Here’s a link to the transcript of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech at the United Nations on Thursday. If you’re too busy to read it, a brief summary of his main points: The Pope started out by highlighting the paradox between the unfair weight given to “the decisions of a few” and the need for “collective action by the international community” to address global problems. He rejected the notion that international rules limit freedom or challenge sovereignty, and he further espoused the principle of the “responsibility to protect.” He argued that each state has the “primary duty” to protect its own people, but that if any state is “unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene.” He ended by endorsing human rights as “the ethical substratum of international relations,” reasoning that human rights can help evaluate discern the difference between “justice and injustice, development and poverty, security and conflict” by serving as “measures of the common good.”
Of course, to some extent the Pope’s speech is a standard one, upholding the principles of the United Nations Charter and calling for a rededication to multilateralism. But harking back to the rules of the post-World War II era will not help us solve the problems the UN faces today. While all nations may be equal under the laws of the Charter, some are clearly more equal than others in terms of funding for the organization. Rather than insisting upon multilateral consensus—an ideal, but not necessarily a reality—the UN rules must develop a new understanding of legitimacy. This new understanding must be able to distinguish between actions generally seen as illegal (i.e. outside UN processes) but legitimate, such as the NATO bombings of July 1995, which helped end the Bosnian war and bring about the Dayton Peace Agreement, and actions that are undeniably illegal and illegitimate, like the invasion of Iraq. It must recognize the importance of consensus in addressing long-term international problems, like global warming, but it must also acknowledge the need for dispatch during times of crisis. All in all, though, the Pope might be on to something when he argues that a basic respect for human rights may lie at the foundation of this understanding.
2 responses so far ↓
1 srudman09 (srudman09) // Apr 21, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I would be interested to here your argument drawn out concerning the principled differences between the Nato bombings in Serbia during 1995 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Both lacked the formal endorsement of the UN security council, though the invasion of Iraq did hold resolution 1441’s authorization of serious consequences, and both were undertaken in accord with an understanding of rights underlying international law. Certainly one must acknowledge that the regime the United States sought to bring forth in Iraq was preferable to that of Saddam’s. While there were many practical problems with the US invasion none of these could obscure the principles behind the undertaking, why then the summary dismissal as “illegal and illegitimate?”
2 mcase10 (mcase10) // Apr 22, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Sam, in retrospect, I guess I would like to take the word “undeniably” out of my post, but I still think there are serious differences between the NATO bombings and the Iraq invasion. I disagree with your point that the “serious consequences” clause in Resolution 1441 was a mandate to invade, not least because none of the parties involved besides the United States intended for it to be one. In any case, by “illegal” I simply meant not fully endorsed by the UN.
By using the term “illegitimate,” I meant to distinguish the legitimacy of the NATO campaign from that of the Iraq invasion based on an understanding of human rights. I agree that we liberals should be careful not to conflate the outcome of the Iraq war with its purpose, but I have three reasons that Bosnia may qualify as a humanitarian intervention while Iraq does not: Firstly, human rights abuses were not used as the main justification for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003, whereas mass insecurity and killings were the primary rationale in Bosnia. Secondly, a humanitarian justification for Iraq would have been faulty even if Bush had used it. While the history of Ba’ath Party rule was surely repressive, much of the killing had tapered off by March 2003 by third party accounts. To be justification for military action, human rights abuses must be both acute and ongoing, neither of which were the case in Iraq. Lastly, war itself obviously carries with it a huge endangerment to human rights, so I don’t agree with any argument based on the regime the US meant to instate if doing so risked compromising human rights even more. The NATO bombing was on a much smaller scale, showing us that engagement on behalf of human rights does not always equate to full-scale invasion.
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