Reserved domains

Should a prime minister have a free hand in taking his country to war? Or in a democracy, should such a decision by made only with the consent of the people's elected representatives? Traditionally, parliaments have been convoked to legitimize decisions which have already been made. Given that retrospective control has been the norm and previous control the exception, the striking case is that of Syria, where parliamentary control has taken a negative and doubting form.

Cameron's unexpected defeat in the Commons has shaken decades of Britain's special relationship with the US, putting into hibernation a highly proactive foreign and security policy. If Obama had not backed off, at least temporarily, on military intervention in Syria, we would have seen something unheard of in recent decades: an international crisis in which London was not shoulder to shoulder with Washington. Obama's case has been no less spectacular. The US is famed for a national security culture in which party differences are immediately set aside in the case of international conflict. However, in this case, the usual American patriotism of "my country right or wrong" has failed to bring public opinion around to unconditional support to Obama. Since American elected representatives fear not only God but their voters too, Obama, smelling the possibility of defeat or narrow, debilitating victory, can only have felt relief at the emergence of an unexpected diplomatic solution.

Smelling possible defeat, Obama must have felt relief at the emergence of an unexpected diplomatic solution

All of this has left President Hollande, who declined to take the matter to the National Assembly, in a singularly exposed position. If anything is characteristic of the French Fifth Republic, it is the president's broad powers for conducting foreign and security policy. These prerogatives, born of the trauma of the war in Algeria and De Gaulle's arrival in the presidency, reflect the idea that foreign and security policy is substantially different from any other public area, and must be conducted in a manner different from all others.

This idea of the "reserved domain" may be difficult to understand in a country like Spain, whose international relations have a multilateral, low-intensity profile in questions of security. But if we look back to the Cold War period we see why, in a world with nuclear weapons whose use would require instant decisions, it was inevitable that heads of government should possess such power, to the consequent exclusion of the parliaments. Though only in a hypothetical way, even today and in consolidated democracies such as the US, the UK and France, it is considered acceptable to confer on one elected representative - Obama, Cameron or Hollande - the capacity to interpret when an existential threat to his country may justify killing millions of people by pushing the nuclear button. This anomaly of democracy has been justified as a reflection of the characteristics of the international system, dominated by what the theoreticians call "structural anarchy," an elegant manner of describing what, in the internal sphere, Thomas Hobbes described as the state of nature where, in the absence of a higher power, "Man to Man is an errant Wolfe."

In spite of the development of international law, which has equipped the international community with broad and robust powers, the Syrian crisis shows that international reality is still built on the existence of sovereign states, which are unanswerable to higher authority. The United Nations being inoperative, the old Westphalian order still stands. In this world, where states collide like billiard balls, force is still the ultima ratio regis. This is not a justification of force, but a defense of the central role of diplomacy; if international law were effective and international order were indeed order, diplomacy would be unnecessary.

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