There was a statement in the House today on the situation in Burma following the cyclone.
It is yet another reminder of why the international community needs to find ways of dealing with extreme authoritarian regimes. It is very difficult for the rest of the world to help when you are dealing with a military dictatorship that is even reluctant to give visas to non governmental organisations.
One of my reasons for persuading the House to set up the Intergovernmental Organisations Select Committee http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200607/ldselect/ldliaisn/118/11804.htm was a growing concern that the institutions set up in the aftermath of World War Two are not well equipped to deal with failed and failing states. Part of the reason for this is the reluctance to intervene. This reluctance stems in part from the treaty signed in Westphalia in 1648 which led to the idea that one state should not interfere in the internal affairs of others.
It is this theory that leads to heated arguments about the balance between the rights of a sovereign state and human rights. I have drawn attention to the analogy with domestic law as it was some years ago. Then a man (and occasionally a woman) could assault his wife as long as he did not do so in a public place. Doing it in your own home was permitted in the sense that the law would not intervene.
This began to be challenged and now assault whether of a partner or a child can result in police intervention. The analogy with international politics is striking. The reluctance to intervene in Bosnia for example led to the ethnic cleansing of Moslem’s in a European state. eventually we intervened effective;ly in kosovo but the argument goes on as we know from Darfur.
Aha, and what about the Iraqis holocaust we have precipitated in the middle east? And the very example that you have given was used to justify it in the Chicago speech and subsequently. What makes us fit to go marching into other people’s countries to fix them? Personally I am much more concerned to stop the industrialised nations from using their dominance in military and industrial power from creating any more catastrophes in a bid to dominate dwindling mineral resources. As this post so well illustrates, some people close to the centres of power in these countries seem to have the slightest consciousness of what we have done. Either that, or they are keen to use every opportunity to exploit these kinds of circumstances in order to justify our coercion of other countries–through war if necessary.
From your link, Lord Soley (or can I call you Clive?!):
“Inquiries into whether a proposed new organisation should be set up — although governments seem to be of the settled view that the number of intergovernmental organisations is sufficient, a committee should be able to review proposals to found a new organisation.”
You seem to be advocating setting up competing NGOs if the UK and ‘countries like us’ don’t like the existing set up. I’ll wait for your reply before commenting further on this particular point.
I am not one who subscribes to the principle that because the UK, for example, acquired an empire we have no right to point a finger at China in the matter of Darfur. To do so would mean there would never be an acceptable solution from any who ever had, or has, an empire.
Chris. When I say that the 1945 international institutions are no longer appropriate to the modern world I am acknowledging the point you make about representation of other major powers. India or Brazil are not on the Security Council of the UN for example.
We need a different set of criteria for the 21st century.The 1945 settlement put all the emphasis on the nation state and not on human rights. We do have problems about how and when to intervene but unless you are content to say that it doesn’t matter what a country does to its citizens then you have to consider intervention.
Intervention is not just carried about by industrialised countries. Vietnam removed Pol Pot from power in Cambodia, Idi Amin was removed by Tanzania and India created Bangladesh by removing the East Pakistan government. I supported those actions although they were all carried out without the support of the UN. For my views on Iraq see http://clivesoleymp.typepad.com/clive_soley_mp/fabian.html
Meanwhile we sit and watch in horror as a military dictatorship in Burma allows its population to starve and for disease to spread very rapidly.If we don’t try and build or reform international institutions then we will go on living with these problems for the indefinite future. That’s why this issue is so important.
Ladytizzy. Yes, I am very happy with Clive – it’s a marked improvement on some of the things I have been called! Again the point I am making is that many of the institutions including NGO’s are not representative of the developing world. I don’t think they always can be but I wouldn’t recommend setting up a new one unless it was supported by developing nations. The World Health Organisation (WHO) tries to deal with this problem by having regional authorities but the success of the regions depends very much on governmental standards in the region.
“There is a saying in international aid circles that WHO knows everything and does nothing while Unicef knows nothing and does everything. (The United Nations Development Programme comes off worst: they say it knows nothing and does nothing.)”
An extract from a fairly damning critique of WHO in the BMJ, 1994.
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/309/6969/1636
I wonder if much has changed since then.
Good article, Clive, and I share most of your views in it.
Tiz
Of course, the comparison falls down mostly because wives and children are discrete individuals, wheras nations are messy and complex conglomerates of people we choose to treat as cohesive and unitary wholes because it makes conversation easier around the embassy cocktail bar.
The analogy with domestic violence falls down in a number of important ways, not least of which is the fact that domestic violence occurs in a social structure with a rule of law and a government monopoly on force. Only the foolishly uninformed and Christian Premillenialists believe that the UN is a “world government” with any kind of power, and what qualifies as “international law” is a dysfunctional hodge-podge of notions that seek to regulate what sovereign nations (the aforementioned oversimplified abstractions) can do in their relations between themselves. If a man beats his wife, we can send around a recognised constable of the law to perform an arrest. If a government starves its people, we have no constables, we have no courts (or none that aren’t merely western conceits), and we have no system of properly differentiating between the government and its people. If we were to scale back down to the domestic abuse example, we would stop a man beating his wife by sending around a mob of well-intentioned neighbours to beat up everybody, including his wife and someone who had just popped around to borrow a cup of sugar.
Liberal interventionism is a noble idea with a number of terribly fatal flaws.
Phil. We know that but it doesn’t change the moral analogy which is what we are talking about. Maybe we need to move towards a law based world even if it is complex. The alternative is not an attractive option as we can see in Burma.
Lord Soley
I appreciate that what we have now is not an attractive option, but moving towards a law-based world is more than a matter of mere complexity. In order to have an intranational legal system with more than a peanut’s hope in an elephant farm we won’t just need more NGOs and international insitutions, but a fundamental overturning of the central assumptions that pre-date Westphalia. A law-based system must have an enforcement mechanism, and that enforcement mechanism must be at least generally universal in scope. If an organisation is to have teeth it will have to be able to tell General Than Shwe what to do, and if it is to do that it must be able to tell George Bush and Gordon Brown what to do too, even if only on paper. If you look at the right wing brouhaha over the relatively minor concessions we make to the EU, you can see that such a shift in public understanding of what it means to be a sovereign nation is a mammoth undertaking.
So in the current geopolitical framework, is it possibly to be more than slightly better than we already are? Without law all we have left is force – no matter how well organised the international organisations are, if a sovereign nation does not let them in then a sovereign nation does not let them in. Our options are variations on the two poles of asking pretty please and making them let us in.
One can imagine a military task force charged simply with violating sovereignty just to hand out food, but that it not simple when it comes to providing security against recriminations later, and it is easy to see that turning into either a deeply ineffective and symbolic use of forces or a gateway to occupation in hostile lands. So we are left with what is, at root, “pretty please let us feed your people,” just the same as we have now.
In short, I’m not sure what the point of the moral analogy is if we lack any real substantive way of acting on it. What is happening in Myanmar is awful and catastrophic, but it’s hard to see what kinds of reforms of our toothless and bloated international institutions could transform them into something worthwhile – the fundamental problem isn’t the institutions but the rules of the framework in which they must operate. The unfortunate truth may well be that without radically reforming the entire world, for tough cases like Myanmar the status quo may be the least-worst option. For all the defenses you can bring of America’s good intentions in Iraq, it’s hard to not point to those very concrete things called “end results” and mention the phrase “road to hell”.
If we lack the capacity to solve the problem, then our choices simply are not between “let the husband beat his wife” and “prevent spouse abuse”. Discussions about what we should do must first and foremost start with what we can do. Otherwise, we find ourselves in the ridiculous situation of trying to prevent hunger and oppression by going in and shooting the hungry and oppressed. If we cannot fix the problem then we should not just do random things to salve our own consciences over inaction.
The Peace of Westphalia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Westphalia
Is not in my view a theory but a practical reality that is degenerating to a time before the treaty. One unintentional agent in this breakdown is American military power.
Given that America is a progressive democracy its often hard to understand why they find themselves at odds with oppressive regimes. Our forbears are largely to blame for this in terms of how Americans perceived themselves under Crown rule before 1776.
It gave rise to prescriptive wording within their ‘Declaration of Independence’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence
in the ‘preamble’:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”
This is the backdrop to American intervention in other sovereign states affairs that they perceive as despotism. It is not our own. This same construct allowed them a moral mandate to thankfully intervene on our behalf in European wars twice in the twentieth century.
However, the essential and subjective argument is what determines whether a state is despotic or otherwise. If the balance is poorly judged it will lead to a world wherein sovereign states need to arm themselves appropriately to counter direct or proxy intervention by super powers.
I watched the video of Dr Rowan, Archbishop of Canterbury’s talk to the London School of Economics on Human Rights and Religion and was much taken by what he had to say:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/pdf/20080501_RowanWilliams.pdf
He suggests amongst other things:
“It may be that the most important service that can be offered by religious commitment where human rights are concerned is to prevent any overlooking of the issue of how to establish a ‘non-negotiable’ foundation for the whole discourse.”
When faced with explicit media coverage of tragedy we feel that Human Rights Aid is non-negotiable and intervention in another states affairs is justified.
This would be to deny them their own sovereignty just because they feel the need to be self-sufficient and private within the terms of their own morality.
The type of changes we need take time. Following the 1807 abolition of the Slave Trade Act it took 60 years to end the transatlantic trade. It was a combination of the forceful (and often illegal) use of the Royal Navy, various international treaties and economic bribery and arm twisting that brought the trade to an end. I can’t track down a copy on the Net but “Strategies of Legal Change: Great Britain, International Law and the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade” by Holger Lutz Kern makes informative reading on this.
The recent expansion of legal concepts dealing with genocide, the International Health Regulations, the right to intervene in humanitarian disasters are all examples of our admittedly slow and stumbling progress towards a more lawful world.
If you tried to invent a world police force tomorrow you would fail but just as the UN was a dream in the early part of the 20th century and the ending of slavery a dream in the 18th and 19th century they both came about. Simply saying the world will always be like this is not enough. The discussion needs to be about how and when we intervene and what new or reformed institutions we need – otherwise it’s back to the telly and watch the bodies floating down the river while the generals hand out pretend food parcels to people who don’t need them.
Lord Soley,
Having neither expertise nor wisdom in history nor philosophy this is way over my head.
My main observations are of the practical difficulties if everyone were allowed to interfere in everyone else’s affairs. It could lead to some confusion, and also an element of ‘buck-passing’ as no one would really know who should assume the lead role in sorting out a particular problem. ‘I though that was so-and-so’s problem’.
Although that excuse seems to get used a lot already..
Is there not also a ‘moral hazard’ danger, as countries start to take less responsibility for ‘little local difficulties’ within their own borders, as they assume that a bigger and better equipped neighbour will always take it upon themselves to ‘sort it out for them’.
Lord Norton’s blog recently paid his respects to two great Parliamentarians. It let me to think what blessings we might have in being mortal. Two, perhaps three come to mind.
Firstly, that we are mortal means that in our passing go our shortcomings and failings allowing the new to flourish and in the fullness of time this too to close the circle. This is how I see society and governments; it is slow and sometimes painful but inevitable.
Secondly, the inability to read another’s mind; except for our closest ones the experience would ultimately lead to madness. This is the situation we find ourselves with today in terms of media coverage. Everything is thrown at us causing us to become insensitive to what otherwise would be of great concern. How should we remove ourselves from this hustle and bustle to achieve clarity of vision and sensitivity, switch off the TV and unplug the broadband connection?
Lastly, anonymity; it is the meek, the humble and the ordinary who pass away without us knowing of them or their lives. To do so is to truly release them from the burden that history might place upon them. So it is with the victims of natural disasters. One can give without knowing just who will benefit from the giving, except in the knowledge that it will benefit the living rather than those who have gone.
Even if the food parcels were pretend ones it would have given hope to those who might have moved on quicker without it; its all a question of faith.
I know international affairs is not the nations favorite hot topic but it is becoming increasingly important and will go on doing so because the world is now very interdependent.
Ideally the three powers that should intervene in Burma are India, Thailand and China. Leaving aside China’s special problems at the moment, these three nations could use their naval power to provide most of the aid needed in Burma. They don’t do so because they are not committed to the principle of intervention.
This is why we have to keep this debate going. It has to be the shape of the world to come and as global warming leads to yet more extreme weather events there will be more Burma’s. The death toll of anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 could have been drastically reduced with timely aid.
Finally consider this question. If as a result of one of these events a major disease epidemic breaks out how do we contain it without intervention?
Dear Clive,
your last statement repeats some points of view displayed by Senex and Phil. Watching the footages and coverages I tend to this direction too.
I say: why not train the mentioned countries to handle the sophisticated devices (e.g. water treatment) the industrialized countries can offer to enable them to help in their region of the globe.
An other item to do so is the experience these countries suffered from the colonialization.
Regarding the effects of the global warming all hands are needed on deck to prevent pandemic diseaes to stop famine locally. And there is no global warming to be considered only: there are disatrous earthquakes, tsunamis and any other desaters.
add on to my last statement.
Why using sophisticated devices at all. There are mechanisms far simpler than these mentioned devices.
I mentioned water treatment in my last statement. I remind at this place the doctrine “peel it, cook it or forget it”. With emphasize on “cook it” it exist an easy way to build a high efficent oven from the debris in a devasted land. Look at http://www.woodgas.com.
Beside this purpose such an oven could resolve the problem of deforestation (I have to remember that forest retain the soil and masses of water!), the pollution with carbondioxide and coud probably give jobs to a lot of peoples as they can construct them with the means and resources they could handle; not to mention the simplicity required in situations fast help is needed.