The following is an essay I wrote just to get it out of my system in December, 2004:
What is the meaning of sovereignty? What is its role in international relations? This is a particularly touchy issue in many countries, because questioning the legitimacy of other governments is all too close to the racist justifications for the history of colonial domination in the last two centuries.
What we have to do, though, is discard that baggage, and look at the world today and how we should deal with the situation facing us now. First, it has to be clear that Western governments simply aren’t interested in becoming colonial powers. Such a policy would not only be morally wrong, it would be economically costly and politically suicide. There is no support for such a bankrupt idea, at least not outside the delusional debates in the White House Situation Room.
But we should not abandon our ability to judge governments. Fear of the non-existent threat of neocolonialism along with the misguided idea of cultural relativism has meant that we given up being able to judge or condemn governments, no matter what they do.
The fact is, some governments are bad. They don’t take care of their own people; in fact they kill and oppress them. Legitimacy ought to be derived from something other than the willingness to kill people. And governments as well as private citizens anywhere in the world ought to be able to say so without being accused of either neo-colonialism or political/cultural incorrectness (or treason). There is an element of racism in the idea that we shouldn’t criticize other societies because their people aren’t capable of meeting our standards.
The idea of sovereignty as presently practiced – and exploited – on the world stage is a holdover from colonial times. As a legal concept, it is enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia, a constant touchstone of practitioners of "realpolitik" and morally bankrupt defenders of absolute sovereignty like Henry Kissinger. The problem is that the Treaty is some four hundred years old, and was meant to govern relations between rulers whose sole source of legitimacy was the idea of the Divine Right of Kings.
Now we know better. No government can legitimately make any mystical claim to infallibility due its connection to either God or the "will of the people." Governments are flawed, human institutions, just like every other human invention. Any claim to the contrary is simply grasping at excuses for violating the rights or bodies of people.
If sovereignty means independence from outside domination, fine. No one can argue with that; it is a valid and obvious demand. However, the concept of sovereignty is often subverted by saying that sovereignty is some special quality of government that gives it permission to do anything the leader wants to do. The word is misused to justify – or at the least excuse – mass murder, as in Darfur, Biafra, Bosnia, Hama, and Halabja.
Let’s put it bluntly: America and other liberal democracies like England, Germany, Japan, and India are not, in this usual misinterpretation of the meaning of the word, sovereign nations. Those governments are limited in what they can do by political, cultural, institutional, and legal constraints. And that’s the way it should be. Having independence from outside control is a no-brainer; but it does not mean that there need be no controls at all. The idea that sovereign governments need have no controls has been hijacked and abused by apologists for oppressive regimes (mainly China).
Sovereignty should mean something more than giving permission to any thug who calls himself a president or chairman to shoot or gas anyone daft enough to disagree with him. It should not be a license to kill, rape, and torture without limit or consequence. We can, in fact apply some minimum standards to judging regimes and governments, without having to then claim police powers to change any ruler we don’t like.
I understand that this is a dicey claim. The standard we use should be minimal, not a carte blanche to remove anyone who would disagree with the world’s policeman. Americans neither claim nor seek such a role (at least the vast majority don’t (would that they had a say in this administration)). But if we don’t apply some standard, the world is on a steep slope to becoming even more dangerous than it is today.
What is the standard we should apply? In a sense, I hesitate to answer that question, because such a standard should evolve from a consensus (if there is such a thing) of the international community. My only claim should be that we need to have that debate, even if the prospect of reaching agreement is remote at best. The process is more important than the product (just like MEP). It is clear, however, that I need to back up my call for this standard with some idea of what kind of judgment needs to be made.
So here it is: a legitimate government is accountable.
That’s it. It doesn’t really have to follow all the forms of a democracy; certainly no one can claim that the U.S. model is the only true model for everyone, or even that it works all that well. All I am saying is that there should be something like a system of laws, and that those laws should apply to everyone, including the nominal rulers.
By this standard, there really are governments that we can call illegitimate. Certainly North Korea, which has been systematically starving and killing its people for decades, must be included. Hussain’s Iraq was, of course. Perhaps we can agree on Burma, Syria, and Sudan. We would have to look carefully at Turkmenistan, Libya, and several others.
By this standard, there are lots of governments whose legitimacy just might be valid, though they are by no means democracies. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Viet Nam, Cuba, the Emirates, and China are all countries with questionable (to put it mildly) records on human rights; but which can claim at least on some minimal level to have or be moving towards accountability. This is not a neat dividing line; in the real world there can be no such thing.
Of course one corollary is that being included in the list of legitimate governments would not automatically include forgiveness of all sins. Russia’s nominally democratic system does not earn it the right to do what it has done in Chechnya, or to its news media and economy. The countries I’ve placed on the borderline certainly have much to answer for. Even in the so-called liberal democracies, including the U.S., eternal vigilance (including of our own government) is the price of freedom. An independent civil society, whose power source is clearly separated from the government, is a necessary balance to providing the accountability I am calling for. This one principle is the genius of our founding fathers: Power must be divided.
To be frank, this is not an idea that will solve all our problems. There is no such thing. What do we do about governments who claim support from most of their populations, and war on their own people of different ethnic groups? (Russia, China, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, . . . ) What do we really mean by accountability?
It is important to mention that pure democracy is not the solution to this problem. Often, the greatest threat to real democracy is democracy itself (examples abound, including Algeria, Pakistan, and Venezuela).
We should not give free reign (sorry about that) to criminals and murderers. How can we say that the gangs in Liberia and Sierra Leone are sovereigns? We can’t really say what accountability/legitimacy is; but we can certainly say where and when it isn’t.
And then what do we do?
In an ideal world, the best solution is the international relations equivalent of Coventry, simply isolating malefactors and letting their own people see that totalitarian murderers make bad rulers. Helping revolutions when we can, maybe (but carefully, please!!). This has not had a resounding record of success, as witness North Korea and Cuba.
But the truth is there are no good answers to this question. In the real world, isolation simply makes a tempting commercial opportunity, that someone will exploit (usually the French). It also allows goverment thugs to control access to information, so that their citizens remain ignorant of their own situation. Borderline states will never accept the right of others to judge their actions. None of us – especially our governments – is perfect (far from it).
But legitimate, democratic governments have to find a better way of conducting international relations than the law of the jungle. International institutions can help, but not without the realization that sovereignty is not an absolute. Which member of the U.N. is willing to advocate that idea? Unaccountable governments are not just humanitarian disasters; they are untrustworthy partners at all levels.
Claiming the right to judge other countries is not, despite U.S. actions in Iraq, the policy of my government or any other. It is a fairly unpopular idea in America, as it is in India or Europe, in part for the reasons I gave at the beginning of this article, in part because it means our own government can be judged along with others. It deserves a hearing; however, or else the only basis for legitimate government as well as international relations will remain who is best at holding a gun to their own citizens’ heads.