Re: Weak States and the Violation of Sovereignty
Michael:
This post is for you in that you have expressed indignation AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE at the violation of Iraq's sovereignty and have expressed abhorrence at the ideas of Wolfowitz et.al..
What follows are selected quotes from Francis Fukuyama's new book, "State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century."
p 92 ..."Sovereignty and the nation-state,cornerstones of the Westphalian system, have been eroded in fact and attacked in principle because what goes on inside states - in other words, their internal governance - often matters intensely to other members of the international system. But who has the right or the legitimacy to violate another state's sovereignty, and for what purpose?......
....Since the end of the Cold War, weak or failing states have arguably become the single most important problem for international order (cit. omit) Weak or failing states commit human rights abuses, provoke humanitarian disasters, drive massive waves of immigration and attack their neighbors....
The 9/11 attacks highlighted a different sort of problem. The failed state of Afghanistan was so weak that it could be hijacked by a non-state actor, the terrorist organization al-Qaida, and serve as a base of global terrorist operations.
.......
pg 95 "Many people critical of the Bush administration's new doctrine of preemption and war with Iraq see it as a radical shift from earlier policies that emphasized deterrence and containment, precisely because it depends on the periodic violation of sovereignty. (cit.omit) In fact, the grounds for the erosion of sovereignty were laid much earlier in the so-called humanitarian interventions of the 1990s. The experience of Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, the Balkans and other places has generated a huge literature on external intervention (cit. omit)
.....
In the debates over humanitarian intervention, the case was made that the Westphalian system was no longer an adequate framework for international relations.....The end of the Cold War, it was argued, brought about much greater consensus within the international community over the principles of political legitimacy and human rights than before. Sovereignty and therefore legitimacy could no longer be AUTOMATICALLY CONFERRED on the de facto power holder in a country. State sovereignty was a fiction or bad joke in the case of countries like Somalia or Afghanistan, which had descended into rule by warlords. Dictators and human rights abusers like Serbia's Milosevic could not hide behind the principle of sovereigny to protect themselves as they committed crimes against humanity...."
p.98...Some people like to draw a sharp distinction between interventions for the sake of promoting human rights within a country and interventions to prevent security threats to other countries, and say that only the former are legitimate grounds for the violation of sovereignty. THIS DISTINCTION IS QUESTIONABLE BECAUSE IT PRESUMES THAT SELF_DEFENSE IS SOMEHOW LESS LEGITIMATE THAN THE DEFENSE OF OTHERS....
This point should NOT be interpreted as making a brief for the Bush administration's war with Iraq. The pros and cons of the case were very complex....."
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This then is the theoretical basis for our violation of Saddam's Iraq.
Do you wish to comment?
Bruce |
