The Chronicle: 3/8/2002: From Tragedy and Bloodshed, Michael Ignatieff Draws Human-Rights Ideals

seminar on "Human Rights, State Sovereignty, and Intervention," the main text is his own experience.

He has traveled, he wrote in his book The Warrior's Honor, "through the landscapes of modern ethnic war: to Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia; to Rwanda, Burundi, Angola; and to Afghanistan." (He went to Kabul just two days after the Taliban seized power in 1996.) He has seen the ruins of bombed cities, dead bodies in a church, and orphans wandering the streets.

Whether as a correspondent for The New Yorker, a broadcaster for the BBC, a member of an international commission, or a human-rights scholar, Mr. Ignatieff has been on the ground in an array of global hot spots. In his classroom at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, he uses his travels to illustrate intricate points about the balancing act of democracy, stability, and human rights. Democracy and human rights are widely seen as essential to one another, but the picture is often more complicated. In Kosovo, for example, where Mr. Ignatieff has spent considerable time, democracy means rule by the ethnic Albanian majority, which introduces human-rights problems for the region's Serb minority.

As the director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the 54-year-old Mr. Ignatieff is at the vanguard of something that is at once a worldwide movement and an emerging field of academic study. He is one of the chief architects of the view that foreign policy should be guided not only by strategic self-interest ("realism") but by a commitment to human rights -- a commitment that, when feasible and when all else fails, must be backed up with military force. (It would not be feasible, for example, to intervene in a place like Chechnya, which could result in a conflict with nuclear-equipped Russia. But in cases where it is possible to stop atrocities and diplomatic means have been exhausted, the West has a moral responsibility, Mr. Ignatieff argues, to intervene.)

The Revolution

Occasionally, a scholar's work finds its way -- thanks to a confluence of current events, historical developments, intellectual trends -- from the margins of the cultural radar screen to the center. That moment has arrived for Mr. Ignatieff. The issues that form the core of his current research -- war, intervention, nation-building, the changing global order -- have occupied center stage in public consciousness since September 11. But even before the terrorist attacks, a seismic geopolitical development of the 1990s, the new notion in the West of "humanitarian intervention," made Mr. Ignatieff's work of particular import. The cases of Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and East Timor occasioned an outcry for Western governments to take action to stop human-rights atrocities. With the election of center-left governments in Britain, Germany, and France, the principle of humanitarian intervention emerged as a new paradigm, if a controversial one, in international affairs.

Mirroring this global "rights revolution," the 1990s also saw an explosion of literature on human rights -- both journalistic and scholarly. A hybrid field by its nature, with strong ties to the world of human-rights advocacy, academic human rights draws scholars from a variety of disciplines: international law, political science, philosophy, sociology, journalism.

Among the most eloquent, well-versed, and prolific of those scholars is Mr. Ignatieff. His output is dizzying. As a snapshot, just in the last three months, Mr. Ignatieff's writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times' op-ed page, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and The New York Times Book Review.

It's not merely the volume of his writing, but the range of its audience: diplomats and elite foreign-policy experts; human-rights activists and political theorists; the intelligentsia and the general, educated public. Mr. Ignatieff's presence is being felt far and wide.

In his 2000 book Virtual War and in a series of essays, he argues forcefully that Western governments haven't done nearly enough to stop genocide and human-rights abuses: In Rwanda, the West watched passively as several-hundred-thousand innocent civilians were slaughtered; and had international forces entered Bosnia sooner than they did, tens of thousands of lives could have been saved.

Mr. Ignatieff's approach to human rights departs from the familiar image of the 1980s letter-writing campaign on behalf of jailed dissidents. "For too long," he writes in his latest book, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, "human rights has been seen as a form of apolitical humanitarian rescue for oppressed individuals." Mr. Ignatieff, in contrast, sees it as a form of political struggle, one that squarely confronts the often thorny and complicated entanglements that arise in the attempt to balance state sovereignty with the rights of individuals in those states. For example, does a sovereign state have the "right" to oppress members of an ethnic minority group within its own borders? Do outside parties (the United Nations, NATO) have the right to intervene in order to stop human-rights abuses?

Opposing Arguments

The idea of universal human rights has become so intuitive, so ingrained in our political vocabulary as to seem essentially unobjectionable. In fact, there are many religious, cultural, and political grounds for opposing the notion. In Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, Mr. Ignatieff canvasses a number of those arguments and attempts to refute them.

One set of objections emanates from the Islamic world. In the Islamic tradition, there is simply a different conception of individual rights than in the West -- in particular with regard to women. Some say no bridge can be built from Islam to the modern, secular notion of rights. Similar objections to universal human rights come from Asian traditions, cultures with beliefs about authority and the relationship of the individual to society that are irreconcilable with the individualistic thrust of Western human-rights conceptions.

Finally, there are objections to universal human rights from within the Western tradition itself. Communitarian conservatives are suspicious of the concept of individual rights; postmodernists argue that there are no "foundations" for human rights and see universalist conceptions as Eurocentric; and left-wing, anti-imperialist critics view human rights as "the rhetoric of empire," a pretense for American hegemony and domination in the world.

Mr. Ignatieff rejects each of these objections to universal human rights. He argues that it is precisely its individualist character that gives human rights its global appeal. "The language of human rights," he says, "is the only universally available moral vernacular that validates the claims of women and children against the oppression they experience in patriarchal and tribal societies," for example. The argument that freedom is a Western idea, he says, makes him furious. "It just isn't so."

As for the anti-imperialist objections, Mr. Ignatieff says that such views "are prominently held by people with seven- and six-figure salaries in American institutions." He thinks there is "a tremendous amount of bad faith" in many of the criticisms of human rights leveled, for example, by tenured professors "from Asian and African countries who have made their homes here and done very well. Their very presence in these institutions," he says, "is a testimony to the force and power of the ideas that they themselves condemn. We wouldn't have doctrines of colonial emancipation, doctrines of self-determination, doctrines of human equality without international human rights."

Yet unlike advocates who defend human rights as being above the crude machinations of money and empire, Mr. Ignatieff sees human rights as an ideology of power -- even one of imperialism. Human-rights discourse wouldn't have spread throughout the world, he says, "were it not for American global hegemony. We would not have a global ascendancy of human rights and a global language of freedom," he says, "without the ascendancy of the American empire. I don't care how controversial it is to say so."

Theory and Practice

Mr. Ignatieff deals with such knotty issues with the tools of an ethicist and a reporter, an intellectual historian and a geopolitical analyst, weaving nuanced philosophical and historical arguments together with concrete explications of real-world cases. Alan Ryan, the warden of New College at the University of Oxford, says that it is difficult to categorize Mr. Ignatieff.

"Cultural commentator is near the mark," he says, "but perhaps public moralist would be the proper description."

That mixture of critical inquiry with on-the-ground experience, says Mr. Ignatieff, who looks like a Slavic Daniel Day-Lewis, is the key to his intellectual life. "I write most convincingly," he says over mushroom soup in the modest apartment he shares with his wife, Suzanna Zsohar, "about things I've touched with my own hands, seen with my own eyes, occasionally been knocked over by physically."

In addition to his prolific writing, he serves on a number of international panels and commissions. As a member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, he traveled to Kosovo with a group of human-rights activists and international-law scholars to observe conditions in the war-ravaged region.

His participation on the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty has taken him to meetings in London, Washington, New Delhi, and Ottawa. And in January, he attended that über-gathering of the global power elite, the World Economic Forum, where he led panels on citizenship and minority rights, Afghanistan, and the future of the Balkans.

The Path

Born in Toronto of Scottish-Canadian and Russian parents, Mr. Ignatieff's origins are in a much more stable part of the world than the places he studies. He brings up that experience in class, as well, in discussing the importance of states being well-governed, for example. But he has been living outside his home country for more than three decades.

Mr. Ignatieff completed his Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1976, on Enlightenment thought and the creation of the modern penitentiary. That also happened to be the subject of Michel Foucault's seminal Discipline and Punish, which was published while Mr. Ignatieff was at work on his dissertation. Rather than immerse himself in the feverish theoretical debates occasioned by Foucault's study, however, Mr. Ignatieff focused his attention closer to the ground, making weekly visits to a medium-security Massachusetts prison to participate in discussion groups with inmates. For a "sheltered Canadian boy," it was both a "formative" and a "convulsive" experience, he says, his first encounter with "the bottom of the heap" -- and with the American color line.

That dissertation became Mr. Ignatieff's first book, A Just Measure of Pain. A study of British jails and penal thought, the book would seem to have little to do with the 20th-century American prison at which Mr. Ignatieff conducted much of his "research." Yet he regards it as his attempt to process his transformative experience there. And he sees a clear connection to his later work on human rights. "Without the Enlightenment," he says, "we wouldn't have human rights. It's all made possible by [the Enlightenment thinkers'] vision of human freedom."

Crossing the Atlantic

After a brief stint at the University of British Columbia, Mr. Ignatieff landed a research fellowship at King's College of the University of Cambridge. His arrival in Britain, where he would make his home for more than two decades, coincided with Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister. He spent the next several years, as he puts it, watching Mrs. Thatcher "smash the place up," dismantling much of the public sector and British social democracy.

If his experience in the American prison system was the first major turning point for Mr. Ignatieff, this was the second. It drove him, he says, toward a kind of liberal centrism, an ideological ground he has occupied ever since.

With the end of the Cambridge fellowship in 1984 and "no real academic prospects," Mr. Ignatieff did something he calls "very peculiar": He became the host of a late-night television talk show on Britain's then-new Channel 4. The show, he says, was "incredibly highbrow," regularly featuring guests such as Susan Sontag and the literary theorist George Steiner. Broadcast from 11:00 p.m. until midnight, it received "exceptionally low ratings," Mr. Ignatieff says. "I became known in Britain as a kind of windbag. It was fun."

He thus commenced his career as a journalist. He began writing a newspaper column, for the London Observer, while continuing to be the host of a series of intellectual television shows. In 1991, just as ethnic wars were engulfing various regions around the globe, he was asked to make a six-part documentary on nationalism. The filming of the series, Blood and Belonging, took him and his crew on the road for six months -- to Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, and other war zones.

It was the first time in his life, he says, that he saw "real, visceral ethnic hatred." It was also the first time that he was shot at. In Vukovar, Croatia, a town on the Danube then occupied by the Serbs, Serbia and Croatia fought the heaviest artillery battle since World War II. The town was flattened, and Mr. Ignatieff's film crew went "prowling around the ruins" in an area patrolled by Serb paramilitaries. The Serbs took Mr. Ignatieff and his crew hostage. They were released after several hours, but shots were then fired at their vehicle.

The experience had an enormous impact on him. "When you have a sheltered, middle-class upbringing, and you're a liberal who believes in civility, tolerance, blah, blah," he says, "to then come into a place where people hate each other that deeply, where they're willing to kill each other and kill you, was a real eye-opener. I can't even describe how deeply it went."

Along with the companion volume Mr. Ignatieff wrote for the series, two subsequent books, The Warrior's Honor and Virtual War, form a kind of trilogy -- on "ethnic hatred, ethnic war, and what we do about it," he says.

But the book for which he is perhaps best known also took shape over the course of the 1990s. A biography of his intellectual hero, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, it would seem to be thematic light years away from the kind of front-lines war reporting Mr. Ignatieff was doing. Yet, he argues, there is a connection between the two.

Life of the Mind

Berlin, whose family emigrated from Latvia to Britain during the early days of Bolshevik rule, became the leading political theorist in postwar Britain. A champion of the liberal tradition of toleration and rights, he was a fierce critic of fascism as well as revolutionary socialism -- indeed, of all forms of tyranny and all utopian systems. In his most famous formulation, he argued that the aim of political life should be to protect "negative liberty," which is to say freedom from tyranny. Political systems with more ambitious designs -- those, for example, with utopian ideals such as the "realization" of the human "essence" or the creation of a "new man" -- were, for Berlin, inherently dangerous, almost certain to be enforced at gunpoint.

As a Jew in the Russian empire, Berlin "knew what it was to be persecuted, what it was to be really frightened," says Mr. Ignatieff. His liberal political philosophy had "a much darker sense of the possibilities for mutual human malignity" than do many contemporary theories. It is here, for Mr. Ignatieff, that the connection between writing about ethnic hatred and writing a biography of Berlin overlap.

Freelance Intellectual

After 20 years as a freelance intellectual, Mr. Ignatieff began teaching at Harvard's Carr Center in September 2000, and in February 2001 he was named the center's director. (He shares administrative responsibilities with Samantha Power, the center's executive director. The division of labor works wonderfully, he says: "She does all the work.")

"My whole life," he says, "can be seen as an attempt to escape institutional responsibility," and yet "now, in my twilight years, institutional responsibility has fallen on me like a ton of bricks." While he has enjoyed having the general audience he cultivated as a writer, "it wasn't always easy," he says. "I didn't have medical, I didn't have dental, and I didn't know what I would live on six months hence."

Being in an academic setting brings with it "some tremendous gains," he says. Academic reflection, "at its best, can widen the frame and deepen the kind of questions you can ask." But the downside, he says, is that he's not on the road as much. During the Afghan war, for example, he's gotten "really itchy at times."

" 'Christ,' I've thought to myself, 'here I am pontificating about this bloody thing, and I haven't been to Kabul in six years, I don't know what it's like now.' I feel out of the loop sometimes."

"I temperamentally think better on the road," he says, "with my laptop jouncing around, and I haven't had enough sleep." It isn't just empirical insights that he gains from being on the ground, Mr. Ignatieff says, but conceptual ones. "The distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism, the dynamics of pluralism -- all these theoretical issues come to me most saliently when I'm up on a hillside in Kurdistan."

Thomas Cushman, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College and editor of The Journal of Human Rights, says that Mr. Ignatieff's contributions to the field are marked by his simultaneous "ability to draw from expansive practical experience and to home in on the most important issues in human rights." Mr. Ignatieff is also, he adds, "an accomplished and poised writer," a quality he finds refreshing "in a field so often prone to legalistic and disciplinary jargon."

Robert Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books, for which Mr. Ignatieff has written for 15 years, says that in the "rather remarkable range of subjects" Mr. Ignatieff has taken on, he displays a "subtle and intimate grasp of personal experience," of "the human consequences" of the topics he addresses, "be it a struggle for power or long-range historical developments."

Mr. Ignatieff has his critics, as well. Richard Falk, an emeritus professor of international law at Princeton who served with the Harvard professor on the Independent International Commission on Ko-sovo, calls him a "rigorous thinker" and "skillful wordsmith," but says that Mr. Ignatieff has a tendency to be "oblivious to the dangers and excesses" of American power and expresses insufficient concern about the inhibitions of international law and morality on the use of that power.

Adam Garfinkle, editor of The National Interest, says that proponents of humanitarian intervention such as Mr. Ignatieff tend to regard their approach to foreign policy as cost-free. "These kinds of interventions are difficult," he says. "They spread American political capital far and wide, dissipating it as often as they accrue it." And they have the effect, he says, of "generating gratuitous resentment against the United States."

Despite his 30-year-long absence from his native land, Mr. Ignatieff calls himself a "proud but weird Canadian" and says he plans to remain a Canadian citizen. "I loved my own country," he says in a forthcoming Granta article about his student days, "but I believed in America in a way that Canada never allowed."

His move to the United States coincides with his growing influence on global-policy thinking. Where better to theorize imperial affairs than in the heart of the empire?

This path was perhaps prefigured in a line from a Judy Garland song that his mother used to sing to him: "People say don't stop -- unless you've played the Palace, you haven't played the top." Playing the Palace, Mr. Ignatieff says, meant playing the United States or Britain.

He played the British Palace for 20 years. His performance at the American one is just getting under way. The crowd is gathering and listening intently.

KEY WORKS OF MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Michael Ignatieff's wide-ranging oeuvre includes works on international affairs, intellectual history, and philosophy. He also has written biography, journalism, and fiction.

1978 A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (Pantheon)

1983 Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, coeditor (Cambridge University Press)

1983 The Needs of Strangers: An Essay on the Philosophy of Human Needs (Viking)

1987 The Russian Album (Viking)

1991 Asya: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf)

1994 Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

1994 Scar Tissue: A Novel (FSG)

1998 The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (Metropolitan Books)

1998 Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Metropolitan)

2000 Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (Metropolitan)

2000 The Rights Revolution (House of Anansi Press)

2001 Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton University Press)

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