Dawn of a New Order

Geopolitics and the Clash of Ideologies

Rein Mullerson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786722256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XXI secolo

The most significant development in global politics following the end of the bi-polar Cold War era has been the rise of a multi-polar state system. This has led to the emergence of major potential super-powers, global rivalry, international terrorism and the gradual weakening of the one remaining hegemonic, uni-polar state after the Cold War - the US. The idealistic hopes following the collapse of communism have evaporated and Cold War competition between liberal capitalism and communism has been replaced by multi-polar global rivalry that can only be resolved by a balance of power buttressed by international law. In this ambitious and thought-provoking book, Professor Rein Mullerson outlines the challenges associated with the new geopolitics of the twenty-first century. Based on in-depth research over several decades it is an essential tool for understanding the new world order and the ensuing crises in global politics.

Chapter 1

Geopolitics and International Law
through the Prism of Ideology

Confessing My Personal Biases

Having studied, taught and practised international law as well as politics and diplomacy for decades, I have noticed that, often, the more one emphasises the necessity of an objective and impartial approach to the study of social phenomena, including international law and politics, the less one is usually objective and impartial. It seems that only by recognising our inherent and inevitable subjectivity can we become slightly more objective, as complete objectivity is perhaps, in any case, beyond the human nature. Not only our backgrounds, but even the languages in which we think and/or write influence what or how we think, what kind of information we are able to use and tend to accept, and what kind we prefer to reject.

We are what we are due to our upbringing, education, culture and other similar factors. Our individual subjectivity inevitably imposes on our research, research that is supposed to be objective, and therefore I find it appropriate, though maybe unusual in academic research, to make my personal subjectivities and probable biases as clear as possible.

Having been conscripted against my own will into the Soviet Army from the Estonian countryside, I found myself, after many misadventures and adventures, at Moscow University, in the then-capital of the Soviet Union. I became a professor of international law there and later the head of the international law department in the Institute of State and Law of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow, where during the years of perestroika and glasnost I also advised the Soviet leadership, including the first and last President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, onmatters of international law. About a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, I returned to Estonia to help it regain its independence, working as the first Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs. Being invited to the London School of Economics as Centennial Professor (the LSE celebrated its hundredth birthday at that time), I ended up at King’s College, London, where I enjoyed teaching and writing until my mandatory retirement age (recently abolished). After a return to Tallinn I had some high administrative posts in universities and now I am wrapping up my career as a research professor at Tallinn University. Throughout this I have worked for the United Nations, being a member of the UN Human Rights Committee, and later had a stint as the UN’s regional advisor for Central Asia – a region I had often visited before and since and where I have many friends. Having lived and worked at length in two imperial capitals – one being authoritarian, the other liberal-democratic – I may have absorbed some of the great-power arrogances and their visions of the world. However, being an Estonian, I am also familiar with smaller nations’ sensitivities and fears; I understand their points, without necessarily sharing them. Moreover, by nature I am hetero, in the largest sense of the term, which means that I like various kinds of differences. However, I well understand that not everybody is, or even wants to be, like me, and there cannot be anything wrong with it. Having lived, studied and worked in different countries at length I have never felt the need to move in expat circles, as most expats usually do. Why be in Paris and look for Estonians to speak to? I am equally well enshrined in three cultures, which also means that, unfortunately, I am not completely at home in any of them. Moreover, today there is an intensive propaganda war ongoing between these very cultures; a war of such virulence that it forces most people to take sides. It is difficult to always remain unbiased, and it may not even be right to always remain neutral. However, if one is not impartial, how can one remain a researcher? In this book, this dilemma of taking the viewpoint of a researcher versus the position of an activist occasionally arises. If there is ‘advocacy journalism’, can there also be ‘advocacy research’? And is this, in such a case, research?

However, there have always been those who, for whatever reasons, often inexplicable ones, have been able to rise above the circumstances, above the intellectual environment by which they have been surrounded. In the relatively freer West, there were naturally more of them, but there were also quite a few in the East. There were dissidents who were ready to go to prison for views that they often expressed clearly and loudly. There were also highly intellectual persons who articulated their individuality in a less radical way. At Moscow University one of these was my teacher, Professor Grigory Tunkin, about whom I recently published a small review article in the American Journal of International Law¹. I recall a trait which I took away from my close association with him – sometimes, while sitting next to him during various academic discussions, when a speaker explained in the best Soviet tradition just how important his or her dissertation was for the promotion of the USSR’s foreign policy interests, and also that this was the first time that so comprehensive a study of this topic had been carried out in the Soviet Union, he used to whisper, and I am not sure whether only to himself or for my ears too: ‘it does not matter whether it is first done in the Soviet Union or not, what matters is whether it is true or not; only first in the world matters’. Of course, this does not mean that he had become unbiased. Soviet ideology, notwithstanding that Professor Tunkin had been exposed more than most Soviet scholars also to Western influence, had of course left an indelible imprint on him too. However, he certainly felt the need, if not to break the intellectual bubbles within which we all inevitably find ourselves, then at least to see beyond them.

Already during the changed political climate of the years of perestroika and glasnost, when I was leading a small working group of lawyers and historians on the legal status of the Kuril Islands in preparation for the 1990 visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to Tokyo, the Soviet leader said something like: ‘I don’t want the usual gibberish about “eternal Russian territories”. I can talk like that myself. I need a memo where not only are our strong points emphasised, but where the arguments, which the Japanese may use, would be highlighted.’ As a result, Gorbachev had a document where on the left-hand side of every page were both the strengths and the weaknesses of the arguments of the Soviet (now it would be Russian) position and, on the right-hand side, arguments favouring the Japanese. I do not know whether or how Gorbachev used this information, but I assume that during those talks in Tokyo he revealed to his hosts only what was on the left-hand side of the memo, but Japanese counter-arguments would not come, for him, as a complete surprise. Similarly, while practising law, representing the interests of our clients, we do not reveal to our opponents doubts which we may have on the validity, weight or persuasiveness of our arguments, hoping that they will not be good enough to find those weaknesses in our position. This is the lawyer’s approach, where a lawyer first acts as a researcher, but then becomes an advocate.

But the approach of the academic researcher should be different. If there exists what is sometimes called ‘advocacy journalism’, which, in my opinion, though probably inevitable and sometimes even necessary, is regrettable, then ‘advocacy research’ is even more deplorable. However, taking into account how scientific research today is mostly funded, some kind of ‘advocacy research’ seems unavoidable. He who pays the piper also calls the tune. In social sciences, including international law studies, there is, however, an additional factor that gives to our work the characteristics of ‘advocacy research’.

On Methods of Research in Social Sciences

Methods of research in social disciplines differ in many ways from those used in natural sciences, and this is understandable. The subject matter of the research dictates the tools and methods used in its analysis and not the other way around. Moreover, research tools are mostly invented, developed and perfected in the process of practical research and not in abstract. However, it should be advisable, even necessary, if the social scientists were to try to emulate the methods of the naturalists in at least one important respect – one should attempt to get as far away as possible from the viewpoint of an activist and as close as possible to the viewpoint of that of an impartial researcher. There are few chemists who have a favourite molecule, which they not only study but whose interests, wellbeing and importance they promote at the expense of other molecules. Having spoken on the matter with my natural science colleagues, this seems not to be the case, though even there the objectivity of the research is sometimes skewered to satisfy, for example, interests of either pharmaceutical companies or oilmen.

On the contrary, in the field of social studies, the opposite – that is, not taking sides – seems to be the exception. Too many social scientists seem to have their preferred ‘molecules’. I am not speaking of those journalists who all too often have specific agendas that consist not so much of informing an audience as of mobilising public opinion. In the domain of social sciences, taking sides is widespread, almost automatic and subconscious, even among the best social scientists. For example, Paul Saunders – a clear-minded American analyst of the realist school, a critic of Obama’s foreign policy – writes: ‘What would a realist foreign-policy strategy look like? It would start with the recognition that maintaining America’s international leadership – without incurring costs that neither our political system nor our economy can sustain – is the best way to protect US national interests.’² Hence, there is a clear agenda – to protect the US national interest, to maintain Washington’s global leadership, that is, its dominance, in the world. There is a clear agenda that the ‘research’ has to justify, underpin and promote. This is exactly the same as it was with the academic research in the former Soviet Union, as described above. And this is so notwithstanding that Paul Saunders, in contradistinction to many other American authors, well understands that without taking account of the positions of the other powers, whose interests and visions of the world may not coincide with those of Washington, the United States can neither carry out its leadership, nor efficiently protect its national interests. Yet, many of those who call themselves, or are by their job description, ‘researchers’, are blatant activists or apologists. Their approaches are almost invariably either, say, pro- Palestinian or pro-Israeli, pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, pro- American or anti-American, pro-Serb or pro-Bosniak and so on and so forth. Moreover, such labels are often used ad nauseam, so that they start functioning like self-fulfilling prophecies even where they ab initio make little sense (e.g., the population of Ukraine was by mass media quite artificially divided into pro-Westerns and pro-Russians). The intentions of activists may be respectable and their moral outrages may be justified, or even necessary, but such positions are not those of the researcher. Of course, such activism sometimes helps change the world for the better. Often, however, it may lead people astray and contribute to the realisation of negative tendencies.

It has become a commonplace assertion that the first victim of war is the truth. The truth being the first victim of war may have had relatively little impact before the era of mass media. Today, however, the CNN phenomenon and then the internet have increased the importance of this, one may say preemptive, ‘killing’. Psychological warfare and propaganda wars have become necessary concomitants of all conflicts; they precede and accompany them. As we discuss below, the warriors in propaganda wars are not all, and maybe not even mostly, coldblooded manipulators. On the contrary, often they are sincere believers in the righteousness of their cause, like those naïve (from my subjective point of view) suicidal jihadists for whom 72 virgins wait in paradise. Exaggerating the enemies’ brutality, demonising them and keeping silent on one’s own atrocities, or more often those of unsavoury allies, are widely used tactics. As one example, the latest newspaper article I read on the war in Syria before I sat down to write these lines was an interview by a certain Ziad Majed in the French paper L’Obs. Mr Majed, whom the interviewer called a ‘spécialiste’, said, inter alia, that ‘the opposition in Syria will never agree to the alliance with Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has killed more than 90% of the civilians in the conflict’.³ Where do such numbers come from? Has there been a reasonable and impartial commission, where all sides have been equally represented, which had provided such figures? Can a critically minded person who knows anything about wars, especially civil wars, which are particularly brutal and where civilian casualties increasingly prevail, believe that one side indeed caused more than 90 per cent of the total civilian casualties? Although the Western media does not often show how Alawites, al-Assad’s tribesman, are murdered, or how civilians are targeted by the opposition in the areas controlled by the government (a specialty of the Syrian and also Russian media), statements like that given by Mr Majed simply defy common sense. These uncritical figures are taken primarily from two sources – the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (Mr Rami Abdulrahman in Coventry), and the Syrian Network for Human Rights (Mr Fadel Abdulghani). To believe them, not only is Bashar al-Assad evil incarnate (which he may well be, together with some of his opponents – rival civil war factions often deserve one another), but all of his opponents, even including al-Nusra and ISIS, are not so bad after all. If one were to believe Mr Majed, al-Nusra terrorists, though affiliated with al-Qaeda, are freedom-fighters since they are fighting alongside ‘moderate’ opposition, which in 2014 created the Army of Conquest to fight the government in Baghdad. There is no doubt that all sides in the Syrian conflict are guilty of targeting civilians. But as an article in the French Libération⁴ confirms, statistics on casualties have mostly come from opponents of al-Assad’s government, who started collecting data on victims of the regime (not on victims of the opposition) from the very start of the conflict. As the newspaper observes, ‘for them it was also an information battle against the regime that was in denial of repressions’. At the same time, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, that is, Mr Rami Abdulrahman, who has been accused of trying to monopolise information sources coming from Syria, has claimed that ‘information provided by other organizations had been either erroneous or unreliable’. Yet, notwithstanding all of this confusion, ‘experts’ still chime the mantra that more than 90 per cent of civilians in Syria are killed by the government, and newspapers in even liberal democracies which boast of their impartiality still republish such implausible claims. When, on 30 October 2016, the rebels against the government of Syria bombarded western Aleppo from the eastern part of the city, killing no less than 46 civilians, including 16 children, most Western information agencies condemning these unspeakable atrocities failed to mention who had committed the crime. Therefore, as Renaud Girard writes, most of the readers, viewers and listeners had an impression that it was done by the ‘regime’ or the Russians – the ‘usual suspects’. The French journalist calls for putting an end to such a Manichean manipulation of journalism: where one side, in this case the government – named inevitably as the ‘regime’ – is evil, while the rebels are mostly considered as victims. He observes that though the President of Syria is a cruel dictator, ‘in case of free elections he would, instead of having 90% of votes, most probably only 51%’. Such Manicheanism in journalism has an additional danger: it makes one believe that if somebody militarily destroyed a hated dictator, peace, liberty and prosperity would reign in places like Syria.⁵

Beside such obvious media support of one side of a conflict, there are subtler, more professional and therefore less obvious means of information manipulation. Often it is done by professional journalists and, hence, the term ‘advocacy journalism’ has emerged. There is probably no way of avoiding this in journalism. The worldview of journalists working for the Guardian in Britain or for Libération in France usually differs from the worldview of those who write for the Daily Telegraph or Le Figaro. Where we stand depends on where we sit, and even the best journalists not only record facts but also analyse and comment on them, and even then are often swayed by which facts they choose to use. Worryingly, there is a kind of advocacy journalism that may become really dangerous.

There are indeed situations where impartial and detached reporting may seem almost impossible, even immoral. For example, Christiane Amanpour, one of the most famous, and probably also one of the best, journalists in the world, once claimed: ‘When you’re neutral in a situation like Bosnia, you are an accomplice – an accomplice to genocide.’⁶ Of course, from the standpoint of the law she was completely wrong, but from a more humane point of view one may understand her indignation. At the same time, as has been observed by some of her colleagues, ‘Bosnia is also where she earned her mistrust of some of her colleagues. They complain that she oversteps the traditional bounds of objectivity and takes advantage of the freedom CNN gives her to bash whomever she considers guilty of that day’s atrocities – in Bosnia usually the Serbs’.⁷ Indeed, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and especially the run-up to the NATO bombardment of Serbia over Kosovo, were accompanied by one of the most biased media coverages that free press has ever undertaken; it was like artillery fire in preparation of attack by the tanks and infantry. I do not use quotation marks for the words ‘free press’, since the best Western European media is still the freest available, which unfortunately does not mean that it is without bias. Such bias may come either automatically or through careful calculation. Sometimes accusing all sides in a bloody conflict of atrocities, which may more often than not be the case, can destroy any mobilising effect. On whose behalf to intervene, whom to bomb, if all sides are evil? Therefore, it is often felt necessary to single out a particular guilty party, whose crimes are meticulously recorded and reported, sometimes exaggerated, and where any benefit of the doubt is de-emphasised for the party who is a priori marked as gui...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Geopolitics and International Law through the Prism of Ideology
• Chapter 2 Processes of Homogenisation and Heterogenisation in the World
• Chapter 3 The West versus Russia or vice versa?
• Chapter 4 The Future of International Law
• Instead of Conclusions
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Back Cover