Once Upon a Time…

I want to tell you a story. Once upon a time in a Europe long, long ago there was a war that extended over a substantial part of the continent without any borders and without any limits. It went on for decades—so long in fact that many people did not remember a time before the war. And that war had followed almost immediately after another even longer war. Tired of war the leaders of that time came up with a novel idea. Individual countries would have agreed-upon borders. Sovereigns were responsible for what went on within those borders, those borders were “inviolable”, and other countries were not to interfere in what went on within those borders. Because the treaties that arrived at that solution were concluded in cities in Westphalia those principles are called “Westphalian sovereignty” and “Westphalian states”. Those principles have prevailed in European-dominated diplomacy ever since. They have worked pretty well despite our frequent violations of them.

What moved me to repeat that story was this editorial in the Washington Post:

Haiti has descended into a state of political, economic and security collapse.

The free fall in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country is accelerating, and it is a pipe dream to imagine it can pull itself together without outside intervention. To oppose a muscular international force that could restore some semblance of order is to shrug at an unfolding humanitarian disaster.

In the face of Haiti’s agonies, the heedlessness of the Biden administration and the United Nations is unconscionable.

Haiti has been in a state of chaos for most of the years since 1791 when slaves in the western quarter of the French colony of Saint-Domingue rebelled against their masters and established their own country. We haven’t helped matters there a great deal. The United States occupied Haiti for about a decade a century ago. It was not precisely a benign occupation.

Haiti is not the only country in the world in a state of “political, economic and security collapse”. The characterization is apt for much of Africa and a broad swathe of west Asia reaching from the Hindu Kush to the Bosporus.

How do you reconcile the sort of intervention the editors are calling for with Westphalian states? Keep in mind that should we choose to abandon the concept of Westphalian states it would introduce the risk of war without boundaries and war without end.

One more quibble with the editors’ advice: there is no such thing as an “international force” and we should resist the creation of such a thing as strenuously as possible. There have been multi-national forces. The last multi-national force in Haiti spread cholera there resulting in many deaths.

My question is what is the basis for intervening in Haiti but not in Somalia? Or Sudan? Or Ethiopia? Or the enormous list of other countries? Where does it end?