book Wi2003 composite · 2019-12-14 · Rwanda, or make the supposedly civi-lized countries ofthe...

coming up in Dædalus:

on the meaningof science

on learning

on secularization& fundamentalism

on time

Anthony Lewis The challenge of global justice now 5

Martha C. Nussbaum Compassion & terror 10

Stanley Hoffmann World governance: beyond utopia 27

Charles Beitz What human rights mean 36

Jack Goldsmith &Stephen D. Krasner The limits of idealism 47

Jean Bethke Elshtain Coercive justice 64

Gary J. Bass Atrocity & legalism 73

Anne-Marie Slaughter Everyday global governance 83

Carl Kaysen &George Rathjens The case for a un force 91

John Hollander The Institute 105

Mary Morris Exchanges 106

Wendy L. Freedman on the age of the universe 122

Daniel C. Dennett on failures of freedom & the fear of science 126

Bonnie Costello on poetry & the idea of nature 131

DædalusJournal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Winter 2003

comment

on international justice

poetry

½ction

notesD

ædalus

Winter 20

03: on international justice

U.S. $9.95/Canada $12.95

Thomas Gold, Michael Rosbash, Danielle Allen, Anthony Grafton,J. Hillis Miller, David S. Landes, Jennifer M. Groh & Michael S.Gazzaniga, D. Graham Burnett, Richard K. Fenn, and MaryDouglas, Michael Thompson & Marco Verweij

Alan Lightman, Evelyn Fox Keller, Peter Wolynes, Susan Haack,David Pingree, Peter Pesic, Margaret C. Jacob, and others

Alison Gopnik, Howard Gardner, Susan Carey, PatriciaChurchland, Elizabeth Spelke, Daniel Povinelli, Clark Glymour,Michael Tomasello, and others

a symposium featuring Nikki Keddie, Martin E. Marty, JamesCarroll, Henry Munson, Christopher Hitchens, and others

Martin Seligman, Richard Easterlin, Martha C. Nussbaum, AnnaWierzbicka, Bernard Reginster, Robert H. Frank, Julia Annas, EdDiener, and others

on happiness

plus poetry by Susan Howe, Lucie Brock-Broido, Les Murray &c.;½ction by Rick Moody, Lee K. Abbott &c.; and notes by DanielSchorr, Nathan Glazer, Yi-Fu Tuan, Jennifer Hochschild, BernardMcGinn, Michael Traynor, Gerald Early, Perez Zagorin, Robert C.Post &c.

How should the world deal with viola-tions of human rights? Consider twotests of that question.

In the early 1990s, Serbian forces, car-rying out what they called ethnic cleans-ing, raped and tortured and murderedthousands of Muslims in Bosnia. Serbiansnipers in the surrounding hills pickedoff children on the streets of Sarajevo.The world did nothing meaningful tostop the savagery. West European coun-tries sent troops and promised to protectdeclared ‘safe areas’–a promise whoseemptiness was exposed when Serbianforces entered the ‘safe area’ of Srebreni-ca and killed seven thousand Muslimmen. Two U.S. presidents, the ½rst Bushand Clinton, rejected proposals thatAmerica intervene with force. But theshame of Srebrenica ½nally forced Presi-dent Clinton to act. He called for thenato bombing of Serbian military tar-gets. The Serbs quickly agreed to a cease-½re, and then accepted the Daytonagreements that ended the ½ghting.

In December of 2002, the British for-eign secretary, Jack Straw, published adossier of human rights violations by theIraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein: system-atic rape, torture, gassing, public be-

headings, mass executions. All were de-signed to suppress any resistance to theSaddam government, which the Britishdossier called a “regime of unique hor-ror.” That Saddam had engaged in inhu-manities on a gross scale could not bedoubted. He used chemical weaponsagainst Halabja, a Kurdish town innorthern Iraq. He has killed more peoplethan the two hundred thousand whodied in the Bosnian war. Yet many sup-porters of human rights who hadpressed for international intervention tostop the atrocities in Bosnia stronglyopposed President Bush’s idea of war onSaddam Hussein’s Iraq. Amnesty Inter-national accused Foreign SecretaryStraw of “cold and calculated manipula-tion” of human rights violations in Iraqto advance the cause of war.

The two cases show that whether andhow to intervene on behalf of humanrights is a complicated question. Whatwas right in Bosnia does not provide asure answer for other times, otherplaces. And the two cases show some-thing else: The presidency of George W.Bush has drastically changed the termsof the discussion on international hu-man rights.

The essays in this issue of Dædalus ex-plore fundamental aspects of the humanrights question. Martha Nussbaum’s dis-cusses a human trait that underlies muchof the cruelty that human beings haveinflicted on each other over the ages: ourability to believe that people of a differ-ent race or nation or color or religion are

Dædalus Winter 2003 5

Comment by Anthony Lewis

The challenge of global justice now

Anthony Lewis, a Fellow of the American Acade-my since 1991, frequently writes about political,legal, and foreign policy issues for “The New YorkReview of Books,” among other publications.Until his retirement in 2001, he was for thirty-twoyears a columnist for “The New York Times.”

less human than ourselves. The Holo-caust might have been expected to shockus out of such thinking. But its lessondid not prevent genocide in Bosnia orRwanda, or make the supposedly civi-lized countries of the world act against itin a timely way. There seems to me to bea tinge of despair in Professor Nuss-baum’s prescription that “an educationin common human weakness and vul-nerability should be a very profound partof the education of all children.” Atheni-ans and Trojans, Hutus and Tutsis: If youprick us, do we not bleed?

At the other end of the problem fromits origins is the question of how inter-national society in the twenty-½rst cen-tury can control the base instincts ofman. The essays range from the vision ofStanley Hoffmann–a world with insti-tutions to investigate abuses and punishthe abusers–to the skepticism of JackGoldsmith and Stephen D. Krasner, theirwarnings about political realities and thedangers of utopianism.

The discussion of whether and how tointervene comes in a remarkable histori-cal context. Consciousness of the prob-lem–of the possibility of internationalintervention–developed slowly, thensuddenly accelerated and became a ma-jor strand of policy in the world.

What might be called the beginningcame in 1876, when Gladstone, the greatLiberal British prime minister, then outof of½ce, published a pamphlet on whathe called the “Bulgarian Horrors,” thereported Turkish massacre of thousandsof Bulgarians in what was then the Otto-man Empire. Disraeli, Gladstone’s long-time political opponent, said the pam-phlet was “vindictive and ill-written,”adding with characteristic Disraelimockery that the pamphlet was “of allthe Bulgarian horrors perhaps the great-est.” But the British public bought twohundred thousand copies.

The idea that outsiders should stop agovernment from mistreating its owncitizens was blocked then, and for nearlya century after, by the concept, in inter-national law and politics, of inviolatenational sovereignty. The U.S. ambassa-dor to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Mor-genthau Sr., made that plain in a cable tothe State Department during the Armen-ian genocide in 1915. “It is dif½cult forme to restrain myself from doing some-thing to stop this attempt to exterminatea race,” he said, “but I realize that I amhere as ambassador and must abide bythe principles of non-interference withthe internal affairs of another country.”

After World War II the United Nationsadopted the Convention Against Geno-cide, giving the phenomenon a nameand committing all the ratifying pow-ers–including, eventually, the UnitedStates–to act if and when there wasanother mortal assault on a populationgroup. But the convention was not en-forced. Samantha Power tells the storyin her chilling book A Problem From Hell.The title comes from a comment byWarren Christopher, President Clinton’s½rst secretary of state. It was what hecalled the genocidal situation in Bosnia,where America did not act for yearsbecause Clinton thought no seriousAmerican interest at stake. Or, to put itmore realistically, he thought the Ameri-can public might not support a riskyventure in a far-off country of which itknew little. The same lack of politicalwill led the U.S. and other governmentsto ignore warnings of genocide in Rwan-da. Extremist Hutus were left free to killeight hundred thousand of their fellowcitizens in one hundred days.

But the failed response to genocidewas paralleled, in the last third of thetwentieth century, by a development ofquite a different character: the rise ofprivate organizations that took up the

6 Dædalus Winter 2003

Comment byAnthonyLewis

cause of international human rights andhad an enormous impact on public opin-ion and of½cial policy. Amnesty Interna-tional, then Human Rights Watch, andmany other groups achieved far morethan nearly anyone expected.

The human rights organizations publi-cized individual cases of tyranny, captur-ing the public imagination with the sto-ries of Soviet dissidents and the victimsof Latin-American dictatorships. At theirurging, Congress passed legislation lim-iting U.S. relationships with govern-ments that violated human rights. Presi-dent Carter created the new position ofAssistant Secretary of State for HumanRights.

The growing concern about humanrights had a powerful effect–a quiteunexpected one–on the Soviet Union.Soviet leaders pressed for years for aConference on Security and Cooperationin Europe, which they wanted to legit-imize the division of the continent be-tween East and West. Western govern-ments reluctantly agreed to hold theconference at Helsinki in 1975. The Hel-sinki Act, agreed there, included pas-sages protecting human rights–amongother things forbidding punishment forpolitical beliefs. That ‘basket’ of the act,as it was called, was considered unim-portant. It turned out otherwise. Sovietand East European dissidents set upwhat they called Helsinki Watch Com-mittees. In the words of Michael Ignati-eff, director of the Carr Center on Hu-man Rights Policy at Harvard, “Theycreated an alternative pole of moral le-gitimacy.”

In the West, Professor Ignatieff wrote,the idea of human rights went “frombeing the insurgent creed of dissidentsand activists to something like the rulingideology.” It happened in the time of ageneration: an astonishing event.

The concept of inviolate national sov-ereignty yielded to new mechanisms for

the international enforcement of humanrights. One is regional systems of protec-tion, the notable example being theEuropean Covenant on Human Rights,enforced by a commission and a court;Britain, for instance, has been forced tochange a number of its laws after theywere found in violation of the covenant.Another is the exercise of jurisdiction bynational courts against wrongdoers fromother countries; the dramatic case wasthe decision by Britain’s highest court,the House of Lords, that Augusto Pino-chet, the former Chilean tyrant, who wasin Britain as a visitor, should be deliv-ered up to a Spanish judge investigatinghim for violations of the internationalconvention against torture.

War crimes have been dealt with byvarious methods. Military interventionwas used in Bosnia and then Kosovo tostop the brutality. Perpetrators weretried in special war crimes courts: notonly to bring them to justice but, byholding them accountable, to meet thefeelings of the victims and break thecycle of violence. The United Nations setup war crimes tribunals for the formerYugoslavia and Rwanda. And then al-most all the countries of the worldagreed to create an International Crimi-nal Court to try those charged withgenocide and crimes against humanity.It was the capstone of the new structureof human rights enforcement.

An International Commission onIntervention and State Sovereignty,1 es-tablished by the government of Canadaand several foundations, produced a re-port in 2001 that stated with admirableclarity the contemporary view on theseissues. The report was entitled “The Re-sponsibility to Protect,” and that was its


The challengeof globaljustice now

1 The commission’s co-chairmen were GarethEvans of Australia and Mohamed Sahnoun ofAlgeria. Members included Cyril Ramaphosaof South Africa, Klaus Naumann of Germany,and Michael Ignatieff.

message: All states have a responsibilityto protect their citizens; if their leadersare unable or unwilling to do so, theyrender their countries liable to militaryintervention–authorized by the Securi-ty Council or, failing that (as in the caseof Kosovo), by individual countries in“conscience-shocking situations.”

That was the framework, the interna-tional state of mind, in which this issueof Dædalus was conceived. Though therewould be sharp differences over the wis-dom of acting this way or that in particu-lar situations, there was a general sensethat human rights had become a primeconcern of the international order. Na-tional governments, most of all the U.S.government, were under public pressureto act against what Gladstone long agocalled horrors–to act unilaterally if needbe.

But President Bush has shaken thatframework. He set out to destroy theInternational Criminal Court, on theground that somehow, some day, anAmerican might be prosecuted before it.He took a dim view generally of treatiesand other international obligations lim-iting American freedom of action; he re-jected the Kyoto Agreement on climatechange and withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The terrorist attacks of September 11,2001, might have been met by a U.S. callfor international justice. Gary Bass, inhis essay, makes a compelling case fortreating the World Trade Center mas-sacre as a crime against humanity. Byseeking an international tribunal ofsome kind, the Bush administrationcould have focused the minds of peoplearound the world on the criminal natureof the enterprise.

Instead, President Bush opted for themetaphor, and the reality, of war. Hiscourse has turned millions from sympa-thy with America to hatred. But it was

never likely that George W. Bush wouldlook to law, least of all international law,as one way of answering terrorism. In-deed, his administration has followedthe events of September 11 with repres-sive domestic legal measures–includingthe claim of a right to hold anyonetermed an “enemy combatant” inde½-nitely without access to counsel. Withthat course, his administration has lostthe great moral and political advantageof being able to hold up the UnitedStates as an exemplar of respect for lawin contrast to the violent lawlessness ofthe terrorists.

In another way, too, the framework ofthinking on human rights has been dras-tically affected by President Bush’scourse of action since September 11. Hequickly shifted his emphasis from a waron terrorism to a proposed war on Iraq.And he claimed a right to launch thatwar unilaterally if it was not authorizedby the un Security Council.

Mr. Bush’s unilateralism raised hardquestions for those of us who arguedstrongly for unilateral intervention, ifnecessary, to stop the savagery of humanrights violators–who called speci½callyfor American intervention against Slo-bodan Milosevic of Serbia. The disquietcaused by Mr. Bush is indicated by thereaction of Amnesty International toForeign Secretary Straw’s dossier of hu-man rights outrages by Saddam Hussein.

Professor Stephen Holmes of NewYork University, writing in the LondonReview of Books,2 blames the supportersof human rights intervention for layingthe groundwork for President Bush’simperial view of American power andright: “The 1990s advocates of humani-


Comment byAnthonyLewis

2 The issue of 14 November 2002. He was re-viewing Samantha Power’s book and one byDavid Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush,Clinton and the Generals.

tarian intervention . . . have helped rescuefrom the ashes of Vietnam the ideal ofAmerica as a global policeman, undaunt-ed by other countries’ borders, defend-ing civilization against the forces of‘evil.’ By denouncing the U.S. primarilyfor standing idly by when atrocity abroadoccurs, they have helped repopularizethe idea of America as a potentiallybenign imperial power. They havebreathed new life into old messianic fan-tasies. . . . By focusing predominantly ongrievous harms caused by American in-action, ½nally, they have obscured publicmemory of grievous harms caused byAmerican action.”

The human rights movement, in itsswift rise to influence, did present a dan-ger of utopian overreaching. But the oc-casional, and hard-won, instances ofAmerican intervention seem to me a

long way from what Stanley Hoffmanncalls President Bush’s “boastful unilater-alism.” There was no great world publicrecoil from the tardy effort to stop theslaughter of Bosnians; it was seen, rath-er, as a rare example of a great poweracting for unsel½sh, largely moral rea-sons. That is hardly ‘imperial’ in thesame sense as President Bush’s assertionthat America has the duty and right toinitiate preemptive war when it per-ceives a threat.

The essays in this issue explore thepros and cons, the advantages and dan-gers of taking human rights seriously.For me, one thing is certain. We shouldnot want the twenty-½rst century to bewhat Hannah Arendt called its predeces-sor: “this terrible century.”

–December 6, 2002


The challengeof globaljustice now

The name of our land has been wiped out.

–Euripides, Trojan Women

Not to be a fan of the Greens or Blues atthe races, or the light-armed or heavy-armed gladiators at the Circus.

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

1The towers of Troy are burning. All thatis left of the once-proud city is a group ofragged women, bound for slavery, their

husbands dead in battle, their sons mur-dered by the conquering Greeks, theirdaughters raped. Hecuba their queen in-vokes the king of the gods, using, re-markably, the language of democraticcitizenship: “Son of Kronus, Council-President [prytanis] of Troy, father whogave us birth, do you see these unde-served sufferings that your Trojan peoplebear?” The Chorus answers grimly, “Hesees, and yet the great city is no city. Ithas perished, and Troy exists no longer.”Hecuba and the Chorus conclude thatthe gods are not worth calling on, andthat the very name of their land has beenwiped out.

This ending is as bleak as any in thehistory of tragic drama–death, rape,slavery, ½re destroying the towers, thecity’s very name effaced from the recordof history by the acts of rapacious andmurderous Greeks. And yet, of course, itdid not happen that way, not exactly:this story of Troy’s fall is being enacted,some six hundred years after the event,by a company of Greek actors, in theGreek language of a Greek poet, in thepresence of the citizens of Athens, mostpowerful of Greek cities. Hecuba’s cry tothe gods even casts Zeus as a peculiarlyAthenian of½cial–president of the citycouncil.

So the name of Troy wasn’t wiped outafter all. The imagination of its con-


Martha C. Nussbaum

Compassion & terror

Martha C. Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distin-guished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at theUniversity of Chicago, is appointed in the philoso-phy department, Law School, and DivinitySchool. A Fellow of the American Academy since1988, Nussbaum is the author of numerous books,including “The Fragility of Goodness: Luck andEthics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy” (1986),“The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice inHellenistic Ethics” (1994), and “Upheavals ofThought: The Intelligence of Emotions”(2001).This essay was originally delivered as the ½rstKristeller Memorial Lecture at Columbia Uni-versity in April of 2002. Nussbaum writes,“Although I am sure Paul Kristeller would havetaken issue with some aspects of its approach toclassical texts, it is offered as a sincere tribute to hislife of committed scholarship, which did so muchto keep these texts alive in and for our time.”

querors was haunted by it, transmittedit, and mourned it. Obsessively theGreek poets returned to this scene of de-struction, typically inviting, as here, theaudience’s compassion for the women ofTroy and blame for their assailants. In itsvery structure the play makes a claim forthe moral value of compassionate imag-ining, as it asks its audience to partake inthe terror of a burning city, of murderand rape and slavery. Insofar as mem-bers of the audience are engaged by thisdrama, feeling fear and grief for the con-quered city, they demonstrate the abilityof compassion to cross lines of time,place, and nation–and also, in the caseof many audience members, the line ofsex, perhaps more dif½cult yet to cross.

Nor was the play a purely aestheticevent divorced from political reality. Thedramatic festivals of Athens were sacredcelebrations strongly connected to theidea of democratic deliberation, and theplays of Euripides were particularly well-known for their engagement with con-temporary events. The Trojan Women’s½rst audience had recently voted to putto death the men of the rebellious col-ony of Melos and to enslave its womenand children. Euripides invited this audi-ence to contemplate the real humanmeaning of its actions. Compassion forthe women of Troy should at least causemoral unease, reminding Athenians ofthe full and equal humanity of peoplewho live in distant places, their fully hu-man capacity for suffering.

But did those imaginations really crossthose lines? Think again of that invoca-tion of Zeus. Trojans, if they worshippedZeus as king of gods at all, surely did notrefer to him as the president of the citycouncil; prytanis is strictly an Athenianlegal term. So it would appear that Hecu-ba is not a Trojan but a Greek. And herimagination is a Greek democratic (and,we might add, mostly male) imagina-

tion. Maybe that’s a good thing, in thesense that the audience is surely invitedto view her as their fellow and equal. Butit still should give us pause.

Did compassion really enable thoseGreeks to comprehend the real humani-ty of others, or did it stop short, allowingthem to reaf½rm the essential Greeknessof everything that’s human? Of coursecompassion required making the Tro-jans somehow familiar, so that Greekscould see their own vulnerability inthem, and feel terror and pity, as fortheir own relations. But it’s easy for thefamiliarization to go too far: they arejust us, and we are the ones who sufferhumanly. Not those other ones, overthere in Melos.

America’s towers, too, have burned.Compassion and terror now inform thefabric of our lives. And in those lives wesee evidence of the good work of com-passion, as Americans make real tothemselves the sufferings of so manypeople whom they never would other-wise have thought about: New York ½re-½ghters, that gay rugby player whohelped bring down the fourth plane, be-reaved families of so many national andethnic origins. More rarely our compas-sion even crosses national boundaries:the tragedy led an unprecedented num-ber of Americans to sympathize withthe plight of Afghan women under theTaliban.

Yet at the same time, we also see evi-dence of how narrow and self-servingour sense of compassion can sometimesbe. Some of us may notice with new ap-preciation the lives of Arab Americansamong us–but others regard the Mus-lims in our midst with increasing wari-ness and mistrust. I am reminded of aSikh taxi driver describing how often hewas told to go home to ‘his own coun-try’–even though he came to the United


Compassion& terror


Martha C.Nussbaumoninternationaljustice

States as a political refugee from themiseries of police repression in the Pun-jab. And while our leaders have preachedthe virtues of tolerance, they have alsoresorted to the polarizing language of‘us’ versus ‘them,’ as they marshal popu-lar opinion to pursue a war on terrorism.

Indeed, the events of September 11make vivid a philosophical problem thathas been debated from the time of Eu-ripides through much of the history ofthe Western philosophical tradition.This is the question of what to do aboutcompassion, given its obvious impor-tance in shaping the civic imagination,but given, too, its obvious propensity forself-serving narrowness. Is compassion,with all its limits, our best hope as we tryto educate citizens to think well abouthuman relations both inside the nationand across national boundaries? Sosome thinkers have suggested. I countEuripides among them, and would alsoinclude in this category Aristotle,Rousseau, Hume, and Adam Smith. Or iscompassion a threat to good politicalthinking and the foundations of a trulyjust world community? So the Greekand Roman Stoics thought, and beforethem Plato, and after them Spinoza and(again) Adam Smith.

The enemies of compassion hold thatwe cannot build a stable and lasting con-cern for humanity on the basis of such aslippery and uneven motive; impartialmotives based on ideas of dignity and re-spect should take its place. The friendsof compassion reply that without build-ing political morality on what we knowand on what has deep roots in our child-hood attachments, we will be left with amorality that is empty of urgency–a‘watery’ concern, as Aristotle put it.

This debate continues in contempo-rary political and legal thought. In a re-cent exchange about animal rights, J. M.Coetzee invented a character who argues

that the capacity for sympathetic imagi-nation is our best hope for moral good-ness in this area. Peter Singer replies,with much plausibility, that the sympa-thetic imagination is all too anthropo-centric and we had better not rely on itto win rights for creatures whose livesare very different from our own.1

I shall not trace the history of the de-bate in this essay. Instead, I shall focuson its central philosophical ideas and tryto sort them out, offering a limited de-fense of compassion and the tragic imag-ination, and then making some sugges-tions about how its pernicious tenden-cies can best be countered–with partic-ular reference throughout to our currentpolitical situation.

2Let me set the stage for the analysis tofollow by turning to Smith, who, as youwill have noticed, turns up in my taxon-omy on both sides of the debate. Smithoffers one of the best accounts we haveof compassion, and of the ethicalachievements of which this moral senti-ment is capable. But later, in a section ofThe Theory of Moral Sentiments entitled“Of the Sense of Duty,” he solemnlywarns against trusting this imperfectsentiment too far when duty is what weare trying to get clear.

Smith’s concern, like mine, is with ourdif½culty keeping our minds ½xed on thesufferings of people who live on the oth-er side of the world:

Let us suppose that the great empire ofChina, with all its myriads of inhabitants,was suddenly swallowed up by an earth-quake, and let us consider how a man ofhumanity in Europe, who had no sort of

1 J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, ed. AmyGutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Universi-ty Press, 1999).

connexion with that part of the world,would be affected upon receiving intelli-gence of this dreadful calamity. He would,I imagine, ½rst of all, express very stronglyhis sorrow for the misfortune of that un-happy people, he would make many mel-ancholy reflections upon the precarious-ness of human life, and the vanity of allthe labours of man, which could thus beannihilated in a moment . . . . And when allthis ½ne philosophy was over, when allthese humane sentiments had been oncefairly expressed, he would pursue his busi-ness or his pleasure, take his repose or hisdiversion, with the same ease and tran-quility, as if no such accident had hap-pened. The most frivolous disaster whichcould befal himself would occasion a morereal disturbance. If he was to lose his little½nger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them,he will snore with the more profoundsecurity over the ruin of a hundred mil-lions of his brethren, and the destructionof that immense multitude seems plainlyan object less interesting to him, than thispaltry misfortune of his own.

That’s just the issue that should troubleus as we think about American reactionsto September 11. We see a lot of ‘humanesentiments’ around us, and extensionsof sympathy beyond people’s usualsphere of concern. But more often thannot, those sentiments stop short at thenational boundary.

We think the events of September 11are bad because they involved us and ournation. Not just human lives, but Ameri-can lives. The world came to a stop–in away that it rarely has for Americanswhen disaster has befallen human be-ings in other places. The genocide inRwanda didn’t even work up enoughemotion in us to prompt humanitarianintervention. The plight of innocent ci-vilians in Iraq never made it onto ournational radar screen. Floods, earth-

quakes, cyclones, the daily deaths ofthousands from preventable malnutri-tion and disease– none of these makesthe American world come to a standstill,none elicits a tremendous outpouring ofgrief and compassion. At most we getwhat Smith so trenchantly described: amomentary flicker of feeling, quicklydissipated by more pressing concernsclose to home.

Frequently, however, we get a compas-sion that is not only narrow, failing to in-clude the distant, but also polarizing, di-viding the world into an ‘us’ and a‘them.’ Compassion for our own chil-dren can so easily slip over into a desireto promote the well-being of our chil-dren at the expense of other people’schildren. Similarly, compassion for ourfellow Americans can all too easily slipover into a desire to make America comeout on top and to subordinate othernations.

One vivid example of this slip tookplace at a baseball game I went to atComiskey Park, the ½rst game played inChicago after September 11–and a gameagainst the Yankees, so there was height-ened awareness of the situation of NewYork and its people. Things began well,with a moving ceremony commemorat-ing the ½re½ghters who had lost theirlives and honoring local ½re½ghters whohad gone to New York afterwards to helpout. There was even a lot of cheeringwhen the Yankees took the ½eld, a highlyunusual transcendence of local attach-ments. But as the game went on and thebeer began flowing, one heard, increas-ingly, the chant “U-S-A. U-S-A,” a chant½rst heard in 1980 during an Olympichockey match in which the UnitedStates defeated Russia. In that context,the chant had expressed a wish forAmerica to humiliate its Cold War ene-my; as time passed, it became a generalway of expressing the desire to crush an


Compassion& terror

opponent, whoever it might be. Whenthe umpire made a bad call against theSox, a group in the bleachers turned onhim, chanting “U-S-A.” From ‘humanesentiments’ we had turned back to thepain in our little ½nger.

With such examples before us, howcan we trust compassion and the imagi-nation of the other that it contains? Butif we don’t trust that, what else can weplausibly rely on to transform horrorinto a shared sense of ethical responsi-bility?

I shall proceed as follows. First, I shalloffer an analysis of the emotion of com-passion, focusing on the thoughts andimaginings on which it is based. Thiswill give us a clearer perspective on howand where it is likely to go wrong. Sec-ond, I shall examine the countertradi-tion’s proposal that we can base politicalmorality on respect for dignity, doingaway with appeals to compassion. Thisproposal, at ½rst attractive, contains, oncloser inspection, some deep dif½culties.Third, I will return to compassion, ask-ing how, if we feel we need it as a publicmotive, we might educate it so as toovercome, as far as we can, the problemthat Smith identi½ed.

More than a warm feeling in the gut,compassion involves a set of thoughts,often quite complex.2 We need to dissectthem, if we are to make progress in un-derstanding how it goes wrong and howit may be steered aright. There is a gooddeal of agreement about this among phi-losophers as otherwise diverse as Aristo-tle and Rousseau, and also among con-temporary psychologists and sociolo-

gists who have done empirical work onthe emotion.3

Compassion is an emotion directed atanother person’s suffering or lack ofwell-being. It requires the thought thatthe other person is in a bad way, and apretty seriously bad way. (Thus we don’tfeel compassion for people’s loss of triv-ial items like toothbrushes and paperclips.) It contains within itself an ap-praisal of the seriousness of various pre-dicaments. Let us call this the judgment ofseriousness.

Notice that this assessment is madefrom the point of view of the personwho has the emotion. It does not neglectthe actual suffering of the other, whichcertainly should be estimated in takingthe measure of the person’s predica-ment. And yet it does not necessarilytake at face value the estimate of the pre-dicament this person will be able toform. As Smith emphasized, we fre-quently have great compassion for peo-ple whose predicament is that they havelost their powers of thought; even if theyseem like happy children, we regard thisas a terrible catastrophe. On the otherside, when people moan and groan aboutsomething, we don’t necessarily havecompassion for them: for we may thinkthat they are not really in a bad predica-ment. Thus when very rich people grum-ble about taxes, many of us don’t havethe slightest compassion for them: for



2 I am drawing on an analysis of compassionfor which I argue at greater length in Nuss-baum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence ofEmotions (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001), chaps. 6–8.

3 C. Daniel Batson of the University of Kansasshould be mentioned with honor here, becausehe has not only done remarkable empiricalwork, but has also combined it with a concep-tual and analytic clarity that is rare in social sci-ence research of this type. See in particular TheAltruism Question (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erl-baum, 1991). Candace Clark’s sociological studyis also exemplary: Misery and Company: Sympa-thy in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1997).


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we judge that it is only right and properthat they should pay what they are pay-ing–and probably a lot more than that.So the judgment of seriousness alreadyinvolves quite a complex feat of imagi-nation: it involves both trying to lookout at the situation from the sufferingperson’s own viewpoint and then assess-ing the person’s own assessment. Com-plex though the feat is, young childreneasily learn it, feeling sympathy with thesuffering of animals and other children,but soon learning, as well, to withholdsympathy if they judge that the person isjust a crybaby, or spoiled–and, ofcourse, to have sympathy for the pre-dicament of an animal who is dead orunconscious, even if it is not actuallysuffering.

Next comes the judgment of nondesert.Hecuba asked Zeus to witness the unde-served sufferings of the Trojan women,using the Greek word anaxia, which ap-pears in Aristotle’s de½nition of tragiccompassion. Hecuba’s plea, like Aristo-tle’s de½nition, implies that we will nothave compassion if we believe the per-son fully deserves the suffering. Theremay be a measure of blame, but then inour compassion we typically register thethought that the suffering exceeds themeasure of the fault. The Trojan womenare an unusually clear case, because,more than most tragic ½gures, they en-dure the consequences of events inwhich they had no active part at all. Butwe can see that nondesert is a salientpart of our compassion even when we doalso blame the person: typically we feelcompassion at the punishment of crimi-nal offenders, to the extent that we thinkcircumstances beyond their control areat least in good measure responsible fortheir becoming the bad people they are.People who have the idea that the poorbrought their poverty upon themselves

by laziness fail, for that reason, to havecompassion for them.4

Next there is a thought much stressedin the tradition that I shall call the judg-ment of similar possibilities: Aristotle,Rousseau, and others suggest that wehave compassion only insofar as we be-lieve that the suffering person sharesvulnerabilities and possibilities with us. Ithink we can clearly see that this judg-ment is not strictly necessary for theemotion, as the other two seem to be.We have compassion for nonhuman ani-mals, without basing it on any imaginedsimilarity–although, of course, we needsomehow to make sense of their predica-ment as serious and bad. We also imag-ine that an invulnerable god can havecompassion for mortals, and it doesn’tseem that this idea is conceptually con-fused. For the ½nite imaginations of hu-man beings, however, the thought ofsimilar possibilities is a very importantpsychological mechanism throughwhich we get clear about the seriousnessof another person’s plight. This thoughtis often accompanied by empatheticimagining, in which we put ourselves inthe suffering person’s place, imaginetheir predicament as our own.

Finally, there is one thing more, notmentioned in the tradition, which I be-lieve must be added in order to make theaccount complete. This is what, in writ-ing on the emotions, I have called the eu-daimonistic judgment, namely, a judgmentthat places the suffering person or per-sons among the important parts of thelife of the person who feels the emotion.In my more general analysis of emo-tions, I argue that they are always eudai-monistic, meaning focused on theagent’s most important goals and proj-

4 Clark’s empirical survey of American atti-tudes ½nds this a prominent reason for therefusal of compassion for the poor.



ects. Thus we feel fear about damagesthat we see as signi½cant for our ownwell-being and our other goals; we feelgrief at the loss of someone who is al-ready invested with a certain importancein our scheme of things. Eudaimonism isnot egoism. I am not claiming that emo-tions always view events and peoplemerely as means to the agent’s own sat-isfaction or happiness. But I do meanthat the things that occasion a strongemotion in us are things that correspondto what we have invested with impor-tance in our account to ourselves ofwhat is worth pursuing in life.

Compassion can evidently go wrong inseveral different ways. It can get thejudgment of nondesert wrong, sympa-thizing with people who actually don’tdeserve sympathy and withholding sym-pathy from those who do. Even morefrequently, it can get the judgment ofseriousness wrong, ascribing too muchimportance to the wrong things or toolittle to things that have great weight.Notice that this problem is closely con-nected to obtuseness about social jus-tice, in the sense, for example, that if wedon’t think a social order unjust for de-nying women the vote, or subordinatingAfrican Americans, then we won’t seethe predicament of women and AfricanAmericans as bad, and we won’t havecompassion for them. We’ll think thatthings are just as they ought to be.Again, if we think it’s unjust to requirerich people to pay capital gains tax, wewill have a misplaced compassion to-ward them. Finally, and obviously, com-passion can get the eudaimonistic judg-ment wrong, putting too few people intothe circle of concern. By my account,then, we won’t have compassion with-out a moral achievement that is at leastcoeval with it.

My account, I think, is able to explainthe unevenness of compassion betterthan other more standard accounts.Compassion begins from where we are,from the circle of our cares and con-cerns. It will be felt only toward thosethings and persons we see as important,and of course most of us most of thetime ascribe importance in a very un-even and inconstant way. Empatheticimagining can sometimes extend the cir-cle of concern. Thus Batson has shownexperimentally that when the story ofanother person’s plight is vividly told,subjects will tend to experience compas-sion toward the person and form proj-ects of helping. This is why I say that themoral achievement of extending con-cern to others needn’t antedate compas-sion, but can be coeval with it. Still,there is a recalcitrance in our emotions,given their link to our daily scheme ofgoals and ends. Smith is right: thinkingthat the poor victims of the disaster inChina are important is easy to do for ashort time, but hard to sustain in thefabric of our daily life; there are so manythings closer to home to distract us, andthese things are likely to be so muchmore thoroughly woven into our schemeof goals.

Let us return to September 11 armedwith this analysis. The astonishingevents made many Americans recognizewith a new vividness the nation itself aspart of their circle of concern. MostAmericans rely on the safety of our insti-tutions and our cities, and don’t reallynotice how much they value them untilthey prove vulnerable–in just the waythat lovers often don’t see how muchthey love until their loved one is ill orthreatened. So our antecedent concernemerged with a new clarity in the emo-tions we experienced. At the same time,we actually extended concern, in many

cases, to people in America who had notpreviously been part of our circle of con-cern at all: the New York ½re½ghters, thevictims of the disasters. We extendedconcern to them both because we heardtheir stories and also, especially, becausewe were encouraged to see them as apart of the America we already loved andfor which we now intensely feared.When disaster struck in Rwanda, we didnot similarly extend concern, or not sta-bly, because there was no antecedent ba-sis for it: suffering Rwandans could notbe seen as part of the larger ‘us’ forwhose fate we trembled. Vivid storiescan create a temporary sense of commu-nity, but they are unlikely to sustain con-cern for long, if there is no pattern ofinteraction that would make the sense ofan ‘us’ an ongoing part of our daily lives.

Things are of course still worse withany group that ½gures in our imagina-tions as a ‘them’ against the ‘us.’ Suchgroups are not only by de½nition non-us,they are also, by threatening the safety ofthe ‘us,’ implicitly bad, deserving of anymisfortune that might strike them. Thisaccounts for the sports-fan mentality soneatly depicted in my baseball story.Compassion for a member of the oppos-ing team? You’ve got to be kidding. “U-S-A” just means kill the ump.

3In light of these dif½culties, it is easy tosee why much of the philosophical tradi-tion has wanted to do away with com-passion as a basis for public choice andto turn, instead, to detached moral prin-ciples whose evenhandedness can be re-lied on. The main candidate for a centralmoral notion has been the idea of hu-man worth and dignity, a principle thathas been put to work from the Stoics andCicero on through Kant and beyond. Weare to recognize that all humans have

dignity, and that this dignity is both in-alienable and equal, not affected by dif-ferences of class, caste, wealth, honor,status, or even sex. The recognition ofhuman dignity is supposed to imposeobligations on all moral agents, whetherthe humans in question are conationalsor foreigners. In general, it enjoins us torefrain from all aggression and fraud,since both are seen as violations of hu-man dignity, ways of fashioning humanbeings into tools for one’s own ends.Out of this basic idea Cicero developedmuch of the basis for modern interna-tional law in the areas of war, punish-ment, and hospitality.5 Other Stoicsused it to criticize conventional normsof patriarchal marriage, the physicalabuse of servants, and many other as-pects of Roman social life.

This Stoic tradition was quite clearthat respect for human dignity couldmove us to appropriate action, both per-sonal and social, without our having torely at all on the messier and more in-constant motive of compassion. Indeed,for separate reasons, which I shall get toshortly, Stoics thought compassion wasnever appropriate, so they could not relyon it.

What I now want to ask is whetherthis countertradition was correct. Re-spect for human dignity looks like theright thing to focus on, something thatcan plausibly be seen as of boundlessworth, constraining all actions in pursuitof well-being, and also as equal, creatinga kingdom of ends in which humans areranked horizontally, so to speak, ratherthan vertically. Why should we not fol-low the countertradition, as in many re-spects we do already–as when constitu-tions make the notion of human dignitycentral to the analysis of constitutional


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5 See my “Duties of Justice, Duties of MaterialAid: Cicero’s Problematic Legacy,” Journal ofPolitical Philosophy 7 (1999): 1–31.

rights,6 as when international humanrights documents apply similar notions.

Now it must be admitted that humandignity is not an altogether clear notion.In what does it consist? Why should wethink that all human life has it? Theminute the Stoic tradition tries to an-swer such questions, problems arise. Inparticular, the answer almost alwaystakes the form of saying, Look at how farwe are above the beasts. Reason, lan-guage, moral capacity–all these are seenas worthy of respect and awe at least inpart because the beasts, so-called, don’thave them, because they make us betterthan others. Of course they wouldn’tseem to make us better if they didn’thave some attraction in themselves. Butthe claim that this dignity resides equal-ly in all humanity all too often relies onthe better-than-the-beasts idea. No mat-ter how we humans vary in our rationaland moral capacities, the idea seems tobe, the weakest among us is light-yearsbeyond those beasts down there, so thedifferences that exist among us in basicpowers become not worth adverting toat all, not sources of differential worth atall. Dignity thus comes to look not like ascalar matter but like an all-or-nothingmatter. You either have it, or, bestially,you don’t.

This view has its moral problems,clearly. Richard Sorabji has shown howit was linked with a tendency to deni-grate the intelligence of animals;7 and ofcourse it has been used, too, not only by

the Stoics but also by Kant and moderncontractarians to deny that we have anyobligations of justice toward nonhumanforms of life. Compassion, if slippery, isat least not dichotomous in this way; itis capable of reaching sympatheticallyinto multiple directions simultaneously,capable, as Coetzee said, of imaginingthe sufferings of animals in the squalidconditions we create for them.

There is another more subtle problemwith the dignity idea. It was crucial, ac-cording to the Stoics, to make dignityradically independent of fortune: all hu-mans have it, no matter where they areborn and how they are treated. It exertsits claim everywhere, and it can never belost. If dignity went up or down with for-tune, it would create ranks of humanbeings: the well-born and healthy will beworth more than the ill-born and hun-gry. So the Stoics understood their proj-ect of making dignity self-suf½cient asessential for the notion of equal respectand regard.

But this move leads to a problem: howcan we give a suf½ciently importantplace to the goods of fortune for politicalpurposes once we admit that the trulyimportant thing, the thing that lies at thecore of our humanity, doesn’t need thegoods of fortune at all? How can we pro-vide suf½cient incentive for politicalplanners to arrange for an adequate dis-tribution of food and shelter and evenpolitical rights and liberties if we saythat dignity is undiminished by the lackof such things?8 Stoic texts thus lookoddly quietistic: respect human dignity,they say. But it doesn’t matter at all what



6 Germany is one salient example. In a forth-coming book, James Whitman describes theway this central notion has constrained legalpractices in Europe generally, especially in thearea of criminal punishment. Dignity, he ar-gues, is a nonhierarchical notion that has re-placed hierarchical orders of rank.

7 Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and HumanMorals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Itha-ca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).

8 I deal with this question at greater length in“Duties of Justice,” and also in “The Worth ofHuman Dignity: Two Tensions in Stoic Cos-mopolitanism,” in Philosophy and Power in theGraeco-Roman World: Essays in Honour of MiriamGrif½n, ed. Gillian Clark and Tessa Rajak (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31–49.

conditions we give people to live in,since dignity is complete and immutableanyway. Seneca, for example, gives mas-ters stern instructions not to beat slavesor use them as sexual tools (Moral Epistle47). But as for the institution of slaveryitself? Well, this does not really matterso much, for the only thing that mattersis the free soul within, and that cannotbe touched by any contingency. Thus,having begun his letter on slavery on anapparently radical note, Seneca slides in-to quietism in the end, when his masterscornfully says, “He is a slave,” and Sen-eca calmly replies, “Will this do him anyharm? [Hoc illi nocebit?]”

Things are actually even worse thanthis. For the minute we start examiningthis reasoning closely, we see that it isnot only quietistic–it is actually inco-herent. Either people need externalthings or they do not. But if they do not,if dignity is utterly unaffected by rapeand physical abuse, then it is not veryeasy, after all, to say what the harm ofbeating or raping a slave is. If thesethings are no harm to the victim, why isit wrong to do them? They seem not dif-ferent from the institution of slavery it-self: will they really do him any harm, ifone maintains that dignity is suf½cientfor eudaimonia, and that dignity is total-ly independent of fortune? So Senecalacks not only a basis for criticizing theinstitution of slavery, but also for thecriticism his letter actually makes, ofcruel and inhumane practices towardslaves.

Kant had a way of confronting thisquestion, and it is a plausible one, withinthe con½nes of what I have called thecountertradition. Kant grants that hu-manity itself, or human worth, is inde-pendent of fortune: under the blows of“step-motherly nature” goodwill stillshines like a jewel for its own sake. Butexternal goods such as money, health,

and social position are still required forhappiness, which we all reasonably pur-sue. So there are still very weighty moralreasons for promoting the happiness ofothers, reasons that can supply both in-dividuals and states with a basis for goodthoughts about the distribution ofgoods.

The Stoics notoriously deny this, hold-ing that virtue is suf½cient for eudaimo-nia. What I want to suggest now is thattheir position on human dignity pushesthem strongly in this direction. Think ofthe person who suffers poverty andhardship. Now either this person hassomething that is beyond price, by com-parison to which all the money andhealth and shelter in the world is asnothing–or she does not have some-thing that is beyond price. Her dignity isjust one part of her happiness–a pieceof it that can itself be victimized andheld hostage to fortune; her human dig-nity is being weighed in the balance withother goods and it no longer looks likethe thing of surpassing, even in½niteworth, that we took it to be. There are,after all, ranks and orders of humanbeings; slavery and abuse can actuallychange people’s situation with regard totheir most important and inclusive end,eudaimonia itself.

Because the Stoics do not want to beforced to that conclusion, they insistthat external goods are not required foreudaimonia: virtue is suf½cient. And ba-sic human dignity, in turn, is suf½cientfor becoming virtuous, if one appliesoneself in the right way. It is for thisdeep reason that the Stoics reject com-passion as a basic social motive, not justbecause it is slippery and uneven. Com-passion gets the world wrong, because itis always wrong to think that a personwho has been hit by misfortune is in abad or even tragic predicament. “Beholdhow tragedy comes about,” writes Epic-


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tetus, “when chance events befall fools.”In other words, only a fool would mindthe events depicted in Euripides’ play,and only fools in the audience wouldview these events as tragic.

So there is a real problem in how, andhow far, the appeal to equal human dig-nity motivates. Looked at super½cially,the idea of respect for human dignity ap-pears to provide a principled, evenhand-ed motive for good treatment of all hu-man beings, no matter where they areplaced. Looked at more deeply, it seemsto license quietism and indifference tothings in the world, on the grounds thatnothing that merely happens to people isreally bad.

We have now seen two grave problemswith the countertradition: what I shallcall the animal problem and what I shallcall the external goods problem. Neither ofthese problems is easy to solve withinthe countertradition. By contrast, theEuripidean tradition of focusing on com-passion as a basic social motive has nosuch problems. Compassion can anddoes cross the species boundary, andwhatever good there may be in our cur-rent treatment of animals is likely to beits work; we are able to extend our imag-inations to understand the sufferings ofanimals who are cruelly treated and tosee that suffering as signi½cant, as unde-served, and to see its potential termina-tion as part of our scheme of goals andprojects.9

As for the problem of external goods,compassion has no such problem, for itis intrinsically focused on the damagesof fortune: its most common objects, as

Aristotle listed them in the Rhetoric, arethe classic tragic predicaments: loss ofcountry, loss of friends, old age, illness,and so on.

But let us suppose that the countertra-dition can solve these two problems,providing people with adequate motivesto address the tragic predicaments. Kantmakes a good start on the external goodsproblem, at least. So let us imagine thatwe have a reliable way of motivatingconduct that addresses human predica-ments, without the uneven partialitythat so often characterizes compassion.A third problem now awaits us. I shallcall it the problem of watery motivation,though we might well call it the problemof death within life.

The term ‘watery motivation’ comesfrom Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s idealcity. Plato tried to remove partiality byremoving family ties and asking all citi-zens to care equally for all other citizens.Aristotle says that the dif½culty with thisstrategy is that “there are two thingsabove all that make people love and carefor something, the thought that it is alltheirs, and the thought that it is the onlyone they have. Neither of these will bepresent in that city” (Pol. 1262b22-3).Because nobody will think of a child thatit is all theirs, entirely their own respon-sibility, the city will, he says, resemble ahousehold in which there are too manyservants so nobody takes responsibilityfor any task. Because nobody will thinkof any child or children that they are theonly ones they have, the intensity of carethat characterizes real families will sim-ply not materialize, and we will have in-stead, he says, a ‘watery’ kind of care allround (Pol. 1262b15).

If we now examine the nature of Stoicmotivation, I think we will see that Aris-totle is very likely to be correct. I shallfocus here on Marcus Aurelius, in manyways the most psychologically profound



9 See Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 35: “Thereare people who have the capacity to imaginethemselves as someone else, there are peoplewho have no such capacity (when the lack isextreme, we call them psychopaths), and thereare people who have the capacity but choosenot to exercise it.”


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of Stoic thinkers. Marcus tells us that the½rst lesson he learned from his tutor was“not to be a fan of the Greens or Blues atthe races, or the light-armed or heavy-armed gladiators at the Circus” (I.5). Hisimagination had to unlearn its intensepartiality and localism; his tutor appar-ently assumed that already as youngchildren we have learned narrow sectari-an types of loyalty. And it is signi½cant,I think, that the paradigmatic negativeimage for the moral imagination is thatof sports fandom: for in all ages, per-haps, such fandom has been a naturalway for human beings to express vicari-ously their sectarian loyalties to family,city, and nation. It was no accident thatthose White Sox fans invoked the hock-ey chant to express their distress aboutthe fate of the nation.

The question is whether this negativelesson leaves the personality enough re-sources to motivate intense concern forpeople anywhere. For Marcus, unlearn-ing partiality requires an elaborate andsystematic program of uprooting con-cern for all people and things in thisworld. He tells us of the meditative exer-cises that he regularly performs in orderto get himself to the point at which thethings that divide people from one an-other no longer matter. One side of thistraining looks benign and helpful: wetell ourselves that our enemies are reallynot enemies, but part of a common hu-man project:

Say to yourself in the morning: I shallmeet people who are interfering, ungra-cious, insolent, full of guile, deceitful andantisocial . . . . But I, . . . who know that thenature of the wrongdoer is of one kin withmine–not indeed of the same blood orseed but sharing the same kind, the sameportion of the divine–I cannot be harmedby any one of them, and no one can in-volve me in shame. I cannot feel angeragainst him who is of my kin, nor hate

him. We were born to labor together, likethe feet, the hands, the eyes, and the rowsof upper and lower teeth. To work againstone another is therefore contrary to na-ture, and to be angry against a man or turnone’s back on him is to work againsthim.10

Notice how close these thoughts are tothe thought-content of a greatly extend-ed sort of compassion. Passages such asthese suggest that a strong kind of even-handed concern can be meted out to allhuman beings, without divisive jealousyand partiality; that we should see our-selves not as team players, not as familymembers, not as loyal citizens of a na-tion, but, most essentially, as membersof the humankind with the advancementof our kind as our highest goal.

Now even in this good case problemsare lurking: for we notice that this exer-cise relies on the thoughts that give riseto the animal problem and the externalgoods problem. We are asked to imaginehuman solidarity and community bythinking of a ‘portion of the divine’ thatresides in all and only humans: we looklike we have a lot in common because weare so sharply divided from the rest ofnature. And the idea that we have a com-mon work relies, to at least some extent,on Marcus’s prior denigration of exter-nal goods: for if we ascribed value to ex-ternal goods we would be in principlecompeting with one another, and itwould be dif½cult to conceive of thecommon enterprise without runninginto that competition.

But I have resolved to waive those twodif½culties, so let me do so. Even then,the good example is actually very com-plex. For getting to the point where wecan give such concern evenhandedly toall human beings requires, as Marcus

10 II.1, trans. G. Grube (Hackett edition). Cf.also VI.6: “The best method of defense is not tobecome like your enemy.”



makes abundantly clear, the systematicextirpation of intense cares and attach-ments directed at the local: one’s family,one’s city, the objects of one’s love anddesire. Thus Marcus needs to learn notonly not to be a sports fan, but also notto be a lover. Consider the following ex-traordinary passage:

How important it is to represent to one-self, when it comes to fancy dishes andother such foods, “This is the corpse of a½sh, this other thing the corpse of a birdor a pig.” Similarly, “This Falernian wineis just some grape juice,” and “This purplevestment is some sheep’s hair moistenedin the blood of some shell½sh.” When itcomes to sexual intercourse, we must say,“This is the rubbing together of mem-branes, accompanied by the spasmodicejaculation of a sticky liquid.” How im-portant are these representations, whichreach the thing itself and penetrate rightthrough it, so that one can see what it is inreality. (VI.13)11

Now, of course, these exercises are ad-dressed to the problem of externalgoods. Here as elsewhere, Marcus is de-termined to unlearn the unwise attach-ments to externals that he has learnedfrom his culture. This project is closelyconnected to the question of partiality,because learning not to be a sports fan isgreatly aided by learning not to careabout the things over which people typi-cally ½ght. (Indeed, it is a little hard tosee how a Kantian project can be stable,insofar as it teaches equal respect for hu-man dignity while at the same timeteaching intense concern for the exter-nals that go to produce happiness, exter-nals that strongly motivate people not to

treat all human beings equally.) In theMarcus passage, however, the link topartiality seems even more direct: forlearning to think of sex as just the rub-bing of membranes really is learning notto ½nd special value or delight in a par-ticular, and this extirpation of eroticismreally does seem to be required by a re-gime of impartiality.

But getting rid of our erotic invest-ment, not just in bodies, but in families,nations, sports teams–all this leads usinto a strange world, a world that is gen-tle and unaggressive, but also strangelylonely and hollow. To unlearn the habitsof the sports fan we must unlearn ourerotic investment in the world, our at-tachments to our own team, our ownlove, our own children, our own life.

Marcus suggests that we have twochoices only: the world of real-lifeRome, which resembles a large gladiato-rial contest (see Seneca De Ira 2.8), eachperson striving to outdo others in vaincompetition for externals, a world ex-ploding with rage and poisoned by mal-ice; or the world of Marcus’s gentlesympathy, in which we respect all hu-man beings and view all as our partnersin a common project whose terms don’tseem to matter very much, thus render-ing the whole point of living in theworld increasingly unclear.12

And this means something like a deathwithin life. For only in a condition closeto death, in effect, is moral rectitudepossible. Marcus repeatedly casts life asa kind of death already, a procession ofmeaningless occurrences:

The vain solemnity of a procession; dra-mas played out on the stage; troops of

11 Based on the translation in Pierre Hadot, TheInner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-vard University Press, 1998), with some modi-½cations.

12 It is signi½cant that this adopted emperordid not, as the movie Gladiator shows us, makea principled rational choice of the best man torun the empire. In real life, Marcus chose hisworthless son Commodus, tripped up yet oncemore by the love of the near.

sheep or goats; ½ghts with spears; a littlebone thrown to dogs; a chunk of breadthrown into a ½sh-pond; the exhaustinglabor and heavy burdens under which antsmust bear up; crazed mice running forshelter; puppets pulled by strings . . . .(VII.3)13

(This, by an emperor who was at thatvery time on campaign in Parthia, lead-ing the ½ght for his nation.) And the bestconsolation for his bleak conclusion alsooriginates in his contemplation of death:

Think all the time about how humanbeings of all sorts, and from all walks oflife and all peoples, are dead . . . . We mustarrive at the same condition where somany clever orators have ended up, somany grave philosophers, Heraclitus, Py-thagoras, Socrates; so many heroes of theold days, so many recent generals and ty-rants. And besides these, Eudoxus, Hip-parchus, Archimedes, other highly intelli-gent minds, thinkers of large thoughts,hard workers, versatile in ability, daringpeople, even mockers of the perishableand transitory character of human life,like Menippus. Think about all of thesethat they are long since in the ground . . . .And what of those whose very names areforgotten? So: one thing is worth a lot, tolive out one’s life with truth and justice,and with kindliness toward liars andwrongdoers. (VI.47)

Because we shall die, we must recognizethat everything particular about us willeventually be wiped out: family, city,sex, children–all will pass into oblivion.So really, giving up those attachments isnot such a big deal. What remains, andall that remains, is truth and justice, themoral order of the world. So only thetrue city should claim our allegiance.

Marcus is alarming because he hasgone deep into the foundations of cos-mopolitan moral principle. What he has

seen is that impartiality, fully and con-sistently cultivated, requires the extirpa-tion of the eroticism that makes life thelife we know–unfair, uneven, full ofwar, full of me-½rst nationalism and di-vided loyalty.14 So, if that ordinary erot-ic humanity is unjust, get rid of it. Butcan we live like this, once we see the goalwith Marcus’s naked clarity? Isn’t jus-tice something that must be about andfor the living?

4Let me proceed on the hypothesis thatMarcus is correct: extirpating attach-ments to the local and the particular de-livers us to a death within life. Let me al-so proceed on the hypothesis that wewill reject this course as an unacceptableroute to the goal of justice, or even asone that makes the very idea of justice ahollow fantasy. (This is Adam Smith’sconclusion as well: enamored as he is ofStoic doctrine, he thinks we must rejectit when it tells us not to love our ownfamilies.) Where are we then?

It looks as if we are back where Aris-totle and Adam Smith leave us: with theunreliability of compassion, and yet theneed to rely on it, since we have no moreperfect motive.

This does not mean that we need giveup on the idea of equal human dignity,or respect for it. But insofar as we retain,as well, our local erotic attachments, ourrelation to that motive must always re-main complex and dialectical, a dif½cultconversation within ourselves as we askhow much humanity requires of us, andhow much we are entitled to give to our


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13 Translation from Hadot/Chase.

14 One might compare the imagery of ancientGreek skepticism. Pyrrho, frightened by a dog(and thus betraying a residual human attach-ment to his own safety) says, “How dif½cult itis entirely to divest oneself of the humanbeing.” Elsewhere he speaks of the skeptic as aeunuch, because he lacks the very source of dis-turbance.

own. Any such dif½cult conversationwill require, for its success, the work ofthe imagination. If we don’t have excep-tionless principles, if, instead, we needto negotiate our lives with a complexcombination of moral reverence anderotic attachment, we need to have akeen imaginative and emotional under-standing of what our choices mean forpeople in many different conditions, andthe ability to move resourcefully backand forth from the perspective of ourpersonal loves and cares to the perspec-tive of the distant. Not the extirpation ofcompassion, then, but its extension andeducation. Compassion within the limitsof respect.

The philosophical tradition helps usidentify places where compassion goeswrong: by making errors of fault, seri-ousness, and the circle of concern. Butthe ancient tradition, not being very in-terested in childhood, does not help ussee clearly how and why it goes especial-ly wrong. So to begin the task of educat-ing compassion as best we can, we needto ask how and why local loyalties andattachments come to take in some in-stances an especially virulent and ag-gressive form, militating against a moregeneral sympathy. To answer this ques-tion we need a level of psychological un-derstanding that was not available in theancient Greek and Roman world, or notcompletely. I would suggest (and haveargued elsewhere) that one problem weparticularly need to watch out for is atype of pathological narcissism in whichthe person demands complete controlover all the sources of good, and a com-plete self-suf½ciency in consequence.

Nancy Chodorow long ago argued thatthis narcissism colors the developmentof males in many cultures in the world.15

Recent studies of teenage boys in Ameri-

ca, particularly the impressive work ofDan Kindlon and Michael Thompson intheir book Raising Cain, have givenstrong local support to this idea.16 Theboys that Kindlon and Thompson studyhave learned from their cultures thatmen should be self-suf½cient, control-ling, dominant. They should never have,and certainly never admit to, fear andweakness. The consequence of this de-formed expectation, Kindlon andThompson show, is that these boys cometo lack an understanding of their ownvulnerabilities, needs, and fears–weak-nesses that all human beings share. Theydon’t have the language to describe theirown inner worlds and are by the sametoken clumsy interpreters of the emo-tions and inner lives of others. Thisemotional illiteracy is closely connectedto aggression, as fear is turned outward,with little understanding of the implica-tions of aggressive words and actions forothers. Kindlon and Thompson’s boysbecome the sports fans who chant “U-S-A” at the ump, who think of allobstacles to American supremacy andself-suf½ciency as opponents to be hu-miliated.

So the ½rst recommendation I wouldmake for a culture of respectful compas-sion is a Rousseauian one: it is, that aneducation in common human weaknessand vulnerability should be a very pro-found part of the education of all chil-dren. Children should learn to be tragicspectators and to understand with sub-tlety and responsiveness the predica-ments to which human life is prone.Through stories and dramas, they shouldlearn to decode the suffering of others,and this decoding should deliberatelylead them into lives both near and far,including the lives of distant humansand the lives of animals.



15 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Moth-ering (Berkeley, Calif.: University of CaliforniaPress, 1978).

16 Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Rais-ing Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys(New York: Ballentine Books, 1999).

As children learn to imagine the emo-tions of another, they should at the sametime learn the many obstacles to suchunderstanding, the many pitfalls of theself-centered imagination as it attemptsto be just. Thus, one should not supposethat one can understand a family mem-ber, without confronting and continual-ly criticizing the envy and jealousy inoneself that pose powerful obstacles tothat understanding. One should notimagine that one can understand the lifeof a person in an ethnic or racial groupdifferent from one’s own, or a sex differ-ent from one’s own, or a nation, withoutconfronting and continually criticizingthe fear and greed and the demand forpower that make such interactions solikely to produce misunderstanding andworse. What I am suggesting, then, isthat the education of emotion, to suc-ceed at all, needs to take place in a cul-ture of ethical criticism, and especiallyself-criticism, in which ideas of equal re-spect for humanity will be active playersin the effort to curtail the excesses of thegreedy self.

At the same time, we can also see thatthe chances of success in this enterprisewill be greater if the society in questiondoes not overvalue external goods of thesort that cause envy and competition.The Stoics are correct when they suggestthat overvaluation of external goods is amajor source of destructive aggressionin society. If we criticize the overvalua-tion of money, honor, status, and famethat Seneca saw at Rome and that we seein America now, then we may encouragepeople to pursue other, less problematicexternal goods, including love of family,of friends, of work, even, to a certain ex-tent, of country. If people care primarilyfor friendship, good work, and–let’seven hope–social justice, then they areless likely to see everything in terms ofthe hockey match and more likely to use

Marcus’s image of the common project.Because my vision is not a Stoic one,there will still be important sources ofgood to be protected from harm, andthere will still be justi½ed anger at dam-age to those good things. But a lot of oc-casions for anger in real life are not goodor just, and we can do a lot as a society toprune away the greedy attachments thatunderpin them.

After Raising Cain, Kindlon wrote abook on rich teenagers in America.17 Itis an alarming portrait of the greed andovervaluations of a certain class in ournation, and its tales of children who hu-miliate others because they don’t go onthe same expensive ski vacations or havethe same expensive designer clothes area chilling illustration of how overvalua-tion is connected to destructive violence.There is a great deal to say about howeducation could address such problems,but I shall not go into that here.

Instead, I want to turn back to Euripi-des, reflecting, in concluding, on the roleof tragic spectatorship, and tragic artgenerally, in promoting good citizenshipof the sort I have been advocating here.Tragedies are not Stoic: they start withus ‘fools’ and the chance events that be-fall us. At the same time, they tend to gettheir priorities straight.

Thus, the overvaluations I have justmentioned are usually not validated intragic works of art. The great Atheniantragic dramas, for example, revolvearound attachments that seem essential-ly reasonable: to one’s children, city,loved ones, bodily integrity, health, free-dom from pain, status as a free personrather than a slave, ability to speak andpersuade others, the very friendship andcompany of others. The loss of any of


Compassion& terror

17 Dan Kindlon, Too Much of a Good Thing:Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age(New York: Miramax, 2001).



these is worthy of lamentation, and thetragic dramas encourage us to under-stand the depth of such loss and, withthe protagonists, to fear it. In exercisingcompassion the audience is learning itsown possibilities and vulnerabilities–what Aristotle called “things such asmight happen”–and learning that peo-ple different in sex, race, age, and nationexperience suffering in a way that is likeour way, and that suffering is as crip-pling for them as it would be for us.

Such recognitions have their pitfalls,and I have identi½ed some of them intalking about The Trojan Women. We al-ways risk error in bringing the distantperson close to us; we ignore differencesof language and of cultural context, andthe manifold ways in which these differ-ences shape one’s inner world. But thereare dangers in any act of imagining, andwe should not let these particular dan-gers cause us to admit defeat premature-ly, surrendering before an allegedly insu-perable barrier of otherness.

When I was out in the rural areas ofRajasthan, visiting an education projectfor girls, I asked the Indian woman whoran the project (herself an urban womanwith a Ph.D.) how she would answer thefrequent complaint that a foreigner cannever understand the situation of a per-son in another nation. She thought for awhile and said ½nally, “I have the great-est dif½culty understanding my own sis-ter.”

There are barriers to understanding inany human relationship. As Proust said,any real person imposes on us a “deadweight” that our “sensitivity cannot re-move.” The obstacles to understanding asister may in some instances be greater

than those to understanding a stranger.At least they are different. All we can dois trust our imaginations, and then criti-cize them (listening if possible to thecritical voices of those we are trying tounderstand), and then trust them again.Perhaps out of this dialectic betweencriticism and trust something like un-derstanding may eventually grow. Atleast the product will very likely be bet-ter than the obtuseness that so generallyreigns in international relations.

As Euripides knew, terror has thisgood thing about it: it makes us sit upand take notice. Tragic dramas can’t pre-cisely teach anything new, since theywill be moving only to people who atsome level already understand how badthese predicaments are. But they canawaken the sleepers by reminding themof human realities they are neglecting intheir daily political lives.

The experience of terror and grief forour towers might be just that–an expe-rience of terror and grief for our towers.One step worse, it could be a stimulusfor blind rage and aggression against allthe opposing hockey teams and bad um-pires in the world. But if we cultivate aculture of critical compassion, such anevent may, like Hecuba’s Trojan cry, pos-sibly awaken a larger sense of the hu-manity of suffering, a patriotism con-strained by respect for human dignityand by a vivid sense of the real lossesand needs of others.

And in that case, it really would turnout that Euripides was right and Hecubawas wrong: the name of the Trojan landwas not wiped out. It lives, in a work ofthe imagination to which we can chal-lenge ourselves, again and again.

Since the end of the Cold War, theworld has been awash in hot wars. Mosthave been waged within, rather than be-tween, states.1 The Yearbook of the Swe-

dish International Peace Research Insti-tute (sipri) annually tabulates what itterms “major armed conflicts”–thoseresulting in more than one thousandbattle deaths per year. Over the elevenyears from 1990 to 2000 there were ½fty-six such conflicts; only three were inter-state (Iraq-Kuwait, India-Pakistan, andEthiopia-Eritrea). The average numberof conflicts in any one year was abouttwenty-eight; the average conflict lastedtwo years.2

Typically, these civil wars have killedmany more civilians than armed com-batants; in addition, they have createdeven larger numbers of refugees. In aneffort to extend humanitarian help, out-siders in recent years have attempted tointervene–in Yugoslavia, in Somalia, inCambodia, and in Rwanda.


Carl Kaysen & George Rathjens

The case for a volunteer un military force

Carl Kaysen is David W. Skinner Professor of Po-litical Economy Emeritus in the Program in Sci-ence, Technology, and Society at mit. He was thedeputy special assistant for national security af-fairs to President Kennedy and director of the In-stitute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A Fellowof the American Academy since 1954 and current-ly co-chair of the Academy’s Committee on Inter-national Security Studies, Kaysen has served as aconsultant to rand, the Defense Department,and the cia.

George Rathjens, professor in the department ofpolitical science at mit, has been a Fellow of theAmerican Academy since 1970. He has servedwith the Institute for Defense Analyses, the U.S.Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the Ad-vanced Research Projects Agency of the Depart-ment of Defense, the Of½ce of the President’s Sci-ence Advisor, and the Weapons Evaluation Groupof the Department of Defense. Past chairman ofboth the Council for a Livable World and the Fed-eration of American Scientists, Rathjens has just½nished a term as secretary-general of the Pug-wash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.

© 2003 by the Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies and the Massachusetts In-stitute of Technology

1 This is a revised and condensed version of anearlier work by the authors entitled “Send inthe Troops: A un Foreign Legion,” WashingtonQuarterly 20 (1) (Winter 1997). That piece inturn was drawn from a longer study by thesame authors entitled Peace Operations by theUnited Nations: The Case for a Volunteer Force,published by the Committee on InternationalSecurity Studies of the American Academy ofArts and Sciences.

2 sipri Yearbook, 2001: Armaments, Disarma-ment, and International Security (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001), Table 1a.1, p. 54; text,p. 52–55.

Unfortunately, the results have beenmixed. In cases where no vital strategicinterests are at stake, many nations, in-cluding the United States, have beenslow to act and reluctant to expose theirmilitary personnel to the risk of casual-ties. Even when troops have been de-ployed, the duration of their deploymenthas often been limited by ‘exit strategies’and a stipulation that they will remainunder national control. In order to keepoutside ground troops out of harm’sway, these outside forces are often, in ef-fect, disarmed and ordered to use theirweapons only in self-defense. The desireto avoid casualties in any case leads to astrong preference for employing air andnaval power.

We believe that the most realistic, ef-fective, and politically feasible alterna-tive to this unsatisfactory state of affairswould be to create a modest standing unmilitary force. As we envision it, thisforce would be composed entirely of vol-unteers from member states–a sort of‘un Foreign Legion.’

Such a force, numbering roughly ½f-teen thousand and backed up by largerforces remaining under national control,would dramatically improve the worldcommunity’s rapid response capabilitywhen faced with humanitarian crises orcivil unrest. Encouraging its creationwould constitute an important expres-sion of U.S. global leadership at a criticalmoment in the development of multilat-eral institutions.

A half century ago, the establishmentof the United Nations raised hopes thatit might constitute an effective instru-ment for meeting the kinds of challengeswe have just described. A Military StaffCommittee, with representatives fromthe ½ve permanent members of the Se-curity Council (P-5), was organized andcharged with creating a plan for a un

military force that might “take such ac-tion by air, sea, or land . . . as may be nec-essary to maintain or restore interna-tional peace and security.”3 Planning be-gan, but the committee was unable toagree on force levels or composition. Asthe Cold War developed, the un effortwas aborted. Since then, un military ef-forts have been limited almost exclusive-ly to peacekeeping–and then only whenboth the contesting parties and the P-5members have been able to reach anagreement on un intervention.

With the end of the Cold War, the like-lihood of agreement among the P-5 hasdramatically improved. Russia, for ex-ample, acquiesced in the U.S.-led DesertStorm effort against Iraq and, more re-cently, in the U.S. intervention in Af-ghanistan. There has been a revival ofinterest in increasing the un’s interven-tion capabilities, particularly in conflictswhere enforcement may be an issue.Some proposals simply earmark selectednational military units for un service;others create a standing un force, basedeither on the rotating commitment ofnational units to a un command, or onindividuals volunteering for service (asthey do for the French Foreign Legion).

In our view, the last option–an all-vol-unteer foreign-legion type force underun control–would likely offer the besthope for responding effectively to hu-manitarian crises. To test this hypothe-sis, we will consider whether the avail-ability of such a force might have madesigni½cant differences in the nature andeffectiveness of some past un interven-tionary efforts, speci½cally in four casesof intrastate conflict–those in Yugosla-via, Somalia, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

Earlier discussions have generally fo-cused on quick reaction capability as the


Carl Kaysen& GeorgeRathjensoninternationaljustice

3 Charter of the United Nations (San Francisco:The United Nations, 26 June 1945), art. 42.

principal rationale for the developmentand maintenance of an all-volunteerforce under un control. At present, how-ever, months usually pass between theSecurity Council’s vote and the assemblyand organization of the contingents foran appropriate force. This also meansthat Security Council members–espe-cially the United States because of itsspecial role in providing logistic capacityfor long-range deployments–in effectvote twice: once in the formal resolutionand then, in practice, in their willingnessto contribute troops, matériel, civilianpersonnel, and ½nancial support.

Certainly, the ready availability ofarmed forces–whether volunteers ortroops provided by member states–isessential to the un’s ability to act deci-sively. But equally vital is the ability ofthe un to make a quick decision–andthat, of course, is determined by the po-litical calculations of the member na-tions, particularly the Security Council’sP-5 members.

This brings us to the single greatestcomparative advantage that a volunteerforce would have over reliance on nation-al forces earmarked for un service (or‘seconded’ to it). The advantage lies inthe fact that member nations would bemore likely to deploy a volunteer force inactions involving a signi½cant risk of ca-sualties. When public sensitivity to casu-alties runs high–as it does in manymodern democracies, including theUnited States–national leaders oftenfeel compelled to follow public opinion.They then decide against intervention ofany kind, or severely limit the scope ofintervention, or authorize interventiononly after a drawn-out debate whose du-ration is liable to cost lives in the affect-ed region.

In at least two other important re-spects, an all-volunteer force would bepreferable to relying on seconded na-

tional forces. First is the issue of com-mand and control. When nations com-mit their forces to un or other multina-tional operations, they insist–nonemore so than the United States–on re-taining ultimate authority over thoseforces, including the right to withdrawthem peremptorily, or to exercise a vetoover particular operations if they judgetroop employment unwise or inconsis-tent with national interests. This prob-lem would not arise with a volunteer unforce, except to the extent that the physi-cal deployment of the volunteer forcemight depend on national forces such aslogistical and air support.

A second reason to prefer a volunteerun force is the question of capability interms of equipment and, especially,training. The ad hoc assembly of nation-al units is a poor basis on which to builda capable military force. Developing na-tions, often eager to supply troops as away of ½nancing their own armies, pres-ent a particular problem in this respect.Yet the un system often must use thesetroops, even if the more militarily com-petent nations were willing to offer allthe forces needed–which they rarelyare.

In many situations of intervention, along-term presence of some force will beneeded to help maintain peace during aprocess of social and political recon-struction. The scale of the proposed unvolunteer force discussed below, howev-er, is far too small to allow it alone toprovide long-term deployments. Thusthe likely need for the long-term pres-ence of peacekeeping forces would per-sist.

In what follows, we will briefly reviewthe history of four un peacekeeping op-erations–in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Cam-bodia, and Rwanda–and attempt in gen-eral terms to assess the differences that a


The case fora volunteerun force

standing un force might have made onthe outcomes.4

The conflict in Yugoslavia, and especial-ly in Bosnia, is probably the richest minewe have for a counterfactual analysis ofthe utility–and limitations–of a stand-ing un volunteer force. From the begin-ning, serious problems hampered the ef-forts of the international community tomitigate conflict in Yugoslavia and pre-vent escalation.

Germany and Austria were particular-ly sympathetic to Croatian and Sloven-ian aspirations for early independencewithin the boundaries they had as re-publics in the Yugoslav federation. Mostof the rest of the world community be-lieved, in contrast, that the maintenanceof some kind of Yugoslav federation, orat least confederation, offered the besthope for peace and stability in the re-

gion. Russia, not surprisingly, was muchless critical of the Serbs than were theother major powers, and the UnitedStates was much more so.

Debates persisted about whether thelead agency for international interven-tion should be the United Nations, theEuropean Community/Union (ec/eu),or nato–or even, possibly, the WesternEuropean Union (weu) or the Organiza-tion for Security and Cooperation in Eu-rope (osce). There were also differencesabout how to organize the internationaleffort. Britain espoused a sharper demar-cation than did the United States in forcerequirements and training for peace-keeping, on the one hand, and for peaceenforcement on the other. Given thesedifferences–and, in the later stages ofthe war, differences between the govern-ment of Serbia and the local Serbs inCroatia and Bosnia, not to mention ever-increasing animosities whipped to afrenzy by the nationalist leaders of thecontesting factions–cease-½re and



4 The descriptions that follow are drawn froma variety of sources: a) Susan Woodward offersa comprehensive review of the background ofthe conflict in Yugoslavia and operationsthrough 1994 in Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dis-solution after the Cold War (Washington, D.C.:The Brookings Institution, 1996). Other partic-ularly useful background papers are John Za-metica’s The Yugoslav Conflict, Adelphi Paper270 (London: The International Institute forStrategic Studies, 1992), and James Steinberg’s“International Involvement in the YugoslaviaConflict,” in Lori Fisler Damrosch, ed., Enforc-ing Restraint: Collective Intervention in InternalConflicts (New York: Council on Foreign Rela-tions Press, 1993). For recent events in Kosovo,see sipri Yearbook, 2000, 28–33; b) The back-ground and story of the 1991–1994 interventionin Somalia can be found in Terrance Lyons andAhmed I. Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Mul-tilateral Intervention, and Strategies for PoliticalReconstruction (Washington, D.C.: The Brook-ings Institution, 1995); Jeffrey Clark, “Debaclein Somalia: Failure of the Collective Response,”in Damrosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint; ChesterCrocker, “The Lessons of Somalia,” Foreign Af-fairs 74 (3) (May/June 1995); and John L. Hirschand Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Re-store Hope (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute ofPeace, 1995); c) For reviews of the un interven-

tion in Cambodia see Trevor Findlay, Cambo-dia: The Legacy and Lessons of untac (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1995); James A. Shear,“The Case of Cambodia,” in D. Daniel and B.Hayes, eds., Beyond Traditional Peacekeeping(London: Macmillan, 1995); Steven R. Ratner,“The United Nations in Cambodia: A Modelfor Resolution of Internal Conflicts?” in Dam-rosch, ed., Enforcing Restraint; William Shaw-cross, Cambodia’s New Deal (Washington, D.C.:Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,1994); and Sheri Prasso, “Cambodia: A $3 Bil-lion Boondoggle,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scien-tists (March/ April 1995). See also un SecurityCouncil Resolution 880, un Document S/RES/880, 4 November 1993; d) The conflict inRwanda is reviewed in Tayler B. Seybolt,“Whither Humanitarian Intervention? Indica-tions from Rwanda,” Breakthroughs 5 (1)(Spring 1996). The best overall account ofevents and their antecedents can be found inGerald Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of aGenocide (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1995); e) For the East Timor conflict, seesipri Yearbook, 2000, 26–28.

mediation efforts by the interveningpowers proved ½tful at best.

With memories still fresh of the Viet-nam War and World War II, when Yugo-slav partisans tied down some twentyGerman and Allied divisions for manymonths, outside powers were not eagerto risk signi½cant casualties in an effortto try to enforce a solution to the conflict.Britain and France accordingly intro-duced peacekeeping forces only after theSerbs and Croats had agreed to a cease-½re, by which time most of the Krajinahad fallen to the Serbs.

Much later, in 1999, the ½ghting movedon to the Albanian-majority province ofKosovo. Serbia resisted the efforts of theKosovo liberation movement, one partof which sought the renewal of theautonomy the province had formerly en-joyed, another part of which wanted theKosovo Liberation Army to lead anarmed campaign for independence, orpossibly to join Albania in creating aGreater Albania. After negotiations be-tween Serbia and the ‘Contact Group’–France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the Unit-ed Kingdom, and the United States–failed, nato, without un authorizationand against the objections of Russia, ini-tiated a bombing campaign against a va-riety of economic and military targets inSerbia and against Serbian militaryforces in Kosovo.

Nearly three months later, partly be-cause of the bombing, partly becauseSerbia lost Russia’s support, Serbiaagreed to withdraw its large forces–about forty thousand military, paramili-tary, and police–from Kosovo. The Se-curity Council then authorized a nato-led force of some ½fty thousand. Afterthe Serbs had withdrawn and the natoforce had started its deployment, thegreat majority of the eight hundredthousand refugees who had fled duringthe Serbian repression and the bombingreturned.

Had a un volunteer force been avail-able early on, at the very beginning ofthe Serbian attacks on Croatia andBosnia, there would likely have been lesssensitivity about casualties. As a result, itmight have been possible to introducethe force earlier with salutary effects,particularly if it had had a mandate toengage in some enforcement actions.Such a force would have strengthenedthe hands of Lord Carrington, acting forthe ec/eu, and of Cyrus Vance, actingfor the un, and a peaceful resolution ofthe conflict might have resulted. Or, hadthe need arisen, the un force might havetaken effective enforcement actionsagainst Serb forces in Croatia or later inBosnia when all sides, but particularlythe Bosnian Serbs, repeatedly floutedun injunctions proscribing attacksagainst ‘safe areas’ and interference withthe delivery of humanitarian relief.

The war in Somalia had its genesis inthe chaotic struggle for power betweenclan leaders that erupted after the fall ofthe Siad Barre government in January of1991. In response to looting by gangs andthe prospect of famine unless order wasrestored, the un became engaged earlyin 1992. In March of that year, it succeed-ed in brokering a cease-½re between theprincipal clan leaders in Mogadishu. Itdispatched ½fty unarmed peacekeepersto monitor compliance with the cease-½re and authorized the formation anddeployment in April of a ½ve-hundred-troop Pakistani battalion to protect thedelivery of humanitarian relief supplies.

Unfortunately, key governments, nota-bly the United States, showed a generallack of support for the operation. Logis-tical and ½nancial problems, as well asnegotiations toward an agreement withSomali clan leaders for the introductionof the force, also posed dif½culties. BySeptember of 1991, when the un forcewas fully deployed, the situation in



Mogadishu had so degenerated that untroops could not safeguard the deliveryof food and other relief supplies. Withimpunity, Somali clan leaders were ableto frustrate the conciliation efforts of theun secretary-general’s special represen-tative in the ½eld. In short, the ½rstphase of operations in Somalia was astory of too little too late.

As the horrors of starvation and thebreakdown of public order in Somaliabecame apparent on the nightly news,President George H. W. Bush, respond-ing to public pressure, authorized theMarine Corps to lead a thirty-eight-thousand-troop intervention in Decem-ber of 1992, with the limited objective offacilitating humanitarian relief efforts.As intended, this phase of operationslasted only a few months, but succeededin saving many lives.

Although some U.S. forces remainedin Somalia, the un took over the majorinterventionary responsibility in May of1993 with a weaker force charged with abroader ‘nation-building’ mandate. Un-fortunately, the expanded mandate wasclearly beyond un capabilities. Wheneighteen Americans and a number of Pa-kistani troops were killed later in theyear, U.S. public opinion turned stronglyagainst continued involvement, andPresident Bill Clinton announced thatU.S. forces would be withdrawn by theend of March of 1994. This third phaseended a year later, without accomplish-ing any of its objectives. There were fur-ther dif½culties in Somalia with unity ofcommand; national forces failed to re-spond to orders from ½eld commandersbecause of conflicting instructions fromtheir capitals. Such problems would nothave arisen with an all-volunteer unforce.

Had a force of several thousand well-trained un volunteers been available fordeployment in early 1992, the humani-

tarian relief mission could quite plausi-bly have been accomplished in less thana year without the Marine Corps inter-vention. Achieving the expanded objec-tives that the un favored but the UnitedStates resisted, however, would have re-quired a much larger force for a muchlonger period of time–and substantialcommitment by the world communityfor nonmilitary support, also for manyyears. As it is, Somalia remains a failedstate–a case for un trusteeship.

The un intervention in Cambodia grewout of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement,which was meant to end two decades ofterrorism and civil war by producing auni½ed–and freely elected–Cambodiangovernment. The Security Council hascharacterized the operation as “a majorachievement of the United Nations.” untroops repatriated three hundred sixtythousand refugees and displaced personsfrom Thai border regions. In addition, atechnically free and fair election washeld with an extraordinarily high level ofparticipation.

But, in fact, the un’s Cambodia mis-sion must be judged a failure. Despitethe high voter turnout, the un was un-able to protect opposition parties from acentrally directed government campaignof terror and intimidation. At best, 10percent of the nation’s roughly threehundred ½fty thousand armed combat-ants were demobilized. Most signi½cant-ly, the Khmer Rouge was able to sabo-tage the goal of national uni½cation: al-though it had been a party to the ParisPeace Agreement–and a major cause ofthe ruthlessness of the nation’s long civilwar–it refused to participate in the elec-tion and to permit un access to the partsof the country it controlled.

Might things have gone better if theun had had an all-volunteer militaryforce at its disposal instead of having to



rely on seconded troops? Many of thesixteen thousand troops that were actu-ally deployed were ill-equipped and ill-disciplined–problems that would nothave plagued a well-trained volunteerforce. Also, the force could probablyhave been deployed soon after the Parisaccords–not eight months later, as wasthe case. Such earlier deployment wouldhave made it possible to make consider-ably more progress in the disarmamentmission. According to observers in the½eld, rapid deployment might also havehelped to deter disorder.

Perhaps the most interesting questionis whether, with a volunteer force, theun would have been able to compel theKhmer Rouge to comply with the ParisPeace Agreement. Perhaps doing sowould have been unwise, given theKhmer Rouge’s military capabilities andideological fanaticism, and given thepossibility of negative reactions fromChina and other Southeast Asian states.Perhaps the Paris consensus might nothave survived, and perhaps one or moreoutside parties would have resumedtheir support of the Khmer Rouge

At least one moral of the story is clear:If the broader nation-building objectivesof the un intervention were to be real-ized–particularly in the absence of aresolution of the Khmer Rouge prob-lem–the un would doubtless have hadto maintain a substantial military pres-ence in Cambodia for a number of years,as well as provide resources for the civilcomponents of the un mission. TheCambodian mission, then, highlights thereasons why the international communi-ty must take seriously the need not onlyfor an enhanced volunteer un militaryforce, but also for a well-quali½ed un‘peace corps’ able to help reconstructwar-ravaged societies.

From the perspective of the interna-tional community, which had recently

been stung by the failure of humanitari-an intervention in Somalia, the genoci-dal war between Hutus and Tutsis inRwanda could not have come at a worsetime or place: Africa, in April of 1994. Atthe time, a un Assistance Mission(unamir i) with a force of twenty-½vehundred troops was already in Rwanda.Yet the immediate Security Council re-action was not to increase its strength,but to reduce it–to a mere three hun-dred troops. Moreover, the SecurityCouncil, ignoring the secretary-general’scall for strengthening the force and in-creasing active intervention, limitedunamir i’s mandate to brokering acease-½re and assisting in relief efforts.

A month later, the un belatedly au-thorized a fresh deployment of ½fty-½vehundred troops for unamir ii, againwith a limited mandate. But as late asAugust, the un force had not yet reachedits authorized strength. After the ½ascoin Somalia, there was little disposition inthe world community to incur the costsof trying to stop the genocide. Francewas the exception; it deployed a force inRwanda during the period of June 22 toAugust 22, which had some success inprotecting the southwestern part of thecountry. (More than any other advancedindustrial state, France has been willingto engage in peace enforcement opera-tions. Relying largely on its Foreign Le-gion, French political leaders may nothave been as sensitive as others to therisk of casualties.)

Of the cases we have considered,Rwanda provides the best example ofthe likely utility of a standing un quickreaction force. Had such a force beenavailable when the secretary-generalproposed the strengthening of ½eld ca-pability in late April, the Security Coun-cil may well have authorized its deploy-ment instead of voting to reduce theunamir i force. Assuming U.S. logisticsupport–not an unreasonable assump-



tion–the larger force could have beendeployed in suf½cient time to save hun-dreds of thousands of lives. And, consid-ering the experience of the French, sucha un force would most likely have expe-rienced few casualties. As it was, over aperiod of four and a half months, andout of a population of about eight mil-lion Rwandans, eight hundred thousanddied, two million became refugees, andtwo million became internally displacedpersons.

This review suggests that the worldcommunity could have, and in some in-stances likely would have, responded toeach of these four crises with greater ef-fectiveness had a well-trained andequipped all-volunteer un force beenavailable. Of course, the fact that inter-ventionary forces were deployed in mostof these cases for protracted periods oftime–in Yugoslavia, the clock is stillrunning–raises serious questions aboutthe necessary size and mission of an ef-fective un military force.

Would a relatively small rapid deploy-ment force be suf½cient to realize unobjectives? Might a volunteer un forcebe effectively supplemented by secondednational units, so that the un forcecould be relieved soon enough to re-spond to other crises? We believe theanswer to both questions is a quali½ed“yes.”

The situations we have examined fallsomewhere on the force spectrum be-tween ‘classic peacekeeping’ and enforc-ing the un Charter’s Chapter VII prohi-bition of aggression. Monitoring a truceline in situations where conflict hasceased and the parties have agreed to ac-cept the intervening force usually re-quires a thousand troops. But stoppingaggression–as the un tried to do inKorea and Iraq–is an altogether moredaunting task, requiring several hundredthousand troops.

In the intermediate situations that wehave been reviewing, an interveningforce will typically have a shifting varietyof tasks, including:• Preventive deployments to forestall vi-

olence between communities or states;• Monitoring or supervising a tense situ-

ation, stalemate, cease-½re, or settle-ment;

• Establishing, monitoring, or supervis-ing cantonment areas, demilitarizedzones, and buffer zones between war-ring parties, which may involve inter-position by the ½eld force;

• Support, supervision, and implementa-tion of a process of disarming and de-mobilizing the warring factions;

• Protection and support of humanitari-an assistance efforts;

• Noncombatant evacuation underthreat;

• Establishing protective zones;• Protection and support of national re-

construction and reconciliation ef-forts, including the conduct of elec-tions;

• Helping to restore and maintain gener-al civil order; and

• Enforcing sanctions.

All of these tasks would have to be per-formed in situations where the threat ofarmed resistance is real and present. If itis to help achieve a political resolution ofthe underlying conflict, a un militaryforce will need to be capable of ful½llingall three of the ultimate political func-tions of armed force–compulsion, de-terrence, and reassurance. The forcemust be suf½cient to compel each side tostop the violence, to deter those whomight resort to violence, and to reassurethe general public that it need neither½ght nor flee.





The most detailed and persuasive anal-ysis of what a un rapid reaction forceshould be is that of Carl Conetta andCharles Knight.5 Examining the trooprequests submitted by the commandersof the un operations in Yugoslavia,Cambodia, Somalia, Mozambique,Haiti, and Rwanda between 1992 and1994, Conetta and Knight concluded thatmeeting those requests would have re-quired a force capable of continuous de-ployment of ½fteen thousand troops inthe ½eld. This level of deployment wouldin turn have required a total force of43,750 personnel, whose operating costswould have been about $3.5 billion peryear.

We believe that the size and cost ofsuch a force are much too large to pro-pose to the international community. Inour judgment, the size of the recom-mended force must fall somewhere be-tween the smallest force that could rea-sonably perform the required tasks and

the largest and most expensive force thatmember states, particularly the majorpowers, would allow the un to com-mand. We believe a force of ½fteen thou-sand, of which eleven thousand wouldbe deployable–half of that for long peri-ods–meets these criteria. The organiza-tion and personnel of this force areshown in the two tables that follow.

A rough estimate of the annual cost ofoperating the force described is $1.25 bil-lion to $1.5 billion per year. About 25 per-cent of this is the annual cost of equip-ment and facilities. These ½gures shouldbe compared with un peacekeeping ex-penditures of $2.5 billion in 2000. Muchof the expenditure for a new voluntaryforce would be a substitute for, not a netaddition to, current peacekeeping costs.

In addition to marshalling the forceitself, the un would need to maintain asubstantial military base where the forcewould train and be stationed when notdeployed. The base should be largeenough to accommodate visits fromdetachments of national units from vari-ous countries for joint training with thisun force. Preparing and maintaining abase would add another substantial ele-ment of cost. But with the downsizing ofmilitary forces in many countries, facili-ties should be available, and at costs farlower than those of creating a new base.

Wherever the force were based, itwould have to be moved to the site of itsoperation for any intervention. Provid-ing it with an organic logistic capacity tomake this possible would be prohibitive-ly expensive; it would have to rely on na-tional capabilities to provide logistic ca-pacity. In effect, this means relying onthe United States, which has providedmost of the logistic support for theforces that have been seconded to theun by member states.6

5 Carl Conetta and Charles Knight, Vital Force:A Proposal for the Overhaul of the un Peace Opera-tions System and for the Creation of a un Legion(Cambridge, Mass.: Commonwealth Institute,October 1995). Other discussions of a un forceinclude: a) Brian Urquhart, “For a un Volun-teer Force,” New York Review of Books 40 (11)(10 June 1993); b) Timothy Stanley, John M.Lee, and Robert von Pagenhardt, To Unite OurStrength: Enhancing the United Nations Peace andSecurity System (Lanham, Md.: University Pressof America, 1992), chap. 2; c) Partners for Peace:Strengthening Collective Security for the 21st Centu-ry (New York: United Nations Association ofthe United States, 1992), see especially chap. 3and recommendations, p. 42; d) Capt. EdwardJ. Dennehy (USCG) et al., A Blue Helmet CombatForce, Policy Analysis Paper 93–101, NationalSecurity Program, John F. Kennedy School ofGovernment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity, 1993); e) Lukas Haynes and TimothyW. Stanley, “To Create a United Nations FireBrigade,” Comparative Strategy 14 (January–March 1995): 7–21; f) Towards a Rapid ReactionCapability for the United Nations (Ottawa: Cana-dian Department of Foreign Affairs and Inter-national Trade, September 1995).

6 This is an important constraint. Any air forcesupply operation involves the risk of accident. If

The number and scale of un interven-tions in recent years makes plain that thestanding force we envisage could notmeet all un objectives on its own. Itwould require backup forces of somekind. This un standing force might becapable of two simultaneous missions,but no more, and its operational conceptshould require an assessment of the suc-cess of an operation after no more thansix months from initial deployment. Ifthe intervention succeeds in damping

violence and moving the conflict to thepolitical arena, then a smaller peace-keeping force drawn from memberstates could replace the standing force. Ifnot, the Security Council would be facedwith the decision to either replace thestanding force units with larger and per-haps more heavily armed national unitsor withdraw from the conflict altogether.Our plan would thus be incompletewithout a provision for backup forces,included in most proposals for a rapidreaction force. These consist of nationalunits designated for un service in bothpeacekeeping and combat modes,trained and exercised to a common stan-dard and doctrine.

For both political and operational rea-sons, these backup forces should be or-ganized and deployed regionally andshould consist of units designated fromthe national forces of cooperative statesin the region. These forces would trainand exercise together on a regular basis,and the un standing force hq wouldplay an advisory and standard-settingrole in this training process. The con-tributing states would bene½t from theupgrading of the capabilities of theirarmed forces. Meanwhile, they wouldhave to be persuaded that doing so ispolitically worthwhile–that an invest-ment in cooperative rather than compet-itive security is desirable.

But would the advantages of the re-gional forces’ proximity in terms of op-erational ease outweigh the potentialdisadvantage of their having a direct in-terest in the conflict and its outcome?This dif½cult question goes to the heartof how best to balance the cooperativeand competitive paths to peace and se-curity. How one answers this questionwill determine, in part, how one thinksabout not only the creation of regionalforces, but also the very idea of a un mil-itary force.



Table 1Tactical and Support Units for a Volunteer unMilitary Force

2 brigade hqs (340 staff and support personnel each)

2 motorized infantry battalions2 light mechanized infantry battalions1 cavalry squadron1 light armored cavalry squadron

(37 light tanks)2 armored scout helicopter companies

(18 aircraft each)4 ½eld artillery batteries (8 guns each)2 air defense companies

(12 mounted air defense systems each)2 combat engineer companies2 signal companies2 ½eld intelligence companies2 mp companies2 civil affairs companies2 ½eld logistics bases

Source: Peace Operations by the United Nations: the Case

for a Volunteer un Military Force, a report of the Com-

mittee on International Security Studies of the Amer-

ican Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge,

Mass., 1995.

the operation is over an area in which ½ghtingis taking place, even further risks arise. Yet theUnited States has established a pattern of pro-viding logistical support for un operations, andwould likely do so in many instances if such lo-gistical support constituted its only exposure torisk.

Schematically, appropriate coverageand operational considerations wouldsuggest the creation of at least six suchregional forces: one each for Africa, Lat-in America (including the Caribbean),West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, andEurope. The scale of national forcesvaries widely in the different regions,both in relation to each other and to theproposed un standing force, so that theappropriate size for a regional forcewould also vary. Neither the un stand-ing force nor the national regional forcescould, or should, be used to engage thenational armies of states with substan-tial military power. The political feasibil-ity of establishing such a regional forcealso varies greatly among the differentregions. In both West and South Asia,for instance, major countries are in astate of ongoing hostility that wouldmake a regional force hard to create.Perhaps the region in which such a forceis most needed and might do the mostimmediate good is Africa; yet the possi-bility of creating a competent force therein the near future is not bright.

If we think of a battalion with astrength of some seven hundred ½fty orone thousand as the smallest combatunit that can be effectively deployed as aconstituent of a larger multinationalforce, then an ideal regional force mighthave up to twenty-½ve combat battalionsplus independent supporting units oftransport, supply, engineering, militarypolice, medical, and sanitation troops.These would form the pool from whicha force could be drawn when needed.

Withdrawing the standing force andreplacing it with elements drawn fromthe committed backup forces wouldmake it possible for the former to con-tinue to serve its deterrent function inother potential conflicts. In such a re-placement, the hq element of the stand-ing force could remain for some time to

act as the memory store for the incom-ing forces, ensuring continuity of action.

The creation of a un standing forcewould require further upgrading of theun’s Department of Peacekeeping Op-erations (dpko). The capabilities andorganization of the department havebeen substantially improved in the lastseveral years, but much more needs tobe done. Further changes should involvetwo levels of the un: the Security Coun-cil and secretary-general, and the dpkoin relation to other parts of the organiza-tion. At the higher level, the MilitaryStaff Committee or its functional equiv-alent must be reactivated, enlarged toinclude representatives from memberstates that are substantial contributorsto ongoing ½eld operations, and capableof functioning full-time whenever anoperation is in progress. The dpko inturn would need to add the administra-tive capacities required to maintain itsmilitary force, including recruitment,



Table 2Personnel Required for a Volunteer unMilitary Force

Field Units Unit-assigned command-and-

combat personnel 6,700Support personnel organic to

tactical units 1, 400Field logistics base 2,000Replacements 500Total deployable 10,600

Nondeployable Personnel Central staff 800 Base support and central logistics 1, 400 Trainers 1, 400 Trainees 1, 800 Total Nondeployable 4,400

Total 15,000

Source: Peace Operations by the United Nations.

training, procurement, and logistics. Thecurrent un system, whereby procure-ment depends on the approval of theundersecretary of the Department ofAdministration and Budget–an entirelyseparate un department–is unwork-able. The budget function must becomean integral part of the dpko’s opera-tions.7

Creating the capabilities describedabove would in many instances make itpossible for the international communi-ty to respond to crises and undertakepeacemaking and enforcement opera-tions more quickly. This could be ex-pected to increase the likelihood of real-izing several of the potential objectivesof such interventions: saving lives andreducing human suffering, facilitatingpolitical settlements between contest-ants, and perhaps undertaking nation-building activities. It would also have abroader deterrent effect, which in somecases would make diplomatic interven-tion alone effective in preventing armedconflict. And it would provide a strengthto Security Council resolutions that isnow lacking.

The advantages of early deploymentshould not, however, be exaggerated. Infew, if any, of the above instances wouldthe existence of such a force on its ownhave made much of a difference. (Rwan-da may be an exception.) Fully capitaliz-ing on a un standing force’s advantageswill depend on various additional re-forms the un would have to undertake.Such reforms include improving staffwork, quickening force deployment de-cision-making processes, more clearlyde½ning mission mandates, and improv-ing command-and-control procedures,

including arrangements for civil-mili-tary coordination.

The un cannot maintain a standingforce on the basis of current ½nancingarrangements, which are a mixture ofvoluntary contributions and special as-sessments for each operation. Instead,the support of both the standing forceand traditional peacekeeping operationsshould be made part of the regular budg-et. Some larger operations–in particu-lar, any relatively large-scale Chapter VIIactivities–might be best handled by spe-cial assessments. Together with the nec-essary strengthening of the dpko, thecreation of a standing force might resultin an annual cost for peacekeeping oper-ations (excluding large-scale Chapter VIIactivities) of $5–$6 billion, about twicetheir current level.

To put this number in some context, itis worth noting that world military ex-penditures in 2001 were about $835 bil-lion. Of this, the U.S. share was about 39percent. The other big spenders–thir-teen countries with military budgets of$10–$60 plus billion–had a 41 percentshare; the share of the other 157 coun-tries amounted to only 20 percent.8

The creation of a volunteer un forcewould require a mobilization of politicalwill at a time when many members ofthe un, including the Security CouncilP-5, view the organization with a mix-ture of skepticism and hostility. This at-titude is strongest in the United States,but it is widely shared. After all, the ma-jority of un member states are develop-ing countries that are among the morelikely targets of outside intervention.

The most widespread objection to anall-volunteer un force–aside from the



8 International Institute of Strategic Studies,The Military Balance 2002–3, Table 26, p. 332 ff.

7 See Partners for Peace, published by the Unit-ed Nations Association of the United States, fora fuller discussion.

economic costs–has been the lack ofcon½dence in un decision-making, andoften a speci½c lack of con½dence in unsecretaries-general. We see little basisfor such concern. Developing and ap-proving a mandate for un operationswill, for as far into the future as we canimagine, be a Security Council responsi-bility, with the P-5 members, at least,having veto power. Although secretaries-general will presumably have executivepowers, we see no need for these powersto be greater–or otherwise different–than those needed for the managementof un operations under the present ar-rangement of relying on secondedforces.

In the present political mood of theUnited States the proposal outlined inthe preceding pages may well appear tobe sheer fantasy. But the underlying real-ity of violent intrastate conflict remains,and we cannot simply persist in lookingthe other way; the ‘cnn effect’ and theactivities of a host of nongovernmentalorganizations prevent such an option.

The U.S. stakes in enhancing ratherthan undermining the capacities of theun are of two kinds. The ½rst is that theUnited States is the one power with

global involvements; serious conflictanywhere is likely to involve the UnitedStates if it persists, and even more likelyto involve the country if it spreads. Yetthe United States has neither the capaci-ty nor the mandate to act alone as a glob-al policeman.

The second reason why the UnitedStates has a stake in strengthening theun is its deep commitment to securing aliberal world order based on a global freemarket. The United States sees such anorder as the key to achieving a minimumharmony of interests between rich andpoor countries, slowly diminishing thegap between rich and poor nationsthrough free trade and growing prosper-ity. Such an order cannot flourish in aworld rent by widespread violent con-flict.

If the United States cannot alone bearthe burden of securing international or-der, then it must persuade others to help.The un, backed by regional organiza-tions–what might be called the formalinternational system–offers the best in-strument for achieving this order, foronly the formal international system hasthe political legitimacy to police theworld.




How did the world begin? How old is it?Do mysterious and invisible forces de-termine its fate? Surprisingly enough,such questions are now at the forefrontof scienti½c research.

Over the past century, old ideas aboutthe cosmos and our place in it have beendramatically overturned. We now knowthat the Sun does not occupy the centerof the universe, and that in addition toour own Milky Way, space is ½lled withhundreds of billions of other galaxies.Even more astonishingly, we know thatthe universe itself is expanding every-where, and that as space expands, galax-ies are being swept apart from each oth-er at colossal speeds.

In the last few years, tantalizing hintshave begun to appear that the expansionof the universe is even accelerating.These results imply the existence of amysterious force able to counter the at-traction of gravity. The origin and na-ture of this force currently defy explana-tion. But astronomers have reason tohope that ongoing research will soon re-solve some of the deepest riddles ofnature.

It was Edwin Hubble, a Carnegie As-tronomer based in Pasadena, California,who ½rst learned that the universe wasexpanding; in 1929, he discovered thatthe farther away from our Milky Waygalaxies are, the faster they are movingapart. A few years before, Albert Ein-stein in his general theory of relativityhad published a mathematical formulafor the evolution of the universe. Ein-stein’s equations, like Hubble’s observa-tions, implied that the universe mustonce have been much denser and hotter.These results suggested that the universebegan with an intense explosion, a ‘bigbang.’

The big bang model has produced anumber of testable predictions. For ex-ample, as the universe expands, the hotradiation produced by the big bang willcool and pervade the universe–thus weshould see heat in every direction welook. Big bang theory predicts that by to-day the remnant radiation should havecooled to a temperature of only 3 degreesabove absolute zero (corresponding to atemperature of -270 degrees Celsius).Remarkably, this radiation has been de-tected. In 1965, two radio astronomers,Arnold Penzias and Robert Wilson, dis-covered this relic radiation during a rou-tine test of communications dishes, adiscovery for which they were awardedthe Nobel Prize.

The current expansion rate of the uni-verse, known as the Hubble constant,

Wendy L. Freedman, a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 2000, has been appointed as thenext director of the Carnegie Observatories inPasadena, California, where she is presently a fac-ulty member and astronomer. For almost a de-cade she has been one of three principal investiga-tors using the Hubble Space Telescope to deter-mine the rate at which the universe is expanding.With a group of Carnegie Astronomers, she hasrecently begun a project to study dark energy.

Wendy L. Freedman

on the age of the universe

determines the size of the observableuniverse and provides constraints oncompeting models of the evolution ofthe universe. For decades, an uncertain-ty of a factor of two in measurements ofthe Hubble constant existed. (Indeed,determining an accurate value for theHubble constant was one of the mainreasons for building the Hubble SpaceTelescope.) However, rapid progress hasbeen made recently in resolving the dif-ferences. New, sensitive instruments ontelescopes, some flying aboard the Hub-ble Space Telescope, have led to greatstrides in the measurement of distancesto galaxies beyond our own.

In theory, determining the Hubbleconstant is simple: one need only meas-ure distance and velocity. But in practice,making such measurements is dif½cult.It is hard to devise a means to measuredistances over cosmological scales accu-rately. And measuring velocity is compli-cated by the fact that neighboring galax-ies tend to interact gravitationally, there-by perturbing their motions. Uncertain-ties in distances and in velocities thenlead to uncertainties in their ratio, theHubble constant.

Velocities of galaxies can be calculatedfrom the observed shift of lines (due tothe presence of chemical elements suchas hydrogen, iron, oxygen) in the spectraof galaxies. There is a familiar analogousphenomenon for sound known as theDoppler effect, which explains, for in-stance, why the pitch of an oncomingtrain changes as the train approachesand then recedes from us. As galaxiesmove away from us, their light is similar-ly shifted and stretched to longer (red-der) wavelengths, a phenomenon re-ferred to as redshift. This shift in wave-length is proportional to velocity.

Measuring distances presents a greaterchallenge, which has taken the betterpart of a century to resolve. Most dis-

tances in astronomy cannot be measureddirectly because the size scales are sim-ply too vast. For the very nearest stars,distances can be measured using a meth-od called parallax. This uses the baselineof the Earth’s orbit, permitting the dis-tance to be calculated using simple,high-school trigonometry. However, thistechnique currently can be applied reli-ably only for relatively nearby starswithin our own galaxy.

In order to measure the distance ofmore remote stars and galaxies, astron-omers identify objects that exhibit aconstant, known brightness, or a bright-ness that is related to another measura-ble quantity. The distance is then calcu-lated using the inverse square law of ra-diation, which states that the apparentbrightness of an object falls off in pro-portion to the square of its distancefrom us. The effects of the inversesquare law are easy to see in everydaylife–say if we compare the faint light ofa train in the distance with the brilliantlight as the train bears down close to us.

To get a sense of the (astronomical)scales we are talking about, the neareststar to us is about 4 light-years away.One light-year is the distance that lightcan travel within a year moving at theenormous speed of 186,000 miles persecond. At this speed, light circles theEarth more than 7 times in 1 second. Forcomparison, the ‘nearby’ Andromedagalaxy lies at a distance of about 2 mil-lion light-years. And the most distantgalaxies visible to us currently are about13 billion light-years away. That is to say,the light that left them 13 billion yearsago is just now reaching us, and we areseeing them as they were 13 billion yearsago, long before the Sun and Earth hadeven formed (4.6 billion years ago).

Until recently, one of the greatest chal-lenges to measuring accurate distanceswas a complication caused by the pres-


The age ofthe universe


Note byWendy L.Freedman

ence of dust grains manufactured bystars and scattered throughout interstel-lar space. This dust, located in the re-gions between stars, absorbs and scat-ters light. If no correction is made for itseffects, objects appear fainter and there-fore apparently, but erroneously, fartheraway than they actually are. Fortunately,dust makes objects appear not onlyfainter, but also redder. By making meas-urements at more than one wavelength,this color dependence provides a power-ful means of correcting for the presenceof dust and allowing correct distances tobe derived.

Currently, the most precise method formeasuring distances is based on the ob-servations of stars named Cepheid vari-ables. The atmospheres of these starspulsate in a very regular cycle, on time-scales ranging from 2 days to a fewmonths. The brighter the Cepheid, themore slowly it pulsates, a property dis-covered by astronomer Henrietta Leavittin 1908. This unique relation allows thedistance to be obtained, again using theinverse square law of radiation–that is,it allows the intrinsic brightness of theCepheid to be predicted from its ob-served period, and its distance fromEarth to be calculated from its observed,apparent brightness.

High resolution is vital for discoveringCepheids in other galaxies. In otherwords, a telescope must have suf½cientresolving power to distinguish individ-ual Cepheids from all the other stars inthe galaxy. The resolution of the HubbleSpace Telescope is about ten times betterthan can be generally obtained throughEarth’s turbulent atmosphere. Thereforegalaxies within a volume about a thou-sand times greater than accessible to tel-escopes from Earth could be measuredfor the ½rst time with Hubble. With it,distances to galaxies with Cepheids canbe measured relatively simply out to the

nearest massive clusters of galaxies some50 to 70 million light-years away. (Forcomparison, the light from these galax-ies began its journey about the time ofthe extinction of the dinosaurs onEarth.)

Beyond this distance, other methods–for example, bright supernovae or theluminosities of entire galaxies–are em-ployed to extend the extragalactic dis-tance scale and measure the Hubble con-stant. Supernovae are cataclysmic explo-sions of stars near the end of their lives.The intrinsic luminosities of these ob-jects are so great that for brief periods,they may shine as bright as an entire gal-axy. Hence, they may be seen to enor-mous distances, as they have been dis-cerned out to about half the radius of theobservable universe. Unfortunately, forany given method of measuring dis-tances, there may be uncertainties thatare as yet unknown. However, by com-paring several independent methods, alimit to the overall uncertainty of theHubble constant can be obtained. Thiswas one of the main aims of the HubbleKey Project.

This project was designed to use theexcellent resolving power of the HubbleSpace Telescope to discover and measureCepheid distances to galaxies, and to de-termine the Hubble constant by apply-ing the Cepheid calibration to severalmethods for measuring distances furtherout in the Hubble expansion. The KeyProject was carried out by a group ofabout 30 astronomers, and the resultswere published in 2001. Distances meas-ured using Cepheids were used to set theabsolute distance scale for 5 differentmethods of measuring relative distances.The combined results yield a value of theHubble constant of 72 (in units of kilo-meters per second per megaparsec,where 1 megaparsec corresponds to adistance of 3.26 million light-years),

with an uncertainty of 10 percent. (Theprevious range of these measurementswas 40 to 100 in these units.) Unlike thesituation earlier, all of the differentmethods yield results in good agreementto within their respective measurementuncertainties.

The Hubble constant is the most im-portant parameter in gauging the age ofthe universe. However, in order to deter-mine a precise age, it is important toknow how the current expansion ratediffers from past rates. If the universehas slowed down or speeded up overtime, then the total length of time overwhich it has been expanding will differaccordingly. Is the universe slowingdown (as expected if the force of gravityhas been retarding its expansion)? If so,the expansion would have been faster inthe past before the effects of gravityslowed it down, and the age estimatedfor the universe would be younger thanif it had always been expanding at a con-stant rate.

Indeed, this deceleration is what as-tronomers expected to ½nd as theylooked further back in time. The calcula-tion for a Hubble constant of 72 and auniverse with a slowing expansion rateyields an age for the universe of about 9billion years. This would be ½ne, exceptfor one not-so-small detail from otherconsiderations: the measured ages ofstars.

The best estimates of the oldest starsin the universe are obtained from study-ing globular clusters, systems of starsthat formed early in the history of ourgalaxy. Stars spend most of their life-times undergoing the nuclear burning ofhydrogen into helium in their centralcores. Detailed computer models of theevolution of such stars compared withobservations of them in globular clus-ters suggest they are about 12 or 13 bil-lion years old–apparently older than the

universe itself. Obviously, this is notpossible.

The resolution of this paradox appearsto rest in a newly discovered property ofthe universe itself. A wealth of new dataover the past few years has begun to evo-lutionize cosmology. Probably the mostsurprising result is the increasing evi-dence that instead of decelerating as ex-pected, the universe is accelerating! Oneimplication is the existence of a form ofenergy that is repulsive, acting againstthe inward pull of gravity. Astronomersrefer to this newly discovered universalproperty of the universe as ‘dark energy.’

Before the expansion of the universewas discovered, Einstein’s originalmathematical equation describing theevolution of the universe in general rela-tivity contained a term that he called thecosmological constant. He introducedthis term to prevent any expansion (orcontraction) of the universe, as it wasthought that the universe was static. Af-ter Hubble discovered the expansion,Einstein referred to the cosmologicalconstant as his greatest blunder. He hadmissed the opportunity to predict theexpansion.

However, a recent discovery suggeststhat, although the universe is expanding,the term in Einstein’s equation may havebeen correct after all: it may representthe dark energy. In a universe with aHubble constant of about 70, and withmatter contributing one-third and darkenergy providing approximately two-thirds of the overall mass plus energydensity, the resulting estimated age forthe universe is 13 billion years, in verygood agreement with the ages derivedfrom globular clusters.

It is too soon yet to know whether theexistence of dark energy will be con-½rmed with future experiments. But tothe surprise of an initially skeptical com-munity of astronomers and physicists,


The age ofthe universe

several independent observations andexperiments are consistent with this the-ory. Perhaps most exciting is the pros-pect of learning more about an entirelynew form of mysterious energy, a prop-erty of the universe that to date hasevaded all explanation.

The dark energy observed is smaller byat least 10 billion, billion, billion, billion,billion, billion times than the best theo-ries of elementary particle physics wouldpredict from ½rst principles. Hence, bystudying the behavior of the universe,astronomers are posing new challengesto fundamental physics. It is often thecase in science that as old questions areresolved, novel, perhaps even moreexciting, questions are uncovered. Thenext decade promises to be a fruitful onein addressing profound questions aboutthe nature of the universe we live in.

Allen Funt was one of the great psychol-ogists of the twentieth century. His in-formal demonstrations on Candid Cam-era showed us as much about humanpsychology and its surprising limitationsas the work of any academic psycholo-gist. Here is one of the best (as I recall itmany years later): he placed an umbrellastand in a prominent place in a depart-ment store and ½lled it with shiny newgolf-cart handles. These were pieces ofstrong, gleaming stainless-steel tubing,about two-feet long, with a gentle bendin the middle, threaded at one end (toscrew into a threaded socket on your golfcart) and with a handsome sphericalplastic knob on the opposite end. In oth-


Daniel C. Dennett

on failures offreedom & thefear of science

Daniel C. Dennett, a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy since 1987, is University Professor,Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, anddirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies atTufts University. The ideas in this note are furtherelaborated in “Freedom Evolves,” which VikingPenguin will publish this spring. His other booksinclude “Brainstorms” (1978), “Elbow Room”(1984), and “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (1995).

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