R2P is the New COIN: Slaughter on Authority and International Law
If you are thinking that this formula shifts political authority and power away from a state and the popular sovereignty of it’s citizens and toward a vaguely defined, supranational community, you would be absolutely correct. Drawing on the theories of Abram and Antonia Chayes, Slaughter, argues that the connectivity and interaction of the modern international system is such that “sovereignty as autonomy makes no sense”.
Such a position requires a healthy contempt for the consent of the governed as well as a childlike faith in the wisdom, integrity and basic competence of a superempowered technocratic elite.
To continue:
….Internally, a government has the responsibility to respect the dignity and basic rights of it’s citizens; externally, it has a responsibility to respect the sovereignty of other states.
Further, the ICISS places the responsibility to protect on both the state and on the international community as a whole. The ICISS insists that an individual state has the primary responsibility to protect individuals within it. However, where the state fails in that responsibility, a secondary responsibility falls on the international community acting through the United Nations. Thus, where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.
As Slaughter is redefining sovereignty as the “new sovereignty” of interactive capacity championed by Chayes and Chayes, “respecting the sovereignty of other states” probably does not mean “non-interference in the internal affairs of other states”. Interference (albeit not necessarily military intervention) might be the natural default position from using the premise of “sovereignty as responsibility” or as a “capacity to participate”. Hey, we aren’t intefering in your elections, your economy or your social system – we’re just “harmonizing” (Slaughter’s term) your laws and regulations and increasing your capacity to participate!
One wonders what aspects of American life that R2P advocates see as being most in need of international harmonization? That’s a subject we can take up in future posts, but in terms of military intervention and R2P, a few comments in regard to international law as well as “capacity to participate”:
First, under current international law, the legitimate pretexts for military intervention largely revolve around the right of self-defense or disturbance of international peace, as recognized by the UNSC. While this is a fairly narrow set of pretexts, in practice they are sufficiently flexible to address most scenarios of violent conflict without also justifying military aggression bent on conquest. What was lacking in Rwanda and the Balkans during the 1990’s were not legal rationales for military intervention but political will among the great powers to do so. I see little evidence that R2P would carry greater moral or legal weight with state decision makers to compel them to undertake major military interventions out of altruism than does the Genocide Convention (which unlike R2P, as an international covenant, is an inarguably solid part of international law). Or, for that matter, the emotional pull of horrifying media imagery of dying children.
Secondly, by greatly broadening the scenarios under which military intervention is allowed under international law, R2P incentivizes such conduct primarily where doing so is inexpensive and will further national interests rather than in the worst cases, like Rwanda, where they are expensive and risky while yielding no tangible benefits. The global military capacity to intervene is finite and instead of doing triage, statesmen will go for the low-hanging fruit in a now much larger set of cases for potential intervention. If R2P were taken seriously, North Korea, Burma, Congo, Somalia, Syria and perhaps Yemen would be ahead in line for intervention before Libya.
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