Geneva Graduate Institute it's a
pleasure to have you reflecting on this
question of War and Peace in the 21st
century in the early 21st century these
questions of course are quite permanent
and eternal they are part of of human
nature but what's important is also
sometimes to try to see what are the the
drivers of continuity change what phases
we are in and reflecting on those I
wanted to start by asking you uh about
the peace component and specifically the
question of democracy um back in 1996
you had published a book entitled
democracy with uh Democrats looking at
the question of renewal of politics and
since then we could arguably see that
there is now particularly since the
2010s a so-called crisis of democracy um
which is playing out both in industrial
States or established democracies but we
also see it in halting transition
processes democratizations precisely
that have not gone forward or even have
taken a step back to to what can we
attribute this Dynamic which is also
running concomitant with the rise of
authoritarianism or NE authoritarianism
you are absolutely
right uh first let me underline the fact
that around the year 2000 for the first
time in
history uh more than 50% of the world
population was living under a democratic
more or less democratic system this has
no
precedent and optimism was absolutely
legitimate then we had like 10
Democratic countries in the year
19,000 and we had around 120 of them in
the year 2000 12 times
more uh this is
phenomenal however something happened
probably around the year 2006 where
those who do the mathematics of
democracy the Berman Foundation Freedom
House Etc started talking about a
plateau uh 2006 is also the year of the
Keta and
Thailand but since then we have seen a
number of
regressions in different
forms first some countries remained
adamantly opposed to the very concept of
electoral democracy like China Vietnam
erria Etc second you had a number of
Keta let me talk about Africa for a
while in Africa you had 16 kudeta in the
1990s then 8 between 2000 and 2010 and
then again 8 between 2010 and
2020 but you had nine in three years
between two 2020 and
2023 which means that Kuda are back in
Myanmar in Thailand in many African
countries three democracy has been in a
much more Insidious way becoming more
shallow in a number of countries where
ethn nationalism is taking the lead this
is the case in India this is the case in
Turkey this is the case in Russia in
different places and even in the west
you can see that democracy is now weaker
you may think that in Afghanistan or in
Ivory Coast you would have a candidate
who refused the results of the election
but to have it in America in on that day
famous Day January the 6 was Trump
refusing the results of the election in
a violent way is something
troubling even in Europe when uh when
the Frenchmen were asked to come and
decide if they want a presidency of 5
years or 7 years uh in a referendum less
than 30% participated in that referendum
so there is a regression that is evident
in different ways what is the reason
there is not a single reason in my view
one of the reasons is certainly the fact
that in many
countries democracy was reduced to
election right and that's why when I was
in Iraq I was opposed to the
organization of election before we can
really guarantee the safety of all
candidates which we didn't because in
this kind of
circumstances election is only a way of
giving the largest militia or the
largest ethnic group a legitimation for
their power this is not election the way
democracy wants it to be well it's
procedural and it's it's Ting it out
absolutely and the another
reason that is probably more Universal
is the fact that a lot of people have
put together the question of democracy
and of economic growth and this is the
case in particular in Latin America
where you can see that many presidents
democratically elected become extremely
unpopular a few months after their
election because people want economic
miracles for their daily life and they
don't get it through the election or
through democ Ry and that there is a dis
disenchantment with democracy because it
is not producing growth while there is a
counter model the counter model is the
Chinese model or the Vietnamese model
where growth has been produced uh
sometimes double digit year uh with an
authoritarian regime in uh in a year
like
2010 the 10 countries with the highest
level of growth nine of them
were authoritarian regimes and only one
Albania was a quasi democracy therefore
this is another reason I think this
confusion between growth and and the
third thing is certainly the complete
failure of democracy promotion by
Western countries especially by the
United States you can't imagine the
billions spent on Democracy promotion
and all objective audit of this money
comes to the conclusion that it has been
to a large extent squandered so there
are different reasons I think I have
mentioned three of them I could mention
others well clearly and I think the last
one also raises the issue that we have
seen as well during the '90s which is
the proliferation of interventionism
military interventionism in the name of
humanitarian issues but often times
coupled with a sort of sort of very
superficial and politicized kind of
promotion of the democracy which was
instrumentalized in many places there's
a number of these dynamics that we see
playing out like this and this is
creating this tension at the level of of
society as you pointed out but if we tie
this to the other sort of big pillar of
this particular moment which is the twin
component of this the the martial
component the war RIT Lodge rather than
the technicality of conflict um the
technocratic aspect sometimes in some of
these studies um during the same time
more or less and you spoke about
different sort of marking moments in
this era if we go back a little bit
earlier in the mid90s or even a bit
earlier we do have also some sort of
evolution transformation metamorphosis
hybridization of War there's all these
Dynamics playing out uh to which later
on comes the question of Technology now
this is also a topic that you had uh
covered in a number of your text I want
to mention one in particular the wars of
the post Cold War which was in an edited
volume on the new international
relations trying to sort of gauge the
grammar of these Dynamics what struck me
in that text at the time was that you
did not insist so much on the complexity
the Practical complexity of the new Wars
or the the evolving Wars but rather how
IR had a hard time international
relations sort of conceptualizing that
which needed to be seen uh and sort of
it seems to me that today that is still
very much with us we have this kind of
back and forth on the forms of it but
there is an issue fundamentally about
that which we should be studying Beyond
phrases such as war is coming back to
Europe for instance um do you care to
comment on that please well I believe
that there is something much wider now
which is a pure deregulation of force
let me insist that if you look at the UN
Charter you will find some kind of
tension between Article 2 paragraph 4
that calls for the respect of the
Integrity of territorial Integrity of
all countries on the one hand are and
and article 51 that allows for
legitimate
defense if you look at the Juris
Prudence of the international court of
justice and of the security Council of
the United Nations until the year 2000
around the year 2000 the Juris Prudence
was very very restrictive and in many
cases Nicaragua Kuru Etc
the icj and the security Council had a
very restrictive Juris Prudence saying
that you cannot use legitimate Force the
way you
want and then something happened and
what happened is two things on the one
hand we adopted the concept of
responsibility to protect which was used
in particular in Libya in
20111 but also we started the war on
terror and in these two cases you could
see that this
restrictive interpretation has been
replaced by a much more laxis one
allowing for much more intervention so
this LED or this helped or facilitated
the deregulation of force you can date
that D regulation of force was the NATO
intervention in Kosovo in
1999 which took place without any
authorization of the security Council as
did Iraq in 2003 but the main I would
say Act of birth is 2003 in Iraq this
was a war that was not authorized and it
was opposed by many important countries
Russia China France the Vatican Germany
you name it and it took place and it
took place based on a concept that has
been uh articulated a year earlier in
2002 in the National Security strategy
of George W bush calling or legitimizing
preventive War so that was a big leap
forward towards deregulation of force
then you had a process of emulation and
this emulation was done by three
categories of State first large
countries and this is the case of Russia
that intervened in Georgia intervened in
Ukraine 2014 before uh invading Ukraine
uh in a completely illegal way in
2022 but this was even more intensely
applied by midsize powers and the
examples of that are numerous I would
cite in particular the many intervention
by turkey in different places in Syria
in Iraq in Libya and elsewhere and by
Iran that also played a very important
role in this and then you had a third
category that appeared which we call the
little sparas and this includes some of
the pet monarchies in the Gulf but also
countries like Chad like Rwanda which is
intervening in many uh African theaters
right now so there is a global
deregulation of force not all countries
are prone to use this deregulation but
it's spreading like like a virus across
the International System and it's
running also in parallel this
deregulation this democratization of
such interventionism which we do see
horizontally indeed in Kenya and other
places going into Somalia Chad going
into the Sahel as mention Saudi Arabia
into Yemen this is very much connected
in this way in a sort of a strange
mirror effect with the role of
transnational non-state armed actors who
at the same times are proliferating also
transnationally which at the tail end of
this and this is my last question to you
is going to create a a new Plateau um of
such sort of deregulation and sort of
instability in which these elements are
now unpacked in a geop political moment
which I wanted to ask a little bit about
so in um the more recent of your Works
uh as a book the book of 2005 uh when
America remakes the world uh connecting
it also to your calls for Empire of 1996
these two works I think speak to this
kind of evolution of the geopolitics we
see that there is kind of a a a a first
kind of moment of opening of this an
opening Salvo of this jumping to now we
see that since then you were saying a
lot has happened um the global war on
terror has arguably failed uh the Iraq
conflict the Afghanistan issues we have
seen the neocons multiplying their work
and ultimately meeting with hubris as
they did and in the meantime Moscow is
now very much in a Mother Russia kind of
M moment as well and if we bring in
midsize Powers such as turkey in almost
Neo ottoman kind of
logic not to mention the United States
of course which is very much should be
concerned with its own World there is
now this kind of a moment in which it
seems to me there are too many variables
of of predictability that are really
very much sort of changing the game what
what do you see as sort of this chess
board in the making in
early in already uh late 2023 for
instance the best example to confirm
what you are saying is the fact that we
are completely unable to give a name to
the period in which we are that's an
Epoch without name we keep calling it
The postc Cold War why do we call it the
postc Cold War because we are unable to
give a name to that era why because
there are too many
contradictory uh let me take the great
Powers first during the Cold War you had
two superpowers with two huge arsenals
nuclear arsenals but you had to a large
extent to kind countries that are not
looking to each other when it comes to
the economy we are now in a
situation where the USSR and America had
$2 billion in trade a year China and the
United States have $2 billion of trade
in a
day so to come with the same concept of
Cold War and apply it to China is
problematic because it's easy talk about
the Cold War when you don't deal at all
with the other side it's much more
difficult when you have a $2
billion daily trade with it of course
when you have so much money being
invested on this side on the other side
and when you have tens of thousands of
students studying in American campuses
Etc so when you have all this
interaction taking place and you want to
decouple it's very very hard it's very
very hard to talk so I'm I'm very very
reserved about the use of concept of
Cold War so it's not a new Cold War it's
something more complex than the Cold War
we have witnessed when we were uh young
now there is another problem you
mentioned or alluded to which is in my
view
crucial there are a number of countries
that are at the same time States and
Empires sometimes they play as states
and everybody applo them they are
playing the game they are into the
globalization process they are free
trade you name it and sometimes they
play the Imperial game and that's the
case of Russia that's the case of turkey
that's the case of Iran that's the case
of china to a certain extent now in in
the South China China Sea and
elsewhere that sometimes countries who
have ibrid in their identity basically
identity between State and Empire
sometimes change the role they are
playing that is why the period we are
going through is still not crystallized
enough to be given a name and that's why
one of our biggest challenges as experts
on international relations Is to really
Christen that period we are going
through that is so full of
contradictions that it remains Anonymous
well for the time being we can still use
the basic concepts of War and Peace and
simply date them whatever time we're
looking at well with that I want to
thank you very much Professor ran salame
it was a pleasure having this
conversation with you here at the Geneva
grit Institute um and thank you again
for your time thank you for inviting
me
No comments:
Post a Comment