The Changing Character of War, Moral Beliefs about War, and International Institutions to Prevent War

Randall Forsberg Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies www.idds.org, email: forsberg@idds.org Prepared for the panel on Conditions of Peace International Studies Association Portland, Oregon 28 February 2003 DRAFT: Please do not cite without permission (forsberg@idds.org) Over the last several centuries, in parallel with the rise and global spread of egalitarian, democratic values and institutions, there has been a declining tolerance for various forms of socially-sanctioned widely-practiced violence. Little by little, previously legal, morally accepted forms of violence have been outlawed and become socially unacceptable. This applies, for example, to legal slavery and serfdom; torture; the beating of children, wives, and students; and many forms of corporal punishment, including hanging. As part of this larger phenomenon, there has been a shrinking set of widely accepted reasons for war, or, in other words, moral beliefs about what constitutes a just war. The single most important change occurred between the early part of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century, when wars of empire and colonialization were delegitimized, culminating with the defeat of the wars of empire of Japan and Germany in World War II and the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. This marked the beginning of a period in which the only kind of war widely accepted as a just war is a war of defense against illegitimate, unjust cross-border aggression. Generally speaking, this long-term trend points toward a better future, with less and less warfare since in theory, if the use of armed force were limited to defense, strictly and narrowly defined, no country would ever attack another. With the end of the Cold War, however, we have seen the rise of new forms of warfare, which do not involve cross-border aggression by one nation state against another, but rather subnational and transnational violence, such as ethnic conflicts, resource wars, warlord violence in failed states, and international terrorism. While all such forms of violence are generally condemned, these new forms of warfare have raised new questions about whether there are just humanitarian uses of armed force to prevent and end the new forms of organized armed violence, and whether being prepared for such uses of armed force is likely to help move the world further toward abolishing war,or in the opposite direction. In order to focus on this question, in this paper I have temporarily set aside the closely related question of the development of a uni-polar world, with the United States as a sole military superpower, and the many regressive developments in US military and foreign policy since 1995. The United States has, in my view, seized the notions of humanitarian and defensive armed interventions and run away with them. The question I address is this paper is whether and how the international community might retrieve the initiative in resuming progress toward the abolition of war, particularly with respect to the moral pull of appeals to humanitarian uses of armed force. The developments of the last year show that in order to resume that progress, a comparable transformation would be needed with respect to the field of arms control and

Forsberg, page 2 disarmament, where the Bush administration has done its best to scuttle the achievements of the last two decades and replace them with a new hegemonic use of armed force: disarming warfare. The Old and New War Paradigms In the half century between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War, people who were concerned about war and its prevention -- academics, politicians, diplomats, journalists, and others -- focused mainly on actual or potential global and major regional wars. The kinds of wars that were fought and feared and the wars that international war-prevention efforts focused on were large-scale conventional wars with traditional ground, air and naval forces: great power world wars; major regional wars, particularly in the Middle East, South Asia, and Northeast Asia; large-scale great power military interventions in those regions; and, most important, the possibility that any such war, and particularly any great power war, could escalate into nuclear war. At the same time, worldwide war-prevention efforts by governments focused almost exclusively on the prevention of major conventional-and-possibly-nuclear wars. The main such efforts involved the founding of the United Nations and the on-going activities of the UN Security Council; negotiations for arms control and disarmament and for related confidence-building measures; and the Helsinki process leading ultimately to the creation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the unification of Germany, the perceived risk of another great power war -- that is, another major conventional world war -- has dropped very close to zero. The risks of major regional war have not fallen as drastically; but they have declined. North and South Korea have begun talking; China has been increastingly open and interactive in world affairs and has developed a reasonably stable modus vivendi with Taiwan; India and Pakistan keep saber rattling, but seem unlikely to actually engage in a major war, particularly since both tested nuclear weapons; and, in the Middle East, after the treaties between Egypt and Israel and Jordan and Israel, and the end of Iraqs wars with Kuwait and Iran, a new generation of leadership in Syria, no major conventional war has seemed likely among the countries in the region. And, finally, following the Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe and the first Gulf War, no further unilateral great power intervention in the third world seemed likely -- until the advent of Bush Junior, and his trio of ultra hawkish advisers, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice. Apart from the regressive policies of the Bush team, the worlds attention in matters of war and peace has turned from major conventional wars to what are often called new forms of warfare: civil wars, ethnic uprisings or ethnic cleansing, transnational ethnic armed conflicts, border wars, and bloody battles for internal control of land or resources conducted by warlords. These, of course, are not actually new forms of warfare. What is new is the lessening of our preoccupation with risks of war among the great powers and major regional powers -- which has given us all an opportunity to pay much more attention to the armed conflicts conducted by civilian and quasicivilian groups. The relatively rapid change in focus, which began about a decade ago, has caught the world almost entirely unprepared in two different but related ways: morally, there is no consensus about which of the new wars are just, and whether the use of armed force by the international community to stop such wars, or to defend one side in them, is just; and practically, there are few means at the disposal of the international community to prevent the outbreak of such conflicts, or to end them quickly and with little loss of life.

Forsberg, page 3 Moral Ambivalence Regarding New Wars Consider the moral dimension of some widely reported new wars of the last decade: Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kashmir (on-going), the Palestinian intifadas, and East Timor. In all of these cases, there has naturally been sympathy for the apparent underdog, or the inhabitants of what might be called an occupied territory. Thus, there was widespread condemnation of the mass murders and other forms of ethnic cleaning by the Serbs and the Milosevic government in Bosnia and Kosovo, and universal condemnation of the vast, awful genocide in Rwanda. In the cases of Chechnya, Kashmir, the occupied Palestinian territories, East Timor, there has been widespread criticism of the occupying governments -- Russian, India, Israel, and Indonesia, respectively. Yet in virtually all these cases, widspread moral beliefs about the use of armed force have been mixed. The evidence for this lies in the tremendous confusion, uncertainty and ambivalence regarding what should be done by the international community to prevent or end the bloodshed. During the period when the Old War Paradigm predominated, the only widely supported use of armed force was for the defense of one country against armed aggression aimed at seizing territory or sovereignty, generally in the form of a cross-border attack, by another country. The use of armed force by subnational groups within states was often viewed as justified by people on the left, who treated national wars of liberation as just wars. But when mainstream analysts and governments might have considered foreign involvement, they did not even raise the subject, because internal wars were considered to lie within the jurisdiction of the prevailing government and not subject to international intervention, particularly by military means. Since the end of the Cold War, a new standard for international intervention has been emerging. This standard is based on two principles: first, the international community should treat the security of individual human beings -- human security -- as a value that is as inviolable as, and in some cases takes precedence over, state sovereignty. And second, the international community should support strivings for human rights, civil liberties, and even self-determination among oppressed minorities. Relative to the older standard that the only just use of armed force was defense, the emerging standard might be described, at least in some cases, as still supporting the use of armed force for strictly defensive purposes, but in a different legal and physical context -that is, to protect individuals exercising internationally recognized human rights from actual or potential violence by their own governments. While the idea of supporting human security, human rights, and self-determination has become much more prominent in the conduct of international affairs and in public policy proposals and debates in the last decade, there is still a great deal of ambivalence or reluctance to advocate the interventionary use of foreign armed force in internal armed conflicts, for many reasons. Sending foreign troops into an on-going civil war for the purpose of ending it generally means favoring one side over another in what may be a highly ambiguous conflict; it invites and risks permanent occupation; it poses a great risk of increasing rather than reducing the bloodshed, including deaths and injuries of innocent civilians on all sides; it is likely to involve deaths and injuries to the innocent intervening forces; and it requires either shared international supervision, which is complicated and difficult to achieve and maintain, or else a predominant nation-state leader, which will be suspect in its motives and later actions. These downsides of foreign military intervention in the internal affairs of other nations are not new. They have been true all along. The difference now is that the agenda of the international community, with respect to protecting human rights and promoting civil liberties, is much more ambitious than it was during the Cold War; and this has created new pressure for humanitarian military interventions. Among the seven new war examples I mentioned earlier, only two -- Kosovo and East Timor

Forsberg, page 4 -- actually generated an armed international response; and of those two, only the rapid, multinational military intervention in East Timor, led by Australia, was widely considered to be a sufficient success to be a good precedent for potential future action. The US bombing of Belgrade and other parts of Serbia as a means of forcing Milosevic to stop expelling and terrorizing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo was widely considered to be an excessively destructive military means of achieving a worthwhile political goal. By comparison, foreign military intervention on the ground would undoubtedly have caused many more casualties among the intervening forces, but fewer casualties among innocent Serb civilians. The cases of Chechnya and Kashmir differ from the others because both regions have long been internationally recognized as parts of existing nation states; and while the international community may sympathize with their striving for independence from an ethnically different parent state, the survival interests of all nation states -- and therefore international law itself -unambiguously oppose armed secession. In the cases of Bosnia and Rwanda -- one already a recognized new state, the other not having secession at stake -- the international community sat by passively and watched the ruling groups commit genocide without intervening to end it. The international community has also failed to act decisively in any way to resolve the bloody Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even after the major international Arab-Israeli conflict ended when Jordan joined Egypt in making peace with Israel. The UN has also failed to militarily protect innocent Palestinian civilians, who have for years suffered harsh reprisals and sometimes death at the hands of the Israeli army in return for the rock-throwing, suicide bombers, and occasional assassinations conducted by a minority of Palestinians; and it has failed to intervene militarily to protect innocent Israelis harmed by that minority. In some of these cases, the practical obstacles to international military intervention, rather than moral ambivalence or opposition, may have been decisive. Foreign intervention in Chechnya is unthinkable, except at the invitation of Russia, because the province of Chechnya is entirely surrounded by Russia territory. This geographic fact also makes the goal of complete secession extremely unlikely ever to be achieved. Instead, some form of home rule is likely to be worked out eventually. Kashmir, lying on the northern border between India and Pakistan, is also physcially inaccessible to foreign intervening forces. In the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Palestinians, however, the lack of international military intervention to prevent the use of deadly force by the government in power against innocent, unarmed civilians seems to have been due primarily not to practical obstacles but to a lack of willingness on the part of the international community to take on the full responsibility for ending the conflict and maintaining a subsequent armed presence for as long as it took to establish representative, viable civilian governments. The difficulty of doing this is well illustrated in Kosovo, where nearly four years after the US bombing ended and Serbian troops left, Kosovo still does not have an independent government but is being run by the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK). On 10 June 1999, the UN Security Council (Res. 1244) asked the Secretary-General create an interim civilian administration in Kosovo under which its people could progressively enjoy substantial autonomy (www.unmikonline.org/intro.htm). Today, according to the UNMIK web site, the mission is still working closely with Kosovo's leaders and people to perform the the whole spectrum of essential administrative functions and services covering such areas as health and education, banking and finance, post and telecommunications, and law and order. Ethnic Serbs and Albanians remain deeply divided on the future of Kosovo, that is, whether it will remain independent or re-enter a federation with Serbia; and there is still sporadic armed violence

Forsberg, page 5 between the two ethnic groups. Despite the lack of fully parallel features, the military interventions in Kosovo and East Timor, following the earlier failures to intervene in Bosnia and Rwanda, illustrate what I believe is growing international support for the view that that if acts of genocide are being conducted by an ethnic group or a government, it is morally justified and, indeed, necessary for the international community to attempt to intervene militarily to end the genocide and then to support political changes that reduce the risk that genocide will resume when international armed forces withdraw. For the purposes of preventing or ending repression of human rights, torture, slavery, and killings on a scale well below that of genocide, however, there is, I think, not much more international support for international military intervention today than there was during the Cold War. The case of East Timor does suggest, however, is a willingness to use armed force to support and protect a legitimate government from disabling armed violence as long as the nature of the foreign military intervention needed to achieve this goal is small scale and brief, and likely to involve little loss of innocent life on the part of either the intervening force or non-combatants on the ground. Evolving Institutions for War Prevention The kinds of international institutions needed to prevent war, or to end it quickly if it starts, are quite different in the cases of old and new wars. The main means of preventing old wars of cross-border military aggression are deterrence, defense, and the establishment of strong international norms against such uses of armed force. The UN Charter and the mutual defense alliances permitted under the Charter reinforced norms against international military aggression which had been growing throughout the century before World War II. The process of decolonialization, which took place from the late 1940s through the late 1970s, further strengthened the view that there was no legitimate role for unilateral cross-border uses of armed force. Soviet President Gorbachev hammered the last nail in the coffin of wars of empire in December 1988, when he announed at the UN that the Soviet Union would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and, if requested to do so, from Eastern Europe. The war-prevention concept which lies at the heart of the UN is a very old collective security idea: smaller, weaker countries will be protected against potential military aggression and absorption on the part of larger, stronger ones by a commitment for all other countries to come to the aid of any country that is attacked. A shared commitment to collective security is meant to supplement national defense measures and successfully deter aggression by making clear that any armed aggression will ultimately fail. Nearly all of the practical war-prevention machinery developed by nations from 1945 to 1990 was aimed at preventing international aggression. In addition to the UN itself, the various military alliances, and the systems of national defense, this machinery included a wide array of arms control, disarmament, and confidence-building measures which were developed starting in the 1950s and incorporated in treaties and agreements over the next five decades. During that same period, virtually none of the international means established to prevent war were tailored to preventing the new forms of armed conflict. Such means are only beginning to be developed now, through trial and error. They are most visible in the working of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. They involve, in the first instance, measures that are intended to help prevent internal conflicts from escalating into armed conflict. They include special measures and diplomatic intervention to protect minority rights, to strengthen democratic institutions, and to end organized crime and government corruption. Then there are means of building bridges and multi-ethnic institutions. Where ethnic conflicts coincide with national borders, there are a variety of military confidence building measures, to decrease fears of armed attack and increase confidence in the commitment to peace on both sides.

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Similar democracy- and nonviolence-building efforts are under way on a lesser scale in Africa under the auspices of the UN, the European Union, and the OSCE, and in Latin America under the auspices of the Organization of American States. What is notably absent from the very wide array of constructive measures being supported by many governments to prevent the outbreak of armed conflict is any agreement, or even a systematic dialogue, on the conditions under which the international community should be prepared to use armed force as the measure of last resort to prevent or end new wars. Each case of imminent or actual armed conflict that catches the attention of the international community, either globally or regionally, is addressed on an ad hoc basis, with arguments for and against international military involvement covering a range of issues: how bad is the bloodshed, what are people fighting over, what people or countries are affected outside the direct area of fighting, is one side or the other clearly in the right, what form might military intervention take, how much would it cost financially and in human lives, who would pay, who would do the intervening, how long would it last, what would be the expected outcome, is it risky, is is worth it. This kind of discussion is not a bad thing; but having such discussion at the last minute, on an ad hoc basis is a bad thing. It is likely to result in more partisan argumentation, in action that is too little too late, and in inadequate development of non-military means of preventing and ending war. The organized armed conflicts that have occurred since 1990 and those that are under way today -- such as the terrible violence in Colombia -- provide a good basis for a broader and more abstract discussion of humanitarian military intervention: when should it happen, who should do it and pay for it, with what goals and expected outcomes, what fall-back positions. A thorough public and inter-governmental debate on legitimate humanitarian uses of armed force is not likely to result in a highly elaborated body of binding international law. One reason is that the goals and expectations of the international community are likely to keep evolving over the course of the next century, as more and more countries establish democratic institutions and recognize and attempt to guarantee the full panoply of human rights. The more widespread are democratic institutions and human rights, the higher our standards are likely to be regarding violations that might warrant international intervention. Another reason we cannot expect too much from a thorough discussion of the conditions for humanitarian intervention is that there will always be risks of increasing rather than reducing the bloodshed in any given situation, and there will always be non-military options that need to be tried and exhausted first. So governments will not want to bind themselves too tightly to a set of guidelines that require military action, nor pretend to be able to predict the consequences of such action. It does seem desirable, however, for the international community to go so far as to recognize that in cases of genocide, there should be an obligation on the UN or comparable (universal membership) regional security organization like the OSCE to intervene militarily if other means of preventing or ending the conflict have failed. The concept of humanitarian intervention has become part of the justifying framework for national armed forces in the Western world, now that there is so little prospective need for defense against international aggression. But the failures to intervene to stop genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda show that the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention has outpaced the reality -- that is, that supposedly humanitarian interventions are undertaken when national interests of the intervenors are at stake and not otherwise.

Forsberg, page 7 By developing and adopting a legally-binding consistent response to genocide, where there is relatively strong global consensus that the use of armed force as a last resort is just, the international community would help deter genocide, be ready to intervene quickly to stop it if it occurs, and deprive governments of countries with large armed forces, like the United States, of a fig leaf with which they may try to cover partisan, unilateral military interventions. Conclusion The very long-term pattern of change in moral values regarding legitimate uses of armed force -rejecting war as an instrument of political or economic gain and limiting the just use of armed force to defense against those who have not yet rejected war as an instrument of gain -- seems likely to lead, sooner or later, to the end of most if not all outbreaks of war. Since the end of the Cold War this long-term trend has been diverted by the increasingly ambitious aim of international politics to support human rights and civil liberties wherever they are being oppressed around the world. In some sense, there is growing pressure to use armed force to advance these goals. Not surprisingly and fortunately, the international community (excepting Bush and company) has not rushed to try to promote democracy and human rights through war. What is less fortunate is that the international community has not yet begun to develop any standard, goals, or threshold for humanitarian uses of armed force or multilateral military intervention to end long-standing internal armed conflicts. Strengthening not only non-military means of preventing and ending internal conflicts, but also criteria and means for multilateral military action to prevent or end genocide is consistent with the long-term trend toward ending the morally accepted use of armed force for any purpose except defense. It is also likely to help move the world toward the abolition of war, by significantly obstructing partisan great power military intervention in the guise of humanitain action.