A Law of Peoples for Recognizing States by Naticchia Chris;

Author:Naticchia, Chris;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Weak Standard

Perhaps one might want to object that this does not undermine all justice-based accounts, just ones that use the strong standard for minimal justice. What if we lower our standard and adopt the weak one instead?

But in Africa (excluding Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, which were counted in the Middle East), less than one-third of the

countries would qualify for recognition under that standard. Under the most charitable interpretation of their political practices, only fifteen

countries—Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Comoros,

Gabon, Lesotho, Namibia, Niger, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal,

Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Togo—would qualify (and four of them are located in the Atlantic or Indian Oceans).[38] The other thirty-

four countries—including Angola, Chad, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, and

Zimbabwe, among others—all fail to meet that standard, in most cases because of arbitrary arrests, torture, abuse, or extrajudicial killings committed by their security forces.[39] Africa’s UN membership would therefore drop from forty-nine to fifteen.

Again, we can only speculate about the impact that refusing to recognize this many countries would have on prospects for peace and justice in Africa. But the following seem like reasonable conjectures.

First, UN peacekeeping operations in Africa and elsewhere in the world would be significantly affected. Currently, nearly one-half of all UN peacekeepers come from Africa.[40] Yet over two-thirds of them would be ineligible to participate, since they come from countries that fail to meet the weak standard, which would render them ineligible to implement international law. In Africa, this would be particularly troublesome. Peacekeeping missions conducted there would be greatly complicated by barring so many soldiers, police, and observers from the region who possess the experience, cultural acuity, and language skills that are crucial for successful peacekeeping. In addition, the demographic makeup of troops eligible to participate would be much less likely to reflect that of Africa—something that would not only open the UN to charges of racial bias, but would also place these troops in greater danger, given the region’s hostility and sensitivity to colonial domination. This in turn would alter the calculation in support of each specific mission.

Second, even if these limits on contributing troops could be overcome, the weak standard still implies that over two-thirds of Africa’s countries had no rights of territorial integrity or noninterference, and thus cannot validly claim that other entities act wrongly in taking their territory or interfering in their affairs. But if they cannot validly assert these claims, then the international community cannot justify corrective action by claiming that it is trying to right such wrongs. In Africa, where twenty-six countries experienced interstate war, internal conflict, major political or religious violence, or wars of independence during 2015 alone, this would clearly be troublesome.[41] Of course, we could always invoke a general duty of justice to authorize action that our policy of recognition fails to authorize. But then, as we saw earlier, even if this succeeds in containing the threats to peace and justice, it would be this duty, not our policy of recognition, that does the crucial normative work.

Under

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