Intervention and State Failure

...Sometimes the cause is the colonial legacy...

...Once the decision is taken to introduce humanitarian aid into a war zone, backed up with peacekeepers to aid in its delivery, the aid itself becomes a focus of combat, and its provision even to unarmed combatants—becomes a way not to damp down the fighting but to keep it going...

...The next obvious candidate for treatment is Afghanistan...

...Such cease-fires rarely hold...

...It is also the precondition for any kind of human rights observance...

...As the tax revenue base shrinks, ruling elites lose their capacity to buy off or conciliate marginal regions or minorities...

...These organizations transformed human rights into the most powerful critique of the non-interference rule in postwar state relations...

...The Chinese occupation of Tibet goes unsanctioned...

...UN bodies, such as the Human Rights Commission, for example, had no power to investigate member states, and after the successful passage of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1948, no formal human rights conventions were ratified until the 1970s...

...To understand how the human rights situation has changed, we need to go back to the end of the Second World War...

...Nothing enfeebled American policy more in the 1990s than the refusal to notice that untended human rights and humanitarian crises have a way of becoming national security threats...

...Universal commitments, even if only rhetorical, can be embarrassing...

...He would like to thank many colleagues at the Kennedy School of Government, especially Monica Toft and Robert Rotberg, for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this essay...

...In Bosnia, intervention prevented the full realization of Serbian war aims, but it did not prevent the deaths of more than three hundred thousand people and the expulsion of nearly a million from their homes...

...They create what Myron Weiner memorably called "bad neighborhoods...

...A crisis of order in a single state risks creating "bad neighborhoods" in a whole region...

...There is no such possibility...

...This process is still not completed...

...Scholars remain divided as to whether state failure is to be blamed on the colonial legacy or on what successor regimes did with that legacy...

...From 1945 until the end of the cold war, human rights remained subordinate to state sovereignty within the framework of the United Nations Charter...

...When these minorities pass from disobedience to rebellion, the elites lack the resources to quell revolts...

...The UN Charter's bias against intervention reflects the chapter of European history the drafting powers believed they had been lucky to escape...

...As the weakening government struggles to regain control, it engages in more and more egregious attempts to terrorize the population into obedience, and rebel groups use more and more drastic forms of counterterror to demoralize government forces...

...Finally, and most important, many failed or fail118 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 ing states are poor and have suffered from the steadily more adverse terms of trade in a globalized economy...

...In the Balkans, as well as west, central, and southwestern Africa, the chief prerequisite for the creation of a basic rights regime for ordinary people is the re-creation of a stable national state capable of giving orders and seeing them carried out throughout the territory, a state with a classic Weberian monopoly on the legitimate means of force...

...MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University...

...Armed ethnic groups, bandits, and guerilla forces take over, using violence to secure the forced allegiance of the local population and to extract the remaining surplus...

...Triumphant apologists for globalization are usually also prophets of an age beyond sovereignty...

...Turkey, for example, discovered that it could not hope to gain entry to the EU unless it abolished the death penalty...

...THIS SURVEY OF what has happened to the interaction between sovereignty and human rights since 1945, and how the theory and practice of humanitarian intervention has developed in response to the epidemic of state failure since the end of the cold war, necessarily ends with skeptical conclusions...

...The UN administration has written the constitutional rules for a gradual handover of power to elected local elites, and there is even a chance that eventually the Serb minority will take their places at the table...

...Helsinki marked the moment in which the rulers of the Soviet empire conceded that there were not two human rights languages—one socialist, one capitalist—but one to which all nations, at least in theory, were obliged to conform...

...Sometimes the state is struggling...

...The Americans had Jim Crow to hide...

...ANOTHER FACTOR in the renaissance of human rights in the 1970s was the weakening of the Soviet empire...

...In still other places, ranging from Chechnya to Tibet, no intervention took place, and the failure showed that universal principles still lack consistent enforcement...

...As the developed world has accelerated into the fourth industrial revolution of computers and information technology, sub-Saharan Africa, for example, remains stuck at the bottom of the international division of labor as primary producers...

...The human rights activists who document the increasingly catastrophic rights abuses in failing states often have no strategy other than denunciation and a perfectionist reluctance to use force to end these abuses...

...in a few cases—Somalia, for instance—it has collapsed altogether...

...In such conditions, international human rights and humanitarian organizations can do no more than bind up the wounded and protect the most vulnerable...

...There are many failed and failing states...

...GIVEN THE unrelenting pressure of poverty— made worse by mismanagement— it is unsurprising that state institutions begin to break down...

...The Russians reduce Grozny to rubble with impunity...

...This debate conceives the challenge of intervention as a response to a series of essentially unrelated moral crises, in which differing populations of civilians in desperate need appeal to us for rescue...

...Until September 11, Western powers placed a two-way bet, supporting the NorthLOOKING FORWARD em Alliance just enough to keep it in business, while refusing to normalize relations with the Taliban...

...In reality, as Bosnia cruelly showed, neutrality can become discreditable as well as counterproductive...

...These premises have been outlined recently in "The Responsibility to Protect," a report sponsored by the Canadian government and delivered to the UN secretary-general in December 2001...

...Peace, combined with the emergence of the EU, diluted the exercise of Westphalian sovereignty in the continent that had been its home...

...American leaders of all political stripes regard foreign criticism of its domestic human rights norms—the persistence of capital punishment, for example—as either irrelevant or impudent...

...As these revolts spread, the central government loses the monopoly of the means of violence...

...For the key dilemma in civil wars is which side to back...

...Doing the right thing appears to require the tenacity to do it when half the world thinks you are wrong...

...If state fragmentation and collapse are the chief sources of human rights abuse, the debate over humanitarian intervention needs to be rethought...

...It would be impossible to assemble all the reasons why this convulsion is underway, but it represents a widening tear in the system of state order, analogous to the tear in the global ozone layer...

...A final feature was the coming to power of the sixties generation, nurtured in anti–Vietnam War politics, disillusioned with socialism and Marxism, awakening to the moral reality of the Holocaust and the Red Terror, and discovering in human rights a redemptive cause...

...The Russians' dirty secret was the Gulag...

...All of these divisions further fragment our capacity to craft strategies of intervention that actually succeed...

...The international responsibility to protect is a residual obligation that comes into play only when a domestic state proves incapable or unwilling to act and where the resulting situation is genuinely catastrophic...

...MENTION OF Yugoslavia brings into focus the chief reason why the conflict between sovereignty and human rights came into the open in the 1990s: the process of state fragmentation convulsed the international system...

...In East Timor, intervention delivered self-determination to the people, but not before more than a thousand people were massacred for seeking their rights...

...By the mid1970s, it became dependent for its survival on Western trade and investment...

...An adverse situation is then made worse by corruption, bad planning choices, or ideological dogma...

...Afghanistan is the most dramatic example of this tendency...

...Arkan's Tigers were responsible for a large part of the ethnic cleansing that occurred at the beginning of the war in Bosnia: Photograph by Ron Haviv/Vll 124 n DISSENT / Winter 2002...

...The prohibition on internal interference is peremptory, while the language that urges states to promote human rights is permissive...

...As long as the chief motive for intervention is conscience alone, we can only expect sporadic action from a few responsible actors...

...Yet through it all, an inchoate practice of LOOKING FORWARD nation building—in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor, and Cambodia—is showing that state order can be successfully rebuilt if wealthy and powerful states are prepared to invest the time and money...

...Nation building takes time, and it is not an exercise in social work...

...Each time, these efforts failed...

...For all their new prestige and power, human rights concerns have not essentially changed the international law governing recognition between states...

...The process is costly, but violence has not returned, and peace in Bosnia has hastened democratic transitions in Croatia and Serbia next door...

...The Portuguese left behind a weak colonial inheritance, but the Angolan civil war has destroyed what was left of it...

...By conceding the right of their own citizens to form human rights organizations—a feature of the Helsinki Act—the Soviets set in train the process that led first to Charter 77 in Prague, Solidarity in Poland, and Memorial in the Soviet Union...

...The way the academy divides up the debate also enfeebles it...

...The marginal place of human rights in the institutional order of the cold war also related to the ambiguous light that human rights standards cast on the behavior of superpowers...

...This preference for order has been reinforced by the disintegration of multi-ethnic states like the former Yugoslavia...

...once action is taken, its legitimacy depends on staying the course DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 121 LOOKING FORWARD until the situation is on the mend...

...The war within Bosnia was brought to an end only when foreign intervention was directed not at the internal combatants but at the chief external instigator, Serbia...

...This fact illuminates the degree to which both the Holocaust and the Red Terror existed in suspended animation during the cold war...

...Wherever democracy means self-determination for the ethnic majority, state formation all too often means "ethnic cleansing" and massacre for the minority...

...Unless one side is helped to win, and win quickly, nothing serious can be done to reduce the violence...

...As long as populations are menaced by banditry, civil war, guerrilla campaigns, and counter-insurgency by beleaguered governments, they cannot be secure...

...For bad neighborhoods harbor terrorists, produce drugs, and generate destabilizing refugee flows...

...Without the basic institutions of a state, no basic human rights protection is possible...

...Neutral humanitarianism, when viewed more cynically, is a kind of hedged bet, in which intervening parties salve their consciences while avoiding the difficult political commitments that might actually stop civil war...

...The Helsinki Final Act of 1975, adopted at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, institutionalized the process by which foreign assistance to an ailing empire was made conditional on human rights concessions...

...Having washed its hands of Afghanistan after the Soviet departure, the United States spent the 1990s conceiving of Afghanistan as a humanitarian or human rights disaster zone, failing to notice that it was rapidly becoming a national security nightmare, a training ground for terror...

...In Japan and Germany, however, total defeat and unconditional surrender gave the Allies the authority to create new democratic institutions from scratch, while the conditions for modern nation building in states recovering from civil war are much less auspicious...

...These inconsistencies mean that intervention in the domestic affairs of states will never rest on unassailable grounds...

...What broke this conspiracy of state silence was the emergence of mass-based human rights groups, beginning with Amnesty InterDISSENT / Winter 2002 n I 15 LOOKING FORWARD national in 1961...

...Nation building thus becomes, for the first time since the Allied occupation of Germany and Japan, a critical instrument for the creation of rights regimes...

...These bad neighborhoods in turn present direct threats to the national interest of states...

...Prior to September 11, the dilemma was this: if Western powers recognized the Taliban, they would help consolidate Taliban rule over the entire territory and thus help bring an end to a devastating civil war...

...The central problem of the cold war world, from the Western point of view, was to consolidate state order and guarantee that these new states remained in the Western camp...

...We want to live in a world in which we do the right thing, and know we are doing the right thing, and believe that the whole world will accept that we have done the right thing...

...As the cold war order disintegrated, human rights became the con1 16 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 dition of entry to the emerging security architecture of NATO and the European Union...

...All these proceed from the incapacity of a state to secure and maintain order...

...All states have an interest in ensuring that territories remain under the effective control of a government, regardless of its human rights record...

...The basic choice is whether external intervention should be aimed at preserving the existing state or at helping a selfdetermination claim succeed...

...Newly emerging nations in Africa and Asia proved adept at using the vocabulary of self-determination to ward off or ignore external scrutiny of their domestic rights records...

...The gathering wave of underground civic activism sapped the self-confidence of the Gorbachev-era elite and slowly but surely undermined the empire from within...

...In the fifth and current wave, processes of disintegration predominate...

...States that are fighting losing battles against insurgents, states where civil wars have become endemic, or where state authority has broken down altogether, radiate instability around them...

...The case of Afghanistan illustrates the dilemmas of taking sides...

...Others— Congo, Angola, and Sudan—are resource-rich states whose elites are incapable or unwilling to use resource revenue to develop their countries and end civil wars...

...The ones that will actually receive sustained international attention will be those that directly threaten the national interest and national security of powerful states...

...sometimes disintegrating...

...Thus the responsibility to protect is intended to provide a rationale for constructive engagement by rich countries through an intervention continuum that begins with prevention and ends with sustained follow-up...

...LOOKING FORWARD To be sure, the problem of tyranny remains: China, North Korea, Iraq, and Libya are strong states, not weak ones, and their human rights abuses fit into a more classical pattern: arrest of activists, detention without trial, extra-judicial murder, torture, and disappearances...

...Once Western forces intervene they are usually committed to rebuild or at least patrol post-conflict societies for a long period of time...

...In such a situation, Afghan women would pay the price of a Western preference for order over justice...

...In Iraq, Kurds remain under the protection of Allied air power, but they do not have the resources to become genuinely self-governing...

...These bad neighborhoods include Latin America: Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru South Balkans: Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo South Caucasus: Georgia, Ossetia, Azerbaijan, Nagorno, and Karabakh West Africa: Liberia and Sierra Leone Central Africa: Congo Southern Africa: Angola East Africa: Sudan and Somalia South Asia: Sri Lanka Central Asia: Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan Some of these—Colombia and Sri Lanka— are capable states that are fighting a losing battle against insurgents and terror...

...The rediscovered memory of these terrible events focused the moral imagination of activists, intellectuals, and foreign policy specialists on sovereignty as an instrument and an alibi for extermination...

...All of these experiences are fraught with difficulty, but all indicate that an inchoate practice of state building, under UN auspices, is emerging...

...Yet, for all this change, states do not accept that their legitimacy—internal or external— is conditional on their human rights performance...

...An intervention strategy that takes sides, that uses force, and that sticks around to rebuild is very different from one premised on neutrality, casualty-avoidance, and exit strategies...

...Nor is the experience of intervention as nation building entirely negative...

...The trick in nation building is to force responsibility—for security, for co-existence— back to local elites...

...He is the author of Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, a trilogy of books on ethnic war and humanitarian intervention, and a biography of the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin...

...We all aspire to perfect legitimacy...

...Finally, in East Timor, a transitional UN administration is handing a new country over to its elected leaders...

...The greatest champion of human rights overseas, the United States, is simultaneously an uncompromising defender of a unilateralist definition of its own sovereignty...

...It re-emerged as a people's democracy after 1945...

...The most that can be said about the emerging practice of intervention is that at its best it prevents the worst from happening...

...Violence is eating away these societies from within...

...NATO, the UN, and the EU have joined forces to put Bosnia into a transitional trusteeship...

...Its ultimate purpose is to create the state order that is the precondition for any defensible system of human rights and to create the stability that turns bad neighborhoods into good ones...

...These fantasies can be indulged in Europe or in the North American free trade area, but they ring especially hollow in Africa and Asia...

...Afghanistan has been devastated both by interference—first by the Soviets, then by the Americans—and then by neglect— the American withdrawal and strategic disinterest after the defeat of the Soviets...

...Many of the disintegrative state conflicts in Africa—Congo and Angola, for example— represent the continuing struggle of competing tribal and regional groups to consolidate state authority on the ruins of colonial regimes...

...Indeed, some states perceive that the promotion of democracy and human rights, especially in fragile, newly emerging states with complex mixtures of minorities and religions, may actually promote secession, fragmenting the international state system still further...

...Afghanistan is the best example of a failing state that was perceived as a distant humanitarian crisis, when it ought to have been seen as a clear and present national security threat...

...There is also the problem of triage...

...We have not come to terms with this changed situation...

...Western aid agencies, international banks, and UN organizations increasingly "mainstreamed" human rights in their aid and lending packages for developing nations...

...The legacy of bitterness in places like Kosovo and Bosnia is so intense that international administration has to remain in place, simply in order to protect minorities from vengeance by the victorious yet previously victimized majority...

...The UN Mission in Cambodia managed to oversee peaceful elections and the creation of democratic rule in a country ravaged by genocide...

...When democracy came to the Balkans, it came in the form of demands for self-determination on ethnic lines, with catastrophic consequences for the state order left behind by Marshal Tito...

...But the crises themselves are not unrelated, and they are not just humanitarian or moral in their claim on our attention...

...What these examples have in common is state failure, although the extent of the failure differs in each case...

...This double game has now come apart, and in the wake of September 11, it is apparent that it was bound to...

...These Hobbesian situations teach the message of the Leviathan itself: that consolidated state power is the very condition for any regime of rights whatever...

...Yet even if some strong states remain a menace to their own people, the worst abuse now occurs not where there is too much state power, but too little...

...sometimes it is maladministration by an indigenous elite...

...In other words, the international community finally intervened to sustain the unity of a state and to defeat a selfdetermination claim by the Bosnian Serbs...

...In part, these processes represent an attempt to correct the failure of the previous episodes of state formation...

...All victims have some claim to mercy, assistance, and aid from those bystanders who can provide it...

...Resettling of refugees and rebuilding are both funded from the outside...

...ANOTHER PROBLEM is the way humanitarian intervention is actually done...

...Yet the Serbs are bombed for seventy-eight days...

...Taking responsibility without confiscating it is the balance international administrators have to strike...

...Most strategies of humanitarian rescue, particularly UN peacekeeping and conflict mediation, are premised on staying neutral in zones of conflict...

...The spectacle of disgruntled locals, sitting in cafes, watching earnest young internationals speeding around to important meetings in Toyota Land Cruisers has been repeated in every nation-building experiment of the 1990s...

...When the Americans and the Russians used the universalistic creed to lecture developing nations, they discovered how easily their own language could be turned against them...

...With peace at home, European powers found a new overseas role for themselves promoting human rights abroad...

...Calling the international order of the postcoldwar era a "system" obscures the reality that it has broken down altogether in the poorer parts of the world...

...TAKING SIDES is not the only dilemma...

...We are somewhere in between, negotiLOOKING FORWARD ating the conflicts between state sovereignty and international human rights as they arise, case by case...

...In Bosnia, Western interveners thought they were intervening to keep warring parties apart...

...In other places, such as Angola, where the UN intervened with high hopes of moving the society out of a civil war, it has now withdrawn altogether...

...Putting national interest criteria into the debate also helps with the problem of triage...

...Failing states are more than problems for themselves...

...Controlling the culture of vengeance usually takes longer than the time frame dictated by most modern exit strategies...

...Now, finally, the United States and its allies will take sides, but once they defeat the Taliban, the same problem they have avoided—namely how to rebuild a nation state there—will recur...

...It was a Versailles state after 1919...

...In certain limited cases, where states are unwilling or unable to do that, and where the resulting human rights situation is catastrophic, other states have a responsibility to step in and provide the protection instead...

...Further south in Kosovo, another trusteeship experiment is underway...

...Unlike the empires of the past, these UN administrations are designed to serve and enhance the ideal of self-determination rather than suppress it...

...Intervention occurs, in general, where states are too weak, too friendless, to resist...

...All of these exercises in nation building represent attempts to invent, for a postimperial, postcolonial era, a form of temporary rule that reproduces the best effects of empire (inward investment, pacification, and impartial administration), without reproducing the worst features (corruption, repression, confiscation of local capacity...

...As this summary suggests, the ascendancy of human rights in the post–cold war world has complex causes...

...Accordingly, the human rights performance of states mattered much less to the West than their allegiance to the Western camp...

...The idea of a responsibility to protect also implies a responsibility to prevent and a responsibility to follow through...

...If, on the other hand, Western support continued to reach the Taliban's opponents, the civil war would continue, and Afghanistan would continue to bleed to death...

...With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, human rights ceased to be subordinate to sovereignty...

...The United States allowed the Pakistani secret service to funnel support to the Taliban, while at the same time American officials denounced the regime for its treatment of women and the destruction of religious monuments...

...Human rights was also given a subordinate place in the UN system...

...These nations, some of which had depended entirely on Soviet support, now felt obliged to comply...

...Given the fact that resources of will power, diplomatic skill, and economic aid are always finite, there have to be criteria to determine which conflicts to take on and which ones to ignore...

...It is also based on different premises...

...A former province of a state is being prepared for substantial autonomy and self-government...

...This is not easy...

...That is why, when peacekeepers are deployed to enforce the cease-fire, they are usually viewed by the party that has lost most in the conflict as colluders 12,0 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 in aggression...

...In places like Cambodia and Haiti, democracy has been restored, but power remains in the hands of corrupt elites...

...In the wake of 1991, it was a satellite of the Soviet system whose component parts set out to create a nation on the basis of popular sovereignty...

...Building on ideas of good citizenship and human security, the commission has argued that all states have a responsibility to protect their citizens...

...The Rwandan genocide could not have occurred without the existence of a strong and effective administrative structure—the burgomaster system— left over from the colonial period...

...The crisis was seen as an internal affair, when in fact its chief determinants were illicit foreign subversion: the arming and training of insurgents and the provision of safe bases of operation in both Serbia and Croatia...

...At this point, we are in a halfway house, no longer in the world of 1945, where sovereignty was clearly privileged over human rights, and yet nowhere near the world desired by human rights activists, in which sovereignty is conditional on being good international citizens...

...Articles 2.1 and 2.7 of the charter define sovereignty in terms of inviolability and non-interference...

...DISSENT / Winter 2002 n I2.3 Serbian Tiger leader Zeljko Raznatovic, or Arkan, poses with his paramilitary unit and a baby tiger he liberated from a Croatian zoo...

...It takes time to create responsible political dialogue in shattered communities, still longer to create shared institutions of police and justice, and longest of all to create the molecular social trust between warring communities necessary for economic development and community co-existence...

...In the customary practice that governs recognition of new regimes, legitimacy continues to be defined by whether a particular regime has effective control over a given territory...

...Pakistan, for example, has been "Talibanized" by nearby Afghanistan...

...Worst of all, eight hundred thousand dead Rwandans remain testimony to our incapacity—even when no insurmountable obstacle exists, either in state sovereignty or Security Council veto—to do the right thing...

...Yet the fact that we cannot intervene everywhere is not a justification for not intervening where we can...

...Historically, this episode of state fragmentation recalls at least four previous periods: • 1919: The dismantling of the European empires after Versailles • 1945: The creation of the so - called people's democracies in Eastern Europe • 1947 - 1960: The decolonization of Africa and Asia • 1989-1991: The independence of former Soviet satellites DISSENT / Winter 2002 n I 17 LOOKING FORWARD In these four periods, the dominant process was state formation and the dismantling of defeated empires...

...These were not caused by weak or collapsing states, but by strong, intolerant, and oppressive ones...

...Internationals can provide impartial administration, some inward investment, and some basic security protec122 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 tion, but the work has to be done by the political elites who inherit the intervention...

...This is not always possible...

...There effective sovereignty— defined as a monopoly over the means of violence and as the capacity to deliver basic needs to a population—is the precondition for any kind of successful entry into the world economy...

...Our current debate about humanitarian intervention continues to construe intervening as an act of conscience, when in fact, since the 1990s began, intervening has also become an urgent state interest: to rebuild failed states so that they cease to be national security threats...

...In Kosovo, intervention put a stop to a civil war that, had intervention not occurred, might still be claiming lives...

...The simultaneous historical rediscovery of the Red Terror and the Holocaust in the 1970s proved important here...

...Protecting human rights in zones where state order is embattled or had collapsed has to mean consolidating or re-creating a legitimate state...

...sometimes, failure is a legacy first of interference by outside powers, and then abandonment...

...For them, aggressive war across national frontiers was a more salient risk than the extermination of peoples within states...

...In this sense, state sovereignty, instead of being the enemy of human rights, has to be seen as their basic precondition...

...Moral perfectionism is always the enemy of the possible and the practical...

...Whereas the abuses of the cold war period came from strong tyrannical states, the ones in the post—cold war world chiefly originate in weak or collapsing states...

...They failed to understand that a recognized member of the UN—Bosnia Herzegovina—was being torn apart by a self-determination claim, aided and abetted by outside powers, chiefly Serbia, but also Croatia...

...The new nations that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet empire wrote rights guarantees into their new constitutions and accepted human rights oversight from Western governments as the price of rejoining Europe and the West...

...Photograph by Ron HavivNII occupied the drafters...

...Indeed, it is a dangerous utopia...

...Action, especially of a coercive kind, lacks legitimacy unless every effort has been made to avert the catastrophe...

...Until 1968, it was able to counter demands for freedom by sending in the tanks...

...In Sierra Leone, however, it could be argued that the British left a decent colonial inheritance, which was then squandered by successor elites...

...Once it is realized that we are looking at a crisis in the international order, a tear in the ozone layer of global governance, states that would otherwise remain uninvolved might understand that their long-term interest in stability and order compel them to commit resources to the problem...

...Those who see its rise as the simple story of progress, of an idea whose time finally came, are missing the key political dimensions: the weakness and collapse of the Soviet Union, the emerging salience of governance— and therefore of human rights—as development issues in the states of Africa and Asia, and finally, the pacification of Europe and its search for a new legitimizing ideology...

...If we survey the interventions of the recent past, the story is decidedly mixed...

...In Congo, Belgium left behind little that independent regimes could build upon...

...The international lawyers who dominate the humanitarian intervention debate spend more time thinking about intervention criteria than how to rebuild failed states once intervention has occurred...

...Where state order disintegrates, basic economic infrastructure also begins to collapse and a new economic order begins to take root...

...Yet it was Hitler the warmonger, not Hitler the architect of European extermination, who preOpposite: A Bosnian woman screams at a UN soldier at a refugee camp...

...Moreover, when neutralist mediators impose a cease-fire in an ongoing civil war, they invariably draw the line in such a way as to reward the side that has waged the conflict with the most aggression and the most success...

...Order would prevail, but it would be the despotism of rural Islam at its most obscurantist...

...This is a different profile of human rights abuse from the ones in the cold war...

...The human rights dilemmas of the twenty-first century derive more from anarchy than tyranny...

...Yugoslavia, for example, figures in three of these four previous episodes of state formation...

...It was only when outside interveners took sides and bombed Serbian installations, forcing the Serb government to exert pressure on its internal proxies, that the civil war stopped...

...It is a state in which internal peace and security are guaranteed by foreign troops...

...What all of these have in common, though, is an inability to maintain a monopoly of the internal means of violence...

...Intervening to defend human rights will never have anything more than conditional legitimacy, even when the cause is just and the authority right...

...The development strategists who do know something about how to set off self-sustaining paths to growth and institutional competence have no place in the debate...

...The initiative for these developments has to come from the local people...

...Doing so led them to expel, terrorize, and massacre their minorities...

...More generally, this survey seems to demonstrate something important about legitimacy itself...

...at its worst, it compromises and betrays the very values it purports to defend...

...IF CHAOS RATHER than tyranny is the chief cause of human rights abuse, then activists will have to rethink their traditional suspicion of the state and of the exercise of sovereignty...

...Neutral humanitarian assistance can have the perverse effect of sustaining the fighting it seeks to reduce...

...States are encouraged to promote human rights, not commanded to do so...

...Once democracy returned, each dominant ethnic majority set itself the task of abolishing both the Versailles and the Titoist versions of the federal state...

...These poor neighborhoods present a cluster of human rights catastrophes: forced population displacement, ethnic or religious massacre, genocide, endemic banditry, enslavement, and forced recruitment of child soldiers...

...They were not the all-defining crimes they were to become in the modern moral imagination of the 1970s...

...More than 7,000 Bosnians were executed as the UN safe haven was overrun by Serb forces...

...Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and Vaclav Havel drew legitimacy away from the regime to the human rights movement, and in doing so, dug the grave of the empire...

...The most successful transitional administrations are ones that try to do themselves out of a job...

...Even in death and defeat, Adolf Hitler remained the ghost at the drafters' feast...

...The debate about humanitarian intervention strikes many people from poorer countries as a lurid exercise in emotional self-gratification— an attempt to demonstrate the power of conscience when the real tasks that rich Western nations need to address are much harder: helping states regain a monopoly over the means of violence, increasing the competence DISSENT / Winter 2002 •I19 LOOKING FORWARD of local institutions, conciliating ethnic conflict, and building up a functioning economy...

...This process of fission may then spread beyond the borders of the state itself, as refugee populations flee across the border, and as insurgent groups use frontier zones for their base camps...

...A collapsing state thus has the capacity to metastasize and to spread its problems through the region...

...Still others—Afghanistan, Somalia, and Sierra Leone—are weak states, with poor resource endowments, and have proved incapable of providing effective governance at all...

...But if that is all that bystanders do, they may help to keep civil wars going, by sustaining the capacity of a civilian population to absorb still more punishment...