Why the Breakdown of the Islamabad Talks Should Worry Us All |
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Statements by the US and Iranian delegations after the breakdown of negotiations in Islamabad indicate that the gap between the parties at the talks was rooted not in technicalities but in a deeper conceptual difference. At the heart of it seems to be the fact that Iran sees itself as a sovereign state with the privileges one normally accords to a sovereign state, including the right to develop its own resources in the manner it sees fit, while the US sees it only as a “regime”, that should be grateful for whatever rights the US chooses to grant it. It is unsurprising that this sort of gap couldn’t be bridged by a single round of dialogue.
The breakdown of talks in Islamabad should worry India, not just because it signals the extension of what has been an economically painful conflict but because it exemplifies the near impossibility of states negotiating peace in a world order where the sovereignty of some states is treated as absolute while that of other states is treated as conditional.
India routinely urges that all international disputes be resolved through dialogue and diplomacy. Curiously though, it fails to see how its own silences when sovereignty is violated, out of fear of alienating one major power or the other, are augmenting a world order that is making the resolution of disputes through dialogue and diplomacy impossible.
The reemergence of conditional sovereignty in international law
At the core of international law, which deals with how order is created among states, is the principle of sovereignty. Unlike the European states, which were presumed from the very origins of the field to have sovereignty, the path of the non-European states to sovereignty, through the processes of colonisation and decolonization was more complicated.
Scholars like Antony Anghie argue that the different process by which the non-European states gained sovereignty, leaves their sovereignty with enduring vulnerabilities. While European sovereignty is treated by international law as existing, and inviolable, non-European sovereignty, which is seen as the culmination of the civilising mission in Western eyes, is often at risk of being treated as conditional upon the state meeting Western standards of civilisation.
Major churns in international law, including most recently during the global war on terror, tend to bring these vulnerabilities to the surface. While the jurisprudence accompanying the global........