This article was written a year before the political upheaval in the Arab world began, but that does not diminish the relevance of the thesis advanced. The changes occurring in Tunisia and Egypt are a clear indication that the gap separating the Mediterranean’s northern shores from its southern rim is primarily of a political nature (Gabriel 2009, pp. 305-332). What burdens the Mediterranean is not – as Samuel Huntington suggests – a clash of civilizations but clashing patterns of governance. It is this divide that, so far, has hindered the establishment of relations and structures that are more than traditional and bilateral.

The divide is anything but new. As the article shows, three different eras can be distinguished. There was a first or pre-modern gap that existed before the formation of the European nation states in the 17th century. There was a second or modern divide which ended with the Second World War, and there followed a third or post-modern gap that began with the formation of the European Union. The present divide shows in terms of sovereignty. Whereas the states to the north, as members of the supranational European Union, are willing to redefine (and qualify) their sovereign independence, the states of the southern shore cling rigidly to their more recently gained sovereignty and independence. The new division, therefore, is characterized by political transformation on one side of the Mediterranean and by continued adherence to fairly traditional conceptions of sovereignty on the other side.

The Libya intervention of 2011 marked the first time that the UN Security Council invoked the “responsibility to protect” principle (RtoP) to authorize use of force by UN member states. In this comment the author argues that the Security Council’s invocation of RtoP in the midst of the Libyan crisis significantly deepens the broader, ongoing transformation in the international law system’s approach to sovereignty and civilian protection. This transformation away from the traditional Westphalian notion of sovereignty has been unfolding for decades, but the Libyan case represents a further normative shift from sovereignty as a right to sovereignty as a responsibility. This significant normative moment demonstrates how far international law has traveled and also where it has not yet traveled.

The Libyan case was propelled by a mass movement in Libya, in the region, and ultimately in the international community, which mobilized Security Council action, relying on RtoP, to protect civilians in the face of brutality. In response to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s threat to slaughter his own people amid the “Arab Spring” of 2011, the Security Council authorized, inter alia, a limited military intervention to protect Libyan civilians, invoking RtoP. The assumption under RtoP is that individual states have primary responsibility for civilian protection and that, as a backstop, the international community has subsidiary responsibility for civilian protection by preventing and rapidly responding to genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Military intervention pursuant to RtoP is, against that background, an option of last resort, when the other, more modest measures preferred as initial steps have failed (as discussed further in part II). Significantly, in the Libyan case, it was the Libyan people — as represented by an opposition movement (including numerous defecting government officials) that was demanding a more representative government — who called for Security Council intervention to mobilize an effective civilian-protection effort.

Not all that begins in hope ends in happiness. In Egypt, the exuberance of Tahrir Square has given way to frustration over the resilience of the security state; in Libya, the anti-Qaddafi movement has fractured along tribal and factional lines; in Syria, as of this writing, calls for reform continue to be met with gunfire from government forces. Throughout the Middle East — from Egypt, Libya and Syria to Yemen, Tunisia, Bahrain and elsewhere — the heady excitement of 2010 has given way to a more sober awareness that enduring political change may take years, if not generations. The Arab Spring brought both progress and turmoil, and its long-term impact remains uncertain.

For international law, the import of the Arab Spring is similarly ambiguous. On the one hand, as Juan Mendez and others have argued, the Arab Spring can be viewed as the world’s first true human rights revolution: the young protesters of the Arab street spoke the language of democracy and human rights, and the international community responded in the same lexicon, with references to human rights law and international criminal law, and referrals to the institutions that help sustain them (such as the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC)). Many human rights advocates rejoiced when the UN Security Council referred the situation in Libya to the ICC, and when the Libya intervention was justified in terms of the international “responsibility to protect.” To the optimist, these developments reflect the renewed vitality of international legal institutions, and will further speed the development of human rights-related international legal norms.

On the other hand, the Arab Spring demonstrated equally the limits and dangers of these same institutions and norms. At the outset, it’s probably worth noting the early irrelevance of international law and institutions to the Arab Spring. For most of the last few decades, international law and institutions did little or nothing to improve conditions in the Arab World. Indeed, the repressive regimes of the Middle East were always asterisks to the global trend towards democratization: even as autocratic regimes in Latin America, Russia and Eastern Europe tumbled, oil-rich Arab political leaders clung to power, with little protest from the United States or other powerful nations. As long as the oil flowed, few wealthy states were inclined to push too hard for reform. It’s unsurprising, then, that change ultimately came from within, not from without. The starring roles in the Arab Spring have been played not by international actors but by the citizens of the Arab World themselves — by street vendors, students, tech entrepreneurs and other ordinary people. International institutions — and certainly powerful nations such as the United States — have been followers, not leaders.

Whether we like it or not, the BRICS are now part of the global geopolitical landscape. It remains to be seen whether this evolving geopolitical acronym –since, in 2011, South Africa was added to the initial group consisting of Brazil, India, Russia, and China – is able to structurally impact the global system. Structural impact refers to the ability to shape one’s identity or future configuration. Regarding identity this consists of proposing, for example, a competing global narrative to that of the West (“the world is multipolar and state sovereignty is one of its essential features”). With regard to balance of power, it involves changing the agenda, direction, standing requirements, and collective decision-making of the international community in sensitive areas (multilateral trade negotiations, International Monetary Fund reform, Security Council and United Nations reform, completion of climate negotiations, implementation of the resolution on the responsibility to protect). The BRICS’ impact can be evaluated based on the degree of political coherence among them, as well as their capacity to influence the international system. This article will from the outset assume that the BRICS form a heterogeneous coalition of often competing powers that share a common fundamental political objective: to erode Western hegemonic claims by protecting the principle which these claims are deemed to most threaten, namely the political sovereignty of states.The BRICS form a coalition of sovereign state defenders. While they do not seek to form an anti-Western political coalition based on a counter-proposal or radically different vision of the world, they are concerned with maintaining their independence of judgment and national action in a world that is increasingly economically and socially interdependent. They consider that state sovereignty trumps all, including, of course, the political nature of its underpinning regimes. Thus the BRICS – even the democratic ones – fundamentally diverge from the liberal vision of Western countries. There is no better evidence of this today than the BRICS’ opposition to any outside intervention in the countries affected by the Arab Spring.

Yet this defensively strong coalition remains weak on the offensive precisely because the sovereign states that form it pursue narrow national objectives. Since they are very distrustful of one another for a number of reasons, of which some are historical (Sino-Russian and Sino-Indian rivalry), the BRICS have trouble interpreting sovereignty as anything other than a zero-sum game, including among themselves. This narrow attachment to sovereignty is both their strength and their great weakness.