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Edited on Thu Jul-24-08 11:55 AM by Boojatta
No, I can give examples to illustrate the ideas, but this is not some special case situation. There's a general principle involved and it doesn't seem to me that the problem to be solved is very complex or esoteric.
There are many cases in history (including relatively recent history) of a country using military force to absorb a neighboring country. Such aggressive acts are sometimes highly popular both in the government of the aggressive country and among the general public of the aggressive country. George Orwell recognized this when he chose, in his novel 1984, to make an effective act of aggression by Big Brother against a foreign country evoke love of Big Brother in Winston Smith.
Now, suppose we consider a somewhat general hypothetical. The government of tribe A attacks tribe B and takes control of the territory that previously was controlled by tribe B. Now tribe A has more land. If the territory that was controlled by tribe B was an official member nation of the UN, then we are now able to say that there is a written rule of international law that the government of tribe A violated. This should be clear.
However, some similar actions are considered to be highly dissimilar in international law. For example, consider "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia or massacres in Darfur. More generally, suppose that it is possible to classify some people within a particular country as "tribally type B" in contrast with the main body of "tribally type A" citizens. It is then possible for a government to acquire or absorb, without violating the rule of international law mentioned above, land owned by the people who have been classified as "tribally type B." They can be simply killed or they can be forced to become refugees. Their jobs, homes, farms or other land, and personal property become available to "tribally type A" citizens.
To me, the situations are quite similar. However, in international law as written today, it seems that efforts to prevent or halt the massacre or deportation of “tribally type B” people are liable to be classified as a violation of international law on the grounds that they "violate sovereignty." Moreover, in addition to being classified as a violation of international law, they may also be unpopular. For example, it is ironic but true that many people decry efforts to prevent or halt massacres and deportations on the grounds that such efforts are "racist."
The above analysis is in truth not particularly general. If coincidentally there had been an ethnic difference between people in colonial America who wanted to achieve independence from Britain and people in colonial America who wanted to remain under British control, then the deportation of people loyal to the British crown could have been easily portrayed as “ethnic cleansing” when in reality there was a civil war based on alternative and conflicting visions of law and justice. It is well-known that deportations and civil wars have resulted from conflicts over religion. We can generalize beyond ethnicity and religion to almost anything.
There is one exception: conflicting visions of law and justice leading to an intractable conflict that a government is unable to keep peaceful. This can provoke deportations that are conceptually distinct from ethnic or religious “cleansing.” After all, if differences in systems of law were merely a technical detail, then the best long-run strategy to deal with the Axis powers (i.e. the WWII-era governments of Germany, Japan, and Italy) would have been to assist them in conquering more territory and neither remain neutral nor resist the conquests. If it doesn't matter what the laws are or what kind of government we have, then the UK, America, and the USSR could have been spared both WWII and the cold war by allowing the whole world to become one nation under Axis government.
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