SUSTAINING AN ELECTION IN PUBLIC: THE LEFTIST SUSPENSION OF THE LAW. posted by Richard Seymour

The UN has returned to its role as an adjuvant to colonialism. As the soft-left's alternative to US imperialism, it has intervened in a crucial way to defend the latter. Kofi Annan told the world yesterday that the role of the UN was now to "assist the governing council" set up by the US and "confer legitemacy on the process". (Guardian, 22/07/03).
People who place their hopes in some version of international law will argue that there is nothing inevitable about this. The UN could or should be restructured. Its charter in some way negates the legality of such complicity. Countries should have the courage to stand up to the US in these arenas. The current neoconservative rejection of international law renders it vital for anti-imperialists to defend the UN.

However, law is always founded upon violence. The initial act of law is always an imposition, and it cannot by definition be legal. And the basis of legal systems is always force. If these simple declarative statements seem either too obvious or too unconvincing, let me slip into a more ponderous mode. Law isn't merely a neutral framework within which disputes can be regulated, criminals can be judged etc. Advocates are in work mostly because there is a job of interpretation to be done. Is this really illegal? Doesn't this instance of the law really compel my client to behave in this way? What about this principle, that prior case?

Within nation-states, there is a spurious determinacy to what could potentially be an infinite process of claim and counter-claim. The judge, backed up with a force of armed men called police, makes a decision one way or the other and in this way we have finality. Not so in the international arena. The UN is even weaker than the old League of Nations in that it does not have any kind of armed force. It can only mandate, sanction and 'confer legitemacy on' the armies of other nations. So, there is not the force of arms available to impose determinacy on the law.

Many of you will remember the arguments over the Balkans war, and the specific lack of involvement (at the early stages) of the UN. The UN's inclusion was as a result of a deal having to be struck with Milosevic. Many on the antiwar left argued that since the UN was not involved and since legal procedures had not been followed, the war was illegal. The Guardian, as well as much of the liberal press, derided opposition to the war based on such objections . The UN, the Guardian averred, was a "recipe for inaction" . Being liberals, of course, they tried to have it both ways and later claimed that the bombing of FRY represented the "growing up" of international law, moving beyond nation-states toward a general concern for humanity. Many well-respected lawyers working in the field of international law defended the action as a rigorous application of UN law rather than a negation of it.

As it happens, there is no way of reaching a final decision on this except to make your own mind up. The US is such an enormous power, noone is going to resist its interpretation of the law, and the law therefore becomes a function of power, as it has always been.

There is something else to bear in mind. The tantrums of Rumsfeld and Perle about the UN are not really a rejection of international law. The article cited from the Guardian finishes by reporting "a growing sense within the administration that the international consensus it eschewed when going into Iraq will have to be established if it is to get out in the foreseeable future". Quite. This is why soldiers are being brought in from the Latin American death-squad states. That is why the US is appealing for help from India, Pakistan and Nepal. That is why they now seek the UN's sanction and symbol. They've got the latter.

The US neoconservatives are not happy with the current structure of international law. But they recognise that they need to regulate their interactions with other states and that this system, whatever else it may be, is highly preferential to their interests. They would, naturally, prefer to seek a system that more adequately represented their "unipolarity" as Foreign Affairs put it. But the current structure is unlikely to change for some time.

Legality is the self-regulation of power, and the UN is the precise institutional representation of imperial power. Time, as Slavoj Zizek once said, for a "Leftist suspension of the law".