Legitimacy and Sustainability

Becks at Unfogged reads Heads in the Sand and asks questions:

So I've been reading Heads In The Sand by one Matthew Yglesias (in stores now!) and a lot of the book is about the liberal case for intervention in places like Bosnia, which got me thinking: why hasn't the case been made for the UN invading Myanmar? If there's one place where I think people would be greeting us with cheers and flowers in the street as liberators, that would be it. It might not be genocide, per se, but the evil going on there rises to that level.

Realistically, you're not going to see a forceful U.N. intervention in Burma because no country capable of mounting such an operation (basically the U.S. and maybe Britain and France) would want to mount one, while Russia and China (and probably even post-colonial democracies like India) would be opposed to anyone mounting one, and democratic countries would be secretly glad that Russia and China would block a move like this because they could blame inaction on Russia and China (or, like Fred Hiatt, toss blame vaguely in the direction of "the U.N.") for a domestic audience even though they wouldn't want to step in themselves.

That said, if you could sort of bracket the logistics/will/capabilities issues, with any proposed humanitarian military intervention I've come to think that we need to think seriously about two issues legitimacy and sustainability. We really might be greeted by the Burmese as liberators. But then again, many Iraqis actually did greet us as liberators. The trouble is what happens the day after you're greeted as a liberator. An occupying foreign power is naturally going to come to be viewed with suspicion by the occupied. This is in many ways an intrinsic problem, but it can be ameliorated a lot by legitimacy -- especially the kind of legitimacy you get from the U.N. where precisely because the UNSC decision-making process is cumbersome you can be ensured that a UNSC authorization reflects a broad international consensus about the need to do something or other rather than the narrow national interest of the lead country.

The other thing is sustainability. The international system needs to have some kind of recognized rules of the road. "The United States topples foreign regimes when we decide their government is bad" isn't a reasonable proposal for us to ask people in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Teheran, Brasilia, or anywhere else to live by. By "any large country topples any foreign regime when it decides their government is bad" is a terrible rule that would lead to a lot of destructive conflict of various sorts. At the end of the day, great power conflict -- even if it "only" takes the form of cold war-style standoffs -- will do immense humanitarian damage to the world and avoiding it should be a very high priority. Does that mean we should do nothing? No, it doesn't, it means American officials (and, indeed, civil society figures) should keep pushing the international community to move to a world where something like the Responsibility to Protect has some force in the real world. But it has to be done in a reasonable consensual way that tries to stitch together America and its traditional allies with new emerging powers in various regions. Otherwise, even if some good is done in a particular case, you're going to be on an unsustainable path of conflict.

[NB: if you have any questions or devastating rebuttals to HITS please email me and I'll respond on the blog]

Photo by Flickr user racoles used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

For what it's worth, I think your concept of what constitutes legitimacy is underdeveloped. The Chinese had no problem intervening in Korea to push back UNSC authorized forces.

And even where an international consensus initially exists, once the bad regime has been trounced and you're left with a messy occupation, the interests of the coalition members are likely to diverge. The tissue paper of UN legitimacy is, in my view, unlikely to hold China and Russia together with the US and UK and India when we decide how Burma's new government is going to be constituted.

Posted by southpaw | May 14, 2008 12:01 PM

Liberal internationalism doesn't work. If you carry it to its logical conclusion (a la Hitchens), you end up having to "liberate" half the planet, which is exactly what Christopher wants to do. I realize neocons and other misguided liberals love to believe that the next Holocaust is always just around the corner and therefore we need to "bomb, bomb, bomb" all the evil in the world. But when you do that you usually just end up killing/displacing/maiming the same set of people you are trying to "liberate."

Posted by jim | May 14, 2008 12:10 PM

As far as I can tell, no one, but no one has actually discussed a possible force-backed intervention in Burma.

Sure, they have discussed the moral necessity of a generalized imagined intervention.

And of course many have already taken the time to attempt to insult anyone who isn't already agreeing with that which no one has opposed as old left coward Quisling anti-Burmese blah blah blahs.

But as far as what anyone is proposing to perhaps do militarily and what the various possible consequences might be -- and "the alternative is too horrible to consider" is NOT a thinking process -- this has not yet been done.

Various people are having pompous and ideological rhetorical eructations about what "must" or "must not" be done, but none of the intervention moralists seem driven enough in their concern for the Burmese to actually think through likely scenarios and possible consequences.

Over and over we apparently have to remind people (who were apparently born in the last segments of superhero movies and who only see the final victory of the hero) that you can actually make a disastrously, murderously bad situation worse.

Let's not forget that the actual aid workers on the ground in Somalia were very, very opposed to Bush Sr's invasion. And rightly so. Not because of ideology or because they lacked the moral fortitude of the intertoobz amphibious landers, but because they thought through the actual scenarios and in that case the military case came up as counterproductive.

Posted by El Cid | May 14, 2008 12:11 PM

its logical conclusion (a la Hitchens)

Whoa, there. Liberal internationalism describes an institutional arrangement. Hitchens has nothing to do with it, and instead is the logical conclusion of a battered flask of Wild Turkey.

Posted by StJoe | May 14, 2008 12:18 PM

Southpaw, not that this completely refutes your point, but it's worth pointing out that the UNSC that authorized the "police action" consisted only of the US, UK, France, and China, represented by the KMT government in Taiwan. The USSR was boycotting the UN at the time.

So a resolution today that was approved by all 5 permanent members (including the PRC and Russia) would probably represent more of an international consensus. That's not to say that such a consensus would never be resisted, or that it is the last word in legitimacy, just that the situation is different today. The UN was only 5 years old then, and there were only 60 members. Today there are 192. Of course, they probably need to add more permanent members to the Security Council to further increase legitimacy.

Posted by Ricky B | May 14, 2008 12:20 PM

My guess is that "jim" probably intended "Liberal Interventionism", although there are any number of phrases to describe the idea of liberally-backed military interventions for humanitarian or legalistic purposes.

Posted by El Cid | May 14, 2008 12:24 PM

Matt, I thought I'd let you know that in Google Reader, you get zero indication that there's any content to this post after "asks questions:" (well, there's the semicolon, but that's somewhat subtle). If you're purposefully publishing shortened entries, this seems like the sort of thing you might wish to know.

Posted by Justin | May 14, 2008 12:41 PM

Matt, I thought I'd let you know that in Google Reader, you get zero indication that there's any content to this post after "asks questions:" (well, there's the semicolon, but that's somewhat subtle). If you're purposefully publishing shortened entries, this seems like the sort of thing you might wish to know.

Posted by Justin | May 14, 2008 12:43 PM

Matt, I thought I'd let you know that in Google Reader, you get zero indication that there's any content to this post after "asks questions:" (well, there's the semicolon, but that's somewhat subtle). If you're purposefully publishing shortened entries, this seems like the sort of thing you might wish to know.

Posted by Justin | May 14, 2008 12:45 PM

Southpaw,

China was not recognized as a country by the UN at the time, so the Korean war might not be a good example.

As you're most likely aware, the UN specializes with messy occupations, and actually does a fairly good job with them. The international consensus is that new countries should be organized as liberal democracies.

China and Russia did not intervene with UN nation-building in Congo, Sierra Leone, or East Timor, so I'm not sure they would mount much interference on the post-invasion government in Burma. (I realize China's oil and Natural Gas interests, but democracies are just as corruptible as dictatorships, I doubt China would raise too much diplomatic trouble to avoid a couple of million in bribes.)

Posted by David Shor | May 14, 2008 1:00 PM

Perhaps liberal interventionists should just get off their lazy asses and invade the place themselves. It's not like weapons are hard to obtain, and if there's enough popular support to actually mobilize the UN, the supporters would be a formidable force. I for one would gladly pay to ship armchair warriors off to get a little dose of reality.

Posted by togolosh | May 14, 2008 1:05 PM

On the Korea point, we would probably remember that war a lot different if MacArthur didn't get greedy and actually push in China. If we had been clear we had no interest in violating China's territorial sovereignty (even if we didn't recognize Beijing at the time), we could have likely avoided fighting China directly. The CCP, after all, had been fighting either the Japanese or the Guomindang pretty much non-step for about 20 years at that point and would probably have rather focused on internal matters of state-building and consolidating control over China.

In addition, if there was any window whatsoever open to invade Burma fullscale, that window probably closed with the passing of the 1980's. Back then, there was a democratic coalition that had the support of around 70% of Burma's people that wasn't allowed to assume power. Since then, the leaders have been imprisoned or killed and the average Burmese person has no real access to any independent media. In fact, several observers noted that it was likely a BBC viewer half a world away was probably more informed about the monks' protests last year than someone living just a few hours away. This isn't to say the current government has legitimacy, but that much of the Burmese democrats' connection with their people's has likely disappeared since then as they have had no real way to cultivate that relationship since the last fair election in the late 1980's. Just a random fact: both India and newly democratic Thailand were strongly opposed to the current regime for much of the late 1980's and early 1990's, but eventually came around to having to work with them for reasons of realpolitik.

Similarly, the window for any real invasion of Iraq with the intent of overthrowing Hussein probably closed once the Shi'ites who rose up after the first Gulf War were slaughtered. Between the beginning of the genocide against the Kurds and that end point, an invasion would probably have had a higher chance of success (but that chance was probably too small for comfort). Military dictators are often at their weakest domestically in terms of legitimacy and popular support when they invade other countries and start being pushed back (think how little time the military junta in Argentina survived after the Falklands). However, once the sanctions regime had done their damage to Iraqi society and sectarian and ideological divides became even deeper in the 1990's, that narrow window closed.

Sometimes you just have to accept that every course of action has its time and place.

Posted by Reality Man | May 14, 2008 1:11 PM

My guess is that "jim" probably intended "Liberal Interventionism",

Your guess would be wrong.

"Liberal internationalism is a foreign policy doctrine that argues that liberal states should intervene in other sovereign states in order to pursue liberal objectives."

Here, for one.

You could say that liberal internationalism taken to its logical conclusion (as I said) leads to liberal interventionism. Semantics, though.

Posted by jim | May 14, 2008 1:39 PM

Hitchens has nothing to do with it

Hitchens explicitly aligns himself with liberal internationalism. But if you want to restrict the term "liberal internationalism" to "a bunch of ineffective international structures like the UN," then you are right: Hitchens isn't a liberal internationalist in that sense.

Posted by jim | May 14, 2008 1:49 PM

I'd think that this whole idea of 'legitamcy' being conferred by the UN is a bit much. Nobody in Asia, Africa, or South America thinks that the UN confers 'legitamacy'. Nobody on the European continent care about the UN either, the Russians?
The French don't care about the UN, if the French rep on the UNSC voted aye, the French aye vote is what confers 'legitimacy', they don't care what other countries or the UN as a whole thinks. If the French want to intervene somewhere and think they can do it by themselves, they never even bother to go to the UN, no Frenchman, or any other continental European cares a fig for the UN.

There is one demographic that does care about the UN, and in the US that's the 'white people' described in stuffwhitepeoplelike.com. If one wants them on board, one makes sure to go to the UN. Such people also seem to exist in the UK, Canada and the 'Anglosphere' in general, but nowhere else on this planet. In addition their support will be purely moral, such people are definitely underrepresented in the Marines, Marines crawl around in the mud, actually know how to move the physical stuff of the world around rather than symbols, and get dirt under their fingernails, being a Marine is so proletarian and icky.

If one is such a 'white person' as described above, one's desire for UN approval will come from within, though and one won't care about all this. One will also have the slight advantage in that if one is a 'white person' in good standing, the 'white people' won't bail on you at the slightest sign of difficulty like they would if the assembler of the coalition wasn't such a person, though since their support was only moral in the first place, it won't matter too much, but should be taken into account. Since most such interventions generally involve a bit of difficulty, it's better if such people think of the assembler of the coalition as one of them.

If I wanted to think intelligently about all this, I'd figure all these facts about the UN and 'legitimacy' in.

Posted by j mct | May 14, 2008 1:59 PM

jim: I apologize for attempting to clarify your comments for those who do not commonly use the term "liberal internationalism" to specifically refer to Wilsonian theory of interventionism, a use which I might assume is encountered frequently only among the poli-sci and international relations theory crowd, outside the occasional Scoop Jackson fetishist.

But if you like it, go ahead, use it, and the next time I'll leave it to you to explain what you mean by it should someone ask.

With regards to what ideologies Hitchens purportedly aligns himself, that might be an interesting question once he ever deigned to make an actual argument, i.e., not a series of contiguous slurs based on simply asserting the calumny of those who didn't agree with him, and which combined realistic analyses of the likely consequences of one's recommended policies instead of vaguely standing upon the asserted moral superiority of his preferred course.

Posted by El Cid | May 14, 2008 2:02 PM

Given that the question being discussed concerns Yglesias' idea of liberal internationalism as expounded in his book, a dictionary definition is not particularly apt here.

In discussing Yglesias' view Hitchens view really does have nothing to do with it, unless it is illustrating what the view does not advocate.

Posted by jim | May 14, 2008 2:08 PM

El Cid:

No reason to get defensive.

a series of contiguous slurs based on simply asserting the calumny of those who didn't agree with him

That's a decent summary of Hitchens. Would have been better if you had worked the phrase "alcohol soaked" in there, though.

Posted by jim | May 14, 2008 2:13 PM

Well said, Matt and reasonable and very intelligent. I think publishing the book has given you new confidence. I think it's important to just bring up the issue of Burma and get it out there -- the blogosphere has been lax on this score.

Posted by Garuda | May 14, 2008 2:20 PM

Matt, you go to war with the government you have.

Posted by Bengt Larsson | May 14, 2008 2:39 PM

Burma doesn't have any ethnic issues with violent components to them that might burst forth if the junta's military no longer suppressed them, does it? We all fully understand the internal dynamics of that country and know exactly what effects upsetting the applecart will have, don't we?

I think I can state unequivocally that we've learned our lessons from Iraq.

Posted by NGO worker | May 14, 2008 5:12 PM

I agree with building and strengthening international law and ultimately establishing a world government that can consistently enforce international law, or world peace. So far, the UN is flawed but it's the best we've got. When the world is developed enough to support a real world government, it will. Until then, illegal vigilante action by America, NATO, or a league of busy-body democracies is silly and will usually be counter-productive, as the Clinton interventions were ultimately counter-productive inasmuch as they led to the Bush interventions that shattered international law and set back prgress towards world peace by decades. Shorter version: Myanmar is not our problem or our business.

Posted by Gary Sugar | May 14, 2008 5:20 PM

> Burma doesn't have any ethnic issues with violent
> components to them that might burst forth if the
> junta's military no longer suppressed them, does
> it? We all fully understand the internal dynamics
> of that country and know exactly what effects
> upsetting the applecart will have, don't we?

Let's see: during the 1920s and 1930s there were seven major factions in (then) Burma, primarily but not entirely ethnically-grouped, fighting to eject the British. Except that they took so much time off from the revolution to fight each other that they British were able to keep the lid on them all.

Then the Japanese invaded. The seven groups agreed to unite under British (and later, joint British/American) command to fight the Japanese. I will leave it to you to guess what happened...

> Back then, there was a democratic coalition
> that had the support of around 70% of Burma's
> people that wasn't allowed to assume power.
> Since then, the leaders have been imprisoned or
> killed and the average Burmese person has no
> real access to any independent media. In fact,
> several observers noted that it was likely a BBC
> viewer half a world away was probably more
> informed about the monks' protests last year
> than someone living just a few hours away.

I ran that by my two acquaintances who have lived/worked in Myanmar over the last 3 years and they did not agree with you. As splintered, rural, and TV-less as Myanmar may be the general population has a very good idea what is going on. There just isn't much they can do about it, and their day-to-day lives are not really that bad by 3rd world standards. The protest of the monks came very close to overturning the government, but there weren't enough people who were unhappy enough to risk death to reach the flash point. But then again, if they had: what would have come next? A return to the ethnic/factional strife of the 1930s?

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | May 14, 2008 10:32 PM

Cranky, I sure hope your friends are right about that, meaning there is a slim glimmer of hope for the Burmese people. That's the thing about the weirder, more paranoid regimes: it's so hard to figure out what is ever going on in them.

"Burma doesn't have any ethnic issues with violent components to them that might burst forth if the junta's military no longer suppressed them, does it?"

In addition to Cranky's point, the government has also been suppressing the Karen people, a mostly Christian ethnic group whose members in general don't seem to happy about being ruled by the current junta. Some observers believe the regime is committing genocide, but it's hard to gather reliable information on that score.

Posted by Reality Man | May 15, 2008 12:06 AM

Matt: "[NB: if you have any questions or devastating rebuttals to HITS please email me and I'll respond on the blog]"

OH, REALLY!?

Emailing you my two questions on IRAN RIGHT NOW!

Here they are direct from the email sent 1:14 AM, Thursday.

"Matt claims he will respond to email questions about his book on his blog

Let's put that to the test!

"[NB: if you have any questions or devastating rebuttals to HITS please email me and I'll respond on the blog]"

- Matthew Yglesias, 14 May 2008 11:41 am

Okaaaaayyyy...

Question 1:

Do you believe that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, i.e., not a nuclear energy program, but a program to develop and deploy actual nuclear weapons, a program sanctioned at the highest levels of the Iranian government?

Question 2:

If it is established that IN FACT Iran does indeed HAVE such a program, do you believe that the use of military force by the United States to destroy such a program, whether or not under UN resolution authorization, would be an effective and correct approach to dealing with the issue?

Feel free to elaborate in a more substantive post, but I'd like at least a "yes" or "no" answer to both questions before any elaboration.

"I don't know" is also an acceptable answer.

Bullshit is not."

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | May 15, 2008 4:17 AM

Thanks, Cranky and RM, for educating where I was being sarcastic (I have an annoying tendency to ask rhetorical questions when I'm irked).

I don't mind liberal internationalism per se, but I do mind this seemingly overwhelming tendency to lump people in a geographic area together. All Burmese are by definition Burmese, therefore they are all alike. No one thinks that about their own country or even their own town.

Posted by NGO worker | May 15, 2008 11:20 AM

Two land wars in Asia? Inconceivable!

Posted by Slappy McButterpants | May 15, 2008 1:07 PM

Good to see that Mr. Yglesias has learned much from his backing of the illegal invasion of Iraq. Now, besides the non-existent WMD's, didn't we go into that sovereign country as well for "humanitarian purposes"?

Mr. Yglesias would be better off not giving any credence to a non-issue like invading Burma to help out its' people. The international community should do something, but it isn't the United States job to police the world.

Posted by Sherman | May 15, 2008 5:48 PM

I think that Jim's comments make a lot of sense. Indeed, his point even makes sense applied to the real Holocaust. If the US and UK had invaded Germany prior to the invasion of Poland, do you think that they could have successfully occupied that country? I doubt it. Germany would have been Iraq sixty years early. What made the successful occupation of Germany in 1945-today possible was the clear legitimacy of responding to the invasion of Poland, France, and the rest of Europe. If Saddam had in 1990 invaded Kuwait, and then Saudi Arabia and Jordan, then a full scale retaliation that included occupying Iraq might have worked.

Liberal internationalism doesn't work. If you carry it to its logical conclusion (a la Hitchens), you end up having to "liberate" half the planet, which is exactly what Christopher wants to do. I realize neocons and other misguided liberals love to believe that the next Holocaust is always just around the corner and therefore we need to "bomb, bomb, bomb" all the evil in the world. But when you do that you usually just end up killing/displacing/maiming the same set of people you are trying to "liberate."

Posted by jim | May 14, 2008 12:10 PM

Posted by mjames1 | May 16, 2008 11:21 AM