World Affairs Institute

PAVED INTENTIONS: Civilization and Imperialism

Author(s): Mark Mazower
Source: World Affairs, Vol. 171, No. 2 (FALL 2008), pp. 72-84
Published by: World Affairs Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20672855
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 PAVED INTENTIONS
Civilization and Imperialism

Mark Mazower

If there is one thingJohnMcCain and Barack Obama seem to agree on, it is

that there remains a for morality in world affairs. Both have lent their sup
place
port to the idea that America has a duty to stand up for the cause of freedom. In
both cases, their advisers have called for alliances that will bypass
of democracies
the flailing UN?its Security Council paralyzed by the obstruction of authoritar
ian powers, itsGeneral Assembly packed with petty despots who have no interest
in promoting human rights. Not so long ago, the ending of the Cold War stimu
lated hopes for the creation of a new world order in which the United Nations
would be able to regain some of the luster that it had lost over the preceding
decades. It was this sense of the beginning of a new historical epoch which also
start of the postwar era that had just
directed scholarly attention back toward the
ended. But the increasingly grim spiral of events in the early 1990s?the war in

the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda?put into question the robust
ness of the human rights regime that had been established after the Second

World War.
If today's humanitarian interventionists have lost hope that the UN can

reform itself to intervene decisively in the name of civilized values?this, despite

the sentiment that culminated in Kofi Annan's to Protect," or
"Responsibility

Mark Mazower is professor of history and international affairs at Columbia University.

His most recent book isHitler's Empire: How theNazis Ruled Europe.

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 Mark Mazower

R2P, as the humanitarian community abbreviates it?they remain convinced that

America and its partners can, or at any rate, should try to do so. If Bosnia and
Rwanda are the stations of their cross, Sierra Leone?and Kosovo and
maybe
Iraq?offer theirmodels for the future.Absent theirguiding hands, itwill not
be the U.S. and its allies that define the norms of civilized international behavior,
but Putin's Russia or perhaps China.
This sense of the need for moral abroad has only been
leadership sharpened
by 9/11 and itsaftermath;witness the evangelism of Tony Blair and George W.
Bush and the rhetorical appeal to an "Alliance of Civilizations." Yet before this

goes much further, we

might want to take a deep

breath and look back.
"The increasinglygrimspiralof For all this talkof stomp
events inthe early 1990s-the war in ing round the world to

the formerYugoslaviaand genocide uphold

or promote civili
zation has a
inRwanda-put intoquestion the long history
and cannot be divorced
robustnessof the human rightsregime from the rise and fall of
thathad been established afterthe Europe and European
values over the last two
SecondWorldWar." centuries. While the val
ues implicit in the idea of
civilization seemed natu
ral and uncomplicated to most Europeans over this period, they looked much
more to those who were abused and colonized in its name. So let
questionable
this new generation of interventionists at least take stock, lest
they risk drawing
on the values of past generations and finding that their moral arse
prejudiced
nals have been even more
depleted than their real ones.

Between 1815 and the Second World War, an international system of states
grew up that was based on the primacy of European power and values and the
spread of European "civilization." The term civilization emerged in both Britain
and France around the middle of the eighteenth century. It connoted both the

process by which humanity emerged from barbarity and, by extension, the con
dition of a civilized society; namely, the security of person and property. Thus,
what is especially striking about Europe's development after Napoleon's defeat

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 PAVED INTENTIONS

is its political coloration. Civilization now a liberal program based on

conveyed
cooperation rather than conquest. Fran?ois Guizot's
History ofCivilization inMod
ern as "the
Europe defines civilization history of the progress of the human race
toward realizing the idea of humanity," and highlights the key themes for the
future: the "expansion of mind" and of the full and rational enjoyment of the
human faculties, and the spread of rights. Guizot that there had
acknowledged
been other and India, for example?in the past. But Euro
civilizations?Egypt
pean civilization was because it combined cultural community with an
superior
acceptance of political diversity.
If civilization was located in Europe,
then Europe's overseas
expansion required
deciding how far civilization could be The new of interna
exported. discipline
tional law provided a useful tool for that distance. A distillation of the
measuring
values of the Concert of Europe, international law was designed as a mechanism
to preserve order among
sovereign states, and its principles were explicitly stated
as applying only to civi
lized states, much as
John
StuartMill saw his prin
was located inEurope,
"Ifcivilization
ciples of libertyas apply
then Europe's overseas expansion ing solely tomembers of
"a civilized
requireddecidinghow farcivilization community."
In 1845, the influential
could be exported." American international

lawyer Henry Wheaton

had actually spoken in
terms of the "international of Christianity"
Law versus "the law used
by Moham
medan Powers." Within or had all but van
twenty thirty years, such pluralism
ished. According to the late-nineteenth-century legal commentator William
Edward Hall, international law "is a product of the special civilization of modern

Europe and forms a highly artificial systemof which the principles cannot be
to be understood or . . .
supposed recognized by countries differently civilized
Such states only can be presumed to be subject to it
as are inheritors of that

civilization."
Thus conceived, international law defined the problem of global commu

nity in terms of the nature of the relationship between a civilized Christendom

and the uncivilized world. States could
non-European only join the magic circle
a doctrine of intervention, which occurred when "a state is
through brought
by increasing civilization within the realm of law." In the 1880s, Scottish legal
philosopher James Lorimer suggested there were three categories of humanity?

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 Mark Mazower

civilized, barbaric, and

savage?and thus three

corresponding grades
of recognition?plenary

political; partial politi

cal; and natural, or mere
human.

The case of the Otto

man
Empire exemplified
this ambivalence. Euro

pean states had been

making treaties with the

sultans since the six Blowback
teenth century. But fol

lowing the Crimean

War, the empire was declared as
lying within the "Public
Law of Europe." In fact, despite its internal reforms, the empire was never
in Europe as in force,
regarded being fully civilized: the capitulations remained
and throughout the nineteenth century the chief justification of the other

European Powers for supporting first autonomy and then

independence for
the new Christian Balkan states was that removing them from Ottoman rule was
the best means of civilizing them.
the spread of rights could be tied directly to a willingness
Indeed, to intervene
and override the formal sovereignty of non-European powers. After the Franco
Prussian War, international lawyers devised the notion of belligerent occupa
tion?a state of affairs in which an occupant interfered as little as was compatible
with military necessity in the internal affairs of the occupied country. But in the
case of Ottoman
territory, the Powers felt no such inhibitions: the Russians in

Bulgaria in 1877, the Habsburgs in Bosnia the following year, and the British in

Egypt in 1882 all demonstrated through their extensive rearrangement of pro

vincial administrations that, although they would permit the Ottoman sultan to
retain a fig leaf of formal sovereignty, in truth the theory of belligerent occupa
tion did not apply in his lands. Thirty years later, the Austrians and the British
went further: on both occasions over the
they unilaterally declared sovereignty
Ottoman territories they were occupying, suggesting that whatever had
or had not
been agreed at Paris in 1856, by the early twentieth century, the Ottoman empire
was once as outside the circle of civilization. (The fact that
regarded again lying
it was a Muslim power was not irrelevant. In 1915, when the French
certainly
and Russians a protest at the mass murder of Ottoman
prepared diplomatic

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 PAVED INTENTIONS

the massacres as "crimes

Armenians, the initial draft condemned against Chris
tendom." Only when the British mentioned that they were concerned over the
a formulation on Indian Muslim was the word
possible impact of such opinion
ing changed to "crimes against humanity.")
If the Ottoman Empire was, as it were, semi-civilized, then sub-Saharan

Africa?site of the main European in the late nineteenth century?was

land-grab
simply savage. European and American lawyers extended the notion of the pro
for new European states such as Greece?to the
tectorate?originally employed
new colonial situation,
asa way of
ostensibly
vulnerable non
shielding
"In the 1880s, Scottish legal European states from the

philosopherJamesLorimersuggested depredations of Euro

Powers, but
therewere threecategories of pean
to avoid conflict
really
among
humanity-civilized,barbaric,and the Powers themselves.

savage-and thus threecorresponding "Much interest attaches to

for protector
grades of recognition?plenary
legislation
political; ates, in which the touch

partial political; and natural,ormere of civilization is cautiously

tomatters barbar
human." applied
ic," wrote a commentator
in theJournal of theSociety
of Comparative Legislation
in 1899. The treaty that followed the Berlin Colonial Conference of 1884-85,
which marked the attempt to manage the Scramble for Africa
diplomatically,
specified the need "to initiate the indigenous populations into the advantages of
civilization." The Congo Free State was one particularly disastrous result.
In this way, Victorian international law divided the world according to its stan

dard of civilization. Inside Europe?and in other areas of the world colonized

was the sphere of civilized life and its defining elements:
by Europeans?there
the rule of law on or constitutions;
property rights; (usually) of codes
the basis

effective administration of its territory by a state; warfare conducted a

by regular
and freedom of conscience. Outside this the was to define
army; sphere, charge
terms according to which or be bestowed. Itwas
sovereignty?full partial?might
here, in the non-European world, that the enormity of the task could best be
It was here, too, that the potential costs of failing to attain the standard
grasped.
of civilization were most evident.

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 Mark Mazower

U ntil well after the First World War, it was axiomatic that "international
law is a product of the special civilization of modern Europe itself." Siam was
admitted to the Hague conferences as a mark of respect; but in China, where

the Boxer Rebellion was put down with enormous violence, the unequal treaties
in force. It was
remained only the Japanese who seriously challenged the nine
teenth century identification of civilization with Christendom. Having adhered
to several international conventions, and revised their civil and criminal codes,

they managed to negotiate the repeal of the unequal treaties from 1894 onward,
as well as to win back control over their tariffs, and their over Russia
victory
in 1905 confirmed their status as a major power. Not surprisingly, the Young

Turks?desperate to repeal their own humiliating capitulations?could not hear

success.
enough of Japan's
The Japanese achievement confirmed that the standard of civilization being
offered by the Powers was, in fact, capable of being met by non-Christian, non
states. But the achievement was also unique and precarious.
European Japanese
After the ending of the Russo-Japanese War, the Second Hague Conference of
1907 talked of "the interests of humanity, and the ever-progressive needs of civiliza
tion." But could civilization ever be universalized? Doubts were growing.
really
German and Italian jurists essentially ruled out any non-European power receiv
ing full recognition. As for the empire-builders, inAfrica, as well as in the Pacific,

many liberals and Gladstonians came to terms with at century's end,

imperialism
terms of a kind of or com
because they thought in imperial cosmopolitanism
monwealth in which individual peoples might preserve their own distinctive cul
tures. Where necessary, of course, civilized powers would have to ensure this.

Although it inherited many of these ways of imagining the relationship

between empire and sovereignty, the League of Nations, established at Versailles
after the First World War, finally adapted the idea of international civilization.
A permanent organization whose members included Abyssinia, Siam, Iran, and
was a very different
Turkey already something with global reach than the old

European order. That was chiefly thanks to the Americans, not the British, whose
schemes for a beefed-up version of the old Concert of Europe collapsed under
the weight ofWilsonian liberalism. was henceforth
Sovereignty shaped explicitly
by the doctrine of national self-determination in its most anti-autocratic and
was a term of rebuke, and
optimistic guise. Imperialism suddenly trusteeship and
mandates became?in the minds at least of some idealistic or deluded British
civil servants?something entirely different from prewar empire-building.
On the other hand, the new Society of Nations in Geneva stilldepended
on the same civilizational hierarchies that had so much
underpinned pre-1914

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 PAVED INTENTIONS

liberal thought. The peace settlement made this perfectly clear. In Eastern

Europe, the victors at Versailles bestowed sovereignty upon the so-called New

States, but insisted on League oversight of the rights of their

own national minor

ities. Should the new regime be imposed on established states such as Germany?

That was not deemed necessary, still less to apply it to victor states like Britain,
or the United in other words, a
France, States. Minority rights were, badge of the
new of their need for
states' secondary and relatively uncivilized status, evidence

tutelage in the exercise of their own sovereignty.

This was bad
enough for East European politicians, but itwas considerably
less humiliating than the fate assigned to those outside In Egypt, which
Europe.
was not, of course, a mandate, the British the leading Egyptian
imprisoned
new not
nationalists and made it clear that Wilson's dawn did apply to them.
Erez Manela calls "the Wilsonian moment" was
Not surprisingly, what historian
with demonstrations and protests from North Africa to China. Even
greeted
Japanese diplomats felt rebuffed when the British and the Americans summarily
dismissed their proposed racial equality clause.
The other former Ottoman lands were brought within a new mandate system
that classified non-European societies on the basis of their civilized qualities. The
Arab provinces of the Middle East became class A mandates?to the fury of their
inhabitants?while former German colonial possessions in central Africa were
in the and C classes, to be administered as "a sacred trust for civiliza
placed
tion" until such time as, in the faraway future, they might be fit to govern them
selves. South African military commander and statesman Jan Smuts, a powerful
influence on the mandate system as a whole, and keen to see the Dominions
was never: the
acquire colonial possessions themselves, thought the time and
C class colonies were "inhabited by barbarians, who not only cannot possibly

govern themselves but to whom itwould be impracticable to

apply any ideas of
political self-determination in the European sense."
All of this was, for British liberal imperialists at least, entirely in harmony

with the idea of spreading civilization around the world. They hailed over
victory
the Germans in 1918 as confirmation of the fundamental harmony between

empire?at least in its British incarnation?and the spread of civilized values.

The Round Table
(an early twentieth-century group of colonial administrators)
offered Britain as a moral
example for the world and saw empire as a way of

defending the weak against the unscrupulous. Imperialism was, essentially, an

exercise in altruism. In his 1917 The Expansion ofEurope, Ramsay Muir, the "for
gotten giant" of interwar British liberalism, described the empire as the "supreme

expression of the very spirit of Liberalism," and thought the British victory would

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 Mark Mazower

allow "the victory of Western civilization" by cementing the "extension of the

influence of European civilization over the whole world" that had been such a
feature of the previous centuries. People wrongly dismissed this process, he went

on, as "imperialism"?a term suggesting "brute force, regardless of the rights of

conquered peoples." In fact, itwas all for the best: "the civilization of Europe has
been made into the civilization of the world."

Such confidence did not last long beyond Hitler's triumph.But even before
then, others, less wedded towere driven to doubt. Some followed
empire,
Freud's diagnosis: civilization was a fragile crust covering harsher instincts shared

by Europeans and non-Europeans alike. For others, the Bolshevik Revolution

the rise of socialism not
and only threatened bourgeois values, but could also
be seen as the spearhead of an Asiatic threat to Europe. Meanwhile, Europe
was
as the constitutional
tearing itself apart through political polarization, regimes
established across the continent after 1919 gave way to varieties of authoritarian

ism. The crisis of democracy in Europe made liberals conscious that their own
values and hierarchies of rights required extensive revaluation. To be civilized, in
the old liberal sense, was not necessarily to be modern. Quite the contrary: itwas
to a set of civil liberties that many Marxist and fascist theorists
prioritize political
dismissed as and self-serving.
antiquated
The First World War had also accentuated long-standing criticisms by Mus
lim, Chinese, and Japanese intellectuals of the pretensions ofWestern claims to
civilizational supremacy; in the immediate aftermath of the "Wilsonian moment,"

many talked about Asia as an alternative civilizational force, one which?unlike

the Europeans?would fight naturally for the "rights of nations" around the

globe. Bengali poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore, for one, described the

European conflict as suicidal, the product of excessive competitiveness and a

love of violence fed by an addiction to and science.
industry
In any case, most European liberals were sublimely indifferent to extra-Euro

pean critiques of this kind. What did give these latter-day Victorians pause for
reflection was not Indian or Japanese criticism, or even the rise of the USSR,
but theNazi seizure of power in 1933. The FirstWorld War dented confidence
in the idea of civilization, but itwas, above all, the rise of Nazism that spelled
its doom. It was this that concerned the British historian H. A. L. Fisher as he

completed his best-selling history of Europe. His concluding plea that Europeans
remember they were "trustees for the civilization of the world" sounded half

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 PAVED INTENTIONS

hearted and unconvinced. He was

keenly aware that the peoples of the

continent had already once allowed
their divisions to lead to conflict and
that this had a dramatic on
impact
the "place of Europe in the world"
and destroyed its "moral unity." Nev

ertheless, he wrote in 1935, Europe

faced a choice: a new war that would

lay "civilization in ruins," or work

toward a permanent organization of
the peace and a new period of plenty
and well-being.
The latter meant continuing to

have confidence in the experiment

of the League of Nations. But the
of the League itselfmade
expansion
it less acceptable to use the old civili

zational language. In 1929, Sir John

Fischer Williams confessed that "the
of 'civilized as a
concept society' R2P2
of nations or States dis
community
tinct from the rest of the world no with the main facts of con
longer corresponds
temporary life." Writing in The Listener, H. A. Smith of London University drew
attention to some of the consequences; the age of what we might call humanitar
ian interventionism was over: "In practice, we no longer insist that States shall
conform to any common of justice, religious
standards toleration and internal

atrocities may be committed in foreign countries, we now

government. Whatever
are no concern of ours . . ."
say that they
Then, too, Nazism's rise was particularly worrying because the Germans were

the most of Europe. The there

among "highly civilized" peoples implications,
of international law were acute: the
fore, of the Nazi rejection of the premises
of the old system were being thrown into question from within
very foundations
itself. "European civilization has shaped modern International Law,"
Europe
noted a London in 1938. "But is European civilization still
University professor
what itwas, and ifnot, how do the changes affect international law?"

It was not just Nazi indifference to the premises of interwar liberal jurispru

dence that was so fatal to a continued faith in the power of international law;

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it was the way Hitler subverted the traditional division of the world between

(civilized) and the (non-civilized) rest. By creating a protectorate out

Europe
of much of prewar Czechoslovakia, the Germans a colonial institution
brought
to itself, and made it clear that they would treat their racial inferiors
Europe
as colonial
subjects. Churchill and others
pretended happeningthat what was
in Europe had no obvious relevance to the fate of the empires; others knew
better. Europeans, wrote Martinique-born author and politician Aim? C?saire,
were learningwhat itwas like to be treated as colonial subjects. Suddenly they
were the value of human rights. But could they seriously maintain
discovering
the old dichotomy between the defense of rights at home and the deprivation
of rightsabroad?
The short answer: they could try.After the war, the United Nations committed
itself to fighting no to force
for human rights, but itmade formal commitment

imperial powers
to disgorge their colonies. On the contrary, at San Francisco,
U.S. delegate Harold Stassen stated that itwould be better for colonial peoples
not to force the issue of freedom: better to think about than
interdependence
African and Asian and commentators were
independence. journalists deeply
dismayed by what
emerged. As they understood it, the founders of the UN were

trying their hardest to keep the civilizational concept intact.

But by thispoint ithad largely lost all credibility.Few talked any longer as
was a let alone a
though there single civilization, single standard. International

law, which had elaborated this, was in disarray. The UN was the very opposite of
a like international
what latter-day Victorian lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht had pre
dicted or wanted; inhis 1943 paper on the rightsofman, he had argued thatrec
man had become a general constitutional
ognition of the fundamental rights of
principle of the law of "civilized states." But the rights regime that he called
for never came into existence. He and others had hoped to see the new inter
national organization defending human rights against tyrannical nation-states.
Instead, what they got was a body committed even more than its predecessor to
the sanctity of state sovereignty?and this was hardly compatible with the sort of
civilizational intervention that had been routine before 1914. The 1948 Declara
tion on Human Rights,
as
Lauterpacht despondently noted, was little more than
decoration?a substitute for a commitment and a retreat from
legally binding
the rights regime of the interwar era.
The rise of a new order after 1945, then, was based on new, or at least sub

stantially adapted, principles. For perhaps the first time, the question of rights
was less than umbilically attached to the notion of civilization. The world wars
had put an end to the concept as an for international
ordering principle poli

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 PAVED INTENTIONS

tics,a principle bound up with the ideas of freedom, humanity,and rights,and

one whose demise could not but affect the projection and political significance
of those values. Some commentators, such as Ian Brownlie, have recognized
that the collapse of the standard of civilization created a normative vacuum at

the UN?for states were no longer united by virtue of regarding one another as

members of the same moral community. In fact, the term civilization in its origi
was denounced as
nal usage insulting, and UN General Assembly resolutions
that claims about the level of civilizational backwardness could not be
specified
allowed to delay grants of independence. Indeed, the drafting of theUniversal
one norm to the other,
Declaration segued neatly from arguing that "civilized
states" were to be
equated with respect for "fundamental human rights."

To be sure, Western civilization?a

phrase that asserted America's role as
heir to a fading Europe?became part of a beleaguered liberal tradition's strug

gle against totalitarianism. American intellectuals were prone, naturally, to such

a view,
especially
as
they tended to worry about what one might call a spirituality
deficit in a culture defined by its technological and especially industrial charac
ter. The United States could preserve European values and save its soul in the

process. In 1941, perhaps the most prominent exponent of this view, University
of Chicago professorJohn Nef, founded theCommittee on the Study of Civiliza
tion (note the singular). Nef had long argued that the United States had to save
civilization as it in Europe, and that American universities in particu
collapsed
lar needed to act as agents of spiritual transformation, truth and the
preaching
universal values embodied in theWestern canon. (Nef was eventually persuaded
to change the title to the more neutral Committee on Social
Thought, in which
form it survives to this day.)
But others found this kind of moral absolutism anachronistic and parochial.
The dominant paradigm in American international relations thought in the
1950s moved in an entirely different direction, toward the cult of national inter

est, of realism as propounded by Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, and others.

In realist thought there was little or no space for civilizational aspirations and the
moral certainty that accompanied them. And even those who did take the idea of
civilization seriously saw the postwar of the idea of humanity?the
globalization
extension of the idea of the Family of Man into the colonial Third World?as
that necessitated a much greater modesty about the pretensions of
something
Western civilization. Inside the universities, meanwhile, the rise of anthropology

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 Mark Mazower

fed into the development of area studies and courses on "non-Western civiliza

tions," while the moral certainties that had the old Victorian stan
underpinned
dard of civilization were now decried as unscientific idealism by a new
generation
of social scientists. Civilization met social science and dissolved into
increasingly
the more comfortable language of culture.
After 1945, therefore, claims to civilization were made in a very different,
and much less propitious context for interventionist policies than had been the
case of civilization had made the
previously. The old standard being civilized

precondition for being independent. Now, during the Cold War, independence
was
granted in the context of a struggle between rival superpowers and civiliza
in less morally loaded terms as simply was
tion?parsed being modern?and
something tobe attained with thehelp of technical and social scientificexpertise
and means of state policy and external assistance. But what did civilization
by
in the new sense the defense of property
Cold War actually mean? Rationality,
rights, to be sure. And
liberty? Initially yes, but as modernization theorists came
to entertain doubts about the capacity of Third World countries to modernize

the spread of freedom came to be

under democratic leadership, equated with
the defense of property, the leadership of army generals, and just about anything
that suited its proponents.
In this postwar world, law and claims of ethical no
superiority longer offered
justifications for intervention, least of all to defend rights. As international orga
nizations like the UN backtracked from earlier, more interventionist regimes
where was concerned, itwas NGOs like Amnesty International that
sovereignty
acted as the chief defenders of individuals and collective groups against their
own governments. But this was a much weaker kind of defense than the impera
tives of civilization itself. In short, the collapse of the old civilizational certainties
fostered a more sense of international even as it weakened
global community
the system's capacity to force through observation of rights of various kinds. A
combination of NGOs and rhetorical exhortation little headway with the
made

sovereign states of the former colonial world. Neither the UN nor regional orga
nizations produced enforceable rights regimes. Perhaps this helps explain why,
in the 1990s, with the re-emergence of genocide as an international
problem,
frustration with the UN's paralysis generated calls for a new basis for interven

tion, new criticisms of the doctrine of sovereign sanctity, and calls for some kind
of return to an idealized version of nineteenth-century liberal imperialism.
In 2005, aftermuch prodding fromKofi Annan, and guided by adviserswho
had over inaction in the Balkans and Africa a decade earlier, UN
anguished
members for the first time their so-called to Protect"
recognized "Responsibility

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 PAVED INTENSIONS

populations from their own governments in the case of egregious human rights
violations. But because this new responsibility required Security Council back
was
ing, it ignored the way the organization actually organized. American frus
tration at Security Council paralysis has led in turn to demands to replace?or
UN with a of Democracies" that can act when state
supplement?the "League
leaders forfeit their right to rule by causing humanitarian crises. Here, too, the

sovereignty criterion is under challenge.

But that is not so surprising as the way proponents of such arrangements

unproblematically
return to the
language of civilization in the name of defend

ing rights.Even before 9/11, Kofi Annan had identified theUN with this, talking
about one on shared values of tolerance and freedom.
"global civilization based
It is a civilization defined by its tolerance of dissent, its celebration of cultural
on fundamental,
diversity, its insistence universal human rights, and its belief in
the right of people everywhere to have a say in how they are Now,
governed."
as before, and the language of humanity fuse so as to be
paternalism deeply
inextricable. As a result, it is difficult to avoid seeing such moves, for all their
as exercises in for a world centered on
self-proclaimed practicality, nostalgia
and values," at the very moment when the world ismoving in
Europe "European
a different direction. ?

84 WORLD AFFAIRS

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