Interventionism

Concept that addresses the characteristics, causes, and purposes of the act of interfering with another state's attitudes, policies, and behavior. Political or military intervention into another state's affairs, regardless of the motivation, is a highly volatile undertaking whose merits have long been debated by philosophers and politicians.

To be considered interventionism, an act needs to be coercive in nature. In other words, an interventionist act is, by definition, a threatening act that is not welcomed by the target of one's intervention. Aggressiveness is also central to the application of interventionism in foreign affairs: an interventionist action always operates under the threat of violence. However, not all aggressive acts on the part of a government are interventionist. Defensive warfare within one's legal jurisdiction is not interventionist in nature, even if it involves employing violence to alter someone else's behavior. One needs to both step outside one's boundaries and operate under the threat of force in order to be an agent of interventionism.

On the international level, a state can engage in a variety of interventionist activities, but the kind of intervention that takes the spotlight most often is military intervention. In turn, military interventions can [Page 373]take many forms depending on their stated goals. A state may invade another country to overthrow a bad regime, although what constitutes a bad regime is also a traditional source of contention. It may also intervene to force a nation to change its domestic or foreign policies.

Humanitarian Intervention

Alternatively, the emphasis of an intervention may be on the people of that country rather than its rulers or government. The concept of humanitarian intervention explicitly addresses the need to care for an entire community afflicted by some kind of misfortune—for example, civil war, government repression, or starvation.

The doctrine of humanitarian intervention, in one form or another, has as long a history as warfare itself. Since the earliest times, armies have been sent to occupy new territory under humanitarian justifications. Countless unprovoked military raids have been mounted with the purported aim of protecting foreign populations from the tyranny of their self-appointed leaders. Humanitarian intervention is part of the very logic of empires, as emperors and their military commanders would often argue that the conquered populations greatly benefited from changing leadership.

Because of its pervasiveness throughout human history, the concept of humanitarian intervention found a place in the international legal system that developed after World War II. Regulating interventionism, however, depended on the importance nations assigned to the concepts of sovereignty and human rights. In order for a state to justify its interference with another state's internal affairs on humanitarian grounds, it had to be able to make the case that human rights take precedence over sovereignty. This case historically has been somewhat difficult to make. Countries are extremely cautious in condoning border transgressions, regardless of the motivations of such measures.

One of the aims of the charter of the United Nations is to balance sovereignty and human rights. The charter prohibits the signatory countries from aggressively acting “against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”—a clear reference to the inviolability of sovereignty. However, the same charter goes on to identify two instances when sovereignty can (and should) be infringed upon: cases of self-defense and situations when the UN Security Council approves military measures that aim to maintain or restore international peace and security. It is the second instance that the supporters of humanitarian intervention usually invoke. They argue that a government that is oppressing its own citizens poses a threat to international peace and thus can be overthrown by force, should the Security Council agree with this judgment.

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