President Nicolas Maduro speaks to pro-government supporters after a referendum regarding Venezuela's claim to the Essequibo, a region administered and controlled by Guyana, in Caracas, Venezuela, on Dec. 4.Matias Delacroix/The Associated Press
Ben Rowswell is the head of the Network for Democratic Solidarity. He served as Canada’s ambassador to Venezuela from 2014 to 2017.
When she was Venezuela’s foreign minister, from 2014 to 2017, Delcy Rodriguez used to invite the full diplomatic corps to listen to her lecture on the changing nature of the international system. Seventy or so of my fellow ambassadors and I would dutifully attend, barred from asking questions but hoping for some insights into the political crisis that had already engulfed her country by that point.
“We now live in a multipolar age,” she would repeat – her way of telling the global community that the international norms of human rights that we defended no longer applied to her country. Each country is now free to abide by the principles that best suit them, she explained. An enthusiastic backer of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, she cited Russia as a rival pole to the international order, which she derided as a purely American construction.
Now, that same Venezuelan government – Ms. Rodriguez is now Vice-President – is challenging another norm in international relations. Just as Moscow did with Crimea, Venezuela now seeks to conquer the territory of a neighbouring state.
The territory in question is the Essequibo region of Guyana. The Essequibo was a largely indigenous area in which few colonists from either Spain or Britain had taken residence by the time Venezuela declared independence in 1811. The border was eventually settled by an international arbitration panel in 1899, and its ruling remained in place when Guyana became independent in 1966; the International Court of Justice has also repeatedly upheld Guyana’s claim. There is no serious debate in international law; the territory clearly belongs to Guyana.
Occasionally, however, nationalist Venezuelan strongmen have suggested that nominal Spanish control over the territory more than 200 years ago somehow entitles today’s Venezuela to a land it has never controlled. The current strongman, President Nicolás Maduro, now threatens to send in troops to the Essequibo to give force to that claim.
On Tuesday, after a state-controlled referendum on the question, he issued a proclamation that Essequibo is a Venezuelan state. He has appointed a major-general as its administrator, with the assistance of an unknown number of military personnel, based in a remote area of jungle close to the borders of Guyana and Brazil. Since Venezuela’s likeliest route for its invasion of the Essequibo cuts through Brazil, the Brazilian government has announced the deployment of some 2,000 soldiers to “bulletproof” its border.
The norm that borders cannot be changed through military force now faces its first major test in this hemisphere in generations. Will it hold?
In geopolitics, norms should not work in theory. In practice, they determine outcomes more than anything else. The actions that states take are constrained by the responses they anticipate from other countries, and nothing predicts future behaviour better than past behaviour. What states tend to do, or tend to avoid, become expectations; those expectations become norms, which collectively form what we call the rules-based international order.
Mr. Maduro, for his part, has made a career of breaking norms. When huge student protests against his rule erupted in 2014, he broke the norm against the mass incarceration of political opponents. A regular feature of Latin American military dictatorships up to the 1980s, this practice was anathema to the democratic governments that have predominated in the region ever since.
And even when Venezuela paid a price for breaking norms, Mr. Maduro carried on. Widespread support across Latin America turned to widespread criticism once lethal force was used against unarmed protesters. After he suspended the constitution in 2016, took direct control over the electoral process and redirected scarce food supplies away from citizens who supported opposition parties, his democratic neighbours (and Canada) responded to the violation of these norms by forming the Lima Group, a multilateral body mandated to co-ordinate responses to the mushrooming crisis in Venezuela.
The Lima Group ultimately backed the elected legislature of the country when the latter invoked the country’s constitution to vacate Venezuela’s presidency in 2019. But that action in itself broke a norm against the intervention in the political affairs of another state, and the Lima Group was effectively disbanded after Mr. Maduro prevailed over Juan Guaidó, the rival president put forward by the legislative branch.
International norms are now falling around the world. After Vladimir Putin proved that a country could get away with annexation by military force, Azerbaijan tried it in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. International condemnation has been relatively faint – and military dictators around the world have surely noticed.
A world with weakening norms against the use of violence is a terrifying place to live. Just ask Israelis, Palestinians, or victims of wars in Africa and Asia that are now growing so quickly in number and scale as to crowd out our limited attention.
It is in Canada’s national interest to stand up for these norms – both those that constrain governments from using force against their own citizens, and those that constrain them from using force against neighbouring countries. The rules-based international order is the foundation of any security Canadians enjoy in a dangerous world.
We were right to stand up for norms in Venezuela, when Mr. Maduro violated the rights of Venezuelans to choose their own government. We were right to join the Lima Group, since the reversal of democracy in the heart of our hemisphere created precedents that threaten other democracies. But by doing so, Canada took a risk, and paid a price. We closed an embassy in Caracas for a time, when the Maduro government stopped issuing diplomatic visas to Canadians.
Thankfully, visa issuance appears to be back on track, and Canadian officials are returning. This is important, as we need diplomats on the ground to observe and understand how governments act, regardless of whether they are democracies or dictatorships.
When we have the courage to do so, we need our diplomats to stand up for the norms on which international security depends, including the ones that protect Guyana. We cannot accept a potential invasion, nor can we accept the likes of Ms. Rodriguez insisting that the rules don’t exist. That affects us all.