CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

‘Democracy’ says de Wijk ‘is promoted, but not if it gives power to non-Christian
religious fundamentalists.’ 120 We might note as an addition to this the EU’s decision in
2000 to impose sanctions on Austria because of the formation of a coalition government
including the far-right Freedom Party that had taken second place in a democratic
election; or the insistence of the West in democratic elections in Palestine (2006) but
subsequent refusal to deal with the Palestinian Authority when the extremist Hamas
organisation were overwhelmingly victorious. There had been similar discontent in the
West when free elections it had insisted upon and facilitated in Former Yugoslavia,
produced results favourable to nationalist and separatist elements. So the West’s own
standards for human rights and democracy can be relative, especially when viewed from
outside.
In the context of contemporary conflicts it is worth considering a fundamentally
different conceptualisation of human rights that exists between Western liberal
democracies, on the one hand, and the Islamic conception predominant in the Middle
East. Whilst Western liberal democracy increasingly places the individual at the epi-
centre of the rights-system, the central tenet of Islam is of God’s sovereignty. There can
be no recognition of any other authority, thus all legal and political systems must be
based on Shari’a – the law flowing from the Qur’an, the Hadith and their interpretation
and commentary by early Muslim scholars. Whilst some Muslims argue for change and
reinterpretation of Shari’a, fundamentalists argue it is unchangeable. Given that it was
largely fixed by the end of the 10 th century there are inevitable clashes with modern
Western understanding of human rights. 121 Under the Islamic conception individuals’
happiness is obtained through obedience to the law of God, as interpreted through the
rules of society; thus the individual is subordinate and the rights of one may be
suborned to the good of the whole. The alterative conceptions of rights can be
summarised as in Figure 3-1
202