Booklist: Freedom's Battle, by Gary J. Bass

Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, by Gary J. Bass
Alfred A Knopf, 2008
382 pages plus over a hundred pages of notes on chapters, and an index
Library: 341.584 BAS

Description
Why do we sometimes let evil happen to others and sometimes rally to stop it? Whose lives matter to us? These are the key questions posed in this important and perceptive study of the largely forgotten nineteenth century "atrocitarians"-some of the world's first human rights activists. Wildly romantic, eccentrically educated, and full of bizarre enthusiasms, they were also morally serious people on the vanguard of a new political consciousness. And their legacy has much to teach us about the human rights crises of today.

Gary Bass shatteres the myth that the history of humanitarian intervention began with Bill Clinton, or even Woodrow Wilson, and shows, instead, that there is a tangled international tradition, reaching back more than two hundred yers, of confronting the suffering of innocent foreigners. Bass describes the political and cultural landscapes out of which these activists arose, as an emergent free press exposed Europeans and Americans to atrocities taking place beyond their shores and galvanized them to act.

He brings alive a century of passionate advocacy in Britain, France, Russia and the United States: the fight the British waged against the oppression of the Greeks in the 1820s; the huge uproar against a notorious massacre in Bulgaria in the 1870s, and the American campaign to stop the Armenian genocide in 1915. He tells the gripping stories of the activists themselves: Byron, Bentham, Madison, Gladstone, Dostoevsky, and Theodore Roosevelt among them.

Military missions in the name of human rights have always been dangerous undertakings. There has invariably been the risk of radical destabilization and the threatening blurring of imperial and humanitarian intentions. Yet Bass demonstrates that even in the imperialistic heyday of the nineteenth century, humanitarian ideals could play a significant role in shaping world politics. He argues that the failure of today's leading democracies to shoulder such responsibilities has led to catastrophes such as those in Rwanda and Darfur-catastrophes that he means are neither inevitable nor traditional.

Timely and illuminating, Freedom's Battle challenges our assumptions about the history of morally motivated foreign policy and sets out a path for reclaiming that inheritance with greater modesty and wisdom.

Table of Contents
Part 1: Introduction
1. Humanitarianism or Imperialism
2. Media and Solidarity
3. The Diplomacy of Humanitarian Intervention

Part 2: Greeks
4. The Reek Revolution
5. The Scio Massacre
6. The London Greek Committee
7. Americans and Greeks
8. Lord Byron's WAll
9. Canning
10. The Holy Alliance
11. A Rumor of Slaughter
12. Navarino

Part 3: Syrians
13. Napoleon the Little
14. The Massacres
15. Public Opinion
16. Occupying Syria
17. Mission Creep

Part 4: Bulgarians
18. The Eastern Question
19. Pan-Slavism
20. Bosnia and Serbia
21. Bulgarian Horrors
22. Gladstone vs Disraeli
23. The Russo-Turko WAr
24. The Midlothian Campaign

Part 5: Conclusions
25. Armenians
26. The Uses of History
27. The International Politics of Humanitarian Intervention
28. The Domestic Politics of Humanitarian Intervention
29. A New Imperialism?
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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