One of the most disturbing features of the drawn out ordeal of the people of East Timor has been the inability of the United Nations to act either promptly or decisively.
East Timor has had little of the basic complexity of Kosovo. Here, the sources of protest against the neo-colonialist invasion of a defenceless people had long been muffled within the alignments of the Cold War. Even though few nations recognised Indonesian sovereignty, a de facto acceptance settled in and defined the practical situation. As globalisation replaced superpower confrontation as the predominant current in world affairs, exploitation of the opportunities offered by the status quo also settled in at the expense of humanitarian concern for human rights as defined by the United Nations.
Australia, having degraded itself beyond most other nations, both by recognising Indonesian sovereignty and by joining Indonesia in the exploitation of East Timor's oil reserves, now finds itself as the agent of a doubly paradoxical situation. In the name of national security and the hope of a special relationship with the United States it had stayed mute both during and following the Cold War in the face of the ongoing ravaging of the people of East Timor. It now finds itself with two divergent prospects. The first is an ongoing enmity with an Indonesia in which an intrinsically corrupt military regime points to Australian/UN betrayal as the source of the host of troubles it has brought upon itself. The second is the unintended and certainly undeserved outcome of being cast in the role of front-runner for a United Nations which now has the chance to reassert itself after having been so recently thrust aside in Serbia by the US/NATO coalition.
It is now abundantly clear that there are two significantly different approaches to intervention, one sponsored by the United Nations and the other by US/NATO , both presenting themselves as humanitarian. In the period of the US/NATO air war against Serbia the mainstream media persistently blurred this distinction by referring to the world community and US/NATO as if these were interchangeable. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, has now re-emphasised the difference. In his annual report, which received scant recognition in the media, and again in an article reprinted in the Australian after first appearing in the Economist, Annan explains:
The genocide in Rwanda showed us how terrible the consequences of inaction can be in the face of mass murder. But this year's conflict in Kosovo raised equally important questions about the consequences of action without international consensus and clear legal authority. It has cast in stark relief the dilemma of so-called humanitarian intervention. On the one hand, is it legitimate for a regional organisation to use force without UN mandate? On the other, is it permissible to let gross and systematic violations of human rights, with grave humanitarian consequences, continue unchecked?
Yet the distinction is by no means clear cut. The crudest type of qualification lies in the fact that member nations can exert pressure by withholding funding due to the United Nations. For instance, the United States owes 1.7 billion dollars to it. But the more fundamental issue is the way a more globalised social reality is to be conceived. Will a nation, such as the United States, or a limited coalition of nations such as NATO be able to enforce a self-interested perception of an appropriate order of globalised reality, or is Annan right in asserting that the ways states have defined
their national interests in the past is now outmoded? Annan remarks that:
The world has changed in profound ways since the end of the Cold War, but I fear our conceptions of national interest have failed to follow suit ... In the context of many of the challenges facing humanity today, the collective interest is the national interest.
One interpretation of the initial reluctance of the United States to lend its support to a humanitarian intervention in East Timor is that, having been party to bypassing the United Nations in Serbia, the actual results of the US/NATO air war led it to draw back: it placed a question mark over any short-term repetition of self-interested involvement. In any case, the initial impression that in East Timor the United States was determined to stand on the sidelines, combined with the wanton killing and the duplicity of key sections of the Indonesian military apparatus, certainly made it easier for others to associate themselves with actually enforcing the peace in East Timor. The result has been a readiness to step forward which reaches out from China to Norway and Ireland and from France to Singapore. In some contrast to NATO exclusivism in Serbia, the United Nations-sponsored intervention in East Timor does suggest that when something like a genuine consensus arises a far more authentically humanitarian response may follow.
Humanitarianism, consensual or otherwise is not by itself a sufficient warrant for an interventionary force. It is vital to ask what any particular humanitarian intervention proposes to achieve, to reality test it against any unstated realpolitik agenda, to consider the likelihood of achieving a given humanitarian end, and finally to avoid any means which, by their very nature, could foreshadow even more serious breaches of a humanitarian ethic. Many would argue that the Kosovan intervention met none of these criteria while that in East Timor has at least some prospect of meeting all of them. Yet these criteria, however important, are nevertheless formal in the sense that they conjure up little sense of just how substantial or deep-set a given humanitarianism is within the value system of the person professing it. Would such a person be prepared to lay down his or her own life in the name of a humanitarian concern for the lives of others? For a test of this sort to be a genuine one, it would at least be desirable that those seeking either to make peace or to enforce it should be volunteers rather than drafted for humanitarian service as enlisted professional soldiers. Under these conditions punishment visited at a distance without significant personal risk, as in Serbia, might more readily be seen to be the dangerous prerogative of a total power whose credentials are suspect.
Under present conditions of a globalising reality, the prospect may well be that individuals of a profoundly humanitarian temper will become harder to find. The logic of the currently dominant mode of globalisation is to accent the rights of individuals while asking few questions as to the specific nature of the social bonds which maintain a sense of responsibility to others. What I am suggesting is that deeply held values, humanitarian or otherwise, depend upon a tap-root into the densely communal or the mutual experience of tangible presence. Particularly in the later stages of modernity, that type of community has been winding down.
Humanitarianism draws on one aspect of the dense experience which is at least one aspect of every community. But its roots are wider too, set within that of concern for others and encounter with others which cross-cultural experience allows. Within classical modernity that wider experience, the crossing of boundaries, was concentrated in the upper middle class and intelligentsia, hence cosmopolitanism and a practical humanitarianism which both drew upon and extended concern for others as promulgated within the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Globalisation, secularised, marked by individualism, enacted by way of tourism and especially by an engagement with the media gives rise to a fleeting sense of the universal other. Moreover it offers an entirely radical breaking of the bonds of mutuality and dense community; it depletes the sense of oneness with other beings. In Annan's perception the stage is now set for a reversal of old-established conceptions of the relation of the individual to national sovereignty.
State sovereignty, in its most basic sense, is being redefined not least by the forces of globalisation and international co-operation. States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa.
At the same time, individual sovereignty by which I mean the fundamental freedom of each individual, enshrined in the charter of the UN and subsequent international treaties has been enhanced by a renewed and spreading consciousness of individual rights.
Annan's generalisation may well be accurate but it is grounded in the empirical trend of contemporary globalisation as set within the universal market. It asks no questions as to whether universal values increasingly severed from ties into the world of fully embodied experience, as encountered in the personal settings of the passage through the life cycle, can provide a substantial basis for sustained action. If it is not, then before a UN type of organisation can hope to keep the peace, some rebuilding of dense community at the grass roots might well be an imperative. Yet this would also need to be community with a difference. Historical communities provide no model to which many people would wish to return, yet the certitudes of parochialism did offer mooring points for a sense of certainty about and commitment to values both for better and for worse. Globalisation, via its inherent universalism does engender a new opportunity to stand outside such other-directed certainties. In principle it can take a form which embodies strong values tied to communal and mutual experience and yet, also being universal, allows these commitments to be seen through or relativised to a degree, through recognition that they might be otherwise.
A humanitarianism in that mode might begin to look beyond an empiricism tied to the currently dominant trend in globalisation. Citizens formed in such a mode might more readily see through that rhetorical humanitarianism which can mask a far harsher realpolitik. They might hope to become the carriers of, a 'third way': a way which rejected that humanitarianism sponsored by NATO while offering, as yet, a cautious welcome to UN initiatives. That caution would be prompted by the recognition that a humanitarianism, unaware of its own necessary roots and the need to sustain them, is likely to be morally thin. That is to say, likely to be without the depth of conviction which supports action of the type where one is ready 'to lay down one's life for one's friend'. There is no evidence as yet that the UN has moved beyond the invocation of a generalised consensual humanitarianism. Until it has done so, until it defines both the social roots of its specific version and sets the limits to the means compatible with that particular version of humanitarianism, the search for a third way will still be a pressing task.
