Sovereignty as Responsibility

Amitai Etzioni

Overshadowed by the oil-for-food scandal and demands to force Cuba and Sudan off the Commission on Human Rights is a revolutionary idea to be discussed this week at the UN World Summit in New York City. It calls for a radical change in the way sovereignty has been perceived for centuries, indeed since the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Instead of viewing nations as independent agents, immune to interference in their internal affairs, the new definition of sovereignty treats it as conditional: a nation can maintain its sovereignty only if it meets its responsibilities to its citizens and the international community. Thus a government that does not protect its people from ethnic cleansing, of the kind that occurred in Kosovo and Rwanda, or from mass starvation as found in Niger, would be considered a government that has forfeited its right to independence. The UN would be fully entitled to authorize an intervention in the internal affairs of that nation, a major departure from the Charter of the UN, which declares, “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the jurisdiction of any state.”

The idea that sovereignty should be treated henceforth as a responsibility rather than a right has been not advanced by some maverick pundit but by a high-level commission appointed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (The High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, chaired by Anand Panyarachun). Kofi Annan embraced the results of the panel, stating, “The Panel has met, and even surpassed, my expectations.”

The new approach to sovereignty reflects an accumulation of profound changes in transnational moral precepts that started when the leaders of the world signed in 1948 a convention that legalized intervention to stop a genocide, in response to the horrors of the Holocaust. The grounds for intervention were further expanded when public opinion supported NATO’s interference in Serbia’s internal affairs to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and when moral outrage followed the UN’s failures to stop the genocide in Rwanda and Sudan.  As a result, humanitarian interventions have become quite common (including in Haiti, East Timor, Liberia, and Congo, among others), even when the genocide standard has not been met. However, they have lacked an overarching legal doctrine that would justify them. Hence the current interest in sovereignty as responsibility.

Whether the UN General Assembly will endorse this new definition of sovereignty depends largely on whether three questions can be answered. First how low should the threshold for intervention be set?  Some diplomats, for instance, Francis Deng, a former representative of the UN Secretary-General, favor intervention whenever states fail to ensure the security and “general welfare” of their citizens. Critics fear that such vague criteria could be used to justify intervention in practically all nations, any time. Second, who will decide that the time has come to interfere and provide the needed troops? The Security Council is well known for its unrepresentative composition and veto-carrying members, which leads it to favor humanitarian intervention in some countries but not in others that act equally irresponsibly. Finally, a proposal in Foreign Affairs by Lee Feinstein and Ann-Marie Slaughter adds building or acquiring WMD to the list of irresponsible state behaviors. This would create a whole new set of conditions that justify intervention—a position that has been rejected by numerous nations, including many more than Iran and North Korea.

Unless these heavy matters are resolved, the idea of treating sovereignty as a responsibility rather than a near absolute right is likely to languish in discussions among scholars. This would be highly regrettable as the basic idea that nations ought to be good citizens of the international community and not just free agents is one whose time has come. The difficulties in working out the smaller print of the sovereignty as responsibility precept are precisely those that must be resolved if ‘international community’ is to turn from a vague catch phrase into a new global reality.

Amitai Etzioni is professor of international relations at The George Washington University.  Most recently, he has authored From Empire to Community.

Updated 9/21/05