Powerless by design

Michel Feher's study looks at how Western governments handled the conflicts that followed the Cold War, and how the Left responded to those policies. From the early 1990s, Feher contends, American and European leaders presented themselves as spokespeople for a emerging global community. Their approach broke with the ideological framing of the Cold War and departed from the early promise of a reordered world. Rather than seeing each regional crisis as a contest between rival camps, they insisted that these emergencies did not require taking sides. The Yugoslav wars and the Rwandan genocide illustrate the pattern. To avoid expensive military commitments, Western officials blamed these atrocities on age-old tribal hostilities and argued that the community's task was humanitarian, neutral and conciliatory toward every party to the fighting. The result was a posture of moral rectitude without the means to act, at least until NATO intervened in Kosovo.

This doctrine left both wings of the Western Left in an awkward position. Liberals were drawn to the humanitarian language of their governments but were troubled by the poor outcomes of policies enacted in the community's name. Anti-imperialist activists mocked the hypocrisy of officials who expressed outrage while doing little, yet they were unwilling to call for the use of force by Western powers. Feher asks whether this era of the international community has ended. He shows that the Kosovo campaign prompted a split: liberal and radical activists alike had to respond to a sudden show of resolve, with liberals applauding it and radicals denouncing it as a revival of imperial domination.

For Western leaders, the war in Serbia was a passing exception rather than a change of course. Within a year, their silence over the Russian devastation of Chechnya suggested that the discursive strategy analyzed in the book would persist for some time. The work is aimed at readers interested in the politics of humanitarian intervention and the divisions within the Left over foreign policy.