Perhaps Ivan Illich Was Right?…

Abstract

One ponders whether, had Thucydides gotten his Athenian contemporary Hippocrates to look at a rough draft of The History of the Peloponnesian War, that ur-text of realpolitik might have included a history-altering version of the Hippocratic Oath. The commandment to “first, do no harm” is facially at odds with the Melian Dialogue and other tenets of Realism. But if included, it just might have leavened the raw-power calculations of war, intervention, security, and conquest that otherwise mark the Thucydidean worldview. General George C. Marshall famously noted that that approach shaped his understanding of geopolitics, as it did so much of Western strategic thinking since Athens. Agnieszka Sobocinska’s book shows that the Oath might also have been usefully applied in the exercise of soft-power known as overseas Western voluntarism. Although sending in the Peace Corps is wildly different from sending in the Marine Corps, nonetheless Sobocinska maps the genesis, spread, reach, and impact of Cold War-era “development volunteering” that constituted what she calls the “Humanitarian-Development Complex” which constituted a species of Western interventionism. Her book fuses the literatures on the two constituent parts—development and humanitarianism—to trace their convergence in the histories of three contemporary initiatives: Australia’s Volunteer Graduate Scheme (VGS), Britain’s Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), and the United States’ Peace Corps. Sobocinska argues that their activities contain a fundamental ambiguity: they could be “a way to end colonialism and colonial attitudes, [or] a means to perpetuate colonial [or neocolonial] influence . . . a way to eradicate racial prejudice, [or] a means to display the supremacy of their own nation, race, or way of life . . . a means towards world peace, [or] a way of waging Cold War” (19–20).