John Gray, en NewStatesment
The progressive narrative in which freedom is advancing throughout the world has left liberal societies unaware of their fragility. Overthrowing despots in the name of freedom, we have ended up facing a situation in which our own freedom is at stake. According to the liberal catechism, freedom is a sacred value, indivisible and overriding, which cannot be compromised. Grandiose theories of human rights have asserted that stringent limitations on state power are a universal requirement of justice. That endemic anarchy can be a more intractable obstacle to civilised existence than many kinds of despotism has been disregarded and passed over as too disturbing to dwell on.
But one modern thinker understood that a strong state was the precondition of any civilised social order. With his long life spanning the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was convinced that only government could provide security against sectarian strife. Anyone who wanted the amenities of “commodious living” had to submit to a sovereign power, authorised to do whatever was necessary to keep the peace. Otherwise, as Hobbes put it in a celebrated passage in his masterwork Leviathan (1651), there would be “no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Consider the migrant crisis and how it is likely to develop in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. The first and most obvious reality is that the crisis has been driven by a flight from failed or failing states. The largest single category of migrants has come from Syria, which has been devastated by a many-sided civil war in which the West – along with its ally Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states – has intervened with the aim of toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Others come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere. But it cannot be accidental that so many of these migrants are fleeing countries whose states have been dismantled by western policies of regime change. Migrant flows have other causes, such as environmental degradation in Africa and the economic opportunities that are available in European countries, which will persist long after war in the Middle East has ended. The chief driver at present remains failed states and it is wishful thinking to imagine that these states will be repaired any time soon.
Destroying states is relatively easy, while re-creating them is very difficult. Iraq and Syria will not be reassembled in a recognisable shape in any realistically imaginable future. Similarly, effective government will not be restored in the jihadist-ridden chaos that is now Libya. Politicians who tell us that the solution to the migrant crisis is to stabilise the migrants’ countries of origin are not being serious, or honest. None of them has any clear idea of how to accomplish such a feat, or is willing to face the enormous difficulties and costs that the task would involve.
By creating failed states, the West brought into being the zones of anarchy in which Isis (also known as Islamic State) has thrived. It will be objected that the states that were destroyed were brutal dictatorships. But Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a secular despotism and so, too, is Assad’s Syria. In working to overthrow these regimes, the West has released the forces of theocracy and come close to eradicating secular government in the Middle East. Worse, by persisting in its efforts to topple Assad, the West risks producing a catastrophe greater than any that has yet occurred. If Assad were violently overthrown, the Syrian army would likely disintegrate and the state of Syria cease to exist. The country would become an anarchical killing field in which dozens of jihadist groups compete for power. Communities that had depended on Assad’s regime for their survival, such as the Alawites, Druze and Christians, would confront a threat of genocide as real as that which has faced the Yazidi in Iraq. The result would be enlarged flows of desperate people into Europe. By intensifying the war, Russia’s involvement in Syria is likely also to swell these flows, though not by as much. In the longer term, Russian intervention opens up the possibility of some kind of political settlement in which Assad can be induced to give up power.
The West continues to reject co-operation with Russia on the grounds that Vladimir Putin and his client Assad are evil tyrants. From a Hobbesian standpoint, this is irrelevant. The salient question can only be: which is the greater evil? How is Assad’s dictatorship worse than a cult that abducts and rapes children, kills women it considers too old for sexual slavery, throws gay men off roofs, assassinates writers, cartoonists and Jews, murders disabled people in wheelchairs and razes irreplaceable cultural sites?
It is true that, with his barrel bombs and torture centres, Assad may have killed more people than Isis but this is not for want of the jihadists trying. They have launched mass-casualty attacks in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, among other countries where the victims have been overwhelmingly Muslims; and, if they can get their hands on biological or other weapons of mass destruction, they will surely use them. By any reasonable standard, Isis is a vastly greater threat to world peace than Assad.
The progressive narrative in which freedom is advancing throughout the world has left liberal societies unaware of their fragility. Overthrowing despots in the name of freedom, we have ended up facing a situation in which our own freedom is at stake. According to the liberal catechism, freedom is a sacred value, indivisible and overriding, which cannot be compromised. Grandiose theories of human rights have asserted that stringent limitations on state power are a universal requirement of justice. That endemic anarchy can be a more intractable obstacle to civilised existence than many kinds of despotism has been disregarded and passed over as too disturbing to dwell on.
But one modern thinker understood that a strong state was the precondition of any civilised social order. With his long life spanning the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was convinced that only government could provide security against sectarian strife. Anyone who wanted the amenities of “commodious living” had to submit to a sovereign power, authorised to do whatever was necessary to keep the peace. Otherwise, as Hobbes put it in a celebrated passage in his masterwork Leviathan (1651), there would be “no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Consider the migrant crisis and how it is likely to develop in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. The first and most obvious reality is that the crisis has been driven by a flight from failed or failing states. The largest single category of migrants has come from Syria, which has been devastated by a many-sided civil war in which the West – along with its ally Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states – has intervened with the aim of toppling the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Others come from Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere. But it cannot be accidental that so many of these migrants are fleeing countries whose states have been dismantled by western policies of regime change. Migrant flows have other causes, such as environmental degradation in Africa and the economic opportunities that are available in European countries, which will persist long after war in the Middle East has ended. The chief driver at present remains failed states and it is wishful thinking to imagine that these states will be repaired any time soon.
Destroying states is relatively easy, while re-creating them is very difficult. Iraq and Syria will not be reassembled in a recognisable shape in any realistically imaginable future. Similarly, effective government will not be restored in the jihadist-ridden chaos that is now Libya. Politicians who tell us that the solution to the migrant crisis is to stabilise the migrants’ countries of origin are not being serious, or honest. None of them has any clear idea of how to accomplish such a feat, or is willing to face the enormous difficulties and costs that the task would involve.
By creating failed states, the West brought into being the zones of anarchy in which Isis (also known as Islamic State) has thrived. It will be objected that the states that were destroyed were brutal dictatorships. But Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a secular despotism and so, too, is Assad’s Syria. In working to overthrow these regimes, the West has released the forces of theocracy and come close to eradicating secular government in the Middle East. Worse, by persisting in its efforts to topple Assad, the West risks producing a catastrophe greater than any that has yet occurred. If Assad were violently overthrown, the Syrian army would likely disintegrate and the state of Syria cease to exist. The country would become an anarchical killing field in which dozens of jihadist groups compete for power. Communities that had depended on Assad’s regime for their survival, such as the Alawites, Druze and Christians, would confront a threat of genocide as real as that which has faced the Yazidi in Iraq. The result would be enlarged flows of desperate people into Europe. By intensifying the war, Russia’s involvement in Syria is likely also to swell these flows, though not by as much. In the longer term, Russian intervention opens up the possibility of some kind of political settlement in which Assad can be induced to give up power.
The West continues to reject co-operation with Russia on the grounds that Vladimir Putin and his client Assad are evil tyrants. From a Hobbesian standpoint, this is irrelevant. The salient question can only be: which is the greater evil? How is Assad’s dictatorship worse than a cult that abducts and rapes children, kills women it considers too old for sexual slavery, throws gay men off roofs, assassinates writers, cartoonists and Jews, murders disabled people in wheelchairs and razes irreplaceable cultural sites?
It is true that, with his barrel bombs and torture centres, Assad may have killed more people than Isis but this is not for want of the jihadists trying. They have launched mass-casualty attacks in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, among other countries where the victims have been overwhelmingly Muslims; and, if they can get their hands on biological or other weapons of mass destruction, they will surely use them. By any reasonable standard, Isis is a vastly greater threat to world peace than Assad.
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