Mar
14
Just A Thought
Filed Under international community, justice, sudan | Leave a Comment
How communal is the international community?
A community is “the lasting and genuine form of living together” wrote Ferdinand Tonnies in his seminal distinction between the sociological concepts of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). His work, published in 1887, presented the dichotomy of communities and societies as two collective forms of human bonding. Tonnies considered the community to be characteristic of a group of individuals who placed the interest of the larger association on equal footing with that of their own. The theory, considered to be at the root of the conceptualization of ‘community’, sprung out of the depths of a well of European discontent at the modern forms of human bonding, considered at the time to lacking in both collective affinity and meaningful affiliation.
This new form of association was termed ‘society’. Characteristic of a co-existence of people independent of each other, ‘society’ is transitory and superficial. Members express far less loyalty to the greater ‘society’ than they do to their own individual interests. Tonnies drew on a comparison of rural villages and developed, urban cities; the latter constituting the foci of developed nations. Forms of human bonding were found to be markedly distinct in each of those settings, which gave rise to a challenge of the sociological construct of community.
A similar challenge may very well be in order in the realm of international politics. Recently, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir became the first-ever sitting head of state to be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC). While the likelihood of a significant aftereffect remains ambiguous (al-Bashir reportedly responded to the arrest warrant with a common phrase of derision in Arabic, telling his prosecutors to “boil the warrant and drink its water.”) reaction to the warrant has revealed the apparent neurosis of the ‘international community.’
Amnesty International’s deputy director of the human rights organization’s Africa program released a statement shortly after news of the warrant, claiming that it sent “a strong signal that the international community no longer tolerates impunity for grave violations of human rights committed by people in positions of power.” A U.S state department spokesman, when pressed on whether or not his government supported the indictment, stated that “(The United States) recognize(s) that by the international community, this has been a move that will try and help resolve the problems in Sudan.” The BBC’s Amber Henshaw, in an article for the news organization’s website, tied the Sudanese government’s claim that the ruling represented a ‘Western’ conspiracy to “blame (of) the international community.” Madeleine Albright, former U.S secretary of state under President Clinton commented that “the international community can(not) stand by and watch as thousands more people starve to death.”
The last statement may hold true and certainly appeals to the morality of a responsibility to protect. Consider, nonetheless, the character of any force that may intervene to resolve a conflict that has, among other tragedies, produced an accepted reality of war rape amongst 1.45 million displaced members of our species. Such a force would undoubtedly be composed of U.S or NATO troops, ‘Western’ troops if you would allow me the use of that phrase. Is the ‘international community’ a euphemism for the ‘Western’ world?
Perhaps; the ‘international community’ that roundly voiced either overt or veiled approval of the indictment would not seem to include members of the African Union, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and China, among others. Those nations either expressed regret or concern over the indictment, and would not seem to factor into the formulation of the ‘international community’ and its tolerations.
This point, however, seems an obvious linguistic hypocrisy that the world’s most powerful nations are privy to. Assuming that the term is indeed an inflation of the ‘Western’ world, the ‘international community’ that is championing justice for millions of Sudanese would be the same ‘community’ that was responsible for the colonization of Africa or the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yet that premise does not hold, since many ‘Western’ nations opposed the war in Iraq and did not participate in the enterprise of colonialism.
What we are left with is a conception of the ‘international community’ whose composition of nation-states do not exhibit a collective will nor action. This ‘community’ is neither entirely international nor Western in composition, and has acted in manners that have been opposed by its own members. The ‘international community’ cannot seem to be defined from a global perspective, but rather finds its identity in its many composite parts. In view of Tonnies’ distinction, what is considered a ‘community’ in this case may well be regarded as more appropriately as a ‘society’.
The ‘international society’, then, looks to be a more appropriate terminology for the collection of states that co-exist to maintain a global order of peace and prosperity. The distinction here is significant in that it changes the assumptions with which an observer can (and should) expect the society to act.