Syria is still going through a bloody crisis. The Syrian crisis provides the world with many lessons about how to maintain domestic and international peace and security. 

The opposition forces began demonstrations in early 2011 demanding democracy and Bashar al-Assad violently responded. The Sunni majority supports the opposition forces and the Alawite and Shiite minorities support the government, while other ethnic and religious minority groups are taking neutral or opportunistic positions. In the Arab world, on the other hand, Saudi Arabia supports the Sunni rebels and Iran supports the Assad regime, mainly because the former is ruled by the Sunnis and the latter the Shiites.

The West, led by the U.S., supports the opposition movement, while Russia and China side with the Assad regime.

Different ethnic and sectarian groups have been cohabiting for centuries as in the Balkan states. To make the situation more complex, Islamism and anti-Western Baathism cut across the complex “civilizational fault line.”

As the anti-government rebellion has intensified, the division between the West and the non-West represented by Russia and China has deepened. The controversy centers on two interrelated questions: first, who should handle the crisis, and second, how should the crisis be settled?

In the case of interstate conflicts the U.N. Security Council is entitled to intervene in them but in the case of domestic conflicts it is legally prohibited to intervene because they belong to the domestic jurisdiction of member states.

Under the pre-World War II international order the principle of domestic jurisdiction was an iron law of international relations, but since the end of the cold war, this rule of international law has been gradually eroding. But the dispute over whether or not domestic conflicts are no longer a domestic issue has divided nations into two camps: the non-West supporting the traditional principle and the West opposing it and instead favoring humanitarian intervention.

The West holds that although domestic conflicts basically belong to the domestic jurisdiction of states, the U.N. and regional organizations can intervene when domestic conflicts have developed into a situation where the existing government authorities engage in mass killing, ethnic cleansing or war crimes, commit crimes against humanity or have lost their capabilities to stop those acts by either the government or rebel forces. Whether such a situation has occurred is to be determined by the U.N. or regional organizations. Some scholars argue that if the international organizations are unable to act, nations as a group can intervene lawfully in domestic conflicts.

The non-West repudiates this view and argues that if any international organization or a group of states is allowed to intervene in the domestic conflict of a state, it will turn the existing international order into a truly anarchic one and stronger powers will abuse this right to subjugate weaker states to their will.

The West has decided to intervene in the Syrian conflict through the Arab League and the U.N. by invoking the right of humanitarian intervention. But Russia and China have tried to keep the case out of the Security Council jurisdiction by invoking the principle of domestic jurisdiction. They contend that it is not allowed to resort to the principle of humanitarian intervention to take action against the legitimate government or support the rebel group until the crisis develops into that stage where it constitutes a threat to the peace, a breach of the peace or an act of aggression. So far the efforts of the West to use the U.N. for the transfer of power from the Assad regime to the opposition group have failed due to the intransigent attitude of Bashar al-Assad and the veto by Russia and China.

From the above we learn the following: First, Syria is highly vulnerable to the domestic conflict mainly because it is a pseudo-democracy(in fact, a hereditary monarchy)and the masses have suffered oppression, and the Sunni majority intolerable discrimination, while the ruling elites and the Alawites have enjoyed a privileged life. Despite this, the Assad regime has been able to survive mainly because the power elites have maintained their solidarity as well as diplomatic and material support from Russia, China and Iran.

Among many factors contributing to the collapse of a regime, a split within the ruling elites is the decisive factor. The longer the crisis continues, the more likely this is to happen.

Second, the international political order is undergoing a profound change from the state-centric system to a transnational community order. Of course, it still has a long way to go. When certain values such as humanitarian intervention are accepted universally, the world will come closer to the transnational community order. The U.N. is the main locomotive to move the world toward the transnational community order but its driving forces ― enlightened world leaders and global civil society ― are not yet powerful enough to remove the obstacles on its track set up by the forces of the state-centric order.

The nation-states, passengers of this locomotive and suppliers of the energy resources for it, take an ambiguous attitude toward the final destination of the world, sometimes acting positively and at other times negatively.

Thirdly, therefore, it is important to find out the true motives of the West, particularly the U.S., and the non-West, particularly Russia and China. Then, we can more easily foresee how soon the transnational community order will emerge.

Russia and China are concerned about the implications of humanitarian intervention in their domestic contexts because both are vulnerable to ethnic, religious and regional separatism. They also oppose U.S. hegemonism and the Western-dominated world order and advocate a multilateral international order.

In contrast, the U.S. does not have serious demographic problems that might develop into a violent conflict. Moreover, it now knows that it cannot and needs not preach democracy to the world anymore because a democratic wind is blowing all over the world, and Western democracy cannot be transplanted to the non-West by force.

Humanitarian intervention is becoming a universal value and therefore the U.S. should use it to achieve its goal, Western democracy, by propagating and enforcing humanitarian intervention. By promoting an idealist goal, it can achieve its realistic goal: the selling of American ideology and influence over the non-West. In this regard, Russian and Chinese approaches to the Syrian conflict are riskier than the American.

The final question is what policy is the best for Syria and the world. There can be four options: a NATO-led military action against the regime; participation of civilian voluntary forces recruited from all over the world in the rebel forces; economic and military sanctions by willing states; and the negotiation between representative Western and non-Western states outside the U.N. framework. At the moment no one can tell which option will work best. Indeed, the Syrian crisis is a testing ground to find out which theory(or policy)of peace and war is valid. 

By Park Sang-seek

Park Sang-seek is a professor at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University. ― Ed.