A liberal hawk lowers the bar …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 9:48 AM on February 5, 2007.

Sebastian Mallaby has a rather hypocritical column today whining about how China's Hu Jintao only pays lip-service to human rights while cutting deals with oil-rich human rights violators like Sudan. Mallaby says that by doing so, the Chinese leader "demonstrated his contempt for the Western understanding of the world-- and for Western policy toward his own country," when, in fact, it looks like he gets both better than Mallaby does.

Anyway, Mallaby goes off the tracks in the middle off the column, pulling international law from his rectum with this statement …

But since the end of the Cold War, the Western view of sovereignty has grown increasingly contingent. If a nation slaughters its civilians (think Rwanda, Kosovo), harbors terrorists (Afghanistan) or refuses to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors (yes, Iraq), it forfeits its right to sovereignty. It may not be invaded, but it certainly can expect to face sanctions.

What utter nonsense. By this standard, even the United States has forfeited its right to sovereignty. And note how he talks about refusing "to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors" rather than with UN Security Council Resolutions; that lets countries like Israel of the hook but keeps Iran on it. Inspectors are just the verification arm for the Security Council and their authority is drawn from the Security Council's. With that statement Mallaby is, of course, just covering his own ass in that he supported the illegal invasion of Iraq -- as Stephen Zunes pointed out during the lead-up to the war, "There are over 90 UN Security Council resolutions currently being violated by countries other than Iraq."

Using nebulous interpretations of international law to justify their aggression is part of a mendacious pattern adopted by liberal hawks. While it's true that "Western" thinking about sovereignty has evolved since the end of the Cold War, people like Mallaby habitually distort that thinking to suit their own ideological ends.

It's reminiscent of the argument put forward by the Bushies and some supporters of the invasion of Iraq that the action was legal because Saddam Hussein had flaunted UN Security Council resolutions. That's a flat-out lie; here's the appropriate language from the UN Charter:

The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Not the U.S, not Sebastian Mallaby, just the Security Council. That is to say, there's no automatic forfeiture of sovereignty under international law for not cooperating with inspectors or for "harboring" terrorists (slaughtering citizens is another matter -- sovereignty is considered by most (but not all) experts to be conditional on a government's ability and willingness to protect its population).

Let me repeat something I've written in the past:

Sovereignty has never been conditional on good governance or the will of the people. The concept predates what we think of as modern democracy. It was codified at the birth of the modern nation-state, in 1648. Back then there was no consent of the governed; the word "sovereignty" has the same root as "sovereign" -- the king (and kings claimed their privilege based on God's will).

The concept of sovereignty exists only to decrease the frequency of war. Before it became a norm in 1648, Europe was locked in a series of bloody back-and-forth wars, many of which were ostensibly religious wars. Catholic countries were attacking Protestant countries and vice-versa.

The idea of Sovereignty gave the king exclusive control over domestic affairs in the hope that those religious wars would cease. Countries would still wage war over various international disputes -- these weren't starry-eyed idealists -- but not over another country's domestic choices.

So it remained for almost four hundred years. It's the bedrock of not only international law -- which is difficult to enforce -- but also of international customs and norms. It's fundamental to the rules of the game.

Now, here's where the right of humanitarian intervention comes in. After Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust, and a whole bunch of lesser despots committed various horrific crimes, the concept of human rights gained prominence and people started to say: "wait a minute, you mean that rulers who slaughter their own citizens can hide behind the principle of sovereignty?"

The answer was no. And the idea that the world has a responsibility to protect innocents gained traction.

But it's a balancing act, because if you throw the concept of sovereignty out the window, you'll end up with powerful states just knocking over countries whose leaders are objectionable -- in their own judgment -- will-nilly. What's to stop, for example, a return of the kind of religious wars that used to be so common? Or wars in the name of democracy? Or socialism?

So, people started to think about how to balance these things out (new foreign policy ideas developed rapidly after the end of the Cold War). A consensus emerged that state sovereignty remained the bedrock of the international system, but there was also a "responsibility to protect," -- to intervene -- as long as certain conditions were met. And those conditions made good sense. Here's a PDF) of a landmark report, commissioned by the Canadian government (and five years in the making), that laid out what that balance should look like. It's influenced foreign policy thinking hugely, and we were on the brink of establishing a more progressive set of norms when, depending on your POV, either 9/11 happened, or the Bush administration happened, or both.

Tagged as: international law, mallaby, right to protect, sovereignty

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.