sovereignity: nations vs states

wrote this as a response to an email from my former debate partner who is now working as a coach for a debate team at a school in inner-city chicago. she asked my opinion on the resolution her students have been asked to debate this semester:

Resolved: The United Nations’ obligation to protect global human rights ought to be valued above its obligation to respect national sovereignty.

Hey Lynx,

Can I send you my team’s negative case for this semester’s UN resolution? My co-coach wote it. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. I think it’s too long- one of the contentions needs to go.

This is the resolution:
Resolved: The United Nations’ obligation to protect global human rights ought to be valued above its obligation to respect national sovereignty.

NEGATIVE

Sovereignty and human rights are linked in complex, contradictory ways. Sovereignty can serve as a shield and pretext to enable a government to engage in abusive behavior toward its own citizenry. At the same time, however, it can also protect a progressive government that is committed to promoting the economic, social, and cultural well-bring of its people against a geopolitically motivated intervention that seeks ti exert pressure on a weaker state.
(www.globalpolicy.org)

Because I agree with the above statements I negate the resolution.

I am not going to argue that human rights are not important, or that sovereignty should be valued above human rights. I am going to argue that the UN’s obligation to protect human rights should not be valued OVER its protection of national sovereignty. The UN Charter set forth a balance between respecting the sovereignty, equality, and independence of nations as well as respecting human rights. I negate the resolution because this balance should continue.

Value: Equality. My value is equality because before any issue is considered among people, among nations, or in international organizations people must be respected as equal and nations must be respected as equal. If this does not occur then the issue will never be dealt with in a just or fair manner. Equality of humans and countries should be pursued.

Thesis: Because of the power structure of the UN, the inconsistent enforcement of human rights by the UN, and the cultural variance of human rights, the UN must value sovereignty at equally as human rights in order that all people and nations are treated equally.

Contention I: The very structure of the UN causes the application of protection of human rights to be applied unequally and unfairly.

Claim: The sovereignty of nations must be equally valued because in the current structure of the Security Council powerful nations are able to control it for their own interest.

Evidence: (wikipedia)
The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (who are all nuclear powers) have created an exclusive nuclear club whose powers are unchecked. The lack of true international representation in the United Nations Security Council, as exists in the General Assembly, has led to accusations that the UNSC only addresses the strategic interests and political motives of the permanent members, especially in humanitarian interventions. For example, take the eagerness to protect oil-rich Kuwaitis in 1991 compared to the lack of enthusiasm to protect resource-poor Rwandans
in 1994[5]

The Security Council’s policy of one veto from any of the “Big Five”can halt any possible action the Council may take. One nation’s objection, rather than the opinions of a majority of nations, may cripple any possible UN armed or diplomatic response to a crisis. For instance, “Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members.”[7];

Impact: Because of the current structure of the UN, specifically the Security Council it is imperative that sovereignty is equally valued because more powerful nations are able to control the actions of the UN in their interest.

Contention II: Human rights are enforced unequally and inconsistently

Claim: The enforcement and protection of human rights are influenced by the political and economic interests of powerful countries

Evidence: The field of human rights has always been one of the most problematic elements of the U.N. system in terms of the discrepancies between rhetoric and practice; compliance remains incomplete and enforcement remains inconsistent at best.[5] It is painfully clear that many gaps still remain in the protective framework that human rights instruments are intended to provide. (Decolonizing Law: Identity Politics, Human Rights, and the United Nations Harvard Human Rights Journal)The UN and its security council members are quick to point to “rogue” nations and their building of nuclear weapons such as North Korea and Iran. Yet the US is steadfast in defending its absence of writ of habeas corpus and other defendants rights in Guatanamo Bay. The UN has repeatedly drug its feet on the human rights abuses in Sudan. There was a lack of national interest in intervening in Rwanda, and in Chechnya the risks were too high in dealing with Russia. Sanctions were placed on the people of Iraq during the 90s due to human rights abuses by the
Hussein government, yet nothing is done about the American death penalty and its inconsistent application.

Impact: If sovereignty is valued as much as human rights then powerful governments would be forced to support human rights equally, instead of just when it benefits their interests. If sovereignty is valued then large powerful countries would not be able to bully smaller weaker nations.

Contention III: Cultural definitions of human rights vary

Claim: It is important to equally value sovereignty with human rights because different cultures may value rights differently than others.

Evidence : The concept of human rights as embraced by the UN is one that is founded in an American view of natural rights, one taken from John Locke. Philosophers and thinkers from varying backgrounds and schools of thought have challenged the American view of human rights. It has been denied by utilitarianism, which implies one can sacrifice individuals to achieve the greatest good of the greatest number of people or maximum of happiness. The idea of human
rights has been attacked by socialists. Communitarians generally see the idea as egocentric, egotistic, and divisive. Human rights have also been charged as undemocratic when claims to individual rights conflict with the will of the majority. Some cultural anthropologists charge that human rights is a western ideal and that imposing it on others is cultural imperialism. (Universality of the concept of human rights around the world Louis Henkin )

Impact: If sovereignty and the equality of nations is not respected then, people’s culture and values are not respected which would be contradictory to human rights. It is essential that sovereignty is equally respected as human rights so that all cultures and people are equal.

- rachel

———————————–

rachel,

i think contentions 1 and 2 are your best ones, contention 3 may be true but won’t win many points with western judges who tend to see human rights as universal and arising as man’s birthright from god (ie “endowed by their creator with certain inaliable rights”).

by the way,  this isnot an “american” conception as your co-coach wrote, it arises out of French enlightenment thought, which was forcibly spread across western europe by napoleon, and of which many of the US’s founding fathers (noticeably jefferson) were adherents.  so it is a philosophy that was powerful and influential in north america but which is by no means American in origin.

this gets into the issue of where do human rights originate from? if they are universal and god-given then they are percieved as being much more potent, powerful, and worth enforcing then if they arise out of mere customs.  if they vary with local customs then they must arise from those customs, after all, and in that case it is not the place of a global institution like the UN to enforce or acknowledge them at all!  clearly this contradicts the history and practice of the un itself, and would require a major re-thinking of it as an institution.  the un originates, after all, in the assertion by the ‘great powers’ after WWII that there are universal principles which all humans hold in common and which require a global institution to safeguard them.  If no such universals exist then the UN should not exist either, so your point three is actually an argument for the abolition of the UN.

of course, a cynic like me might argue that the origin of the un had less to do with establishing universal norms then it had to do with setting up a formal multilateral structure to negotiate conflicts between the major imperialist powers and preserve their continued influence against the rising tide of anti-imperialist nationalist revolutions that would have otherwise crushed euro-american global hegemony.  that’s why france has a seat on the security council even though in modern global politics france is really irrelevant – it is not a great power and haven’t been since it lost all its colonies.  in this view the main function of the un was to oversee the transition from a world order based on imperialism to one based on neo-imperialism; and it is thus fundamentally based on the assertion of sovereignty for a few “great powers” (britain, france, the us, the former ussr) at the expense of everyone else.

by the way – an alternate universal origin for human rights,  if you don’t want to involve deity and the french enlightenment, is that they are part of our evolutionary heritage and arise inevitably from the fact that we are by nature social beings.   i wrote a term paper on the topic, “anarchism in human rights”, which is up in the library on my website.  by bypassing the ‘god-given’ you can avoid the contradiction that – while claiming to be universal – religions are the ultimate embodiment of sectarianism.

a fourth contention for the negative is that the UN is not a world government, it is a council of independent, sovereign nation-states, each of which is VERY much interested in maintaining its own sovereignty, so any action taken by those nation-states under the banner of the un that in any way weakens the tradition and practice of sovereignty is in fact an attack on all of them.

there are internal contradictions of course:
- third-world nations whose sovereignty has traditionally not been respected have in fact used this tool (while potentially undermines their sovereignty further) as a forum to demand their sovereignty be respected!
- stateless nations (ie indigenous nations) have taken to using the un as a forum to demand that they be given sovereignty (which is perceived by the nation-states as an attack on their own sovereignty of course)
- and superpowers like the US, the USSR while it was around, and now russia and the EU member states, have used it as a tool to assert their own sovereignty and national interests at the expense of smaller less powerful nations.

all of this is, of course, tied up in the definition of sovereignty as the power of a government to control its own territory.  the definition is simple, but there are lots of hidden implications:
- what about cases where multiple nations and/or states claim the same territory?  (taiwan vs china, the US and canada vs indigenous nations, britain vs spain over gibralter, etc)
- does ‘controlling its own territory’ mean the right to control everything that affects the interests of its own territory?  ie – is the Monroe doctrine a facet of US sovereignty?  US nationalist s would say yes because it arises out of the desire by the us to ensure that no european-controlled state capable of challenging US hegemony would arise in the western hemisphere and to ensure easy access by US economic forces to the resources and labor of central and south america.

–>  if we accept such an argument, what about the sovereignty of central and south american nations?   or of nations in the US’ (or the UK / USSR / EU ’s) other “sphere’s of influence”?  conflicts over who would be the dominating hegemonic power in east asia was the driving force behind US / Japanese conflict in WWII after all and is the main threat to US/ Chinese relationships today.  Likewise, Russia is not at all happy about the fact that several of the former USSR republics have now joined the EU, effectively moving the boundary of “western europe” east and closer to their borders – and cutting off markets that have been in Russia’s economic sphere of influence for centuries.  as with the US and “latin” america, Russia sees any attacks on its influence in these areas as an attack on its sovereignty, but (as you can imagine) the Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Czechs, etc have a *very* different view of things.

– >Also, what about the right/responsibility of governments to defend the economic interests / property rights of “their” corporations when those corporations operate in foreign countries?  The US has repeatedly overthrown foreign governments that had the audacity to stand up to american corporations.  from the right wing US nationalist point of view this is a justifiable defense of “american interests” and an essential element of defending US sovereignty, while for the people whose governments were overthrown and replaced with fascist dictatorships beholden to Washington, things look a bit different.

–> and of course, if we accept that security is a zero-sum game as most scholars of so-called “high politics” argue (ie that the “security” of any given state is dependant on its rivals insecurity), then the sovereignty of any state is automatically dependant on the denial of sovereignty to others.  this explains the hypocrisy of the US’s position on nukes vs north korea, iran, etc.  we have them and they don’t so we feel secure and our sovereignty is protected because we become functionally un-attackable in the terms of conventional warfare.  that’s why Statists are so flipped out over “terrorism” right now – because it presents a means for non-state entities to wage warfare directly against states, opening up a whole new realm of insecurities now that traditional state vs. state warfare has been all but eliminated by the mutual assured destruction of the nuclear age.

all of this is critical because the entire “damages sovereignty” element of the resolution hinges on which side of this secondary debate you take.  are you an advocate of the sovereignty of big powers or of universal self-determination that affords small nations the same rights?  what about stateless nations like the basque, galicians, catalans, scots, welsh, cherokee, hopi, bantu, hutu, tutsi, etc?  don’t they have the right to sovereignty?

which leads to an entirely separate line of argumentation: that the entire concept of “national sovereignty’s unworkable in the real world and that *NO* STATE is really interested in “sovereignty” in its fullest terms because if we were to really recognize sovereignty for all nations then virtually all of the worlds existing states would have to be dissolved because with a very very few exceptions they are all based on the denial of sovereignty to some group in order to assert the sovereignty of another.  the real issue is power – the ‘monopoly on coercive force within a given territory’ that is the traditional definition of the State.  in this view the interests of nations and the interests of states become diametrically opposed and the assertion of sovereignty and of human rights could potentially become synonymous because (of course) States are the main violators of human rights everywhere and a meaningful assertion of sovereignty for nations would have to begin with the removal of all state power.

since the un is, of course, a council of states, the idea that the un could ever ‘defend’ human rights or respect sovereignty thus becomes nonsensical.  this conveniently dovetails with your contention 2.

you could get very, very deep on this one. much deeper then most of your judges are willing to go i’m sure.

also: i *love* wikipedia and have even written several articles for it.  but the very fact that people like me can and do write for it means that in the eyes of most academics it is not a “legitimate” source of information, so i wouldn’t cite it.  Instead, check who the wikipedia article is citing, hunt down the original articles, and cite those.

I’m gonna go post this on my blog, hope its helpful,
lynx

Posted: February 28th, 2007 under politrix.
Comments: none