|
|
Features: By Michael J. Glennon The High-level Panel’s high-minded errors In july 2003, on the
heels of the American invasion of Iraq, United Nations Secretary General
Kofi Annan held an extraordinary press conference. He warned that we are
“living through a crisis of the international system.” He
wondered aloud “whether the institutions and methods we are
accustomed to are really adequate to deal with all the stresses of the last
couple of years.” “What are the rules?” he asked. Four
months later he proceeded to appoint a group, the “High-level Panel
on Threats, Challenges and Change” to recommend reforms. The panel
consisted of former governmental officials and in pursuing its task met at
various points around the world. Hopes ran high that its ideas would
breathe new life into an organization that needed, in Annan’s word,
“radical” change. In December 2004, it issued its report.
For a Burkean realist with any sense of institutional
conservation, making the most of the United Nations is a useful project.
Lots of capital, financial and otherwise, has been invested in the
organization over the past 60 years. To the extent possible, humanity should profit from its
investment. Even if the objective were merely to advance individual
states’ national interests, the un may be a useful tool for doing so. In any event, it is
hard to fault an organization that recognizes the need to reform itself,
especially one that has borne the hopes of humanity so heavily as has the
United Nations.
Sadly, however, the core recommendations of the
panel’s report, concerning the use of armed force, rest upon wishful
thinking rather than empirical evidence. The report evinces a view of a
world governed by objective, universal morality rather than by competition
for power and shifting national interests. It treats substantive problems
as language problems, suggesting that a new vocabulary will eliminate
underlying differences. Historical context is either missing or incorrect.
The report, in short, exhibits all the familiar shortcomings of old-style
Platonic idealism, ignoring the real-world incentives and disincentives to
which states actually respond.
Use of force
The panel’s core
recommendation is twofold, addressing when force
may be used and when
force should be
used. Force may lawfully be used by states, the panel declares, only in
response to an imminent threat or when that use has been approved by the
Security Council. Force should be used, by states or by the Security
Council, only when its use is legitimate. “[A]nyone . . . involved in
these decisions” should be guided by five “criteria of
legitimacy” before using force: (1) whether the threat is sufficiently serious, (2) whether the purpose is proper,
(3) whether every
nonmilitary option has been exhausted, (4) whether the military action is proportionate to the threat,
and (5) whether
there is a reasonable chance of success.
Many problems inhere in this approach, foremost among
them that, unless the Security Council approves, a state would not be
permitted to use force against a serious and likely threat until it becomes
imminent. This would not be a reasonable limit on state power. The gravity
of a threat and the probability of its occurrence are factors far more
likely to determine whether a state will use defensive force than whether
the threat is imminent. No responsible policymaker, knowing that some rogue
state or terrorist group is planning a nuclear strike, would recommend
sitting tight until the attack becomes imminent. Indeed, the panel’s
own criteria seem to suggest that using defensive force under such
circumstances would be legitimate. The New York
Times, not known for its support of
unilateralism, thus editorialized that the suggestion is unrealistic
(December 7, 2004).
Similarly out of touch is the report’s
condemnation of humanitarian intervention without Security Council
approval. “Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of
all,” the report declares, “and should never be
tolerated.” But the panel doesn’t really believe that genocide
is always intolerable. If the Security Council deadlocks, the panel opines,
genocide must be allowed to continue. France’s invasion of the
Central African Republic to end the murderous regime of Jean-Bedel Bokassa,
Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia to oust the Khmer Rouge,
Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda that put a halt to Idi Amin’s
bloodbath, nato’s 1998 air
campaign against Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo — all
would have been prohibited had the panel’s preferred rules prevailed.
Yet here again, under the five criteria espoused by the panel, each such
intervention might have been legitimate.
The panel suggests that its legitimacy criteria should
be formally adopted in resolutions by both the General Assembly and
Security Council. Doing so, the report insists, “should significantly
improve the chances of reaching international consensus on what have been
in recent years deeply divisive issues.” But there is, alas, little
reason to think so.
The criteria of course originate (though the panel does
not acknowledge it) in the doctrine of just war. It might actually be more
accurate to say a just
war doctrine: There is no single such doctrine. Various versions have been
proffered over the centuries, each with different criteria. (One common
account, for example, sets forth the requirement of noncombatant immunity,
which the panel’s version omits.) The single unifying element in
competing versions is their supposed source: natural law. Each posits as
its well-spring a single, universal, overarching set of moral precepts that
all human beings everywhere are obliged to obey.
The fifth-century writings of St. Augustine form the
basis of just war arguments. In The City of God, Augustine presents a morality that he believes all
right-thinking persons must necessarily accept. “[I]n men,” he
writes, “a right will is in union with the divine law.” Good
and evil are known through “an inward law, that in thy very heart is
written.” The “tribunal is in thy mind, there is sitting there
God.” Man’s law corresponds to God’s, “[b]ecause
God has distributed to mankind these very human rights through the emperors
and kings of the world.” God’s law is man’s law;
“‘lawfully’ means justly and justly means rightly.”
Thus, war must be “undertaken in obedience to God.” When it is,
it is a “righteous war.” A “man be blameless who carries
on war on the authority of God”; war, Augustine urges, “might
be waged by the good, in order that, by bringing under the yoke the
unbridled lusts of men, those vices might be abolished which ought, under a
just government, to be either extirpated or suppressed.” The reason
that people disagree about what is just is simply that there are
“erring and impious men.” If only “one faith existed in
all,” we would not be plagued by such disagreements. It is no
surprise that Augustine’s next chapter is entitled “Persecution
of Heretics”: Sometimes, “he that inflicts [persecution] is in
the right.” The “necessary . . . terror inspired” by such
laws is merely “a kind of medicinal inconvenience for the cold and
wicked hearts of many men.”
The enlightened members of the High-level Panel would
no doubt be horrified by such ideas, or at least by some of them. But the
panel does seem to buy into the core assumption of just war theory that all
right-thinking people, everywhere, will somehow identify in unison
“sufficiently clear and serious” threats to “State . . .
or human security” and can in addition determine as with one mind the
“primary purpose” of a given military action. It is important,
the report counsels, that decisions be made “for the right reasons,
morally.” Force should only be used when “good
conscience” permits. The “moral stance” against terrorism
must be reinforced. So it is only fair to ask: From what source does the
panel extract its universally “valuable” legitimacy criteria?
Right reason? The Bible? The Koran? The Islamic scholar Bassam Tibi has
written that.“[t]he Western distinction between just and unjust wars
linked to specific grounds for war is unknown in Islam. Any war against
unbelievers, whatever its immediate ground, is morally justified.”1 Where can we go
to find more information on the panel’s source? Why does its source
trump all other potentially conflicting sources?
The question is important because “erring and
impious men” continue to differ on when use of force is just or,
rather, legitimate.
We’re not yet all singing from the same hymnal. Prior to the American
attack on Iraq, opposing op-eds appeared in the New York Times contending that under
just war doctrine an attack was permissible (Senator John McCain) and
impermissible (former President Jimmy Carter). Who was erring and impious?
Was the Iraqi threat “sufficiently clear and serious”? What was
the invasion’s “primary purpose”? What, for that matter,
was the primary purpose of, say, Tanzania’s 1978 invasion of Uganda?
The Ugandan head of state, Idi Amin, had murdered around 300,000 people,
many of whom were tortured and killed in his presence. Julius Nyerere, the
president of neighboring Tanzania, felt “aversion” to
Amin’s “murderous practices.” Was Nyerere’s primary
purpose to stop them? Or was it to repel aggression (the month before the
Tanzanian invasion of Uganda, Uganda had invaded Tanzania)? Or to restore
Nyerere’s friend, Milton Obote, to power in Uganda? The truth is that
in most cases no one can know the principal reason that states behave as
they do. Governments, like individuals, act for many reasons, some of which
can barely be discerned let alone identified as “primary.”
The “source” question is important because
applying the panel’s legitimacy criteria can easily lead to
contradictory results. We need to know where the criteria originate so that
we can clarify questions concerning their application. The panel’s
“last resort” criterion, for example, counsels that force be
used only when there exists “reasonable grounds for believing that
other measures will not succeed.” Yet in some circumstances where
force is not a last resort, its use can still advance the ultimate
objective of protecting “human security.” The panel notes, for
example, that the Security Council has stopped imposing comprehensive
sanctions because of their “humanitarian impact,” but the
imposition of comprehensive sanctions might still succeed in averting a
threat. Is the use of force therefore “illegitimate” until such
sanctions are imposed? It could conceivably save more lives.
In resolving these and other dilemmas posed by its
criteria, the panel offers no guidance, which makes all the more puzzling
its claim that its criteria will help eliminate discord. Given that just
war principles have, after all, been around in one form or another through
every war fought during the past 15 centuries, what reason is there to believe that their
official endorsement in a un resolution will make a difference? Why would refitting the
principles in a spiffed-up vocabulary of “legitimacy”
accomplish anything more than shifting the discourse and changing the
buzz-words? Indeed, any likely substantive effect would seem the opposite
of that intended by the panel. Rather than bringing humanity together,
resurrecting natural law arguments from the Middle Ages could well provide
fodder for zealots everywhere who need factitious intellectual ammunition
with which to inflame their followers. Osama bin Laden would hardly
disagree that war “undertaken in obedience to God” is a
“righteous war,” a contention philosophically akin to the
panel’s proposals for “legitimate war.” The last thing
the world needs is more grounds for division, and needless ones at that.
Law and force
Legitimacy, then, is one metric by which the panel urges that the propriety
of armed force be measured. The other is law. What, precisely, is the law?
When can a state use armed force?
On this crucial question the report is contradictory.
According to the Charter, unless the Security Council approves, a state may
use force only in self-defense in response to an armed attack. Article 51 provides that
“[n]othing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of
individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a
Member of the United Nations.” Purporting to interpret this
provision, the panel asserts that “according to long established
international law,” a state can take military action only if
“threatened attack is imminent.” (It elsewhere credits the
United Nations with upholding a “strong norm against aggressive
war.”) However, the panel seems to have second thoughts about whether
the imminence rule really is “long established” or, for that
matter, whether any norm against aggressive war, strong or otherwise,
actually exists. Earlier, the panel acknowledges that states have not in
fact honored the imminence requirement and have used force without Security
Council authorization:
That all States should seek Security Council authorization to use force is not a time honoured principle; if this were the case, our faith in it would be much stronger. Our analysis suggests quite the opposite — that what is at stake is a relatively new emerging norm, one that is precious but not yet deep-rooted.
How can a norm be “long-established international
law” if it is a “relatively new emerging norm” that is
“not yet deep-rooted”?
The panel’s confusion about the law derives from
two factors. The first is the law’s own incoherence. The second is an
unwillingness to locate the law in historical context. Treaties and custom
both are sources of international law. In this case the two conflict: The
Charter sets forth a rule that requires an actual armed attack as a
predicate for the use of force, but subsequent state practice is not
consistent with that rule. As the report notes in a footnote, “[f]rom
1945 to 1989, states used military force
numerous times in interstate disputes. By one count, force was employed 200 times, and by another count, 680 times.” Which of the
two counts is accurate, the panel does not venture to guess. But in every
one of those instances, at least one state must have used force with no
bona fide defensive justification because it is impossible for all parties
to a conflict simultaneously to act in self-defense, and in very few of
these incidents have states either waited to be attacked before defending themselves or waited
until a developing threat became imminent. So it is clear that a
significant number of violations have occurred however Article 51 is construed. Giving due
weight to this profligate practice, how should Article 51 be interpreted?
The panel suggests that, historically, Article 51 has always been construed by
everyone in a way that somehow reads out of its text the requirement of an
actual armed attack as a predicate for using defensive force. A recent
article in Survival (Autumn 2004) by one panel member,
Gareth Evans, is revealing. Evans co-chaired a group assembled by the
Canadian government that issued a report on humanitarian intervention,
parts of which are lifted and included verbatim (and without attribution)
in the panel’s report. Evans writes that “[i]f an army is
mobilizing, its capability to cause damage is clear and its hostile
intentions unequivocal, nobody has ever seriously suggested that you have
to wait to be fired upon.”
In fact, the “nobodies” who have suggested
it include the un’s
founders and some of the leading lights in international law. Professor
Thomas Franck has summarized the thinking of those who drafted that portion
of the Charter:
The stringent requirement of an “armed attack” was used at the insistence of the United States. Although the State Department’s legal adviser, Green Hackworth, felt that this “greatly qualified the right of self-defense,” Governor Harold Stassen, deputy head of the delegation at San Francisco, insisted: “This was intentional and sound. We did not want exercised the right of self-defense before an armed attack had occurred.” In response to a challenge regarding U.S. “freedom under this provision in case a fleet had started from abroad against an American republic, but had not yet attacked,” Governor Stassen replied that “we could not under this provision attack the fleet but we could send a fleet of our own and be ready in case an attack came.”2
Professor Louis Henkin has been among the foremost
critics of a Charter interpretation that would permit preempting a future
attack. The panel cites Henkin in support of the imminence requirement, but
here is what Henkin wrote in 1979: “[N]either the failure of the Security Council, nor
the Cold War, nor the birth of many new nations, nor the development of
terrible weapons, suggests that the Charter should now be read to authorize
unilateral force even if an armed attack has not occurred.” The
contrary argument, he wrote, “is unfounded, its reasoning fallacious,
its doctrine pernicious.”3Oxford’s Ian Brownlie, writing in 1963, agreed. “[T]he view
that Article 51 does
not permit anticipatory action is correct,” Brownlie wrote, and
“arguments to the contrary are either unconvincing or based on
inconclusive pieces of evidence.”4 Professor and
later World Court judge Philip Jessup concurred: “Under the
Charter,” Jessup wrote in 1948, “alarming military preparations by a neighboring
state would justify a resort to the Security Council, but would not justify
resort to anticipatory force by the state which believed itself
threatened.”5 It is therefore hard to see where the panel gets the idea
that an imminence requirement is “long established.” It is not.
What is clear is simply that Article 51 did at one time require states to await an actual armed
attack before defending themselves, but that that provision has been
violated so many times by so many states states that used force before
threats became even imminent that its edge has been blunted by history.
Subsequent state practice has overtaken both the imminence requirement and
the armed attack requirement.6
Yet the proverbial Martian would get nary a clue from
this report as to why Article 51 reads the way it does or why it didn’t work. In fact,
the reason for its wording is simple. Its intent lies in the finely wrought
design of the un
Charter — a plan that has long been shattered by the weight of
reality: The Security Council was originally intended to exercise a
monopoly on the use of force. The founders’ notion in 1945 was that a state, if
attacked, would report to the Security Council and that the Council,
drawing upon standing or standby forces provided by member states and
directed by its own Military Staff Committee, would itself respond to the
breach of the peace. Defensive force would be used by the victim state only
during the brief interim between its report to the Security Council and the
Council’s armed response. All know, of course, that it didn’t
work out that way. The Council, deadlocked by the Cold War, never
negotiated the special agreements contemplated in the Charter under which
military units would be provided, and Churchill’s vision of a
“constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will
stand in awe” was never realized. The rest is not, as the report
implies, mystery, but history.
But the panel’s history is not simply incomplete.
It is wrong. The Founders of the un, the panel asserts, intended to create “a system in
which States join together and pledge that aggression against one is
aggression against all, and commit themselves in that event to react
collectively.” But the Founders had no such intent. The notion that
an attack on one is an attack on all is a premise that underpins mutual
security treaties such as nato and the Rio Pact, but not the United Nations Charter. The
use of force by member states to enforce Charter provisions or Security
Council resolutions has always been regarded as optional. That is why the
Charter provides, in Article 43, for the negotiation of special agreements with member
states so as to require states and the Security Council to work out the
conditions, if any, under which states would provide naval, air, and land
forces to the Council. Absent such an agreement, no obligation obtains on
the part of any member state to use armed force when another state is
attacked.
Dispute over this same issue — whether the treaty
obliges states to use force — first arose in 1919 in connection with
Article 10 of
the Covenant of the League of Nations. Concern was expressed about the
constitutionality of excluding the House of Representatives from the
decision to go to war by locating the commitment to use force in a treaty
approved only by the Senate. That dispute was largely responsible for
sinking the League Covenant in the Senate. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and
the “small group of willful men” who were his allies insisted
that it be made clear that the United States undertook no obligation to use
military force under the Covenant. Wilson refused to accept clarifying
reservations to this effect and as a result could never get the two-thirds
vote needed to join.
Memories of all this were fresh in the minds of those
who met in San Francisco in 1945, and they were not about to see the un Charter go down the
same drain. The founders therefore made clear that that Charter contained
no obligation on the part of any state to use force. Rather, they
incorporated into the Charter what was in effect an agreement to agree:
Upon the initiation of the Security Council, states would have the
opportunity, if they wished, to contribute military units for use by the
Council in the event a member state was attacked. But member states did
not, as the panel insists they did, “commit themselves in that event
to react.” Indeed, in the halcyon days of 1945, the suggestion that states would
themselves be using armed force individually to enforce the Charter or
Security Council resolutions would have been taken as strange. It was not
until the collapse of the Charter’s grand design during the Cold War
and the shattering of the Security Council monopoly that the Council began
to “franchise out” to individual states the right to use armed
force. Even then, such use has always been regarded as a right, never an
obligation. It is, indeed, doubtful that the Security Council can lawfully
order a member state to use force absent a special agreement with the
Council in which the state explicitly undertakes to do so.
Because the panel gets the past wrong, it gets the
present wrong. “Today, more than ever before,” its report
repeats, “threats are interrelated and a threat to one is a threat to
all.” But that is not the way that modern states assess threats. The
reason that Rwanda, Darfur, Kosovo and other human tragedies generate
mainly yawns within the United Nations is not that states fail to respond
to genuine threats to their own security. The reason that states often do
not respond to such humanitarian catastrophes is that they do not believe
that such events really are threats to their own security. Yet the report prattles on in this
vein in the seeming belief that the power of positive thinking can overcome
that reality. “There is a growing recognition,” the report
asserts, “that the issue is not the ‘right to intervene’
of any State, but the ‘responsibility to protect’ of every
State when it comes to people suffering from avoidable catastrophe.”
The report here borrows, once again, from Evans’s Canadian group,
which had initially come up with the idea of rhetorical relabeling as the
solution to international divisions over humanitarian intervention. This
panel resists confronting those underlying divisions, however, let alone
the historic and geopolitical reasons that states of the South and East
have opposed Western suggestions that sovereignty ought not be permitted to
shield intra-state genocide. Michael Ignatieff, a member of the Canadian
group, got it right. Referring to the panel’s report, Ignatieff told
the Financial Times (August
30, 2003):
On intervention, the conclusion I draw is that there is no consensus in the system for any change. The great majority of states are against it, come what may. . . . I remember talking to Jeremy Greenstock [the departing British un Ambassador] and saying “we’ve got to get into a situation where the un can intervene over ethnic massacres and occasions like that.” And he said “if you think that’s a starter you don’t know what planet you’re living on.”
In response to such objections, the panel declares
repeatedly that a new global consensus should somehow come into being, as
though creating one is just one more item to be added to some to-do list.
The panel never asks why the current consensus is what it is, how attitudinal patterns
such as these develop, or why they change. It doesn’t care what
interests states view as countervailing or what incentives might need to be
put in place to overcome them. States are simply at fault for having
“a lack of political will to react firmly against genocide”;
why they lack that will is a question that the panel neither asks nor
answers. What planet we’re living on is beyond the scope of its
inquiry.
Correlation or causation?
The extent of the panel’s wishful thinking and distaste for
empiricism is most apparent in its assessment of the contemporary
international system. Panglossian assertions that there exists a
“growing recognition” that humanitarian intervention by the
Security Council is permissible, that there has emerged a “recent
expectation that the Security Council should be the arbiter of the use of
force,” that “the world has now changed and expectations about
legal compliance [with the Charter] are very much higher,” that the
United Nations has upheld “a strong norm . . . against aggressive
war,” that “collective security institutions have made critical
contributions to the maintenance of international peace and security”
all are presented with neither evidence nor argument to back them up.
Kosovo, Iraq, and the 200 to 680
instances in which force was used by states in violation of the Charter are
not even explained away; they are ignored. Not mentioned is the General
Assembly debate of 1999, in which only about a sixth of its members supported the
secretary general’s endorsement of humanitarian intervention. Not
mentioned is the inability of the parties to the International Criminal
Court to define the term “aggression.” Not mentioned are
numerous state-by-state public opinion polls, such as those conducted by
the German Marshall Fund, that demonstrate deep and abiding divisions among
states’ populations on fundamental issues of international peace and
justice.
Instead of sound empirical research, the panel relies
upon a specious methodology that equates correlation with causation.
Readers are assured, for example, that “without the United Nations
the post-1945 world
would very probably have been a bloodier place.” How does the panel
know this? Because “[t]here were fewer inter-State wars in the last
half of the twentieth century than in the first half.” The
possibility that the decline in inter-state conflict was the result of
something else, such as growing economic integration, stronger alliances,
military deterrence, more influential nongovernmental organizations, the
reportage of mass media, increased international tourism, or merely a
broader transnational sense of horror over the barbarism of war, seems not
to have occurred to the panel.
Readers are assured, further, that in “the last 15 years, more civil wars were
ended through negotiation than in the previous two centuries in large part
because [of] the United Nations.” But between 1945 and 1990, the report also reveals, the number of ongoing civil wars increased by over 400 per cent. Of course more
civil wars could end through negotiation: There were more civil wars. Based
upon the report’s mode of reasoning, a reader might ask whether the
increase in the number of civil wars was caused by the United Nations. That
possibility, of course, is unworthy of the panel’s attention, but
curious inferences might nonetheless be drawn if the panel’s
methodology were applied consistently. If correlation equates with
causation in the way the panel implies that it does, then comparatively
speaking, the legalist collective security institutions of the twentieth
century have been a tragic failure. During the nineteenth century, peace in
Europe depended upon balance of power dynamics, not legalist institutions.
As Eric Hobsbawm pointed out in The Age of
Extremes (Pelham Books, 1994), no world war was
fought between 1815
and 1914; during
that period, “no major power fought another outside its immediate
region.” The greatest (post-Napoleonic) interstate conflict of
the nineteenth century, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, killed perhaps 150,000 — about the same
number killed during the Chaco War of 1932-35 between Paraguay and Bolivia. During the twentieth century,
however, the number of war-related deaths — after the legalist model
was put in place following World War i — exceeded 140 million. But these numbers do not appear in the
panel’s report. Could they be the consequence of an ill-advised
reliance upon legalist institutions to control armed conflict? Might there
be some alternative — an alliance of democracies, strengthened
regional organizations, coalitions of the willing that are less ad hoc, or
some other possibility — that would maintain peace and security more
effectively than has the Security Council? To the panel, this is not an
issue; the panel’s task is “not to find alternatives to the
Security Council as a source of authority but to make it work better than
it has.” The question whether other options for managing the use of
force might work better than the Security Council is simply not on the
table.
Nonetheless, the panel does hazard to assess the
Security Council’s effectiveness, apparently believing that
effectiveness can be measured without reference to possible alternatives.
The “flood of Foreign Ministers into the Security Council chambers
during the debates” on Iraq “demonstrated not just the
relevance but the centrality of the Charter.” One wonders whether the
panel counted the number of diplomats who flooded to Geneva in 1936 to attend the League of
Nations debate following Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia. Presumably
the relevance and centrality of the League were also demonstrated by such
homage. The panel proudly reports that the Security Council is now
effective in dealing with global crises: “With the end of the cold
war, the Security Council became increasingly active in addressing
international threats. The average annual number of resolutions it passed
increased from 15 to
60, or from one
resolution a month to one a week.” What better way to address
international threats than by passing resolutions? Nowhere is the Security
Council’s record in conflict prevention measured against the standard
set out in the first great words of the Charter: “to save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war.”
If shoddy empirics were merely peripheral to its
conclusions, the panel might be excused. But they are not. The
panel’s impressionistic sketches of how the world works form the
basis of its ideas about the solidity of the global order, and it is
concern about the “risk to the global order” that causes it to
oppose humanitarian intervention and preemptive defensive force.
Consequently, it is crucial to know how great the costs will be if these
disfavored options are to be discarded. Just how stable is the global order? How effective have
the current rules really been? Who’s right — has it been 200 or 680 times that the Charter has
been violated? How great would the sacrifice to stability really be if
preemption and humanitarian intervention were permitted? The reader can
only guess. To the panel, the unilateral option is intrinsically wrong, and
that’s that. Weighing costs against benefits is not an acceptable
approach. To reduce state miscreance it is necessary to reduce state power;
countervailing concerns such as humanitarianism and state security are
simply irrelevant.
“Unshared idealism”
That, then, is what Secretary General Annan has commended as the
panel’s “sweeping” cure for the crisis in the
international system: resurrection of the medieval just war doctrine, a new
vocabulary for describing it and humanitarian intervention, and the same
law — whatever it is — that we now have.
Richard Rorty has written about self-marginalization,
describing how the failure of idealists to connect with the real-life
concerns of a community can cause their commentary to be dismissed. With
this report the United Nations moves toward that self-marginalization. It
is not that ideals have no place in international discourse; far from it.
States, like individuals, are driven by preferences that they often call
ideals. The point here is twofold: that there is no transcendent reason why
those ideals are necessarily shared by every other state or individual on
the planet and that, whatever their origin, global ideals cannot be
advanced unless idealists confront the practical navigational problems that
stand in the way of their realization. Getting from point “a” to point “b” requires studying the
world as it is, appreciating what works and what does not, knowing which
incentives states respond to and which they do not. Navigational success
requires determining whether others share one’s ideals, and if not,
why not. Proceeding under the illusion that one’s ideals are and must
be everyone else’s is a formula for disaster. “There is grave
danger,” Henry Cabot Lodge said, “in an unshared
idealism.” With empirical data, on the other hand, and a realistic
assessment of what is feasible, it is possible to identify shared ideals
and to forge compromises that last. Humanity needs to know as a practical
matter what is possible to achieve and what is not. That is what was called
for in this report, and that it is what it fails to deliver.
1 Bassam Tibi, "War and Peace in Islam," The Ethics of War and Peace, ed. Terry Nardin (Princeton University Press, 1996), 131. 2 Thomas M. Franck, “The UN and the Protection of Human Rights: When, If Ever, May States Deploy Military Force Without Prior Security Council Authorization?” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy 5 (2001), footnotes omitted. 3 Louis Henkin, How Nations Behave: Law and Foreign Policy, Second Edition (Columbia University Press, 1979), 141. 4 Ian Brownlie, International Law and the Use of Force by States (Oxford University Press, 1963), 278. 5 Philip C. Jessup, A Modern Law of Nations (Macmillan, 1948), 165-66. 6 For elaboration, see Michael J. Glennon, “Desuetude,” Georgetown Law Journal (March 2005).
|
QUICK LINKS:
Policy Review
TOOLS: FOLLOW THE HOOVER INSTITUTION: 
|
