Sovereignty Versus Safety

Sovereignty Versus Safety : American Intervention Abroad


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Everyone differs on America 's position in the global order . While
neoconservatives claim it is our goal to spread the American ideal of
liberal democracy to nations embroiled in dictatorship after
dictatorship , protectionists believe we have already spent too much time
and resources - both human and economic - on conflicts abroad with no
clear remedies for the future . Opinions outside of the U .S . are equally
contentious . Some critics ask where America was when violence irrupted
in Rwanda and question why it took them so long to take action in the
former Yugoslavia , while others condemn America 's current involvement in
Iraq .

The only thing most analysts do not disagree upon is American
preeminence in international relations .

Since the end of the World WarII

and America 's rise to power in a bipolar power system , there has been
no doubt of its super power status . At the end of the Cold War they
remained alone in that status . So what position should the United
States take on conflicts abroad ? The purpose of this paper is to
discuss America 's role in conflicts abroad and the viability of
intervention in countries with highly different cultural , political and
economic practices . It is within this discussion that the paper will
seek to answer one question : can and should the American model of
liberal democracy be transferred to countries abroad through methods of
intervention ?

Sovereignty versus Human Rights:

The supremacy of the nation state in international law has been in
decline for some time now . While for centuries nation states were
effective at rebuffing any attempts to limit their power over their territory the growing importance of human rights has
slowly chipped away at state sovereignty . Hundreds of years of debate
came to a culmination at the end of the Second World War with the
adoption by a great number of the world 's nations of the UN Charter . We
cannot claim that the co-existence of the two as seen through the
charter has been easy . Indeed while some support ``a modern concept of
sovereignty that involves a duty to protect human rights (Popovsky ,
2004 , 16 ) others hold that the sovereignty of a nation is of greater
concern and that intervention and its aftermath can in fact complicate
things further .

There is no doubt that the emerging norm of humanitarian intervention
derives from ``a fundamental shift in the understanding of sovereignty
in international relations - a move from 'sovereignty as authority ' to 'sovereignty as responsibility (Welsh , 2004 , 52 . Those supporting
the eminence of human rights refer to two documents , the UN Charter and
the Nuremberg Charter . While the first of these holds at its heart the
promotion , encouragement and respect for human rights , the second
outlines ``the individual accountability for war crimes and crimes
against humanity (Popovsky , 2004 , 16 . Following these documents came
others such as the Genocide Convention , the Geneva Conventions , and the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights . Clearly outlined...