Justice and Foreign Rule

On International Transitional Administration

D. Jacob

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137452566
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137452573
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Can foreign rule be morally justified? Since the end of the First World War, international transitional administrations have replaced dysfunctional states to create the conditions for lasting peace and democracy. In response to extreme state failure, the author argues, this form of foreign rule is not only justified, but a requirement of justice.

1

Introduction

Can foreign rule ever be morally justified? At first glance, the answer to this question seems clear: Foreign rule violates the right to collective self-determination and, throughout history, has led to massive human rights violations. In Lincoln’s famous words, it is neither a government of the people, nor a government by the people. Can it nonetheless be a government for the people? Ever since the end of the First World War, liberal democracies have established international transitional administrations (ITAs) to replace dysfunctional state governments and to create the conditions for lasting peace and democracy. Recent prominent examples of this practice are Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Iraq. Beyond numerous practical challenges, ITAs thus turn the seemingly outdated question of whether foreign rule can be morally justified into a question of pressing practical concern: Can ITAs ever be morally justified, although they are a form of foreign rule?

In this book I approach this question by discussing ITAs as a potential means to fulfill the requirements of the natural duty of justice in response to the suffering caused by severely unjust social and political conditions. When John Rawls first introduced the idea of a natural duty of justice, he described it as the duty ‘to support and to comply with just institutions that exist and apply to us,’ noting further that it also requires us ‘to further just arrangements not yet established, at least when this can be done without too much cost to ourselves’ (Rawls 1971, 115). This depiction of the natural duty of justice immediately raises two questions: First, what are the kind of just institutions this duty requires us to support or help establish? Second, what are appropriate means to fulfill this duty?

In this book, I answer the first of these two questions by developing an account of minimal justice, at the core of which lies a conception of basic human interests. More specifically, I argue that the two basic human interests in physical integrity and autonomy can help us to determine what we all owe each other in terms of minimal justice. What the natural duty of justice requires, thus, is to support or help establish institutions that protect these two basic human interests.

This interest-based conception of minimal justice then also provides a framework to address the second question. We can now ask whether ITAs, although a form of foreign rule, can be a means to fulfill the requirements of the natural duty of justice. This requires a closer look at the dangers usually attributed to foreign rule. If an ITA is supposed to be a means to fulfill the requirements of the natural duty of justice, after all, it may not itself violate these requirements. Yet, authors such as William Bain (2003a), David Chandler (1999, 2002), and Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin (2003) fundamentally criticize the current practice of ITAs as just the latest reenactment of liberalism’s supposedly inherent tendency towards imperialism and liken the modern human rights discourse to 19th century justifications of colonialism and the ‘mission civilisatrice.’ As Bain writes, ‘The idea of trusteeship, no matter how enlightened and well intentioned, cannot escape its imperial past because it belongs to a mode of conduct that is imperial by its nature. Indeed, considered as a mode of conduct, shorn of the discourse of superior civilization, there is little to distinguish trusteeship of the future from trusteeship of the past’ (Bain 2003b, 75). From this perspective, it may indeed seem misleading to discuss ITAs within the framework of liberal political philosophy. Through the course of my argument, however, I hope to convince the reader that the kind of liberalism that I advocate in this book – and in particular the idea of a natural duty of justice and the account of minimal justice I propose – has the normative resources to account for the immorality of colonial imperialism, and in fact of foreign rule more generally. The advantage of such an approach, thus, is that it can systematically link the moral arguments for ITAs as a means to restore justice with the objections to foreign rule informed by the history of colonial imperialism.

The goal of this book thus is twofold: On the one hand, I want to provide a principled answer to the question whether ITAs can be morally justified. This answer takes the form of a set of conditions that an ITA needs to fulfill in order to be morally justified. On the other hand, with this discussion of the more specific empirical phenomenon of ITAs I also want to contribute to the larger debate about the natural duty of justice and minimal standards of justice.

In this introduction, I provide some background for the discussions in the following chapters. First, in section 1.1 I clarify my understanding of ITAs. I present a definition of ITAs and provide a brief overview of historical cases. Second, in section 1.2 I turn to the debate about the natural duty of justice and highlight the controversy over the account of minimal justice to inform this duty. Third, in section 1.3 I explain how I will proceed in this book in order to answer the question whether ITAs can plausibly be conceived of as a means to fulfill the requirements of the natural duty of justice. To this end, I explain the structure of the book and provide an outline of the following chapters.

1.1 International transitional administration

Kosovo, Bosnia, and East Timor are the most prominent cases of ITAs and often portrayed as a new form of peace- and state-building. In fact however, the history of ITAs goes back to the end of the First World War, when the first ITA was established in the Saar Basin. ¹ Despite this long history and a general agreement on the relevant cases among those researching ITAs, however, no commonly accepted definition has emerged so far. Simon Chesterman uses the term transitional administration to describe a special type of state-building operations that assume ‘some or all of the powers of the state on a temporary basis’ (Chesterman 2004c, 5). What defines international administrations for Richard Caplan (2005a, 2) is their comprehensive scope of activities that include, but go beyond, traditional state-building efforts. Ralph Wilde suggests the term international territorial administration to describe a ‘formally constituted, locally based management structure operating with respect to a particular territorial unit, whether a state, a sub-state unit or a non-state territorial entity’ (Wilde 2008, 21). Bothe and Marauhn (2002, 219) discuss Kosovo and East Timor as instances of trusteeship administration, whereas James Fearon and David Laitin (2004) use the term neo-trusteeship to emphasize the historical dimension. Finally, in a short article on the international community’s responsibility towards post-war Iraq Michael Walzer (2004a) simply uses the term occupation; in a very similar way, Gregory Fox (2008) proposes the term humanitarian occupation. All these terms and underlying definitions highlight different aspects of what constitutes an ITA. Rather than choosing one of these, however, I suggest a definition that combines these different aspects in a way that, importantly, does not already anticipate answers to the moral questions that I want to discuss in the course of this book. According to this definition, an international transitional administration (ITA) is a special type of foreign rule that (1) takes the form of a military occupation and (2) claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the ultimate authority to make and implement collectively binding decisions (3) for a limited period of time and with the goal to (re-)build local institutions of self-government.

A few more words on the three elements of the definition: Drawing on Walzer and Fox, the first element of the definition emphasizes that ITAs are a form of foreign rule that is established through the largescale deployment of foreign military forces. This part of the definition excludes other forms of non-military external interference. Conditional development aid, for instance, can be a means through which a donor state or an organization such as the World Bank can exert massive influence over a recipient country (Grant 2012, 101–11). Such development aid might thus also be described as a certain form of foreign rule, yet this influence is still not the same as that of a military occupation. To avoid confusion, what is important to note in this context, however, is that the term ‘occupation’ is used here in a broader political sense to describe a situation in which military forces are deployed to another state to control that state’s territory and its population. Whether ITAs also qualify as occupations according to the more narrow definition used in international law, and in particular in the law of occupation, is a more controversial question (Ratner 2005; Sassòli 2005, 686–93; Fox 2008, ch. 7).

The second element of the definition holds that ITAs claim the monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the ultimate authority to make and implement collectively binding decisions. Empirically, the scope of activities performed by ITAs varies greatly. In some cases, ITAs fully replace the administrative apparatus of the local state, whereas in others they rely extensively on local institutions to uphold their monopoly on the use of force or to implement their decisions. It is a defining feature of ITAs, though, that even if responsibility for certain tasks is delegated to local institutions, ITAs claim the monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the ultimate authority to make and implement collectively binding decisions. Indeed, the decision whether and to what extent to rely on local institutions is part of both the monopoly of force and the ultimate authority with regard to collectively binding decisions. With regard to these two core dimensions of statehood, an ITA thus replaces the local state government, even if in doing so it may make use of some of its institutions. Importantly, though, it should be noted that this part of the definition of ITAs does not preclude the possibility that an ITA may fail to uphold the monopoly of force or to implement collectively binding decisions. The definition merely requires that an ITA claim the monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the ultimate authority with regard to collectively binding decisions.

This second element of the definition of ITAs provides another reason why even heavily conditional development aid is to be distinguished from ITAs. Whereas such development aid may de facto replace the local state government with regard to certain state functions, in this case the local government retains ultimate authority and in particular does not give up the claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Moreover, this second element of the definition explains why the external involvement in Afghanistan did not amount to an ITA. The massive number of external military forces certainly fulfills the first element of the definition of ITAs, yet immediately after the end of the war a new Afghan government was formed which both claimed the monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the ultimate authority with regard to collectively binding decisions. To be sure, the relation between the Afghan government and the major external actors involved in Afghanistan has always been highly asymmetrical (Suhrke 2009). In this sense, the case of Afghanistan raises questions very similar to those discussed in this book. Yet, because external actors never claimed the monopoly on the legitimate use of force and the ultimate authority to make and implement collective binding decisions, Afghanistan does not constitute a case of an ITA. Another such case was the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), which operated from 1992 to 1993. After decades of civil war, UNTAC was supposed to assume temporary authority to enable the implementation of a peace agreement and in particular to prepare and conduct national elections. Part of its mandate was to oversee the local security forces and to this end it was also supported by a UN mandated military force. Importantly, however, despite this extensive role of UNTAC, the ITA neither claimed the monopoly on the legitimate use of force nor the ultimate authority with regard to collectively binding decisions. On the contrary, both remained with the ‘Supreme National Council,’ a local body also created as part of the peace agreement (Findlay 1995; Ratner 1993; Doyle 1995).

Finally, as expressed by the third element of the definition, ITAs are limited in duration and have a very particular purpose, namely to (re-)build local institutions of self-government. Traditionally, the main goal of foreign rule has been some form of annexation. The purpose of ITAs, instead, is to (re-)build local institutions of self-government and transfer authority to these institutions. Given this purpose, ITAs are inherently limited in time and transitional by nature. As Robert Jackson notes, an ITA ‘is in business to put itself out of business’ (Jackson 2004, 26). This purpose most clearly distinguishes ITAs from imperial colonialism. Despite some lofty rhetoric about the ‘mission civilisatrice,’ it was clearly not the purpose of imperial colonialism to (re-)build institutions of local self-government. In principle, the same can be said about the League of Nations mandate system and the United Nations Trusteeship Council (UNTC).

The League of Nations mandate system was created through the Versaille treaty that ended the First World War.² It transformed the former German and Ottoman colonies in North Africa and the Pacific region into so-called mandate territories, which were classified according to their perceived level of development. Among those deemed to be closest to the Western ‘standard of civilization’ were Iraq and Syria, while the German possessions in the Pacific were mostly labeled as incapable of self-government. Each territory was administered by a member of the League of Nations that was given the task to support the territory’s development towards independence (Jones 1994). After the Second World War, the United Nations Trusteeship Council (UNTC) was set up as one of the principal organs of the UN to govern the former possessions of Germany, Japan, and Italy, most of which were former League mandates.³ The UNTC system mostly copied the League of Nations mandate system. Again, individual states were assigned administrative authority, limited in their activities only by loose international oversight. And again, France and the UK, were the main states to serve as trustees. During the decolonization movement of the 1960s, most of the trust territories gained independence (Lyon 1993, 100–4). When the small island state of Palau became independent in 1994 as the last of the trust territories, the UNTC suspended its operations (Caplan 2005a, 32). Both the League of Nations mandate system and the system of the UNTC were responses to the growing demands for collective self-determination. Yet, beyond some rhetorical changes neither the mandate system nor the Trusteeship Council meant any real change in the power relations between foreign rulers and the local population. Indeed, today there is wide agreement that their true purpose was actually to prolong imperial rule (Lyon 1993; Anghie 2002; Matz 2005). Therefore, neither the League of Nation mandates nor the UN trusteeships qualify as ITAs.

In the following, I now want to present a historical overview of cases that fit this definition of ITAs. This overview is supposed to further clarify the meaning of my definition and, moreover, to provide some empirical background for the normative discussions in the following chapters.

The first case of an ITA was the League of Nations’ administration of the Saar Basin from 1919 to 1935. Established as part of the Versailles treaty, its central objective was to create a politically neutral environment for a referendum, through which the local population was to decide whether it wanted to belong to France or G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Basic Human Interests
• 3 Human Rights, Collective Self-Determination, and Legitimacy
• 4 Responding to Extreme State Failure
• 5 Restoring Minimally Just Conditions
• 6 Respecting the Requirements of Justice
• 7 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index