December 15, 2007
States and Armies in the Eyes of the Times Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:00 PM EST An interesting article in today’s New York Times reports on what the article’s tone and headline (“Ethiopians Said to Push Civilians Into Rebel War”) seems to consider an outrageous scandal. Ethiopia has an occupying force in neighboring Somalia, where it recently helped a not-necessarily very popular indigenous government overthrow an Islamist theocracy, and when I read this headline, my first assumption was that the Ethiopian military was grossly breaching international law by forcing Somali citizens to do something like clear minefields in Mogadishu. If you read the Times article, however, you discover that the (elected) Ethiopian government is conscripting Ethiopian citizens of Somali ethnicity into militias, attempting to restore order in a rebellious province (Ogaden). The Times’s article’s lead paragraph is revealing: “The Ethiopian government, one of America’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians—including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations—to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.” Why is this a shocking scandal? Liberal states have often claimed the right to conscript their citizens. Sometimes these citizens are minimally or very imperfectly trained for the war they will face, which may cause a ghastly and unnecessary loss of life, but liberal regimes like the United States, Great Britain, and France have waged some of their major wars by precisely such means. Waging war incompetently makes for tragedy and needless human cost, but the tone of the Times piece suggests not tragedy but crime, and under-training troops is not in the literal sense of the word a crime. Similarly, from a traditional liberal perspective, if a regime does not have legitimacy derived from having won honest elections, it may well lose the moral authority to conscript its citizens—but the government of Ethiopia has been elected and reelected in multi-party elections. I am not sure how honest the last round of Ethiopian multi-party elections (in 2005) are generally thought to have been, but Ethiopia is more of a democracy than are most states on the continent of Africa. The people being conscripted are in this case members of a minority, being ordered to put down an insurgency waged by other members of their group, but the United States (along with almost all other liberal regimes) claims a comparable right, and has at times exercised it. Some of the Ethiopians being conscripted work for international organizations and NGOs, and some are even doctors and teachers (!), but democratic states are invariably accorded the right to conscript their own citizens, independent of employment status. A scene in the admittedly imperfect Saving Private Ryan, in which a very capable Captain of Army Rangers reveals himself to have previously worked as a teacher of expository writing in a Pennsylvania high school, is normally thought to be peculiarly affecting: In democracies, citizen soldiers drawn from all walks of life are the nation in arms, once a liberal ideal. The Times article somehow suggests otherwise, which I think reveals a kind of contempt for the rights of the state, even of a state possessing a degree of democratic legitimacy, as opposed to an NGO or supra-national body. I think the moral hierarchy here revealed—states presumed wicked, NGOs and multinational organizations presumed just, teaching and practicing medicine presumed just, killing anyone presumed unjust—deserves more critical reflection than it seems to receive at the paper of record. We revere the conscript armies in which our ancestors served, putting down rebellion or smashing politics not all that much less attractive than some of the politics practiced by the Union of Islamic Courts, the government the Ethiopians recently smashed in Somalia. Could it be that the Times thinks a relevant fault of the Ethiopian government is the one mentioned first in the paragraph above—being “one of the America’s top allies in Africa”? That may be ungenerous; the government in question has an abundance of faults, although not necessarily more than do the scores of governments with which it shares a continent. But whatever faults it has, conscripting teachers to put down a rebellion is not very clearly one of them. So history certainly changes. For most of the last few hundred years in the West, one of our characteristic sins was to immoderately admire the state, above all in its claim and capacity to monopolize legitimate violence. Now, in some quarters, people who seek to break that state monopoly are regarded very tenderly, and no human association seems to attract less careless admiration than does the democratic state.
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