There were, for me, a number of problems with Berman's analysis and his polemics and apologetics. On the historical and apologetics level Berman, though he comes close to doing this at times, fails to explore precedents for the liberal interventionism for the 1990s and after. Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, was, like the 68ers Berman explores, a radical in the 1930s who became a liberal interventionist in the years that led to World War II. Niebuhr's one has to chose the best of bad options, by the way, had, thanks to its manicheanisation by his more naïve followers, an immense impact on official American policy during the Cold War, another thing that parallels the trajectory of the 68ers.
Berman plays, historically speaking, fast and loose with the concept "totalitarian". Berman seems to divide the world up into totalitarian and non-totalitarian regimes and urges intervention when the former engage in the mass violation of human rights. "Totalitarian", however, is simply the modern and perhaps postmodern variant of autocracy or authoritarianism. Berman seems to argue that "totalitarian" regimes are fundamentally different from autocratic and authoritarian ones but he doesn't tell us why. Are autocracies and authoritarian regimes distinct economically, culturally, and politically from "totalitarian ones? If not why the need for a new term? Or is the term "totalitarian" one invented in the 20th century to scare the masses (propaganda) into submission (for a history of the term see Abbot Gleason's Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War)?
The Guardian, contrary to Berman's claim, is not, and I assume he is speaking of the British newspaper here, is not a marxist or communist rag. The Guardian is one of the great newspapers of the world.
Finally, Berman, though he mentions the Quakers at one point, elides the role Quakers have played in the pursuit of an internationalist human rights over the years. Quakers played major roles in the prisoner rights movement, the Indian rights movement, the women's rights movement, the anti-slavery movement, the saving refugees movement, and the anti-war movement. Quakers played such an important role in the pursuit of global human rights that the Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee won the Nobel Prize in 1947, itself an acknowledgement of the roles Quakers played in the human rights movement. It is likely, by the way, that Quaker pacifism is one of the reasons for Berman's ignoring of the Quaker historical precedent. Berman, you see, like the 68ers he turns into heroes, sees war as a means to protect human rights while most Quakers did not and do not.
Speaking of heroes, heroes and villains are at the heart of Berman's manichean apologetics and polemics. Berman's heroes are 68ers like Joshka Fischer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Bernard Kouchner, and Andre Glucksmann who, according to Berman, were nutted by reality, particularly the anti-Semitism of those terrorising Israel and Jews that many on the left, because of their anti-imperialist mentality, allied with, and, as a result, whether in government service or as founders or supporters of international human rights organisations, became involved in and supported international intervention in support of human rights whether in Vietnam, the former Jugoslavija, or, more problematically for the 68ers, Iraq. The villains in Berman's not fully interconnected essays are factions within the left, Berman, by the way, is more historically and empirically accurate when he notes that the left has factions than the right and extreme right.
It is this manicheanism, a manicheanism that seems to trap Berman into a corner in which reflexivity is unnecessary and unwanted, that is a key factor in the problems at the heart of Berman's book. For instance, Berman seems to assert that war in general and war in the age of indiscriminate total war is a viable last option to protect human rights. The obvious problem with this argument, however, is that war is and always has been indiscriminate in its victims and hence is itself something that violates human rights. How many civilians were killed in the "good war" of the 1940s? In the end, the strong pacifist position that argues that something that violates human rights cannot be a weapon for the protection of human rights seems a stronger and more empirically grounded perspective. I suppose one could counter with Niebuhr's argument that sometimes one has to choose between less bad and more bad alternatives, but if one is going to make this argument one has to recognise that war is something that violates human rights and live with it. Berman, however, doesn't seem to have the sense of irony and tragedy, Niebuhr had.
Nor does Berman explore the contradictions inherent in the notion that the US or any other nation can and should be an instrument of pursuing human rights. The US, like the USSR and every other great power present and past, is a bureaucratic oligarchy (see Max Weber and Robert Michels on bureaucracies and inequalities of power and authority) that at both home and abroad has been and will continue to be a violator of human rights. How can the great powers with their economic, political, cultural, and geographic imperialisms be the protectors of human rights around the globe? Again, I suppose one could follow the Niebuhr strategy and argue that we must chose the least worst of bad alternatives but again one has to be conscious, as was Niebuhr who remained critical of oligarchy, capitalism, and imperialism all of his life, that one is choosing the least worst of alternatives and live with it. Berman once again seems to want to have his cake and eat it too.
In the end Berman's book was far too limitedly historical and far too polemical and manichean for my taste. In many ways I found Berman's book, because it engaged in far too much ahistorical polemics and apologetics, that which he ironically rails against in the book, utopian. So reader beware, while Berman's book offers an interesting exploration of the political and ideological "evolution" of the 68ers, it does so in a far too limitedly historical way and in a far too manichean and utopian way for my taste. The more things change?
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