Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Survival risk or Date: Wed, 4 Nov 92 16:16:30 EST Message-ID: \SE A;WORLD \SS (WS) \HD Survival risk or sovereignty? \SH Some nations need saving from selves \BY Joy Aschenbach \CR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Intervention: It's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't world dilemma. National sovereignty, a tradition since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the Thirty Years' War in Europe, is under siege. In what's left of Yugoslavia, and in Somalia, it's being severely tested. More countries - 180 and counting - mean more borders to be violated or sovereign governments to be protected. Is it the international community's duty to intervene to save a country from itself? Or are borders sacrosanct? The issue is an urgent one in the United Nations, the United States and the European Community. Since World War II, the principle of not forcibly interfering in the internal affairs of a country without its consent has prevailed. Third World countries that have won independence since the war have been especially defensive about their newly gained sovereignty. But the balance between national sovereignty and international intervention may be shifting. "Preventive diplomacy" and "humanitarian action" are the new watchwords. Critics have taken the United States and its European allies to task for their nonintervention policy against atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Nearly 50,000 U.N. peacekeepers, including the first troops from Japan, make up the largest U.N. forces ever deployed, defusing a dozen world trouble spots. The 178-member United Nations is weighing the creation of its own permanent, multinational "standby army" that could be summoned on 48 hours' notice - a kind of "foreign legion for the world." The International Committee of the Red Cross is staging its largest-ever relief operation in Somalia, spending $150 million, or one-third of its 1992 worldwide budget, there. "Somalia needs immediate and massive intervention. There's no government whose sovereignty would be violated. Everything's disintegrated. There are only warlords and masses of starving people," says Said Samatar, a Somali-born African history professor at Rutgers University. "I don't believe we'll see the return of a nation-state in Somalia in the foreseeable future. "But no one internationally is interested in intervening with the commitment necessary to disarm the situation. The best thing that could happen would be for someone to intervene and save Somalia from the Somalis," Mr. Samatar said. Will Sudan be the next Somalia? Leaders of the Organization of African Unity are debating whether to create the continent's first peacekeeping force. A West African peacekeeping operation is now trying to protect Liberia's battered interim government. "The validity of the concept of state sovereignty over national space is being seriously questioned," says geographer George J. Demko of Dartmouth College. "Sovereignty is clearly not absolute. The movement toward intervention is rapidly growing. But who is the collective community and who has the right to intervene?" The United States, Britain and France jointly imposed a "no-fly zone" on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, restricting his military planes from flying south of the 32nd parallel in his own country. Is it precedent-setting intervention or the legitimate aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf war? Globally, three sets of organizations interact and often conflict: sovereign countries; intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the United Nations, the European Community and the Organization of African Unity; and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and Greenpeace. "The IGOs and NGOs are now challenging state sovereignty, the NGOs more boldly," Mr. Demko says. The role and influence of international organizations will be enhanced, he says, with more daring humanitarian operations. "There's no clear consensus yet to abandon sovereignty as a principle," says government professor Michael Mastanduno of Dartmouth College. "But international interventions may become more routine and have the effect of chipping away at the sovereignty principle." Interventions have caused conflict in four areas: humanitarian assistance, defense of human rights, environmental protection and control of weapons of mass destruction. Discussing his country's relationship to the Commonwealth of Independent States, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk has stated: "Sovereignty is not something up for bargain or sale. Decisions interfering in internal policies are not accepted by us." In a "borderless world of global webs, global factories and de-nationalized intercorporate alliances, it is difficult to construct a scenario in which sovereignty is declared as the ultimate principle of world politics," says international affairs professor James N. Rosenau of George Washington University. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM