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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Interventionism and International Order (II)

Ted Bromund critiques the Mark Mazower World Affairs essay I discussed at some length a few weeks ago. He compares new liberal respect for state sovereignty with “detente,” and invokes Reagan and Thatcher to attack Mazower’s argument. This might seem like a clever rhetorical move, but Mazower might easily reply that Reagan was mistaken to […]

Ted Bromund critiques the Mark Mazower World Affairs essay I discussed at some length a few weeks ago. He compares new liberal respect for state sovereignty with “detente,” and invokes Reagan and Thatcher to attack Mazower’s argument. This might seem like a clever rhetorical move, but Mazower might easily reply that Reagan was mistaken to oppose detente as completely as he did and Thatcher was at least partly wrong when she said “a nation that denies those freedoms to its own people will have few scruples in denying them to others.” Such governments may not be limited by scruples, but it doesn’t follow that they are therefore going to be that much more likely to contribute to international instability and conflict.

Bromund then trots out the usual complaint against respecting state sovereignty:

It is simply not possible to separate the internal behavior of a state from its external policies. States that abuse human rights are not states that respect legal norms, and not ones that promote international stability.

This is a widely-shared conviction that, as far as I can tell, has little evidence in support of it. Abusive and authoritarian governments respect legal norms that they find useful, and a stable international system based on respect for state sovereignty is very useful to them. The world has been full and continues to be full of governments that abuse human rights, and yet very few of them violate other states’ territorial integrity, start wars or kill off foreign nationals on a regular basis in the name of national security. Over the last thirty years, Western democratic governments have done these things at least as often if not more often than authoritarian states around the world.

One could say almost the exact opposite of Bromund’s formulation and be much closer to the truth. That is, states that do not respect international legal norms vis-a-vis other states tend not to abuse human rights at home (or at least they abuse them much less often), while states that abuse human rights at home want to maintain certain strong international legal norms if only to guarantee non-interference in their internal affairs. Internal and external policies are never entirely separable, because the same government is responsible for both, but looking at the last sixty-five years it is not at all clear that repressive and abusive states are more likely to disrupt or undermine international stability.

As a matter of international law, state sovereignty has nothing to do with the type of regime or the consent of the people in that state. China has sovereign rights, regardless of what kind of government it has, and the same goes for every other internationally recognized nation-state. Mazower did not err when he acknowledged this reality. If the people in a country desire to change their government and reject the legitimacy of the regime they have, that is another matter entirely, but that is their internal affair.

Of course, it is true that there are policies in between “universal armed intervention and ‘stability.'” On the whole, it is interventionists who want to deny the existence of alternative policies to make military intervention unavoidable. It is interventionists who tend to deride the importance of “soft” power and reject the use of most multilateral institutions. Whatever their opponents are willing to do, they are always urging a more aggressive posture and continually push to escalate things until there is enough political support for the use of force. Mazower’s essay did not rule out possible alternatives. For the most part, Mazower was describing the decline of humanitarian military interventionism on the left. He was not necessarily rejecting any and all advocacy for human rights and political reform in other countries.

I have no idea if Mazower is “unhappy” with universalism. This is a charge universalists on the political right like to make against people on the left to establish their superior claim to Western universalism. The argument usually goes something like this: you decadent relativists believe all values are equal, but we know that ours are universal. Mazower is almost certainly not the particularist I am, and he may not find the claim that Western values are universal to be as far-fetched as I do. However, if he is “unhappy” with universalism I think it must be a universalism that uses the claim of universal values as a license to dictate terms to other nations at gunpoint. What Mazower’s essay showed was that many on the left are coming to realize that their support for universal values does not have to have a militant, crusading element and that there are far more constructive ways to advance human dignity and welfare than launching ruinous wars in the name of human rights and democracy.

Barone’s commentary on Mazower and Mead a few weeks ago was bad enough, but Bromund’s praise for Barone is even harder to take. Bromund writes:

Instead, I prefer Michael Barone’s reaction. In a thoughtful commentary on Mazower, he points out that, since existing international institutions cannot be effective, the U.S. needs to work more closely with its friends and allies. And that leads full circle back to the incoherence at the root of Obama’s vision: if U.S. policy is not based on a preference for democracy over dictatorship, the pursuit of stability will lead the U.S. to cold shoulder its friends and sidle up to its enemies, who can command our actions simply by threatening to disturb the stability that we prize so highly. And that will leave us without stability, law, peace, or human rights.

Readers can judge for themselves how thoughtful Barone was, but most of his argument was based on the misunderstanding that Mazower was emphasizing the importance of international institutions in his essay. As far as I can tell, he was not, so it didn’t contradict his argument at all when Barone noted Mead’s claim that the world was changing in ways that undermined the “authority and efficacy” of international institutions. Indeed, what makes the move away from humanitarian interventionism not only desirable but largely unavoidable is the way that the world is changing. As I said before, other major and rising powers, both authoritarian and democratic, have no interest in a world order in which military interventions are directed against their satellites and clients, and they will become increasingly effective obstacles to future interventions.

These major and rising powers also tend to be in agreement in their resistance to policies that sustain and extend U.S. hegemony, especially as these policies concern Iran. To some extent, the administration has been trying to maintain good relations with these powers, some of which are authoritarian, because we are moving away from a world in which it is easy for U.S.-led “coalitions of the willing” to act in defiance of the rest of the world. This is part of a slow, somewhat grudging recognition of the shifting balance of power in the world. It has nothing to do with a preference for democracy or dictatorship, and there is no substance to the claim that the administration ignores allies and placates foes.

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