This is part of my PhD draft chapter containing the theoretical framework for my thesis. Asking why some countries intervene in other countries, it examines the ancient history of intervention and the ethical or moral grounds given until recently.
As a legal concept, the use of forceful intervention has a long history. The Mahabharata (probably dating from the 8th or 9th century before the Common Era) contains a long discussion of dharmayuddha, or ‘righteous war’. The principles agreed on include proportionality, just cause, just means and fair treatment of prisoners[1].
In Ancient Egypt, also, there were discussions about what constituted just war[2]. In Ancient China, from at least the period of the warring states onward, the idea of Just War was developed among others by Mengzi (Mencius) in the 4th century BC[3]. In the classic Western world, the justification of intervention in another (city-) state’s affairs was defined most famously by Aristoteles and Cicero (bellum iustum) who reserved the right of declaring a just war to the State[4]. In all these traditions, the (later defined) concepts of ius ad bellum and ius in bello were covered, although, with the exception of the Indian tradition, the former – the right to initiate a war – was given more preponderance than the latter – the principles of justice to apply during warfare.
In discussing ancient Egyptian ‘just war’ theories Cox makes the observation that the focus on the ius ad bellum impedes the development of ius in bello[5]; for when the right to initiate war rests on principles with an unquestionable universal status, there is little need to examine how that war is fought, because ‘right’ is already with the side declaring the war, and the other side is ‘wrong’. The Geneva Conventions and other conventions regulating ius in bello could only arise in a context of moral incertitude about the right to declare war[6].
This moral incertitude stems mostly from the (potentially) attacked states and their citizens; the traditional approaches to righteous war mentioned above were developed by powerful states that were regional hegemons and that would therefore usually win wars, while the Geneva (and The Hague) conventions were developed in small countries with a tradition of neutrality, and were adopted by Western countries after they had themselves experienced the horrors of war and occupation in the First and Second World Wars[7].
An aspect of historical ‘Just War’ theories that reveals hegemonic values is the tendency, in Western public and academic discourse, to trace their origin to the early Christian period[8]; this has been the legacy of Michael Walzer and the American school of ‘Just War’ theorists that his 1977 book ‘Just and Unjust Wars’ spawned[9]. This perception – that Christians have thought deeper about what constitutes a just war, and that this ethical tradition has civilised warfare through institutions such as the Geneva conventions – as is supposedly evident in the current conduct of warfare by America and Europe[10] – is evidence of the type of universalism which lifts restraints on the conduct of war. US brutalities in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan against unarmed civilians or prisoners strongly hint at this lack of restraint[11] especially when counterposed with the commonly held but counterfactual perception among Americans that their troops are bound by too many rules to fight effectively[12], that their warfare is too civilised and ethical.
One interesting point about just war theory as it was developed in Christian and later Islamic political theory is the notion of war as an individual moral duty. St Augustine not only provided a Christian justification for war but also cast it as a religious duty of the ruler, to be shared by his subjects[13]. This is also the basis for the Islamic concept of jihad, but here the individual duty is even taken further, as Islam permits the believer to decide that his or her ruler is unjust, and thus need not be obeyed – as the Prophet Muhammad argued during his period of exile in Medina[14].
One of the main political motives for intervention has been racism, of the defensive or aggressive kind (to defend ‘civilisation’ from ‘the barbarians’ or bring it to them). The ancient Egyptians, the Aryan conquerors of India, the Chinese, the ancient American civilisations and the Greeks all argued that a war against ‘barbarians’, defined in racial, legal and religious terms, was inherently a just war. This racist motivation behind intervention still seems apparent to non-white peoples in countries being intervened in, as in Somalia. The message conveyed by international media is that the life of one white person is equal to that of many non-whites[15], and that a military intervention by white people in the countries of coloured people is often legitimate, even when it results in the killing of innocent civilians.
This is not the place to enter too deep into the discussion of ‘just war’, because the type of intervention that is the object of this dissertation is mainly political, not military. However, the notion of righteousness, that if required will be defended by coercive means (war), still lies at the basis of intervention today. The points made above also apply to the aid world and political intervention, i.e. state-building: that what is ‘just’ is defined in universal terms by the hegemonic powers, that it has been and arguably still is inherently racist, and that it is cast as an individual moral duty.
It would however be unfair to reduce the impulse to intervene to this hegemonic discourse. The philanthropic motivation is as ancient as the racist, power-hungry one. As noted, the Mahabharata urges rulers to show restraint and to use intervention to restore peace. This Hindu principle was reaffirmed in India by the Buddhist concept of non-violence (ahimsa) propagated by Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century B.C.E.[16] The 13th century Persian poet Sa’adi voiced the principle of universal humanism in his poem ‘the Sons of Adam’ – which appropriately is displayed in the UN building in New York – ‘the one who is indifferent about the suffering of other should not be called human‘[17].
In Western philosophy the idea of a universal human community was put forward by Immanuel Kant: “The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers law among men[18].” This vision of a universal human community is gaining ground globally, thanks in part to the communications revolution which has laid the practical basis for such a global community (the ‘global village’). However, it has not found a clear expression in International Relations theory. In general, the vision of a universal human community is brought under liberal thought, but it has not been developed as such. One could expect ‘humanism’ to fill this gap, but there are not many scholars claiming that affiliation[19].
In fact, current debate in this direction has already moved beyond the human: ‘post-human’ international relations theories see the human species within its environment, postulating that we have arrived in the ‘Anthropocene’, and that nature is no longer the canvas against which international relations are performed, but part of the equation[20]. Interesting as these ideas may be, it seems a step has been missed: before integrating nature into international relations, must it not first be determined how the human species can reorganise itself, and form a functioning universal civic society as postulated by Kant[21]?
In practice, the humanist justification for intervention has usually been coupled with the realist desire to defend or extend hegemony. Niccolò Machiavelli admitted that intervention in other political entities was based on self-interest and political calculation but warned that such reasons must be concealed; to ensure public support an appeal had to be made to values the population shared[22]. With the rise of the popular army after the French revolution, such a justification was also needed to mobilise troops. Hitler’s invasion of Sudetenland, for example, was presented as being based on humanitarian grounds[23]. During the century before the second world war, Western imperial powers routinely justified their aggressive interventions in the rest of the world on such grounds (e.g. the ‘white man’s burden’), thus emptying the concept of most of its ethical content in the eyes of all but some idealists in the intervening states.
The institutionalisation of this mixed moral/realist justification to intervention may be found in international law; although interventions to punish the breach of treaties are as old as the notion of intervention itself, and not a European invention, the codification of international law, which is commonly assumed to have started with Grotius[24] in the 17th century, was one of the foundational acts of the international state system. It suggested that the law applies to all states, not, as in the past, because it was imposed by one stronger state on others, but because of its intrinsic qualities, supposed to derive from the natural world (natural law). As such international law remains one of the underpinnings of Western hegemony.
Bourdieu believes that the Law and education are the two main instruments of the state to produce and perpetuate its symbolic power. Elevating this to the international state-system, it is obvious that international law has a similar function. Lacking enforcement capability, international law cannot impose itself, but it has other means of rewarding compliance and punishing dissent. Naming and shaming, for example. Although Western populations have integrated principles of international law in their daily lives as if it were common sense, this acceptance is not universal. Many non-white people believe that international law does not articulate universal principles, but upholds the supremacy of the West. It may be noted, for example, that the International Criminal Court has never indicted any leader of a Western country[25].
In summary,
intervention has always had to obey to a certain moral logic, but it has only
taken place when rulers saw an
interest to do so; and the intervening
power has generally been free to construct its legitimation for intervention,
as long as the moral logic was palatable to its population and its allies[26]. As
the justifications for intervention usually sounded hollow to all other
parties, colonial and imperial practices led ‘interventionism’ to acquire a bad
reputation worldwide; ‘non-interventionism’ became an inversely popular foreign
policy principle, especially when coupled with the right to self-determination
after World War One. During the Cold War the core Western countries and the
USSR both cloaked their interventions in idealistic language; after the demise
of the Soviet Bloc, the West cemented its hegemony, and thus the rationale for
intervention, through the United Nations and a new, more elaborate intellectual
and legal (or disciplinary) framework. This brings us to 1992, the year
the UN sanctioned intervention in Somalia began, which we will explore in more
detail in chapter 3. But first the general evolution of intervention since the
Cold War ended merits analysis.
This section is followed by one on the evolution of international intervention since the end of the Cold War, in 1991.
[1] Kaushik Roy: “Just and Unjust War in Hindu Philosophy” in Journal of Military Ethics, 6:3 (2007), 232-245
[2] Cox, Rory: “Expanding the History of the Just War: The Ethics of War in Ancient Egypt” in International Studies Quarterly (2017) 61, 371–384.
[3] Ping-Cheung Lo: “The Art of War Corpus and Chinese Just War Ethics Past and Present” in The Journal of Religious Ethics Vol. 40, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 404-446
[4] Cicero: De Officiis , Book 1, sections 1.11.33–1.13.41.
[5] Cox (2017: 381-382). The Egyptians saw themselves as the guardians of order (Ma’at) in a sea of chaos (Isfet) and this justified extreme brutality against the outsider, who was considered enemy and evildoer. As today’s prisoners in the War on Terror, such enemies enjoyed absolutely no rights.
[6] Cox (2017: 381) compares contemporary efforts to ‘spread the rule of law’ through interventions to Egyptian assumptions about the superiority of their culture.
[7] The belief that universal values need to be defended weakens restraint in the conduct of war (Rengger, Nicholas: “Just War and the International Order: The Uncivil Condition in World Politics”, 2013). However, this belief seems to underlie each war. A leader haranguing his troops or citizens to support a war will put his case in terms of the need to defend essential universal values that his country supposedly embodies. Dissension may however be found in the community providing a public evaluation, contemporaneously or a posteriori, of the conduct of war. For example, during the early Bush years there was much public and academic discussion about the use of the term ‘terrorist’ to designate a person stripped of combatant rights, to whom the Geneva conventions do not apply, and not usually being citizen of the country (typically, the USA or one of its allies) that captures him: stripped of all rights like Agamben’s ‘Homo Sacer’. Many experts even avoided the term. But public discourse by politicians prevailed and after a decade, to avoid using the term, or to suggest ‘terrorists’ have equal rights to other citizens, is becoming a radical position (an example is the growing practice among European states to strip their citizens of their nationality when they have joined the ranks of Islamic State; this was quite unthinkable a decade ago but is now gradually becoming mainstream). This is a sure sign of hegemony. I would thus refine Rengger’s proposition; while all wars see themselves as essential to defend universal values and therefore tend to disregard the laws of warfare, restraints on the conduct of war are most clearly lifted when those values become hegemonic – such as the necessity to defend the state against terrorists. Amy Eckert, in “National Defense and State Personality” (Journal of International Political Theory 5/2, 2009: 161–76) argues that states should be given equal rights as people, and that a terrorist attack against a state is thus akin to attempted murder. In the past, the hegemonic reason to wage war was to defend the Christian faith.
[8] Cox 2017 p. 371
[9] Walzer, Michael: “Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations”, 1977. Walzer reinitiated an ages-old debate of moral philosophy, that has since then spawned an amazing production of academic but also ‘policy-oriented’ papers, especially within the US military establishment. One could counterpose this whole line of ethical enquiries to an equally venerable tradition and maybe more popular opinion: that a just war is one that is won, and an unjust war is one that is lost or which results in a stalemate.
[10] A variant of this line of thinking extends Just War thinking to Cicero – not Christian but Western. However, Aristoteles is not quoted, as he defended the right of Greeks to wage wars against non-Greeks, as these were ‘natural slaves’ whose existence was essential for the survival of the Greek city-states. Such a blunt view does not agree with the Western-Christian civilizational narrative.
[11] The kind of war brutality which Walzer characterized as pertaining to a ‘Supreme Emergency’.
[12] a common theme of many American war movies, where the hero must place himself outside the law to defend his country more effectively, pitting his individual conscience against the ‘bureaucracy’.
[13] In The City of God: “They who have waged war in obedience to the divine command, or in conformity with His laws, have represented in their persons the public justice or the wisdom of government, and in this capacity have put to death wicked men; such persons have by no means violated the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill”. Such Christian theological arguments were used to justify the Crusades.
[14] See the discussion by Kelsay, John: “Arguing the Just War in Islam” (2007) pp 175-176, and the positive criticism of this book by Bassam Al Tibi “John Kelsay and ‘Sharia Reasoning’ in Just War in Islam: an Appreciation and a few Propositions” in Journal of Church and State vol. 53 no. 1 (2011), pages 4–26. I would add that this personal obligation to conduct a ‘just war’ on the basis of one’s individual conscience is echoed in discussions among American Just War theorists who suggest that the individual soldier must be convinced of the moral rectitude of the war he’s fighting.
[15] For example, it has been common sense to commemorate, with grief, the 18 US military that were killed in the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu, 1993; but one rarely hears of the hundreds of Somalis, many of them civilians, who were killed by those soldiers at that time. Instead, the Somalis are cast as bloodthirsty, irrational criminals. This is obviously a racist view.
[16] Not all warfare in ancient India was peaceful. Before Ashoka, the ‘realist’ approach to winning wars through deceit, treachery and unfair advantage was formulated by Kautilya in a manner more reminiscent of Niccoló Machiavelli than Sun Tzu. See Roy, op. cit. 2017 pp. 235-238.
[17] Human beings are members of a whole,
since in their creation they are of one essence.
When the conditions of the time brings a member to pain,
the other members will suffer from discomfort.
You, who are indifferent to the misery of others,
it might not be fitting that they should call you a human being.
(Literal translation of Bani Adam (the Sons of Adam) by Saadi, Gulestan, ca. 1258)
[18] Kant, Immanuel: “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View”, 1784.
[19] Robert Jackson, in “Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations” (2005) argues for a return of humanism in international relations studies; by this he means a broad-spectrum ‘classical’ education based on moral values, to counter the excesses of the ‘behaviouralist’ school. His appeal has not met with much success, as specialisation and the avoidance of moral questions dominate social sciences. Another common meaning of humanism is padeia, the love of humankind, but the notion of ‘love’ is banned from scientific discourse.
[20] Harrington, Cameron: “The Ends of the World: International Relations and the Anthropocene” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies 2016, Vol. 44(3) 478–498. See also Cudworth, Erika & Hobden, Stephen: “Posthuman International Relations: Complexity, Ecologism, and Global Politics” (2011), a standard reference in the posthuman IR debate.
[21] Posthuman International Relations theory typically does mention that the system of nation-states must be superseded by a human community at one with its environment (e.g. Burke, Fishel, Mitchell, Dalby & Levine: “Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR” in Millenium 2016; Vol 44(3) pp. 499-523) but I have failed to find any further elaboration of what political form that human community would take.
[22] Machiavelli: “The Prince” chapter XX.
[23] “I am simply demanding that the oppression of three and a half million Germans in Czechoslovakia cease and that the inalienable right to self-determination take its place” Adolf Hitler’s speech at the NSDAP Congress 1938, Wikipedia
[24] The Latinized name of Hugo de Groot, a Dutch lawyer.
[25] From the list of the 34 indicted from 2005 to January 2020 most come from Africa, and none from a Western country. See Wikipedia: “List of people indicted in the International Criminal Court” accessed on 22 January 2020.
[26] If necessary, a casus belli could be fabricated, as when the US invaded Panama in 1990, or (a less contentious example) the Mukden Incident which Japan staged as a pretext to invade Manchuria in 1931.