Today's imperial frontiers are characterised by lavish 'reconstruction' efforts. The waste and fraudulence of these projects has been anatomised, if not necessarily in great detail, and it is hard to miss the gaping chasm between the effort put into creating appropriately opulent surroundings for the occupiers and that put into creating liveable conditions anywhere outside the administrative hubs. In downtown Kabul, you can sip a Starbucks coffee while browsing teh internets, but beyond, in the vast rural hinterlands, the best technology you see will probably be whizzing toward your house courtesy of an American jet. In Baghdad, American advisers, technocrats, military officials, spinners, aid workers and others can secrete themselves within a gargantuan alien compound, attended by imported serfs, if not outright slave labour. Beyond those confines, lucky are those who get electricity for 12 hours a day, and have drinkable water, or can get medicine when they need it, or find the tortured corpse of a recently kidnapped relation. This is the utopianism of Manifest Destiny.

But green-zoning, as elaborate and other-wordly as it seems, is hardly new. The Third World was built on the basis of such topographical entities, informed by bodies of racial knowledge. The outposts of formal empire replicated European town structures, the better both to provide settlers with a familiar environ and to exclude 'natives'. Both states and companies accumulated considerable expertise in this practise, just as in general they were adept in devising the appropriate geographies for managing labour. Although this was often part of a genocidal process (in Australia and North America), colonists in 19th and 20th Century Africa usually practised segregation the better to super-exploit the locals, either tacitly or explicitly. This was particularly the case in those urban areas which the colonists made their headquarters. As Ambe J. Njoh describes it ("The segregated city in British and French colonial Africa", Race and Class, 2008; 49; 87), colonial town planners sought to develop spaces environments that were fit for capital accumulation and which reflected the perceived cultural superiority of the colonists. The very fact that the colonisers and the indigenous lived in such different conditions was then ascribed to an insurmountable cultural gulf, as well as to pathological factors (as when British planners in South Africa or Sierra Leone denigrated the native population as vectors for deadly diseases). Urban African dwellers were maintained in carefully charted segments of the urban environment where they could be kept under surveillance. Such segregation was not only racial, of course: it also maintained the white proletariat in separate, inferior living quarters.

Segregation was also a norm when the American state (in the Panama Canal Zone, for example) and American companies (Fordlandia in Brazil, the working environments for oil companies in Dhahran, the Niger Delta, Jakarta and so on) set about devising new urban environments appropriate to its mode of imperial dominance. Congruent with the paternalism of the 'Progressive' era and beyond, these Arcadian developments in the Canal Zone reproduced islets of suburbia for a white labour aristocracy (those on the 'Gold Roll'). A complex of townships and military installations asserted America's colonial possession. Every asset was owned by the state, and white American workers - in contrast to the enormous West Indian and African American labour stratum - were provided with every amenity, including free housing and healthcare, and superior schools, for which they paid no taxes. West Indian and African American workers, of course, received none of these perks, being on the 'Silver Roll'. All urban facilities were organised along racial lines, much as they were in the Jim Crow south. The same was true of the banana producing enclaves in Central America, where white Americans resided in airy bungalows secluded from the local workforce, whose wooden shanties often had mud floors.

Robert Vitalis, writing on the global oil frontier, notes that American companies such as Texaco, Chevron, Exxon and Mobil, the major partners in Aramco and thus central to America's 'special relationship' with the House of Saud, had accumulated decades of experience in developed segregated practises in the Jim Crow south and applied precisely the same techniques of segregation, wage differentials, and race management wherever they went. In these cases, white workers comprised the more skilled, managerial and privileged sectors of the workforce, and were provided with modern housing and facilities. Arab labour was put up in huts, and remunerated poorly. As Vitalis also notes, when Aramco had to eventually abandon its explicit segregationist policies, under pressure both from Arab labour struggles and from liberal capital represented by Nelson Rockefeller, it sought to bury its racism, and redescribe its differential treatment in market terms. But the means by which segregation was effected and rationalised were frequently market-based, enforced through 'racially-laden' policies rather than openly exclusionary directives. Thus, for example, it was possible to retard indigenous development by legislating that the best land be developed exclusively with imported European materials, driving up the market price. Similarly, segregated labour in turn-of-the-century south Africa was initially based on the migrant labour system. Having created the conditions by which certain segments of labour are subordinated, it is always possible to reproduce these effects through market transactions. Indeed, barring massive intervention into the labour market, the rule is that they will be. And much the same geographies will persist, as they do in post-apartheid south Africa.

That the evil paradises of yesteryear were explicitly racialised, and that today they are not, hardly means that the effects of that ascriptive hierarchy are no longer discernible in the geography of capital accumulation, as a quick perusal of Mike Davis' Planet of Slums would suggest. It is no accident, though, that the residents of gentrified (class-upgraded) zones across the world resemble a colonial elite themselves. In the cities of advanced capitalist societies the rich, having 'discovered' groovy niches in the metropolitan landscape, convert them into colonies of the upper bourgeoisie, drive up mortgage costs and rents, and send working class residents fleeing to other densely populated locales that have not yet had the misfortune to arouse the desire of hipster capitalists. Either that, or they get pushed out into overspill areas. In the cities of the very Third World that was created by colonialism, as well as in formerly Second World countries, the presence of Western (or Westernised) social elites generates its palatial green zones, carefully secluded and robustly secured from the slums that provide the labour force. These lifeworlds seem 'natural' to us when we grow up in them. They become alien, and alienating, when such colonial restructuring makes it obvious just how much intelligence has gone into creating them, and just how much they seem designed to keep us in our place.

Alain Badiou doesn't mess around. As an advocate of direct action, contre "capitalo-parliamentarism", he has pledged to reward his nastier critics (largely idiots like BHL) with a slap whenever he sees them. These opponents, with their accusations of antisemitism and fascism, were responding to the publication of his book 'Polemics' (in French, 'Circonstances 3') and the more recent 'The Meaning of Sarkozy' ('De quoi Sarkozy, est-il nom?'). The latter is less about the "fidgety mayor of Neuilly", or "the Rat Man", than about what Sarkozy's ascendancy says of the vacuity of the electoral process. Sarkozy himself is important only inasmuch as he embodies the spirit of reaction, even if it is a dwarfish embodiment compared to the Thermidoreans, the Orléanists, the Versaillais, Pétain and even d'Estaing. The book is a curious mixture of political philosophy and acuminated satire. I had never thought of Badiou as an especially funny man before, but - as is so often the case - it is because he is so serious that his satire is so lethal. Through a series of essays and lectures, he takes the occasion of Sarkozy's election victory and subsequent travailles to subject parliamentary democracy to an acerbic critique - and behind all of this witty and indomitable polemicising lurks the shade of communism.

According to Badiou, the French Left (and by extension, the Left as such) has practised a reactive politics based on fear of the right, which in turn is essentially mobilised by the fear of the leftist challenge. At the same time, the politicians of the reformist left flaunt their impotence, their inability to transform affairs, and cling to it. All they can do is keep the right out of office and limit the reaction. Then Sarkozy wins, and Socialists - many from the generation of the nouveau philosophes - flock to join his administration, or be part of the clique. Sarkozy expresses his 'openness' to the left, the better to coopt its luminaries for the creation of a technocratic single-party state (this is what the language of bipartisanship always boils down to) and form what Badiou calls a Union for Presidential Unanimity (a pun on the name of Sarkozy's party, the Union for a Popular Movement). This is the state that neoliberal capitalism has reduced politics to. As Badiou says, quoting Zizek, those who used to oppose parliamentary democracy to Stalinism missed the point that Stalinism was the future of parliamentary democracy. Indeed, "the technological means for controlling the population are already such that Stalin, with his endless handwritten files, his mass executions, his spies with hats, his gigantic lice-ridden camps and bestial tortures, appears like an amateur from another age".

And how many times have you heard pundits boasting about the big turnout for a particular election? Boast they must, because it is happening with less and less frequency these days. But what does this say about voting, as an act? What matters, apparently is that people participate, and thus give the system a democratic imprimatur. Badiou's conclusion is different. Observing the heralds of Sarkozysme ratify the new administration with its engorged turnout, he retorts: "If numbers alone are a cause for celebration, then this means that democracy is strictly indifferent to any content". If people vote for a mediocre clerk, then "all glory to them! By their stupid number, they brought the triumph of democracy". The bards of parliamentarism are "more 'respectful' than I am of the 'popular will', even when they see it as idiotic and dangerous. Bow down before the numbers!"

Beyond which caustic banter lies the humane purpose of defending migrant workers, upholding the hippocratic principle, supporting creative art, putting emancipatory politics before managerial necessitarianism, and ultimately restoring the 'communist hypothesis' to its proper place. Said hypothesis, which is that the system of classes can be overthrown, is a "real point" to hold onto against the alternative hypothesis of parliamentarist impotence. Those who reject the communist hypothesis are bound to market economics and parliamentary democracy, and therefore to the very logic that leads to the Rat Man. You could wish that Badiou would not say 'democracy' when he means 'parliamentary democracy', or that he would not say 'left' when he means something much more ambiguous (is Ségolène Royal really in any meaningful sense on the Left? Or Bernard Kouchner for that matter?). But the provocative, ludic manner of the collection is part of its charm. It is because Badiou doesn't respect the rules of the 'capitalo-parliamentarist' game that even his ultra-left tendencies - an overhang from his wild Maoist days - become the basis for important insights.

The government, you will be heartened to learn, has something else on its mind aside from prominently displaying its mean streak toward the disabled and single mothers. The cabinet has been sick with worry about your welfare in this recession. For this reason, the nationalised bank Northern Rock, having slashed jobs and shed mortgages from its books for months on end, is now offering some first-time buyers mortgages on 10% deposits. And the government has also persuaded Lloyds to expand its lending to consumers and small businesses, on pain of full nationalisation. Wonderful. Orgasmically peachy. The trouble is that in the current climate, no one wants to borrow, given the real knowledge that they won't be able to pay it back. Who would be a first-time buyer today, when 1.2m households are in negative equity? Who would borrow money for an expensive consumer item that didn't have to? As for small businesses, forget it. Business investment has shrunk by 7.7% across the economy over the last year. Demand is plummetting, there is tons of spare capacity, and businesses are more likely to sell assets and cut jobs than borrow more to invest more.

But before you go drawing the conclusion that senior ministers think in terms of amusing demographoids such as ‘Vauxhall Man’ and ‘Bognor Regis Woman’, and designs policies on the basis of flattering said specimens’ alleged ‘aspirational’ propensities, please consider the stimulus. Because, after all, a giant middle finger aimed in your direction can be quite stimulating. Aside from the fact that the supposed spending increases comprise cash that was already in the pipeline, brought forward a couple of years, don't forget that the Chancellor is still intending to cut public spending by £5bn this year. Schools and hospitals, the latter already suffering from the burden of soaring PFI costs, are expected to fare the worst. There’s your stimulus – do you feel that? So, with unemployment expected to reach 3 million next year, and with the government pushing through cuts in public services and welfare, where are these millions of confident, spendy consumers going to come from to bail out the economy and get investment flowing again? It seems that the government is essentially committed to restoring the City of London and the housing market to their prior importance after the recession. They still think they can rely on the financial sector to generate jobs, and a strong housing market to give people collateral to borrow against. This is the only explanation that I can think of as to why they are still committed to keeping even the worst banks alive as profitable enterprises while refusing to do anything substantial about the massive housing crisis that the country faces.

And even as the government rushes to repeatedly inject billions into the financial system and (temporarily) nationalises failing banks, the rush to privatise existing (and comparatively well-functioning) public services continues. 30% of Royal Mail is to be sold off, following up on the pre-Xmas orders of the latte-moustached Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson. This is ostensibly to help recoup sufficient funds to make up for the pensions deficit and introduce modernising measures. The trouble is, the government has already pledged to fund the deficit, and all it is doing is handing over a profitable part of the enterprise to a private company. Taxpayer still gets milked, private capital gets the cream. It has absolutely nothing to do with pensions. This is a move that the government is by no means obliged to undertake. It is not politically popular, it will split the Labour Party, and it has galvanised serious opposition even among ordinarily spineless backbenchers. 125 Labour MPs have signed motions against the policy, and even that former left cheek of Blairism John Prescott is opposed to the plans. The government will have to rely on Tory votes to push the policy through. So, the government's slogan come election 2010 will be: "If you value it, vote for it; then we'll smash it up and sell the parts."

Still, at least you can rely on the government, having alienated voters on the left, to pander to voters on the right who are going to vote Tory anyway. Thus, even as the flow of migrant workers decreases sharply under the impact of recession, the Home Secretary still wants to ban thousands of them. That 'British jobs for British workers' bollocks has a lot to answer for. Meanwhile, Hazel Blears, having been taken to pieces by George Monbiot, is preparing her comeback as an archnemesis of political-correctness-gone-mad, in a madcap re-enactment of Margaret Hodge's campaign to give half of her constituency over to the BNP. When this bizarre mix of haughtiness, arrogance, elitism and pseudo-populism leads to electoral annihilation, Blears will be the first one to blame it on the government's refusal to use her purloined Jimmy Carr jokes in the campaign.

One of the points that Critical Race Theory makes, regarding the 'colour-blindness' of the law, is that it has functioned to conserve existing hierarchies. By expressing them as equality before the law, such 'colour-blindness' gives the impression that the pronounced racial inequalities that structure labour markets, educational access, legal entitlements, state behaviour, etc., are meritocratic. Attempts to ameliorate those inequalities constituted 'reverse discrimination'. The most intensely debated example is that of 'affirmative action'. The conservative backlash in the 1970s against Great Society programmes included attempts to legally neuter a supposedly cumbersome bureaucracy. For example in 1978, following a suit by Alan Bakke who had been denied a place at the University of California, the Supreme Court ruled against universities using quotas to recruit minority candidates to their student body. Subsequent local rulings reinforced that verdict. The argument was that quotas protected minorities from the rigours of competition, thus promoting undeserving candidates while stigmatising those minorities as in some sense needing protection. This re-coded inequality in the language of free markets, notwithstanding the fact that the existing testing systems are coachable and reward those of higher socioeconomic status. By a simple ideological sleight-of-hand, fields of production that had been nakedly structured by race were de-raced.

In an analogous fashion, international relations has been the subject of an energetic white-washing. As a discipline, and as a discourse that frames policymakers' decisions, the problems central to IR have been always been Eurocentric. After all, the obsession with strategies for maintaining an equilibrium between sovereign states, coupled with a tautological reading of the character of such states as 'power-maximisers', has its origins in the writings of David Hume, whose original contribution was to universalise the interests and behaviours of emerging European states. Maintaining that states were sui generis institutions, essentially the same from the Greek city-state to the modern nation-state, and that sovereign states had ontological primacy in world affairs, his narrative rendered invisible that majority of humanity which he, in other writings, racially denigrated.

Imperialism was similarly not among the predicaments of IR when the discipline was launched in 1919, that year of Wilsonian 'national self-determination' (after which colonialism continued to expand, reaching its apogee by 1947). This was not because the institution of race was disavowed. Quite the contrary: global jurisprudence in 1919 was explicitly imperial, colonial and racially-laden. The dichotomy in positivist jurisprudence between civilized and non-civilized states asserted that law did not apply outside the small family of existing sovereign states. The emerging institutions of liberal order were also underwritten by explicit codes of racial solidarity. Woodrow Wilson's remarks on the launching of the League of Nations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference are worth excerpting:

"We, Anglo-Saxons, have our peculiar contribution to make towards the good of humanity in accordance with our special talents. The League of Nations will, I confidently hope, be dominated by us Anglo-Saxons; it will be for the unquestionable benefit of the world. The discharge of our duties in the maintenance of peace and as a just mediatory in international disputes will redound to our lasting prestige. But it is of paramount importance that we Anglo-Saxons succeed in keeping in step with one another." (Quoted in Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919, Routledge, 1998, p155.)

This was crucial to Wilson's rationale for rejecting the proposed 'racial equality' clause. Parenthetically, it is only fair to state that any interest Wilson ever had in the idea was circumscribed by his own devoutly held belief in racial inequality, expressed in his support for Jim Crow in Washington, his paternalistic arguments for empire in the Philippines, and his writings on governance and statehood. So, if race and empire were not officially recognised as problems in international relations, it was more because they were taken for granted than because it was necessary to cleanse the territory of such incriminating associations.

Post-war Realism in IR was different. Not by accident or design, but as a consequence of its function, Realism coded imperial pursuits in the language of power-balancing, maintaining an equilibrium between the US and the USSR. Just as anticommunism was the official ideology behind America's attempts to variously manage, curtail, and coopt decolonizing movements, so the sacred Balance of Power was its strategic rationale. If the US sought to repress national liberation movements through the proliferation of right-wing dictatorships, this apparent conflict with the objectives of liberal internationalism could be rationalized as a necessary balance to Soviet assertiveness in supporting Kim Il-Sung, Castro, the Viet Minh, etc. To the extent that decolonization was important at all to Realism, it was only in the sense that European sovereignty was apparently being extended to what is still called the Third World. And once formerly non-sovereign peoples were assimilated to the order/anarchy of sovereign states, their susceptibility to external intervention, exploitation and so on was just one more vista onto the Hobbesian tragedy of world affairs. The dominant ideas concerning order, the sovereign, the international, and so on, were thus gradually expunged of their racial content. The fact that decolonization did not ultimately end relations of dependence or the imposing inequalities of power and resources that were generated by the colonial system could be delicately effaced in the language of development and modernization theory. The fact that a caste of formerly colonial powers still determine under what conditions the sovereignty of a state outside that caste is abridgable, has equally been interpreted as the right of 'democracies' over their 'totalitarian' opposites.

The norm has thus been established that it is bad form to notice how world affairs continue to be conspicuously structured by race. The failure to notice, though, is so laboured, and so arduous, as to demand attention and explanation. There is a whole genre of literature waiting to be written here.

"The generality of Seymour's conclusion, the broad sweep of his argument and the passion of his attack are overstated, dissipating their force. More nuance and context could have made this potentially important book compelling. It is a shame, as buried in these pages and their footnotes is a great deal of damning material on the apologists of recent illegalities."

I find little to complain about here - not because I agree with Sands, but because I can't object to someone with his views reaching the conclusions that he does. In general, Sands would like more "nuance" and less generality. In specific, he would have liked to see some discussion of international law and its centrality to justifying war. I don't see this as being particularly damaging to my case, since the book is about the ideas, rather than the legal institutions, that have helped justify imperialism - apparently a word that is absent from Sands' lexicon. Perhaps, however, it would have been worth stating a position on international law, however briefly, if only to outline the view that law is an expression of force and will, not morality. Thus, while Sands contends in several lucid and highly readable dispatches that that the problem with the Bush administration is its subversion of international law, I maintain that the rule of law in international affairs is itself barbaric. The post hoc legalisation of the occupation of Iraq is a condign example, both of law being the product of violence and of the barbarism in its application. Still, I realise that this is a controversial position, that Sands would not be receptive to such an argument and that, in fact, he wishes I had written a different book.

Otherwise, Sands would have preferred to have some acknowledgement that some "use of force", sometimes, can be justified. This is what I take the plea for "nuance" to mean. As he puts it, "it seems all force is wrong, so that any liberal support may be treated as liberal justification for murder". I do not, for the record, say that "all force is wrong". Sands seems to have confused anti-imperialism with pacifism. I do, however, go to some lengths to detail several interventions, over several centuries, that were strenuously moralised on humanitarian terms, from the Boer War to Operation Allied Force, and I do find the humanitarian case wanting. Clearly, such a gauche lack of subtlety on my part does not merit any particular leniency. However, as the critique does not address the substance of the argument, it is at best a missed opportunity.

Sands says that Liberal Defence "glosses over vastly important issues" such as: "Was the post-second world war human rights project intended to create new conditions of colonial domination? Has it contributed to circumstances in which there will be more oppression and misery, rather than less? Have the economic rules promoting globalisation engendered war?" It is easy to concede the point, but equally difficult to see its relevance. Again, he seems to have wanted a book about something else. Similarly, when he says that "the real critique of those who supported the latest Iraq war is that they killed off any hope, for now at least, of garnering support to use force where massive violations of fundamental human rights are taking place", I have a feeling that he and I have a different outlook on life entirely. The "real critique" is that they helped facilitate the very "massive violations of fundamental human rights" that Sands opposes, with the outstanding result of perhaps over a million excess deaths. Therefore, if one side-effect of the slaughter we have seen for the last five or six years is that people are less willing to exhort the United States to deploy its awesome machinery of violence, this ought to be welcomed. I do, in the conclusion, engage with those who see US imperialism as a potential guarantor of human rights and last resort terminator of genocide, but if Sands has read this, he shows no sign of having done so.

There is one part of the review that seems entirely out of place, jarring to the point of inducing nausea. Sands says: "those who are on the receiving end of what Seymour perceives as US excess have, through the acts of their own governments, or their failure to object, contributed to their own oppression." I confess I don't understand what this means - or, perhaps, I would rather not understand what this means. Perhaps it is best to leave this one to the readers' judgement.

Update: I've had a rather interesting exchange with Philippe Sands, and - just to set the record straight on the last paragraph of this post - I am, with his permission, reproducing his comment clarifying his remarks:

"The only point I was making is that a number of the conflicts you refer to were supported by Security Council action (even unanimous in some cases). To my mind, that takes the sting out of your critique, in the sense that not all the blame can be laid at the feet of the US or those on the left who may have supported the actions. In various cases many governments and many peoples supported a conflict, whether directly or indirectly. That raises issue of their own responsibilities, although it cannot in any way justify the illegalities and excesses once the conflict is underway, or the terrible suffering of innocents caught up in broader geopolitical nightmares."

So, the former head of MI5 says that we are cruising toward a "police state" because of the unwieldy apparatus of surveillance and repression introduced during the 'war on terror'. What would a police state look like? How would it behave toward its citizens? I think it was Neal Ascherson who warned that we should always pay attention to how the state treats refugees, because that is eventually how they will treat us. Well, then.

Consider the fate of Binyam Mohammed. A refugee who had been living in Britain since 1994, kidnapped in 2002, deposited at various CIA 'ghost prisons', tortured with British complicity, subject to genital mutilation, eventually detained at Guantanamo under brutal conditions with no recourse to judicial review. Now, he may - under a deal negotiated between Washington and London - be returned to the UK. He might not be allowed to stay, however, as David Miliband has said that his status will be determined by 'security' tests applied to all foreign nationals. Take another example. In December 2001, about a dozen foreign nationals living in the UK as refugees were rounded up, taken to Belmarsh prison, and kept in indefinite detention, with no right to trial. They were never interviewed by a police officer or any security official prior to their arrest. They spent several years in these conditions, locked for much of the day in isolation cells. It was only when the House of Lords, in one of those 'awkward' moments that so annoyed the Blair administration, ruled that such internment was illegal in December 2004 that the men were released - and even then they were kept under control orders, whose provisions were laid out in the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005. They were arrested again after 7 July 2005 attacks, and the British government sought to deport the refugees. They have never been apprised of any evidence against them.

Now take the case of Mohamed Othman, aka Abu Qatada. He is a refugee born in the West Bank when it was under Jordanian control, who sought asylum in the UK in 1993. Like the other examples, he has never been charged with any crime. Like the others, he has been detained without trial. Like the others, the British would like to expel him, in this case to Jordan, where he will certainly be tortured. Of course, unlike the others, he has a public persona: he is what is commonly referred to as a 'radical cleric'. His fatwas and writings are supposedly read and appreciated by those 'combat fundamentalists' who, without such intellectual sustenance, would be smoking weed and indulging experimental sex in the Bay Area. With little evidence, it has also been asserted that he is involved in terrorist plots, is bin Laden's "right-hand man" in Europe, etc. The strength of those allegations can perhaps be judged by the fact that they have never resulted in a prosecution. If the Crown Prosecution Service declines to try Qatada for such serious crimes, how strong can the evidence be? Now, if you go away from this post thinking 'that boy lenin loves Abu Qatada and all his works', you'll be wrong. The point I wish to make in citing such an unpopular rogue is that the mystique generated about him in the media is being used to justify attacks on the very limited and basic civil liberties that we all claim. If the precedent is established that people may be subject to harrassment and unlawful detention, as well as vilified in the media, even with there being no crime prosecutable under law, then we have lost something important.

Surely, it cannot be long before such repressive legislation is turned toward internal dissidents. In fact, to be clear, it already has been. We have already had the arrests of antiwar protesters on ludicrous terrorism charges. Anti-terrorist legislation has been used against such harmless people as cyclists and photographers. The Viva Palestina convoy has already been subject to police harrassment on bogus suspicions of 'terrorism'. In the current global inferno, one can see it being used against strikers, anticapitalist protesters, student occupiers, and any other dissident groups that the police are charged with attacking.

Hoare begins by accusing me of a tautology: "Seymour is unable to provide any evidence that any of his liberal targets did, indeed, support ‘murder’" in the cases of Croatia and Bosnia, there being no notable instances of "bloodcurdling war cries", "unless simply being in favour of Western military intervention automatically makes one a supporter of ‘murder’". In fact, the argument in the book is that in misconstruing the situation in Yugoslavia, and by calling for intervention, pro-war liberals helped to justify political and military interventions that did indeed contribute to ‘murder’, and prepared the ideological ground for supporting future wars. I do not characterise everyone who (to my mind mistakenly) bought the 'humanitarian intervention' argument as a defender of 'murder'. And at no point do I argue that liberal imperialism is simply characterised by "bloodcurdling war-cries". The whole point of liberal imperialism as an ideology is that it doesn’t work that way. The accusation of "tautology" rebounds on the reviewer: it is his tautology, not mine.

I do not argue against military intervention on the grounds that "the Croatians and Bosnians were not worthy of being defended by Western military intervention, because their governments were just as bad as Milosevic’s - possibly worse - and were guilty of the same atrocities." I argue that liberals and leftists misconstrued the facts of the matter, demonised the Serbs and paid little or no attention to comparable crimes by Croatian and Bosnian forces. I do not argue that anyone is "not worthy" of "being defended". The reviewer just assumes that military intervention would, in fact, constitute 'defence'. In outlining the grotesque disinformation in the coverage of the conflict, he further assumes, I mean to imply that Croats and Bosnians were unworthy of a form of 'solidarity' that I might extend to others, suggesting that he has not read/understood the rest of the book. Nor do I say, or imply, that Croatian and Bosnian governments were "possibly worse" than "Milosevic's". This a tautology followed by a non-sequitur, crowned by an invention.

I do not argue that the proper response "to news and images of Serb ethnic-cleansing and atrocities (which Seymour does not deny took place) is not to demand action in defence of the victims, but to ensure that the perpetrators of this ethnic cleansing and these atrocities get a fair coverage and are not condemned in too strong terms". I argue that "action in defence of the victims" of any atrocity is not identical to calling for states to engage in military aggression, and that humanitarian solidarity is not to be confused with hysterical propaganda. It is because Hoare doesn't notice such distinctions that he is able to conclude that "what Seymour has written is a defence of the Milosevic regime and Serb ethnic-cleansing from their liberal critics". (Emphasis in original). If only I were as litigious as the Hoares. It would be far more realistic to say that much of Hoare's output constitutes a defence of the Tudjman regime and Croatian ethnic cleansing.

I would prefer to leave aside the matter of Hoare's taking umbrage on behalf of his mother, but Hoare's misrepresentations make it impossible. Firstly, interviewing former friends of those one wants to evaluate, even if in passing, is not the disreputable technique that he appears to think it is - it is normal practise. Secondly, Hoare claims that Branka Magas only supported Croatian secessionism in the same sense that Socialist Worker did. Magas supported secession, Socialist Worker supported the right to secede - a distinction that made all the difference when Magas denied the ‘systematic persecution’ of the Krajina Serbs, and husband Quentin Hoare defended Tudjman from claims that he was an antisemite and Holocaust-denier.

I reject the evocations of Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust with reference to the Serbian government. This is not because the Serbian government lacked for authoritarianism or because it was not interested in expanding its power – with brute violence when all else failed. It is because that system of allusions was the basis for propaganda that denied the atrocities of other powers and legitimised the highly destructive interventionism of the United States, including its diplomatic sabotage and its subcontracting of reactionary Wahabbi fighters. Serb camps were compared to Belsen, in a sense, so that one didn't have to mention camps run by the HDZ and BiH. In that context, I ironised about Finkielkraut’s deployment of the Nazi-Jew homology in the context of the Croatian war by pointing out that Tudjman was more apt to vocalise pro-Nazi sentiments than Slobodan Milosevic. It is true that I didn’t mention that a number of Bosnian Serb paramilitaries embraced the symbols of the far right, but that was because it not germane to an argument about the Croatian war. I will spare Hoare’s blushes by not meditating too long on the topic of the BNP’s Nazi proclivities, which he denies exist. I will merely say that if it was possible not to see the antisemite in Franjo Tudjman, it is possible to miss the Nazi in Nick Griffin.

Hoare is scandalised that I impute "political motives" to the International Court of Justice: the problem is that I don't. He is referring to page 204, which explicitly references the ICTY, a wholly different (and highly politicised) body. Hoare is also vexed by my claim that "Izetbegovic’s Bosnian regime was the party favoured by ‘Western imperialism’". My claim is actually that US imperialism backed Bosnia. I note that the French government of Mitterrand, for example, was sympathetic to the Serbian side. The reason for this distortion on Hoare's part is that he wants to establish a 'gotcha'. Thus, citing alleged 'false flag' operations by the Bosnian side in Markale, I note that the accusations originate from UN personnel. According to Hoare, this means that the "representatives of Western imperialism" were maligning Bosnians, blaming them for "their own suffering". Even if those UN witnesses were in an uncomplicated way the imperialist delegates that Hoare takes them to be, the point would be one of 'evidence against interest': if those UN witnesses were representatives of US power, they were undermining the narrative industriously promoted by their bosses. Further, the point about 'false flag' operations is precisely that those responsible for them are not the victims. The implication of such an operation would be that the Bosnian government was using the populace as a bargaining tool in its negotiations. Only by assuming that the Bosnian government was the bearer of the volksgeist, in a way that is congruent with his support for Croatian nationalism, could Hoare fail to understand this point.

What seems to annoy Hoare more than anything else is my habit of citing left-wing dissidents, especially those who are either sympathetic to Slobodan Milosevic or sceptical of the claims surrounding the Srebrenica massacre. I make no apology for doing so where they have something interesting to say, and they are more than outnumbered by the usual texbooks, scholarly articles, news reports and so on. But Hoare's undignified indignation leads him to yet another pratfall. Thus, belabouring me for citing Diana Johnstone on Izetbegovic’s deathbed confession, as related by Bernard Kouchner, he complains: "Kouchner’s French government was aiding and abetting Milosevic’s destruction of Bosnia, and maintaining an arms embargo against the Bosnians". And so, he wonders, why should we take his word at face value? Had he read the 22 pages he focuses on properly, he would have been aware that Kouchner was not a supporter of that policy, and worked to get it overturned (see p 199). This would be one more case of 'evidence against interest'.

Those extensive mis-readings and gaffes to one side, there are a number of criticisms where I think Hoare has a point. And it would be grossly unfair, given how much effort he put into his review, to ignore them, so I conclude with those. I cite a quotation from Tudjman that was reproduced in Michael Parenti's To Kill a Nation in which genocide is described as "permitted", and even "recommended". Hoare, who has read the original text from which the quote has been extruded, says that it is taken out of context. I am quite prepared to take his word for it barring better advice, and correct it in the paperback edition. Accusing me of mis-stating casualty figures, Hoare notes my claim that in the run up to the Srebrenica massacre, "a wave of terror, including rape, by Bosnian Muslim forces in surrounding areas had killed thousands of Serbs.’" This was based on a number of neglected news reports from the time, found on LexisNexis. His rejoinder is that statistics from the Research and Documentation Centre, whom I cite elsewhere, put the number of Serb civilians killed in the surrounding area at 879. I did say "Serbs" and not "Serb civilians", and the total number of Serbs killed in that area, according to Hoare's source, is 5573. He might have been more attentive to what he was reading. Still, let us concede that it would have been better to measure those news reports against the RDC’s stats and to make a clear distinction between the killing of military men and civilians in the UN-protected enclave and surrounding areas. There would have been no damage to the substantive point that forces loyal to General Naser Oric were using their numerical strength over the Serbs to harrass, rape, and kill locals, and that little attention was paid to these and other atrocities by Bosniak forces. And I will also give Hoare the point that having opposed the use of inflated figures for civilian casualties, my use of Kate Hudson’s maximal figure for the number of Serbs expelled during Operation Storm (which may well be the total number displaced during the whole of the war from 1991 to 1995) does not sit well – and at any rate wasn’t essential to the point that what Hoare refers to as "the liberation of Krajina" was a bloody and repressive operation.

All the rest, I am afraid, is just futile bluster on Hoare’s part.