The Post-Modern Praetorians
“The Post-Modern Praetorians” (TPMR) contains Alex Olteanu’s reflections and comments on topics touching on his “War in the Modern World” M.A. studies at King’s College, London, UKArchive for cosmopolitan citzenship
Warrant for War Project Launches “The NATO Challenge”
Today, the Warrant for War Research Project has oficially launched The NATO Challenge – a unique attempt to develop a grass-roots, global civil society solution to perhaps the most important problem we face in the Twenty-First Century: How can we help protect human beings across the globe whose rights and lives are arbitrarily threatened by humanitarian and environmental disasters?
If, after reading the outline of The NATO Challenge below you are interested to participate, please CLICK HERE to access the Warrant for War Wicki, register and participate in this innovative and important global civil society experiment.
The Quest: How can we help protect human beings across the globe whose rights and lives are arbitrarily threatened by humanitarian and environmental disasters?
The Problem: The United Nations, originally designed to protect the sovereignty of its member states, usually cannot act in a timely and effective manner in situations of crisis; and states or organizations willing and able to so act usually do not receive UN approval. Thus we are caught in a double bind: legitimate UN impotence or illegitimate state / coalition intervention. This vicious circle must be broken.
The Challenge: Draft the Charter of a new level of supranational governance entrusted with the protection of human security in all its forms.
The Means: The Charter will be drafted under a Creative Commons license by means of a bottom-up approach allowing any and all contributions and suggestions from any individual regardless of race, religion, residence, nationality, creed or profession.
The Rationale: The ongoing global media and communications revolutions is increasingly empowering an emerging global civil society – us! – to organize ourselves and take charge of our own lives not only in our own neighborhoods, regions and countries, but also globally. Only by actively participating in this Challenge can we create the required pressure to develop and implement this new level of governance and endow it with the necessary legitimacy to ensure its adoption and implementation. Human security is too important for all our futures to be left solely in the hands of professional politicians and expert academics. We must get involved and make a difference!
The Rules:
1. The Charter must be democratic (it must allow for some form of direct citizen participation).
2. The Charter must be reflexive (not only democratic, but arrived at and implemented democratically).
3. The Charter must be effective (decisions must be made and implemented in practice).
4. The Charter must be inclusive (it cannot exclude anyone who wishes to participate).
5. The Charter must be tolerant (it must respect diversity in all its forms).
6. The Charter must be accountable (as long as some members are themselves not democratically governed, they may participate in debates, but will have no votes in the decision-making process).
7. The Charter must be achievable (it must propose an actually existing point of departure and define a realistic transition process from this point to the optimum environment defined therein).
The Solution: the proposed point of departure is the only truly multinational military institution with proven capabilities to effectively intervene on a global scale to protect human security: NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). NATO would be re-founded by its current members into a legitimate supranational level of governance (Novum Aedificium Terrae Orbis – New Structure of the Global Earth) entrusted to preserve, protect and promote human security in all its forms across the globe, in accordance with the Rules outlined above.
The Tools: The Charter and the debates, discussions and proposals leading up to it will take place on this wiki, allow the use of any other appropriate tools of social networking and communication, and facilitate the creation of a global on-line community of participants who will all be entitled to contribute to this Challenge – although not all proposals may be able to be integrated into a coherent, final Charter draft.
The Product: The final draft of The Charter and its Commentary (including both supporting and dissenting opinions) will be subjected to a democratic ratification process arrived at democratically by all NATO Challenge participants.
The Start: Initial pages will be set up with key questions allowing the debates, discussions and drafting process to start. The rest is up to you!
The Timeline: Up to two years for a Charter first draft and supporting Commentary; up to one further year for revisions and final ratification.
The Follow-up: The new draft Charter and Commentary will be published and promoted as a Global Civil Society Initiative leading to its final ratification, adoption and implementation.
Key Questions: The Charter and its supporting Commentary will need to address, at a minimum, twelve key questions, in a manner consistent with The Rules above:
1. What are the basic principles on which The Charter is founded?
2. What are the legitimating foundations of The Charter?
3. Who are the member organizations of The Charter?
4. What is The Charter’s implementation procedure?
5. How does The Charter and its membership change over time?
6. What specific emergencies does The Charter cover?
7. What are the aims of intervention?
8. Who decides when intervention is necessary?
9. Who, specifically, intervenes, and under whose direct authority?
10. What are the rules of engagement in the intervention?
11. What happens after the intervention?
12. What are the checks and balances of The Charter system?
Please join the Warrant for War Wicki, take part in The NATO Challenge -and don’t forget to let your friends know about it so they may also join and help out!
Warrant for War
I have recently decided to focus my post-graduate studies and research around the theme of legitimate force and the force of legitimacy in the global arena, under the title “Warrant for War”.
The “Warrant for War” research project is an essentially interdisciplinary enterprise, crossing the boundaries of various fields of study, such as political theory, strategic studies, constitutional and international law, history, sociology, international relations, philosophy and even physics. It has developed out of my eclectic readings on these topics and my attempts to find linkages, similarities, and synergies between and across them.
I have set up a blog Warrant for War Blog and Warrant for War Wiki, which will hopefully assist me in my work by building up, over time, a community of interest around this topic. Anyone is more than welcome to visi, join, and contribute to these sites.
Lone Civilian and Tanks - Beijing, China 1989
“Warrant for War” hypothesizes that the emergence of a proactive, dynamic global civil society as an essentially democratic, participative grassroots network of movements, opinions and interests has become a critical factor both enabling and constraining developing legal rights of universal jurisdiction, use of emergency powers to apply military force in protecting communities at risk across national borders, and the manner in which such force is deployed and employed. This sui generis process of developing a global legitimacy requirement “from below” represents a key factor in the emergence of a global cosmopolitan citizenship heralding not the birth of a hierarchical, centralized “world state” based on the traditional European state-building model, but rather of a post-Westphalian multi-level world order where particular levels of governance will accommodate various state and non-state, territorial and non-territorial actors as well as various forms of grassroots, individual participation.
The “right of participation” of these various actors in the process of public opinion-formation and actual decision-making regarding the use of force across borders, the reasons why and the manner in which such force is deployed and wielded, and the specific actors who can legitimately exercise such powers in various circumstances will profoundly affect not only the shape and structure of a new international juridico-political order, but also the nature of the actors which will constitute this order. These trends and processes are by no means inevitable; rather, they are contingent upon the ability of today’s liberal democracies to create a “pole of attraction” possessing a critical mass sufficiently resilient in space and time to allow the progressive transformation of illiberal, totalitarian regimes and their integration in the emergent post-Westphalian international order by means of a variety of political, economic, military and ideological networks of governance expanding across their borders and their progressive transformation both from “inside” and “outside”.
Managing the transition between the current, state-centric international system structured around the key principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention tending towards a multi-polar, global balance of power system based on realist notions of interaction between territorially-defined, sovereign nation-states, and a post-Westphalian international order defined by a universal jurisdiction, cosmopolitan citizenship, and legitimate processes of multi-level governance providing effective rights of participation to various state and non-state actors will constitute the central strategic challenge of the Twenty-First Century.
This presupposes the conceptualization of more sophisticated and dynamic strategic theories than either those of a multi-polar balance of power combining both liberal democratic and illiberal totalitarian states, each pursuing their national interest in an essentially anarchic international environment, and those of a “League of Democracies” counter-posed to a set of illiberal totalitarian states in a new ideological “Cold War”. Such a transition will exhibit three simultaneous, interactive, and dynamic processes of “global social capital building” : a “bonding” process deepening the integration of liberal democracies and accelerating their transition from a Westphalian to a post-Westphalian system of governance; a “bridging” process providing illiberal totalitarian states with a voice (but not a vote) in the development of the new international order, thus endowing them with increasingly high stakes in its success and attracting them to gradually move towards this new order; and a set of “evolutionary”, national processes at work within each totalitarian state generating internal legitimacy and direction to the progressive integration of illiberal totalitarian states in the emerging system of global governance.
An evolving NATO, a revitalized G-8 and a possible NAFTA-EU Free Trade Area could provide the initial institutional military, political and economic frameworks allowing the development of such “bonding” processes of global social capital formation between liberal democracies, whilst the UN and its specialized agencies, the WTO, IMF and the World Bank could provide settings for the creation of the “bridging” processes mentioned above. Together, these three processes would lead to the progressive consolidation of today’s emergent global civil society and cosmopolitan citizenship as part of an expanding, increasingly global post-Westphalian system of governance where emergency powers of intervention and use of force for protection purposes in a universal jurisdiction will be democratically legitimated, enabled and constrained.
