|
|
|
By Ken Coates The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation* July 28, 1999
"Sovereignty is less absolute than in earlier times.
Just as we now consider it right to intervene in families to
prevent domestic violence, so it has become normal to
override State sovereignty in cases of large scale
violations of human rights."(1) Ever since the cold war ended, she claims "the distinction between internal peace and external war, between a domestic rule of law and international anarchy that characterised the Westphalian era has broken down".(2) Indeed, she continues, since the second world war "there has been steady progress towards a global legal regime which deals both with the laws of war and with human rights and which has been strengthened by bodies like Amnesty". And so we arrive at a new role for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation: "benign or ethical imperialism". NATO at 50 must "switch from defence of the West to upholding international law everywhere". There are some pretty serious difficulties about all this. Firstly, there is not so much international law as Ms. Kaldor believes. If the upholding of human rights were to legitimate intervention, then larger transgressions should mean brisker responses: but the truth is very far from this. More: a large part of the responsibility for the failure to generate such rights-based law falls on the leader of NATO, the United States. It is the United States which has repeatedly refused to ratify the Convention on Genocide(3), and then with the reservation that, before any dispute to which the United States is party may be submitted to the jurisdiction of the court, "the specific consent of the United States is required in each case". It is the United States which refused to recognise the competence of the International Court of Justice in The Hague in the case of Nicaragua, and which defied fifteen specific judgements condemning the actions of the US Government and awarding compensation to the Nicaraguan Government. It is the United States which is the largest defaulter on its financial payments to the United Nations. In all these cases, senior American politicians have claimed that UN decisions must be set aside if they conflict with the interest of the US Government. Admittedly, the American State is the most powerful at large in today's world, so that, when it stands off from the principles of international order as agreed by all the other States, by that fact alone, it goes a long way to neutralise such principles. Noam Chomsky gives us a much better guide to the real legal position. There is, he says, a regime of international law and order, based on the UN Charter, and on the resolutions of the United Nations, together with the decisions of the World Court. This regime rests on the doctrines of national sovereignty, and outlaws the use of force, or even the threat of force between States, unless this has the express authority of the Security Council. In parallel, there is a Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees the rights of individuals against States, but which provides no legal mechanism for upholding such guarantees, and offers no guidance on how the Charter can be amended or suspended to provide for its enforcement. To be lawful, any attempt to reconcile this contradiction would need to be based upon consensus. Conquest could impose a solution to the problem, but would itself be unlawful under this system. "Benign imperialisms" could only make law if they conquered everyone, and then proclaimed a new law. Even the potent Americans might balk at this task, which would involve the generation of active Government on a forbidding scale. It would surely militarise the economy and thus be inimical to the freedom of enterprise, or at any rate market sovereignty. Short of such highly improbable conquest, consensus is the only way to international law. Ms. Kaldor thinks that we can derive a formula that will help us from Immanuel Kant. She is right that Kant can help us, but he will offer no support whatever to benign imperialism. His proposal is to secure perpetual peace among States, and so, unsurprisingly, like the United Nations Organisation, it considers States to be the foundation of the international order. A State is a society of human beings, Kant tells us, that no-one other than itself can command or dispose of. Regarding conquest, of which he disapproves, Kant has a simple remedy. Standing armies should be abolished. Kant's fifth principle is that "no State shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another State". The right to perpetual peace then, will depend upon reforming States in such a manner as to provide them all with "republican" or constitutional Governments. Once they became similar, or sufficiently alike, they could then embrace federalism in a League of Nations which "need not be a state of nations". In this, as in other matters, Kant's essay is prescient, and its echoes are still resounding. Certainly the present United Nations has not evolved sufficient congruities among its members to induce them voluntarily to accept such federalism, which might indeed provide for the agreement of enforceable human rights. The question does not arise, although the problem can clearly be seen. The enforcement of human rights today depends as much as it ever has, on the development of public opinion, both within States and between them. That was the foundation upon which we tried to build the Russell Tribunals, in order to alert international opinion to the presence of abuse. The Tribunals became necessary, in the words of Lelio Basso, because "human rights are at the same time proclaimed and left unprotected, devoid of international or national safeguards". But when Basso gave his authority to upholding human rights in Latin America, in the 'seventies, the science of spin was in its infancy. Today public opinion is almost a department of state, so that it becomes ever more difficult even to imagine what justice might be. Mary Kaldor is right to say that the work of Amnesty International has powerfully assisted in the creation of a public opinion which now both sustains and feeds on a wide variety of more specialised human rights agencies. But without the reform of the international system, there is no law to justify the intervention of any State or group of States or to support the use of force to uphold human rights in any other State. Ms. Kaldor implies that humanitarian intervention is a matter of opportunity, because, although there are many cases in which it is not possible, "that is not a reason to stand aside" when it is possible. The condition thus described has nothing whatever to do with law. It would fit, perhaps, the primitive rules which guarantee circumscribed security in gangland. Certain types of crimes will be punished, if they simultaneously offend one or other of the principal gangsters. Other victims of arbitrary misbehaviour need not apply for such "justice". But law gives equal treatment to all cases, so all victims are entitled to equal redress. Discriminatory treatment is the antithesis of law. Numerous commentators have compared the repression in Kosovo before the American bombardment, with the sustained and ferocious military action of the Turks against the Kurds in South East Turkey. In fact, repressive legislation against the Kosovars had rightly aroused sustained opposition elsewhere in Europe since 1989(4): but it was nothing like as bad as the more comprehensive repression, indeed, slaughter, of Kurds in Turkey. As repression fomented rebellion, massacres became more common, and more bloody. And yet Kaldor's benign imperialism recruits one set of oppressors from Turkey, under the flag of NATO, in order to redress the complaints of another set of oppressed in Kosovo. Justice would require that an impartial hearing be granted to both Kosovars and Kurds, and their separate complaints adjudicated within the framework of even-handed fidelity to the law. If it is possible to bomb Belgrade in pursuit of justice, it is equally possible to bomb Ankara. The logistics involved are not the problem. The problem is that the bombardment of our Turkish ally is as unthinkable, to NATO, as is justice for the Kurds. The Turks are our own oppressors, and it is necessary to be evil-minded to see any equivalence at all between their behaviour and that alleged againstYugoslav Serbs. Of course, in fact, bombing from outside is no more conducive to the defence of human rights in Kurdistan than it was in Kosovo: in both cases the remedy was or would be even worse than the original disorder. But we are not engaged in a plea for benign imperialism. It is not necessary to list the fearful roster of gross violations of human rights around the world, to see that the only pretexts for intervention which concern benevolent imperialism are those in which some material strategic concern already exists. But the law does need to be reformed, because proxy wars, destabilisation and direct manipulation are more and more common in the modern world, and indeed are frequently found to be happening under the tutelage of the United States or other NATO allies. Until comparatively recently, the European allies would quite normally have sought diplomatic release from the more bellicose American projects by a very simple device. They would have brought in an appeal to the United Nations, in order to find a diplomatically acceptable way of getting out of the unwanted Yugoslav confrontations. Why did they not do this in the case of Yugoslavia? They could then have relied on the Russians or the Chinese to veto the bombardment, and thus escape the responsibility for blocking the American design themselves. But by arranging to bypass the Security Council and its veto, the European allies have achieved a number of very undesirable results, most of which damage them far more than their possible adversaries. Firstly, they have given the Americans hegemony over some important future decisions in the Balkans and further afield, which they are likely to find rather embarrassing, and quite difficult to modify. Secondly, by breaching the rule of unanimity among the great powers, represented by the veto, they have not secured any better mechanism for avoiding serious collisions of interest. The Americans and the Chinese can come into fierce conflict, and the possible beginnings of this can already be seen in Taiwan and even Kashmir. The veto was a poor instrument for the maintenance of peace and no doubt it would be possible to improve on it. But to kick it away before any improvement has been devised will not be deemed very sensible by future generations. China will presumably veto any "humanitarian intervention", because it will not wish to welcome such an intervention into Tibet or Xinjiang. At this time, though, there is not much likelihood of Ms. Kaldor's freedom legions following her up the Himalayas. The Dalai Lama thinks that public opinion can still play an important part in moderating Chinese behaviour in Tibet. Certainly, he understands the limits of benign imperialism. During the Gulf War, after I had conducted hearings with him in the European Parliament, I wrote to him to ask if he could support the Pope's stance on that conflict. He replied by saying that there were undoubtedly some similarities between the cases of Kuwait and Tibet. "…but unfortunately, so far as is known, in Tibet there is absolutely no oil whatever to be found". Perhaps that reinforces his view that in Tibet's case, the movement of argument and persuasion is more likely to be effective than military action of any kind. But yes, there needs to be a continuous effort to create a more civilised international regime, in which human rights may genuinely flourish. This needs to be a regime of law, and it is difficult to see how any progress towards this can be made by destroying the frail system that was created at the end of the second world war. Back in 1945, destruction had raged across the world, and focused the minds of Governments everywhere. The impulse to avoid new wars was powerful enough to give us the United Nations Charter with all its faults, and all its promises. Nobody can expect that Governments are suddenly improved and made moral by their agreement to league together in a United Nations. But they are not worsened in this effort either. The problem which has been created by the actions of benign or ethical imperialism is, of course, that it has seriously undermined the United Nations. That the most powerful State can lead its allies into a unilateral military onslaught without the express endorsement of the Security Council, means that brute force alone now determines whether any other State or combination of States might take unilateral action in their own interests. Conflict zones abound around the world, and most of them engender fairly serious cases of human rights abuse. Ethical imperialism is supposed to sound quite innocuous. But what if there were to be several such imperialisms? It is not likely that the United Nations machinery will disintegrate as a result of the war in the Balkans. But it has been undermined, and it may begin to give place to other alliances, calculated to ward off the hegemony of United States ethics. The true face of these ethics was revealed by Mr. Karl Bildt, speaking for the UN in a television interview on Newsnight on the 28th July 1999, on the progress made in organising international aid for the reconstruction of those areas of Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, which had been devastated during the war. Mr. Bildt maintained that it was difficult if not impossible, to aid Serbia, because the economic system there was not conducive to receiving aid. That is how far the sovereignty of the market place has undermined that of ethics. Yugoslavia had established a form of market socialism with self-management, which functioned adequately. But was it this unusual economic system as modified by the IMF, rather than any ethical judgements on its leaders and administrators, which informed Mr. Bildt's response to questioners? Or was it the war economy of Yugoslavia which could not be aided? If ethical imperialism is driven by the need to assert the absolute domination of market forces over society, there will be other States which begin to find it tiresome. And the UN will have to contend with the ideological debates which ensue. In short, the Balkan war has established a new order of extreme instability and insecurity. That is why the parliament of the Ukraine recently voted for nuclear rearmament, because it felt that the security guarantees it had previously been given by the United States were no longer valid. That is why the Russian Government, caught in a very precarious political balance, encouraged statements to the effect that it was now abandoning its "no first use" pledge. Ethical imperialism has thus begun the reversal of all the gains which had previously been made to limit and control the possibilities of nuclear war. Against the ethical imperialists there needs to be a new peace movement. Undoubtedly such a movement will oppose future wars, some of which could be nearer than is generally supposed. But it is also necessary to have a clear idea of the kinds of reform which would enable us to advance from the United Nations' present organisation to a reconciliation of the contending claims of peace and human rights. How can we advance from 1945 and the UN Charter to 1795, and Immanuel Kant's regime for perpetual peace? Again and again we come back to the view that "standing armies shall in time be abolished altogether". A transition to this objective has been apparent for a very long time. Such military force should be vested in the control of the United Nations itself, and its deployment should thus be subject to a positive decision of the Security Council. Bertrand Russell called for a world regime in which the United Nations held all stocks of fissile materials, and thus a monopoly of nuclear force. It may well be thought that these are advanced proposals, hardly realisable in present circumstances. So let us look for another even more tentative transitional step. Should not all present military alliances be put under the ultimate control of the Security Council? It would then become perfectly acceptable for regional alliances to form themselves, as NATO did before the age of ethical imperialism. But their decisions to act, to initiate hostilities of any kind, would be directly subordinate to the decision of the Security Council. The registration and control of military alliances would still leave Member-states in possession of defence forces, and there is scope within the UN Charter for the action of such forces in certain defined conditions. But the great military alliances pose qualitatively different problems, and so should we not place them under a universal tutelage? Other reforms of the UN structure are overdue. The veto was invented to protect the interests of major powers. Now we have more major powers but no more vetos. The interests of India and Japan, or of Latin America and Africa, might be thought every bit as much deserving of a veto safeguard as those of the existing powers. Britain and France exercise the European veto, but there is no veto for the European Union. Any reform of the UN will need to address these questions, in addition to addressing the much more difficult wider questions of the circumstances in which it might be conceivable to dispense with vetos altogether. And behind this gigantic problem, there remains the problem with which we begin, that an assembly of United Nations has still not found the way to make the human rights upon which it agrees properly justiciable.
Footnotes (1) Observer, 18th July 1999. (2) "A Benign Imperialism", Prospect, April 1999 (3) This Convention was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, and came into force in January 1951. It was signed by the USA but not ratified by the Senate, on the grounds that it was poorly drafted, and could allow intervention by other Governments in US affairs. The Senate again refused to ratify in 1984, while supporting the "principles embodied in the Convention". It finally ratified on 25th November 1988, with the reservation. (4) In the early 'nineties, I received H. Rugova and a group of leading Kosovars as chairman of the Sub-committee on Human Rights in the European Parliament. Although we obtained a sympathetic response from our colleagues, I cannot say that much was done to help redress the grievances of which Rugova was complaining.
* Ken Coates is a former member of the European Parliament and TFF Associate |
