Dream of a world where people come before power

In this month's Oxford Amnesty Lectures, Peter Singer argues for a United Nations consisting only of countries dedicated to democracy and preservation of human rights.

For much of the past century it has been widely believed that people commit crimes of violence because they are poor, ignorant, oppressed, abused or exploited - either when they commit crimes or at a formative period in their lives. This was supposed to be true not only for individual crimes but for those on a larger scale. It follows that while we may be able to prevent some crimes by effective policing, this is treating the symptoms and not the causes of crime.

But will stopping injustice, exploitation, poverty and abuse be enough to put an end to violence? I do not think so. The potential for mass murder and genocide lies deeper in our human nature.

So what can be done to prevent it? I believe genocide should be stopped in the same way we prevent individual crimes or murder, rape and assault: by policing and law enforcement, at a global level.

There are good and bad aspects of globalisation. One good aspect is the development of international law. The Nuremberg Tribunal was a watershed moment in this respect, leading to the formulation of legal principles for dealing with genocide. These have been strengthened recently by proposals for an international criminal court. We are hopefully about to become a global community that has, at least, some global criminal law.

Punishing criminals is something most people would support, but far better is intervening to prevent crimes occurring in the first place. But when should humanitarian intervention take place? Instead of trying to find the right criteria for intervention, it may be better to search for a procedure to authorise intervention.

The United Nations charter accepts the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of another sovereign state. There are three obvious ways this can be reconciled with humanitarian intervention: if we consider that the violation of human rights and the existence of tyranny is a threat to international peace; the fact that non-democratic nations are more likely to go to war; and if we say the rights of domestic jurisdiction do not extend to committing crimes against humanity, nor to allowing them to be committed within one's domestic jurisdiction.

A fourth way could be to question the traditional view of the sovereign state as the apparatus that is in effective control of a territory. An alternative opinion is that a government cannot be legitimate unless it can show, presumably by free elections, that it represents the will of the people.

The UN was founded at a time when colonies were struggling for self-determination. It recognises people's right to "seek and receive support" for the purposes of self-determination against a colonial ruler. They should also therefore be entitled to seek and receive support against domestic tyrants. If the colonial rulers are not regarded as possessing sovereignty in the territories over which they have control, why should the fact that a gang of thugs have control over a territory mean that they are seen as holding sovereignty over it?

Kofi Annan says the state "is now widely understood to be the servant of its people and not vice versa". This could be made more precise by insisting that the will of the people is the basis of a government's authority, and that this must be expressed in periodic and genuine elections that shall have universal and equal suffrage and should be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

But how are we to decide when a government is sufficiently democratic to be recognised as sovereign? Intervention must be a measure of last resort, to be used only against regimes that rule by force and do not allow the will of the people to be expressed in any open and recognisable form.

A democratic concept of sovereignty would make a huge difference to the way we conduct world affairs. The UN could appoint a tribunal of judges and experts in the conduct of free elections to scrutinise the credentials of each government on a regular basis. If a government could not, over time, satisfy the tribunal that it had held elections allowing the will of the people to be expressed, it would not be recognised by the UN or by other world bodies like the World Bank. But that is not all. When transnational corporations trade with governments, they are implicitly accepting a government's right to sell their country's resources. An illegitimate government would not be so recognised. It would also be a crime to receive these resources.

It is sometimes said that since all values are relative to a particular culture, to use a preference for democracy as the basis for intervention in other countries is a form of cultural imperialism. This objection is confused and can be used to undermine an ethical case against cultural imperialism itself. For example, if we happen to live in a society that holds the view that it is good to expand and impose its ideas on the rest of the world, we could argue that that is our morality.

Once we accept that there is scope for rational argument in ethics, independent of any particular culture, we can also ask whether the values we are upholding are sound, defensible and justifiable. Although reasonable people can disagree about many areas of ethics and culture plays a role in these differences, acts of the kind carried out by the Nazis are not based on a sound, defensible or justifiable ethic.

The most challenging objection to humanitarian intervention, however, is that it usually costs lives and often does not achieve anything positive. We need to have rules and procedures making intervention difficult to justify, but even when these have been satisfied, the key question must always be: will intervention do more good than harm?

If the cultural imperialism argument can be refuted when it is brought against the general idea of promoting democracy and human rights, it is much harder to refute at the political level, given the present undemocratic structure of the UN. This is most evident in the Security Council with its five permanent members holding a right of veto. There can be no justification today for giving special status to nations that were great powers in 1945, but are no longer so.

What then should be done? To expand the number of permanent members with a right of veto risks making the council unworkable. A better idea would be to eliminate the veto and perhaps the notion of permanent membership. The major objection is that this is unthinkable and that it would be dangerous for the Security Council to take military action against a superpower, such as the United States. If this is the best argument for defending the status quo, it should be made clear that it is a matter of political realism, of power, and not of right, that gives these nations special status and the rights of veto could be allocated accordingly, with some variation depending on the region in which action is to be taken.

The General Assembly seems more democratic, but can only take limited action. But it is an assembly of the world's nations, not its people and it does not take into account the fact that a country like India represents vastly more people than one like Iceland.

I believe the European Union with its European Parliament directly elected by the people could provide a model for a future, more democratic UN. The EU has minimum standards for admission, including a democratic government and basic human rights guarantees. Applied to the UN, this would make undemocratic states pariahs, not only to the UN but to associated institutions such as the World Trade Organisation. They would be forced to trade among themselves, and their dictators would know they were liable to arrest if they visited a UN member. Their people could not be kept ignorant of the situation and would become restive. The dictators would have limited means for buying weapons and paying their armies. Moreover, they would know that, if they committed atrocities, the UN would intervene to overthrow them.

Is this a utopian fantasy? Perhaps. The realities of politics today make it impossible to anticipate anything like this occurring in the near future. But is it an ideal worth aspiring too, no matter how far off it may be? I believe that it is.

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp professor at the Center for Human Values, Princeton University. This is an abridged version of a lecture given as part of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2001.