Dealing with the world as it is: reimagining collective international responsibility. (I. Introduction through IV. The Responsibility to Protection: Critical Legal and Policy Concerns B. R2P and Humanitarian Intervention: Political Objections 1. The Problems of Motivation and Moral Standing, p. 695-724)

• Published date: 22 December 2013
• Author: Gassama, Ibrahim J.
• Date: 22 December 2013

I. INTRODUCTION

"[I]n many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower." (1)

There is a specter haunting American progressives today when it comes to the use of American military power in international affairs. Bludgeoned over many decades by the misuse of such power, many progressives find comfort in the cold embrace of reflexive rejectionism. Unlike the foreign attitudes that President Obama referenced above, (2) the attitude of American progressives is not ambivalence. Increasingly, there appear to be no circumstances under which they can see much good coming out of the deployment of American military power. (3) Their skepticism extends well beyond the unilateral use of force, demonstrated by their strong opposition to an American role even in the United Nations-sanctioned multinational assaults on Ghadaffi's forces in Libya. (4) Arguably, this degree of skepticism about the use of force has reached epic cynical proportions. (5) The net effect is that American progressives have taken themselves effectively out of the dialogue on what to do concretely in the immediacy of persistent, widespread, and systematic assaults on the most vulnerable people in the world.

Ironically, the American progressives' opposition to the use of force has not hindered American interventions abroad, UN-sanctioned or otherwise. On the contrary, the United States promotes its political, economic, and social interests, often mediated by military power, as robustly as ever. (6) The principal consequence of such abdication is that interventions occur without adequate input from progressives. Progressives are increasingly reduced to complaining, protesting, or sitting back in sullen disappointment or anger as American human and material resources are deployed in the service of other agendas. (7) They have not developed a strategy or capacity to influence the trajectory of American external interventions or to channel it to do the sort of work or produce the kind of outcomes progressives would prefer.

Progressives must deal with the world as it is, replete with evil, plain meanness, depredations, absurdities, and the like, not all of it the result of American policies or actions. (8) Demands that the United States first do no harm are a necessary but quite insufficient foundation for a human society congruent with progressive values. Failure to engage cannot be an option. The world sometimes needs the deployment of military power--and the use of American military power needs progressive involvement to enhance its capacity to do more good than harm.

An earlier generation of progressives understood that a sine qua non of civilization and progress is an appreciation of the deeply interconnected nature of human experience--a realization that evil (such as the Holocaust, Congo under Leopold, Cambodia under the Khmers, and Afghanistan under the Taliban) cannot be allowed to flourish in one part of the world unchallenged. (9) Violence and misery respect no human borders, natural or artificial. Thus one of the most important commitments generated by progressives of the post-World War II era was not to let atrocities proceed with security within artificial boundaries. (10) That generation of progressives advanced a commitment to confronting evil. This was not a conservative notion. The Genocide Convention, (11) the articulation of a category of crimes against humanity, (12) the creation of the United Nations with a Security Council empowered to counter threats to international peace and security, (13) and the development of an international bill of rights (14) all attest to this salutary progressive tradition. The Cold War pushed this flowering of progressive re-imagination of international relations to the side. Conservatism's internationalist partner, realpolitik, (15) with its dyspeptic and jaundiced view of humanity, took hold. (16) Hence we find ourselves in a world marked by varying measures of ambivalence, indifference, and hostility to the plight of the most fragile among us.

This Article first argues for recognizing not just the legal and political right to engage in humanitarian intervention, but also a legal obligation or duty on the part of the international community to respond with armed force when necessary to ameliorate massive human tragedies or threats of such calamities even where the acquiescence of national governments or those in effective control of the area may be lacking. The argument for a duty adopts a more prescriptive sense of responsibility than the international consensus that is emerging with the "responsibility to protect" doctrine. (17) This argument is especially targeted toward those who see themselves as progressives or liberals within present-day American society and have a general aversion to using military force in international affairs. With appreciation of the pitfalls and challenges of such a position, the Article outlines the case for the right and the duty of the global community to intervene collectively to protect the innocent where national governments and the ordinary structures (18) of the international community have failed. The argument here follows Professor Kok-Chor Tan's argument for the moral obligation to protect. (19)

Secondly, the Article argues that the legal and political legitimacy of humanitarian intervention--or its current iteration, the responsibility to protect--should be predicated upon the international community's acceptance of a broader collective responsibility, better stated as a duty, to assist those who are imperiled under less spectacular conditions of misery. In short, a legitimate collective right or duty to intervene across sovereign jurisdiction under crisis conditions must be founded upon an acceptance of broader responsibility for conditions that do not meet current definitions of "crisis." It should be emphasized that this acceptance of collective responsibility derives not from charitable sentiments, but from a clear recognition of obligations based on profit from historical and ongoing injurious policies and practices. (20) The world as it is today did not just happen. It is the result of conscious policies and practices that extend over the ages. A common humanity, as well as recognition of history's grossly unequal distribution of benefits and burdens, compels a communal political responsibility to engage the causes and the manifestations of immense suffering. (21) Such engagements must allow for the possible use of force against extreme and totalizing violations of human dignity, but only as long as force is part of a package that also covers communal responsibility for dealing with enduring structures of misery. This argument benefits substantially from the work done by Iris Marion Young and Thomas Pogge. (22)

The analysis is informed by critical concerns such as the indeterminacy and incoherence of legal principles and policies. It accepts the limits of our capacity to fully comprehend, let alone devise solutions to, longstanding and intractable issues implicated in persistent violence and misery within and across national boundaries. Yet the perspective offered here is entirely consistent with both accepted international legal principles and sound critical progressive traditions. It is in the best interests of humanity, in the sense of efficaciously dealing with misery, for progressives to work at incorporating a collective international duty to assist within the traditional humanitarian policy context. The alternative is for them to continue down the path of disengagement, cynicism, and despair. A failure to acknowledge our collective obligations and the necessity for engagement, which includes deploying armed forces when the occasion warrants, would continue to deprive American and other progressives of opportunities to help shape military and non-military interventions by powerful countries around the world. (23) A reflexive aversion to the use of military force would not reduce or eliminate interventions or military adventurism by the powerful. On the contrary, the main consequence would be that these interventions would continue on terms dictated by less benign traditions and voices, without the full input of those who might be in the best position to mediate such engagements around the world. The distance between the privileged "us" and the afflicted "them" would continue to widen.

II. HUMANITARIANISM: ACCEPTING COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WORLD AS IT IS

Australian philosopher Peter Singer captured the essence of humanitarianism when he wrote about the humanitarian crisis in East Bengal (now Bangladesh) four decades ago:

 The suffering and death that are occurring there now are not
                 inevitable, not unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term
                 Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least
                 nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is
                 not beyond the capacity of the richer nations to give enough
                 assistance to reduce any further suffering to very small
                 proportions. (24)
                

Time, technological advances, and economic and cultural globalization have not reduced the need or occasions for "decisions and actions of human beings" to "prevent this kind of suffering." (25) Just since 2011, the world community has had to acknowledge the following instances of human perversity: hundreds of thousands of Somalis dying or at the risk of dying as drought, civil war, and anarchy induced a famine (26) that rolled over...