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Not long ago, Vaclev Havel maintained (in an essay titled "Kosovo and the End of the Nation State") that the bombing of Yugoslavia, for which there was no UN mandate, "placed human rights above the rights of states. . . . But this did not come into being in some irresponsible way, as an act or aggression or in contempt of international law. On the contrary. It happened about of respect for rights, for rights that stand above those which are protected by the sovereignty of states. The Alliance acted out of respect for human rights, in a way commanded not only by conscience but by the relevant documents of international law." This "higher law" has its "deepest roots outside the perceptible world." "While the state is the work of man, man is the work of God." In other words: NATO can violate international law because it is acting as the immediate instrument of God's "higher law." If that's not religious fundamentalism, the concept has no meaning.<br>

Havel's statement is a great example of what Ulrich Beck back in April called "military humanism" or "military pacifism" (in a feuilleton in the <i>Sueddeutscher Zeitung</i>). The problem is not so much one of Orwellian oxymora like the famous "War is Peace." (In my opinion the term "pacificism" was never meant seriously. When people buck up and are honest with themselves, the paradox of military pacificism disappears.) [Translators note: "pacifism" has a broader meaning in German than it does in English - it includes roughly everything we would think of as "anti-war sentiment" or "anti-war movement." So a free translation of "military pacificism" would be roughly "war by people that have always said they were against it." But Beck's phrase is kind of famous, so let's leave it.] The problem is also not that the targets of the bombing weren't chosen on entirely moral grounds. The real problem is that a purely humanitarian, purely ethical justification for NATO's intervention completely depoliticizes it. NATO has shied away from a clearly defined political solution. Its intervention has been cloaked and justified exclusively in the depoliticized language of universal human rights. In this context, men and women are no longer political subjects, but helpless victims, robbed of all political identity and reduced to their naked suffering. In my opinion, this idealist subject-victim is an ideological construct of NATO.<br>

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http://www.lacan.com/zizek-nato.htm