El debate que se viene. El derecho de los paises desarrollados, de las coaliciones y de los organismos internacionales a intervenir en los Estados fallidos. ¿Dónde queda el concepto de soberanía nacional? Sobre el que se basa la Carta de la ONU.
R2P: The Limits of Fear
By Nikolas Gvosdev | 28 Jun 2011
R2P: The Limits of Fear
By Nikolas Gvosdev | 28 Jun 2011
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| Somalía 1993: un operación humanitaria que terminó mal. |
Despite all the favorable rhetoric regarding the responsibility to protect, governments continue to hesitate to embrace wholeheartedly the doctrine whereby, in the event a state is unable or unwilling to prevent its citizens from dying in large numbers, other states must be prepared to intervene. Governments from around the world endorsed this concept in the abstract at the September 2005 World Summit, but have been reluctant to apply it in reality. Indeed, Paragraph 139 of the World Summit Outcome document hedges, noting that application of the principle will be undertaken "on a case-by-case basis."
Some experts, however, have argued that the decision by the U.N. Security Council to authorize the no-fly zone and other measures directed against the government of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya earlier this year is a sign that this hesitation is giving way to a new willingness to act on the part of the international community.
I do not share this optimistic assessment.
The five abstaining states on the Security Council vote authorizing the no-fly zone -- Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia -- all reflect different aspects of the "fear" of humanitarian intervention, ranging from Germany's concerns about prolonged military involvement to China's obsession with defending state sovereignty. And, notwithstanding Robert Kagan's formulation of a world divided between democracies and autocracies, many of the democratic states of the rising South and East have real concerns about how the principles behind humanitarian intervention are applied in practice.
As Ramesh Thakur noted, if it is the state's inability to "discharge its responsibility to protect" that serves as the catalyst empowering other states to intervene, who determines when that threshold has been met? The trigger for the intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was the death of several thousand people in a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign -- certainly a large number by Western European standards. But a democracy like India -- which must deploy a good deal of "hard power" internally to deal with low-level insurgencies, organized crime and bandits, intercommunal strife and the chaos caused by natural disasters -- might conceivably surpass the "Kosovo threshold" given the numerous challenges, both political and climactic, that New Delhi faces in trying to preserve order on the subcontinent. Other Southern democracies -- among them Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia -- are wary of setting any standard that suggests that a state has abrogated its sovereign rights when it deploys security forces to maintain order, causing civilian deaths in the process.
This is why China's interpretation of the "responsibility to protect" finds a ready audience throughout much of the world. A 2005 China Daily editorial made it clear that Beijing believes a country best defends human rights by laying the groundwork for prosperity -- even at the possible expense of civil and political rights: "Human rights first find expression in the rights to survival and development, which constitute the basis for all other rights." And in contrast to the view, often prevalent in European capitals, that the "international community" is the best guarantor of human rights, Beijing's blunt reply is, "A country's sovereignty is the foremost collective human right."
Given that position, getting China to allow a U.N.-mandated humanitarian intervention to move forward either requires the diplomatic stars to align, as in the case of Libya, or else for civilian casualties to occur on such a catastrophic scale -- accompanied by the collapse of state authority -- so as to validate intervention. Otherwise, Beijing has been the leader of a global coalition of nations eager to preserve the Westphalian privileges of states, even when death on a large scale has taken place, whether from fighting, as in Sudan, or natural disaster, as in Myanmar.
On the other side of the ledger, those states, largely in the developed North and West, that support a more robust interpretation of the responsibility to protect are also driven by fear -- of the costs of humanitarian interventions. One response to that fear is to try to downplay those costs. As Jacob Heilbrunn recently noted (.pdf), "This idea that the U.S. could get in and out of a humanitarian intervention without significant loss of life or deep involvement continues to be one of the justifications for humanitarian interventions" around the world.
Still, governments become far more reluctant to get involved if doing so requires a sustained and prolonged commitment of forces on the ground, entailing costs and possible casualties. The shadow of the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia in 1993 has forever colored perceptions about the desirability of humanitarian interventions simply for the sake of "doing something right," as the late Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger put it. Public support for interventions evaporates once casualties are incurred. Governments, particularly U.S. administrations, have therefore been forced to adopt one of two approaches.
The first is to cloak a humanitarian intervention in the guise of averting an existential threat to the nation in order to build up domestic support for action -- that any sacrifice of blood and treasure is about not simply helping others, but also protecting the homeland. President Bill Clinton justified intervention in Kosovo in 1999 not only by calling it a "moral imperative" but also by claiming it was in "America's national interest" to prevent another major European war from breaking out. The justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power in 2003 was not simply that he was a tyrant who oppressed his people and menaced his neighbors, but that the "smoking gun" of a future terrorist attack could turn out to be a "mushroom cloud" over a major American city. Similarly, President Barack Obama argued that "a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America" than the intervention itself.
The problem is that the dangers are always vastly overstated and "sexed up," leading to greater public skepticism and reluctance to engage in future interventions. So this leads to the second approach: to look for "someone else" to do the heavy lifting. One NGO lobbying for a more robust U.N. peacekeeping and nation-building mission in Libya cites polling data that 64 percent of Americans support such a standing force. Yet Americans are also quite clear that U.S. forces should not be part of this increased effort. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in early June found that some 70 percent of respondents wanted U.S. involvement "held at the current level" -- that is, limited to support for the air campaign, with some special forces support for the rebellion; only 15 percent would want America to play a greater role. This fits the pattern that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat described (.pdf) as the American preference for humanitarian intervention: "relying on airpower and then pulling out."
The authorization in August 2007 of UNAMID, a hybrid U.N.-African Union force for Darfur, shows what happens to humanitarian intervention when both China and the United States are reluctant to act but are driven by negative press coverage of an ongoing humanitarian disaster to "do something." The restrictions on UNAMID's mandate appealed to China's desire to protect state sovereignty; the composition of the force -- mainly from African Union countries -- satisfied America's desire for "someone else" to do something. But the mission's effectiveness has been hobbled by weak leadership, Sudanese obstructionism and a lack of resources.
So Eastern governments are reluctant to breach the wall of state sovereignty; Western governments are unwilling to pay the price of intervention. But is there a way forward?
It is unlikely that, as John Owen has observed, the world will adopt a norm "calling for the extirpation of illiberal government wherever it is found . . . [which] would lead to continuous interventions around the world." Even when faced with large-scale casualties, there will be reluctance on the part of Southern and Eastern governments to use this as a pretext for regime change. At the same time, Northern and Western governments are experiencing real "intervention fatigue," particularly as NATO "heads for the exits" in Afghanistan.
What might work is the resurrection of the U.N. Trusteeship Council to administer states that have plunged, as Tom Nichols wrote in "Eve of Destruction," "into the bloody free-fall of complete disorder." Because the council would operate under the supervision of the U.N. Security Council, the major powers would maintain their veto power, thereby soothing noninterventionists' concerns. As for Western reluctance to commit national forces to such missions, the council could be granted the authority to hire private military contractors. That would also avoid the perennial problem of national forces operating under caveats, particularly the desire to avoid taking casualties, which prevented the deployment of more robust and engaged forces. In addition, as Western militaries downsize, a growing cadre of personnel with experience in nation-building missions will become available. The private sector could retain this expertise that has been built up over the past decade in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and put it at the disposal of the United Nations.
Humanitarian intervention remains an idealistic dream that governments, operating under the principle of politics as the art of the possible, are not prepared to fully embrace. Recognizing those realities may help us to chart more effective policies that will end up saving more lives in the future.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government. His weekly WPR column, The Realist Prism, appears every Friday
I do not share this optimistic assessment.
The five abstaining states on the Security Council vote authorizing the no-fly zone -- Brazil, China, Germany, India and Russia -- all reflect different aspects of the "fear" of humanitarian intervention, ranging from Germany's concerns about prolonged military involvement to China's obsession with defending state sovereignty. And, notwithstanding Robert Kagan's formulation of a world divided between democracies and autocracies, many of the democratic states of the rising South and East have real concerns about how the principles behind humanitarian intervention are applied in practice.
As Ramesh Thakur noted, if it is the state's inability to "discharge its responsibility to protect" that serves as the catalyst empowering other states to intervene, who determines when that threshold has been met? The trigger for the intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was the death of several thousand people in a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign -- certainly a large number by Western European standards. But a democracy like India -- which must deploy a good deal of "hard power" internally to deal with low-level insurgencies, organized crime and bandits, intercommunal strife and the chaos caused by natural disasters -- might conceivably surpass the "Kosovo threshold" given the numerous challenges, both political and climactic, that New Delhi faces in trying to preserve order on the subcontinent. Other Southern democracies -- among them Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia -- are wary of setting any standard that suggests that a state has abrogated its sovereign rights when it deploys security forces to maintain order, causing civilian deaths in the process.
This is why China's interpretation of the "responsibility to protect" finds a ready audience throughout much of the world. A 2005 China Daily editorial made it clear that Beijing believes a country best defends human rights by laying the groundwork for prosperity -- even at the possible expense of civil and political rights: "Human rights first find expression in the rights to survival and development, which constitute the basis for all other rights." And in contrast to the view, often prevalent in European capitals, that the "international community" is the best guarantor of human rights, Beijing's blunt reply is, "A country's sovereignty is the foremost collective human right."
Given that position, getting China to allow a U.N.-mandated humanitarian intervention to move forward either requires the diplomatic stars to align, as in the case of Libya, or else for civilian casualties to occur on such a catastrophic scale -- accompanied by the collapse of state authority -- so as to validate intervention. Otherwise, Beijing has been the leader of a global coalition of nations eager to preserve the Westphalian privileges of states, even when death on a large scale has taken place, whether from fighting, as in Sudan, or natural disaster, as in Myanmar.
On the other side of the ledger, those states, largely in the developed North and West, that support a more robust interpretation of the responsibility to protect are also driven by fear -- of the costs of humanitarian interventions. One response to that fear is to try to downplay those costs. As Jacob Heilbrunn recently noted (.pdf), "This idea that the U.S. could get in and out of a humanitarian intervention without significant loss of life or deep involvement continues to be one of the justifications for humanitarian interventions" around the world.
Still, governments become far more reluctant to get involved if doing so requires a sustained and prolonged commitment of forces on the ground, entailing costs and possible casualties. The shadow of the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia in 1993 has forever colored perceptions about the desirability of humanitarian interventions simply for the sake of "doing something right," as the late Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger put it. Public support for interventions evaporates once casualties are incurred. Governments, particularly U.S. administrations, have therefore been forced to adopt one of two approaches.
The first is to cloak a humanitarian intervention in the guise of averting an existential threat to the nation in order to build up domestic support for action -- that any sacrifice of blood and treasure is about not simply helping others, but also protecting the homeland. President Bill Clinton justified intervention in Kosovo in 1999 not only by calling it a "moral imperative" but also by claiming it was in "America's national interest" to prevent another major European war from breaking out. The justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power in 2003 was not simply that he was a tyrant who oppressed his people and menaced his neighbors, but that the "smoking gun" of a future terrorist attack could turn out to be a "mushroom cloud" over a major American city. Similarly, President Barack Obama argued that "a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America" than the intervention itself.
The problem is that the dangers are always vastly overstated and "sexed up," leading to greater public skepticism and reluctance to engage in future interventions. So this leads to the second approach: to look for "someone else" to do the heavy lifting. One NGO lobbying for a more robust U.N. peacekeeping and nation-building mission in Libya cites polling data that 64 percent of Americans support such a standing force. Yet Americans are also quite clear that U.S. forces should not be part of this increased effort. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in early June found that some 70 percent of respondents wanted U.S. involvement "held at the current level" -- that is, limited to support for the air campaign, with some special forces support for the rebellion; only 15 percent would want America to play a greater role. This fits the pattern that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat described (.pdf) as the American preference for humanitarian intervention: "relying on airpower and then pulling out."
The authorization in August 2007 of UNAMID, a hybrid U.N.-African Union force for Darfur, shows what happens to humanitarian intervention when both China and the United States are reluctant to act but are driven by negative press coverage of an ongoing humanitarian disaster to "do something." The restrictions on UNAMID's mandate appealed to China's desire to protect state sovereignty; the composition of the force -- mainly from African Union countries -- satisfied America's desire for "someone else" to do something. But the mission's effectiveness has been hobbled by weak leadership, Sudanese obstructionism and a lack of resources.
So Eastern governments are reluctant to breach the wall of state sovereignty; Western governments are unwilling to pay the price of intervention. But is there a way forward?
It is unlikely that, as John Owen has observed, the world will adopt a norm "calling for the extirpation of illiberal government wherever it is found . . . [which] would lead to continuous interventions around the world." Even when faced with large-scale casualties, there will be reluctance on the part of Southern and Eastern governments to use this as a pretext for regime change. At the same time, Northern and Western governments are experiencing real "intervention fatigue," particularly as NATO "heads for the exits" in Afghanistan.
What might work is the resurrection of the U.N. Trusteeship Council to administer states that have plunged, as Tom Nichols wrote in "Eve of Destruction," "into the bloody free-fall of complete disorder." Because the council would operate under the supervision of the U.N. Security Council, the major powers would maintain their veto power, thereby soothing noninterventionists' concerns. As for Western reluctance to commit national forces to such missions, the council could be granted the authority to hire private military contractors. That would also avoid the perennial problem of national forces operating under caveats, particularly the desire to avoid taking casualties, which prevented the deployment of more robust and engaged forces. In addition, as Western militaries downsize, a growing cadre of personnel with experience in nation-building missions will become available. The private sector could retain this expertise that has been built up over the past decade in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and put it at the disposal of the United Nations.
Humanitarian intervention remains an idealistic dream that governments, operating under the principle of politics as the art of the possible, are not prepared to fully embrace. Recognizing those realities may help us to chart more effective policies that will end up saving more lives in the future.
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government. His weekly WPR column, The Realist Prism, appears every Friday
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