Freedom's Battle

Zusatztext 77504307 Informationen zum Autor Gary J. Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals . A former reporter for The Economist, he has written often for the New York Times, and has also written for The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs . Klappentext This gripping and important book brings alive over two hundred years of humanitarian interventions. Freedom's Battle illuminates the passionate debates between conscience and imperialism ignited by the first human rights activists in the 19th century, and shows how a newly emergent free press galvanized British, American, and French citizens to action by exposing them to distant atrocities. Wildly romantic and full of bizarre enthusiasms, these activists were pioneers of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about today's human rights crises. Leseprobe Introduction The president of the United States, in his State of the Union speech, gave a grave warning to the American people. He noted that overseas "there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror" that the United States had a duty to step in. "In extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper." In a few cases, depending on "the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it," the president argued, "we could interfere by force of arms . . . to put a stop to intolerable conditions." This was an explicit call for using U.S. troops to save foreigners. It was not from Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carterthe two presidents who claimed to make human rights a centerpiece of their foreign policy. The president was Theodore Roosevelt; the year was 1904; his example was Cuba, where Roosevelt had famously put his own neck on the line against Spanish atrocities. 1 This was familiar rhetoric. Roosevelt's audience would not have been scandalized or confused by his words on this formal occasion. The president of the United States gave a ringing message about what we today would call humanitarian intervention, in ways that would be stunning almost a century later, and nobody thought too much of it. Something has been lost since then. The tradition of humanitarian intervention once ran deep in world politics, long before Rwanda and Kosovo came to the world's fitful attention. Over a century ago, it was a known principle that troops should sometimes be sent to prevent the slaughter of innocent foreigners. That principle has recently reemerged with fresh strength in the aftermath of the Cold War, but it is anything but new. Human rights policies are usually thought of today as being largely an innovation of the Carter presidency, making another appearance in the Clinton administrationor, at most, going back to Woodrow Wilson. Before that, on this account, international politics were run by hard-nosed diplomats, unsentimental about foreign lives and liberties but dedicated to maintaining the balance of power. The fate of the world was worked out at lordly conferences in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, behind closed doors thick enough to shut out the hubbub of mass opinion. This common belief that humanitarianism has no real historical standing has been used powerfully to oppose U.S. and European missions abroad. But in fact, the century before Wilson's presidency was anything but an age of unbroken realpolitik. Especially in Victorian Britain, this was a period rich in what we today would recognize clearly as human rights rhetoric, all the way up to the highest levels. This was the time of the antislavery campaign in Britain, and then of the mass uproar against vicious Belgian colonial rule in the Congo. It was the era of philhellenism in Britain and pa...

A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book

“A delight. . . . Fascinating. . . . Erudite. . . . Draws vivid parallels with recent events in Georgia, Darfur and Kosovo. . . . A cool, erudite, historical view. . . . History may not repeat itself exactly, but the arguments are often strikingly similar.”
—The Economist

“A wonderfully intelligent and sardonic history. . . . Full of fascinating and ironic incident. . . . Spirited and elegant. . . . Bass expertly brings to life a rich panoply of characters. . . . Helps us to see our own moral history in a more serene and clear-eyed light. . . . Thanks to Bass’s fine book, we can uncover the lineage of some enduring intuitions about the duties that people owe each other across borders.”
—Michael Ignatieff, *The New Republic

• “[A] vivid new exploration of the historical roots of modern-day humanitarian intervention. . . . Bass moves convincingly from the present to the past.”
  —Samantha Power, *Slate
• “An absorbing, well-researched, and frequently amusing book. . . . Bass provides a trove of fresh material, as well as fresh insight, concerning this exciting period.”
  —Christopher Hitchens, Foreign Affairs

“Engaging. . . . [A] compelling narrative, rich with accounts of parliamentary debate and battlefield confrontation. . . . Persuasive.”
—*The New Yorker

• “Bass tells the strange, bloody tales of these now nearly forgotten campaigns with extraordinary verve and wit. . . . The book’s real payoff is what it brings to our understanding of contemporary conflicts.”
  —Lev Grossman, *Time
• "A terrific study of the history of humanitarian intervention."
  —Adam Gopnik, *The New Yorker
• “Lively, subtle, and comprehensive. . . . Sheds a penetrating light on current policy debates. . . . Bass’s sense of nuance constitutes the strength of this book, which has the force of a polemic without descending to one.”
  —Robert D. Kaplan, Washington Post

“Lively. . . . Fascinating and well told. . . . [Bass] writes with a jaunty flair and an eye for eccentric characters.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Bass relates these episodes masterfully, providing a wealth of detail in fluid prose. Although he aims to make a point—about the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention—his accounts are full and fair-minded. Freedom’s Battle is a pleasure for the learning one can take away from it and for the opportunity to reflect on how much things have changed since the 19th century, and how much, in certain ways, they have not.”
—*Wall Street Journal

• “Lively. . . . Engaging. . . . Barack Obama could learn a lot from Freedom’s Battle about how to restore the country’s moral leadership in the world.”
  —Boston Globe

“[An] eye-opening new history of humanitarian intervention.”
—*New York Magazine

• “Gary Bass is one of the country’ s most important scholars working on the politics of human rights. Freedom’s Battle is a brilliant book—meticulously researched, surprising, nuanced, and remarkably entertaining.”
  —Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens

“In Freedom’ s Battle, Gary Bass takes hold of what is perhaps the most vitally important of contemporary foreign policy questions—when is a nation justified, for humanitarian reasons, to intervene abroad?—and traces its roots deep into the rich soil of recent history. As Bass shows by his fascinating historical detective work, this painful question has dogged leading Western statesmen for more than a century. How they answered it, as Bass shows in rich detail, has a great deal to teach us today. This is a gripping and important book.”
—Mark Danner, author of The Massacre at El Mozote and Torture and Truth

“Delightf…