Must it be the West against the rest?

Lionel WIJESIRI

Sri Lanka's ambassador in Geneva - Tamara Kunanayakam's comment on UNHRC resolution on Sri Lanka makes good sense. She said, "The resolution judges the intentions of an elected government, and proposes actions that arise from unwarranted hypotheses. These hypotheses are of a piece with the condign criticism from countries advancing this resolution when the LLRC was appointed.

The effort to impose technical assistance and advice from the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is contrary to the principle that these should be based on consent. The conflation of these with special procedures and the requirement of a sovereign government to mandatorily accept such advice is totally contrary to the principle of sovereignty, and has no precedent'.

The concept of sovereignty has been discussed across history, from the time of the Romans through to the present day and has changed in its definition, concept, and application throughout. The current notion of state sovereignty is often traced back to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which, in relation to countries, codified the three basic principles: territorial integrity, border inviolability and the supremacy of the state.

Tamara Kunanayakam

Tony Blair

George W. Bush

In our day, the concept of national sovereignty resembles a fallen Humpty Dumpty whose only hope is that all the king's horses and all the king's men will be able to perform a miracle of restoration. Amid conflicting calls for radical surgery and compulsory euthanasia, some nations are fragmenting; others are expanding their power boundaries, and many live under the shadow of ever more active international organizations.

The concept of national sovereignty has always had its opponents, but there have been times when the nation-state seemed to be a well-established norm. From within, the greatest attack has consistently come from armed uprisings, when a group of misguided people denies the right of the proclaimed sovereign to remain sovereign. From without, the greatest attack has consistently come from intervention, when one powerful country or group of countries denies the right of another to determine its own affairs.

For the most part it is not sovereignty per se that is under attack, but rather state or national sovereignty. In fact, those who attack state sovereignty most intensely often seem to champion a traditional, absolute sovereignty with a different locus.

Movements

The history of sovereignty can be understood through two broad movements, manifested in both practical institutions and political thought. The first is the development of a system of sovereign states, culminating at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, bringing an end to the Thirty Years' War, which had drowned Europe in blood in battles over religion, defined the principles of sovereignty an in this way became the constitution of the new system of states in Europe.

Article I of the Treaty says that peace among sovereign nations requires that each nation develops itself fully, and regards it as its self-interest to develop the others fully, and vice versa - a real 'family of nations.' Article II says: "On both sides, all should be forever forgotten and forgiven-what has from the beginning of the unrest, no matter how or where, from one side or the other, happened in terms of hostility-so that neither because of that, nor for any other reason or pretext, should anyone commit any hostility secretly or openly, directly or indirectly, under any pretense.

The second movement began in practice after World War II and has since continued through European integration.

Some scholars have doubted whether a stable, essential notion of sovereignty exists. But there is in fact a definition that captures what sovereignty came to mean in early modern Europe and of which most subsequent definitions are a variant: supreme authority within a territory. This is the quality that early modern countries possessed, but which popes, emperors, kings, bishops, and most nobles and vassals during the Middle Ages lacked.

Each component of this definition highlights an important aspect of the concept. First, a holder of sovereignty possesses authority. Authority is "the right to command and correlatively the right to be obeyed". But if sovereignty is a matter of authority, it is not a matter of mere authority, but of supreme authority. The holder of sovereignty is superior to all authorities under its purview.

Political authority

The third ingredient of sovereignty is territoriality, also a feature of political authority in modernity. Territoriality is a principle by which members of a community are to be defined. It specifies that their membership derives from their residence within borders. It is a powerful principle, for it defines membership in a way that may not correspond with identity.

Historical manifestations of sovereignty are almost always specific instances of this general definition. It is in fact the instances of which philosophers and the politically motivated have spoken most often, making their claim for the sovereignty of this person or that body of law. Understanding sovereignty, then, involves understanding claims to it, or at least some of the most important of these claims.

Claims and interventions

In practice, since the end of the cold war the USA and its allies have been intervening more often in conflicts within (as opposed to between) states. Sometimes it has happened with, and sometimes without, the consent of the governments concerned. In 1999 Tony Blair became the first world leader to assert a moral right to "get actively involved in other people's conflicts" - even without leave from the Security Council. Speaking after NATO's war over Kosovo, which the Security Council had declined to endorse, Britain's then Prime Minister made the case for "just war, based not on territorial ambitions, but on values".

Four years later, an American-led coalition invaded Iraq, using somewhat similar rhetoric about the need to overthrow a dangerous tyrant for the good of everyone. Although it wasn't in any formal or legal sense a test case for responsibility to protect, many people felt that the disastrous outcome in Iraq discredited the entire idea of intervention for 'altruistic' purposes.

Intervention is an external denial of a state's sovereignty. It is a de facto claim for the existence of a higher authority or a greater power. In this era, intervention is primarily the action of one country or a group of countries to enforce its will within the territory or affairs of another country. The use of military force is not the only means of forcing another country to submit. Foreign economic and political coercion has often replaced massed armies, and interventions have been based on request from governments with questionable legitimacy.

The need

What is the need for an intervention? What was the type of government that these interventionists are willing to defend? The American people were told that their soldiers were going and dying to restore democracy in Iraq. Their rulers, who knew that there had never been any democracy in Iraq which could be restored, told them that.

There were economic interests to protect, as well as the position of certain families. The overwhelming majority of people in the most liberal democracies are not at all involved in the major decisions that form the boundaries of their lives. Having a vote is not at all the same as having a voice. And having a voice is not at all the same as having a share of the power, and certainly not an equal share.

Human rights are often the pretext for political, economic, or military coercion. The concept of human rights is rooted in Western political thought with a particular Biblical background. Though often given lip service, it is foreign, and occasionally irreconcilable, towards many other systems of thought.

The causes and rationales for intervention are varied, but they ultimately can be reduced to either the self-interest of those intervening or the claim of a higher morality, be it humanitarian, ecological, or religious. Even as the rulers of a state claim the right to intervene and impose their order in the lives of those within the borders of the state, so they occasionally claim the right to intervene in the lives of those outside the borders of their state.

Since the joint military attack on Iraq, intervention has become increasingly common. In certain situations, intervention, or the expectation of it, has become normative. Whatever may be the nature of 'the New World Order' which George Bush announced, military intervention was recognized as an essential means of establishing it.