Southern Honor and American Foreign Policy

The concept of honor is very ancient and even venerable - but sometimes it can cause more problems than it solves. Basically speaking, honor is the desire to maintain high worth both in your own eyes and in the eyes of others. When your honor is questioned, then so is your value. Naturally, it is possible for this to provoke a strong and even violent reaction. But what does this have to do with American foreign policy?

Paul Robinson wrote for The Spectator that the Southern sense of honor, which is demonstrably stronger even today, has long been a driving force in American politics.

Sensitivity over one’s honour was more than a purely personal matter. It was southern honour that caused the War of 1812. The areas of America that were suffering most from the British impressment of American sailors, and who had most to gain from expansion to the West and a possible conquest of Canada, were opposed to the war. In the vital vote in Congress to declare war on Britain, senators from the maritime areas of north-eastern America voted against war. It was the senators from the South who voted in favour, not because they were suffering from British policy, but because they regarded it as outrageous, an insult to America’s young nation, a challenge which could not be rejected without undermining their honour and their manhood.

Some 50 years later, the South seceded from the Union. Opponents of the Confederacy generally argue that it did so to preserve slavery. Its supporters counter that slavery was a secondary issue, that states’ rights were more important. Increasingly, though, scholars are citing another factor altogether: southern honour. As the historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has pointed out, slavery provoked the secessional crisis, but ‘southern honour pulled the trigger’.

Today, Robinson argues, Southern honor is a driving force in American foreign policy as well:

The honour code dictates that one loses face if one does not respond to an insult, but one does not always know whether something is an insult. So it is always best to treat it as if it were. Similarly, it is better to get one’s strike in before an opponent has a chance to hit first, even if perhaps he never intended to attack anyway.

The word ‘honour’ is rarely used, but substitutes such as ‘credibility’ abound in official speeches. Nato had to bomb Yugoslavia because the ‘credibility of the alliance was at stake’. Coalition forces had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was ‘undermining the credibility of the UN’. Saddam was not a threat to the USA, but he was a living insult to its honour. Despite all the efforts of the most powerful state on earth, he had for ten years continued to survive and defy America’s wishes. For an administration driven by sentiments of honour, such an insult could not be permitted. Just as the South could not allow Lincoln to become their President, so George W. Bush could not allow Saddam to continue humiliating his country. Only war could satisfy honour.

This is a highly plausible argument — but is it a correct argument? The evidence seems quite strong that Southerners continue to have a stronger sense of honor that can provoke violent reactions. There is also very strong historical evidence that Robinson presents that Southern honor has played an important role in the conflicts that the United States has been involved in. But is the same happening today? Is honor really all there is to it?

It’s plausible that the new conservative claims that their efforts in Iraq were undermined at home by war critics is also driven by an exaggerated sense of honor. Instead of simply admitting flawed policies, or at least flawed implementation of their policies, they are turning on critics who had nothing to do with either the creation or the implementation of the policies. They are trying to save face rather than take responsibility for all the damage, death, and destruction they have wrought.

 

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• War and Morality
• War on Terrorism
• Godless Liberalism