-----Original Message-----
From: Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu>
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Which goes to my point that "law" is not about the words in the text but
>their interpretation and enforcement under real existing systems of
>government and state power.
_I would not say it better myself, Nathan, you are my man. If you could
-only apply that principle to the US intervention in Kosovo :)...
-wojtek
THey are related in my mind, since the point is that "international law" in regards to human rights has as little legal meaning as (to reinvoke the Civil War analogy) "free labor" did before the US Civil War. The Gettysburg Address is all about how the ultimate change in the constitutional framework of the country was not made through the Amendments later passed but through the bloody struggle that "consecrated" the new nation and its free labor legal system in the post-war era.
I don't want to push the "blood and iron" view of social change too far, for I believe fundamentally in the power of non-violent social and economic struggle as well, but whether by arms, by economic coercion or by the moral force of Gandhian resistance - the law changes only when force is used, not when pretty words are written down.
There is a ban against genocide and denial of civil rights within "international law" but it has never been enforced, so it has no real existence. The war in Kosovo is being based on enforcing that part of international law and through that intervention, the law is taking on some meaning. Of course, there are other darker motives involved; there always are, but to agree with Charles just slightly, the forms and rhetorics of intervention do matter, if only in giving those of less power in society a legitimacy to hoist the powers that be on their own petard of rhetoric.
On substance, I think the Kosovars have right on their side and I take seriously their view that intervention was necessary for them to achieve human rights in their land. On the law, we have the choice of privileging the "law" of non-intervention and the sanctity of borders or alternatively privileging human rights over the sanctity of the right to brutalize ones own people.
That the first major war fought in the name of human rights is a clumsy, bloody mess in many ways is hardly surprising, but if the end result is freedom for the Kosovars - and yes however circumscribed by outside dominance, but at least the form of dominance apparently preferred by the population's leadership - that will not only be for their good but for establishing real Law on human rights that has more meaning than the Sermon on the Mount.
--Nathan Newman