Moral Responsibility, Statecraft and Humanitarian Intervention

The US Response to Rwanda, Darfur, and Libya

Cathinka Vik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317498971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the moral complexity of statecraft in the context of decision-making on armed intervention in the post-Cold War era.

This book adds to the debate on humanitarian intervention by analyzing the moral complexity of statecraft when confronted with situations of severe human rights violations. Through a comparative case study of President Bill Clinton administration's failure to intervene in the Rwanda genocide (1994), the George W. Bush administration's tepid response to the Darfur atrocities (2003-07), and the Barack Obama administration's leadership behind the limited U.N. intervention in Libya (2011), it explores the factors – domestic and international – that influence decision-making about humanitarian intervention. These cases show, not only how international moral concerns often compete with interest-based and domestic concerns, but how decision-makers are often confronted by competing moral imperatives. In such situations, it is often not clear which imperatives should be followed. In an increasingly interconnected world, this book examines how we expect state leaders to balance different moral responsibilities.

This book will be of much interest to students of humanitarian intervention, the Responsibility to Protect, human rights, US foreign policy, African politics and IR in general.

1 The moral dimension of statecraft

DOI: 10.4324/9781315713762-2

Whether we can conceive of a way to think of morality that extends some form of sympathy further than our own group remains perhaps the fundamental moral question of contemporary life.

(Jean Tronto 1993: 59)

The academic analysis of moral responsibility in international relations has approached the topic based on three principal conceptions of international morality. The first, international moral skepticism, holds that moral judgments are appropriate only within sovereign political communities and thus denies entirely the intelligibility of moral discourse in international relations.¹ Second, the morality of states or pluralist notion of international morality conceives of international relations as a moral order in the sense that states have obligations to conform to moral rules derived from a “domestic morality analogy,” in which international society is understood as a larger domestic society, and where states play the roles occupied by individuals in domestic society.² The third, cosmopolitan or solidarist conception of morality, opens up the state to external moral assessment, understanding persons, rather than states, as the ultimate and equal subjects of international morality.³

Humanitarian interventions challenge these conceptions of morality in international relations, with most analysis focusing on whether state sovereignty or individual human rights should take precedence in situations where a choice between the two has to be made. Today, it is widely accepted that since “state sovereignty” is an instrumental and not an intrinsic value, “tyranny and anarchy cause the moral collapse of sovereignty” (Tesón 2003: 93). The research on humanitarian intervention and state sovereignty has been invaluable in establishing the individual as the primary object of security in international relations.

However, what this literature has largely failed to consider are the difficulties associated with this solidarist development for governments of potential intervening countries, whose primary moral duty remains the protection of their own citizens. For potential intervening states, the question is not only one of whether individual human rights or state sovereignty should take precedence in situations where a choice between the two has to be made, but one of whether sacrificing the lives of national soldiers to protect the lives of civilians abroad can be vindicated domestically and internationally.

One of the problems inherent in current approaches to humanitarian intervention is that they tend to collapse individual and state morality. Acting on the ideological reservoir of the state, policy makers are at constant risk of losing moral authority by basing their decisions on precedence considerations in situations where their individual moral compass may not be compatible with state policy. Moreover, state leaders must constantly strive to uphold the state’s – at times incompatible – domestic and international commitments. Due to the moral complexity of state leadership, therefore, this book suggests that the moral stance of policy-makers must be separated from the moral stance of individuals. Through comparative case studies of the nature of, and moral justifications for, the US response to the atrocities in Rwanda (1994), Darfur (2003–2007), and Libya (2011), this book examines the “unique ethical sphere” of state leadership.

In doing so, this study utilizes a combined English School–relational constructivist framework, adding a theoretical dimension to the literature on humanitarian intervention that is too often underplayed or appears in a one-dimensional way. The English School is useful in this context because it offers an account of international relations that captures the interplay between:

• morality and power;
• the empirical and the normative;
• the national (pluralist) and the international (solidarist);
• order and justice; and
• theory and history (Dunne 2008).

Moreover, it offers insight into dynamics such as the relationship between agency and structure; the orientations of insiders versus outsiders; changes in sovereignty and international legitimacy; and the possible transformation of international society into some kind of world society (Bull 1977; Suganami 1989; Linklater 1998). It thus provides a holistic framework for analyzing the most central question of any normative international theory, namely the moral value to be attributed to particularistic political collectivities against humanity taken as a whole, or the claims of individual human beings (Brown 2009).

Constructivism highlights how these values change over time by providing a framework for analyzing how “logics of appropriateness” evolve in terms of which moral values take precedence in the international system. Within this context of evolving “logics of appropriateness,” the relational constructivist emphasis on legitimation through ongoing contestation and rhetorical struggle illuminates key features of the US response to the situations of mass atrocities in Rwanda, Darfur, and Libya, providing new insights into the state as a moral actor and the notion of moral responsibility in international relations. In addition to the above, the analysis of US foreign policy traditions provides a historical context within which the complexity of moral decision-making by state actors in international relations can be explored.

The moral dimension of statecraft in the English School

Drawn from E.H. Carr’s (1939) famous antithesis between “reality” (politics) and “utopia” (ethics), a prevailing inclination of international relations scholarship during the second half of the twentieth century was to represent politics and ethics as mutually exclusive spheres (Nardin 2008). According to Carr, “the world of nature,” dominated by power, differs from “the world of value,” guided by principles of morality. The latter he portrayed as a kind of dream world with little, if any, contact with reality. This “realist” thinking represented by Carr’s antithesis is misleading because it poses a bifurcation, which Carr acknowledges at the end of his book:

If, however, it is utopia to ignore the element of power, it is an unreal kind of realism which ignores the element of morality in any world order. Just as within the state every government, though it needs power as a basis of its authority, also needs the moral basis of the consent of the governed, so an international order cannot be based on power alone, for the simple reason that mankind will in the long run always revolt against naked power. Any international order presupposes a substantial measure of general consent.

(Carr 1939: 235–239)

In Carr’s view, therefore, “political action must be based on a coordination of morality and power” (ibid.: 97). Realism fails, in Carr’s analysis, precisely because it excludes essential features of politics like emotional appeal to a political goal and grounds for moral judgment. R.H. Jackson (2000) similarly acknowledges that in relations between human beings, including in relations among representatives of states in international relations, there is not a choice between the instrumental and the normative, between power and morality. One cannot contemplate the use of power, or actually use power, without justifying it in some way. “Politics and ethics are coupled, and they are both part of the real world” (ibid.: 8). Thus, while it is commonly assumed that international relations is a sphere of hypocrisy and power politics, this assumption is misleading because when power is employed in human relations it has to be justified, and most of the controversy surrounding the use of power is whether or not it can be vindicated (ibid.: 20). As pointed out by classical realist Hans Morgenthau (cited by Jackson, ibid.: 9), “Let me say … in criticism to those who deny that moral principles are applicable to international politics, that all human actions in some way are subject to moral judgment. We cannot act but morally because we are men.” Yet it does not necessarily follow that domestic and international conceptions of moral legitimacy always coincide.

At the heart of the politics of protection debate lies the question “protection of whom?” Concern has in recent decades shifted from states to individuals, groups and communities. In this process, article 1(1) of the UN Charter has been reinterpreted to include security beyond the state, expanding the United Nations mandate to preserve human security as an aspect of “international peace and security” (UN 1948). With this, the distinction between nationals and foreigners traditionally providing the foundation for security in international relations has been challenged significantly. The English School pluralist–solidarist debate, providing “differing judgments about the extent of solidarity or potential solidarity in international society” (Suganami 2002: 13) offers a useful framework for analyzing this question in the context of decision-making on armed intervention.

Solidarism rests on the philosophical normative foundation of cosmopolitanism.⁴ In the realms of social and political philosophy, cosmopolitanism is considered the idea that all human beings belong to a single moral community; one which exists regardless of social circumstances, and to which universal moral principles apply (Fienberg 1996). The pluralist argument, in contrast, delineates the international scene into geographic communities (states), which formulate the individual’s morality, in a social rather than natural context. For pluralists, the nation state is considered a community whose members are bound by strong ties of solidarity from which moral feelings and a sense of ethical obligation naturally derive (Hoffman 1981). Pluralists thus appeal to particularistic foundations of morality, viewing the state as “the framework that founds and enables the ethical discourse in which social judgments are possible” (Cochran 1995: 48). Without the existence of a higher authority analogous to the state, this framework does not exist at the international level. Instead, the security dilemma generates interactions derived from considerations of interest and fear, and ties of solidarity consequently exist only among states, rather than among individuals regardless of borders (Hoffman 1981).⁵ From the pluralist perspective, states, rather than individuals, are thus the main subjects of international morality, and the rules that regulate state behavior are assumed to preserve a peaceful order of sovereign states.⁶

As the world has become a smaller place through increased social, political, and economic contacts, the disputes between cosmopolitan and pluralist arguments, particularly in relation to their different emphases placed on the role of the nation state as a moral actor, and the issues raised by these disputes, have become increasingly apparent. Defenders of solidarism highlight that the development of international norms and organizations, paralleled with steadily increasing economic interdependence, have challenged the nation state’s both moral and practical impetus to exist (Beitz 1979). Pluralists, in contrast, maintain that since it conceives of the state as “a manifestation of the community” possessing moral value, globalization does not affect their basic argument (Fienberg 1996).⁷

Applied to situations of prospective humanitarian interventions, the root of this moral controversy relates to the extent and depth of moral obligations to other human beings, extending across political and cultural boundaries. Since state leaders are not morally obliged to weigh the interests of all people equally, pluralists discourage any violation of the principle of state sovereignty, insisting that during wartime, the self-interest of a nation masquerades as a moral cause weighty enough to justify the annihilation of innocent people.⁸ In this view, states apply principles of humanitarian intervention selectively, resulting in inconsistency in policy. For pluralists, moral principles do not determine political behavior in the international sphere and can therefore not be used as justification for the violation of another state’s right to sovereignty and self-determination (Donnelly 2000). On the contrary, since the international system is a world of conflict and competition in which any nation that practices altruism does so at the expense of its own citizens, altruism by nation states is considered an immoral act that violates the trust that their cit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The moral dimension of statecraft
• 2 The US response to Rwanda
• 3 The US response to Darfur
• 4 The US response to Libya
• 5 Responsibility to whom?
• Index