Atlantic Council.
The
Arab Spring
is generally discussed in terms of the prospects for democracy.
Equally significant is the increasing appeal — most recently in Syria —
of outside intervention to bring about regime change, overturning
prevalent notions of international order.
The modern concept of world order arose in 1648 from the
Treaty of Westphalia,
which ended the Thirty Years’ War. In that conflict, competing
dynasties sent armies across political borders to impose their
conflicting religious norms. This 17th-century version of regime change
killed perhaps a third of the population of Central Europe.
To prevent a repetition of this carnage, the Treaty of Westphalia
separated international from domestic politics. States, built on
national and cultural units, were deemed sovereign within their borders;
international politics was confined to their interaction across
established boundaries. For the founders, the new concepts of national
interest and balance of power amounted to a limitation, not an
expansion, of the role of force; it substituted the preservation of
equilibrium for the forced conversion of populations.
The Westphalian system was spread by European diplomacy around the
world. Though strained by the two world wars and the advent of
international communism, the sovereign nation-state survived, tenuously,
as the basic unit of international order.
The Westphalian system never applied fully to the Middle East. Only
three of the region’s Muslim states had a historical basis: Turkey,
Egypt and Iran. The borders of the others reflected a division of the
spoils of the defunct Ottoman Empire among the victors of World War I,
with minimal regard for ethnic or sectarian divisions. These borders
have since been subjected to repeated challenge, often military.
The diplomacy generated by the Arab Spring replaces Westphalian
principles of equilibrium with a generalized doctrine of humanitarian
intervention. In this context, civil conflicts are viewed
internationally through prisms of democratic or sectarian concerns.
Outside powers demand that the incumbent government negotiate with its
opponents for the purpose of transferring power. But because, for both
sides, the issue is generally survival, these appeals usually fall on
deaf ears. Where the parties are of comparable strength, some degree of
outside intervention, including military force, is then invoked to break
the deadlock.
