The Slaughter Of Innocents

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The Slaughter of Innocents State Terrorism and Genocide in Our Time Presented by Park, Eun Hong Sungkonghoe Univ, Seoul

We have recently left perhaps the bloodiest and most terrifying century of human history. The tragedies are too numerous to mention in full, but a short list will suffice: the Armenian genocide, the Soviet gulag, the European Holocaust, the Nanking Massacre, the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the repressions of Maoist China, the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge, the slaughter of the Kurds, the “dirty wars” waged by Latin American governments upon their own people. Killing fields dot the landscape of human history. But in the 20th century, we developed the techniques to realize our most murderous tendencies. The end of the Cold War in Europe in 1989 led to much speculation that great historical passions were finally put to rest and the world would settle down to a bureaucratic state of ever increasing political entropy – the EU-ification of the world. But the 1990s were just as brutal as the previous nine decades. The mass slaughter in Rwanda, the targeting of civilians in the former Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the ruthless suppression of uprisings in Iraq, and countless bloody disputes throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Asia all suggested that those initial expectations were naïve. The 20th-century atrocities that I’ve mentioned, both before and after 1989, share two things in common. They involved the large-scale death of civilians – non-combatants who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or were killed for not having the right ethnicity or religion or ideas. And the perpetrators of these crimes were states, for only states possess the means to plan, carry out, or inspire such large-scale killing. If the 18th and 19th centuries witnessed all the bloody sacrifices associated with the rise of states – consider the French Revolution, the forging of Germany out of “blood and iron,” the making of the Meiji state in Japan – the 20th century provided a cautionary tale of the consequences of mature state power. In the 21st century, some argue that the threat from states has largely retreated, and it is non-state actors – terrorists – who most threaten individuals and the world order. The Bush administration has used this argument to justify recent attacks. It was the Taliban’s sheltering of Al Qaeda that served as the explicit rationale for U.S. intervention in 2001. And the administration, to rally public support for invasion, 1

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attempted to link Saddam Hussein to its larger “war on terrorism” by suggesting links that did not exist to Al Qaeda. Both Iran and North Korea, the two other members of the “axis of evil,” are demonized not so much for what they can do directly to the United States (though the United States frequently worries about the reach of North Korean missiles), but for their alleged capacity to service terrorist organizations with material support or even weapons of mass destruction. For all this talk of the terrorism of non-state actors, however, states have not suddenly become benign in the 21st century. States, both large and small, continue to wage war both externally and internally. Indeed, in terms of sheer numbers, states continue to be responsible for the overwhelming number of civilian deaths around the world – in the millions over the last decade compared to the thousands killed by terrorists. Approximately 5,000 people died in terrorist attacks from 2001 to the end of 2003 – a record number because of 9/11 – but that compares to an estimated 9,000 civilian deaths in the Iraq occupation alone. This is not to excuse or justify or minimize terrorism. From the point of view of the victim, an atrocity is an atrocity, regardless of the perpetrator or the scale of the act. As the largest and most powerful state in the world, the United States plays a particularly troubling role, as much for its acts of war as for its stubborn adherence to unilateralism. This unilateralism predates the Bush administration. Linked to a tradition of American exceptionalism, this “go it alone” ethos is hard-wired into the very practice of U.S. foreign policy. This presentation will look at the role of the state in perpetuating violence against citizens, both in the form of “state terrorism” and “genocide.” I’ll also briefly look at what has been done to curb the excesses of the state, largely through popular movements and legal action at both the national and international level. And I’ll look at how the United States, despite many excellent organizations and committed politicians, has a disproportionately negative impact on creating international standards to prevent human rights abuses. But the central questions I’ll be posing today will be the following. Is it naïve to expect that states can be transformed, or are they, like colonial systems, constitutionally disposed to large-scale, unjust actions? Is it equally naïve to expect that we have any sane or effective alternatives to the modern state? And what can we expect from the most powerful state in the world, regardless of who is in the White House? A Short History of the State and Terrorism

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Life before the State was not a great deal of fun, if we are to believe the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. It was a “war of all against all,” and the average person’s experience was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The State might be an awesome and fearful force – a “Leviathan” in Hobbes’s biblically inspired words – but it was generally preferable to the alternative of chaos. To prevent challenges to its authority that might return society to this “war of all against all,” the modern state has sought a monopoly on violence. It reserved for itself the right of both foreign military activities and the maintenance of internal order. And the state, with occasional consultation with religious authorities and even less frequent resort to treaties, determined whether any particular use of force was just or not. The history of the formation of states can be viewed romantically (Garibaldi and the creation of modern Italy) or with a more jaundiced eye (the slaughter of indigenous peoples, the ruthless suppression of minorities). But today, however you would like to believe a given state was constructed, the 180-odd existing states in the world are legal facts backed up by force of arms. The poorest states, like North Korea, have armies. Neutral states like Switzerland have armies. And even Japan, which was governed by the world’s only “peace constitution,” is lobbying hard to have a “normal” military. (Costa Rica, the only country without a standing army, is the exception that proves the rule). The history of the modern state is also a history of bureaucratic control. This control has been maintained through institutions such as the military, schools, and the civil service. To the extent that state and nation do not coincide – and this is the case throughout the world with only a few exceptions – the state has also used its institutions to create national sentiment as a legitimizing force – to turn “peasants into Frenchmen” in Eugen Weber’s characterization of the breaking down of minority (Breton, Provencal) affections to build support for central French power in Paris. The state, in other words, is the great homogenizer. Violence has been used to maintain borders (or expand them), but it has also been used to enforce loyalty domestically. No state tolerates rebellions, revolts, and revolutions. Governments may come and go, depending on the democratic nature of the country, but states with very rare exceptions – East Germany, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union – do not disappear gently into history. Those who are not loyal to the state – in the form of individual traitors or collective rebellions – are subject to criminal penalties in the first case (including death) and war in the second case (the crushing of uprisings such as the one in Kwangju or the suppression of the National League for Democracy in Burma). Much has been written of the economic origins and justifications of the state. But when it comes to state violence and genocide, economic rationales have rarely played a 3

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critical role. Certainly the mass slaughters associated with colonialism – the millions who died, for instance, in Congo at the hands of the Belgians in the 19th and early 20th centuries – were motivated by greed. But desire for wealth cannot explain the rampages of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or the Nazis in Europe. These campaigns required some conception or ideology of enforced homogeneity based on race, political beliefs, or a combination of the two. Genocide can be understood as an extreme corruption of the homogeneity that all states require and which goes by various names – patriotism, nationalism, political loyalty. It has been common to contrast states and terrorists. States are a legitimate part of the world order, and their violence is legal and expected and governed (to a certain extent) by international law. Terrorists form an illegitimate force whose violence is unexpected and illegal. This facile contrast, repeated by most state leaders, does not hold up to close scrutiny. Let’s look first at several definitions of terrorism. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “the use of terror, violence, and intimidation to achieve an end.” The FBI puts an emphasis on the illegal nature of terrorist acts and throws in attacks against property: "the unlawful use of force against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in the furtherance of political or social objectives." The United Nations has so far been unable to achieve consensus on a definition, but there has been a good deal of support for defining terrorist acts simply as the “peacetime equivalents of war crimes.” Even with the FBI definition, it should be clear that terrorism can be a technique used by both state and non-state actors. The Nazi state was a terrorist state, as was the Soviet state under Stalin and the Japanese state of the 1930s – they all used violence against civilians to further political goals. But democracies, too, have used terror and violence against citizens to achieve ends. During the 20th century, for instance, large-scale terror attacks against civilians became a legitimate strategy of war. The Allied fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were specifically designed to kill civilians in large numbers and reduce popular support for the respective governments. U.S. use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II and the bombing of dams in North Korea in the Korean War were a logical continuation of this trend. The continued development of weapons of mass destruction during the Cold War must be considered in this context of state-sponsored terrorism; nuclear deterrence, a cornerstone of the current world order, is a technique by which states balance each other’s institutionalized terrorism. During peace-time, too, democratic states practiced terrorism through both overt and covert operations (for example, U.S. material and logistical support for death squads in 4

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Latin America or Israel’s assassinations of its enemies). But terrorism, conventionally, has been used to describe the activities of non-state movements. The precursors to modern terrorists espoused violence to combat tyranny. In the modern era, however, terrorist movements initially arose to either create states (Israel, Macedonia), recreate states (Korea, Poland), or transform states (Russia, Germany). To achieve these goals, movements that are outnumbered seek advantage by breaking the “rules of combat.” In many cases, terrorism has only been a method of equalizing power relations so that outsiders can win a seat at the table. Many organizations that have been labeled “terrorist” – the precursor to Israel’s Likud, Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, the African National Congress – have since become political actors in the mainstream. The term “terrorism” is thus ambiguous. Both state and non-state actors use violence against civilians to achieve political goals. The term can be stretched to encompass virtually any group, from the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, from the Red Army Brigade in Japan to the Real IRA in Ireland, and even (according to the Chinese government), the Falun Gong. And former terrorists like Nelson Mandela have become world-renowned statesmen. With the end of the Cold War, however, the categories have shifted once again. A new construct for understanding international relations has emerged: market democracies versus everyone else (rogue states, stubbornly communist countries, terrorist organizations). Anti-terrorism has thus become the anti-communism of our generation. State-sponsored violence, which was once directed against “communists” in Guatemala or Indonesia or South Korea, is now directed against those engaged in “jihad.” What was once a strictly political distinction, for communists were understood largely in terms of their goal of seizing state power, now comes with a set of cultural assumptions as well. Al Qaeda does not believe in “our” God. It rejects “our” social liberalism. And it believes not so much in seizing state power as eliminating modern states altogether in favor of recreating an ancient caliphate with mullahs in charge. The political needs of the “war on terrorism” do not quite square with the cultural overtones of the current crusade against radical Islam. To imagine that Al Qaeda has anything in common with the IRA or the Basque ETA or with North Korea and Cuba or with noncommunist “rogue” states such as Sudan and Syria stretches “terrorism” beyond even its previous malleability. Just as anti-communism saw conspiracies between disparate movements – inveterate enemies such as China and Vietnam or feuding powers like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia or distant acquaintances like Chilean socialists and Cuban communists – anti-terrorism has created an equally disconnected “axis of evil.” 5

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Before I turn to the “war on terrorism” and current U.S. policy, though, let me discuss the non-violent path to reining in the excesses of the state – popular movements for democracy and human rights. Democracy and Human Rights The most profound transformation to temper the excesses of the state has been democracy. Majority rule, with minority protections and transparent political institutions, offers the promise of reaping the benefits of the state (stability, economic growth) while avoiding the drawbacks (oppression). Democratic movements serve a vital watchdog function on the exercise of state power, whether overseas or domestic. Democratic institutions, through checks and balances, prevent any one individual or group from using state power unjustly. At least, this is the theory. Without going into the real world failings of democracy, suffice it to say that democracy does not automatically spell the end of oppression. There is the problem of the tyranny of the majority – German support for the Nazi party, Japanese-American internment camps in the United States – which sanctions oppression through popular support. Second, there is the problem of the “national security exception,” which exempts questions of national security from democratic scrutiny. The budget and activities of U.S. intelligence agencies, for instance, are not open to public control. Pentagon strategy is not subject to Congressional control much less citizen oversight. The state argues that the security of the country requires a measure of secrecy, and with this secrecy comes a wealth of opportunities for abuse. Democracy is a necessary condition for putting controls on state violence. But it is not sufficient. Popular movements can organize domestically to improve democratic controls over the army and intelligence agencies. But let’s look at another strategy – applying pressure from the outside. This is where the human rights movement enters the picture. The human rights movement grew out of the experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Developing countries, anticipating the break-up of colonialism, demanded the creation of standards for economic and social justice. An incipient NGO movement, numbering approximately 40 organizations, pushed for universal human rights for individuals over and above the self-determination of peoples. As described by Mary Ann Glendon in A World Made New, Eleanor Roosevelt guided the Human Rights Commission toward reconciling these two approaches by asserting a set of basic human values that transcended diverse cultural contexts. The UN Declaration of Human Rights 6

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offered a potential check on states that engaged in cross-border violence or that turned against their own citizens. At the same time, the Commission was careful not to upset the principle building blocks of the nation-state system, namely the notions of sovereignty and territorial integrity established in the 17th century in the Treaty of Westphalia. As such, no state could use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to justify intervention in another state’s affairs. Sovereignty has always been the last refuge of the state. If internal policies cannot be justified on a moral or legal basis, the state in the end asserts that the policies are not open to external challenge for all states have the right to do what they please within their own borders. Parallel to the work of the Human Rights Commission, however, were Raphael Lemke’s efforts to secure a genocide convention. Here the goal was to establish a kind of exception to the standard of sovereignty if and only if a state attempted mass murder against an ethnic group within its borders. This was a radical move. Even at the Nuremburg trials, Nazi defendants were charged with crimes against humanity only in the cases of German invasion of other countries; what German citizens did in Germany to other German citizens did not count. The convention, which passed in 1948, deliberately excluded political groups from its definition of the potentially victimized. The genocide convention has had more hortatory than actual effect. As Samantha Power makes clear in her 2002 book A Problem from Hell, all states have acknowledged the importance of the genocide convention but very rarely have invoked it. States are large, unwieldy creations. They do not act with moral conviction (though an occasional leader will do so, for better or worse). Only the most slender efforts were made to prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Even less was done to stop the killings in Rwanda. Very little is being done today, as we speak, to prevent the Sudanese government and its proxy Arab militias from killing non-Arab Africans in Darfur. Human rights organizations can bring attention to genocide, but they cannot by themselves stop the killing. Nor can the international community, such that it is, stop genocide. Only states have the means to prevent (or authorize the UN to prevent) genocide. Although they haven’t been able to stop genocide, the human rights movement has had measurable impact on the activities of states. Human rights movements played critical roles in democratizing Eastern Europe, transforming governments throughout Latin America, and making a profound difference for millions of people throughout Asia. As critically, human rights movements have affected how putatively democratic governments behave, for such movements have challenged pragmatic alliances that the United States or European countries have maintained with dictatorial regimes. 7

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Although democratic institutions are more widespread and human rights organizations have greater power today than every before, states continue to oppress. A large gap remains between the state as guarantor of rights and the state as the violator of rights. When the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention were written in the 1940s, there were great hopes that a newly emerging set of international institutions would make states behave. This did not happen. In the 1990s, hopes were renewed that the UN would step into the void of power created by the end of the Cold War. Let me turn now to one of the chief reasons why an international system has been slow to replace the old, creaking nation-state system. American Exceptionalism Although U.S. civil society and elements of the U.S. government have taken strong stands on human rights issues, there are four major problems in the overall U.S. approach, all of which have made it very difficult to construct an international set of standards that can serve as a backbone for a peaceful, rights-respecting global system. Reluctance to combat genocide Refusal to compromise on “sovereignty” Inconsistent application of human rights standards globally Extralegality in counterterrorism operations . Although U.S. citizens were instrumental in pushing for the genocide treaty, the United States did not ratify the treaty until 1988. Even while they quibbled over the terms of the treaty, U.S. politicians solemnly promised that the European Holocaust would “never again” happen. Actions did not live up to these words. The United States condemned the Khmer Rouge during its reign of terror, but then backed the deposed movement after the Vietnam invasion of 1979 in order to achieve a “balance of power” in the region. In a similar effort to balance the power of Iran, the United States sided with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The U.S. agricultural lobby also blocked consideration of economic sanctions against Iraq when news of the slaughter of Kurds began to leak out (Iraq was the 9th largest importer of U.S. food). The Clinton administration decried the acts of the Serbian government and Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia, but tended to blame all sides. While Croatia was certainly guilty of atrocities (Bosnia committed considerably fewer), this tendency to assess blame evenly prevented the U.S. government from backing more resolute action – more UN peacekeepers, NATO 8

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bombings of Serb military targets – to prevent, for instance, the slaughter of 7,000 Bosnians at the supposedly “safe haven” of Srebrenica. And when very credible reports began to emerge from Rwanda of Tutsi atrocities against the Hutu minority, the Clinton administration refused to invoke genocide for fear of being required, by international law, to support intervention into the crisis. Approximately 800,000 Hutus were killed, approximately 80 percent of the Hutu population in Rwanda. In the middle of the genocide, the U.S. government actually prevented the UN from deploying 5500 troops when the Security Council finally approved a measure to expand its forces. Only 800 men were deployed. Why didn’t the United States act? In part, it was reluctant to oppose France, which was aligned with the Tutsis and blocked intervention at the UN level. The United States also did not want to be caught in a long conflict that could cost American lives, especially so soon after the Mogadishu disaster and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia. Nor was there a Tutsi community in the United States putting pressure on the U.S. president or the U.S. Congress. This was a clear case of the necessity of a “humanitarian intervention.” It has been estimated that a force of 5,000 well-armed soldiers deployed immediately could have prevented the bulk of the atrocities. But the United States, like other countries, did not feel compelled, either politically or morally, to intervene. While it is easy to make judgments about genocide after the fact, the choices at the time are not always so clear. Take the example of Kosovo. In March 1999, the Clinton administration finally used genocide as a rationale for instructing NATO for the first time in its 50-year history to wage an actual war. NATO conducted bombing raids over Serbia during which not a single NATO soldier died. Indeed, planes bombed from much higher altitudes than would otherwise be effective simply to avoid anti-aircraft fire. This led to several costly mistakes, such as killing a busload of Albanian refugees – overall, approximately 500 civilians died during the bombing, according to Human Rights Watch. Did the bombing work? 2500 Kosovars were killed in the year before bombing. Within 11 weeks of the bombing, Serb forces killed roughly 10,000 (the exact figures are still under dispute). But how many might have died if the bombing hadn’t taken place? Would fewer innocent civilians have died if American fighter pilots had flown at lower but riskier altitudes? These are not easy questions to answer. The second problem of U.S. policy is the government’s refusal to tolerate any formal infringement of its sovereignty. This has led the U.S. government to reject numerous international treaties (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, the treaty on landmines, the Kyoto protocol on global warming, the International Criminal Court) and to sign others only with 9

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“reservations, understandings, and declarations” that render U.S. participation largely nominal. Large powers have shown no qualms about infringing the sovereignty of other countries – invading them, establishing “no-fly” zones, and insisting that they conform to international rules of conduct. But only large countries, the United States most prominently, are powerful enough to remain within the Westphalian system, retaining the right of exclusive control over what happens within their borders. The refusal of the United States to “play well with others” means that the international norms governing genocide, human rights, fair working conditions and so on remain weak. The United States argues that U.S. laws are more robust than any international laws, but this insistence in fact is self-fulfilling. U.S. unilateralism flows from an “exceptionalist” tradition that argues that the United States is an exception to the rules that govern all other nations. The United States has a special role in history (which is God-given, according to fundamentalists), has not suffered from foreign wars on its soil, does not have the baggage of feudalism, and has the moral authority to spread American-style democracy (and culture and economics) worldwide. If other countries don’t understand this role, then the United States must go it alone. The third problem is inconsistency in application of human rights standards. No U.S. government – even the Carter administration – has been immune from economic and political considerations when formulating human rights policy. U.S. economic interests in Uganda, for instance, contributed to the Carter administration’s reluctance to impose sanctions against the brutal Idi Amin. The Reagan administration adhered to Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” governments when it ignored the human rights abuses of the former (Chile) and focused on the abuses of the latter (Soviet Union). Subsequent U.S. governments have followed a similar pattern of selective application. For our allies in the war on terrorism – Pakistan, Indonesia, Uzbekistan – human rights has taken a backseat to military aid and trade. When the United States needed China’s support last year for the war on Iraq, the administration conveniently neglected to introduce a resolution on the human rights situation in the country at the UN Human Rights Commission (this year, to deny the Democrats an easy campaign issue, the administration dusted off its resolution because of Chinese “backsliding”). Julie Mertus, in her valuable book Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy, argues persuasively that the United States has systematically refused to apply to itself the human rights standards to which it insists other countries adhere. “In no presidency to date can we say that human rights norms have been pervasively or consistently embedded in thought and action,” she writes. In its recent “war on terrorism,” the Bush administration has highlighted a fourth 10

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problem in U.S. policy – extralegality. While other administrations have skirted the law in the past, the current administration has used counterterrorism to justify a sweeping rejection of international standards on such matters as preventive war, political assassination, secret military tribunals, torture, and illegal detentions. In order to limit my remarks, let me focus on political assassination. After the Watergate crisis, a Congressional hearing into covert activities uncovered a wealth of information on U.S. complicity in political assassinations world wide. Here was concrete proof that the United States was engaged in the oldest form of terrorism – plotting to kill leaders such as Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and Salvador Allende and killing as many as 20,000 opponents of the South Vietnamese government in the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. As outraged legislators prepared a bill to prevent the United States from engaging in such activities, President Ford stole their thunder by issuing an executive order to the same effect. But there was a big difference between the legislation and the executive order. The president could make exceptions to the executive order. In 1989, the Bush Sr. administration asked for legal clarification of this order. As journalist Mark Danner describes the clarification in Killing Pablo, “a decision by the president to employ clandestine, low visibility or overt military force would not constitute assassination if the U.S. military forces were employed against the combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States.” This interpretation permitted the United States to go after drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. The Bush Jr. administration has relied heavily on this particular interpretation to expedite its “war on terrorism.” In November 2002, CIA agents used an unmanned Predator drone to kill a suspected high-ranking Al Qaeda lieutenant along with five others. The attack took place outside a war zone. The five other victims not connected to Al Qaeda were considered “collateral damage.” No judicial proceeding determined the guilt or innocence of the targeted victim. The United States simply acted above the law. The United States is not alone in its inconsistent application of human rights standards, the use of extrajudicial killings, the refusal to compromise sovereignty, and the refusal to intervene to stop genocide. But as the largest and most powerful country in the world, the United States is in a special position to establish precedents, lead by moral example, and help create international institutions that can enforce collective decisions. Conclusion: Beyond the State? 11

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The state is at the same time the greatest protector of human rights and the greatest oppressor. Jews, East Timorese, Bosnians have all struggled to build states as a check against genocide and large-scale human rights violations. But as we can see from the example of Israel, even the experience of genocide does not prevent a people from using the state apparatus as a tool of oppression. In the world that we live in – as opposed to the world that we want to live in – states are a given. But go back only a hundred years and you will find an era in which colonial empires were a given. Colonial empires co-existed with the nation-state system. As colonial empires broke apart, new states emerged, which strengthened the inter-state system and, ultimately, made the United Nations possible. We are nearing the end of this process. Yes, there remain some peoples who are struggling to create states – Kurds, Basques, Kosovars, Tibetans, Xinjiang Muslims, Chechens. But new regional and international institutions may soon be able to offer stateless peoples the kinds of protections and guarantees that once only a state could provide. The European Union offers Basques and Bretons and Flemish and Lombards and Corsicans and Roma a level of representation other than national. International covenants on human rights and genocide, if backed by a standing army of peacekeepers, will be more than mere pieces of paper. Multilateral humanitarian interventions, rather than unilateral decisions or hastily assembled “coalitions of the willing,” will enforce the collective decisions of an international community. Between today’s world and the world of tomorrow stands what may well be the last empire in history, the United States. As in Hobbes, the United States claims that it must act as a Leviathan in order to prevent the world from slipping into chaos, a war of all against all. The U.S. Leviathan, with its refusal to abide by international standards, is holding the world back from building a new global system in the same way that the British empire prevented the emergence of nation-states in the developing world. In the world that Hobbes described, people supported the Leviathan to escape the chaotic state of nature. But today, the world over, people are increasingly uncomfortable with U.S. misuse of power. And poll after poll reveal that American citizens, too, do not want to bear the costs and responsibilities of empire. In South Korea, you have thrown off dictatorship, built democratic institutions, and created one of the strongest civil societies in the world. Recently you held one of the most exciting elections of the last decade. Now it is our turn to do the same in the United States: so that we can together build an international system that makes genocide and terrorism of all varieties a thing of the past . 12

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