Dutch Revolution, Burkean Writings and the Libyan Revolution of 2001
Everywhere people have the ‘desire to live in liberty’, but, at least according to Guido Bentivoglio Relatione dell Provincie Unite of 1611, nowhere was ‘the love for liberty’ as strong as in the ‘Flemish regions’ (Hampsher-Monk, 1976). It was an opinion widely shared in seventeenth-century Europe. With the rest of Europe suffering from civil wars or rising absolutism, the Dutch Republic was said to offer a haven of tolerance, intellectual and individual freedom, serving as sanctuary for philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza, Bayle, and Locke.
Conformist theories of revolution and Burkes writings edify that the revolutions like the Dutch Revolt and the modern revolutions like the one in Libya, in 2011, display one or more of the constitutive facets of revolution: violence, speed, and critical mass movements (van M., 1993). However revolution theory is both incorrect and uncooperative in several ways. For starters, recent events in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are different from classic revolutions of the past revolutions; for currently they are better described only as coups. Secondly, revolution theory does a disfavor to the bigger historical ambitions of revolution when it links together these six dissimilar episodes on the foundation of their technical similarities unaided (Hampsher-Monk, 1988).
Furthermore, the amorality of revolution theory guides us to the regrettable outcome of mucking the significant distinctions that exist among these six episodes, specifically that a few of them have made the nation’s path to a democratic system at the same time as others have pushed the state into dictatorship (Sallust, 1963).
Burkean Writings, Contemporary Politics and the Libyan Revolt
Like all comparisons, that between Dutch and Libya is flawed, not least because the nature of the current crisis is not yet comprehensible. The U.S. President and British Prime Minister’s plan over Libya is entrenched in a much broader beginning of British foreign policy, which symbolizes a basic break from conventional pragmatist positions. To be certain, David Cameron openly denies being an adolescent neoconservative who considers you can dump democracy out of an aircraft at 40,000 feet. This discerns him from the more vigorous democracy exporters in government, for instance the Chancellor, George Osborne, and the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, who allegedly made an emotional speech in cabinet calling on Britain to maintain the revolutions sweeping the Arab world.
In spite of everything, David Cameron’s latest Libya speech was much more aligned to George W. Bush’s program of democracy endorsement than the thin “national interest” center of Hurd and Rifkind. The Prime Minister differed with decades of British friendliness for “affable” repressive regimes in the area. “We call for to discard once and for all with the obsolete idea that democracy has no business in the Arab region,” he disagreed. “Too frequently in history we have made an artificial choice between alleged strength on the one hand and improvement and honesty on the other. As fresh events have established, denying people their basic rights does not protect stability, rather the opposite.”
Declining to be diverted into a conversation of the Palestinian issue, Cameron finished by saying that “a number of the more despotic regimes use the Arab-Israeli clash as a way of maintaining their own people happy without having a democratic state.” This study of the problems of the Middle East is unpolluted neo-conservatism.
The overpoweringly optimistic response to Cameron’s words amongst Conservatives in the Commons was a symbol of just how distant the party had gone from its conventional realist stance. Tobias Ellwood, MP for Bourne mouth East, exclaimed “a once-in-a-lifetime chance to give confidence to democracy to increase all over the Middle East” and said, for “a uniformly healthy point for … dictators in Africa.”
The MP for Halesowen and Rowley Regis, James Morris, impassioned that “it was in Britain’s state interest to … endorse democracy and hold up rebel movements where citizens are fighting towards a need for more democracy in these states.” Referring openly to Bosnia, William Cash, MP for Stone, inquired with the Prime Minister to think “correctly arming individuals who resist Gaddafi, if needed, with the intention of making sure that they are not killed, as happened in Srebrenica and Sarajevo.”
During the Libyan Revolt of 2011, David Cameron, his cabinet supporters, The U.S. President, and the Conservative parliamentary majority are a great deal nearer to Burke than the “realists” understand. A long way from being a careful supporter of the “national interest,” Burke robustly thought not just that “liberty” was “the legacy of our species,” but that for British well-being it was important for its defense, even at the price of defying state sovereignty. “A more roguish idea cannot exist,” he grieved, “than that any amount of evil, hostility and tyranny may triumph in a country that the most repulsive, murderous and exterminatory rebellions may fume in it, or the most terrible and gory tyranny may dictate, and that no neighboring power can take cognizance of either or afford succor to the miserable sufferers.”
For his caution, Burke was tiredly released by most peers as a fanatical ideologue who botched an attempt to recognize lawful Dutch ambitions and the military-political truth that the Dutch Revolution would have to be accepted. All through the 1790s Burke supported a chain of unsuccessful expeditions to the Dutch shores on the advice of exiles who had been out of touch with the state of affairs at home, or even worse were thought of as the agents of a foreign authority.
At present, though, the British Prime Minister and American President’s goal appears more incomplete than that of Burke. The Irishman insisted all-out war against the oppression of the Dutch. Cameron is still not calling for an argument with Iran, for instance. He bears a greater resemblance to his 19th-century precursor Lord Palmerston, who was persuaded that the defense of British liberties needed support for constitutional government overseas. As a substitute of an extended slugging match to force democracy where it is most opposed, Cameron appears to be aspiring for a Bosnian-style strategy of tactic in which fairly small amounts of western interference help to turn away a humanitarian disaster, or to tilt the equilibrium in favor of a democratic change.
By talking about action against Libya, David Cameron and the American President has already interfered.
The Dutch themselves had cherished the idea of liberty from the beginning of their revolt in the 1560s. In the political literature justifying and motivating the protest and resistance against the government of Philip II, liberty was presented as the supreme political value, to be virtually equated with the common good. Liberty was, as the 1568 De beschrjvinge . . . (Complaint of the Sorrowful Land of the Netherlands) put it, the ‘daughter of the Netherlands’. The Dutch, Jacob van Wesembeeke, one of the most prolific authors of the 1560s, emphasized, ‘had always been very great lovers, supporters, and advocates’ of their old liberty, which had brought them their renowned prosperity (Hampsher-Monk, 1988). As the Complaint put it, ‘Marchandise’, ‘Manufacture’, and ‘Negotiations’ were the sisters of Dutch liberty, which was seriously threatened by the lust for power and the ambitions of ‘idle men’ such as Granvelle, Alva, and, indeed, Philip II himself. Thus the Act of Abjuration of 1581, with which the States General of the United Provinces declared Philip II’s sovereignty over the Netherlands forfeit, presented a long, and by then familiar, list of grievances to prove that from the beginning Philip ‘has been trying to deprive these Countries of their ancient freedom and to bring them under Spanish rule’ (Hampsher-Monk, 1976).
From the perspective of many authors supporting the Dutch revolution of the late sixteenth century, the Dutch Revolt was in its essence a fight for liberty (van M., 1993). The basic argument was exemplified by a discourse of 1579, asserting that the principal aim of the Revolt was ‘no other but to defend the liberty of the fatherland, to free oneself of servitude . . . In sum to redress everything that is against liberty, under whatever title it may have been introduced, be it religion, the authority of His Majesty, or whatever else’ (Thelwall, 1796). Denying the increasingly sophisticated eighteenth-century accounts of how the rules of sociability could have emerged spontaneously, Burke reverts to Hobbes’s polarization, not only of natural liberty and political community but of natural liberty and any society at all: ‘In a state of rude nature there is no such thing as a people. A number of men in themselves have no collective capacity. The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation. It is wholly artificial; and made like all other legal fictions, by common agreement’ (van M., 1993). ‘In such dissolution of an ancient society as hath taken place in France’, even majorities (‘one of the most violent fictions of positive law’) have no status: ‘amongst men . . . disbanded, there can be no such thing’. The consequences of the loss of our socialized natures is such as to reassert all the problems that resulted from unleashed subjectivity (Thelwall, 1796).
When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a people; they have no longer a corporate existence; they have no longer a legal coactive force to bind within, nor a claim to be recognized abroad. They are a number of vague, loose, individuals, and nothing more. With them all is to begin again (Sallust, 1963).
Soon authors started to insist on the antiquity of Dutch liberty. In 1587, for example, Willem Verheyden urged the Dutch to uphold the ‘exceptional freedom which we have inherited from our ancestors’, as it had been retained ‘since the time of Julius Caesar’. 5 The antiquity of Dutch liberty became one of the foundational ideas of the Dutch Republic. According to the Batavian myth, as it is called nowadays, (Brewer, 1975) the liberty of the United Provinces, and of Holland in particular, had been urged by the Batavians, the direct, ‘classical’ ancestors of the Dutch. As Hugo Grotius argued in his 1610 ‘Treatise on the Antiquity of the Batavian now Hollandish Republic’, the Batavians had been respected as ‘authors of liberty’, (Brewer, 1975), as a free, self-governing people willing to do the utmost to retain their freedom. The Batavians and the leader of their revolt against the Romans, Claudius Civilis, were amongst the heroes of the ‘Golden Age’. They were celebrated in literature with both Vondel and Hooft offering epic tales of Batavian history (Hampsher-Monk, 1988). On the basis of Tacitus’ Histories, the moment of the Batavians committing themselves to the revolt was captured by the famous painting of Otto van Veen and the etching by Antonio Tempesta, and in 1662 by Rembrandt, whose Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis was commissioned for the New Amsterdam town hall. The latter was probably rejected because Rembrandt repudiated the humanist conventions of the Batavian myth, interpreting instead the ‘barbarous ceremonies and strange oath’ of the Batavians (as Tacitus had in fact put it) in what has been called a ‘staggering picture’ of ‘brutal monumentality’. Lest the foundation of the king’s exclusive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory freedom, the political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert (Thelwall, 1796) that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights, all which, with him, compose one system (Burke, 1790).
The aim of this thesis is to study, within the normative context of sixteenth century political thought, the ideological meaning and implications of the foundational idea of Dutch liberty, as developed during the Revolt, for the political rights and duties of individual citizens and its relation to the Libyan Revolt of 2011 and contemporary American politics. During the Dutch Revolt notions of civic rights obviously focused on the issues of political obedience and resistance, which were central to the political thought of the Reformation (Smith, 1977). Therefore, it is historically imperative to interpret Dutch political thought on these issues within the context of Reformation debates on Christian liberty and the foundations and limits of secular authority (Oxford, 1765-9). Although the issues of civic duty and its relation to liberty were not absent from Reformation political thought, they had been analyzed first and foremost in the Renaissance political thought of civic humanism. It is, therefore, useful to explore late sixteenth-century Dutch debates on civic duty and liberty within the context of Renaissance political thought (Oxford, 1765-9).
Dutch Revolt and Burkean arguments in American politics today
As many proponents of the Dutch Revolt emphasized in their publications, the active support of the defense of liberty, and of its essence the liberty of conscience, was the duty of every Dutch citizen. Clare vertoninge . . . (Hampsher-Monk, 1976) of 1579 was one of many treatises which urged Dutch citizens to act as true ‘patriots and lovers of the liberty of the country’. Indeed, the individual citizen should, ‘coming to the worst’, prefer to ‘die an honest death for the defense of his fatherland and preservation of his goods, wife, children and offspring instead of waiting every day and from hour to be led to death as a sheep’ (Brewer, 1975).
As this sort of phrase suggests, in analyzing civic duty Dutch authors adopted Ciceronian arguments. In fact it was not uncommon for authors to present their treatises as acts of civic duty in the Ciceronian sense (Smith, 1977). In 1582, for example, Jan van den Kiele published his pamphlet Redene Exhortatyf, because, as he put it, ‘as Cicero testifies in De Officiis each good subject (after the gifts conferred unto him by the Lord, and after his quality) is bound to support his fatherland and to render service’. The argument that virtuous acts of public service by the citizens were the key to the preservation of liberty, to the promotion of the common good, and indeed to individual glory and happiness was revived and revered in particular by the republican theorists of the Italian Renaissance. With Cicero, his De officiis in particular, as guide, the celebration of a life of negotium, of virtuous acts of public service, featured prominently in, for example, the works of the Florentine chancellor, Leonardo Bruni (Thelwall, 1796). In the Laudatio Florentinae Urbis, which Bruni wrote in 1403-4, the Tuscan humanist extolled Florence’s greatness as the fruit of its liberty. According to Bruni, Florentine liberty was championed by an outstanding military machine and a well-balanced mixed republican constitution, which were animated by the virtue of active citizens. For civic humanists like Bruni virtue and active life were inseparable; their motto was Cicero statement in De officiis that ‘the whole glory of virtue lies in action’ (Burke, 1869).
In England extravagant claims were made about the essentially unchanged nature of Common Law going back to Saxon times and before. Such naive (or disingenuous) claims persisted to the end of the eighteenth century — we find them in Edmund Burke, of whom more later, and in Blackstone’s famous midcentury Commentaries on the Laws of England: ‘the first ground and chief cornerstone of the laws of England . . . is general immemorial custom, or common law, from time to time declared in the decisions of the courts of justice’ (Sallust, 1963). The more ancient was the more authoritative. In seventeenth-century debates, royalists and Parliamentarians alike agreed that identifying immemorial law was the key to resolving conflict: if Parliaments formed no part of it but had been created by kings, then kings could dismiss them; but if Parliament were immemorial they could not (Hampsher-Monk, 1976). But both radicals and royalists disputed the immemorial and unbroken character of parliamentary institutions (van M., 1993).
It is unlikely that there were, in eighteenth-century England, much like in Contemporary American Politics today, many true moral relativists or even convinced atheists. For most, the new moral sciences existed in an unexamined conformity with at least the core of traditional moral deontology; some, in favorable circumstances, could persuade themselves that these secular processes were simply the mechanism by which God’s will was promulgated (Hampsher-Monk, 1988). But when public subjective belief swung massively away from anything that could be squared with Christian requirements, as in the French Revolution, the underlying commitment to a religious deontology was rapidly reasserted. The British eighteenth-century experiments in theorizing how individuals’ subjectivity might be rationally shaped by purely secular forces and beliefs was, by the last decade of that century, only a qualified success (Thelwall, 1796). The continual mobilization of the population, brought on by the needs of both war and industrial development, required further ideological resources to render stable the relations between the State and the individual. One was a novel assertion of national identity, the other a renewed religious and moral campaign (Smith, 1977).
It is, I think, no accident that each of the detailed accounts here — that of Natural Jurisprudence and that of Common Law and custom, has ended with Burke — as could the account of political economy, had there been room to tell it. For the appeal of his opposition to the French lay in the crystallization of a conservative national political identity, and in his ability to synthesize, rather than implicitly oppose, religious belief with the new moral sciences which, on their own, proved such dangerous foundations.
Conclusion
The U.S. And Britain have called for Gaddafi’s trial in the International Criminal Court, forced ruthless sanctions on him and all of his principal lieutenants and repeatedly called on him to step aside. Six British Special Forces units have been found in Libya, supposedly accompanying a diplomat to the rebels — terrible enough of if it were accurate — but also transporting ordinance and arms. There is clear interest in both nations in setting up a “no fly zone” in Libya, which, as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has stated, would indicate a campaign of bombing towards Libyan military facilities with the intention of demolishing the country’s anti-aircraft ability.
Libya is being sheltered in the UN Security Council by the Russians and the Chinese. The new draft of the resolution accusing Gaddafi urged member nations to use all essential ways to re-establish compassionate aid to Libya. The Chinese and Russians declined to recognize this language because it may just have been construed by the U.S. And Britain as approving an attack on Libya.
Works Cited
Brewer J., Rockingham, Burke, and Whig Political Argument, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), 188-201.
Burke Edmund, The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, 6 vols. (London, 18869).
Burke Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
Blackstone William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1765-9).
Hampsher-Monk I.W., The Political Theory of the Levelers: Putney, Property, and Professor Macpherson, Political Studies, 24 (1976), 397-422.
Hampsher-Monk I.W., Rhetoric and Opinion in the Politics of Edmund Burke, History of Political Thought, 9 (1988), 455-84.
Thelwall John, The Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments in a Series of Letters to the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1796).
Sallust, The Jugurthine War and the Conspiracy of Catiline, trans S.A. Handford (Harmondsworth, 1963).
Smith Adam, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner ( Oxford, 1977).
van M. Gelderen (ed.), The Dutch Revolt (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought; Cambridge, 1993).
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