perhaps the most noteworthy are the participatory budget initiatives. In some cases these initially ‘organic’ processes have been incorporated into more formal processes. For example, the South African Women’s Budget Initiative analyses the national budget in terms of its impact on different gender groups. Within a year of its establishment in 1995, a parallel initiative was set up within the government. The success of the South African Women’s Budget Initiative demonstrates that alliances between civil society organisations and parliamentarians can prise open the budget process and, through a social accountability approach, ensure more rational budgetary planning and monitoring. Monitoring and evaluation is essential to accountability not only in terms of national budgets, but also in relation to the broader PRS process. Logically enough, the first generation of PRSPs emphasised their design and attempted to secure a minimum level of popular participation in their formation. Now that PRSPs are an established policy device and some have been in place long enough to yield results, more attention needs to be paid to measuring impacts and learning from past experiences. Monitoring and evaluation activities are key to assessing progress, cross-checking the impacts of policy against aims, asking why goals have not been achieved and improving subsequent interventions. This requires the collection and dissemination of reliable data and a continued commitment to engaging poor communities. Part of the strength of PRSs is that they are designed to be pro-poor, comprehensive and address poverty as a multi-dimensional problem. The upshot of this is that they present a massive challenge to the bureaucrats charged with collecting and synthesising the data necessary to monitor and evaluate the strategies. Despite the goal of harmonising and coordinating poverty reduction initiatives, the PRS process is still quite complex in terms of who monitors the implementation of PRSPs, how and for what purposes. In most countries with PRSPs, monitoring and evaluation activities are undertaken by a variety of bodies: a high-level committee charged with coordinating the monitoring process; a Technical Secretariat ideally staffed by the most highly skilled technocrats with responsibility for identifying data needs and overseeing its collection, analysis and dissemination; decentralised administrative units through which data collection responsibilities are devolved; donor groups using a range of mechanisms to monitor progress; and civil society organisations who carry out monitoring exercises depending on capacity and political latitude. A range of methods have been used to gather and analyse information on PRS impacts; however, the coverage and desegregation of data is generally poor. Efforts are

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underway in many countries to build routine data systems, which can be used along with surveys and more participatory approaches to information gathering. If monitoring and evaluation activities are to function as drivers for downwards accountability, then they must integrate participatory principles and deliver reliable data in a way that is useful to the diverse range of actors involved in PRSs. In countries such as Uganda, monitoring and evaluation has become a vehicle for building partnerships between government, civil society and external cooperation organisations. Faced with inadequate and unreliable data on budget allocation, the Ugandan government recognised the importance of developing a unified, national monitoring and evaluation system that has in turn improved communication and cooperative efforts between stakeholders. In Bolivia, an interesting attempt to promote effective provider-community partnership through the generation, analysis and application of information was pioneered by Save the Children and Johns Hopkins University. Communities and service providers worked together to develop a community health information system called SECI (Sistema Epidemilógico Comunitario Informático) which collects and presents data in an accessible manner that the partners can then use to make collaborative decisions, set priorities, plan activities and monitor progress.22 While these examples of innovative approaches to monitoring and evaluation are instructive, the formidable constraints facing most national PRS monitoring and evaluation systems should not be underestimated. In many cases data is lacking altogether or is not meaningfully disaggregated.23 This is particularly problematic as aggregate data may suggest a relatively successful PRS process, which in fact further excludes marginalised groups such as women and children.24 A related problem with data capture and interpretation is what Lucas et al term the ‘missing middle’25. This refers to the lack of information and analysis on the chain of causality between policy implementation and outcomes. To address these problems, the World Bank and IMF26 propose to rationalise the range of indicators that must be monitored, and to track the intermediary indicators that can reveal more about how policies actually work and, by extension, could be improved. Underlying these paucities in data and analysis are pervasive problems with technical skills and resources. The level of expertise and number of experts is lacking in most countries. Technical secretariats are understaffed and must work to unrealistic time frames. There is widespread overlap in the efforts of different state agencies and donors, which causes waste, confusion and duplication. Local 22

D. Booth and H. Lucas, ‘Good Practice in the Development of PRSP Indicators and Monitoring Systems’, ODI Working Paper, 172, 2002. 23 H. Lucas, D. Evans and K. Pasteur, Research on the current state of PRS Monitoring Systems, Sussex, IDS, 2004 (Commissioned by DFID). 24 K. O’Malley Children and Young People Participating in PRSP Processes: Lessons from Save the Children’s Experiences (SCF, London, 2004). 25 H. Lucas, D. Evans and K. Pasteur, Research on the current state of PRS Monitoring Systems, op. cit. 26 IMF Independent Evaluation Office, Report on the Evaluation of PRSPs and the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility, Washington, DC, 2004 .

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governments are generally least likely to have adequate data collection capacities, which makes it increasingly difficult for poor people and civil society to participate in monitoring and evaluation exercises. Partly as a response to these constraints, a number of monitoring and evaluation innovations have been introduced. Perhaps the most critical development is the introduction of the Poverty and Social Impact Analysis (PSIA) system. First piloted in 12 countries in 2001/2002, PSIAs have become a widespread tool that strives to ensure that policies are not judged purely in terms of economic efficiency and thereby improve the quality of debate on PRSPs.27 PSIAs are novel because they are applied to policy reforms rather than to projects and represent a welcome synthesis, which could streamline and enhance the rigour of outcome-based poverty reduction analyses. However, applying and understanding PSIAs requires a high level of technical sophistication and therefore underlines the need for enhanced training for government and civil society representatives involved in monitoring and evaluation. Experiences in Bolivia and Zambia suggest that despite their strengths, PSIAs are currently used more as a planning tool for donors than as a monitoring tool for all stakeholders. If PSIAs are to support poverty reduction within the context of an empowerment approach, they must be realigned to enhance downward accountability to citizens, rather than simply accountability to donors. Implications for Donors and Governments The discussion above has clearly shown that although PRSs represent a qualitatively different approach to development, the shift to a greater focus on local empowerment and downwards accountability has not been a smooth one and is far from complete. The adoption of an empowerment approach has the potential to increase aid effectiveness and improve relations between donors, recipient governments and poor citizens. However, significant obstacles remain in terms of harmonisation and alignment and aid conditionality. Despite the IFIs’ support for the PRS process, it remains unaligned with the approaches used by the influential Organisation for Economic Cooperation’s Development Assistance Committee. However, in both Zambia and Bolivia, efforts are underway to harmonise international development support with the priorities identified through PRSs and related processes. For example, a National Harmonisation and Alignment Plan was drawn up in Bolivia in February 2005 to improve working relationships between the government and the international community. In 2004, the government of Zambia signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the harmonisation of donor and government practices, with a view to increasing aid effectiveness. This Harmonisation in Practice initiative was meant to put the Zambian government in the ‘driver’s seat’ on managing relations with donors, including on direct budget support.28 If these harmonisation initiatives are to translate into increased aid 27 World Bank and IMF, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers – Progress in Implementation, Prepared by the Staffs of the World Bank and IMF, Washington, DC, 12 September 2003. 28 Government of the Republic of Zambia ‘Harmonisation in Practice in Zambia: Facing the Challenges with Government in the Driver’s Seat’, Statement by Hon. Felix Mutali, MP,

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effectiveness and local ownership of the development process, donors must move away from short to medium term, project-centred funding and must increase the predictability of aid delivery. Increased coordination is also sorely needed amongst donors regarding funding strategies and reporting requirements. Donors and other stakeholders should establish specific timetables and monitoring systems for progress towards harmonisation; indicators for alignment and harmonisation should go beyond budget systems to include sectoral priorities and governance of the PRS.

Figure 10.5 Accountability in the Poverty Reduction Strategy context The success of the PRS approach is inseparable from the reform of the crippling conditionalities attached to most development aid. Donors set out conditions that developing country governments must meet to qualify for loans, ostensibly in order to ensure that aid resources are used responsibly and effectively. While the distribution of aid without regard for questions of human rights, environmental protection and political legitimacy is a recipe for disaster, most forms of conditionality serve first and foremost to advance donors’ political and economic interests. Some conditions border on remote micro-management of national policymaking and violate national laws. However, developing country governments are compelled to accept inappropriate conditionalities to secure debt cancellation or obtain essential finances. In order to advance downwards accountability and aid effectiveness, rather than donors’ political agendas, conditionalities should be transparently negotiated. The right of Deputy Minister, Ministry of Finance and National Planning, Lusaka, 2004. Government of the Republic of Zambia ‘Memorandum of Understanding: Coordination and Harmonisation of GRZ/Donor Practices for Aid Effectiveness in Zambia’, Lusaka, 2004.

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developing countries to reject donor prescriptions that fall outside agreed mandates should be enhanced. Parliaments and civil society groups should be systematically involved in assessing progress made towards achieving PRS priorities and meeting the conditions set for further aid. Ultimately, as Figure 10.5 below shows, the challenge of aid is one of working effectively in both external or donor and domestic or developing country constituencies and transforming relationships towards greater influence from the grassroots upwards. Conclusion Historically, aid has typically been an act of charity, and a misguided form of charity at that, one based on mistaken assumptions and conflicting interests. Instead of reducing inequalities, the international aid system has often compounded the indignities of poverty by excluding the poor from the decisions intended to improve their lives. The game of participation has continually been played on terms defined by the powerful, to be withdrawn at any time when power is challenged. Participation has never been approached as genuine right of the poor. This is an agenda that faith-based organisations and NGOs need to advocate for more strongly, and hold political power holders to account. In the language of the new White paper for the UK government’s Department for International Development,29 this is where politics must be made to work for the poor. The church has great potential to use the political proximity with policy makers in both developed (such as Gordon Brown cited in the introduction above) and developing countries, to champion advocacy for aid that empowers. The church can use its direct institutional linkages to the grassroots to provide evidence of how aid can be used innovatively, providing the stories of change that go beyond physical images to reflection on people’s dignity and hope as a result of aid or lack of it. These stories are hardly heard among the loudest of calls against poverty. Poverty reduction strategies, used in the discussion in this chapter, are an imperfect but promising entry point to magnifying poor people’s influence in the development process. Based on the experiences of Bolivia and Zambia, the recommendations outlined above may go a long way towards improving the PRS process by strengthening its connection to principles of local empowerment and social accountability. Realigning poverty reduction and accountability efforts to place the poor at the centre of the process should increase the effectiveness of aid and recast it not as a question of charity, but as a matter of justice.

29

Department for International Development, Eliminating World Poverty: making governance work for the poor, a White paper on International Development, London, 2006.

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Abdullah, King of Jordan 49 ADMARC 130–31 aid Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 135 Bolivia 138–53 Burkina Faso 140 China 135 Civil Society for Poverty Reduction 144 conditions set by donors 152–3 DAC (Development Assistance Committee) 136 IMF; see IMF India 135 Make Poverty History campaign 6, 135 MDGs (Millenium Development Goals) 135–6, 138 National Harmonisation and Alignment Plan 151–2 NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) 135, 140, 153 Nicaragua 140 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) 136, 151 PPAs (Participatory poverty assessments) 141–3 PRS (Poverty Reduction Strategy) 137–53 PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper) 130, 140–41, 144–5, 147–9 PSIA (Poverty and Social Impact Analysis) system 151 SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programmes) 139–40 Tanzania 140 Uganda 140, 147 UK 137–8 volume from donors 136 World Bank; see World Bank World Vision 138–9 Zambia 138–53

Allah, Hasan Nasr 41 arms sales 105–16 Al-Yammamah project 110–11 to allies 110 benefits to UK armed forces 108 and British government policy 107, 109–11, 116 White Paper UK Strategic Export Controls 109 contribution to technology development 107–8 to controversial customers 112–13 Defence Exports Services Organisation (DESO) 109 Department of Trade and Industry 109 economic issues in 107–8 employment generated by 107 end user certificates 112 ethics 105–7 Biblical guidance 105 Church ethical investment policy 106, 109 Church policy on 106, 110 and Just War 106 pacifism 105–6 right to use force 105–6 and internal repression 112–13 landmines 113 regional arms races 112 regulation by UK 114–15 and terrorists 114 types of weapons 111–12 Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) issues 112 Aussaresses, General Paul 66 Aylwin-Foster, Nigel 96 Baker, Secretary of State James 77 Baldwin, Prime Minister Stanley 15 Barth, Karl 14 Benn, Secretary of State Hilary 3, 127 Bentley, James 16

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Berger, National Security Advisor Samuel 38–9 Biblical prophecies ambiguity in 13 as basis of government policy 12–13, 128 Isaiah 10–11, 12, 14, 27 Joel 12 John 14 Leviticus and debt 128–9 Micah 11 Biddle, Stephen 40 Bignardi, Irene 63 Bishop of Hereford 94 Blair, former Prime Minister Tony 5–6, 15, 48, 84, 97–8 Blewett, Reverend Tim 3–7 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 3 Bonney, Richard 37–53 Booth, Ken 18 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 31 Bremer, Ambassador Paul III 44–6, 86 British American Security Information Council 111 British military intervention 73–87 fatalities among servicemen 73 Gulf wars 75 loss of Empire 73 post-Cold War 74–6 post-World War Two 73–4 see also international issues Brown, Chancellor then Prime Minister Gordon 6, 111, 129, 135, 153 Browne, Robert 12 Buchan, John 67–70 Bunyan, John 67 Bush, President George (Snr) 42, 75 Bush, President George W. 40, 42, 44, 48, 85, 91, 97–8 CAFOD 4 Campbell, Prime Ministerial advisor Alastair 15 Carr, E.H. 16 Cavanaugh, William 100–102 Chalabi, Ahmed 45 Challans, Dr Timothy L. 51 Chang, H-J 123 Cheney, Vice-President Dick 47

Chirac, President Jacques 97 Christian Aid 4 Christian ethics 9–27 Christian Realism 9, 19–22, 24–7, 103 identified with UN and international law 18 Just War; see Just War liberal theology 9, 18–19 moral conduct 24–6 pacifism 9, 17–18, 20 pietism 9 and Sermon on the Mount 9 theology of hope 9, 16 Christian Realism; see Christian ethics Church of England and American policy 95–7, 103 and arms sales; see arms sales Bishop’s Report; see Countering Terrorism... and Christian ethics; see Christian ethics constitutional powers of 90 Ethical Investment Advisory Group 106 falling attendances 4 General Synod 93 House of Bishops 90, 93–4, 97 as integral part of society 3, 104 and international issues; see international issues and Just War; see Just War London bombings (2005); see terrorism as ‘midwife of exploitation’ 4 official policy on arms sales; see arms sales and pacifism 106 relationship with British society 5 with State 3–4, 6–7, 15, 89–90 reports Christian Principles in 37–8, 93, 99–100 Christians in a Violent World 5 The Church and the Bomb 5 Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post 9/11 36–8, 90–91, 93–104 Facing the Challenge of Terrorism 93 Faith in the City 103 Force in the Modern World 5 The Mission-Shaped Church 95

Index Peacemaking in a Nuclear Age 5 role in maintaining dignity in poor countries 138 and terrorism; see terrorism church organisations, UK 92 Churchill, Winston S. 9 Clarke, Richard 47 Clinton, President Bill 38 Coalition Provisional Authority (Iraq) 44–5, 85 Cold War 32 Conditional Sovereignty 84–5 Cook, Foreign Secretary Robin 6, 109 Cox, Robert 18 Critical International Relations theory 18 Cromwell, Oliver 13, 17 Cross, Tim 73–87 DAC; see aid debt cancellation 119–33 ADMARC 130–31 commodity prices 124–5 competing theories 123 conditions imposed on debtors 121–2 effects of trade liberalisation 122–3 extent of developing nation debt 120–21 global campaign for 127–9 government intervention 123 guidance in Leviticus 128–9 HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) 129–31, 133 history of debt relief 129–30 IMF; see IMF PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper); see aid tariffs 123 trade protection 123–4 UK as key player in 132–3 WDM 119, 127–8, 130 World Bank; see World Bank see also G7, G8, aid Diamond, Larry 39 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 13, 21 ethics, Christian; see Christian ethics ethnic cleansing 78 EU Code of Conduct on Arms Exports 115

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Evans, Brian 107 fanaticism 27 Far Eastern Commission 43 Foreign Affairs 40 foreign aid; see aid Forster, Bishop of Chester Dr Peter 94 French, Lieutenant-General John 59 Fromm, Erich 10 Fukuyama, Francis 87 G7 119 G8 128–32, 135–6 Gaston, Reverend Ray 101–2 gospels as seen by Niebuhr 19–22 seen as non-political 15–16 seen as pacifist 17 Grotius, Hugo 34 Harnack, Adolf 15 Harries, Richard 31–6 Hauerwas, Stanley 102–3 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC); see debt cancellation Hill, Christopher 13 Himes, Kenneth R. 50 HIPC; see debt cancellation Hirohito, Emperor 43–4 Historic Peace Churches 17, 19 Holbrooke, Richard 78 Hurd, Foreign Secretary Douglas 116 Hyde-Price, Professor Adrian 3, 9–27 Iasiello, Rear Admiral Louis V. 52–3 IFIs; see IMF; World Bank IMF (International Monetary Fund) 119–22, 124–7, 129–33, 139, 142, 145, 148, 150 International Criminal Court 34 international issues Abu Ghraib prison 49 Afghanistan 32, 36, 86, 94–6, 103 aid; see aid attempts at world peace 9–10 Balkans 6, 33–4, 37, 77–85, 97–8 Chile 100–101 Conditional Sovereignty 84–5 Darfur 4 Dayton Peace Agreement 78

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debt cancellation; see debt cancellation ethnic cleansing 78 Falklands War 4, 34 globalisation 4 Guantanamo Bay 35, 95, 98, 103 Gulf Wars 4, 36, 42, 50, 75 Iran 98 Iraq 5–6, 32–53, 92–6 Malawi 130–31 Middle East 4, 35, 98 politics 9–10, 22–3 social justice 4 see also arms sales Iraq Interim Governing Council 44 Jackson, General Mike 78, 82 Japan, as exemplar for Iraq 42–7 Jewish messianic tradition 10 John Paul II 92 Jones, Charles 55–71 Jones, Timothy 119–33 Joulwan, General 78 Journal of Social Philosophy 50 Jubilee 2000 Campaign 5–6, 128 Judaeo-Christian influence on society 6, 10, 14, 27 Just War 10, 31–6, 106 action of last resort 34 and arms sales 106 balance between intent and outcome 57 and Bishop’s Report 93–4 chances of success 35 consequences of 35 framework for argument 55 Jus Post Bellum 38, 41, 47, 50, 52–3 legitimate authority for 32, 55–7 moral conduct during 32 moral considerations before war 32 pre-emptive action 34–5 responsibilities of military and political leaders 51 of victors 52–3 and terrorism 35 UN as arbiter 32–3 see also international issues; warfare Kellogg, David E. 50 Kerry, John 40 Khalizad, Zalmay 42

Kissinger, Secretary of State Henry 53 Kitchener, Field Marshal Lord 60 Klemperer, Otto 64 Krause, Keith 107 The Late Great Planet Earth 96 Launde Abbey, conference at 3 Le Monde 49 Lewis, Stephen 123–4 liberal theology; see Christian ethics Liberation Theology 17, 19 Lindsey, Hal 96 Lloyd George, Prime Minister David 6 Lock-Pullan, Richard 89–104 Lucas, H. 150 Luther, Martin 15 MacArthur, General Douglas 42–3, 46 MacIntyre, Alasdair 102 Major, Prime Minister John 109, 114 Make Poverty History campaign; see aid Maliki, Prime Minister Nuri al- 40 Marx, Karl 13n 16, 21 MDGs; see aid Mearsheimer, John 22 Mellen, Joan 63–4 Miguez Bonino, José 18 Moltman, Jürgen 16, 100 Moore, Ray A. 43–4 moral conduct 24–6 Morant, Lt. H.H. ‘Breaker’ 61–3 Mubarak, President Hosni 50 9/11; see terrorism National Security Strategy 91 NATO 6, 56 Naumann, Friedrich 15 New York Times 39, 42 NGOs; see aid Niebuhr, Reinhold 9, 11, 13, 15, 17–23, 27, 31, 103 Northcott, Michael 96 An Angel Directs the Storm 96 Oakshott, Michael 13, 21, 23–5 O’Donovan, Oliver 33, 57 OECD; see aid O’Neill, Onora 6 Orend, Brian 50

Index pacifism; see Christian ethics Peace Studies 18 pietism; see Christian ethics Pinochet, General Augusto 100–101 Pipes, Daniel 41 Pontecorvo, Gillo 58, 63–7 post-war responsibilities of victors 52–3 PRS; see aid PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper) see aid; debt cancellation The Purpose-Driven Life 96 Quakers 17, 105 Quinlan, Michael 33–4 Rees, Professor Wyn 3, 105–16 Rice, National Security Advisor Condoleezza 42n Robbins, P. 124 Roberts, Field Marshal Lord 59 Robinson, Donald L. 43–4 Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense Donald 91 Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert 4–5 Saddam Hussein 32–3, 36, 39, 41–2, 44, 75, 98, 109 St. Augustine 57 St. Thomas Aquinas 55–7 Sanger, David E. 42 Schmitt, Eric 42 Schroeder, Chancellor Gerhard 97 Sebastian Acevedo Movement 101 September 11; see terrorism, 9/11 Serenity Prayer 103–4 Sermon on the Mount, representing Christian ethics 9 Short, Secretary of State Claire 82, 113 Shue, Henry 84 Smith, General Rupert 75 Society of Friends; see Quakers Stansfield, Gareth 41–2 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) 114 Taliban 36, 85 Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury William 103 terrorism 34–5, 47, 89–104

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al-Quaeda 40, 98 and arms sales 114 Global War on terror 85 London bombings (2005) 93, 101 9/11 34, 42, 85, 89–92, 99 US response to 91 see also Church of England Thatcher, Prime Minister Margaret 4–6 theology Constantinian 18 of hope; see Christian ethics liberal; see Christian ethics Liberation Theology 17, 19 Thirty-Nine Steps 67 Tinder, Glenn 27 Tito, Josip Broz 77 Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ 100–101 Truth and Reconciliation Committee (South Africa) 93 Tudjman, President Franjo 77 UN 31 Article 51 31–2 in Balkans 77 Charter of Human Rights 100 Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) 123 criteria for legitimate war 37–8 and Iraq 85 and Just War 32 proposed arms treaty at 115 report, A more secure world: our shared responsibility 37 Security Council 31–4, 37, 56, 75, 109 The High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change 31, 34, 37 UNHCR 86 see also international issues United Nations; see UN utopian realism 24 A vision for Iraq and the Iraqi People 47–8 Vitoria, Francisco de 33 Waltz, Kenneth 22–3 Walzer, Michael 50, 57 Arguing About War 50 warfare 58–71, 73–87

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Australian participation in 61–3 Balkans; see international issues The Battle of Algiers 58, 63–7, 71 Breaker Morant 58, 61–3 British military intervention; see British military intervention fictional morals 58–71 Geneva Convention 86 harm to environment by 59 Human Rights legislation 86 International Red Cross 87 killing of prisoners 60–62 Laws of Armed Conflict 86 military terms 76 Mr. Standfast 67–70 Passion narrative 63–7 Pilgrim’s Progress 67–8, 70 Scapegoats of the Empire 58 South African (Boer) War 58–63 treatment of horses 58–61 and the UN; see UN Wars of Choice 75–6 see also arms sales; international issues Warren, Rick 96

Washington Post 48 WCC 92 and Iraq 92 WDM 119, 127–8, 130, 148 Weber, Max 25 Weigel, Georges 32, 35 Wellington, Duke of 31 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 15 Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan 5, 32, 89, 91–2, 94 Writing in the Dust 89 Wilson, President Woodrow 97 Witton, George 60–61 Woodward, Bob 42 World Bank 119–22, 124–7, 129–33, 136, 139–40, 148, 150 Governance and Anti-corruption Strategy 136 World Council of Churches; see WCC World Development Movement; see WDM World Vision; see aid Zinni, General Anthony 46 Zulu, Jack Jones 132