It is obviously a vision of utopia but, far from being a distraction, it clearly points to a horizon of expectation and hope. Written in 1795 by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, amid the shock created by the French revolution, Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch, was, during the age of the Enlightenment, the first, decisive attempt to think up a notion of “international law”, founded upon “a federation of free states”, and a “cosmopolitan law” creating the conditions for a “universal hospitality”.
Otherwise put, a proposition to found a law of humanity, taken as a whole to which each party is faithful, interdependent and indissociable, a law that would apply to nations and their rulers – and in particular to their egotistical flights of ambition and blind warmongering. It is hardly by chance that this was also the first text to theorize the notion of the necessary disclosure to citizens of information about the acts of those who govern, freely and widely, in order for them to control events through the vitality of a democratic public space.
Kant’s text sets out a political truth that was so recently and curtly spelt out again to the US and French presidencies by their democratic elder, the British parliament: “If the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared […] nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war,” wrote Kant.
It is a truth that is increasingly disregarded while, with missiles and drones fired or guided from distance, the act of war appears ever more unfettered from the constraints of mobilizing human combatants. “With war becoming phantom-like and remotely controlled, citizens – who no longer put their lives at risk – will, in the extreme, no longer have any opinion to offer,” writes Grégoire Chamayou, a French professor of philosophy, in his recently-published book Théorie du drone (The Theory of the Drone).
The fantasy of political action led by urgency and emotion that has become apolitical, is to escape contradiction, debate and argumentation, silencing these with a hotchpotch of clichés and sentiment, authoritative arguments and speeches that promote exclusion. Such an approach is one that is inept at grasping and thinking through the complexities of the world, its interdependencies and its pluralities. Above all, its irresponsible activism dangerously hides a fear of something new, something which it can neither understand nor master – all the more so given that this newness is positioned against the errors of the past; blind colonialism, the pretences and ambitions of the West, economic domination, the support of dictatorships, etc.
Here at Mediapart we have analysed and documented the dangers under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, from its corrupt compromises made before the Arab revolutions to the military adventure in Libya afterwards, which finally left a legacy today with the war in Mali, a war of policing with no political solution.
Alas, here we are again with President François Hollande, the head of the French armed forces, in person, who alone believed he could put France at war with Syria. With the single argument that the regime of Bashar al-Assad has finally and defintively proved itself a criminal one for having added 1,400 deaths in an attack using chemical weapons to the 130,000 killings it has already perpetrated in all-out assaults against its own people, and who have been engaged for the past two years in a revolt against the dictatorship. Before the vote in the British parliament brought a wake-up call back to reality, this solitary march for war did not even include an attempt to protect its rear flanks: neither with regard to diplomacy (without mentioning the United Nations, Europe was as if wiped off the agenda even though elections for its parliament are to be held next year), nor with regard to the media, which would appear to be an elementary step given the lies that were produced by the intelligence services for the US-led war in Iraq. The precaution of giving the UN’s independent experts the task of certifying the crime of the Syrian regime was simply neglected.
While, at an international level, it appears that a process has begun (although, following the G20 meeting, hope that it will last is diminishing) to do what should have been done at the beginning – a global plan of aid for the Syrian revolution, a democratic deliberation about military options, the respect of the verdict of the UN weapons inspectors and diplomatic talks with Russia and Iran – we must not forget what we have seen in France. In short, a solitary president and an isolated nation.
How can one imagine, at the beginning of the 21st century, that a single man, even if an elected head of state, can decide to take a country to war without consulting, via elected representatives, his fellow citizens who will be exposed by his decision to further dangers? How can one imagine, in our world where unstable regions are inseparable from the future of the whole, that a single nation can decide what is good and what is evil, when to deliver punishment and when to offer reward, without weighing its judgment with that of other nations, within the respect of binding and demanding international law?
To put these questions, and therefore set limits, is not a formula for political impotence. It is on the contrary a process that ensures constant and coherent global action that meets the challenges given to the world since the movement of uprise among Arab peoples began in 2011, from Tunisia to Syria to Egypt. Ever since the beginning of the Arab revolutions, hailed by Mediapart as a welcome turnaround of history for a section of humanity which had hitherto been subjected to an imposed future rather than choosing one, it is this response that we demand, with all the political enlightenment that comes with it. But instead of which, under former president Nicolas Sarkozy and now his successor François Hollande, we have seen simply a response of war, both expeditious and eruptive.
This military activism has come, within France itself, with the stigmatization of those that they pretend to protect afar, namely - and in the broad sense of culture, origins and religion - the Muslims. Behind what might at first appear to be a paradox is the same incomprehension, at home and abroad, of the realities of peoples, societies, cultures and religion.
'He who purposes right proceeds according to right': Dante
The fiasco in which François Hollande has found himself since August is therefore a serious alarm call. It underlines the extent to which the presidential exception in France weakens and exposes us, for it puts the country at the mercy of the adventure of one man by his institutional refusal of mediation, discussion and negotiation which are the strong counter-powers of lively and conscious democracies. Under an alibi of haughty grandeur, the solitude of a nation and its leader threatens, like clouds before a storm, to place the citizens he represents in further danger and, what’s more, without them being warned to the risk of events spiraling out of control, with unpredictable consequences, just as in the manner of the ‘butterfly effect’ set out in chaos theory.
This image of a political ruler elected to represent ‘us’ and yet gripped by the pathological and imperious use of the presidential ‘me’, adds to the sentiment of deception - already fuelled by economic and social problems – regarding the conformist behaviour of a socialist administration that was elected by our votes cast in the hope of change. Contradicting every principle of multi-polarity, interdependence and respect of the UN – and which under the presidency of Jacques Chirac saved France from joining the folly of the war of worlds led by the administration of George W. Bush – the path chosen by the socialist presidency is even more of concern amid an uncertain international situation.
Had the same, fundamentally Atlantist, socialists been in power during the immediate post-2001 period (and who were indeed at that time tame in their reactions to the excesses of neo-conservatism) one can imagine that they could have joined the irresponsible slide that led to the trampling over international law, with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the rehabilitation of systematic torture, the invention of secret prisons, justification of collateral crimes and the organised ‘disappearing’ of individuals – in sum, to deny the very humanity of the designated enemy.
Some might argue that this is merely an opinionated judgment, given those concerned by the present cannot re-write the past. But it remains that the recent saber rattling entrusted to various French Socialist Party officials is hardly reassuring: the party’s First Secretary, Harlem Désir, has evoked “the Munich spirit” of those who question the planned French intervention in Syria, while socialist Senator David Assouline has attacked their “cowardice”. The government’s spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, meanwhile, has described Bashar al-Assad as “mad”.
The attacks against those who refuse to join the march to war without discussion or thought are reminiscent of the worst moments of American warmongering hysteria in the early 2000s, and for which the world is today paying the price. But even worse still is that one cannot exclude that this total nullity of political expression and reasoning is the true illustration of what the leadership of the Socialist Party has become. In a recent interview with Mediapart, the celebrated French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin in described the French Socialist Party (PS) as one that “had lost its line of thought”.
Let Socialist Party activists, who are also part of our loyal readership, hear this criticism as an appeal for a return to reason, such is it that the Left of progress has always been a mismatched bedfellow with the war of powers. From the blind nationalism of World War One in 1914-1918, (for which assassinated socialist leader and anti-militarist Jean Jaurès was a symbolic martyr before that butchery created catastrophe in Europe), to the colonial entrenchment in the 1950s, (the moral shame of which was to enduringly disqualify the legitimacy of the French Section of the Workers’ International, the SFIO, forerunner of the French Socialist Party), the Left is now called upon to remember the abysses into which its short-term choices sent it, taken without broad vision nor reflection upon the consequences, and without consideration of past events or any precaution for the future.
There are socialists who know this and who speak out, notably those who, far from adopting a narcissistic Western vision of the world, understand and live its diversity. From this point of view, one cannot fail to listen to the pertinent warnings of socialist MP Pouria Amirshahi, born in Iran and who represents the 9th constituency for French nationals resident overseas, which covers the regions of North and West Africa (and thus including Tunisia and Mali). Calling for “a debate of arguments, founded on reason and not on emotion” he recently denounced how the emotional tone employed for war had masked the cruel absence of a “geopolitical strategy”, one that included a credible plan for ending the crisis and for bringing a political transition to Syria.
It is a fact that the Syrian regime is a dictatorship that oppresses its people. It is also a fact that the use of chemical weapons against that same people is a crime. Just as it is also a fact that the people have suffered the sort of martyrs after having been left abandoned for too long while aspiring for a free choice of their future. Yet these three observations also applied to the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose regime was just as criminal. He repeatedly used chemical weapons while being supported and armed by the West in his war against Iran and its Islamic regime. The West would finally decide he was uncontrollable, and therefore no longer of any use.
Unless the intention is to repeat to a greater or lesser degree the disastrous episode of Iraq, which far from reducing that country’s instability only increased it, it must be realized that no military response by Western nations that have given themselves the right to use force above law will offer any effective, sustainable and stable response to the dramatic reality of the crisis in Syria.
“He who purposes right proceeds according to right”, wrote Dante in his work De Monarchia, completed in 1313. That recommendation, exactly 700 years later, is still valid for our republican monarchy which would do better to give up its haughty warmongering solitude and rejoin our ordinary humanity which is concerned about our common world where the requirement to act in a rightful manner, and as set down in international law, applies as much to the justice-maker as to the criminal.
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This editorial by Edwy Plenel can be read in French by clicking here .
Earlier this year, Edwy Plenel appeared at a New York University conference when he spoke (in English) about the challenges and opportunities for the new media in bringing greater accountability and democracy to society, the history of Mediapart in exposing corruption under governments of the Right and Left, and in particular the lessons to be learnt from this website’s role in revealing budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac’s secret foreign bank accounts, a scandal that continues to rock the French political establishment. Click here to watch the video of his presentation.
English version by Graham Tearse