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Politics in a Small World 77

project to make capitalist investments secure and profi table across the
world (Mann, 2003 ).
A more contingent, less functionalist and rationalist account of impe-
rialism, linked closely to the changes in international law that cosmopoli-
tans see as potentially progressive, is that of Michael Ignatieff. It is all the
more striking because Ignatieff is himself a liberal champion of human
rights. He argues, however, that human rights politics should be treated
pragmatically, and that “ human rights culture ” is imperialist, not because
of elite interests in capitalist accumulation, but because human rights have
taken on an absolute value such that their extension appears now as a
kind of “ anti - politics. ” He argues that we must understand that claims
for human rights no more transcend neutrality and partiality than any
other political claims. It is not the morality of developing cosmopolitan
law that should be at issue, or even its legality, according to Ignatieff, but
the politics of the human rights movement. What kind of vision does it
promote? Whose interests are at stake in any particular case? What com-
promises does it make possible, and how are its representatives to be made
accountable? In practice, Ignatieff argues, the criteria that have emerged
as crucial in decisions to intervene in order to prevent human rights abuses
have been strategic as well as moral: not only must military intervention
stand a chance of stopping gross violations of human rights, but those
violations have to be a threat to international peace and security in the
immediate surrounding region. Most crucially, the region in question
must be of vital interest to a powerful state in the world, and the exercise
of force must be unopposed by another powerful nation (Ignatieff, 2001 ).
According to Ignatieff, the US is leading human rights imperialism,
supported by European money. Although the US is often reluctant to
compromise its democratic sovereignty by binding itself to international
agreements, its role as leader of the world in establishing international
human rights is far from new. Since Eleanor Roosevelt led the committee
that drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the US has been
at the forefront of promoting human rights norms across the world. Now
the US is the only state with the military capacity for humanitarian inter-
vention, and since 9/11, it has been willing to exercise its military strength
in the name of national security. At the same time, however, it is in

part the fact that Americans continue to see their state as anti - imperialist,
as having freed itself from British imperialism and as supporting self -
determination and democracy, that makes the new “ humanitarian ” impe-
rialism problematic. Ignatieff argues that Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan,
and now Iraq, despite nominal sovereignty and democracy, are actually
ruled from imperial capitals, especially Washington and London. These