Anti-Climacus

LINK: norman geras has an interesting set of arguments on national sovereignty with respect to the Iraq war. This has been something of an interesting topic for me, as it abuts nicely a talk I went to last month by Jennifer Pitts (soon to be at Princeton, if the rumors are true) on national sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. norm says:

"I do not take lightly the principle of national sovereignty, and I would urge anyone reading this not to do that either if they are so inclined."

But it strikes me that we should go the opposite way, and be inclined to take national sovereingty less seriously, or at least acknowledge that we do in fact take it much less seriously than we claim to.

"Yet every - or maybe it's nearly every - value has its limits, has sometimes to be made an exception to, and the principle of sovereignty comes under this general rule. There is an established lineage of moral thinking about international affairs, including thinking specifically within the tradition of international law, that respect for national sovereignty, as important as it is, does have its limits. These limits are set high. They do not permit one state to invade another merely because the former disapproves of the latter's internal policies, or because 'we' don't share some of 'their' values or customs or practices, or because some of those strike us as, or indeed are, bad. However, beyond a certain threshold of what I will call, for short, basic humanity, where a state has begun to violate on a large scale some of the most basic rights and/or needs and/or requirements that go with any kind of tolerable existence, then that state is no longer to be seen as enjoying the protection of the principle of national sovereignty."

this is certainly how we usually talk about national sovereignty, but I think it's wrong. Try finding an example of a situation in which the violations norm talks about occurred in which you would not feel that it's the case that intervention was required. This seems to me to be an utterly self-defeating task--in any instance where you can't do it, I contend there's a pretty strong counterargument that you're wrong about your assumption that your chosen example meets the conditions described in the quote.