Human rights trumped sovereignty, we were told by Ken Roth in 1999, as NATO bombs dropped on Yugoslavia in support of the secession of the Serbian region of Kosovo. Kofi Annan argued that no government had the right to hide behind sovereignty. State sovereignty was an idol that had to dissolve, argued the darling of the West Vaclav Havel And NATO, far from acting in pursuit of narrow state interests, claimed to be acting in the name of universal human rights, encapsulated by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s argument that “Kosovo” was a just war based on values not interests.
For British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the “Kosovo” intervention was a just war based on values, not interests.
In 1945, a truly new world order had been established, one in which international peace and security were to be maintained by the universalization of the formally sovereign state as the only legitimate political unit. This was a new system in which war was no longer considered a legitimate instrument of foreign policy. Sovereign equality and non-intervention were seen as key to stopping aggressive war, understood to be the main problem for international peace. But this was also a world of power politics and pragmatic spheres of influence, when NATO sat back and let the tanks roll into Budapest and Prague for fear of nuclear war.
With the end of the Cold War in 1989, the West promised a new world in which “values, not interests” purportedly drove Western foreign policies. In President George Bush’s famous New World Order speech given in 1990, he asserted that Cold War divisions and their consequent pragmatic politics were at an end, and promised a world in which freedom and human rights would reign. Boutros Boutros-Ghali argued that the time of absolute sovereignty had passed. The Responsibility to Protect report, published in 2001, argued that if only we re-conceptualised sovereignty as the responsibility that states had to their citizens, then there was no contest between human rights and sovereignty. When states failed in their responsibilities, they were no longer sovereign, and intervention would be a form of “sovereignty restoration”.
The argument went that if only we re-conceptualised sovereignty as the responsibility that states had to their citizens, then there was no contest between human rights and sovereignty.
Yet for all the 1990s and 2000s statements about a post-sovereign world of universal rights and values, it was only ever a post-sovereign world for some. Only some states could choose when to intervene and which other states needed a spot of social-contract-restoring bombardment. This was what Charles Krauthammer dubbed the “unipolar moment”. As Graham Allison argued, pragmatic Cold War “spheres of influence” had given way to a single sphere of influence and the US reigned supreme. Rather than a post-sovereign world, the unipolar world allowed for the rehabilitation of a hierarchical order, in which some states had a right, in true Athenian fashion, to do what they would, whilst the weak suffered what they must. With Russia down and out for the 1990s, languishing under Jeffrey Sachs’s shock doctrine that entailed lifting price controls, a fire-sale of state assets, hyperinflation and intense social instability, the Euro-Atlantic alliance ruled the waves, the land, and the air, with America at the head, doling out punishment beatings and rewards – depending on the relationship the target state had to the global cops on the block.
However, the unipolar moment was to be short-lived, and the era of the Euro-Atlantic alliance’s free hand to punish at will would soon be drawing to a close. The “rise of the rest”, as Fareed Zakaria termed it, is a real development. But perhaps the most significant change was Russia’s revival. By the early 2000s, Russia was beginning to recover economically and socially from the Western-sponsored free fall of the 1990s. The expansion of NATO in the 1990s, pushed by President Clinton, was to be an enduring source of friction. For Russia, the Kosovo intervention and the West’s proclamation of its sovereign right to decide which states were worthy and which ought to be dissolved were a recipe for destabilisation and chaos. By 2000, Russia’s national security concept explained that there were serious concerns in Russia with “…attempts to create an international relations structure based on domination by…Western countries…under US leadership”.
The expansion of NATO in the 1990s, pushed by President Clinton, was to be an enduring source of friction.
Nonetheless, in 2001, President Putin was the first foreign head of state to call President Bush the day after 9/11 to offer full support. In 2011, in response to the Euro-Atlantic push for intervention in Libya, both China and Russia abstained on the United Nations Security Council Resolution no. 1973 that authorised intervention, a face-saving way of supporting what was framed as a limited humanitarian operation. Behind the scenes, however, Britain, France, and the US were working with Libyan jihadi groups and militias to depose Gaddafi (including supporting British jihadis to travel to and from Libya — one of whom, the British Libyan Salman Abedi, went on to murder 22 people in Manchester in 2017). Former secretary of state Robert Gates observed that “the Russians thought they had been played for suckers”.
Behind the scenes, Britain, France, and the US were working with Libyan jihadi groups and militias to depose Gaddafi.
But after Gaddafi was killed, NATO could not leave Libya fast enough. In 2017, CNN broadcast a report about ISIS-run slave markets in Libya, and the silence from the compliant Euro-Atlantic media about NATO’s role in Libya’s collapse was deafening. Meanwhile weapons flowed from the destroyed state of Libya into other parts of North Africa and into the Middle East. Many of these were funnelled by Western states to Syrian jihadis as the Euro-Atlantic alliance turned its attention to the next Arab government on the list for destruction in the name of peace, stability, democracy and human rights. In 2015, the Syrian government asked Russia to come to its aid against the multi-national, multi-billion-dollar proxy war being waged against it. This was the end of Euro-Atlantic dominance. Hillary Clinton demanded that Syria become a no-fly zone (for the Syrians and Russians, not NATO). At the same time, NATO shooting Russian planes out of the sky was not seriously considered. The end of the unipolar moment was revealed for all to see.
In 2015’s war in Syria, the end of the unipolar moment was revealed for all to see.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, much of the world was uninterested in Euro-Atlantic pontificating about Russia’s disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty. Key Western allies such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and India have ignored American demands to join in Western sanctions and to cut diplomatic ties. As Trita Parsi argues, this is not out of any love for Russia or hatred of Ukraine, but these powerful states have no interest in suffering economically for something that is seen as a regional matter. Pragmatism rules. For the wider Global South, the simple fact is that there is no state that has more consistently undermined international law and global norms than the US, either by its own actions or when supporting allies to commit mass atrocities.
Outside of Brussels, Washington, and London, the cant of humanitarian intervention and human rights is met with a polite smile and a shrug at best. The brief unipolar political moment that allowed the Euro-Atlantic alliance to rule, and to dole out punishments in the name of universal human rights as it saw fit, is over. In its place we are seeing a return to a more complicated world of spheres of influence. Whether the Euro-Atlantic alliance will accept this or not remains to be seen.
