KARACHI: We need a populism that fulfils human rights as a political project to address problems like climate change and the dangers of nuclear weapons and in the process turn it into something with institutional capabilities that can respond to these issues.

This was said by Dr Richard Falk at the end of his talk on the topic of ‘Sovereign States, Human Rights and World (Dis)Order’ at the Habib University on Thursday evening.

Dr Falk, who is Professor Emeritus of International Law, Princeton University, said the way in which the world was organised had two types of ordering logic. The first was premised on legal thinking where sovereign states were equal — regardless of their size, power or wealth — giving rise to international law and the foundation of memberships in international institutions (such as the United Nations). The idea was derived from the European experience of the chaotic conditions that existed in feudal Europe. The rise of territorial states paved the way for the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. All of that interacted with the logic of inequality based on the disparities of power, wealth and influence of status. Throughout the history, the role of the powerful transcended the limitation of equality. This meant that only the powerful had the option to intervene. He likened this intervention to the Mississippi River which “only flows from north to south”.

Dr Falk said that in the United Nations, the General Assembly was premised on the logic of equality where every state was a member, whereas the Security Council, which was the only part of the UN responsible for peace and security, recognised inequality by creating five permanent members, each given a right of veto, which was a contradictory right in relation to the first logic. The veto had been used against weaker countries and had never been used against violation of fundamental international law by countries like the US, the UK or Israel. In that sense human rights seemed to be subject to the Westphalian logic of equality. The powerful countries used human rights law as a justification to intervene, sometimes giving it a moral dimension by calling it a humanitarian intervention what Noam Chomsky called ‘military humanism’.

Describing the historical dimension to the subject, Dr Falk said that after the end of the Cold War, there was a sense that the future belonged to democracy, market forces and human rights. The three ideas were associated with the victory of the West over the East. There was an arrogant assertion that it was the end of history (as espoused by Francis Fukuyama), the sequel to which was the decade of economic globalisation.

Dr Falk said what we were now experiencing was a double-tiered crisis where disorder was the defining feature of our present world. The double crisis was defined by overlapping two distinct sets of challenges. On one end of the spectrum there were challenges of global scope such as climate change which was easy to comprehend. But nuclear weapons was another (difficult) challenge of global scope because a war with these weapons would be so catastrophic that there would be no way of distinguishing between winners and losers. The framework of global order was not able to address these issues because while it could bring states together as happened in the case of the climate change agreement in Paris last year, but still would not be able to address the issue because of the lack of a system that had enforcement capability. In many respects a legal order was a voluntary order and that’s true vis-a-vis human rights because their effectiveness depended on the willingness of governments to implement them on the basis of their free will. “There is a need for global institutions capable of implementing global interests.”

Dr Falk said that another cluster of concerns was the second phase of the post-colonial crisis. In a sense it was related to the first phase which was the adaptation to the collapse of the colonial order through a series of devastating wars and struggles waged by the people of the south successfully, even though the technologies of power possessed by the colonial side were superior. So it was a victory of the weaker side that challenged the notion that history was made by actors with military power. That lesson was yet to be learned in the US, and the problem had led to a serious world order disaster.

Dr Falk said that in the second phase of the post-colonial crisis, wars were not only fought and lost in the global south, but the south had now the capability to hit back at the north, creating a new interaction where states were no longer the principal actors in the blowback phenomenon.

Dr Falk linked the argument to the rise of the popular autocrat. The second phase of the post-colonial crisis meant that the violence was not confined to the south, the north was challenged in such a way that it too abandoned its principles of liberal democracy. As a result, for instance, there was the rise of Donald Trump in the US who’s an autocratic populist figure supported by ordinary people dissatisfied with the dynamics of migration and the presence of foreigners.

Dr Falk said that dealing with the problem depended on a second populism that fulfilled human rights as a political project and made the establishment of global capabilities to address climate change and the dangers of nuclear weapons into something with institutional capabilities that could respond to these issues.

Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2016