Sovereignty is good – it shields against western interventionism – anything else allows the U.S. to push its agenda onto the rest of the world

The question that concerns us here is how the cosmopolitan legitimation of humanitarian intervention assists in the maintenance of Western hegemony. Realists have long argued that the claim to be acting in defence of universal morality usually turns out to obscure the pursuit of very particular interests. Carl Schmitt’s observation that ‘whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’ is frequently cited in this regard,33 as is E. H. Carr’s evisceration of the tendency of dominant groups to conflate their interests with those of the community as a whole and to proclaim them as such.34 In the context of Kosovo, for example, Danilo Zolo has suggested that lurking beneath the cosmopolitan moral justifications for the intervention were a host of power-political considerations—an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate its indispensability in the maintenance of European security, to obtain access to the resources of the Caspian Sea and the Caucuses, to establish new raisons d’eˆtre for NATO given the end of the Cold War, and so on.35 Critics on the left have made analogous arguments in respect of virtually every humanitarian intervention in the post-Cold War era.

Liberal proponents of intervention have urged that motivation ought not to be considered a defining test for the humanitarian credentials of an intervention. Wheeler suggests that this treats the intervening states as the referent object for analysis rather than the victims.36 Michael Ignatieff advances a pragmatic consequentialist argument for ignoring motivation: ‘if good results had to wait for good intentions, we would have to wait forever’.37 While a great deal of the moral argument around humanitarian intervention has focused on the issue of motives, an obsession with the nature of motivations for particular interventions misses the ways in which intervention as a persistent practice in international society has assisted in the consolidation of Western hegemony. Recall that hegemony rests, to a significant extent, on the acquiescence of lesser actors in the international system in their own domination. In the context of humanitarian intervention, this acquiescence has been elicited, first, by creating a broad consensus on the need for international intervention, and second, by insisting on satisfying the demand for intervention in ways that maintain and reinforce a distribution of power in the international system that grossly favours the West in general and the United States in particular.

Egregious human rights abuses are an undeniable feature of our contemporary world, but the clamour for international intervention to deal with them is the result of a set of representational practices38 in which failures of governance are attributed primarily to local dynamics internal to putatively dysfunctional states. This is a crucial element of the hegemonic cosmopolitan sensibility. Anne Orford offers a compelling critique of what she calls ‘the imaginative geography of intervention, according to which the international community is absent from the scene of violence and suffering until it intervenes as a heroic saviour’.39 In contrast to readings of the humanitarian crises in Yugoslavia and Rwanda as exemplars of ‘ancient tribal hatreds’,40 Orford argues that international economic institutions and development agencies were present and actively interventionist in these regions well before the eruption of security crises. Relying on Susan Woodward’s account of the dissolution of Yugoslavia for example,41 she draws attention to the detrimental impact of economic austerity measures foisted on the Yugoslav state in the 1980s by foreign creditors and Western governments, which weakened the federal government at precisely the moment when greater state capacity was needed to ensure civil order and to enable people to cope with the shocks of transition from a state to a market economy. Orford’s analysis radically unsettles the false dichotomy between international intervention and inaction that is usually presented at the moment of crisis to justify the imperative that ‘something must be done’. In her reading of these cases, the international had already intervened in the domestic in ways that rendered it deeply culpable for the security crises that allegedly beseeched (more) intervention.

Working in conjunction with imaginative geographies are imaginative histories, whereby security crises are represented as failures of post-colonial governance, with the causal implication of colonial governance being eclipsed or retrospectively whitewashed.42 Robert Jackson’s work on ‘quasi-states’ is illustrative in this regard, for its insinuation that decolonization heralded a significant deterioration in the quality of governance experienced by Third World peoples and for its silencing of the historical and contemporary global relationships that contribute to state failure.43

One corollary of the practice of constructing failures of governance as primarily local and post-colonial is that the function of the international human rights regime is conceived in extremely narrow terms as facilitating the intervention of the international in the domestic. Prominent liberal cosmopolitan philosophers have been complicit in these constructions. According to Charles Beitz, for example, ‘the role of human rights in international political discourse has two aspects: first, human rights may serve to justify interference in the internal affairs of states or other local communities; second, they may argue for various external agents, such as international organizations and other states, to commit the resources required for effective interference’.44 Similarly, the liberal international lawyer Michael Reisman views the function of human rights as being ‘the international control of the essential techniques by which governments manage and control their peoples internally’.45 In an influential 1992 article on a putative ‘emerging right to democratic governance’, Thomas Franck saw the most significant threats to democracy as internal to states, emanating from coups, dictators, and totalitarianism.46 The notion that human rights or democracy could be threatened by powerful external actors (other states, IFIs, multinational corporations) or global structures (capitalism) and that international human rights regimes ought to protect against such eventualities does not even enter into these formulations. It is not as if this literature is blind to these possibilities; rather, it is informed by an implicit hierarchy of threats and a corresponding set of priorities. ‘Human rights’ are the instruments that protect individuals from the depredations of their own states; ‘sovereignty’ is supposed to shield them from the depredations of the international. Yet human rights are treated as absolute and non-derogable, while sovereignty has become conditional—thereby betraying a sense that it is the local that is likely to be the more serious locus of threat.

We should note, parenthetically, that these assumptions also infect the thinking of Western communitarians, where they serve a radically different purpose. Rawls, relying on the work of David Landes, asserts that ‘burdened societies’ owe their travails primarily to features of their domestic political culture.47 Miller has similarly relied on the empirical assumption that successful economic development reflects prudent domestic choices, to deny that Western states have global obligations of distributive justice.48 For Western communitarians, the attribution of Third World underdevelopment to domestic dysfunctionality is used to deny or restrict the claims of global distributive justice. Cosmopolitans use the very same assumption to bolster the authority of the international to intervene in Third World states. Despite beginning from shared empirical premises, the antagonists in this debate reach radically different conclusions because of a fundamental normative disagreement. For communitarians, obligations of justice are tied to causality: those who are responsible for bringing about a certain state of affairs must remedy any injustices that result from it. For cosmopolitans, obligations of justice arise out of a putative shared humanity, tempered perhaps by the capacity to assist.

The selective geographies and histories of culpability that underpin cosmopolitan narratives of intervention are essentially exercises in constructing the authority of the international, premised on its putatively superior knowledge, expertise, and clean hands. Having established a relatively consensual basis (a ‘demand’) for intervention as the best method of dealing with security crises, the West—and the United States in particular—insists on supplying security in ways that reinforce its crushing dominance in international society. Referring to Lake’s 1993 ‘From Containment to Enlargement’ speech setting out US priorities for the post-Cold War world, Andrew Bacevich finds it instructive for what it did not mention—worldwide disarmament and the creation of an effective global security organization, both of which had long been central to the liberal internationalist agenda. Neither figured explicitly in Lake’s strategy of enlargement because each would diminish US authority and freedom of action.49 Rather than taking seriously alternative methods of global security provision, the United States has unilaterally assumed the mantle of ‘guardianship of human rights everywhere’,50 and has tended to seek exemption from a number of rules on that basis. It has sought to legitimate unrestrained power by setting itself up as the driving agent of the liberal cosmopolitan project (even if not explicitly in those terms).