Beyond Preemption: Force and Legitimacy in a Changing World

Chapter Four: The Evolution of Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect

chapter four The Evolution of Humanitarian Intervention and the Responsibility to Protect Susan E. Rice and Andrew J. Loomis In the middle months of 1944, Soviet, British, Chinese, and American statesmen met in Washington to begin to design a postwar architecture that could secure lasting peace. These officials were not quixotic utopians expecting their words on paper to deter future wars. Rather, their deliberations, and those that followed until the June 1945 signing of the UN Charter, presumed that power would remain in the foreground of interstate relations and be shared among strong states. Only by accepting the privileged position of the strong states could the emerging world order generate the coordination necessary to reduce the risk of recurrent major wars. The rules could only be effective to the extent that they were enforced by the strongest states. The leaders of the Allied nations were realists who focused on national interests, embraced the efficacy of national strength buoyed by military and economic health, and denounced as naïve the view that principles alone could guarantee order. They eschewed Wilsonian idealism and the failed League of Nations. Instead, their views reflected Thomas Hobbes’s admonition that “covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man.”1 Thus the system they built was premised on the reality, indeed the utility, of national power. Human rights were a peripheral consideration in those early days of geopolitics that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. President 59 Franklin Roosevelt was more sympathetic to the idea of elevating human rights to a central place in the UN Charter than his British and Soviet counterparts. However, the requirements of political pragmatism, strong resistance from Churchill and Stalin, and Roosevelt’s increasing frailty and eventual death in April 1945 conspired to sideline human rights as a core component of the postwar agreement. Respect for national sovereignty and the prohibition of wars of aggression were the twin foundations upon which the nascent UN system was built. Still, human rights did receive brief mention in Article 55, Chapter 9, of the UN Charter, reflecting the Allied powers’ judgment that the internal character of the Axis powers had helped fuel Europe’s descent into violence. Only subsequently did the international community begin in earnest to craft a legal architecture that responded directly to the horrors of the Holocaust and the terrible human costs of World War II. On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention ), which defined genocide and made it punishable as a crime under international law. Although the U.S. signed this seminal treaty immediately , and it came into force in 1951, the U.S. Senate did not ratify the Genocide Convention until 1980. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unanimously adopted the day after the Genocide Convention by the UN General Assembly, proclaimed the “inherent dignity and . . . the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” and laid the foundation of declared human rights.2 A raft of subsequent agreements outlawed racial discrimination, torture, and arbitrary detention. Two conventions on economic, social, and cultural rights and on civil and political rights, adopted in 1966, legislated what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed. As a new language of rights was being born, the delicate balance began to shift from the inviolability of state sovereignty toward a commitment to protect human welfare. The ideological conflict of the cold war helped solidify the importance of human rights in the consciousness of western democracies. The ringing language of “freedom versus tyranny” that had been born in opposition to fascism quickly found a second life in the struggle between capitalism and communism, between free and repressive nations. It is no accident that Winston Churchill’s famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he coined the term “iron curtain,” also warned that “. . . we must never cease to proclaim in fearless tones the great principles of freedom and the SUSAN E. RICE AND ANDREW J. LOOMIS 60 rights of man.”3 In his inaugural address, President John Kennedy insisted that “the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forbears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. . . . Let every nation know, whether it wishes us...