The Normative Scenario: UNSC Resolution 1529

At the heart of UNSC Resolution 1529 is an emerging debate about new rules regarding “state sovereignty.” In the post–Cold War, with the controversial interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and the equally controversial absence of intervention to prevent the Rwandan genocide, the discourses over sovereignty reflect a North-South security contest. Characteristically, ideological divisions between a realist-neorealist right versus a liberal-postmodern left have given way to a cultural divide between advanced, industrial, Western top-tier states and the weak states of the developing world. The ability of bottom-tier states to achieve legitimacy in the global system—whose rules are not created by them and which they have little political agency and power to influence—is of especial significance to this debate. The debate can be categorized by three new norms: (1) the new terms by which sovereignty is being constructed for third world states, (2) related concerns regarding “humanitarian intervention,” and (3) nation building covered by the rubric of shared sovereignty and trusteeship of occupied countries.

The 2004 intervention in Haiti embodied the state sovereignty debate in significant ways. In a period of just over ten years (1993–2006), the international community demonstrated in Haiti new global rules for the practice of sovereignty and trusteeship through a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions authorizing the use of force, the peacekeeping deployment of troops, and the administration of transitional governments for the purpose of nation building and developing Haiti. It is against this backdrop of “international intervention” that in 2004 the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1529, authorizing the MIF and declaring the international community's readiness to establish a follow-on U.N. stabilization force to support the continuation of a peaceful and constitutional political process and the maintenance of a secure and stable environment in Haiti. Trusteeship required authorization of yet another resolution, Security Council Resolution 1542, which expanded the powers of the peacekeeping mission by deploying a multidimensional stabilization operation, known as the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). The international community's fourteen years of intervention in Haiti has been premised on a familiar theme in North-South relations: the United Nations' self-proclaimed objectives have sought to restore democracy, foster civil society, develop democratic values, and restructure the military.

Nevertheless, many raised important questions about both the legitimacy and legality of the humanitarian intervention in Haiti in 2004. Haitians and their allies raised the question of sovereignty as their first line of defense to protest the injustice of Resolution 1529, arguing that the Aristide regime had been a duly elected, multiparty democracy since 1993. In criticizing the way in which sovereignty rules were applied disproportionately upon weak, bottom-tier states, especially in Africa and the Caribbean, dissenters proclaimed that Resolution 1529 set a dangerous precedent for democratically elected governments everywhere, as it promoted the unconstitutional removal of duly elected persons from office (Caribbean Community 2004).

New Rules of Sovereignty

Sovereignty serves as a basic principle underpinning international relations interpreted by Article 2 of the U.N. Charter, which stipulates that state authority is not subject to a higher power. The sovereign state has the right to decide matters within its own territorial jurisdiction, and the norm of nonintervention extends from this principle, prohibiting the use of force between states, as well as U.N. intervention in matters essentially within a state's jurisdiction (Fixdal and Smith, Reference Fixdal and Smith1998). Yet, new rules are reconstituting global rights to sovereignty in developing countries such as Haiti. New rules governing international human rights law refocus the role of the state from having an absolute control over a certain territory (sovereignty) to being responsible to govern in a certain manner (Stanley Hoffmann cited in Popovski Reference Popovski2004). States like Haiti are now asked to prove their “right” to sovereignty by demonstrating a duty to protect the rights of their citizens.

As the rules on sovereignty of states change to include a new meaning of sovereignty, which now focuses on the sovereignty of people rather than on state leaders, so do rules on intervention, which now punish “violating” states (mostly in the developing and transitional regions of the world). Sovereignty in this context increasingly refers to rules that “protect” people's universal rights as they have been constituted in the U.N. Declaration for Human Rights. Changing global circumstances explain these new trends in international sovereignty. Following the events of the 1990s—when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War were followed by the proliferation of civil wars, Balkanization, and increased military insurgencies in several countries—scholars of international security began advancing a critique of sovereignty in the developing world and in transitional states. They began defining states in the bottom tier of the global security structure in terms of “negative sovereignty,” describing them as “quasi” (Jackson Reference Jackson1990), “pre-modern” (Cooper Reference Cooper2002), “collapsed” (Zartman Reference Zartman1995), and “failed” states. According to this theory, quasi-states were conferred a “juridical” sovereignty, rather than the “empirical” sovereignty of their advanced industrial Western counterparts.

In this respect, states such as Haiti in the bottom tier of the security structure are not only accorded an inferior status because of their poverty and underdevelopment, but they are also deemed to be afflicted with chronic incivility and repression against their own citizens. Even though such states are recognized as juridically independent territorial entities, whose internal affairs cannot be meddled with due to the U.N. sovereignty principle, scholars who advocate the need to change the sovereignty status of these states defend their position by arguing that these states lack the institutional features of sovereign states as defined by classical international law. Populations within these states do not enjoy many of the advantages associated with independent statehood because, the argument continues, the governments of these states are often deficient in the areas of political will, institutional authority, and organized power to protect the human rights of their citizens and to provide them with basic socioeconomic welfare.

Negative sovereignty was used to justify UNSC Resolution 1529. A difficult democratic transition that began in 2000 led the international media to characterize Haiti as facing impending “collapse.” In January 2004, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell noted it was Aristide's own failure to adhere to democratic principles as the contributing factor that led to the violent unrest in Haiti, citing accusations of electoral fraud in an election that gave Aristide a second term. The Bush administration announced that Aristide's own actions called into question his fitness to continue governing Haiti (Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006). By 2004, the international community categorized Haiti as a “failed state” caught in a “human rights crisis” and a cycle of violence.

Transformations in Global Consciousness: Humanitarian Intervention

One important consequence of the changing rules of sovereignty is how it has led to a debate about rules for international intervention. When the U.N. Security Council authorized Resolution 1529, the international community set aside Haiti's international sovereignty rights to justify the 2004 military intervention on humanitarian grounds (U.N. Security Council 2004). Such reasoning provided justification for northern states and international forces to make exceptions to the traditional sovereignty rules in more expansive ways than current international law allows. This is because the criteria for international intervention into sovereign states are no longer limited to the existence of genocide, but now include “state failure,” “civil war,” and “gross human rights abuse” (Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum1996).

Since the end of the Cold War, realist and liberal scholars have justified changes in international intervention rules and norms on the premise of maintaining global security. Previously focused on East-West issues, they are now on North-South issues (Huntington Reference Huntington1996). A British senior diplomat, Robert Cooper (Reference Cooper2002), provides a neorealist scholarly argument that unabashedly proposes a renewed plan for a post–Cold War international order. He argues:

Referring to much of the “developing” world as “pre-modern,” Cooper asserts that “failed states” are too weak to secure their home territory. He further argues that because such states present a threat to international security, it is appropriate for top-tier states (the postmodern world, or the West), to offer a vision of “cooperative empire, a common liberty and a common security” (Cooper Reference Cooper2002, p. 4). Cooper's chilling proposal reflects the vision of the “new liberal imperialism,” a paradigm fashioned by Cooper and other neorealists that is at the center of the current debate on global governance. A resuscitation of the hegemonic stability theory, the new liberal imperialism advocates for the legitimate use of force by top-tier global security states and institutions—such as the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations—on third world states to provide democracy, human rights, and free markets as global public goods (Mandelbaum Reference Mandelbaum2002).

Presenting a liberal perspective on this debate, Martha Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003) has written one of the most influential studies on humanitarian intervention. In her discussion on the changing normative context of international rules on how top-tier powers act to secure global security, Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003) argues that intervention by the North is required to protect humans in national boundaries that have no central government or law enforcement to enforce standards of conduct. Breaking with the realist model for intervention, which she argues tends to limit its rationale exclusively to interest, she criticizes the international community for not intervening to prevent Rwanda's genocide. Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003) argues in favor of the growing global consciousness and shared consensus in support of humanitarian intervention in small, nongeostrategic countries such as Haiti. She suggests that humanitarian intervention is emerging as a positive value in international society, where a formerly excluded Haitian “Other” is now included in the North's (Great Powers) sphere by being deemed worthy of the North's protection (Finnemore Reference Finnemore2003, chapter 3).

However, it is these changes in international law, made to accommodate the principle of humanitarian intervention, that are exacerbating North-South relations to the degree that southern states, the targets of intervention, view such infringements as an assault on their sovereignty. Southern states do not view actions by northern states and global governance institutions as humanitarian. Southern states view interventions as pragmatic rather than humanitarian, given that top-tier states have staged several prominent interventions since the 1990s based on their strategic foreign policy interests. Examples of such intervention include the failed U.S.-U.N. intervention in Somalia; the controversial NATO-E.U.-U.S.-U.N. intervention in the Bosnia-Kosovo crisis; the multilateral U.S.-coalition intervention into Afghanistan; and more recently, the catastrophic U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

Shared Sovereignty and the Resuscitation of Trusteeship

With the redefinition of sovereignty and the new shared support among northern forces and the international community for humanitarian intervention, rules regarding shared sovereignty and trusteeship complete northern states' attempts to establish security in bottom-tier southern states. International relations theorists have begun arguing for the transcendence of accepted rules of sovereignty so that new rules can be established, claiming that conventional sovereignty no longer works because many countries in the South suffer under failed, weak, incompetent, or abusive national authority structures. In positing shared sovereignty as an alternative to absolute sovereignty in bottom-tier states, Stephen Krasner recommends a new set of policy tools, ranging from governance assistance, transnational administration, and a form of trusteeship that powerful and well-governed states would make available to fix badly governed or collapsed states (Krasner Reference Krasner2004).

Shared sovereignty would involve external actors engaging in some of the domestic authority structures of the target state for an indefinite period of time. According to Krasner, national actors of failed states would need to use their international legal sovereignty to enter into agreements that would compromise their Westphalian sovereignty, with the goal of improving their domestic sovereignty. In extreme cases of state failure, this option recommends establishing trusteeships under the auspices of the U.N. Security Council-style protectorate (Helman and Ratner, Reference Helman and Ratner1993; Caplan Reference Caplan2002, p. 7; Ignatieff Reference Ignatieff, Holzgrefe and Keohane2003, p. 308). New Krasner-style interventionist discourses have contributed immensely to the growing normative consensus on creating new and more effective strategies to ensure the development of insecure southern states.

These discourses are also structurally linked to an equally emergent human security model of development, which tends to provide the forum for a loose convergence of neorealist and postliberal perspectives in promoting Western solutions to global governance in the South. For instance, postmodern liberals have recently brought extensive global attention to human rights, which are now intricately linked to third world development and security issues in all-encompassing ways. Caroline Thomas defines human security as the fulfillment of basic material needs and the achievement of human dignity, whose core features incorporate personal autonomy, control over one's life, and unhindered participation in the life of the community (Thomas and Wilkin, Reference Thomas and Wilkin1999).

Numerous Security Council resolutions, while authorizing the deployment of strong multinational military forces to facilitate peace and democracy in Haiti, have been followed by a number of successive U.N. peacekeeping missions, including the full deployment of the U.N. Mission in Haiti (UNMIH), the U.N. Support Mission in Haiti (UNSMIH), the U.N. Transition Mission in Haiti (UNTMIH), and the U.N. Civilian Police Mission in Haiti (MIPONUH). The United Nations' humanitarian intervention and trusteeship policies draw from the human security thesis, arguing that national environments of human “insecurity,” which are exacerbated by the state and market forces, require international administration to restore human dignity and state security.

Yet the U.N. trusteeship of Haiti that followed Resolution 1529, from 1994 to 2006, illustrates the limitations of the shared sovereignty and “human security development” models. The international community's prolonged and invasive presence in Haiti has been perceived differently by various sectors of Haitian society. For example, whereas the 1994 intervention sought to restore a democratic regime in an era of global resuscitation of democratic norms, the 2004 intervention, after more than six previous years of U.N. administration, represented a blatant use of force against Aristide's democratically elected regime, which the United Nations had previously reinstalled. As a case study of “trusteeship,” MINUSTAH was viewed by many Haitians as an international force that legitimized an “illegitimate” “transitional regime” and that subverted dissidents against the intervention.

A New World Order and Its Postcolonial Discontents

The 2004 humanitarian intervention into Haiti occurred as a product of international relations in a post–Cold War era. Cooper's world of a “new liberal imperialism” appropriately characterized the mish-mash, new world order, where theories and policies on global security and global governance clashed in relations between the North and South. In 2001, the election of President George W. Bush in the United States reinforced Cooper's theory in ways that had important implications for the developing world. The Bush doctrine, which reflected transformations in post–Cold War foreign policy in the United States, aggressively promoted the idea that sovereignty entailed obligations and limits that if not adhered to gave the United States, NATO, and the United Nations the right to intervene (Haass Reference Haass2005, p. 46). The advanced industrial world talked of a “White man's burden”(Easterly Reference Easterly2006) and a “rich man's burden” (Mallaby Reference Mallaby2002), reinvoking colonialist discourse when referring to “disorderly,” “failed,” and “poor” states, as countries such as Haiti were deemed unable to move beyond their chronic dysfunction.

Unlike interventions in Afghanistan (2001) and in Iraq (2003), Resolution 1529 in Haiti was consensually authorized with little global contestation, disputation, or significant debate from the core of the international community, despite the fact that Haiti was a democratically elected, sovereign, U.N. member state, while these states were authoritarian states. With the Iraqi intervention, for which the United States could not amass enough votes for a Security Council resolution, international actors recognized ideological contradictions, and thus a danger from the new interventions that were ironically celebrated as both “liberal” and “imperialistic,” representing a new liberal imperialism. Yet even progressive global forces, who had been highly critical of the intervention in Iraq, justified the Haitian intervention on the grounds that it was the world's moral obligation to bring human security to Haitian citizens.Footnote ¹ The international media especially employed praetorian language of “dysfunction and collapse” to describe Haiti's political instability in 2004 (Said [1994] Reference Said2003). One news source described the country's “descent to hell” (Beaudet Reference Beaudet2005).

Notwithstanding the limited opposition against intervention in Haiti among the core of the international community, there emerged a stringent and forceful opposition to UNSC Resolution 1529 from the world system's periphery. While this forceful resistance remained on the sidelines of mainstream opinion, the protestations of President Aristide and the Haitian peoples themselves, the transnational agitations of several of their pan-African allies, and the scholarly works on critical international relations theory all provided an alternative interpretation of Haiti's 2004 crisis. At the intellectual core of this challenge to the new world order was the postcolonial critique, an emergent paradigm defined by peoples of the developing postcolonial world as “fostering an international existence beyond colonialism” (Grovogui Reference Grovogui, Chowdry and Nair2002, p. 33).

Chowdhry and Nair argue that their alternative, critical international relations gaze on postcoloniality is necessary to investigate a variety of “colonizing practices that structure power relations globally, and resistance to these practices” (Chowdhry and Nair, Reference Chowdhry and Nair2002, p. 12). Postcolonial thinkers argue that the rules of international law have afforded the top-tier hegemonic nations of the international order to continue subordinating the rights of postcolonial states to the requirements of their own self-defined national interests and security (Grovogui Reference Grovogui1996, p. 2). This point of view holds that variations in international relations over time (four international regimes from 1493 to the present) have incorporated formerly colonized states into the global order and placed them at the bottom of the European-inspired universe (Grovogui Reference Grovogui1996, p. 10). The postcolonial polar of global governance reflects the intellectual underbelly of the resistance to UNSC Resolution 1529. It rejects the notion that Western institutions should represent international reality and thereby reaffirm Western-centric structures of power, interest, and identity, while curtailing and restricting the “autochony” and equal entry to this system by non-Western nations.

Re-representing UNSC Resolution 1529: The Pan-African Opposition

The Haitian regime, its democratic constituencies, and its pan-African allies contested the interpretation of events in Haiti in 2004. These forces eloquently articulated their alternative interpretation of Resolution 1529 as a Security Council action that advanced the economic and strategic interests of two of its strongest members: FranceFootnote ² and the United States (Miller Reference Miller2004). Moreover, the inclination to use force, instead of regional diplomatic strategies that were to end the Haitian political crisis, was interpreted differently by these groups who all raised to the fore the contradictions in the intervention's conflation of national rights with citizenship (the Haitian democracy), regional rights (Haiti's membership in CARICOM), and universal rights (Haiti's membership in the United Nations).

Though operating on the sidelines of decision making and international media attention, the AU, CARICOM, and the CBC made criticisms that reflected earlier pan-Africanism that Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia constructed during the decolonizing era. In 2004, these regions aligned with Haiti in solidarity with their shared political, linguistic, and cultural experiences as European colonies. However, more than fifty years later in the new millennium, these postcolonial regions have been much more willing and able to critically and dialectically engage the effects of the various processes of European conquest and colonization on the histories, cultures, societies, and self-conceptions of both “the colonized” and “the colonizers” (Ashcroft et al., Reference Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin1989).

Pan-Africanist forces from postcolonialist states, who constitute the world's smallest, poorest, and weakest states, expressed their resistance to an allegedly new “liberal democratic order” that would unceremoniously depose a democratically elected regime. CARICOM was the first to affirm Haiti's new democracy by protesting U.N. action, arguing it violated its democratic membership in both CARICOM and the United Nations. Led by former president P. J. Patterson of Jamaica, the fifteen-nation organization publicly expressed dismay and alarm over the apparent complicity of the United States and France over the events that led to Aristide's departure from office. CARICOM called for the immediate return to democratic rule and for respect for the Constitution of Haiti. With the AU, CARICOM nations also called for a U.N. investigation into the circumstances of Aristide's departure from office and from Haiti.

Having endorsed the deployment of the MIF to Haiti only after the forced removal of Aristide, CARICOM expressed its concerns over the constitutionality of the U.N. Security Council's adoption of Resolution 1529. CARICOM's leaders raised questions as to why the United Nations had not responded to Aristide, who during the period of instability was the incumbent democratic leader of a sovereign member state, and his request for assistance. It was only after Aristide had been removed from office that the interim, U.N.-installed Prime Minister Yvon Neptune re-requested U.N. assistance, and only then was the United Nations' multiforce deployed to the country.

Opposition to UNSC Resolution 1529 by pan-African agents also underscored a racial dimension of the Haitian intervention. For example, both South Africa and Nigeria initially turned down the United States' requests to have former President Aristide deported to their countries. Like CARICOM, both Nigeria and South Africa justified their rejection of the United States' request through the AU, claiming that Aristide's removal was an unconstitutional act that contravened international law. With Nigeria and South Africa standing up to the Bush administration's hawkish demands, Aristide's ultimate, though interim, exile destination turned out to be the Central African Republic, one of the few of Africa's fifty-three member states to have resisted a democratic transition. However, the mainstream media characterized the exile by invoking “racialist” stereotypes; for example, the media announced to the world that Aristide had been flown to an intensely poor former French colony in the “heart of Africa” (Flounders and Stevens, Reference Flounders and Stevens2004). Under the leadership of its chair, Alpha Oumar Konare, the AU was critical of the unconstitutional and denigrated manner by which President Aristide was brought to Africa, though the organization set about creating a positive role in mediating the crisis. Using pan-Africanist discourse, Konare called for dialogue and consensus when he stated, “He is from the first black republic, and a mother never rejects its child” (Associated Press 2005).

Within the United States, the CBC, traditionally a powerful lobby for U.S. foreign policy in African and Afro-Caribbean affairs, demonstrated the African American community's dissatisfaction with the Bush administration's policy toward Haiti. The CBC first voiced their concern for Haiti in the early 1990s when they supported the campaign to reinstall Aristide's democratic regime. At that time the TransAfrica Forum founder, Randall Robinson, made headlines by initiating collective action strategies, such as organizing an antiapartheid sit-in of a South African embassy and going on a hunger strike to urge the United States to restore Aristide's rule in Haiti. By Reference Robinson2004, though no longer in the forefront of U.S. foreign policy, Robinson remained close to the Aristide regime and thus became an important eyewitness to the Reference Robinson2004 crisis. It was the former TransAfrica executive who announced to the world that Aristide had informed him on the phone that U.S. soldiers had kidnapped him at gunpoint and ousted the Haitian leader in a U.S.-supported coup. Additionally, Aristide claimed he was being held prisoner in the Central African Republic (Robinson Reference Robinson2004).

The CBC began disagreeing with the Bush administration over the Haitian crisis as early as February 26, 2004, when President Bush rejected President Aristide's appeal for immediate security assistance from the international community. The caucus also disagreed with the Bush administration's threat to turn back any Haitian refugees trying to leave the country to escape the political crisis. In a meeting between Bush and the CBC, members of the Black Caucus expressed their concern over the President's refusal to preserve what they argued was the democratically elected government in Haiti. The caucus accused the administration of double standards as well. Comparing the administration's favorable treatment of Cuban and Mexican immigrants to the treatment of Haitian refugees, they claimed Haitian refugees were marked by racism.

Following Aristide's controversial ousting and the authorization of UNSC Resolution 1529, the CBC convened a congressional hearing on what they alleged was a U.S.-French undermining of Haitian democracy. At the hearing, Assistant Secretary of Western Hemispheric Affairs Roger Noriega faced off with CBC members who charged the administration with racism for how they treated Haitians and how they disregarded the country's historical struggle for civil rights and democracy amid a U.S.-Euro obstruction, an embargo, dollar diplomacy, and divide-and-conquer shenanigans (Laurent Reference Laurent2004). The CBC also discussed their rejection of UNSC Resolution 1529 with the United Nations. Members of the CBC, along with U.N. goodwill ambassador and TransAfrica Executive Director Danny Glover, met with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to begin consultations on Haiti. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), who chaired the CBC, declared that the forty-three members would not stand around and watch a democracy being taken apart by their own country (Cummings Reference Cummings2004).

Quasi-Sovereignty and the Construction of Haiti's Postcolonial State

Postcolonial scholars have challenged mainstream international relations scholars on their constructions and deconstructions of third world sovereignty. Mainstream scholars tend to perceive bottom-tier states as having quasi-sovereignty, a sovereignty morally conferred on them by Western powers during a decolonization phase (Jackson Reference Jackson1990). Third world states and peoples argue their position is the result of Western colonial mentality and neocolonialism, and thus a restriction of their freedom. Contrary to Western-dominated discourse—which constructs postcolonial states as “pre-modern” (Cooper Reference Cooper2002) and links security crises in these developing states to their inability to modernize—postcolonial scholars posit that the underdevelopment of these same states stems from their postcolonial status and, therefore, from such structural forces as colonialism, international security, and political economy that disadvantage bottom-tier states and privilege top-tier states.

Postcolonial scholars have begun to challenge the sovereignty constructions of the likes of Stephen Krasner (Reference Krasner2004) and Robert Jackson (Reference Jackson1990), dismissing them as yet another restriction on the self-determination of Africana peoples. Siba Grovogui (Reference Grovogui1996), for example, argues that third world collapsed-state theory ignores the ways in which structures within the global polity have contributed to the contemporary political crises in the developing world in the first place. Grovogui (Reference Grovogui1996) rightly challenges the assumption made by mainstream international relations theorists that global stability is necessarily associated with Western hegemony, or that universal morality necessarily means the collective submission to the will of a few hegemons in the U.N. Security Council and other global governance institutions (Grovogui Reference Grovogui, Dunn and Shaw2001). After all, the author argues, those rights and freedoms currently celebrated by international relations theorists as natural rights that emerged from the West and are now being promoted in the South were in actuality denied to southern states during the long process of colonialism (Grovogui Reference Grovogui1996).

While defending Jackson's (Reference Jackson1990) notion that the postcolonial state achieved quasi-sovereignty rather than absolute sovereignty, and thus true independence and self-determination in the post–World War II era, Grovogui (Reference Grovogui1996) reveals an entirely different context and therefore rationale for the emergence of the postcolonial state in this respect. Grovogui (Reference Grovogui1996) argues that the decolonization process that fostered independence in the developing world falsely claimed to do so by merely eliminating legal constraints, which did occur. The scholar argues that the decolonization process in actuality was one sided, dominated by the colonizers (today's top-tier states). It did not question the injustice and inequality of the colonization process in itself and therefore ignored and avoided the existing sovereign rights and claims of the colonized who wanted absolute political authority and equal protection before the international law. Thus, the process of decolonization, while transferring basic political powers to the colonized, nevertheless did not transform the institutional and cultural structures of domination that had informed Western hegemony over the international order.

A postcolonial analysis of formerly colonized states acknowledges that the influences of colonialism remain even after a country becomes an independent country; postcolonial societies continue to respond in myriad ways to the experience of colonial contact (Ashcroft et al., Reference Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin2006). Postcolonial theory, thereby, seeks to disrupt the tendency by Western scholarship to present third world states in “imperial binarisms” of tradition and modernization. Postcolonial thinkers instead investigate the interstitial space arising out of the postcolonial condition, emphasizing the complexity of the postcolonial subject who, rather than being placed on a failed linear trajectory to modernity, is instead viewed as a hybrid subject whose state-society interactions with international relations, especially former colonizer states, need to be problematized.

A postcolonial historical examination of Haiti's contemporary development crisis illustrates that rather than a collapsed, premodern country devoid of political struggle, U.N. Security powers (the United States and France) have had in reality a long history of contributing to the country's demise. French colonialism and subsequent U.S. Monroe Doctrine imperialism structurally link Haiti's contemporary travails to its legacy as a slave-trading colony and its distorted postcolonial state formation. The international order conferred sovereignty on Haiti much earlier than on its Latin American and certainly African and Caribbean counterparts. Nevertheless, sovereignty was in no way a moral gift for the country, rather Haitians violently struggled for sovereignty during the Haitian revolution. The successful 1791–1803 slave-led, anticolonial struggle, headed by Toussaint Louverture, led to the establishment of the contemporary Haitian state. Irritated by the loss of their colony to slaves, France broke off relations with its former colony and only reestablished trade relations when the Haitian regime agreed to pay France a compensation of 150 million francs for the loss of its slaves (Hallward Reference Hallward2004).

U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean immediately undermined sovereignty in Haiti, reinforcing global structures that were to embed the Haitian sugar economy in an unequal international political economy on U.S. hegemonic terms. Haiti's indebtedness to France throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered the “gunboat” interventions of the United States under Woodrow Wilson. From 1916 to 1924, the U.S. military regime restructured Haiti's political and economic institutions by abolishing the clause in the constitution that barred foreigners from owning property, taking over the country's national bank, reorganizing the economy to ensure regular repayment on foreign debt, expropriating land to create new U.S. plantations, and training a military force (Fatton Reference Fatton2002, p. 53).

By the time the U.S. troops left Haiti in 1934, the most prominent political institution they had built was the army, which ruled the country until a counterforce, led by Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) and his own paramilitary force, known as Tontons Macoutes, won a 1957 election establishing the Duvalier regime. Nevertheless, both France and the United States supported Haiti for another thirty years as a client regime for its aggressive anticommunist stance during the Cold War. Papa Doc and Baby Doc (his son) along with the Macoutes and the Haitian military all controlled Haiti's politics until the 1990s post–Cold War era ushered in changes emerging from contemporary globalization.

The 2004 crisis of political instability is not unrelated to Haiti's immediate postcolonial history, which took on new class and identity dimensions in the democracy struggles of the 1980s and 1990s in the developing world. In Haiti, the symbol of this struggle was indeed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a liberation theology priest with mass support among Haiti's majority poor. Aristide, Haiti's three-time democratically elected leader, had already been ousted once by the Haitian military and the right-wing elite, and then reinstalled by a joint U.N.-Clinton administration mission. Yet in the 2004 crisis, Western media represented him as corrupt and dictatorial. The reality, however, is that Aristide emerged in the political frontline during a global era of democratic struggles that began for Haiti in the late 1980s by a resuscitated political opposition constituting the Haitian civil society—especially from the churches among the subordinate classes in the urban areas of Gonaïves and Port-au-Prince. Aristide's Lavalas movement was forged in this context as he mobilized a popular opposition against the Duvalier regime, forcing Baby Doc to flee to France in 1986. Aristide's brand of populism however was not limited to a critique of Duvalierism, as the liberation priest also criticized the Haitian military and elite, capitalism, and U.S. imperialism (Gros Reference Gros1997).

In 1990, running on a platform of massive economic redistribution, Aristide won the presidential elections with 67% of the vote over the U.S.-favored candidate, Marc Bazin, a World Bank economist and former Duvalier minister who won only 14% of the vote. However, President Aristide and the Front National pour le Changement et la Démocratie (forged from the Lavalas movement) ruled for less than a year when the military—who had been resilient in its attempts to bring down what was considered to be a new force from the working class and democratic left—launched a bloody military coup in September 1991, forcing Aristide to flee to the United States. Under the junta leadership of General Cédras, the Haitian military launched a new Duvalierist militant force, the Front pour L'Avancement et le Progrès d'Haitien (FRAPH), and instituted a reign of terror in an attempt to dismantle the Lavalas networks, sending Haiti into a renewed era of postcolonial crisis.

Shared sovereignty positively characterized Haiti's relationship with the international community in 1993, when the exiled President Aristide sought the help of the United States and the United Nations to assist him in reversing the coup and reinstalling Haitian democracy. Aristide and his democratically elected government were successfully reinstalled as a result of Operation Restore Democracy, a joint U.N.-U.S. mission led by the Clinton administration. However, the character and structure of the newly installed regime once again inextricably tied Aristide and Haiti's development prospects and political processes to the international community. For example, conditions imposed upon the Aristide regime by the United States as a contingency for assistance required that Aristide grant amnesty to the coup makers, that he not sack the army but “professionalize” it, that Aristide only serve for his remaining time in office until 1995 (two years only), and that he adopt a drastic IMF structural adjustment program.

These political and economic conditions severely affected the autonomy of Aristide's two-year regime, as well as the regime of his equally embattled successor, René Préval, through the year 2000. Both regimes were characterized by political divisions that emerged between Lavalas and the reconstituted Haitian elite amid the drastic consequences of IMF reform programs. Additionally, the international agenda could not have been more apparent in revealing the pragmatic intentions behind the U.S.-led intervention; U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi explained on Haitian radio in 1996 that there was never any question that either the United States or the United Nations would allow the reinstalled Aristide regime to dilute the Haitian elite's monopoly of economic power (Arthur Reference Arthur1997).

This internationalized class struggle in Haiti took a new turn in 2004 when a bereaved army reconstituted into aggrieved militants, and the elite formulated a right-wing international alliance with the administration of George W. Bush. The struggle began to crystallize in the May and November 2000 elections that brought in another decisive legislative, local, and presidential victory for Fanmi Lavalas and President Aristide. With the help of the Haitian elite, who had thoroughly been defeated in the 2000 elections, the international community (the Bush administration and Organization of American States) sought to discredit Aristide's regime for what it considered “electoral fraud.” The Convergence Democratique (CD), a mixed medley of former Duvalierist (and OPL) dissidents and other elitist opponents of Aristide, launched a campaign to annul the 2000 elections and bar Aristide from participating in future elections. The Organization of American States, which had previously described the May 2000 elections as a great success for the Haitian population, subsequently characterized the elections as “flawed” (Sachs Reference Sachs2004). It was these events that set the stage for Resolution 1529, which led to the ousting of the democratically elected Aristide regime by France, the United States, and the United Nations.

Inhumanitarian Intervention and Neocolonial Trusteeship

Postcolonial scholars also disagree with the way in which humanitarian intervention and trusteeship are being used to justify forcible intervention into the sovereign domains of third world states. Many view these new humanitarian interventions as “occupations” and attempts by former colonized states to “recolonize” weaker states. Moreover, since the millennium, postcolonial scholars have been particularly put off by the Western human rights community for attributing the main source of underdevelopment and insecurity among developing states to the cultural vices of third world leaders. In this regard, postcolonial scholars argue that the exclusive human rights focus on development ignores the deeper structural developmental challenges that developing states face.

However, while making a persuasive liberal case, rather than a realist one, in favor of humanitarian intervention that favors intervention based on geopolitical security and interest, Finnemore's (Reference Finnemore2003) own assumptions are equally exclusive of the views, perceptions, and agency of the recipients of humanitarian intervention. Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003) assumes that there are shared norms regarding the changing rules for the use of force for humanitarian intervention. Yet she refers exclusively to hegemonic top-tier powers when she discusses this new global consensus. In this respect, Finnemore betrays her Western liberal bias when she uses “we” to argue that the international community should intervene to protect “non-white,” “non-Christian” peoples; to do otherwise, she ironically asserts, would be racist (Finnemore Reference Finnemore2003).

Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003) uses this presumption of “shared” international values to advocate for the ethical and moral considerations of humanitarian intervention in an evolving world where universal human rights have been extended from the Western Westphalian core to citizens of other (non-Western) states. What goes unconsidered in Finnemore's (Reference Finnemore2003) analysis, however, is whether there is indeed a shared notion that shapes a consensus on humanitarian intervention. Most Haitians and their pan-African allies do not share these norms of Westerners. Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003) also fails to consider the contentions between “universalist” shared norms, rights, and obligations and those of national democracy, which is perhaps a more legitimate arena for such obligations since it presumes to have elections.

David Rieff (Reference Rieff2002) has a different view. He has referred to the uncritical focus by international relations theorists on humanitarian intervention as evidence of their inclination to mobilize the international community by using “horror, without context” (Rieff Reference Rieff2002, p. 33). The author argues that conflicts such as the one in Haiti are deliberately presented to a Western audience as a morality play devoid of political context, where the victims are presented as deserving of the world's sympathy, its protection, and, thereby, its intervention on humanitarian grounds. Himadeep Muppidi (Reference Muppidi2007), however, argues for a postcolonial interpretation of the same scenario. The author suggests that the humanitarian interventionist model proposed by Martha Finnemore (Reference Finnemore2003) is devoid of a complex and realistic consideration of the “Other.” As a result, compassion, assistance, aid, action, and intervention are all used by the humanitarian interventionists and human security theorists, but without engaging the specificities and particularities of the local (Muppidi Reference Muppidi2007). Rather than investigate this national context, humanitarianists instead simply restructure the conflict into a “moral” global economy of passion, care, and activism.

While acknowledging that postcolonial states lack both internal (domestic) legitimacy and external authority, postcolonialists differ with the liberal proponents of humanitarian intervention and of shared sovereignty on the reasons that explain political instability and economic underdevelopment in these countries. For example, in explaining these states' domestic fractionalization—which Grovogui (Reference Grovogui1996) argues has emerged as a result of the longstanding existence of cultural, regional, and class subgroups, as well as these states' incapacity to deter other states or to act freely in the international arena—Grovogui characterizes the “diminished sovereignty” of the postcolonial state as lacking the institutional features that constitute fully sovereign Western states. Notwithstanding this acknowledgement, Grovogui rejects the proposition that deficiencies in states such as Haiti are intrinsic to “failed” state behavior, inadequate domestic leadership, and bad governance (Grovogui Reference Grovogui1996, p. 180). Alternatively, his own explanation underscores the importance of structures within the present international system that limit the capacity of bottom-tier states to achieve self-determination and full sovereignty.

The human security and humanitarian intervention paradigms do little to more deeply interrogate the ways in which African and Caribbean postcolonial states have become compelled to fight against cultural and institutional hegemony manifest in colonialism and neocolonialism (Persaud Reference Persaud, Dunn and Shaw2001). Indeed, the concerns of the contemporary postcolonial states in Africa, the Caribbean, and other parts of the developing world, vis-à-vis the advanced industrial world, appear to be no different today from those during the interwar period. In 1936, the then deposed Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, in grieving the Italian military intervention into his country, proclaimed in his address to the League of Nations, of which his country was a member, “There is not on this earth any nation superior to any other…. Are the States [of the League] going to set up the terrible precedent of bowing before force?” (Time 1936, pp. 14–15). Related to their critique of humanitarian intervention is postcolonial thinkers' opposition to the “human security” prescription of the development crises in acclaimed “collapsed” states such as Haiti. Once the case for humanitarian intervention has been made, for example, Krasner's theory of shared sovereignty and trusteeship is employed to restructure the “de-sovereigned” postcolonial state and link it to the controls of the hegemonic forces of the international community. This occurred in Haiti when UNSC Resolution 1529 ushered in a two-year period of U.N. trusteeship (MINUSTUH); although, not once did the international community (U.N. or U.S. operations) question its own contribution to the country's political instability, despite ten years of previous quasi-trusteeship.Footnote ³

Moreover, the United Nations' classification of the Haitian problem in terms of “human rights violations,” “lack of democratic culture,” and “bad governance” missed the reality that interventionist missions in Haiti were not listening to, assessing, nor responding to the existing rights and priorities of the Haitian people. Neither this intervention nor previous interventions built the Haitian government's capacity to respond to the Haitian people's expressed needs. In effect, after a two-year period of trusteeship in Haiti, from 2004 to 2006, Haitians' general perception was that the objectives of the international community's humanitarian intervention in Haiti had failed.

This failure was evidenced by assessing two important objectives of UNSC Resolution 1529—to end the violence and build democracy. For example, though the resolution aimed to bring the militant insurgency and violence that besieged the Aristide regime under control, the two-year trusteeship period was marked by the continuation of militant insurgency and violence despite the presence of U.N. peacekeeping forces. During the period, the Macoutes reinstitutionalized state and paramilitary violence and violently repressed Lavalas and Aristide supporters while U.N. troops stood by. In some cases, interim government police openly fired on unarmed demonstrators, while the peacekeepers themselves were also alleged to have launched “search and destroy” assaults on the slum district of Cité Soleil, in which civilians were killed in “crossfire” (Buncombe Reference Buncombe2006).

UNSC Resolution 1529's objective to build democracy via elections also had questionable results due to suspicious behavior surrounding the elections, which were marred by fraudulence and perceived by Haitians to have been rigged. From the outset, the United States and the United Nations took a hostile position against Lavalas, which had been the democratically elected legitimate regime, and against Aristide supporters. Upon assuming power, Haiti's interim regime immediately arrested and persecuted key members of the Aristide regime, including Lavalas's ousted prime minister, Yvon Neptune. For almost the entire period, the U.N. mission was silent on the illegal detentions of over 4000 political prisoners arrested by the interim government (Delva Reference Delva2006). Viewing the detention as a violation, many Haitians accused the United Nations of prejudice against Aristide's Lavalas party. Haitians accused the United Nations of collaborating with the United States to force Aristide to flee in exile so that they could make way for their conservative, elite candidate, Mark Bazin (Podur Reference Podur2005).

Moreover, the conduct and procedures regarding elections were inefficient. The elections were postponed four times due to lack of preparedness and the growing sense of insecurity and violence throughout the country despite intervention. At the national level, many in the reconstituted Lavalas prodemocracy movement, under the leadership of René Préval's Lespwa Party, accused the interim government of intentionally delaying the elections to prevent Haiti's working and subordinate mass classes from returning to democratic power.Footnote ⁴ In the February 2006 poll, many Lavalas members voted for Préval because he promised to release the thousands of Lavalas members and supporters who had been illegally jailed as political prisoners. Significantly, the final counting of election results reinforced Haitians' feelings of an international conspiracy by the pro-U.N.-U.S. interim regime to manipulate ballots and ensure that René Préval would not meet the 50% threshold, despite earlier announcements that he had attained 61% of the vote.

It took a massive pro-Lavalas/Préval demonstration protesting the impending fraud to move MINUSTAH to enter into negotiations with Préval and thus mysteriously put him back above 50%. By doing so, the international community attempted to salvage their trusteeship mission in Haiti. They chose to avoid the serious charges by the Haitian people that the Interim Government of Haiti (IGH) had manipulated vote tabulations and discarded ballots to prevent Préval from winning. This allowed the international community to say, after two years, that at least it had successfully transitioned Haiti to a democracy (Concannon Reference Concannon2006). Of course the international community ignored the reality that despite two years of trusteeship under UNSC Resolution 1529, with the exception of Aristide's absence in 2006, Haiti was in exactly the same position that it had been in 2004—a class-divided national democracy controlled by representatives of the country's progressive masses.