Idealism in International Politics

One is left with the conclusion, listening to this analysis, that not much is left for idealism in international politics. The nineties for a while appeared to be the human rights decade -- all sorts of items were on the table, from universal jurisdiction, to the international criminal court, to humanitarian intervention that would define a new way of dealing with the world; but in the end idealism doesn't seem to make much sense, or does it?

I think idealism makes sense, but I think idealism can only be realized through effective domestic political structures. The idea that you could accomplish better protection of human rights, or ending abuses by autocratic regimes by, for instance, having universal jurisdiction in Belgium, or creating an international criminal court, I think, is a chimera. It's a project that worked well in Europe, the project being stated as a set of ideals, initially, creating the institutions, and then altering the way in which individual actors or politicians or citizens actually conceive of their own self-interest. But this project worked well in Europe because a) Europe was exhausted by World War I and World War II, and b) the Europeans had managed to kill a hundred million people. Nazi Germany was not just a German phenomenon; a lot of people all over Europe bought into Nazism. So you had what was supposedly the highest flowering of civilization degraded into this grotesque regime. So Europeans, I think, didn't have a lot of faith in their conventional institutions. And c) you had the United States providing security, which was a very convenient thing to do, and, coincidentally, supporting European integration.

If you look at European support for the ICC, International Criminal Court, I think Europeans see their project as something that could be internationalized. I am deeply skeptical of that. It worked in Europe for these three reasons that I alluded to, and because Europe had high levels of economic development and experience in many countries with democracy. So it was ripe for doing this. In many parts of the world, this European project of starting with ideals and then hoping that the ideals could be embodied into institutions and the institutions will change the way people think is a false hope. It's not to say I don't think idealism matters. But to realize idealism, what you need are decent domestic institutions. Places have to be governed in some kind of accountable and, ideally, democratic way.

It's your argument that, strangely enough, in seeking international justice by some of these mechanisms, you actually lose political accountability.

This is a somewhat separate argument from my thoughts about sovereignty, linked only in a sense that I think these issues of justice by which some basic provision of human rights for individuals, some opportunity for individuals to control their own economic life, some opportunity for individuals to avoid the arbitrary power of the state, can be realized only if you have decent domestic structures. These structures in many places have been provided by conventionally sovereign states -- Europe, Japan, the United States. These places have worked quite well. The problem is that there are many places where these structures haven't worked well, and you need to do something else, which is this "sovereignty with an asterisk."

So that's one set of issues that have to do with domestic governance. There are then a second set of issues in which you had in the 1990s -- the hope that we would somehow be able to get international legislation that would make human rights work, or we would get more decent governance that way. And that, I think, fails. It fails for a number of reasons; one is the one you alluded to. If you look at democracy, it's not clear. The problem is that these institutions aren't responsible or accountable to anyone. You have the International Criminal Court established by the vote of states, many of whom are not democratic. You have a set of justices elected by a process that's designed to distribute the judges across regions and by gender, and you've just selected a prosecutor who's actually a very, very competent person. But you're in a situation [of wondering] who are the judges accountable to?

Now, this is a problem to some extent in any judicial system, including the United States or anyplace else. You want judges to be independent, but at some level you don't want the judges to run off the end of the table, to be unresponsive to domestic democratic concerns. This is always something that's difficult and tricky to work out at the domestic level. It's an impossible thing to work out at the international level.

One problem with the ICC is that you have no democratic accountability. But the deepest problem with the ICC and with other efforts, like universal jurisdiction, is that international politics is not something that you can deal with adequately using judicial reasoning. Judicial reasoning has to be based essentially on absolute rules, or at least more or less on absolute rules. It has to be deontological or Kantian. You have to have a set of rules and you have to honor the rules. You don't want the judge or a jury saying, "If I convict this guy, his family members or his gang members are going to be mad, so they're going to go out and shoot ten other people." No system of justice domestically that works well can work in that way. But in the international level, that kind of thinking is utterly irresponsible, because the critical issue at the international level is how you can maintain order, ideally have justice, and save lives. That requires utilitarian thinking. It requires thinking about the greatest good for the greatest number. I do not think there is any escape from this.

So, for instance, if you look at Baby Doc Duvalier, he left Haiti and he ended up living on the French Riviera. Or Idi Amin, who has lived in Saudi Arabia for the last twenty years now, and I assume comfortably, I don't actually know. At some level, when you think about justice and especially Idi Amin, who killed a lot of people, the question is this: was it better to offer him sanctuary in Saudi Arabia, or would it have been better to say to him when he was still in power, "We are going to prosecute you"? The reaction of any autocratic ruler under those circumstances would be to hold on to power as long as he possibly can.

If you look at the human rights community, Human Rights Watch, for instance, the claim is always that the ICC will discourage autocratic rulers from committing human rights atrocities. If you're looking at Saddam Hussein -- someone who's willing to rape, someone who's willing to put out the eyes of children in front of their parents to try and get information from them -- he is not going to be deterred from these actions by the existence of the International Criminal Court. Threatening these actors with prosecution may make it more difficult to get rid of them. In international relations, what you need is to a full repertoire of options open to you.

I'm not opposed in principle, for instance, to the international criminal tribunal for Yugoslavia or Rwanda, which have worked so-so, especially the Rwandan one. They were established on an ad hoc basis as the result of a political choice by the Security Council. I think the ICC, in which you want to apply universal legal rules to a wide variety of situations which require, in my judgment, prudential political thought, is a tremendous error, something that's irresponsible and something that will actually get people killed.

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