CHAPTER 6: STATE SOVEREIGNTY AND HUMANITARIAN MILITARY INTEVENTIONS
6.5 Conclusion
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when a number of empires dominated the world. However, bigger states have broken up while some smaller states have coalesced to create bigger states. In recent history major states like the former Soviet Union broke up to create smaller states, other states that have broken up include Pakistan, which lost the territory to give birth to Bangladesh in 1971, Ethiopia which lost Eritrea in 1993, and Sudan which lost South Sudan in 2011. Even states that are considered stable today have their equal share of secessionist agitations. The United Kingdom has its problems with Scotland, Spain has Catalonia region while Iraq, Turkey and Syria have the Kurds.
One would also question the sincerity of the Major Powers to the theory of the international community.
The international community that is being perceived is rules based with international institutions that ought to be respected. The fact that the USA denied to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which is an important institution of the international community, fearing the prosecution of its service and former service personnel (Brown, 1999:855-856) and the R2P doctrine, puts to question the sincerity of the neo-liberal world that is at the forefront of the creation of the international community and the concept of sovereignty as responsibility. The irony of the refusal by the USA to ratify the Rome Statute of the ICC, while participating in international tribunals like the ICC for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), as well as participation in HMI missions like the Kosovo intervention and Libyan intervention signals the primacy of national interest in the doctrine of sovereignty as responsibility. It also shows the esteemed position the USA holds its sovereignty, which creates a competition to guard sovereignty by other state and the moral bankruptcy of sovereignty as responsibility.
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sovereignty has always accorded rights and duties to the sovereign in relation to the citizens in his or her state. The most important of the rights is to be able to enforce authority without hindrance and the capacity to use legitimate force in cases of non-compliance. However, this right is only exercised in enforcing the rights of the society and restraining those who might want to hinder the enjoyment of these rights.
The Peace of Westphalia ushered in a new era in state system and the concept of state sovereignty. The Peace of Westphalia separated the state from the church. It also established the principle of territorial based state sovereignty. The principle of sovereignty was observed as a right which meant that in a number of instances, the right was breached which led to the two world wars and the establishment of the UN based international system.
The UN system adopted the Westphalian system of sovereignty. However, it abolished the acceptance of wars of conquest, specifically on the so called uncivilized world. Hence for the first time, there was a coded international instrument which abolished all aggressive wars as unethical in the international system. It also established the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as part of norms to be followed by sovereign states in dealing with their peoples. The chapter noted that the UN system, unlike the Westphalian system, gave importance to both the states and peoples. Hence there is numerous reference of ‘peoples’ in the UN Charter as well as the term ‘human rights’. However, the importance given to peoples by the Charter did not demean the importance of state sovereignty. Far from it, the Charter strengths sovereignty as it looked back at the primary aims of granting sovereignty from its philosophical roots.
While there was the strengthening of state sovereignty and human rights, there has always been breaches of these concepts by either powerful states like the USA, and Britain in the invasion of Iraq (2003) among other cases, or by rogue leaders like Idi Amin’s invasion of Tanzania in 1979. There has also been grave breaches of human rights, specifically the right to life such as the numerous cases of alleged genocide as was in Srebrenica, Rwanda and Darfur. These events and other cases of war crimes led some scholars like Deng and his compatriots at Brookings Institute to argue for the reconceptualization of state sovereignty. Deng et al propounded that sovereignty should be conceptualized as a responsibility to protect the citizens. The argument was headed by some neo-liberal western leaders like Bill Clinton of the USA and Tony Blair of Britain. Blair came up with what he termed the doctrine of the international community which argued that sovereignty was now limited by the
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interconnectedness in the world. In 2000 the government of Canada led in sponsoring the ICISS which forwarded an official call to the UN to redefine sovereignty as the responsibility to protect, a term which also became the title of the report which the ICISS produced in 2001.
The concept of the responsibility to protect as a redefinition, or re-interpretation of state sovereignty, denotes that every state has a responsibility to protect the right of its citizens through its internal mechanism. When the internal mechanisms are failing, the state has a responsibility to request international help, failure of which will result in the international community morally assuming the responsibility to protect the citizens in the distressed state without its consent. The international community can exercise this moral duty by any means which in extreme cases can be the use of force, after authorisation by the UNSC.
The chapter noted that this redefinition of sovereignty, while morally appealing, has a number of problems in implementing it. The concept can be seen as diminishing the sovereign rights of the weak while empowering the strong to trample on the weaker states who for long had seen the concept of state sovereignty as a shield. There is no proven case that when the state fail to protect its weak, mostly minority citizens, there will be another state or coalition of states who can intervene. Hence, the concept is open to abuse by the strong in furthering their interest. Even the argument by the ICISS that the UNSC authorisation can limit the influence of abuse and self-interest, which is noted in chapter 5 in depth and in passing in this chapter, has been tested and proven to be wrong in Libya and Syria. Hence, the notion of sovereignty as responsibility is still to prove its practical moral and ethical clout. The next chapter is an investigation on the role of national interest in humanitarian military interventions.
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CHAPTER 7: AN INVESTIGATION ON THE ROLE OF NATIONAL INTERESTS IN HUMANITARIAN