Geography Reference
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Iraq. Now it was the anticipatory threat of a state itself—and its ambitions to gain weapons
of mass destruction—that provided the justification for intervention.
This new thinking was captured at the time by an American official at the State Depart-
ment. There is, argued Richard Haass, “an emerging global consensus that sovereignty is not
a blank check. Rather, sovereign status is contingent on the fulfillment by each state of certain
fundamental obligations, both to its own citizens and to the international community. When
a regime fails to live up to these responsibilities or abuses its prerogatives, it risks forfeiting
its sovereign privileges including, in the extreme, its immunity from armed intervention.”
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Haass argued that there are three circumstances when exceptions to the norms of noninter-
vention are warranted: when a state commits or fails to prevent genocide or crimes against
humanity; when a state abets, supports, or harbors international terrorists or is not capable
of controlling terrorists operating within their borders; and when a state takes steps—such as
attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction—that are a clear threat to global security,
particularly a state with a history of aggression and support for terrorism.
There are several implications of these developments. First, eroded norms of sovereignty
have created a new license for powerful states to intervene in the domestic affairs of weak and
troubled states. The norm of sovereignty has less “stopping power” in world politics. Sover-
eignty really was born as a legal doctrine and international norm in early modern Europe as
a way to prevent the intrusion of transnational religious and imperial authority into newly
evolving nation-states. It spread around the world and became, in many ways, the single most
universal and agreed-upon norm of international politics. It underlies international law, the
United Nations, and the grand historical movements of anticolonialism and national self-de-
termination. So when the norm weakens, it is not surprising that there are consequences. And
indeed, with the erosion of Westphalian sovereignty, there are fewer international legal or
political inhibitions on intervention and the use of force across national boundaries.
Second, the erosion of norms of sovereignty has not been matched by a rise of new norms
and agreements about who and how sovereignty-transgressing interventions can proceed. The
international community has more authority than it had in the past to act inside troubled
states—but who precisely is the international community? To some extent, the answer is:
ideally, the United Nations. But there is unresolved disagreement on the standards of legality
and legitimacy that attach to the actions of powerful states acting on behalf of the internation-
al community.
As a result, the erosion of norms of sovereignty has ushered in a new global struggle over
the sources of authority in the international community. This problem is made worse by the
rise of American unipolarity. Only the United States really has the military power to sys-
tematically engage in large-scale uses of force around the world. The United Nations has no
troops or military capacity on its own. The problem of establishing legitimate international
authority grows.
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