In his testimonies on the war in Kosovo, Wesley Clark calls into question the very foundation of the international order: the clash between Westphalian sovereignty and the universal values of human rights. This dilemma remains just as relevant today, in cases such as Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro. Sovereignty is not a license for violence, but a moral contract with the citizen. When that contract is broken, Westphalian sovereignty remains only a form without substance.
By Lorik Idrizi
In his accounts and testimony regarding the war in Kosovo and the political and moral responsibilities of that period, Wesley Clark touches upon a fundamental dimension of the international order: the relationship between the Westphalian system of state sovereignty and the universal values of human rights.
Clark emphasizes that the classical Westphalian system—built on the principles of territorial integrity and non-interference in the internal affairs of states—loses its moral legitimacy the moment a state systematically violates “the human,” that is, when it exercises violence, repression, and mass violations of the fundamental rights of its own citizens.
The Westphalian system, upon which the modern international order has been built since 1648, regards territorial integrity and non-interference as the pillars of global stability. Yet Clark articulates a truth often overlooked: this system ceases to be legitimate the moment the state turns into an instrument of violence against its own people.
The war in Kosovo represents a turning point in the history of international law. It demonstrated that non-intervention is not neutral, but often complicit, when ethnic cleansing and state terror unfold before it.
Clark’s argument was clear: the intervention was not undertaken against a sovereign state, but against an apparatus that had lost every shred of human legitimacy. In this context, sovereignty was no longer an expression of the will of the people, but a mechanism of repression.
The same dilemma appears today in cases such as Venezuela under Nicolás Maduro. Can the systematic oppression of citizens be justified by the argument that “a sovereign state exists”?
The answer, from this perspective, is no. Sovereignty is not a license for violence. It is not the property of a political elite, but a moral contract with the citizen. When that contract is broken, claims to territorial integrity become hollow.
There are cases in which democracy has been attempted and has failed for cultural, historical, or institutional reasons. But when the state is captured by criminality and used as a tool of repression, we are no longer speaking of democratic failure, but of the destruction of the very idea of the state itself.