CIAO DATE: 03/05

Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs

2004/2005, Vol 18, No. 3

Articles

• Whose Sovereignty? Empire Versus International Law (PDF, 24 pages, 208.1 KB)
  Jean L. Cohen

  This article focuses on the impact of globalization on international law and the discourse of sovereignty. It challenges the claim that we have entered into a new world order characterized by transnational governance and decentered global law, which have replaced “traditional” international law and rendered the concepts of state sovereignty and international society anachronistic. We are indeed in the presence of something new. But if we drop the concept of sovereignty and buy into the idea that transnational governance has upstaged international treaty organizations, we will misconstrue the nature of contemporary international society and the political choices facing us. In the contemporary context where there is a powerful imperial project afoot (on the part of the United States) that seeks to develop a useful version of global (cosmopolitan) right to justify its self-interested interventions, proposals to abandon the default position of sovereignty and its corollary, the principle of nonintervention in international law, are both premature and dangerous. Instead, we should rethink the normative dimensions of the concept of sovereignty in light of the new principle of sovereign equality articulated in the UN Charter, and show how it can complement cosmopolitan principles such as human rights and collective security. The task is to strengthen, not abandon, international law and supranational institutions, and to foster a global rule of law that protects both the sovereign equality of states, based on a revised conception of sovereignty, and human rights.

• Interim Imposition (PDF, 26 pages, 249.0 KB)
  Andrew Arato

  In spite of the storm surrounding its first appearance, the cumbersomely named "Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period" (TAL)2 has been surprisingly immune from criticism in the West since its initial signing on March 8, 2004. American officials, anxious to declare victories where they can, as well as journalists seeking newsworthiness have insisted on the more accurate and revealing term "interim constitution." Its technocratic name, designed to neutralize (or hide) its constitutional significance, may partly explain why it has received little critical attention, but a more likely explanation is that many of its readers have rightly or wrongly viewed it as offering better protections for rights, including those of minorities and women, and more safeguards against new forms of authoritarian rule than other constitutions in Islamic countries, especially those in the Arab Middle East, including Iraq's own constitutional past. Commentators are apt to overlook the imposed character of the production of the document, perhaps because they suspect that a more genuinely negotiated and consensual product would very possibly have included fewer supposed protections for rights and safeguards against dictatorship, or at least the "tyranny of the majority."

• Occupation as Liberation: International Humanitarian Law and Regime Change
  Simon Chesterman

  The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been the subject of much discussion for its impact on the use of force outside of UN Security Council authorization. Less commented upon is the fact that the so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom resurrected a body of international law that had been dormant through the second half of the twentieth century: the law of military occupation. Developed at a time when war itself was not illegal, this doctrine became something of an embarrassment after the UN Charter established a broad prohibition on the use of force. Nevertheless, through the 1990s the United Nations itself had become involved in operations in Kosovo that looked distinctly like military occupation. Even the most liberal reading of the instruments governing occupation law, however, finds it hard to reconcile this law with military intervention and post-conflict occupation premised on regime change. This article first surveys the law of military occupation before briefly examining the role of the UN Security Council in post-conflict administration. It then turns to the ambiguous responsibilities accorded to the United States and Britain as occupying powers in Iraq in 2003-2004.

• Toward Establishing a Universal Basic Health Norm
  Arnab K. Acharya

  Significant inequalities in health status exist within developing countries, where the poorest face considerably higher mortality and morbidity rates than wealthier groups do. Yet most of these wealthier groups enjoy health levels that are far below those of people in the industrial countries. The most prominent normative response to this situation has been an equality-demanding norm, stipulating that we strive to make health outcomes more equal even within the developing countries.

  In this article, I argue that under current resource constraints, institutional arrangements seeking to ensure commonly accepted egalitarian goals would engender the decrease of health status of many who do not currently enjoy particularly high levels of health. Although an alternative view, the prioritarian view, can avoid some of the negative implications of the egalitarian view, it too is untenable given the current resource constraints. We should instead develop a threshold norm that characterizes minimally adequate health status. An institutional order is just with respect to health to the extent that participants in this order do not (avoidably) fail to reach this threshold. One implication is that redistribution of resources is limited within any developing country, and thus redistribution must take place from industrialized to poorer nations.

Report From South Africa

• Reflections on Journalism in the Transition to Democracy (PDF, 9 pages, 137.9 KB)
  Anton Harber

  New democracies pose a particular challenge for journalists. They are vulnerable and sometimes shaky. One wants them to work and, therefore, one is seeking to define not just what constitutes high-quality and interesting journalism but also how one can best contribute to helping democracy take root. In South Africa, journalists by and large emerged from many years of fighting against state, corporate, and political pressures under apartheid in the 1990s with a fierce commitment to independence. This sentiment was often strongest, predictably, in those institutions that had suffered the most political interference, such as the state broadcaster and the Afrikaans press, both of which had served largely as mouthpieces for the apartheid government.

Review Essays

• The Politics of Conceptualizing Islam and the West (PDF, 8 pages, 80.9 KB)
  Cemil Aydin

  In the last three years, a large number of books have been published, all trying to answer the now-classic post-September 11 question: Why do they, "the Muslims," dislike or hate "us"?-with the "us" variously defined as the United States, the West, or the modern world. Scholarly and nonscholarly curiosity on this topic is not limited to the history of al-Qaeda and a small network of fundamentalist terrorists but also tries to explain why untold numbers of Muslim intellectuals have critical, and even hostile, opinions of the United States and Western civilization. Are critiques of the "West" peculiar to the Muslim world? Are they a reflection of a simple discontent with the international order or a conservative rejection of Western-originated, universal modernity? How should Western intellectuals and leaders respond to the Muslim critiques of modernity, the international order, and Western civilization?

• Empire Versus Multitude: Place Your Bets
  Julian Bourg

  What is the relationship between globalization and democracy? Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, published in 2000, attempted to answer this question. Hailed as provocatively ambitious and jeered as impenetrably odd, the book created some stir when it appeared, and as post-September 11 developments have renewed and intensified talk of an American imperium, a number of thoughtful scholars and public intellectuals have since engaged Hardt and Negri’s arguments. It is now possible to read Empire through the lenses of those who have been ruminating on it for several years and also in light of postpublication amplifications by the authors, notably the recent appearance of their follow-up second volume, Multitude.

Recent Books On Ethics And International Affairs

• Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust, by Ira Katznelson
  Reviewed by Anna Wertz

  Civilization is threatened by a radical evil. Traditional diplomatic methods no longer apply on the international scene, and the duties and rights of the citizen have altered drastically as well. Politics has taken on a messianic strain: leaders talk of a perpetual battle against hidden enemies who threaten the annihilation of our way of life. How is it possible to champion liberalism and democracy in such a poisonous atmosphere? This was the challenge that faced a select group of intellectuals in the aftermath of World War II.

• Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions, by Teresa Godwin Phelps
  Reviewed by Mark Sanders

  The court of law shares much with theater. This idea is elaborated by Teresa Godwin Phelps in Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions. By turning to drama and to the law, Phelps demonstrates how, in an era when truth commissions are at the fulcrum of "transitional justice," soliciting the testimony of victims and commanding that of perpetrators in forums other than criminal trials may achieve a dimension of justice lost in traditional juridical proceedings.

• In the Shadow of "Just Wars": Violence, Politics and Humanitarian Action, Fabrice Weissman, ed. (PDF, 2 pages, 49.5 KB)
  Reviewed by Angela Raven-Roberts

  The debate on the nature of war and conflict and the ways in which the international aid or "humanitarian" community responds to them has taken on heightened significance in the past few years, as this community has grappled with the emergence of new norms both for the conduct of warfare and for intervention on humanitarian grounds. Should NGOs, the authors ask, take the side of "justice" in so-called just wars? Or should they also strive to help those on the "wrong" side of conflict when they are in need? In the Shadow of "Just Wars" is a welcome contribution to the growing field of humanitarian studies. Its analyses consider not only the practical, technical response to crises but also the moral, ethical, and political dilemmas caused by these conflicts and the ways in which they challenge internationally held notions of peace and security.

• The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush, Peter Singer
  Reviewed by Binoy Kampmark

  The literature on President George W. Bush's purported deceptions has reached a point where an anthology would not seem inappropriate. Such has been the nature of his administration's impact on U.S. domestic and international politics that the assembly line of criticism often resembles polemical pamphleteering rather than solid academic argument. This is not to suggest that such work is not valuable-Watergate was unraveled by committed journalists and morally concerned civil servants. But a piece that sets out to examine the Bush administration on its own terms, within the language of its own rhetorical framework, is to be commended. Has this aim been realized with Peter Singer's new work?