Defending Ideals: War, Democracy, and Political Struggles

171 Pages·2004·0.86 MB·English

by  Drucill Cornell

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Defending Ideals
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Defending Ideals
War, Democracy, and Political Struggles
Drucilla Cornell
Routledge
A member of the Taylor & Francis Group
New York and London
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Published in 2004 by
Routledge
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Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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© 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or utilized in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cornell, Drucilla.
Defending ideals : war, democracy, and political struggles / by Drucilla Cornell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0–415–94882–7 ISBN 0–415–94883–5 (pbk.)
1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. United States—Foreign relations—2001–3.
Iraq War, 2003. 4. Human rights. 5. Women and peace. 6. Intercountry adoption. I. Title.
JA71.C598 2004
320—dc22 2003026845
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Contents
Preface: Why We Need Ideals vii
Acknowledgments xi
Chapter 1: Living and Dying in Iraq: Killing Talk 1
and the Limits of Just War
Chapter 2: Worlds Apart: Perpetual Peace and Infinite War 21
Chapter 3: Variegated Visions of Humanity: John Rawls’ 41
The Law of Peoples
Chapter 4: Developing Human Capabilities: Freedom, 63
Universality, and Civility
Chapter 5: Civilization, Progress, and Beyond 85
Chapter 6: Reconsidering Nationalisms: Feminism and 99
Anti-Militarist Ideals
Chapter 7: Other Family Stories: The Ethics and Politics of 117
Transnational Adoption
Notes 143
Bibliography 151
Index 155
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Preface: Why We Need Ideals
The essays in this book defend ideals such as freedom, equality, and peace.
We need ideals more than ever after September 11, 2001. This hardly
seems like a controversial claim, for who would disagree with it? Both pro-
ponents and critics of the United States wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
claimed that they defended their respective positions on the basis of ideals.
To argue over ideals in politics means that we defend not only their the-
oretical importance, but also how they are applied in actual political situ-
ations and struggles on the ground. If the peace movement in this coun-
try is going to convince people that the ideal of peace is vitally important,
it must make arguments against the Bush administration’s appeals to free-
dom as the basis for its recent preemptive military strikes and protracted
military occupations. Remember that the Bush administration said that we
needed to attack Iraq because of its weapons of mass destruction and strong
links to Al-Qaeda. It was only when no evidence for either could be mar-
shaled that the discourse of freedom was deployed to shore up the legiti-
macy of the United States military campaign in Iraq.
So the questions arise. Does this fact alone show the infinite manipu-
lability of ideals? Is the battle over ideals just the battle for power dressed
up in fancy clothes? In this book, I do not want to argue that anyone who
defended the war in Iraq from the standpoint of enduring freedom was
simply insincere. Rather, I want to suggest that configurations of ideals
that, for example, represent freedom and “shock and awe” as compatible
are, however, flawed. We can still make judgments about competing
definitions of ideals. Certain actions and practices are not compatible with
respect for those ideals, even as understood as allowing for a range of
interpretation. Freedom cannot be brought at the point of a gun. But not
everyone appealed to ideals to defend the actions of the government of the
United States. After September 11, a new discourse of political realism arose
that not only justified the Bush administration’s military actions in the
war on terror, but also supported legislation that curtailed basic constitu-
tional liberties in the irresponsible name of an idealized form of national
security. Often cast in the guise of irresponsible liberals, idealists were
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thought to be horribly out of touch with post-9/11 realities, particularly
the foremost need to fight terrorism.
I share the view with many progressive activists and intellectuals
that steps should have been taken to bring Al-Qaeda to justice. But note
the word “justice” here. Our moral outrage was based on the sense that
September 11 was a crime against humanity and, for that very reason,
the worst kind of injustice and human atrocity. Even in the propagan-
distic explanations of the Bush administration as to why “they” hate
“us,” we were returned to the great ideals for which the United States
stands. Thus, we were told that “they” hate “us” because we are free. The
cynicism of the Bush administration aside, everyone should have been
called to recommit themselves to those ideals in their political response
to September 11. When rage and fear seemed to demand immediate war
efforts and military campaigns, we were tested in our commitment to
those ideals. We continue to be tested as the war in Iraq each day takes
more military and civilian lives, despite the Bush administration’s procla-
mation in the spring of 2003 that the war was over and that we had
won. Simply put, we need to reexamine our ideals precisely at a time
when we are most likely to forsake them in an effort to protect ourselves
against further acts of terrorism.
Respect for the rule of law as against the rule of men, whether on
the national or international plane, is an indispensable political as well
as legal ideal—not a wistful or naïve dream. I want to argue against
those who critique the movement for peace and justice as being imma-
ture and irresponsible. We are responsible because we insist that, in the
war against terror, we cannot controvert the ideals that, at its best, the
United States has defended for over two centuries. We are the ones who
are calling for a thoughtful response to September 11 that includes a
rigorous examination of how we can be most effective in dismantling
the transnational networks of Al-Qaeda and in preventing further acts
of terrorism.
I grew up in a time when the need for security against communism
led the government of the United States to curtail civil and constitutional
rights within this country and to engage in grossly unjust military con-
flicts in the name of national security. The paranoia about communism
denied us access to information, and prevented many different points of
view from being heard. I was educated out of fear rather than a commit-
ment to democratic citizenship, and I do not want to see that happen
again to this generation. Political realism dominated the war against
communism. Then as now, idealism was easily targeted as being out of
touch with the nature of the political threat. The word “communist” was
all too easily bandied about as an epithet against the leaders of the com-
munist as well as the civil rights movement. But in the current peace
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Preface: Why We Need Ideals ix
and justice movement, many of us today are standing by the ideals of the
civil rights movement as we criticize and protest against certain flagrantly
unconstitutional provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Idealism is not
the problem. If we vigorously debate what our commitment to ideals
should mean, and if we demand that we struggle openly about their
meaning, that is all to the political and moral good.
I am proud to be a member of the “60s generation,” the generation
most easily associated with the idealism that animated the civil rights
movement and the innumerable demonstrations against the Vietnam
War. I am also proud to be a feminist committed to freedom and equal-
ity. But for all that I have already said here about the importance of
ideals, I do not want to discount the most important critiques of them,
even as I take issue with the charge that idealists are dangerous after 9/11
because they encourage irresponsibility in the face of a real threat. There
are serious criticisms of idealism that I take to heart, especially the cri-
tique that targets the danger of the idealization of ourselves and, with
it, the threat of self-righteousness. Sometimes we idealize ourselves in the
name of the purported moral superiority of our ideals—a superiority that
can no longer be put into question because ideals have been established
as the basis of how we see ourselves. Indeed, even the grandest of
ideals, as soon as they are articulated and defended—even the ideal of
humanity—can become exclusionary at the very moment of their defense.
As many contemporary theorists and philosophers have noted, norms can
normalize and set others outside the norm as abnormal or, worse yet, not
within the reach of humanity. Similarly, some may want to argue that
because rights can legally embed certain limited conceptions of the
human being in the abstract form of the person, human rights deny
the ideality of humanity and, further, that this denial remains unshake-
able within a rights-based legal system. Many of us are familiar with
these criticisms; they are warnings that must be heeded in the way we
defend ideals as necessarily open, as never yielding once and for all a total
configuration of their meaning, even when they become material forces
in the world. Ideals neither emerge out of thin air nor do we simply
dream them up. They are a part of our historical and social reality and,
indeed, they have been critiqued as nothing more than expressions of the
interests of the most powerful. These are criticisms that can never be
answered once and for all. They must be taken into account as part of a
complex and nuanced defense of ideals. That such a defense of ideals is
possible is the burden of this book.
Drucilla Cornell