Defence

In July 1942 the Police Battalion 101 was ordered to murder all the older men, women, and children in Józefów, in Poland. Major Wilhelm Trapp, a member of the Nazi Party, led the battalion. He made an unprecedented offer. If any older members of the battalion felt unable to proceed, they could be excused. Twelve men ...

The end of the Cold War was meant to herald a shift towards a ‘new world order’ of liberal states prepared to use force to prevent political and humanitarian disaster. Morality and self-interest converged: borders were more porous; geopolitical raison d’état no longer reigned; the defence of the oppressed – the improvement of the human condition everywhere – trumped the inviolability of sovereignty. The incantatory phrase ‘humanitarian intervention’ served as the moral fulcrum for those disenchanted by the levelling of economic globalisation and the decay of Communism: a righteous doctrine in a secular world starved of ideology. But the 1990s was a decade of unspeakable slaughter and humanitarian catastrophe, and states capable of stopping the carnage were feckless bystanders, unwilling to translate the nobility of their moral sentiment into the commitment to intervene militarily in defence of a supposed cosmopolitan consciousness. The logic of national interest and universalist morality did not coalesce as neatly as Western policy makers had proclaimed in the Indian summer following Communism’s collapse.