I watched a film last week about the Special Relationship between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. The film – and the relationship – bobbed and weaved through a number of high profile incidents: Blair’s 1997 landslide victory in the UK election, the troubles in Northern Ireland and Monica Lewinsky’s dress, amongst others. For me, however, Blair’s interest in Kosovo, and the subsequent NATO incursion, described by the New York Times as the “first humanitarian war”, provided the most interesting, revealing and poignant moments in the film.
In a speech in Chicago in 1999, Prime Minister Blair proposed that nations have a responsibility to intervene in the affairs of other independent sovereign states and even overthrow regimes that were either failing to protect their population, or perpetrating atrocities against their own people. His doctrine of “international community” challenged the already dwindling concept of state sovereignty and brought into mainstream thought the notion of just and legitimate use of pre-emptive force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state.
“This is a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values” declared Tony, referring to Kosovo, “awful crimes that we never thought we would see again have reappeared – ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, mass murder.” Of course, this was not the first time atrocities on this scale had happened and events in Rwanda five years earlier had not provoked such an international response. Perhaps it was Kosovo’s proximity to European capitals with their 24 hour rolling news, or a lingering sense of shame following the Srebrenica Massacre four years previously, or simply that a burgeoning notion of global interdependence found its focus, whatever the reason, Blair’s call to arms resonated around the world and prompted the international community to mobilise. Intentionally or not, Blair had begun to fashion his prime ministerial legacy.
Thus it was that in 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) published The Responsibility to Protect, and proposed a change in the way we view state sovereignty “from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility” (Para 2.14). Henceforth, state authorities should bear a duty of internal responsibility to protect their citizens and promote their welfare, as well as an external duty to govern in accordance with international standards. The report adds that this implication is strengthened “by the ever-increasing impact of international human rights norms” (Para 2.15).
Thus, when a state’s sovereignty is ferociously abused internally, manifested in Yugoslavia by President Milošević’s crimes and human rights abuses – and diplomacy is ineffective externally – it is the duty of the international community, to protect that nation’s population. Congruently, Blair acknowledged that “oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries” and therefore it is also in the self-interest of the international community to solve the problem. No war can be exclusively internal, and the inability to protect one’s own citizens “can properly be described as a threat to international peace and security”. In such ways pre-emptive military action may be sanctioned.
The Responsibility to Protect doctrine altered the way state sovereignty is viewed and begs the question: How useful are other facets of state sovereignty today? The internal face of sovereignty, usually a hierarchical system of state governance, is waning. Multi-national corporations are able to dominate economies and manipulate governments. The international movement of trade, finance, people and knowledge similarly undermines the nature of state sovereignty and presents the need for new solutions for global and local governance. Maybe that’s a topic for another post.
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