By Andrew J. Williams
The UN Charter was not an innocent document that has now been violated by all concerned as we might decide to listen to various foreign ministers in New York for the General Assembly. Russia is most certainly a ‘mafia’ state, as a growing number of commentators have demonstrated, and it certainly has breached the rules of basic decency as much as the UN Charter since February 2022.
But let us not forget that China and Russia were ‘victorious powers’ in 1945, China far more than historians have given it credit for. The UN Charter was designed to suit the power relationships of the 1940s, with some commentators like Mark Mazower suggesting that Britain and France’s imperial interests were meant to be protected by the document. More recently, the late (and great) Christopher Coker suggested that ‘civilisational states’, which China, Russia, Britain, France and the United States clearly believe (or believed in the case of Britain and France?) themselves to be, hold to the view that they are above the usual rules of behaviour.
Not for them the interdicts on non-intervention in the affairs of other states, hence the behaviours of 1956 (Suez), 1964 (Vietnam), 1979 and 2001 (Afghanistan), Iraq (2003) and now the new Russian imperial wars against Georgia (2008), Ukraine (2014-present). Only in 1991 did the UN agree to any ‘legitimate’ intervention, so sanctioned by the whole international community. The UN Charter is quite simply no longer fit for purpose, if it ever was. So does power, legitimacy and order simply come out of the barrel of a gun? I was not convinced otherwise after reading this volume. Maybe that was inevitable? We are all pessimists now.
I would recommend this book for its heterogeneous and varied contributions. Krishnan Srinivasan gives a magisterial overview of the other chapters and is possibly even more pessimistic than I have been in my comments. He puts some hope in popular renewal for what should be the ideals of the international system, as does Sanjay Pulipaka (another excellent contribution).
If you ask anyone on the street in Moscow, Beijing, Delhi or London, as well as anywhere in the Global South whether we should allow the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine or anywhere else the reply will usually be in the negative, vehemently so. The ‘apotheosis of public opinion’ that Woodrow Wilson wanted to unleash in 1919 is still a powerful weapon. We should use it better. There are some good ideas here about how the digitisation of the world, the rise of social media, for example, could re-energise the debate.
‘Liberalism’ has been devalued, as many of the authors in this volume indicate or suggest, and it was by its own fault as in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that doesn’t mean that anyone, globally, has ditched liberalism’s underlying desire for freedom (within limits that are culturally defined in my view) and individual development. In the West that has often meant freedom for the few and not the many, as it has also in, for example, China, India and Russia. But the West must allow other voices or the very legitimacy of liberal impulses will be suffocated.
It was David Hume who warned in the 1770s that to have a world ‘composed of peace, tolerance and moderation’ we had to guard against ‘corroded national mores … in the name of liberty, commerce, profit and empire’. It’s not just in Russia that such words ring true, Western states should look more at their own past and reflect how they look to others. Russia is an imperial aggressor but so were the British, French, and a long list of others. We are all to blame for interiorising the idea that imperial states somehow have rights that subject states do not.
How might the UN Charter be re-written in the 2020s? In my view, China needs to be given a fairer hearing in the West. It certainly is being belligerent in Asia, as Malone and others imply, but it has been treated with contempt for far too long, latterly by the very country that encouraged its re-emergence on the international scene, the United States. As Pulipaka says, ‘China’s economic dependence on the West will continue … ’. (p. 15) but the rest of the world needs such (inter-)dependence, indeed cannot avoid it, as the many comments about COVID demonstrate. Instead of pursuing a nationalistic and hateful argument about what or who was to ‘blame’ for the outbreak we should be celebrating the cooperation that ensued. And we should listen to the argument by Professor Wang ‘drawing from the past, present and future and embracing the whole planet’. (p. 17) Such ideas are not simply platitudes, but they need proper discussion and mutual respect to bring to full realisation.
Andrew J. Williams is with the University of St Andrews.
- Power, legitimacy and world order: changing contours of preconditions and perspectives edited by Sanjay Pulipaka, Krishnan Srinivasan and James Mayall, London, Routledge, 2023.
[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.]
The post Power, legitimacy and world order: Changing contours of preconditions and perspectives appeared first on Caribbean News Global.
