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Article Excerpt
Abstract: This article is an examination of American foreign policy towards Sierra Leone in 1999 and 2000. Hopefully it will contribute to the literature of Sierra Leone while shedding theoretical light on types of humanitarian intervention. It seeks to answer two questions about American policy: First, why did the Clinton White House become involved in this particular West African civil war? Secondly, what factors led the U.S. to give financial and logistical help but not military aid? These types of limited interventions have usually been ignored by American foreign policy scholars. To understand Sierra Leonean decision making, it examines four key policy decisions using primary interviews with Clinton officials and looking at internal documents from the White House, Defense and State Departments. I contend that a theory of international institutional agenda setting can best describe American policy. This argument explores how constructivist norms (i.e. human rights and sovereignty) are transmitted, magnified or mitigated by international institutions. By bringing neo-liberal institutional literature back into constructivism we can show how 'institutional identity' influences and shapes state policy preferences--not only in decisions to intervene but in shaping the size and scope of UN peacekeeping mandates.
INTRODUCTION
The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) waged a decade long gruesome and terrifying campaign to unseat the Sierra Leonean government. Tens of thousands of people died, millions were displaced and the economy destroyed. Under international pressure the warring parties signed a peace agreement in Lome, Togo in July of 1999 which quickly collapsed. The RUF were finally defeated with a strengthened UN peacekeeping mission, West African military help, and key American and British aid. This article is an examination of the American decision-making in this conflict. By using Sierra Leone as a case study we can hopefully expand two areas of the foreign policy literature concerning failed states and intervention: most treatments of Sierra Leone concentrate on the government in Freetown or the institution of the UN, not the decision making process in Washington. Secondly, and more substantively, I wish to examine the decision making process in what I define as limited interventions. To accomplish these goals we need to answer two questions about U.S. policy in Sierra Leone: first, why did the United States become involved in the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL)? The Clinton Administration could have easily ignored the crisis. It was a low intensity civil war in a region with little strategic interest. Secondly, I try to answer why the U.S. chose to provide logistical and financial aid but not military help.
To answer these questions I will carefully look at American policy in Sierra Leone for 1999 and 2000 using internal memos from the National Security Council (NSC), Defense and State Departments, combined with elite interviews of key Clinton decision makers. This article will then break down Sierra Leone policymaking into four key decisions: first, the early 1999 decision to help end the conflict; second, the American dedication to the Lome Accords that culminated in July of 1999; third U.S. support for UNAMSIL; and finally the U.S. decision to save UNAMSIL as it seemed it was going to collapse in early 2000. We will then test these four observations against a structured focused comparison of two hypotheses of foreign policy making: neoclassical realism and what this article will develop as a hypothesis of institutional agenda setting based on constructivism and neo-liberal institutionalism. Since realism (in its many forms) is still considered the dominant paradigm of foreign policy scholarship it is essential we also discuss how it views intervention in Sierra Leone. These hypotheses will hopefully shed some theoretical light on how the Administration framed the questions of intervention and what guided their actions.
I contend that institutional commitments and UN legitimacy play a crucial role in American policy formulation for Sierra Leone. Nancy Soderberg, a member of President Clinton's NSC staff summarizes the power of international commitments, "Sierra Leone does not become an issue on its own throughout all this. The UN cannot technically place items on the NSC agenda--but the UN is part of the NSC agenda." [1] Institutional agenda setting provides a robust look at how the Sierra Leonean crisis was framed by these international commitments and how they shaped the policy path that was eventually chosen.
SIERRA LEONE AND THE CONCEPT OF LIMITED INTERVENTION
What makes Sierra Leone a compelling case is the nature of American involvement. UN missions in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and East Timor fall into a category of limited U.S. intervention. What is often missing in the literature of intervention and peacekeeping is a qualitative look at how decision makers understand peacekeeping as a question of degrees. There are levels of intervention. A limited intervention provides the financial and logistical support to other organizations and nations in humanitarian crises but does not reach the level of military intervention, or as policymakers say "boots on the ground." In fact, a large component of U.S. participation in UN peacekeeping is not providing military but critical logistical aid.
Yet the literature has been silent on this subject. Interventions are often seen as a simple dichotomy: you either intervene or not. There are also plenty of large "n" quantitative works on "third party" and UN interventions. However, these studies have the UN as the focus of analysis and not Washington. A good example of this can be found in Mark J. Mullenbach's recent, "Deciding to Keep Peace: An Analysis of International Influences on the Establishment of Third-Party Peacekeeping Missions." [2] There has been an explosion of qualitative research in places where the U.S. has actively intervened. For example, Ivo Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute provide a descriptive policy analysis of the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts. [3] In the same vein, Ken Menkhaus and Louis Ortmayer provide an exhaustive account of Somalia. [4] American failure to intervene has also been widely explored from a normative perspective; for example: Samantha Powers, A Problem from Hell, and Philip Gourevitch's work on Rwanda. [5]
Sierra Leone has not garnered the same kind of academic scrutiny as some of these other humanitarian tragedies in the post cold war world. But these kinds of missions deserve special attention because they are qualitatively different than what happened in Somalia and Rwanda. By providing a rich deep look at Sierra Leone I hope to shed light on the concept of limited intervention while adding to the historical record of American policymaking in West Africa.
THEORETICAL DISCUSSION OF COMPLEX HUMAN EMERGENCIES
In order to better understand why the U.S. intervened in Sierra Leone and how it chose the type of intervention we need to ground our discussion in the larger theoretical debate of intervention, peacekeeping, and foreign policy. Can theory help us explain American behavior?
Neoclassical Realism
Realism is the baseline in which to judge American policy. In the eyes of Washington's non-academic elites it is nothing more than creating policy that advances (or protects) American strategic interest. The real debate is how broadly we define interest. Peacekeeping sometimes advances these interests and sometimes not. However, one thing is certain for realists: the U.S. should only become involved in peacekeeping when American interests are threatened. The academic side of the realist debate is a bit more complicated but arrives at the same conclusion.
The power of realism is its parsimonious understanding of international relations. The world is understood as an anarchical system of nation states. The only difference between states is power. International relations occur in relation to the distribution of power. Realism has been silent about what to do in humanitarian crises and complex humanitarian emergencies for two reasons: first, because structural realism implicitly deals with a bigger picture and not specific cases. Secondly, that humanitarian tragedy is a priori outside of the national interest for most states. Kenneth Waltz for example seems to dismiss foreign policy outright in his work on structural neo-realism. Waltz cannot tell us how effectively (or even how) the units of a system (states) will respond to these pressures and possibilities of changes in the balance of power. [6] Unless genocide or gross human rights abuses dramatically changes the balance of power then realism does not have much to say about peacekeeping. We find this same lack of understanding for the role of peacekeeping in the offensive and defensive variants of realism debated in the 1990s. [7]
Though this paper focuses on understanding American foreign policy, it is important to note that realism has traditionally been silent about the politics of Africa and the third world in general. As John F. Clark states: "Neo-realism provided a form of analysis that seemed well suited to the Great Power relations of the Cold War era, but it reveals little about international politics on the periphery in the post-Cold War era." [8] Clark goes on to state: "The concept of [western inspired] national interest fails patently in Africa." [9] Clark, along with other African scholars, Sakah Mahmud, and Assis Malaquias, point out that various African nations are often peripherally connected to global power politics. [10] Overall, peacekeeping in the developing world has remained outside the scholarly gaze of structural realism.
A more fruitful alternative for understanding American foreign policy is the school of neoclassical realism. [11] Neoclassical realists grapple with the foreign policy decisions that many structural realists ignore. The key to neoclassical realism is how policymakers perceive relative power. Gideon Rose explains: "Foreign policy choices are made by actual political leaders and elites, and so it is their perceptions of relative power that matter." [12] This emphasis on perception as an intervening variable opens up the black box of domestic politics and lets the state back into the analysis.
So how does a realist explain humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping? A neo-classical realist would contend that the core of every peacekeeping operation is a sober analysis of national interest. Policymakers must perceive that something will be gained from participating in these kinds of international ventures. A successful mission might maintain or change the distribution of power but always to the benefit of the intervening nation. What kind of hypothesis could we derive from neoclassical theory (hereinafter realism) when it comes to Sierra Leone?
Hypothesis 1, Realism: The U.S. will intervene in Sierra Leone if policymakers perceive American strategic and economic interests are at stake. These interests may include regional stability. Conversely, the U.S. will not intervene if these specific criteria are not met
If this hypothesis is true we will find the Clinton Administration making choices to intervene or not based on explicit arguments of Sierra Leone's importance to the stability to western Africa. These findings will be strengthened if we find evidence that top-decision makers made consistent and repeated references, in their comments to the media, minutes from official meetings, memoirs, government papers, reports, and personal interviews, to what were, if any, the geo-strategic and financial stakes Sierra Leone had to the United States.
Institutional Agenda Setting Hypothesis
The institutional agenda setting hypothesis explores how constructivist arguments of norms are transmitted, magnified or mitigated by international institutions. By bringing back institutions into the constructivist argument we can show how 'institutional identity' influences and shapes state preferences. States choose to cooperate in peacekeeping missions in areas of little strategic importance. However, there is a second part to the theory: since these institutions are meeting grounds they must mediate between international norms of human rights with member preferences of national interest. Organizations send mixed signals to policy-makers about its preferences. The end result is fluctuations over policies chosen--or limited interventions.
Constructivism provides an interesting avenue of research in the development of state norms and identity in complex human emergencies. Martha Finnemore's The Purpose of Intervention best exemplifies this new research agenda. [13] Finnemore sets out to explain why states conduct military interventions; and how the rationalizations for such actions have changed over time. Intervention in the 19th century was strictly limited, and often tied to collecting international debts. By the 20th century, intervention to stop gross human rights abuses were not only discussed, but expected from the international community. In her earlier works, Finnemore (joined by Kathryn Sikkink) explore why states would accept these norms. They posit that states have a sense of appropriate behavior (and later Finnemore discusses the concept of felt obligations). In a process similar to peer pressure, policymakers accept these norms, "not out of conscious choice, but because they understand these behaviors to be appropriate." [14] State identity changes when enough critical states endorse the new norm.
Finnemore ends The Purpose of Intervention with a jumping off point for future research: "We lack good understandings of how law and institutions at the international level create these senses of felt obligation [towards the norms of humanitarian intervention for example] in individuals, much less states, that induce compliance ..." [15] What we can tease out of Finnemore's work is that membership and participation in these institutions are the transmission belt for felt obligations. Finnemore's constructivism leads us to institutional liberalism.
International regimes are systems of norms and rules agreed upon by states to govern. [16] The primary goal of institutionalism was to demonstrate that even in anarchy structured cooperation was still possible. [17] Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, two of the most prominent architects of institutionalism contend: "in the long run, one may even see changes in how governments define their own self-interest in directions that conform to the rules of the regime." [18] Keohane and Nye seem to suggest a constructivist argument. Over time institutions can change the behavior (and identity) of member states. The wall of fixed identity (so important to neo-liberalism) is now broken.
Jennifer Sterling-Folker concisely sums up the theoretical connections between liberal institutionalism and constructivism and how they are "birds of a feather,"
Actor expectations in a given issue-area [peacekeeping] converge around principles, norms, rules, and decision making procedures which have relevance because they are the social practices in which elites are already engaged when the regime analysis begins. This neo-liberal institutionalism already recognizes what [Alexander] Wendt labels the fundamental principles of constructivist social theory& ... that people act towards objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them. [19]
This connection between liberal institutionalism and constructivism is where I want to develop my hypothesis of institutional agenda setting in limited interventions.
Institutional Agenda Setting: Transmission
The UN plays an important role in transmitting ideas of peacekeeping to elite policymakers of member states. Ending gross human rights abuses is enshrined in the UN Charter (found in Chapters VI and VII). Over time, nations make UN peacekeeping part of their agendas even if it is not always consistent with a strict understanding of national interest. [20] States learn to see multilateral action as the best way to end gross human rights abuses even in the face of institutional weakness in the UN Department of Peacekeeping. Keohane argues in After Hegemony that states are loath to scrap these international regimes because they embody sunk costs. They "persist even when all members would prefer somewhat different mixtures of principals, rules, and institutions." [21] Institutions have staying power and once established become difficult to remove and hard to change.
Institutional Agenda Setting: The Importance of Feedback Loops
When it comes to complex human emergencies policymakers take their cues from international organizations. But agenda setting is a two way street. Institutions may be difficult to remove or change but they are open to influence from states. Stephen Krasner contends iterated cooperation within an institutional framework leads to a reinforcing feedback loop. The more states cooperate the more this reinforces the institutions of cooperation. However, that loop is more complex than just reaffirming legitimacy. [22] If institutions push on...
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