There is one more aspect of international morality which needs a brief discussion. We referred to it briefly earlier. The basic norm of international political order is respect for independence and sovereignty of nations. This implies that outside powers should not intervene in the internal affairs of a nation. Such intervention is countenanced when in certain emergencies the Security Council of UN authorizes intervention.
The emergencies can originate from many causes. But we may consider two important circumstances. An emergency can arise when a state conductsgenocide against its own population. The most notorious example is the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis under Hitler. Another example is genocide in Kampuchea under Pol Pot. Genocide means massive killing of people.
Another emergency arises due to ‘ethnic cleansing’. This means that in an area inhabited by a diverse population, a particular section is forcibly ejected. The section of population targeted for eviction is selected on the basis of its race, ethnicity or religion. A recent example is from the state of Yugoslavia during its phase of disintegration. From their areas of dominance, Serbs tried to drive out Croats; Croats did the same with Serbs. The whole process was accompanied by war crimes and unspeakableatrocitiesto forceethniccleansing.NATOforcesintervened on humanitariangrounds.
A state has a right to preserve itself against domestic rebellion. Many countries are made up of diverse populations. The divesities relate to ethnicity, race, language, religion or denominational differences within the same religion. When any particular community in a country is populous and occupies a definite geographic area in that country, it may harbour ambitions of independence. It may want to secede, and start a violent struggle with military and material support from outside states. The current struggles in the Middle East have their origin in these causes. They involve clashesbetween Sunnis and Shias, moderate and radical Islamic groups and rival tribal formations. The details are irrelevant for our present discussion.
UN charter does not authorize such secessionist movements. UN has adopted an interpretation of ‘self determination’ which excludes any claims of secessionist groups within a nation state. The state has to however treat the different groups within its population fairly and impartially. It has to respect their minimum human rights. Some states have to engage in military conflict to overcome and crush secessionist movements. At times, they violate the international law which governs warfare. Recently, the Assad regime in Syria used chemical weapons against rebel held areas and caused widespread civilian damages. USA considered it a sufficient ground to militarily attack Syria in violation of its sovereignty. The matter ended after Assad agreed to the destruction of his chemical weapon stockpile under UN supervision.
Besides humanitarian intervention, powerful nations have also brought about ‘regime changes’ in a state. Regime change means replacing the existing government of a state by another government which agrees to abide by canons of internationally recognised norms of behaviour. The well known examples are the regime changes which occurred in Iraq, Libya and Egypt. This raises a tricky question of what are the preconditions which warrant regime change and who determines whether the preconditions are met in any particular case. Both in Iraq and Egypt, Western powers led by USA decided these moral issues.
Before concluding, we may briefly discuss two instances which involved India. One is the Indian intervention when Pakistan used brutal military force to crush the democratic movement in what was then East Pakistan. Apart from human costs in terms of lost lives,Pakistan’s brutalitiesforced 8 million refugees into India. At that critical stage in our history, Shrimati Indira Gandhi acted with admirable grit and determination and withstood the American pressure from President Nixon and Secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. The operation was completed even as the US Seventh fleet entered the Bay of Bengal.
One cannot help comparing India’s above mentioned decisive response to its utterly tepid responseto themassacreof SriLankanTamils. By manyaccounts, it was a majorepisodeof genocide. However, the humanitarian aspect was taken up by Scandinavian nations especially Norway. India was reluctant to support resolutions in UN which condemned the human rights violations against Tamils in Sri Lanka. India abstained even on the most recent resolution in UN on this subject of human rights violations. It is not our intention to suggest that India should have acted as did in response to events in the then East Pakistan. At a minimum, India should have halted the massacre. It is possible that India might not have succeeded. But the point is that the Indian policy makers just stood in silence while the Sri Lankan army went on its rampage.
We need not get into the details of the matter. But its moral aspects need a brief mention. It is difficult to fathom India’s acquiescence in the massacre. One may argue that Sri Lankan Tamilians are foreigners, and not Indian citizens. But then so were the people of Bangladesh. But since our foreign policy owes so much to Gandhian legacy, should we not have tried to prevent the carnage in our immediate neighbourhood?
A more interesting feature is the total lack of outrage at any stage in the media or among opinion makers or in political establishment. Historically speaking, Tamilian migration is recent, to all intents and purposes, they are like other Indians. Regrettably, we have to conclude that the spark of fellow feeling and solidarity for erstwhile members of our national community has become weak in us. This is the reason why we have discussed what may be considered a well worn theme – the need for solidarity born out of national fellow feeling. Without this feeling, neither nations nor their citizens can survive.
Summary
¤ International morality refers to morals or codes of conduct governing relations between nations.
¤ ‘Sovereignty’ is the ultimate authority or power possessed by a state as an embodimentof its political community. Sovereignty represents the will of the people which is theoretically absolute and unfettered.
¤ A nation is a group which thinks of itself as ‘a people,’ usually because they share many things in common. These consist of a common territory, history, culture, language, religion and way of life. The state has a narrower meaning referring to the constitutional arrangements which determine how a nation is governed.
¤ The main theories of IR are – realism, idealism, their variants and a collection of views drawn from other schools of thought. Neorealism and neoliberalism have become popular in the twentieth century.
¤ Idealism advocates the moral point of view or ‘what ought to be’ in politics.
¤ Machiavellianism is a radical type of political realism. It denies the relevance of morality in politics, and claims that all means (moral and immoral) are justified to achieve certain political ends. This is the doctrine of raison d’état which implies that rulers should follow whatever is good for the state and not ethical scruples or norms.
¤ In the nineteenth-century, Hegel and Treitschke, pushed Machiavellian realism to even furtherextremes, andapplied it to international relations.
¤ Realpolitik is a national policyhaving a soleprinciple–advancement of the national interest.
¤ For realists, the world of (nation) states is anarchic, and security is the overriding goal of any state. Realists doubt the relevance of morality to international politics.
¤ Descriptive realism claims that in real world states do not behave morally. Either they lack the moral motivation, or are unable to act morally due to competitive struggles
¤ Prescriptive realism advocates that states should be prudent in their international conduct.
¤ Immanuel Kant is among those who anticipated many modern themes of idealism in international morals.
¤ The idealists of the 1920s and 1930s are also known as liberal internationalists or utopians. They upheld values like peace, international law, common interests of nations, human rationality and morality.
¤ In his The TwentyYears’ Crisis, E. H. Carr attacks idealism.
¤ Hans J. Morgenthau is another famous writer who formulated an international relations theory based on realism. He identifies unquenchable human lust for power, the desire to dominate, as the main cause of conflict.
¤ Morgenthau uses six principles to show howrealism underliesinternational relations.
¤ Kenneth Waltz, who proposed neorealism, regards the international order of nations as a system, and argues that states in the international system, like firms in a domestic economy, seek survival.
¤ Waltz explains that states continue to behave uniformly over long periods because of the constraints which the structure of the international system imposes on them.
¤ Liberal institutionalists (another name for neoliberal thinkers) believe that states can seek security through construction of international agreements, regimes and structures such as arms control agreements (like START I and START II) and multilateral economic institutions like the WTO. States can engage each other through these structures, learning norms of peaceful cooperation and developing a common interest in the status quo.
¤ For some time, neorealism became influential in international relations, at the expense of realism. But major international developments like disintegration of USSR weakened it greatly.
¤ Postmodernism and Feminism have influenced international morality to some extent.
¤ Tenets of international morality are found in UN Charter. The principles embodied in UN Charter form the norms or maxims of currently accepted international morality.
¤ UN prescribes that for achieving its aims member states should adopt the following principles of conduct.
¤ Sovereign equality of all Members
¤ Fulfilling in good faith the obligations assumed by Members in accordance with the Charter.
¤ Settling by members of their international disputes by peaceful means so as not to endanger international peace and security, and justice
¤ Avoidance by Members of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the UnitedNations
¤ Assisting UN in its actions under the present Charter, and refraining from assisting any state against which the UN is taking preventive or enforcement action
¤ Ensuring by UN that non UN member states comply with these Principles to the extent necessary forthe maintenance of international peace andsecurity.
¤ Non intervention by UN in internal affairs of members nor requiring them to submit such matters for settlement under the Charter
¤ John Rawls discusses the morality of international politics in his book The Law of Peoples. His list of international moral norms is based on his version of political liberalism. States have to comply with these norms (code of conduct) to qualify as members of good standing in the international political community.
¤ Rawls is concerned here with proposing an international framework in which states with different internal political regimes(i.e.liberal and nonliberal) canlive in peaceandharmony. In this framework, liberal states will not insist that all states should follow full blown liberalism; and illiberal regimes will adopt some watered down principles of liberalism.
¤ States which do not meet the minimum requirements are termed outlaw regimes. Rawls regards their existence as an unfortunate fact.
¤ Rawls’s framework implies that states should avoid ideological crusades and struggles against
other nations with divergent regimes.
¤ Rawls also mentions that some countries face extremely unfavorable circumstances like
famine and immiseration. Rawls urges that well-ordered societies should help these countries.
¤ There are three main schools of thought on the ethics of war and peace - Realism; Pacifism; and Just War Theory.
¤ Just war theory is divided into three parts which have Latin names. These parts are:
1. jus ad bellum, which is about the justice of resorting to war in the first place;
2. jus in bello, which is about justice of conduct within war; and
3. jus postbellum, which is about the justice of peace agreements and the termination phase of war.
¤ Pacifism totally opposes war. While pacifists oppose all killing, they particularly abhor the mass killing which usually accompanies war. They object to this type and scale of killing. Pacifists believe that no moral groundscan justify war, and that it is always wrong.
¤ There is considerable controversy on coercive regime change – changing the government of a nation through external military intervention. It involves the question — Can coercive regime change ever be justified, or is it essentially an act of imperialism? One view is that UN mandated sovereign equality of nations prohibits external intervention in the internal affairs of a state.
¤ New dimensions of international morality are:
(i) Transfer of resources from rich countries to less developed nations
(ii) Removing inequities in economic exchanges (trade, commerce and finance) between developed and less developed countries
(iii) Giving greater voice to developed countries in the working of international agencies
(iv) Humanitarian assistance to countries in the grip of famine andimmiserization
(v) Intervention in states which carry out genocide, ethnic cleansing or war on their own people
(vi) Naturalization of people who migrate into a country and settle there
(vii) Adopting a cosmopolitan as opposed to a national approach to morals
¤ Although, it was Jawaharlal Nehru who shaped India’s foreign policy, Mahatma Gandhi’s thinking and philosophy influenced it greatly. India’s foreign policy is based on the Gandhian values of freedom struggle. It was Gandhian ideas that set the tone of India’s foreign policy in the early decades of its independence.
¤ India’s stand on international problems was based on moral clarity and courage. Many nations admired this approach. It won for India the leadership of the developing countries. It gave India an influence in world affairs out of proportion to its real economic and political strength
¤ Both supporters and critics of Indian foreign policy invariably focus attention on Panchsheel. It goesback to astagelongpast in Indianforeignpolicy.Nehruperhapsthought it a centerpiece of policy which also held up a moral torch in the cynical environment of diplomacy. While some praise Panchsheel for its idealism, others condemn it for its unrealism.
¤ Some liberal thinkers believe that egalitarian guarantees should not be confined to national boundaries or to territorial states.Theyconsider an individual’s nationalityalso an accident of birth like his/her race, gender, or social class. It cannot therefore be made a basis for differentiation in dispensing administrative justice. This leads to the vexing problem of the moral status of national boundaries.
¤ Moral egalitarianism should be confined to national boundaries.
¤ Indian foreign policy makers acted vigorously during the crisis leading to the birth of Bangladesh. But their response to the killing of Sri Lankan Tamils has been tepid.
PRACTICE QUESTIONS
1. What are the main aspects or components of international morality?
2. What is sovereignty? Explain its significance in international relations.
3. Outline the main principles of idealism in relation to international relations.
4. Briefly discusstheconcept of realismininternationalrelations.
5. What is Descriptive realism? What is Prescriptive realism? How will you distinguish between the two?
6. What according to the idealists of the 1920s and 1930s are the main principles which should guide the conduct of nations in international affairs?
7. What are the main points of EH Carr’s criticism of idealism of the 1920s and 1930s?
8. Outline the theory of neorealism.
9. State the main ideas of neoliberalism in respect of international relations.
10. What are the tenets of international morality enumerated in the UN Charter?
11. State the principles of morality of international politics according to John Rawls.
12. What are three main schools of thought on the ethics of war and peace?
13. Statetheprincipleswhichaccording tothe Just Wartheory should be followed inthedeclaration of war, conduct of war and the termination of war.
14. Discuss the merits and demerits of pacifism.
15. What are the new dimensions of international morality?
16. Discuss the economic aspects of international morality.
17. Comment on the role of idealism in India’s foreign policy. To what extent has it been modified by realist principles and for what reasons?
18. Outline the principles of Panchsheel and comment on them.
19. Discuss the view that moral egalitarianism should be confined to national boundaries in the context of large scale migration of people from one nation to another.
REFERENCES
{W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz Political realism in International Relations.
Michael Blake, International Justice
Orend, Brian, War } articles from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
Rajiv Sikri, Mahatma Gandhi’s Influence on India’s Foreign Policy (Available on website)
