R2P is certainly not—to judge by a careful reading of its history—a mere ploy by rich and powerful countries to poke their noses into the affairs of small nations. Its origins are somewhat more interesting.

One of the first international bodies to endorse the concept, or a version of it, was the African Union, which emerged from the discredited Organisation of African Unity. The AU’s Constitutive Act included a provision for “the right of the Union to intervene in a member state pursuant to a decision of the [AU] assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.” It cited a new principle of “non-indifference” to large-scale crimes.

One of R2P’s keenest sponsors was Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian who preceded Mr Ban as secretary-general. Mr Annan has agonised in public about the UN’s failure in Rwanda, when he was head of un peacekeeping, and has argued that his success as a peace-broker in Kenya last year owed something to the existence of R2P as a moral instrument.

Meanwhile, America, far from dreaming up R2P as a crafty way of justifying imperialist adventures, was initially rather sceptical. Under the Bush administration, both the Pentagon and the State Department were intensely wary of signing up to anything that might bind them to take draconian action in the name of humanity.

Indeed, R2P was a part of a much broader 2005 reform of the United Nations that George Bush first sought to weaken, then only reluctantly accepted. And to this day, there are voices on America’s political right that remain profoundly sceptical about the idea of costly pledges to wage wars in the name of protecting people from inhumanity.

A conservative foreign policy, which can be practiced by any political party, is one that will place national interest always and everywhere above anything else. If we believe that this is the beginning and the end of the foreign policy question then we should accept that the attempt to construct an ethical foreign policy is impossible. It is worth pausing on this question for a moment. Is social democracy about building walls around our own polity to defend ourselves and keep our people safe from various threats? If so we should venture out from this little island only when material threats exist to ourselves. When civil war breaks out in Yugoslavia we should be with the Tories and do nothing. We should leave the Iraq people living under a genocidal dictator. Today, we should be arguing hard against any form of intervention against the Khartoum government. If that is really what progressives want, then let us say so.

A conservative foreign policy defines national interest in terms of security but also in terms of the economic interest of a broad entity called "the west." Therefore it will pursue intervention in pursuit of the control of resources, particularly oil, because of the pressing political and economic need to deliver stable supplies. While it would naïve to believe that in the realist world of the global economic and the competition for resources that economic interests never influence foreign policy choices, economic interests should not be the deciding factor in making progressive foreign policy choices.

A conservative foreign policy is one that will act unilaterally or, more often, work hard to stop collective action through the United Nations when it does not see vital economic or strategic gains for the United Kingdom. Ideally a progressive foreign policy should be conducted through the United Nations and in line with international law and international humanitarian law. I say ideally because the responsibility to protect and the rights of victims to be saved from gross violations of human rights are more important in certain circumstances that the mechanisms of international law. We should also see the responsibility to protect as a umbrella concept that involves not only prevention of harm and rescue but also a long term commitment to reconstruction.

So we shape a progressive foreign policy by putting victims first, by understanding our national interest in terms of promoting, protecting and enforcing human rights around the world and by working through the mechanisms of international law and the United Nations.

Then we come up against cases. Take Darfur. We all agree that gross human rights violations in Darfur should be stopped, but how?

The African Union (AU) force that has pushed the Janjaweed back does not have enough money or equipment to do the job properly. They do not have the planes to enforce the no-fly zone. They are constantly being attacked by the rebels and by the government's militia. According to one report, they do not have sufficient funds to withdraw.

The best option is for a United Nations force to replace the AU peace keepers. But this is real dilemma the UN system faces us with. Resolutions have authorised the sending of a peacekeeping force to the Darfur region. That force cannot go to Darfur unless the Khartoum government agrees to its entry. This government — which is a coalition and not an Islamic government but which is targeting its African population in Darfur — has broken many agreements. It is worth noting that the overwhelming majority of both the victims and the perpetrators in Darfur are Muslims. Yesterday, Kofi Annan sais, "the message I have tried to get to the Sudanese government is that the international community is not coming in as an invading force, but basically to help them protect the people … If the government had been able to do it itself, I don’t think we would be having this debate".

The rebels fighting the government who did not sign the peace agreement have committed their own atrocities. In response the Khartoum government is organising a force of 10,000 to move south. A Human Rights Watch report on the 6th September stated that the government was indiscriminately bombing civilian-occupied villages in rebel-held North of Darfur. The African director of the HRW Africa said: "Government forces are bombing villages with blatant disregard for civilian lives, "A penalty for indiscriminate bombing in Darfur is U.N. Security Council sanctions, which should be imposed now." But would the impositions of sanctions make the deployment of a UN force more or less likely?

The HRW reports goes on: "Firsthand sources report flight crews rolling bombs out the back ramps of Antonovs, a means of targeting that was often practiced by government forces in their 21-year civil war with rebels in southern Sudan. This method is so inaccurate that it cannot strike at military targets without a substantial risk of harm to civilians. International humanitarian law prohibits such attacks, which can constitute war crimes. Deliberately attacking civilians is in all circumstances prohibited and a war crime."

So here is the rub — the government that plans on ethically cleansing part of its territory as a "counter-insurgency" operation is the government that can say yes or no to a UN force intervening to stop the genocide.

A progressive response should be that international law needs to be enforced, that the structures exist and need to be used, these need to be made to work.

That is what was said in Rwanda in 1994. Then we had a Tory government indifferent to the fate of the Rwandans and instrumental in blocking intervention. Now we have a Labour government that is deeply concerned with the fate of the people but is not prepared to go down the NATO road again, although this has been suggested by the US administration in the past. What should a progressive think — that it is ok for between 250 000 – 400 000 Muslims to die while the legal structures that should deal with this situation are not allowed to work?

In this case these seems to me to be a need to square the circle and that is to accept that some states can sacrifice their sovereignty when they fail to protect their own citizens or when they are attacking their own citizens. The ethical debate for progressives should be about what the threshold of violence that should mean that a state no longer has the right to agree or disagree to intervention. The ICC could be the institution that makes such a decision. And this does not then lead to full-scale invasion — there are many measures that can be taken short of that, but they must be taken in line with international law or else, like Kosovo, they will not be repeatable.

This is the key — the victim-centred progressive foreign policy we need is one that is permanent, repeatable, enforceable and predictable. Only international law can give us these things and the only way international law can be made to work is if it recognises that some states do not belong in the community of nations.

Brian Brivati is Professor of Contemporary History and Course Director of the MA in Human Rights at Kingston University.

To post a response to this article contact Alanjohnsonsdf.

Commentators and politicians expend countless hours debating how we handle he rise of Islam and raise the spectre of a "clash of civilisations". In fact, how the West handles the emerging Chinese superpower will define foreign relations in the 21st century. Worryingly, neither the Blair government nor the Bush administration seems to have a clear view of how to approach the PRC. At the heart of this complacency is the underlying western assumption that free markets and free politics inevitably go hand in hand. After all, that has been the hallmark of western development since the industrial revolution. As rapid economic expansion along China’s east coast continues apace then the emerging middle class will surely demand political choice in the same way as they have come to expect consumer choice, or so the theory goes. The problem with this theory is that there is no evidence for it at all in China. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. China may not yet be the world’s leading economy but it is a world leader in another field: it is the world’s number one abuser of human rights.

Even our Foreign & Commonwealth Office, not China’s sternest critic, noted in its last Human Rights Report in 2005 that there was "extensive use of the death penalty; torture; shortcomings in judicial practices and widespread administrative detention, particularly re-education through labour; harassment of human rights activists, lawyers and religious practitioners … and severe restrictions on basic freedoms of speech and association." The campaigning group Human Rights Watch went further and has suggested that since President Hu Jintao came to power the human rights situation has deteriorated, especially in the last year. To put all this into some perspective, Amnesty International’s lowest estimate for the number of Chinese people who suffered the death penalty in 2004 was 3,400, or over 90 percent of the world’s total. Chen Zonglin, a Deputy in China’s National People’s Congress put the figure at 10,000 per year. Both the UK and European Union have human rights dialogues with China but have very little to show for them other than the release of the odd political prisoner. Whilst even these small gains are welcome, there is a fear that the existence of the dialogues allows the PRC to compartmentalise human rights concerns. It seems that the PRC can show the West that it is serious about tackling human rights abuses by pointing to the existence of the dialogues whilst the abuses themselves continue apace.

Central to the problem has been the West’s inability to decide whether China’s emergence as an economic and military superpower presents a challenge or an opportunity. The US in particular has too often appeared as an appalled bystander at the rise of China’s economy, unable to see beyond the unpalatable truth that it has an annual trade deficit with the PRC of over $200 billion. The US has been similarly unsure at how to cope with China’s spectacular military build-up: the People’s Liberation Army has 2.3 million ground forces, 8,000 battle tanks and an air force of over 3,500 aircraft; but it is China’s navy that is the real concern as it develops both the capacity to have a "blue water" global force combined with the sophisticated submarine presence to provide a real threat in the Taiwan Strait. Earlier this month China threatened Taiwan with a military invasion if it contemplated independence, and as I discovered on my recent visit to Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party is none too keen on the concept of self-determination for the people of Taiwan. America’s response to this provocation last week was to invite the Chinese military to observe their military manoeuvres in Guam as a sign of friendship. You don’t have to be a supporter of Taiwanese independence to see that this may be sending the wrong signal to Beijing.

Most of China’s aspirations are entirely reasonable: it sees the per capita wealth of the West (an area where China still lags far behind) and wants to emulate it; it wants to emerge from being merely a dominant regional player to being a global player, eclipsing its former (and largely unforgiven) occupier Japan in the process; it wants to be a responsible stakeholder on the United Nations Security Council. Some of its aspirations are less appealing: China’s desire for re-unification with Taiwan has too often veered into bullying behaviour; its respect for the integrity of the internal affairs of other nations has led it to believe that selling arms to the Zimbabwean dictatorship is a reasonable thing to do; and its desire for rapid economic expansion is having dire consequences for the environment, for example with its plan to build 500 coal-fired power stations over the next ten years.

We need to change tack in our relations with the People’s Republic of China. It wants to emerge as a global player economically, militarily and politically and it is in our strategic interest to assist China in that aim, and our role should be that of an honest friend. It is too simplistic to see the PRC with its seemingly endless supply of cheap labour as an economic threat to West, and in fact China is already suffering as some jobs are being outsourced in industries such as textiles to countries such as Vietnam. The irony of this, as someone who represents a former textile manufacturing constituency, is not lost on me. We should instead be looking at the PRC as a prime location for UK investment and not just in the well-established and highly profitable financial and banking sectors; why not engage more aggressively in other areas of British expertise such as green technologies? China is showing real signs of finally taking its place on the Security Council of the UN seriously after decades of merely seeing it through the prism of self-interest; adroit but robust diplomacy over facing down the nuclear ambitions of both Iran and North Korea is essential for China to demonstrate this new-found seriousness. As US Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos has noted, if China steps up to the plate on the issue of nuclear proliferation then it will be a welcome sign that the PRC is finally recognising that with global power and prestige comes global responsibility. On Taiwan, China needs to discover that bullying doesn’t pay dividends; as with other territorial disputes (Spain and Gibraltar come to mind) a prolonged period of wooing would be much likelier to achieve China’s desired outcome, not least as most Taiwanese want to see the issue resolved peacefully. Opening up transport links such as direct passenger and cargo flights between the PRC and Taiwan would be a welcome step in the right direction.

Finally, we ought to accept that the human rights dialogues with China are not working and break them off, for they provide a cloak behind which China routinely abuses the human rights of its citizens. Far better to be an honest friend that can look the Chinese Government in the face and tell it that the repression of free speech, religion and the right to freely associate have no place in the modern world of which China so desperately wants to be a part.

Greg Pope MP represents the constituency of Hyndburn and is a member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

Do you want to respond to this article? Send your comment to Alan Johnson, alanjohnsonsdf, Social Democratic Futures editor, and we will post it.