Ivory Coast and liberal intervention

In today's Times a British-Ghanaian businessman suggested that the reason the West has been reluctant to respond to the ensuing civil war in the Ivory Coast is because 'it seems that the old stereotype of Africa - the poverty-stricken, corrupt, incompetent, violent Dark Continent - has reasserted itself as an excuse for inaction'. In many respects the writer, Tutu Agyare, is right. However, there is a more fundamental reason why the West responded so readily to Libya and almost not at all to the Ivory Coast; and that reason is public exposure to the issue and the subsequent public appetite for action. The former feeds the latter and the latter forces the West to take action.

Many people will dismiss what I have said above as wrong because isn't Libya and Iraq all about oil? Indeed, the reticence of the West to get involved in Rwanda in 1994 suggests that backwaters in the Dark Continent are irrelevant to the West but oil rich Arab nations are. That's nonsense for several reasons, notably, that our oil situation has worsened as a result of out interventions in the Middle East not improved. Nevertheless, something about the Middle East and South-East Asia (tsunami 2004), East Asia (Japanese Earthquake 2011), i.e., the world other than Africa, consistently captures our nation's attention.

So, if it's not self-interest in oil why doesn't the West treat the Ivory Coast the same as Libya: people are being killed on a scale greater than Libya and the conflict is much bloodier than the Libyan incident currently. Unfortunately, I suspect Mr Agyare is right - the West is so used to seeing poor, starving, dead Africans that it is no longer scandalous. Take the annual BBC circus that is Comic Relief for example: every year we see some the biggest egos in music, showbiz and politics make fools of themselves to raise money to help people in places like Africa. Each year it raises more and more money. It breaks more and more records. But the poverty of Africa goes on and on. The videos of crying celebrities and malnutritioned children come back and haunt us year after year. In other words, the failure of Africa to be seen to be improving (which it is) neutralises the public appetite for liberal intervention in those areas. It is expected that Africa is nasy, brutish and life is short. Although I commend charity like Comic Relief I also believe that it is giving Africa the wrong type of publicity. The pictures and film clips on the news are no longer shocking. The poverty is no longer heart-wrenching. The status quo is accepted and no longer challenged. As such, the public appetite (or lack of it) for the lost cause that is Africa has killed any impulse to action on the part of Western governments.

For many liberal interventionists, they would love to see the West intervening in every humanitarian disaster in the world, but unfortunately public opinion doesn't allow it. Public opinion allows only for a patchy, inconsistent and fundamentally cruel response to the plight of our fellow humans in Africa. When people on Question Time ask the panelists 'why are we not in country x if we're in country y?' the answer is because the person asking the question won't let us. The argument that because we can only act inconsistently, irrationally and discriminatory in which global flashpoints we intervene doesn't mean we shouldn't intervene at all. It shows us that to intervene more we need to prove that Africa has a future which can be improved; it is not destined to play the key actor on our television screens every year on Comic Relief to allow us to go through a trivial cathartic back-slapping moments of charity and make us feel good because we've given a fiver over the phone. The task of think-tanks, Churches, charities and the BBC is to show that the world is improving and that intervention works. Only then will the right kind of media attention fuel the right kind of public appetite for the right kind of liberal intervention.