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Ethics & International Affairs
Annual Journal of the
Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
Volume 14, 2000
When, where, and how should the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad figure in American foreign policy? A compelling way for liberals to influence this debate is to underscore a Wilsonian agenda's relevance to national security. To the extent that stability in a region is grounded in a commitment to liberal democratic government, American security interests are served directly and powerfully. Nevertheless, liberals must also recognize that in some regions their agenda may be irrelevant, even quixotic. Not every part of the world is ready for the liberal democratic message, and the failure to recognize this fundamental truth has often undercut efforts to advance a Wilsonian agenda.
States have long taken exception to the notion of humanitarian intervention because it threatens to undermine a bedrock principle of international order: national sovereignty. In the case of Kosovo, however, NATO's nineteen member states chose not only to put aside their concerns for national sovereignty in favor of humanitarian considerations but also to act without UN authorization. This essay examines the ways in which states–European states in particular–are rethinking historic prohibitions against humanitarian intervention in the wake of the Kosovo war. It focuses on two approaches: efforts to reinterpret international law so as to demonstrate the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention and efforts to build a political consensus regarding when and how states may use force for humanitarian ends. While efforts to weaken prohibitions may succeed, thereby facilitating future interventions, resolution of the tension between legitimacy and effectiveness in defense of human rights will continue to elude the international community unless a political consensus can be achieved.
In recent years, American military forces have been deployed in an ever-expanding array of humanitarian, peacekeeping, peacemaking, and nation-building operations. In practice American forces have often been reluctantly committed, and almost always with an extreme emphasis on force-protection and the avoidance of American casualties. Often this issue is discussed in the framework of perceived political constraints on American use of the military–in terms of how many casualties the American public will accept in exchange for a given mission. Beneath the level of the political constraints on American leaders, there lies a deeper tension having to do with the implicit moral contract between the United States and its military personnel. Although military personnel are required to follow all legal orders, morally the traditional contract between soldier and state rests on shared assumptions about the purposes for which national militaries will and will not be used.
One of the most remarkable features of contemporary international relations is the new prestige accorded universal standards of human rights. However, NATO’s attempt to redeem the promise of human rights by way of military intervention during the recent Kosovo crisis may have established a disturbing precedent for humanitarianism. The Alliance exploited the capabilities of precision weaponry and digital information systems to wage war with air power alone, thus avoiding entirely the deployment of ground troops and the domestic political exposure such a deployment inevitably involves. The best available evidence is that this approach had little immediate effect on the atrocities carried out by Serbian troops in Kosovo and that NATO’s overriding concern with casualty-avoidance in war undermined both the effectiveness and the moral legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. Even more disturbing is the question whether NATO’s action implies that states endowed with the advanced military assets that were brought to bear against Serbia will adopt a casual policy on the conduct of limited war, a policy at odds with the lessons of the twentieth century.
The scale of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is difficult to deal with (over one million Cambodians lost their lives), but efforts are now underway to bring at least some of the surviving leaders of the regime to justice. This essay explores the reasons for delay of the trials, citing the absence of international precedents prior to the 1990s; the show trial of two Khmer Rouge leaders in 1979; and the obstacles to a trial arising from geopolitical considerations in the 1980s (in which some powers now calling for a trial, including the United States, were effectively allied with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh). In the 1990s, following the Paris Peace Accords and the brief UN protectorate over Cambodia, demands for a trial came from overseas and from Cambodian human rights groups. The Cambodian regime considered the show trials of 1979 sufficient, however, and in 1998 Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen urged his compatriots to "dig a hole and bury the past." Eager to regain foreign support for his regime after several brutal incidents in which political opponents were killed, Hun Sen has more recently agreed to limited international participation in a trial. A procedure targeting a few Khmer Rouge leaders seems likely in 2000, but Cambodian government control of the proceedings means that nothing like a truth commission or a wide-ranging inquiry will result.
What type of ethics should guide our behavior in contemporary conflicts? Religious groups working in many parts of the world are deeply involved in providing practical and theological answers to that question. This article examines two types of Judeo-Christian perspectives that stress the imperative to act to relieve suffering and transcend violence: liberation theology and the "religious humanitarian perspective." Both perspectives draw linkages between ethical guidelines and action, and both have influenced broader political debates. The essay poses the following questions: (1) What are the ethical bases of action for contemporary activists and theologians in these traditions, and have these changed with political circumstances?; and (2) Are there ethical and practical connections between contemporary religious humanitarianism and liberation theology, and can they provide us with a coherent ethic of action to relieve suffering and reduce violence in the world? These questions are analyzed in light of current theological conceptions of evil, religious pluralism, and the uneasy boundaries between violence and nonviolence.
Evaluating the role of international organizations (IOs) in promoting social justice in a globalizing international political economy, this essay presents and defends four propositions: (1) IOs are in a different, and more vulnerable, political space vis-à-vis globalization than are nation-states, firms, nongovernmental organizations, or labor unions; (2) central perceptions about problems of social justice in the context of globalization common to many IOs are a product of the history and intellectual trajectory in which these organizations have evolved; (3) as a result, there is a common theme and a core set of objectives at play, having to do with promoting and sustaining liberalization. That is obviously not the same thing as social justice, although in some intellectual frameworks there is a tight relationship; and (4) the ability of IOs to promote these goals has been challenged and will continue to be challenged by globalization. The essay concludes by arguing that IOs are suffering a loss of legitimacy, and that both social and technological changes associated with globalization will make it harder for IOs to recapture the power to affect the behavior of other actors in world politics.
It is true that international institutions do not command the primary loyalty among the peoples of the world that would allow them the opportunity to legislate in favor of social justice. They do, however, command strong political backing from the most important political actors in world politics–namely, states. In addition, virtually all international organizations integrate nongovernmental organizations into their deliberative processes. Present globalization trends are increasing economic disparities between and within countries, but most regimes do provide poorer states with special provisions that can be used to protect their economic interests. Also, some have clearly benefited from economic openness. In the long term it will be surprising if states do not address the problem of growing economic gaps through international regimes, although the likely adequacy of their responses is open to question.
John Rawls is the most influential English-language political philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century–indeed, perhaps since John Stuart Mill. His influence rests partly on the very format of his masterwork, A Theory of Justice. But Theory is a flawed and incomplete masterpiece, and the "Rawls industry" that has developed around his work has been stimulated by these imperfections. Indeed, Rawls himself has corrected and elaborated upon his original formulations in a series of essays compiled in Political Liberalism and his recent Collected Papers. One of the most controversial features of Theory concerns its handling of international issues; Rawls turned to this question explicitly in an Amnesty International Lecture of 1993, "The Law of Peoples" (published in his Collected Papers), which he has now extended into a monograph with the same title. The latter is the main focus of this essay, which also includes a sketch of Rawls’s project as a whole as a necessary preliminary.
Despite the fact that the idea of holy war is the unique product of European Christian culture, it is often used to project the Western normative experience onto cultures rooted in an entirely different set of socio-historical circumstances. This process is clearly observed in the way the West approaches the Islamic idea of jihad, which is often equated with holy war and mistakenly considered synonymous with Islamic violence. James Turner Johnson’s The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions is a refreshing effort to alleviate the misunderstanding and hostility toward the concept of jihad. Yet scholars such as Johnson will continue to be unable to properly assess the Islamic tradition or its full potential because of the paucity of serious secondary works on the issue of Islam and war. The absence of quality studies on the micro-historical practices and discourses of Islamic jurists and rulers prevents the emergence of any accurate and sophisticated understanding of the totality of the Islamic experience.