From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Tue May 06 2003 - 13:13:10 MDT
On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 02:22:39PM +1000, Brett Paatsch wrote:
> There is a lot of truth in this I think. The first purpose of the UN
> was and should be international peace and security. Without that
> working the human rights stuff and the world court stuff is ultimately
> farcical (and increasingly it is being seen to be farcical).
Historically one of the most important ways that human rights spread was
for states not respecting human rights to be militarily defeated by states
that did. The defeated states adopted human rights either because they
were conquered and taken over, or as a side effect of economic and
political reforms that allowed them to better defend themselves in the
future. There's a great book about the historical interactions between
war, military strategy, international law, and constitutional law. It's
titled The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History by
Philip Bobbitt. I recommend this book highly and it is very relevant to
the current discussion.
What makes the UN's version of human rights farcical is not the lack of
world peace and security but the notion that human rights can be achieved
through an organization based on the principle of "one government, one
vote" with no qualification for what constitutes a legitimate government.
What would prevent Libya from heading the human rights commission even if
we had world peace today?
Roosevelt clearly made a big mistake with the U.N. The security council
represents the alliance that defeated Germany and Japan in WW2, and the
general assembly allows any government to have a vote. But what made him
think that the alliance could be permanent? Or that the general assembly
wouldn't be taken over by a coalition of repressive and corrupt
governments? I'd really like to know what he was thinking at the time so
we can avoid making the same mistakes again.
Of course one way to avoid those mistakes is to simply not have a U.N. 3.
For the forseeable future, the United States seems capable of achieving
what it wants through ad hoc "coalitions of the willing". What does it
have to gain from creating a U.N. 3?
Brett seems to favor a U.N. not for itself, but as a step to something
better in the future. But what? Where do you want this "bootstrap process"
to take us?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue May 06 2003 - 13:24:19 MDT