The long, never-ending life of humanitarian intervention

By Uditha Devapriya

In 1999 Charles Krauthammer famously penned an obituary for humanitarian intervention. Such an idea, he argued, cannot last, especially not as a cornerstone in foreign policy, since it has no real plan, no real purpose. All it does is pursue utopian objectives which are “of the most peripheral strategic interest to the United States.” Americans may be willing to give up their lives in the cause of their country, but not “to allay feelings of pity.” Bringing peace to the world, which was humanitarian intervention’s aim, is practical and doable if all it takes is the bulldozing of enemy territory, as with Germany and Japan during World War II. Yet this is precisely what interventionists choose not to do.

As policy, humanitarian intervention dates back to the 19th century. As theory, it goes back even further. At the centre of its universe is the question of how, if not to what extent, the sovereignty of the State became secondary to the sovereignty of the individual. Since this is, by default, a key dilemma in international law, it was first addressed though not resolved by those associated with the development of international law: Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez, Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, and Jean Bodin.

Though these were hardly, if at all, advocates of humanitarian intervention, they affirmed the legitimacy of interfering in another State’s affairs, even for purposes other than national interest. “[K]ings, and those who possess rights equal to those kings,” observed Grotius, had the right to demand punishments regarding “injuries committed against themselves or their subjects” and “injuries which… excessively violate the law of nature or of nations in regard of any person whatsoever [my emphasis].” Restated, rephrased, this is, in the words of one scholar, “the principle that exclusiveness of domestic jurisdiction stops when outrage upon humanity begins.” Yet even Grotius recognised the limits of such intervention, just as he did the limits of sovereignty: in De jure belli ac pacis (1625), he makes what Raymond J. Vincent calls “a remarkable concession” to sovereignty, by “denying his subjects the right to take up arms when wronged by him.” However, interestingly enough, while denying locals this right, he concedes the right of foreign players to intervene on their behalf.

Hersch Lauterpacht’s view that Grotius propounded “the first authoritative statement of the principle of humanitarian intervention” has been widely contested. To focus attention on one individual philosopher is to ignore, if not undermine, the trajectories of history that led to him formulating that statement. As Heraclides and Dialla (2015) have pointed out in their excellent book on the subject, the antecedents of humanitarian intervention go back, not to Renaissance Europe, but to Classical Antiquity, to a concept that, while not directly related to the issue of intervention today, nevertheless influenced it: Just War, or jus bellum, whose acknowledged founding father was Thomas Aquinas.

In the distinction Aquinas made between the innocent and the guilty, and in his admission that the innocent can well be killed in a conflict, he addresses a central dilemma for all those caught up in war: how justifiable is it? Three conditions, he wrote, can help us rationalise it: if war is declared by a proper authority, if it is embarked upon to punish wrongdoing States, and if military force is exerted “to secure for peace, rather than lust for power.” The tenet that binds these together is proportionality: a war may have good and bad effects, but that is permissible so long as the good is intended and the bad is necessary to achieve the good. I concur this is a notoriously fluid thing to verify, even at a time when it’s becoming harder to conceal the ill-effects of war. But in Aquinas’s day, and in later periods when the sanction of the clergy was considered necessary to embark on the Crusades against the Fertile Crescent, such points were conceded without too much debate.

Besides, this was the era of city-states. After the Peace of Westphalia when the focus shifted to nation-states, when the issue was of sovereignty and to what extent it could be intruded on, the founding fathers of international law revisited the principles of Just War to ascertain whether the State was absolute or not. To my mind four distinct historical trends had a say in shaping the principles of humanitarian intervention, apart from, and in addition to, this shift in international politics: Spanish conquests in the New World, the rise of naval power “from a medieval setting into an early modern framework”, the decline of Ottoman power at the end of the 18th century, and the clash between Hobbesian sovereignty and Lockean liberalism in the wake of revolution in France and elsewhere in Europe.

All these factors had a say, a profound one, in widening both the theory and the practice of intervention for purposes other than those of national interest and power, especially under its foremost proponent of the 19th century, Emer de Vattel. It is in de Vattel’s writings that we see, as one scholar puts it, the principle of sovereignty giving way to “a claim to freedom and independence.” This line of reasoning really goes back to the English liberals of the 16th century, in particular John Locke. Locke, while not justifying revolution, argued that subjects had a right to rebel against the State and sovereign if the latter turned tyrant: such rebellion symbolised, not an act of revolution, but an act of restoration to what it had been before. For Locke, by violating political order the sovereign automatically vitiated any right to hold on to power and govern.

In other words, like most proponents of individual sovereignty, he saw the State as a holder of trust rather than a wielder of power.

What de Vattel did was to extend this to the framework governing relations between, not just within, States: resistance to tyranny invariably called for intervention by other States if, and when, citizens found it difficult to rise up in arms against it. Obvious and self-evident as that may seem today, in de Vattel’s day it was an extreme doctrine to hold, just as in Locke’s day it was an extreme doctrine to hold that sovereigns were less rulers than trustees. But in spite of its radical overtones, interventionism caught on; far from becoming an exceptional feature of 19th century politics, it became very much a part and parcel of it, and was put into practice on three occasions: the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832), the Mount Lebanon Civil War (1860), and the Balkan Crisis (1875-1878).

As Heraclides and Dialla have cogently pointed out, each of these crises bolstered the use of humanitarian rhetoric relative to the one before, and each of them had as the adversary the Ottoman Turks. As important, in my opinion, was the use made of naval power, one which proved pivotal to the rise of Britain as a colonial powerhouse in the 19th century and of the United States as a regional and global imperium in the 20th. Indeed, insofar as humanitarian intervention is concerned, it was the United States, not Europe, which reshaped the rules of the game in intervention throughout the 20th century.

It is essential that we not underestimate the American aspiration to become a naval power when putting in its proper historical perspective American involvement in Cuba at the tail-end of the 19th century. As Jenny Pearce has noted, the publication of Alfred Mahan’s book on naval superiority as a determinant of global power did not go unnoticed in the US, and it was this which propelled it to build its first battleship. Notwithstanding the humanitarian impulses it touted later on, the primary motivation, as one Senator put it, was to “cover the ocean with our merchant marine” and “build a navy to the measure of our greatness.” Since its first target was its “backyard”, i.e. Central and Latin America, this new policy called for an overhaul of the Monroe Doctrine, which had limited American intervention in the region to preventing and pre-empting interference by European powers.

How soon that altered. And yet, as scholars point out, the decision to move into Cuba and support the local uprising against colonial rule followed years of extensive debate among US lawyers over the merits of humanitarian intervention. “The intervention in Cuba,” observe Heraclides and Dialla, “was to prove a turning point.” Jenny Pearce puts it better: Cuba, she argues, “emerged as a model for United States imperialism.”

But that model was, at least at the time, couched in purely humanitarian terms. What John Hay (US Secretary of State under McKinley and Roosevelt) called the “splendid little war” came be garbed in the rhetoric of “big power protecting small player” owing to three main reasons: the shift of Big Business from opposition to support for intervention; the push in Congress for US support for local uprisings against colonial rule; and the widely shared belief that as a maritime power, America just had to project its greatness. Insofar as this is what exacerbated the push for intervention on humanitarian grounds, it has served to justify and prolong intervention even in cases where it has not been called for: an ironic perversion of what Spanish philosophers of the 16th and 17th centuries had intended. Perhaps it is not so much a coincidence that in Cuba, the US chose to combat the Spanish.

Charles Krauthammer was wrong, I think, in arguing that humanitarian intervention – as a doctrine of US foreign policy – would fade away in the new millennium. A vocal, trenchant critic of the Clinton administration, he simply saw no need for deploying the military to the far corners of the world to fight bloodless wars. War without bloodshed, he contended, was a self-contradiction, an oxymoron that prolonged war; the Serbian army, after all, chose to expel the Kosovar people from their homes after the NATO strikes. This was a great illusion, and for Krauthammer, it had to end: “it is an idea whose time has come, and gone.”

But illusions are great for a reason: they live on and they endure. Krauthammer may or may not have foreseen Libya and Iraq, yet even he fell under the gospel of intervention: barely three years after he wrote his critique of it, he began to enunciate a new doctrine, a new variation on it, in support of the Bush administration’s relentless pursuit of rogue states after 9/11. But as I wrote to this paper two months ago, that doctrine – what Krauthammer called “democratic realism” – proved to be even more of a disaster than what Clinton toyed with. An even bigger disaster cropped up a decade after 9/11, when Samantha Power, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama “despatched” R2P to Tripoli. The West’s conception of humanitarian intervention suffers from one major flaw, and in Libya we saw it unfold only too clearly: a failure to oversee essential, vital post-war reconstruction.

Yet as the smoke and the ashes of the R2P fire wafted out, the evangelists of humanitarian intervention, like Oliver Twist, returned to keep asking for more, whether in Syria or Yemen. This is an idea that survived Antiquity, the Renaissance, Westphalia, the Triple Alliance, and two World Wars, not to mention a Cold War. It survived Clinton and Bush, and it survived Trump. It will survive Joe Biden, just as it will survive whoever comes after him.

The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com