The focus on Security First as the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy does not refer, as the followers of narrow realism might have it, only to the security of the United States and its allies. The Primacy of Life principle places a responsibility on the major powers not only to ensure basic security for their own peoples, but also to contribute to the basic security of other peoples. The legitimacy of the approach relies in part on its consistent application, one that respects life—not American or British or some other Western life—but life simply, indeed all lives. This entails, under limited conditions, interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations.
To sort out where Security First takes us when we consider whether a foreign government acting unilaterally, a "coalition of the willing," or for that matter the United Nations, should send troops into a given nation, I proceed first to discuss the profound change in the moral weight attached these days to sovereignty and to a nation’s right to be free from interventions. I then explore the implications of this change for armed humanitarian intervention and the quest to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In plain English, this chapter asks: when is it okay to bomb or invade someone else’s homeland?
In 1996 the most important moral principle that had guided international relations for more than three hundred years, since the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648—namely, that sovereign states are not to interfere in one another’s internal affairs —was turned upside down. This radical change was initiated by what was at first a little known book, Sovereignty as Responsibility, by the Sudanese diplomat and Brookings Institute senior fellow Francis M. Deng and his associates. They argue in this book that when nations do not conduct their internal affairs in ways that meet certain internationally recognized standards—the Sudanese government’s support for marauding militias in Darfur provides a contemporary example—other nations not only have a passive right to intervene, but an active duty to do so. In other words, governments that fail to abide by internationally recognized standards of decency forfeit their sovereign rights. Sovereignty is thus transformed from an absolute claim into a conditional one, revocable in case of bad behavior.
Deng and his co-authors originally may have had a limited purpose in mind, in that they were primarily concerned with the various African nations which were blocking U.N. humanitarian relief to refuges, known in international jargon as "DPs," or displaced persons. (As a former DP myself I have a special interest in the fate of such people.) Sovereignty as Responsibility seeks a moral ground to justify sending U.N. troops to clear the way for caravans carrying medical supplies and food. However, in the process of seeking a systemic rationale for such a line of action, the book in effect redefines sovereignty. Deng and his co-authors replace the long-standing definition of sovereignty as "supreme authority within a territory," with a new definition: "sovereignty as responsibility means that national governments are duty bound to ensure minimum standards of security and social welfare for their citizens and be accountable both to the national body politic and the international community."
Like all groundbreaking books, this one was not without its precursors. These include works by the political philosophers Bertrand de Jouvenel, specifically his Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (1957) and Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (1951). Both call for changing the notion of sovereignty or, in Maritain’s case, eliminating it altogether, and obliging outside governments to intervene in the affairs of those governments that do not uphold or obey the natural or moral law. De Jouvenel writes that much more important than the particular constitutional form a government takes is the "spirit of government and the spirit of citizens," which consists in awareness that the sovereign, as such, is unfree to do anything not consonant with the performance of its function." Maritain meanwhile speaks caustically of the "false pretense" of the modern state "to be a superhuman person, and to enjoy, as a result, a right of absolute sovereignty." He adds further that internal peace and self-sufficiency, regarded by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as the distinguishing characteristic of a complete city or kingdom, could be realized in the present day only in "a pluralist world-wide political society." And long before de Jouvenel and Maritain, the early modern natural lawyers Hugo Grotius, Alberico Gentili, and Francisco Suarez all wrote on similar themes, arguing that a cruel prince could be subject to disciplinary action from his neighbors.
Feminist critiques of the traditional concept of privacy provide a useful analogue to the dramatic shift in perspective for which Deng and his associates called. We used to hold as semi-sacred the precept that "a man’s home is his castle"; that is, it was regarded as a gross violation of basic human rights for the government, indeed for anyone from Peeping Toms to busybody social workers, to intrude into this private space. However, feminists fairly pointed out that when husbands abuse their wives behind closed doors, the public has not merely a right but a duty to intervene. Protecting women and children from violence trumps privacy. And that which holds for households also holds to some extent for the political community, for the nation.
As Deng puts it, if a nation-state fails to fulfill its obligations, the "rights to inviolability should be regarded as lost, first voluntarily as the state itself asks for help from its peers, and then involuntarily as it has help imposed on it in response to its own inactivity or incapacity and to the unassuaged needs of its own people." It follows therefore that "the sovereign state’s responsibility and accountability to both domestic and external constituencies must be affirmed as interconnected principles of national and international order." The international community expects states to bring their domestic laws and conduct into line with established international standards; if they do not, others have a responsibility to interfere in the offending state’s internal affairs. Thus, Deng’s justification for armed humanitarian intervention turns what was once a taboo of international relations into an ethical imperative.
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