When, if ever, should states interfere in each other's internal affairs?

Self-defence is the least contentious reasons for inter-state interference. Ever since states came into being and the principle of sovereignty first widely applied, states are formally seen to be independent of one another. Any violation of this independence legitimises interference against the violator to the effect of halting the violation. The right to self-defence, either by one state or many, is firmly established in the international system and enshrined in international law. Article 51 of the United Nation’s Charter speaks of an “inherent right of individual or collective self-defence.” Thus, the first Gulf War (1990), in which a US-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, is a clear example of self-defence justifying and legitimising the interference of one state (USA, Britain etc.) into the internal affairs of another (Iraq). The legitimacy of military interference on grounds of self-defence is clear when such self-defence is against an armed invasion. It becomes a lot less clear when self-defence is pronounced in response to hostage-taking, mistreatment of nationals or even pre-emptive self-defence against a potential aggressor. The legal arguments in such situations may be able to shed some light on the situation. The question regards the scope of the right to self-defence. Though states agree that an armed attack is justification for armed self-defence, there is disagreement as to what constitutes an armed attack. The attack by the USA on Nicaragua was justified as self-defence against the latter’s attacks upon Costa Rica, El Salvador and Honduras, but this was found to be illegal as International Court of Justice (ICJ) found such actions did not amount to an ‘armed attack.’ Other incidents have occurred, but led to no hard rule regarding what constitutes an armed attack. Other issues effecting the scope of self-defence is the cross-border actions by irregular forces (i.e. not the recognised army.) Portugal claimed such a basis for self-defence against Guinea, Senegal and Zambia repeatedly in the 1960s and 1970s. Once again the ICJ found such justification inadequate, but this was mainly due to its view that Portugal’s territory in Africa was illegally held, not necessarily that irregular forces do not count as ‘armed attacks.’ Perhaps the controversial use of the self-defence justification for the interference in a state’s affairs is the ‘pre-emptive’ self-defence often attributed to Israel’s bombing of Egyptian airfields in 1967. What is interesting is that Israel did not claim to be acting in a ‘pre-emptive’ fashion, but in response to what it considered an armed attack by Egyptian forces blocking the Straits of Tiran to Israeli vessels. Similar cases have shown that the reliance ‘pre-emptive’ self-defence for the justification of military interference has been rare and that the general scope of what is deemed self-defence is relatively narrow. However, more recent developments have suggested a possible shift to a wider definition. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ as well as US-led ‘interference’ in Afghanistan have suggested that action against states can be justified in terms of self-defence against irregulars. This is the case with Afghanistan; though the Afghan Army didn’t commit the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, ‘irregulars’ from that state did. In the case of Iraq, ‘pre-emptive’ (some have suggested preventative) self-defence was certainly used in the UK’s justification of invasion. What matters for the purposes of this essay is not whether such invasions were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but that such justifications are acceptable and seen to be acceptable by the world community. In the case of the former, it seems self-defence against a state due to irregular forces is now acceptable. However, the general response to the US-led invasion of Iraq seems to suggest that ‘pre-emptive’ justification is not so widely accepted. Overall, self-defence is justification for military interference by one or states into the internal affairs of another. By attacking a state, the aggressor loses the right to strict sovereignty with regards to that particular situation. The next section of  this essay shall tackle a much more controversial justification for interference; reasons of humanity.

The issue of humanitarian intervention is a contentious one. It encompasses many levels of debate and disagreement is rife on all; from the military strategy perspective to the international legal debates to those of moral philosophy. Concerning subjects such as justice and rights, moral philosophy plays an important role and this essay shall outline the major theoretical approaches before offering suggestions on what basis humanitarian intervention is justified and some necessary considerations that need to be taken into account before any such operations are launched.

The theoretical basis for a firm stance on non-intervention draws on the moral philosophy of many thinkers, particularly Hobbes and Hegel, but finds contemporary resonance in the writings of Michael Walzer. For Walzer, it is the state that best represents the political community, which is based on a “common life” including shared experiences and co-operative activity. The principle of non-intervention is therefore necessary for the protection of the political community that is an important human right. Walzer also proscribes intervention on the grounds that the state, being in a society of states, have a right to territorial integrity and political sovereignty. It is also important to note that Walzer construes these two separate justifications for non-intervention as being independent.Walzer’s position means intervention is morally unjustifiable on two grounds;

Intervention therefore ordinarily constitutes a double violation of fundamental rights: of the right of a people to live unmolested by foreigners in a political community – a state – of their own, and of the right of this state itself to political sovereignty and territorial integrity.

For Walzer, the situation within a particular state is largely the concern of the inhabitants. This is largely due to his belief that specific moral principles are not universal, but culturally specific to political communities, and cannot be set by other political communities in the absence of a global community. Of course, Walzer accepts that certain situations are so grave as to justify intervention, but he places firm restrictions on such endeavours, preferring that the “common brutalities of authoritarian politics” and the “daily oppressiveness” of some states “have to be dealt with locally.” This position draws heavily on communitarian moral philosophy, which stresses the importance of community to human existence. Walzer’s position allows for three derogations from non-intervention; when a secessionist movement is sufficiently strong to remove the possibility that a single political community exists; when intervention by another state has taken place and intervention is needed to restore the ‘balance’; and in the gravest situations of massacre, genocide or enslavement. Walzer’s third situation is what most concerns this essay. He justifies intervention when gross violations of human rights that “shock the moral conscience of mankind” are committed by governments, but he does so in two distinct ways. On the one hand, Walzer asserts that such crimes indicate that the link between the state and the community that it purports to represent no longer ‘fit’. In this sense, intervention is justified because the legitimacy of the state can no longer be drawn from the existence of a political community. This is a troublesome postulation, as surely there are acts other than the most heinous abuses that indicate a lack of ‘fit’ between community and state. In addition, many if not most states nowadays are multi-national and multi-ethnic and indicate, often quite strongly, that the state does not represent the political community. Such an assertion could be made of Ukraine in recent times. Walzer’s other justification for intervening on humanitarian grounds, distinct from the lack of ‘fit’, is the seriousness of the crimes. However, Walzer’s justification here seems too arbitrary. He includes few crimes; genocide and enslavement among them, and excludes a great deal. Also, the immediacy of the crimes seems crucial and thus it would seem Walzer would have little problem with non-intervention in the case of the lengthy, systematic abuses carried out by such states as Chile in the 1970s with the ‘disappearances’ of tens of thousands of people over many years. Walzer’s position is simply too arbitrary to be acceptable; he offers no criteria for judging where or when everyday abuses become so ‘shocking’. To be forced to rely on his first justification, that of the ‘fit’ (or lack of it) between community and state is also unsatisfying. As has been seen, many states do not easily ‘fit’ the community they represent, but do not abuse the rights of their citizens. On the other hand, many states that do closely relate to the community still commit heinous crimes. Many states reflecting the will of the majority, have committed severe human rights abuses in the past, Nazi Germany being the most obvious example. To base the justifiability of intervention on this criterion would mean “there could be no morally justified external intervention in the cases of majority tyranny, no matter how severe.”

With Walzer’s theory of strict non-intervention, except in the case of such horrific crimes, found to be unacceptable, this essay will now suggest a broader justification that finds widespread military intervention morally justifiable. This is found through both a re-interpretation of Walzer’s theory, and through a more liberal theory about the individual-state relationship.

Liberals, such as John Rawls or Will Kymlicka, state that individuals are not wholly tied to the community of which they are a member. States therefore are legitimised not through the community as a whole, but through the individuals that constitute that community. This is the concept of ‘popular sovereignty’, identified previously and differentiated from the ‘state sovereignty’ that has become the cornerstone of international relations. The Secretary-General of the United Nations also recognises this concept; that states derive legitimacy from individuals: “States are now widely understood to be instruments at the service of their peoples, and not vice-versa.” Taking this legitimisation of a state’s right to sovereignty, David Luban notes that a state’s right to non-intervention is derived from the rights of individual humans that may conflict with other human rights. In this conflict, states cannot derive the right to non-intervention from other states (rights against aggression) if it is denying those same rights to the people from whom it purports to derive its legitimacy. Thus it is suggested that states have a moral right, perhaps a duty, to intervene in more cases than Walzer suggests, possibly in all states which abuse human rights and whose moral standards fall below those of the intervener. This is a controversial assertion, which critics will no doubt accuse of moral-imperialism or lacking in respect for moral and cultural differences. Given that it is only Western states that have the capacity to intervene, calling on them to intervene whenever and wherever states fail to meet their moral standards will shock many liberals.

However, it is suggested that some values have global worth and are not culturally specific. Looking again at Walzer’s theory, he champions the state as the only unit capable of realising the “shared values” of a community and rallies against intervention as there are no shared global values. Yet in recent years, many situations suggest that shared global values do exist. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example of such values. Dunne and Wheeler find that “there is normative consensus underlying the human rights regime…state leaders justify their human rights policies in terms of these standards.” Indeed, Walzer implicitly accepts the notion of shared global values, even while explicitly denying them, in his assertion that certain crimes “shock the moral conscience of humankind.” This conscience of humankind must be global in nature and constitute a shared value. Furthermore, to assert that certain human rights are a shared moral value, one has to consider the actions of those that have abused them. Not one leader who has abused the human rights of its citizens has argues that to do so is a moral value intrinsic to the community. The usual defence is denial, but none suggest that human rights are not accepted global, moral norms. Thus a moral justification for intervention can be established. States have a moral right, even a duty, to intervene in the internal affairs of another state when that state does not meet the standards of human rights widely accepted by the international community. This is contingent of the idea of proportionality; that the abuses be sufficient to outweigh the possible harm that intervention would do.

Thus a moral case for humanitarian intervention into the domestic affairs is available on the grounds that there are moral values, globally accepted, and that adherence to such values is a condition of sovereignty. When such values are breached, states lose the right to non-intervention as this is gained through adherence to these values. This essay shall now briefly consider some of the counter-arguments to a broader justification of humanitarian intervention before considering some of the criteria laid down by some writers for the justification of humanitarian intervention.

Realist thinkers have generally postulated three concerns regarding the extended justification of humanitarian intervention. Firstly, that humanitarian reasons will be used by powerful states to justify actions that serve the national interest of the intervening states. Indeed, Franck and Rodley identified that in “very few, if any, instances has the right [to intervention] been asserted under circumstances that appear more humanitarian than self-interested.” This is a strong point, and the international community should be ever watchful for such actions, but humanitarian motives are not necessary to justify humanitarian intervention. Teson argues that to require humanitarian motives incorrectly identifies the intervener as the object of reference, whereas the correct objects should be the victims of human rights abuses. To remove motive as a criterion helps to alleviate the problem that realists identify.

The second realist objection to humanitarian intervention is that states, being the self-interested egoists that realists assume, would not embark on humanitarian intervention if it was not in their interest to do so. This is a descriptive criticism, not of the need of justness of humanitarian intervention, but of its impracticality, and it is a strong one. In a world of states under no higher authority, this will seem to the case. It must be remembered that the question this essay attempts to answer is when states should interfere, not when they will. This lack of interest exhibited by some states, towards others, particularly regionally and culturally distinct ones, is also used by realism to criticise humanitarian intervention on moral grounds. According to Samuel Huntington, it is immoral for one state to risk the lives of its own citizens to protect those of another: “It is morally unjustifiable and politically indefensible that members of the [US] armed forces should be killed to prevent Somalis from killing each other.” Both of these criticisms are forceful and unavoidable in the present age. One can only hope of a happy coincidence when self-interest and humanitarian motives meet, or that the political leaders of the would-be interveners possess the persuasive capacity and the courage to follow humanitarian objectives through to completion. Also, it is important to note how the impact of global television news and the growth of non-governmental organisations may influence this process in the future. The realist objections to such a broad justification of humanitarian intervention are strong, but only in the sense that they seem impractical given the current international system. The moral justification for such action is not challenged by such views.

In conclusion, this essay has established that the justification for the interference of one or more states into the internal affairs of another can be made on two grounds; self-defence, and intervention to prevent abuse of human rights (humanitarian intervention). It is worth noting that many writers give a third justification; that it be authorised by the United Nations’ Security Council. However, such authorisation is made on behalf of the two justifications already given, not as a separate one. Security Council authorisation for the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the first Gulf War, for example, was because of the principle of self-defence (in that case collective) and authorisation for intervention in Somalia (though officially on the grounds of maintaining international peace and security) was construed by many to be authorisation of humanitarian intervention. Self-defence as a justification has been generally accepted in international relations for centuries. However, by looking at some of the legal problems the international community has faced, it appears that the situation remains problematic. Issues of ‘pre-emptive’ self-defence and the use of irregular forces have complicated the matter. Nevertheless, it remains a firmly entrenched justification for the use of force in another state. The main focus of this essay, the justification of humanitarian intervention has been made largely on moral grounds. There are of course extensive legal and political implications, but to answer the question of whether should intervene, this seems the most fruitful discussion. It was shown that the standard prohibition of non-intervention, except in the most extreme cases, is insufficient. It has been shown that one of the chief theorists behind such a stance, Michael Walzer, places the value of the community too far above that of the individual. He expects, and believes others should expect, that states reflect the political community of the population. Yet in many situations this is not the case, and to believe that it is always the duty of the population to rectify any mismatch between state and community, fails to consider the scope of the coercive measures that can be brought to bear for the purposes of the state. In addition, Walzer fails to realise that even a state that reflects the political community can still considerably abuse the rights of its citizens. Walzer’s exceptions to the norm of non-intervention have been seen to be inadequate. He offers no justification of why some crimes justify intervention and other do not, and by suggesting that only those crimes that offend the “conscience of humanity” warrant breach of the norm, he implies that there exists a global moral value that transcends those of national (or state-based) communities. This essay offered a more liberal interpretation of non-intervention; this remains the accepted norm, but a much broader scope for intervention is suggested. States themselves can judge other states according to global moral values. Where such values are being breached, states have a right, even a duty to intervene. This essay has briefly considered some of the counter-arguments to this assertion, mainly from the realist school. While it is accepted that the postulation that states should intervene does not necessarily mean they will, due to the influence of national self-interest and the dictates of local politics, this essay maintains that states should. One cannot limit what is moral to what is practical.

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