Forced to Be Free: Rethinking J. S. Mill and Intervention

In the run-up to and aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, it became something of a commonplace for many on the American left to label US policy as a return to an imperial colonialism. The critique was far from unanimous, though, as the editorial boards at the New York Times and the New Republic together with a number of prominent leftists coalesced into a supposedly new entity, the ‘liberal hawk’ who envisions using American military might to secure human rights and to spread democracy. Of course, the liberal hawk is not really new; many eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal intellectuals defended the same sorts of claims. John Stuart Mill, for instance, argues in Considerations on Representative Government that while some nations are already candidates for representative government, ‘there are others which have not attained that state, and which, if held at all, must be governed by the dominant country, or by persons delegated for that purpose by it’ (Mill, 1861: 345). In an essay explicitly addressing the topic, ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’, Mill outlines a set of criteria for just interventions in other nations. Not coincidentally, liberal hawks often take ‘A Few Words’ as their starting point for intervention. This return to Mill is not without its problems, as a number of commentators note. After (in)famously labeling all non-Western nations ‘barbarians’, Mill argues that those nations ‘have not got beyond the period during which it is likely to be for their benefit that they should be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners’, claiming further that they must be held in this fashion until such time as the inhabitants can be made ready for civilization (Mill, 1859a: 406). So the question, then, is whether the humanitarian intervention advocated by liberal hawks is really just colonialism in another form. Are such missions really humanitarian or are they imperialist adventures thinly veiled by disingenuous moral language? Certainly it is true that there are those who speak in boldly colonialist language, characterizing American soldiers in Iraq as occupation