The end of the nation-state era?

By Jim Anderson

WASHINGTON (DPA): Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic and Iraq's Saddam Hussein may go down in history in a way that they never contemplated or intended: They pounded the final nails into the coffin of the concept of inviolable national sovereignty.

That principle has been the foundation of international law since Oct. 24, 1648, where the Peace of Westphalia treaty was signed in the town of Munster. It put an end to the Thirty Year religious wars, in which some 40 percent of the population of the future Germany perished.

In historical terms, more importantly, it established the idea that rulers were obliged to observe certain fundamental guarantees for their subjects. In return, other states were bound to respect the national sovereignty of such rulers.

It was a tenet that lay under the peaceful growth of the European and western nation-states and any violation of that sovereignty, if it were serious enough, was a cause for war.

In the 20th century, that sacrosanct idea began to erode a bit, for example when U.S. President Jimmy Carter said the United States and other western democracies had an obligation to interfere by exerting their influence when egregious abuses of human rights occurred anywhere in the world.

But it was the outrageous treatment by Milosevic of his Muslim and Croatian ethnic communities and the mass killing of his Kurdish and dissident Arab subjects by Saddam Hussein -- plus compelling pictures broadcast world-wide by television -- that led to the next step.

The United States led the way but the Europeans in NATO and even the United Nations under Secretary-General Koffi Anan have now joined the international consensus which says that the international community not only has the right, it has the obligation to intercede when a national ruler massively abuses his subjects. In effect, such a ruler gives up his national sovereignty.

This was the logic that led to the NATO and United Nations intervention in Yugoslavia and the current sanctions and British and American air campaign against Iraq.

In a milder way, the same principle is invoked currently by the European Union and the United States in taking steps to try to undo the results of the national elections in Austria which brought Joerg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party into second place last year.

It was nothing that Haider had done but statements that he had made -- and mostly retracted -- that aroused international fear and anger.

As a U.S. State Department spokesman said this week, "Democracy is more than having elections."

Ten years ago that statement by an American spokesman would have been unthinkable. The principle of national sovereignty and the unacceptability of interfering in another nation's internal affairs were sacred.

Then came Milosevic and Saddam Hussein and the realization that legal and historical niceties were less important than the principle of preventing authoritarian rulers from massive abuses of human rights which would eventually spill over national borders.

Thus ends the 350 years of the imperfect peace based on the Peace treaty of Westphalia and thus begins a new era which has yet to be defined.