Going Deeper
US presidential candidates and War on Terror
When the Westphalian concept of sovereignty was conceived, and the UN Charter which guaranteed territorial integrity of member nations was framed, the historical contexts were different from the threats posed now from failing states and non-state actors. While the Treaty of Westphalia heralded the end of the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) among European Princely states, and of the anarchic and non-regulatory inter-state affairs existing in Europe at that time, the UN Charter was framed with the hope that, thenceforth, inter-state wars would be banished forever.
The Organization of African Unity formed in 1963 held respect for borders as sacrosanct. The 1975 Helsinki Final Act expressed the view that "frontiers can only be changed in accordance with international law, by peaceful means and by agreement." The basis of the Dayton Agreement between Bosnia-Herzogovina, Croatia, and Serbia was full respect to sovereign equality of the contracting parties. But the European Union, though a "union of sovereign states," has become an organization in which member states have limited their sovereign rights in certain areas.
The reason the international community has remained so sensitive to the sanctity of sovereignty is that if secession is allowed unchecked then an anarchic situation would prevail in the world, threatening international peace and security. The Bangladesh liberation war received international legitimacy because it was not regarded as secession, like Biafra's attempt to secede from Nigeria despite widespread death and destruction that the Biafran war caused. The Bangladesh case was accepted as the right of self-determination of all the people as a fundamental human right, and also because of the genocide committed by the Pakistan army in then East Pakistan. In the case of Biafra, the African States' orthodoxy that only former colonies could gain independence and form states stood in the way of the wish of the people of Biafra to be independent of Nigeria.
The world, however, has changed from the values of freedom propagated by the US during the cold war to oppose the communist menace that the Western world feared would be embraced by the developing countries. The end of the cold war and the demise of the Soviet Union, and consequent spread of democracy in the former Soviet colonies, described as the third wave of democratic promotion by Samuel Huntington, interpreted by some analysts as inevitable because they felt that the erstwhile Soviet colonies were spiritually geared towards democracy that was rooted in their culture and that authoritarianism was foreign to them (one should not forget Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia), the drive by the West for defense of values of liberal democracy has now been enshrined in their foreign and defense policies.
The tragedies of Rwanda, Srebenica, and Darfur, as in many other African countries, have given a push to the doctrine of the responsibility to protect. Paul Taylor (Sovereignty at the Millennium) has expounded the doctrine as the obligation by the sovereign states to the international community of their accountability for the license of sovereignty given to them. The states must be prepared to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the international community continued adherence to the rule of law, respect to human rights( in particular to those of the minority community), and democratic practices. The same doctrine has been enunciated by Gareth Evans, co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention, and Tony Blair in his doctrine of International Community that he advocated to explain the Nato bombing of Serbia.
The UN World Summit of 2005 embraced for the first time the doctrine of the responsibility to protect, thus compressing the concept of unimpeachable sovereignty that the world had been used to since the UN Charter came into being. The problem arises with a misadventure like the invasion of Iraq, firstly on the premise of Saddam Hussein's readiness to strike the West with weapons of mass destruction and his links with Al-Qaeda, that proved to be false, and later to change Saddam Hussein's brutal regime and gift the Iraqis with democracy, which effectively resulted in a fractured Iraq immersed in internecine and sectarian strife, leading the country to a possible disintegration into three parts.
The Iraqi election of 2005 was directed more at establishing Shia supremacy over the Sunnis than attempting to establish democratic rights for an essentially tribal society owing primordial allegiance to tribal traditions. The lessons learnt from the Iraqi episode, and the reluctance of countries of the broader Middle East to embrace pluralism, give merit to Francis Fukuyama's thesis that democracy constituting the "end point of man kind's ideological evolution" needs a certain level of economic development for sustainability. India, the largest democracy in the world, has somehow proved to be an exception to the conditions generally believed to be necessary for sustaining democracy.
The American concern, indeed the global concern of the 21st century, is to confront terrorism in all its forms. The locus of this evil, generally identified as rooted in Islamic extremism, is not only to be found in the West but in the developing countries of the East as well, which were no less victims of the Islamic extremists. These deviants from Islam believe many Muslim countries to be equally guilty of transgressing the limit of what they believe to be the "purist" form of Islam, like the West that has degenerated into a permissive society, thereby contaminating Muslim societies. But then, it would be naïve to ignore that the stringent drive by the Bush administration to rid the world of "all evils" through hard power has resulted in the anti-US feeling that has become a global epidemic.
This year's Pew Research Center Global attitude survey of 45,000 people in 47 countries has shown pervasive disapproval of US foreign policy, widespread opposition to President Bush, and worsening anti-Americanism in the last five years. The uncaring attitude of the present US leaders about the global issues beyond security has resulted in anti-Americanism not only in the Islamic countries but also in Europe, Canada( 83% feel that America ignores their interest), Japan and South Korea. Though seen through a different prism in 1842, Charles Dickens found Americans "rude, addicted to sharp business practices, hypocritical about liberty in the light of their treatment of blacks, and careless about where they spit tobacco."
The Democratic party's presidential nomination seeker Barack Obama's controversial remark about military assault on Al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan, if necessary without the approval of the Pakistani authorities, also repeated by his rivals Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, appears to be a reiteration of the Bush doctrine of preemption, or intended application of Professor Michael Byers' theory of exceptional illegality that would permit states to violate international law in truly exceptional situations where a serious threat exists and the UNSC remains frozen.
It has been argued that under the regime of customary international law, developed long before the UN Charter was framed, it was generally agreed that preemptive force in self-defense was acceptable as long as the state exercising the right of preemption could demonstrate its necessity, and the use of force was proportionate to the threat. To prevent a threat to international peace and security from maturing, the narrow view of inviolability of national frontiers should be ignored, preferably with the sanction of the UNSC or, if needed, without it. Admittedly small and weak developing countries with failing governance would be up in arms against any such intrusion. But in cases where diplomatic and economic engagements fail to cure the anarchy, with spill-over effects in neighbouring countries (e.g. Darfur and DR Congo), then the global hegemons may, in the teeth of opposition of liberal democrats, have no option but to use hard power.
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