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Sovereignty and Community after Haiti: Rethinking the Collective Use of Force

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

Extract

The history of diplomacy has been a history of two competing structural conceptions: sovereignty, the barrier that limits state power, and community values, the collective power that overcomes that barrier. In ages past, when the fault line shifted between sovereignty and community, and cracks began to appear in the old legal edifice governing use of force by sovereign against sovereign or community against sovereign, the leading nations of the world gathered at Westphalia, or Vienna, or Versailles, or San Francisco to clarify the contours of the new order and to formulate, however loosely, a set of rules that would govern the use of force for generations to come—rules that recognized states as equals, rules that prohibited aggression, rules that permitted only defensive force. But not this time.

Type
Agora: The 1994 U.S. Action in Haiti
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 1995

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References

1 UN Charter Art. 39.

2 SC Res. 794 (Dec. 3, 1992).

3 SC Res. 929 (June 23, 1994).

4 SC Res. 940 (July 31, 1994).

5 UN Charter Art. 2(7).

6 See Questions of Interpretation and Application of the 1971 Montreal Convention Arising from the Aerial Incident at Lockerbie (Libya v. UK; Libya v. U.S.), Provisional Measures, 1992 ICJ Rep. 3, 114 (Orders of Apr. 14), where the International Court indicated that Security Council Resolution 748 is valid because Article 25 of the UN Charter makes Security Council resolutions adopted in accordance with the Charter binding on member states, and Article 103 makes obligations of member states under the Charter prevail over obligations undertaken pursuant to other international agreements. Since the Court did not look beyond the Charter to general international law, it did not decide whether the Security Council may override the legal rights of states.

7 Peter G. Peterson with James K. Sebenius, The Primacy of the Domestic Agenda, in Rethinking America’s Security: Beyond Cold War to New World Order 57, 59 (Graham Allison & Gregory F. Treverton eds., 1992).

8 Id.

9 T. C. Schelling, The Global Dimension, in Rethinking America’s Security, supra note 7, at 196, 199.

10 Henry A. Kissinger, Balance of Power Sustained, in Rethinking America’s Security, supra note 7, at 238, 239.