Tag Archives: History

Geopolitical Obstcles to International Law Enforcement: Deficiencies in the Management of Global Security

9 Feb

[Prefatory Note: Ressponse of Richard Falk to Questions posed by the Iranian journalist Asgar Ghahramanpour, 9. February 2026]

1. **In light of the rise and consolidation of far-right and nationalist movements—such as the Trump phenomenon in the United States and similar trends in Europe and elsewhere—how do you assess the current status of international law within the emerging global order?**

   Would you say that international law is increasingly retreating in the face of power politics?

International law is definitely being marginalized in contemporary international relations by the rise of ultra-nationalist political leaders and authoritarian governments. This negative trend is making a severe impact on political consciousness as a result of the adoption and revival of an imperial foreign policy by the U.S. under Trump, although the pragmatic use or neglect of international law in the management of global security preceded Trump, and can be traced back to 1945 when the winners of World War II became self-anointed as the architects of ‘a new world order,’ a role most prominently associated with the design and establishment of the United Nations.

It is notable that the UN Charter designated the Security Council as the only political organ of the new Organization that was provided with the legal authority to reach obligatory decisions binding on sovereign states. Most significantly it refused to allow international law or ensure democratic representation of the non-West to control outcomes in the Security Council in the face of opposition of even one of five winners of World War II given permanent representation while other member states were selected on a term basis. The role of international law was curtailed by according these five winners in 1945 not only permanent SC membership but more significantly a right of veto. This meant that if a breach of international law was to be dealt with even by a majority vote of 14-1, it would still fail, and have no legal effect if the lone dissenting vote was one the P5, which not only crippled the role of the SC in relation to geopolitical rivalry, as during the Cold War, but was highly undemocratic if evaluated from demographic perspectives. This absence of democracy also was present in the internal makeup of the P5 giving the US, France, and the UK great power status in the form of SC permanent membership and the veto, and excluding such Global South great powers as India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Brazil, creating an everlasting Western dominance in the SC, including a right of each P5 member to block any effort to reform the SC because all amendments of the Charter were nullified unless the support of all five.

The net result of this extensive role of the SC in UN affairs has been to make the Organization submissive to the P5, and to confer geopolitical primacy with respect to the management of global security, including war prevention and resistance to genocide as well as subordinate to the strategic interests of the powerful rather than responsive to the regulative principles of law that should possess universal applicability, and governs the strong and weak alike.

It is a mistake to think that the whole enterprise of international law is failing. International law works effectively in any substantive setting in which there exists a mutual interest in its applicability. The routines of international life, including most commerce and trade relations, air and maritime safety, communications, tourism, and diplomatic representation are complied with because the logic of reciprocity is operative. This is not true in domains of behavior such as armed conflict in which differentials of hard power determine political outcomes and uphold strategic interests and reflect the ambitions of the powerful. In these latter contexts international law has long been marginalized by design leaving the management of global security to the discretion of the geopolitical actors for any given issue involving the implementation of international law as the disappointing UN response to the recent Gaza genocide illustrated.

2. **Do you believe that the era in which international law functioned as a normative framework capable of restraining state power is coming to an end?**

   If so, what kind of alternative global order appears to be taking shape?

It is a fiction embraced by naïve legalists to suppose that international law ever controlled the management of global security or inhibited the strategic priorities of dominant states. There were eras of greater peacefulness when Great Powers acted prudently with respect to militarization and conflict resolution. The idea of a rule-governed international order applied selectively and within the limits set by those domains of international life where reciprocity prevailed, and differentials in power and wealth were minimized as in international trade and investment as compared to the colonial era.

The experience with nuclear weapons is illustrative of this pattern of marginalizing international law despite the risks of leaving the use of this apocalyptic weaponry of mass destruction entirely under the control of the most dangerous geopolitical actors. Rather than favoring denuclearization and disarmament, the same five winners in 1945 continued to leave this weaponry essentially unregulated except to the extent of seeking maximum control over the spread of the weapons to other states. The result has been costly arms races, dangerous crises, abetted by a scheme of deterrence + nonproliferation, with a resulting nuclear hegemony. If ever there was a basis for universal rule governance it was with respect to nuclear weaponry, but it could not overcome the ideology of ‘political realism’ that dominated the thinking of foreign policy elites of the major states, and was systemically opposed to accept any arrangements that restricted their hard power capabilities.

Whether this discouraging character of international relations will change in light of the Gaza Genocide, aggressive uses of forces, extreme violations of human rights, ecological instability is impossible to predict, although it seems unlikely in the present atmosphere. The antics of Trump’s narcissistic geopolitics are generating a tidal wave of anxiety about the human future, as well as bearing witness to the devastating consequences of unchecked lawlessness. We can only hope that civil society activism and more responsible political leadership will emerge to create a more viable international legal order than was framed in 1945.

3. **Based on your experience as the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, to what extent does this case illustrate the gap between the principles of international law and the political will of powerful states?**

   What are the broader implications of this gap for the credibility of the international system?

There is no doubt that this gap between law and politics exists in relation to the management of global security, including war prevention, conflict resolution, genocide, apartheid, and ecocide. This should not confuse us about the reliance on compliance with international law by all sovereign states, including those most powerful, whether labeled as Great Powers or in the UN context as the five permanent members of the Security Council or P5. As suggested in my prior responses where the logic of reciprocity applies to the behavior of sovereign states, international law provides a stable and convenient basis for the myriad of interactions that make routine international interactions trustworthy. For the agenda of global security and strategic ambition the design of the UN itself recognized the lack of political will to close the gap between international law and its dependence for implementation on political will and capabilities, epitomized by the right of veto conferred upon the winners of World War II, arguably at the time the most dangerous political actors in the world.

At present, despite the widespread disappointment and tension arising from this gap, there is still the absence of political will among the leading geopolitical actors (U.S., Russia, and China) to close the gap. From a legal perspective, this gap is insulated from remedy by each of the P5 possessing an unrestricted right to veto any proposed amendment of the UN Charter. The most that can be realistically envisioned in the near future is more prudent or responsible behavior by these dominant geopolitical actors and by secondary geopolitical actors of limited geographic scope to restrict their lawlessness to the security agendas of. regional geopolitical configurations of power, although U.S. imperial geopolitics and Russian and Chinese spheres of influence geopolitics ensures that the harmful gap between what international law requires and what international politics determines will continue to cause immeasurable harm, especially to vulnerable peoples and nations, or states that have resources coveted by geopolitical actors.

4. **Some argue that international law has always been subordinate to politics rather than an independent constraint upon it.**

   From your perspective, is the relationship between politics and international law inherently conflictual, or is there still room for a constructive and mutually reinforcing relationship?

To avoid confusion and repetition, please consider the relevance of my responses to earlier questions. In sum, with respect to all aspects of global security international law, in practice and design, has long been subordinated to politics, but only for regional and global political actors. And then only since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 when Europe gave birth to a self-serving format for an international normative order that legitimated coercion in the course of colonizing projects in the Global South.

A deficient version of symbolic international law enforcement occurs at the conclusion of major wars ending in victory for one side. As in the aftermath of World War II the winners prosecuted the war crimes alleged to be committed by surviving German and Japanese individuals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, which critics persuasively derided as ‘victors’ justice.

As also suggested in previous responses, where reciprocal benefits result from compliance, international law has long provided a reliable framework guiding the behavior of individuals, corporations and financial institutions, and governments in many international interactions, although even here there are important subtle

encroachments by the rich and powerful on the rights of the poor that escape from the discipline of a legal order administered on the basis of equality of all

5. **At a time when powerful states increasingly disregard or actively undermine multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the global human rights regime, how do you envision the future of multilateralism? **

There is little doubt that this is a bad time for internationalism, given global trends toward ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, which tend to devalue cooperative multinationalism. These trends are accentuated by the intense US hostility to internationalism given Trump’s diplomacy on behalf of the United States, which continues to be the most influential world state, although in danger of losing this status due to China’s continuing rising star. Early in 2026 the U.S. Government, by executive order, withdrew and stopped funding for no less that 66 international institutional arrangements, 31 of which were within the UN System.

The global scope of ecological challenges as well as the complexities of digital age communications, global migration flow, vulnerabilities to disease epidemics makes it likely that a new cycle of functional pressures will in the years ahead restore and even expand dependence upon multilateralism. This seems probable, although the signature reality of the present global setting is radical uncertainty, or put differently, the unknowability of the future.

6. **Can global civil society, academics, and human rights institutions play a meaningful role in restoring the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law, or are such efforts structurally constrained by the current global power configuration?**

In line with unknowability of the future, an initial response is to underscore unknowability, together with an awareness that there are many historical examples of surprising happenings in international life that were not anticipated by relevant experts or public opinion. Among notable recent examples is the victory of Vietnamese nationalism in opposing the militarily superior US intervention in the Vietnam War. Other important examples are the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peaceful transition of the apartheid regime in South Africa into a multiethnic constitutional democracy, and the Arab Spring attacking dictatorial rule in several Arab majority countries at least briefly. In light of this defining feature of  unknowability, it is appropriate to struggle for a desirable future. This suggest that civil society activism is worth supporting as strongly as possible in the hope of both restoring and enhancing the role of legitimacy and withit, the effectiveness of international law in relation to global security and human rights priorities.

Of course, resistance from current geopolitical configurations, statism, and predatory capitalism is to be expected, and current prospects for a successful transformation of irresponsible patterns of geopolitics seem low, this may change over time in unpredictable ways. The struggle for law and justice is imperative, even without any assurance that it will be successful in the short term, but neither is it doomed to failure.

7. **Finally, what advice would you offer to the new generation of international lawyers and policymakers seeking to defend and advance international law in a world moving toward unilateralism, authoritarianism, and weakened global governance?**

My first advice would be directed at teachers and commentators on law and global politics to adopt a paradigm of international law pedagogy that emphasizes the importance of justice-driven law in relation to global security, human rights, and ecological policy agendas. My second advice would be to urge all students of international relations and law to be required to study international law within a framework that is less vocational and more humanistic as integral to engaged citizenship in democratic societies. This educational commitments needs to be supplemented by societal beliefs that such moral literacy is expect to be present in all phases of the professionalism of law, lawyers, and judges, as well as of foreign policy advisors.  

This reorientation of pedagogy would also necessitate a prior critique of prevailing versions of ‘political realism’ that continue to dominate foreign policy decision-making, especially in the governments and ‘think tanks’ of geopolitical actors in a manner, which among elements would downgrade the historic agency of militarism. This would include studying the record of defeat of the militarily superior side in most anti-colonial wars since 1945. The link between international law and international legitimacy would also be stressed to make the key point that if international law is not implemented by governments and inter-governmental institutions it still legitimates civil society secondary enforcement capabilities in the form of solidarity initiatives and informal pressures by protests and boycotts, mounted to promote national and international sanctions.

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World Order After 1945, After Vietnam War, and After Second Coming of Trump

3 Feb

[Prefatory Note: This post elaborates upon a lecture of mine on Janurary 26, 2026 at a webinar in a series convened and moderated by the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, which has kept alive the relevance of the Vietnam experience to current struggles. The invitation to me proposed the topic of ‘World Order After Vietnam.’ In this modified text I devote attention to the relevance of world order after 1945, as well as the Vietnam War itself, and subsequent developments.

One point of clarification: We speak of the Vietnam War rather glibly, which glides over the crucial reality that tragic abuse of power is better understood as ‘America’s War in Vietnam.’ Having noted this, I will stick by the standard terminology for the sake of convenience.

Feedback is particularly welcome as I intend to work further on this theme.

I welcome this occasion to be at virtually together with comrades in the Vietnam anti-war movement, and grateful to John McAiliff & Doug Hofsteter for this invitation, as well as Chris Appy who heads the Ellsberg Initiative at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for illuminating and lucid comments in his role as discussant. I had my doubts as to whether I could meet such a challenge. Part of my predicament in this talk recalled T.S. Eliot’s words to a NYC audience at the start of a poetry reading that I attended over 60 years ago: ‘I am reluctant to make any comments about my poems to an audience that knows more about them than I do.’ In that vein, I realize that there are many with us who have experienced the Vietnam and its aftermath with deeper experience and knowledge than I bring to this challenging topic.]

We are now living through a period of radical uncertainty with respect to the future of world order, an atmosphere agitated by the Gaza Genocide and Trumpism, the resurgence of geopolitical primacy and rivalry, prospects for radical modifications of modernity due to AI and related technological innovations, a transactional and narcissistic US leadership, a discredited  and weakened UN coupled with the emergence of cooperative international frameworks, a divided US versus a resurgent China, and a threatening conflict reality that is stimulating increased military spending, new modes of warfare, danger of warfare fought with nuclear weapons. A time of world order transition or rupture, from the end of the Cold War & US dominated unipolarity to a yet unknown future—What does this Trump phenomenon and the Chinese rise portend for the human future?

I think a few brief bullet points on world order before Vietnam would be helpful in giving some background to both changes and continuities relative to world order after Vietnam:

–World Order after WWII was designed by the winners, which defeated hopes for a peace system restraining hard power militarism, in accord with the precepts of political realism that understand international history as largely the story of military superiority and economic inequality as expressed  a favorite quote of hyper-realist through the ages, and recently by Henry Kissinger, and now Stephen Miller: “the weak do what they must, the strong do what they will.” Thucydides has been typically interpreted wrongly endorsing this cynical outlaw whereas more careful reading of the context of this adage suggests it is a prophetic warning that such Athenian corrupt behavior with respect to morality will lead to its downfall. The intention, contrary to the amorality of post-Machiavellian realism, was a counsel of moral self-constraint to those with power at a time when the prohibitions of international law did not yet exist.

 –the design of the UN could have worked had the winners of World War II acted with moral and now legal self-restraint: permanent veto rights for the winners, criminal accountability for the losers at Nuremberg, Tokyo; it is true that international law seems never to have been intended to displace the geopolitical management of global security by the architects of world order after 1945, but neither was its existence denied; the hope then was that at least the liberal democracies of the West (US, UK, and France) and their allies, would voluntarily exhibit respect for the contemporary code of law and morality as embodied in the UN Charter, and thus comply with international law and morality without burdening the Organization with enforcement duties that would have required a superior military capability even in relation to nuclear superpowers, which would have caused a different set of problems that have been identified by criticisms of world federalism as the solution to peacebuilding challenges.

–In retrospect, we should realize that even the leadership of liberal democracies could not be trusted to comply with international law or observe moral values if in tension with the pursuit of strategic ambitions or the supposed requirements of national security. As a result, it is understandable to blame the leading members of the UN, and not the UN, for its disappointing performance in relation to global security, genocide and ecocide prevention, human rights generally, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts. 

–Cold War excesses from the outset suggest wartime trust was dissipated even prior to the surrender of Germany and Japan: covert regime-changing interventions displacing elected leaders: Mosaddeq in Iran (1953); Arbenz in Guatemala (1954); political assassinations Lumumba, Castro Ché Guevera, attempts for both ideological and economic reasons; Soviet failure to hold elections in Eastern Europe and interventions to uphold the pro-Soviet status quo; see James Douglass, Martyrs to the Unspeakable: Assassinations of JFK, Malcolm, Martin, and RFK (2025) interpreting the corrupting impact of these violent killings on progressive politics in the US.

–death rattle of European colonialism but not delegitimized by the UN Charter or among conservative elite circles. The emergence of predatory globalization as legitimized by Clinton, Bush presidencies, neo-con influence favoring Huntington view of Cold War Islamic threat demonized as ‘terrorism’ and associated with Israel’s frontline struggle against suicide bombing reaching a climax in response to Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

The Pedagogy of the Vietnam War

         –Lessons learned by US foreign policy establishment (militarized bureaucracy; Think tanks)—avoid ground warfare & minimize US casualties, abolish the draft, manage media discourse; technological innovations; proxy war option (Ukraine: Biden-fight Russia by arming Uk & discouraging diplomatic compromise); pacify citizen activism; overcame ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ in Iraq War (1991)

         –Peace Movement failures: sedated by the ‘Vietnam Syndrome into ‘game over’ delusions, overlooking systemic character of the partnering of militarism, nuclear hegemony, capitalism and political leaders’ short-termism

Major Developments in World Order Since the Vietnam War:

         –Vital turning points: end of Cold War; 9/11, Al Qaeda, & Osama bin Laden; Great Terror War; Iraq War and occupation, 2003; rise of & rivalry with China; Ukraine War; Israel’s response to October 7; anti-woke, anti-immigrant politics in liberal West; Abraham Accords and geopolitical deference of Muslim-majority countries to US hegemony; reelection of Trump, 2024; inauguration of Zorhan Mamdani, 2026, ICE rampage, ecological and climate change neglect; global rise of authoritarianism, xenophobia and ultra-right nationalism; transformative technological innovations- AI, robotics, hybrid warfare.   

         –formal defeat of European colonialism, but not of colonial mentality, generating economic and security residual colonialism in Africa, imperial encroachments elsewhere

         –US reliance on economic warfare, principally through sanctions broadly applied and political destabilization; the current Iran Protest Movement

         –end of Cold War, Berlin Wall, the Gorbachev vision of a new world order & Russia’s decline, temporary withdrawal from geopolitical rivalry; neoliberal globalization and the deindustrialization of the US, heavy indebtedness, precarious finance-oriented hegemony through dollar after abandoning the gold standard;

         –Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ reliance on Israel to fight US proxy wars in the ME; Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilization’ hypothesis- containing Islam rather than USSR and left ideologies; Israel given a free hand in the region, as well as with Palestine (liberal societies swallow severe legal/moral wrongs of apartheid, genocide, ecocide); containing Islam—Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, Muslim Brotherhood,  Egyptian coup; Huntington validated by 9/11 attack, Taliban, ISIS, Hamas.

         –US state-building ‘democratizing,’ containment p.us projects: Libya, Iraq (after 2003), Afghanistan, and now Venezuela; chaos, not democracy, state-destroying;

         –The anti-apartheid campaign contra South African racism, UN support and global solidarity via boycotts, divestments, sanctions;

         –The world order deficiencies as Israel intensifies repressive apartheid policies by recourse to  Gaza genocide, with West Bank spillover; discrediting of UN as weak, geopolitically neutralized, and most shamefully, a unanimous endorser of the Trump Plan in the SC 1803 (Nov. 17, 2025), given approval by SG, formation of Board of Peace at World Economic Forum, 2025;

         –US withdrawal from and hostility toward ‘internationalism’; started the year by withdrawing participation and funding from 66 international institutional arrangements-31 from within the UN System. These include the Climate Change Framework Convention, WHO, UNESCO; Board of Peace as shift toward what might be called ‘imperial internationalism;’

         –Rise and spread of authoritarianism, decline of rule of law internal to the state, from the Orban model to the rightest recent victory in Chile (some friction, Brazil: Lula over Bolsonaro; Trumpism; hard borders; realignment prospects.

         –US National Security Strategy 2025: Declaration of Imperial Internationalism

                  //Venezuelan attack

                  //US Western Hemisphere preeminence (challenging China’s trade and infrastructure diplomacy of mutual interests

                  //rejects liberal post-Cold War  

What Prospects for New Order

         –Spheres of Influence trilateralism 

        –Imperial Internationalism

         –End of NATO and alliance diplomacy; hard and soft power transactionalism; Europe as marginalized; a new state-centric world order

         –Rise of Regionalism and Civilizationalism (clash and alliance models)

–UN Reform or Collapse: a reset to moderate geopolitical influence, and restore confidence

–Functional Internationalism: cooperative global problem-solving mechanisms

–Polycentric Balance: Bandung-revived NAM; BRICS; Chinese Development Collective Framework

–Revolt against international payments system as tied to dollar: failure or success

–Extending US Imperialism: Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Cuba, Iran; and reactions- European realignment, heightened geopolitical rivalry

–Important global challenges: climate change, ecological instabilities; heightened risk of major wars

–key national challenges: reviving democracy and human rights; demilitarization and domestic investment in infrastructures, restored respect for truth and rationality, internationalism, prudent geopolitics; more equitable distributions of wealth and income, defeating the economics and politics of inequality

Concluding Remarks

–a time of radical uncertainty and unparalleled complexity; humility about forecasting the future;

–present world order precarious, unjust, militarized

–nuclear hegemony as geopolitical core of managing global security

–transactional statism versus civilizationalism

–hope, struggle, and the unknowable future

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A Remembrance of Jimmy Carter

3 Jan

[Prefatory Note: A recollection of my only meeting with the former president at the Carter Center, a minor event, although in the context of repeated mistakes by the ‘political realists’ who continue to shape American foreign policy, perhaps of some interest. The pessimistic note is that the economic hardships imposed on the Iranian people since the fall of the Shah may have been inevitable so long as imperial geopolitics and predatory capitalism dominate the Washington mindscape, and currently to threaten dangerous regional warfare in the Middle East.]

In 1981 or 1982 I was invited to a small human rights meeting at the Carter Centerin Atlanta. It was in the aftermath of the Iran hostage crisis that is blamed for Carter’s loss, Reagan’s win in 1980. The Carters somehow knew that I had previously supported their daughter, Amy, who was an activist against the Vietnam War. It is solong ago I cannot remember the exact context, whether it was a matter of political support or somehow connected with a legal proceeding associated with civil disobedience. Whatever the past, Rosalynn Carter apparently to show their appreciation seated me next to President Carter at a formal conference dinner despite their being more distinguished guests present.

I sheepishly did what I was told and took the opportunity to talk with the ex-president about the situation in Iran. I had been in Iran accompanying Ramsey Clark, the former American Attorney General who had become a leading progressive voice after leaving government and someone sympathetic with the Iran movement against the Shah. While in Iran in early 1979 in a period dramatized by the Shah’s departure from the country, we were frequently asked about Carter’s New Year’s toast to the Shah in 1977: “An island of stability” surrounded by “the admiration and love which your people give to you.” Ensuing events proved how wrong were these sentiments, but that is a longer different story of mass disenchantment that has been frequently told.

During our visit to Iran, we had met with numerous prominent Iranian officials, Islamic leaders, and ordinary citizens. We also met with the American ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan, who was a hawkish diplomat during the Vietnam Era. Reacting to the anti-Shah movement, Sullivan was clear about the fact that the Shah’s 1979 abdication a few days before our meeting with Sullivan who felt that the Shah’s departure was  an inevitable development given the play of forces in Iran by that time, including the army’s abandonment of the Shah’s government by then. Sullivan hoped that the US Government would accept the outcome, and normalize relations with the new leadership, but reported being blocked by hardline National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was following the pro-Shah diehard diplomacy rather than accommodating approach recommended by the Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, a conservative realist, a somewhat aristocratic acquaintance of mine, yet seemingly free from the compulsions of the geopolitically oriented deep state that guided US foreign policy from its undercover sites during the Cold War, and beyond. We should be aware that the Shah was perceived as a major strategic asset in the Middle East, what Henry Kissinger described “as the rarest of things, and unconditional ally.’

During the hostage crisis that started on November 4, 1979 I had been asked to accompany Andrew Young to negotiate the release of the hostages after Ayatollah Khomeini had let it be known that he would welcome an Afro-American negotiator to arrange a diplomatic solutions. The trip was vetoed by Brzezinski. I recall the somewhat bitter, but likely discerning, comment by the head of the State Department’s Iran Desk at the time: “Brzezinski would rather see all the hostage dead than have Andrew Young get credit for their release.” This senior civil servant favored the Young mission, and Young was willing to go, but only if he received a green light from the White House, which never came, we never went, and the rest is history still in the making.

After some pleasantries at the dinner about the Carter Center and the conference, I gathered my courage and asked Carter why he followed Brzezinski policy advice rather than Vance’s counsel, and he gave a short, yet talked further but it was evident that Carter had no deeper reasons to cling to a lost cause, unsatisfactory answer: “Because he was loyal to me.” Nothing more, nothing less. I reflected at the time that Carter would probably have been hosting a state dinner at the White House and being hailed as a peace minded statesman rather than having this tense chat about the low point of his presidency with a brash stranger at his Center.  

The Road Not Taken

We do not know what would have ensued in Iran or the Middle East had the Vance view prevailed, and the US fully respected the exercise of the right of self-determination by the Iranian people. The political sequel to the overthrow of the Pahlavi monarchy was not clearly prescribed in advance. It might have led to a more democratic version of the Islamic Republic had it not been immediately threatened by internal enemies linked to foreign states in the region. With bad memories of the 1953 anti-Mossadegh coup, facilitated by the CIA, it is hardly surprising that Iran theocratic hard liners took command of the government, especially given the internal and regional challenges mounted against Iranian developments of 1978-79.’ What might have been’ could serve, even belatedly, as a signpost to ‘what should have been’ and more hopefully,  ‘to what will be in the future.’ More soberly, imperial geopolitics and neoliberal capitalism have displayed a willingness to potentially radical enactments of the right of self-determination, and as Kurt Vonnugut vainly tried to teach us, “and so it goes.”    

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Global Governance and Global Security in the 21st Century:  A Philosophical Inquiry

4 Oct

Richard Falk

            [50th Anniversary of Philosophical Society of Turkey, Ankara, Oct. 4, 2024]

A Preliminary Reflection on Orientation

It is an honor for me, not even a philosopher, to be a panelist on this program honoring Professor Kucuredi for her inspirational role in the development of the Turkish Society of Philosophy over its life of 50 years.

Listening to the presentations and the introduction of speakers have made me aware that this Society, unlike so much of contemporary philosophy whether of the language or postmodern variety, is devoted to understanding the global crises of our time and how they might be best resolved for the benefit of all humanity.

If ever during the history of the human species did we need the benefits of ‘deep thinking,’ which is the enduringly profound contribution of philosophy, is now so many of the world’s leaders and influencers are behaving mindlessly or malevolently, raising risks of provoking quasi-species or even extinction events. Never has the need for philosophical deep thinking been greater with attention to the time dimensions of urgency as well as with the space dimensions of complex and intensive interdependence. Of course, this is not to denigrate longer term thinking relating to peacemaking and peacebuilding as a contribution to transformative patters of behavior in political, economic, and cultural domains of human expression and ecological awareness, but it is alerting deep thinker to the emergency conditions that bind together the destinies of all peoples sharing life on planet earth.

I have chosen to focus my remarks on the theme of ‘global governance’ that has been at the core of my scholarly work ever since I was a bewildered graduate student, then fearful of a major war fought with nuclear weapons. My overriding concern is with the management of global security in the sense of war, genocide, and atrocity prevention, which explains their linkage here. I was less concerned with the management of routine interactions across and within national borders that brings order, stability, and benefits in many diverse areas of life, including health, travel, diplomacy, sports, culture, and countless others. It ranks high among the achievements of modernity, but it is not enough given the rate and nature of technological innovation.

I explored from the standpoints of international law, international relations, and cultural values two central issues: 1) a critique of global governance as a structure of international life; 2) were there viable alternative modes of global governance that were less war-prone, more justice-oriented, and less a product Western hegemonic ambitions and civilizational provincialism. In carrying forward this line of thought I often turned to Western philosophy for insight and wisdom and to Eastern philosophy for empathy, different groundings in social/political realities, and ethical values reflecting different civilizational traditions.

Sketching the Philosophical Roots of Global Governance      

Existing structure and procedures of global governance have their normative and political deep roots in the framework set forth in the Peace of Westphalia back in 1648, but continuously evolved to adapt to changing conditions.

The essential feature of this Westphalian framework was the formal or juridical autonomy of territorial states sovereign within recognized international borders, a systemic condition of philosophical anarchy most influentially theorized by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan published in 1651. This vision was accepting of the abiding reality of war, which in Hobbes’ words pitted ‘all against all.’

Hedley Bull modernized Hobbes in his important book, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order initially published in 1977. The originality of Bull’s adherence to state-centrism was his idea that anarchy could be combined within the overarching non-governmental normative reality of ‘society,’ which was the narrative he believed best described world history, and could not be changed for the better.  Revealingly, the main societal premise of Bull’s worldview was the political, moral, and legal obligation of sovereign governments to show respect for the norm of non-intervention by refraining from forcible intervention in the internal affairs of foreign countries.

The realist element in Bull’s approach was expressed by his rejection of the pretensions of international law as ‘a higher law’ than national legal authority when it came to maintaining global security, establishing and upholding political order, and imposing criminal accountability on individuals. Bull illustrated his bold reluctance to submit power to law within international settings by his rejection of the Nuremberg precedent by which German political and military officials were held internationally accountable after World War II for their alleged criminality.

Bull believed, and experience has largely vindicated his skepticism, that such punitive treatment as imposed on the losers in World War II made a mockery of law by overriding the sovereignty of only the losers. This unwillingness of the victorious countries to submit their own behavior to any legal assessment meant that what was being called ‘law’ at Nuremberg is more properly regarded as a naked expression of power.  At the same time Bull valued law for its functional roles in serving the mutual or reciprocal interests of states in political order internationally, but he believed it had no constructive role in relation to war/peace contexts other than shared humanitarian concerns such as the humane treatment of prisoners-of-war by adversaries.

In effect, the Nuremberg Judgment was more an exercise of state propaganda by the winners in World War II than their claim of an advance in criminal jurisprudence of international accountability. In effect, war was accepted as embedded in the anarchic structures and it was leading many liberal idealists to regard international life as governed by law rather than power. Such thinking was an anathema to a confirmed realist such as Bull who felt there no alternative to leaving global governance and global security to what the most influential international relations

agreed upon despite policy divergencies (Morgenthau, Kissinger, and Kennan).

Bull’s deconstruction of Nuremberg accountability claims have been reinforced by invoking criminal law to punish Saddam Hussein after the Iraq War of 2003 while foregoing any legal scrutiny of serious war crimes allegations directed at George W. Bush or Tony Blair. The furious refusal by the US to have any member of its armed forces investigated or arrested for international crimes by the International Criminal Court is a further indication that Bull’s skepticism continues to be validated by experience.

Also significant is the reality that these projections of global governance that originated in the West and served Western interests in overriding the sovereignty of non-Western national societies by disguising power grabs as criminal justice. At its peak this Western hegemony both had recourse to law to rationalize colonialism, sugarcoat in the process genocidal policies directed toward native populations, especially in the British breakaway colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

As world history unfolded the US Government insisted upon and achieved total impunity even in relation to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were viewed as unlawful in more objective legal and cultural venues ever since such weaponry of mass destruction came into existence. We can only regret that these grants of impunity for the atomic attacks cleared the path to the Nuclear Age that might not have come to pass if Germany or Japan had resorted to such weaponry and yet went on to lose the war. Controversial combat tactics by the losers in war rarely become acceptable practices in future wars, but if by winners it becomes more tenuous to deny the validity of their future use.

Kant’s disruptive challenge to Hobbes and contemporary realists

An earlier partial philosophical break came to the fore in the aftermath of the French Revolution articulated in perhaps the most conceptually sophisticated manner by Immanuel Kant in his publication 230 years ago of a long essay given the title Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. The basic Kantian insight was that the global spread of democratic republicanism, and accompanying human rights, could come to allow separate states to co-exist in a condition of harmony with respect to their national security, thereby indirectly achieving global security.

Kant sought to counter the structure of political realism that envisioned no alternative go ‘perpetual war’ with the revolutionary idea that war was not rooted in the human condition or even in the fragmented character of international society, but is an outgrowth of ideological tension, predatory economic impulses. Kant explored the possibility that the newly comforting belief that democracies would not wage war against each other. There were other related features in this Kantian hopeful view of international relations including a self-interested dynamic of state in mutual demilitarization.

It is arguable that this Kantian radical vision has never been tested historically because of the failure of democracy to spread to many important countries outside of the West, and with anti-democratic national governance remaining commonplace even in the West. The source of both world wars of the prior century were often accurately described as pitting the liberal democracies against first fascism and then totalitarian socialism, which can be conceived as a meeting place between Kant’s bonding expectations of democracies and their antagonism to anti-democratic forms, a kind of second-order fulfillment of Kant’s views on the relevance of internal state/society relations.

With the rise of civilizational consciousness conflict configurations are often portrayed by reference to diverse religious or ethnic  identities, and their conflictual perspectives. Biden is the latest of Western leaders who sought to rally democracies against autocracies, as if he were a Kantian, although his designation of democracy was so broadened as to be normatively meaningless, malevolent, and mendacious by including Israel, Modi’s India, Saudi Arabia, and others. Such ideological opportunism undermines second-order Kantianism.

There remains a slender basis for the Kantian belief that ‘genuine’ democracies do not fight one another, and that if global political landscape came one day to consist only of genuine democracies, there would be, or at least might be, a prolonged period of world peace.

 The Fleeting Promise of Governmental Solutions 

From pre-Westphalian times contrary expectations envisioned an enhanced role for international law, entertaining political and ethical notions of overcoming Hobbesian anarchy by various ideas of institutional centralization expressive of various ideas of spontaneous or coerced unity of humanity, generating even governmental proposals for world government or geopolitical ambition to establish a global state. In other words, the pathway to a peaceful world led not through an anarchic structure but depends on overcoming political fragmentation by way of a deliberative process that credibly gives rise to a more centralized system of governance.

What now exists, epitomized by the design of the UN as an institutional (non-governmental) system in which all sovereign states are treated as equal in a formal diplomatic sense yet the five main prevailing states in World War II enjoy a right of veto in the Security Council, the only UN political organ with the authority to reach binding decisions. In effect, this has meant that global security is managed outside the UN by these powerful political actors who are granted the legal authority to evade the UN Charter while pursuing either peacekeeping or strategic interests.

In fact, this P5 managerial role produced during the 40 years of Cold War led to a precarious balance between the Soviet Union and the three NATO members of the SC led by the US with respect to major war. Since the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War this geopolitical P2 became behaviorally the P1, at least until Russia mounted a geopolitical challenge as an accompaniment to the Ukraine War and the Global South showed signs of promoting their own version of global governance with encouragement by China. The Ukraine War also highlighted the moral hypocrisy of the West by its denunciation of Russia while actively supporting Israel in openly carrying out genocide in Gaza. This posture also exhibited a betrayal of liberal values associated with respect for international law and human rights in this clash with strategic interests and cultural affinities.

After each of the world wars, idealists on the sidelines of world politics put forward views that advocated world government in the form of the enactment of a federalist constitutional framework providing global governance and the institutional management of global security.

These views never gained political traction against either the realist consensus that dominated foreign policy elites in the powerful countries of the world or by public advocacy on the part of engaged national citizenries. These ideas of centralized global governance continued to languish despite the advent of nuclear weapons, the climate crisis, and the wastefulness and menace of militarized global security in the nuclear age. The UN was framed to create a system of institutional centralization for functional activities while being forced to adapt to the geopolitical management of war prevention and global security. It should therefore come as no surprise that the UN has been minimally involved in the ongoing war in Ukraine and the genocidal assault in Gaza

The 2024 UN Summit of the Future with its call for virtuous behavior protective of long-term human wellbeing and ecological stability by UN members and along with the championing of inspiring policies directed at mitigating human suffering seems likely to experience the disappointing destiny of the UN Preamble to the Charter with its confident call to end the scourge of war and serve as a beacon of hope for a peaceful future. Satisfying words with a pacifying impact without obligatory matching deeds is similar to being presented a beautiful wine bottle that is empty of the coveted liquid within.

A Concluding Lament

We live in disillusioning times, where the appeals of 21st century pragmatic thinkers and critics, alive to real world challenges, are still dismissed as visionary, and are neither heard nor heeded in the corridors of power. These venues of power and wealth still remain mainly the preserve of ambitious men who continue to be bewitched by the benefits of short-term performances, while the profound challenges that haunt a human future facing increasingly urgent imperative consisting of long-term vision, commitment, empathy, ecological resilience, and spiritual wisdom. May it be so! And may philosophers add their variants of deep thinking in the process.     

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David Krieger (1942-2023): A Life of Dedication to the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons

21 Dec

[Prefatory Note: My In Memorium essay honoring David Krieger’s notable life was published in the December 21 Santa Barbara weekly newapaper, The Independent. Although David devoted his professional life to anti-nuclear scholarship and activism, his underlying motivationa were guided by fervent hopes for a world anchored in dignity for all and respect for the authority of international law and a robust United Nations]

Remembering my long, close, cherished friendship reinforces my sense of loss resulting from the death of David Krieger.

Our primary interests were unusually congruent. We were devoted to a world in which nuclear weapons and the danger of a nuclear war had become an unpleasant recollection rather than an existential menace. We both found great satisfaction as well as a sense of personal liberation playing competitive tennis as often as our schedules would allow. And we both expressed our deepest feelings about the world through poetry, both reading and writing poems.

David excelled in each of these spheres while I struggled, but despite this hierarchy of relative achievements, we managed to find pleasure through sharing much that seemed happily uncorrupted by the pressures of normal professional life.

David was well-known in Santa Barbara. He was the founding president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in 1982 until his reluctant retirement in 2020. He managed to sustain this nongovernmental organization (NGO) through the support from an array of donors, many drawn from local sources. He put together a Board of Directors and staff that shared his single-minded dedication to the abolition of nuclear weapons, which for him was the darkest cloud overhanging the future of humanity.

David firmly believed that reliable knowledge conveying the drastic havoc of a nuclear war would awaken both the citizenry and its governmental representatives to the menace that threatened the future, ever since the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The spirit of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was well captured by its website adages: “For the human race, Not the arms race” and “Abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.”

David never lost his hope for such a peaceful future for the country and the world, despite his knowledge of how deeply embedded nuclearism was in the political and economic consciousness of the nation, through the arms industry, a subservient Congress and media, and militarist foreign policy.

In lectures of invited peace luminaries and awards for life achievements, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation honored those who contributed to realizing its goals, including Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Robert Jay Lifton, celebrated activists such as Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire and Helen Caldicott, and notable personalities such as Queen Noor and Oliver Stone.

For such prolonged anti-nuclear efforts, it is hardly surprising that David and the Peace Foundation were nominated on several occasions for the Nobel Peace Prize. In the recent book, The Real Nobel Peace Prize: A Squandered Opportunity to Abolish War, the renowned Norwegian expert on this most coveted of peace prizes, Fredrik Heffermehl, writes convincingly that David deserved the prize more than many of its recipients because his life’s work and that of the foundation he created. Heffermehl believed that the foundation’s contributions were in keeping with what Alfred Nobel had in mind when he established the prize to realize a vision of a world without war. David’s focus on nuclear weaponry was the vital first step in achieving this goal.

If nuclearism was what David hated, what he loved, besides his family, was poetry. It was a great joy for me to exchange haiku with David on a regular basis. Here are two examples of his haiku that should be read in relation to the profound impact the Hiroshima experience had on David’s life:

There, in the dark sky
through the sycamore leaves
the full moon

A rare good fortune —
to awaken from dreaming
in the moonlight

Although disease made him unable to speak, David remained alert until the end of his life, undoubtedly mourning the terrible wars in Ukraine and Gaza, but I also imagine him glimpsing glimmers of light, none brighter than knowing that the foundation his life was built around would continue to thrive under the sway of its inspirational new president, Ivana Hughes. She shares David’s passion, exhibiting a nurturing energy far and wide that spreads the message of nuclear disarmament, effectively introducing the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation abolitionist perspective into the practical activities of the United Nations and many other global venues around the world.

A second glimmer of light is the entry into force of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2021. Although the treaty is opposed by NATO countries, including of course the United States, as well as by the other eight nuclear states, it is supported by governments representing a majority of the world’s peoples. David never lost his faith in respect for international law as the pathway to a peaceful world. This new treaty gives peace activists a powerful instrument by which to work toward a denuclearizing world, but it will not happen without a robust worldwide movement of people. That alone, with the capacities to mobilize sufficient democratic pressures, will lead governments — above all, ours — to finally do the right thing.

Above all, David believed in the transforming potential of love and beauty. His life was memorable for more than being a warrior for nuclear abolition. He was blessed by the love and the extraordinary support of his life partner, Carolee; children who made him proud; and grandchildren who kept him young as he grew old. It was Carolee who was so steadfast in her loving vigil of recent years as to make David’s transition from life to death as bearable, even mostly joyful, as it appeared to be.

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Beyond The Haunted Imagination

12 Feb

 

            Ever since atomic bombs were exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II end of the world forebodings have been present in Western cultural consciousness. In the background of such thinking is the religious anticipation of a day of judgment when life in earth will be replaced by the consignment of everyone then living to either the hell of damnation or the heaven of salvation. The first type of end time thinking is based on the fear that the Promethean gift of technological innovation when carried to its omega point will produce a big bang terminal moment in the human experience. The second kind of end time thinking imagines that the gift of planetary life was a testing time for the human species that would end with endless punishment for the many and eternal rewards for a few, and was divinely programmed in a fatalistic manner beyond human capacity to control or alter. We live now amid both types of end time thinking, a realization made more troublesome because such alarmist patterns of awareness while rather widespread have not generated any strong reactive movement based on prudence and preservation. Instead, all of us avert our eyes most of the time, and most manage to look away all the time often with the help of drugs and denial. Only a few are able to fix their full gaze on the impending cosmic wreck without turning away.

 

            One of those few is a poet named C.K. Williams who in an essay, “Nature and Panic,” which appeared in the October 2012 issue of Poetry magazine, acknowledged panic in response to what he observes in the world around him. In words that resonate with me Williams wrote: “Like many people I know, I often have a somewhat—no, a wholly—frightening vision of the future of humanity and of our earth. There are periods when I live in a state of acute anxiety, indeed, near panic, about what awaits our children and grandchildren. Last year, I realized one day that every poem I was writing or attempting to write, had global warming and its consequences either as its overt or implied theme. Sometime I’m depressed beyond writing or saying anything at all; I fall into a funk that threatens never to end.”

 

            Williams goes on to refer to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which paints the darkest possible picture of the desperate aftermath of a totalizing apocalyptic catastrophe that reduces human existence to the barest of survival struggles waged among roving gangs of desperate people ready to feast on one another. Such an extreme playing out of dark forebodings provokes an attitude of resentment in Williams, not because it is an exaggeration of what lies in store for humanity, but because it rings true! In Williams’ words: “I’m not the only person I know who’s expressed regret at having injested the book: I feel sometimes indignant that I have to have it in my consciousness. If there ever was a book that embodies the extremity of the emotion we call panic, this has to be it. I find it’s like having a piercing scream in my mind, one that, when the book comes to mind, which it does more often than I’d like, goes off like a siren.”

 

            From this low point of panic, Williams finds his solace in beauty as an authentic manner of not succumbing to the torments of reason and the all too realistic tremors of a beckoning end time. He takes note of the pervasiveness of beauty in all its forms—music, painting, architecture, poetry—“if not in every day then in every age” as something that lifts human experience to a higher realm of being that is no longer vulnerable to panic no matter how dire the warning signs. Williams writes “[o]ften our first experience of beauty will be the first hint of what each of us at some point will dare call our soul.’ This allows our exposure to great art of any kind to carry us beyond ourselves and whatever conditions we fear in the world. Williams notes that the first creators of painting retreated to caves so as to avoid being distracted by the lesser wonders of nature that he seems also to regard with awe, yet a lesser awe, because these wonders are there to be found rather than there to be discovered in the solitary mineshafts of the creative imagination. Williams ends his extraordinary pilgrimage beyond the realms of end time with these almost hopeful words: “Beauty saves us. Beauty will save us. The world, though, is still ours to cherish, and ours to protect.”

 

            This brave sentiment is less an act of will than a refocusing of the human spirit. While we are alive, let us be saved by beauty, and I would add by love, but let us not forget that the world is not yet alien, but contains flowers and birds and stars and moonlight and rainbows and many beautiful people of all shades and beliefs. It is worth protecting, and cherishing, and who really knows what the future will bestow? Despite sharing with Williams  “a pessimism of the intellect” I also know deep down that the struggle for the human future is far from over, that the world and all those who are being made to daily suffer close by and at great distances are both “ours to protect.”      

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In Further Memory of Edward Said

27 Dec

In Further Memory of Edward Said

 

Always, always

 

That voice

remains

is gone

needed

 

What he gave

we miss

we need

we want

 

Our loss

his loss

remains

an echo

 

Sunsets bright

that shine

yet soon

depart

 

Unlike waves

that beat

on shore

remains

 

Relentless

is loss

his gift

our hope

 

Remembering

our loss

our tears

his hopes

 

Honor such a loss

clear eyes

brave words

courage

 

XII..27…2012

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Warfare Without Limits: A Darkening Human Horizon

27 Jul


There are several pressures that push war in the direction of the absolute, and imperil the human future. Perhaps, the foremost of these is emergence, use, retention, and proliferation of nuclear weapons, as well as the development of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki there have been several close calls involving heightened dangers of wars fought with nuclear weapons, especially associated with the Cold War rivalry, none more serious than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. To entrust such weaponry to the vagaries of political leadership and the whims governmental institutions seems like a Mt. Everest of human folly, and yet the present challenges to nuclearism remain modest and marginal despite the collapse of the deterrence rationale that seemed plausible to many during the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.

 

Underneath the tendency to develop for use whatever weapons and tactics that technology can provide is the fragmented political identities of a world divided into sovereign states. The inhabitants of these states of greatly varying size, capabilities, and vulnerabilities, have long been indoctrinated to view their own state through the idolatrous eyes of nationalism that view the extermination of the enemy as acceptable if necessary for national security or even desirable to satisfy national ambitions. The ideology of nationalism, nurturing the values of unquestioning patriotism, have led to an orientation that can be described as secular fundamentalism, vindicating militarist worldviews however dysfunctional given the risks and limits associated with gaining desired political ends by relying on military superiority. The crime of treason reinforces the absolutist claims of the secular state by disallowing defenses based on conscience, law, and belief.  

 

As I have pointed out in other contexts, the militarily superior side has rarely prevailed in an armed conflict since the end of World War II unless also able to command the moral and legal heights wherein are located the symbols of legitimacy. The political failures of the colonial powers despite their military dominance provides many bloody illustrations of this trend of miltarist frustration that did not exist until the middle of the last century. Because of entrenched bureaucratic and economic interests (‘the military-industrial-media complex’), the experience is denied, military solutions for conflicts continue to be preferred, and futile recourse to war goes on and on.

 

One further check on the excesses of warfare is supposedly provided by the inhibiting role of conscience, the ethical component of the human sensibility. This sentiment was powerfully and memorably expressed by some lines in the Bertolt Brecht poem, “A German War Primer”:

 

                        General, your bomber is powerful

                        It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men

                        But it has one defect:

                        It needs a driver.

 

This ‘defect,’ a driver is both a human cost, and maybe a brake on excess, as Brecht suggests a few lines later:

 

                        General, man is very useful

                        He can fly and he can kill

                        But he has one defect:

                        He can think.

 

Of course, military training and discipline are generally effective in overcoming this defect, especially as backed up by the nationalist ideology discussed above, while international humanitarian law vainly tries to give support to thinking and respecting limits. The Nuremberg Trials of Nazi surviving leaders even went so far as to decide that ‘superior orders’ were no excuse if war crimes were committed.

 

In the nuclear age this process went further as the stakes were so high. I recall visiting the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) at the height of the Cold War. SAC was responsible for the missile force that then targeted many cities in the Soviet Union. What struck me at the time was the seeming technocratic indifference of those entrusted with operating the computers that would fire the missiles in contrast to the ideological zeal of the commanding generals who would give the orders to annihilate millions of civilians at a distant locations. I was told at the time that the lower ranked technical personnel had been tested to ensure that moral scruples would not interfere with their readiness to follow orders. I found this mix of commanders politically convinced that the enemy was evil and apolitical and amoral subordinates a frightening mix at the time, and still do, although I have not been invited back to SAC to see whether similar conditions now prevail. I suspect that they do, considering the differing requirements of the two roles. This view seems confirms by the enthusiasm expressed for carrying on the ‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

 

In this period new technological innovations in war making accentuate my earlier concerns. The reliance on drone attacks in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) removes the human person altogether from the war experience, except as in the role of programmer, and even here reliance on algorithms for targeting, removes any shred of responsibility. When mistakes are made, and innocent civilians are killed, the event is neutralized by being labeled ‘collateral damage,’ and an apology is issued but the practice goes on and is even extended.  More important is the chilling effect of removing that human presence, both as a person of one’s own nation being at risk and as a source of potential questioning and even refusal. It should be recalled that the anti-war opposition of American soldiers in Vietnam exerted a powerful influence that helped over time finally to bring this failed war to an end.

 

What is at stake ultimately is the human spirit squeezed to near death by technological momentum, corporate greed, militarism, and secular fundamentalism. This web of historical forces continues to entrap major political actors in the world, and dims hopes for a sustainable future even without taking into account the dismal effects of the gathering clouds of climate change. Scenarios of future cyber warfare are also part of this overall process of destroying societies without risking lives directly. The cumulative effect of these developments is to make irrelevant the moral compass that alone provides acceptable guidance for a progressive human future.

    

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Dilemmas of Sovereignty and Intervention

16 Jul


 

         

            The Arab Spring (and its troublesome, yet still hopeful, aftermath in Egypt), intervention in Libya, nonintervention in Syria and Bahrain, drone military operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the influx of unwanted immigrants and walls of exclusion, and selective applications of international criminal law draw into question the most basic of all ideas of world order: the sovereignty of territorial states, and its limits. Also, at issue, are the closely related norms of international law prohibiting intervention in the internal affairs of states and affirming the fundamental right of self-determination as an inherent right of all peoples. These are basic rules of international order acknowledged in the United Nations Charter, taking the form of prohibiting the Organization from intervening in matters ‘essentially within domestic jurisdiction’ and through affirmations of the right of self-determination.

The latter is only aspirational in the Charter, but becomes obligatory as a result being posited as common Article 1 of the two human rights Covenants and being listed as one of seven principles enumerated in the authoritative Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States (UN General Assembly Resolution 2625, 1970).

 

            At the same time, as Ken Booth provocatively pointed out almost 20 years ago one of the great failings over the centuries of the Westphalian framework of world order (based on treaties of peace in 1648 concluded at the end of the Thirty Years War that are treated as establishing the modern European system of territorial states premised on the juridical ideal of sovereign equality) was associated with sovereign prerogatives to possess unconditional authority in state/society relations. Booth showed that respect for sovereignty had legitimated the inner space of states as a sanctuary for the commission of what he called ‘human wrongs,’ that is, non-accountable and cruel abuses of persons subject to territorial authority. Historically, the West claimed rights of intervention, often in the name of ‘civilization,’ in the non-West, particularly in the decaying Ottoman Empire of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The great wakeup experience, at least rhetorically for the liberal West, was the non-response at the international level to the lethal internal persecutions in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, which were not only within a sovereign state, but within a country with a high claim to be a major embodiment of Western civilization.

 

The responses after World War II, mainly expressed via international law, consisted of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials of surviving German and Japanese leaders, the adoption of the Genocide Convention, and the negotiation and approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), as well as the establishment of the United Nations itself. These were well-intentioned, although somewhat ambivalent, gestures of global responsibility that generated criticisms and even suspicions at the time: the Nuremberg and Tokyo standards of individual accountability for crimes were only imposed by the coalition of victors in World War II upon the losers, exempting the Allied Powers from any legal responsibility for the terror bombings of German and Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Genocide Convention seemed deficient due to its failure to  provide mechanisms for enforcement; the UDHR was drafted under the sway of Western liberal individualism as a hegemonic orientation, and was only endorsed in the form of a non-binding ‘declaration,’ a clear signal that no expectation of enforcement existed; as well, the legitimacy of the colonial structures of foreign ruler were not questioned until challenged by a series of populist uprisings throughout the non-West that produced some bloody wars as in Indochina and Algeria..

 

            In passing, it should be observed that the West never respected the sovereign rights of the peoples of the non-West until it was forced to do so. Whether it was European colonialism that extended its reach throughout Africa and Asia or the assertions of American hegemony over Latin America beneath the banner of the Monroe Doctrine the pattern was one based on relations of hierarchy, not equality. This was accompanied by a refusal to extend the Westphalian writ of mutual respect for sovereign rights beyond the Euro-American regional domain until the imperial order began to crumble after World War I. First, the Good Neighbor policy seemed to reaffirm sovereignty for Latin America, but only within limits set by Washington, as the Cold War era of covert and overt interventions confirm. In the Middle East and Africa various experiments with colonial halfway houses were undertaken within the framework of the League of Nations, and formalized as the Mandates System. Secondly, after World War II a variety of nationalist movements and wars of national liberation broke the back of European colonialism as an acceptable political arrangement, and the idea of the equality of sovereign states was globalized as a matter of juridical doctrine, although not geopolitically.

 

            During the last six decades the world has moved forward in pursuit of global justice, or has it? On the one side, human rights has matured beyond all expectations, and to some degree exerts a generalized moral and political force subversive of national sovereignty by validating a higher law that exists above and beyond the legal order of the state. This subversive thrust is reinforced by the development and institutionalization of international criminal law, enforcement of accountability claims against such pariah leaders as Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, as well as lesser figures in the entourage of tyrants, the establishment of the International Criminal Court, arrest warrants for the likes of el-Bashir of Sudan and Qaddafi. And, perhaps, most significantly in relation to global justice, the rise of respected transnational NGOs that have created a somewhat less selective pressure for implementation of human rights norms, but one that remains weighted toward political and civil rights that are given priority in the liberal democracies of the North, and one that gives little attention to the economic, social, cultural, and collective rights that possess primary importance to developing societies in the South. In actuality, the UDHR was correct in its integration of all forms of human rights in a single coherent legal instrument, but it became a casualty of the Cold War ideological tensions between capitalism and socialism, with one side championing a liberal individualist understanding of human rights and the other side a collective conception.

 

            And yet, these various moves toward what might be called ‘humanitarian globalization’ achieved at the expense of older conceptions sovereignty are too often subordinated to the realities of geopolitics. That is, the application of legal standards and the assertion of interventionary claims remain imbalanced: the West against the rest, the North against the South, the strong against the weak. Even the supposedly globally oriented human rights NGOs devote most of their attention to non-West violations when it comes to alleged infractions of international criminal law.  Selective applications of law and morality tarnish the integrity of law and morality that is premised upon fidelity to principles of equality and reciprocity. This makes supposedly challenges to sovereignty suspect, but are they also worthless, or as some argue, worse than worthless?

 

            There are two contradictory modes of response. The liberal answer is to insist that progress in society almost always occurs incrementally, and doing what is possible politically is better than throwing up one’s hands in frsutration, and doing nothing. So long as targets of intervention and indicted leaders are given fair trials, and are convicted on the basis of the weight of the evidence, such results should be affirmed as demonstrating an expanding global rule of law, and serving the interests of global justice. The fact that the principal states intervene at will and enjoy impunity in relation to international criminal law, remains a feature of world politics, and is even given a prominent constitutional status at the UN by granting a veto power to the five permanent members of the Security Council.

 

            The critical response argues that the prevalence of double standards contaminates law, and makes it just one more instrument of power. The authority and legitimacy of law depends on its linkage to justice, not power. To enforce prohibitions on the use of aggressive force or the commission of crimes of state only on losers and the weak is implicitly to cede the high moral and legal ground to the richest and most dangerous political actors. It makes available a humanitarian disguise for abusive behavior in a post-colonial global setting, providing pretexts for disregarding the dynamics of self-determination, which is the legal, political, and moral lynchpin of a system of sovereign states detached from the hierarchies of geopolitics.

 

            In a world beset by contradictions, there are only hard choices. There seem to be three kinds of situation that somewhat transcend this tension between liberal and critical perspectives: a severe natural disaster that cannot be addressed by national capabilities ( Asian tsunami of 2004; Haiti earthquake of 2010) acute or imminent genocide as in Rwanda (1994) where a small international effort would have seemed likely to avert the deaths of hundreds of thousands; a mandate to act issued by the UN Security Council as in Libya. In each instance, there are risks, uncertainties, and unanticipated effects; especially worrisome is the recent pattern of authorizations of force by the Security Council. Both in the Gulf War (1991), to some extent the sanctions currently imposed on Iran, and now with the Libyan intervention, the mandate to use force is stretched beyond the limits specified in the language of authorization. In the Libyan case, Security Council Resolution 1973 the initial justification for intervention was justified by reference to an emergency situation endangering the lives of many Libyan civilians, but converted operationally and massively by NATO into a mandate to achieve regime change in Tripoli by dislodging the Qaddafi leadership. No effort was made to secure a broader mandate from the Security Council and nothing was done to insist that NATO operations be limited by the terms of the original UN authorization.

 

            What can be done? We have little choice but to cope as best we can with these contradictions, especially when it comes to uses of force in the course of what is labeled as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ or an application of the ‘right to protect’ norm. I would propose two ways to turn the abundance of information on these issues into reliable knowledge, and hopefully thereby, to engender greater wisdom with respect to the specifics of global policy and decision-making. First, acknowledge the full range of realities in international life, including the absence of equal protection of the law, that is, judging claims and deciding on responses with eyes wide open by being sensitive to the context, including its many uncertainties. With these considerations in mind adopt a posture of reluctance to use force except in extreme cases. Secondly, presume strongly against reliance on hard power resolutions of conflict situations both because the costs almost always exceed the estimates of those advocating intervention and because military power during the period of the last sixty years is rarely able to shape political outcomes in ways that are on balance beneficial for the society on whose behalf the intervention is supposedly taking place.

 

            When it comes to severe human rights abuses somewhat analogous considerations apply. In almost every instance, deference to internal dynamics seems preferable to intervention-from-without, while soft power interventions-from-below-and-without are to be encouraged as expressions of emergent global democracy. Victimization and collective acute vulnerability should not be insulated from assistance by rigid notions of sovereignty, but nor should self-determination be jeopardized by the hypocritical moral pretensions of hegemonic states.  This is inevitably a delicate balance, but the alternative is to opt for extremes of passivity or activism.

 

            In effect, to the extent possible, global challenges to sovereignty should take the form of transnational soft power tactics of empathy as identities of persons around the globe become as globalized (and localized) as markets. The recent furor aroused by Freedom Flotilla II is illustrative of an emerging tension between the role of sovereign states in defining the contours of law and morality and that of popular forces mobilized on behalf of those unjustly suffering and neglected by the world of states. Ideally, the UN should act as a mediating arbiter, but the UN remains a membership organization designed to serve the diplomacy of sovereign states and the states system, and is generally hostile to the claims of global civil society however well founded. One attractive proposal to endow the UN with a more robust mediating role is to establish some form of Global Parliament, perhaps building on the experience of the European Parliament that has evolved in authority and political weight over the decades.  A more relevant innovation consistent with the above analysis would be the establishment of a UN Humanitarian Emergency Peace Fund with independent funding, an authorizing procedure that was not subject to a veto, and an operational discipline that ensured that the implementation of a mandate to act forcibly did not exceed its boundaries.  

 

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