Issue No. 591
Opinion
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20 - 26 June 2002 Issue No. 591 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
A tale of two world orders
Amidst the US preoccupation with its 'war on terror' and new allegations about Israel's nuclear capabilities, Ayman El-Amir* argues that the international order is moving further away from the principles embodied by the UN Charter
News reports this week that Israel's three Dolphin-class submarines are equipped with nuclear-armed cruise missiles give the appearance of being messages destined for Iran and Pakistan. Both countries have recently tested new long-range missiles, capable of carrying nuclear warheads and which put Israel within their reach.
The reports on the submarines undermine Egypt's decade-long effort to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, and they mark the dawn of a new phase in the post- Berlin Wall world order: the revival of the nuclear arms race. Once again, the world is on a razor's edge. But this time, in the context of a unipolar world; responsibility for the direction of the world order rests squarely with the United States.
In 1945, when the Allied Forces had achieved their victory, the world breathed a sigh of relief. Fascism had been defeated, the old colonial powers were weakened and it seemed possible that a new, more egalitarian world order might be established. Henry Luce, the co-founder of Time magazine and the media magnate who was prominent in US politics for much of the 1950s and 1960s, believed that the new order would be dominated by the US. He called the new era "The American Century".
Luce's vision was not far-fetched. In the ensuing 50 years, the US played a major role in shaping and setting the pace of global developments. It was undeterred by its sometimes ill-considered involvement in foreign wars or by the challenges of the Cold War. In less than five decades, the American Century was crowned by yet another historic victory when communism, its arch-enemy, crumbled with the Berlin Wall. With the defeat of Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and the bombing into submission of Milosevic's Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999, which put an end to "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo, Luce's words appeared apt. At the dawn of the 21st century, the US is not only the world's sole superpower but also a new imperial power. However, as students of history know, imperial powers invariably sow the seeds of their own demise. The US is no exception to this rule. From the vantage point of the beginning of the third millennium, many observers acknowledge that the future may well be most "un- American", indeed.
In the new scheme of things, the old order of the post-World War II era has all but vanished. The collapse of the former Soviet Union and the communist bloc it commanded created a power vacuum, which the US quickly filled. In less than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, the US has all but eroded the pillars of the old bi- polar system. Shaped by the difficult lessons of internecine continental, global wars and foreign conquest, the United Nation's vision for a post-World War II rested on four main pillars. Those pillars are the United Nations' charter, the decisions of the International Court of Justice, the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the principles of international law. The UN Charter looked forward to an era in which all peoples would see their standard of living improved and their freedom expanded.
Two years into the new millennium, the optimism implied in the UN Charter with those principles has all but disappeared. Those principles have effectively been superseded by a new, superpower doctrine based on claims of "moral superiority". The new doctrine sanctions unbridled military intervention by the Western alliance, marginalises the role and authority of the United Nations and views with contempt any international judicial system, including the International Criminal Court. The doctrine has made globalisation the cornerstone of the new international economic order. It backs away from nuclear disarmament, gives the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) a new and aggressive role and undermines the international consensus on environmental protection. The new supreme power has substituted the "rule of law" by a doctrine of "ruling above the law".
Two landmark developments defined the new world order. First, in October 1999, the United States Senate, acting against the recommendation of President Bill Clinton, refused to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), thus weakening the underpinnings of global security arrangements. This gave existing and aspiring nuclear powers the green light to resume nuclear testing and undermined the principles of non-proliferation. Successive US administrations, wanting to maintain the prevailing monopoly on nuclear arms, had consistently bullied the US's non- nuclear allies into endorsing the CTBT, and refused to tolerate any questions on the matter of Israel's nuclear arsenal.
The Bush administration has recently announced its withdrawal from the 1972 SALT II treaty with the former Soviet Union, which limited the deployment of anti- ballistic missiles. Last week, the Russian government responded by abolishing the treaty. Successful medium- and long-range missile tests by Pakistan and Iran last month were defensible in light of US actions. China, Russia, Israel and India will probably now feel free to undertake nuclear and missile testing to fine tune their nuclear arms systems. According to Western military sources, Israeli nuclear-armed submarines have been deployed in the Persian Gulf, having previously been based in the Red Sea for easy deployment near Iran. The probable outcome of these developments is that the nuclear arms race will once again proceed at full swing.
The other major development, which occurred six months earlier, was the NATO member states' ratification in Washington of a US proposal to modify the defensive nature of the organisation. In accordance with the US proposal, NATO gave itself the right to intervene militarily in the affairs of any sovereign state without authorisation of the UN Security Council. This changed mandate provided advance justification for the bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a "humanitarian intervention".
Although NATO's new role clearly violates one of the cardinal principles of the UN Charter -- resort to the threat of or the use of force unless authorised by the Security Council -- it was comfortably endorsed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. After the recent expansion of NATO to incorporate the former countries of the Eastern Bloc and the associate status bestowed upon Russia, NATO's mandate was further strengthened when it adopted the fight against terrorism as its principal mission. Following a consultative meeting last week, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that NATO might launch strikes against targets without having incontrovertible evidence of their involvement in terrorism. This suggests that the US might launch preemptive strikes on the mere suspicion that a terrorist plot is afoot -- a new turn in international relations.
If there had been anything left of the post-1945 world order, it was shattered by the terrorist attacks of 11 September. Since the world's superpower suffered a blow it has been obsessed with retaliation. Consequently, in the new spirit of international relations, the global fight against terrorism is the highest order. Neither dissent nor even critical discussion of the matter are permitted. In its pursuit of terrorism, the new superpower is both extraterritorial and extrajudicial.
The new world order is very much a divided entity. A wide gap separates the superpower, which has renounced all checks and balances, from an underdeveloped world that largely suffers from political, economic and social injustice. This gap is to an extent bridged by a group of manipulative countries with shifting allegiances.
At the beginning of the third millennium, the global picture is dismal. Of the world's six billion people, more than two billion live in abject poverty. Less than 10 per cent of the world's population lives comfortably, while 5.5 billion persons live in constant need. More than one billion of them are unemployed or under employed and 300 million children live and work in conditions of unprecedented brutality, reminiscent of the early days of capitalism. Globalisation is wreaking economic, social and political havoc. It is destabilising political regimes and social systems. It has turned countries and peoples into businesses to be bought, held or sold. The new era is supposed to mark the triumph of justice, freedom and democracy. However, the world is dominated by totalitarian regimes, media censorship is appearing in new forms and individual freedoms and civil liberties are increasingly proscribed.
The preoccupation with the all-out war on terrorism has circumscribed the global agenda. A number of explosive regional crises are being given only the most limited attention. The crisis in the Middle East, the impending war between India and Pakistan, the deteriorating international financial situation, the rise of transnational crime and the explosion of crushing global poverty and pandemic diseases are but few examples. Only the most urgent of crises -- the Indo-Pakistani situation and that in the Middle East -- have captured the attention of the world's sole superpower, but only from the narrow perspective of combating terrorism.
The new world order is at a crossroads. The Clinton administration had divided it into "allies" and "rogue states", leaving some space in between for countries with other political opinions. The Bush administration has defined the world as comprising a "coalition against terrorism" and an "axis of evil", with nothing in between. Washington's insistence on a high-powered militarism and political hounding is creating a new class of "rebel states" in the Middle East and elsewhere -- a loose alliance that is determined to halt US extraterritorialism. These factors appear set to define a new system of international relations in which the rebel states and the superpower are continually at loggerheads. Samuel Huntington, who developed the controversial clash of civilisations theory, said as much in his article "The Lonely Superpower" (Foreign Affairs, March-April 1999).
However, this dangerous course of action is neither desirable nor inevitable. If it wishes, the world's sole superpower could lead a drive towards establishing a new global contract for peace and development aiming to realise the objectives stated by the UN Charter. A new and courageous dialogue is needed -- a dialogue that will not shy away from giving weight to the causes of terrorism and not only the "war" against it. The dialogue should not be monopolised or manipulated by governments, but should be led by the genuine voices of civil society. It's only when the world's superpower begins to listen, rather than talk, to heed rather than instruct, that the promise of a new, just and equitable order could begin to be realised.
* The writer is former correspondent for Al- Ahram in Washington DC. He has also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
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