The Limits of Loyalty

Some critics of the "international community" stress the lack of institutional structure and political consensus needed to bring the concept to life. Others assert that, as a practical matter, the international community doesn’t exist at all. But such critiques miss the point. The international community is important and valid primarily as a moral concept that in turn can shape institutions and inform policy choices. Perhaps this moral meaning is better expressed in the notion of a "human community," which exists prior to the sovereign state and is a more appropriate point of reference for analyzing world politics. The moral reality of the international community is rooted in a shared human nature, and its normative imperative is one of solidarity — a conscious conviction that common humanity sustains a minimal number of moral obligations across cultures, national boundaries, and geographical distances.

The basic conviction that such obligations exist and can be specified instructs the human conscience on the limits of loyalty that one can pledge to a sovereign state. The state, for instance, cannot obliterate (or ask individuals to violate or ignore) preexisting moral duties. Of course, the content and scope of a charter of rights and duties remains a continuing source of debate even with the human rights texts of the United Nations in hand. But agreement on one catalog of rights and duties is less significant than the prior assertion that a community of moral actors indeed undergirds the ebb and flow of world politics.

Within individual nation-states, the moral fabric of rights and duties among citizens is given visibility and authority by institutions, laws, and policies. Though civil law never captures the full range of moral relationships, it specifies some rights and duties and enforces them with coercive power. The laws and institutions in the international arena are qualitatively weaker than in domestic society. Yet during the last half of the 20th century, the institutional architecture of the international community developed and matured, primarily through the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, and the emergence of regional and global human rights regimes. The concept of the international community, therefore, is not purely a normative or moral ideal. It has been given shape and structure above and beyond the role of the sovereign state that for centuries has been the principal unit of authority and action in international relations.

The crucial issue, of course, is not the mere existence or growth of international organizations but their capacity to enhance, organize, and manage the life of the international community. This statement presupposes the continued primacy of the sovereign state yet also acknowledges that much of international politics today involves challenges that no nation-state can address alone. The end of the Cold War raised expectations about the potential of international institutions to contribute to the welfare of the international community. But the 1990s highlighted two challenges for international bodies: effectiveness and legitimacy.

History will record the 1990s as the decade of globalization and genocide. As analysts including Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis and Harvard University’s Stanley Hoffmann have observed, the post-Cold War world has manifested both increasing integration and deep fragmentation. Globalization exemplifies the dynamic of integration — between cultures, among economies, and through communication and travel. The event of genocide, vividly on display in the 1990s, exemplified fragmentation within and among states, as large, capable actors chose to ignore the facts on the ground. At the beginning of this new century, the international community still lacks institutions adequate to confront either integration or fragmentation.

The challenge of fragmentation underscores the ineffectiveness of international organizations. The United Nations is the obvious body through which the world should debate, decide, and confront the question of military intervention to prevent genocide (or its related manifestations such as ethnic cleansing). But the 1990s tragically demonstrated the inability of the United Nations to act as the primary agent in addressing these crises. The major states remain the effective repository of response, and the 1990s showed their response to be largely indecisive, tardy, and limited.

Meanwhile, international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund confront the test of legitimacy as they grapple with the multidimensional reality of globalization. Legitimacy in this context implies a shared international conviction that the policies and programs affecting individual nations proceed from international institutions that represent the perspectives and interests of all member states. Yet many states and civil society actors in the Southern Hemisphere believe that key multilateral bodies — which are needed as mediators of conflicting interests and disparities of power — act as agents of the foreign policies of major states. This belief should not lead to the conclusion that these institutions are dispensable but to the discussion of how they might play their role with greater credibility across the spectrum of states and peoples.

The gap between the moral requirements of fashioning a true international community — promoting security, peace, economic justice, and human rights — and the current institutional inadequacies of that community establish the matrix of political choice for states and other participants in the community. In particular, the moral demands of creating a truly international community highlight a double challenge for states. The substantive challenge is the way states conceive the relationship of vital interests and national interests. The vital interest of states usually involves their basic, self-interested concerns for security and prosperity. But vital interests should not exhaust the national interest; both the values that states hold and the needs of others compel states to define national interest in light of a broader global interest. No student of world politics will underestimate the difficulty of persuading states to endorse this broader view. But this challenge is precisely where the moral meaning of the international community has significance for the policy choices of states.

Finally, the procedural challenge for states is to recognize the role of other crucial actors in the international community and to conceive of policy in collaboration with them. The two key groups here are the yet underdeveloped international institutions and nongovernmental organizations that now permeate both the security and economic dimensions of world politics. Ultimately, a broader substantive conception of national interest will require a more creative strategic relationship for states with these other forces.