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SPEAKING
FREELY
War on Iraq: Implications for
sovereignty
By Adrian Kuah
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing. Has the war on Iraq finally
consigned sovereignty to the wastebasket of history? If
sovereignty is taken to be the cornerstone of the
international system, then the United States, by acting
without a United Nations mandate, had surely broken the
"rules of the game" and done as much to destabilize the
international system as what Iraq might have done.
Yet the current crisis could also be seen as the
unabashed vindication of realist thought. If so, then
sovereignty, along with "power" and "interest", has
never been more important since the end of the Cold War.
Sovereignty, it seems, is caught between the
realists/unilateralists and the
liberals/multilateralists.
Right and
responsibility or power politics?
One way to
understand the implications on sovereignty is through a
recent exercise in rethinking sovereignty undertaken by
the International Commission on Intervention and State
Sovereignty. Its controversial report supplements
"sovereignty as a right" with the added dimension of
"sovereignty as responsibility". The crux of the report
is that when states fail or act irresponsibly, thereby
putting its own people at risk, the international
community has an obligation to intervene.
Given
this radically augmented conception of sovereignty as
both a right and responsibility, the US's actions appear
to fulfill the criteria for justifiable intervention:
despotic regime, repression of society, human suffering,
hence responsibility to protect. Why was there a lack of
support within the UN for the war?
One reason
could be that intervention did not fulfill the criteria
for justifiable intervention. Another could be that the
"regime change" rationale was really just a smokescreen
for US interests. Whichever the case, it is clear that
the "sovereignty as responsibility" doctrine is highly
problematic. Obtaining a consensus on what makes a good
case for intervention is extremely difficult. And in the
event, the responsibility principle failed simply
because it was viewed as a realist agenda in a benign
liberal guise. Ironically, too, the greatest skepticism
about US intervention in the name of regime change came
from the liberals themselves.
Current norms
and past practices
The current norm of
sovereignty is enshrined in the United Nations Charter,
which declares that all states are equally sovereign.
Sovereignty has come to mean the mutual coexistence of
the great powers, and the restraint in dealing with
weaker states. More crucially, sovereign equality was in
some sense underwritten externally by the UN and other
international norms.
However, there is a "power
politics" dimension that predates the UN system and
which stems from historical practices of sovereignty,
for example in China of the Warring States period. No
external guarantees of sovereignty existed: territorial
expansion against the weak was not only regarded as fair
game, but as the whole point of the game. In Orwellian
language, some states are more sovereign than others.
The US's behavior should then not seem so surprising:
strip away the rhetoric of regime change and the idea of
"responsibility to protect", and what obtains is the
archetypal great power behavior in the pursuit of
national interest.
The question "is sovereignty
dead?" turns on the further question: "which aspect of
sovereignty?" Certainly, US unilateralism has brought
the normative dimension of sovereignty into a crisis. At
the same time, the reversion to power politics has
reinforced the all-important link between sovereignty
and the will and power to assert it. In one sense,
sovereignty is in crisis; in another, sovereignty is
alive and well, and has never been more robust.
Unresolvable contradiction
Can
"sovereignty as responsibility" be meaningful when there
is always an ultimate recourse to "sovereignty as a
right"? Or when that right is very much linked to the
ability to assert it?
The war in Iraq has
demonstrated that the normative liberal dimension of
sovereignty remains very much dominated by the
imperatives of statesmen and policy makers who are, by
their very nature, realists. Any attempt to elevate the
current discourse on sovereignty into a "post-sovereign"
dialogue of "the responsibility to protect" will face
obstacles and objections, especially since the language
of politics remains heavily dominated by the realpolitik
vocabulary of power and interests. And given the lack of
international consensus on when and how to intervene, US
primacy and unilateralism will combine to render
multilateral dialogue and consensus building more and
more difficult, if not irrelevant.
Sovereign
equality is essentially a fiction maintained by the
international community. Nevertheless, it was a
convenient fiction that has endured because it provided
a useful social framework for international life. As
with all international norms, their viability relies on
the continued engagement of the great powers. With
unfettered US supremacy and unilateralism, that norm is
unraveling even as the "power politics" interpretation
of sovereignty is in ascendancy. It would appear that
the liberal ideal of "sovereignty as responsibility"
will have to remain simply that: an ideal.
Adrian Kuah, Associate Research
Fellow, Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
(©2003 Asia Times Online
Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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