The onslaught of Russian tanks into Ukraine on February 24, 2022 sounded the death knell not only of an era but also of an idea: that of peace through law, which prevailed despite setbacks for more than a century.
Certainly Woodrow Wilson’s project [président des Etats-Unis de 1913 à 1921] Making the “world safe for democracy” with the League of Nations met the fate we know. But Franklin D. Roosevelt [1933-1945] had learned lessons from the United Nations Charter, a treaty that prohibits the use of force except in cases of self-defense, and a Security Council responsible for compliance. The fact that the five victorious powers of the Second World War were permanent members with veto rights should have been a guarantee of its effectiveness.
This system, paralyzed during the Cold War, had since its end offered hope for the emergence of a lawful world, as evidenced in 1990 by the restoration of sovereignty to Kuwait, which was invaded by Iraq. But this hope faded when military interventions that violated international law continued to occur – in Georgia, Serbia, Iraq, Ukraine, etc.
Power strategies
The implosion of the Soviet Union had dealt the final blow to another idea: that of world peace through the abolition of capitalism and its “highest level, imperialism.” Above all, it had given substance to the thesis of the “end of history” and the triumph of liberal democracy, an illusion maintained by a broad movement around the world advocating this model. This raised the prospect that respect for the rule of law – a feature of democracies – would ultimately affect the behavior of states outside their borders.
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The curve reversed after about fifteen years. Today there are only around thirty true democracies left, after two successful decades for dictators, autocrats and juntas to take power in their countries. However, the pursuit of freedoms, rights and dignity has not been extinguished, as the regular uprisings in Burma, Hong Kong and Iran show us.
Another illusion was undermined by this war, that of “peace through trade”. The British essayist Norman Angell [1872-1967] had postulated in 1910 that the interdependencies interwoven between states by the first capitalist globalization would ultimately lead to the resolution of antagonisms and political ambitions in the well-understood interests of rival industrial powers. Although this theory was invalidated by the First World War and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933, the idea, which was refuted again in 1939, kept popping up. Its most recent avatar, embodied by the slogan “Change through Trade” [« le changement par le commerce »]which Germany had become the harbinger of, failed in 2022.
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