Aggression, Crime and International Security by Page Wilson

Author:Page Wilson [Wilson, Page]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Political Science, Civil Rights, Law Enforcement, Peace
ISBN: 9781134012855
Google: 0Ad5AgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-04-07T01:15:32+00:00

Conclusion

This chapter further reinforced the folly of seeking to push the evolution of international law beyond prevailing political constraints. Over the period examined, three different sets of political tensions militated against defining state aggression as a matter of law. The first set of tensions arose in the mid-1940s among the great powers themselves, two of whom opposed altogether the inclusion of the concept of aggression in the UN Charter on the basis of the challenges it posed in the League context. Despite this opposition, a compromise was brokered with the Soviet Union and aggression was referred to in the draft Charter, though in the interest of preserving great power discretion it was not defined. At San Francisco a second set of tensions emerged, this time between the great powers and the small and middle powers. The latter powers, wary of the wide margin of discretion left to the great powers under the draft Charter, attempted to resurrect the debate on defining state aggression in the Charter in order to constrain this discretion. Confronted with the political circumstances of unanimous great power opposition, however, this move was blocked, and aggression was left undefined in the final document.

Nevertheless–and undeterred by the political battles mentioned above which revealed the political, not legal, nature of the problem of aggression–the issue of bringing the force of law to a definition of state aggression was once again revived in the early UN period. Over more than twenty years, and blind to the real source of difficulty masked by efforts to ‘define’ aggression, committee after committee met to discuss the substance, form and effect of a definition of state aggression, with no consensus achieved. On the contrary, the universal negative value associated with aggression did not translate into its legal definition at all; rather the discussions about defining aggression as a legal matter themselves reflected a third set of political tensions: the Cold War conflict. This is apparent from the dramatic outbursts by the USA and the Soviet Union in the 1968 committee meeting, and even from the final text of the General Assembly Definition of Aggression itself.

It was not until 1968 that the lessons of 1928 were properly learned–namely, that ‘in existing circumstances … no practical result’ would emerge from efforts to establish advance, strict criteria for determining an aggressor.74 In both eras, it was the self-interest of the great powers in maintaining their freedom of action that was the true political reason behind the failure of legal efforts to define state aggression. Put another way, the lack of sufficient great power support for effective peaceful change mechanisms–such as a world legislature, executive and judicial authority backed up by binding enforcement powers–meant that approaching the task of defining state aggression as a legal issue was an extremely premature act doomed to failure. In fact, as demonstrated in this chapter, it was more the desire to revisit other topics which, in a short-sighted decision by the General Assembly, had been postponed pending arrival at a ‘definition’ of

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