26 July - 1 August 2001
Issue No.544
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 26 July - 1 August 2001 Issue No.544 |
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Instead of intervention
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed argues that intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states need not be fatalistically accepted as an unavoidable feature of the new world order and proposes a mechanism to replace it
This week I was in New Delhi at the invitation of the Indian Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses to take part in the conference organised by the Institute on "State Sovereignty in the 21st Century -- Concept, Relevance and Limits," I was asked to deal, in particular, with the critical problem of alternative approaches to external intervention.
As everyone knows, "intervention" and "sovereignty" are two 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. Can the world system become coherent despite this obvious contradiction at its very heart?
A prerequisite for removing the contradiction is to proceed from the assumption that the various states constituting the world system are not equal to each other, 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, let us assume that all other states are subsumed into that superpower, and that its relationship with them is similar to that between the central authority in a given sovereign state and the local authorities in that state, that is, where intervention is totally legitimate and raises no inner contradictions.
Indeed, the assumption has become a reality following the breakdown of the bipolar world order and the emergence of a new unipolar world order in which the United States reigns supreme as the sole remaining superpower. Thus, consistency in the world system is restored once we recognise that "intervention" is legitimate whenever it is dictated by, or 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 development.
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. How can we talk of absolute sovereignty when the spy satellites of the great powers are openly monitoring the skies of supposedly sovereign states and when the Information Revolution has brought down all barriers separating states and peoples? The demotion of the notion of state sovereignty from absolute to relative has been further 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 and of the communist camp 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 inbuilt mechanism in the UN that would enable it to restructure itself when global developments require such change. Thus we face two problems: first, a conceptual problem, namely, what type of UN we need that would be commensurate with the requirements of world order in the twenty-first century; second, a procedural problem, namely, how to bring about the change in the structure of the UN to make it responsive to these new requirements?
Given the absence of a self-adjusting mechanism in the UN, one alternative could be to set up a monitoring agency outside the international organisation and invest it with the authority to ensure that unipolarity does not mean the subordination of the South to the North -- in other words, to build a new type of contractual relationship between North and South.
What I am proposing, in fact, is the creation of a "political shield" (not a "missile-military shield" à la Bush), that could be initiated by an eminent nation of the South, such as India, in the form of a Council of high-level judges and international law jurists drawn mainly but not exclusively from states of the South. The Council would be modelled along the lines of the arbitration tribunals which adjudicate international commercial disputes, and its decisions would be conclusive and binding on the parties that resort to its jurisdiction. This entails an international convention of some kind to which all nations would be invited to adhere. The Council will first have to sell itself, as it were, to the nations of the South and I see no reason why they would object to membership in an organisation whose function will be to redress the balance of international justice. The next stage will be to win over the nations of the North, more concretely, the UN Security Council. While the nations of the South will be free to join the Council or not, its effectiveness and authority will depend to a very great extent on the size of its membership.
The Council's authority will derive from a tacit quid pro quo: the states of the South will surrender part of their sovereignty to the Council and accept its ruling a priori, and, in exchange, the Security Council, in the name of the world community of nations (more specifically, in the name of the great powers), will refrain from military intervention in such states. Whenever a crisis erupts in or between any of the states of the South, or between any of these states and their counterparts in the North the Council of Judges (actually, a sort of South tribunal for war crimes and/or crimes against humanity) will issue a ruling. If the ruling is to the advantage of the state in the South, it will have prevented the great powers from intervening militarily. In case the ruling condemns the given state in the South, that state is committed to implement the ruling. In both cases, intervention does not occur.
As events in recent years proved, crisis situations which have called for intervention involved countries of the South (with the very important exception of the Arab-Israeli conflict), and were intra- rather than inter-state (a characteristic, it would seem, of the growing tend towards globalisation in world affairs).
The United States has branded as "rogue states" those in the South which have challenged its supremacy, and considers them to be the main source of instability and conflict in the world. As such, they are deemed legitimate targets for intervention as and when Washington considers this necessary. The notion is vague, and the US should not be both judge and party when it comes to characterising these states. Giving the last word to a third party would be a decisive step forward towards the democratisation of world order.
If the idea for such a Council is adopted and proves effective in reducing the need for external intervention, the Council could eventually be in a position to negotiate with the Security Council transformations in the latter's composition that would integrate the former's function into the very structure of the United Nations. If these negotiations are successful, unipolarity will acquire a totally different identity: it will have the UN, rather than the US, as its epicentre.
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