7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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Sovereignty and intervention
Can intervention be reconciled with state sovereignty -- a question now subject to intense debate in the international arena? Mohamed Sid-Ahmed discusses what is at stake
Two weeks ago, I was invited to take part in a round-table discussion organised by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), aimed at building a broader understanding of what has come to be described as "humanitarian intervention" and to foster a global political consensus on the issue.
In working to achieve its objectives, the commission is drawing on the record of debate and discussions generated by this topic at the United Nations and in other inter-governmental forums. To pool all available opinions worldwide, round-table discussions with regional officials, NGOs, experts and academics have been organised in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America. In cooperation with the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs (ECFA), a similar discussion was organised in Cairo the week before last. The Commission intends to complete its work by September 2001 and to present its report to the UN secretary-general at that time.
As everyone knows, "intervention" and "sovereignty" are mutually exclusive notions. State sovereignty is one of the basic pillars on which world order rests, and yet there is a growing belief that different forms of intervention are necessary in some cases to prevent or alleviate human suffering and human rights abuses. How is it possible to make the world system coherent despite this obvious contradiction at its very heart?
A prerequisite for eventually removing the contradiction is to recognise that the various states constituting the world system are not equal, but that one given superpower is "more equal" than others and should be seen not as "adjacent" to them but as "encompassing" them all. In other words, all other states are subsumed into that superpower, and its relationship with them is similar to that between the central authority in a given sovereign state with the local authorities in that state -- that is, intervention is totally legitimate and raises no inner contradictions.
In fact, our assumption is not merely theoretical; it is graphically illustrated by political developments on the world stage, where the United States reigns supreme as the sole remaining superpower in the new, unipolar, world order. Consistency in the world system will be restored once we recognise that "humanitarian intervention" really means any type of intervention that Washington considers legitimate.
"Humanitarian intervention" thus becomes a code word for "superpower intervention," which is dictated by and serves the interests of the summit of the global community rather than those of its base. In a way, this phenomenon can be seen as a "coming of age" crisis for globalisation, which, with unipolarity at its core, has reached a stage where state sovereignty stands as an obstacle in the way of its further expansion. True, state sovereignty is no longer as absolute and inviolable as it once was, but has been transformed by modern technology into a relative notion, which can be, and indeed often is, contemptuously disregarded. How can we talk of absolute sovereignty when the spy planes and satellites of the great powers openly monitor the skies of supposedly sovereign states? It would appear that even the little that remains of sovereignty as it was initially defined is now regarded as too much.
If these assumptions are correct, we must highlight some of the consequences that arise out of them.
To begin with, the phenomenon we are discussing is not a marginal issue touching on crisis situations erupting on the periphery of the international community but the tip of an iceberg covering the world order itself. In a way, it is symptomatic of an objective need for accelerated globalisation, a need that is translated into big power intervention to liquidate all pockets of resistance to its fulfilment, particularly when it comes to states that use the prerogatives of sovereignty to disregard contemporary world values and abuse human rights. These states are branded by Washington as rogue states.
The demotion of the notion of state sovereignty from absolute to relative has been facilitated by the inability of the United Nations to present itself as a counter pole to the United States in the current unipolar world order. In its present form, the international organisation is an anomaly, a throwback to a different age. The structure of the United Nations reflects the global balance of power that emerged following the defeat of the fascist states in 1945, not the balance of power that emerged following the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1981. Updating the United Nations in line with the new realities is essential if we are to overcome the crisis. But here we come up against the difficulty that there is no in-built mechanism in the UN that would enable it to restructure itself when global developments require such change.
What is still more worrying is that there exists no super-actor on the world stage able to assess the needs of the global system objectively, that is, independently from the will of each specific actor in any given conflict. Objective reality is always evaluated through the prism of subjective interests. So how to ensure that the decisions taken respond to "right" rather than to "might"?
One way of addressing the problem is to proceed from a future perspective, from a time when the United Nations will have been updated, and when unipolarity is represented in the universal acceptance of a set of values, not in the supremacy of one superpower. From that perspective, accelerated globalisation will tend to lead us not towards still greater hegemony by one specific superpower but towards greater democratisation in the global system, to globalisation through polycentrality.
This will also help resolve the ambiguity in the notion of "humanitarian intervention." The word "humanitarian" was not included in the title of the ICISS because of its controversial nature. Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia and co-chairman of the commission, had proposed, instead of "humanitarian intervention," "responsibility to protect," hoping that a change in terminology could help overcome the reservations over the notion of intervention. But the problem is not one of terminology; it is one of substance. The very legitimate reservations on the issue of intervention can only be overcome if the United Nations replaces the United States as the super-actor in the unipolar world order. A reformed and updated United Nations would presumably replace might by right. "Intervention" could then assume the function, and not only the form, of "responsibility towards growing interdependence" of the world community of nations. The responsibility will be collective, not emanating from any specific superpower at the head of the global system.
The Middle East offers flagrant examples of confusion over the use now made of the term "humanitarian intervention." Can the intervention in Iraq be described as humanitarian, whatever the defects of the regime in power? To starve an entire population for a full decade can hardly qualify as humanitarian. In the case of Palestine, we come up against an opposite phenomenon, namely, the refusal of the United States to allow UN intervention to protect a defenceless people against what everyone agrees is excessive violence by the Israeli occupation forces.
The question is how to move from where the UN now stands to where it should stand. That is a difficult problem to solve with might overwhelmingly prevailing over right and discrepancies deepening rather than the opposite between developed and non-developed nations. This raises the critical question of whether a mechanism could be introduced to update the United Nations and make it more representative of the realities of our time, or whether we are condemned to pursue the approach of small incremental improvements whenever this appears to be possible. What is certain is that this incremental approach will leave us with gross inconsistencies in the world system that are bound to have ever more detrimental repercussions.
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