It is not a secret that a big battle is taking place in Syria. However, the way this internal crisis is interplaying with the international community (or the way the international community is approaching this situation) is underpinned by a wider battle that goes beyond the border of this Middle Eastern country: around and beyond Syria there is also a clash between competing interests and ideologies: a clash between the non-synchronized way in which reality and international law unfolds, represented by the tensions connecting the opposing principles of national sovereignty and responsibility to protect.
In order to better understand the competing views that underpin the contradictions and lack of consensus in the way the international community is approaching the Syrian conflict, it is necessary to understand the background: the context, the principles and the assumptions that lay behind the rules structuring the current relations and rules between nation states.
Although a path could be traced to thousands or hundreds of years ago, the immediate reference to how the international community is structured comes from the end of the Second World War: after WWII, national sovereignty was at the core of the world order.
The UN system but also the international community was envisioned as having sovereign entities at the center: while the protection of human rights and the prevention of new bellicose adventures –between, rather than within countries- were also an important consideration, public international law barely consider actors beyond the state. This blueprint worked properly for most of the 20th century (a short century, according to Eric Hobsbawm). However, as the material and ideational conditions changed, also the rules and institutions governing reality did.
On one hand, new actors began to emerge. Most distinctively new economic actors (as owners of financial capital) but also others “less influential” began to develop: this was the case of civil society movements and other transnational non-for profit networks. The aforementioned amounted to the weakening of the states’ primacy or monopoly as the only actor of international relations. In addition, with the end of the Cold War, a new face of armed conflicts emerged. The world began to witness humanitarian tragedies that lay within national boundaries: international warfare was substituted by intrastate conflicts and civil wars.
This emerging face of war posed new challenges to the international community: on one hand, there was the old and well-established principle of national sovereignty, and on the other, the moral imperative of safeguarding the international law contained in the Geneva Conventions and, more importantly,of preventing from happening again atrocities as the genocide in Rwanda. Furthermore, the new configuration of conflicts had other more subtle dimensions: for example, the question of who is a civilian in the context of a civil war? In any case, and as a response to the atrocities witnessed in the 90s and the failure of the concert of nations to react, the international community developed the notion of responsibility to protect, or R2P.
Responsibility to protect states that national sovereignty does not preclude the international community from intervening at the local level when national governments carry out war crimes, genocides or ethnic cleansing against its own people. In a nutshell, the end of the Cold War and the increase of internal conflicts where civilians were the most affected (as Rwanda, Bosnia or Darfur), tended to weaken the idea of national sovereignty’s inviolability and to strengthen the one of human rights primacy and the responsibility to protect (Kosovo, and more recently Libya).
In accordance to this, the UN also began to develop a more sophisticated system of humanitarian assistance. Interestingly, this system can be seen in motion in the case of Syria. On one hand, the first UN person to visit Syria was Valerie Amos, UN Under Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, who had the mission of assessing the humanitarian needs and coordinate the response. On the other, the different agencies that take part on the humanitarian response (UNHCR, Red Cross, UNICEF, etc.) are already acting on the ground, waiting for the temporary cease fires that would allow them to better assist civilians.
Nonetheless, and as usual in the art of (international) public policy: the response is not clear-cutting. And this is so partly because as much as the principle of national sovereignty was undermined by the atrocities carried out by national governments, the principle of responsibility to protect has also been undermined by the actions of “first world countries”, mostly by the relentless intervention of the USA and the UK in Iraq. What George Bush and his team of contractors achieved with the illegitimate intervention in Iraq was to inaugurate a new paradigm that turned out to be detrimental for R2P: this paradigm was the one of foreign driven change. Instead of intervening to save civilians at risk, Bush inaugurated a new era of foreign intervention driven by economic interests (the tyranny of oil, as president Obama called it) but dressed as national security and concerned with freedom and democracy.
Furthermore, the inconsistent approach that the USA and its European allies have taken during the Arab Spring (very cautious and patient in places like Yemen or Bahrain, but ready to intervene and alter the internal balances of power in others like Libya) confirms that the hegemonic powers do not have friends or enemies, but rather interest… which, it seems, tend to prevail over beliefs… except maybe the belief that humanitarian interventions can be carried out with “humanitarian” bombardments. Furthermore, this uneven behavior has made other important players reluctant to support foreign intervention.
And the whole aforesaid story takes us to where we are today: Syria. What we are currently witnessing in Syria (besides the struggle against the rule of the minority and a humanitarian crisis that without a doubt is affecting the population) is a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis of the historical processes, circumstances and beliefs sketched in the aforementioned paragraphs. The US Secretary of State yet again crying to intervene; Russians and Chinese blocking UN Security Council resolutions intended to “intrude”, and highlighting that any external attempt to favor one of the parts would be unacceptable;the short sighted Syrian government repressing its own people, Turkey trying to be the big guy in the region, and a wise guy, Kofi Annan, skeptic about the fruitfulness of external military intervention and trying to contribute to a negotiated political solution, as it should be.
Rodrigo Avila B.
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