The just war tradition and sovereignty (book review)

James Turner Johnson, Sovereignty: Moral and Historical Perspectives. Georgetown University Press, 2014. 181 pp. (including bibliography and index).

 
James Turner Johnson is an expert on 'the just war tradition,' and in Sovereignty he considers the co-evolution of ideas about sovereignty and just war.  Indeed the book probably should have been called something like The Just War Tradition and Sovereignty, since that would have more accurately indicated its contents than the title it actually carries.
 
Johnson's starting point is a conception of sovereignty that predates the modern state, one that defined sovereignty "in terms of the moral responsibility of the ruler for the common good of the people governed" (p.2).  Johnson is rather vague about what this meant in practice, but at a minimum a ruler's "moral responsibility" entailed meting out just punishments and protecting the political community from external (and internal) threats.  The 'sovereign', a ruler "without temporal superior," was sometimes required to wage war for these purposes.  This particular notion of sovereignty thus developed in tandem with what Part 1 of the book calls the 'classic just war tradition.'  One probably could also make a case, though Johnson does not do so, that this somewhat paternalistic view of authority traces back, at least in the West, to Plato's description of the guardians in the Republic. 

In any event, one of the book's main arguments is that this older view of sovereignty, in its concern with the quality of rule and the sovereign's responsibility for the common good, has a moral dimension that the modern view, with its emphasis on territorial integrity and non-intervention, lacks.  Yet some writers, such as Robert Jackson in The Global Covenant and Brad R. Roth in Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement, have argued that the principles of territorial inviolability and non-intervention have their own moral foundation, inasmuch as they allow, at least in theory, each 'political community' to shape its own destiny with a minimum of external meddling.  Roth's position is that "...international law's highest and best uses remain those given pride of place in the United Nations Charter: the establishment of a platform for peaceful accommodation among states representing a diversity of interests and values, and the protection of weak political communities from overbearing projections of power by strong foreign states" (Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement, p.5).  By contrast, Johnson is less concerned with "overbearing projections of power" from outside and more concerned that existing sovereignty norms often serve to shield bad behavior by oppressive or murderous rulers.  This in turn raises questions about, among other things, the moral status of state boundaries and state autonomy, questions that Johnson tends to answer only indirectly. 

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Although there is a nod in the first chapter in the direction of Augustine and "the Augustinian heritage," the book's historical discussion really gets underway with Aquinas, who listed "three requirements for a war to be just: the authority of a prince [auctoritas principis], a just cause, and a right intention" (pp.16-17).  The prince's responsibility was to uphold "the moral order itself" and thereby "the divine will," by punishing injustices and those who had committed them (pp.19, 20).  Aquinas distinguished between rulers who acted in the interest of the political community and 'tyrants' who did not; however, he was not consistent on "how to respond to tyranny" (p.41).   

Aquinas's main concern was jus ad bellum, i.e. the grounds for starting a war, rather than what came to be called jus in bello, i.e. the conduct of a war once begun.  The latter considerations entered the tradition via the writing of Honoré Bonet and Christine de Pisan during the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) (p.43).  These writers "joined the chivalric 'law of arms'" to Aquinas's jus ad bellum requirements, and the "combined conception was then passed on into the debates over warfare in the early modern period" (p.43).  Thus by the fifteenth century, if not before, 'just war theory' already encompassed two basic questions: (1) Under what circumstances is it just to begin a war? and (2) What constitutes just conduct on the battlefield (and in the treatment of noncombatants, prisoners, etc.)?

After discussing Aquinas and several of Aquinas's Neo-Scholastic successors, Johnson moves on to Luther and some other Reformation thinkers, and then to Grotius.  Grotius (drawing on some previous writers such as Vitoria) shifted "the locus of authority to wage just war...from the prince to the commonwealth," with the prince now seen as the polity's agent or representative (p.82).  Grotius also put more emphasis on defense, especially defense of the polity's territory, as a justification for war (p.84).  The political community's right to defend itself is now seen as derivative of the individual right to self-defense, and the authority to act in the community's defense is delegated from its members to the ruler.  

Johnson sees the Grotian emphasis on self-defense as a narrowing of the earlier conception of just war and sovereignty.  Here Johnson takes the traditional view of the Peace of Westphalia, i.e., he regards it as having laid the ground for the close connection between sovereignty and territory that has characterized the modern state system.  However, this view of the Peace of Westphalia has been quite persuasively criticized in recent years.  Older, 'feudal' notions of territoriality and authority clearly persist in the Westphalian treaties; Johnson neither acknowledges this nor quotes any articles of the treaties.  He does say that the shift in focus from the ruler-as-independent-actor to the ruler-as-the-polity's-agent resulted from reading the Peace of Westphalia through a Grotian lens (p.93), but that's a different point.  There's nothing wrong with accepting the dominant linguistic conventions and retaining the adjective "Westphalian" to refer to the current sovereignty regime (or key aspects of it), provided one notes -- as Johnson fails to do -- that its link to the actual provisions of the Peace of Westphalia is rather tenuous, to say the least.       

In the book's second part Johnson discusses issues of contemporary resonance, namely Islamic views of just war (ch. 6) and 'the responsibility to protect' (ch. 7), taking a broad view of the latter.  He is, however, unduly critical of the UN (p.160).  I'm not going to summarize these chapters in any detail here (so readers who are interested in them will have to consult the book).

The brevity of this book is welcome but it comes at a cost: Johnson does not engage with most of the secondary literature on the writers he discusses.  A fairly standard work like Richard Tuck's The Rights of War and Peace is not in the bibliography; nor is Edward Keene's Beyond the Anarchical Society, which connects Grotius to colonialism.  (Nor, with a couple of exceptions, does Johnson reference recent work on sovereignty and territoriality, though it's admittedly somewhat more removed from his main concerns.)  Still, Johnson's core chapters do provide an overview of some of the main lines of thought on just war and sovereignty in the Western tradition.  Rather than adopting the neutral tone of a textbook or survey, Johnson makes a definite argument, and one that might be questioned on certain points; this book is therefore probably best read in conjunction with other treatments of the same general ground that take a different perspective.       

What caused the decline in interstate war?

In a recent post, Eric Posner (prof. at Univ. of Chicago Law School) writes that he sees little evidence that the UN Charter, which dates from 1945, has caused the decline in interstate war. Although I don't share what I take to be Posner's general view of international law, this particular point seems right, inasmuch as Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter is best seen as having codified an already-developed consensus rather than having instituted a 'new' rule. And it wasn't really new anyway: "The League of Nations Covenant specified that the highest purpose of the organization was to protect the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of its members. The Stimson Doctrine (1931) declared that the United States would not recognize as legal any territorial changes brought about through the use of armed force. The League of Nations subsequently adopted this position as a new rule of international relations." (K.J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns, 2004, p.134)

As I've mentioned before, I lean to John Mueller's argument that the seeds of the decline in interstate war, or at least in major-power war, were sown in 1914-1918. I'm not saying this is the whole story re the decline, but I think it's part of it. 

Here's a passage from Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday (1989), pp.55-56:

That World War I was a watershed event in attitudes toward war in the developed world is clear. Exactly why is less clear.... The impact on war attitudes of the Great War's physical devastation and of its horrifying weaponry should not be discounted.... But the bone-deep revulsion it so widely inspired and and the very substantial blow it administered to the war spirit so prevalent just a few years earlier should be credited at least in part to the insidious [I might have chosen a different word] propagandistic efforts of the prewar peace movement. The war proved to be a colossal confirmation of its gadfly arguments about the repulsiveness, immorality, and futility of war and of its uncivilized nature. Of course, the war also shattered the peace movement's airy optimism, and it certainly undercut its proposition that Europe was becoming progressively more civilized; but that was nothing compared to what it did to the notion that war was progressive -- as well as glorious, manly, and beneficial.... Since the peacemakers of 1918 were substantially convinced that the institution of war must be controlled or eradicated, they tried to apply some of the devices and approaches the peace movement had long been advocating.

He continues:

For reasons that seem in reflection to have been special, it didn't work out so well. In Germany a leader arose who almost single-handedly brought major war to Europe, while Japan, a country that had not substantially participated in World War I nor learned its lessons, set itself on a collision course in Asia that was to lead to national cataclysm.

If one accepts this narrative and explanation, the UN Charter formalized a change in attitudes that had been well underway for more than two decades, which could partly explain why the trend line of decline in interstate war does not track neatly with the UN Charter's adoption.

ETA: If Mueller is right, an underlying normative evolution is mainly responsible for the decline of major war in the 'developed' world, rather than the use-of-force rules themselves. Whether the argument can be extended to cover the decline of interstate war in general is something one could debate.

Note: Edited after posting to fix a grammatically challenged sentence. 

Art. 2(4) and the Ukraine situation

I've been following, though not intensely, the developments re Russia/Crimea; this report has what seems to be the latest. For reasons of time (and lack of expertise on the region), I'll limit myself to one point. The news reports have been referring to the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, under which Ukraine gave up its Soviet-era nukes and Russia pledged to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity. That's fine and all, but Russia is already required to do that under Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter. So the Budapest Memorandum seems to me, though I'm not an international lawyer, redundant on that point.

Also, one commenter at the WaPo said something like "why is the U.S. concerned about international law, given drones, Guantanamo, etc etc.?" That the G.W. Bush admin violated international law, and that the Obama admin may also be doing so in certain respects, is no reason to refrain from expressing concern/alarm when a country of some consequence appears to be violating one of the most basic norms of international society and one of the most basic provisions of the UN Charter. I'm aware there are all sorts of complications here, but the essential points, in terms of international law, seem reasonably clear. That's not to say anything about the policy questions, which I'm not going to do, not in this post at any rate.

Does the process of state recognition need to be 'normalized'?

The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States sets out the minimum requirements for statehood in international law: "a permanent population; a defined territory; government; and capacity to enter into relations with the other States." A prominent international lawyer has written that several of these criteria boil down to "the existence of effective government...." (Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, 4th ed., p.73).

Not surprisingly, the rather vague criteria of the Montevideo Convention have not always been applied consistently. In a 2002 article, "Sovereign Rights in International Relations: A Futile Search for Regulated or Regular State Behavior" (Review of International Studies, 28:4), Ersun Kurtulus pointed out that, for example, Chechnya in the 1990s had most of the empirical attributes of statehood but lacked the legal status of sovereignty, whereas Bosnia-Herzegovina was widely recognized as a sovereign state while (arguably) lacking the empirical attributes of statehood. Bosnia was hardly alone in that respect, of course. There is a well-known distinction in the Int'l Relations literature, introduced by Robert Jackson, between "juridical" and "empirical" sovereignty. To take an example: Somalia has juridical but not empirical sovereignty, whereas Somaliland, one could argue, has empirical but not juridical sovereignty. (On Somaliland, see, e.g., Peter Roethke, "The Right to Secede Under International Law: The Case of Somaliland," Journal of International Service, 20:2, Fall 2011.)

The above remarks are prompted by reading Courtney Brooks's article, "Making a State a State," in the current issue of World Policy Journal. Brooks, the UN correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, argues that there is a "need for a mechanism to normalize the process of international recognition of a state."  UN membership, which requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly, is perhaps the closest thing to an official stamp of recognition of statehood, but it isn't quite that, and moreover any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council can veto a membership application. 

Brooks contends that no one country should be able to veto a UN membership bid and that a way should be found to bypass the veto power, perhaps by reviving a 1950 SC resolution that was used to break a deadlock over the Korean War by giving "the General Assembly the power to overrule the Security Council in some instances...." The likelihood of this occurring, I would say, is minimal, but it's an interesting proposal.  
 
However, in terms of the way it's organized, the problem with Brooks's generally good article is that it begins with a discussion of Abkhazia, a region in the west of Georgia (see map here) that declared itself independent in 1999 but is recognized as an independent state only by Russia and four other countries. (The four are Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nauru and Tuvalu, the latter two being tiny island states in the Pacific.) 

Abkhazia is thus not a case of an entity that would benefit from a 'normalization' of the recognition procedure or a bypassing of the Security Council veto, since virtually no country wants to recognize it except Russia. Brooks quotes a Russian spokesman as saying "we encourage everybody to accept the new geopolitical reality in the South Caucasus. Two independent states, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, exist there alongside Georgia." This is Moscow's position and (with respect to Abkhazia at least) Venezuela's and Nicaragua's position, and Nauru's and Tuvalu's, all of whose positions have, as one might delicately put it, been influenced by Russian financial largesse. But the other 180-plus sovereign states in the world aren't buying this "new geopolitical reality."    

Accordingly, Brooks tacks on a coda proposing that residents of "disputed territories" like Abkhazia should have their rights to travel freely, for example, guaranteed by some mechanism, perhaps a revival of something like the UN Trusteeship Council. Again, I don't know whether this particular mechanism is the right one, but the basic idea of enhancing the rights of Abkhazians and others similarly situated seems reasonable.

Two other quibbles with the piece: it uses "state" and "nation" interchangeably, which I think should be avoided if possible, and it refers at one point to the "rigidity" of territorial boundaries in negative terms. In fact the rigidity of boundaries has some significant benefits as well as some costs; for further discussion, see, e.g., here.

P.s. Be sure to catch the very short poem quoted at the very end of Brooks's article.

Further reading: Mikulas Fabry, Recognizing States (Oxford U.P., 2010).

A.M. linkage

Pressman on whether the U.S. and Israel continue to share values.

D.C. Exile on sovereignty and drone strikes.

[added later] More on Israel: The Fall 2012 issue of Dissent, which I just bought in a bkstore, contains an exchange on Israel between James Rule and Michael Walzer, as well as a review-essay "Zionism and Its Discontents." Haven't read either one yet.    

Taylor's crimes in Liberia

Here (h/t HC).

In case you missed this...

Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, a U.S. citizen, was killed in a recent drone strike in Yemen that also killed the media chief of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). (H/t V. Yadav) This will raise further questions about drones and whether their increasing use accords with accepted principles of the law of armed conflict.

Related (added 10/27): Drone strikes in the Pakistan border regions earlier this month killed several al-Qaeda figures and a "top deputy" in the Haqqani network, according to this piece.

Goldstein on Sudan

A good review of the situation in Sudan which concludes that the independence of South Sudan will occur as scheduled in July and that, despite recent fighting around Abyei, full-scale civil war will not resume. Omitted (probably because not directly relevant to the current situation) is the fact that Omar al-Bashir remains under indictment by the International Criminal Court for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in connection with his government's actions in Darfur. The chief prosecutor of the ICC said a few years ago that the entire Sudanese state apparatus was complicit in the crimes.

Phillipe Sands lecture

Tomorrow; see here.

Rhetorics of empire

The calendar tells me that today is United Nations Day: a fitting day for this post (for reasons that will become clear).

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In Cosmopolitanism (Norton pb., 2007), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

The independence movements of the post-1945 world that led to the end of Europe’s African and Asian empires were driven by the rhetoric that had guided the Allies’ own struggle against Germany and Japan: democracy, freedom, equality. This [i.e., the conflict between colonial powers and independence movements] wasn’t a conflict between values. It was a conflict of interests couched in terms of the same values. (p. 80)

According to this view, the colonizers and the colonized framed their positions in the same language: both sides argued that they were upholding liberal principles. If so, did the colonizers genuinely believe that they were acting on behalf of such principles? No doubt some of them did, but that issue is beyond the scope of this post. The above-quoted passage from Appiah does, however, raise questions about the relation of words to concepts. Someone’s use of a word such as “freedom” does not necessarily indicate a commitment to anything that most people would recognize as freedom. A slaveholder in the act of beating a slave does not become a promoter of freedom simply by uttering the words “I am doing this because I believe in freedom.”

Admittedly this example is an exaggeration. In the conflict between colonial powers and independence movements, rhetoric was used in somewhat, but only somewhat, more subtle ways. The career of Jan Smuts (1870-1950) is instructive in this connection. In No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009), Mark Mazower devotes a lot of attention to Smuts, who was the leading South African politician of the first half of the twentieth century. Smuts viewed membership in the British Empire as a means to ensure the preservation and spread of white rule in southern Africa. During the first of his two terms as prime minister of South Africa (1919-1924), “the foundations of the future apartheid regime were being laid by eroding the last remnants of the native suffrage and introducing segregationist settlement restrictions.” (p. 51)

Smuts was also a believer in international organization. Among other things, he was a main drafter of the preamble to the UN Charter, which listed among the organization’s purposes the reaffirmation of “faith in fundamental human rights, …the dignity and worth of the human person, …the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small….” Mazower asks: “How could the new world body’s commitment to universal rights owe more than a little to the participation of a man whose segregationist policies back home paved the way for the apartheid state?” (No Enchanted Palace, p. 19) The answer – or at least an answer – is that for Smuts, and for some others involved in the UN’s founding, “fundamental human rights” did not in fact mean universal rights. Adhering to an “evolutionist paradigm of cosmic harmony under beneficent white guidance” (p. 57), Smuts saw “differential degrees of freedom and differential treatment of groups by the state [as] not merely reasonable but necessary for human progress.” (p. 64) As a young man, Smuts “had talked easily about the mission of ‘half a million whites’ to lift up ‘the vast dead weight of immemorial barbarism and animal savagery to the light and blessing of ordered civilisation,’” and he hoped the UN would be “a force for world order, under whose umbrella the British Empire – with South Africa as its principal dynamic agent on the continent – could continue to carry out its civilizing work.” (p. 65)

The UN Charter itself, as Mazower observes, did not specifically condemn colonialism, and few people of any prominence, except for W.E.B. Du Bois, objected to this omission at the time. Indeed an African journalist predicted that a new “scramble for coloured territories and spheres of influence” was in the offing, adding that “new life has been infused into predatory imperialism.” (quoted, p. 63)

However, the UN did not, as things turned out, conform to Smuts’s vision, nor did a new scramble for colonies occur. On the contrary, what Harold Macmillan called a wind of change (in his famous 1960 speech) was running strongly against the continuation of formal empire. This soon became evident within the UN itself. A complaint to the General Assembly about the treatment of Indians in South Africa, spearheaded by Nehru and first brought in 1946, presaged “the emergence in the General Assembly of an entirely new conception of world order – one premised on the breakup of empire rather than its continuation.” (Mazower, p. 185) The General Assembly’s December 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples called for quick independence for the remaining colonies, rejecting the argument that an alleged lack of readiness for self-government could justify delay.

The end of colonialism, an epochal change in world politics, represented an unusual case of a modern international institution becoming obsolete (cf. K.J. Holsti, Taming the Sovereigns: Institutional Change in International Politics [Cambridge U.P., 2004], p. 274). But although the institution became obsolete, the rhetoric associated with it has proven to be longer lived. Although virtually no one in authority extols, in Smutsian fashion, the superior wisdom of the “white race,” more nuanced versions of what Mazower calls imperial internationalism are still extant. In the context of the “war on terror,” references to “civilization” and “barbarism” have become common (see Mark Salter’s work on this); these words have overtones, whether intended or not, that cannot be fully grasped unless one remembers the once-widespread view that colonized peoples were “uncivilized.” The trope (to use a fashionable word) of civilization versus barbarism should not have been resurrected in recent years, no matter that the context is different. These words carry too many reminders of the old rhetorics of empire.

Note: For more on Smuts, see the sources listed in Mazower's notes. Also, Richard Toye's Churchill's Empire (Henry Holt, 2010) contains a couple of references to Smuts from a somewhat different perspective.

The UN water rights resolution

The UN General Assembly today declared access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation a human right, in a resolution that no country opposed but on which 41, including the U.S., abstained. The abstainers raised various objections, one of which had to do with the status of an ongoing 'process' on the subject at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, another with the alleged absence of a basis in international law for declaring the right to water a "free-standing" right (as the British delegate put it).

2.6 billion people, or roughly 40 percent of the world's population, lack access to sanitation, and nearly a billion people lack access to clean water. This resolution, like all General Assembly resolutions, is non-binding and must be seen as aspirational. It apparently does not commit states to any specific actions, though it does call on them to "scale up" efforts to transfer technology and expertise that would improve the situation. Aspirational resolutions are not meaningless, and abstaining on this particular one makes little sense. It only makes the abstainers look small-minded and mean-spirited. Moreover, pronouncements about the "existing state of international law" merely reinforce the accurate perception that international law in this respect is in need of renovation.

Update: S. Carvin at Duck of Minerva has a longer post about this here.

Loosen the blockade

Freud's Little Hans, in the famous case study of that name, said: "Doing's not wanting, and wanting's not doing," or something to that effect. Adopting (or adapting) this syntax, one might say: "Moral's not (necessarily) legal, and legal's not (necessarily) moral."

In more standard English: Some people may have had time to absorb the dueling salvos of pundits and experts, self-appointed or otherwise, about the legality of the Gaza blockade. I have had neither the time nor inclination to do so. I glanced at a Charles Krauthammer column, which I couldn't bring myself actually to read, which cited a piece by Leslie Gelb that apparently defends the legality of the blockade. That view, however, is strongly disputed here, on the grounds that Israel remains in "effective" occupation of Gaza, controlling among other things its airspace and territorial waters, despite the 2005 withdrawal of settlers.

Apart from the question of its legality, the blockade in its current form is politically and morally bad, restricting as it does certain essential humanitarian items including medical equipment. The Obama admin. is apparently bringing some pressure to bear on Israel to reconsider how the blockade is administered, and the Israeli government itself is reviewing the matter. A loosening would be only a temporary improvement in an awful situation, but that would be better than nothing. All this is certainly not to deny Israel's legitimate security concerns vis-a-vis Hamas, but there must be a better way of balancing the considerations than the situation that exists now.

In January 2009, in a comment attached to this post, I expressed the view that an action (or actions) could be immoral even if lawful under international law, and I'm basically just reiterating that.

India and the NPT

I'm embarrassed (again) to have missed this development when it happened, but I just learned this afternoon, from David Fidler and Sumit Ganguly's Newsweek column ("India's Bombshell," Dec. 14) about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's statement on November 29 that India is willing to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nuclear weapons state. India, of course, has never signed the NPT (neither have Pakistan or Israel).

Singh's move comes as a considerable surprise, and as Fidler and Ganguly note, it puts the current NPT nuclear weapon states, especially the U.S. and China, in something of a quandary:

"To admit India as a nuclear-weapons state, NPT members would have to amend the treaty -- specifically, the provision that defines nuclear-weapons states as those that detonated a weapon before 1967. Opponents will argue that bringing India inside the nuclear club could set a dangerous precedent, dangling the possibility of legitimacy in front of other would-be nuclear states. But, given India's responsible behavior as a nuclear-weapons democracy, it would also strengthen the NPT at a moment when the treaty is under attack for its apparent ineffectiveness in curtailing nuclear violations in North Korea and Iran.... [T]he U.S. and China will have particularly hard choices to make. For Washington, opposing the NPT amendment would hurt its relationship with India.... And opposing Indian membership would make Beijing look selfish, more concerned with its own narrow interests than with non-proliferation."

I haven't figured out yet exactly what I think about this, but I have one gloss on this passage: India is effectively already a member of the nuclear club. Even though it's not in the NPT, India was the beneficiary of a deal with the U.S. on civilian nuclear power entered into last year. And it's not as if one hears much of an outcry from any of the current NPT nuclear weapon states about India's nuclear status. Moreover, how would India's joining the NPT affect its none-too-satisfactory relations with Pakistan? Might it not heighten resentment in Islamabad about perceived international favoritism toward India? And, in the long run, would that be good for India? All in all, I'm not sure I entirely agree with Fidler and Ganguly that joining the NPT "would confer enormous benefits on India." It will be interesting, in any case, to see what happens with this.

African Union Convention on Displaced Persons

The African Union recently adopted a Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Displaced Persons, the first legal instrument to define states' obligations toward their own displaced citizens. There are roughly 12 million internally displaced people in Africa. The convention needs to be ratified by a minimum of 15 countries before coming into force. More details here and/or by googling "convention on displaced persons."

You might ask whether conventions like this have any practical effect. The safe, albeit perhaps unsatisfying, answer is that it varies: some have more impact than others. But at a minimum they can help focus attention on a problem, and that in itself can be useful.

A missed opportunity: Guy Raz, Paul Wolfowitz, and one bad interview

I don't regularly listen to All Things Considered (ATC) but I hear snatches of it now and again, often if I happen to be driving when it's on. This Saturday afternoon I heard Guy Raz, the ATC weekend host, interview Paul Wolfowitz. The ostensible subject was a piece Wolfowitz wrote for Foreign Policy (a piece I was aware of but have not read) apparently criticizing the "realist" view -- as Wolfowitz labels and interprets it -- that other countries' internal political arrangements are their own concern and should be off-limits to U.S. foreign policy. Or, to quote or closely paraphrase Wolfowitz from the interview, he was criticizing the notion that "other countries' internal affairs is [sic] their own business" and should be insulated from U.S. interference of any kind, including peaceful efforts to promote democracy, womens' rights, etc.

There are more than a couple of interesting questions that could have been raised about this. First of all, does any analyst or commentator or academic or whatever hold the view Wolfowitz is labeling "realist"? If not, why bother criticizing it? If so, who are they? Second of all and more important, how is Wolfowitz defining "internal affairs"? When is intervention, peaceful or otherwise, in another country's internal affairs warranted and when is it not? If no bright-line principle can be stated, what kinds of considerations should be weighed? How does Wolfowitz's approach jibe, if at all, with the well-known axiom that, from the standpoint of international law and diplomatic norms, a country's internal affairs are indeed mostly its own business? And so on.

Unfortunately, Raz did not ask most of these questions, preferring to spend time needling Wolfowitz about the Iraq war and his role in its planning. Now far be it from me to suggest that Wolfowitz does not deserve to be needled, badgered, and hounded about his role in the Iraq war. The fact that Wolfowitz's reputation has survived Iraq sufficiently unscathed to permit him to be a visiting fellow at AEI and a writer of pieces for Foreign Policy in itself is suggestive of how gross mistakes, no matter how blatant and horrible, go basically unpunished in Washington policy circles. Nonetheless, the subject of the interview was supposed to be the "realist" doctrine of non-interference in internal affairs -- actually less a "realist" doctrine than, as I've already indicated, a basic principle of international law -- and it would have been nice if Raz had pressed more on this subject. He could have conducted just as tough an interview if he had asked fewer questions about Iraq and more about what Wolfowitz came to talk about, since it's a subject that people have been debating forever. Toward the end Raz started to ask some pointed, relevant questions but by then it was too late. This was not one of Nat'l Public Radio's finer moments, IMHO.

But wait!, I hear you crying. Wasn't the invasion of Iraq an extreme case of intervention in another country's internal affairs and aren't questions about Iraq therefore very relevant to the subject? Well, no. The very fact that it was such an extreme case means that it's not especially useful as a point of interrogation -- in this context.

P.s. James Fallows links to the unedited, longer version of the interview. I'm not sure I'm going to listen to this 37-minute version (indeed, I'm almost certainly not going to), but I'm providing this link as a service to this blog's hordes of readers.

The attack on "foreign law"

Today's Judiciary Committee hearings on the Sotomayor nomination featured a lot of discussion about the supposed evils of making reference to international law and the law of other countries in constitutional adjudication. At the end of today's proceedings, two conservative law professors delivered statements on this issue; I may have occasion to say more about those statements after I've had a chance to read them (or re-listen to them). Regrettably, the Democrats missed an opportunity to come to the defense, so to speak, of international law and foreign law. They did not invite a witness to counter specifically the testimony of the two law professors I referred to. None of this will affect Sotomayor's confirmation prospects, of course, but it may affect the broader debate on this topic.

Quote of the day

From Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (1977), p.174:

"A soldier must take careful aim at his military target and away from nonmilitary targets. He can only shoot if he has a reasonably clear shot; he can only attack if a direct attack is possible. He can risk incidental deaths, but he cannot kill civilians simply because he finds them between himself and his enemies. [Footnote]

[Walzer's footnote]: It remains true, however, that the issue of 'interposition' or coercion has to be resolved first. Consider an example from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870: during the siege of Paris, the French used irregular forces behind enemy lines to attack trains carrying military supplies to the German army. The Germans responded by placing civilian hostages on the trains. Now it was no longer possible to get a 'clear shot' at what was still a legitimate military target. But the civilians on the trains were not in their normal place; they had been radically coerced; and responsibility for their deaths, even if these deaths were actually inflicted by the French, lay with the German commanders. On this point, see Robert Nozick's discussion of 'innocent shields of threats' in Anarchy, State and Utopia, p.35."

"A waffly piece of blah"?

Michael Walzer wrote a short piece for The New Republic's website several days ago about "proportionality" and the Israel-Gaza war. The piece was characterized by a writer at Crooked Timber as a "waffly piece of blah." It is true that Walzer raises questions without explicitly answering them. However, I do not find the tone of Walzer's column to be as objectionable as the CT commentator does.
P.s. Those interested in just war theory will find the comments thread attached to the linked CT post worth perusing.

Slightly-off-the-beaten-path news

A couple of items:
1) The Japanese p.m. has decided not to go to Yasukuni shrine to mark the 63rd anniversary of Japan's defeat in WW2. (A few members of his cabinet did go to the shrine, however.) The decision is seen as part of his effort to mend fences with neighbors who were ruffled by his predecessor Koizumi's shrine visits (among other things). See here.

2) Complying, six years late, with a 2002 decision of the International Court of Justice in the Hague (a/k/a the World Court), Nigeria handed the Bakassi peninsula over to Cameroon. The peninsula, which juts into the Gulf of Guinea, has oil reserves, though activities by several armed groups in the region may prevent Cameroon from getting the oil out. See here.

'The Dark Side'

Jane Mayer's just-released book about the 'war on terror,' The Dark Side, makes reference to a report given by the Intl. Committee of the Red Cross to the CIA last year, concluding that interrogation methods used against certain top al-Qaeda detainees constituted torture. The New York Times reported this on July 11, in advance of the book's publication. Hat tip: the blog Elected Swineherd.
p.s. Mayer had apparently revealed the existence of the Red Cross report earlier, in one of her pieces in The New Yorker.
p.p.s. See also this post at Neither Property nor Style.