Philip Bobbitt: This crisis is the crucial test of the new world order
21 July 2014
Lawless defiance: armed rebel soldiers block access yesterday to the main crash site of MH17
The terrible events in Ukraine, electrified by the interception and destruction of a Malaysian passenger plane, should be a thunderclap, shaking us from our torpor and confusion.
We cannot begin the 21st century in the way we began the 20th, with powerful states determined to overthrow the international system, tossing away the rulebook for international behaviour that states of the previous century had used to maintain peace. Now, as then, there are claims of justice and ambition, fired by nationalism and envy, by a sense of historical grievance and by contemporary domestic political manoeuvring, that intermingle to animate and justify the destabilising violence of an insurgent power. Now, as then, the states that need to be united in opposing that violence are divided among themselves.
What does the current rulebook, written with such pain and suffering, provide? First, it requires that no territorial aggrandisement can be achieved by invasion and conquest. As much as Europe’s present borders result from accidents of history, so much more are they ratified by that history, so that while we can accept the creation of new states, such as those that emerged from the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, we cannot begin the process of reconquest without unravelling the European state system with the kinds of consequences we saw in the 20th century.
Second, the rulebook provides for various oversight mechanisms to monitor elections, investigate atrocities and prosecute war crimes. Third, these rules prescribe the autonomy of states in their interstate relations, what groups they may join and what alliances they may maintain.
All these rules were ratified in the Peace of Paris, a collective name for a series of agreements among which are the Moscow Declaration, the Copenhagen Declaration and the Charter of Paris, by which the long war of the 20th century was finally ended. These agreements, to which Russia was a party, memorialised a commitment by their signatories to the legitimacy of market-based democracies and the rule of law. Whatever may be the objections to the Euromaidan demonstrations that led to the fleeing of the Ukrainian president earlier this year, the elections in May have surely settled the question of the legitimacy of the current regime. One of the agreements of which the Peace of Paris is composed guarantees the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
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