ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

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The Responsibility to Protect 70 military intervention is undertaken. We have argued that the responsibility to protect embraces not only the responsibility to react, but the responsibility to prevent, and the responsibility to rebuild. 8.6 As to delivery, we found the most widespread concern of all. There were too many occasions during the last decade when the Security Council, faced with conscience-shocking situations, failed to respond as it should have with timely authorization and support. And events during the 1990s demonstrated on too many occasions that even a decision by the Security Council to authorize international action to address situations of grave humanitarian concern was no guarantee that any action would be taken, or taken effectively. The Commission has been conscious of the need to get operational responses right, and part of our report has been devoted to identifying the principles and rules that should govern military interventions for human protection purposes. 8.7 But it is even more important to get the necessary political commitment right, and this is the issue on which we focus in this chapter. It remains the case that unless the political will can be mustered to act when action is called for, the debate about intervention for human protection purposes will largely be academic. The most compelling task now is to work to ensure that when the call goes out to the community of states for action, that call will be answered. There must never again be mass killing or ethnic cleansing. There must be no more Rwandas. MOBILIZING DOMESTIC POLITICAL WILL 8.8 The key to mobilizing international support is to mobilize domestic support, or at least neutralize domestic opposition. How an issue will play at home – what support or opposition there will be for a particular intervention decision, given the significant human costs and financial costs that may be involved, and the domestic resources that may need to be reallocated – is always a factor in international decision making, although the extent to which the domestic factor comes into play does, however, vary considerably, country by country and case by case. 8.9 Contextual factors like size and power, geography, and the nature of the political institutions and culture of the country concerned are all important in this respect. Some countries are just more instinctively internationalist, and more reflexively inclined to respond to pleas for multilateral cooperation, than others: really major powers tend never to be as interested in multilateralism as middle powers and small powers, because they don’t think they have to be. Geographic proximity comes into play, simply because what happens nearby is more likely to endanger nationals, to raise significant security concerns, and to result in refugees, economic disruptions and unwanted political spillovers – and to capture media attention and generate demands for action accordingly. By contrast, cultural affinity can mean particular concern for the plight of co-religionists, or fellow language speakers, even in small countries far away. Again, an extremely inward-looking political culture, by contrast, can find it hard to accommodate any external supporting role; many political systems disproportionately reward political actors whose focus and commitments are wholly domestic in character, leaving quite isolated those willing to stand up for international engagement. 8.10 Particular caution is also routinely to be expected from those countries in possession of the military, police, economic and other assets that are most in demand in implementing intervention mandates. Given the magnitude of continuing operations in the Balkans (more than 50,000 troops), as well as the shrinking military budgets of most countries in
The Responsibility to Protect 71 the post-Cold War era, there are real constraints on how much spare capacity exists to take on additional burdens. UN peacekeeping may have peaked in 1993 at 78,000 troops. But today, if both NATO and UN missions are included, the number of soldiers in international peace operations has soared by about 40 per cent to 108,000. Even states willing in principle to look at new foreign military commitments are being compelled to make choices about how to use limited and strained military capabilities. 8.11 In mobilizing political support for intervention for human protection purposes, as for anything else, a great deal comes down to the leadership of key individuals and organizations. Someone, somewhere has to pick up the case and run with it. Political leaders are crucial in this respect, but they are not the only actors: they are, for the most part, acutely responsive to the demands and pressures placed upon them by their various political constituencies, and the domestic media, and they are much influenced by what is put to them by their own bureaucracies. NGOs have a crucial and ever increasing role, in turn, in contributing information, arguments and energy to influencing the decision-making process, addressing themselves both directly to policy makers and indirectly to those who, in turn, influence them. The institutional processes through which decisions are made will vary enormously from country to country, but there are always those who are more responsible than others and they have to be identified, informed, stimulated, challenged, and held to account: if everyone is responsible, then no one is actually responsible. 8.12 The trouble with most discussions of “political will” is that more time is spent lamenting its absence than on analyzing its ingredients, and working out how to use them in different contexts. To reduce the issue to its bare essentials, what is necessary is a good understanding of the relevant institutional processes, as just mentioned, and good arguments. What constitutes a good argument will obviously depend on the particular context. But it is not too much of an oversimplification to say that, in most political systems around the world, pleas for international action of the kind we are dealing with in this report need to be supported by arguments having four different kinds of appeal: moral, financial, national interest and partisan. 8.13 As to moral appeal, preventing, averting and halting human suffering – all the catastrophic loss and misery that go with slaughter and ethnic cleansing and mass starvation – are inspiring and legitimizing motives in almost any political environment. Political leaders often underestimate the sheer sense of decency and compassion that prevails in their electorates, at least when people’s attention is engaged (just as they also underestimate the public willingness, when well informed, to accept the risk of casualties in well designed military interventions aimed at alleviating that suffering). Getting a moral motive to bite means, however, being able to convey a sense of urgency and reality about the threat to human life in a particular situation. Unfortunately, this is always harder to convey at the crucial stage of prevention than it is after some actual horror has occurred. 8.14 The best financial argument is that earlier action is always cheaper than later action. If prevention is possible, it is likely to be cheaper by many orders of magnitude than responding after the event through military action, humanitarian relief assistance, postconflict reconstruction, or all three. In Kosovo, almost any kind of preventive activity – whether it involved more effective preventive diplomacy, or the earlier and sharper application of coercive preventive measures like the credible threat of ground-level military action – would have had to be cheaper than the $46 billion the international community is estimated to have committed at the time of writing in fighting the war and following up with peacekeeping and reconstruction.
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ICISS report - International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect

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