The Hindu Business Line : New sovereigntism

THIS is an appellation that has gained currency to describe a tendency on the part of a country or its policy-makers to be narcissistically obsessed with its sovereign rights in its relations with other nations or in its reaction to international covenants.

There are writings exhaustively documenting instances of dogmatic, self-centred and almost megalomaniacal approach of countries practicing sovereigntism to issues, arising in part from paranoia, in part from a delusion of grandeur. Standing out among them is the article The New Sovereigntists: American Exceptionalism and Its False Prophets" by Peter J. Spiro published in Foreign Affairs, November/December 2000.

The first symptom of the disease is the arrogation by a country to itself the right to determine, and impose on others, what it considers to be in its national interest or against its security concerns. The notorious nostrums of regime change and pre-emptive strike on which the US brazenly stage-managed the entire onslaught on all that is sacrosanct in international law to make a scapegoat of Iraq and to inflict untold human suffering on that hapless country sprang out of the disturbing delirium tremens of the new fever of sovereigntism.

The second symptom of this pathological condition is the virulent resistance to any opinion, individual or nation running counter to an untenable stand of the new sovereigntists. The leaders of France and Germany had a bitter taste of this vicious intolerance when they showed the temerity to question the wisdom of attacking Iraq on manifestly insufficient, if not deliberately concocted, grounds.

The third symptom is the stubborn refusal of the country to subject itself to any sort of international obligations accepted by all other nations. It would rather be a lone ranger flexing its muscles than a team player obeying the rules of the game. The US again scores in rejecting the largest number of international covenants.

A sampler: Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: Land Mines Convention; Rome Treaty establishing an international criminal court; Kyoto Protocol on global warming; Convention on the Rights of the Child; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) (defying, in particular, its prohibition of the execution of juvenile offenders along with Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia).

Warning: So long as there is none to stand up to the new sovereigntists, their bullying can only get worse.