In the issue of the New Statesman for 11 September 2006 (one free hit), Lindsey Hilsum explains why she could not oppose the Iraq war, went along with it despite misgivings, but now thinks she was wrong to do so. Key to what she says was an Iraqi friend, Mohammed Fatnan, whose hopes, and whose desperation for change ‘even if it meant war’, she shared in some measure. He was kidnapped by Sunni insurgents in December 2004 and has not been seen since. The story she tells of Mohammed Fatnan’s fate she tells as being part of something wider, of the present state of Iraq and the ‘cruel chaos’ that has overtaken it. With this there can be no quarrel. But Hilsum’s article also has another purpose. She writes:

Here in Britain, the pro- and anti-war lobbies continue their arguments, tired and shrill. Everyone wants to prove that they were right. I was not right. I was swayed by Mohammed, who wanted the war, and was destroyed in its wake.

Not right, and her arguments no doubt not tired or shrill either. Hilsum is, nonetheless, sufficiently possessed now of the rightness of her abandoned wrongness, so to put it, as to be rather free and easy in how she lays about her. Here’s the central passage:

From the beginning, the debate in this country has been about British politics and prejudice, largely ignoring Iraqis, as if they were bit players in their own tragedy. The pro-war lobby — including the Euston Manifesto Group, heavily influenced by the Kurds, who have a different agenda from other Iraqis — refuses to acknowledge the disaster war has created. Even as Sunni insurgents slaughter Shias, and Shia ministry of interior thugs terrorise Sunnis, they claim that democracy is nascent. To them, anyone who states the obvious — that Iraq is a violent mess where life for ordinary people is worse than before — must be a covert apologist for Saddam. As Winston Churchill said during the Second World War: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

Their refusal to acknowledge the truth is as sickening as the cynical reasoning of the anti-war lobby, which opposed the war because its members hate America, not because they thought it would harm Iraqis. Most Iraqis I know agreed with Mohammed that there was no other way to get rid of Saddam, and that, however rough it was, war would in the long run bring a better life. They have been proved wrong, but the anti-war mob infantilises Iraqis, allowing them no responsibility for their own fate. They blame the US for all killings in Iraq, as if the murderous bands who detonate car bombs in Baghdad and Baquba were not responsible for their own actions.

As it’s not something I do very often, I’ll start here by defending ‘the anti-war lobby’. Lindsey Hilsum does what supporters of the Euston Manifesto are widely accused (but without justification) of doing: she simplifies opposition to the war as if all of it was based on hatred of America rather than on any concern for the well-being of Iraqis. But while this properly characterizes part of the anti-war movement, it is a travesty if applied to the whole. There were people (including, it may be said for the nth time, amongst supporters of the Euston Manifesto) who opposed the war not out of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, or ‘anti-imperialism’, but because of their estimate — or merely worry — that the consequences of the war would be all-round negative.

I turn to what she says about the Euston Manifesto Group. Hilsum relies on an ambiguity in her statement ‘they claim that democracy is nascent’. The Euston Manifesto says that once Saddam’s regime had been overthrown…

…the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted…

If ‘nascent’ is taken in this spirit — in the spirit of the possibility of democracy being born in Iraq, of a battle for, an effort at, transformation and democratization — then yes, pro-war Eustonians might reasonably be said to regard democracy as nascent. We have argued that there was a project there to be supported, against those forces trying to defeat it — a project for which there was evidence from two elections that millions of Iraqis themselves supported. But Hilsum’s meaning for ‘nascent’ would seem to be the more closed one, in support of her unshrill but condemnatory purpose: namely, that we Eustonians think democracy is being born born regardless of the forces ranged against it and as though it were a foregone conclusion. And that is pure invention. As also is her allegation that supporters of the war can’t see and won’t acknowledge that, in her words, Iraq is ‘a violent mess’; and that for us anyone who says so must be an apologist for Saddam. I repeat, pure invention. Iraq is now a violent mess, if this is how you want to put it; and there is no foregone conclusion about the democratic project which those of us who supported the war were supporting in doing so. This is not something that — speaking for myself — I’ve just got round to today. You can read here and here and here to see the point made perfectly clearly.

If the whole democratic project does come to grief in Iraq, then the hopes of those of us who supported the war will have been defeated, and the estimates of anyone who did think the outcome was a foregone conclusion confounded. This doesn’t show that, turning the clock back to late 2002/early 2003, the decision to support the war was self-evidently wrong. That decision was made on the basis of information available at the time, of estimates of probable consequences both ways — with war and without it — and of ignorance about certain things that hadn’t yet happened; not on the basis of 20-20 hindsight. Those like Lindsey Hilsum who now wax righteously indignant after changing their mind about the war face the small difficulty that they themselves, on the basis of what they knew and didn’t know back then, made precisely the same call as those at whom they are so indignant.

What is it that Hilsum takes to license such self-righteousness? I don’t know her, so I don’t know. But one possibility is that, having had Iraqi friends like Mohammed Fatnan, friends she knows she cared and cares about, she imagines that this puts her in a different category from the rest of us: you know, those both pro- and anti-war who ignored the needs and interests of Iraqis to focus on ‘British politics and prejudice’. What an unlovely moral conceit. ‘Only I (or some small ‘we’) care about the suffering of Iraqis; all you others… just shrill and callous.’ Give yourself that satisfaction if you will, but it isn’t how the world goes. Others (than Lindsey Hilsum) who supported the war also had Iraqi friends or acquaintances. And still others, although they didn’t, were moved by the same considerations as she was — ‘swayed by Mohammed, who wanted the war’, thinking just like ‘most’ of the Iraqis Hilsum knew ‘that there was no other way to get rid of Saddam, and that, however rough it was, war would in the long run bring a better life.’ And others than Hilsum have been every bit as dismayed and upset and troubled as she is by the current tragic sufferings of the Iraqi people.

It may be thought that self-righteousness only afflicts those who remain resolute in a single unchanging view. Never, though, underestimate the capacity for self-righteousness of the recently ‘saved’. (Thanks: GK.)

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

In the latest issue of Red Pepper, there is a critique of the Euston Manifesto by David Beetham and Pat Devine — both old friends of mine. Their article is also available online at ZNet. I respond here to a single theme connecting a number of the points David and Pat make early on in their article. Later posts will deal with other points.

One preliminary. Above the ZNet version of their article, the Euston Manifesto is billed as being ‘by a group of left-leaning journalists and others who backed the Iraq war’. Red Pepper has it more accurately, indicating that most of the group behind the manifesto backed the war.

But if the manifesto is presented at ZNet with this error of fact, it is an error that is faithful to what David and Pat have written. For it is the impression the two of them convey in this remarkable opening passage:

They [the manifesto’s authors] purport to defend the ‘authentic values’ of the left against those who opposed the war on Iraq and oppose the continuing occupation, asserting that we operate double standards by supporting forces hostile to our values.

While this is certainly true of some of those who opposed the war, it is a travesty as a characterisation of the overwhelming majority of those in the anti-war movement. The values that the manifesto espouses are historically, and remain today, those that the democratic left has always advocated and struggled for, and the attempt to appropriate them by this group for their own purposes is deeply offensive to the wide spectrum of those on the left who have been working for them all their lives.

The Manifesto Group’s attempt to draw a line between those who support the values of the Enlightenment, of modernity, of the Age of Revolutions, against those who do not, or are prepared to compromise them, is wholly spurious. The suggestion that the differences that exist are over values, or indeed over whether there are universal values, is to overemphasise the influence of post-modern relativism and is a diversion.

I call the passage remarkable not because of the way it turns the manifesto into a criticism of ‘those who opposed the war’ — those who opposed the war, period. For although this is a mischaracterization, the claim is by now unremarkable, having been made rather often since the manifesto was published in mid-April. Against it I will merely say yet one more time that the text of the manifesto is perfectly clear on this matter — ‘The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree… etc’ — and that several of its original signatories (including Michael Walzer) opposed the Iraq war. It continues to be a surprising piece of carelessness that neither the text itself nor this fact about the signatories gives pause to those criticizing the manifesto as a pro-war document. But it is a mischaracterization that has ceased to be remarkable.

What makes the above passage remarkable is its further claim that we of the Euston Manifesto Group have appropriated for our own purposes the values ‘the democratic left has always advocated and struggled for’ — as if we regarded these values as exclusive to ourselves. This charge is based on precisely nothing. In the manifesto we treat the central values we want to see upheld as being the common inheritance of the left: speaking of them (in the Preamble) as the left’s ‘authentic values’; and (at B 15) as ‘the inheritance of us all’. We do, indeed, criticize others on the left for compromising these values; but when we do, we say, for example, ‘currents that have lately etc’, and ‘those left-liberal voices today’, and ‘much self-proclaimed progressive opinion’, and ‘too many on the Left’. None of these is a totalizing judgement. None of them either says or implies that supporters of the Euston Manifesto extend the criticisms to the entirety of the left save only ourselves. As I’ve put this once before, if the cap doesn’t fit, no need to wear it. The group who produced the Euston Manifesto is a tiny number of people, and the idea that we would lay exclusive claim to a commitment to values such as pluralist democracy, human rights, equality, freedom of opinion and so forth, is preposterous. People sometimes do, of course, make preposterous claims, but you need a bit of evidence to establish persuasively that that is what they have done if you think they have. In the present case Pat and David don’t even gesture towards any evidence, let alone provide it.

Note the symmetry here, however. Just as we are supposed to be claiming that it is ‘against those who opposed the war’ (without any further qualification) that we defend the values we defend, so we are supposed to have tried to appropriate these values for ourselves in a way that would exclude the rest of the democratic left. The effect in the two cases is to turn a criticism directed against specific tendencies of argument and apologia, against some currents of opinion on the liberal-left, against documented cases of individual advocacy, into a blanket condemnation of opposition to the war as such and the entirety of the liberal-left.

Read on and you will see that pretty much the same thing is repeated here:

The manifesto also accuses the anti-war movement of anti-Americanism and suggests that criticism of Israel’s racist treatment of the occupied Palestinian people is often a cover for anti-semitism. Once again, this misses the point. While there undoubtedly exists blanket anti-Americanism and some resurgence of anti-semitism, the real issue is not that of being pro or anti America or Israel, but recognition of the differences that exist within countries and the decision as to which internal forces the democratic left should support in terms of its values.

You need perhaps to read that twice to see what its logical structure is. The passage tells you that the Eustonians miss the point because… there is another point. But this is an elementary logical error, since it’s possible for there to be more than one point at any given time. If, as David and Pat allow, blanket anti-Americanism does exist and there has been some resurgence of anti-Semitism, why wouldn’t it be to the point to combat both the one and the other? In its best traditions, the left has always stood against prejudice and bigotry, and there seems every reason for it to continue doing that. Countries do, of course, contain different internal forces, to be supported or opposed (as appropriate) by people on the democratic left. But that is a real issue, rather than the real issue, if the latter phrase is meant to convey that anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have no serious purchase anywhere today.

And this really is the crux of the matter. On each of these points, David and Pat seemingly agree with supporters of the Euston Manifesto that the criticisms the manifesto makes have some application. They evidently think, though, that their application is marginal. And we don’t think it is. We think there is significant evidence, which we have done our share over the last three years to assemble, for our view. But in any case that — a judgement about the spread, the extent, of certain contemporary themes of political argument — is something there can be serious discussion about. Nothing is gained towards such a discussion, however, by seeking to diminish the significance and extent of what we for our part criticize, via the suggestion that we present it as rampant, omnipresent — and then knocking this down. Nothing is gained by the several fictions that the Euston Manifesto stands against opposition to the Iraq war as such, or that it lays claim to democratic and universalist values to the exclusion of everyone else on the liberal-left, or (by implication) that we treat every criticism of Israel and of US foreign policy as instances of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism respectively.

Finally, it is by the same impulse to diminish, that Pat and David say that we Eustonians ‘overemphasise the influence of post-modern relativism’ — as if post-modern relativism exhausted the reasons for the differences over values that the manifesto talks about. We think that cultural relativism plays some part in these differences (see B3). But that is all we’ve ever said. We also point to other sources of them, like double standards and a simplistic ‘anti-imperialism’.

When people on the Western left make excuses for suicide terrorism, when others — some of them, writers of world renown — treat the contemporary US as comparable with Nazi Germany, when some of those who opposed the Iraq war cannot bring themselves to comprehend what considerations might have impelled others to support it, when it is not uncommon for the crimes committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib to be seen as overshadowing what happened in that same place during Saddam Hussein’s rule, when well-known left or liberal journalists tell you that democracy may not be for everybody or that an attachment to the legacy of the Enlightenment is a form of Islamophobia — this is not all due to cultural relativism, much less to postmodernism (though some of it may be). But it does betoken a difference of some kind over values, notwithstanding Pat and David’s view that the attempt to argue so is ‘wholly spurious’.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

A recent article critical of the Euston Manifesto is worth noticing for the principle of textual interpretation it makes use of: the principle, namely, that if the item before you — here, a document — doesn’t actually say what you need it to say for your critical purposes, never mind, invent something. The article is by David Clark and appears in the current issue of the New Statesman (where you’ll get one free hit). Clark starts off in not unfriendly terms:

There is… much in the manifesto with which to agree. Its belief in the intrinsic value of democracy reflects the left’s most enduring achievements. Its call for a humanitarian foreign policy is in the best traditions of internationalism. Even its scathing criticism of sections of the anti-war left for abandoning these values in favour of a vulgar anti-imperialism is substantially justified. Western guilt and the doctrine that my enemy’s enemy is my friend have produced some truly ugly sentiments.

So what’s the ‘but’. The ‘but’ is that like the early American neoconservatives we are leftists who condemn the stance of others on the left — ‘a journey that led most of them [the neocons] eventually to abandon the left for good’. And Clark goes on:

The question is whether supporters of the Euston Manifesto are destined to follow a similar trajectory. There are good reasons for suspecting that they might.

That’s the first step: our imagined future is a mark against us. The next step is the ‘irresistible logic’ underlying a defence of liberal principles (glossed, this, by Clark in war-of-civilizations terms, though these aren’t the terms of the manifesto itself). For that defence ‘sits uneasily with a tough critique of [the West’s] economic and social structures, and the tension is hard to sustain’.

The neoconservatives resolved this contradiction by dispensing with the critique, and there are clues in the Euston Manifesto that point the same way.

OK, you still with it? Our future is against us, us Eustonians, even though it hasn’t happened yet, and so is the logical tension Clark has proposed — though, strangely, the same tension is not held to threaten his own political future. Anyway, what are the clues that we Eustonians will go, in Clark’s imagined future, the way of the American neocons? These:

There are vague and slightly ritualistic expressions of concern about social injustice and global inequality, but nowhere are they confronted with the kind of passion that is devoted to attacking those considered guilty of appeasing terrorism by criticising western policy — nor is any attempt made to identify their cause.

The Euston Manifesto sees the inequality generated by globalisation as some sort of inexplicable mishap; genuine progressives are clear that its origins lie in the uneven distribution of global power that underpins the free-market policies of the Washington consensus. The manifesto’s failure to grapple with this problem, or even acknowledge that it exists, robs it of whatever radical potential it may have contained.

Got that? What we do say about social injustice and global inequality is ritualistic and it’s not passionate enough, according to David Clark, arbiter of passion levels. And what we don’t say, entirely passionless because we don’t say it — that global inequalities are ‘some sort of inexplicable mishap’ — this suffices for him to know where the manifesto and its supporters are going.

There’s only one small drawback to the whole production: that the people who produced the Euston Manifesto think inequality and the maldistribution of power, whether nationally or globally, are merely contingent and inexplicable, with no structural basis in the economic relations of contemporary societies, is a fiction of Clark’s making. It comes from the sucking it out of your thumb school of textual analysis. Not a great school.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

[The following appears, slightly abridged, in today’s Guardian, and at Comment is Free.]

Was the Euston Manifesto written, as some wags now say, in a pub? Well, no. Would you want beer spilt over your manifesto? Would you want it smelling of smoke? The document was mooted — yes, mooted — in one pub and discussed in another. But it was written where things get written these days, on computers. And this, in a sense, is also where it came from. It came out of the blogosphere and into the world.

The manifesto, which has its public launch today, states a commitment to certain general principles and identifies patterns of left-liberal argument that its supporters think fall short of those principles. So, we commend the democratic norms and institutions that typify the liberal democracies, despite their shortcomings, and criticize those on the left who make excuses for undemocratic movements and regimes. We affirm the importance of universal human rights values, rejecting the cultural relativist arguments and double standards by which these values get watered down or inconsistently applied. We express our opposition to terrorism and to indulgently ‘understanding’ (where this means condoning) it because it is thought to be motivated by legitimate grievances. We state an attachment to a broad ideal of equality in all spheres, from gender relations to economic justice. The full text can be read at the manifesto website.

The document stepped out of the virtual world into the real one and, my, didn’t people say hello. How do we feel about this, we ‘Eustonians’? Encouraged, no more. But also no less. Since it was published in April, it has generated an enormous volume of comment, from supportive, through critical, to jolly unfriendly. The abstract generality of its principles is one point of complaint. But we are unembarrassed by this. We make no claim to have formulated a programme for government; we hope merely to remind people on the liberal-left of the values they ought to be defending. A related point is the suggestion that this wish to remind is needless, since the manifesto’s criticisms don’t apply beyond a tiny section of the far left. We are just as relaxed on this second point as on the first. For the suggestion isn’t true, as has been amply documented on the blogs.

A third reaction is that of people who see the manifesto as pro-war — referring to the Iraq war. The short answer here is: no, it isn’t. This is stated as clearly as can be in the document itself, and it is a plain fact that a number of the original signatories opposed that war.

But a longer answer is worth spelling out for what it reveals about the ‘geography’ of the left in relation to the Iraq war, and how this is simplified by some of the war’s opponents. Their story is of a three-way division within left-liberal opinion: comprising (1) those who supported the war, the ‘left hawks’ or ‘muscular liberals’; (2) on the other side, but merely marginal - people in and around the Socialist Workers Party and Respect - a small body of anti-war opinion actually wanting America to come to grief in Iraq, supporting or making apology for the Iraqi so-called resistance and its murderous methods; (3) in between these, the largest sector of anti-war opinion, opposing the war for a combination of reasons, prominent amongst these the judgement that it was likely to turn out badly.

This mapping of the terrain underlies the mystification over how people who opposed the war could support the Euston Manifesto, and also the upset over criticisms directed at the left, when according to that map they apply to no more than a small band of souls on the far, and hard, left.

The real geography, however, has been different. Within the large ‘middle’ sector of left-liberal opinion opposed to the war there has been, from the start, a differentiating subdivision — between those who opposed the war without being in denial about the considerations on the other side of the argument, and those who precisely have been in denial about them. This latter group extends well beyond the far left.

The signs of denial are abundant in the recent public life of the Western democracies: in the banners and slogans for that Saturday on 15 February 2003, from which one would never have known that Saddam’s Iraq was a foul tyranny; in the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, many indeed unable to comprehend, why others of us supported a regime-change war; in a constant stream of comment in liberal daily newspapers and weeklies of the left; in the excommunications issued and more recent calls for apology or recantation; and, most seriously of all, in the perceptible lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise given its origins in a war led by George W Bush.

That is the actual geography, with four regions, not three. A significant segment of the international left lost touch with some of its most important values.

Conceived in a small blogospheric space because of a hunch that there were people out there in the world who found this state of affairs troubling, the Euston Manifesto stepped out. And the hunch has been confirmed.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

The manifesto, which has its public launch today, states a commitment to certain general principles and identifies patterns of left-liberal argument that we think fall short of those principles. So we commend the democratic norms and institutions that typify the liberal democracies, despite their shortcomings, and criticise those on the left who make excuses for undemocratic movements and regimes. We affirm the importance of universal human rights, rejecting the cultural-relativist arguments and double standards by which these values get watered down or inconsistently applied. We express our opposition to terrorism and to indulgently “understanding” (where this means condoning) it because it is thought to be motivated by legitimate grievances. We state an attachment to a broad ideal of equality in all spheres, from gender relations to economic justice. The full text is at www.eustonmanifesto.org

Since it was published in April, the Euston Manifesto has generated an enormous volume of comment, from supportive, through critical, to jolly unfriendly. The abstract generality of its principles is one point of complaint. But we make no claim to have formulated a programme for government; we hope merely to remind people on the liberal-left of the values they ought to be defending. A related point is the suggestion that this wish to remind is needless, since the manifesto’s criticisms don’t apply beyond a tiny section of the far left. But this suggestion isn’t true, as has been amply documented on the blogs.

link to full text of article online

link to original text at normblog

Writing in this newspaper [three] weeks ago, Daniel Finkelstein gave the Euston Manifesto — a document calling for a progressive realignment and which I had a large part in drafting — a mixed review. “Really very good,” he said. “I agree with its sentiments; I think it well written and timely.”

But he also described it as “a gigantic waste of time and energy”. How so? Because, even though it challenges ideas widely held on the Left, the aim of those who produced it is “to save the Left from itself” and that isn’t worth the bother.

There are two things that may be said in response to this. The first is that even for someone who doesn’t regard the Left as the best place to be politically, a more rather than a less healthy Left is surely to be desired.

Finkelstein thinks the manifesto’s “clear statement of principles has been wasted on people who do not agree and never will”. But in politics you don’t know how many will agree with what you have to say until you’ve said it, and there are already signs that what we’ve said in the manifesto — holding firm to democratic principles and universal human rights, not making excuses for tyranny or terrorism, opposing anti-Americanism and not selling short the liberal tradition of freedom of ideas — has found a welcome from a section of left-liberal opinion. How far this will go remains to be seen, of course, but except from a very narrowly partisan view it has to be better for the wellbeing of the polity that those on the “other side” from you are attached to principles of a better rather than a worse kind.

Secondly, for those of us who haven’t given up on the Left, there is more reason still why we shouldn’t want to see democratic and universalist values made light of. We see these values as linked to others that have always been the special concern of the Left. No one else can be relied on to defend them.

Finkelstein writes that the “task of persuading the Left is also unnecessary”: for if the Euston Manifesto had been published by rightwingers, support for it on the Right would have been overwhelming. But that isn’t true of some of the manifesto’s positions — for example, its embrace of broadly egalitarian principles and of trade unions as the “bedrock organisations for the defence of workers’ interests”, and its defence (in Shalom Lappin’s words) of “the integrity of the public domain against the onslaught of privatisation and expropriation that has resulted from the dogmatic pursuit of neoliberal ideas”. Some conservative voices have, in welcoming the manifesto, expressed clear reservations about these aspects of it.

Still, Finkelstein is right about the people on the Left “who do not agree and never will”. For all those leftists who have responded positively to the manifesto there are at least as many who have been dismissive. What is interesting about much of this reaction is the themes it typically combines. In so far as the manifesto says anything true (so critics have said), it deals in well-meaning platitudes; and in so far as we are critical of others on the Left, our criticisms apply to only a small number of people on the very far Left. And yet despite this, the manifesto at once brought down upon itself a hostility from many that it is fair to describe as warm. Why? The document named nobody in particular in identifying some lamentable patterns of argument, evasion and apologia. If the cap doesn’t fit, no need to wear it. I would suggest that at least one of the reasons for the antipathy is that the cap fits rather more heads than just those of the Socialist Workers Party.

If this weren’t so, why is it now as common as it is to hear people on the liberal Left damning universal principles as “arrogant”, “imperialist” or (sotto voce) “Islamophobic”? The attachment to these principles — to democracy, freedom, equality — used to be standard on the Left. But in the opinion pages of the liberal press it has become routine to find journalists and others of would-be progressive outlook telling us that democracy, or liberalism, or Enlightenment values, all possibly suitable in the West, may not be so in other cultural contexts. The right to speak freely — entirely freely, barring only incitement to hatred or violence — is also frequently put in question in the face of religious sensibilities clamorously asserted.

“Understanding” noises about terrorist atrocities — in London or Madrid, but especially Tel Aviv and Haifa — as having their roots in poverty, oppression and injustice are equally common, though these voices are at a loss to explain why there have been movements in the past fighting these evils that didn’t resort to randomly blowing up civilians. Well-known writers — mature people, veterans of the Left — see their way to endorsing the Iraqi so-called resistance despite its murderous methods, or give out lightminded comparisons between the US under George Bush’s leadership and Nazi Germany. That there are such themes being aired by people on the broad liberal Left is a matter of record. It has been documented and criticised repeatedly. Presumably the newspapers carrying comment of this kind wouldn’t be doing so if such comment weren’t finding comfortable accommodation with their readers.

The Euston Manifesto is a response to these political tendencies, and as such is very much on target. That is why it has aroused the interest it has, hostile interest included. We are happy to be restating some important if indeed obvious truths, in not giving up on the future of the Left.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

WRITING IN this newspaper two weeks ago, Daniel Finkelstein gave the Euston Manifesto — a document calling for a progressive realignment and which I had a large part in drafting — a mixed review. “Really very good,” he said. “I agree with its sentiments; I think it well written and timely.”

But he also described it as “a gigantic waste of time and energy”. How so? Because, even though it challenges ideas widely held on the Left, the aim of those who produced it is “to save the Left from itself” and that isn’t worth the bother.

There are two things that may be said in response to this. The first is that even for someone who doesn’t regard the Left as the best place to be politically, a more rather than a less healthy Left is surely to be desired.

Finkelstein thinks the manifesto’s “clear statement of principles has been wasted on people who do not agree and never will”. But in politics you don’t know how many will agree with what you have to say until you’ve said it, and there are already signs that what we’ve said in the manifesto — holding firm to democratic principles and universal human rights, not making excuses for tyranny or terrorism, opposing anti-Americanism and not selling short the liberal tradition of freedom of ideas — has found a welcome from a section of left-liberal opinion. How far this will go remains to be seen, of course, but except from a very narrowly partisan view it has to be better for the wellbeing of the polity, that those on the “other side” from you are attached to principles of a better rather than a worse kind.

Secondly, for those of us who haven’t given up on the Left, there is more reason still why we shouldn’t want to see democratic and universalist values made light of. We see these values as linked to others that have always been the special concern of the Left. No one else can be relied on to defend them.

link to full text of article online

‘They should come out as imperialist and proud of it’, and ‘There is a progressive tradition of support for colonialism, which the Euston manifesto group could champion’ — this is the way Wheatcroft’s article announces itself. The content doesn’t disappoint: he reminds readers that ‘Mill, Macaulay and even Marx made approving noises about British rule in India’ on the way to his intended conclusion: ‘Maybe the Euston group should be less nervous of “leftist colonisers” as a term of abuse.’ It’s a nice piece of wizardry, and ‘dialectical’ at that. Wheatcroft turns the core principles of the Euston Manifesto upside down.

Many of the manifesto’s signatories supported the war in Iraq (though others of them didn’t), and before that military intervention in Afghanistan, and before that the same in Kosovo. On imperialist-type grounds? Why, no.

Imperial: ‘of, relating to, befitting, or suggestive of an empire or an emperor’.

Imperialism: ‘a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires.’

The support for the aforementioned interventions by the people Wheatcroft is talking about was based on human rights and just war considerations, not on empire-building ones. Indeed, the very principles informing that support rule out support for imperialism, even a putatively ‘progressive’ imperialism. Self-determination and political independence for all peoples is one of the basic rights we Eustonians defend.

B.3 of the Euston Manifesto: ‘We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declaration to be precisely universal, and binding on all states and political movements, indeed on everyone.’

21 (3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government…’

Chapter 1, Article 1.2 of the UN Charter: ‘… respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’.

There’s a difference between an imperial project that seeks to build an empire ruled by a superpower, and an internationalist politics that regards human rights as universal and inviolable — and, beyond a certain threshold of human suffering, as rendering the claim to national sovereignty forfeit and justifying outside intervention.

For the rest, it’s true that we in the Euston Manifesto Group don’t begin, as some others on the left do, from the idea that everything America does is bad; and it’s true that we don’t regard being ‘anti-imperialist’ in this sense as a sensible way of aligning oneself in the world; and we do think that pluralist democracies are better forms of polity than tyrannical and totalitarian ones, and that liberal political and social cultures are better than illiberal ones. If that all adds up to being imperialist, then we’re guilty as charged and indeed proud. But it doesn’t. So thanks, Geoffrey, but no thanks.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

The violation of basic human rights standards at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of “rendition”, must be roundly condemned for what it is: a departure from universal principles, for the establishment of which the democratic countries themselves, and in particular the United States of America, bear the greater part of the historical credit. But we reject the double standards by which too many on the Left today treat as the worst violations of human rights those perpetrated by the democracies, while being either silent or more muted about infractions that outstrip these by far. This tendency has reached the point that officials speaking for Amnesty International, an organization which commands enormous, worldwide respect because of its invaluable work over several decades, can now make grotesque public comparison of Guantanamo with the Gulag, can assert that the legislative measures taken by the US and other liberal democracies in the War on Terror constitute a greater attack on human rights principles and values than anything we have seen in the last 50 years, and be defended for doing so by certain left and liberal voices.

Not because he puts the point especially cogently — there is no cogent way of putting it — but because what he says is representative of much of the negative comment the paragraph has attracted, I will respond to Randy Paul’s version of such comment. He says:

First of all, they appear to be more concerned about AI’s abuse of metaphor rather than the torture abuse in Abu Ghraib.

I break this into its two constituent parts.

(a) Paul speaks of the now notorious Irene Khan statement — that Guantanamo is ‘the gulag [of] our times‘ — as an abuse of metaphor. What it was as well as that was a piece of extreme rhetorical inflation, defended by Khan and other Amnesty spokespeople as a way of trying to grab attention. This was worthy of a political propaganda department, and unworthy of the reputation which Amnesty has deservedly gained for accuracy and care. It diminishes the colossal scope of the horror and suffering that the actual Gulag produced. (See 1, 2 and 3 for the more detailed argument on this that I made at the time.)

(b) Perhaps because he has no compelling defence of Khan’s statement, Paul adds the second thing, which is worse than just being uncompelling. It is his suggestion that supporters of the manifesto might care more about an abuse of metaphor than about the crimes committed by US personnel at Abu Ghraib. This is a serious allegation, because of course to care more about an abuse of metaphor than about the abuse and torture of people, you’d have to be morally lost, to put it no more harshly than that. One might therefore expect Randy Paul to have something substantial to go on in support of his suggestion. What he has, however, is only the pair of words ‘appear to’: we of the Euston Manifesto ‘appear to be more concerned’, he says, about the one thing than the other. He has, in other words, sucked this out of his thumb. Perhaps he thinks that by criticizing a couple of statements from Amnesty’s officials we make ourselves opponents of its work. He can try to justify that assumption, but he will fail. Especially supporters of the organization (as, speaking only for myself, I have been for longer than I accurately know) might want to hold the organization to its own best standards when it appears to slide into an unbalanced political rhetoric that is current on parts of the liberal-left.

Paul continues:

What I find downright offensive is this comment:

The violation of basic human rights standards at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of “rendition”, must be roundly condemned for what it is: a departure from universal principles[.]

Oh please. Talk about defining deviancy down. It’s not a “departure from universal principles,” it’s a crime against humanity…

That is criticism in the same thumb-sucking mode as before, trying to produce something out of nothing. Yes, the violation is a crime against humanity; and, being that, it is also a departure from the universal principles by which this category of crime is defined. If the authors of the manifesto had said not the one but the other, Paul would have had better than his thumb. But he doesn’t, and so he manufactures the notion that we’re ‘defining deviancy down’. But if he’s not prepared to give some serious evidence for his ‘not/but’ interpretation, he might just as well go and sing it in E-flat.

It is a publicly known fact that the Euston Manifesto came out of a grouping that involved, among others, certain British bloggers. You want to know what we thought and think about Abu Ghraib vis-à-vis the offence of crimes against humanity? Or about torture? You can take a look:

It is not to the point to say that the abuses [at Abu Ghraib] were not, either in nature or scale, comparable to the crimes of the Saddam Hussein regime. The practice of torture, just as such, is an unmixed and inexcusable evil; it is an abomination. Correspondingly, the prohibition of torture should be a moral absolute in any civilized national polity, as it has over time become within the law of the community of nations. Along with the prohibitions of other core crimes against humanity — genocide amongst them — the prohibition of torture comes under the doctrine of jus cogens: it is a peremptory norm binding all states, and from which none may opt out; it protects a right from which derogation is not allowed even in war or national emergency. The prohibition of torture is not a moral and legal restraint of the kind which it is permissible to transgress just provided the transgression is not too ‘extreme’.

And you can take a look. And you can take a look. Yes, why not take a look?

Or else you might just as well go and sing it in E-flat. This isn’t intellectually or morally serious criticism, it is ungrounded animus; and it typifies the negative comment there has been about that paragraph in the Euston Manifesto.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this [the overthrow of the Baathist regime — NG] occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted — rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.

The problem here is the ‘rather than’; and ‘picking through the rubble’ doesn’t help. These make up an ill-chosen phrase. The intent was to say that, once the invasion had occurred and the regime was overthrown, the primary focus of those on the left and others of democratic outlook should have been on solidarity with the Iraqi people and with the democratic forces trying to reconstruct the country on a new, free basis. The authors of the manifesto thought, and we think, that the future of Iraq and the fate of the Iraqi people should have been a more important preoccupation of leftists and liberals than returning constantly, as many have, to why the war should never have been fought. The way the above passage reads, however, it looks as if we’re saying that criticism relating to earlier arguments about the war, concern over the way it was presented by the US and British governments or about the planning for its aftermath, was inappropriate. And that isn’t right. The point was picked up in one of the earliest responses to the manifesto, by Martin Bright on the New Statesman website. He wrote:

The manifesto suggests that we should stop arguing about the whys and wherefores of the war and concentrate on building a left consensus on reconstruction.

And he went on to demur. He’s right: right about what the Eustonians think a left consensus should have ‘concentrated’ on once the Saddam regime was gone; and also right — unfortunately — that we’ve given the impression in the manifesto as written that arguments about ‘the whys and wherefores of the war’ ought to have stopped. We have done, but by a mis-statement of a point meant to be about priorities as if it were about mutually exclusive alternatives. It has not in fact been the position of those blogs which took the initiative leading to the Euston Manifesto that discussion of the origins of the war, or the planning for its aftermath, was somehow out of bounds. As just one piece of evidence for this I refer to a post of my own (old normblog site, ‘But where is the green parrot?’, August 21 2003) on the question of whether the Bush administration or the Blair government deliberately misled their publics. This is obviously a legitimate matter for discussion; more than that, it is a very important one.

The manifesto needs to be amended on this point.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester