Wednesday, May 02, 2012

International Law

There seems to be one fundamental principle in international law: encapsulation. You limit the number and complexity of interactions with other groups by channeling them through a recognized interface--the sovereign government of the region where those people live.

If a foreign ne'er do well steals from you, you don't ask the Berwyn police to find him, you hand over that exercise to the police there, and ask the judge there for compensation. It simplifies life considerably, and avoids a lot of rough edges and anger at interfering strangers.

Of course it doesn't always work right. Sometimes you find egregious evils that you can't do much about without violating encapsulation. And sometimes one or more countries (it only takes one) figure a war is worth the risk. That also is supposed to be channeled through recognized interfaces, where the armies do the fighting until some recognized authority gives up or arranges a treaty.

All bets are off if a country loses a war and those "interfering strangers" get to do what they like, including adjust the loser's laws. Sometimes this makes the losers slaves, sometimes it (e.g. Japan after WWII) makes them a better country.

The encapsulation (sovereignty) model doesn't seem to work very well with groupings like Pakistan or Somalia. If they were peaceful nobody would worry; and if they were wholly occupied in molesting themselves and didn't bother outsiders we could look the other way and pretend it wasn't happening. But they often do attack outsiders, and are effectively sanctuaries for "international criminals."

That leads to several questions.

How do you identify such a situation in a non-arbitrary way? How do you select the representatives of the group that is causing mischief? And what restrictions are you under when you intervene?

Somalia doesn't have a government; it has a low-level civil war with some outside powers taking a hand here and there. It is a collection of closely related peoples who don't like each other: a "nation" in the old sense of a tribe and a language, but not in a sense useful to themselves or others.

One warlord can decide that he's going to attack Americans. We can complain to the paper central government all we please; nothing will happen. We can collect forces to go do battle--but who do we fight? We've no beef with the rest of the Somalis, just the one warlord and his minions. We can, thanks to superior technology, send a drone in to blow him up--or blow up somebody, anyway. Our humint is often very bad in rotten corners of the world where we don't speak the language and everybody lies to outsiders.

Where are you able to make the distinction between that and an Iranian government, weary of dealing with the futile atheists in British government, sending a drone to kill Salmon Rushdie?

The distinction seems obvious, but I'm not at all sure how one can make the distinction precise--as precise as "work through government channels." If there were an international way to decide that nobody recognizes the existence of a government in area Z, that might be a method, but all we have is the UN. Big joke. (To play devil's advocate: Iran could point out that Britain fails to punish criminals but afflicts citizens who try to defend themselves, is failing to teach its youth knowledge manners or morals, and fails completely to enforce laws found around the world against blasphemy. It sounds like a failed state when you put it that way, doesn't it?)

Who regulates contracts in the tribal areas of Pakistan? The local jirga or Islamabad?

In a region of mixed tribes it isn't clear who to deal with or how. The local warlords threaten families because it works. Ought we, in wild areas of the world, pay assassins and threaten families the same way, to focus the retaliation on the enemy and not the other bystander tribes in the area? The traditional alternative is sending in troops that shoot up the area and make the bystanders mad too--especially if we need troops to hang around to keep tribe Y under control. Afghanistan comes to mind.

Take Mexico as a nearby case. Sections of it are allegedly no longer under the control of the central state, or even of the local government, but instead under the sway (but not detailed control--they don't run schools or courts: see Britain above :-) ) of what are universally recognized as criminal groups. If US citizen are regularly attacked, when does the US have the right to send in forces? (When in hot pursuit?) Maybe peel off a section of the country and administer it ourselves to put things right?

This seems a can of worms. I can see why people keep trying to shoehorn every grouping of other people into something resembling a government.

I started this as a comment, but moved it higher to expand it.

3 comments:

Texan99 said...

So we can see how hard it is to be Secretary of State. It's the Wild West out there.

Texan99 said...

I've been listening to lectures about the Peloponnesian War lately on weekly long drives. Athens and Sparta had eyed each other suspiciously for almost fifty years after their jointly successful effort to defend against the Persian invasion in 480 B.C. The crisis that led to war in 432 B.C. was a little troublemaker state called Corcyra that wasn't formally allied with either Athens or Sparta. Corcyra picked a fight with Corinth, a Spartan ally, then got spooked when Corinth gathered itself and its allies for reprisals.

Corcyra apparently convinced Athens that, since war with Sparta was inevitable, Athens would do well to prevent Sparta from conquering Corcyra and adding its considerable fleet to Sparta's own. Corinth argued that Athens should stay out of the Peloponnesian league's quarrels, especially when they didn't involve any of Athens's important strategic or trade interests.

Athens went with Corcyra. In retrospect, I wonder whether Athens shouldn't have teamed up with Sparta to spank Corcyra, thus removing the real source of trouble and preventing Sparta from glomming onto Corcyra's fleet all for itself. Instead they all fought for 30 years and destroyed their economies.

james said...

It is almost as though leaders got their positions by being good at getting elected or picking the right parents, but not by how well they could think through the pros and cons of national actions.