Hegemony and Sovereign Equality
M. J. Balogun
Hegemony and Sovereign Equality The Interest Contiguity Theory in International Relations
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M. J. Balogun Warby Trail 1108 L3X 3H7 Newmarket Ontario Canada
[email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-8332-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-8333-6 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2011926296 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
International relations books targeted at popular or professional readers are not in short supply. Every year, hundreds of titles examining the subject from different angles are turned out by the publishing houses. Complementing books on the theory, history, politics, and conduct of international relations are those focusing on specialized themes—like the law of the seas, nuclear proliferation and disarmament, climate change, globalization, international trade and finance, and terrorism. In light of this apparent glut in the book market, it is fair to ask, what is new that another text intends to share with the reader? In the language of economics, this book’s value-added lies in the attempt made to explore international relations from a new angle—that of states that are not as militarily powerful or economically prosperous as those running the world and thus not getting the attention of scholars. The book proceeds on the assumption that making the study of international relations genuinely international entails acknowledging the coexistence of the strong with the weak. Based on this assumption, it develops a conceptual framework which is likely to prove helpful in understanding the conflict and the harmony between and among the various classes of interests—be this the interest of the powerful or of the weak, the interest of the state or of nonstate actors. In outlining a new theory—the interest contiguity theory—the book begins by identifying broadly three types of interests. The first is the interest of the individual over what concerns him/her and no other person. The second type, besides personal interest, is the interest of the state acting for and on behalf of a society of individuals. The third category of interests is that of the international community and/or of rival sovereign states. The book argues that the significance of each type of interest could not be fully comprehended unless and until the distance or contiguity between one type and another is analyzed. To illustrate patterns in the emergence of the various types of interests, the book relies on legend, notably that of Adam, Eve, their offsprings as well as their descendants. It notes, in particular, that in the beginning, nothing mattered to Adam except himself. Before the arrival of Eve, he, by some accounts, had the Garden of Eden all to himself. He could roam the Garden’s length and breadth as he pleased, and remove whatever got in his way. If he had foreknowledge of the serpent’s plot to get him extradited to the accursed earth, nothing could have stopped him from cutting off the scheming reptile’s head and living blissfully thereafter. Adam could v
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act without answering to anybody, except his conscience and possibly, God—if he really knew Who God is. Adam’s simple, carefree life conferred upon him all the rights and no obligations—save the obligations to himself, and for his own survival and well-being. The situation changed when Eve came on the scene. Instead of worrying about himself, Adam now had to care for, and accommodate the idiosyncrasies of, his new companion. His “theory of individual sovereignty”—if we may call it that—had to be slightly modified to account for the spouse variable. The constraints on Adam’s unilateral actions grew as the original First Couple “increased and multiplied.” Population growth necessitated the construction or enforcement of moral codes for the purpose of regulating interpersonal and intergroup relations, and balancing rights with obligations. Even then, and for several millennia, Adam’s descendants jealously guarded their individual freedoms. Thus, when population increase in one territory threatened the typical cave man’s freedom, he moved with his kinsfolk or “tribe” to another. The wave of migration continued until almost every inch of space was taken, and there was nowhere else to go. This was the point at which forceful individuals with the power, the resources, and above all, the will to impose order stepped in to regulate the behavior of the embryonic communities.1 From this early stage to the present, the organized community has had to grapple with questions like the morality of power, why the individual should restrain his natural inclination to be free and instead choose obedience to an external authority, what constitutes the limit of power, and how to respond to the basic human craving for justice. While the modern state continues to wrestle with the questions, a new type of sovereign has emerged with its own set of demands not only on the state, but also on individuals who had hitherto been under the exclusive control of the state. One question that the book seeks to answer is whether the progression from anarchy or “state of nature,” through the emergence of the nation-state, to internationalism, is a historical accident or an inescapable reality of human evolution. In other words, can Adam’s journey toward internationalism be tracked along a predictable historical path, as is done with the deterministic sequences in physics? As argued in the book, Adam’s journey from the state of nature through the Westphalia state to internationalism is best understood not as a unidirectional movement, but as a multisided experience. The interest contiguity theory holds that rather than turning out as a smooth, one-way cruise through history, the humankind’s journey from the inception to the present has unveiled broadly three types of interests. The first is the individual interest which, strange as it may sound, tends to be internally contradictory—as reflected in the natural human tendency to vacillate between good and evil, right and wrong. The second is the society’s (or “national”) interest which, due to the clash of wills, is even more difficult to harmonize. The third is the interest espoused to justify the establishment and maintenance of supranational institutions. Though conflicting, some interests are, due to their closeness, more easily reconcilable than others. This is theoretically the case with the interest of the individual vis-à-vis him-/herself, and relative to his/her immediate community. Other interests
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are poles apart, and need extraordinary effort to be made mutually compatible. An example is the desire to colonize vis-à-vis the will to resist, or a typical state’s (or its citizen’s) interest and the “organization interest” pursued by distant international institutions. In tracing the links between and among the three broad types of interests, this book begins with a brief philosophical excursion, paying particular attention to diverse perspectives on how individuals acquire the knowledge of right and wrong. It then proceeds in Chapter 2 to examine the implications of human knowledge for individual liberty. Against the backdrop to the epistemological and ontological questions raised in the earlier chapters, Chapter 3 examines the contending perspectives on the theory of the state, and in particular, the circumstances under which it is justified to place the interest of society over that of the individual. The focus of Chapter 4 is on the insertion of the supranational governance constant in the sovereignty equation, and on the conflict between idealist and realist explanations for the new order. The adequacy or otherwise of the conflicting explanations of the change (or is it “evolution”?) from anarchy to a “new world order” is the subject taken up in the succeeding chapters. Besides proposing a new analytical tool for the consideration of and adoption by professionals in the field of international relations, the interest contiguity theory is likely to spark off popular debate on contemporary issues—notably, the role of the superpowers in the maintenance of order, the clash between hegemony and resistance, the scope and limit of the War on Terror, and the choices open to the world in attempts at curbing anarchy and promoting lasting peace. Hopefully, policy makers in different parts of the world would find the options outlined in the book sufficiently pragmatic and useful to be integrated into their global strategic visions. I am particularly grateful to professional colleagues who offered useful comments on earlier drafts. I must also thank the anonymous reader for his/her favorable comments on the manuscript, but more important, for the helpful hints on changes that I needed to make in different parts of the book. I must, however, accept responsibility for any residual errors. Newmarket, ON
M. J. Balogun
Notes 1. Among the historic figures behind nations and empires are Hammurabi, the Pharaohs, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, the Muslim Caliphs, Genghis Khan, the Ottoman sultans, and the Hapsburgs. See Talbot, Strobe, 2008, The Great Experiment: The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States, and the Quest for a Global Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster). In Africa, the Mali, Shonghai, Benin and Oyo Empires, as well as the Zulu Kingdom and the Hausa States of Kebbi, Zazzau, and Gobir brought disparate groups under unified rule. The African state builders included Sonni Ali Ber, Askya Muhammadu Ture, Oduduwa, the Alafins, the Obas of Bini, the Jajas of Opobo, Chaka the Zulu, and the great Islamic scholar, Othman dan Fodiyo.
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Contents
Part I
Internationalism: Philosophy and Theory
1 The Individual, the State, and International Relations: Toward an Interest Contiguity Theory of Parallel and Competing Sovereignties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Conflict and Harmony in the Quest for Freedom: A Tale of Three Sovereigns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Individual Freedom: Scope and Limit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.1 Awareness of Reality and Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.2 Socially Constructed Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3.3 Received Wisdom and Individual Initiative . . . . . . . . 1.4 Individual Freedom and the Common Weal: Emergence of the Sovereign State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.1 Subordinating the Small to the Larger Freedom . . . . . 1.4.2 Proper Interest and Role of the Sovereign State . . . . . 1.4.3 Mature Democracies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.4 Democratic–Authoritarian Crossbreeds . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.5 Authentic and Nominal Theocracies . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4.6 Authoritarian State—Real, Unreconstructed . . . . . . . 1.4.7 Failed States—with Friends in Foreign Places . . . . . . 1.5 Externalizing the Internal Effects of Social Action: The Ascendancy of International Arrangements and Institutions . 1.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 The Individual as the Origin and Purpose of Sovereignty . 2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Knowledge of the “Essence of the Good”: Its Origin and the Method by Which It Is Acquired . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Comprehending Reality: Epistemological Challenges . . 2.3.1 Empiricist Search for Truth and Virtuous Conduct
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Reason as an Arbiter of Conflicting Truths . . . . . . . The Individual as the Foundation of Liberty . . . . . . The Individual Under Three Philosophical Traditions: A Summation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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3 The State’s Claim to Obedience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Legitimacy of Power and Benefits of Obedience . . . . . . . . 3.3 Emergence of the Westphalian State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Justice and the Rule of Law in State Formation and Maintenance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 On the Proper Role of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.1 The Diseconomy of Free Enterprise . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.2 Taming Capitalism: From Palliatives to Panaceas . . . 3.6 The State and the People: A Comparison of Social Contract Formulae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6.1 The Freedom to Choose: Democracy’s Bragging Right 3.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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4 External Effects and the Supranational Sovereign . . . . . 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Idealism as the Bedrock of Internationalism . . . . . . . 4.3 The Realist Rebuttal to Idealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 NeoRealist Fine-Tuning of Cold-Blooded Realism 4.4 Globalization and the “Withering Away” of the State: Kantian Rationalism’s Vindication or Misinterpretation? 4.4.1 Globalization and “International Society” . . . . 4.5 Internationalism: From Old Realities to New Choices . . 4.6 Future Directions in Internationalism . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Part II
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International Relations: History and Contemporary Challenges
5 From the League of Foes to the United Nations: A Brief History of Internationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Internationalism before the Establishment of the League of Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 The League of Nations: The Dream and the Reality . . . 5.3.1 Organs of the League . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 The League of Nations and World Security . . . . . . . . 5.4.1 The League and World War II . . . . . . . . . . .
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From Swords to Plowshares: The Birth of the UN 5.5.1 Key Provisions of the UN Charter . . . . 5.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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6 United Nations: Evolution, Structure, and Dominant Challenges 6.1 Overview of UN Organizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.1 Membership Enlargement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.2 Proliferation of Agencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.3 Increase in Staff Complement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.4 Budget Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.5 Factors in UN Growth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1.6 Debunking the Principal-Agency Myth . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Governance and Accountability Structure . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.1 The General Assembly’s Powers and Functions . . . . 6.2.2 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) . . . . . . . 6.2.3 Trusteeship Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.4 The International Court of Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.5 The Security Council . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2.6 The Secretariat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 The UN, Global Security, and the Nuclear Peril . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Nuclear Non-proliferation, “Weapon Sharing,” and “Peaceful Use” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Conventional Arms Race and the Future of Humankind . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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7 Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in a Lawless World 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Anarchy in the Post-Westphalia World: Nature and Scope of the Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.1 Overview of Terrorism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.2 Violence Perpetration Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2.3 Terrorists’ Motives/Affiliations . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Consequences of Anarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 Image and Security Backlash . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 9/11 Fallout: The “War on Terror,” Xenophobia, and Loss of Sovereign Authority . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.1 War on Terror or Quest for Hegemony . . . . . . . . 7.4.2 Post-9/11 Measures: Scope and Justification . . . . . 7.4.3 Limits of Paternalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4.4 Hegemony, Resistance, and Mounting Body Count . 7.4.5 Rising Tide of Xenophobia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Role of the UN in a Lawless World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Future Directions
8 Toward a Genuinely New World Order . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Perspectives in the Study of International Relations: Focus on Three Competing Traditions . . . . . . . . 8.3 Interest Contiguity Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.1 Role of the Sovereign State . . . . . . . . . . 8.3.2 Globalization and Internationalism . . . . . . 8.4 Internationalism: Trends, Issues, and Challenges . . . 8.4.1 The War on Terror and US Hegemony . . . . 8.5 Future Directions in Interstate Relations . . . . . . . 8.6 Role of the United Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Part I
Internationalism: Philosophy and Theory
Chapter 1
The Individual, the State, and International Relations: Toward an Interest Contiguity Theory of Parallel and Competing Sovereignties
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. —US Declaration of Independence, 1776
1.1 Introduction In the contemporary world, broadly three types of sovereignty exist parallel to one another. These are the sovereignties of the individual over what concerns none but him/her-self, of the nation-state over its territory and people, and of the institutions established to give expression to the will of the “international community,” howsoever defined. The frequent conflict between and among the various types of sovereignty raises a few questions. First, against whose moral standards would the freedom claimed by each type be legitimized? To put it differently, is the right to freedom “God-given,” as argued by the creationists? Or is it a dictate of pure, undiluted reason, as maintained by the Kantians? Does it evolve with society over time, as contended by the social Darwinists, or is it simply fabricated to assert and defend one among competing interests, which is the underlying thesis of Machiavellian realism? Second––and springing directly from the first question– –under what circumstances is it justified to subordinate one type of sovereignty to another? Third, how will the boundary between and among the various types of sovereignty be drawn to ensure that each performs only those functions for which it is best suited? Fourth, what checks and balances have been or can be devised to hold each sovereign to account? In answering the preceding questions, this chapter interrogates three contending theories of international relations—notably, realism with its assumption of power struggle as the harbinger of conflict; idealism that credits reason with the capacity to promote harmony; and Kantian rationalism that makes an even more extravagant claim regarding reason’s tendency not only to banish conflict, but also to promote the emergence of an “international society” in place of parochial nationstates. Departing from the three philosophical traditions, this chapter argues the M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_1,
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proposition that the interests that get served at any particular time are those that are tangible, organized, and, above all, easily reconcilable with their parallels. The chapter then proceeds, in the second section, to focus specifically on the individual, paying attention to his perennial quest for freedom and the obstacles to perfect liberty. In the third section, the chapter interrogates society’s (and by implication the nation-state’s) claim to obedience as well as to autonomy from external control. The growing tendency toward the externalization (or “internationalization”) of the internal effects of human choices is the subject of the fourth section. This section also addresses the question, whether globalization and the ascendant international institutions have displaced the nation-state, rendered it obsolete, and vindicated the Kantian faith in the “international mind.”
1.2 Conflict and Harmony in the Quest for Freedom: A Tale of Three Sovereigns Facing up to the challenge of global security entails reconciling at least three parallel and competing interests—those of the individual, the sovereign state, and the supranational institutions. The interest of the individual is served when s/he enjoys maximum freedom to decide matters which concern her/him and nobody else. The state or “national interest” lies in reconciling, arbitrating, and aggregating contradictory individual interests and maintaining order at the municipal level. The interest of the typical supranational institution or arrangement is not easy to define, particularly, in relation to the two other types mentioned earlier. Although Kant (1724–1804) envisaged the possibility of “pure reason” leading to the emergence of an “international society,” individual freewill guarantees that the interests pursued at any one time would be in conflict with one another. If interests clash, it is highly unlikely that minds would come together to form an “international society” of individuals or of states. This chapter starts from the premise that the individual is the one who knows what serves his/her best interests. However, it acknowledges the possibility––long foreseen by Grotius and latter-day realists––that acting on individual knowledge and intuitions would almost invariably lead to conflicting choices. When wills collide, reason dictates that the contradiction be resolved by an arbiter most familiar with the issues at stake, and––due to the clear and present danger stalking the issues––most interested in how they are resolved. Therefore, instead of expending a disproportionate amount of time and energy searching for the perpetually elusive harmony in interpersonal and interstate relations—as Kantians and idealists are wont to do–– the chapter takes conflict as given. However, unlike the power-obsessed realists, the chapter reckons with the probability that otherwise contradictory interests would, because of their relative contiguity, be reconcilable. The “interest contiguity theory” postulated in the chapter dictates that, barring purely personal questions left to individual conscience, domestic quarrels are best settled by the family or the clan, interclan conflicts by the district or provincial authority, and interprovincial disputes by agencies of the Westphalian state that all
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parties freely and equally accept as legitimate. At any rate, the interest that gets fully served in any particular situation is the one that is tangible, present, dominant, and organized. This is the case with the interest of the solitary individual in his/her own personal life, as it is with state policies that are compatible with the aspirations of the people, the vision that one state shares with others (as in bilateral or multilateral arrangements aimed at combating cross-border crime, environmental pollution, and mutating viruses), and the bureaucratic or broader “organization interest” in supranational environments. The contiguity theory is overturned and its vital message is lost where a distant supranational entity pretends to be better equipped (and more legitimate) to serve purely local interests than the government and/or the people directly concerned. Undoubtedly, new forms of idealism and realism have emerged with a deterministic view of an expanded and expanding international jurisdiction. The new idealists, in particular, see globalization as fulfilling the Kantian prophesy of the nation-state’s replacement by an “international society.” They, the idealists, contend that as novel and complex challenges unfold, a new order, the supranational state, is bound to supplant the nation-state, just as the latter had replaced anarchy centuries earlier. For its own part, and despite its suspicion of arrangements that limit state options, the realist strand in the Grotian thought envisages situations under which sovereign states would collaborate for the good and security of the world. International law, institutions, and “morality” also present the Machiavellian realists wide opportunities to bind “rogue states” to a form of global social contract, and to allow states—notably, the powerful ones—to pursue interests deemed strategic. This raises the question whether the march to global governance is inexorable, and whether this bodes well for individual liberty, for national stability, and for global peace and security. Equally cogent is the question whether a distant and largely unaccountable supranational bureaucracy is to be preferred to one that the citizen sees, relates to, and has ways of holding to account. Above all, if their common hatred of “bourgeois exploitation” had, in a bygone era, failed to unite the workers of the world, globalization theory will be hard put to explain how civic groups, with conflicting agendas, would line up behind a single ideology of global governance. Neither realism nor idealism has yet provided any satisfactory answers to the aforesaid questions. Machiavellian realists see the international environment as too anarchic to be governed according to the Grotian or any other code of morality. By contrast, the idealists take a wholly positive and, therefore, simplistic view of human nature. Like the Kantian rationalists, the idealists are wont to overstate the human capacity to “reason” and, particularly, the capacity to suppress personal urges for the good of society—national and international. At the very least, explaining why multiple checks have so far failed to produce the intended balances at the global level warrants that the morality or legitimacy of the power exercised by international institutions be interrogated against the backdrop of parallel and competing interests, notably the interests of the individual and of the sovereign state. In specific terms, the analyst needs to go beyond rhetoric and ask whether the allegiance of the supranational institutions is to the big powers (Wight,
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1952), to national governments and/or their citizens (Machiavelli, 1997; Hobbes, 1985; Morgenthau, 1967; Carr, 2001), to the putative “global citizen,” as well as to the nebulous category imaginatively termed “international community” (Kant, 2007), or to international organizations and their gatekeepers (Balogun, 2010). The next section focuses on the individual, a party whose actual or implied consent validates social contracts––local, national, or supranational.
1.3 Individual Freedom: Scope and Limit A natural human inclination is to be free—free to think, to believe or disbelieve, and to pursue what constitutes his/her best interests. The individual is not true to his/her nature unless and until he enjoys the basic freedoms—notably, those of conscience, thought, association, and action. Relying on his/her senses as a guide, the individual stoutly defends his right to choose “good” over “evil,” right over wrong, and conduct which brings pleasure over that which occasions harm or pain. That human senses sometimes deceive and mislead is beside the point. Whatever the senses tell the individual to be in his best interests will almost invariably strengthen his desire for freedom and determine how far he is prepared to go to assert and defend the freedom. Human faculties have little or no difficulty understanding what lies within observable time and space. These faculties help the individual make discriminatory decisions on matters affecting them or others brought into direct or indirect relations with them. Thus, the sight welcomes objects and gestures that are deemed pleasant, but not their disagreeable counterparts. The olfactory sense reacts positively to adorable fragrances but recoils from putrid environments. The sense of hearing learns to absorb soft, romantic, and generally pleasing tunes, and to erect defensive barriers when the sound signals (and electromagnetic waves) become louder and less friendly than deemed normal. A situation perceived as congenial is likely to be preferred to a “threatening,” “hostile,” and dangerous one. If the capacity (as well as inclination) to discriminate between a preferred and a detested state of affairs is part of human nature, we need to ask where this ability or tendency came from. Equally relevant is the question whether sense experience is an adequate guide when searching for answers to life’s complex challenges. According to subjective idealists, the individual comes into existence already equipped with the consciousness of right and wrong (George Berkeley, Plotinus, Schopenhauer, and Leibniz). In contrast to the subjective idealists’ position, adherents of the objective school of idealism (Plato, Grotius, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Herbert Bradley, and Hegel) place emphasis on how the mind’s interaction with the observed world assists the acquisition and refinement of human knowledge. The focus on the empirical world accounts for the realist influences discernible in the works of objective idealists like Grotius and Hegel. The essence of objective idealism is admirably captured by Oakeshott’s observation on knowledge. According to him (Oakeshott, 1962),
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As with every other sort of knowledge, learning a technique does not consist of getting rid of pure ignorance, but in reforming knowledge which is already there. . .. And if its (knowledge’s) self-completeness is illusory, the certainty which was attributed to it on account of its self-completeness is also an illusion.
The differences between subjective and objective realism will be further examined in the next chapter. The differences, notwithstanding, there is general agreement on the role of reason in the acquisition and refinement of knowledge. As a rational being, the individual relates causes to effects, couples means with ends, and compares benefits with costs. This is not to say that individual calculations would always be right, or that the choices s/he makes would serve her/his best interests. As a matter of fact, individuals are rarely certain that their picture of reality would be right or that their choices would be absolutely perfect.
1.3.1 Awareness of Reality and Reason Knowledge of reality (and assurance of certainty) cannot be guaranteed where the individual relies on nothing but sense experience. This is due to the nature of the individual him/her-self. S/he starts out in life with a split personality—that is, simultaneously with the capacity to reason, and with insuperable obstacles to the awareness of what is “reasonable.” Endowed with attributes that are at one and the same time positive and negative, every person is a bundle of contradictions––an internally inconsistent program that perpetually wrestles with the paradoxes of good and evil, right and wrong, piety and sacrilege, compassion and callousness, empathy and sadism, liberty and enslavement, yin and yang. This is how the Qur’an (Surah 95, Ayats 4–6) traces the origin of antinomy, and portends man’s Jekyll and Hyde nature: Surely, We (the Creator) have created the human being in the best form. Then we relegated him to the lowest of the low.
In his/her noblest form, the human being aspires toward the pinnacle of perfection— such as altruism, purity, beauty, decency, optimism, compassion, fortitude, tolerance, probity, truthfulness, justice, fairness––what Plato refers to as the “Form of the Good.” At the same time, man’s basest instincts push him toward the other extreme—egotism, narcissism, lust, greed, hypocrisy, cynicism, despair, apostasy, paranoia, xenophobia, inequity, treachery, deceitfulness, and villainy. To paraphrase Plato’s aphorism, the human soul seeks freedom in the Form of the Good. However, trapped as it is in the body, the soul cannot expect to be liberated until the individual is in tune with reality. In other words, the soul’s quest for the Form of the Good would always be frustrated by the body in which it is trapped. Consequently, no matter how “reason” is translated, man’s reliance on sense experience would always prove an unreliable guide to knowledge. For example, and as noted in the next chapter, a presumed “cause” may end up triggering several different “effects,” while one “effect” may owe its existence to multiple, possibly unrelated, “causes.” Similarly, it is not in every case that a means of solving a
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problem would produce the desired ends or results. A “solution” one minute has a tendency to “mutate” into a problem the next. This is what Popper means when he weighs in with his superb critic of historicism (Popper, 2001, 2002). Attempts at tracking causal relations between or among variables particularly face daunting obstacles. A clear example is the tendency to draw a correlation between the assertion of religious freedom, on the one hand, and violence, on the other. Atheists, looking for equanimity in their skepticism (and in ignorance), frequently and loosely argue that the only threat to world peace is religion, or specifically, the conflict that arises from sectarian differences. In the causally framed language of reason, religion becomes the direct and only cause of war, and war emerges as the effect of religious conflict. To buttress this specious argument, critics of religion cite examples of suicide bombers who maim and kill in the name of God, and of fanatics who openly endorse the atrocities. The inductively validated, a posteriori, argument crumbles when subjected to simple empirical tests. First, not all believers are suicide bombers or extremists. In fact, many believers—in Allah, Trinity, Talmud, or the Vedas—are opposed to the slaughter of defenseless civilians, in particular, and to war in general. Second, largescale violence has been known to be perpetrated by individuals and groups neither espousing, nor affiliated to, religious causes, but driven solely by materialist factors. As indicated in a subsequent chapter, the two World Wars were fought not in God’s name but over territories and resources. The decision to bomb Nagasaki and Hiroshima was taken neither by the pope nor by the mullahs, but by secular authorities looking for a quick end to the Second World War. The former Soviet Union’s and contemporary China’s secular, nay, antireligious, stance did not make either less belligerent—that is, less willing to fight when attacked or to invade territories when doing so was deemed strategically necessary. The civil strife that wreaked much damage on African populations and economies in the 1990s has been traced not to differences in faith but to a combination of this-worldly factors, notably, ethnicity, bad governance, economic deprivation, and struggle for access to resources (Ahmed, 1999; Adedeji, 2000; Argyriades, 2001; Balogun, 2001; Collier and Binswinger, 1999).
1.3.2 Socially Constructed Reality The attempt to use reason to demonize religion shows how easy it is to “reconstruct” reality. The realists are aware of this possibility—the possibility of reality being flexibly and cynically conceptualized to serve a particular purpose. That is probably why they are neither swayed by the idealist arguments about human reason, nor interested in bridging the subjective–idealist divides. As far as the realists are concerned, moral values are mere illusions. Norms of right and wrong, they argue, are created by individuals and cultures in response to ongoing challenges, rather than discovered through a process of deduction and experimentation. Evolving, as they do under different conditions, norms and values are likely to be invoked when they serve a specific interest, but cast aside when they do not. In effect, therefore,
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the only program or software implanted in every human mind is, according to the realists, that of self-interest. Anything to the contrary is a virus that the mind will quickly find and destroy. In fairness to the realists, human consciousness or perception of reality tends to be shaped not only by the mind’s Janus-faced nature, but also by the surrounding circumstances. With or without his consent, other minds beside the individual’s (e.g., parents, husbands, wives, family elders, newspaper columnists and editors, and society at large) never cease to push their own ideas of “what is good” for him/her. Indeed, one major cause of interpersonal (and, as will soon be clear, interstate) conflict is the tendency to “externalize” what is basically internal, that is, to impose one’s will on others. It is one thing for the father in a patriarchal society to arrogate to himself the status of omniscient “family head” and keeper of family conscience. It is another for a society to seek the dominance of others through systematic colonization of the latter’s minds, and the imposition of values and ways of life otherwise deemed alien, if not abhorrent. Just as each individual has his/her own moral compass, each society—developed or underdeveloped, industrial or agrarian, secular or theocratic—has values by which daily conduct is judged and individual choice is determined. In the West, capitalism is an entrenched belief system that leaves no room for “ifs and buts” and brooks no ideological or socioeconomic management alternative. Capitalism promotes egotism, greed, consumerism, and self-gratification as tokens of freedom, but regards abstinence, self-restraint, contentment, and faith in the afterlife as unwelcome signs of “religious fanaticism.” By contrast, other societies blunt the materialist edges of capitalism by falling back on otherworldly precepts, notably, those of altruism,1 self-denial, humility, empathy, compassion, and clemency.
1.3.3 Received Wisdom and Individual Initiative Each society’s cherished values serve as an informal code by which the conduct of every member is judged. It is tempting to assume that only the inhabitants of tribal societies are “tradition-bound,” and that the “modern” mind is totally “liberated” from ancient beliefs, practices, and influences. However, and regardless of the innovations brought about by modern technology, industrial societies also take pride in, jealously preserve, and instinctively rely on cultures and practices dating back to the preindustrial era. An example of a way of life that evolved over centuries is “liberal democracy.” Like capitalism, it has hardened into a quasi-religious dogma that defines life and prescribes how it should be led in the Western world. Depending upon the diverse evolutionary paths followed by democracy in various Western societies, the individual is programmed to accept the local understanding of the doctrine without question, and discouraged from reflecting upon any arrangement different from it. The political establishment and the counter-elite regard it as sacrosanct. The print and the electronic media build stereotypes, decide who or what fits into the stereotypes, and disseminate only those viewpoints that support the
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established political order or extol its virtues. The pundits build “scientific” models and theories to demonstrate the “superiority” of familiar systems over alien forms of social organization. It does not matter if the academic commentators are, as once noted by Runciman, “lecture-room moralists whose social science is no more than a gloss of counterfeit objectivity used to disguise their sermons and prejudices” (Runciman, 1969). What matters is the academic respectability that they confer on what is otherwise a culturally shaped thought system. It is not only in Western societies that received wisdoms constitute a major restraint on individual freedom. Throughout the world also, individuals are rarely free to cross ethnic boundaries with a view to learning about “stranger elements” or reflecting on what their own groups have in common with others. The tribe or race to which an individual belongs will most likely fasten a collar of prejudice round his neck to rein him in, and to maintain internal solidarity. Right or wrong, every culture ranks itself higher than any other. The individual who believes that outside cultures are as good as his risks being banished physically or psychologically. In effect, the average individual goes through life struggling against encroachments on his liberty. While hinging his freedom on the sovereignty of “reason,” the world around him is apt to confront him with demands that are not always reasonable. Ironically, the reason that the individual invokes to defend his sovereignty is also what his society relies upon to circumscribe his freedom. As noted in the next section, the modern state anchored its emasculation of individual freedom on the danger that anarchy—an unreasonable choice—constituted not only to the individual himself, but also to his neighbors.
1.4 Individual Freedom and the Common Weal: Emergence of the Sovereign State Despite society’s unrelenting efforts to curtail his freedom, the individual sometimes manages to assert himself. However, as a social animal, he is fighting a losing battle. Only one person ever succeeded in exercising his “sovereign” powers unchallenged, but even then, this was for only a short period. Adam, for some time, had the Garden of Eden all to himself. As long as he was alone, he did not have to worry about what any other person thought of him or his morality. His freedom became restricted immediately after Eve arrived on the scene. When Abel, Esau, and their descendants followed, Adam’s notion of individual sovereignty had to be substantially modified to accommodate the opinions and interests of the emerging society. All the same, the prehistoric society hardly appreciated the need for obedience and for public order. Indeed, for several millennia, early man resisted attempts at bringing him or his folks under any form of centralized control. The state of nature continued until it became clear that unrestrained pursuit of self-interest bred anarchy, and threatened the survival of the nascent community and the individuals living therein. Over time, individuals with the knowledge (e.g., Plato’s philosopher-kings), foresight (e.g., Aristotle’s ruler as an “element that can use its
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intelligence to look ahead”), determination and requisite strength (e.g., Thucydides’, Machiavelli’s, and Hobbes’ ideal-types) brought individuals and disparate groups under various types of centralized rule. These then are the origins of the earliest and the contemporary forms of social organization—particularly the clans, the tribes, the city-states, as well as the principalities, kingdoms, and empires founded by influential personalities and military conquerors.
1.4.1 Subordinating the Small to the Larger Freedom The first question that the earliest forms of government had to answer was, why any individual should surrender his/her freedom to an external authority? The idealists’ answer is that the individual, as a “reasonable” being, would readily appreciate the need to part with some of his rights (e.g., the right to freedom of action) for the sake of other vital rights and society’s well-being.2 The alternative was for freedomloving individuals to constitute veritable threats to one another and to give anarchy a free rein. Locke, for instance, proceeds from the assumption that the individual is born in a state of perfect freedom—“a state . . .of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another. . .” (Locke, 1965:51– 52). However, even in this state of nature, reason would always propel the individual toward surrendering a fraction of his freedom in the interest of public order. After all, it is only in public order that the individual finds the peace of mind needed to pursue his best interests and to enjoy his freedom. The realists are not entirely sure that reason does what the idealists attribute to it. For the realists, the individual is too self-obsessed to think about the collective good. The only way to secure his obedience is to forcibly bind him to a form of social contract—one that makes the enjoyment of his freedom contingent upon his surrendering part of it to a central authority. It is by compelling the individual to part with a fraction of his “sovereignty” that the leviathan is able to protect one against the destructive tendencies of other individuals. In realist thought, the evil nature of the individual always encourages him to maximize his self-interest at the expense of others—that is, to violate other individuals’ rights while evading the attendant responsibility. With the state as the arbiter, rights are expected to be balanced with obligations, as benefits are with costs, and causes with effects. If it is agreed that the individual needs the leviathan to safeguard his freedom and pursue his interests, that raises the question whether the power so transferred or “delegated” is recoverable sometime in the future—that is, if and when the individual feels that the leviathan’s protection is no longer worth the freedom s/he had earlier ceded. Bodin, a renowned exponent of the sovereignty doctrine, acknowledges that the individual might have started as the “owner” of a particular right, but once it is determined that collective good necessitated that the right be exercised centrally, it—the right transferred by the individual to the state—remains with the latter in perpetuity. Bodin arrives at this conclusion because he regards the rights surrendered to the sovereign state as tradable products—the rights being the “payment” for the security and other services provided on a permanent basis by the state.
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Like commercial agreements sealed with “no money-back guarantees,” such rights remain with the state for good. In Bodin’s formulation, the state combines three key attributes. First, while the monarch and his agents exercise all the powers vested in the state, the powers do not lapse with the monarch’s incapacitation, death, abdication, or removal. In other words, the sovereign state is a permanent entity that survives individual rulers. Second, it is the custodian of society’s values—be these secular, spiritual, or moral. Third, it is the guarantor of individual rights and freedoms, and defender of the collective (now termed national or state) interest. In a nutshell, the sovereign state aggregates individual freedoms with a view to forging a common or collective identity. As it is with the freedom-loving individual, so it is with his reincarnation as a sovereign state. In other words, like individuals in the state of nature, the post-anarchic state conceives of its sovereignty in absolute terms. Indeed, before Bodin (and his contemporaries) espoused the doctrine of sovereignty, states forged in the wake of military conquests most frequently started by declaring their independence of external sovereigns, and asserting complete authority over their territories. Accordingly, each state claimed nothing less than exclusive control of its “possession”—that is, its territory and the allegiance of the people living therein. Unfortunately, the unending struggle for territories and for the allegiance of the peoples often sparked violent conflicts. Even when local resistance to external control had been fully suppressed, the rulers of newly acquired territories had to contend with their rivals’ expansionist designs and unresolved irredentist claims. It was not until 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia was signed, that a modicum of order and stability was brought to the process of state creation. Details of the Treaty are provided in Chapter 3. While the Treaty of Westphalia paved the way for the emergence of the modern state, it left unanswered critical state-construction questions. Prominent among these are: what constitutes the proper “interest” and role of the state vis-à-vis that of nonstate actors, how to ensure that the powers vested in state institutions are exercised for no other but the intended purpose, and, above all, where the interest and freedom of the individual fit into the emerging interstate arrangements.
1.4.2 Proper Interest and Role of the Sovereign State As the body with the monopoly of coercion, the state exercises broadly three types of power—the legislative, executive, and judicial. In theory and, to a large extent, in practice, the three types of power place the state in a position to decide life and death questions by itself—that is, without taking instructions from any other state. However, while there is a consensus on the state’s freedom to act independently of others external to it, the exact purpose of the sovereign powers is not always clear. To put it differently, whose interest should the state serve when it begins to perform its legislative, executive, and judicial functions? Is it the interest of the “nation,”
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the subcultures, the rich, the working class, state officials, the military, individual citizens, the electorate, the tax-paying public, or foreign allies? In democratic theory, the interest of the state is coterminous with the interest of the people. This is because as once crudely defined, democracy is government of the people, by the people, for the people. Yet, it is rare to find in the contemporary world a government that is under the effective control, and is administered solely in the interest of the people. The probability is that a government, and the benefits accruing therefrom, would fall into the hands of those controlling the state apparatus––that is, those managing the flow of information, taking authoritative decisions on the allocation of resources, and exercising the power that commands instantaneous obedience. If truth be told therefore, the “democracy” which some states are keen on “exporting” to others is far from perfect. Its imperfect and relative nature is reflected in its diverse manifestations in states that are labeled “democratic.” The United States is a good example. Though hailed as a model of “liberal democracy,” its institutions and practices differ substantially from those found in Great Britain, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Greece, and Italy. However, of greater significance than the differences among democracies are the differences between and among the world’s states in general. It is the latter type of differences that some states most frequently harp upon to justify interfering in the internal affairs of others. As noted in the succeeding paragraphs, the moral contestation may become so strong as to threaten global peace and stability. The tendency in recent years has been for liberal democratic states to regard themselves as the custodians of international morality, and to sit in judgement over differently structured political arrangements. Yet, if the claim of superiority rests on direct and unimpeded accountability to the people, it needs to be critically reexamined. Due to the complexity of the modern state and the wide-ranging obstacles to individual awareness of how to penetrate the complexity, it is well-nigh impossible for even the most liberal of all democracies to reach the apogee of perfection. More often than not, a state, liberal or not, is likely to be under the firm grip of an elite which, from time to time, co-opts other interests to maintain its grip on power and, with that, the status quo. Indeed, understanding the interests served by the state at any particular time warrants going beyond the conventional labels, with a view to tracing the pattern in the institutionalization of practices and arrangements. Following the latter approach, it is possible to group states under the following headings: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)
Mature democracies; Democratic-authoritarian crossbreeds; Theocracies (authentic and nominal); Authoritarian (one- and no-party) states and military dictatorships; Failed states.
As indicated in subsequent paragraphs, how a state is labeled will, to a large extent, determine the pattern and intensity of contestation between and among
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states. The cycle of dominance and resistance also has major implications for global security.
1.4.3 Mature Democracies Due to its pluralistic features, the liberal democratic model often claims to be superior to any other. The question is how valid (or universally acceptable) this self-assessment is. While making necessary allowances for national variations, the typical liberal democracy may be distinguished from the nondemocratic ideal-types in terms of the institutions and practices associated with it. Among these are the constitutional stipulations on the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the state; imposition of checks and balances; promulgation of a charter of rights and freedoms; creation of an enabling environment for the exercise of basic rights and freedoms and for active civic engagement; provision of a level-playing field for political competition; conduct of periodic elections; and respect for the will of the people. Yet, the strength of liberal democracies lies not in the impressive display of people-oriented institutions and processes, but in the broad measure of consensus built around the arrangements as they evolved over the ages. It is often forgotten that, after passing through the state of nature, the modern democratic states were, for centuries, under different forms of nondemocratic rule—notably, serfdom; slavery; absolute monarchy; fusion of church with the state; concentration of legislative, executive, and judicial powers in a single hand; restricted suffrage; and colonization of foreign lands. Through a process of trial and error, today’s liberal democratic societies constructed arrangements that responded to specific and time-bound challenges. The outcome of the incremental changes made over time is the brand of democracy currently found in each country. Even today, and despite the outward appearance of being anchored on popular sovereignty, the typical liberal democracy is anything but “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Awkward as it may sound, the quintessential democracy is controlled not by the people, but by an elite—like the United States’ military–industrial complex that has now effectively co-opted the media. While the military and the corporate elites dictate the parameters within which the civil and the political rights are exercised, the media constantly beam images that condition the citizen’s mind to the superiority of the internal orthodoxy over external and competing worldviews. The media’s role is particularly significant when it comes to extolling the “virtues” of liberal democracies and berating rival political arrangements. Regardless of the growing disillusion with representative democracy, the print and the electronic media frequently tout it as the only form of government capable of responding to the yearning for freedom, guaranteeing prosperity, and fostering improved standards of living. When confronted with a “nondemocratic” system like China, with impressive growth rates, the media and public affairs analysts
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often cite the Confucian “authoritarian” culture as the factor accounting for this “aberration.” In any case, China’s human rights violations never escape the attention of the Western democracies and the media: such violations generally provide the stick with which to hit the nondemocratic, but economically prosperous, state on the head.
1.4.4 Democratic–Authoritarian Crossbreeds As a result of changes in internal conditions, erstwhile closed systems frequently recognize the need to open up. A case in point is the former Soviet Union. From the 1980s and the 1990s, it went through a process of liberalization (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika). Within a short period, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the once-dominant Communist Party was edged out by new political parties that were established in the succeeding Russian Federation, the former Soviet Republics, and Eastern Europe. With glasnost came the adoption of new democratic constitutions, the replacement of the one-party with the multiparty system, the organization of periodic elections, the revitalization of the Duma (the legislative arm) and the judiciary, the opening up of the political space to civil society and to the emerging business class, and the promulgation of a bill of rights and freedoms. However, as systems making a difficult transition from authoritarian rule to representative government, the Russian Federation and other democratizing states were unlikely to start off as governments “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” They were instead apt to be controlled by a coalition of strong-men, oligarchs (the new moneyed class that benefited from hastily packaged neoliberal divestiture policies), as well as top-ranking officials in the military and civil bureaucracies. Thus, democratic-authoritarian systems might be committed to civic and press freedoms, but they are likely to vacillate between the opening and the restriction of the democratic space, to blow hot and cold on civil liberties, and to marry imported systems with indigenous cultures. Still, the authoritarian-liberalizing systems are likely to be left alone—warts and all—where they pose no threat to the strategic interest of the established liberal democracies. It is only when the liberalizing systems and the mature democracies’ interests collide that the former are likely to become frequent targets of the latter’s attack. The Russian Federation and China, for instance, seem to be the only rivals left standing among the superpowers—the once fearsome USSR having been dismantled. Therefore, any move the Soviets’ presumed heir, Russia, makes is likely to be of interest to the West and to the media. If the focus is not on the brutal suppression of internal dissent, it is likely to be the bogey-state’s “unfriendly” designs on its neighbors. More or less the same thing applies to China and other states in competition with the West. The objects of attack know the real reason they are under attack—which is not to promote democracy or human rights in distant and remote corners of the
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world, but to extract concessions from obstinate rivals. They (the objects of attack) often respond by feigning deafness, and focusing instead on the attainment of their strategic objectives.
1.4.5 Authentic and Nominal Theocracies The nondemocratic superpowers can afford to brush off press attacks and move on to do what they set out to do. Other recalcitrant opponents of the West do not have that kind of leverage. Theocracies, in particular, are likely to come under persistent attack from Western democracies when they are perceived as a nuisance by the latter. There are a few examples of theocratic states, but to date, only one of them, Iran, epitomizes the features of theocracy, while at the same time adapting a few democratic practices. Apart from the nongoverning, but influential theocracy of the Vatican,3 states professing to be theocratic include Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Morocco, and Jordan. The Saudi King is, among other things, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, or in Arabic, Khadim al-Haramain al-Shareefain. The King of Morocco is the Defender of the Faith. Chapter Eight of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’s National Charter sums up the state’s theocratic posture as follows: Jordan is an indivisible part of the Arab and Islamic nation. Hence, its national identity is Arab just as Islam is the faith of the nation, the fountainhead of its civilisation and the source of values which govern its conduct.
Of all the theocracies, however, the one that has received the greatest attention is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Like Western democracies, it organizes periodic elections, and allows more than one candidate to vie for a position, whether that of legislator or the presidency of the republic. However, it restricts participation in the political process to candidates who accept the theocratic foundation on which the Iranian state rests. It goes a step farther than most theocracies by insisting that those seeking to serve the state in critical capacities must furnish evidence of commitment to the nation’s Islamic values. In other words, they must, through their actions and pronouncements, exemplify what the Jordanian National Charter professes— notably, that “Islam is the faith of the nation, the fountainhead of its civilization and the source of values which govern” the conduct of the state and its officials. The stipulation is no different from others encoded or implied in the eligibility rules for state offices elsewhere. It is very much akin to the United States deciding a priori that persons that do not accept the directive principles of state policy (as outlined in the Constitution) or do not swear an oath of allegiance to the state would not be eligible to hold elective or appointive offices. Among others, those explicitly barred from occupying public offices in the United States are communists, members of the Third Reich, and persons guilty of treason and other impeachable offenses.
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Similarly, and to match word with deed, the Iranian constitution provides that candidates for key state offices be duly vetted by a 12-member Guardian Council—comprising renowned Islamic scholars holding neither formal nor hereditary positions in government. The body of learned men does what hereditary and absolute monarchs do in other systems, that is, vet the qualifications and eligibility of candidates for key offices. Thereafter, the screening body withdraws and allows the electorate to decide who among the rival candidates would be conferred with the mandate to serve in various capacities. The West was never a fan of the Iranian model. The United States, in particular, is unlikely to embrace a system which between 1979 and 1981 permitted the raid on its Teheran embassy and stood by while the embassy staff was held hostage by radicals. The unprecedented act—the 444-day siege on the US embassy—cannot on any rational grounds be defended. All states that value their sovereignties must observe the basic rules of international conduct. Holding foreign diplomats hostage is far from civilized, let alone legal. It is, to put it mildly, a clear violation of international law and gross breach of diplomatic etiquette. Yet, the damage could have been rectified if the two sides—Iran and the United States—had not been set in their distrust of each other. The former regards the latter as an uncompromising enemy of Islam and of the nascent Iranian state, besides being Israel’s consistent defender. In response, the latter paints Iran as an unruly state bent on dominating the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, and on inciting Muslims worldwide against the “infidel” West. Relations between the two sides—which had been damaged by the 1979 seizure of the US embassy—became particularly testy from 2005 when the United States, with the support of its Western allies, demanded that Iran give up its nuclear ambitions. Iran, for its part, insists that its uranium enrichment program was for peaceful purposes—to wit, for the purpose of augmenting its electricity and energy resources. Iran also wonders why the United States and its NATO allies were interested in the Islamic Republic’s own nuclear program, while turning a blind eye on Israel’s. With its real objective in the background—that is, stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear technology and weapons—the West has perfected a new strategy designed to bring Iran to heel. The Iran state’s strength lies in its ability to project a sense of national unity, and to line its people behind the Islamic value system. To turn this into a weakness, the West has embarked on a policy of sowing seeds of discord among the country’s elite and detaching the people from the state. In the hope of shaking the people loose from the Islamic state’s tight grip, the West has cast the religious establishment as the main obstacle to freedom, and has thrown its lot with the “reformers.” The first “reformer,” Mohammad Khatami, came and went without succeeding in changing Iran’s Islamic course or turning the people against the clerics. He was succeeded by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fiery critic of the West and of Israel. Besides making provocative statements on the Holocaust and on Zionism, Ahmadinejad has staunchly defended Iran’s right to possess nuclear technology and to direct the technology to peaceful ends. The West bid its time till 2009 when it hoped to be rid of Ahmadinejad for good. As it did earlier, it openly endorsed the candidature of the latest arrowhead
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of “reform,” Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi, in his quest for the office of president, in 2009, had sought and obtained the support of former President Mohammad Khatami, and of some young activists on the nation’s university campuses. Again, the election came and went, but it was Ahmadinejad, not Mousavi, that was declared victorious. This did not go down well either with Mousavi’s supporters or with their external backers in the West. Since then, the Western media outlets have consistently painted grim pictures of conditions in Iran. There is no evidence that Western intelligence agencies have infiltrated Iranian civic groups and students associations. However, the Iranian government’s allegation that external hands are behind the frequent eruptions on Teheran streets cannot be dismissed. Supposedly private foundations have been known to front for the US government, and, in the process, funnel millions of dollars to professional and civic groups within Iran. The CIA has also been accused of funding and arming insurgent groups operating from external bases to cause havoc in Iran. When the political situation looked like returning to normal after the hotly disputed 2009 elections, the Western media often stirred things up by blowing up reports of student demonstrations and of iron-fisted response (including human rights violations) by state agencies. The West also passed up no opportunity to incite the Sunni world against the predominantly Shia Iran. In yet another attempt to reconstruct reality, the United States, in February 2010, termed Iran a “military” state. Iran immediately fired back by terming the United States the “only military dictator away from home,” notably, in the Middle East.
1.4.6 Authoritarian State—Real, Unreconstructed While states working within their constitutional parameters and pursuing their interests continuously wrestle with internal opposition and with external agent provocateurs, bona fide authoritarian, one- or no-party states tend to be left alone. The authoritarian state does not pretend to be democratic. If it organizes elections, the chances are that they would neither be free nor fair. Human rights might have been “entrenched” in its constitution, but that is no guarantee that the rights would be respected. Only that civic voice is heard which echoes or parrots the state’s line on the unilaterally imposed and dictatorially enforced “social contract.” The key state institutions (the executive, legislature, and judiciary) and their nonstate equivalents (the media, civic groups, and business organizations) are almost invariably under the firm grip of the authoritarian state. All the same, as long as the authoritarian state’s policies do not threaten the interest of the big powers, it is insured against externally fomented crises and diplomatic harassments. Consequently, and realizing the gains to be derived from remaining in the good books of the West, many an authoritarian state cannot wait to be counted among those waging the “war on terror.” In any case, terrorism has conveyed on the authoritarian state the legitimacy it needs to suppress genuine aspirations for freedom.
1.4
Individual Freedom and the Common Weal: Emergence of the Sovereign State
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1.4.7 Failed States—with Friends in Foreign Places Of all the systems earlier described, the most amenable to foreign domination, if not outright recolonization, is the failed state. Indeed, some are of the view that the “failed state” is a myth created and perpetrated by powerful states to justify the former’s recolonization or the imposition of alien, mostly neoliberal, capitalist values (Dolek, 2008). Lacking in a clear strategic direction, the failed state is open to penetration by foreign interests—governmental, corporate, civic, or a combination of the three. If the failed state has any “interest,” it (i.e., the state interest) is likely to be superseded by, or assimilated into, the power obsessions of the ruling class. With the capture and retention of power as its sole concern, the ruling class is not averse to bartering away the rights and freedoms of the people for internal support, or “outsourcing” the state’s sovereignty to external benefactors. Examples of failed states abound: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Siaka Steven’s Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor’s Liberia, post–Siade Barre’s Somalia, Habyarimana’s Rwanda, Milton Obote’s and Idi Amin’s Uganda, David Dacko’s and “Emperor” Bedel Bokassa’s Central African Republic, and Mobutu’s Republic of Zaire. Nigeria is also on the list of the world’s failed states although its government has vehemently opposed being identified with this group. The failed state is, first and foremost, totally incapable of holding its territory or performing the basic functions (Zartman, 1991). Consequently its writ runs only in the national capital and in a handful of provinces. Since it is not founded on consensual and emotionally appealing values, it lays no claim whatsoever to any form of social contract with its people, or to the people’s allegiance. Instead of projecting a sense of national identity, the failed state yields the ground to contradictory primordial (ethnic, religious, and regional) interests. Lacking the capacity to defend the interests of the individual, the state stands aside as the individual looks after his own interest or, when his freedom is threatened, turns to his/her immediate kinship group for protection. Consequently, in place of one republic, there are mini-republics, each performing the functions that its loyalists require to survive— that is, functions which the constitution formally assigns to, but abandoned by, the state. Corruption tends to be systemic and cynicism widespread in the failed state. Public institutions—particularly, those responsible for enforcing the law and maintaining order—cannot be counted upon to perform their statutory functions, unless those functions serve the interests of powerful personalities. In its comatose state, the presumed senior party to a social contract is consistently unable to fulfill its own part of the bargain. Above all, the failed state is neither ruled by philosopher kings, nor anxious to enlist the services of intellect and higher learning to achieve productivity and welfare gains. As a matter of fact, the state most frequently looks down on the knowledge it needs to discharge its obligations, relying instead on external “advisers” or on brute force to accomplish short-term, power-consolidation objectives.
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The governments of failed states may be totally dysfunctional—that is, totally incapable of maintaining effective control over their territories and commanding the allegiance of their peoples. Nonetheless, they may still survive for a fairly long time. Like their authoritarian counterparts, failed states may, for years, limp from one crisis to another without going down under. Failed states may be kept going by powerful allies if they sit on much-coveted resources, or prove capable of caging cross-border troublemakers. The secret of their success thus lies in their un-canning ability to subordinate their poorly defined interests to those of powerful foreign allies. As puppets, the operators of failed states are interested, not in preserving their countries’ sovereignty or territorial integrity, much less in staying faithful to the putative social contracts binding them to their people. The overriding interest is the capture and retention of power, along with the perquisites. If foreign allies are willing to help in this regard, national sovereignty is a small price to pay. A few examples may be cited to illustrate the link between failed states and foreign interests. Under Mobutu Sese Seko, the richly endowed Republic of Zaire was run aground by corruption, mismanagement, and outright embezzlement of state funds. Zaire managed to stay afloat for decades thanks to the backing of a powerful ally, the United States. For as long as communism posed a threat, Zaire was a treasured, probably indispensable, ally in Africa. With the collapse of Communism, and the stepping up of internal resistance, Zaire’s former allies let it hang out to dry. It quickly vanished from the world map only to be replaced by the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other failed states with friends in foreign places include Ahmed Kadyrov’s Chechnya (Russian Federation), Bokassa’s Central African Empire, and pre-genocide Rwanda (France), Republic of Chad (France and, after the 1999 oil concessions to Exxon, the United States), William Tolbert’s Liberia (the United States), Siaka Steven’s and John Momoh’s Sierra Leone (Great Britain), and Charles Taylor’s Liberia (traffickers in blood diamonds).
1.5 Externalizing the Internal Effects of Social Action: The Ascendancy of International Arrangements and Institutions In a bygone era, interference in the “internal affairs” of another state was often equated with an act of aggression deserving a forceful response. In recent years, and with dire consequences for peace and stability, it has become a frequent and routine method of conducting international relations. The practice is for one state, most likely a powerful one, to disguise its interest and pass it off as the interest of a weaker state. Under the influence of globalization, and due to the emergence of new threats, international institutions have also emerged to share the powers formerly exercised independently by the sovereign states. Idealists justify the increasing erosion of state sovereignty by taking an evolutionary view of the development. As the argument proceeds, in much the same way as the state of nature gave way to the sovereign state, so would the latter cede part
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of its freedom or sovereignty to international institutions better equipped to handle new complex challenges. The hard-nosed realists might remain unconvinced by this argument, but their neorealist successors envisage circumstances under which sovereign states would cooperate with one another for collective security. However, as argued in succeeding chapters, the impact of globalization on the erosion of state sovereignty might have been grossly overstated. For a start, the sovereign state remains the only party with the legitimacy and capacity to enter into social contracts with the people. Second, and contrary to Kant’s expectation, no “global civil society” currently has the mandate to negotiate, on behalf of diverse interests, the terms of any international “social contract” to apply in holding supranational actors and institutions to account. The “workers of the world” once constituted a formidable “global society,” but not formidable enough to unite and overthrow their oppressors as foreseen in Marxist historicism. In any case, it is highly contestable whether the cause of freedom or of global peace and security would be served by the rapid “withering away of the state” and the ascendancy of supranational regimes. Were globalization or any other force to succeed in killing off the sovereign state, individual freedom would be subordinated to the interests of powerful groups, particularly, the local ruling class, their foreign sponsors, the distant international institutions, and the profit-seeking multinational corporations. The “withering away” of individual freedom is also likely to face a backlash as disempowered individuals, out of frustration, lend support to radical, nay, anarchic causes. In other words, instead of ensuring a linear progression from anarchy to advanced forms of government, the externalization of internal effects of human choices would produce a vicious cycle of oppression, resistance, and violence.
1.6 Conclusion At any point in time, broadly three types of interests exist parallel to one another— those of the individual, the sociopolitical community with which the individual identifies, and supranational institutions. This raises the question to whom the freedom of the individual should be subordinated. Or to rephrase the question, if it is impracticable for the individual to be absolutely free to pursue his interests, should his freedom (and his interests) be relative to his narrowly defined interest, his immediate community’s, or the external sovereigns’? In enunciating the contiguity theory of parallel sovereignty, this chapter holds that to the extent that the sovereign state is as yet the only party capable of entering into fairly credible “social contracts” with the individual to that would it be a more appropriate body (than distant supranational regimes) to be trusted with the mandate to decide matters of direct concern to, but beyond the capacity of, the individual. The chapter obviously raises more questions than it is capable of answering. Still, by identifying the parallel interests that compete with one another, it suggests a new approach to the study of international politics. Besides rejecting the overarching historicism underlying both Kantian idealism and contemporary realism, the
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chapter wonders whether the lurch to global government is the only plausible, or even rational way, to answer Rousseau’s question on the form of association which “defends and protects with all common forces the interest of each associate,” while at the same time allowing each associate maximum liberty to live his/her life as s/he sees fit.
Notes 1. This is not to say that altruism is alien to the West. However, the type referred to in this chapter is altruism of an unpublicized and unrequited kind. 2. Like the rights to life and limb, and to the pursuit of happiness in a community of pleasureseeking but pain-avoiding individuals. 3. The Vatican “governs” the world’s Roman Catholic populations not directly through the exercise of coercive powers, but by indirectly appealing to the adherents’ conscience. Despite its lack of policing authority, the Vatican’s influence is felt far and wide. Its position on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and stem-cell research may affect the fortunes of candidates running for offices in even the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America.
Chapter 2
The Individual as the Origin and Purpose of Sovereignty
Your creation as well as your resurrection is but as an individual soul. . .. —Qur’an, Sura 31, Ayat 28 Faith has to do with things that are not seen and hope with things that are not at hand. —Thomas Aquinas
2.1 Introduction To justify interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, powerful nations and supranational institutions most frequently project themselves as the defenders, if not the custodians, of lofty human ideals. Examples of norms frequently invoked to rationalize sundry encroachments on individual and state sovereignties are freedom, equality, democracy, justice, rule of law, human rights, and world peace. The question is, where did these values and ideals originate from? Who knows best what is good for an individual––is it the individual himself or others external to him/her? Are the ideals, which inspire international action, traceable to the “international mind and community” as such, or to divine sources, or are they simply the outcome of social evolution—that is, evolution of customs and practices in a particular society? This chapter holds that the knowledge of “what is good” for the individual inheres in the individual and not in any party external to him/her. However, while the knowledge begins with the individual, it is the community of which s/he is part that sometimes applies it to attain specific ends. As further argued in the chapter, whether the individual’s knowledge would be applied to serve his interest or of interests external to him depends on the distance between the individual and the party claiming to act on his behalf. Individual interest is liable to be the first to be sacrificed in a remote international environment—more so, when values collide and there is no mathematically precise method for resolving the ensuing ambiguity. In such an environment, the interests that prevail are those that are well-articulated and energetically promoted. M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_2,
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This chapter begins by tracing human knowledge to its source—that is, to the individual. In the second section, the chapter highlights the epistemological obstacles to human understanding of reality, truth, and morality. The focus of the third section is on the role of “reason” in arbitrating conflicts arising over the definition of reality, truth, and virtuous conduct. The section also discusses the role of society in the conceptualization process. The fourth section examines the implications of individual knowledge for freedom, while the fifth concludes by finding out where the individual stands under three contending theories of international relations.
2.2 Knowledge of the “Essence of the Good”: Its Origin and the Method by Which It Is Acquired A major essence of being human is the capacity to judge some actions “good” and others “bad”—prior to making the appropriate choices. However, it is necessary to ask how the average human being acquires the knowledge of what is genuinely good as against what is evil. If each individual person comes already equipped—albeit, in varying degrees—with the knowledge of the good, the only limit on his/her freedom will be that imposed by whoever gives him/her life, that is, God, for those who believe, or the vaguely defined “nature,” for those who do not. Spencer (2002:3–12) would not be drawn on the question concerning the “Unknowable,” much less, about whether or not a Deity exists. He responded to the antinomy challenge by evading it—that is, by conceding that those who believe that there is a Deity are as justified in their position as those who do not. He goes on to argue that human beliefs are not as irrational as is sometimes assumed. In his words (Spencer, 2002:3): And thus it is with human beliefs in general. Entirely wrong as they may appear, the implication is that they originally contained, and perhaps still contain, some small amount of truth.
Idealists and realists hold different views on how humans first came about the knowledge of what is “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong,” and “wise” or “foolish.” To the adherents of the subjective school of idealism (e.g., Bishop George Berkeley, Plotinus, Schopenhauer, and Leibniz), the human mind is conscious of, probably endowed with, the capacity to reflect on ideas of goodness, if not of what lies beyond space and time. According to them, the individual mind is not a slate wiped clean, but a program complete with images, mathematical equations, abstractions, ideal constructs, language skills, musical notes, flashes of inspiration, and, if one may add, evil designs and intentions. Whether awake or asleep, the mind is conscious of itself and its external surrounding. Good or bad can thus not be known to exist by itself outside human consciousness––that is, unless it already exists in the mind. This view accords with the Qur’anic affirmation on human nature. In Sura 2, Baqarah (Ayats 30–33), the Qur’an details how God notified the angels about His intention to create man. The angels responded by asking why God would want to place on earth “one who would
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Knowledge of the “Essence of the Good”
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make mischief and shed blood therein.” Determined to accomplish His plan, God proceeded to create Adam and to teach him “the names of all things”––names which were totally unknown to the angels.1 Similarly, Grotius (1583–1645) regards God as the source and origin of right (Knight, 1925; Finnis, 1980; Brett, 2002). In De iure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) he notes that: “What God has shown to be His Will, that is law.”
The dilemma facing Grotius is showing how God manifests His Will. He resolved this dilemma by assuming, like objective idealists, the rationality of human nature: The mother of right—that is, of natural law—is human nature. . .The Will of God is revealed, not only through oracles and portents, but above all in the very (rational) design of the Creator.
In their rebuttal to subjective idealism, objective idealists (Plato, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Herbert Bradley, Hegel, and, if he could pass for an idealist, Karl Popper) argue that knowledge originates and expands only when the mind perceives and becomes one with the observed world. Kant, in particular, holds that reason connects all individuals directly to the phenomenal world and to things-in-themselves. That is to say, one is connected with all. Through transcendental deduction, it is possible, according to Kant, to perceive “conditioned reality” and establish the link between “causes” and “effects.” This is more than one can say for “unconditioned reality”—the world of morals and spirituality. Knowledge of God, freedom, and immortality, for instance, cannot be scientifically validated, but have to be anchored on faith.2 Russell, who had led the British revolt against idealism, notes that limiting knowledge to what is already known—subjective idealism—is mere tautology (Russell, 1912:42–43). Instead of holding that the mind knows because it knows, Russell stresses the part that the mind’s perception of external objects plays in the acquisition and refinement of knowledge. The realists will undoubtedly find the subjective-objective arguments at best, laughable, at worst, diversionary and downright pointless. According to the realists, values, particularly of the moral kind, are nothing but illusions. Norms of right and wrong, they argue, are never discovered but created by individuals and cultures in response to ongoing challenges. Since they evolve under different conditions, norms and values may be invoked when they serve a clear purpose, and discarded when they do not. For instance, conscience and virtues may turn out to be a liability when an individual or a state is confronted with stark realities—like threats to vital interests or to cherished ways of life. As far as the realists are concerned, man is driven solely by self-interest and not by any higher or nobler ideals. In other words, knowledge of what is good has no meaning outside the interests to be served. In realism, philanthropy or altruism is an irrational concept—a program that the human mind is incapable of understanding, let alone run. As indicated in the succeeding chapters, this amoral view of human knowledge has major implications for any form of cooperative endeavor, be this an endeavor targeted at peaceful cohabitation between
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husband and wife, the management of business partnerships, the integration of tribes into nations, or the maintenance of cordial relations between and among sovereign states.
2.3 Comprehending Reality: Epistemological Challenges Notwithstanding the realist contempt for idealism, the latter has played a significant role in efforts at tracking the sources of human knowledge. One of idealism’s contributions to knowledge is the development of methods for comprehending transcendent reality. Plato, an idealist, started from the premise that “the body is the prison of the soul.” He then proceeded to find out how the soul could be liberated to comprehend reality, or the Form of the Good. Like his teacher, Socrates, Plato was of the view that knowledge promotes the cause of good just as ignorance does the exact opposite—by propping up evil. The goal of education, according him, is to impart the knowledge of the Good—which goes beyond an awareness of the benefits and pleasures immediately derivable from actions, to total acquaintance with the Form itself, that is, with reality. A major challenge is how to define reality. Plato’s answer was to begin at the lowest level—the level at which reality takes the form of shadows, pictures, and images that could be “conjectured,” “imagined,” or “visualized.” According to Plato, any opinions formed on the objects or images are likely to be at best, contestable, at worst, totally unreliable. The visible form of reality also contains physical objects, the perception of which provides the basis for belief. Thus, natural objects like the sun, hills, dense basal vegetation, lakes, and volcanoes will be invested with attributes—some aesthetic, others utilitarian or mystical. While one person sees a “god” in a physical object, another is liable to see a “comparative economic or military advantage.” Yet another will see an object of cosmic, impenetrable, or divine significance. At the next higher level, knowledge of reality manifests as the intelligence needed to comprehend the Forms of numbers, shapes, and other objects amenable to precise measurement and mathematical logic. This contrasts sharply with the highest form of knowledge—knowledge of Equality, Beauty, platonic Love, Truth, and, as to be expected, the Form of the Good.
2.3.1 Empiricist Search for Truth and Virtuous Conduct In sharp contrast to Plato’s overarching, deductive (the realists will add, impressionistic) approach, Bacon developed a new inductive philosophical method which he hoped would assist in the search for the truth. Unlike his contemporaries that relied on formal logic to interpret nature, he decided to start from known and specific experiences before proceeding to formulate axioms and laws. He acknowledged that the successful application of the inductive method required that the philosopher liberate
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Comprehending Reality: Epistemological Challenges
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him-/herself from prejudices, emotions, and other states of mind likely to becloud or distort the truth. Bacon identified four specific threats to objectivity (“idols”3 or idola as he called them in his Novum Organum). The first he calls “Idols of the Tribe” (idola tribus), which spurs ethnocentric reactions to situations. The “Idols of the Cave or Den” (idola specus) is a shorthand for individual biases, while “Idols of the Marketplace” (idola fori) are those which lead to misuse of language. Finally, “Idols of the Theatre” (idola theatri) are those “which have migrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas of philosophers” and from imaginations. A good inductive method is one that succeeds in erasing traces that these invisible ritual objects might have created (Durrant, 2005:100–102). It is only when the mind is purged of prejudices and emotions that it is capable of seeing nature in its true light—including the forms, as well as their causes and effects. This is the foundation of modern empiricist thought. It is also a guide which postmodernist thinking sorely needs to be able to separate verifiable hypotheses from emotions, and reason from desire. Based on the application of the empirical method, Bacon grappled with the ethical challenges of his day. According to him, duty to the community belonged within the province of ethics, in contrast to duty to God which fell under religion. While good habit encourages man to channel his actions toward good ends, there was no universal law or formula that individuals in different circumstances could apply to resolve situation-specific ethical dilemmas. Even though his empirical method differed from Plato’s overarching rationalism, the two agreed on the need for a modest approach to the study of reality. In this sense, they differed with Hume (1711–1776), who believed, rather naively, that by disconnecting morality from its divine source, he had succeeded in uncovering a secular, yet universal, law of right and wrong. By the same token, neither Plato nor Bacon would accept Machiavelli’s blanket categorization of politics as an amoral calling, much less Nietzsche’s contempt for the Judeo-Christian and Islamic precepts of honesty, altruism, philanthropy, penitence, leniency, compassion, humility, love, justice, and fairness. Hobbes’ view of reality combines Bacon’s empiricism, with Machiavelli’s general proposition linking man’s “evil” tendency to the unending struggle for power. Hobbes’ attachment to the empirical world is such that, despite occasional flashes of idealism, his view of human nature remains undoubtedly that of a realist. According to him, “love” and “hate” merely describe an individual’s inner emotions or feelings, rather than present a true picture of reality. The words “love” and “hate” describe objects that the individual is drawn to or repelled by, respectively (Hobbes, 1985:119–120). By the same logic, the terms “good” and “bad” have no meaning outside their description of individual tastes, preferences, or dislikes. Hobbes’ relativist leaning is thus predicated on the assumption that human beings are driven by self-interest rather than altruism. His theory of human nature isolated the “selfish gene” before the evolutionary biologists adopted it as a scientific mantra. Man, if Hobbes is right, pursues only what serves his best interests—mechanically embracing what brings gains and pleasure, and shrinking from what inflicts pain or harm.
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2.4 Reason as an Arbiter of Conflicting Truths Yet, the strength in Hobbes’ argument is also its weakness. His explicit equation of “reason” with personal aggrandizement (Hobbes, 1985:30–31), or with the pursuit of carnal desires, is what makes his, and the non-Platonic wing of Western philosophy, highly problematic for non-Western societies—including societies that have demonstrated the inclination to embrace the teachings of science and savor the benefits of modern technology. The Islamic world is a good example. While acknowledging the boundless potential of the human mind, and at times showing their readiness to join the rest of the world in the craving for sensual delight, adherents of Islam generally believe that narrowing “reason” down to the calculations made by the human senses is tantamount to endowing the senses with the capacities that they do not possess. They contend that if man is indeed a rational being, history would not keep taking bizarre turns or repeating itself. Reason does make possible the construction of seemingly perfect socioeconomic or political systems. Over time, the imperfections in each system will surface, as those who know how it works apply their knowledge to corrupt it and/or evade its obligations or restrictions. We shall return to this subject later as part of the critique of Kant’s association of “reason” with the emergence of the “international mind.” Suffice it to say that under the doctrine of taoheed, reason emerges as the unity of the visible and the invisible, internal and the external, the positive and the negative. Whereas, in Western philosophy, obligations to self, to community, and to God fall into different compartments; they are an inseparable whole in taoheed. Since God is One and indivisible, His laws are of universal application. His Sovereignty encompasses—in fact, supersedes—all others. God’s Oneness is unique since it does not fall within the system of numbers. There is no second, third, or any other god besides Him. In view of the fact that God transcends time and space, neither deductive reasoning nor empirical analysis fully captures (or helps human understanding of) His true essence. In this respect, the Islamic view of the human mind—and particularly, of the limitations of sense experience—has much affinity with the underlying premises of oriental philosophy. By conjuring up notions of what “lies beyond shapes or forms,” Islam, like Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, takes philosophy, Western and nonWestern, beyond its neatly demarcated and familiar boundary—that is, beyond sense experience, and to a world in which rational laws fail to make sense. The challenge of explaining the empirical and the invisible worlds is what thinkers have endlessly wrestled with in their search for the infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality— that is, haqeeqah, among the Sufis; Brahman, among the Hindus; and Tao, among the Taoists. The Taoists, and to some extent, adherents of the Chinese School of Names, tend to be deeply suspicious of assertions founded on sense experience. It does not matter whether the assertions are based on formal logic (i.e., hypotheses and deductions), or on real-life experiences (inductions). Over time, any of Bacon’s four idols is liable to rear its head, creep into the thinker’s mind, and influence his/her conclusions. Like Ekwensu, the Devil incarnate in Igbo folklore,4 or the Shaytan mentioned in the
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Qur’an, the idols’ sole mission is to muddle up understanding, frustrate the search for the truth, and project the bad as the good and conversely. In the same vein, the School of Names harps on the limits of sense experience. According to the School (Fung Yu-Lan, 1948), To say that something is big because it is bigger than something else (that we know) is to say that everything is big. . .. The Tao that can be (imagined, observed or) spoken is not the true or eternal Tao.
As noted later, the methodological and epistemological obstacles to the search for ultimate reality are too daunting for analytical philosophy. The futility of employing human reason beyond its natural capacity is probably what prompted Hobbes, Ayer, Spencer, Popper, Berlin, and the latter-day logical positivists to leave the incomprehensible to metaphysics, while getting on with the more manageable task of rationally explaining the purpose, workings, and directions of the empirical world. Justifying the decision to abstain on such a momentous subject, logical positivists hold that a person who postulates that metaphysics is wrong or does not exist is a “brother metaphysician with a rival theory of his own” (Ayer, 1936:47). In the logical positivists’ view, the ultimate test any philosophical premise must pass is reason. Unless metaphysics begins to make sense, serious philosophers have no choice but to distance themselves from it. Unfortunately, for them, reason has yet to crack the antinomy code implanted in the human mind.
2.5 The Individual as the Foundation of Liberty The copyright on a significant number of human attributes is frequently, though arbitrarily and erroneously, assigned to particular cultures.5 The Samurai ethic is “Japanese”; the Confucian, “Chinese”; and the virtues of reason, freedom, and democracy, “Western.” It is seldom realized that by attributing virtues to particular cultures, the classifications ignore the virtues’ common origin and “ownership”— specifically, the individual living in every corner of the earth. If truth be told, nearly all the values labelled “Western,” “Oriental,” “African,” or “Middle-Eastern” are nothing of the sort. Insofar as the capacity to classify values—into right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral, just and unjust, pious and profane, the urge to dominate and the will to resist—defines humanity in general, it be wrong-headed epistemology to regard awareness of these values as the exclusive preserve of any particular culture. It is, however, necessary to enter a caveat. While certain types of virtue—for example, reason, freedom, love, compassion, justice, honesty—are universal, their translations into norms and practices vary from one locality to another. It is very much like “beauty.” That it is in the eye of the beholder does not mean that beauty— or for that matter, reason, freedom, love, justice, as well as honesty––does not also exist in every conscious mind or language. For instance, “reason” is interpreted in the West to mean tracing causes to effects as well as finding the means to achieve the desired ends—with the ultimate objective
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of accumulating gains and minimizing losses, or amassing benefits while reducing costs. It is this interpretation of reason that supports conferring on the “rational” and self-interested individual maximum freedom to make basic economic or sociopolitical decisions, no matter the consequences for others or himself. Capitalism or free enterprise is thus the Western societies’ interpretation of reason. In other societies, “reason” is liable to be construed in a communal, holistic, and meta-economic, rather than individualistic, way. The result will be a conceptualization of “reason” that includes “compassion,” “morality,” and “piety”—a conceptualization that produces a broader, but no less logical, interpretation than in the West. The foregoing analysis highlights the difficulty in tracing “effects” to “causes” and by so doing, determining which moral choices are “reasonable.” This is the dilemma that Cartesian dualism seeks to resolve. By separating the conscious, selfaware, and self-subsisting mind from the body, Descartes raises the possibility of man possessing reasoning or “knowing” capacity not visible to the naked eye––a capacity that is distinct from that of the body. The two capacities—corporeal and non-corporeal—undoubtedly interact, but the essence of being human lies in the “causative” mind. Cartesian dualism is thus a variant of Plato’s dichotomy of the body and the incorporeal soul. In the Cartesian formulation, it is possible for an individual to judge a conduct morally right because s/he personally knows (or perhaps thinks and feels) this is the case. Her/his dualistic formulation contrasts with theories of divine inspiration which hold that man “knows” a conduct to be right because the gods have so led him to believe. Indeed, if morality rests on the approval of the gods (rather than God, with a capital letter) reason demands that we ask for the method which has been developed to allow the proposition to be verified in a systematic, non-arbitrary manner, or better still, to confirm that the gods did not fall into disputation over what to approve and disapprove––just as ordinary mortals do on earth. As a key concept in the analysis of reason, causality descends into mere speculation where a single effect can be attributed to several conflicting but equally plausible causes, or where one single cause produces different but logically unrelated effects. Islam’s response to the causality dilemma is to trace the effects of action to one and only plausible Cause, God. Realizing how awkward it would be to hold many “gods” responsible for the state of the earth, Islam, like other monotheistic religions, recognizes the suzerainty of only one Supreme, Boundless, Self- Subsisting, Omnipotent, Incomparable, All-Knowing, Immanent, Merciful, Beneficent, Just, Forgiving, and Everlasting God.6 This non-corporeal, indescribable, yet fully aware and responsive God is the origin of all creation, and to Him will all created objects, including nature, eventually return. Knowledge of Reality and of the Good is impossible until the believer knows Who God truly is.7 In one of the Hadiths (accounts of Prophet Muhammad’s life and teachings), Allah is quoted as exhorting the believer to know Him before serving Him—“Aarif’nee qabla an taab’da nee” (“Know Me before you worship Me”8 ). It was by following this injunction that the Moslem, who had earlier been considered “stupid,” was able to lead Europe back from what Rousseau terms “a state worse than ignorance” to an era in which reason prevailed (Rousseau, 1987:3).
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In place of Plato’s body–soul dichotomy and of the Cartesian dualism, Islam identifies four constituent elements of man/woman. These are nafs (an incorporeal, but conscious and everlasting soul), af’edah or aql (a mind preprogrammed to think, and to choose between good and evil, right and wrong, love or hate, compassion or wickedness, hot or cold, black and white, or shades between), qalb (a heart which, as the seat of emotions, either gravitates toward virtuous conduct and the Form and essence of the Good, or is so “diseased” as to be drawn into earthly temptations), and jasad (a body that seeks gratifications to biological and carnal desires, but eventually succumbs to disease, the inexorable march of time, and death). An individual that is able to control bodily cravings and the heart’s desires will be one whose conduct matches that characterized by Imam Muhammad Al-Ghazzali as “praise-worthy” (Faris, 1962). Such a person contrasts sharply with one whose heart has been blighted or corrupted by earthly desires, and who constantly lapses into blame-worthy conduct (like perfidy, hypocrisy, dishonesty, injustice, oppression, cynicism, arrogance, lust, greed, xenophobia, and wickedness). Islam recognizes individual freedom of choice and the accompanying responsibility. The accent on personal responsibility is in fact a salient feature of Islam. It contrasts sharply with Christianity’s emphasis on the cleansing and redeeming power of Jesus’ blood. Thus, belief in Christ’s divinity is, in Islamic exegesis, neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the amortization of earthly debts, and/or for afterlife salvation. As noted in the Qur’an, “whoever follows true guidance does so to his/her soul’s benefit,” and one that goes astray has none but him/herself to blame. Sura Israa/Bani-Israeel, Ayat 14, is quite specific on the link between actions and responsibility: Wa laa tazir waazirah wizra ukhraw (“And no bearer of burdens will bear another person’s burden”).
Thus convinced that each individual will personally answer for his/her deeds on the Day of Resurrection, the Muslim tends to regards his/her core beliefs as rights which are not subject to negotiation with earthly authorities. The next section concludes by examining the status of the individual under three philosophical traditions—realism, idealism, and Kantian rationalism.
2.6 The Individual Under Three Philosophical Traditions: A Summation There are broadly three contending paradigms in the study of international relations—the realist, the idealist, and the Kantian. While all of them in varying degrees lean toward sovereign states and international institutions, none has responded in any meaningful way to the individual yearning for freedom. Grotius, a foremost exponent of natural law theory, started off with moral values shared by all human beings. However, realizing that individuals are likely to disagree on the interpretation of the values, he acknowledged the need for order, and for organized government. He expected the new contraption (the state) to operate
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within well-defined moral and legal parameters in its relations both with its people and with its foreign counterparts. This is where he differs substantially from the realists. As far as the deep-dyed realists—especially, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Morgenthau, Kennan, Carr—are concerned, there is nothing remotely resembling a community of minds on right and wrong, much less, an “international society.” All the institutions that have been created and the laws enacted to sustain international relations are but mere illusions. The reality, as far as the realists are concerned, is an international environment characterized by chaos, total disregard for civilized norms of behavior, and impunity. Every sovereign state, they argue, is out for itself; none cares about the collective good. In such an anarchic state—the new state of nature—what counts is not an appeal to reason, morality, or the rule of law, but access to hard and soft power. Only that state survives which is militarily supreme, economically strong, and capable of outwitting its opponents. Even if realism’s negative view of the international environment accurately describes the “evil” side of the individual, it still leaves the other “good” side totally unaccounted for. After all, man does not thrive by power and deception alone. S/he needs to be aware of the fact that as s/he is capable of plotting and scheming, so are others. In fact, both the unending struggle for power and the resultant global instability stem directly from this naïve assumption that only one’s interests and calculations matter in today’s highly polarized world. Also by depicting the world in black-and-white, “either us-or-them,” terms, realism prevents the individual from seeing the world with an open mind, and from knowing about life outside his/her own borders. An alternative to realism is a frame of mind that acknowledges the interdependence, if not the communality (or “common destiny”) of the human race. In Kant’s theory of reason, everything is connected with everything else in the observable world. On the face of it, Kantian rationalism provides the individual an opportunity to evade restrictions that the sovereign state places on his/her liberty. The case of Ireland summarized in Box 2.1 below shows how civil society elements sometimes bypass national democratic institutions to achieve their objectives.
Box 2.1 Logic, Freedom, and Morality in an Ambiguous Environment Reason is generally believed to be the bedrock of Western civilization. Yet, this concept sometimes takes on different meanings as individuals and groups wrestle with life’s challenges. A clear example is the controversy over the individual’s right to terminate an “unintended” pregnancy. On one side is Ireland with its strict anti-abortion law. On the other are three women who sought to evade the restrictions, and travelled to Britain to abort their pregnancies. As a predominantly Catholic country, Ireland had, as far back as 1861, outlawed abortion. Under the country’s constitution, the right to life extends
2.6
The Individual Under Three Philosophical Traditions: A Summation
to all, including the unborn. Three women (two from Ireland and another from Lithuania) found the anti-abortion law not only oppressive, but also discriminatory and in direct violation of the European human rights protocols and conventions. One of the litigants added the health dimension, arguing that allowing the unborn to live threatened her own life—that is, her very existence. This raises the question how “reason” was to arbitrate a major conflict—the life of the mother as against that of the unborn child. The petitioners reckoned that pursuing their rights within Ireland was going to be “futile and costly.” They, therefore, decided to approach an outside body for relief. To fight the infringement on their rights—this affront on the dignity of women—they bypassed the Irish judiciary and headed straight to the European Court of Human Rights. In its own defense, the Irish government argued that under its laws, abortion, or the termination of an unborn life, was a crime. The litigants knew this. So did the European Union. In fact, Ireland had agreed to a second referendum on the Union’s reform only on the understanding that the reform would leave its abortion law untouched. It further held that for 50 years, the European Court of Human Rights had recognized “the diversity of cultures and traditions in Europe.” Countries with sizeable Catholic populations (e.g., Poland, Spain, and Malta) will certainly watch the case with interest. It is likely to be resolved in one of three ways. One possible scenario is the Court ruling in favor of the three petitioners. The Court could, for instance, fall back on “reason” and conclude that as individuals, it is the three women who know what is in their best interests. In other words, it is not for the state or any other external party to substitute its judgment for those of the persons bearing the pains of unwanted pregnancies. Besides, the Court might argue that it was not obliged to consider the understanding that Ireland had reached with the European Union before allowing a second referendum to proceed. After all, the Court is not an organ of the 27-member European Union, but of a larger, 47-member Council of Europe. A second possibility is the Court accepting Ireland’s plea to throw the case out. The discrimination argument would be the first target. Unless the women could cite concrete examples of pregnant women (or men) that went unpunished after undergoing abortion procedures within Ireland, the litigants would have a hard time sustaining the allegation that the abortion law in this particular case was discriminatory. By far, the more substantive issue that would most likely be addressed is the will of the Irish majority on right to life. As individuals, the three women have the right to begin, continue, and end the process of procreation. However, each choice carries its own consequences. If reason supports the women’s right to end their pregnancies under any condition, the same reason dictates that they answer to a society whose membership they freely accept. The society may be right or wrong, but it is firm in its conviction
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that a mother’s right to abort must be weighed against the unborn child’s right to live. Two interests are in conflict, and the Irish society has come out on the side of the defenseless fetus. Where interests clearly conflict, the state is obliged to step in and redress any perceived imbalance. The Irish government, conscious of the fact that the fetus cannot protect itself, has assumed the role of its (the fetus’s) defender. To argue that “the rest of Europe” takes a liberal view of abortion simply begs the question. The will of the non-Irish populations does not, in any way, nullify the will freely expressed by the Irish at elections and plebiscites. Indeed, to substitute the will of a distant body like “the rest of Europe” (or the Council of Europe) for the will of the duly enfranchised Irish is nothing short of gross travesty of democratic principles. It will amount to transforming the Irish majority into a European minority to justify marginalizing them and imposing on them canons of behavior they would otherwise find objectionable. This leaves the third option—referring the case back to the Irish Supreme Court for determination on its merits. An appeal to the European Human Rights Court will then be allowed if and when the petitioners raise cogent points of fact or law that the Irish judiciary might have overlooked. Already, an Irish judge had, according to The Guardian of Thursday, May 10, 2007, allowed a 17-year-old girl carrying a headless baby to travel to Britain with a view to terminating her pregnancy. The Irish abortion law has also become less stringent following new court rulings and opinions expressed at referenda. In these recent cases, the Irish at least had the chance to decide for themselves, instead of “the rest of Europe” arrogating to itself the knowledge of what is good for Ireland.
Regardless of how the Irish case is finally resolved, excessive lurch toward internationalism might not be the best way to safeguard individual rights. The position of the three unwilling Irish mothers on external resolutions of internal problems is likely to change were the issue at stake to be different—say, export of Irish jobs to foreign countries, or a European assault on a cherished Irish custom and institution. In any case, by leaning too heavily toward internationalism, the Kantian rebuttal to realism might itself have overstated the case for reason, and might end up compromising what it values most––the freedom of the individual. Freedom is synonymous with freewill. The former means nothing unless given practical expression by the latter. And where individual freewill prevails, the chances are good that one choice would be in conflict with another—as highlighted in the clash between pro-life and abortion activists, or between advocates of same-sex marriage and their opponents, and, for that matter, between the Saudi family of a paralyzed man insisting on the severance of his attacker’s spinal cord as reparation, and the Amnesty International’s characterization of the demand as retrogressive, savage, and unreasonable.9
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The Individual Under Three Philosophical Traditions: A Summation
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It is precisely with a view to “banning” conflict and diversity that authoritarian systems seek to restrict personal freedoms and to impose holistic solutions on otherwise-pluralistic environments. By sanctioning unrestrained expansion of the international space in which all are required to look, think, and act alike, Kant’s transcendental idealism risks confusing the will of one with the commonweal. Conflict is inevitable where such a frame of mind prevails. The phenomenal world may, as postulated by Kant, exist independently of individual minds, thoughts, perceptions, or choices. However, Kant would be among the first to agree that when the mind ponders the world, it sees not a tidy picture of unity, but a time-and-space image frequently blurred by antinomy, paradoxes, and conflict. The case of Ann Coulter, a neoconservative commentator, who sees nothing good in Islam, is indicative of a world increasingly detached from a common understanding of reason and morality. Employing a highly inflammatory language—one that endears her to her right-wing constituents and helps promote her books—Coulter terms Muslims “homicidal maniacs.” Not yet done, she counselled immediate occupation of Muslim countries, the execution of their leaders (including leaders aligned with the West), and forceful conversion of the recolonized peoples to Christianity: We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpetbombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this (war on Muslims) is war.10
Despite the venom and the malevolence, Coulter knows deep down that no rational person would take her seriously. Only her neoconservative colleagues, indeed, saw any merit in her warped thinking and insane recommendation. An example of those egging her on is David Horowitz. Based on his own, totally inaccurate, summary of what Islam preaches, Horowitz openly identified with Coulter and those baying for the Muslims’ blood: I began running Coulter’s columns...shortly after she came up with her most infamous line, which urged America to put jihadists to the sword and convert them to Christianity. Liberals were horrified; I was not. I thought to myself, this is a perfect send-up of what our Islamofascist enemies believe—that we as infidels we should be put to the sword and converted to Islam.11
More insidious than Kantianism’s fabrication of an “international mind” is the likelihood of the idea being hijacked and then cynically interpreted to justify imperial designs and creeping global authoritarianism. To begin with, a theory founded on unbridled expansion of the international jurisdiction ignores the distance between local preferences and global choices, and between choices and accountability. By sanctioning international entanglements that the individual does not fully comprehend, idealism is likely to “externalize” the internal effects of, and practically preempt, human choices. Liberating, as the idea might first sound, the Kantian international mind may thus turn out serving an imperialistic and enslaving purpose. As pointed out in the fourth chapter, the assimilation of African tribes into “civilized Europe” was a cardinal principle of French colonialism. While the colonial policy actually failed to stop
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the African independence train or “assimilate” even the most modernized of the modernizing elite, its ghost was resurrected by President Nicolas Sarkozy to justify the French government’s clampdown on modes of dressing considered “Islamic.” According to the president, the burqa had no place in France. Besides endorsing the Swiss minaret ban, he gave the French Muslims an ultimatum to accept “our social and civic pact” or face dire consequences. With regard to his largely anti-immigrant “national identity” campaign, the president of France let it be known that the land of liberty, equality, and fraternity (liberte, egalite et fraternite) had no room for diversity. He viewed Islamic identity as a threat, and warned that: Moderate Islam would fail if Muslims tried to challenge ... (France’s) republican valuesystem or Christian heritage.12
It did not occur to the proponents of forceful assimilation that if “moderate Islam” fails, the extremists would rise to fill the vacuum. Instead of undermining the efforts of the law-abiding majority (moderate Islam), attention ought to focus on safeguarding individual rights that are not in conflict with equivalent rights. The only limit on individual liberty is equivalent liberty for other individuals. Article 4 of Declaration of Rights, approved by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789, sums it up admirably as follows: Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.
For instance, laws banning “indecent exposure” may be justified where such manifestations of bodily assets “disturb the public order established by law”.13 Still, laws banning indecent exposure must not only clarify what is meant by “indecency,” but also demonstrate the link between that definition and the disturbance of “public order.” By contrast, laws banning the burqa or hijab are invasive, arbitrary, and regressive, besides clearly targeting a particular section of the public, that is, the Islamic community. The laws also violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Proceeding from acts similar to the French’s—that is, acts that have implications for individual and group rights––the next chapter focuses on the sovereign state and its relations with its people.
Notes 1. Adam’s knowledge of the “names of all things” is the origin of human consciousness of moral and spiritual values, and of modern era’s scientific and technological breakthroughs, artistic contributions, and, regrettably, destructive tendencies. The Qur’an also notes that in addition to the basic senses, God endows man with the capacities to articulate his/her thoughts, communicate with others, and choose between right and wrong. See Surah Balad (Ayats 5, and 7–10). 2. See Kant, I., Prolegomena to any future metaphysics (1783), and Critique of pure thought (1787). 3. The idols are not to be confused with the images and icons worshipped by pagans of old. Bacon used the term figuratively to show how values to which an individual is attached become an object of worship rather than of dispassionate study. Contemporary examples of
Notes
4. 5.
6.
7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12.
13.
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“idols” include “nationalism,” “feminism,” “narcissism,” hedonism, consumerism, neoliberalism, communism, capitalism, religious fanaticism, endorsement of Aryan race doctrines, and other emotion-laden ideas—doctrines and ideas that hold the mind captive, and prevent it from entertaining and objectively examining contrary worldviews. Basden, G.T., 1966, Niger Ibos. (London: Frank Cass) See, for instance, Wight, M., 1966, “Western values in international relations”, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic investigations: essays in the theory of international politics. (London: Allen and Unwin), pp. 89–131. These are a few of the 99 Names or Attributes of Allah. The Muslims believe that to Him belong the most beautiful Names, and to Shaytan (the Devil) belong the worst and most despicable appellations. Neo-Cartesian scholars like Arnold Geulinex (1625–1669) and Nicholas Malebranche (1638–1715) also attribute mind–body interactions to a First Cause––that is, God. Muslims also hold that as the Master of the Universe (to Whom all created objects owes its existence), He has no need for a parent or an offspring. See Surah 7 (A’araf), Ayat 28 on the frequent tendency to pass off human desires as God’s will. By the same token, it could be argued that adherents of the various belief systems ought to know Who God truly is before proceeding to slaughter one another in His Name. Although the demand accords with the Mosaic law of an eye-for-an-eye (or qisas in Arabic), the Qur’an urges the victim or his family to be lenient, and to be content with payment of reparations in material, rather than arm-and-limb terms. It was the Qur’anic injunction on leniency that led the Saudi court to persuade the family of the paralyzed man to accept monetary compensation for the harm caused by the attacker. According to Reuters news dated August 23, 2010, the Governor of Tabuk, Prince Fahad Bin Sultan, also ordered mediation between the two families. Coulter, A., 2001, “This is war”, National Review, September 13. Horowitz, D., 2003, “The trouble with ‘Treason’”, FrontPage Magazine, July 8. President Nicolas Sarkozy’s article in Le Monde, December 8, 2009, reproduced in part in Crescent International, Vol 38, No. 11, January 2010, p. 16. The Muslims realize that others had tried in the past but failed to shake their faith. See the history of prophet Shuaib as narrated in Surah A’araf, Ayat 88. Shuaib and his followers were given an ultimatum to repudiate God or face instant banishment. The believers remained steadfast and ultimately prevailed over their adversaries. Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen categorically states that “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.” The onus on the French government is demonstrating how the burqa “disturbs” public order, and that this “public order,” which is about to be disturbed, is clearly established and defined by law. (Except otherwise stated, quotations from the French Declaration of Rights based on the translated version prepared by Gerald Murphy, the Cleveland Free-Net, Cybercasting Services of the Division of the National Public Tele-computing Network, NPTN).
Chapter 3
The State’s Claim to Obedience
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. — James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51
3.1 Introduction That it is only the individual who knows what is good for him-/herself is beyond doubt. That much has been argued in the last chapter. However, even if the knowledge of what is good for the individual begins with him/her, it rarely ends there. As soon as Adam (or any of his descendants) steps out of his or her solitude and becomes an integral part of a community, the absolute sovereignty which s/he once had over her/himself becomes relative—that is, relative to the overriding needs of the community. The task before political philosophy is determining the proportion of the freedom the citizen has to cede to ensure the survival and development of society––without losing his/her own individuality. While the idealists see no conflict between individual craving for freedom and the new sovereign’s demand for obedience, the realists consider it expedient to bind the anarchy-prone individual to contracts promising him protection in return for allegiance to an external authority. Whereas the idealists hinge their faith on the individual’s capacity to reason and to recognize limits to his/her freedom as a member of a community, the realists see the individual as too self-absorbed and too self-seeking to submit to authority willingly. Curiously, reason is also what Kant employed to postulate the interconnectedness of the humankind, dismiss the case for parochial nation-states, and predict the emergence of an “international society.” In examining the case for the sovereign state, this chapter starts by noting how authority is legitimized, and obedience is assured. It proceeds in the succeeding sections to interrogate the sovereign powers of the state vis-à-vis individual craving for freedom and for maximization of self-interest. M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_3,
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3.2 Legitimacy of Power and Benefits of Obedience The earliest forms of government emerged when those with intellect and vision saw in anarchy an opportunity to impose order. The first generations of statespersons thus acknowledged the need to bring diverse individuals and groups under various forms of centralized rule. Over time, power gravitated toward leaders of migrant tribes, charismatic personalities, folk heroes, military conquerors, and empire builders. The latter-day rulers, in an attempt at establishing their authority and commanding obedience, employed a combination of brute force, superstitions, evangelism, cunning, and diplomacy. In an attempt at explaining the origin of sovereign rule over a community of individuals, Aristotle proceeds from reason to argue the proposition that power naturally gravitates toward the intelligent and the visionary. As he (Aristotle, 1992:57) notes, For the element that can use its intelligence to look ahead is by nature ruler and by nature master, while that which has the bodily strength to do the actual work is by nature a slave, one of those who are ruled. . ..
Aristotle’s conclusions on the relationship between intellect and power are not significantly different from Plato’s. In fact, Plato is very clear on who should be entrusted with the sovereign power of the state. In an ideal and efficiently governed republic, the power to rule would be exercised by philosopher-kings, that is, by individuals that are fully in tune with the Form of the Good and devoted to the cause of excellence. This highest form of government––government by an enlightened aristocracy––is naturally different from other forms. Among the latter are “timocracy” (government by property owners and military usurpers), oligarchy (rule by a few wealthy citizens assisted by educated officials and soldiers), and democracy (government by free-born, predominantly male, citizens). It is surprising that Plato’s Republic has but little respect for a form of government that the modern world holds as the gold standard––that is, democracy. Plato, like Aristotle and Hobbes, is not taken in by democracy’s promise of equality for all citizens, preferring instead to highlight the anarchy that the form of government unleashes. In a democracy, unrestrained pursuit of self-interest (or selfaggrandizement) will constantly erode the sense of community that is so critical to building and nurturing a functional republic. While Plato and Aristotle focused on the qualifications of rulers, it was Bodin (1450–1589) who developed the first systematic, though not always internally consistent, theory of sovereignty (Bodin, 2009; Franklin, 1973). His philosophy was shaped not only by the comparative study of laws and of governments which he undertook, but also by the horrors which he witnessed firsthand during the protracted religious wars in France. In his view, the only remedy for rebellion and anarchy was a powerful central authority. This is the main thrust of his Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum (Method for the easy comprehension of histories) published in 1566.
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Legitimacy of Power and Benefits of Obedience
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In his quest for peace and stability, Bodin envisaged a state in which the ruler would exercise near-absolute power, especially the power to legislate, appoint temporal and ecclesiastical officials, declare war, hear judicial appeals, and decide life and death questions. Such a state he termed “sovereign.” He followed up ten years later with his Six livres de la republique (Six Books of the Commonwealth). In contrast to his earlier treatise on sovereignty, Bodin’s 1576 work came out clearly on the side of absolute monarchy. A commonwealth is not in its true form unless it is capable of acting independently of authorities external to it. The few checks that Bodin imposed on absolute sovereignty—particularly, the monarch’s obligations to uphold divine and natural law, obtain the subjects’ consent to be taxed, enforce contracts with the people, and respect the rights of communities–– were clearly meant to undercut the advocates of “legitimate resistance,” rather than to temper the despotism implied in his theory. The checks were soon watered down, or rolled back, as Bodin’s theory designated the sovereign as the sole interpreter of divine and natural law, permitted the ruler, in periods of emergency, to tax the subjects without their consent, and sanctioned the repudiation of contracts where public interest so dictated. Hobbes might not have directly acknowledged Bodin’s pioneering contribution, but his position on sovereignty was rather similar to Bodin’s. An unrepentant realist, Hobbes has an answer to the hordes of citizens making all sorts of “unreasonable” demands on the leviathan and threatening its survival. Writing against the background of the English Civil War—and the threat that the War posed to public order—Hobbes postulates in his Leviathan of 1651 that life without government or central authority would, among other things, be “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To ward off the evil effects of the anarchy prevailing in the state of nature, Hobbes envisioned a social contract, binding the ruler and the ruled. In his view, sovereign rule becomes absolutely necessary “when there is no visible Power to keep them (the mob) in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants” and to the observation of the natural laws of Justice, Equity, Modesty, and Mercy (Hobbes, 1985:223). As the price for the protection of individual but conflicting self-interests—that is, the price of social peace and equanimity––the citizen cedes his natural rights to the sovereign. Rebellion is justified only when the ruler abuses his power. Otherwise, civil, military, judicial, and ecclesiastical powers should come under the direct control of the sovereign. This is how Hobbes reconciles man’s inclination toward self-interest with his tendency to be “reasonable” enough to submit to coercion and to external authority. His Leviathan has no room for the doctrine of Separation of Powers which John Locke (1632–1704) deemed a valuable restraint on authoritarianism, and Baron Charles de Montesquieu (1689–1755) popularized in his 1748 classic, Of The Spirit of the Laws. In Hobbes’ Leviathan, the “social contract” (which the subjects might have had no hand in drawing up) binds them all the same. Obedience to the Leviathan is compulsory, rather than voluntary and “spontaneous,” as postulated by the idealists. This is probably why Rousseau sees no difference between Hobbes and Grotius before
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him. Grotius might have traced the knowledge and ownership of rights to the individual, but like Hobbes, Grotius believes that individual rights are possessions, and, therefore, tradable—that is, alienable. Thus, once the right to individual freedom is pledged in return for the sovereign’s protection, it remains in perpetuity with the sovereign, rather than revert to the individual at a later date.1 While accepting Hobbes’ notion of state of nature, idealist John Locke rejects the main premise on which earlier social contract theories rested—that is, the “divine right of kings.” In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke contends that the natural inclination of man is toward perfect and complete liberty—liberty to pursue life’s goals as one sees fit without external interference. However, this does not mean total anarchy—or freedom to hog all the rights while rejecting the corresponding obligations. In Locke’s view, the state of nature might be lacking in central government but not in morality. The moral awareness of an otherwise-anarchic society explains the natural inclination of individuals within the state (of nature) to acknowledge limits to their freedom, and to accept the obligations imposed by their membership of society. In Locke’s formulation, the state of nature is not the state of war described in the Leviathan, but a state of reason, or of relatively enlightened selfinterest. The rational impulse in man pushes him toward coming together with others to establish civil order and to draw up a contract for the governorship of society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) is another philosopher that sought an answer to the question regarding the legitimacy of rulers. In formulating his theory of social contract, this Enlightenment scholar traces the evolution of man from the simple, uncomplicated life of the state of nature (where everyone knew practically everybody else) through the development and formalization of property ownership rights, to the emergence of modern, highly differentiated, socioeconomic institutions. Human progress or “development” is, however, not without its own cost. Among the consequences of socioeconomic change are the displacement of superstitious beliefs by science, industrialization, population increase, displacement and migration, the polarization of society along class lines, competition for resources, avarice, greed, vanity, inequality, envy, and crime and violence. Consequently, although man is born free, his freedom has been constrained by his historical circumstances—that is, by socioeconomic change. The social contract, as Rousseau sees it, is man’s answer to the problems created by humankind’s evolution or “development.” To live together under a government and at the same time retain one’s freedom requires submitting individual to the general will—a general will created with the concurrence of other free and equal individuals. According to Rousseau, an ideal social contract is not one that sets the clock back to the days of anarchy, but that, at least, and in a reassuring way, removes the limits that social change places on human freedom. He summarizes his governorship formula as follows (Rousseau, 1987:148): Find a form of association which defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and by means of which each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.
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Emergence of the Westphalian State
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3.3 Emergence of the Westphalian State After experimenting with different governorship forms—some of which triggered bloody conflicts—the world finally settled for an arrangement thought to be capable of binding the individual to the commonweal. This is the sovereign state which emerged on October 24, 1648, with the ratification of a peace treaty between the Roman Emperor and his allies, on the one hand, and the King of France and his allies, on the other. The new contraption emerging from the Treaty of Westphalia might not be exactly what Rousseau had in mind, but it corresponded to Bodin’s idea of sovereignty. At the very least, the Treaty formally recognized each sovereign’s freedom to govern the territory under his/her control—without any external prodding or interference, but subject to his/her ability to hold the territory and command the allegiance of the people therein. As the fulcrum of national power, the Westphalia ideal-type is accountable to no one besides itself and, under a democracy, to its people. Article 64 of the 1648 Treaty is significant in restoring to their rightful owners the sovereign powers earlier confiscated by the Elected Roman Emperor. The article provides as follows: And to prevent for the future any Differences arising in the Politick State, all and every one of the Electors, Princes and States of the Roman Empire, are so establish’d and confirm’d in their antient Rights, Prerogatives, Libertys, Privileges, free exercise of Territorial Right, as well Ecclesiastick, as Politick Lordships, Regales, by virtue of this present Transaction: that they never can or ought to be molested therein by any whomsoever upon any manner of pretence (emphasis added).
Under the Treaty, individual interest finds expression in, or is subsumed under, state or “national interest.” As the embodiment of the people’s collective will, the state is empowered to make choices that may or may not coincide with individual preferences but which, as postulated by Bodin, Grotius, and Hobbes, inevitably prevail (Remec, 1960). The doctrine of “sovereignty” enshrined in the Treaty implies exclusive power to take autonomous decisions concerning the maintenance of internal order; enforcement of laws and contracts; preservation of the society’s cultural, moral, and religious norms; provision of an environment conducive to orderly exchange of goods and services; defense against external invasion; and conduct of relations with other sovereign states. A sovereign state cannot tell another how to conduct its business; neither could it be told how to conduct its own. Interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state is considered illegitimate and an act of aggression deserving of forceful response (Brown, 1996:108). Thus, the untrammeled freedom that the individual enjoyed in the state of nature now reverted, under the Treaty of Westphalia, to the sovereign state. While the intention of the Treaty of Westphalia cannot be faulted, its basic assumption is questionable. This is the assumption that every state with a flag and an anthem has the wherewithal to assert its sovereign rights and take its seat in the comity of nations. As argued in Chapter 1, the real threat to global security today lies in the tendency to prop up otherwise-unviable, internally unrecognized, and
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externally dependent regimes as bona fide members of the “international community.” Not only are these states lacking in the resources needed to hold and govern their territories effectively, they are also viewed by radical elements in their midst as puppets or satellites of external powers. Before comparing the methods applied by sovereign states to secure and retain the allegiance of their peoples, the next section examines the role of justice and the rule of law in the state formation and maintenance process.
3.4 Justice and the Rule of Law in State Formation and Maintenance It is clear from the preceding chapters that morality engaged the attention of philosophers, Western and non-Western. Hume’s utilitarian response to the challenge is to view it in purely secular terms. Yet, by disconnecting morality from an external force, and equating it with the totality of benefits resulting from a particular type of conduct, Hume fails to grasp the point that “benefits” have different meanings for different persons. As Kant (1724–1804) once noted, pure judgment of taste, and therefore of morality, is bound to be subjective insofar as it rests on the judge’s personal emotion and feelings. This more or less applies to the notion of justice. In a competitive, zero-sum situation, the winner would walk away with the prize––a prize which might have been won using foul tactics. To argue that such a victory is “well-earned,” “morally right,” and “just” is to accept what idealist philosophers reject––in other words, that “might is right”.2 The weak will, in fact, be the first to challenge the survival-of-the-fittest doctrine, insisting that his/her weakness is attributable to circumstances external to him/herself, rather than being “self-inflicted.” All the same, Hume’s moral theory would undoubtedly appeal to utilitarian philosophers (like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte), to the exponent of free-enterprise philosophy (Adam Smith), to Darwinist evolutionary biologists and atheists (like Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins), and to political realists (Thucydides, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Bismark, Morgenthau, and Kennan, among others). However, it is unlikely to be acceptable to those looking for morality’s deeper meanings. These are meanings either which no human mind has yet been, and will ever be, able to comprehend, or which the secularist bias conveniently evades. In Plato’s Republic, reason serves as the criterion for judging human action, including the struggle for power. In one of the Socratic dialogues, Plato depicts reason as the ability not only to relate cause to effect (as well as means to end), but also to maximize benefits while minimizing costs. Doing justice, for instance, entails “doing good to friends and evil to enemies.” A republic will not have acted justly, and might even disintegrate, if it refuses to wage war on opponents, and conclude alliances with friends. It will be the height of injustice—at least, to one’s own self, if not to reason—to cuddle enemies, and repulse allies.
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Justice and the Rule of Law in State Formation and Maintenance
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Plato’s idealism, however, contrasts sharply with the realist view of power. As a philosopher perpetually searching for the Form of the Good, he could not have come to terms with a situation in which victory is achieved outside the rules, and in defiance of the doctrine of fairness. The absence of the “fairness” consideration is, in fact, what undermines the realist, utilitarian, and Darwinian notion of justice. It is thus not enough for a conduct to be “just”; it must also be “fair.” It is just so long as individuals in equal situations receive equal treatment (as in the case of friends that are entitled to be rewarded with good treatment, and enemies that rightly earn condemnations). This is the kernel of Grotius’ natural law theory. According to him, a war is just only if three conditions subsist—that is, self-defense, reparations of injury, and punishment or deterrence.3 Grotius’ idea of a just war is rather similar to the philosophy underlying the Mosaic law of an eye-for-an-eye or the Islamic doctrine of qisas. The latter (qisas) came under intense scrutiny when a Saudi court ruled in favor of a family that had demanded the severance of the spinal cord of a man accused of inflicting an identical damage on one of their own. The family hinged their demand on the punishment, deterrence, and reparation stipulations of qisas, arguing that neither a prison sentence nor money would undo the damage done to their paralyzed son and to themselves.4 However, Amnesty International saw the case differently—the human rights watchdog could not understand how a court could, in good conscience, ask doctors to break a healthy and functioning spinal cord. Yet, if qisas is rejected as a principle of equality and reciprocity, the onus is on its opponents to come out with a formula which would accurately equalize benefits with costs, and the compensation offered with the harm caused. No matter what the moral argument advanced, it is just for a sovereign state to punish persons found guilty of stipulated offenses, and, in civil litigation, to declare the wronged party victorious while awarding costs and/or punitive damages against the transgressor. The state would have acted unjustly and unfairly if its agents pronounce the innocent guilty and vice versa, revoke or limit rights that threaten no other rights, or erect obstacles to the fact-finding needed for impartial arbitration of right and wrong. Equality of rights presupposes that every person participating in a practice or who is affected by it has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all. This immediately rules out master–slave, ruler–subject, citizen– immigrant, metropolis–colony, or indigene–settler segregation clauses in the design of social contracts. The term that sums up the doctrine of equality is “merit.” Yet this too can sometimes be slippery. As Aristotle points out, merit has different connotations depending on circumstances. While acknowledging that assigning unequal shares to equals often breeds complaints and starts quarrels,5 he argues that deciding who merits what treatment depends on situations. He adds (Aristotle, 1992:177–178): Everyone agrees that justice in distribution must be in accordance with merit. . .but they do not all mean the same kind of merit: the democratic view is that the criterion is free birth; the oligarchic is that it is wealth or a good family; the aristocratic that it is excellence.
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In an attempt at overcoming the contextual limitation of merit, legal philosophers came up with the concept of reciprocity, by which is meant the assignment of benefits to various parties proportional to their costs. When relations are truly reciprocal, and conducted along just and fair lines, equal obligations will confer equal rights. Reciprocity is, of course, a necessary but insufficient condition for the sustenance of justice and fairness. Thus even when relations are formally reciprocal, the cause of justice will still not be served if there is no respect for the “rule of law.” In specific terms, the rule of law is said to be lacking where: (a) There are no rules governing apportionment of costs and benefits; (b) Such rules exist, but a party constantly insists that they be interpreted or modified to suit its interest; or (c) The rules are not ambiguous, but, in order to claim undeserved benefits or to avoid the prescribed penalties, a party diligently looks for Machiavellian exits— or for outright exemptions. The next two sections look at how different political systems apply the prevailing notion of justice to decide the outcome of economic and political contests while at the same time maintaining the state’s equilibrium.
3.5 On the Proper Role of the State As indicated in preceding sections, the state’s original and sole task was to enforce order in place of chaos, while at the same time ensuring that the rule of law prevailed over the law of the jungle. Over time, and under the influence of mercantilism, the state began to see its strength as lying in effective control of industry and foreign trade. Mercantilism, however, did not go unchallenged. Adam Smith, father of free-enterprise economics, highlighted the tendency of state intervention to impede, rather than accelerate economic growth. In his view, the Invisible Hand is infinitely superior to the state when it comes to the allocation of scarce resources. He summed up the minimalist view of the state as follows: Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice6
Smith’s opposition to mercantilism is based on the premise that as “monopolistic” suppliers and “monopsonistic” consumers of goods and services, the state is the least qualified to allocate economic resources. Unlike individual suppliers that compete with one another for the patronage of the consumers, the state competes with no one but itself (and possibly, other sovereign states). It is thus under no pressure to supply goods/services in demand, to determine the equilibrium price by matching supply with demand, or to make choices likely to assure increasing rates of return. As a monopoly, it imposes its own sovereignty (and preferences) on the individual. By contrast, pure competition allows for maximum individual freedom. In a free market, the individual consumer is king. S/he exercises her/his sovereignty by
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On the Proper Role of the State
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combining with other individuals to pass judgment on goods/services brought to the market. Just as there are many consumers’ expressing demands for a designated product, so are there many suppliers’ competing for the individual sovereigns’ attention and patronage. Everything being equal, competition will encourage individuals and firms to behave optimally, and will, in the process, facilitate the attainment of efficient (Pareto-optimal) social outcomes. It will enable aggregate demand to be balanced with aggregate supply. The point at which both demand and supply intersect is that at which the equilibrium price emerges. When demand exceeds supply, the price goes up, and conversely. Where the Visible Hand of the state interferes with this Invisible but natural process—that is, with the interplay of demand and supply—the prices of factor inputs and finished products will tend to be distorted, leading to inefficient resource allocation. Building on Adam Smith’s classical theory, utilitarian philosophers are wont to place the individual at the center of their analysis. Mill, for instance, begins by demarcating the boundary between individual and collective choices. He leaves to the individual that in which he is “chiefly interested,” and to society what directly concerns it (Mill, 1998:83). However, his tautological formulation does not tell us precisely where the interest of the individual ends and that of society begins. By way of clarification, Mill himself adds that the individual enjoys unfettered freedom of action provided that this freedom is not prejudicial to the interests of others. As soon as a person’s conduct interferes with the liberty, or adversely and unjustly affects the interests of another, society has an obligation to step in to rectify any perceived imbalance. In a language that is more categorical than Mill’s in its leaning toward minimalism, Bentham depicts “big government” as a threat to democracy. In his view, the utilitarian objective of producing “the greatest possible sum of good” could not be realized where the state meddled in areas properly belonging to the individual. As he puts it (Bentham, 1965:97), Suppose. . .that a legislator should feel himself authorized to undertake the extirpation of drunkenness and fornication by direct laws. He would have to begin by a multitude of regulations. The first inconvenience would therefore be a complexity of laws.
3.5.1 The Diseconomy of Free Enterprise However, the laissez-faire doctrine’s confidence in perfect competition may turn out to be misplaced. For a start, the assumption underlying the theory of perfect competition—that is, of free, unimpeded mobility of productive resources—is largely erroneous. More often than not, the “rational economic man” faces daunting challenges as s/he attempts to shift resources from an area deemed less profitable to another with brighter prospects. Examples of obstacles to timely switching and efficient allocation of resources are data and information gaps, immigration quota laws, import restrictions and tariffs, trade union rules on preferential treatment for members, and price-fixing practices by producers and/or consumers cartels.
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If perfect competition is an illusion, so is perfect rationality. Even where antitrust legislation has been enacted and a robust regulatory regime exists to enforce it, profit-seeking firms can always find ways round the restrictions on hoarding, price fixing, and related practices. Equally significant is the tendency of capitalist systems to view “freedom” in a narrow, highly restrictive sense. Such systems rarely acknowledge the fact that freedom is like microeconomics’ concept of marginal “income”—it will be allocated to that end which gives the individual “citizen-customer” maximum satisfaction. This end may be purely economic, political, cultural, aesthetic, or even spiritual. So it is that a few individuals would spend their freedoms on the pursuit of carnal delight, while others expend theirs on the quest for meaning, spiritual enlightenment, and self-actualization. Hedonism, in any case, has its limit. At one time or the other, the pursuit of happiness will get to a point at which the mind begins to move beyond instant gratification to matters of the soul. And should consumption go on unchecked the planet earth will pay the cost in terms of resource depletion, global warming, and ecological dislocations. By overlooking the externalities—that is, the costs that profit-making enterprises pass on to the rest of society—capitalism leaves society with mounting challenges. Among these are industrial and atmospheric pollution, resource depletion, market failure, economic meltdown, unemployment, and social distress. Even when the free-enterprise economy is running smoothly, the inequality entrenched under it raises vital questions about the role of the state. Where the minimalist view prevails, the state will be expected to stand clear while the Invisible Hand controls the means of production—land, capital, and labor.7 Over time, the bulk of the benefits accruing from economic growth would be cornered by a tiny minority—that is, the corporate executives with high salaries, fat bonuses, and generous retirement perks. Meanwhile, the masses will either have to wait for crumbs to “trickle down,” or live in absolute poverty and destitution. Either way, the Invisible Hand widens social inequality. In effect, capitalism is a tide that lifts the yachts of the rich but leaves the dinghies of the poor at the ocean’s mercy. Proponents of the laissez-faire doctrine see nothing wrong with inequality or class divisions—both of which are a “natural” outcome of individual choices. The view that the poor deserves his condition may be cold, calculating, and, probably, callous. It nonetheless has its defenders in the individualistic philosophy of utilitarianism. Spencer’s eugenic view of the “unworthy” poor is highly revealing. According to him (Spencer, 1982:33): . . .the command ‘if any would not work neither should he eat’, is simply a Christian enunciation of that universal law of Nature under which life has reached its present height—the law that a creature not energetic enough to maintain itself must die: the sole difference being that the law which in the one case is to be artificially enforced, is, in the other case, a natural necessity.
Yet, appealing as individualism might first seem to defenders of liberty, the assumptions underlying it are easily falsifiable. If a particular community regards drunkenness as a threat to individual and collective welfare—or, specifically, as
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On the Proper Role of the State
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hazards to safety on the road or in dark alleys—it will be unreasonable for the community not to enact appropriate legislation addressing their concerns. And should a person defy the law by driving under the influence of alcohol and in the process taking another person’s life, the law will be unreasonable—nay, unjust—either to trivialize the infraction or to punish it with a slap on the wrist. As it turns out, it is not everyone that accepts the efficacy of the Invisible Hand even as an instrument for the allocation of economic resources—especially, when efficacy is broadly conceived. While the development of Western Europe and North America could not have been imagined outside the contributions of private enterprise, it is also the same laissez-faire doctrine that begot the Enron and other scandals, and was largely responsible for the economic meltdown that triggered panic across the globe toward the end of 2008 (Stigliz, 2010). The Invisible Hand’s tendency to get out of control is reflected in the response of big banks and leading corporations to the global crisis. Citigroup, for instance, decided that the best time to splurge $50 million (of its own share of bailout funds) on a new executive aircraft was when retrenching thousands of its employees!8 If this obscene behavior is exclusively Citigroup’s, the tendency to place higher premium on the profit motive than on human welfare is a defining attribute of private enterprise in general. Senior citizens (including those living in economically advanced countries) have been known to freeze to death because of their inability to pay the heating bills. Similarly, patients in private medical facilities risk dying from lack of attention unless they or their relatives come up with the stipulated down payment. Food products are genetically modified and growth hormones are indiscriminately injected to increase yields and profits—without regard for the short- to the long-term health consequences. Besides recoiling from the Invisible Hand’s sadism, socialist thinkers hold that where inequality is fully entrenched, free enterprise does nothing but deepen it. This state of affairs, in turn, engenders greed and conspicuous consumption, on the part of the wealthy, envy, on the part of the underclass, and violence, all around. Thus, instead of promoting the cause of happiness, capitalism may end up igniting conflict and social distress. Capitalism’s strength, it is often argued, lies in its capacity to play on the individual’s egoistic urges, thereby increasing productivity. Yet, as the wealth of each nation grows, so do psychotic and psychopathological tendencies. Dittmar et al. (2007, 2008) detect a tendency toward “compulsive buying” among the affluent members of society. This form of addiction comes with symptoms such as an uncontrollable urge to purchase new items, chronic indebtedness, depression, impairment at home and at work, and breakdown in personal relationships. If there is any correlation between wealth and happiness, Myers (2000) has yet to find it. Close personal relationships and religious belief appear to outrank affluence as harbingers of happiness. Myers’ study particularly reveals that Our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective well-being.
Schwartz, another psychologist, contends that under the influence of the materialist economic ideology (and, in particular, of the rational-choice theory) modern
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American society has placed undue emphasis on freedom, the excess of which leads to people’s dissatisfaction with their lives and to depression. The way out of the predicament lies in de-emphasizing individual freedom and strengthening cultural values, enabling people to live meaningful and satisfying lives (Schwartz, 2000). Despite, or probably because of, the substantial improvement in their material conditions, modern-day American students were more likely than the class of 1938 to succumb to depression, “psychopathic deviation” (meaning, trouble with authority along with the belief that rules apply to others except one), addiction to antidepressants and mind-bending drugs, and other mental disorders. Thus, a survey of 77,576 American high school and college students carried out under the auspices of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) finds that the students of 2007 were far less likely to have a sunny view of life than their 1938 counterparts (Twenge et al., 2010).
3.5.2 Taming Capitalism: From Palliatives to Panaceas To preempt the undesirable political consequences of capitalism, the socialists advocate the nationalization of key assets or enterprises, as well as the provision of safety nets for the poorest and weakest sections of society. Not satisfied with the palliative effect of socialist welfare programs, the Marxists see class revolution as the only way out of what they perceive as grave injustice and a modern-day version of slavery. The Marxists generally start with a historicist—in effect, more extreme and rigid—view of the origin and consequences of social inequality. Convinced that human history follows a predetermined, unilinear, and predictable path—from peasant, agrarian systems, and medieval serfdom, through industrial stages, to the stage of “over-ripe capitalism”—the Marxian dialectic sees the cycles of oppression and resistance ending with a worldwide proletarian revolution and the emergence of a “classless society.” Heads will undoubtedly roll before the arrival of the utopia. The proletarian revolution cannot but be bloody on both sides—on the sides of the workers, and of their oppressors. In the end, however, the proletarian forces will vanquish their exploiters––that is, the bourgeoisie. There is no sign on the horizon yet of the Marxian prophesy coming true. The Soviet Union that came into being with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution provided the proletariat the only but short-lived opportunity to brag about the scientific accuracy and predictive power of Marxism. With the unraveling of the Soviet empire after glasnost (openness) and perestroika (decentralization) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the turn of the capitalist West to gloat. This indeed is one major weakness of historicism—it bites more than it can chew and suffocates while still trying. The moral in USSR’s collapse is its stubborn, doctrinaire attachment to Marxism. The Soviet communists did not grasp the lesson about the self-interested individual sufficiently to marshal and redirect the individual’s otherwise “negative” energy to the state’s survival and development ends. The communists were too hypnotized by “scientific socialism” (and by the power conferred on them by “democratic
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centralism”) to see the danger ahead. China, by contrast, changed course before it was too late. While maintaining a tight grip on broad political directions, the Chinese Communist Party allowed the economy to apply innovative methods— including introducing the incentives needed to transform the economy into the state’s primary nest egg. Karl Popper is one philosopher who remained unmoved by the exaggerated claims of overarching historicism. He, in fact, saw the end of Marxism before he could even consider the probability of history’s end. In Popperian logic, the truth implied in Marxism would still not have been confirmed even if one or several— for instance, the Soviet, the Chinese, and other socialist—experiments had been successful. Truth, after all, lies not in merely assembling facts that correspond to a theory, but in how falsifiable the theory is. According to Popper, life is constant problem solving (Popper, 2001, 2002). A solution one minute becomes a problem the next. For one visible cause, there are many probable but uncertain effects.
3.6 The State and the People: A Comparison of Social Contract Formulae Popper’s attack on the arrogance of Marxism is equally applicable to the contemporary theory of democracy. Just as history is not preprogrammed to go through the social upheavals predicted by Marx, or end with a classless society, there is nothing to suggest that man’s search for the good life—and for a system of government befitting it—will end with the entrenchment of capitalism, liberal democracy, and their situation-conditioned variants. This is what separates serious works of scholarship (like Dahl’s) from Fukuyama’s hype (Dahl and Rae, 2005; Fukuyama, 1993). The only truth none can ever deny is that the knowledge of what is good for the individual lies with the individual. Whether s/he will apply this knowledge to embrace “reason,” for example, Western notions of democracy and capitalism, or choose “foolishness”—by sticking to a system s/he is fully conversant with—is not a question that science can definitively answer.
3.6.1 The Freedom to Choose: Democracy’s Bragging Right If the individual is persuaded by the argument that, under certain conditions, his/her interest lies in surrendering part of his freedom to a central authority, that still leaves open the question how s/he is to check the application of the powers so ceded against her/his preferences. This brings us back to Rousseau’s fundamental question regarding the “form of association” that is best suited to protect individual interest while simultaneously allowing the individual to remain as free as before. Specifically, what part of an individual’s freedom should remain with her/him and what part should s/he forgo for society’s good, and for what specific purposes? Respect for individual liberty is the hallmark of a democratic system of government. As the argument goes, it is only in a democracy that the individual has access
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to the widest array of freedoms—among which are freedoms of conscience, thought, opinion, speech, and worship. The constitution of a typical democracy protects the citizen from arbitrary arrest, retroactive legislations, and enslavement. Unlike an authoritarian system that allows only one political party to operate—specifically, the ruling party—a democracy opens up its space to allow as many political parties and candidates as are willing and able to compete for the people’s mandate. A free and virile press joins a vibrant civil society to keep the rulers on their toes, and to hold the latter accountable. Nondemocratic systems, however, are intolerant of dissent, and so go to great lengths to stifle contrary opinions. Also in contrast to tradition-bound states that rely on superstitions to secure the allegiance of their peoples, or theocratic systems that appeal to religious sentiments and emotions, a democratic state places high premium on the secular values of reason, contestation, and legality. Above all, a democracy is not like hereditary monarchies in which power rotates among particular families, or passes from one ruler to the next in an unbroken line of divinely ordained dynastic succession. In a democracy, sovereignty is totally disconnected from individual personalities, and remains an entity “owned” collectively and on a permanent basis by the “People,” howsoever defined. A democracy’s faith in its people is never in vain. By trusting the individual with the freedom to choose, a democracy ends up being strong and stable. By comparison, the nondemocratic systems’ lack of faith in the reasoning capacity of the individual often springs unpleasant surprises—insurrections, civil strife, state failure, and eventual disintegration. Whereas failed states tend to be brought down in palace coups and nocturnally planned revolutions, the governments of democratic states rise and fall peacefully, and at predictable intervals. What makes all this possible is the freedom that the individual has to associate with others as members of political parties, and, by so doing, decide the fate of individuals and groups competing for the people’s mandate. Thus, simulating the free market where the interplay of demand and supply determines the equilibrium price, a democratic system opens up the political market so rival contenders for power could “sell” their programs to different members of the voting public—the latter being the surrogate “customers.” Although liberal democracy is often touted as the model for other systems to copy, it is far from perfect. To start with, no system concocted by man is perfect. This is true of liberal democracies as it is of their “nondemocratic” counterparts. The liberal democracy’s claim to “perfect competition” is particularly suspect. First, and as earlier argued, the economic model—that the liberal democratic system of government mimics—is itself imperfect. With regard to the “political market,” organized lobbies and political party machines behave exactly like business monopolies and the cartels—that is, they come between the “citizen-customers” and the suppliers of public goods. The organized lobbies, in particular, buy off politicians, and ensure the passage of laws favorable only to the moneyed class and other powerful vested interests. For their own part, the political parties “package” thoroughly disastrous policies as a panacea to the people’s problems, and market clearly incompetent individuals as leaders and “statesmen.”
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Second, if at all, there is something resembling a “political market,” it is totally different from its economic counterpart. A customer faced with the dilemma of choice among competing economic goods is always at liberty to expend his/her marginal income on the product with the highest marginal utility, and withdraw his/her patronage from another with diminishing marginal utility. The average citizen/voter/taxpayer does not enjoy that kind of luxury. The citizen, for instance, cannot decide that s/he has had enough of police protection, or of the obligation to pay tax or to obey traffic regulations. “Demands” for such public goods are deemed to be perpetual, and are, as a matter of public necessity and interest, imposed by the state. Third, the more economically advanced a democracy becomes the greater the restraints on individual liberty. As Rousseau once noted, development comes but at a price—notably, loss of individual freedom. For instance, urbanization requires that a complex maze of laws or ordinances—zoning, traffic, parking, street-walking, and other laws curtailing individual freedom—be enacted. Advances in information and communications technology have also presented the state boundless opportunities to spy on the citizen. At the same time, momentous decisions (like whether or not to invade another country or go to full-scale war) are taken mostly by a few, provided the print and electronic media’s support is assured. This is how it was possible for Obama, as presidential candidate, to distance himself from the Bush administration’s militarism, and as president, to take the “war on terror” beyond Iraq, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia. Iran and Syria are also on the US radar. Whether either or both will feel the weight of American imperialism depends on the influence prevailing within the military–industrial–media coalition. Fourth, lacking in the knowledge of how a modern state functions, the “People” by and for whom the supposedly democratic state is created, is rarely in a position to hold the officials fully accountable for acts of omission and commission. The growing distance between the state and the People is reflected in increasing voter apathy, declining voter turnout, and the drift to parties and candidates espousing extremist causes—mostly right-wing causes in hegemonic states, and apocalyptic in states perceived to be under foreign occupation. Within the United States, the number of groups losing faith in government—and by implication in the democratic system—seems to be on the rise. An example of radical fringe groups, so-called patriot movements, springing up in the citadel of democracy is Hutaree, a right-wing Christian militia. Not content with declaring the federal government Antichrist, nine members of the group plotted the murder of a policeman and the use of weapons of mass destruction at his funeral.9 The aim was to apply terror as a catalyst for widespread uprising against the government. Fifth, if the democratic systems at any time “looked perfect,” it is only because they had enough time to evolve and mature—and all this, without any form of external interference. By contrast, many of the new states—the Soviet Union and China included—have had to fend off disruptive external influences. The weak states in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America are particularly vulnerable to external control and destabilization. The new states might have flags and anthems to support their claims to sovereignty. However, the industrialized states could, at
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any time and contrary to the stipulations of the Treaty of Westphalia, fall back upon any manner of pretence to molest their weaker counterparts and curtail the latter’s freedom of choice.
3.7 Conclusion Human reason has not yet advanced to a stage at which it could instantaneously create perfect socioeconomic and political arrangements. More often than not, each society has to rely on its own ingenuity and, by so doing, incrementally build institutions capable of responding to ongoing challenges. Regrettably, however, the powerful states rarely allow autonomous and contradictory interpretations of “reason” to prevail. Believing that they know what is good for all, the powerful states most frequently impose monistic solutions even when the natural order is in favor of pluralism. Unless sovereign states are determined to preserve their independence and the dignity of their peoples, powerful states are wont to externalize the internal effects of choices made outside their own territorial boundaries—that is, of choices made in distant lands. The pattern and consequences of the externalization are among the topics discussed in the next chapter.
Notes 1. See Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis 2. To thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and statesmen like Bismark, strength is to be preferred to humility, resolute intelligence to altruism, and power to justice. See Durrant, The Story of Philosophy, op. cit., p. 302. 3. De iure belli ac pacis, Chapter 3, op. cit. 4. It is not in all cases that the Mosaic law applies. In Sura Nisai (Ayat 92), the penalty for murder is emancipation of a slave as well as payment of reparations to the deceased’s family. For those without the wherewithal to fulfill the two conditions, fasting for two months is obligatory to atone for the sin. As for qisas, it is meant to be a deterrent to crime, specifically, crime against person. Its underlying message is “do unto others as you very well know shall be done unto you.” Devoid of sentiments, the argument that whoever willfully and maliciously takes an eye loses an eye is difficult to fault. Unless the aggressor is truly penitent, money cannot fully atone for his/her transgressions. Indeed, of what benefit is money is to a person paralyzed for life by the deliberate act of another, to a victim of acid attack, or to those killed in terrorist acts and to those they leave behind? 5. This must sound familiar to the UN Office of Human Resource Management, as well as to the oversight bodies which are inundated with petitions from aggrieved staff members. 6. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. 7. Schumpter and the Austrian school regard “entrepreneurship” as a separate category, whereas the Marxists lump it with “labor,” albeit a special kind of labor. 8. New York Post, Monday, January 26, 2009 (article is titled, “Just plane despicable”). 9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/30/militia-members-police-death-plot. . . (19/04/2010)
Chapter 4
External Effects and the Supranational Sovereign
He mocks the people, (he) who proposes that the Government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor. —President Grover Cleveland’s Fourth Annual Message (December 3, 1888)
4.1 Introduction More than 400 years after its creation, the Westphalian state continues to wrestle with fundamental political questions—particularly, those concerning the purpose and limit of power, the virtues of obedience, the role of the state in individual life, and the morality of arrangements established to secure individual liberties and guarantee access to justice and fairness. Yet, as if they have finally found scientifically precise answers to the perplexing and enduring political questions—that is, the “form of association” acceptable to all and sundry—statespersons and scholars have moved from the national to the global stage with their preconceived, but divergent, ideas of what is good for all. On the one side are the idealists who believe that multilateralism is a natural corollary to the replacement of anarchy by order at the state level, and of the gradual withering away of the Westphalian state in the wake of new complex, supranational challenges; on the other are the realists who see multilateralism as one option among many that could be invoked in pursuit of national interests in an increasingly hostile international environment. In between are those who are persuaded neither by the idealists’ stress on the universality of human values and the interdependence of nations, nor by the realists’ undisguised pursuit of self-interest and crude reliance on power. Building on Chapters 2 and 3, which interrogate the logic underpinning individual freedom and state sovereignty, respectively, this chapter examines the case for internationalism. The chapter focuses, in particular, on the justifications provided for international institutions and arrangements by three schools of thought— idealism, realism, and Kantianism. It also tests the assumptions underlying the three philosophical traditions against contemporary experience. M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_4,
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4.2 Idealism as the Bedrock of Internationalism State sovereignty matters as long as the state is accepted as the major, if not the only, actor on the international scene. As soon the focus changes from the state to supranational regimes, sovereignty as hitherto understood takes on a different meaning. This is the significance of Arnold Toynbee’s (and Samuel Huntington’s) comparative analysis of history. One conclusion emanating from this analysis is that what makes a difference to human history is not the choice made by any nationstate, no matter how powerful, but how effectively particular civilizations respond to ongoing challenges (Toynbee, 1934; Huntington, 1998). According to Toynbee, history is a recurring cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations—with those that prove incapable of responding to challenges going down and being displaced by others better fitted to fill the moral vacuum. The weakness of Toynbee’s thesis lies in its ascription of values to specific cultures. By defining “civilization” to include a group of nations subscribing to a common set of values—like the “Western,” the “Orthodox,” Inca, Ming, and the “Greco-Roman” civilizations—Toynbee mistakes labels for substance, and ignores the internal contradictions in each value system. A major contributor to the evolution of idealist thought is Grotius. His faith in natural law extends to the reasoning capacity of the individual as well as the willingness of states to operate within the law. Where the realists rely on force, Grotius appeals to reason. Whereas the realists see no room for morality in interstate relations, Grotius places it at the center of his analysis. Following Grotius’ example, other idealists devote their time looking for causes of war (casus belli), in the hope of finding a “lasting cure” for the malady. Osgood (1957), for instance, declares any war immoral whose aim is to force a nation’s ideology on others. He holds that to use force under the pretext of making the world safe for democracy, or to sidetrack the rule of law in the name of power politics risks plunging the world into war and violence. Raymond Aaron concurs with the view that power is not a reliable instrument for creating a stable political order, or for maintaining peaceful coexistence among individuals. He argues that within and among states, autonomous wills most frequently collide—with each employing the rhetoric of “honor,” “vital interests,” or “legitimate defense” to gain an advantage over its adversary. The conflicting wills continue to check or balance each other, but when the disputants run out of options, they frequently fall back on the only option left—war. This is where contests between or among individuals are different from interstate power struggles. Aaron maintains that regardless of the prize or the ferocity of the competition for it, individuals tend to be reasonable enough to submit to rules of engagement (Aaron, 1966). Kant’s position on internationalism is not clear—more so, as translations of his writings from German to English differ from one Kantian scholar to another. According to interpreters like Rauch (Kant, 2007), Kantian idealism goes farther than others in arguing the interconnectedness of humankind, and predicting the displacement of parochial nation-states by an international society of states. Other Kantian scholars, however, disagree (Frank, 2001). The third section will examine the two contradictory interpretations.
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4.3 The Realist Rebuttal to Idealism Meanwhile, attention focuses on the realists’ perspective on internationalism. The realists flatly reject the proposition that individuals submit willingly to authority or the rule of law. They instead emphasize the significance of power and the “natural human inclination” to struggle for its possession. Despite important differences— particularly between classical and structural realism—adherents of this school of thought have a few things in common—among them, intense distrust of the human nature, a fanatical devotion to the pursuit of “national interest,” howsoever defined, and a keen sense of the role of power in a hostile environment and in settling disputes arising therefrom. In realist thought, the key actor in international politics is the state, not a supranational regime or group of regimes. As argued by the historian Friedrich Meinecke, “raison d’etat” is the fundamental principle of international conduct, the state’s first law of motion. It determines the action that the statesman must take to ensure the survival and prosperity of the state (Meinecke, 1957:1). Realism’s history runs deep. The school of thought can be traced to the works of Thucydides (circa 460–406 BC), Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527), and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Unlike Herodotus who views history as a compilation of moral lessons—with wars resulting from acts of injustice which, in turn, triggers resistance and retribution—Thucydides noted that based on empirical, eyewitness accounts of political and military conflicts, it was the powerful, not the morally right, that often came out victorious. Thucydides paid particular attention to the fear which the rapid expansion in Athenian power had generated among its opponents in Sparta. He also catalogued instances of apostasy as erstwhile believers saw their places of worship desecrated—that is, reduced by military conflict to theatres of carnage and bloodshed. For Thucydides the lesson is unmistakable: when faced with stark choices, the average human being would do all it takes to survive, including acquiring power, and if confronted by superior power, renouncing moral obligations and religious precepts. Like Thucydides, Machiavelli ridiculed the earlier preoccupation (bordering on obsession) with morality. His experience as a statesman and diplomat did not teach any useful lesson on pious or socially approved conduct. If anything, this experience led him to believe that conscience most frequently stood in the way of the attainment or retention of power. When he employed the term “virtu,” Machiavelli did not mean “virtuous.” He meant “manly,” as in the ability and willingness to enforce one’s will and achieve one’s goal. Virtu required that the prince combine iron resolve with demonstrable strength, guile, and cunning. His amoral view of power is summed up in his classic work, The Prince, as follows: All cities that ever at any time have been ruled by an absolute prince, by aristocrats or by the people, have had for their protection force combined with prudence, because the latter is not enough alone, and the first either does not produce things, or when they are produced, does not maintain them. Force and prudence, then, are the might of all the governments that ever have been or will be in the world.
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Machiavelli must have had a great influence on the Cold War realist writings and policies. In any case, the First and the Second World Wars revealed the weaknesses in idealist thought, and witnessed the ascendancy of realism. Between 1930s and the 1940s, the realists (among them, Han J. Morgenthau, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Frederick Schuman, and George Kennan) engaged the idealists in a robust intellectual debate. Hans Morgenthau’s 1948 book, Politics Among Nations, is a clear example of works inspired by Machiavelli. However, whereas Machiavelli’s focus was on the principalities, Morgenthau’s book was targeted at statesmen taking decisions affecting their and other states. The book’s cold-blooded view of power appealed to realists, and served as the manifesto the United States needed to counter the Soviet threat—the so-called red peril—during the Cold War. Morgenthau pointedly argues that in interstate struggle for power and influence, morality takes the backseat, leaving military and economic strength, systematic deception, and disinformation as strategies in the pursuit of national interest. According to him, when states relate to one another, they never disclose their real intentions—pretending to be strong when they are, in fact, weak, and going out of their ways to be courteous when their motives are really sinister. Actions that are actually designed to enhance a particular nation’s power are packaged and presented (i.e., rationalized) as serving every one’s best interests. In Morgenthau’s view, the end justifies the means (Morgenthau, 1967). The realists draw a sharp dividing line between international and domestic politics. While politics is generally a perpetual struggle for power, it is only in the domestic arena that exercise of power finds true expression and is directed toward concrete goals. Besides, the international environment is not only anarchic and violent, it also lacks the capacity that a typical state relies on to maintain order. As argued by Morgenthau, internationalism is inherently incapable of sustaining a universally acceptable morality. He fails to see how supranational ethics, “composed of Christian, cosmopolitan, and humanitarian elements,” and couched in diplomatic language, could serve as a basis for regulating the conduct of diverse state parties (Morgenthau, 1967:244). In fairness to Morgenthau, many of the values cherished within states tend to be diluted by the imperatives of protocol and diplomacy, and, as noted elsewhere,1 by the different and constantly mutating interpretations they are given inside supranational bureaucracies. After dominating the study of politics for centuries, classical realism might have finally run its course. Its major weakness lies in its negative view of the human nature. By taking faith out of the mind and putting fear in its place, realism increasingly assumed the character of a self-fulfilling prophesy—one which leaned toward actions most likely to trigger, rather than deter, the dreaded reactions. When a nation lives in perpetual fear of others, the chances are that it will thirst for the power it does not need, thus engineering a similar reaction on its opponent’s side. The Iran nuclear standoff should be seen in this light—seen in terms of the actions and reactions of all the parties to the dispute. Raw power, in any case, is useless if it cannot be offensively deployed. An example is the stockpile of nuclear weapons. Whoever initiates a nuclear war had better
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start by preparing for the annihilation of the human race or for the end of life as it has come to be known since the dawn of creation. Even conventional weapons have their limitations. Where the opponent is determined to fight to the bitter end (as in the case of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the threat or reality of death ceases to be a deterrent. Such a situation clearly disproves Thucydides’ hypothesis on the fragility of the human spirit, and leaves the mighty and powerful in a quandary. Suffice it to say that realism’s focus on the state blinds it to the crucial role of nonstate actors in the contemporary world. The terrorists, for instance, have shown little willingness either to work within the state parameters or to be bound by the constraints of protocol and diplomacy.
4.3.1 NeoRealist Fine-Tuning of Cold-Blooded Realism It is against the backdrop of classical realism’s theoretical and practical limitations that its “structural” or neorealist reformulation needs to be viewed. Neorealists hold that while international politics is essentially a struggle for power, this struggle is not attributable to evil or anarchic inclinations (Watson, 2009). Interstate conflict and the attendant security threats are, in neorealist thought, traceable to the absence of an overarching authority above the states, and to the pattern in the distribution of power at the global level. At least three concepts are thus critical to our understanding of neorealist theory––“anarchy,” which prevails at the international level; “hierarchy,” the basis of domestic order; and the distribution of power in the international system. In neorealist ideal construct, the focus of actors is on security, not power (Waltz, 1979; Haas, 1964).
4.4 Globalization and the “Withering Away” of the State: Kantian Rationalism’s Vindication or Misinterpretation? While the Westphalian state is reappraising its role in an increasingly volatile world, a new school of idealism has been busy, plotting a comeback and mounting a counterattack on realism. The contemporary idealists’ case for internationalism almost invariably comes across as a fait accompli. Internationalism, they argue, is the natural outcome of an evolutionary process, which began with the anarchic “state of nature,” followed by the emergence of the sovereign state, and as a result of the Westphalian state’s inherent ability to tackle new challenges, its gradual replacement by supranational institutions. If some scholars are to be believed, the moving spirit behind internationalism is Kant. Rauch’s 2007 translation of this seminal thinker depicts the latter as a foremost internationalist. In support of this conclusion, Rauch highlights Kant’s influence not only on the evolution of the doctrine of self-determination, but also on the establishment of the League of Nations as well as the succeeding United Nations (Kant, 2007).
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It is easy to see how Kant could have been mistaken for an internationalist. His Postulates of Practical Reason convey grand ideas—what he terms “the Ideas of God, freedom, and immortality.” In Kantian philosophy, reason not only connects the individual to the phenomenal world and to things-in-themselves, but also turns him/her into a moral, public-spirited being. Besides, as the one with the exclusive knowledge of what is personally right or wrong (i.e., of what is good for him/herself), the individual is better equipped than any external authority, presumably the state, to take decisions concerning him/her. The liberating influence of Kantianism is immediately palpable. If the individual is endowed with reason, where does that leave the sovereign’s “divine right” to rule? If reason connects one with the other—and everything is connected with everything else—where is the room for parochial nationalism? Indeed, if the preceding interpretation of Kant accurately reflects his inner thoughts, he could not but be viewed with suspicion by those in authority. His appeal to reason could, in fact, be interpreted as incitement against coercive authority, or better still, a clarion call for unity among the peoples of the world to remove encumbrances on their personal freedoms. By relying on the authority of reason, rather than on preordained arrangements for the governance of society, Kant comes across as a subversive element—one bent on upsetting the Westphalian applecart, and lending intellectual support to a worldwide revolution. Wight must have endorsed this characterization of Kant, for he, Wight, lumps all the Kantians under the heading of “the subversion and liberation and missionary men” (Butterfield and Wight, 1966; Bull, 1976). Still, whatever “internationalist” designs were embedded in Kant’s writings must have been counteracted, if not sabotaged, by his emphasis on freewill. Where the individual is truly free, wills are likely to collide. To proceed from the Kantian presumption of an “international mind” to the fabrication of an “international society” risks turning what is supposed to be a liberating idea into an enslaving one. The likelihood of Kant’s ideas being hijacked by power-driven realists (and turned into a justification for global dominance and oppression) is not lost on a few Kantian scholars. Unlike other Kantian translators, these scholars tend to be wary of the sweeping, unqualified portrayal of Kant as an internationalist. Franke, for instance, cautions against reading too much into Kant’s idea of the “international” mind or society, arguing instead that attention focus on the thinker’s contribution to political theory and philosophy (Franke, 2001). The concepts of “international mind” and “international society” undoubtedly flow from a false premise—that of harmony in international relations. 9/11 and subsequent events bring into bold relief the conflict that remained submerged for centuries. These events indicate that the faster the world accelerates toward a society of minds the sharper is the conflict on issues that had earlier been dismissed as inconsequential or completely overlooked (Bernstein and Coleman, 2009). There is no doubt that by bringing issues facing different societies to every home on the planet, modern information and communications technology enables peoples from diverse backgrounds to “know one another,” and by so doing, to tolerate, if not celebrate, cultural diversity. Nonetheless, knowledge is a two-edged sword. It is capable of promoting tolerance. At the same time, it may create new fault lines that
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reinforce age-old prejudices, foster a siege mentality within civilizations, and render cultural boundaries impermeable. Box 4.1 below lists topics frequently covered in news reports, and capable of reinforcing old prejudices and sharpening the conflict between Western and non-Western societies.2 Box 4.1 Probable Ethno-Centric Interpretations of Media Coverage of Western and Non-Western Societies’ Norms and Practices
Sample headlines of Western societies’ norms and practices that non-Western societies may find strange and/or unsettling Evolutionary “progress”; supremacy of science over faith; secularism; hedonism/instant gratification; drug addiction; corporate greed; impatience with traditions; tolerance of nudity, lewd language/behavior and violence on prime time television; degrading treatment/portrayal of women at wrestling contests—for entertainment and profit; same-sex marriage; ordination of gay priests; stem-cell research (or harvesting and destroying of embryonic life to “save” the living); human cloning; euthanasia; school shootings and lock-down; teenage pregnancy; water-boarding and torture, telephone tapping, invasion of privacy, and sundry individual rights violations in liberal democracies; sub-human conditions under which Guantanamo detainees (labeled “enemy combatants”) are kept, vis-à-vis the provisions of the Geneva Convention.
Sample headlines of non-Western societies’ norms and practices that their Western counterparts may find strange and/or unsettling Creationism; belief in God, and in life after death; failure to apply the intellect to conquer the environment and engineer economic growth; grinding poverty; masochism; fatalism; resistance to change; arranged marriage; marriage of under-age girls; homophobia; whipping of “adulterous” women in public; sundry human rights violations; ethnic violence and spill-over effects; child labor; ill-treatment of war prisoners and non-combatants; genocide and commitment of war-related atrocities; increasing number of refugees and internally displaced persons; breakdown of civil order; state collapse.
4.4.1 Globalization and “International Society” Undaunted by the cautionary interpretation of Kant, a new generation of scholars have taken the ascendancy of globalization as an opportunity to reopen the debate on Kantian internationalism. The new internationalists are bolder than their idealist predecessors in stating the case for a “new world order”—a world in which sovereign rule has been toppled by international law and institutions. Thus, where the realists had once seen the Westphalian state as the final frontier, the new idealists project it as a transit stop in the journey to new forms of international governance dominated by a new set of, largely nonstate, actors (Little and Smith, 2005). The main
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strands of neo-idealist thought are power and security, interdependence, the tension between dominance and resistance, and the role of institutions in global governance and in the development of international law (Keohane, 2005, 2007; Holzgrefe and Keohane, 2003). Needless to add that contemporary studies of globalization have yet to take a truly global—that is, culturally neutral and objective—form. As Scholte rightly observes (Scholte, 2005:15), . . . most studies of globalization have come from a limited social base of urban-based, white, professional, Judaeo-Christian, middle-aged men. Given these biases, the existing literature—however wide-ranging it may be—does not adequately cover many experiences of globalization.
The biases manifest in different forms, but particularly in the way the state is cast as a supine, decaying, retreating, and increasingly irrelevant institution. As the argument goes, the sovereign state—the traditional custodian of “national interest” and bulwark against the conquest of the weak by the strong—is on its way out. According to the globalist determinists, the factor accounting for the withering away of the state is not the worldwide proletarian revolution (or the emergence of a classless society) foretold by Marx. Instead, the “unstoppable force” of globalization is behind the decline of the state and the ascendancy of supranational regimes (Muldoon, 2004:4; Kenny and Germain, 2006; Baylis, Smith, and Owens, 2008). Helping the globalization force along are other developments with transnational effects. Examples of the secondary or opportunistic factors in the emergence of supranational regimes are the rise of institutions with transnational agenda, socioeconomic instability in parts of the world, the advance of the HIV-AIDS scourge and other hitherto unknown health hazards, global warming, environmental pollution, increasing cases of human trafficking and other cross-border crimes, sundry threats to global peace and security, and, above all, advances in information and communications technologies along with the corresponding integration of countries into a global economic and financial network. The new idealists argue that states are incapable of responding to the perceived threats on their own, and therefore have to surrender a measure of their sovereignties to regimes better equipped for the challenge—notably, global and intergovernmental institutions. Above all, globalization has conferred on nonstate actors powers which they never had (Zacher, 1992; Slaughter, 2004). In other words, national governments are losing their autonomy not only to multinational corporations and international organizations, but also to “a multitude of citizen groups, known as non-governmental organizations. . .” (Muldoon, 2004:4; Buzan, 2004). In Anglo-American discourse, civil society seeks nothing less than promoting the merits of individual rights and voluntary association, a contractual and delimited state structure, and a market economy in which the relations of private property are sacrosanct3
However, any announcement of the Westphalian state’s demise would appear to be premature, and the inevitability of the momentous event, highly questionable. First, “global civil society” is an ideal that is not universally shared, rather than
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an idea with a firm theoretical or empirical base (Kenny and Germain, 2006). Second, as Brown forcefully argues (Brown, 1996:108–109), most national authorities would prefer to handle by themselves the conduct of their relations with other nations, rather than subordinate “the sovereignty of their territorial unit to ‘supranational’ governing bodies purporting to act on behalf of some larger inchoate (or non-existent) international community. . ..” The experience of the United States supports Brown’s conclusion. Close to 50 Republican Congressmen once sponsored a nonbinding resolution requesting the Supreme Court to ensure that judicial decisions were based on American laws and court decisions, rather than on foreign ones (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/ 4506232 – “A flap over foreign matter at the Supreme Court: House members protest use of non-US rulings in big cases,” March 11, 2004).4 Other observers see sovereign states remaining relevant in the contemporary era of globalization (Dunne and Schmidt, 2005:161). As regards the NGOs, their rising profile at international fora is a sign of their wanting a piece of the action, not of their endorsement of power grab by supranational regimes (Rosenau, 2007; Scholte, 2006). NGOs, particularly those based in the developing countries, would welcome an opportunity to share much of the power currently exercised by external agents, such as the Permanent Members of the Security Council, the donor countries and their agencies, international financial institutions, and the big multinational corporations. It is thus not entirely correct to assume that the only stumbling block to internationalism is state sovereignty. Individuals agitated by the growing erosion of their freedoms are likely to resist supranational intrusion into their lives as energetically as they contest the legitimacy of states sustained by force rather than by popular will. Evidence abounds indicating that the “multitude of citizen groups” are not enthusiastic about globalization and the feeling of individual helplessness it engenders. The antiglobalization protests at the venues of the World Economic Forum and of the meetings of Breton-Wood institutions are a sign that, if put to a vote within nation-states, the majority would block proposals likely to deepen “foreign entanglements.” The draft constitution meant to transfer powers from member states of the European Union to Brussels came to naught when the Dutch and the French electorate voted against it in the 2005 referenda held in both countries. Since then, advocates of the pan-European project have moved gingerly, weighing their options as they proceed. Among the options so far explored are bypassing the electorate altogether and dispensing with the trappings of democracy and the pretense to legitimacy. In any case, Muldoon himself acknowledges that “globalization” would not have succeeded in bringing about the “New World Order” without the aid of another fortuitous development—notably, the collapse of the Soviet Union. His comment on this chance occurrence betrays the logical inconsistency in contemporary idealist thought. According to him (Muldoon, 2004:3), the disintegration of the Soviet Union provides an opportunity for the emergence of a New World Order which, besides being secured by “the unprecedented harmony” among the permanent members of the UN Security Council, guarantees
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4 External Effects and the Supranational Sovereign peace and prosperity based on core Western values—justice and democracy, free and open trade within a global market economy, and international security.
This characterization of the emerging world order leaves at least four questions unanswered. If the values, nay, precepts, of “justice,” “democracy,” and free trade are Western, will the non-Western world not feel colonized if required to learn and imbibe them? Second, if harmony rules within the Security Council, does this not portend grave risks for those who have legitimate questions about the new order? Or to rephrase the question, is the world not heading toward a “one-party” state––a supranational state that, in its demand for total obedience, equates dissent with, at best, resistance to “progress,” at worst, an open rebellion that must be suppressed with all available means? Where does this modern-day authoritarian idealism fit into the universal values of freedom, democracy, and human rights underpinning multilateralism? Third, and this flows directly from the first and the second questions, if a country or a group of countries holds a copyright on values, is there no danger of the values being opportunistically invoked (or repudiated) as occasion demands? Fourth, if the Westphalian state disintegrates, is there not a likelihood of the world relapsing to the pre-Westphalian era? When, in the era of globalization, the elected Roman emperor reincarnates as the unelected coalition of superpowers and bureaucrats, sovereign states are likely to be denied the authority they need to fulfill their citizens’ unique expectations, serve local constituencies’ interests, and curb anarchy. Contemporary writings on globalization, in fact, fail woefully when it comes to explaining the increasing but destabilizing role played by another kind of international “civil society”—the masterminds and executors of terrorist attacks. These otherwise nonstate actors that have plunged the world into a permanent state of emergency have also refused to operate within the conventional state structure, or to subscribe to the conventional rules of civic engagement. Global civil society would remain a myth unless its apologists can point to one instance of unanimity of opinion. Indeed, if their common hatred of “bourgeois exploitation” had, in a bygone era, failed to unite the workers of the world, globalization theory will be hard put to explain how civil society groups, with conflicting agendas, would line up behind a single ideology of global governance. Thus, instead of fabricating global civil society solidarity, and hyping “new forms of international governance,” built on a virtually nonexistent social contract, attention ought to focus on a significant development—that is, the ascendancy of institutions with cleverly articulated and constantly expanding transnational agendas. The accounts presented in the succeeding chapters indicate that when supranational institutions (like the World Bank, WTO, and the United Nations) join forces with willing civil society groups, it is only to use the latter as pawns in high-stake bureaucratic chess games. The interests that get served in such circumstances are not those of civil society at large, much less of the individual citizen, and certainly not of the average state party, or of public order. The “interest of the organization” rides piggyback on the strategic interests of the powerful member states and of organized lobbies to override all others.
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The relationship between a typical supranational bureaucracy and civil society is, of course, not always one-sided. Just as the former sometimes uses the latter as a front, elements within civil society sometimes have their own agendas that cannot be advanced, except with the support of foreign allies. Civil society’s motivation to “go global” increases where national arrangements are perceived as too constraining and the supranational arena provides an escape. Yet, as noted in Chapters 2 and 3, the frequent tendency to enlist the support of outsiders in resolving local issues raises fundamental questions about democracy, suffrage rights, the essence of pluralism, and the quest for identity in a multicultural world.
4.5 Internationalism: From Old Realities to New Choices The contemporary world is—as it has always been—one inspired by idealism but ruled by the realists. Fashioning a genuinely new world order entails applying realism’s state-centered methods to attain idealism’s overarching objectives of freedom, equality, and international understanding. The Treaty of Westphalia’s underlying aim was to create a world in which peace and security would reign. It, accordingly, conferred on sovereign states the power to dispose of matters directly concerning them. The Treaty acknowledged the sovereign equality of the states, big and small, and decreed the principle of noninterference in each state’s internal affairs. Yet, more than 400 years after the Treaty came into force, the world remains unstable. Since the promulgation of the Treaty on October 24, 1648, the world has been engulfed in two great wars (the First and the Second World Wars), and millions have perished in countless localized conflicts across the globe. It is true that with the accession to the Treaty by an increasing number of states, relations among states became formalized. Not only was each state held accountable for developments within its territory, but over time, multilateral institutions like the League of Nations and the present-day United Nations were also created to serve as forums for the resolution of interstate conflict. Nonetheless, and regardless of the progress in international law (and institutions), peace and security continue to elude the world. The gap between the Westphalian Treaty’s promise and the contemporary reality demands an explanation. Does the fault lie with the Treaty itself or with how it plays out in the world of realpolitik? To rephrase the question, is the growing insecurity attributable to the parochialism fostered by the Treaty, or to the failure to honor the Treaty’s letter and spirit? The answer lies somewhere between the two possible explanations. As argued in this book, the world’s trouble began when each powerful state saw in the Westphalian Treaty an opportunity to pursue its interests at its rivals’ and the weaker states’ expense. Each powerful state looks for “every manner of pretense” to assert its sovereignty and to ride roughshod over other sovereign states. Power conveys on the wielder the right to dispense with diplomatic etiquette and civility, and grants it immunity from retribution.
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The UN Security Council is where the great power rivalry and arrogance are clearly on display. Where no vital interest is at stake, the Permanent Members deem themselves empowered not only to run the world, but also to make broad declarations on who or what constitutes threat to public order. On other occasions, however, the Security Council is unable to achieve the unanimity required to declare anything good or bad. The stumbling block on such occasions is the veto power that the Charter confers on each permanent member. The veto is the UN Charter’s acknowledgement of antinomy—that is, of the permanent members’ right to hold conflicting, but equally plausible, positions on an issue. The veto, at times, created deadlocks at the Security Council, thus sparking off a frantic search for escape. For instance, although the United States was convinced that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and would like to see this threat to world peace immediately removed, it felt obliged to bypass the Security Council when Russia, France, and China insisted on waiting for the report of the UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, before taking any action.5 Faced with the real possibility of its Iraq plan being vetoed in the Security Council, America decided instead to constitute a “coalition of the willing” to invade Iraq in March 2003, and, above all, effect a “regime change”—a pseudonym for an externally executed military overthrow of the government of a sovereign state. The United States might brittle over its fellow permanent members’ “obstructionist” tactic on the Iraq question. However, it too has, on many occasions, exercised its veto right to block declarations deemed unfavorable to its allies, particularly, Israel. At the height of the Israel–Hamas conflict in 2008, the United States rejected Libya’s proposal for a cease-fire, citing Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas aggression. Back in 1956, both France and the United Kingdom had teamed up to veto a Security Council resolution, calling on Israel to withdraw its forces from the Sinai Peninsula. The Iraq invasion is, at any rate, not the first instance of the superpowers’ interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. In 1983, US forces overthrew the Marxist-leaning and Cuba-backed government of Grenada, ostensibly to rescue American medical students whose lives had been threatened. Similarly, in 1989, the United States entered Panama, deposed the country’s de facto ruler and former CIA operative, Manuel Noriega, and dissolved the Panamanian Defense Council. Citing Article 51 of the UN Charter on self-defense, the United States informed the Security Council that it had opted for self-defense following a series of provocative actions by Noriega—among them, threatening American lives, rigging elections that American-leaning candidates were sure of winning,6 violating human rights, trafficking in drugs while pretending to be working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and laundering the proceeds of his ill-gotten gains in US banks. The death of one US Marine and the harassment of US citizens by the Panamanian military presumably constituted the “armed attack” that Article 51 had in mind in allowing individual or collective self-defense. The Russian Federation is another member of the Security Council that knows when its intended course of action runs the risk of being vetoed. Citing Georgia’s ground and air attack on South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, on August 7, 2008,
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as an act of aggression, Russia mounted a counterattack aimed at restoring the status quo ante. Russian and Abkhazian forces opened a second front by attacking Kodori Gorge. Not satisfied with expelling Georgian forces from South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia went into the offensive by occupying Georgian territory. All the while, the General Assembly did what it knew best how to do—appeal for calm. In their own response, the United States and its NATO allies hinted that Russia’s use of force in Georgia would damage relations with its Security Council counterpart and with the Western military alliance. China’s role in Tibet is well known and does not deserve any further attention. The British and the French have a long history of colonizing foreign lands, and imposing imperial rule. Whether, as members of the UN Security, they could behave with moderation is a moot point. Besides applying force to achieve their objectives, the powerful states have devised other methods to circumvent the noninterference provisions of the Westphalia Treaty. They rely mostly on soft power—like the promulgation of global trade and finance rules favorable to early starters, seasoning of aid and technical assistance packages with condiments likely to perpetuate the recipients’ dependence on the donors, infiltration of foreign government and civil society institutions, and reliance on espionage as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. As soon as a targeted state downloads the viruses uploaded by foreign interests (by placing in strategic positions individuals beholden to, or highly recommended by, such interests), it loses the capacity to pursue a truly independent course. Whether the steady subordination of local to foreign interests bodes well for peace and stability is an open question.
4.6 Future Directions in Internationalism Chapter 2 argues the proposition that it is the individual who knows best what is good for him/her. However, acting on individual knowledge will almost invariably lead to conflicting choices. When wills collide, it is essential that the contradiction be resolved by an arbiter most familiar with the issues at stake, and—due to the clear and present danger that the issues constitute—most interested in how they are resolved. This is the rationale for the powers exercised by the sovereign state, and has been alluded to in Chapter 3. This chapter examines the case for internationalism. It concludes that instead of expending a disproportionate amount of time and energy searching for the perpetually elusive harmony in international relations, the focus of analysis ought to be on the proximity or contiguity of interests. The “interest contiguity theory,” postulated in Chapter 1, dictates that, barring purely personal questions left to individual conscience, domestic quarrels should be settled by the family or the clan, interclan conflicts by the district or provincial authority, and interprovincial disputes by agencies of the Westphalian state that all parties freely and equally accept as legitimate. At any rate, the interest that gets fully served in any particular situation is the one that is tangible, present, dominant, and organized. This is the case with the interest of
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the solitary individual in his/her own personal life, as it is with state policies that are compatible with the aspirations of the people, the vision that one state shares with others (e.g., in securing the world against terrorism, environmental pollution, and virulent diseases), and the bureaucratic or broader “organization interest” in supranational jurisdictions. The message in the contiguity theory is lost where a distant supranational entity pretends to be better equipped (and more legitimate) to serve purely local interests than the government and/or the people directly concerned. Facing up to the challenge of global security thus entails reconciling three parallel and competing interests—those of the individual, the sovereign state, and the supranational organizations. The individual interest is served when s/he enjoys maximum freedom to decide matters which concerns her/him and nobody else. The state or national interest lies in arbitrating and aggregating conflicting individual (as well as group) interests and maintaining order. However, the typical supranational organization’s interest is not easy to define, particularly, in relation to the two other types of interest. It is, in fact, this ambiguity that the protagonists of internationalism have yet to address. Undoubtedly, new forms of idealism and realism have emerged with a dogmatic view of global governance. The new idealists, in particular, contend that as new challenges unfold, a new order, the supranational state, is bound to supplant the nation-state, just as the latter had replaced anarchy centuries earlier. This raises the question whether the march to global governance is inexorable, and whether this bodes well for individual liberty, for national stability, and for global peace and security. Besides rejecting the overarching historicism underlying both idealism and contemporary realism, this chapter wonders whether the lurch to global government is the only plausible or even rational way to answer Rousseau’s question on the form of association which “defends and protects with all common forces the interest of each associate,” while at the same time allowing each associate maximum liberty to live his or her life as he or she sees fit. The coming generations of visionary leaders will be those that make a serious and determined attempt to answer the question in a meaningful way. If history offers any lesson, it is that the New World Order (which thrives on the emasculation of national sovereign powers) will soon become old. This is likely to happen as new generations of leaders embark on a diligent search for alternatives. Whoever argues that there is no alternative to his theory has either stopped thinking, or has decided that the only way to discourage others from thinking is by affirming the futility of their efforts. Life, as Popper reminds us, is constant problem solving.
Notes 1. Balogun, M.J., 2010, Headhunting for world peace: An inside view of UN employment law and practices. PublishAmerica, Baltimore, MD. 2. This is not to say that opinions within either category of societies will converge on every topic. For instance, there are “creationists” and believers in God in Western societies as there are “free thinkers” in other parts of the world. Similarly, just as many non-Westerners will recoil from
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the idea of same-sex marriage, a good number of Westerners will still take their chances with the age-old institution of marriage—that is, the one founded on the union of man with woman. There are probably more Westerners opposed to Guantanamo than non-Westerners! Like any affective comparison, the asymmetry presented in Box 4.1 is relative. Its only relevance lies in providing the pretext which different communities need to label and pigeonhole, that is, “name and shame,” one another. To the extent that mass communication assists in “labelling,” to that would it collude in the pigeonholing process. Kenny, M., and Germain, R., 2006, “The Idea(l) of global civil society” in Randall Germain and Michael Kenny (eds.), The Idea of Global Civil Society: ethics and politics in a globalizing era (Abingdon: Routledge). Like Justice Antonin Scalia’s, Justice Clarence Thomas’s position on the subject is even more rigid. In a 2002 death penalty case, he declared that the Supreme Court’s “jurisprudence should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans.” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/ 4506232/). Foreigners would, in all probability, concur, hoping that American moods, fads, or fashions would not be foisted on them as non-Americans. Similarly, the United States declared the Lebanese Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization in October 1997. It did not succeed in persuading the Security Council to so declare. All the Council did in September 2004 was to pass a resolution (No. 1599) calling for the disbanding and disarming of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias, which by implication covered Hezbollah. America’s support, open or covert, for candidates in Panamanian elections raises the question if that country was another US state (like Texas, New York, or Georgia).
Part II
International Relations: History and Contemporary Challenges
Chapter 5
From the League of Foes to the United Nations: A Brief History of Internationalism
We (the Creator) did assign the Trusteeship (for the governance of the universe) to the Heavens, the Earth, and (finally) the Mountains. They all declined the offer, conscious of their limitations and scared of failure. Then Man stepped forward to accept the burden, only to turn out to be unjust and ignorant. —Qur’an, Sura Ah’zaab, Ayat 72
5.1 Introduction In contrast to nationalism that has, in different forms, shaped political behavior for centuries, internationalism did not enter into human consciousness or serious academic discourse until the early and the later parts of the twentieth century, respectively. When Hobson’s book, Towards International Government, was published in 1915, the world hardly understood what was meant by “international,” let alone the form of government capable of giving the word practical expression. The nations that might have “interrelated” with one another on a multilateral basis were still at different formative stages, with some—particularly, the Ottoman, the AustroGerman Hapsburg, the Napoleonic, the Austro-Hungarian, the Japanese, and the British empires—wrestling with internal and external irredentist claims, demands for home rule or boundary adjustments, and conflict. Besides, the League of Nations had not yet been created to provide a forum at which nations could harmonize their interests, and the number of specialized institutions with supranational mandates were few and in between. Yet, in recent years, internationalism tends to be portrayed as an age-old, steadily evolving, and unstoppable force. This chapter holds that, rather than follow a preordained, unilinear, and foreseeable historical path, internationalism emerged as a result of unusual collocations of interests and circumstances, and through a process of trial and error. In an attempt at breaking the path dependency in the contemporary study of international relations, the chapter proceeds by undertaking a longitudinal analysis of the history of the multilateral institutions. Besides tracing the antecedents to the establishment of the League of Nations and the United Nations, it highlights the challenges facing the world in balancing power with the imperatives of international law and morality. M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_5,
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5.2 Internationalism before the Establishment of the League of Nations Before the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919, the world had little experience in the design and operation of public multinational organizations. It is true that the writs of the huge empires—like the Byzantine, the Roman, the Mongol, the Ottoman, the Austro-German Hapsburg, the Napoleonic, the Austro-Hungarian, the Japanese, the British, and, in Africa, the Mali, the Shonghai, and the Oyo empires—extended beyond the modern states’ territorial boundaries, and were as “international” as any could be. However, each of the empires was to all intents and purposes administered as a single entity, founded on allegiance to a single sovereign, that is, the emperor or empress, and bound, mostly by force or implied concurrence, to one form of “social contract” or another. Over time, the empires faced and almost invariably succumbed to demands for home rule and for the abrogation of imaginary—nay, fabricated—“social contracts.” In other words, early efforts at the imposition of supranational governance arrangements were resisted by competing external forces as well as by local nationalists’ demand for autonomy from foreign rule. It is equally a fact that a handful of specialized organizations existed before the creation of the League of Nations. They include the International Telecommunications Union (established in 1865); the International Meteorological Organization (1873)1 ); the Universal Postal Union (1875); the International Electro-technical Commission (1906),2 and the Rhine Commission established by the Congress of Vienna in 1915 (see Box 6.1 in the next chapter). The Concert of Europe, which was convoked by the Congress of Vienna (between 1815 and 1914), could be regarded as the forerunner of the present-day Council of Europe and of the European Union. The Concert was established to create a new Europe out of the ruins of the Napoleonic wars. It soon disintegrated due to its domination by powerful states that became the “self-appointed guardians” of the European system of states (Alger, 1995). Yet another attempt at multilateralism was the Hague system which evolved after a series of conferences held between 1899 and 1907. The League of Nations borrowed extensively from the approach to peaceful settlement of disputes as codified by the Hague System. Also, like the Hague System, the League adopted a universal thrust, emphasizing the need for the participation of all states in its deliberations (Alger, 1995). However, relations among states were largely bilateral and built on a system of competing alliances. The United States, which today plays a prominent role on the international stage, maintained its isolationist position up to the 1930s, believing that its freedom of action was better assured by unilateralism than multilateralism. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 compelled a rethinking of the bilateral arrangements. The idealists, in particular, believed that wars became inevitable where institutions for the resolution of conflict and enforcement of peace were lacking. The First World War, for instance, could have been avoided if a forum had existed at which nations might iron out their differences and deliberate on common interests.
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In the second year of the War, Hobson articulated the idealists’ position by publishing a major work titled Towards International Government (Hobson, 1915). Like any idealist, his major concern was how to bring the War to a speedy end, preempt future wars, and get nations “to cooperate for common purposes” (Hobson, 1915:173). Following Kant’s eighteenth-century lead, Hobson went to great lengths to find ways of building and sustaining what he termed “the international mind.” Convinced that states were prone to mutual self-destruction, he advocated the establishment of an international government founded on a “social contract of nations,” and rendered effective by the leadership of the European powers of the time— Britain, France, Russia, Germany—and their non-European counterparts, the United States and Japan. The powerful nations would presumably form the International Council, the precursor to the modern-day Security Council. The other instruments proposed by Hobson are the Conciliation Committee, and a Court of Arbitration. Hobson was particularly concerned about German sensibilities. Besides forcefully recommending the inclusion of Germany in any postwar settlement, he cautioned against humiliating the country and its people. In his view, any attempt at Germany’s dismemberment or degradation would blast all hopes of a pacific future for the world by planting a permanent danger zone in the centre of Europe, which would keep that quarter of the globe an armed camp and a perpetual area of intrigue (Hobson, 1915:174).
As will soon become clear, the European powers were not fully swayed by Hobson’s argument. While his recommendation regarding Germany could not be readily dismissed, the premise on which his argument rests is highly questionable. Hobson’s basic assumption is that nationalism was an impediment to global understanding. To the extent that sovereign states served as its (nationalism’s) arrow-head, to that would they have constituted serious threats to peace and security. It is true that even before the first shots were fired, the struggle among European states for territories and power contributed in no small measure to the commencement of the First World War. Influenced by the realist balance-of-power doctrine, European states entered into treaties, based on their calculations of their interests and their perceptions of threats from other states. The shifting system of alliances was by itself a cause of global instability. While states had permanent interests their external allegiances changed from time to time. Such an unstable system could not but threaten public order and international security. However, if the world went to war in 1914, it was not because sovereign states were bent on annihilating one another, but because the states were still grappling with a crisis of epic proportions—the crisis of legitimacy compounded by mounting, but largely unsettled, territorial claims. Heedless of historical lessons, states applied force to bring disparate peoples in far off places under centralized control. The Byzantine empire, for instance, had waxed strong as it extended its GrecoRoman influence in foreign lands. Its military, economic, and cultural presence was felt over a huge swath of territory in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Its descent from glory was a matter of time, more so, as its hostile neighbors—the
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Persians, the Arabs, the Finno-Ugrians, and the Slavs—did not cease conspiring against it. It was, however, the Turks that finally saw the end of the Byzantine empire. The succeeding Ottoman empire waxed for centuries before disintegrating in 1923. By refusing to learn from history, the Ottoman empire went the way of its precursors. From its humble beginnings in 1299 to its demise in 1923, the empire displayed an insatiable craving for power. It extended its influence across three continents— southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Following its defeat in the First World War, the Allied powers ordered that the empire be partitioned. It was left to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to dispose of the last vestige of Ottoman power when he declared Turkey a republic in October 1923.3 Ataturk was, of course, not the brain behind the Ottoman empire’s disintegration. He was merely finishing a task started by others. For instance, Arab and other nations formerly subject to Ottoman rule sought to break free. With the encouragement of European powers (that were horrified by the rapid growth of the Islamic Caliphate), the former Ottoman territories got what they craved—independence as sovereign states. Just as the Ottoman empire was breathing its last, its Austro-Hungarian counterpart was battling with Serbian irredentist claims over Bosnia-Herzegovina. It probably would have succeeded in containing the revolt but for events leading up to the First World War. The War was preceded by high drama depicting a cast of shadowy characters with murderous intentions. At the center of the drama was the Austro-Hungarian empire, supported by Germany. Opposed to the two allies were the Kingdom of Serbia and Russia. The drama unfolded with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, during an official visit to Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. With the backing of irredentist elements within the Serbian military intelligence, a few Serbian youths had concluded that taking out the heir to the Austrian throne would greatly help their cause—which was the merger of Slavic populations in the Austro-Hungarian empire with their “kith and kin” in Serbia. Their dream state would be a new Slav Kingdom under Serb control. It will amount to extreme reductionism to hold a singular act, no matter how significant, responsible for such a momentous decision as the mobilization of troops or for the subsequent escalation to a full-scale war. Specifically, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was more a pretext for than the cause of World War I. In looking for the casus belli, the analyst needs to take into account the long-standing animosity between and among the States Parties. All the same, the assassination of the prince provided a good excuse as any to settle old scores and ignite new conflicts. Assured of Germany’s support, the AustroHungarian authorities peremptorily gave Serbia 48 hours to answer a number of questions, such as, when those accused of masterminding and carrying out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be apprehended, tried, and punished; Serbia’s policy on Bosnia-Herzegovina’s status as an Austro-Hungarian enclave; what Serbia was doing to maintain good relations with the Austro-Hungarian empire; and the steps being taken to stop anti-Austrian sentiments within Serbia.
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Although the government of Serbia officially disowned the assassins and went through the motion of condemning their action, it failed to meet the key demands of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Dissatisfied with Serbia’s response—or lack of it—to its diplomatic query, the Austro-Hungarian empire mobilized its troops. Germany soon followed suit. Serbia’s ally, Russia, got the message. So did other European powers. One by one, all, except Italy, quickly chose sides. The Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire, Germany, and Bulgaria banded together on one side as the “Central Powers.” Arrayed against the four were 28 countries fighting on the side of the “Allied Powers.” Prominent among the Allied Powers are Great Britain, France, Russia, Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro. Italy and Japan joined the Allies in 1915 but the United States of America did not come on board until 1917. The War lasted four years (1914–1918), resulting in huge civilian and military casualties on both sides—16 million dead and 21 million wounded. The total number of soldiers lost in combat was 9.7 million, with 5.7 million fighting on the side of the Allied Powers, and 4 million on the side of the Central Powers.4 The cessation of hostilities presented an opportunity to revisit Hobson’s 1915 ideas about the causes and consequences of the War, as well as his proposals for lasting peace.. . .Probably because of the scary title he chose for his book, international government, many of the useful ideas canvassed by Hobson were ignored at the Paris Peace Conference and left out of the Treaty of Versailles. Also, rather than assuage the defeated powers’ feelings and placate the Prussian militarist spirit, the Allied Powers took special delight in cutting the belligerent Germany down to size—diplomatically, economically, and above all, militarily. Each of the victorious Allies undoubtedly had its own design on the militarily subdued but adamant and defiant Germany. For instance, France, on whose soil the major battles had been fought, insisted on the payment of crippling reparations. Great Britain did not welcome the prospect of losing its long-standing trading partner (Germany), but was persuaded by the argument that the latter’s war-making capacity needed to be completely dismantled. The United States was equally conciliatory on the issue of reparations, but like Great Britain, saw no alternative to total eradication of German militarism. Thus, contrary to Hobson’s recommendation, the five victorious Allies (France, Great Britain, the United States, Italy, and Japan) practically humiliated Germany. They constituted a “Council of Ten” which excluded their old foe, and took the big decisions. One of such decisions was that Germany should formally acknowledge its role as the aggressor. This acknowledgement carried a huge price—payment of reparations for the damage inflicted on the victorious countries’ infrastructure and on their populations, arraignment of German leaders, starting with Emperor Wilhelm II, before a war crimes tribunal, and drastic reduction in military personnel and equipment. In addition, Germany was to return to France the portion of Alsace-Lorraine territory captured during the Franco-Prussian war, give up the Polish Corridor, and lose its colonies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Northern Schleswig was to be returned to Denmark, and the new Polish Republic was to take back much of Poznam, West Prussia, and eastern Upper Silesia.5 The Hultschin area of Upper
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Silesia was to be ceded to Czechoslovakia.6 Serbia was to have what it wanted— a new Kingdom of Yugoslavia comprising Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro.7 As can be deduced from the concession to Serbia (on the creation of a pan-Slavic kingdom), Germany was not the only target of reprisals. Both the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires were to be dismantled, and their territories shared among existing states, or carved out as new sovereign entities (like the Kingdom of Yugoslavia). All these stipulations, which formed part of the Treaty of Versailles signed on June 28, 1919, effectively sowed the seed of another war—the Second World War.
5.3 The League of Nations: The Dream and the Reality The Allied Powers did not throw out Hobson’s book in its entirety. While careful not to mention or legitimize the concept of “international government,” the Allied Powers incorporated a few of Hobson’s ideas in the Covenant establishing the League of Nations in 1919. In the preamble to the Covenant, the High Contracting Parties charged the League with the responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. In specific terms, the objectives of the League would be to “promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, by the prescription of open, just, and honorable relations between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among Governments, and by the maintenance of justice and scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples with one another. . .” As provided for in Article 1 of the Covenant, the League was open to any “fully self-governing State, Dominion, or Colony not named in the Annex. . .if its admission is agreed to by two-thirds of the Assembly (and) provided that it shall give effective guarantees of its sincere intention to observe its international obligations, and shall accept such regulations as may be prescribed by the League in regard to its military, naval, and air forces and armaments.” A total of 63 nations (excluding the United States of America and a few other powerful states) ratified the Covenant and joined the League. Membership was voluntary, and so was withdrawal. The same Article 1 stipulates that Any Member of the League may, after two years’ notice of its intention to do so, withdraw from the League, provided that all its international obligations and all its obligations under this Covenant shall have been fulfilled at the time of its withdrawal.
However, Members that chose to remain within the League must give an undertaking to respect and preserve the territorial integrity “and existing political independence of all Members of the League.” Any war or threat of war from then on became the concern of the whole League. A Member that resorted to war in disregard of the Covenant would be deemed to have declared war on all other Members of the
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League. Members were also to register any treaty or international engagement with the Secretariat of the League. This was presumably to discourage compacts designed against the League or any of its Members. The Covenant acknowledged the possibility that some treaties would be obsolete, and provides in Article 19 for reconsideration of “treaties which have become inapplicable,” and, of greater significance, for the consideration of “international conditions whose continuance might endanger the peace of the world.”
5.3.1 Organs of the League Among the organs of the League are the Assembly (comprising representatives of Member States), and the Council (made up of representatives of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers, together with four other members selected by the Assembly from time to time).8 While the Assembly might “deal . . .with any matter within the sphere of action of the League or affecting the peace of the world,” it was the Council which was given the primary task of maintaining peace, and formulating plans for the reduction of national armaments. To be binding, decisions of both the Assembly and the Council required the unanimity of all the Members represented at any particular meeting. This, according to some observers, proved to be the League’s undoing. In other words, it is argued that by bending over backward to recognize the sovereignty of member nations and arming each with a virtual veto right, the Covenant dug the League’s grave in advance. As will soon become clear, the First World War could not have been averted even if the Covenant had not conferred the veto power on Germany and other members of the League. Besides the Assembly and the Council, the Covenant provided for a permanent Secretariat headed by the Secretary-General.9 The staff of the Secretariat would be appointed by the Secretary-General with the approval of the Council. Article 6 required the expenses of the Secretariat to be borne by Members “in accordance with the apportionment of the expenses of the International Bureau of the Universal Postal Union.” A permanent Commission was to be constituted to advise the Council on the implementation of the provisions on military, naval, and air questions generally. In addition, a Permanent Court of International Justice was to be established with the power to hear and determine any dispute of an international character which the parties thereto submitted to it. The Court would also be competent to give an advisory opinion on any matter or dispute referred to it by the Council or by the Assembly. The Red Cross was not an organ of the League, but the Covenant took pains (in Article 25) to identify it as an organization that Members needed to “encourage and promote,” so it could serve the purposes of improving health, preventing disease, and mitigating suffering throughout the world. In effect, therefore, the social mandate which the United Nations would subsequently assume was originally exercised by a nongovernmental organization.
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The Covenant contained no special provisions on the International Labor Organization (ILO) since the Treaty of Versailles had, in the hope of weakening communism at its base, included clauses on workers’ collective bargaining rights, the protection of labor unions, and the establishment of the ILO itself. The mandate of the new organization included the regulation of working hours, prevention of unemployment, protection of the worker against sickness, disease and injury “arising out of his employment,” protection of migrant workers from exploitation by host countries, and organization of vocational and technical education.10
5.4 The League of Nations and World Security As Alger notes, what we know about multilateral cooperation came out of two experiments: the League of Nations, which was founded on January 10, 1920, and the United Nations, established on October 24, 1945. It is these two “great laboratories” that allow the world to test the success or failure of multilateral diplomacy (Alger, 1995). That the League fell by the wayside was by now very obvious. What is not clear is the explanation for the tragic turn of events. Some observers have attributed the League’s collapse to the contradictions in the postwar settlement reached at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. While the victorious European powers had favored the traditional realist, state-centric, and decisive response to the German threat—including occasional recourse to secret pacts and naval blockages to deter aggression—the United States canvassed an idealist position at the Conference. In the end, realism won, albeit, after making token concessions to the idealist concept of “collective security.” Still, other explanations, besides the triumph of realism, must be found for the recourse to war in 1939. In any case, the end of the War in 1945 afforded the world yet another opportunity to begin the process of “associating together” for the overall good of humankind. The question is whether the United Nations which rose on the ashes of the League of Nations represents a new equation gotten right or another failed experiment in international cooperation. In the interim, it is necessary to find out where the League might have foundered, and what lessons the successor organization, the United Nations, might learn from previous missteps. As argued in this chapter, the tendency on the part of powerful states to seek to impose their will on one another, and on weaker State Parties, is an issue that has yet to be addressed in any scheme of international cooperation. In this respect, Algers’ observation on the link between the UN and previous international cooperation efforts is significant. Besides terming the UN as “a child of the League of Nations,” he argues that humankind was set on a course of internationalism, not by a “social contract” willingly entered into by equal and free contracting parties, but by a practice dating back to the fifteenth century when, in his words, Europeans began a pattern of worldwide exploration that eventually led to extensive empires in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and to Western domination of the world. (Algers, 1995:5–6)
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5.4.1 The League and World War II The experience with the League is illustrative of the weak foundation on which past cooperation efforts rested. In spite of the elaborate provisions in the 1919 Covenant, the League was unable to preempt the Second World War. Was the obstacle to peace built into the Covenant and/or the League, or was the time-bomb hidden elsewhere? The other question is whether the founders of the United Nations learnt any lessons from past failures. On the face of it, the 1919 Covenant setting up the League of Nations could not be faulted for trying to avoid war. Indeed, if the Covenant could be faulted, it must be for trying too hard to avoid war. Filled with the horror of the First World War, the drafters of the Covenant had gone overboard to preempt, in fact, outlaw, belligerent actions between and among states. Yet while underscoring the importance of collective security, the 1919 Covenant, and by implication, the League, failed to address the underlying causes of the past wars. If truth be told, the peace of the world has for centuries, and almost invariably, been endangered by the European powers’ greed for territories as well as for resources neither lying beneath their soils nor under their immediate control.11 This is the lesson learnt from the various foreign explorations and “civilizing missions,” the forceful occupation of other peoples’ lands in Europe and in other regions, the imposition of colonial rule on subject peoples, the perpetual struggle among empires for supremacy, and the frequent upsurge of nationalism and irredentism across the world. Thus, against the natural human inclination to be free, powerful nations sought to impose their wills on others. Besides ignoring the underlying causes of past wars, both the Covenant and the League failed to grasp the immediate and foresee the future threats to peace. One threat that the Covenant overlooked was ironically the most visible and precipitate— Germany’s refusal to accept defeat, coupled with its rage over the fait accompli it was confronted with by the Treaty of Versailles. By seeking to belittle Germany, the Versailles Treaty had provided an enabling environment for Adolf Hitler’s megalomania. It cleared the way for an all-out war by giving the Third Reich a reason to exist and grow. Indeed, a dishonored Germany was all Hitler and his propaganda machine needed to whip up national emotions, invent and witch hunt internal “enemies,” and, most important of all, drag the world into another war by invading Poland in 1939. In a desperate attempt to preempt war, the Covenant had acknowledged each state’s sovereign and equal status. This is the essence of its insistence on unanimity of decisions. However, while the veto power might have served as a hindrance to timely and decisive response to threats, it could not, by itself, have been the “cause” of World War II. Germany’s pent-up grievances and the opportunity that the Allied Powers handed to Hitler offer better explanations for the War. Like the First World War, the Second World War was fought by two opposing sides—the Allied and the Axis Powers. However, the Second War witnessed a realignment of forces. While Great Britain, France, and Russia remained firmly on the side of the Allied Powers,12 Italy (whose territorial claims had been shot down at the 1919 Paris Conference) and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact of September
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1940, thus effectively defecting to the German-led Axis side. As was the case during the First World War, the British colonies and protectorates as well as the French overseas territories were dragged into the Second World War to fight on the side of the Allies.13 The Second War would also go down in history as the most costly in human and material terms.. . .When other losses (particularly, destruction of tanks, aircraft, and other military hardware, the damage inflicted on the infrastructure and on the production capacity of the combatants) are added to the human cost, it is difficult to see reason playing any part in the decisions leading up to the war. The discovery of the atomic bomb brought another tragic dimension to the War as Hiroshima and Nagasaki felt the full impact of the ultimate weapon of mass destruction. It has been estimated that close to 59 million were either killed or wounded during the War, with civilians accounting for the bulk of the casualties (40.8 million) as against the military casualty of 18.6 million.14 Many of the enlisted men and women that died in the war came from different parts of the world—Western and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The conscripts must have been persuaded to fight on the side of the good by the Allied Powers’ counterpropaganda harping on Hitler’s evil design against humankind.
5.5 From Swords to Plowshares: The Birth of the UN It was to avoid future catastrophic wars that the United Nations was established on October 24, 1945. Before the creation of the new world body, and ahead of the conclusion of hostilities in May 1945, a number of Conferences had been organized in an effort at finding lasting peace. Prominent among these are the meetings between US President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill between 1941 and 1942, resulting in the signing of the Atlantic Charter, as well as the Declaration by 26 nations accepting the Charter’s underlying principles; the Dumbarton Oaks Conference held in Washington, D.C., from August 21 to October 7, 1944; the Yalta Conference attended by British Prime Minister Churchill, US President Roosevelt, and Communist General Secretary Stalin, from February 4 to 11, 1945; the UN Conference on International Organization held in San Francisco between April 25 and June 26, 1945; and the Potsdam Conference attended, from July 17 to August 2, 1945, by Stalin, Truman, and Churchill and (after the Labor victory in the British general election of 1945) by Atlee. Suffice it to say that by the time the United Nations was created in 1945, it had its job cut out for it. It was going to be an “international” organization juggling competing sovereign claims, and pulled in different directions by contradictory provincial interests. The Allied Powers had many advantages over the rest of the world. They were present when the edifice was being designed, and were in a position to embed their interests in its foundation.15 More significant than any other factor, they had the power to back up their demands with force. The only snag is the rivalry between the Western members of the wartime Alliance, on the one hand, and the new but ascendant Soviet empire, on the other. The rivalry manifested in different forms
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throughout the war years, but was smothered to enable the Allies’ energies to be directed against the common Nazi threat. With the capitulation of the last remnants of the Axis forces, the “Soviet threat” or the “Red peril” became too stark to be ignored by the “Free world.” It was not as if nothing was done to preserve the unity of the grand alliance. At least four of the pre- and postwar Conferences have special significance for the Allied Powers’ solidarity, particularly solidarity on the United Nations. These are the Dumbarton Oaks and the San Francisco Conferences, as well as the Yalta and the Potsdam Summits. It was at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference that the architecture of the UN was drawn. At the Conference were the officials of the participating states (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China). As the host country, the United States (represented by Under-Secretary of State, Edward Reilly Stettinius, Jr.) presided over the meeting. Among the issues tabled and resolved at the Conference were the mandate and structure of the United Nations as a successor to the League of Nations, the composition and powers of the United Nations Security Council (including the right of the Permanent Members to “veto” decisions), and the countries to invite to a larger conference scheduled to take place in San Francisco between April and June 1945. Under the Dumbarton Oaks plan, responsibility for preventing future wars and enforcing the peace would fall squarely on the shoulders of a powerful body named “the Security Council,” the nearest equivalent of an Imperial Council. To enable the Council to perform its policing role effectively, Member States were to place their armed forces at its disposal when world peace was threatened. The Council’s awesome powers could not be easily detected on the organization chart drawn at Dumbarton Oaks, but the Council’s significance was clear. With regard to the structure of the United Nations, the Dumbarton Oaks Conference had envisaged an organization comprising a General Assembly the membership of which would be open to all Member States. There would also be a Security Council made up of eleven members. Of the eleven members serving on the Council, five would be permanent while the remaining six would be filled on a twoyear rotational basis by nominees of the General Assembly. The third organ of the United Nations would be the International Court of Justice, while the fourth would be a Secretariat staffed by career officials. The plan also included the establishment of an Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) working under the authority of the General Assembly. Dumbarton Oaks was followed up by the Yalta Conference of February 1945. As a summit of Allied leaders, Yalta enabled Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin to vet the recommendations of Dumbarton Oaks prior to giving the acceptable ones the necessary stamp of approval. The Yalta summit reached an understanding on the need for Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, the demilitarization and de-Nazification of German institutions, payment of reparations, the pursuit and apprehension of Nazi war criminals, the establishment of a “Committee on the Dismemberment of Germany”,16 and the Soviet Union’s role in working with the United States to bring Japan to heel in the Pacific (Imperial Japan was still holding out after the virtual defeat of the Nazi and the Fascist forces in Europe).
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However, the issues that dominated the agenda of the Yalta Conference are those which would outlive the War and engage the attention of the United Nations right from its inception. The sticky points at the Black Sea resort summit included election and democratic reforms in Eastern Europe (already liberated from German control by Soviet forces, and, therefore, effectively in communist hands); and the Soviet demand for security against future invasion, which it presented as the justification for its continued occupation of Eastern Europe and East Berlin. After hastily organized elections in Poland and other countries, the communists took total control of Eastern Europe, thus heralding the emergence of the Iron Curtain and heightening of the East–West tension. Despite the widening gulf between the Soviet Union and its wartime Western allies, Yalta succeeded in committing the three leaders to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals and to the organization of an international conference on the subject. In a communiqué issued at the end of the Yalta summit, the leaders were “resolved, upon the earliest possible establishment with our Allies of a general international organization to maintain peace and security,” and on the convocation of “a Conference of Nations” in San Francisco to prepare the charter of such an organization. The Conference was held on schedule. Even Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 did not stop the arrangements that he had played a prominent part in initiating. Under the new President Truman, the United States lent its support to the Conference, as it did earlier when it distributed copies of the Dumbarton Oaks recommendations to its citizens, and to foreign governments. The San Francisco Conference, held between April 25 and June 26, 1945, afforded representatives of governments an opportunity to consider the Dumbarton Oaks proposals and to deliberate on the Charter of the new organization.
5.5.1 Key Provisions of the UN Charter As a large body, the San Francisco Conference could hardly be expected to go into the same detail as the technical—nay, business—meeting in Dumbarton Oaks. Predictably, the San Francisco Conference left intact the key pillars erected at Dumbarton Oaks, only introducing a few cosmetic changes. It will probably be farfetched to term the San Francisco gathering a “rubber stamp,” but an alternative word or phrase that faithfully captures the essence of the much-hyped 1945 event is yet to be found. Nonetheless, and at least for historical purposes, it was at the San Francisco Conference that the Charter was formally adopted. The San Francisco intergovernmental meeting also served as the culmination of the efforts made to secure world peace, or in the language of the time, to convert “sheaths into plowshares.” The straining and the pretense in the Charter start with the preamble where the “Peoples of the United Nations” are credited with the determination: (a) to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
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(b) to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations at large and small, and (c) to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and (d) to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.
The Charter proceeds from these high moral principles to enunciate (in Chapter I, Article 1, and Chapter IX) the aims and objectives of the United Nations. These are: (i) To maintaininternational peace and security, and to that end: to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace; (ii) To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principles of equal rights and self-determination of peoples. . . (iii) To achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion; (iv) To promote higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development (Chapter IX, Article 55); (v) To make recommendations for the coordination of the policies and activities of agencies brought into relationship with it, that is, the specialized agencies (Chapter IX, Articles 57–58); and (vi) To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.
In Article 2, the Charter underscores the sovereign equality of all its Members, the necessity for all Members to fulfill the obligations of membership “in good faith,” the need for peaceful settlement of disputes, and the inviolability of the territorial integrity and political independence of any state. The Charter, in Article 2.7 forbids the United Nations to interfere in the internal affairs of Member States or to intervene in matters “which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state,” the only exception to this rule being the enforcement powers conferred on the UN under Chapter VII. Membership of the organization is open to the original Members that were at the San Francisco Conference of April–June 1945, the signatories to the Declaration by United Nations of January 1, 1942, and to all “other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter” and which are admitted by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council (Chapter II, Articles 3–6). A Member against which preventive or enforcement action has been taken by the Security Council may be suspended from the exercise of the rights and privileges of membership. Only an act of the Security Council could restore a suspended membership (Chapter II, Article 5).
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The principal organs of the United Nations, as set out in Chapter III of the Charter, are the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council, the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. Other subsidiary organs deemed necessary for the fulfillment of the Charter objectives may also be established. Article 8 of Chapter III makes for interesting reading. It lays down a law that is frequently overlooked and routinely violated. With regard to the composition and/or staffing of the principal and subsidiary organs, the Charter stipulates as follows: The United Nations shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women to participate in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principal and subsidiary organs
As earlier noted, in constituting the Security Council, the founding fathers of the UN enshrined restrictions on eligibility by naming countries for which the permanent seats were reserved. The UN personnel rules are also replete with clauses restricting competition for various classes of posts. Still, the Charter would seem to have made attempts at addressing the challenges facing the world. Whether these attempts are adequate is an open question.
5.6 Conclusions Has the United Nations Charter learnt any lessons from the past? Answering this question requires returning to another question Hobson raised in his 1915 book. Hobson had asked rather rhetorically, or perhaps, presciently, as follows: After this war is over, will the nations fall back again into the armed peace, the rival alliances, the Balance of Power with competing armaments, the preparations for another war thus made ‘inevitable’, or will they go forward to the realization of the idea of ‘public right’. . .of a real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal rights . . . established and enforced by the common will?
As observed in the next chapter, it would appear that the United Nations Charter preferred the latter option—that is, a form of association based on the principles of sovereign equality, and of noninterference in the internal affairs of State Parties. In contrast, the “superpowers,” as the Permanent Members of the Security Council are generally termed, appear wedded to the former. The anachronistic bent toward the balance of power doctrine has serious implications for the credibility of the United Nations and other multilateral arrangements. By seeking to impose their will on one another and on weaker states, the superpowers have yet to address those “international conditions whose continuation. . .endangers the peace of the world.” These and related topics are examined in greater detail in the next chapter.
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Notes 1. It was renamed the World Meteorological Organization, WMO, in 1950. 2. The International Electro-technical Commission merged with the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations in 1947 to form the present-day International Standards Organization. 3. If the analogy is not far-fetched, Ataturk could be said to be to the Ottoman Empire what Mikhail Gorbachev was to the former Soviet Union. However, while Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika practically brought down the Iron Curtain, the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration began before the onset of Kemalism. 4. Everett, S., 1980, The World Wars, Vol I, World War I (Bison Books); Nicolson, C., 2001, The Longman Companion to the First World War (Longman); and Dumas, S., 1923, Losses of Life caused by war (Oxford: Clarendon Press). 5. The boundary adjustments were arbitrary, sometimes placing Germans under non-German rule, scattering new minorities across Europe, and igniting ethnic conflicts. 6. It is significant that Czechoslovakia which was carved out of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 had to be split into two, Czech and Slovakia, on January 1, 1993, after the disintegration of the USSR. 7. Yugoslavia became a Republic in 1943, only to break into autonomous republics—of Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina—in 1992, after the demise of Josef Broz Tito in May 1980. 8. The Representatives of Belgium, Brazil, Spain, and Greece were designated by Article 4 to serve on the Council pending the selection of members by the Assembly. 9. Sir James Eric Drummond of Great Britain was designated as the first Secretary-General. 10. Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles. 11. This is not to say that there were no empires outside Europe, or that the non-European empires were driven by motives any less sinister than the craving for power and boundless real estate. However, with the possible exception of Japan in the East, non-European empires lacked the determination to follow their greed through to the stage of locking the whole world down for military purposes. Besides, the two World Wars so far fought originated in Europe with distinctly European agendas and imprints. Above all, the key characters were Europeans, only bringing in non-European side-kicks when it was deemed strategically wise to do so. 12. Besides those mentioned above, the Allied Powers included the Soviet Union, Poland, Australia, Canada, India, Greece, Czechoslovakia (government-in-exile), New Zealand, Morocco, South Africa, and Nepal. 13. The Vichy regime in France had started by throwing its lot with the German-led Axis powers, and by conscripting France’s overseas territories into the service of the Third Reich. The situation changed as each territory was captured by Allied forces. 14. Encyclopaedia Brittanica. 15. As in 1919, when the League of Nations was created, Liberia and South Africa were the only African states that were signatories to the Charter of the United Nations. The latter was still firmly under the apartheid system and decades away from black majority rule. 16. Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945, did not stop the Allied powers from taking their pound of flesh. Besides ordering the systematic stripping of German industrial and war-making assets, the Allies agreed on the country’s partition. The southwest occupation zone fell under French control, the northwest went to the British, the south to the United States, and the east to the Soviet Union. That was not all, German provinces east of the OderNeisse Line were to be transferred to Poland. In all, Germany lost close to 25 percent of the territory it had owned since 1937. The border adjustments also resulted in gross maltreatment of German populations in the non-German states, as well as in mass migrations. It was only after the 1990 reunification that East Germany was merged with the rest of the country.
Chapter 6
United Nations: Evolution, Structure, and Dominant Challenges
6.1 Overview of UN Organizations The scope of the United Nations and allied agencies has expanded over the past six decades. In terms of membership (and of geographical spread), the United Nations has grown from the original 51 to the current 192 State members.1 A major factor in the Organization’s rapid enlargement is the process of decolonization which began with India’s and Pakistan’s attainment of independence in 1947, and gathered pace with the transformation of many African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific nations into sovereign states in the 1960s and 1970s. The creation, in the 1990s, of new states out of existing ones further increased the number of the UN Member States.
6.1.1 Membership Enlargement A total of 51 states represented at the 1945 San Francisco Conference constituted the original members of the United Nations. Of this number, 20 (twenty) came from Latin America and the Caribbean,2 16 (sixteen) from Europe and North America, 7 (seven) from the Middle East and North Africa, 3 (three) from Asia, and 2 (two) from Oceania, that is, Australia and New Zealand. Like Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa was represented at the historic event by only 3 (three) states––Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa. Neither Ethiopia nor Liberia qualified as a major player, and South Africa was still under minority apartheid rule. By 1946, Afghanistan, Iceland, Sweden, and Thailand had joined the Organization, followed, in 1947, by Pakistan3 and Yemen. The year 1955 also witnessed an influx of new members—Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Kingdom of Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, and Spain. Sub-Saharan Africa remained conspicuously absent until Ghana joined in 1957, and Guinea in 1958. Africa’s presence in the Organization was not substantially felt until the 1960s when several former British and French (along with a few Belgian) colonies became independent. Examples of countries that joined in 1960 are Dahomey (now Republic of Benin), Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Senegal, M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_6,
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Somalia, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and Togo. Mauritania, Sierra Leone, and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) followed in 1961, and Algeria, Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda in 1962. Among the non-African late joiners are Singapore (1965); Barbados and Guyana (1966); Yemen (1967); Fiji (1970); Bahrain, Bhutan, Oman, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates (1971); and Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic (1973). Palau shed its trust territory status and became a sovereign member of the United Nations in 1994 (thus virtually terminating the regular mandate of the UN Trusteeship Council). Montenegro is the latest member of the Organization, having joined in 2006. While the founding members knew the type of organization that they were creating back in 1945, many of the latecomers simply regarded their membership as a confirmation of their newly achieved sovereign status. Little did they realize that the Organization which was largely instrumental in their freedom would also be a major factor in the erosion of their sovereignty. In describing the structure of the Organization, this chapter shows how the freedoms attained, along with political independence, have been systematically emasculated by creative interpretations of the Charter and in the course of the performance of the Organization’s functions.
6.1.2 Proliferation of Agencies Another indicator of the United Nations’ growth, besides the membership enlargement, is the number of Departments, Offices, and Allied Agencies established since 1945. Box 6.1 is a sample of organizations with supranational mandates that were created before and after the establishment of the United Nations in 1945.
Box 6.1 Sample of Agencies/Entities Created before and after the Establishment of the League of Nations and the United Nations Group A Pre–League of Nations Agencies: The Central Rhine Commission (1804); the Congress of Vienna (1815); the European Danube Commission (1856); the International Telecommunications Union (1865); the Universal Postal Union (1875); the International Meteorological Organization (1873, renamed WMO in 1950); the International Bureau of Industrial Property (1883); the International Union of Railway Transportation (1890); the International Electro-technical Commission (1906) and the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations (1926) both which merged into the International Standards Organization in 1947.
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Overview of UN Organizations
Group B The League of Nations and Parallel Agencies League of Nations (1919); International Labor Organization (1919); International Commission for Air Navigation (1919, but transformed into International Civil Aviation Organization in 1947); and the Permanent Court of International Justice (1919).
Group C United Nations and Allied Agencies Created in 1945 United Nations (1945); International Court of Justice (1945); United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (1945); World Bank/IMF (1944); General Agreement on Tariff and Trade, GATT (1945, but replaced by the WTO in 1995); and Food and Agriculture Organization (1945).
Group D Agencies/Commissions Created After 1945 Economic Commission for Europe (1946); Commission on the Status of Women (1946); Economic Commission for Europe (and North America, 1947); Economic Commission for Asia and the Pacific (1947); Commission on Human Rights (1948); World Health Organization (1948); Economic Commissions for Latin America and the Caribbean (1948); United Nations High Commission for Refugees (1950); International Finance Corporation (1956); International Atomic Energy Authority (1957); Economic Commissions for Africa (1958); International Development Association (1960); World Food Program (1961); United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD (1964); United Nations Development Program, UNDP (1965); United Nations Institute for Training and Research, UNITAR (1966); United Nations Capital Development Fund (1966); United Nations Industrial Development Organization, UNIDO (1967); United Nations Environment Program (1972); Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (1973); United Nations Office of Project Services (1974); International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (1975); International Fund for Agricultural Development (1977); United Nations Development Fund for Women, UNIFEM (1984); World Trade Organization (1995); United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (1997); and International Criminal Court (ICC)/Tribunal (2002). The last, ICC, is in theory an organization independent of the United Nations. However, its Statute requires it to pursue cases referred to the ICC Prosecutor by the UN Security Council, “irrespective of the nationality of the accused or the location of the crime.” Sources: Various sources
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6.1.3 Increase in Staff Complement The number on the payroll of the UN Secretariat varies from time to time. Including incumbents of posts financed from the regular budget and extra-budgetary resources, the figure rose from 6,135 in 1986 to 13,159 in 2005, an increase of more than 100percent over a 20-year period.4 According to ECOSOC’s estimate, UNICEF’s staff strength of 8,488 for the period June 2003 constituted about 22 percent of all staff in the United Nations Secretariat and other entities. By simple deduction, therefore, the total figure for the entire UN system as on June 2003 would be approximately 38,582.5 The UN Secretariat accounted for 40 percent of this global figure, UNICEF 22 percent, the UN High Commission for Refugees slightly more than 17 percent, the UN Development Program (UNDP) a little under 14 percent, and other agencies 7 percent.6
6.1.4 Budget Growth The United Nations regular budget in 1946 was a mere US$21.5 million. The figure rose to US$1.18 billion in 1992—representing a 55-fold increase over a period of 46 years. The increase in budget between 1946 and 1992 is moderate, considering the growth in mandates and the inflationary pressures. It was the subsequent—1992–2004—growth in expenditure that proved really substantial. Thus, in real terms, the UN budget rose from $1.18 billion in 1992/1993 to $3.16 billion in 2004/2005, representing more than 100 percent increase over a period of 12 years.7
6.1.5 Factors in UN Growth For reasons that are not always clear, the United Nations is able to accomplish what is ordinarily beyond the capacity of an average national civil service—that is, obtain its governing organs’ support for its expansion plans, especially, at a time of dwindling resources. The answer to the puzzle lies partly in the ambiguous environment in which the UN operates, and in the governance structure making such ambiguity possible, if not inevitable.8 Thus, contrary to the situation prevailing at the national level, most UN programs originate from within the Secretariat only to be packaged and sold as the Member States’ “marching orders.” The birth of a program almost invariably starts with formal and informal “consultations” followed by an elaborate propaganda. The substantive process begins with the identification of a problem—for example, poverty, starvation, education, food, gender inequality, and capital punishment. As soon as awareness of the problem is sufficiently raised during formal
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and informal consultations, parliamentary legitimization and resource allocation are almost assured. At any rate, a program or an initiative considered a priority by the United Nations could expect to materialize as soon as its future is entrusted to a group of officials and experts skilled in “quantifying data in mythologies,” and capable of defending muddled and distrusted statistics as “mere indicators.”9 Naturally, not every problem is internally concocted, and not every understanding on the way forward is premanufactured. The ILO, for example, was not the League of Nations Secretariat’s brainchild, but that of the Allied Powers’ which saw the new organization as the Western industrialized economies’ hope of winning over the working class and reducing the appeal of communism. The International Atomic Energy Authority came into being after President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech at the United Nations in 1953. The Kyoto Treaty is not sponsored by the United Nations, but by a coalition of environmental activists who constantly alert governments to the grave danger lying ahead. Neither a deadly virus nor organized violence is a respecter of territorial boundaries. Both require a robust global response. So do the proliferation of, and global trade in, small arms, the growing incidence of cross-border crime, and the widening circle of violence and terrorism. However, for every one mandate that the world—or failing that, the law of external effects—assigns to the UN, there are four Secretariat-backed “initiatives” and projects. The World Food Program was created in 1961 as a three-year experimental project of the FAO. In 1965, the General Assembly voted to extend the program “for as long as multilateral food aid is found feasible and desirable.” In 2008, that is, 43 years after its inauguration, the World Food Program was still in business—presumably because food aid was deemed “feasible” and “desirable.” The International Fund for Agricultural Development was created in 1977 as an outcome of the 1974 World Food Conference, another Secretariat-supported extravaganza. The International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women came into being in 1975 sequel to the organization by the Secretariat of a major international conference on women. The International Criminal Court would not have been conceived if the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda had not fallen into crises, and the Tribunals established for the two countries on an experimental (watertesting) basis had not been given maximum publicity. It goes without saying that the complacency among sovereign states with this encroachment on municipal authority was another factor on the International Criminal Court’s side. The UNDP is a classic case study in bureaucratic self-perpetuation. When it was established in 1965, its mandate was to unify the operations of the Expanded Fund of Technical Assistance and the Special Fund. By 1971, it had fully accomplished the unification mission—the bulk of the beneficiaries of the technical assistance program in developing countries having made impressive progress in filling the education and training gaps that they inherited on independence. In other words, the demand for technical assistance—whether of an expanded or constricted kind—was
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not as high as when the UNDP was established in 1965. With little left to do, the UNDP had to redefine its mission to bring “sustainable human development” within its purview. This is how it became involved in “Democratic Governance,” Poverty Reduction,” “Crisis Prevention and Recovery,” “Energy and Environment,” and HIV/AIDS—activities that other UN agencies had effectively covered, and could, with sustained investment in local institutional capacity building, be undertaken at the national level. The Breton Woods’ experience is rather similar to that of the UNDP. When the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development started out in 1944, its immediate job was to assist the reconstruction of the war-battered European economy. It began in 1947 by lending dollars to France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Luxembourg so the countries could import essential items from North America. When the Marshall Plan became fully operational, the Bank shifted its attention to the rest of the world. As a bank of last resort, the World Bank finances projects with maximum economic payoff, and stays away from payment of local salaries. Gradually, the Bank got into the business of advising governments on measures to adopt to stimulate domestic savings, rectify fiscal imbalances, and promote macroeconomic stability. It was a matter of time for it to impose stringent conditions for granting structural adjustment loans, dictate government policy directions, and make profound statements on the governance arrangements essential to growth. As it so happened, economies that broke free from the Breton Woods institutions’ hold (like India and China) performed better than those trapped in the institutions’ neoliberal net.10
6.1.6 Debunking the Principal-Agency Myth The United Nations’ widening geographical coverage (together with the rapid increase in the number of allied agencies) raises the question whether international secretariats are really invisible in global politics. Mathieson, for one, believes that international secretariats (and civil servants employed therein) are invisible “because sovereign governments—the member states—are in charge of the organizations, giving them their tasks, and their money.” He further submits that international organizations are not governments, “and they do not govern.” They merely “engage in what has been termed governance, a process of steering public policy and services in a non-sovereign world” (Mathiason, 2007:xii). Nonetheless, the facts on the ground do not support the notion of an international secretariat that is either “invisible” or a mere instrument of governments and “governance.” The range and scope of activities undertaken by international organizations are such as to raise the organizations’ profile, thrust them onto public consciousness, and conjure up the image of an ascendant global leviathan. The United Nations and allied agencies, in particular, have assumed responsibility for an increasing number of functions—including functions that, in ordinary circumstances and barring institutional weaknesses, should have been better performed by national authorities.11
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6.2 Governance and Accountability Structure 6.2.1 The General Assembly’s Powers and Functions Membership of the General Assembly is, as to be expected, open to all Member States. However, the Assembly is, over and above everything else, a talking shop. It makes recommendations which are not binding. It lacks the power to enforce its own decisions, or to hold the Security Council to account as regards the exercise of the later body’s executive authority. The Assembly’s role, according to Chapter IV (Article 10), is to “discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of the present Charter or relating to the powers and functions of any organs provided for in the present Charter, and, except as provided in Article 12, may make recommendations to Members of the United Nations or to the Security Council or to both on any such questions or matters.” The functions assigned to the Assembly are further examined in the next chapter.
6.2.2 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) In addition to the General Assembly, the Charter provides for the establishment of an 18-member Economic and Social Council to be constituted on a three-year rotational basis.12 A retiring member is eligible for re-election. The Council’s terms of reference are to initiate studies and issue reports on “international economic, social, cultural, educational, health, and related matters” (Chapter X, Article 62.1– 62.3).
6.2.3 Trusteeship Council The Trusteeship Council is another instrument for translating the Charter objectives into programs of action. Chapter XII empowers the United Nations to “establish under its authority an international trusteeship system for the administration and supervision of such territories as may be placed there-under by subsequent individual agreements.” The objective of the trusteeship system is essentially to safeguard the interests of the inhabitants of trust territories. Details of the Trusteeship Council’s composition and powers are provided in Chapter 5.
6.2.4 The International Court of Justice The principal judicial organ of the United Nations is the International Court of Justice which inherited the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice. All UN Members are ipso facto parties to the Court’s Statute.13 Non-members may accede to the Statute on conditions to be determined by the General Assembly (Article 93).
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The General Assembly or the Security Council may request the Court to render an advisory opinion on any legal question. Other organs of the United Nations and specialized agencies may, with the authorization of the General Assembly, request the Court’s advisory opinion on legal questions arising within the scope of their activities.
6.2.5 The Security Council Of all the instruments earlier described, the most powerful is the Security Council. Chapter V of the Charter sets out the composition, functions, and powers of the Council. Whereas the Dumbarton Oaks Conference had envisaged and the Charter had provided for a Council of 11 (eleven) members, a 1965 amendment to the Charter raised the number to 15 (fifteen). As recommended by the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, but contrary to Chapter III, Article 8, the Charter (in Chapter V, Article 23) restricts the Permanent Membership of the Council to 5 (five) countries, notably, the Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (latter succeeded by the Russian Federation), the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. The remaining 10 (ten) slots were to be filled on a two-year rotational basis by Members elected by the General Assembly. The power of the Security Council has expanded in recent years to such an extent that the Council is increasingly viewed more as an imperial authority than just another organ of the United Nations. Lending credence to this characterization are the imperial antecedents of the majority of the Permanent Members—particularly, Great Britain, France, the defunct Soviet Union (now the Russian Federation), and China. The next chapter examines the implications of the present composition of the Council for global power relations, the credibility of the United Nations, and the legitimacy of the world body’s decisions.
6.2.6 The Secretariat The last but not the least important organ of the United Nations is the Secretariat. Chapter XV provides for the establishment of a full-time Secretariat headed by the Secretary-General, and comprising such staff as the Organization may require. The staff members are expected to be appointed by the Secretary-General “under regulations established by the General Assembly” (Article 101). In the performance of their duties, the Secretary-General and the Secretariat staff “shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization” (Article 100).
6.3 The UN, Global Security, and the Nuclear Peril Right from its inception in 1945 up to the present, the United Nations has wrestled with various types of crises. The tension between the East and the West was the first item on its agenda. The sour relations between the erstwhile allies had outlived the
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war to haunt the postwar order and distract United Nations. Signs of trouble had surfaced at Yalta but were played down in the interest of wartime solidarity. It was at the Potsdam Conference––the first summit held on German soil from July 16 to August 2, 1945, and the last to be held after the Nazi’s defeat—that the wartime united front put up by the Allies was seriously threatened. Unlike Roosevelt, whose frail health and moderate views had allowed Stalin to get most of what he wanted at previous meetings, Truman, a staunch anti-communist, was deeply suspicious of the Soviet leader’s moves in Potsdam. With the successful testing of the first atom bomb, “Trinity,” on July 16, 1945—a day before the commencement of the Potsdam summit—Truman felt that the United States no longer needed Soviet support to vanquish the Japanese forces. Still, at the Potsdam meeting, he hinted at the use of “a powerful new weapon.” Since Stalin’s spies had already kept him up-to-date on the American nuclear program, Stalin knew what the “powerful new weapon” meant. He thus had no problem endorsing an ultimatum to Japan to lay down its arms or face “prompt and utter destruction.” The Japanese dismissed the threat as a bluff, only to suffer the serious consequences— the detonation of the atom bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, and the virtual American takeover of the governorship of Japan! The Soviets quickly got the message. Going the way of Japan in the not-so-distant future was a real possibility—nay, a calamity—that could only be averted either by toeing the US line or fast-forwarding the Soviet’s nuclear program. Stalin chose the latter option. The USSR had to have its own bomb to shield itself and its Warsaw Pact allies against pulverization. This marked the beginning of the nuclear race, and signaled tough times ahead for the United Nations. The importance attached to the possession of nuclear (as well as delivery) capability is such that it appears to be a prerequisite for admission into the permanent membership of the Security Council. The deterrent effect of nuclear bombs is by now a settled question. The dreaded weapons of mass destruction—cluster bombs, long-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, “integrated air defense systems,” and biological weapons—are nothing compared to nuclear-armed warheads. These weapons of total destruction are in the arsenals of the five Permanent Members of the Security Council and senior members of the “nuclear club.” The nuclear club comprises, as earlier noted, the five Permanent Members of the Security Council that acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of July 1968; two States that were not parties to the Treaty—that is, India and Pakistan; and North Korea which was party to, but in 2003 pulled out of, the Treaty. Israel is another State known to possess nuclear technology and warheads. It too has kept its option open by staying out of the NPT. Iran is alleged to be working round the clock to acquire nuclear technology and delivery capability. However, it has consistently maintained that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. As at the end of 2007, the International Atomic Energy Authority found “no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran.”14 Syria is suspected of harboring nuclear intentions which an Israeli air strike has not completely dispelled. States that once possessed, but later pledged to dismantle, nuclear programs include South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Libya
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abandoned its own clandestine nuclear program in 2003 and was promptly rewarded by the Security Council.15 The concern is ensuring that the discarded nuclear weapons are not recycled to or traded in underground markets frequented by “rogue states,” crime syndicates, and death-defying terrorists. The fear of these deadly weapons getting into wrong hands became real after the events of September 11, 2001. The US nuclear arsenal boasted 30,000 warheads in the 1960s, in contrast to the Soviet Union’s 1980s estimate of 40,000. According to the Doomsday scenario drawn by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists the potential for an accidental or inadvertent nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia remains, particularly, with both countries anachronistically placing more than 1,000 warheads on high alert, ready to launch within tens of minutes.16 There is no doubt that the number of active nuclear warheads has dropped substantially—from the 1985 high of 65,000 to the 2002 figure of 20,000. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis was the first alarm signal. The crisis revealed how close the world was to nuclear war and sudden annihilation. Following the shipment of Soviet missiles to Cuba, the United States had imposed a blockage on Cuba until the latter arranged with Moscow for the immediate removal of the missiles from the neighborhood. The Soviet Union finally climbed down, but not before obtaining the US commitment to remove its own missiles from Turkey. The face-off lasted approximately two weeks during which the United Nations and the whole world became jittery about the danger of brinkmanship.
6.3.1 Nuclear Non-proliferation, “Weapon Sharing,” and “Peaceful Use” With the lessons learnt from the missile crisis, both the United States and the Soviet Union on August 5, 1963, signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting underwater, atmospheric, and outer space nuclear tests. Underground tests were exempted on the assumption that they posed lesser risks of radiation (and of environmental pollution) than the surface or underwater alternative. Close to 100 states ratified the Treaty by 1963. The scope of the Limited Test Ban Treaty was broadened with the adoption of the Non-Proliferation Nuclear Treaty in July 1968. Unlike the former Treaty, which focused mainly on the parameters for nuclear testing, the NPT was meant to discourage the dissemination of nuclear technology to countries that had not yet acquired it. The Treaty stands on three legs—notably, non-proliferation, disarmament, and “peaceful use.” By 1970, more than 50 countries had ratified the Treaty. The number of NPT signatories currently stands at 189. The Treaty leaves a signatory with an option to withdraw after giving three months’ notice.17 However, in what appears as a direct violation of the non-proliferation clauses of the NPT (Articles I and II), the United States has “outsourced” its nuclear capability to NATO members––particularly, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. In defense of this action, NATO maintains that the weapon sharing
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arrangement was consistent with the NPT, insofar as the US nuclear weapons in Europe “are in the sole possession and under constant and complete custody and control of the United States.”18 In the same breadth, NATO issued a disclaimer— to wit that the text carrying its “Positions” on weapon sharing was “not a formally agreed NATO document, and, therefore, does not necessarily represent the official views of individual member governments on all policy issues discussed.”19 NATO also contends that its (unofficial) positions had the backing of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The Court’s Advisory Opinion cited by NATO had been rendered on the legality of the threat or actual use of nuclear weapons. In this opinion, which NATO correctly describes as not legally binding, the ICJ practically passed the question of legality back to whoever brought it up, preferring to stay within the safe and clear confines of the Charter. Specifically, the Court held that: (a) Neither in customary nor conventional international law is there any specific authorization nor any comprehensive and universal prohibition of the threat of use or (actual) use of nuclear weapons,20 (b) Any threat or use of nuclear weapons that is contrary to Article 2, paragraph 4, of the UN Charter, and that fails to meet Article 51 is unlawful. The Court was unanimous in its opinion that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Nonetheless, it reached a deadlock on whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons was lawful or unlawful “in an extreme circumstance of self-defence,” with 7 members voting for and another 7 voting against either proposition. In light of the equivocation on the part of the ICJ, the second leg on which the NPT rests—disarmament—is as shaky as the first, non-proliferation. The NPT had been expected to accelerate the process of nuclear disarmament. The nucleararmed states were supposed to take the lead in ridding the world of the nuclear menace by reducing and ultimately eliminating the stockpile of weapons in their arsenals. While a few countries went through the motion of dismantling their nuclear weapons, no meaningful step has been taken to date by the nuclear club members to disarm themselves. In fact, rather than “decommission” and destroy the deadly weapons, these countries have merely stashed them away. The five world powers represented on the Security Council together account for the largest share of weapons in the world’s nuclear arsenal. Besides, the struggle for the leadership of this elite club is still between the United States and the Russian Federation, the latter being the heir to the Soviet nuclear throne. Having resorted to legalism to knock off two of the legs on which the NPT stands, the nuclear weapons establishment tends to be suspicious of moves aimed at the last and only leg supporting the NPT—that is, peaceful use of nuclear energy permitted in Article IV of the Treaty. “Peaceful use” is interpreted to mean the enrichment of uranium for the purpose of supplementing traditional energy sources, like electricity. Yet the matter is not as simple as it sounds. Uranium enrichment and plutonium
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reprocessing could lead to the production of fissile material vital to the construction of nuclear warheads. The established nuclear powers—particularly, the United States, Great Britain, and their NATO allies—accordingly insist that any nuclear program claiming to serve nothing but “peaceful purposes” must be under constant surveillance. Unless placed under the microscope, such a program will not, in their reckoning, stop looking for ways to get round the only remaining leg of the NPT, and to upgrade “peaceful use” to a full-fledged weapons development regime. While the capacity to develop uranium to weapons grade leaves the possibility of non-peaceful use of nuclear technology, the NPT requires concrete evidence that a program, purported to serve peaceful ends, is in fact a cover for sinister intentions. This places a huge burden on the International Atomic Energy Authority. At the very least, and going by the Advisory Opinion of the ICJ, the Authority has to furnish incontrovertible evidence that, contrary to Article 2, paragraph 4, and Article 51, of the UN Charter, an ongoing nuclear program constitutes “a threat of use or (actual) use of nuclear weapons.” That will probably require that the weapons be produced— as a first step to determining what threat it poses, or the use to which it is about to be put when the aggressor was caught red-handed.
6.4 Conventional Arms Race and the Future of Humankind No person in his or her right mind would consider the use of nuclear weapons as a realistic option. It is only conventional arms that have proved handy in times of conflict. Conventional weapons have been regularly deployed where the intention is to inflict targeted damage—as in the case of criminal assaults on rival gangs, or on police formations—or to perpetrate “manageable violence” in theatres of localized wars. Whether targeted or not, the damage caused by conventional weapons since the end of the Second World War has been substantial. The 1969–1975 Vietnam War was a test of will over weapons. While the Vietcong’s will eventually prevailed, the American weapons did not rest until they had brought death and destruction to approximately 58,000 American servicemen and -women, 1.1 million North and South Vietnamese soldiers, between 500,000 and 2 million Vietnamese noncombatants, and the socioeconomic infrastructure. The AK-47 s, which served the Hutu militants’ ethnic cleansing objectives in Rwanda, left the country with a body-count exceeding 1 million. By the time the casualty figures from other flash points21 are taken into account, the total loss occasioned by conventional warfare would have exceeded the combined casualties of the two World Wars. As is the case with the possession of nuclear weapons, the permanent members of the Security Council are the leading contestants in the conventional arms race. For years, the Soviet Union consistently led the United States in arms export worldwide.22 The situation changed dramatically in 1990 with the gradual disintegration of the Soviet Union. Since then the United States has maintained a solid lead as an arms exporter. Table 6.1 below shows that the United States, the United
182,500 34,200 19,900 N/A 6,200 5,400 6,000 10,000 − 3,000
Arms sales, 2005 (US$ millions) 62.9 11.8 6.9 N/A 2.1 1.9 2.1 3.8 − 1.0
Share of arms sales, 2005 (%) 4.3 20.1 19.4 (–US$1,757 millions) 26.8 N/A 27.4 11.8 − (–US$1,724 millions)
Official Development Assistance, 2006 (as % of military spending) Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No No No
Permanent Member of UN Security Council (Yes/No)
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
Member of G8 (Yes/No)
Sources: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2007, SIPRI Yearbook 2007: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, New York
1. United States 546,018 2. United Kingdom 61,925 3. France 54,686 4. China 51,400 5. Japan 41,702 6. Russian Federation 39,800 7. Germany 38,108 8. Italy 30,905 9. Saudi Arabia 29,541 10. India 24,014
Ranking and country
Military expenditure, 2006 (US$ millions)
Table 6.1 Military spending, arms sales, and Official Development Assistance: a league table
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Kingdom, France, China, and the Russian Federation are at the top of the arms transfer league. The five Permanent Members of the Security Council account for over 80 percent of global arms sales in 2005–2006. Only the United Kingdom and France made fairly substantial contributions to Official Development Assistance (ODA) within the period, and even then, neither was able to match Germany’s or Japan’s generosity in this area. China is a big military spender, but a net recipient of ODA. Up to the 1990s, the Middle East was the prime recipient of arms transfers, with the bulk of military goods and services heading for Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and North Africa’s Libya (Purver, 1993). Between 1965 and 1989, Iraq topped the list of arms importers, with military spending amounting to $93 billion. It was followed by Saudi Arabia which allocated $62 billion to military supplies and equipment within the period. In 1989, Saudi Arabia finally caught up with and surpassed Iraqi military budget (Purver, 1993:4). The arms trade has not only eaten into the already lean finances of developing countries, but has also, at the same time, sustained localized wars and triggered horrendous human consequences across the globe. Besides the India–Pakistan faceoff dating back to 1948, the Berlin Blockage of 1948, the Korean war of 1950, and the 1962 Cuban missiles crisis, world peace and security had, over the years, been threatened by localized wars and wars of national liberation. With an ideological undertone, the national liberation wars were fought at different theatres. Among these are southeast Asia (Laos, North Vietnam, Cambodia); the Middle East and Africa (Palestine, Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa); and Latin America (Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Columbia). The liberation wars were mostly backed by the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba. To “contain” the communists, the United States relied on the Central Intelligence Agency to infiltrate, spy on, and sabotage Marxist regimes. It also supplied arms and provided technical assistance to friendly regimes under siege (like Zaire’s Mobutu), as well as to West-leaning counterrevolutionaries (such as Angola’s Jonas Savimbi). With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, ethnic revivalism gradually replaced political ideology as a conflict trigger. In 1999 alone, conflict had erupted in no less than 27 countries, with the Africa region reporting the highest incidence (11).23 To date, the theatres of ethnic-related conflicts include the western Balkans (BosniaHerzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia); Europe (Northern Ireland, and the Basque region of Spain); the former Soviet Union (Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh); the Middle East (Turkey, Iraq, Cyprus); Asia (Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, East Timor); and Africa (Burundi, Cote d’Ivoire, Dafur, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, northern Uganda, Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Tchad). The actors and principal beneficiaries are the secret services and agent provocateurs as well as the gun lobbies in the arms exporting countries; crime syndicates working in
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collusion with arm shipment firms and corrupt customs officials; and local warlords that fill the vacuum created by state collapse and the disappearance of civil authority. Ironically, no other country is more poignantly exposed to the small arms threat than the one considered the leader in arms trade––that is, the United States. It is estimated that roughly 90 percent of the arms that the Mexican drug cartels deployed against government troops, or distributed to paid assassins, originated from the United States.24 In the constant struggle for supremacy, drug lords often recruited death squads to take out their rivals or anyone that stood in their way. The risk of the lawlessness spilling across the American border was such that the Department of Homeland Security decided in 2009 to authorize rigorous search of vehicles entering the United States from Mexico. However, even if the Department succeeds in preventing the smuggling of weapons back into the United States, it would still find it almost impossible stopping another type of trafficking—trafficking in drugs and dangerous substances. The United States has many other reasons for seeking a lasting solution to arms trafficking. A sizeable cache of the weapons which traumatized Africa—and wrought so much damage in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Cote d’Ivoire, and Somalia, to mention a few—subsequently found its way to Bolivia where leftist guerrillas were locked in a life-and-death struggle with the government.25 Like any other country, therefore, it is in the United States’ best interests to find a lasting solution to the small arms problem. The first Gulf War provided an opportunity to control trade in conventional arms. Thus, realizing the enormous human and economic costs imposed by wars and possibly the boomerang effect of arms exports, the five Permanent Members of the Security Council met in London in October 1991 to find common grounds on the draft “Guidelines for Conventional Arms Transfers.” The Guidelines required the powerful nations and arms exporters to avoid transfers which “prolong or aggravate an existing armed conflict,” introduce “destabilizing military capabilities” (whatever that meant) in a region, or might “be used other than for the legitimate defense and security needs of the recipient State.” However, whatever pledge they made by adopting the Guidelines would still have been nullified by the commitment’s voluntary nature, and the Guidelines’ vagueness on key questions. As it so happens, none of the five Permanent Members have taken any meaningful action to halt arms transfers with combat-elongation and militarily destabilizing effects (Purver, 1993). Besides, the UN Arms Register, which a 1994 General Assembly resolution caused to be opened, has only made the transfer process relatively transparent, not aimed to reduce arms trafficking or preempt the serious consequences of arms trade. In general, if the arms trade sustains wars and endangers peace, it stands to reason that the United Nations’ development mandates would constantly be derailed. How the Organization could turn sheaths into plowshares remains to be seen.
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Notes 1. Montenegro’s admission in 2006 brought the number of Member States from 191 to 192. The Vatican participates as an Observer State, and Palestine as a nonstate entity. 2. The Soviet Union was yet to make an inroad into Latin America and the Caribbean, as the United States still reigned supreme in the Western Hemisphere. For instance, Cuba did not fall into the Communist hands until 1955 when Fidel Castro took control of Havana. 3. India was still under the British Raj when it joined the United Nations as a full-fledged member in 1945. It was one of the few colonies accorded this privilege. 4. See the Annual Reports of the Secretary-General to the General Assembly on the Composition of the Secretariat (various years). 5. Economic and Social Council, Update on developments in human resources, United Nations Children Fund, Second regular session, 13–17 September 2004 (Ref. E/ICEF/2004/17), p. 4, paragraph 4. 6. Ibid. 7. See Childers, E., and Urquhart, B., 1994, Renewing the United Nations System (Uppsala, Sweden: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, pp. 143–144; United Nations, 2004, Basic Facts About the United Nations (United Nations: New York), p. 19. 8. See Balogun, M.J., Headhunting for World Peace, op. cit. 9. Pitt, 1986, The Nature of United Nations Bureaucracies, op. cit., p. 30. 10. Amsden, A.H., 2007, Escape from Empire: the Developing World’s Journey through Heaven and Hell (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press). 11. Balogun, M.J., Headhunting for World Peace, op. cit. 12. The membership of ECOSOC was increased to 27 in 1965, and to 54 in 1973, after the General Assembly had secured the two-third majority needed to amend Article 61. 13. Members may elect to have their differences arbitrated by other tribunals by virtue of existing or subsequent agreements (Article 95). 14. Statement by IAEA Director-General on New US Intelligence Estimate on Iran (December 4, 2007). 15. The sanctions imposed on Libya, after the Lockerbie plane crash, were lifted in 2003. See Security Council Resolution 1506 of September 12, 2003, which terminated Resolution 748 of 1992. 16. “Doomsday Clock Overview,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (http://www.thebulletin.org/ content/doomsday-clock/overview). 17. It is this opt-out clause that North Korea invoked in 2003 to free itself from the NPT obligations. 18. “NATO’s Positions Regarding Nuclear Non-Proliferation, Arms Control and Disarmament and Related Issues, NATO, June 2005” (http://www.nato.int/issues/nuclear/position.html). 19. Ibid. 20. The Charter could not have foreseen the nuclear arms race, since it was adopted in 1945, the same year when the first bomb (“Trinity”) was tested by the United States. The Soviet Union did not test its “own” bomb until 1949. Great Britain tested its own bomb only in 1952. 21. Examples of flash points are wars of national liberation, border clashes, civil strife, terrorism, and wars waged by criminal gangs on one another and on government forces. 22. The 1956 Suez crisis, for instance, erupted when Egypt received large consignments of arms from Communist Czechoslovakia and stacked them close to the Israeli border. The tension escalated as Egypt seized control of the Suez Canal and blocked sea traffic. Britain and France promptly demanded the Canal’s immediate return to a company whose stock they both held, that is, the Universal Suez Canal Company. It took the intervention of the Security Council and the General Assembly to separate the warring parties—notably, Egypt that had blocked the Gulf of Aqaba, accusing Israel of invading its territory, along with France and Britain that were ready to mount “police action” to take the Canal back from Egypt and clear the way for vessels.
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23. Bhatia, M.V., 2003, War and Intervention (Bloomfield CT: Kumarian), p. 31. 24. In a statement relayed by CNN on March 14, Mexican President Felipe Calderon pointedly accused the United States of aiding and abetting his country’s drug trade in two ways—first, by arming the drug cartels and second, by providing a ready market for cocaine, marijuana, and other dangerous substances originating from Mexico. 25. This is probably why the US government was keen to have an alleged Russian gun-runner, Viktor Bout, extradited by Thailand for trial in the United States. Curiously, the Russian Government appeared to be opposed to Bout’s extradition. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/ id/29698814
Chapter 7
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in a Lawless World
We have captured 689 (terror suspects) and handed over 369 to the United States. Various Pakistani individuals have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars. Those who habitually accuse us of ‘not doing enough’ in the war on terror should simply ask the CIA how much prize money it has paid to Pakistanis. —Former Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf (p. 237 of his memoir, In the Line of Fire)
7.1 Introduction Contrary to the assumption in some quarters that international law and institutions could, by themselves, check anarchy and enforce order, events of the past few years have exposed the fragility of contemporary collective security arrangements. Due largely to the lack of a social contract, binding nations to a uniform code of conduct, the state of nature which organized government managed to contain at the national level has returned with a vengeance. In the increasingly lawless world, states that have the power to do so resort to unilateral action. “Rogue” nations and unruly individuals often follow suit by renouncing obligations and rules of civilized conduct. The weak nations’ (and/or insurgent groups’) defiance of the powerful states frequently leaves the latter with the option of either appealing to the “conscience of the international community” or taking the law into their own hands. The consequence of anarchy’s return is too important to be ignored. Life, for instance, that was once considered sacred is now liable to be terminated at short notice—if not by suicide bombers, but by ethnic separatists, marauding armies, drone strikes, and soldiers of fortune that are answerable to no one but themselves and probably their paymasters. Liberty is apt to be confiscated either by individual tyrants or by leviathans with territorially specific jurisdiction or supranational reach. With life and liberty under unrelenting attack, the pursuit of happiness becomes a secondary, if not an eternally fruitless, one. Starting from the premise that even in the best of times happiness is an elusive target, this chapter argues that the breakdown of global order has contributed to the growing sense of despondency. It notes, in particular, that failure to abide by the letter and spirit of the Westphalia Treaty is at the root of the crises engulfing M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_7,
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the contemporary world. Focusing on the anarchy prevailing in the post-Westphalia world of “globalization,” the chapter, in the second section, holds that rather than afford nation-states an opportunity to maintain their identities while partaking in a multicultural exchange of traditions, globalization has become a one-way street on which the secular “modernizers” seek nothing less than the total annihilation of other- and this-worldly “traditionalists.” In the third section, the chapter examines the impact of the global “War on Terror” not only on the authority and esteem of the only effective safeguard against anarchy—the sovereign state—but also on international harmony and security. The role of the United Nations is the focus of the fourth section.
7.2 Anarchy in the Post-Westphalia World: Nature and Scope of the Challenge Terrorism is not a new phenomenon. What is new is its global reach coupled with the scale of destruction and the devastating impact. Otherwise, human history is replete with acts perpetrated with the express purpose of accomplishing political objectives by violent and destructive means. Examples of terrorist acts in modern history are the attempts to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte I in 1800, and his nephew (Emperor Louis Napoleon Bonaparte III) in 1858, the Ku Klux Klan’s massacre of thousands of emancipated slaves and the “carpetbaggers” between 1865 and 1877, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and of Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948, the British soldiers’ slaying of Indians at Amritsar in 1920, and the 9/11 attacks that resulted in the death of 3,025 innocent civilians, mostly American citizens and nationals of 70 other countries1 .
7.2.1 Overview of Terrorism Detailed and accurate records of modern terrorism incidents are hard to come by. The US State Department has documented a total of 246 terrorism incidents which took place between 1961 and 2009 and which the Department deemed significant. However, the list excludes many other critical occurrences. Examples include the organized lynching and racially motivated murders in the United States of the 1950s and the 1960s; the CIA and the Mossad assassination programs; the March 1968 My Lai massacre of unarmed South Vietnamese by the US troops; the Khmer Rouge’s torture and execution, between 1975 and 1979, of counterrevolutionaries or “enemies” of Kampuchea; the atrocities committed (up to the present) by the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons across the United States; the massacre of the Tutsi by the Hutu in Rwanda; the Gujarat anti-Muslim riots of 20022 ; the violence in Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Moscow perpetrated by the northern Caucasus’s ethnic separatists; the ethnic-cum-religious violence in different parts of the world; the sabotage of oil installations and abduction (for ransom) of foreigners and local politicians in Nigeria’s Niger-Delta region; and the frequent bombing of civilian quarters in war-affected areas.
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While terrorism and Islam are used interchangeably—and possibly, cynically— the tendency to rely on violence as a means of settling sociopolitical disputes defies religious, ethnic, or ideological categorization. Violence may be masterminded by bona fide revolutionaries (like leaders of anticolonial struggles and of postcolonial liberation movements, the Abul Nidal group, the Red Brigades, Tupac Amarus); by religious zealots (IRA; Hamas; Baruch Goldstein; the Hindu nationalist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and the more recent Vishwa Hindu Parishad); by ethnic separatists (Tamil Tigers, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the Chechnya and the Kurdish guerrilla bands); or by common criminals (particularly the Colombian and the Mexican drug cartels). It may also be executed by well-meaning ideologues, genuine believers, or plain mercenaries. Although never listed as such, the governments that bomb civilian targets and send women and children into refugee camps are, by the standard definition of the term, terrorists. The same applies to governments that bankroll failed or successful assassination of developing countries’ leaders. Examples of leaders killed on the instructions of foreign powers are Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of Congo; Ruben Um Nyobe, leader of Union des Populations du Cameroun, and his successor, Felix-Roland Moumie; FRELIMO’s Eduardo Mondlane; and Samora Machel in Mozambique3 . The CIA tried every trick to get rid of Castro, but the Cuban leader, with his nine lives, survived all assassination attempts. Due to the horrendous nature of the 9/11 attacks and the rhetoric employed by the alleged perpetrators, terrorism has in recent years come to be associated with Islam. In its final report, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (hereafter referred to as “the 9/11 Commission” or “the Commission”) wittingly or unwittingly launched the faith profiling campaign by concluding that: The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not come as a surprise. Islamist extremists had given plenty of warning that they meant to kill Americans indiscriminately and in large numbers4 .
The Commission took pains to explain that Islam, “the great world faith,” was not the enemy. The enemy, according to it, was a perversion of the faith. It adds that The enemy goes beyond al Qaeda to include the radical ideological movement, inspired in part by al Qaeda, that has spawned other terrorist groups and violence5 .
By the time the Commission had published its findings, Islam, and not just al Qaeda, had been cast as the enemy—the enemy of the United States and of Western civilization. The tendency on the part of neoconservative commentators (like Ann Coulter and David Horowitz) to misrepresent the faith has been noted in Chapter 2. In the eyes of these commentators, Islam and terrorism are two sides of the same coin. In his own unguarded moments, former President Bush claimed that the “Islamic fascists” were driven by their hatred of American freedoms and way of life. Notwithstanding attempts to hold the entire Muslim world responsible for the acts of a few extremists, the evidence assembled by the US State Department does not support the contention that Islam, or indeed any other faith, endorses terrorism. Table 7.1 provides random examples of terrorist acts perpetrated by various groups over a 40-year period, that is, from 1961 to 2001. The incidents include those
Belfast, Northern Ireland Munich, West Germany NY City, Wall St bar
Teheran, Iran
Grand Mosque, Makkah, Saudi Arabia US Air Force Base, Ramstein, West Germany Beirut, US embassy and US military barracks Rangoon, Burma Torrejon, Spain Amritsar, India East Beirut
1972 (July)
1972 (Sept) 1975 (Jan)
1979 (Nov)
1979 (Nov)
1985 (June)
1983 (Oct) 1984 (Apr) 1984 (June) 1984
1983 (April)
US embassy, San Salvador, El Salvador
Unknown
1961 (May)
1981 (Aug)
Location(s)
Year (month in bracket)
Bomb
Hit squad Bomb Temple seizure Truck bomb
Suicide bomb
Bomb
Mosque seizure
Embassy seizure
Gun/grenade attack Bomb
Bomb
Hijacking of US plane
Nature of attack
FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front)
North Korean agents Unknown Sikh extremists Hezbollah
Islamic Jihad
Red Army
Islamic extremists
Irish Republican Army (IRA) Black September group FALN (Puerto Rican nationalists) Radical students
Puerto Rican Antuilo Ramierez
Identity of alleged attackers
Table 7.1 Significant terrorist incidents, 1961–2001
242 marines, and 17 civilians 21 South Koreans 18 US servicemen 100 24 (including 2 military personnel) 4 US marines and 9 embassy staff
–
250
–
14 4
11
–
No. of deaths
–
48 83 – –
120
–
(No death/injury, but 53 spent 444 days in captivity) 600
– 60
Ramierez took plane to Havana where he was given asylum 130
No. of injuries (or nature of damage)
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Mediterranean Sea
Air India Boeing 747 flight, over the Atlantic Athens, Greece
Berlin discotheque Kimpo Airport, Seoul
Barcelona, Spain, bar frequented by US servicemen Lockerbie, Scotland
NY City (WTC garage)
Oklahoma City, Federal Building) Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, US military base) Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
1985 (Oct)
1985
1986 (Mar)
1986 (Apr) 1986 (Sep)
1987 (Dec)
1993 (Feb)
1995 (Apr)
1996 (June)
1995 (Nov)
1988 (Dec)
Location(s)
Year (month in bracket)
Truck bomb
Car bomb
Car bomb
Bomb
Bomb (Pan Am flight)
Bomb (explosion aboard flight) Bomb Detonation of explosive device Bomb
Gun attack on Achille Lauro, Italian cruise liner Bomb
Nature of attack
Hezbollah
Followers of Umar Abd al-Rahman Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols Hezbollah
Libya
Catalan separatists
Palestinian splinter group Libya North Korean agents
Sikh and Kashmiri extremists
Libya
Identity of alleged attackers
Table 7.1 (continued)
19 US servicemen
5 US servicemen
166
6
259 (all passengers)
1 (US citizen)
2 (US soldiers) 5
4
329
1
No. of deaths
515 (among them, 240 US personnel)
(structural damage to 220 buildings) –
11 (nonpassengers on ground) 1,000
–
79 (servicemen) 29
9
–
(700 taken hostage but later released)
No. of injuries (or nature of damage)
7.2 Anarchy in the Post-Westphalia World: Nature and Scope of the Challenge 111
Aden, Yemen (US Navy destroyer, USS Cole) NY City; Arlington, Virginia; and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Central Bank, Colombo, Sri Lanka Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (US embassies)
Location(s)
Hijacking and conversion of planes into missiles
Explosives
Truck bombs
Explosives
Nature of attack
al Qaeda
al Qaeda
al Qaeda
Tamil Tigers (LTTE)
Identity of alleged attackers
Source: US State Department (Diplomacy in Action), 9/11 Commission, and other sources
2001
2000 (Oct)
1998 (Aug)
1996 (Jan)
Year (month in bracket)
Table 7.1 (continued)
3,025 (US and other nationals)
17 sailors
291 in Kenya, and 10 in Tanzania
90
No. of deaths
5,000 Kenyans, 6 US citizens, and 13 embassy staff (structural damage to embassy buildings) (Extensive damage to destroyer) Levelling of twin towers at the WTC, and damage to Pentagon.
1,400
No. of injuries (or nature of damage)
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motivated by the will to change the existing political order, liberate particular societies from foreign rule or influence, preserve a way of life, or take out individuals considered an obstacle to the realization of specific or vaguely defined objectives.
7.2.2 Violence Perpetration Methods Table 7.2 is a breakdown of terrorist attacks reported by the State Department for the period 1961–2009. An analysis of the incidents reveals that by far the most common terrorism method applied within the period is detonation of bombs (80 separate incidents or 32% of the total). Explosive devices have been placed on flights and set off on or before reaching cruising altitude. Bombs have also been planted in cars and trucks, in crowded shopping malls, and beneath apartments and office complexes. Abduction (including seizure of holy places) comes next on the list of methods popular with the terrorists. No less than 52 such incidents (21% of the total) were reported between 1961 and 2009. The other methods are suicide bombing (17%), gun/grenade/rocket attack (13%), and assassination (12%). Suicide bombing is a new and worrying phenomenon. Although self-immolation was a method routinely applied by the Vietcong against South Vietnamese and US targets in the 1960s and 1970s, it was largely unheard of until a female member of the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed herself and the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991. Even then, suicide bombing remained an isolated terrorism method until the tragic events of September 11, 2001 changed everything. Today, terrorism has since become armed struggle by another name.
Table 7.2 Breakdown of terrorism incidents by method applied, 1961–2009
Terrorism method Hijacking Abduction/kidnapping Assassination/execution Gun/grenade/rocket attack Detonation of bombs/explosive devices (by remote control) Suicide bombs Miscellaneous Total (all categories)
1961– 1970
1971– 1980
1981– 1990
1991– 2000
2001– 2009
Total No. of incidents (1961–2009)
1 2 1 1
1 5 4 2
2 6 10 2
2 34 6(a) 9
2 5 8 18
8 (3.2%) 52 (21%) 29 (12%) 32 (13%)
–
3
16
26
35
80 (32%)
– 1
− −
1 −
2(a) 1
38 2
41 (17%) 4 (1.6%)
6
15
37
81
107
246
N.B. (a) 1991–2000 assassination incidents may also be classified as suicide attacks Source: Table based on data supplied by the US State Department.
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7.2.3 Terrorists’ Motives/Affiliations The motives of the perpetrators of violence vary. Suicide bombing is a clear signal of despondency. As Crenshaw observes, groups resort to suicide terrorism when they see no other strategy working (Crenshaw, 1998). Rape (2003) equates terrorism with a “rational” strategy pursued by secular or religious groups to gain territorial and other concessions from liberal democracies. Haddad and Khashan find greater support for radical (political) Islam among Lebanese youth than among older respondents. However, they see no connection between income and education, on the one hand, and support for radical Islam, on the other (Haddad and Khashan, 2002). That is another way of saying there is no connection between poverty and illiteracy on the one hand, and support for radical Islamic causes, on the other. By the same token, Atran (2004) finds no evidence linking support for terrorism to hatred of America or of its internal cultural freedoms. What he finds is the impact that intense opposition to US foreign policy in general, and its Middle Eastern policy, in particular, has on attitudes toward the country. Based on the information supplied by the US State Department on the terrorists’ declared motives and/or affiliations, it is possible to conclude that the decisions to launch terrorist attacks are more likely to be driven by secular political, than religious considerations. Table 7.3, for instance, shows that religious or sectarian differences did not begin to feature as a serious terrorism trigger until after 9/11. By contrast, contestation for secular political power has been a direct causative factor from the early 1960s to the present. Even some of the terrorist acts presumed to be religiously motivated (and classified as such in Table 7.3) have underlying secular (sociopolitical) objectives. Al Qaeda, for one, is often assumed to be driven solely by fundamentalist Islamic doctrine. This may be a gross oversimplification. But for its fiery language, its message of Armageddon, and its ruthlessness, this sponsor of global violence could have passed for any secular group. Balancing its religiously motivated advocacy of Sharia law is its clearly secular ideology––one founded on opposition to sectarianism, parochial nationalism and “pan Arabism,” Western occupation of Muslim territories, communism’s Godlessness, capitalist exploitation, liberal democracy, and, in
Table 7.3 Breakdown of terrorism incidents by the perpetrators’ motives/affiliation, 1961–2009 Perpetrators’ motives/affiliation
1961– 1970
1971– 1980
1981– 1990
1991– 2000
2001– 2009
Total (1961–2009)
Secular/ideological/political Religious/sectarian Mix of secular and religious motives Undeclared/unknown
4 – 1
7 3 2
24 10 −
50 14 9
17 32 26
102 59 38
1
3
3
8
32
47
Total (all categories)
6
15
37
81
107
246
Source: US State Department
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particular, democracy’s cynical view of people’s sovereignty. In other words, were it not for its stand on the replacement of secular with Sharia law and its reliance on terror as a method of choice, al Qaeda would have been no different from groups inveighing against nationalism, neocolonialism, communism, capitalism, globalization, and the imperfections of democracy. Similarly, the IRA might have been the Catholics’ last stand and an implacable foe of the Protestants. However, any bomb it detonated and any shot it fired were meant not to spread the word of God, but to secure its supporters’ (Irish Catholics’) place under the earth’s sun. The Hamas may be an Islamic group, but its struggle is, first and foremost, about how to lessen the plight of the Palestinians in the face of Israel’s military and economic intimidation. Since Hinduism is viewed as a way of life rather than a religion, neither the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh nor the Vishwa Hindu Parishad is out to propagate the teachings of any of the several sects into which the faith is divided (Jaffrelot, 1998). Both merely use Hinduism as a rallying point for the attainment of their underlying objective—which is to promote Indian nationalism and fend off foreign influences6 .
7.3 Consequences of Anarchy Terrorism’s devastating impact is by now familiar. The immediate economic cost of the 9/11 attacks alone has been estimated at over US$20 billion. The Comptroller of the City of New York valued the property loss at $21.8 billion which was equal to 0.2% of the GDP for a year. Krugman bases his own calculations of terrorism’s economic costs on three types of loss—what he terms “the direct losses from criminal acts; the costs of spending on law enforcement; and the costs of distorted individual decisions because of fear of crime” (Krugman, 2004). From the point of view of the US economy, the direct cost of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were minimal. According to Krugman’s estimate, the $21.8 billion property loss reported by the New York City Comptroller was “less than half as large as the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan, and less than a quarter as large relative to the economy” (Krugman, 2004:2). Even the diversion of business away from the city to other locations was not a net economic loss to the United States. It is the second category of cost—spending on law enforcement—that Krugman finds staggering. Working on estimates prepared by the Center for American Progress, Krugman sees the spending on “homeland security” rising between 2001 and 2004. As a proportion of GDP, the CAP estimates suggest a long-term increase roughly equivalent to 1.3 or 1.4%. He regards the projected increase in homeland security spending as “vastly larger than the direct costs imposed by the 9/11 attacks,” Krugman (2004:4). This prompts him to ask rhetorically “to what extent this additional security spending should be viewed as a response to terrorism, as opposed to a political program enabled by terrorism.”
Krugman’s concern on the rising cost of homeland security is shared by Glen Hodgson, Vice President and Deputy Chief Economist for Export Development
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Canada (EDC). In a paper posted online in July 2004, Hodgson underscores terrorism’s negative impact on investment flows, stock market valuations, the insurance industry, and tourism. He reckons that the US spends close to US$500 billion annually, or 20% of the US federal budget, on two departments directly engaged in combating or preventing terrorism—Defense and Homeland Security7 . The Defense budget, in particular, recorded a 33.3% increase from 2001 to 2003. Hodgson concedes the fact that defense and security spending is essential for any nation, but they also come with an opportunity cost, more so as “those resources are not available for other purposes, from spending on health and education to reductions in taxes.” By 2008, the US defense spending had risen to $623 billion, which is over 50% of the world’s $1,100 billion. The US military budget dwarfs China’s $65 billion and Russia’s $50 billion. The third category of costs identified by Krugman are the additional “transaction costs” imposed by security restrictions. Business travellers now spend more time getting through airport security. He refers to a 2002 Fortune’s estimated costs of the long airport queues—1.5% of GDP per year. However, Krugman believes that this estimate is grossly inflated. It includes projected increases in insurance premiums, which could not be regarded as a net economic loss, but “only a transfer of money among economic agents.” The Fortune estimate also factors in the risk that enhanced security measures would “slow up supply chains, force companies to maintain higher inventories, and hence reduce productivity.” Krugman does not see heightened security arrangements having such a devastating impact on productivity. However, he finds that fear—whether of terrorism or of crime—distorts individual choices. Distorted travel decisions, for instance, “confer losses on the destinations perceived as risky, but benefits those that are chosen as alternatives.” Overall, it does not matter what the short-term effects of terrorist attacks are. What matters is the long-term impact not only on the United States but on the world at large. The cumulative impact of the “economics of uncertainty” is already noticeable. Although other factors might be at work, terrorism and the attendant restrictions might have contributed to the global meltdown that manifested in the fourth quarter of 2008. The current travel restrictions will remain in place for as long as passenger tolerance could be sustained. Over time, however, passengers will think twice before embarking on trips to destinations considered risky and/or hassle-prone and stressful. The resultant decline in passenger traffic will have adverse effects on airline and hotel reservations, and on travel-dependent jobs. The net loss to the economy will increase as job mobility and retraining opportunities decrease.
7.3.1 Image and Security Backlash It is legitimate to ask whether the “War on Terror” has lowered or heightened the risk of further attacks. Regrettably, and as indicated in the next section, reactions to 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks have exacerbated, rather than lessen, global security challenges. The invasion of Afghanistan was not unexpected. However, even
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if it was sold as an act of self-defense, the decision by powerful states to gang up on weak states and inflict maximum damage on defenseless civilians could not but prove detrimental to the image of the United States. Coming closely on the heels of the Taliban’s overthrow, the invasion of Iraq handed the extremists a major propaganda victory. The Iraq invasion and the subsequent “regime change”—under what turned out to be false pretenses—might not be the proof the extremists need to support their allegation of Western conspiracy against Islam. However, a single war waged by the West in or against any Muslim nation can easily be seized upon as evidence of the former’s anti-Muslim designs. The next section examines the aftermath of 9/11 within the context of the “War on Terror,” the Islamic community’s heightened sense of persecution, the rising level of xenophobia worldwide, and the steady erosion in the authority of the nominally sovereign states.
7.4 9/11 Fallout: The “War on Terror,” Xenophobia, and Loss of Sovereign Authority Understanding the War on Terror requires clearing up a few doubts about its antecedents. According to the 9/11 Commission, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the US Pentagon was a clear and present danger—a danger that could only be met with equally deadly force. In the eyes of cynics and conspiracy theorists, however, 9/11 is part of an elaborate plan—a political program—designed by a tiny elite with gargantuan world dominance ambitions.
7.4.1 War on Terror or Quest for Hegemony The odds against the 9/11 attacks being “staged” by a few power-driven individuals are overwhelming. First, as noted by the 9/11 Commission, “Islamist extremists” had placed America on notice by attacking the latter’s interests in the Philippines, Somalia, New York/WTC, Yemen, Kenya, Tanzania, and Saudi Arabia. Second, the names of the 9/11 attackers released by the media do not sound American. If anything, the 19 hijackers that brought down the twin towers were of Arab descent. Third, and by far the most important of all, Osama bin Laden and his associates have, by their utterances, owned up to the crime. The conspiracy theorists are not swayed by any of the preceding arguments. First, not all the pre-9/11 attacks were carried out by “Islamist extremists.” The Somali marauding bands that brought down the Black Hawk in Mogadishu were under the command of rival warlords. The warlords might be extremists, but they were by no stretch of imagination “Islamists.” With the fall of Siad Barre’s regime, each warlord’s primary motive was to seize power, and to rid Somalia of external influences. Sheikh Sharif Ahmed’s case is highly enlightening. He started off as an “Islamist”— that is, as a prominent member of the al-Shabaab and head of the Islamic Courts. When assured of the support of Western powers, he switched sides, denouncing alShabaab as “terrorists,” and, as President of Somalia’s interim government, touring
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Western capitals to solicit financial and military assistance to crush his former allies. The Yemeni and Saudi attacks could also be explained as giving vent to internal political grievances, rather than acts directed at the United States. Second, if, for the sake of argument, it is accepted that the 9/11 attackers were staged by Arabs, that still leaves open the question who or what brought down the 47-storey Salomon Building eight (8) hours after the collapse of the north and the south towers. What is most intriguing about the collapse of the third tower—otherwise known as WTC 7—is the manner the event was reported by the media, along with the subsequent official news blackout. According to a YouTube footage, WTC 7’s collapse was reported by the BBC World at 4.57 p.m. Eastern Time—30 minutes before the event! 8 Since then, no official document has made any reference to the Salomon Building’s eventual collapse. Surely, coming down the same day as the twin towers, a building as big and important as WTC 7 ought to have merited, at least, a casual mention in the 9/11 Report. The cynics argue that silence was part of a clever strategy—the strategy to instill in the mind of Americans fear of Islamic fundamentalism, and keep public attention focused on “Islamist extremists” long enough to justify the imposition of global martial law and other draconian measures. Besides, to tell the world that another tower fell without being hit was to take the wind out of the terrorism sail, and to raise questions about the 8-hour gap between the collapse of the twin towers and that of WTC 7. As CNN later observed, the news of WTC 7’s collapse sounded “far-fetched.” While the event does not support the “controlled demolition theory,” it certainly raises questions about how a 47-storey steel structure went tumbling down at that material time and on that historic date. The cynics have an answer: a powerful but invisible group is out to whip up mass hysteria, and coax the freedom-loving people of America (and the world) into surrendering their freedoms. The idea that a small group of individuals would wake up one morning, plot the takeover of the world, and get foreigners to do the deed is as far-fetched as the collapse of WTC 7. No one who expects to be taken seriously will rest his/her case on assumptions as tenuous as those underlying the “controlled demolition” of the twin and the Salomon towers. This, however, does not rule out the existence of a group with a global dominance agenda. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is precisely such a group. It is not only real, but has also made no attempt to disguise its hegemonic plans. Established in June 1997, the PNAC is, according to its Chairman, William Kristol, a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world, and that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle.
This paternalistic language is eerily familiar. Back in June 1960 when Belgium was about to transfer sovereignty to Congo, King Baudouin had begun his speech by extolling the “virtues” of Belgian colonialism. He then went on to admonish the new African rulers not to tamper with the structure about to be bequeathed by the
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colonialists. As if addressing schoolchildren, the King told the leaders waiting to take over the new nation’s sovereignty what they must or must not do: Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms, and don’t replace the structures that Belgium hands over to you until you are sure you can do better....Don’t be afraid to come to us. We will be by your side, give you advice, train with you the technical experts and administrators you will need9 .
Joseph Kasavubu, the new President, nodded approvingly while the King’s sermon lasted. When it came to his turn to address the nation, he reassured the King (and the Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens) by pledging Kasavubu’s commitment to the status quo. Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister (who was not even listed as a speaker at the occasion) quickly distanced himself from Kasavubu. He bluntly told the august gathering that independent Congo would take instructions from no one, least of all, Belgium. Prefacing his address with a reference to “Congolese men and women, fighters for independence, who are today victorious,” Lumumba went over the Belgian colonial record, and found it totally appalling. Belgium might think it was doing Congo a favor by agreeing to the latter’s independence. However, Lumumba felt that Congo’s independence was not a gift bestowed, but a right reclaimed after a long struggle10 . Unfortunately, Lumumba did not live long enough to steer Congo toward a truly independent course. Belgium and the United States began in earnest to destabilize his administration. The foreign powers not only backed the “pro-West” Kasavubu against Lumumba at the center, but also fomented crises at the periphery. With the support of Belgian troops, Moise Tshombe declared his Katanga province an independent state. Albert Kalonji soon followed suit by announcing South Kasai’s secession. Not satisfied with making Congo ungovernable, the CIA and the Belgian intelligence service plotted Lumumba’s abduction and eventual assassination. Congo has known no peace since then. This is one manifestation of the leadership that the PNAC believes to be “good for the world.” It is highly instructive of the “moral principle” on which the leadership is anchored. In retrospect, and going by Congo’s experience, PNAC is not an aberration. It is a continuation of the US practice of telling sovereign states what is “good” for them. Among the signatories to PNAC’s Statement of Principles are Republican Party and corporate heavyweights such as former Vice Presidents Dan Quayle and Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and former Governor Jeb Bush. Others are Elliot Abrams of the Iran-Contra fame, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Eliot Cohen, Midge Decter Forbes, Paula Dobriansky, Steven Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad11 , I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Peter Rodman, Stephen Rosen, Henry S Rowen, Vin Weber, George Weigel, and former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. Proceeding on the assumption that other states have no interests or values worth protecting, PNAC seeks, among other things, to: (a) Increase defense spending significantly “if we are to carry out our global responsibilities. . ..”
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(b) Strengthen ties to democratic allies and challenge “regimes hostile to our interests and values”; (c) Promote the cause of political and economic freedom abroad; and (d) Accept responsibility for “America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” On the face of it, PNAC comes across as a group dominated by, and reflecting the views of, the extreme right of the Republican Party. However, on close examination, its Statement of Principles reads like the guidebook that succeeding administrations (Republican or Democratic) consult when framing American foreign policy. Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party has questioned the holistic image that PNAC imposes on diverse cultures, the contempt and the paternalism that sum up its attitude to other sovereign states, and the militarism that is central to the realization of its goals. With the likes of Bob Kerrey serving on it, the 9/11 Commission could hardly be described as a right-wing body. Yet, either as a response to the 9/11 challenge or seeing the challenge as an opportunity to implement a wider political program, the Commission takes a view of the world that is suspiciously similar to PNAC’s. To preempt future attacks on the United States, the Commission rightly advocates drastic overhaul of the country’s intelligence apparatus. Then, it goes for the overkill—direct interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. In the Commission’s words: The first phase of our post 9/11 efforts rightly included military action to topple the Taliban and pursue al Qaeda. This work continues. But long-term success demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defense.12
By “public diplomacy,” the Commission means precisely what PNAC says—that is, communicating and defending “American ideals in the Islamic world. . .to reach more people, including students and leaders outside government13 .” The War on Terror thus wittingly or unwittingly serves America’s global interest, an interest which is largely economic, but whose fulfilment relies on frequent display of military strength and on “‘public diplomacy.” America is not alone in the scramble for the world’s scarce resources. As the New York–based Global Policy Forum notes, powerful governments are ever ready to support huge oil and mineral exploration companies as the latter roam the planet in search of new reserves. Conflict is inevitable when resource-hungry companies like ExxonMobil, BHP Billeton, Total, TotalFinaElf, Shell, Rosneft, Gazprom, and Lukoil jostle for control of enormously valuable oilfields and mineral lodes. Joining the scramble for the world’s underground resources are other players, such as the big banks, resource traders, smugglers, corrupt local officials, arms dealers, transport operators, private security firms and mercenaries, as well as military/intelligence arms of governments.
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7.4.2 Post-9/11 Measures: Scope and Justification Believing that America’s interest lies in beating others to the world’s resources, succeeding governments have aggressively pursued objectives similar to those outlined by PNAC and the 9/11 Commission. The War on Terror is ostensibly directed at religious fanaticism, but its long-term aim goes far beyond the al Qaeda and “Islamist terrorists.” As to be expected, the War entails tightening border security, overhauling the visa and immigration regulations, establishing a robust intelligence-gathering and information-sharing system, monitoring private communications (including electronic and phone conversations), sending terror suspects to military tribunals for trial, and funding military operations in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. If these are all there is to the War on Terror, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to fault it. After all, any state’s true responsibility lies in protecting the life and property of its people. The United States, like any other state, is perfectly justified to place high premium on homeland security and to watch-list individuals and groups that constitute threats to its citizens. It is a different matter when it comes to other measures tied to the War on Terror. As recommended by the 9/11 Commission, the War is fought on other fronts. Besides engaging in covert actions designed to destabilize regimes considered unfriendly, the United States relies on its embassies and consulates to penetrate and lean on foreign governments. The RAND Corporation has been particularly active in sponsoring studies aimed at influencing the policies of foreign governments. Its Qatar affiliate, the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute, operates as an arm of the Qatar Foundation, an initiative of the Emir of Qatar14 . As part of its “human capital development” program, the National Security Research Division of the RAND Corporation sponsored the publication of a book by Cheryl Benard (wife of Zalmay Khalilzad) 15 . According to Benard, Islam is in a “crisis.” Its tenets are hotly contested by four groups—the “fundamentalists” who are opposed to democracy and the ways of the world, the “traditionalists” that are against any form of change, the “modernists” who want Islam to be integrated into the modern world, and the “secularists” that stand for the separation of “church” from state. To help resolve the “crisis” Benard canvasses a policy of supporting the side of Islam that is most sympathetic to US ideals, and most compatible with the aspirations of the modern, “globalized” world. Surely, whatever “crisis” Islam is in is either externally fomented or overblown or both. By painting a picture of internal dissension, Benard carries on the tradition of stoking the embers of sectarianism in the Islamic world. At any rate, her knowledge of Islam is obviously limited. If she is conversant with the teachings of the faith, she would have realized that Muslims the world over—adherents of Sunni/Shia sects as well as the Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, Shafi’i and other schools—fully accept the core tenets and the five pillars of the faith. If the adherents fall into disputation, they have only one arbiter—the Qur’an, the contents of which remain unchanged since they were revealed. The Hadiths are no doubt important, but they are to be read in conjunction with, not as a substitute for, the clear message of the Qur’an.
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7.4.3 Limits of Paternalism The Qur’an, for good reasons, provides for no distinction between “church” and state. Whoever makes such a distinction has wandered off the path of Islam and to another of his/her own making. Islam could not have sanctioned a church–state dichotomy since it has no “church.” Also, going by the doctrine of taoheed referred to in Chapter 2, the Qur’an teaches that whatever secular choices an individual makes has profound spiritual consequences. Proceeding from the dictum that there is no compulsion in matters of faith, the Qur’an is clear on the consequences of the choices made by every individual—whether it is a “fundamentalist,” a “traditionalist,” a “modernist,” a “secularist,” a private person, or a state official. While in the privacy of his/her home, the individual is free to conduct him-/herself any way s/he likes. It is only when s/he moves to the public space and his/her choices—for example, adultery, alcoholism, indecent exposure—begin to have implications for public policy that the state intervenes. In this respect, the Islamic state is not too different from its non-Islamic counterparts. The latter constantly make profound church-related decisions such as those concerning birth control, abortion, same-sex marriage, and inclusion of creationism in, or exclusion from, school curricula. Of even greater significance than any point against state–church dichotomy in Islam is the apparent contradiction in Benard’s argument. If, the “church” must be divorced from the “state,” that leaves the question why it is one particular “state,” the United States of America, that should take up the “responsibility” for deciding the fate of the Muslim “church.” Neither America’s wealth nor its military power qualifies it to make a choice as profound as how any state must relate to its church or places of worship. It is up to each local congregation to assert its independence of the state—and to do so without external interference and incitement. Indeed, rather than get itself enmeshed in Islam’s internal “crisis,” the United States needs to focus on the acute moral and environmental dilemmas that neither capitalism nor liberal democracy has yet been able to comprehend, let alone resolve. Examples of such dilemmas have been given in Chapter 4. For the foregoing and other reasons, Muslims tend to be suspicious of nonMuslims’ attempts to “secularize” and “modernize” their faith. No Muslim (“fundamentalist,” “traditionalist,” or “modernist”) will ever dream of asking adherents of other faiths to “edit” their holy books or to expunge passages considered disagreeable. The “secularization” or “modernization” of Islam is indicative of the tendency in certain quarters to expand the “responsibility” of the United States to include deciding what is “good” for others. If the intention is to curb extremism and terrorism, treating adherents of Islam as minors (or as mentally impaired) is not the best way to proceed. As argued in Chapters 1 and 2, no one person knows what is “good” for another. Even in the same family, individual members’ interests (or preferences) are apt to be in conflict. The father’s idea of a “good” bride rarely matches the son’s image of a life partner. As it is among individuals, so it is among states. When one state claims to know what is “good” for another, it is merely using that as a cover for motives that are at
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best, non-altruistic, at worst, sinister. To know what is good for another is to serve the dependent mind adequate notice of the superior mind’s real intent—which is to help the former reconstruct reality and make life’s critical choices. Yet, interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states is not only at odds with the spirit of the Westphalia Treaty and the United Nations Charter, but is also a major conflict trigger. Failure to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states has been known to spark off border clashes and full-scale wars. The capitalist economies might regard the corporate-driven neoliberal agenda as “good” for the global economy. However, countries battling entrenched poverty and inequality (particularly, in Latin America) are likely to chart an independent fiscal and macroeconomic course. With its messianic attitude to the rest of the world, the United States will always find itself at odds with states that are determined to safeguard their independence. Among sovereign states that would likely refuse to jump when ordered are Castro’s Cuba, Chavez’s Venezuela, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Added to these are states that the United States will itself never dream of ordering around—the Russian Federation, China, North Korea, Japan, Surkano’s Indonesia, Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore, Mahathir Mohammed’s Malaysia, Nyerere’s Tanzania, Mandela’s South Africa, India, and, naturally, members of NATO that also happen to be US allies. Canadians are not from the Third World. Yet they are unlikely to sit by if their country’s sovereignty looks like being eroded. The Canadian Action Party was formed in 1997 for precisely this reason—safeguarding Canada’s sovereignty threatened by regional integration and corporate yearning for the country’s resources16 . The Japanese might be America’s ally, but the US base in Okinawa has been a sticky point in the relations between the two countries. Unfortunately, failed or otherwise weak states do not have the wherewithal to assert and defend their sovereignty. A survey carried out by the Fund for Peace and a US journal, Foreign Affairs, in 2009, identified no less than 20 “failed states” in the world. The highest number, 15, comes from Africa. The states and their rankings are Somalia (1st or Number One Failed State), Zimbabwe (2nd), Sudan (3rd), Chad (4th), Democratic Republic of Congo (5th), Central African Republic (8th), Guinea (9th), Cote d’Ivoire (11th), Kenya (14th), and Nigeria (15th) 17 . Other failed states include Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Lebanon, Haiti, Yemen, and Bangladesh.
7.4.4 Hegemony, Resistance, and Mounting Body Count Leaders of weak and failed states sometimes seek external assistance in their bid to acquire or retain power. However, even when they are willing to trade state sovereignty for personal ends, they may face rebellion from quarters they least expect—their followers. The secret of al Qaeda’s recruitment success lies in its ability to portray local despots as agents or lackeys of foreign powers. Muqtada al Sadr’s Jaish al Mahdi (Mahdi Army), which fought the US occupation forces in April 2004, was fired, not by al Qaeda’s message but by the steely
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determination to preserve Iraqi sovereignty. Following the Mahdi Army’s lead, other groups often attacked US and coalition forces, government troops, and civilians. Meanwhile, up to 103,000 Iraqis were reported, as at December 2009, to have lost their life as a result of the war and the ensuing anarchy. The number of US military personnel killed during the war reached 4,390 in April 2010. The number of injuries was as high as 31,770, with many servicemen and women suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other mental ailments. According to the Pentagon, the 6-year war also cost the American taxpayers a whopping $524 billion. Taking advantage of the anarchic situation, a private security firm, Blackwater, took to killing Iraqi civilians. Although Blackwater was arraigned before a US court, the prosecutors mishandled the case, thus allowing the firm to go scot-free. It thus never answered for its misdeeds in Iraq, a sovereign state. According to The Nation, Blackwater moved to Pakistan after its Iraq contract expired. It was retained by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and the CIA to backstop drones operations in Pakistan. It operates out of the Bagram Air Force base in nearby Afghanistan18 . Like Iraq, Afghanistan was plagued by instability following the arrival of the US, NATO, and allied forces. Piqued by the presence of foreign troops on their soil, Taliban insurgents spared no effort to make the country well-nigh impossible to govern. Their targets included the coalition forces, local Afghan troops, police posts, top government functionaries, and, unfortunately, unarmed civilians. Among the weapons in the resistance group’s armory are roadside and suicide bombs, improvised explosive devices, assassination squads, and guerrilla bands. In the first ten months of 2009, about 2,038 Afghan civilians had been killed either by militants or by coalition forces. Earlier in 2008, 2,118 had been caught in the cross-fire. In comparison to Iraq, the number of coalition troops’ deaths in Afghanistan is low. Table 7.4 indicates that as at 2010, the total number of US and coalition fatalities was 1,700. As in Iraq, the United States recorded the highest number of Afghan Table 7.4 Coalition forces’ Afghanistan fatalities, 2001–2010 Year
United States
United Kingdom
Other
Total
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
12 49 48 52 99 98 117 155 316 81
0 3 0 1 1 39 42 51 108 31
0 17 9 7 31 54 73 89 96 21
12 69 57 60 131 191 232 295 520 133
Total
1,027
276
397
1,700
Source: iCasualties.org
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Table 7.5 Annual fatalities in terrorist violence in Pakistan, 2003–2009 Civilians
Security force personnel
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010a
140 435 430 608 1,523 2,155 2,307 429
24 184 81 325 597 654 1,011 126
25 244 137 538 1,479 3,906 8,267 970
189 863 648 1,471 3,599 6,715 11,585 1,525
Total
8,027
3,002
15,486
26,595
Terrorists/insurgents
Total
a N.B.:
2010 Data only up to March 22. Source: South Asia Terrorism Portal/Institute of Conflict Management
casualties. The Afghan war also came with a high price tag—$120 billion from 2001 to 2009. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan was not officially declared a war zone. However, the country was nearly brought to its knees by extremists battling Pervez Musharraf and his successor, Asif Ali Zardari. The extremists’ grouse with Musharraf was his decision to enlist Pakistan in the United States–led War on Terror. His tenure as president was characterized by threats to public order—including armed attacks, suicide bombings, abductions, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the abortive attempts on his (Musharraf’s) own life. As at March 22, 2010, no fewer than 26,595 Pakistanis (civilians, security personnel, and insurgents) have been killed as a result of the breakdown in civil order (see Table 7.5 for the figures for the period 2003–2010). The high civilian casualties are unlikely to endear foreign troops to local populations.
7.4.5 Rising Tide of Xenophobia The mounting body count is not the only outcome of the War on Terror. With the print and electronic media’s unrelenting focus on “Islamist terrorism,” Muslims in different parts of the world have fallen victim to xenophobia. The French government instituted measures aimed at banning the hijab, and cautioned moderate Muslims against challenging the country’s secular heritage. The Swiss followed suit by banning the minaret—which is actually a Middle Eastern architectural style but which in the Western mind is an Islamic symbol. Not to be outdone, the Quebec Provincial Assembly on March 24, 2010, accepted a bill seeking to deny niqabwearing Muslim women accesses to essential public services—including services provided by educational institutions, government funding agencies, nurseries, and health centers19 . Around the same time, a bill was introduced in the Belgian parliament banning the niqab. In other parts of Europe, individuals joined the anti-Muslim frenzy by making provocative statements about Islam or denigrating its prophet.
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Curiously, at a time when anti-Semitism and hate crimes are decried20 , Europe could not understand why Muslims should complain about cartoons insulting their faith.
7.5 Role of the UN in a Lawless World There is no doubt that the United Nations has a major role to play in curbing anarchy in international politics and in bringing civility back to interstate (as well as interfaith) relations. The Organization could have made a difference in the 1960s when the then newly independent Congo was being torn apart by foreign intrigue and local factionalism. Yet, rather than work with Patrice Lumumba’s central government to safeguard Congo’s sovereignty and preserve its territorial integrity, the then Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, looked the other way as Belgium and leading Western powers facilitated the consolidation of Katanga’s secession plan. The United Nations has since come a long way. It played an active role in the decolonization process and in the liberation of Namibia and South Africa from apartheid regime’s grip. Its technical assistance program proved invaluable in developing the critical capacities needed by newly independent states to achieve their development objectives. Debates in the General Assembly went a long way in sensitizing the peoples of the world to the risks of nuclear proliferation, civil strife, climate change, environmental degradation, and pandemics. Even if the Security Council was unable to preempt the Iraq war in 2003, the organization could, at least, take comfort in the fact that it (or specifically, Hans Blix) had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Besides ensuring that the Iraq history does not repeat itself, the United Nations has a major responsibility for curbing the anarchy prevailing in the contemporary world. In specific terms, it needs to reaffirm the Charter stipulations on sovereign equality, and on noninterference in the internal affairs of Member States. Member States need to find their voices and participate actively in debates on contemporary topics—notably, those relating to measures to adopt to foil terrorism plots, safeguard state sovereignty, bring civility back to diplomacy, defend the weak against the strong, and promote world peace. Naturally, states that are under attack have every right to defend themselves. It will be unreasonable, for instance, to expect the United States of America or any country to fold its arm while extremists are plotting attacks against it in far-off places. It will, as it must, use every means at its disposal to find and preempt plots against its homeland. This is what any responsible state will do. However, while conceding the States Parties’ right to self-defense, the United Nations needs to prevail upon the powerful ones among them not to go out of their ways to interfere in the internal affairs of weaker states. The former would have gone out of their ways if they think that their responsibilities include deciding matters of faith, which religious precepts are “compatible” with modernity, and when an individual flouts an arbitrarily determined dress code. The United Nations should be the foremost defender of each state’s freedom to be “imperfect.” Similarly, the time is ripe to discuss in an open and frank manner the tendency on the part of powerful states
Notes
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to bypass national authorities and enter into direct communication with the latter’s civil society. Interference should be broadly defined to include siding either with an illegitimate government or inciting the opposition to rebellion. The cause of peace can only be served if each state and its society work out their differences without external meddling.
Notes 1. The 19 hijackers of the passenger aircraft used to bring down the twin towers (and to inflict damage on the Pentagon) were among those killed. Conspiracy theorists, however, insist that the hijackers were mere pawns in a high-stake global power game. According to cynics, the 9/11 attacks were deliberately staged to instill terror in the minds of the people, and by so doing, coax the people into surrendering their liberties to an elite with supranational dominance ambitions. Questioning the assumption underlying the destruction of the twin towers, the cynics ask why a third tower, the Salomon Building—otherwise known as WTC 7—did not come tumbling down until 5.20 p.m., long after the hijackers had perished in the twin towers’ inferno? The answer, they argue, is that WTC 7 was clearly an inside job. They further contend that the two other towers were brought down not only by hijacked planemissiles, but also by deliberately planted bombs. See http://www.canada.com/story_print. html?id=2948e948e9ba-df6a-4785-9ba2-180a472e918&... 2. According to the Tribune, close to 2,000 persons were killed during the 2002 Gujarat riots, and 100,000 were uprooted from their normal abodes. See Tribune, online edition, 17 September 2004. 3. Foreign intelligence services have been accused of masterminding the assassination of leaders they deemed intransigent. This is the case with Congo’s Lumumba (the US CIA and Belgium), Cameroun’s Nyobe and Moumie (France), Mozambique’s Mondlane (Portugal), and independent Mozambican President Machel (South African apartheid regime). However, foreign intrigue would not have succeeded without domestic assistance. In the case of postindependence Mozambique, for instance, FRELIMO’s internal rift might have been exploited by the South African intelligence. Lumumba would not have been abducted if his radicalism had not put him on a collision course with conservative elements such as first President Joseph Kasavubu, Katanga Premier (Moise Tshombe), and the head of the rag-tag army, Joseph Desire Mobutu (later known as President Mobutu Sese Seko). 4. The 9/11 Commission, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (Executive Summary), p. 2 5. Ibid., pp. 16–17 6. Lal Advani’s estranged daughter-in-law, Gauri Advani, caused a stir when she filed an affidavit alleging that her father-in-law was a Sikh rather than a Hindu. Gauri further alleged that her father-in-law’s widely advertized devotion to Hinduism was an opportunistic strategy calculated to hasten his political agenda. She later withdrew the affidavit. See the online edition of The (Indian) Tribune, 1 December 2004. 7. Spending US-VISIT program alone rose from $13.3 million in 2002 to $162.5 million in 2007. See General Accounting Office, 2007, Report of Congressional Committees on Homeland Security: Planned Expenditures for US Visitor and Immigrant Status Program, GAO-07-278 (Washington DC: GAO) 8. http://brasschecktv.com/page/88.html (24/03/2010) 9. De Witte, L., 2002, The Assassination of Lumumba, translated by Ann Wright and Renee Fenby (London: Verso) 10. Ibid. 11. Khalilzad’s wife, Cheryl Benard, is behind another initiative in Qatar. As author of Civil Democratic Islam (a RAND publication), Benard recommends that Qatari youth be
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12. 13. 14.
15. 16. 17.
18. 19.
20.
7 Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness in a Lawless World reacquainted with their pre-Islamic culture and history—that is, that they be taken back to the age of jahiliyah and of ignorance of the Qur’an. See Crescent International, January 2010, p. 19. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 17 Ibid., p. 18 The Qatari First Lady, Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser al-Missned, serves as Chairperson of the Foundation’s Board of Directors. Among those serving on the Board are Sir Charles Masefield, Chairman of the Swiss-based Helvetica; Dr Jordan J. Cohen, President and CEO of the Association of American Medical Colleges; and Dr Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnergie Corporation of New York. Benard, C., 2003, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources and Strategies, (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation) Dana Gabriel, “No Security, Prosperity or Sovereignty for Canada in a North American Union”, http://stoplying.ca/articles/07/july/072007dananau.php (22 /03/2010) The average failed state’s problem begins with the breakdown of internal consensus—that is, the consensus needed to keep external meddling at bay. Soon, the state loses control over institutions it had earlier relied on to enforce its authority—particularly, the judiciary, the police, and the civil service. As the institutions fall into the hands of rent-seekers, the state’s grip on its territory and its people loosens. Scahill, Jeremy, November 23, 2009, “The Secret US War in Pakistan” http://www.thenation. com/doc/20091207/scahill (26/03/2010) Bill No. 94, innocuously titled “An Act to establish guidelines governing accommodation requests within the Administration and certain institutions,” was introduced by Kathleen Weil, the Minister of Justice. However, the Al Arabiya News Channel reported on April 3, 2010, that only 10 of the 146,000 people served in the health insurance board offices in Montreal and Quebec City in 2008–2009 were veiled. In other words, Quebec did not face a “Niqab crisis,” serious or otherwise. The anti-Niqab bill was thus perceived not as a measure meant to defend the “equality” of women with men, but as one directed against Muslims generally. The bill is also reminiscent of the practice under communism. When the Communist Party of the then Soviet Union sought to consolidate its authoritarian grip on society, it set up Komsomols and encouraged children to denounce and/or spy on their reactionary parents. The only difference now is that the capitalist state seeks total control by invading the Muslim home and “church” in a futile attempt at turning wife against husband. The French Justice Minister Michele Alliot-Marie did contemplate instituting criminal proceedings against one of the winners of a photo contest whose winning entry was the image of a man wiping his bottom with the French national flag. Apparently, freedom of speech allows adherents of a particular faith to be disparaged, but did not cover the “offensive” and “unacceptable” act of insulting the French flag.
Part III
Future Directions
Chapter 8
Toward a Genuinely New World Order
And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? —Holy Bible, Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 3
8.1 Introduction According to a school of thought, state sovereignty is dead—having been killed by globalization and allied forces. This book holds that the seriousness of the sovereign state’s ailments might have been exaggerated, and the announcement of its death premature. The book interrogates the logic underpinning contemporary globalist determinism, and concludes that, based on the contradictory interests of parties to collective security arrangements, the world should not hasten to bury the sovereign state until the legitimacy of the supranational arrangements has been fully established. The book begins by examining perspectives in the study of international relations, and, due to their limitations, argues the case for a new approach. The interest contiguity theory, at the very least, attempts to make the study of international relations genuinely international. By acknowledging the existence of parallel and competing interests, the theory covers both the strong and the weak states. It also provides the tools for the empirical analysis of trends and issues in international relations.
8.2 Perspectives in the Study of International Relations: Focus on Three Competing Traditions There are broadly three contending paradigms in the study of international relations—the realist, the idealist, and the Kantian. While all of them, in varying degrees, lean toward sovereign states and international institutions, none has responded in any meaningful way to the individual yearning for freedom. Grotius, a foremost exponent of natural law theory, started off with moral values that are shared by all human beings. However, realizing that conflict is bound to arise over the interpretation of the values, he settled for a system most likely to check M. J. Balogun, Hegemony and Sovereign Equality, C Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-8333-6_8,
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anarchy and enthrone organized government. The new contraption, the state, would operate within well-defined moral and legal parameters in its relations both with its people and with its foreign counterparts. This is where Grotius differs substantially from realists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Morgenthau, Kennan, and Carr. As far as the realists are concerned, there is nothing remotely resembling a community of minds on right and wrong, much less, an “international society.” All the institutions that have been created and the laws that have been enacted to sustain international relations are but mere illusions. The reality, as far as the realists are concerned, is an international environment characterized by chaos, impunity, and total disregard for civilized norms of behavior. Like the selfish individual that it represents, the sovereign state, the realists argue, is out for itself. No state cares about the collective good. In such an anarchic state—the new-age “state of nature”—what counts is not an appeal to reason, morality, or the rule of law, but access to hard and soft power. Only that state survives which is militarily supreme, economically strong, and capable of outwitting its opponents. Even if realism’s negative view of the international environment accurately depicts the “evil” side of the individual, it ignores the other “good” side. After all, man is not driven by power and deception alone. S/he is, or must be, aware of the fact that as s/he is capable of plotting and planning, so are others. In fact, both the unending struggle for power and the resultant global instability stem directly from this naïve assumption that only one’s interests and calculations matter in today’s highly polarized world. Also by depicting the world in blackand-white, “either-us-or-them” terms, realism prevents the individual from seeing the world with an open mind, and from knowing about life outside his/her own borders. An alternative to realism is a frame of mind that acknowledges the interdependence, if not the communality, of the human race. In Kant’s theory of reason, everything is connected with everything else in the observable world. However, by leaning too heavily toward internationalism, the Kantian rebuttal to realism might itself have overstated the case for reason, and might end up compromising what it values most—the freedom of the individual. Freedom, after all, is synonymous with freewill. The former means nothing unless given practical expression by the latter. And where individual freewill prevails, the chances are good that one choice would be in conflict with another. It is precisely with a view to “banning” conflict and diversity that authoritarian systems seek to curb personal freedoms and to superimpose holistic images on otherwise ornate, multicolored designs. To the extent that Kant’s transcendental idealism is open to unrestrained expansion of the international space in which all are required to think and look alike, to that would it have fallen into the temptation of equating the will of one with the commonweal. Conflict is inevitable where such a frame of mind prevails. The phenomenal world may, as postulated by Kant, exist independently of individual minds, thoughts, perceptions, or choices. However, Kant would be among the first to agree that when the mind looks at the world, what it sees is not a tidy picture of unity, but a time-and-space picture blurred by antinomy, paradoxes, and conflict.
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Interest Contiguity Theory
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More insidious than the falsehood underlying the Kantian assumption of an “international mind” is the likelihood of the idea being hijacked and then cynically interpreted to justify global imperial designs and creeping authoritarianism. A theory founded on unbridled expansion of the international jurisdiction ignores the distance between local preferences and global choices, and between choices and accountability. By sanctioning international entanglements that the individual does not fully comprehend, idealism is likely to “externalize” the internal effects of, and practically preempt, human choices. Liberating, as the idea might first sound, therefore, the Kantian international mind may turn out serving an imperialist and enslaving purpose. As pointed out in Chapter 2, the assimilation of African tribes into “civilized Europe” was a cardinal principle of French colonialism. While the colonial policy actually failed to stop the African independence train or to “assimilate” even the modernizing elite, its ghost was resurrected by President Nicolas Sarkozy to justify the French government’s clampdown on modes of dressing considered “Islamic.” According to the president, the burqa had no place in France. Besides endorsing the Swiss minaret ban, he gave the French Muslims, especially, the “moderates,” an ultimatum to accept “our social and civic pact” or face tough times ahead. It rarely occurs to the proponents of forceful assimilation that if “moderate Islam” fails, the extremists would move quickly to fill the vacuum. Instead of undermining the efforts of the law-abiding majority (moderate Islam), attention ought to focus on safeguarding individual rights that are not in conflict with equivalent rights. The only limit on individual liberty is equivalent liberty for other individuals. Article 4 of Declaration of Rights, approved by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789, sums it up admirably as follows: Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.
For instance, laws banning “indecent exposure” can be easily justified particularly where such manifestations of bodily assets “disturb the public order established by law.”1 Even then, laws banning indecent exposure must not only clarify what is meant by “decency,” but also demonstrate the link between that definition and the disturbance of “public order.” By contrast, laws banning the burqa or hijab are regressive, arbitrary, besides clearly targeting a particular section of the public, that is, the Islamic community.
8.3 Interest Contiguity Theory It is against the backdrop of the inadequacy of existing conceptual models that this book comes up with a new theory, the interest contiguity theory. The book starts from the premise that if the study of international relations is to be genuinely international, the analyst needs to focus on the interactions between and among
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broadly three types of interests—those of the individual, the sociopolitical community with which the individual identifies, and the “international community,” howsoever defined. The key question is to whom the freedom of the individual should rightly be subordinated at any point in time. Or to rephrase the question, should individual freedom be relative to the individual’s purely personal interest, to that of his immediate community’s, or to the interests of external sovereigns and institutions? In elaborating the interest contiguity theory, this book holds that to the extent that the sovereign state is as yet the only party capable of entering into fairly credible “social contracts” with the individual to that would it be a more appropriate body (than distant external and supranational regimes) to be trusted with the mandate to dispose matters of direct concern to, but beyond the capacity of, the individual. By identifying the parallel interests that compete with one another, the book suggests a new approach to the study of international politics. Besides rejecting the overarching historicism underlying both Kantian rationalism, Grotian idealism, and Machiavellian realism, the book wonders whether the lurch toward global government is the only plausible or even rational way to answer Rousseau’s question on the form of association which “defends and protects with all common forces the interest of each associate,” while at the same time allowing each associate maximum liberty to live his/her life as s/he sees fit.
8.3.1 Role of the Sovereign State The interest contiguity theory rests on three principal pillars—the sovereignty of the individual, of the state, and of supranational arrangements. Understanding the scope and limits of individual freedom entails interrogating the principles underlying the role of the closest regulator of individual behavior—the state. Where the minimalist view prevails, the state will be expected to stand clear while the Invisible Hand controls the means of production—land, capital, and labor. Over time, the bulk of the benefits accruing from economic growth would be cornered by a tiny minority—that is, the corporate executives with high salaries, fat bonuses, and generous retirement perks. Meanwhile, the masses will either have to wait for crumbs to “trickle down,” or live in absolute poverty and destitution. Either way, the Invisible Hand is likely to widen social inequality and, where poverty is entrenched, to weaken the masses’ allegiance to “social contracts” and to threaten public order. Proponents of the laissez-faire doctrine generally see nothing wrong with inequality or class divisions—both of which are a “natural” outcome of individual choices. The view that the poor deserves his condition may be cold, calculating, and, probably, callous. It, nonetheless, has its defenders in the individualistic philosophies of capitalism and utilitarianism. Besides recoiling from the Invisible Hand’s sadism, socialist thinkers hold that where inequality is fully entrenched, free enterprise does nothing but to deepen it. This state of affairs, in turn, engenders greed and conspicuous consumption, on the part of the wealthy, envy, on the part of the underclass, and violence, all around. To
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preempt the undesirable political consequences, the socialists advocate the nationalization of key assets or enterprises, as well as the provision of safety nets for the poorest and weakest sections of society. Not satisfied with the palliative effect of socialist welfare programs, the Marxists see class revolution as the only way out of what they perceive as grave injustice and a modern-day version of slavery. The Marxists generally start with a historicist— in effect, more extreme and rigid—view of the origin and consequences of social inequality. Convinced that human history follows a predetermined, unilinear, and predictable path—from peasant, agrarian systems, and medieval serfdom, through industrial stages, to the stage of “over-ripe capitalism”—the Marxian dialectic sees the cycles of oppression and resistance ending with a worldwide proletarian revolution and the emergence of a “classless society.” Heads will undoubtedly roll before the arrival of the utopia. The proletarian revolution cannot but be bloody on both sides—on the sides of the workers, and of their oppressors. In the end, however, the proletarian forces will vanquish their exploiters—that is, the bourgeoisie. There is no sign on the horizon yet of the Marxian prophesy coming true. The Soviet Union that came into being with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution provided the proletariat the only but short-lived opportunity to brag about the scientific accuracy and predictive power of Marxism. With the unraveling of the Soviet empire after glasnost (openness) and perestroika (decentralization) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the turn of the capitalist West to gloat. This indeed is one major weakness of historicism—it bites more than it can chew and suffocates while still trying. The moral in USSR’s collapse is its stubborn, doctrinaire attachment to Marxism. The Soviet Communists did not grasp the lesson about the self-interested individual sufficiently to marshal and redirect the individual’s otherwise “negative” energy to the state’s survival and development ends. The communists were too hypnotized by Marxian historicism (and by the power conferred on them by “democratic centralism”) to see the danger ahead. China, by contrast, changed course before it was too late. While maintaining a tight grip on broad political directions, the Chinese Communist Party allowed the economy to apply innovative methods—including introducing the incentives needed to transform the economy into the state’s primary nest egg. Karl Popper is one philosopher who remained unmoved by the exaggerated claims of overarching historicism. In Popperian logic, the truth implied in Marxism would still not have been confirmed even if one or several—say, the Soviet, the Chinese, and other socialist—experiments had been successful. Truth, after all, lies not in merely assembling facts that correspond to a theory, but in how falsifiable the theory is. According to Popper, life is constant problem solving. A solution one minute becomes a problem the next. For one visible cause, there are many probable but uncertain effects. Popper’s attack on the arrogance of Marxism is equally applicable to the contemporary theory of capitalism and democracy. He in fact saw the end of Marxism before he could even consider the probability of history’s end. Just as history is not preprogrammed to go through the social upheavals predicted by Marx, or end with a
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classless society, there is nothing to suggest that man’s search for the good life—and for a system of government befitting it—will end with the entrenchment of liberal democracy, capitalism, and their situation-conditioned variants. The only truth none can ever deny is that the knowledge of what is good for the individual lies with the individual. Whether s/he will apply this knowledge to embrace “reason,” say, Western notions of democracy and capitalism, or choose “foolishness”—by sticking to a system s/he is fully conversant with—is not a question that science can definitively answer. Regrettably, the powerful states rarely allow interpretations of “reason” contrary to theirs to prevail. Believing that they know what is good for all, the powerful states most frequently impose monistic solutions where the natural order is in favor of pluralism. Unless where sovereign states are determined to preserve their independence and the dignity of their peoples, powerful states are wont to externalize the internal effects of choices made outside their own territorial boundaries—that is, of choices made in distant lands.
8.3.2 Globalization and Internationalism In expanding on the interest contiguity theory, the book moves from the sovereign state to examine the case for internationalization. It argues that instead of expending a disproportionate amount of time and energy searching for the perpetually elusive harmony in international relations, the focus of analysis ought to be on the proximity or contiguity of interests. The “interest contiguity theory” suggests that, barring purely personal questions left to individual conscience, domestic quarrels should be settled by the family or the clan, interclan conflicts by the district or provincial authority, and interprovincial disputes by agencies of the Westphalian state that all parties freely and equally accept as legitimate. At any rate, the interest that gets fully served in any particular situation is the one that is tangible, present, dominant, and organized. This is the case with the interest of the solitary individual in his/her own personal life, as it is with state policies that are compatible with the aspirations of the people, the vision that one state shares with others (e.g., in securing the world against terrorism, environmental pollution, and virulent diseases), and the bureaucratic or broader “organization interest” in supranational jurisdictions. The contiguity theory is upturned where a foreign government or a distant supranational entity pretends to be better equipped (and more legitimate) to serve purely local interests than the government and/or the people directly concerned. This has serious consequences for understanding and action. Facing up to the challenge of global security thus entails reconciling three parallel and competing interests. The individual interest is served when s/he enjoys maximum freedom to decide matters which concern her/him and nobody else. The state or national interest lies in arbitrating and aggregating conflicting individual interests and maintaining order. However, the typical supranational organization’s interest is not easy to define, particularly, in relation to the two other types of interest. It is in fact this ambiguity that the protagonists of internationalism have yet to address.
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Undoubtedly new forms of idealism and realism have emerged with a deterministic view of an expanded and expanding international jurisdiction. The new idealists, in particular, contend that as new challenges unfold, a new order, the supranational state, is bound to supplant the nation-state, just as the latter had replaced anarchy centuries earlier. This raises the question whether the march to global governance is inexorable, and whether this bodes well for individual liberty, for national stability, and for global peace and security. Equally cogent is the question whether distant and largely unaccountable external bureaucracies are to be preferred to one that the citizen sees, relates to, and has ways of holding to account. Both idealism and realism have so far failed to address the questions raised in the last paragraph. At the very least, explaining why multiple checks have so far failed to produce the intended balances at the global level warrants that the morality or legitimacy of the power exercised by the “third force”—that is, by international institutions and arrangements—be interrogated against the backdrop of competing individual and state interests. The analyst needs to go beyond rhetoric and ask whether the allegiance of the supranational institutions is to the citizens of the Westphalian states, to national governments, to the putative “global citizen,” to the nebulous category imaginatively termed “international community,” or to the organizations and their gatekeepers.
8.4 Internationalism: Trends, Issues, and Challenges To break the path dependency in the contemporary study of international relations, it is necessary to carry out a longitudinal analysis of the history of the multilateral institutions and arrangements. Besides tracing the antecedents to the establishment of the League of Nations and the United Nations, it is essential that the challenges facing the world in balancing power with the imperatives of international law and morality be fully captured. In contrast to nationalism that has, in different forms, shaped political behavior for centuries, internationalism did not enter into human consciousness or serious academic discourse until the early and the later parts of the twentieth century, respectively. Before then, the nations that might have “interrelated” with one another on a multilateral basis were still at the different formative stages, with some—particularly, the Ottoman, the Austro-German Hapsburg, the Napoleonic, the Austro-Hungarian, the Japanese, and the British empires—wrestling with internal and external irredentist claims, demands for home rule or boundary adjustments, and conflict. Besides, the League of Nations had not yet been created to provide a forum at which nations could harmonize their interests, and the number of specialized institutions with supranational mandates were few and in between. Yet, in recent years, internationalism tends to be portrayed as an age-old, steadily evolving, and unstoppable force. The evidence available suggests that rather than follow a preordained, unilinear, and foreseeable historical path, internationalism emerged as a result of unusual collocations of interests and circumstances, and through a process of trial and error.
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The League of Nations, in particular, was created in response to the challenge facing the world before and immediately after the First World War. The League turned out to be inadequate to the challenge, and had to be replaced in 1945 by the United Nations. The question is whether the United Nations Charter learnt any lessons from the failings of the League’s Covenant. Specifically, has the United Nations Charter found a lasting solution to the problems posed by what Hobson in 1915 termed “the armed peace, the rival alliances, the Balance of Power with competing armaments,” or has it, by negating the principle of sovereign equality, planted seeds of future instability? It would appear that the United Nations founding fathers (and the Charter) prefer a form of association based on the principles of sovereign equality, and of noninterference in the internal affairs of State Parties. In contrast, the “superpowers,” as the Permanent Members of the Security Council are generally termed, appear wedded to the anachronistic balance of power doctrine. The United States’ global expansionist policy has received adequate coverage in this book. This, however, does not mean that the United States is the only superpower seeking to impose its will on others. Great Britain and France have yet to live down their past imperialist image. The Russian Federation may lack the wherewithal or the motivation of the former Soviet Union, but its imperialist ambitions in the North Caucasus are not in doubt. China does not conceal its interest in Tibet, or its desire to be a global economic player. However, where the United States and its allies are keen to spread “Western values,” both the Russian Federation and China are content to be the unchallenged leaders in their neighborhoods. In general, the superpowers’ attachment to realism has serious implications for the credibility of the United Nations and for world peace. By seeking to impose their will on one another and on weaker states, the superpowers have yet to address those “international conditions whose continuation. . .endangers the peace of the world” and sealed the fate of the League of Nations. Evidence of power play at the UN is provided by the General Assembly’s heroic but futile effort at balancing the Security Council’s expansive authority with its (the Assembly’s) numerical strength. For better or worse, the sovereignty that the Member States “outsourced” to the Organization over the past 60 years has been shared between the Security Council and the ranking members of the Secretariat, with the General Assembly occasionally putting up resistance and struggling to reassert its legislative authority. Meanwhile, due to the emergence of new challenges, and the Secretariat’s penchant for new “initiatives,” the scope of the United Nations and allied agencies has expanded in various directions. In terms of membership (and of geographical spread), the United Nations has grown from the original 51 to the current 192 State members. A major factor in the Organization’s rapid enlargement is the process of decolonization which began with India’s and Pakistan’s attainment of independence in 1947, and gathered pace with the transformation of many African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific nations into sovereign states in the 1960s and the 1970s. The creation in the 1990s of new states out of existing ones further increased the number of the United Nations Member States.
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The 51 states represented at the 1945 San Francisco Conference constituted the original members of the United Nations. Of this number, 20 (twenty) came from Latin America and the Caribbean then under the influence of the United States, 16 (sixteen) from Europe and North America, 7 (seven) from the Middle East and North Africa, 3 (three) from Asia, and 2 (two) from Oceania, that is, Australia and New Zealand. Like Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa was represented at the historic event by only 3 (three) states—Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa. Neither Ethiopia nor Liberia qualified as a major player, and South Africa was still under minority apartheid rule. While the founding members knew the type of organization that they were creating back in 1945, many of the latecomers simply regarded their membership as a confirmation of their newly achieved sovereign status. Sub-Saharan Africa remained conspicuously absent until Ghana joined in 1957, and Guinea in 1958. Africa’s presence in the Organization was not substantially felt until the 1960s when several former British and French (along with a few Belgian) colonies became independent. Examples of countries that joined in 1960 are Dahomey (now Republic of Benin), Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Somalia, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), and Togo. Mauritania, Sierra Leone, and Tanganyika (now Tanzania) followed in 1961, and Algeria, Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda in 1962. Among the non-African late joiners are Singapore (1965); Barbados and Guyana (1966); Yemen (1967); Fiji (1970); Bahrain, Bhutan, Oman, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates (1971); and Federal Republic of Germany and German Democratic Republic (1973). Palau shed its trust territory status and became a sovereign member of the United Nations in 1994 (thus virtually terminating the regular mandate of the UN Trusteeship Council). Montenegro is the latest member of the Organization, having joined in 2006. Other indicators of the growth in the size of the UN are the increases in the number of agencies, in staff complement, and in spending, especially, the expenses on peacekeeping operations. The growth has, however, made little difference to the challenges facing the world. These challenges continue to multiply regardless, or probably because, of membership enlargement, institutional proliferation, staff and budget increases. Neither the enactment and codification of international law nor the establishment of supranational institutions has succeeded in turning swords into plowshares, curbing anarchy, and promoting world peace. Due largely to the lack of a social contract binding nations to common standards of conduct, the state of nature which organized government managed to contain at the national level has returned, thus constituting veritable threats to life, property, and the pursuit of happiness across the world. In the increasingly lawless world, states that have the power to do so resort to unilateral action. “Rogue” nations and unruly individuals often follow suit by renouncing obligations and rules of civilized conduct. The weak nations’ and/or the resurgent groups’ defiance of the powerful ones frequently leaves the latter with the option of either appealing
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to the “conscience of the international community” or taking the law into their own hands. The consequence of anarchy’s return is too important to be ignored. Life, for instance, that was once considered precious, is now liable to be terminated by suicide bombers, ethnic separatists, marauding armies, drone strikes, and soldiers of fortune that are answerable to no one but themselves and probably their paymasters. Liberty can no longer be taken for granted: it is subject to confiscation either by individual tyrants or by leviathans with territorially specific jurisdiction or supranational reach. With life and liberty under unrelenting attack, the pursuit of happiness becomes a secondary, if not an eternally fruitless, one. While happiness is, at the best of times, an elusive target, the breakdown of global order has contributed to the growing sense of despondency. In particular, the failure to abide by the letter and spirit of the Westphalia Treaty is at the root of the crises engulfing the contemporary world. Rather than afford nation-states an opportunity to maintain their identities while partaking in multicultural exchange of traditions, globalization has become a one-way street on which the secular “modernizers” seek nothing less than the total annihilation of other- and this-worldly “traditionalists.” Frustrated by the growing emasculation of their freedoms, religious fundamentalists have emerged in place of the secular ideological movements that served as arrowheads of resistance to the capitalist order and to neocolonialism in the 1960s up to the 1990s. The new insurgents are different from their predecessors not only in the emphasis given to the application of terror, but also as regards their reliance on self-immolation as a mark of commitment to their causes. Sadly, for the humankind, insurgents have chosen suicides to drive home the point that death is no deterrent.
8.4.1 The War on Terror and US Hegemony In an effort at combating terrorism, the United States formed a global alliance against terrorism. Besides further curtailing personal liberties, the “War on Terror” has eroded the authority and esteem of the only effective safeguard against anarchy—the sovereign state. It has, by so doing, aggravated the situation that it set out to control—that is, threats to international peace and understanding. Individual will or freedom is certainly not without a limit. When a person’s right threatens or interferes with another person’s, the law of external effect dictates the intervention of a third (neutral) party to mediate the conflict. That third party is almost invariably the state or any of its authorized agents—be it a legislative assembly outlawing forced marriages, infanticide and slavery; a police constable arresting arsonists and other law breakers; a court of law adjudicating disputes and administering justice; a post office delivering local and processing foreign mail; or a defense force patrolling the borders and deterring external aggression. The typical sovereign state’s advantage lies in combining proximity to the individual with the capacity to reconcile or simultaneously serve conflicting individual interests. When the state fails to perform its essential functions—including the maximization of public welfare, the custodianship of cherished traditions, the upholding
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of the noblest values, the exfoliation of practices that are repugnant to the principles of natural law, justice, decency and good conscience, and the protection of individual citizens’ rights from external raids and emasculation—it loses its moral claim to obedience. Its sovereignty therefore rests on, and is coterminous with, the will of its people. This is true for any state—powerful or weak, secular or theocratic. The sovereign state’s primary duty is to the individuals who implicitly or explicitly cede their freedoms for the proximate society’s collective good. That sovereignty risks being challenged where the freedoms reluctantly surrendered by individuals are outsourced to external authorities without good cause and without a firm assurance of accountability. The War on Terror remains legitimate for as long as its objective is seen as safeguarding the life and property of the citizens of states threatened by terrorism. States facing such clear and present danger would indeed have abdicated their responsibility if they fail to take proactive measures to anticipate, preempt, and diligently foil terrorist attacks on their homelands and peoples. However, the anti-terror war becomes a War of Terror when it can be reasonably perceived as hastening the prosecutors’ global dominance agenda. The war becomes highly contentious when the responsibility of the state(s) waging it is broadened to include direct interference in the internal affairs of foreign individuals, faith groups, and other sovereign states. The African countries’ firm rejection of the US plan to station “AfriCom” on their soil is borne out of fear—fear of subtle recolonization of the continent. The US tendency to interfere in the internal affairs of other states might also have influenced the African countries’ decision.
8.5 Future Directions in Interstate Relations In light of the foregoing observations, it is essential that power be returned to and left with the sovereign states and their peoples. The proposed reform places at least three types of burden on the re-energized sovereign state. First, it requires the state to exercise the power thus returned to its people to serve none but its people. For states with porous policy borders, returning power to the people further entails acquiring the capacity to track the sources of development “initiatives” and to ensure that policies inimical to the interest of the people are not sneaked in through informal but influential channels. Each legislative assembly may need to enact laws compelling the executive branch to maintain proper surveillance on sources of policies and on the processes applied in legitimizing and adopting the policies. Second, since a state’s continued existence as an independent entity depends largely on the acknowledgment of the likelihood of others doing unto it what it does unto others, the state is now obliged to safeguard with all the resources at its disposal the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors, near and distant. With the principle of reciprocity as a point of departure, it would no longer be acceptable for any state to allow its territory to be used to plan or launch attacks on other states. A state shall be presumed to have declared war on another if it is established beyond reasonable doubt that its soil has become a haven for terrorists and its agents
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have turned into facilitators of cross-border mischief-making.2 Of course, in a world filled with easily improvised explosive devices, it is debatable if a determined terrorist needs a country let alone a “base” to wreak maximum damage. All the same, sovereign states will find that it is in their own (and no external party’s) interest to address the underlying causes of internal discontent, and to promote unity among their peoples. Where genuine consensus building efforts fail, sovereign states should move quickly and decisively to curb anarchy. The third obligation of the sovereign state is to the “international community,” howsoever defined. This obligation includes, but is by no means limited to, the maintenance of collective security, protection of the rights of foreigners and local minorities, denuclearization and disarmament, and institution of measures to counter the ill effects of small arms proliferation, climate change, atmospheric pollution, genetically modified foods, carcinogenic emissions, virus mutations, and pandemics. Hopefully, by accepting the major responsibility for critical choices made within its borders, the sovereign state would become increasingly proactive in the management of both the internal and the external effects. In any case, the future of the human race hinges on the preparedness of each state to accept primary responsibility for the containment of new and unimaginable threats facing the world. The alternative is to leave the destiny of the world in the hands of a few powerful states, supported by equally powerful, unaccountable, but anonymous bureaucrats. For reasons adduced in this book, the latter option has been tried for more than 50 years and found wanting. This leaves the only viable option—returning power to the people. If history offers any lesson, it is that the New World Order (which thrives on the emasculation of national sovereign powers) will soon become old. This is likely to happen as new generations of leaders embark on a diligent search for alternatives. Whoever argues that there is no alternative to his theory has either stopped thinking, or has decided that the only way to discourage others from thinking is by affirming the futility of their effort. Life, as Popper reminds us, is constant problem solving.
8.6 Role of the United Nations There is no doubt that the United Nations has a major role to play in curbing anarchy in international politics and in bringing civility back to interstate (as well as interfaith) relations. The Organization could have made a difference in the 1960s when the then newly independent Congo was being torn apart by foreign intrigue and local factionalism. Yet, rather than work with Patrice Lumumba’s central government to safeguard Congo’s sovereignty and preserve its territorial integrity, the then Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold watched as Belgium and leading Western powers facilitated the consolidation of Katanga’s secession plan. The United Nations has since come a long way. It played an active role in the decolonization process and in the liberation of Namibia and South Africa from apartheid rule. The organization’s technical assistance program proved invaluable in developing the critical capacities needed by newly independent states to achieve
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their development objectives. Debates in the General Assembly have gone a long way in sensitizing the peoples of the world to the risks of nuclear proliferation, civil strife, climate change, environmental degradation, and pandemics. Even if the Security Council was unable to preempt the Iraq war in 2003, the organization could at least take credit for being the first to caution the United States against hasty decisions. This is significant in view of the fact that Hans Blix, the person appointed by the UN to investigate allegations of Saddam Hussein’s stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, eventually found no evidence to back up the allegations. Besides ensuring that the Iraq history does not repeat itself, the United Nations has a major responsibility for checking the anarchy prevailing in the contemporary world. In specific terms, it needs to reaffirm the Charter stipulations on sovereign equality, and on noninterference in the internal affairs of Member States. Member States need to find their voices and participate actively in debates on contemporary topics—notably, those relating to measures to adopt to foil terrorism plots, safeguard state sovereignty, bring civility back to diplomacy, and promote world peace. Naturally, States that are under attack have every right to defend themselves. It will be unreasonable, for instance, to expect the United States of America to fold its arm while extremists are plotting attacks in far-off places on its territory and on its people. It will, as it must, use every means at its disposal to find and preempt plots against its homeland. This is what any responsible state will do. However, while conceding the States Parties’ right to self-defense, the United Nations needs to prevail upon the powerful ones among them not to go out of their ways to interfere in the internal affairs of weaker states. The former would have gone out of their ways if they think that their responsibilities include deciding matters of faith, which religious precepts are “compatible” with modernity, and when an individual flouts a whimsically determined dress code. The United Nations should be the foremost defender of each state’s freedom to be “imperfect.”
Notes 1. Article 10 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen categorically states that “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.” The onus on the French government is demonstrating how the burqa “disturbs” public order, and that this “public order” which is about to be disturbed is clearly established and defined by law. (Except otherwise stated, quotations from the French Declaration of Rights based on the translated version prepared by Gerald Murphy, the Cleveland Free-Net, Cybercasting Services of the Division of the National Public Tele-computing Network, NPTN) 2. For the avoidance of doubt, “cross-border mischief making” includes, but is by no means limited to, sponsorship and funding of suicide missions; aggressive rather than defensive acts of espionage and sabotage; infiltration of foreign countries’ government, labor, student, and civic bodies for the purpose of destabilizing regimes deemed “unfriendly”; giving succour to armed opposition groups; and extension of technical, advisory and logistics support to covert operations targeted at military overthrow of governments deemed unfriendly, i.e., operations aimed at effecting “regime change” and bringing death and destruction to foreign lands.
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Index
Note: The letters ‘b’, ‘n’ and ‘t’ following the locators refers to boxes, notes and tables cited in the text. 9/11, 60, 108–109, 114–126, 127n1, n4, 128n12 commission on, 109 economic cost, U.S., 115 post-measures of, 121 See also Terrorism A Aaron, R., 56 Aaron, S., 119 Abduction, 108, 113, 113t, 119, 125 Abkhazian force, 67 Abrams, E., 119 Abul Nidal group, 109 Adam, 10, 25, 36n1 Adedeji, A., 8 Afghanistan, 16, 19, 53, 59, 89, 102, 116, 121, 123–125, 124t coalition forces’ fatalities, 2001–2010, 124t Africa, 8, 19–20, 29, 35–36, 53, 74–77, 80, 82, 87n12, n15, 89–90, 91b, 97, 102–103, 118, 123, 126, 127n3, 133, 139, 141–142 Islamist extremists’ attack, 117 new members, 89 AfriCom, 141 Ahmadinejad, M., 17–18 Ahmed, I., 8 Ahmed, S. S., 117 AI, see Amnesty International (AI) AK-47, 100 Alger, C. F., 74, 80 Al-Ghazzali, I. M., 31 Allah, 8, 30, 37n6 Allied Powers, 76–78, 81–83, 87n12, n16, 93 al Qaeda, 109, 112t, 114–115, 120–121, 123
Alsace-Lorraine territory, 77 al Sadr, M., 123 al-Shabaab, 117 Altruism, 7, 9, 22n1, 25, 27, 54n2 America, see United States American law, 63 American nuclear program, 97 Amin, I., 19 Amnesty International (AI), 34, 45 Amritsar, 108, 110t Anarchy, 108–115, 126–127 consequences, 115–117 U.N.’s role, 126–127 See also Post-Westphalia World Anglo-American, 62 Anti-abortion law, 32b–33b Antiglobalization, 63 Argyriades, D., 8 Aristocracy, 40 Aristotle, 10, 40, 45 Article 4 of Declaration of Rights, 36, 133 Article 1 of the Covenant, 78 Article 64 of the 1648 Treaty, 43 Aryan Brotherhood, 108 Asia, 53, 77, 80, 82, 89, 91b, 102, 139 new members, 89 Ataturk, M. K., 76, 87n3 Atlantic Charter, 82 Atlee, C., 82 Atran, S., 114 The Austro-German Hapsburg empire, 73–74, 137 The Austro-Hungarian empire, 73–74, 78, 87n6, 137 and Serbia, 76–77
151
152 Authoritarian states, 15, 18 See also China; Soviet Union Axis Powers, 81, 87n13 Ayer, A. J., 29 B Bacon, F., 26–28, 36n3 Bagram Air Force, 124 Balance of power, 75, 86, 138 Balogun, M. J., 6, 8, 68n1, 104n8, n11 Baqarah, Sura 2, 24 Barre, S., 19, 117 Basden, G. T., 37n4 Bauer, G., 119 Baylis, J., 62 BBC World, 118 Benard, C., 121–122, 127n11, 128n15 Bennett, W. J., 119 Bentham, J., 44, 47 Berkeley, G., 6, 24 Berlin, I., 29 Berlin Blockage (1948), 102 Bernstein, S., 60 Bhatia, M. V., 105n23 BHP Billeton (company), 120 Bhutto, B., 125 bin Laden, O., 117 Binswinger, H., 8 Bismark, 44, 54n2 Black Sea resort summit, 84 Blackwater (security firm), 124 Blix, H., 66, 126, 143 Bodin, J., 11–12, 40–41, 43 Bokassa, B., 19–20 Bolshevik revolution (1917), 50, 135 Bourgeois exploitation, 5, 64 Bradley, H., 6, 25 Brahman, 28 See also Hinduism The Breton Woods, 63, 94 See also U.N. Development Program (UNDP) Brett, A., 25 The British empire, 73–74, 137 Brown, S., 43, 63 Buddhism, 28 Bulgaria, 77, 89 Bull, H., 60 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 98 Bush, J., 119 Bush administration, 53, 109
Index Butterfield, H., 37n5, 60 Buzan, B., 62 The Byzantine empire, 74–76 C The Canadian Action Party, 123 Capitalism, 9, 30, 37n3, 48–51, 115, 122, 134–136 over-ripe, 50, 135 Carr, E. H., 6, 32, 132 Cartesian formulation, 30–31 Castro, F., 104n2, 109, 123 Causes of war (casus belli), 56 Center for American Progress, 115 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 18, 66, 102, 107–109, 119, 124, 127n3 Central Powers, 77 Chavez, H., 123 The Chechnya, 109 Cheney, D., 119 Childers, E., 104n7 China, 8, 14–15, 51, 53, 66–67, 83, 94, 96, 101t, 102, 116, 123, 135, 138 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t secular policies, 123 Chinese Communist Party, 51, 135 Churchill, W., 82 CIA, see Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Citigroup, 49 Citing Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, 66 Civilizations Greco-Roman, 56 Inca, 56 Ming, 56 Orthodox, 56 Western, 56 Classless society, 50–51, 62, 135–136 CNN, 105n24, 118 Cohen, E., 119 Cold War, 58 Coleman, W. D., 60 Collective security, 21, 80–81, 107, 131, 142 Collier, P., 8 Committee on the Dismemberment of Germany, 83 Comte, A., 44 The Concert of Europe, 74 Conciliation Committee, 75 See also Hobson, J. A. Conditioned reality, 25 A Conference of Nations, 84 Congress of Vienna, 74, 90b Conventional weapons, 59, 100–103
Index Cooperative endeavor, 25 Corporate-driven neoliberal agenda, 123 Corporeal capacity, 30 Coulter, A., 35, 37n10, 109 Court of Arbitration, 75 See also Hobson, J. A. Crenshaw, M., 114 Croatia, 78, 87n7 Cuban missiles crisis (1962), 98, 102 Czechoslovakia, 78, 87n6, n12, 104n22 D Dacko, D., 19 Dahl, R. A., 51 Darwin, C., 3, 44–45 Dawkins, R., 44 Day of Resurrection, 31 Defense and Homeland Security, 116 De iure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace), 25, 54n1, n3 See also Grotius Democracy, 40 authoritarian crossbreeds and, 13, 15–16 economic aspects of, 53 liberal form of, 14–15 vs. nondemocratic system, 51–52 and UNDP, 94 in western societies, 9–10 See also Individual liberty Democratic Republic of Congo, 20, 102, 123 de Montesquieu, B. C., 41 Denmark, 77, 94 Department of Homeland Security, 103 Descartes, 6, 25, 30 Descartes, R., 6, 25, 30 Dittmar, H., 49 Dobriansky, P., 119 Doctrine of self-determination, 59 Doctrine of Separation of Powers, 41 Doctrine of sovereignty, 43 Doctrine of taoheed, 28, 122 Dolek, C., 19 Dumas, S., 87n4 The Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944), 82–83, 96 Dunne, T., 63 Durrant, W., 27, 54n2 E Ecological dislocation, 48 Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 83, 86, 92, 95, 104n5 Economics of uncertainty, 116
153 ECOSOC, see Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) EDC, see Export Development Canada (EDC) Emir of Qatar, 121 Empirical method, 27 English Civil War, 41 Enron (company), 49 Ethnic-cum-religious violence, 108 Ethno-centric interpretations western vs. non-western societies, 61b Europe, 15, 30, 33b–34b, 35, 49, 63, 74–77, 80–84, 86, 87n5, n11, 89, 90b–91b, 94, 99, 102, 125–126, 133, 139 Czechoslovakia, 78 new members, 89 Yugoslavia, 78, 87n7, 93 European Court of Human Rights, 33b–34b European power, 75–77, 80–81 European Union, 33b, 63, 74 Everett, S., 87n4 Export Development Canada (EDC), 115–116 ExxonMobil (company), 120 Eyskens, G., 119 F Failed states, 13, 19–20, 52, 123, 128n17 FAO, 93 Faris, N. A., 31 Ferdinand, A. F., 76, 108 Finnis, J., 25 First World War, 58, 65, 74–76, 79, 81–82, 87n4, 138 Forbes, M. D., 119 Foreign Affairs (U.S. journal), 123 Form of the Good, 7, 26, 40, 45 Forms of government, see individual entries Fortune, 116 France, 13, 20, 36, 40, 43, 63, 66, 75, 77, 81, 87n13, 94, 96, 102, 104n22, 127n3, 133, 138 colonialism in, 35 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t Franco-Prussian war, 77 Franke, M. F. N., 60 Franklin, J. H., 40 Free enterprise, see Capitalism French National Assembly, 36, 133 Friedberg, S. A., 119 Fukuyama, F., 51, 119 Fund for Peace, 123
154 G Gaffney, F., 119 Gandhi, M., 108 Gandhi, R., 113 Gazprom (company), 120 General Assembly, 67, 83, 85–86, 93, 95–96, 103, 104n4, n12, n22, 126, 138, 143 Germain, R., 62–63, 69n3 Germany, 75–79, 81, 83, 87n16, 90, 98, 101t, 102, 110t, 139 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t See also Hobson, J. A. Global civil society, 21, 62, 64, 69n3 Globalization, 59–65 and international society, 61–65 in new world order, 136–137 transnational effects, 62 Global warming, 48, 62 Goldstein, B., 109 Great Britain, see United Kingdom Greco-Roman influence, 75 Grotius, 4, 6, 25, 31, 41–43, 45, 54n1, 56, 131–132 natural law theory, 31, 45, 131 The Guardian, 34b Guidelines for Conventional Arms Transfers, 103 Gulf War, 103 H Haas, E. B., 59 Habyarimana, J., 19 Haddad, S., 114 Hadiths, 30, 121 Hague system, 74 Hamas, 66, 109, 115 Hammarskjold, D., 104n7, 126, 142 Hanafi, 121 Hanbali, 121 Haqeeqah, 28 Hedonism, 37n3, 48, 61b Hegel, G. W. F., 6, 25, 32, 132 Herodotus, 57 Hijab (burqa), 36, 125, 133 Hinduism, 28, 115, 127n6 The Hindu nationalist group, 109 Hiroshima, 8, 82, 97 Hitler, A., 35, 81–82 HIV-AIDS, 62, 94 Hobbes, T., 6, 11, 27–29, 32, 40–44, 57, 132 Hobson, J. A., 73, 75, 77–78, 86, 138 Hodgson, G., 115–116
Index Holocaust, 17 Holzgrefe, J. L., 62 Horowitz, D., 35, 37n11, 109 Human conduct blame-worthy, 31 praise-worthy, 31 future of, 100–103 historical analysis, 56 knowledge of, 24 progress and, 42 See also Human values Human values good and bad, 29 just and unjust, 29 moral and immoral, 29 pious and profane, 29 right and wrong, 29 urge to dominate and will to resist, 29 Hume, D., 27, 44 Huntington, S. P., 56 Hussein, S., 66, 126, 143 Hutaree, 53 Hutu, 108 militants, 100 I ICJ, see International Court of Justice (ICJ) Idealism, 3, 5–6, 21, 24–27, 31, 35, 45, 55–59, 64–65, 68, 132–134, 137 Idealist perceptions, 31 on internal affairs, 20–21 on new world order, 131–133 See also Grotius “Idols” (idola), 27 “Idols of the Cave or Den” (idola specus), 27 “Idols of the Marketplace” (idola fori), 27 “Idols of the Theatre” (idola theatri), 27 “Idols of the Tribe” (idola tribus), 27 Ikle, F. C., 119 ILO, see International Labor Organization (ILO) India, 87n12, 89, 94, 97, 102, 104n3, 108, 110t–111t, 113, 115, 123, 127n6, 138 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t secular policies, 123 Individual freedom, 6–7 Bodin’s perception on, 11–12 government’s role in, 11–12 human faculties, 6
Index sovereignty, role, 11 See also Individual liberty Individual liberty, 29–31 capitalist systems, 48 citizen-customer maximum satisfaction, 48 democracy, economic aspects, 53 democratic vs. nondemocratic system, 51–52 external influences, 53–54 human attributes, cultures, 29 Islamic recognition, 31 political market, 53 state functions, lack of knowledge, 53 values, see Human values Individual mind program abstractions, 24 evil designs and intentions, 24 flashes of inspiration, 24 ideal constructs, 24 images, 24 language skills, 24 mathematical equations, 24 musical notes, 24 Individual sovereignty, origin and purpose, 10, 47, 134 as foundation of liberty, 29–31 good vs. bad actions, 24–26 Deity, existence, 24 moral kind values, realists’ values, 25 subjective vs. objective idealism, 6, 24–25 idealism, significance, 26 goal of education, 26 Hobbes’ view of reality, 27 search for truth and virtuous conduct, 26–27 philosophical traditions, 31–36 case of Ireland, 32–34 See also individual entries reason as arbiter of conflicting truths, 28–29 Divine impact, 28 Hobbes’ argument, strength vs. weakness, 28 Islamic view, 28 Indonesia secular policies, 123 Inductive philosophical method, 26 Interest contiguity theory, 3–22, 67, 133–137 international relations and, 3–22 new world order, 133–134 Interference, 20, 23, 42–43, 53, 66, 120, 122–123, 127, 141
155 The International Atomic Energy Authority, 91b, 93, 97, 100 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 94 The International Bureau of the Universal Postal Union, 79 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 83, 86, 91b, 95–96, 99–100 The International Criminal Court, 91b, 93 The International Electro-technical Commission, 74 The International Fund for Agricultural Development, 91b, 93 Internationalism, in new world order, 137–138 International Labor Organization (ILO), 80, 91b, 93 The International Meteorological Organization, 74, 90b The International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, 91b, 93 The International Telecommunications Union, 74, 90b Invisible Hand, 46, 48–49, 134 IRA, 109, 110t, 115 Iran, 16–18, 53, 58, 97, 104n14, 110t, 119, 123 delivery capability, 97 nuclear technology, 97 secular policies, 123 theocracies, 16 Iran nuclear standoff, 58 Iraq, 16, 53, 59, 66, 102, 117, 121, 123–126, 143 Iraq invasion, 66, 117 superpowers’ interference, 66 Iron Curtain, 84, 87n3 Islam, 16–17, 27–28, 30–31, 35–36, 45, 76, 109, 110t, 114–115, 117–118, 120–123, 125, 127–128n11, 128n15, 133 state–church dichotomy, 122–123 Islamic doctrine, 114 of qisas, 45 Islamic view of reason, 27 See also Nietzsche’s contempt Islamist terrorism, 125–126 Israa/Bani-Israeel, Ayat 14, 31 Israel–Hamas conflict, 66 Italy, 13, 77, 81, 89, 98 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t
156 J Jaffrelot, C., 115 Jaish al Mahdi (Mahdi Army), 123–124 Japan, 29, 73–75, 77, 81, 83, 87n11, 97, 102, 115, 123, 137 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t secular policies, 123 The Japanese empire, 73–74, 137 Jordanian National Charter, 16 JSOC, see U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) Judeo-Christian precept, 27 See also Nietzsche’s contempt K Kadyrov, A., 20 Kagan, D., 119 Kalonji, A., 119 Kant, I., 3–6, 21, 25, 28, 31–32, 34–35, 36n2, 39, 44, 55–56, 59–65, 75, 131–134 See also Kant’s theory of reason Kantianism, liberating influence, 60 Kantian rationalism, 3, 31–32, 59–65, 134 perspectives in new world order, 131–133 Kant’s theory of reason, 32 Kasavubu, J., 119, 127n3 Kennan, G., 32, 44, 58, 132 Kenny, M., 62–63, 69n3 Keohane, R. L., 62 Keohane, R. O., 62 Kerrey, B., 120 Khadim al-Haramain al-Shareefain, 16 Khalilzad, Z., 119, 121, 127n11 Khashan, H., 114 Khatami, M., 17–18 King Baudouin, 118 King of France, 43 Klan, K. K., 108 Knight, W. S. M., 25 Knowledge of God, 24–25 Kobe earthquake, 115 Korean War (1950), 102 Kristol, W., 118 Krugman, P., 115–116 The Kurdish guerrilla bands, 109 The Kyoto Treaty, 93 L Laissez-faire doctrine, 47–49, 134 Latin America, 53, 80, 89, 91b, 102, 104n2, 123, 139 League of Nations, 59, 65, 73 and 1919 Covenant, 81
Index dream and reality, 78–80 international obligations, 78 organs, 79–80 internationalism before, 74–78 empires, writs, 74 United Nations establishment, 82–84 allied powers, advantages, 82 pre- and postwar Conferences, 82–83 and world security, 80–82 Alger’s observations, 80 and World War II, 81–82 Legitimate resistance, 41 Leibniz, G. W., 6, 24 Leviathan, 41–42 Libby, I. L., 119 Liberal democracy, 9, 13–14, 51–52, 114, 122, 136 Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 112t, 113 Liberty, see Individual liberty Liberty, equality, and fraternity (liberte, egalite et fraternite), 36 Life, see Pursuit of happiness Limited Test Ban Treaty, 98 Little, R., 61 Locke, J., 11, 41–42 LTTE, see Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Ludo, D. W., 127n9 Lukoil (company), 120 Lumumba, P., 109, 119, 126, 127n3, n9, 142 M Machel, S., 109, 127n3 Machiavelli, N., 3, 5–6, 11, 27, 32, 44, 46, 57–58, 132, 134 Malaysia secular policies, 123 The Mali empire, 74 Maliki, 121 Mandela, N., 123 Man/woman, constituent elements Islamic classification, 31 af’edah or aql, 31 jasad, 31 nafs, 31 qalb, 31 Marching orders, 92 Marshall Plan, 94 Marxian dialectic, 50, 135 Marxism, 50–51, 135 Mathiason, J., 94 Mature democracies, 13–15
Index Media, 14–15, 18, 53, 61b, 117–118, 125 Megalomania, 81 See also Hitler, A. Meinecke, F., 57 Mercantilism, 46 Messianic attitude, see Secular policies Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum (Method for the easy comprehension of histories), 40 Middle East, 17–18, 29, 53, 75–76, 89, 102, 114, 125, 139 Middle Eastern policy, 114 Military–industrial–media coalition, 53 Mill, J. S., 44, 47 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), 50 MMPI, see Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Mohammed, M., 123 Momoh, J., 20 Monarchy, 14, 41 See also Bodin, J. Mondlane, E., 109, 127n3 The Mongol empire, 74 Monopoly consumer, 46 supplier, 46 Montenegro, 77–78, 87n7, 90, 104n1, 139 See also The Byzantine empire Morgenthau, H. J., 6, 32, 44, 58, 132 Mosaic law, 37n9, 45, 54n4 Moslem, 30 See also Islam Mossad assassination program, 108 Moumie, F.-R., 109, 127n3 Mousavi, M.-H., 18 Muldoon, 62–63 Musharraf, P., 16, 107, 125 Myers, D. G., 49 My Lai massacre, 108 N Nagasaki, 8, 82, 97 Napoleon Bonaparte I, 108 Napoleon Bonaparte III, Louis (Emperor), 108 The Napoleonic empire, 73–74, 137 Napoleonic war, 74 The Nation, 124 National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, see 9/11 National Security Research Division, 121 NATO, 17, 67, 98–100, 104n18, 123–124 Natural human inclination, 6, 57, 81
157 Natural law theory, 31, 45, 131 See also Grotius Nazi threat, 83 Neorealism critical concepts anarchy, 59 distribution of power, 59 hierarchy, 59 New Polish Republic, 77 New world order, 61, 63, 65, 131 internationalism, 137–140 global order, breakdown, 140 sovereign state’s advantage, 140 interstate relation, 141–142 sovereign state’s role, 134–136 U.N.’s role, 142–143 New York–based Global Policy Forum, 120 NGO, 63 Nicolson, C., 87n4 Niebuhr, R., 58 Nietzsche’s contempt, 27 Non-corporeal capacity, 30 Non-Platonic wing, 28 Non-western society, 28, 61 See also Islam Noriega, M., 66 North Africa, 75–76, 89, 102, 139 See also Africa North Korea, 97, 104n17, 110t–111t secular policies, 123 Novum Organum, 27 NPT, see Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 97–100, 104n17 Nuclear testing, 96–98 disarmament process, 99 global security, 96–98 See also Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Nyerere, J., 123 Nyobe, R. U., 109, 127n3 O Oakeshott, M., 6 Obama, B., 53 Obedience, state’s claim authority and commanding brute force, 40 cunning, 40 diplomacy, 40 evangelism, 40 superstitions, 40
158 Obedience, state’s claim (cont.) critcism against Marx, 51–54 justice and rule of law, 44–46 Hume’s utilitarian response, 44 order enforcement, 46–51 power and benefits, legitimacy, 40–42 Westphalian state, emergence, 43–44 Objective idealism, 6, 24–25 Obote, M., 19 ODA, see Official Development Assistance (ODA) Official Development Assistance (ODA), 102 Of The Spirit of the Laws, 41 Oligarchy, 40 Osgood, R. E., 56 Otherwise-anarchic society, 42 The Ottoman empire, 73–74, 76–78, 87n3, 137 victory, 76 Owens, P., 62 The Oyo empire, 74 P Pakistan, 16, 19, 53, 89, 97, 102, 107, 121, 123–125, 128n18, 138 annual fatalities in terrorist violence, 2003–2009, 125t Panamanian Defense Council, 66 Pareto-optimal social outcome, 47 Paris Peace Conference, 77, 80 Permanent Court of International Justice, 79, 91b, 95 Philanthropy, 25, 27 Pitt, D., 104n9 Plato, 6–7, 10, 25–28, 30–31, 40, 44–45 Plotinus, 6, 24 Plutonium, 99 PNAC, see The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) Podhoretz, N., 119 Polish Corridor, 77 Politics Among Nations, 58 Popper, K., 8, 25, 29, 51, 68, 135, 142 Postmodernist thinking, 27 Post-Westphalia World, 108–115 The Potsdam Conference (1945), 82, 97 Power, see individual entries President Dwight Eisenhower, 93 The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), 118–121 Psychopathic deviation, 50 Psychopathological tendency, 49 Psychotic tendency, 49 Public diplomacy, 120
Index Pursuit of happiness, 22n2, 48, 107–127, 139–140 Purver, R., 102–103 Q Qatar Foundation, 121 Quayle, D., 119 Quebec Provincial Assembly, 125 Qur’an, 7, 23–24, 29, 31, 36n1, 37n9, 73, 121–122, 128n11 R Rae, D., 51 Raison d’etat, 57 RAND Corporation, 121, 128n15 RAND-Qatar Policy Institute, 121 Rape, R. A., 114 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 109, 115 Realism, 31 frame of mind, 132 good and bad, 32 human consciousness/perception, 9 international environment, 32 international society, 132 negative view, 132 perspectives in new world order, 131–133 superpowers’ attachment, 138 on supranational sovereign, 57–59 See also Hobbes, T.; Reality Realists, subjective-objective arguments, 25 Reality awareness, 7–8 knowledge, manifestation, 26 beauty, 26 equality, 26 form of the good, 26 platonic love, 26 truth, 26 physical objects, 26 Plato’s opinion, 26 social reconstruction, 8–9 See also Realism Reason, conceptualization of compassion, 30 morality, 30 piety, 30 Reciprocity, 45–46, 141 The Red Brigades, 109 The Red Cross, 79 Red peril, 58, 83 2005 Referenda, 63 Remec, P. P., 43 Resource depletion, 48
Index The Rhine Commission, 74, 90b Rodman, P., 119 Roman Emperor, 43, 64 The Roman empire, 74 Roosevelt, F. D., 82–84, 97 Rosen, S., 119 Rosenau, J. N., 63 Rosneft (company), 120 Rouge, K., 108 Rousseau, J.-J., 22, 30, 41–43, 51, 53, 68, 134 Rowen, H. S., 119 Rumsfeld, D., 119 Runciman, W. G., 10 Russell, B., 25 Russia, 15, 20, 66–67, 75–77, 81, 96, 98–99, 102, 105n25, 116, 123, 138 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t S Salomon Building, 118, 127n1 Samurai ethic, 29 San Francisco Conference (1945), 83–85, 89, 139 Sarkozy, N., 36, 37n12, 133 Saudi Arabia, 16, 102, 110t–111t Islamist extremists’ attack, 117 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t Schmidt, B. C., 63 Scholte, J. A., 62–63 Schopenhauer, A., 6, 24 Schuman, F., 58 Schwartz, B., 49–50 Scientific socialism, 50 Second World War, 8, 58, 65, 78, 81–82, 100 Secular policies, 123 Segregation clauses citizen–immigrant, 45 indigene–settler, 45 master–slave, 45 metropolis–colony, 45 ruler–subject, 45 Seko, M. S., 20, 127n3 Self-appointed guardian, 74 Self-fulfilling prophesy, 58 Selfish gene, 27 Shafi’i, 121 Sharia law, 114–115 Shell (company), 120 The Shonghai empire, 74 Sinai Peninsula, 66 Singapore, 90, 139
159 secular policies, 123 Six livres de la republique (Six Books of the Commonwealth), 41 Slaughter, A.-M., 62 Smith, A., 39, 44, 46–47, 54n6 Smith, M., 61 Smith, S., 62 Social contract, 5–6, 11, 18–21, 41–42, 45, 51–54, 64, 74–75, 80, 107, 134, 139 Socioeconomic change, consequences, 42 Socrates, 26 Somalia, 19, 53, 90, 102–103, 117, 123, 139 South Africa, 87n12, n15, 89, 97, 102, 123, 126, 127n3, 139, 142 secular policies, 123 See also Africa Sovereign states individual freedom, 10–11 types of power in, 12–13 Sovereignty, types of, 3 Soviet threat, 58, 83 Soviet Union, 8, 15, 50, 53, 63, 82–84, 87n3, n12, n16, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104n2, n20, 128n19, 135, 138 Spencer, H., 24, 29, 48 Stalin, J., 82–83, 97 Stark reality, 25 State sovereignty, 20–21, 55–56, 63, 123, 126, 131, 143 Stettinius, Jr., E. R., 83 Steven, S., 19–20 Stiglitz, J. E., 49 Subjective idealism, 6, 24–25 The Sudan People’s Liberation Army, 109 Suicide bombing phenomenon, 113 Sukarno, 123 Sunni/Shia, 121 Superpower, 15–16, 64, 66, 86, 138 Supranational sovereign, 134 bureaucracy and civil society, relationship, 65 challenges, 67–68 idealism, 56 internationalism, old realities to new choices, 65–67 NGOs, 63 realists’ perspectives, 57–59 international and domestic politics, 58 neorealism, 59 See also Globalization Survival-of-the-fittest doctrine, 44
160 Sustainable human development, 94 See also U.N. Development Program (UNDP) Syria, 53, 97, 102 T Taliban, 117, 120, 124 Talmud, 8 Tamil Tigers, 109, 112t Tanzania, 90, 112t, 117, 139 secular policies, 123 Tao, 28 Taoism, 28 Tautology, 25 Taylor, C., 19–20 Terrorism annual fatalities in Pakistan, 2003–2009, 125t breakdown of incidents by method applied, 1961–2009, 113t coalition forces’ Afghanistan fatalities, 2001–2010, 124t common method, 113 modern history acts, 108 motives/affiliations, 114–115 breakdown of incidents by perpetrators, 1961–2009, 114t overview, 108–113 perpetration methods, 113 significant incidents, 1961–2001, 110t–112t See also Islamist terrorism Theocracies, 13 authentic, 16–18 nominal, 16–18 Thomas, H., 57 Threats to objectivity, 27 See also Bacon, F. Thucydides, 11, 32, 44, 57, 59, 132 Timocracy, 40 Tolbert, W., 20 Total (company), 120 TotalFinaElf (company), 120 Towards International Government, 73, 75 Toynbee, A., 56 Toynbee, A. J., 56 Transaction cost, 116 Transcendental deduction, 25 Transcendent reality, 26, 28 Treaty of Versailles, 77–78, 80–81, 87n10 Treaty of Westphalia, 12, 43, 54, 65 sovereign equality, 65 Trinity, 8, 97, 104n20
Index Tripartite Pact of September 1940, 81–82 Truman, H. S., 82, 84, 97 Tshombe, M., 119, 127n3 Tupac Amarus, 109 Tutsi, 108 Twenge, J., 50 Two Treatises on Government, 42 U U.N. Arms Register, 103 U.N. Charter, 66 key provisions, 84–86 principle organs the Economic and Social Council, 86 the International Court of Justice, 86 the Secretariat, 86 the Security Council, 86 the Trusteeship Council, 86 Unconditioned reality, 25 The U.N. Conference on International Organization (1945), 82 See also San Francisco Conference (1945) U.N. Development Program (UNDP), 92 case study, 93–94 Crisis Prevention and Recovery, 94 Democratic Governance, 94 Energy and Environment, 94 HIV/AIDS, 94 Poverty Reduction, 94 UNDP, see U.N. Development Program (UNDP) UNICEF, 92 United Kingdom, 13, 20, 66, 75, 77, 81, 83, 87n9, 96, 100, 102, 104n20, 124t, 138 new members, 89 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t United Nations, 73–86, 89–103 challenges, 96–103 non-proliferation, 98–100 See also Conventional weapons; Human, future of East–West tension, 84, 96 evolution agencies, proliferation, 90–91 budget growth, 92 growth factors, 92–94 membership enlargement, 89–90 non-African joiners, 90 principal-agency myth, debunking, 94 staff complement increase, 92 in Lawless World, see Anarchy
Index League of Nations, after establishment, 90b–91b Group A: Pre–League of Nations Agencies, 90b Group B: League of Nations and Parallel Agencies, 91b Group C: United Nations and Allied Agencies created in 1945, 91b Group D: Agencies/Commissions created after 1945, 91b San Francisco representatives, 139 See also United Nations, structure United Nations, structure Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), 95 General Assembly’s powers and functions, 95 The International Court of Justice, 95–96 The Secretariat, 96 The Security Council, 96 Trusteeship Council, 95 United Nations Security Council, 83 United States, 13–14, 16–18, 20, 22n3, 53, 58, 63, 66–67, 69n5, 74–75, 77–78, 78, 80, 83–84, 87n16, 96–100, 102, 104n2, n20, 105n24, n25, 108–109, 115–126, 124t, 127n4, 138–140, 143 arms trade, 103 444-day siege, 17 federal budget vs. military budget, 116 hegemony in new world order, 140–141 Islamist extremists’ attack, 117 ODA, arms transfer league, 101t secular policies, 123 theocracies, 17 Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, 36 The Universal Postal Union, 74, 79, 90b U.N. programs formal vs. informal consultations, 92–93 problem, identification, 92 U.N. Security Council, 63, 66, 91b, 101t Uranium, 17, 99–100 Urquhart, B., 104n7 U.S. coalition forces Iraqi sovereignty, 123–125 U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, 66 U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), 124 U.S. Pentagon, 112t, 117, 124, 127n1 USSR, 15, 50, 87n6, 97, 135 See also Marxism; Soviet Union
161 V Vedas, 8 See also Hinduism Venezuela secular policies, 123 Veto, 66, 79, 81, 83 Vietnam, 59, 100, 102, 108, 113 Vietnam War (1969-1975), 100 Vishwa Hindu Parishad, 109, 115 W Waltz, K., 59 War, conditions punishment or deterrence, 45 reparations of injury, 45 self-defense, 45 War on Terror, 18, 53, 107–108, 116–126, 140–141 in new world order, 140–141 Warsaw Pact, 97 Washington, D.C., 82, 127n7 Watson, A., 59 Weber, V., 119 Weigel, G., 119 Western philosophy, 28 See also Non-Platonic wing Western power, 117, 126, 142 Western society, 9–10, 30, 61, 68n2 Westphalian state, 4, 43–44, 55, 59 Wight, M., 5–6, 37n5, 60 Wolfowitz, P., 119 World Bank, 64, 91b, 94, 119 World Economic Forum, 63 World Food Conference (1974), 93 The World Food Program, 91b, 93 World Trade Center, 117–118 Wrong-headed epistemology, 29 WTO, 64, 91b X Xenophobia, 125–126 Y The Yalta Conference (1945), 82 Yew, L. K., 123 YouTube, 118 Yu-lan, F., 29 Z Zacher, M., 62 Zardari, A. A., 125 Zartman, W., 19 Zionism, 17
