For fifty years the world watched and held it's breath as two hegemons narrowly averted conflict time and time again while building up enough weapons that could destroy the world many times over.
For fifty years the world watched and held it’s breath as two hegemons narrowly averted conflict time and time again while building up enough weapons that could destroy the world many times over. As hard as it is to believe, the world was virtually stable, with two superpowers, with many allies on either side it was hard for a conflict to break out. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 all that was stable began to disintegrate and one power remained, while the other quickly regressed along with it’s satellite states. This left the world with a security dilemma it had never witnessed before… With only one superpower, where will the next conflicts arise and what will we do about them? The consensus is that the next wars will be intrastate rather than interstate wars and that these wars will be on ethnic grounds rather than political grounds; this much has been proven in Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia, where once ties between ethnicities existed, they have now collapsed and have resulted in civil wars, ethnic cleansing, potential genocides and genocides. The purpose of this paper is to show how these conflicts arise and when the international community should intervene in them. Ultimately, one sees that the international community should intervene earlier and more often in these types of conflicts because the damages caused by genocide and ethnic cleansing are immeasurable and not only immoral but also present several security costs, indeed, there is a New World Order.
In order to establish this “moral criterion for intervention” we must first establish that there are some values that are held to be universal, and that these values should be upheld over values of a certain culture. It is my contention that the crimes of genocide or ethnic cleansing should be viewed as immoral acts throughout the world, as well as slavery and torture. Michael Ignatieff elaborates on this argument a little more: “the idea of human universality rests less on hope than on fear, less on optimism about the human capacity for good than on dread of human capacity for evil… A century of total war has made victims of us all… We no longer live in a time when violence is distributed… along the lines of tribe, race, religion, or nation. If new technology has committed a new form of war and a new crime—genocide—we have also witnessed the creation of a new kind of victimhood. War and genocide have overturned the moral boundary markers of citizenship, race, and class that used to allocate responsibility, it is because a century of total destruction has made us ashamed of that cantonment of moral responsibilities… Modern moral universalism is built upon the experience of a new kind of crime: the crime against humanity.” This argument essentially sets up the criterion for intervention; it is morally justifiable to intervene in another state when a crime against humanity is being committed. It is my contention that those crimes should be held as universally bad. Edward W. Said argues differently, he argues that the costs of American intervention around the globe is American Imperialism, he argues: “the idea of American leadership and exceptionalism is never absent, no matter what the United States does, these authorities often do not want it to be an imperial power like the others it followed, preferring instead the notion of ‘world responsibility’ as a rationale for what it does.” Said even goes farther in arguing that this imperialism is nothing more than an attempt to re-colonize the places where intervention takes place and that this intervention offers the victims of Ignatieff’s human slaughter two options: “serve or be destroyed.” While I do give Said’s argument some weight, it doesn’t really seem to answer the argument that intervention is justified in cases of genocide or ethnic cleansing; Ignatieff makes this argument even clearer, “:genocide and famine create a new human subject—the pure victim stripped of social identity, and thus bereft of the specific moral audiences… The family, the tribe, the faith, the nation; no longer exist as a moral audience for these people. If they are to be saved at all, they must put their faith in that most fearful of dependency relations: the charity of strangers.” Indeed, obligations between strangers exist and not acting on these obligations is in itself immoral. Another argument that Said makes is that the very foundation of western involvement in another state is culturally subversive; he states: “the important factor in these micro-physics of imperialism is that in passing from ‘communication to command’ and back again, a unified discourse develops that is based on a distinction between the Westerner and the native so integral and adaptable as to make change almost impossible. We sense the anger and frustration this produced over time from Fanon’s comments on the Manichanism of the colonial system and the consequent need for violence.” I think that the same arguments made before apply, but John Rawls, professor emeritus at Harvard University, brings up an interesting argument against this, he claims: “Outlaw states are aggressive and dangerous; all peoples are safer and more secure if such states change, or are forced to change, their ways. Otherwise, they deeply affect the international climate of power and violence.” I agree with this argument for the most part, the one part I find troubling is his characterization of states that don’t correspond to international norms as “Outlaw States,” while I think that these states are entitled to their own value systems, I also think that they should be held responsible when they violate universal values.
