Left Center Left

It’s Foreign Policy Week at LeftCenterLeft, during which I’ll attempt to articulate some first principles for a left-liberal-meets-center-left foreign policy. See this post for an explanation.

Back on the eve of the Iraq War, I wondered where, in all the Wilsonianism being bandied about, the ideal of self-determination had gone:

[W]asn’t one of Wilson’s key principals the right to national self-determination? Against a European world order that wanted to carve up nations based on balance of power, Wilson wanted recognition of the burgeoning nationalisms of central Europe and colonized lands. Self-determination did not necessarily mean democracy. This distinction is perhaps one good reason why people in the industrial world, left, center and right, rightly abandoned the notion of self-determination - others include the problems of letting genocide, human rights abuses, civil war and the like continue unchecked. Still, in the absence of a principle of self-determination, or else in a larger international legal mechanism, there is nothing to keep imperialist or neo-imperialist designs from stepping in.

My critique (which has held up pretty well over time, I think) was against a nexus of neocon theories of democracy promotion as muscular policy — that is, the best way to fight anti-Americanism and to align Middle Eastern states to our interest is to overthrow tyrannical regimes and install liberal democracies instead. But my surprise was equally that the center-left (the liberal hawks) really had no use for national sovereignty. To this day, centrist-progressive think-tanky foreign-policy voices like Democracy Arsenal explicitly place no value on self-determination:

I think there is an argument to be made that an external attempt to impose democracy upon a country in the grip of dictatorship is not illegitimate. The claim that sovereignty trumps imperialism rings hollow when used as a shield by a regime that denies any form of self-government to its own people. That being said, I think it is going a bridge too far to presume to bestow not just democracy in the broadest sense, but a particular kind of democracy — the liberal model.

This sentiment strikes me as representative of the liberal hawks. But as I wrote back in 2003, I think that sovereignty does trump imperialism, whether or not the country is a democracy. I know this is not a satisfying ideal in the way that democracy promotion is: I’d be as happy to see North Korea’s regime fall as anyone. But even non-democratic governments have their political base somewhere. (It’s a stretch to say that Iraq had no self-government for its own people; it’s just that the government wasn’t democratic or particularly humane.)

What’s more, there’s the question of who decides whether a country’s government properly reflects the national will of the people. If the answer is “whichever hegemon wants to,” then clearly the game is rigged toward imperialism under the guise of, or alongside, democracy promotion. The issue isn’t academic or hypothetical: this is exactly what has happened in Iraq. It’s hard to get excited about self-determination (unlike in 1917, when it meant standing up for incipient nationalisms), but it’s a principle that keeps imperialism in check and keeps the world stage relatively stable.

It’s not a sacrosanct principle, however. Genocide and politicide are two overarching reasons that we can violate sovereignty. Internal strife can spill over into neighboring countries, requiring a response. Weapons proliferation treaties may require some surrender of sovereignty on that issue.

I still am not sure where the American left and liberal-left (including the anti-war movement and the war skeptics) stand. Clearly, the internationalist impulse (of going to UN or NATO or international law for legitimacy in invasions) springs from it. Yet I get the sense that sometimes they have sympathy with the Wilsonian international system, but really aren’t that bothered by self-determination in and of itself. It’s more a confluence of their arguments about the war in Iraq with the arguments about national sovereignty.