The Cosmopolitan Military

To begin with a somewhat autobiographical turn, this project is founded in the experience of growing up in the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Although the threat of global nuclear war, under which my parents lived for many years, had receded, and the War on Terror had not yet begun, I have vivid memories of the news reports from this period being punctuated by scenes of bloody localised wars in societies far away or, in the case of the former Yugoslavia, close at hand. News of suffering, human rights abuse and genocide, and the apparent failure of the international community to prevent these occurrences aroused, from a relatively early age, both a concern for the welfare of those affected by political violence and a desire to learn about violent conflict. As an undergraduate and later a graduate student during the early 2000s, I observed the rise of the War on Terror and the apparent confidence amongst prominent Western policymakers that the causes of freedom, democracy, human rights and development could be well served by the use of military force. I also observed the polarisation within British society and beyond, between those deeply opposed to Western interventionism in Afghanistan and Iraq and those who found normative value in the use of force to expand liberal systems in formerly authoritarian states.

This chapter surveys the political and intellectual landscape within which this book’s exploration of the cosmopolitan military is situated. The post-Cold War period and the continued advance of globalisation have provided significant openings for a rethinking of political community, the boundaries of moral responsibility and the ways in which the world’s most vulnerable human beings might be protected from harm. The chapter argues that these openings have led to the development of new ideas about community, security, moral responsibility and the role of the military, but also pose some challenging questions. Intellectually, a plethora of different conceptualisations of cosmopolitanism have emerged, alongside debates on ethical commitments in foreign policy and on how security is conceptualised and for whom. Corresponding policy developments have also reflected these reconsiderations of moral community and an increasingly human-centred diplomatic discourse. The concept of human security has sought to reframe security debates with individual human beings, rather than states, as key security referents. In doing so, a more complex security environment is revealed, highlighting the latent threats overlooked in traditional security discourse. Similarly, debates on humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) opened up a discussion on whether we have responsibilities to protect vulnerable non-citizens from large-scale human rights violations.

The first chapter outlined the context within which a potential reappraisal of the role of the national military might emerge. As the boundaries between Self and Other are destabilised through processes of cosmopolitanisation, new avenues are created for transborder empathy and the extension of moral community. Ideas of human security and the R2P reflect elements of a cosmopolitan view of security and imply new roles for military forces. However, a significant problem in the transition towards such new cosmopolitan military roles is the tension with the dominant warfighting tradition — a series of key assumptions about the nature of conflict and the practice of war around which national militaries are frequently orientated.

As Chapter One suggests, the last two decades have been an important period for the translation of cosmopolitan ethical commitments into the practice of foreign policy. Debates on humanitarian intervention, the R2P and human security have provided openings for practical expressions of transborder moral solidarity. Despite this apparent cosmopolitan moment, cosmopolitan ethics and ideas about human security have experienced a difficult encounter with liberal interventionism and the War on Terror in the early 21st century. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 2011 Libya Intervention, illustrated the ways in which ethical discourses, similar in tone to cosmopolitanism, were deployed to support a trend of armed intervention by Western states. Cosmopolitanism, offensive liberalism and the War on Terror project are not a ‘joint enterprise’. However, emancipation, transborder moral solidarity, human rights protection and the language of human security, which are all significant concerns for cosmopolitans, have been invoked repeatedly as justification for warfighting operations and counterinsur-gency programmes. Both practices sit awkwardly with cosmopolitan security commitments.

As the previous chapter argues, despite considerable apparent concern for the wellbeing of vulnerable non-citizens and distant strangers in Western foreign policy, far too little attention has been dedicated to the techniques by which militaries might protect civilians and promote human security. In particular, there remains an implicit assumption within the debate on humanitarian intervention that warfighting skills might usefully support these activities. This chapter addresses this impasse, outlining a possible mode of military action more in keeping with cosmopolitan ethics. One of the principal difficulties revealed during the War on Terror was a distinct lack of reflection on how commitments to the wellbeing of the Iraqi and Afghan populations could be reconciled with the use of warfighting and therapeutic intervention. A lack of reflection on the congruence of warfighting with cosmopolitan-like claims resulted in both a breakdown in the moral solidarity required in cosmopolitan-minded operations and a failure to consider the day-to-day experience of military operations on local populations, the intended beneficiaries of the intervention.

This book has so far explored the increasingly close, and sometimes problematic, connections between military practice and the language of cosmopolitanism in the post-Cold War world. The question the book has sought to address is how cosmopolitanism might translate into the ways militaries perform civilian protection and human security-related roles. The final section of this book moves on to explore the possible locations of a future cosmopolitan military. This chapter examines the UN as one such possible location. Since its creation, the UN has been instrumental in collective efforts to prevent political violence and protect human rights. More recently, the vision of the organisation has moved beyond the prevention of inter-state aggression, to focus on the protection of civilians (see United Nations, 2004). The first section of this chapter examines the presence of cosmopolitan ethics within the ethos of the UN. Although an organisation of states, the UN is also linked to an explicitly cosmopolitan vision, reflected initially in the reference to ‘we the peoples of the United Nations’ in its Charter and perhaps best manifested in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Major contributions to international development, the creation of the human security concept and the endorsement of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), continue to place the UN at the forefront of a nascent cosmopolitan imagination.

The final chapter of the book examines the prospects for the pursuit of cosmopolitan security goals by national militaries. As the previous chapter suggests, the UN has been a fertile site for the development of more sophisticated military concepts for civilian protection and human security goals. However, in a world of sovereign states, and with no independent military capacity, UN peacekeeping is often beset by lack of consensus on key issues and the influence of national interest.

Despite the optimism with which the end of the Cold War was greeted, the post-Cold War period has seen a continuation of violent and protracted internal conflicts in many parts of the world. Rapid enhancements in communications technology in the late 20th century had the effect of bringing individuals within the stable and largely peaceful societies of the West into greater and more immediate contact with vivid images of human suffering in often distant conflicts. The awareness of how human beings are harmed needlessly in other parts of the world and the recognition of our shared capacity to experience suffering and pain, provide channels through which our ability to empathise with other members of our species might be translated into a widening of moral community beyond state borders. The experience of violence and atrocity, whether it be in Mogadishu, Sarajevo, Kigali, Darfur, Benghazi or Horns, has become increasingly, though by no means universally, morally significant for those living beyond the borders of the affected states. Shocking images of killing and physical destruction from societies affected by internal conflict have spurred the conscience of outsiders and has created greater impetus for the international community to ‘do something’ in response.