The Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience by Michael Ignatieff Chatto & Windus 207pp, £9.99 in UK
For almost five years during the earlier part of this decade, Michael Ignatieff braved the battle lines of modern ethnic war. Blood and Belonging (1993) introduced us to those skirmishes. Now, steeped in action (having been shot at, threatened, hastened out of town), be brings back briefings from the conflicts in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, from Africa, from the smoking rocks of Afghanistan.
"I saw the ruins of Vukovar, Huambo, and Kabul; the bodies in the church at Nyarubuye," he writes, "and the orphans of Mazar al Sharif. At the checkpoints I met the new warriors: the barefoot boys with Kalashnikovs, the paramilitaries in wraparound sunglasses, the turbaned zealots of the Taliban . . ." Fundamentally, his is a moral curiosity; it fuels an intelligence bred on compassion; it makes possible Ignatieff's responses of heart and head to the dilemmas, the ubiquity of suffering, the unreason, the ragged weave of fear and prejudice which time and again he seems to encounter with muted despair.
"My concern here is with moral obligation," he states at the outset, to fathom "that impulse we all feel to `do something' when we see some terrible report on television . . ." Within what he terms "the modern universal human rights culture" he seeks "to plumb the moral connections" that associate zones of safety where most of us live, with "zones of danger where ethnic struggle has become a way of life." A way of death.
Television is the focus in the first of these five essays, "Is Nothing Sacred", positing quietly (the characteristic tone of Ignatieff's stance) that, having made malleable the consciences of viewers, television then connects them to the victims of affliction as "consumers", thus beginning a continuum of connection which moves potentially through voyeurism, (the absence of moral engagement), into at best a form of commitment, at worst exploitation, and sometimes, ironically, counter-intentionally, resulting in prolonged suffering in the wake of intervention.
And there lies the crux of the dilemma on which the book's subject, so finely balanced, risks impaling itself - the question of moral rights and obligations. As well as debating the issues it raises, the book is a fluttering contribution to the ticker-tape of pamphlets, reports, and journalistic accretion which seek to analyse the cause and effect relationships - social, political and historical - which permeate the dramas they depict. The danger is that the pursuit of understanding becomes a substitute for the understanding it seeks.
Ignatieff's sharpness, and wide arc of vision, help him avoid a monocular line of approach. He begins not with theories but with questions. This makes him more interesting and readable. What is the source of group identity? What makes it something perceived as worth dying for? How can reconciliation in ethnic wartime be advanced? The current hearings in South Africa are examined, as is the neutralist role of the International Red Cross in current conflicts. Based on interviews with participants, and on in-situ observations, his comments seek to strike a balance. While his trek around troubled Africa with Boutros Boutros-Ghali might leave the UN Secretary General looking conscienceless, it also points up the unavoidable need for realpolitik.
Always Ignatieff balances visceral immediacy - the blood, the stench of cordite - with a hands-on but arm's-length distance, imposing argument as a framework around the chaos he shows on the streets, or finds in a death-ridden village compound. Ignatieff the novelist (let's acknowledge this string to his bow) through careful description engages the reader's tactile and visual imagination. The polemicist philosopher in Ignatieff meantime recruits the reader in search of a rationale.
It makes for a bracing examination of the politics and psychology of fear (enlisting Freud in the essay "The Narcissism of Minor Difference", an unconvincing stab at unpacking the mess of Serbo-Croat self-destruction). Rather than minimising differences, the matter of understanding where they come from might have occupied more of the foreground of this book. An attempted, belated, deconstruction of nationalism - "The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Awake" - fails to grasp the emotive compound its subject presents.
But these are quibbles, and seem an indulgence in the context of a book which, despite the disparateness of its essays, gets close to coherence on some quite famously slippery ground, yet keeps its feet, and sets the agenda for future forays. No one who reads it will find indifference an option.
Tom Adair is a critic