Peacekeeping, human rights, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have flourished in complementary contrast with each other. Their relationship has reflected the constraints and opportunities provided by three geopolitical eras since World War II. The first (the first Cold War) began in about 1948 and lasted until 1988; the second (the Post-Cold War Liberal Primacy) ran from 1989 to around 2012; finally, since 2012 the world has been threatened with the emergence of a second Cold War.
During the first geopolitical era, NATO was the centerpiece of the Western Cold War alliance. However, its importance declined when the Cold War waned. Thereafter, during the Post-Cold War liberal primacy, human rights and peacekeeping flourished. In our current geopolitical era, both human rights and peacekeeping are under stress, yet it is not clear that these new forces are strengthening NATO

Doyle, Michael W.

English

bepress Legal Repository

Cold War I, Post-Cold War, and Cold War II: The Overarching Contexts for Peacekeeping, Human Rights, and NATO

Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive

Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2019 Cold War I, Post-Cold War, and Cold War II: The Overarching Contexts for Peacekeeping, Human Rights, and NATO Michael W. Doyle Columbia Law School, mdoyle@law.columbia.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship  Part of the Human Rights Law Commons, and the Military, War, and Peace Commons Recommended Citation Michael W. Doyle, Cold War I, Post-Cold War, and Cold War II: The Overarching Contexts for Peacekeeping, Human Rights, and NATO, 113 AM. SOC'Y INT'L L. PROC. 31 (2019). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/3745 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact scholarshiparchive@law.columbia.edu, rwitt@law.columbia.edu. CHALLENGESANDPROSPECTSFOR INTERNATIONALPEACEANDSECURITY: UN PEACEKEEPING, NATO, AND THE UDHR AT 70This panel was convened at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 28, 2019, by its moderator DianeMarie Amann of the University of Georgia School of Law, who introduced the panelists: StevenHill of the NATO Office of Legal Affairs; Michael Doyle of Columbia University; Bruce Oswaldof the University of Melbourne Law School; and Rita Siemion of Human Rights First.COLD WAR I, POST-COLD WAR, AND COLD WAR II: THE OVERARCHING CONTEXTSFOR PEACEKEEPING, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND NATOBy Michael Doyle*Peacekeeping, human rights, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have flour-ished in complementary contrast with each other. Their relationship has reflected the constraintsand opportunities provided by three geopolitical eras since World War II. The first (the first ColdWar) began in about 1948 and lasted until 1988; the second (the Post-Cold War Liberal Primacy)ran from 1989 to around 2012; finally, since 2012 the world has been threatened with theemergence of a second Cold War.During the first geopolitical era, NATO was the centerpiece of the Western Cold War alliance.However, its importance declined when the ColdWar waned. Thereafter, during the Post-ColdWarliberal primacy, human rights and peacekeeping flourished. In our current geopolitical era, bothhuman rights and peacekeeping are under stress, yet it is not clear that these new forces arestrengthening NATO.COLD WAR IHuman rights as established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), peace-keeping, and NATO were all born between 1948 and 1949. The first two preceded, and the lastdirectly reflected, an escalating Cold War.The ColdWar was a warlike conflict aiming at defeat, “burial,” but not by military conquest. Hotwar between the U.S.-ledWest and Soviet-led East was deterred first by the power of conventionalarsenals and subsequently by the weight of nuclear deterrence. Instead, the United States andUSSR competed with each other through proxy wars in East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, andLatin America and through industrial rivalry, covert action, propaganda campaigns, and culturalstruggle. The Cold War was comprised of a threefold, multidimensional, mutually reinforcingrivalry: first, a bipolar international system; second, competition between capitalist and communisteconomic systems; and third, contestation between two political ideologies—liberal democracyand communist dictatorship.* ColumbiaUniversity School of International and Public Affairs and Columbia Law School. I thankNathan Feldman forhis assistance and suggestions in preparing this draft.Copyright © 2019 by The American Society of International Lawdoi:10.1017/amp.2019.13431https://doi.org/10.1017/amp.2019.134 Published online by Cambridge University PressThe UDHR was endorsed in 1948, just as the era of the World War II “United Nations” alliancewas fading and ColdWar tensions were rising. It reflected many ideologies:Western liberalism andsocial democracy; Global Southern developmentalism; and Soviet Communism. EleanorRoosevelt’s social democracy, John Peters Humphrey’s liberalism, and Charles Malik and ReneCassin’s cultural humanism kept these ideologies together enough to produce the UDHR amalgam.The UDHR passed in 1948 with no negative votes, forty-eight positive, but with nine abstentions(including the USSR, Byelorussia, Ukraine, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and—for obvi-ous reasons—South Africa and Saudi Arabia). This soon produced divisions on human rights, withtheWest sponsoring civic and political rights and the East social and economic rights—all of whichhad been united in the UDHR.A multilateral stalemate between East and West at the United Nations Security Council(UNSC) also limited the scope of peacekeeping. “First generation” peacekeeping emergedin 1948, designed to launch interpositions between warring parties. However, its reach waslimited to the few conflicts that both the United States and the USSR wanted to isolate, andits functions were limited to monitoring truces—with the notable exceptions of the UNOperation in the Congo (ONUC) and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).On the other hand, NATO, created in 1949, directly reflected and flourished in the Cold War. Itwas not merely a military alliance, as suggested by its preamble, which stipulated that:The Parties to this Treaty… reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter ofthe United Nations and are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civ-ilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and therule of law.The Cold War stimulated, reinforced, and gave shape to NATO’s confrontation with the WarsawPact across Europe, which was replicated and mirrored in numerous regional conflicts and in thealphabet soup of alliances including the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the SoutheastAsia Treaty Organization (SEATO).POST-COLD WARThe ColdWar ended with Gorbachev’s loosening of the restraints on Eastern Europe: the famous“Sinatra Doctrine” (each country could now do it “my way”); his announcement that open democ-racy was the crucial foundation of genuine socialism (1985 Party Congress Speech); and, moststrikingly, his announcement that human rights were notWestern, but were rather “human values,”owned and acknowledged by all human beings.1 The end of the ColdWar was reinforced bymove-ment toward glasnost and perestroika in the USSR and ultimately secured with its collapse in 1991.After the Cold War, human rights doctrines flourished; with the highpoint being the ViennaDeclaration’s consensus that human rights are “universal, indivisible, interdependent, and interre-lated”—rhetorically amalgamating civic and political rights with their economic and social coun-terparts. Similarly, with the Agenda for Peace (1992), peacekeeping flourished with a rapidescalation in the number and depth of missions. This included the move from First Generationceasefire monitoring to Second Generation multidimensional peacebuilding and ThirdGeneration peace enforcement (including the protection of civilians). Before 1988, there were thir-teen Peacekeeping Operations (an average of just over three per decade), and between 1988 to2010 there were fifty-three (twenty-six per decade).1 GorbachevAddress to the UnitedNations General Assembly (Dec. 7, 1988), available at https://www.c-span.org/video/?5292-1/gorbachev-united-nations.32 ASIL Proceedings, 2019https://doi.org/10.1017/amp.2019.134 Published online by Cambridge University PressWhile human rights and peacekeeping operations blossomed, NATO entered a period of identitycrisis. It had been designed to deter the Soviet Union and theWarsaw Pact and to stop the spread ofcommunism. What should it do once these threats were gone? Indeed, many scholars of interna-tional relations predicted its rapid demise.NATO, however, did not die. Rather it expanded in numbers and evolved by undertaking newroles, including peacekeeping in the Balkans and then peace enforcement in Afghanistan.Institutions rarely do die. The United States still has two powerful regiments called cavalry, thoughnow they ride helicopters and armoured personnel carriers. But NATO budgets did decline andreadiness slipped.NEW COLD WAR?Since 2012—the year of Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency and Xi Jinping’sascendancy in China, both of which sparked alarm in the United States and Europe—we haveseen the reemergence of global rivalry. These phenomena can be understood as the potential devel-opment of a second Cold War.2The West is alarmed by cyberthreats. U.S., UK, and French intelligence services all agree thatPutin waged a concerted campaign to intervene in U.S., French, and British elections and referendain 2016. It is widely assumed that this cyberwarfare was undertaken with the intention of tiltingelections toward right-wing candidates or with the purpose of discrediting democracy itself. Chinais seen as a geostrategic power rival by the United States—one that might replace it—and is deeplyengaged in industrial espionage and technology theft. This new level of tension is characteristic ofa revolutionary, legitimacy conflict.Russia has acted aggressively because it resents its eclipse since the 1990s and because it is fear-ful of democratic upheavals encouraged from abroad, tilting former allies toward NATO andimpinging upon its sphere of influence. In particular, it has been concerned by the “color” revolu-tions, which have toppled pro-Russian oligarchies in Ukraine and Georgia. China feels that it isbeing contained by the United States.Both China and Russia have experienced the emergence of autocracy and hypernationalismwhich put an internal premium on external conflict (whether focused on Ukraine or the SouthChina Sea) as a way to gin up nationalist support and reinforce autocracy by discrediting localinternationalist voices.Moreover, the tension between Russia and China, on the one hand, and the United States, onthe other, are also the result of deep institutional differences between them. Russia and Chinaare Corporatist Nationalist Autocracies (CNAs) which are aligned with remaining communiststates—North Korea and Cuba—and clients such as Venezuela. Conversely, the United States(as well as other allies, such as the United Kingdom, Western Europe, and Japan) are liberalcapitalist democracies. (By “liberal,” I do not mean that they are left-leaning politically but ratherclassically liberal, ranging from social democracy to libertarian: in the U.S. case, from BernieSanders to Paul Ryan.)Importantly, this burgeoning second Cold War is not as extreme as its predecessor. NeitherRussia nor China is as implacably hostile as the USSR or PRC were during the Cold War.There are areas of common interest between current actors. The United States and China bothworry about the nuclearization of North Korea; the European Union and China are both troubledby climate change; the United States, European Union, and Russia are connected in efforts2 I plan to address these themes in my forthcoming book: COLD PEACE. What follows in this section draws fromarguments that are more thoroughly developed there.Cold War I, Post-Cold War, and Cold War II 33https://doi.org/10.1017/amp.2019.134 Published online by Cambridge University Pressagainst Islamic State terrorism. Moreover, all these actors are much more economically interde-pendent than during the original Cold War, and tensions between them are thus much morecostly.An odd dynamic of the secondColdWar is that the United States is a liberal capitalist democracy,but current U.S. President Donald Trump is not a liberal in the usual sense of that word. Althoughits government is democratic and capitalist, Trump endorses torture and traffics in the rhetoric ofviolence and white nationalism.3 He is much closer to the views of Putin (and many other hyper-nationalists such as Victor Orbán, Rodrigo Duterte, and Jair Bolsonaro) than previous or currentliberal leaders.Human rights have come under attack by all sides. The combination of rising Cold War styletensions and Trump’s illiberalism have greatly harmed the human rights project. The UnitedStates has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council. China’s recent actionagainst theUighurs and Putin’s attack against freedom of speech (criticism of state and governmentis now illegal) have been both condemned by the European Union Parliament.A commitment to peacekeeping has also been collateral damage of escalating tensions. Therehave been only five peacekeeping operations launched since 2012, and because of Russian andChinese vetoes, the UNSC has been AWOL on Syria.One might thus expect that NATO, as during the first Cold War, should now be reviving.However, although European and Canadian defense expenditure, after falling during the GreatRecession, sharply revived in 2014, NATO too may be in crisis. NATO is now subject to deepdivisions between its Western European members and the United States. To quote two prominentdiplomats, Nicholas Burns and Douglas Lute:The single greatest challenge NATO faces today is the critical need for reviving strong,reliable American leadership…. At the most basic level, the next American president mustreaffirm U.S. commitment to the Alliance, especially the Article 5 collective defense pledge,in both words and deeds. Given the opportunity to do so within months of his inauguration inMay 2017, President Trump refused to honor the U.S. commitment to Article 5, even whileunveiling a memorial at the new NATO headquarters commemorating its historic invocationafter 9/11.4Ironically, then, the NewColdWar seems to be producing problematic prospects for all three pillarsof post-WorldWar II international order. Peacekeeping operations and human rights are harmed bythe new Cold War rivalry, while NATO is damaged by Trump’s presidency.3 Previous U.S. administrations sometimes engaged in torture while denying that what they were doing was “torture.”See, e.g., Kim Lane Scheppele, Law in a Time of Emergency: States of Exception and the Temptations of 9/11, 6 U.PENN. J. CONST. L. 1001 (2004).4 Nicholas Burns&Douglas Lute,NATOat Seventy: An Alliance in Crisis 13 (Belfer Center for Science and InternationalAffairs, Harvard Kennedy School Report, Feb. 2019).34 ASIL Proceedings, 2019https://doi.org/10.1017/amp.2019.134 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4761&context=faculty_scholarship

Cold War I, Post-Cold War, and Cold War II: The Overarching Contexts for Peacekeeping, Human Rights, and NATO

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

bepress Legal Repository

Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive