Is a pious attitude to the UN now an obstacle to progressive internationalism and a dangerous gift to the emerging league of autocracies?
The UN’s signature failures are well known and range from the comedic, such as Zimbabwe chairing the Human Rights Council, to the tragic. In Rwanda the UN’s response to the genocide was to pull out the troops. In Bosnia in 1995 UN peacekeepers handed over 7,000 men and boys to Serb fascists, its ‘safe areas’ revealed as a mere paper commitment unsupported by force. In East Timor in 1999, UN staff, ‘abandoned civilians to murdering pro-Indonesian militias’ in the words of the left-wing sociologist of war Martin Shaw.
The UN’s failure is structural and political and liberal internationalists should be the first to say so. Listen to Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton:
‘Kant did not seek multilateralism for its own sake because he knew that what you could achieve internationally depended on what nations were like domestically. Yet today, in its weakest form, liberal internationalism has become the dogma that everything has to be done through international institutions without paying attention to the types of governments who are in those institutions. In fact there are very diverse governments in those institutions – autocracies, oligarchies, theocracies as well as democracies and they water down any effort to distinguish between governments based on domestic regime type – they’ll treat a genocidal dictatorship the same way as they’ll treat a liberal democracy.’
Autocracies, theocracies, thug-ocracies and the like cannot be relied on to be a fully effective instrument for progressive internationalism. It’s as simple as that.
That’s why support is growing for the creation of a new international organisation, a ‘league’ or ‘concert’ of democracies. Partisans include Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Barack Obama’s adviser Ivo Daalder; the liberal internationalists Anne-Marie Slaughter and G John Ikenberry‘; Tony Blair; as well as Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister; Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister; and, most volubly, John McCain and his adviser Robert Kagan.
Robert Kagan believes ‘the world’s democracies could make common cause to act in humanitarian crises when the UN Security Council cannot reach unanimity’. The league of democracies ‘would not be limited to Europeans and Americans but would include the world’s other great democracies, such as India, Brazil, Japan and Australia, and would have even greater legitimacy’
The Republican McCain hopes to ‘harness the vast power of more than 100 democracies’ and so ‘bring concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma or Zimbabwe, with or without Moscow and Beijing’s approval’. Alternatively, ‘it could unite to impose sanctions on Iran’. McCain sees the idea as a retreat from unilateralism and hubris: ‘we cannot build an enduring peace based on freedom by ourselves, and we do not want to. We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact – a League of Democracies – that can harness the vast influence of the more than one hundred democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests.’
Will the league of democracies sound the death knell of the UN? The Democrat Slaughter thinks not. ‘The concert of democracies will push UN reform … Creating it should enhance the chances of UN reform because it signals that you can’t wait forever. Right now, the Security Council powers have very little incentive to make room at the table.’
‘Would a concert of democracies supplant the UN?’ asks Kagan? ‘Of course not, any more than the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations or any number of other international organisations supplant it. But the world’s democracies could make common cause to act in humanitarian crises when the UN Security Council cannot reach unanimity’ (ie when the leaders of the emerging league of autocracies, Moscow and Beijing, object).
A concert of democracies could promote liberal ideals in international relations and give teeth to the ‘responsibility to protect’. It could exercise the power of attraction, a soft power that might act as a goad to democratic reform in many countries seeking the benefits of membership. It could re-anchor the US in an internationalist framework and enhance the influence that America’s democratic allies wield in Washington. The concert, perhaps 100 strong, would seek to protect interests, defend principles, reconcile differences, reach consensus, gauge and grant international legitimacy to actions, signal a commitment to the democratic ideal and show solidarity with those movements ‘trying to pry open a democratic space’ as Kagan puts it.
Would we be abandoning liberal internationalism if we created a concert of democracies? Well, here’s a thought. Maybe we would be moving from cant to Kant and embracing a genuinely progressive liberal internationalism for the first time. For as Anne-Marie Slaughter reminds us:
‘[Kant] knew “world government” was not going to work but he also knew you needed some kind of global governance capacity. His solution was a federation of free states. (…) Liberal internationalism is not just about multilateralism, but also about promoting (or ‘standing for’, a better term) liberal democracy as best you can on a global level.’