The responsibility for the other and The Responsibility to Protect

From beginning to end, the 20th century was marred by conscience-shocking organized genocides in Eurasia, Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa. These events have prompted some of the most profound thinking on human nature, ethics and the structure and character of human society. Two particularly original, creative and challenging responses to these events are the ethical investigations of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–95) which yielded, in his late work, a particularly far-reaching concept of responsibility, and, more recently, the elaboration of the doctrine of a ‘responsibility to protect’ unarmed civilians that would be borne collectively by the international community. Though originating in vastly different intellectual traditions, historical circumstances and disciplinary contexts, these two converge, in both substance and approach, in particularly interesting ways. In the light, especially, of independent and distant points of departure, would the convergence of substantive ethical imperatives, original methodologies and innovative intellectual approaches hold particular promise in examining what Samantha Power has powerfully characterized as this ‘problem from hell’? The purpose of this article will be to investigate this possibility by reviewing certain salient features of each and attempting to establish a junction of the two. The convergence I will seek to demonstrate will answer one question which takes slightly different turns with respect to each of the doctrines under consideration. First, can the responsibility to protect be construed as a possible policy dimension, a practical application or extension, of Levinas’ ethical theories? Second, and conversely, can the responsibility to protect be grounded in the ethical principles of Levinas’ responsibility for the other? Can, in other words, Levinas’ ethical thought help to theorize or frame, in substance or in method, the very original and creative intellectual démarches of the responsibility to protect?

Several of Levinas’ most forceful and penetrating commentators have unambiguously characterized his entire philosophical opus as a response to the massive ethical failure represented by Europe’s Holocaust. In this, of course, they follow Levinas’ own assessment of his biography as ‘dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror’ ¹ and many other observations to this effect in various essays and interviews. Maurice Blanchot, Howard Caygill and Richard Bernstein, among others, have eloquently argued this position, each emphasizing a slightly different dimension of it. Richard Bernstein emphasizes the problem of evil: ‘The thesis that I want to explore and defend is that the primary thrust of Levinas’ thought is to be understood as his response to the horror of the evil that has erupted in the twentieth century.’ ² Most are familiar with Blanchot’s comments about Levinas in ‘Our Clandestine Companion’ which echo Adorno’s famous remark about poetry: ‘How can one philosophize, how can one write within the memory of Auschwitz … ?’ ³ Howard Caygill, in a fine study on Levinas and the political, emphasizes instead the ubiquity, in Levinas’ oeuvre, of the problem of war (Caygill, Levinas and the Political: 5 and passim).

As most readers of Levinas well know, the eruption of the evil of the Holocaust is understood by him to be at once an intellectual, moral, cultural and structural failure: a possibility embedded in our very modes of thought. In what follows, I would like to consider a limited sector of Levinas’ thought and entertain the possibility that the ethical definitions that Levinas there elaborates are attempts to outline the intellectual and structural conditions of impossibility of such events. In other words, if there is or has been a fundamental flaw in the West’s way of conceiving the human subject, the other, their relation, and human society in general, a flaw that in the extreme allows for the possibility of genocide, is there not a way of rethinking the subject, of reconfiguring our understanding of identity and alterity, and, ultimately, of recasting some of the most fundamental terms and basic units of our intellectual, philosophical and moral currency in such a way as to foreclose such an eventuality? And would this not be one of the fundamental intellectual challenges of our time?

While I believe that such an orientation corresponds to much of Levinas’ intellectual and philosophical program, the concept that I wish to attend to here is that of responsibility in Levinas’ late work. Etienne Féron quite correctly, in my view, subsumes the entire argumentation of Otherwise than Being in terms of this problem: ‘Despite its abrupt logic and tortuous trajectory, Otherwise than Being could be summed up in a single thesis, even encapsulated in a single word: responsibility.’ ⁴ In what follows, I will propose a short overview and review of Levinas’ concept of responsibility and I will examine its implications in the context of political theory, an avenue that has, in fact, been clearly indicated and charted by Levinas himself in various contexts and in various writings either in relation to the state of Israel and its ‘election’ – for example, DL: 313–15/DF: 224–5 – or in relation to the state as such, the problem of the tiers, and the problem of justice, ⁵ or in his writings on the problem of human rights. ⁶ However, for the purposes of the present discussion, I will not examine Levinas’ own thematization of the problem of responsibility in this context but instead examine the possibility of effecting an alignment or a rapprochement – in both substance and method – of Levinas’ text with the reassessment of the problem of responsibility in the document authored by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun and published in 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect. ⁷ Any linkage of these two texts must concern a limited sector both of Levinas’ concept of responsibility and of the doctrine articulated by Evans and Sahnoun. I will, for example, omit consideration of the transcendent or divine character of responsibility in Levinas (not a trivial aspect of his thematization) and of the secondary policy implications or operational dimensions, as well as the assumptions of symmetry or reciprocity in the principles of the relations among states, which inform The Responsibility to Protect.

While Robert Bernasconi acknowledges some difficulty with the question of substitution, ⁸ he usefully indicates both Sartre and Hegel as primary among Levinas’ interlocutors in Otherwise than Being (‘To Which Question?’: 236). And indeed, in the texts in which Levinas elaborates the concept of responsibility, the references to Sartre are significant and numerous. Bernasconi very usefully – if implicitly – frames Levinas’ near total reversal of the basic Sartrean formula when he notes: ‘[f]or Levinas, I am not ultimately someone who chooses, but someone chosen.’ ⁹ One will recall that in the section ‘Freedom and Responsibility’ of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, ¹⁰ Sartre extends the concept of responsibility in tandem with his substantial expanding of the horizons of freedom. The fact of Heideggerian Geworfenheit, of being cast into an existence, into historical and other circumstances that one has not elected, does not constitute for Sartre a limitation of one’s responsibility for them. ¹¹ According to the argument of Being and Nothingness, it is not possible to limit one’s responsibility by claiming that one has not chosen one’s historical circumstances, one’s social location, and so on. A particular historical moment – and indeed all of one’s circumstances of civic status – these are, ultimately, claimed or chosen retroactively, and Sartre provocatively extends this implicit and ex post facto choice to one’s very birth. Still, it would seem that for Sartre and others such as Hans Jonas who have notably examined the concept, responsibility remains essentially correlated with, essentially secondary to, and derivative from, the parameters of consciousness, the horizon within which is exercised one’s freedom, and the limits of one’s effective action. ¹² And for the most part, the causal and logical syntax that relates for Sartre and others the themes of consciousness, freedom, action, responsibility and subjectivity (and where specific lapses in this syntax effectively delineate bad faith and authenticity) remains incremental, linear and relatively straightforward.

From his early critical investigations of Heidegger and of ontology, Levinas has examined the notion that one’s responsibility may extend beyond intention, action and even consciousness, ‘I can be responsible for what I have not done’; ¹³ in fact, the thematization of the notion of ‘trace’, prior to indicating a complicated excess over both transcendence and immanence (Caygill, Levinas and the Political: 149), is related to the problem of an excess over intention and to a responsibility that exceeds both intention and action: ‘In doing that which I wanted to do, I have done so many things that I did not want. The act has not been pure, for I have left some traces. In wiping out these traces, I have left others … We are thus responsible beyond our intentions.’ ¹⁴

The notion of responsibility is central to the basic arguments of Totality and Infinity where, for example, the face calls the subject to his responsibility for the other (TI: 236/ti: 214) or where responsibility provides a concrete access to the infinite and thus a breach of the order of totality (in the unlimited character of a subject’s responsibility for the other [TI: 273–5/ti: 244–6]). At the end of Totality and Infinity, there is a substantial development of the opposition of freedom and responsibility and an extended treatise on the principle of a subordination, a limitation, and an essential qualification of freedom. Evoking both Sartre and Heidegger, and noting how dissonant is for both of them the notion of limited (or finite) freedom, Levinas here insists on the secondary character of a freedom that demands a justification that, as it turns out, is properly ethical, and thereby makes of ethics first philosophy (TI: 340/ti: 304); this anticipates many of the arguments of Otherwise than Being as well as the important section in chapter IV, ‘Finite Freedom’ (AE: 194/OB: 121). Still, however, in relation to the centrality that it will acquire in subsequent works, the concept of responsibility has a somewhat tentative, provisional, limited, or experimental character in Totality and Infinity.

I have briefly reviewed the ambit of the concept of responsibility here because the manner in which I propose to characterize Otherwise than Being, or at least the portions of it that will interest me, is as an abrupt and almost exponential upgrading of the concept of responsibility. Throughout Otherwise than Being and other texts, but particularly in its central chapters: ‘Sensibility and Proximity’ and ‘Substitution’, Levinas formulates and examines, systematically, persistently and repetitively, models whereby such basic concepts of our philosophical currency as freedom, consciousness and subjectivity (identity and ipseity) are now derived from – and subordinated to – responsibility. If the subordination of freedom to responsibility has already been outlined in Totality and Infinity, the manners in which consciousness and subjectivity (as identity and ipseity) are secondary to and derive from responsibility are very different. Indeed, in these analyses, Levinas reverses the basic thematic structure and procedures of Totality and Infinity; instead of proceeding from the subject to the subject’s disruptive encounter with the other and assumption of responsibility for the other, Otherwise than Being works backwards: its basic exposition follows a counter-intuitive and difficult movement from responsibility to the subject, from responsibility to consciousness, from responsibility to unicity. ¹⁵ To my mind this represents one of the very challenging and highly original features of Levinas’ conception of the subject. How radical a break this marks from the Sartrean formulae need not be underscored (Chrétien, ‘La dette’: 268–70).

As observed, part of the originality – and considerable difficulty – of Otherwise than Being, Humanism of the Other and other texts is that Levinas there confers the characteristics of identity, uniqueness, subjectivity, ipseity and selfness secondarily and relationally. Identity or unicity is neither given nor assumed. It does not emerge spontaneously or naturally, nor is it an a priori, defining, essential characteristic, or core property of the subject; it occurs through relation, specifically, as the result of irreplaceability (AE: 167, 181, 196, 197, 198, 201, 212, 221/OB: 114, 123, 124, 126, 135, 141), non-interchangeability, ¹⁶ or impermutability, through the impossibility of ceding, yielding, or transferring to others a specific responsibility for the other (AE: 203, 212/OB: 128, 135). Only thus is a subject ‘identified’ by an identification that carries the character of an ‘accusation’, an election (AE: 195, 196, 201/OB: 122, 123, 126; Chrétien, ‘La dette’: 263 and passim), a designation, an assignation (AE: 166, n. 1/OB: 194, n. 9). Thus does the object (or accusative) case precede the nominative (or subject) case (AE: 197/OB: 124) as a subject announces himself as such only in response to another’s call (AE: 135/OB: 85); thus, a subject is a ‘me’ or ‘moi’ as in ‘me voici’ (AE: 180, 222, 226–8, 233, 283/OB: 114, 142, 144–6, 149, 185) or ‘envoie-moi’ (AE: 233, n. 2/OB: 199, n. 17) rather than a ‘je’ as in ‘je suis’ (AE: 180/OB: 114); the subject’s mode of self-proclamation is as a response to a summons (as ‘comparaître’ rather than ‘apparaître’ [AE: 217/OB: 139]); alternatively, it is like the pronoun ‘se’, which has dative and accusative cases but no nominative (AE: 177/OB: 112), or, more simply, a pro-noun, standing in or substituting for a (proper) noun [pro-nom]. ¹⁷

This structural arrangement, this essential secondariness, this relational and derivative character of the subject will have many consequences which are presented in various permutations throughout Otherwise than Being, Humanism of the Other, Discovering Existence and other works where, among other things, Levinas examines the demands that such a situation places on the subject. Hence, subjectivity is no longer the comfortable or confident habitation of time and space, or an unproblematic location in the here and now (AE: 175/OB: 110); rather it is a passive subjection; it is an essential dénudation (AE: 216/OB: 138), displacement or dislocation (AE: 216/OB: 138), a de-position, usurpation, exile (AE: 216/OB: 138), dé-nucléation (AE: 221/OB: 141), unhinging [désarçonnée] (AE: 202/OB: 127), dé-substantiation (AE: 202/OB: 127), subjection (AE: 200/OB: 126), or dispossession (AE: 188/OB: 118; Chrétien, ‘La dette’: 268), an ‘excidence’ (AE: 188/OB: 118) as opposed to a coincidence – thus depriving the subject of its essential sovereignty (‘le Moi perd sa souveraine coïncidence avec soi’, EDE: 195, HAH: 53), to the point of substitution for the other. This anarchy has a specific temporal dimension as well: the subject is thus basically anachronistic (AE: 141, 159/OB: 88, 101); in addition to being out of place, it is always out of step or out of phase, always late for its commitments, too late to fulfill its obligations (AE: 141, 160, 194, 235, 252/OB: 88, 101, 122, 150, 162). In this scenario, action acquires the character of expiation (AE: 188, 189/OB: 118, 119). This essential dislocation and anachrony generate other paradoxical characteristics of the subject who thus owes without having borrowed (AE: 175, 178/OB: 111, 112), finds himself obligated beyond his means (AE: 178/OB: 112), in a position of indebtedness (Chrétien, ‘La dette’: 259, 264) and obligation that precedes – and thus structurally exceeds awareness, knowledge, freedom, or consent (AE: 219, 227/OB: 139, 145); responsible prior to consciousness or knowledge, evaluation, freedom, decision, or action, thus responsible even for things one cannot remember or represent to consciousness. As subject to (but also subject through) obligations and responsibilities that precede consciousness and knowledge, and exceed their very possibilities and strategies (to recover, represent an origin, identify a provenance, convert to its terms, thematize, etc.; Chrétien, ‘La dette’: 263–4) the subject can be said to be obsessed (AE: 158, 159, 180, 246/OB: 100, 101, 114, 158) or traumatized by the other; consciousness here becomes a mode of obsession (EDE: 229/CPP: 120). Secondary in its very nature and core to the other, the subject can be thought of as hostage to (AE: 180, 186/OB: 114, 117), besieged by, the other (EDE: 233/CPP: 123) and experience this relation as persecution (AE: 200/OB: 126) and victimization (‘accablé par l’autre’: AE: 201/OB: 126).

Of course, the striking paradox in this arrangement is that such a structure does not limit, undermine, or destroy a subject, but indeed, constitutes it; constituting it on a basis other than that of being – the basis of responsibility. Levinas, in Ethics and Infinity, summarizes thus the problem of responsibility and subjectivity: ‘In [Otherwise than Being] I speak of responsibility as the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility’ (ei: 95/EI: 101; Chrétien, ‘La dette’: 260, 268). Indeed, the general principle of all of these formulations illustrates the derivation of identity from relation and second, and in more specific formulas, the derivation of subjectivity, ipseity, unicity, consciousness, freedom and action from responsibility. Just as Levinas will situate fraternity prior to liberty and equality in the motto of the French Republic (AE: 184/OB: 116; HS: 187; Caygill, Levinas and the Political: 3, 113, 140, 157–8, 178; though we know that, historically, it was the last term added to it), responsibility here is given priority over the principal concepts in the philosophical currency of the West in general, and, most notably, over those that existentialism has most ardently advanced.

Both the originality and the difficulty of Levinas here seem to be something that Levinas has openly and repeatedly attested about his definitions: the ex-orbitant, ‘é-norme’ (AE: 283/OB: 185), excessive character of this responsibility. The only suggestion of a limitation on this responsibility comes from an institution of justice which is intimated without ever really being spelled out. The level of responsibility to which the reader is conveyed is alienating and unreasonable: one is enjoined to a responsibility for things one does not know or understand, for people one does not even know (‘une responsabilité à l’égard des hommes que nous ne connaissons même pas’; AE: 159/OB: 100). Yet this is, of course, Levinas’ point and the very meaning of thinking ‘otherwise’ than according to the strictures, horizons and principles of being.

This is the very conclusion reached by Samantha Power in her provocative and impassioned testimonial of genocides in the 20th century: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. ¹⁸ In surveying the consistency in the patterns of inaction before the grossest violations of human rights and the most egregious crimes against humanity in the 20th century, from the Armenians (1915) to Kosovo (1999), Power concludes as follows: ‘We are responsible for our incredulity. The stories that emerge from genocidal societies are by definition incredible … Americans must join and thereby legitimate the ranks of the unreasonable’ (ibid.: 505, 516). That is, Power indicates here, in parallel fashion to Levinas, a structural intellectual problem whose solution necessarily entails a substantial expansion of the concept of responsibility. Indeed, Power argues, a careful, measured, rational, prudent, or reasonable response to the most excessive actions of which humanity is capable will necessarily and tragically fall short – and, ultimately, provide strategic advantage to the perpetrators of such crimes. ¹⁹ If such events are to be prevented, the concept of responsibility must be re-examined and ethics must be privileged in a new and provocative way – based on the obvious premise that it is morally untenable to do nothing as egregious violations of human rights are committed and that, as corollaries, crimes occurring within the borders of sovereign states, the lack of full knowledge or understanding of a situation, and absence of obvious options or of a comprehensive solution must not serve as justifications for inaction.

It is the inaction of the international community before the genocide committed in Rwanda in April of 1994 and controversy over the intervention in Kosovo in 1999 which led Secretary-General Kofi Annan to repeat in 2000 a challenge first issued in 1999, to wit: could consensus be reached within the international community on the very problem which the Armenian genocide had raised; when egregious violations of human rights occur within the borders of a sovereign state, in what terms can a right (duty or responsibility) of intervention be understood? In other words, in what terms could the conditions of impossibility of such events be outlined in the context of political theory and within – or beyond or, perhaps, otherwise than – the laws and principles governing the relations among states?

The result of Annan’s challenge, a report written by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun under the sponsorship of the government of Canada (and with the support of various international organizations and foundations), is entitled The Responsibility to Protect. Broadly hailed as effecting a paradigm shift in the approach both to humanitarian crises and to crimes against populations, this report has been characterized as bold and innovative in its manner of effecting a ‘conceptual leap’, proposing a ‘nascent doctrine’, a ‘constructive shift’, or a ‘shift in parameters’, in ‘altering the terms of debate … in a most creative and promising way’ in its conceptualization of the problem of intervention and of the relations among states. ²⁰

The Responsibility to Protect grows out of a substantial body of thought, and a very active and developing field in political theory that deals with the problems of human rights, development and humanitarian intervention, a field to which Levinas has made significant contributions with several articles on the subject of human rights that develop in this context the problem of the other and of the subject’s posture of responsibility for the other. ²¹

In this discipline, the structural character of the problems of human rights and intervention is widely acknowledged as involving one of the most basic principles of political ontology, the question of state sovereignty. Thus, among the stumbling blocks in the question of humanitarian intervention – beyond the innumerable practical matters normally invoked to justify inaction – is the problem of whether one is circumventing, suspending, superseding, or cancelling one of the most basic matters of political ontology since the 17th century – as Stanley Hoffmann puts it: ‘the sacredness of borders’. ²² In the words of Jarat Chopra and Thomas Weiss: ‘One word explains why the international community has difficulty countering [human rights] violations: “sovereignty.”’ ²³ The structural problem associated with a statist or realist view of sovereignty is well recognized and characterized as follows by Michael J. Smith:

… weighing in heavily on the side of traditional sovereignty and nonintervention entails a willingness to turn a blind eye to many outrages in the world. We could say, ‘Well, it is a pity that people are killing each other and it’s true that there is something that we could do about it relatively easily, but it is actually occurring within a state and it’s not our business.’ Surely one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that we should not allow this to occur again. ²⁴

Such a conception of state-to-state relations and its direct consequences which obviate the ethical recall Levinas’ oft-quoted characterization of Cain’s response as the eminent example of an attitude informed by ontology and which, as such, excludes the ethical; ²⁵ indeed the corollary – opposite – notion of being one’s brother’s keeper, so basic a figure of responsibility throughout Levinas’ oeuvre, is, as Francis M. Deng observes, something of a trope in the political writings on human rights and intervention. ²⁶ Others go even further in this diagnosis of the structural character of the failure of a system of political ontology based on sovereignty to safeguard human rights; according to Richard Falk, ‘the prevailing world order has a high tolerance for severe violations of human rights, especially if the harmful effects are confined within territorial limits’ and ‘a weak potential for effective action against the target polity’. ²⁷ Indeed, the most conventional conception of state-to-state relations which derives from Hobbes’ Leviathan is the precise correlate in the political sphere of the ontological order in whose very nature and structure is embedded, according to Levinas, the possibility of conflict and war. ²⁸

Thus, in the literature on human rights and humanitarian intervention, there is a pronounced and generalized questioning of the primacy accorded to state sovereignty. One specific context of the questioning of sovereignty involves a broadening of the understanding of responsibility which develops the general implications of a consensus in the international community that atrocities committed within the borders of a sovereign nation justify intervention for humanitarian purposes. In different forms and permutations, with different emphases, and variously deemed: liberal, cosmopolitan, globalist, or universalist, different authors question, revise and recast, sometimes quite radically, the principle of state sovereignty. ²⁹ Two representative examples, Michael J. Smith and Francis M. Deng, will illustrate this revision; Smith characterizes thus a liberal, cosmopolitan view:

In this conception of liberalism, then, the justification for state sovereignty cannot rest on its own presumptive legitimacy. Instead it must be derived from the individuals whose rights are to be protected from foreign oppression or intrusion and from their right to a safe ‘sovereign’ framework in which they can enforce their autonomy and pursue their interests. It follows, then, that a state that is oppressive and violates the autonomy and integrity of its subjects forfeits its moral claim to full sovereignty. Thus, a liberal ethics of world order subordinates the principle of state sovereignty to the recognition and respect of human rights. (Smith, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’: 76)

Now it seems to me that Smith’s presentation alternates among at least two conceptions of sovereignty that it would be useful to distinguish. First, Smith’s view restates a traditional conception of national sovereignty with a substantial expansion and reinforcement to the extent that it derives from and is identified with the people and is thus further anchored and consolidated by this dual determination. In this view, state sovereignty as ‘the people’s sovereignty’ is determined from the ground up, so to speak; it is existentially based. On the other hand, in making the argument that a moral claim to sovereignty can be ‘forfeited’, and in intimating that state sovereignty is subordinated to an implied world community operating on the basis of shared or universal moral standards, Smith postulates a principle of sovereignty that operates from the top down, an interpretation of sovereignty that is relationally – not existentially – based and structural in character. As Smith’s development implies through the ‘subordination’ of sovereignty to respect for human rights, these two principles of sovereignty are not co-equal; the latter, structural sovereignty, supersedes the former, conventional view of sovereignty.

Among the many ways in which the literature on human rights and humanitarian intervention analyses and revises the question of state sovereignty is by the explicit association of state sovereignty with responsibility. Francis M. Deng associates the two in particularly creative and provocative ways. On the one hand, he assails traditional notions of sovereignty as ‘parochial’ (‘Reconciling Sovereignty’: 298), asserts that ‘absolute sovereignty is clearly no longer defensible, it never was” (ibid.: 301), and provocatively concludes that ‘unmasking sovereignty to reveal the gross violations of human rights is no longer an aspiration; it is a process that has already started’ (ibid.: 308). Deng then examines a revised concept of sovereignty, one that is associated with responsibility rather than control where responsibility is understood both internally (as responsibility for populations within a state’s territories) and externally (as responsibility to the international community to exercise the former responsibility and thus as accountability to a broader community). Summarizing the conclusions of a conference on human rights, Deng articulates these two notions of responsibility: ‘the concept of sovereignty … is becoming understood more in terms of conferring responsibilities on governments to assist and protect persons residing in their territories – so much so that if governments fail to meet their obligations, they risk undermining their legitimacy.’ ³⁰ Once again, Deng’s argument alternates between the two distinct conceptions of sovereignty observed above. First, and in parallel to Smith’s development, a traditional concept of state sovereignty is reaffirmed with another dimension added to it. In this view, sovereignty involves not just exercising power and control within defined borders, it entails the exercise of a responsibility for those within these borders. Here again we have a ‘ground-up’ and existentially based conception of sovereignty that undergoes substantial expansion. But Deng also advances a view of sovereignty that links the ‘legitimacy’ of a state’s sovereignty to a responsibility to the international order formulated as the obligation to exercise a responsibility for those within its borders. In so doing, Deng postulates a distinct conception of sovereignty that is relational and structural. Once again, these conceptions are not equivalent since traditional sovereignty is subordinate to and contingent upon this second, abstract principle of sovereignty. In these two cases, which I take to be relatively representative of a large body of research on the question of intervention and human rights, the attention to human rights and an upgrading of the concept of responsibility entail rethinking sovereignty according to a more complex model and a distinct ontology. And while such enquiries necessarily proceed on the basis of assumptions of shared values and certain universal moral standards, what emerges is first: a loading of traditional sovereignty with an ethical dimension (as in the ‘people’s sovereignty’) and second, the identification of an alternative – and higher – order of sovereignty that is in its very nature and essence structural, relational and ethical.

It is within such a conceptual framework that Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, the authors of The Responsibility to Protect, investigate the question of sovereignty and its relation to the question of human rights. Indeed, The Responsibility to Protect, in effect, develops, expands and generalizes the notions that have been observed above and evolves incrementally toward a provocative and new concept of sovereignty. Against a background of several important assumptions: first the qualitatively different conditions of the modern world with respect to those that gave rise to the traditional concept of state sovereignty, second, the essentially new character of the fundamental interdependency of nations, The Responsibility to Protect investigates a series of models and definitions of sovereignty setting out, ostensibly, to ‘modernize’ (ibid.: 8) or ‘reconceptualize’ (ibid.: 9) the concept of sovereignty. This, it does essentially by associating sovereignty with responsibility: ‘there is a necessary re-characterization involved: from sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility in both internal functions and external duties’ (ibid.: 13, 74). The authors of The Responsibility to Protect go further in a direction that suggests to me an interesting parallel with Levinas. Asserting that ‘no one is prepared to defend the claim that states can do what they wish to their own people, and hide behind the principle of sovereignty in so doing’ (ibid.: 75) implies that there is also a responsibility that lies with the international community and that supersedes sovereignty. This evokes the argument advanced by Michael J. Smith that sovereignty is contingent and secondary; its legitimacy is not presumptive; neither given nor assumed, it is structural, relational and derived, and because it is based upon the respect for human rights, sovereignty is essentially subordinate to ethics (Smith, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’: 72). Where human rights or basic ethical principles are violated, the international community has not so much a right, but incurs a basic obligation or responsibility to intervene, to protect (to prevent, to react and to rebuild), that is more fundamental than the principle of the state’s sovereignty and that supersedes it when conditions warrant. In so generalizing the concept of responsibility: from a responsibility associated with and assigned to the sovereign state as part of its constitution as such, to a responsibility assumed by and assigned to the international community to intervene within a sovereign state, a statist, realist and conventional model of international relations yields to a liberal and cosmopolitan model. ³¹ We arrive at a conception of ethics as prior to sovereignty; in the sphere of political theory, as in Levinas’ provocative reinterpretations of responsibility and identity, the ethical precedes and supersedes the ontological. ³²

Perhaps because this is so radical a shift, the authors of The Responsibility to Protect make this step prudently and incrementally. As if retreating before the boldness of what they are proposing, they characterize the responsibility of the state to respect the human rights of its citizens as a ‘default’ and ‘primary’ responsibility (Evans and Sahnoun: 17); the responsibility of the international community as only a ‘residual’ or a ‘fallback’ one (ibid.). Even thus cautiously construed as a residual or fallback responsibility, the contingent, secondary and derivative character of the principle of sovereignty in relation both to the ethical concern for respect for human rights and to the international community is unmistakable. Thus, the international community bears a responsibility to intervene and protect: ‘if the state is unable or unwilling to fulfill this [internal] responsibility, or is itself the perpetrator … it becomes the responsibility of the international community to act in its place’ (ibid.); or, again: ‘[t]his basic consensus implies that the international community has a responsibility to act decisively when states are unwilling or unable to fulfill these basic responsibilities’ (ibid.: 75). In other words, the two interpretations of sovereignty are articulated in an order of priority. Indeed, in such formulations, a statist, conventional, or realist model of the international community is unambiguously pre-empted by a cosmopolitan or globalist one. In this view, the principle of the international community is more basic than the concept of sovereignty accorded individual states within it. It is from the assumed authority of the world community and from an implied principle of world government – even if the actual institutions of such a government are incipient – that the legitimacy of the state’s sovereignty derives. These two conceptions, based on and reflecting distinct political ontologies, run simultaneously throughout The Responsibility to Protect. On the one hand, we observe a reaffirmation and consolidation of a statist and traditional conception of sovereignty by the attempt to identify more closely this conception with the people themselves. Yet, where provisions are outlined for suspension of sovereignty and intervention, ³³ another conception of sovereignty seems to be at work, a conception of sovereignty as essentially secondary, derivative and contingent (Bellamy, The Global Effort: 24), fundamentally following from a relation understood concretely as the maintenance of certain universal standards of global citizenship and responsibility.

One of the most provocative and powerful insights of the thought normally characterized as ‘postmodern’ has been its examination of identity and its explicit formulation of identity as deriving from relation. This is one of the consequences of the specifically postmodern examination of language, culture and politics according to the models of closed, heterological, relational, or oppositional systems rather than as open, autological, unitary, or simple systems. Formulated explicitly and clearly in linguistics and philosophy by Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and others, such a model entails a subordination of ontology since any ‘basic’ term or unit of the system is always secondary to the system itself or to relation. This is the concept of ‘differences without positive terms’, the apparently paradoxical secondariness of identity, that Saussure has ascertained in his Course in General Linguistics and that Derrida and others have largely developed in influential writings. In the first part of this article, I demonstrated how such a model determines Levinas’ examinations of identity, ipseity and subjectivity. That a subject can be such (possess characteristics of identity and ipseity) only through relation, that is, only upon exercising responsibility for another, appears both counter-intuitive and contradictory. ³⁴ Yet it is precisely this step that Levinas requires us to make; furthermore, this priority of responsibility over subjectivity is parallel to, and follows from, the priority of relation over identity, and illustrates the more general priority of ethics over ontology that organizes Levinas’ argumentation in Otherwise than Being.

Now even a limited survey of the literature on human rights and intervention reveals that the question of sovereignty tends to be formulated following an analogous revision. While it is hardly surprising that the concepts of sovereignty and identity should be so associated as the former is an obvious characteristic of the latter, ³⁵ it is striking that, independently, and in distant and distinct disciplinary contexts, they are revised according to the same principle and the same logic. Specifically, the emphasis on the problem of responsibility, in both contexts, results in a recasting of the principle of identity/sovereignty from a unitary or autological model to a relational or heterological one, resulting in the ontological shift observed above. We find, consequently, an ambivalence or ambiguity: on the one hand, where sovereignty is conceived according to the model of an open (non-relational) system, we observe statist, realist, or traditional definitions of state sovereignty; on the other hand, where it is formulated according to a closed system, cosmopolitan, internationalist, universalist, or globalist conceptions of sovereignty follow. ³⁶ The former conceives sovereignty basically following traditional models of identity (and accords to sovereignty a primacy that translates into an extra-legal, extra-moral status where are stressed such attributes as: independence, autonomy, legal control, power, permanent population, defined territory, government); ³⁷ the second conceives sovereignty as conferred by virtue of relation and through location in a system where this system is primary (and thus are stressed various measures of global citizenship, and various structural features of interconnection and interdependence; here both legal and moral principles not only apply to but, as noted above, can both determine the legitimacy of a state’s claim to sovereignty and supersede it) (Smith, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’: 72, 76–8). Based on opposing ontologies, these conceptions cannot readily be reconciled, though they can and often do coincide, and, as observed, there is often a confusion or amalgamation of, or an uncritical alternation between, the two. One will observe, for example, in the following analysis by Chopra and Weiss (whose provocative title – ‘Sovereignty is No Longer Sacrosanct’ – eloquently indicates their point of view on the matter) that the first concept of sovereignty is essentially deconstructed according to the second: ‘The flaw in the theory of sovereignty is that it was a unitary concept operating in a community’ (‘No Longer Sacrosanct’: 106). Recast in post-structuralist terms (and in a relatively typical post-structuralist analytic procedure), ³⁸ Chopra and Weiss argue in effect that sovereignty, a concept of a closed, heterological system, has been reduced to the terms of an open or unitary one. ³⁹ As observed above, these various models and this ambivalence inform the analysis in The Responsibility to Protect and generally are found throughout the literature on human rights and intervention where, predictably, there is a pronounced tendency, as the preceding survey of The Responsibility to Protect reveals, to move from the first to the second conception and, indeed, to frame the analysis in such a way as to effect this transition – and this ontological shift – from open to closed systems, from unitary to relational models: or, concretely, from ‘sovereignty as control to sovereignty as responsibility’, as the authors of The Responsibility to Protect put it (Evans and Sahnoun: 13, 74).

An important dimension of this revision has an historical character. Indeed, the traditional, statist, or realist concept of sovereignty, whose origin is traced back to the 17th century and to the Treaty of Westphalia and whose inspiration is Hobbes’ Leviathan, is considered to describe, and to found, a model of state-to-state relations that is now deemed largely out of date, obsolete and essentially irrelevant to the modern world. ⁴⁰ In this view, a whole set of issues, problems and challenges (many of which, perhaps, compose the defining issues of our age) generally associated with modernity and referred to under the umbrella term ‘globalization’ ⁴¹ tend to suggest a conception of the international order according to the principle of a closed and relational rather than open and unitary system and thus to emphasize and privilege the concepts of interrelation, interdependence and interconnectedness. The problem, then, is expressed in terms of two distinct emphases: on the one hand, repeated assessments of the inadequacy of the traditional concept of state sovereignty, overtaken by events in the modern world, and, on the other hand, the emphasis on the relatively ‘new’ character of the conditions that necessitate its revision or updating. ⁴² The common principle of the two is an implicit understanding of the international order as a closed system or, and in a reflection of the historical dimension of this issue, as effecting the transition from an open to a closed system.

Thus, while Levinas’ ethical investigations and the examination by the authors of The Responsibility to Protect of issues of human rights and human security are conducted on vastly different intellectual planes and in different disciplinary contexts, both attempt to confront those structural factors that, in the past, have enabled the grossest violations of human rights; both arrive at a novel – and substantially expanded – concept of responsibility; ⁴³ and both do so by means of an analogous re-evaluation of some of the most basic notions in their respective disciplines. In particular and perhaps most notably, both arrive independently at a conceptual shift and a fundamental relocation of the related concepts of sovereignty and identity within an adjusted ontological horizon and context.

As both positive and negative features of the modern, globalized world imply the relevance or necessity of conceiving it according to the properties of a closed system where relation serves as a basis of identity and sovereignty, I think that effecting a junction of Levinas with this branch of political theory holds some promise. Levinas’ analysis of identity can ultimately supply a de jure framework for the de facto arguments of interrelation and the attendant ‘weaknesses’ in the conception of traditional sovereignty repeatedly ascertained by those authors who have conceptualized and analysed The Responsibility to Protect.

Furthermore, as political theory increasingly in the last decades introduces ethical criteria, ⁴⁴ and tries in various ways to effect a junction of ‘realism’ with concerns for human rights in the conceptualization of relations among states, it seems natural that these investigations should converge with Levinas’ creative and challenging ethical analyses. Levinas’ provocative propositions that ‘politics must be able to be checked and criticized on the basis of the ethical’ (EI: 86/ei: 80), and that, more specifically, ‘justice, society, the state and its institutions, labor, and exchange, understood on the basis of proximity, [means] that nothing falls outside of the jurisdiction of responsibility’ (AE: 248/OB: 159) both confirm and reaffirm the provocative challenges issued by political analysts of genocide and of humanitarian intervention. And as political theory increasingly seeks to conceptualize the problem of the other, and does so in such terms as ‘moral imagination’, it seems that Levinas’ complex, extensive and creative manners of thinking the relation to the other could usefully inform the discipline. In general, the fit between these remains somewhat provisional and limited in purview; on the other hand, the particularly creative logic and innovative approaches that Levinas has employed to challenge ontology, to derive it from – and base it upon – the ethical, seem to me to illuminate well and characterize effectively various strains of thought, various assumptions and conceptions of political ontology that inform such questions as the issues of state sovereignty, humanitarian intervention, human rights, and respect and responsibility for the other, and perhaps even help to bring us closer to a modern understanding of responsibility that transcends these disciplinary lines. In both cases, the understanding of responsibility is substantially enlarged, to transcend accountability and answerability, beyond what is correlatable with one’s action, intention and field of possibility, beyond normative and causal responsibilities, beyond what can reasonably be predicted or even conceived. Responsibility becomes instead the impossibility of adopting an attitude of ethical neutrality, the inability to proclaim that an action or series of actions does not concern us or is too remote to warrant attention; it entails the a priori rejection of postures of impotence, indifference, or unwillingness, and the transcending of narrow self-interest and political realism as implicit or explicit justifications for action or inaction. ⁴⁵ Thus construed as ‘non-indifference’, as Levinas often puts it (and Bellamy, The Global Effort: 77), such a notion of responsibility becomes coextensive with a cosmopolitanism that has at once a philosophical, moral, intellectual and political dimension. ⁴⁶

The pervasive metaphor of the modern, ‘globalized’, era is the idea of interconnectedness; it implies both a revision of the concept of state sovereignty as secondary or contingent, and the indication of an ethical orientation rendering obsolete the realist posture of particularity and extra-moral autonomy. The concept of relational identity elaborated and applied from Saussure to Levinas can confer a more concise meaning to this image and perhaps expand our understanding of it, specifically affording an opportunity to move beyond the intuitive and metaphorical argumentation that informs much modern reflection on political ontology, ethics and the relation of the two.