The Contest of the Century (32 page)

This tension has been at the heart of the UN ever since it was founded in 1945, created out of the ashes of the Second World War by men scarred by the experience of Nazism. The UN’s architects aimed to establish a world free from foreign invasions by territory-hungry great powers. The defense of sovereignty was proclaimed as a core value. Article II, Part 7, of the UN Charter reads: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Over the next decade, the UN was closely involved in the process of decolonization, which added to its doubts about outside interference in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. The number of member countries has risen from fifty at the start to 194, and the leaders of these new nations had little intention of letting the UN become a rubber stamp for meddling in their politics by former colonial masters. Decolonization, as the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra puts it, was “fueled by an
intense desire among humiliated peoples for equality and dignity in a world controlled by a small minority of white men.”

Yet, right from the start, the UN was also squarely focused on human rights and the protection of minorities. The same shattering war experiences encouraged world leaders to sign in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at a conference in Paris. Having seen the paralysis of the League of Nations, the UN’s founders did not intend
to create an organization that would be impotent in the face of wide-scale abuses. This debate about sovereignty lay dormant during the Cold War, when the U.S.-Soviet rivalry neutered the effectiveness of the UN. But by the time the Berlin Wall fell, it was clear that many of the greatest humanitarian problems in the world were caused no longer by wars between nations, which had declined, but by abuses taking place within nations—from Uganda to Cambodia. The growing awareness of environmental degradation has only added to the perception that sovereignty has its limits.

The end of the Cold War prompted a wave of optimism about the creation of a new, coherent international community which could put the stale arguments of the previous decades aside, and which would never again be too late to the scene. Yet this confidence was short-lived. The recurring crises in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Rwanda, where eight hundred thousand people were massacred, reinforced the uncomfortable reality that the UN lacked the tools to deal with the worst humanitarian crises. Stung by its failure to do anything to stop the bloodshed, then UN secretary general Kofi Annan launched a discussion about when it was right for the international community to intervene to protect vulnerable populations. The negotiations were tortuous, in part because of the objections of those developing countries which did not want to provide an excuse for the U.S. and other Western powers to send in the marines every time there was a crisis. But in the end, a committee led by Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister, and the Algerian diplomat Mohamed Sahnoun, came up with a formula which was approved unanimously at a UN summit in 2005 and which became known as the “Responsibility to Protect.”

The end result was a carefully crafted compromise. Military action was held out only as a very last resort; instead, there would first be a whole spectrum of policy options for the UN to take, from pressure and diplomacy to sanctions and referring leaders to the International Criminal Court. But, for all the caveats, the governments of the world committed themselves to take action in cases of genocide or grave crimes against humanity. The combination of the Rwanda disaster and the disappearance of Cold War ideological divisions gave the UN an opening to promote a new international philosophy about the defense
of innocent civilians from rapacious governments. Robert Mugabe may have denounced it as a “phony principle,” but for its supporters, “Responsibility to Protect” was an attempt to enshrine a series of basic guidelines that would underpin the international community in a new century. Martin Gilbert, the British historian of Winston Churchill and the Holocaust, called it “the most
significant adjustment to national sovereignty in 360 years.”

China voted in favor of “Responsibility to Protect,” but right from the start Beijing was deeply anxious about the whole project. Under Mao, China had been a revolutionary power that occassionally looked to export its model around the world and saw international forums as a stage for occasional tantrums. But since the late 1970s, it has put its firm support behind the old Westphalian notions that sovereign nations should keep out of one another’s affairs. The survival instincts of the party demanded as much. During an era when democracy has spread rapidly, this aggressive defense of sovereignty is a way to deflect attention from China’s own affairs and to help make the world safe for the Chinese Communist Party. After all, how can Communist China shield itself from overseas criticisms of its own political arrangements if it routinely sticks its nose into the affairs of others? China has worked assiduously to make sure that the UN Human Rights Council, which is supposed to report on abuses around the world, has remained a toothless talking-shop.

Yet there is more to China’s position than just opportunism. China has its own arguments for why a policy of strict nonintervention is a strong foundation for the international system. Rather than weakening the international community, China believes it is creating a more equitable world, a “democracy between nations” in which each state is treated equally by the rest of the international community. Beijing sees its friendship with dictatorial regimes as part of an approach that is better for the developing world than the bullying interventionism of the West. Whereas the West values human rights and transparent governance, China places emphasis on stability. Beijing argues that only when a poor country has a solid government, whose sovereignty is respected by other nations, can it then introduce the sorts of coherent, long-term policies needed to promote growth and reduce poverty. Even when the
Western powers have a good point about abuses, Beijing claims, the initial intervention on humanitarian grounds often becomes an excuse for prolonged colonial interference that makes the situation worse. For Beijing, nonintervention is a firewall against destabilizing meddling.

The irony is that, from Beijing’s point of view, the U.S. is the radical, revolutionary power trying to change the rules of the game. While the West has become more animated about tackling humanitarian catastrophes since the end of the Cold War, China believes it is defending tried and tested ideas about how states should behave, which took root in Europe four centuries ago and are a better guide for international stability. From Sudan to Zimbabwe, China believes it is defending a status quo the West once established but now wants to tear up.

In conversations and interviews about this subject, Chinese officials would occasionally try to play Europe off against the U.S. “We want the same multipolar world that Europe wants,” a senior diplomat once told me. “Europe’s view of the world emphasizes system building, rules, dialogue, and discussion, as opposed to a view of the world that stresses confrontation.” But mostly I would be on the receiving end of a finely honed series of talking points about how Western or American interference was a big part of the problem in the developing world. “Look at Liberia,” a lunch companion from the Foreign Ministry told me. “It has had lots of U.S. help and influence and money, but it is not a mini-America. You cannot govern another country from the outside.”

China also has its own list of grievances about American obstruction at the UN, starting with the large number of vetoes that Washington has exercised to protect Israel from criticism about human-rights abuses. And, like many other developing countries’ governments, China is quick to point out the double standards in American moral leadership. Washington does not like our support of Mugabe, Chinese officials would say, but it backed Mubarak for so many decades. The U.S. complains when we buy oil from Iran, they ask, but is the situation in that country really much different from Saudi Arabia? Or Equatorial Guinea? Chinese diplomats can play these games all night. Beijing is also not shy about using the anti-colonial card, suggesting that noninterference is a bulwark against the sort of exploitation China itself suffered at the hands of the imperial powers in the nineteenth century. At the United
Nations, China often listens closely to what other developing countries are saying and then, if it does not have big issues of its own at stake, will follow their views. It has become very skilled at channeling anti-colonial resentment in the developing world against America’s messianic tendencies. “We are very different from you,” a senior official at the Foreign Ministry once told me. “We do not think that we are the world’s savior.”

China’s defense of sovereignty has a lot of support at the UN from developing countries with colonial pasts. There is even sympathy among such big democracies as Brazil and India, on whom the humanitarian evangelism of the West often grates, and who were appalled by the aggressive unilateralism of the Iraq War. Plenty of developing countries, democratic and authoritarian, would like to see limits placed on the moralizing interference of the U.S. in the affairs of others. All of this makes nonintervention an extremely important policy for China. It provides international protection for the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, it gives the government a powerful anti-colonialist calling card as it seeks to expand its international influence. We will do business with you and not ask any questions about how you run your country, China tells other developing nations. It is not just autocrats who find this extremely appealing.

But then there was Darfur. The fierce debates about Sudan in the early years of the 2000s put China at the center of UN politics in a way it had never been before. China came under intense political pressure because its support of Sudan appeared to be making a mockery of the post-Rwanda “never again” rhetoric at the UN, even as diplomats were drafting the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. For all the attractions that China’s opposition to outside interference holds for many governments, there is also a powerful downside—in the hands of a veto-holding, permanent member of the Security Council, it can render the UN mute at the very moment when it should be at its most active.

The burden of proof for genocide is a very high one, and for some of the most informed observers of the events in Darfur, that bar was not reached by the Sudanese government. Human Rights Watch, for instance, declined to define what happened as genocide. It is also true that the complex events in Darfur were not a one-sided affair—the government in Khartoum was responding to a rebellion in the province. At
the same time, there exists ample documented evidence to show that, between 2003 and 2010, widespread and grotesque human-rights abuses were committed by the Sudanese government or by the local proxy it used, a militia group called the Janjaweed. There is extensive testimony of villages burned to the ground, the men then killed and the women raped. In a country that had seen constant outbreaks of civil unrest since its independence, this was more than the usual burst of violence. A decade after Rwanda, Africa was witnessing again an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Yet the early years of the conflict were also the time when China’s oil investments started to bear real fruit, and Beijing did everything it could to shelter its Khartoum ally from international pressure, often with the support of Russia. In 2003 and 2004, when Kofi Annan was trying to draw the world’s attention to the emerging catastrophe, China tried to keep the Darfur situation off the agenda at the UN. In 2004, it threatened to veto a resolution which merely raised the prospect of sanctions. A year later, with African Union peacekeepers struggling to control the situation, it blocked the idea of a UN peacekeeping operation. Chinese officials argued that, however bad things were in Sudan, they would become much worse if heavy-handed intervention by outside powers led to the downfall of the Khartoum regime. “The country would have become another Somalia,” a Foreign Ministry official told me a few years later, still with a tone of indignation that China had come in for such intense criticism.

In the near-decade since the Darfur crisis, the same debates about outside intervention have continued to rage. The fiercest dispute has been over the civil war in Syria that started in 2011. In this case, Russia took the lead in blocking sanctions on the Assad regime as it waged war on its people, but China moved in lockstep at each stage in the process—both countries vetoing three separate UN Security Council resolutions. The international community remains deadlocked. Almost a decade after the “Responsibility to Protect” was negotiated, the leading powers at the UN are no closer to agreeing on how to respond to these types of crises.

The bruising arguments over Sudan and Syria have prompted anguished discussion in the West about a new “axis of authoritarians,”
with China and Russia using their vetoes at the UN to protect dictators around the world from outside pressure. There is widespread criticism in the West about the deadening impact that China’s noninterference principle is likely to have on international politics. As François Godement of the European Council on Foreign Relations puts it, the effect of China’s growing influence is a “hollowing out of the international system.” Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian intellectual-turned-politician who was one of the leading voices in the interventionist debates of the 1990s, has also become one of the fiercest critics of the new axis between China and Russia. “Syria tells us that
the era of humanitarian intervention, ‘responsibility to protect,’ is over, because it assumed a historical progression that has turned out to be false,” he wrote. “When they look at the world this way, the Russian and Chinese regimes mock our view of history.”

This is a powerful view, and one that is deeply pessimistic about the ability of the West to continue to shape the values at the heart of the international community. It fits into the narrative of decline, of a West that is now powerless to turn its ideas and instincts into coherent action in the face of the influence of rising powers. Yet it is also a mistaken view, because it misses two essential features about the emerging international environment, both of which are potential game-changers. It ignores the way in which China’s rapidly expanding interests around the world are undermining its reluctance to get involved in crises. And it also downplays the potential for the U.S. to find common ground with some of the other new rising powers, who are likely to have considerable influence in the coming years over the shape of the new global order.