I resurrected this, as sovereignty, self determination, religious sectarianism and similar obsessions are resurgent. It has relevance, I do not know where to be heartened, by my prescience, or disheartened at the lack of progress. In particular, the debate about the Responsibility to Protect seems to have been subject to even more caution than was warranted at the time, as Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the US all show total insouciance to the UN Charter and bask in impunity.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Don't Blame Westphalia!
Comment is Free on the Guardian
24 October 2007
Today, October 24, is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, or at least the final part of it signed in Munster. When quoted nowadays the treaty is seen as the bedrock of the modern system of independent states, free of feudal entanglements and thus from foreign interference in internal affairs. Most often, it is the foundation of every thuggish ruler's claim: "T'ain't nobody's business what I do" to my own subjects.
Like many others I've pontificated about the Westphalian system and state sovereignty, and in fact I have usually pontificated against it. So to celebrate its birthday, I went to read it. The only version that seems generally available is a translation from Latin into English, probably at the beginning of the 18th century. And the amazing thing is the complete lack of direct quotes about sovereignty. Apart from being an extended suicide note for the Holy Roman Empire, there are few larger principles to be drawn from its text. Even the bits about religious toleration were basically reiterations of the Treaty of Augsburg, and it specifically allowed the Hapsburgs to keep the Inquisition burning away in their own lands outside the empire.
It had taken 30 years of war for the emerging sovereign states to "have form'd thoughts of an universal peace". The result of years of negotiations, the treaty is a detailed and highly pragmatic settlement of the myriad local and regional squabbles that became conflated into what was allegedly a religious war. Like current so-called clashes of civilisation and religions, the mere technical detail that the very Catholic "the most puissant prince, and most Christian king of France and Navarre," was the ally of protestant Swedish kingdom against the Holy Roman Hapsburgs.
Effectively, the treaty gave legal as well as practical independence to the constituent states of the Holy Roman Empire, allowing them to sign treaties and wage wars, with the oft-to-be ignored exception that they should not bear arms against the emperor. "Above all, it shall be free perpetually to each of the states of the empire, to make alliances with strangers for their preservation and safety; provided, nevertheless, such alliances be not against the emperor, and the empire". It also warned against interference in the internal affairs of these statelets.
But of whence their sovereignty came, the treaty saith nought. It deals with various claims and counterclaims of princes, marquises, landgraves, bishops, emperors, dukes and electors, but the "we the peoples," of the UN charter are nowhere to be seen. A state here is coterminous with its sovereign, with none of the 19th century romantic notions of organic nations with one people, one country and one government.
The "Westphalian system" is really a later interpretation of the results. Those "thoughts of an universal peace," did not last as long as the 30 year torrent of blood and fire it took to form them, although until the French revolutionary wars, the squabbles tended more to be conflicts between armies rather than the unbridled savagery of the 30 year war itself.
Replacing the nominal Holy Roman Empire (which as Voltaire pointed out, was none of the preceding) we now have the United Nations, which often appears to be misnomer as well. According to the charter, all nations have, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," surrendered their sovereign "Westphalian" right to wage war, except in self defence.
In an odd way, countless millions of dead notwithstanding, the UN has succeeded in preserving the Westphalian dream. The only outright invasion and annexation, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was over-turned. Usually invaders are quick to set up regimes to legitimise their efforts retrospectively: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Panama, Grenada, Cambodia, Uganda and Iraq, to name but a few.
But while Westphalia enjoined freedom of religion, its modern invokers want to defend the presumed rights of the modern equivalent of those landgraves, marquises, princes and counts, to massacre their own people with impunity. Burmese, Sudanese and Serbian regimes have all enjoyed the support of a motley band of self-interested regimes and "anti-imperialist" orators and commentators.
Two years ago, the United Nations tried to square the circle of avoiding wars between states while fulfilling its pledges to "us the peoples," by adopting the "right to protect", setting out the principle of humanitarian intervention in the case of "national authorities manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity". Not one of the 191 member states voted against this effective rescinding of one of the alleged bedrock principles of Westphalia. Perhaps they were sadly confident that the veto-holders in the security council were only kidding, and would always protect their client genocidaires when the votes were taken. After all, every veto holder had attacked another country in defiance of the charter, but no one had ever disputed the alleged Westphalian right of each anointed thug to mistreat his "own" people.
It took almost 300 years for the protection of state sovereignty part to become mildly effective with the UN charter. The people in Burma and Darfur should not have to wait a century for the right to protect to be implemented.
Posted by Deadline Pundit at 12:30 AM No comments: 
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Of course it is not all down hill. Spain has proven "a light unto the nations!"
Saturday, October 14, 2017
Damage to Catalonia!
"This is my truth. Tell me yours." Aneurin Bevan, founder of Tribune.
Letter From America
Written By: Ian Williams
Published: October 13, 2017 Last modified: October 13, 2017
Between Darth Vader imitators brutalizing Catalans and Donald Trump at the UN, sovereignty is in the air, and not just in Catalonia. Donald Trump made “sovereignty” a theme of his speech to the UN for the opening of the General Assembly.
There was a lot of adverse comment since it was discordant with the spirit of the world body, and indeed it is – now. But it does hew to the original letter of the UN Charter, which makes it plain that the main purpose of the organization was to preserve and defend the sovereignty of the nation states who were its members.
The preamble of the Charter does start with “We the Peoples of the world,” but within a few paragraphs and months it was clear that the founders were only kidding. The sovereignty of the nation state is the bedrock principle of the organization, as one would expect for a body that had Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, not to mention the segregationist USA, as original signatories and which was set up in response to predatory annexations by the Axis.
National sovereignty took shape in the Treaty of Westphalia, which, apart from a lot of sordid horse-trading to end the Thirty Years War, encapsulated the concept that what a ruler did inside a sovereign state was nobody else’s business. But of course, once again they were only kidding: it only applied to West Europeans and it was fine to go to the rescue of Christians in Muslim countries and to liberate little brown brothers across the world from uncivilized rule.
Back in 2003, China kept trying to add “and separatist activities” to resolutions on terrorism, until put down by Jeremy Greenstock, one of the better British Ambassadors to the UN, who pointed out that nothing in international law, nor even British law, prohibited people supporting or wanting self determination.
Hence the chill with Trump’s enthusiasm for invoking sovereignty… Russia, China, Burma Venezuela, Burundi, Serbia… you could almost draw up a Human Rights Watch list from the speakers who echoed his invocation of sovereignty from the podium of the General Assembly.
They are not talking about the sovereignty of the peoples, but about the untrammeled powers they claim as rulers of nations. In a similar way, the fans of Lenin’s ghost across the left are now much quicker to invoke national sovereignty than workers’ unity. And it seems that Madrid shares Beijing’s views on advocating self-determination. Indeed, May’s government supports it by proxy: if you make it illegal to vote on self determination then it is fine to violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to stop them in order to “uphold the law”.
I suspect Madrid’s lawyers would be hard put to cite a Spanish custom, let alone small print, that allows black clad storm troopers to concuss peaceful Catalan grannies trying to vote.
To put it mildly, this is counterproductive. Those who are firmly attached to the metaphysical idea of a nation state usually have difficulty learning from reality, and one surefire lesson from history is that telling people they do not have the right even to consider reaping that metaphysical image is thoroughly counterproductive.
But self-determination plus sovereignty are explosive concepts when mixed. “Why should I be a minority in your country, when you can be a minority in mine?” as the old Balkan adage had it. Self-determination can be negotiated to allow all concerned their rights. “Sovereignty” almost always implies a claimed right to abuse people’s rights in the name of a notional nation.
The refusal of Madrid and Buenos Aires to even consider that the Falklanders or Gibraltarians have rights or a voice in their future has guaranteed predictable near unanimity in referenda. It would have taken a tremendous amount of making nice by Belgrade to win over the Kosovars, but the Serbian refusal even to apologize to the victims of years of apartheid that culminated in attempted ethnic cleansing, shifted the referendum odds on independence from high probability to complete certainty.
With Gibraltar as the best example of Rajoy’s tact, sadly his actions in Catalonia have now switched a not very probable victory for independence closer to near certainty. There are degrees of separation and co-habitation. Wooing works better than whipping, but sending in thousands of Darth Vader imitations from outside Catalonia to beat up locals wanting a say in their future is epochal idiocy calculated to change the minds of any Catalans who might have wanted to stay part of a larger Iberian polity.
If Rajoy keeps it up, he may lose the Basques next.
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