If somehow these preventive measures fail, or seem about to fail, then the new antigenocide, anti-eliminationist, international dispensation, codified among other places in a revised genocide convention and revised International Criminal Court, should provide member states standing authorization, alone or in concert, to intervene in the ways discussed here. In addition to its many other problems, the genocide convention does not currently empower such intervention, permitting member states only to refer the problem to the United Nations in the hopeless hope an institution set up to do nothing might do something.
These prescriptions do not include an obligation to intervene. This is not because I oppose one. To the contrary, I think the duty to intervene exists as a moral principle and would support such an obligation wholeheartedly as a political and legal principle. But such an obligation is less likely to be enshrined in law and international institutions than the enabling measures suggested here. Pragmatically, it is wiser to work toward institutions and laws demanding less of participating states, particularly when they are almost as likely to work, as the preventive measures outlined here would. Nevertheless, it is worth laying out more robust contours of prevention, intervention, and justice regimes.
The international watchdog organization would monitor the world for signs an eliminationist onslaught may be on the way, identify when it looks possible, and trigger preventive intervention to forestall it. Some signs are well known: the declaration of a state of emergency or martial law, the suspension of civil liberties, restrictions placed on foreign diplomats and international organizations’ representatives, the widespread closing down of media outlets or access, and intensified fanning of hatred and fear of an ethnic, religious, linguistic, or political group by government-controlled or -inspired media. The watchdog organization and independent member states would adopt well-established and -publicized procedures and measures that every country’s political leaders and elites would already know.q They would formally warn the threatening country—especially its political, security, and business leaders—that the international community will respond to any eliminationist measures with all its means and power. The warning would further clearly convey that the threatening country’s political leadership, including all cabinet ministers and high officials in military and police organizations, will be declared in a state of war against humanity and will be hunted down until killed or arrested, with a bounty on their heads ranging from $100,000 to $10 million dollars. The country would be bombarded with radio broadcasts, Internet postings, e-mail, voice mails, and leaflets warning its people against participating in or supporting any such violent measures. The country would also be required to permit the international rapid-deployment force to enter and act freely to ensure no eliminationist violence occurs. If it refuses, then such troops could be forcibly inserted, with participating countries’ naval, air, and ground forces’ further mobilization, which might also mean deposing the country’s leadership.
If a country’s political leaders deem the new preventive, interventionist, and punishment regime’s practices and past successes insufficiently persuasive, and if their followers—in high political and military positions—are equally blithe about their own safety and futures, and manage to take the international watchdog organization unawares and initiate mass murder, expulsion, or incarceration, then that organization would immediately notify the relevant international institutions and the world community, triggering the interventionist measures to stop it as quickly as possible. A bombing campaign to destroy the country’s military infrastructure would immediately commence. Only military targets, including airfields, depots, bases, and ships would be attacked to minimize civilian deaths and damage to the country’s general infrastructure. Such bombing’s purpose, as it effectively was against the Serbs, is more to raise the costs to the eliminationist regime’s political and military leaders (it would often threaten their hold on power) than to weaken their capacity to proceed, because, as we and they know, perpetrators can quickly slaughter people by the tens of thousands without sophisticated weaponry. Military ground intervention would begin quickly to stop the killing and eliminationist violence, and to topple the enemies of humanity constituting the outlaw regime.r
Complex and difficult nation-building measures would need to follow, ideally under international supervision. Varying enormously from instance to instance, they would include providing justice, with all its complexities, impossibilities, and unhappy choices and compromises.
All these measures to intervene to stop eliminationist assaults are unlikely to occur. Only a naïf would expect that in the foreseeable future, say, the next five to fifteen years, such robust antigenocide, let alone anti-eliminationist, pro-human, institutions and laws will be created, actors lined up, and policies enacted, and then, when necessary, be used appropriately. Many might say that, given the international state system, fifty years would not be enough. States, governed by self-interested political leaders and responsive to publics concerned overwhelmingly with their own countries, are unlikely to intervene to stop mass murder, let alone lesser eliminations, costing substantial sums and the lives of their country’s soldiers. And it is difficult to see the United Nations, the leading and currently unavoidable international institution, facilitating such morally positive developments.
That is why focusing on preventive measures is more likely to succeed and (for the other reasons discussed here) be more efficacious. Cynics, many thinking themselves hardheaded realists, might say the proposed preventive measures are equally unlikely to be enacted. To this there are several rejoinders. Such preventive measures, demanding less and requiring less coordination, are by definition easier to bring about. Even if not, those wishing to reduce eliminationist politics’ incidence and vast toll should lay out a feasible pathway while recognizing that gathering support will take time. If only in one instance bounties work or one country intervenes, saving thousands or tens of thousands, and giving pause to future potential perpetrators, it will be worth it. And here reason for hope exists. Just as one political leader or a small group of political leaders initiates eliminationist onslaughts, so too can one political leader or a small number of leaders, in one country or a cooperating few, initiate measures to prevent or stop a mass extermination or elimination. Even if only one powerful country’s leader did so once, the success would be enormous, providing an example, an unmistakable challenge, a model for others.
In thinking about ways to combat eliminationist politics, especially mass murder, we are blinded by misleading analyses and overwhelmed by the problem’s colossal scope. We do not see two facts: one moral person, the president of the United States, or a few such people leading a few countries in Europe or elsewhere, can positively change forever the eliminationist equation; and even if he or they are not such moral leaders, they, their advisers, and American congresspersons and other countries’ parliamentarians should be politically pressured so their political and reputational interests will be to do the right thing. Second, succeeding in just one place would produce enormous positive aspects (save and prevent the ruination of lives) and effects (a demonstration to future potential perpetrators and possible interveners). If we enacted a policy reducing an American city’s murder rate by 50 percent, saving in one year four hundred lives in New York, or even fifty-five in Atlanta or forty in Boston, we would declare it an enormous achievement. Studies would be done so the effective methods could be applied elsewhere. Its architects would be celebrated. But if an imperfect but genuine antieliminationist regime prevented only one mass murder of tens of thousands but not others, or cut one short while others went on, cynics and critics would scoff at its failures, even as they have for decades failed, every day, to take the obvious feasible steps to save lives, typically of Africans and Asians and Latin Americans. Similarly, even if one nation is rebuilt, even if only some eliminationist assaults are stopped, then such a policy’s success would be historic, dwarfing the many ballyhooed initiatives marginally i
mproving life in industrialized democracies. Anyone saying that intervention in Rwanda would have been “folly,” no matter that the United Nations was obstructionist and international law provided no other clear mechanism for sanctioning intervention, ought to be condemned.
Implementing any of these provisions, especially the preventive ones, would be progress. If international law is not appropriately changed, then the signatories to the convention establishing the international watchdog organization to stop exterminationist and eliminationist onslaughts could still act upon its provisions. The convention’s signatories (it can be two or five or fifty) ought to operate under the obvious humanitarian and humane principle moving NATO in Bosnia and Kosovo: Eliminationist onslaughts—mass murders, expulsions, incarcerations, and rapes—must be stopped. They should invoke and further the developing norm of responsibility to protect, which the UN Security Council, and therefore international law, at least implicitly recognizes. No real adverse international consequences will befall states acting to save innocents’ lives. Even without such an international watchdog organization, single states or supranational entities (certainly the United States or the European Union), or small ad hoc groups (the United Kingdom, France, Germany), can save lives by preventing or stopping wars against humanity.
The second necessary preventive measure is reducing the number of regimes with strong tendencies to practice eliminationist politics and replace them with the democratic institutions that rob political leaders of the ready institutional and cultural means to initiate domestic slaughters or eliminations. Many political leaders pay lip service to increasing democratic governance but do little to bring it about. That topic also deserves a separate book.
The problem’s crux is twofold: the United Nations, and sovereignty. The United Nations, as we now know, enables, even legitimizes dictatorships. Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization, assesses every country’s degree of freedom, using two major dimensions: political rights (including a functioning electoral democracy) and civil liberties. In 2009 out of 193 countries, only 89 are free, while more than half, 104, are partly free (62) or not free (42). Only 119, 62 percent, are electoral democracies. So more than a third of the current UN membership consists of nondemocratic regimes, namely criminal regimes. By broader measures of freedom, more than half the UN membership is tyrannies, committing substantial or colossal crimes and human rights violations against their own peoples.27
Imagine your country was run with more than one-third, perhaps even more than half, of the voters hardened, felonious criminals. Your laws are made with their participation. Your enforcement of legal measures depends on their agreement or participation, with their representatives staffing much of the enforcement mechanisms’ implementation. Imagine they controlled, absolutely and with utter impunity, not just their own households, but entire towns, cities, and regions. Such is the United Nations.
This immense international problem is barely mentioned and is effectively not part of international or domestic political discourse, let alone where it should be—at the center of concern, thinking, and policy development. Many American commentators, predominantly Republican in orientation, despise the United Nations, mainly because it is the principal international forum and instrument for contesting and constraining American power. They disdain multilateralism in general and the undeniable hostility the United Nations mobilizes against the United States. Similarly, those suspicious of and seeking a counterweight to American power, or simply hoping the international community can become an actual community, reflexively support and wish to expand the United Nations’ power. The United Nations (aside from the World Trade Organization for economic matters) is the major overarching international institution and forum for the world’s countries to cooperate and solve disputes peacefully. This—in addition to the enormous good its agencies, such as the World Health Organization, perform—is the principal point in its favor. For these reasons the United Nations’ fundamentally illegitimate nature and its enabling of tyranny remain world politics’ dirty secrets, barely an issue in Europe and the industrial world, let alone in the developing world, home to scores of criminal regimes and tyrants, which look to the United Nations to give their voices weight and support their illegitimate claims to legitimacy. The United Nations is treated more as a revered institution and model for the world than as the fundamentally corrupt, undemocratic, and antidemocratic institution it is. This alone (aside from its administration’s additional corrupt aspects) ought to disqualify democrats and people of goodwill from supporting it, no matter the good it may perform.
We should do away with the United Nations and replace it with a powerful international institution carrying out many of its current duties and functions but not suffering its disqualifying deformities. We should do this not because the United Nations constrains American power or is hostile to many American positions, but because it is illegitimate, and ineffectual, and corrupt, and does far too little to coordinate the world’s countries to alleviate misery, including to fight against exterminationist and eliminationist politics. The United Nations sits on a conceptual foundation, its charter, that for the foreseeable future all but guarantees its continuing enabling of mass murder, other eliminations, mass brutality, denial of basic democratic and civil libertarian rights to billions, and slowed economic development. The United Nations should be replaced with an institution without foundational principles and membership promoting these horrors and abominations. This institution could therefore be true to the United Nations’ name (and ignored conceptual foundation), namely the second part of its name: nations—not states sitting above, often tyrannically, the people, but the people composing each nation.
This leads to the second problem, state sovereignty. Sovereignty exists not for nations or countries’ peoples. It exists for states. The notion of sovereignty came into being, law, and international politics beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, a nondemocratic age of monarchs ruling peoples, not of self-governing citizens. International politics deems states, no matter how atrocious their rulers, sovereign. This unjustifiable conception of international relations made some sense so long as war was a common option, thus rightly orienting the beneficent impulses in international politics toward reducing its incidence. State sovereignty contributed to this by constraining states’ capacities to intervene in other states’ affairs, diminishing conflict points, and contributing to a more ordered, predictable, and stable international environment.
But today state (or rulers’) sovereignty—as opposed to national or people’s sovereignty—is indefensible. Interstate war and its threat has declined considerably. Respecting the sovereignty of criminal states, namely nondemocracies and tyrannies, does not reduce war but promotes it: It is nondemocratic states and leaders that still use war to aggrandize territory, expand power, seek glory, and accrue economic gains. Furthermore, given the great emerging eliminationist danger of nuclear weapons’ proliferation to nondemocratic rogue states or nonstate actors finding safe harbor in such states, the threat tyrannies pose to peoples outside their borders is growing exponentially. And because it is indisputable that (absent emergency circumstances or a governing party’s eliminationist conduct) a country’s people should determine their government, the indefensibility of respecting, legitimizing, and supporting dictators, tyrants, and murderers becomes absolute.
The world’s democracies must stop promoting and safeguarding the world’s tyrants, including their capacity to practice eliminationist politics, from mass murder to mass expulsions to violently repressing those not conforming to their narrow ethnocentric, ideological, or religious prescriptions. Democratic leaders and the world’s peoples should stop perpetuating this legal, institutional, and political fiction, most glaringly at the United Nations, that tyrannical regimes and leaders represent anything aside from their own criminal, warmaking, and eliminationist interests. Democracies should assiduously work to reduce the number of such regimes, which, as we now know, ar
e inherently unstable and weak (being actually or potentially threatened by the demands of their countries’ peoples to be represented and treated fairly) and inherently prone to eliminationism. (Creating a world of democracies is the only effective long-term strategy to prevent nuclear weapon use.) Democratic leaders and peoples should replace the United Nations with a new United Democratic Nations that admits only democracies, an idea John McCain also floated while running for the American presidency. But instead of his “league” of democracies, it should be democracies united against tyranny, genocide, and all eliminationist politics, and united for the world’s people. Democracies should similarly make membership in other international political and economic organizations open only to democracies. They should place prohibitions on their companies doing business in nondemocratic countries. There will be short-term costs—acrimony, tension, and harm done to the people under tyrannical regimes refusing to relinquish their antihuman power. Yet many nondemocratic regimes and their sustaining economic elites will see tyranny’s continuing costs as prohibitive. Most tyrants and the supporting elites follow calculations of power and advantage. Making democracy a much better cost-benefit option will powerfully appeal to their cherished values and interests, and further create within their countries self-reinforcing societal and economic pressure and support for democracy. Such incentives’ power to induce political and economic elites and countries’ peoples to opt for democracy is more than a logical conclusion. The evidence for democratizing political and economic pressure’s enormous effectiveness exists. The European Union has required countries seeking membership to meet genuine democratic and other criteria, in Freedom House’s terms, political rights and civil liberties (NATO has further contributed to this pressure). Consequently, Central and Eastern European countries, as well as Turkey, which otherwise might not have embraced democracy, or fallen away from it, saw democracy as the only option. Quickly, despite a highly unpromising starting point, the region transformed from wholly undemocratic and unfree into an almost wholly democratic and free one.
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