Syria, the end of a utopia

(To Gino Lanzara)
15/03/19

The Syro-Libyan crises have similarities that make them similar; they affect the same (unstable) theater, and both originate from the Arab Spring of the 2011. Beyond the specificities of the individual scenarios, we were able to witness the repositioning of areas of old and new, regional and non-regional powers. Both cases put the international forum in front of the problems inherent to the respect of the rules of international law; therefore, there was a comparison between the principle of effectiveness and democratic legitimacy, together with the customary aspect of the recognition - or not - of the subjects of law, both through the work of international organizations, and through the approval of the Security Council, as in the case of the Sarraj government in Libya.

Other elements to consider regarded the right to legitimate individual and collective defense, especially when related to activities from Non State Actors like ISIS, and the hybrid nature of conflicts that, especially in Syria, has revived the controversy concerning the recognition of both the right to popular self-determination and the principle of respect for territorial sovereignty and integrity. To this was added the need to find a balance between the statutes and new responsibilities related to the protection of the civil population, and to the obligations borrowed from the consolidated rules, concerning the prohibition of the unilateral use of force, the principle of not intervention, the safeguarding of sovereignty.

The two conflicts thus witnessed the state of crisis faced by the UN, incapable of facing situations completely different from those contextualized by the Cold War bipolar system; international action, ruinous in Libya, has clashed, in Syria, both with Russian vetoes, capable however of giving rise to engaging regional negotiations, in Astana, Turkey and Iran, and with American retaliatory ones, obtaining as a single result the impasse of UN mechanisms, incapable of producing resolutive reactions. The inevitable and subsequent unilateral interventions for humanitarian reasons, although cloaked in noble intentions, have then opened the way to legally unsustainable actions that are nevertheless carried out, and which have given life to a consolidated practice and without any jointly shared legal guarantee.

Given the irreversible crisis of the post-1945 political model, international relations have struggled to find acceptable balances, and have thus sanctioned the decline of the dream Kelsen and constitutional of international law; on the other hand, however, the new values ​​relating to the recognition of human rights sanctioned by the UN must be pointed out, values ​​that have given birth to new principles that generate both unpublished obligations and responsibility. erga omnes in terms of co-activity, sometimes in conflict both with the classical state conception and with the static nature of the UN. The Syrian crisis has underlined the difficulty, within the UN, of guaranteeing these new principles, especially when the realization of the basic assumptions has contrasted with the interests of the individual states, in particular those belonging to the Security Council. What he found was the apparent beginning of a historical phase in which old and new mores they failed to reconcile, however giving rise to the hope that the sky of ideals can find a meeting point with the concreteness of reality, triggering a revision of the international institutional system.

Photo: United Nations