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Video Interview
Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of
4 min 23 sec 4 min 41 sec
(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)
Transcript
A period of successful institution building
I think our assessment today is coloured a bit by the fact that we saw an incredible period of international institution building with the end of the Cold War. Between the end of the Cold War and before the rise of an administration in the U.S. which is instinctually hostile towards the notion of multilateral and international institutions for a variety of reasons, in that space of about a decade, we saw the conclusion of the International Criminal Court, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the authorization by the Security Council of a major war, the Gulf War of 1990-91. This was an incredible period for the role of the UN in war. And I think what it did was it showed people this was how this institution was supposed to be—deeply involved in war from the get go, but it was frozen because of the Cold War for the better part of 45 or 50 years. So we had a decade where it actually started to function in a way that people had envisioned it just might, and in ways people didn’t envision it. Peacekeeping wasn’t part of the original idea of the international community of the UN, but that’s one of the functions it developed—an explosion of peacekeeping and peacemaking operations in the 1990s, an explosion of Security Council resolutions on such issues. That, I think, became the standard. Now, with the Bush administration coming to power, and then countries like China and India, I suspect that what you’re going to see is something closer to the kind of ebb and flow of occasional agreements by enough states to permit an intervention in another East Timor down the road. They are going to be the exception rather than the rule, I would suspect. So I think that it will probably revert back to somewhere between the Cold War period and the 1990s, which were in both cases, I think, the extremes. What we are likely to see is something that’s really in between, over the foreseeable future.
Canada has played, I think, an incredibly important role—in that decade in particular—of institution building. Canada is one of the countries that have really seized upon that opportunity in history in very fruitful ways, with the Landmines Convention and the International Criminal Court being two of the obvious ones. But it’s always been a very strong component of other initiatives, in particular related to the NPT and others. And it did so, I think, with an approach which took advantage of a certain historical period, forging ahead with coalitions of so-called like-minded states in conjunction with civil society actors. That’s a good part of the explanation of how the Landmines Convention came about. Also, tight networks with broader professionals and experts in various areas of society. The ICC, the role of lawyers: it’s hard to put your finger on, but it’s incredibly important. You can’t understand how this institution could come about except the deeply embedded notion of the rule of law in so many countries, and the role of lawyers. This is the way societies ought to work.
The Canadian government was very intelligent in how it strategically helped build those coalitions. I think the question is, can it have successes like that again, and are those—what appear to be successes—in fact likely to be long-term successes? And that’s one of the challenges raised by the Bush administration, which has not signed on to any of those aforementioned initiatives. So the question is, are those just sort of feel-good moments, but let’s face it, they’re not going to have a broad impact? Or not? I think they’ll have a broader impact than most people give them credit for, for a couple of reasons. One is that a lot of those initiatives tried to put in formal institutional settings (that is, treaties of international law) norms that are, or are likely to be increasingly so, broadly accepted. The United States does not think it’s a good idea to commit genocide. So you don’t sign the ICC, but it’s not as if the United States is entirely likely to be going about committing genocide itself. And the mandate of the International Criminal Court is fairly narrow, for the gravest of international crimes. And so even though Canada stitched together these coalitions, and got formal institutional expression, major players like Russia, India, China and the United States have opposed some or all of those. I still think that you can identify, in very careful, close ways, the successes that have been attained in the short term. In the case of landmines, we now know there are quite a bit fewer people being killed by landmines, probably about half, just in the last decade. That’s an enormous success. The question is, can Canada do it again? Again, I think the nineties were a particular period, and a particular opportunity, and the framework around norms of warfare is pretty dense now, so identifying the remaining opportunities—space weapons, small arms and light weapons—I personally don’t see either of those going anywhere.
Norms in warfare
There are two major kinds of norms regarding warfare. One is a set of norms about when it’s right to go to war in the first place. And there’s a second set of norms about once you’re in war, what is it permissible or not permissible to do? Those latter types of norms are also of two major kinds. One is, what can you do? Can you use certain weapons, can you torture, can you interrogate? And the other is about who you can do things to, and is there a certain specially protected class of persons historically? And those are some of the strongest norms we’ve had, even as they are often still violated. Norms against bringing harm to the wounded, to the shipwrecked, to prisoners of war, to innocent civilians. That particular category, by the way, is the one around which a lot of the recent controversies have revolved, with the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners in the war on terror. They want to redefine, or define, where we put that class of persons. And that’s what it’s all about: how do we categorize who deserves what kind of treatment?
The norms with respect to what we do in war, I think, have had a really palpable influence over the years in affecting the outcome of wars. Norms about how or when we can go to war—people have had a kind of unrealistic expectation, in my view. I don’t think they’ve ever worked very well—that is, the formal norms to outlaw war through the United Nations, which is, in some sense, the big, original objective of the UN, to get rid of war. I don’t think those norms have ever had much of an impact. There was a huge focus in 2003, in the war in Iraq, obviously, over this issue. Many felt, well, this just illustrates how weak these norms are, this is a fundamental crisis in the international system. I don’t think those norms have ever worked terribly well. That doesn’t mean I think there aren’t important norms restricting when states actually go to war—I think there are. But they are more limited. I think there are very important norms among liberal democracies. Scholarly research has argued and even shown that liberal democracies don’t go to war against one another. So there is a particular class of state among which norms, I think, are very important. But as a general formal inhibition, I think those norms have always been really weak. Much stronger, I think, have been norms about the kind of conduct permitted in war. The norm against chemical weapons, the norm against the use of nuclear weapons, biological weapons—all are very strong, at least in restraining states. The big question on the horizon is, what can be done to restrain non-state actors to also abide by these kinds of norms.
The liberal democracies since 1789 until the present time: have any two ever really gone to war? There’s at best, really, a couple of cases on the margins: Finland in World War II with the Allies, but those were pretty peculiar circumstances; perhaps Chile and the United States in its role undermining Allende—it wasn’t really a war, but it came close to that kind of activity. So it’s a really robust finding, and scholars are still, I think, unsettled as to the exact reasons and mechanisms, in terms of pinpointing really exact things, other than institutional mechanisms such as respect for the rule of law. That clearly is quite important, such that, for example, if another state enacts something that you don’t like, whether it be a trade tariff or who knows what, you respect the fact that they are a democratic polity that has certain procedures and that sometimes they don’t turn out the way you’d like. Just as in your own polity, you decide, well, we just have to live with that outcome, that’s part of being in a democratic society. And it seems to me that the shared expectation among countries of that type, with those institutions, is that you don’t always get what you want, but it doesn’t mean you use violence when you don’t get it. That’s the norm domestically in liberal democracies: you just live with the outcomes, even if you don’t like them. And that seems to be diffused in those transnational relations as well.
A taboo against use A lot of the controversies today about disarmament revolve around an attempt to install a really deep norm: the non-possession of something. And I think that a lot of the controversies lose sight of the fact that the primary norm around which we ought to be above all concerned is the use of a particular weapon. So with regard to nuclear weapons, there is an enormous controversy. People today are wondering whether the nuclear weapons control regime is in crisis—breakouts by India and Pakistan, the Bush administration arguing that the Treaty is not doing the job and we have to use other means, like war if necessary, with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and so on. So a lot of people are saying, maybe this regime is in crisis. But it’s an incredibly deep norm, to try and take something out of possession, as opposed to the primary norm, which is non-use, which I would argue is not under siege at all. And that’s the norm that really drives efforts toward non-proliferation. You say, well, you’re never going to use these things; therefore, why do you need them? And that’s always been the dilemma of having nuclear weapons—you can only have them if you leave a little bit of doubt in a potential adversary’s mind that you could use them. So every once in a while, you have to give a clue that you don’t have an absolute aversion to using them. And that’s why states don’t have first-use policies, for example, which many in the disarmament community argue ought to be the first big step towards disarmament. So those are always going to be very tough nuts to crack, at least on the nuclear side.
...The first instance is the inhibition by those who have these weapons to use them. And it’s particularly puzzling, really, because the usual common knowledge over the centuries, on these sorts of issues, is that it’s basically futile to try and restrain a weapon. The only weapons you will effectively restrain are the ones the militaries don’t want anyway, because they are relatively useless or marginal. In my own research, I looked to see if that was true, and found out it just wasn’t. The historical record actually showed, in the case of chemical weapons, for example, that in World War I, 40 percent of the shells used by the end of the war were chemical weapons—that’s hardly a useless weapon. In World War II, the United States was fighting the Japanese across the Pacific. The Japanese forces were barricading themselves in caves and tunnels, making the Americans dig. It was extraordinarily bloody fighting. The U.S. army did a study: what would be the best single weapon to use? Chemical weapons. So they are hardly a useless weapon. Nonetheless, we don’t see them used. So you can’t just reduce restraint to the fact that it’s a useless weapon. There’s something bigger going on, and that’s what I call a taboo.
The other usual explanation is that you only get the non-use of a weapon because of deterrence. That is, a potential adversary fears retaliation in kind from that same weapon. Now, I argue in my work that sometimes that’s a pretty good explanation. But sometimes it doesn’t work. There’s lots of cases we’ve identified where a country has a weapon of mass destruction, it’s in a war against an adversary who doesn’t, and still that weapon is not used. The States never used nuclear weapons in Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, in 2000 against Iraq, in 2003 against Iraq. Similar with the Soviets during the Cold War; similar today. There’s all sorts of cases, so clearly deterrence can’t be the explanation. There is no fear of retaliation. So for all those reasons, the work that I and others have done has been to investigate how it is that you can still have restraint against weapons when those two common explanations simply can’t suffice. And what we’ve discovered is that indeed there are taboos—that is, a notion held by some people who are in positions to make those decisions that... the formulation is usually something like “we just don’t do certain kinds of things.” Chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, biological weapons and more recently landmines have all come into that category, that they just cross the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in the contemporary international system. |
