The Cosmopolitan Potential of Exclusive Associations by Scholz Bettina R.;

Author:Scholz, Bettina R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Case of MSF in Brief

A group of French doctors formed Médecins Sans Frontières in 1971 after returning from volunteering on a French Red Cross mission in Biafra. Bernard Kouchner, one of the founders, was frustrated to find that the media overlooked political sources of the crisis in Biafra. At the same time he was not supposed to speak about what he had seen because the Red Cross’s neutrality position required that doctors “abstain from all communications and comments on the mission.”[5] Silence was seen as the way to ensure access to patients since political authorities would feel less threatened by the presence of silent doctors and allow them to complete their work. MSF was founded in order to allow doctors serving in humanitarian crisis situations to speak out if violations of human rights were being ignored. This makes MSF a particularly interesting case for cosmopolitans because it was founded in order to challenge concepts of neutrality understood as respecting state sovereignty. The humanitarian as well as advocacy goals of MSF were emphasized in the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize Lecture James Orbinski delivered on behalf of MSF. He began by describing MSF’s goals as “to help people in situations of crisis” and continued that crises do not occur “in a vacuum” so it requires speaking out “with a clear intent to assist, to provoke change, or to reveal injustice. Our action and our voice is an act of indignation, a refusal to accept an active or passive assault on the other.”[6] In fact, if MSF feels its aid is being misused or hampered it may speak out even if this results in being expelled from the country where it is trying to provide aid.

Witnessing human rights violations is important, but MSF’s primary mission is to administer medical aid “to populations in distress, to victims of natural or man-made disasters and to victims of armed conflicts.”[7] Addressing emergencies is “more than simply generosity, simply charity.”[8] It is an obligation, a duty. This obligation stems not from adherence to a philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism but rather from a reinterpretation of the professional code of doctors. In the Hippocratic Oath a doctor promises: “I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.”[9] This is commonly understood to mean that doctors do not only have responsibilities to their patients. In an emergency a doctor has an obligation to assist the injured or sick in any way he or she can. This is why in situations of emergency one can call out, “is there a doctor in the room?” For MSF this obligation is not fulfilled through helping those in one’s immediate location. If there is a greater emergency elsewhere doctors have an obligation to lend their expertise to the process of healing there.

Expertise is a critical criterion for membership in this organization. In fact, the first MSF charter made the exclusive professional nature

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