The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (12 page)

The Council of Constance was significant for the history of sovereignty and the regional integration of states. It was the first ecumenical council organized along national rather than religious lines and presided over by an emperor instead of a pope. Some view this as the true origins of the state system.
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Additionally, the famous
Haec sancta
decree stripped the pope of his supreme authority and vested it in a council or assembly of members from different states and church organizations. By pooling their authority, the representatives could overrule any single sovereign, even the pope.

Today the United Nations and other international organizations act analogously to the Council of Constance: they allow states to pool their sovereignty and claim authority over individual member states for the greater good. This trend is increasing, as a century ago, there were about a dozen international organizations, and now there are more than 355. Generally, they are made up of states, maintain formal procedures, and focus on a region, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or a single policy issue, such as the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL). To Bull, these organizations do not threaten the primacy of states so long as they act as conduits of coordination for transnational problems such as climate change and terrorism.

However, as already seen with the United Nations, after the Cold War’s end, some international organizations sought to transform themselves from a world stage for international relations into an actor upon it. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an example of this. Established in 2002, the ICC is a permanent tribunal at The Hague that prosecutes individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. By 2017, the ICC might also adjudicate “crimes of aggression,” a broad category that entails any action that “constitutes a manifest violation” of the UN charter. This includes trying a head of state whose military goes to war after a formal declaration of war has been issued, signaling a significant departure from Westphalian norms.

The ICC exists to reinforce international law, potentially challenging the domestic laws of states. Its law is sourced from the 1998 treaty known as the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and its preamble explains that the court’s purpose is to “guarantee lasting respect for and the enforcement of international justice.”
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So far, 111 countries are party to the statute, although three of the five veto powers on the Security Council—China, Russia, and the United States—have not signed up. They are concerned that the court’s authority would impede their own, restricting their latitude in areas ranging from warfare to domestic law enforcement. This might seem like an overreaction, but it is not. “International justice” is often code for supranational law that seeks to intervene in the domestic affairs of states, or, as Rosalyn Higgins, former president of the International Court of Justice, warns, “the state can no longer protect itself by claiming domestic jurisdiction.”
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In many ways, the ICC and supranational law function like the medieval church to create overlapping authorities within a single territory. The foundation of church legitimacy was not territory but claims to the moral sphere of individuals’ lives. Similarly, supranational law is concerned with the welfare of people within states as realized through human rights, a concept that traces its moral lineage to the church and its notions of natural law. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights serves as the foundational document of human rights and the cornerstone of international organizations’ legitimacy as actors within a neomedieval world.

As the self-proclaimed protector of human rights, the ICC claims universal jurisdiction over all people everywhere, just as the church did in the Middle Ages. This creates mixed authorities in the world, pitting state law against supranational law. In some cases, the court may even investigate and try citizens of states that have not signed or ratified the Rome Statute.
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The ICC also issues arrest warrants for heads of state, such as Sudan’s president Omar Al-Bashir or Libya’s president Muammar Qaddafi, for actions they undertake within their state’s own territory. New doctrines have emerged, such as the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), that demand that the United Nations stage armed interventions in states that fail to respect human rights.
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Such measures would not be permitted in a strong Westphalian order.

The ICC is not alone. It is representative of a larger trend to create supranational authority that replaces government with governance, as states are increasingly enforcing laws established by international organizations, exemplified by the European Court of Human Rights and the European Union more generally. Contrary to Bull’s assumption that pooling state sovereignty does not impugn state power, international organizations have proven to be more than the sum of their parts. They now assert their own authority alongside states within the same territory, producing the conditions of neomedievalism. As Emma Bonino, the senior European Union commissioner, said during the Rome treaty negotiations, “foreign policy may well be the last vanity of nations.”
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In 1338, a diplomatic mission left Europe and embarked on a perilous journey across central Asia to Cathay, today northern China. The envoys’ objective was to “carry letters and presents” to the mighty Khan of the Tartars, the Mongol-Chinese emperor, so that they might strike a treaty, enter formal diplomatic relations, and build an embassy at the capital of Armalec.

The diplomacy in question stemmed not from a state but from a transnational actor, the Church. Pope Benedict XII sent John of Marignolli to Cathay after the unfortunate “martyrdom” of their last diplomatic mission, and John proved more capable or luckier, spending several years in Cathay and Manzi, in southern China, acting as a legate to the Khan’s court, building churches, converting pagans to Christianity, and ministering to the faithful. The great Khan also maintained an embassy at Avignon, where Pope Benedict XII held his court, and in this way, both political authorities kept diplomatic relations, even though the Church was not a state.

The church was not the sole nonstate authority in Europe at the time. Medieval international society was teeming with transnational organizations: chivalric orders such as the Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller; merchant and craft guilds ranging from apothecaries to wheelwrights; and mendicant orders such as the Franciscans, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Augustinians, all of which depended directly on the charity of the local population for their livelihood rather than on the church.

Formalized relations between states and transnational actors were not uncommon during the Middle Ages and are becoming increasingly less uncommon today. Bull defines transnational organizations as any organization “which operates across international boundaries, sometimes on a global scale, which seeks as far as possible to disregard these boundaries, and which serves to establish links between different national societies, or section of these societies.”
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As with globalization and international organizations, the expansion of transnational organizations as international political actors has grown exponentially since Bull’s time, perhaps beyond what he thought possible. Today such actors fall into three broad categories: nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Oxfam and the Red Cross; multinational corporations such as ExxonMobil and Walmart; and illicit groups such as al-Qaida and drug cartels.

NGOs are international nonprofit groups that operate independently of governments to provide humanitarian services directly to people, and they are increasingly challenging state authority. They are also on the rise. A hundred years ago, there were 1,083 NGOs, and today there are more than 40,000.
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Like medieval ecclesiastical charities, NGOs derive their legitimacy and power by doing “good works,” not in the name of God but instead of human rights.
The universe of NGOs is diverse and defies a single description, with programs in almost every corner of the world, sometimes eclipsing the state in providing social services to populations. In general, there are two types of NGOs, operational and advocacy groups, and each contributes to the neomedieval order in unique ways.

Operational “on the ground” NGOs seek to accomplish good literally from the ground up, such as providing medical care to the world’s most needy, as Nobel Peace Prize laureate Médecins sans Frontières does. Operational NGOs challenge state authority by choosing whom to aid and when, independent of state interests and sometimes in violation of them. For example, an NGO might provide medical care to a rebel group. NGOs invoke human rights to justify such arguably treacherous action, and many also claim “humanitarian space,” a sort of “no-state sovereignty zone” within a state, which allows them to act freely and remain faithful to their core principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence. Obviously, this assertion works best in weak states that lack the military forces necessary to throw NGOs out of their space. Regardless, the recent concept of humanitarian space is a direct challenge to Westphalian sovereignty, since it allows NGOs to claim authority beside states within the same territory.

Advocacy NGOs challenge Westphalian sovereignty by acting as watchdogs for states’ alleged bad behavior and bringing international pressure to bear on regimes through adroit worldwide media “name and shame” campaigns. For example, Save Darfur and other NGOs helped pressure the UN and the African Union, a regional international organization, to launch a peacekeeping mission in Darfur to end the genocide there. It also ran a number of unflattering full-page ads in the
New York Times
and other influential media outlets that personally demonized top Sudanese officials and demanded that the ICC issue an arrest warrant for Bashir, the president of Sudan. Advocacy NGOs seek to expand the frontiers of supranational law by acting as norm entrepreneurs, promoting concepts of justice that eventually become international law like the Rome Statutes. NGOs have rendered Westphalian authority ambiguous, whether through the “humanitarian space” where NGOs can disregard state sovereignty or through “norm entrepreneurship” which precipitates supranational laws.

NGOs hire PMCs, too. Save the Children, CARE, CARITAS, GOAL, IRC, and Worldvision all hired PMCs to protect their operations abroad. Humanitarian organizations are big business for the private military industry, and companies include ArmorGroup, Control Risks Group, Global Risk Strategies, Erinys, Hart Security, KROLL, Lifeguard, MPRI, Olive, RONCO, Triple Canopy, and Southern Cross.
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USAID required NGOs that it contracted in Iraq to hire private security. According to Corey Levine, a human rights consultant, “My organization, a small NGO working to build the capacity of Iraq’s civil society, was no exception. Approximately 40 percent of our $60 million
budget went to protecting the 15 international staff. Our security company was South African.”
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Large corporations have also joined the ranks of international relations and even employ PMCs. More than $3 trillion flows across national borders each day in today’s globalized economy—nearly triple the world’s GDP a century ago.
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This incredible economic growth is propelled by multinational corporations, which are private, for-profit organizations with commercial operations and subsidiaries in two or more countries. In 1960, they numbered 3,500, with an aggregate stock worth $68 billion. By 2000, there were more than 64,000 multinational corporations, worth $7.1 trillion. They account for between 25 and 33 percent of world output, 70 percent of world trade, and 80 percent of international investment. The fifty largest multinational corporations each have annual sales revenue greater than the gross national product of 142 countries, which is about 75 percent of the world’s nations. If revenue were counted as GDP, ExxonMobil would rank among the top 30 countries.
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The rise of multinational corporations has profoundly affected the viability of a state-centric system.

Unlike the East India Companies of the early Westphalian era, today’s multinational corporations are not quasi-state-owned enterprises but instead fully private and independent firms. Their foremost allegiance is to their shareholders, who may hail from anywhere in the world, and their chief concern is profit rather than king and country. For example, multinational corporations are increasingly reincorporating outside their home countries to evade taxes in “offshore” low-tax states such as the Isle of Man or the British Virgin Islands, which maximizes shareholder earnings as it garners the wrath of their countries of origin. A US government report found that in 2007, eighty-three of the one hundred largest publicly traded US companies used such tax havens. Worse, from the US perspective, some of these firms, such as Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Bank of America, received federal bailout money in 2008 and 2009 that amounted to $700 billion, outraging members of Congress who demanded that the government “shut down these tax dodgers.”
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Tellingly, this has not happened.

Multinational corporations have helped create a world financial system that binds together the economic fates of nations and has created a global economy so strong that no government, even among those with the most powerful economies, can withstand sustained speculation against its currency, imposing significant constraints on national economic policies. States no longer control financial flows across their borders, and it is not possible to regard any one country as having its own separate economy, unless it chooses to live in total isolation as North Korea does. Moreover, states that wish to benefit from the riches of globalization cannot afford to ignore multinational corporations, because they are the gateway to global markets and control the location and distribution of economic
and technological capital. This dynamic has given multinational corporations considerable sway within international relations, and many of the Fortune 500 companies are more powerful than most states. It could not be argued that Togo is more influential in world affairs than ExxonMobil.