Humanitarian Intervention Revived

As the guard changes in Kosovo from Serb belligerents to international peacekeepers, many moral assessors are asking whether the war was just. But fewer voices for international ethics have asked another pressing question, this one looking to the future: if international intervention entails possibilities for justice, is it likely to continue?

America's intervention in Kosovo continued the post-Cold War trend of internationally sanctioned intervention in war-torn, genocidal, and malnourished states, a phenomenon repeated at least 15 times during the 1990s. Though novel for modernity, the trend unseals a vault closed in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia, after which non-intervention became a standard practice in international politics. Legitimizing absolute state sovereignty, Westphalia dashed the hopes of early modern Christian natural-law-philosophers, Hugo Grotius and Hubert Languet among them, who hoped that even in a system of sovereign states, princes might occasionally intervene where neighboring princes either caused or failed to prevent egregious suffering. Since Westphalia, however, few states have openly admitted the legitimacy of intervention.

In contemporary interventions we may be realizing the early modern philosophers' long-dormant vision. What have recent forays achieved? The successes include quelling war, as in Bosnia, ending starvation, as in Somalia, reversing the subversion of democracy, as in Haiti, protecting Kurdish minorities, as in Iraq, and restoring ethnic autonomy, as in Kosovo.

The future of this trend, though, is uncertain. In the intervention in Kosovo, we can see portents of trouble for future interventions. Two such portents are most prominent. First, diplomatic cooperation was more difficult to achieve than in any previous intervention in the 1990s. In the first half of the decade, when Russian as well as China endorsed intervention in Somalia, in Haiti, and in Iraq in 1991. In the Kosovo conflict, both countries not only failed to endorse the intervention, they sponsored a resolution condemning it.

American hesitancy is the other major portent of intervention's future difficulty. Like other interventions under President Clinton, Kosovo seemed minimalist, ad hoc, and daily revised, and was diminished for it. Clinton's blanket renunciation of ground troops, for instance, probably encouraged Milosevic to withhold his surrender in hopes that NATO's forces, and its harmony, would fail. Clinton was far from assertive, too, in making the case for intervention to the public and to Congress. Minimizing commitment, in the end, is likely to minimize success. Minimizing success, and failing to articulate the case for intervention as an enduring and fitting foreign policy, in turn diminishes future interventions' prospects.

To argue for enduring and fitting intervention is not to urge intervention anywhere and everywhere. Whether we ought to undertake any multilateral intervention to end gross suffering depends on the military task, the nature of the crisis, the level of support, and sundry other situational factors. But the long-term possibility of intervention requires that we look at the policy not as one of merely putting out fires, but as a fire-fighting strategy. Such a strategy involves prior efforts to deter injustices and to seek alternative settlements, pubic articulation of the case for intervention, and the commitment of the forces necessary for the job. An international consensus is needed, too. All of this requires a longer view—one that looks back to Westphalia as well as forward to the next century—than our current president and Congress have embraced.

[Dr. Philpott, a specialist on international humanitarian intervention, is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California—Santa Barbara.]