International Intervention in the Post-Cold War World

Moral Responsibility and Power Politics

Michael C. Davis,Wolfgang Dietrich,Bettina Scholdan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315498157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

International intervention on humanitarian grounds has been a contentious issue for decades. First, it pits the principle of state sovereignty against claims of universal human rights. Second, the motivations of intervening states may be open to question when avowals of moral action are arguably the fig leaf covering an assertion of power for political advantage. These questions have been salient in the context of the Balkan and African wars and U.S. policy in the Middle East. This volume undertakes a serious, systematic, and broadly international review of the issues.

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The Emerging World Order

State Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention

Michael C. Davis

There have been at least two distinct kinds of war in the post-Cold War period, each of which brings its own set of challenges to human rights and global institutions.¹ The first, humanitarian intervention, came earlier in the form of military responses to humanitarian crises. For these crises, the United Nations’ (UN) framework has sometimes proved inadequate. The second, wars primarily based on claims of national defense—evident in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the so-called war on terrorism—has grabbed our attention since September 11, 2001. Such wars, though claimed to be sanctioned by the right of self-defense under UN Charter Article 51, sometimes in combination with a UN Security Council initiative under UN Charter Chapter VII, have spawned expansions of the notion of self-defense in ways that severely challenge the charter regime.²

The human rights focus of each of these two types of war is somewhat different. Humanitarian intervention is primarily about protecting entire populations of people against ethnic cleansing and genocide and holding individual elites accountable for such crimes. The current crop of defensive wars and their offshoots have primarily focused human rights attention on the changing character of war, expansive notions of self-defense, the applicability of international standards for belligerents in the fields of battle, and the sources and boundaries of terrorism, though humanitarian concerns are also generally implicated.

In spite of these differences, both cases have common foundations in communal conflicts and both have arisen out of similar circumstances. Among these two pressing areas of human rights concern, this book focuses primarily on the former, though the interconnectedness between the two will sometimes bring our attention back to the latter.

Humanitarian crises of vast proportions, often brought on by communal or ethnic conflicts, have been among the defining events of the post-Cold War world order. The cries of human anguish caused by these events have captured our global media and our political debate. We have, however, inherited an international regime that, in its current state of practice, often appears inadequate to the task of coping with these events. International responses to humanitarian crises are often too late or nonexistent, and when they do occur, they are often inadequate. These kinds of events are sure to repeat themselves. How this debate will shape the instruments of world peace, especially the use of intervention to avert humanitarian crises, is a matter of great concern in the post-Cold War era.

A variety of conceptual questions are involved in the debate over humanitarian intervention, including issues of moral responsibility, strategic concerns, appropriate standards for intervention, the nature of the modern state, and the like.³ Practical factors that shape global attitudes toward these issues include the prevalence of ethnic domination and the intractability of ethnic disputes, principles respecting self-determination and rights of seceession, classic doctrines of sovereignty and nonintervention, the importance of democracy, individual and collective responsibility in international law, and the global-strategic implications of intervention actions. A compelling concern is that military intervention only be a last resort after a variety of nonmilitary forms of intervention, such as sanctions, humanitarian assistance, legal prosecutions, and so on, have been exhausted. These issues admit no easy answers. It is not surprising that the UN Security Council often cannot agree on an adequate response to such emerging crises. Despite that difficulty, crafting a shared understanding of the appropriate standards for global or regional behavior is vital to alleviating existing humanitarian disasters and averting new ones in the future.

The post-World War II vision of global security was aimed at the prevention of another World War II. The UN Charter thus saw future conflicts as interstate in character, leading to the charter’s emphasis on sovereignty and nonintervention. Contrary to the UN Charter vision, in the post-Cold War era, conflicts giving rise to humanitarian crises and questions of intervention often arise out of domestic politics, internal wars, and communal conflicts. The technology of war and global strategic changes in international politics have contributed to the escalation of internal ethnic conflicts and humanitarian disasters in ways that call the classic nonintervention principle into question. In a global age, humanitarian crises almost always have dramatic external effects that countries in the region and beyond ignore at their peril.

At the same time, global strategic political differences have often made cooperation in dealing with humanitarian crises difficult. This has been especially evident in the frequent immobility of the UN Security Council. These debates entangle law and morality and confront a rapidly changing political landscape. So far, the legal side of this equation has generally remained committed, in some formulation, to a principle of nonintervention. But the moral side has presented us with arguments to waive this principle when confronted with humanitarian crises of vast proportions. Efforts to resolve this tension have been encumbered by domestic, international, and global strategic politics. With general inaction against and privileging of great powers and much quicker responses to crises in sensitive areas, geostrategic considerations have further confounded the development of consistent practice.

Much of the literature in this field focuses on important legal issues and historical developments. However, the politics of humanitarian intervention are often neglected. The aim of this book is to capture some of the voices and perspectives that have been sidelined in discussions of humanitarian intervention and in designs of intervention regimes. On the ground, some of these voices are heard only in protests outside various summit meetings. Academically, these voices are on the challenging end of a variety of mainstream and critical schools in intellectual thought in law, international relations, political science, and philosophy. The included contributions are informed by a variety of critical schools, including feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, constructivism, the English School, and development studies.

Critical challenges from legal, political, philosophical, regional, and topical perspectives are addressed in succeeding parts of this book. While the primary focus is on the use of military force in response to humanitarian crises, important nonmilitary interventions and contextual factors are addressed. Part I shapes the broad debate by articulating the legal foundations of humanitarian intervention, including both state action and responsibility and individual action and responsibility. In this part, Peter R. Baehr and Tania Voon set forth the contours of the contemporary legal regime for humanitarian intervention and provide an assessment of practices in Kosovo and East Timor. Baehr, in chapter 2, worries that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) actions in Kosovo were legally dubious and politically controversial, while Voon, in chapter 3, laments the growing gap between legitimacy and lawfulness in intervention practices. In chapter 4, Robert Cryer closes part I by charting the remarkable recent expansion of the international regime for individual responsibility for crimes against humanity and related crimes, culminating in the International Criminal Court (ICC). Cryer traces the strong pull of international politics in the creation of this legal institution. The succeeding four parts of this book consider the challenges with which the legal discourse must ultimately cope, starting with international politics.

While the growing literature on intervention has offered refined analysis of legal traditions and practices in this area, it has often failed to appreciate the pull of politics in shaping these legal traditions. Victoria Tin-bor Hui, in chapter 5, challenges the common understanding of sovereignty as nonintervention, which necessarily condemns humanitarian intervention as illegal. She advances a more historically fluid concept of “relative sovereignty” that takes into account a state’s evolving relations with other states and with societal actors. Mark D. Evans advances this relativity in a different form in his chapter, noting that sovereignty may matter in different ways for weak and strong states. He argues that international authorities could be better served by a “softer” form of intervention, aiming to augment the capacity and willingness of authorities at the national level to protect human rights. In chapter 7, Hiroki Kusano provides a transition argument, contrasting the commands of political calculations with the rich normative tradition in international politics.

Do politics ultimately win out? Part III takes up the philosophical and normative challenges in the preceding two parts. Do we need a philosophical foundation for this debate? Franca D’Agostini’s chapter argues that a philosophy that seeks the foundational premises of global responsibility and human rights should be engaged in this debate, rejecting antifoundational debates in the human rights discourse. Nathalie Karagiannis shifts the focus to ethics in chapter 9, insisting that we look more carefully at the notion of responsibility before considering the consequences of global responsibility. She notes that notions of responsibility, autonomy, and knowledge change over time. Finally, this philosophical reflection in part III closes with attention to the contrasting moral concerns of the war on terror. In chapter 10, Daniela Ingruber queries whether the war on terror is an appropriate moral response to the conditions that have spawned terrorism. While that war falls into a different category than humanitarian intervention, Ingruber explores their common foundations, noting in postmodern terms how global discourse shapes our perceptions of both.

In this debate, some regions are superempowered, while others are barely heard. If the UN Charter regime presents political and legal hurdles to humanitarian interventions, will regional institutions be required to take up the slack? In the face of UN immobility, national and regional actors may ultimately shape global practice.

The fourth part of this book addresses the regionalization of this debate through the competing lenses of NATO, Africa, and Asia. A lot of attention has been given to NATO and intervention, but much less to Africa, and almost none to Asia. On NATO, this part of the book enjoys both optimistic and skeptical viewpoints. Rebecca R. Moore argues in her chapter that NATO ultimately has a liberalizing influence and that its expansion has witnessed expansion of a Euro-American community committed to both democracy and liberalization. Moore’s analysis leads to the question of whether NATO can provide a foundation for importing democracy and human rights into the intervention norm. In NATO’s operations in Kosovo, Giovanna Bono, in chapter 12, sees a policy community committed to a strategy of “diplomacy backed by force” that often sought to renovate NATO’s strategic capabilities. She worries that these considerations may have overridden humanitarian concerns. The closing two chapters in part IV consider the role of non-Western countries in shaping our humanitarian intervention practice. Michael C. Davis notes in his chapter that although China is a major power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, it has followed such a hard-line policy on sovereignty and nonintervention that it has virtually excluded itself from the debate. While most of the contributors to this volume focus on military intervention, Rasheed Akinyemi addresses in chapter 14 “soft” or economic intervention in the form of conditionality and structural adjustments. Using the case of Africa, Akinyemi examines the issue of economic development and institutional responses to it.

Part V takes up two topical issues that reflect sharply on those who are excluded from this debate. As has been teased up in the most recent debate on the war on terror, Alice Sindzingre, in chapter 15, asks whether global poverty and its neglect are the real problems that are responsible for humanitarian disasters in the first place and whether global developmental structures are adequate for this challenge. In chapter 16, Chris Corrin considers how women and their nongovernmental organizations are ultimately the neglected participants in both military intervention and reconstruction. Both chapters remind us that the issues associated with humanitarian intervention neither begin nor end with the question of military intervention.

Various neoliberal and constructivist theories have asserted that domestic institutions and political conditions are constructive of global practices in respect of war and peace.⁴ This has implications both for current international proposals and for long-term norm development. We should bear in mind that international norms such as sovereignty and nonintervention are not just constraints on actors with a priori interests, but are also constitutive of the state and other multinational actors that engage this debate.⁵ As constructivists in international relations argue, norms and institutions transform actors and actors transform norms and institutions. So, the outcome of this debate is not just about applying moral or legal principles to a given set of facts, but rather will be shaped as circumstances evolve in dynamic processes of change. This outcome will also be shaped in a world where our capacity to do harm is continuously enhanced by the expansion of our technological and political capabilities. A moral antidote for extreme and violent actions against humanity is especially needed in the debate over humanitarian intervention. This debate and its constituents are therefore quite fundamental in efforts to understand the emerging post-Cold War world order. Several later chapters of this book enhance our capacity to sort out these issues by considering their historical and philosophical roots.⁶ A brief introductory overview of some of the prime arguments that have animated this debate is therefore a useful starting point for our analysis.

The Historical Humanitarian Intervention Debate

In practice, in recent years varying perspectives on appropriate responses to humanitarian crises have emerged. Some are impassioned and hopeful about our capacity to devise new mechanisms and institutions to confront the menace of humanitarian crises, while others have despaired at the incapacity of our state system to exceed the narrow interests of its constituent states. The latter realist skepticism has in many ways shaped the current global order and related regimes. Among realists in international relations, the primacy o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Emerging World Order State Sovereignty and Humanitarian Intervention
• Part I. International Legal Foundations
• Part II. The International Politics of Intervention
• Part III. The Philosophy of Intervention
• Part IV. Regional Dialogues
• Part V. Topics in Intervention
• Index