'In the grim present, humanitarian intervention feels like an idea whose time has come and gone," laments Michael Ignatieff in a review-essay in the current issue of The New Republic. Mr. Ignatieff may be right. I regret that being right alarms him. It reassures me.

The birth of organizations such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) at a UN-sponsored conference in Rome alarmed me much more 10 years ago. This was around the days when, in Mr Ignatieff's words, "the idea that all states have a 'responsibility to protect' civilians at risk of ethnic cleansing or massacre in other states appeared to carry all before it --it became something approaching a principle of international law."

Indeed. I found it chilling. Not because I've a soft spot for massacres and ethnic cleansing, but because the spectre of a new world order of supra-national bureaucracy replacing the Treaty of Westphalia and national sovereignty terrified me. It wasn't a question of "better the devil you know." I knew both devils. The devil of a bigger power acting arbitrarily scared me, but I found the devil of a super-state run by a bevy of philosopher-princes even scarier.

The philosopher-princes were just then putting NATO's air force at the disposal of the Kosovo Liberation Army. They were getting ready to ethnically cleanse the Serbs from Kosovo, and then haul into court Serbia's ex-leaders for having failed to ethnically cleanse Albanians from the same region. The new world order was going to be successful ethnic cleansers prosecuting unsuccessful ethnic cleansers for the crime of ethnic cleansing.

It didn't turn me on.

Mr. Ignatieff-- who may still be a contender for the Liberal leadership when his party realizes that giving the job to Stephane Dion wasn't such a bright idea -- is a former member of an organization with the Orwellian name of International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The ICISS's mandate -- "reconciling the international community's responsibility to act in the face of massive violations of humanitarian norms while respecting the sovereign rights of states" -- has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. Sovereignty, if it means anything, means the unencumbered entitlement of an entity to act according to its own best interest, as it perceives it. Trying to reconcile this with a responsibility to other norms causes suzerainty to vanish, no matter how desirable such norms may be.

Nations would enter the new world order voluntarily, its advocates have argued. That's nice, but meaningless. The imposition of a duty turns a state into a vassal of the imposing organization, even if it accepts the imposition freely. In a chain of command, a volunteer is no less a subordinate than a conscript.

It seemed to me a post-Westphalian era would be particularly problematic for countries such as Canada. The contest wasn't between power and realpolitik on one hand, and the law and idealism on the other, as many academics and journalists seemed to believe. The contest was between contenders for future power: Traditional nation-states vs. supranational bureaucrats of a New World Order.

International bodies like the ICC, independent of the UN Security Council, with jurisdiction to enforce and adjudicate criminal matters in any country, would be a coercive force of considerable significance, especially if it were able to call upon the military of member states. Through such courts, UN functionaries and "progressive" academics could have more say in world affairs than the elected representatives of major powers, to say nothing of minor powers.

1960s-type nationalists within Canada's Liberal establishment seemed to think that empowering supranational bodies would result in an end-run around powerful neighbours like the United States. I thought the likely result would be the opposite. Supranational bodies wouldn't make a dent on the United States, Russia or China, but would play havoc with Canada's sovereignty.

To think that permanent security council-class powers, such as America, China or Russia, would become vassal states of some Belgian-Canadian Axis of Goody-Goodies, briefed and debriefed by ICISS-and ICC-types acting as a kind of global super-state, apart from being undesirable, was just plain unrealistic.

Today, as we're about to abandon Georgia to the tender mercies of Russia--it's obvious that we are, and I'm not arguing that we should or that we shouldn't-- Mr. Ignatieff's conclusion is that humanitarian intervention has hit the shoals of reality. "In the case of Georgia, the humanitarian impulse has collided with raw, vast, and unyielding power," he writes. "For the moment at least, world-weary realism rules."

But was there ever a time it didn't? If anything, brave-new-world doctrines like a "responsibility to protect" handed an entire garbage dump full of justification to ursine Russia for grabbing South Ossetia from Georgia. Humanitarianism became a free gift of a casus belli from idealistic Mr. Ignatieff and his ilk to pragmatic Russian leader Vladimir Putin & Co. Prince Metternich, the grandfather of all realists, must be smiling.

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