Even if we had a perfect court, we have no enforcement system. If we had a working enforcement system, we could use it to prevent all the wars in the first place.
Neither the court not the enforcement mechanism have to be perfect. And the mechanism for enforcing war crimes and crimes against humanity doesn’t have to be so powerful as to be able to prevent all wars. I agree that we’re not likely to see a state-like system for enforcing international law any time soon. But all that is needed is a small multinational force backed financially and logistically by the United States. And they don’t need to catch every bad guy, even a prosecuting a handful would go a long, long way to deterring future leaders.
And the mechanism for enforcing war crimes and crimes against humanity doesn’t have to be so powerful as to be able to prevent all wars.
What mechanism could there be for enforcing a judgment on a country that won its war of illegal aggression, other than some powerful enforcer nation(s) warring against that country?
I’m not saying there are no alternatives, I’m just asking.
What mechanism could there be for enforcing a judgment on a country that won its war of illegal aggression, other than some powerful enforcer nation(s) warring against that country?
Incidentally, that’s exactly what happened when Saddam’s Iraq invaded Kuwait.
There have been proposals for an independent force under the control of the UN. But I don’t really have a problem with enforcement meaning nations warring for basically the same reasons I don’t have a problem with the state using violence to enforce domestic law. For various reasons the kind of nations that are going to be involved in enforcement are going to be more democratic, more liberal, more legitimate and more powerful than the states run by war criminals. And the actions of the enforcement force will be observed far more closely by than the actions of your average autocracy. If this isn’t obvious I guess I can go into it more. All this doesn’t mean enforcement will never ever ever lead to abuse, but crimes during enforcement will be substantially less likely than crimes during your average ethnic conflict or authoritarian territory grab.
If there were an external force that was decent enough and powerful enough, then it would make sense to have that force actually decide which side is right on the merits, and that would pretty much be the end of war. That would be great. Whether it is possible, or whether it is likely to become possible, are very important questions. But right now no such force exists. Humanitarian law serves the function of limiting the human suffering caused by war, and as such is very valuable.
Humanitarian law serves the function of limiting the human suffering caused by war, and as such is very valuable.
It does this only insofar as it is enforced. If it were enforced more, more people would be deterred. If it was enforced less, fewer people would be deterred.
Not sure I grant the premise but Russia definitely isn’t going to be enforcing anything unilaterally. Other militaries would be a pretty solid check on abuse.
Russia claimed, among other things, that it was acting to protect South Ossetians from Georgian genocide. That makes it definitely count as a case of Russia enforcing (their interpretation of) international law unilaterally, with no repercussions from other nations.
That makes it a ilaw vigilante, not part of an enforcement regime. As a rule, aggressor nations say stuff like that. Part of the point of an international criminal court is to legitimize actual humanitarian interventions.
There have been proposals for an independent force under the control of the UN.
How independent could it really be? Who would be giving the orders?
The UN General Assembly? That has all the disadvantages of a non-representative democracy—tyranny of the majority and so on. Plus the disadvantages of deciding questions of law and morals by vote. You’d get big alliances or parties sticking together right or wrong, and demanding rent from others (join us in votes or we’ll vote war on you).
For instance what if all the Arab countries voted for war against Israel? What a bunch of countries voted for war against some little county you never heard of? I don’t want to rely on the other countries diligently fact-checking every time when they suffer no repercussions for making mistakes.
What if votes were by UN GA with veto power to a few big countries, like today’s GA resolutions? That just means those big countries, like the US, are above the law and can also grant their proxies and satellites above-the-law status. And because these countries aren’t afraid of ever being voted against, they don’t care much (from symmetrical considerations) about enforcing the law correctly against other countries. Instead they enforce the law only in their own interests.
Plus, in any war declared by a voting body like the UN, the voters are liable to cancel the war after the first battle gone wrong.
OK, what if decisions were made by some International Court of Justice? Well, how would you elect the judges to this court? Or do you want 1000-judge panels with a judge from every country? That would be the same as voting.
For various reasons the kind of nations that are going to be involved in enforcement are going to be more democratic, more liberal, more legitimate and more powerful than the states run by war criminals.
Why is that? I think a much simpler explanation for the state of affairs today, and a much better predictor of the future, is—the nations involved in enforcement are going to be whichever nations belong to the most powerful military and economic global alliances. They have to be to be able to enforce judgments against anyone else; and they do it to protect their own economic interests.
The UN needs to be reformed. Specifically, the Security Council (which is where the big countries have vetos) needs to get rid of the veto and replace it with a 2⁄3 or so supermajority requirement. This would be the body that would have control over any security forces.
But that really isn’t the issue. Every potential problem you point out has an exact analog in domestic government. Majority rule? Check. Fear that some will be above the law? Check? Militias abandoning their posts when things get ugly? Check. The wealthy using the law to enforce their own interests? Check. What is needed is the right set of institutions to alleviate these concerns. It will be difficult. It may be impossible. But I don’t see why the result would be worse than the status quo.
Why is that? I think a much simpler explanation for the state of affairs today, and a much better predictor of the future, is—the nations involved in enforcement are going to be whichever nations belong to the most powerful military and economic global alliances. They have to be to be able to enforce judgments against anyone else; and they do it to protect their own economic interests.
Well for one thing, the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries. For another, leaders of non-democratic countries tend to be more wary of granting ilaw legitimacy because they are more likely to be prosecuted by it. Israel and US are in pretty unique positions that cause them to reject the ICC, but by and large the biggest objectors are autocrats and ‘rogue’ states.
The UN needs to be reformed. Specifically, the Security Council (which is where the big countries have vetos) needs to get rid of the veto and replace it with a 2⁄3 or so supermajority requirement.
It’s fine saying it “needs to be reformed”. How do you see this actually being done? The existing UN will resist (with votes and vetoes) any reform movement. The only realistic proposal is for most countries to go off and start their own body and ignore the UN. This happened once before—when the League of Nations was disbanded. And how did that occur? By the Big Guys (US and USSR, basically) deciding at the WW2 Tehran Conference to do it. The rest of the world combined (other than Axis-allied nations) couldn’t have done anything to stop them if they wanted to. And they conveniently gave themselves unique veto powers in the new body they established, the UN.
Every potential problem you point out has an exact analog in domestic government.
Democratic-esque nations use variations on the separation of powers—passing laws, passing judgments, and enforcing them. The UN would have to have an equivalent. Essentially a world system functioning like the EU. Well, we can dream, but I don’t see this happening. A lot of nations will not freely vote to be subject to the UN. Which leaves you with a body forever enforcing laws on nations that don’t agree to them and don’t want the UN to exist.
The theory of nations includes the idea of self-determination. It’s the opposite of universal worldwide law. (The practice of nations, of course, is ‘might makes right’.)
the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries
My point is that this is an utter coincidence, and unlikely to last indefinitely.
Reforming the UN would definitely require the support of some of the current UNSC veto nations. But the idea is actually quite popular among American foreign policy elites—I’m talking about advisors to Clinton, Obama and McCain (the last less so). As far as I can recall, Anne Marie Slaughter, current Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, came up with the supermajority idea (though it could be she was just repeating it). It is a relatively mainstream, if liberal notion. It is the kind of thing Obama might have tried if the economy hadn’t shot south and he had some political capital left. If the US made a push for this there would definitely be resistance, but it wouldn’t be universal. The new powers (Brazil, India, etc.) would have a lot to gain since they aren’t currently on the UNSC. With the right bribes and threats backed by the US UN reform doesn’t look like an impossibility to me. If we really wanted it I’d say we’d have a 30-40 percent chance of making it work.
Democratic-esque nations use variations on the separation of powers—passing laws, passing judgments, and enforcing them. The UN would have to have an equivalent. Essentially a world system functioning like the EU.
I’m pretty confused by this. It is true separation of powers is one way to check abuse (but by no means our only tool). But checks and balances don’t have to come with a powerful central government. Nations wouldn’t have to submit to a power that could regulate their economy or legislate- they just have to submit to the very sparse list of prohibitions that constitutes international law. A lot already have. You get a decent number of countries (especially rich, powerful countries) and it wouldn’t be hard to get more to follow.
Some might take a long time to join (say, North Korea). But if there are a few places where we can’t enforce international law, so be it. We’re no worse than in the status quo.
My point is that this is an utter coincidence, and unlikely to last indefinitely.
It almost certainly is not an utter coincidence. There is a huge body of literature on this, some google searches should do the trick.
If we really wanted it I’d say we’d have a 30-40 percent chance of making it work.
If we did it without making a lot of other changes at the same time, I don’t think the result would be any better than the current situation, and might be a lot worse. At least we’d need to exclude unelected, oppressive governments that commit large-scale violations of the Rome treaty themselves from the game. (E.g., Syrian serving a term as president of SC isn’t something you’d want without US veto.) We’d also want voting based on number of people represented, maybe as upper and lower houses, etc.
Nations wouldn’t have to submit to a power that could regulate their economy or legislate- they just have to submit to the very sparse list of prohibitions that constitutes international law. A lot already have.
I think the main reason for this is that there’s no enforcement of the Court’s decision except for voluntary submission of the state parties to the Court’s decisions. The worst that could happen to a state party that the Court ruled against is that it would have to withdraw from the Court.
The politicians who sign the Rome Treaty send a good signal and get political rewards. They don’t care about their successors who may suffer the political penalty of having to “unsign” the treaty. They would be a lot more careful about signing submission to an International Police Force. I think most of them would then refuse on the same grounds as the US Senate, i.e. that it would be surrendering (judicial) sovereignty.
It almost certainly is not an utter coincidence. There is a huge body of literature on this, some google searches should do the trick.
That’s frankly quite surprising. I’ll try searching, but could you drop a couple of names of theories of this sort?
Hmm. It doesn’t look to be well supported to me—at least not on the basis of reading the WP article and some statistics. Possibly reading the professional papers on this would change my mind, but I’m not going to spend the time to do it. The problems I see with the theory are:
Most democratic countries are inside a few political and cultural allied blocks—Western Europe, North America and to some extent South America. This must be controlled for.
There are few wars between two democratic countries, but there are many wars between a democracy and a non-democracy, and the democracy is often the initiator (per the WP article). If you look at how many wars democracies initiated against autocracies, vs. how many wars autocracies initiated against other autocracies, there’s no significant difference (again per WP article). To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
The definition of what should be counted as a democracy is problematic anyway. For instance, at the start of WW1 Germany was arguably the most democratic of the big countries after France. It was almost as democratic as the USA is today, which is sort of the entry-point standard for democracy (noone wants to publish a paper that classifies the USA as non-democratic). And yet any standard history book will treat WW1 as a conflict of the Good Democracies vs the Evil Autocracies. A similar argument applies to some WW2-era countries.
Oh, and US hegemony in Western hemisphere affairs. The US has started many more wars than the average for any country regardless of regime.
Most democratic countries are inside a few political and cultural allied blocks—Western Europe, North America and to some extent South America. This must be controlled for.
I’m not sure why you would want to control for this. Creating these kind of political and cultural blocks is one of the mechanisms by which democracies act and influence the world.
To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
Doesn’t this support the original statement, which was that it’s not a coincidence that “the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries”?
I’m not sure why you would want to control for this. Creating these kind of political and cultural blocks is one of the mechanisms by which democracies act and influence the world.
Is there evidence that the democracy caused the creation of the blocks? To me it looks more like the blocks were there to begin with—for political and historical reasons—and because dominant members of the blocks were democratic and some of them strongly pushed for democracy in their foreign policy, democracy spread and lasted inside the blocks.
E.g., Western and Southern Europe has been almost entirely democratic post WW2 because the victors led by the US demanded it. If the Nazis had won, or if the USSR had conquered Western Europe, then they would not have been democratic. That’s another (and obvious) sense in which it’s a historical coincidence, not predictable beforehand, that Western Europe is democratic.
It’s true that the block(s) define themselves, today, as democratic and won’t allow tight integeration with non-democratic countries. But what countries are there whose regimes actually changed as a result of this policy? Probably a few and a few more where it was a factor, but AFAIK nothing much on a global scale.
To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
Doesn’t this support the original statement, which was that it’s not a coincidence that “the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries”?
It’s a method by which such alliances maintain their power, but it’s hardly powerful enough to be the main reason they became paramount in the first place.
If during WW2 (and plausibly also during WW1), the US had been anti-democratic—then the post-war world would almost certainly not have contained any democratic countries in Europe. If we count countries and not people (which is reasonable when discussing alliances and power blocks), then a regime change in just one country would have (with significant probability) reversed the regime outcome for the whole world.
I also want to point out that the power to make war is insufficient to resolve many conflicts. You also need to be able to subsequently enforce and manage order in peacetime—to be a police force and a managing government.
Even if we had a perfect court, we have no enforcement system. If we had a working enforcement system, we could use it to prevent all the wars in the first place.
Neither the court not the enforcement mechanism have to be perfect. And the mechanism for enforcing war crimes and crimes against humanity doesn’t have to be so powerful as to be able to prevent all wars. I agree that we’re not likely to see a state-like system for enforcing international law any time soon. But all that is needed is a small multinational force backed financially and logistically by the United States. And they don’t need to catch every bad guy, even a prosecuting a handful would go a long, long way to deterring future leaders.
What mechanism could there be for enforcing a judgment on a country that won its war of illegal aggression, other than some powerful enforcer nation(s) warring against that country?
I’m not saying there are no alternatives, I’m just asking.
Incidentally, that’s exactly what happened when Saddam’s Iraq invaded Kuwait.
There have been proposals for an independent force under the control of the UN. But I don’t really have a problem with enforcement meaning nations warring for basically the same reasons I don’t have a problem with the state using violence to enforce domestic law. For various reasons the kind of nations that are going to be involved in enforcement are going to be more democratic, more liberal, more legitimate and more powerful than the states run by war criminals. And the actions of the enforcement force will be observed far more closely by than the actions of your average autocracy. If this isn’t obvious I guess I can go into it more. All this doesn’t mean enforcement will never ever ever lead to abuse, but crimes during enforcement will be substantially less likely than crimes during your average ethnic conflict or authoritarian territory grab.
If there were an external force that was decent enough and powerful enough, then it would make sense to have that force actually decide which side is right on the merits, and that would pretty much be the end of war. That would be great. Whether it is possible, or whether it is likely to become possible, are very important questions. But right now no such force exists. Humanitarian law serves the function of limiting the human suffering caused by war, and as such is very valuable.
It does this only insofar as it is enforced. If it were enforced more, more people would be deterred. If it was enforced less, fewer people would be deterred.
Given the current state of the world, Putin’s Russia is going to be one of the enforcers. How do you feel about that?
Not sure I grant the premise but Russia definitely isn’t going to be enforcing anything unilaterally. Other militaries would be a pretty solid check on abuse.
Well, there was that one incident last year...
How is that an instance of international law enforcement?
Russia claimed, among other things, that it was acting to protect South Ossetians from Georgian genocide. That makes it definitely count as a case of Russia enforcing (their interpretation of) international law unilaterally, with no repercussions from other nations.
That makes it a ilaw vigilante, not part of an enforcement regime. As a rule, aggressor nations say stuff like that. Part of the point of an international criminal court is to legitimize actual humanitarian interventions.
How independent could it really be? Who would be giving the orders?
The UN General Assembly? That has all the disadvantages of a non-representative democracy—tyranny of the majority and so on. Plus the disadvantages of deciding questions of law and morals by vote. You’d get big alliances or parties sticking together right or wrong, and demanding rent from others (join us in votes or we’ll vote war on you).
For instance what if all the Arab countries voted for war against Israel? What a bunch of countries voted for war against some little county you never heard of? I don’t want to rely on the other countries diligently fact-checking every time when they suffer no repercussions for making mistakes.
What if votes were by UN GA with veto power to a few big countries, like today’s GA resolutions? That just means those big countries, like the US, are above the law and can also grant their proxies and satellites above-the-law status. And because these countries aren’t afraid of ever being voted against, they don’t care much (from symmetrical considerations) about enforcing the law correctly against other countries. Instead they enforce the law only in their own interests.
Plus, in any war declared by a voting body like the UN, the voters are liable to cancel the war after the first battle gone wrong.
OK, what if decisions were made by some International Court of Justice? Well, how would you elect the judges to this court? Or do you want 1000-judge panels with a judge from every country? That would be the same as voting.
Why is that? I think a much simpler explanation for the state of affairs today, and a much better predictor of the future, is—the nations involved in enforcement are going to be whichever nations belong to the most powerful military and economic global alliances. They have to be to be able to enforce judgments against anyone else; and they do it to protect their own economic interests.
The UN needs to be reformed. Specifically, the Security Council (which is where the big countries have vetos) needs to get rid of the veto and replace it with a 2⁄3 or so supermajority requirement. This would be the body that would have control over any security forces.
But that really isn’t the issue. Every potential problem you point out has an exact analog in domestic government. Majority rule? Check. Fear that some will be above the law? Check? Militias abandoning their posts when things get ugly? Check. The wealthy using the law to enforce their own interests? Check. What is needed is the right set of institutions to alleviate these concerns. It will be difficult. It may be impossible. But I don’t see why the result would be worse than the status quo.
Well for one thing, the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries. For another, leaders of non-democratic countries tend to be more wary of granting ilaw legitimacy because they are more likely to be prosecuted by it. Israel and US are in pretty unique positions that cause them to reject the ICC, but by and large the biggest objectors are autocrats and ‘rogue’ states.
It’s fine saying it “needs to be reformed”. How do you see this actually being done? The existing UN will resist (with votes and vetoes) any reform movement. The only realistic proposal is for most countries to go off and start their own body and ignore the UN. This happened once before—when the League of Nations was disbanded. And how did that occur? By the Big Guys (US and USSR, basically) deciding at the WW2 Tehran Conference to do it. The rest of the world combined (other than Axis-allied nations) couldn’t have done anything to stop them if they wanted to. And they conveniently gave themselves unique veto powers in the new body they established, the UN.
Democratic-esque nations use variations on the separation of powers—passing laws, passing judgments, and enforcing them. The UN would have to have an equivalent. Essentially a world system functioning like the EU. Well, we can dream, but I don’t see this happening. A lot of nations will not freely vote to be subject to the UN. Which leaves you with a body forever enforcing laws on nations that don’t agree to them and don’t want the UN to exist.
The theory of nations includes the idea of self-determination. It’s the opposite of universal worldwide law. (The practice of nations, of course, is ‘might makes right’.)
My point is that this is an utter coincidence, and unlikely to last indefinitely.
Reforming the UN would definitely require the support of some of the current UNSC veto nations. But the idea is actually quite popular among American foreign policy elites—I’m talking about advisors to Clinton, Obama and McCain (the last less so). As far as I can recall, Anne Marie Slaughter, current Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, came up with the supermajority idea (though it could be she was just repeating it). It is a relatively mainstream, if liberal notion. It is the kind of thing Obama might have tried if the economy hadn’t shot south and he had some political capital left. If the US made a push for this there would definitely be resistance, but it wouldn’t be universal. The new powers (Brazil, India, etc.) would have a lot to gain since they aren’t currently on the UNSC. With the right bribes and threats backed by the US UN reform doesn’t look like an impossibility to me. If we really wanted it I’d say we’d have a 30-40 percent chance of making it work.
I’m pretty confused by this. It is true separation of powers is one way to check abuse (but by no means our only tool). But checks and balances don’t have to come with a powerful central government. Nations wouldn’t have to submit to a power that could regulate their economy or legislate- they just have to submit to the very sparse list of prohibitions that constitutes international law. A lot already have. You get a decent number of countries (especially rich, powerful countries) and it wouldn’t be hard to get more to follow.
Some might take a long time to join (say, North Korea). But if there are a few places where we can’t enforce international law, so be it. We’re no worse than in the status quo.
It almost certainly is not an utter coincidence. There is a huge body of literature on this, some google searches should do the trick.
… Now there’s a name to live up to.
If we did it without making a lot of other changes at the same time, I don’t think the result would be any better than the current situation, and might be a lot worse. At least we’d need to exclude unelected, oppressive governments that commit large-scale violations of the Rome treaty themselves from the game. (E.g., Syrian serving a term as president of SC isn’t something you’d want without US veto.) We’d also want voting based on number of people represented, maybe as upper and lower houses, etc.
I think the main reason for this is that there’s no enforcement of the Court’s decision except for voluntary submission of the state parties to the Court’s decisions. The worst that could happen to a state party that the Court ruled against is that it would have to withdraw from the Court.
The politicians who sign the Rome Treaty send a good signal and get political rewards. They don’t care about their successors who may suffer the political penalty of having to “unsign” the treaty. They would be a lot more careful about signing submission to an International Police Force. I think most of them would then refuse on the same grounds as the US Senate, i.e. that it would be surrendering (judicial) sovereignty.
That’s frankly quite surprising. I’ll try searching, but could you drop a couple of names of theories of this sort?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
Hmm. It doesn’t look to be well supported to me—at least not on the basis of reading the WP article and some statistics. Possibly reading the professional papers on this would change my mind, but I’m not going to spend the time to do it. The problems I see with the theory are:
Most democratic countries are inside a few political and cultural allied blocks—Western Europe, North America and to some extent South America. This must be controlled for.
There are few wars between two democratic countries, but there are many wars between a democracy and a non-democracy, and the democracy is often the initiator (per the WP article). If you look at how many wars democracies initiated against autocracies, vs. how many wars autocracies initiated against other autocracies, there’s no significant difference (again per WP article). To me that suggests that democracies preserve political capital by redirecting their wars against the outsiders, while not forgoing wars at all.
The definition of what should be counted as a democracy is problematic anyway. For instance, at the start of WW1 Germany was arguably the most democratic of the big countries after France. It was almost as democratic as the USA is today, which is sort of the entry-point standard for democracy (noone wants to publish a paper that classifies the USA as non-democratic). And yet any standard history book will treat WW1 as a conflict of the Good Democracies vs the Evil Autocracies. A similar argument applies to some WW2-era countries.
Oh, and US hegemony in Western hemisphere affairs. The US has started many more wars than the average for any country regardless of regime.
I’m not sure why you would want to control for this. Creating these kind of political and cultural blocks is one of the mechanisms by which democracies act and influence the world.
Doesn’t this support the original statement, which was that it’s not a coincidence that “the most powerful military and economic global alliances consist mostly of democratic countries”?
Is there evidence that the democracy caused the creation of the blocks? To me it looks more like the blocks were there to begin with—for political and historical reasons—and because dominant members of the blocks were democratic and some of them strongly pushed for democracy in their foreign policy, democracy spread and lasted inside the blocks.
E.g., Western and Southern Europe has been almost entirely democratic post WW2 because the victors led by the US demanded it. If the Nazis had won, or if the USSR had conquered Western Europe, then they would not have been democratic. That’s another (and obvious) sense in which it’s a historical coincidence, not predictable beforehand, that Western Europe is democratic.
It’s true that the block(s) define themselves, today, as democratic and won’t allow tight integeration with non-democratic countries. But what countries are there whose regimes actually changed as a result of this policy? Probably a few and a few more where it was a factor, but AFAIK nothing much on a global scale.
It’s a method by which such alliances maintain their power, but it’s hardly powerful enough to be the main reason they became paramount in the first place.
If during WW2 (and plausibly also during WW1), the US had been anti-democratic—then the post-war world would almost certainly not have contained any democratic countries in Europe. If we count countries and not people (which is reasonable when discussing alliances and power blocks), then a regime change in just one country would have (with significant probability) reversed the regime outcome for the whole world.
I also want to point out that the power to make war is insufficient to resolve many conflicts. You also need to be able to subsequently enforce and manage order in peacetime—to be a police force and a managing government.