Analysis: There is no hard rule that obliges governments to evacuate their overseas nationals from crisis zones, but they do so consistently
Earlier this week, Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee announced that the Irish Government would charter flights to facilitate the repatriation of nationals who are in the Gulf region and wish to return to Ireland. The first charter flight is expected to depart from Muscat, Oman for Dublin later this week. France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and the United Kingdom all announced similar schemes on the same day.
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From RTÉ Six One News, Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee says Government to charter flight for Irish citizens to leave UAE
Why do governments sanction these missions? There is no hard rule that obliges governments to evacuate their overseas nationals from crisis zones, but they do so consistently. The Irish Government, with its partners in the European Union, evacuated hundreds of its nationals from Sudan in 2023, and helped dozens leave Afghanistan after the Taliban took over the country in 2021.
Such ventures are now mostly seen as an exercise of humanitarian goodwill, but they have their basis in long-standing legal doctrines of self-defence. The protection of overseas nationals is a foundational doctrine in international law. Swiss diplomat Emer De Vattel wrote "whoever ill-treats a citizen indirectly injures the State, which must protect that citizen."
If citizens are essentially extensions of their nation, then harm to them is harm to the nation. It is therefore incumbent on a nation to either reduce the threat of harm or retaliate against those responsible for inflicting it. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, states preferred to take the second option. The US and European empires used attacks on "their" overseas nationals, typically merchants and missionaries, to justify sending gunboats to discipline unruly governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The protection of nationals was often a pretext for other forms of military and economic intervention.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's News At One, Eoghan Corry from Travel Extra on preparations to bring home Irish people stranded in the Middle East
However, neutral nations also enacted large-scale evacuations to reduce the chance of foreign engagement. At the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the United States, which was clinging to its neutrality, sent $4.5 million in gold pieces across the Atlantic Ocean to help over 100,000 Americans return home on commercial ocean liners. In 1928, at the height of the Afghan Civil War, the Royal Air Force evacuated hundreds of British nationals from Kabul by air, marking the first use of aircraft to evacuate a mass civilian population.
The United Nations sought to limit abuses of the doctrine of protection. Article 2 of the UN Charter prohibits the "use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State", forbidding the kind of interventions imperial powers had pursued in the late nineteenth century. With notable exceptions, the doctrine of protection has been wielded less frequently as a justification for military intervention since the end of World War 2.
Instead, the kind of evacuation currently underway have become commonplace. Although civilians are encouraged to use commercial transportation where possible, governments occasionally have to mobilize their own resources. Since the 1990s, the Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) has become institutionalized military practice: military planes, relying on the consent and cooperation of the host nation, are used to evacuate to civilians from areas with deteriorating security situations. This current wave of evacuations seems to be proceeding solely with the use of civilian aircraft, but it follows a similar approach to the NEO.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime on 27 February, Dr Patrick Bury from Bath University on the US announcement that its citizens should evacuate Israel immediately
There are continuities between the older doctrine of protection of nationals and the modern emphasis on NEOs and civilian evacuations. Most notably, the disbursement of this aid is almost always organised on a national (or, in the case of the European Union, a 'supranational') basis. Nationality, as the German philosopher Hannah Arendt put it, is "the right to have rights", and in this case the "right" to access help while overseas is dependent on belonging to a community whose government is willing to extend that help to its overseas citizens.
This also means that overseas citizens of less prosperous nations have less recourse. The government of Nepal only opened an online portal for its overseas citizens in the Middle East to register their presence on Tuesday, leaving the estimated 1.8 million Nepalese workers in the region with even less information than their neighbours from western countries of origin.
But there is one important difference from then and now. The welfare of overseas nationals is ultimately far less central to foreign relations than it was in the early 20th century. It now takes a backseat to a morass of geopolitical, economic, cultural and strategic considerations that are lumped together under the banner of "national security".
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From RTÉ Radio1's News At One in December 2020, Sandra Hurley reports on Government plans to repatriate Irish citizens during the Covid lockdown
That fact becomes all too clear when we consider the current position of American civilians in the Gulf. On Monday last, the Department of State released an advisory telling Americans in 14 countries across the Gulf to "depart now via commercial means", despite the majority of airports in the region being closed to commercial traffic. It announced a day later that it, too, would charter evacuation flights, but at time of writing, there are reports of understaffed embassies that cannot meet the demand of their citizens.
Unlike Ireland, the United States government had some sense of what was coming, yet it evidently had no plan in place to protect its overseas citizens. People will continue to debate the reasons why it chose to pursue this war against Iran, but we can firmly discount the notion that the welfare of US overseas nationals was an important consideration.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
