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Humanitarian Intervention: An Overview of the Ethical Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Michael J. Smith
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Extract

The capacity to focus on the issue of humanitarian intervention represents what Joel Rosenthal has noted as the maturation of the field of ethics and international affairs. If nothing else, the debate surrounding this vexed issue has demonstrated that we have left behind the so-called oxymoron problem: there is no reason now to be defensive about bracketing the terms “ethics” and “international relations.” One can hardly talk about Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, or any cases of possible outside intervention, without recognizing from the very beginning that ethical dilemmas abound in the way we define our goals, our interests, and the means we use to pursue them. Even Samuel P. Huntington, not usually known to be a moralist, has asserted that “it is morally unjustifiable and politically indefensible that members of the [U.S.] armed forces should be killed to prevent Somalis from killing one another.” Whether or not one agrees with that assertion (I do not), one may note that Huntington speaks in terms of moral justification and regards his view of morality to be, in effect, self-evidently true. Thus even archrealists invoke morality in urging their preferred policies.

The discussion in this essay proceeds in three unequal stages. First, I present a brief and oversimple sketch of the objective and subjective changes in the broader milieu of international relations as they relate to humanitarian intervention. Second, and more substantially, I survey and analyze the arguments justifying or opposing the notion of humanitarian intervention from realist and liberal perspectives. Finally, I offer the beginnings of my own argument and consider the enormous difficulties of undertaking humanitarian intervention with any degree of effectiveness and consistency.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 12 , March 1998 , pp. 63 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1998

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References

1 Joel H. Rosenthal, ed., Ethics and International Affairs: A Reader (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995), introduction.

2 Samuel P. Huntington, “New Contingencies, Old Roles,”Joint Forces Quarterly, no. 2 (autumn 1992), p. 338.

3 See Joseph S. Nye, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), or, much earlier, Hoffmann, Stanley, “Notes on the Elusiveness of Modern Power,” International Journal 30 (Spring 1975), pp. 183–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 An exhaustive analysis of such conflicts can be found in Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1993). An alarmist, journalistic account is offered by Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century (New York: Random House, 1996).

5 Franck, Thomas M., “The Emerging Right to Democratic Governance,” American Journal of International Law 86 (January 1992), pp. 46–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 For an excellent summary of these operations, see the appendix prepared by Robert C. Johansen and Kurt Mills in Stanley Hoffmann, The Ethics and Politics of Humanitarian Intervention (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), pp. 101–15.

7 Torn J. Farer, “A Paradigm of Legitimate Intervention,” in Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts, edited by Lori Fisler Damrosch (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), p. 341.

8 Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Rescue,”Dissent (winter 1995), p. 41.

9 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), ch. 6.

10 Farer, “A Paradigm of Legitimate Intervention,” pp. 320, 330. On the “founding fathers,” see J. L. Briefly, The Law of Nations, 6th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 403 ff., and Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations, edited by Richard B. Lillich (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973).

11 Farer, “A Paradigm of Legitimate Intervention,” p. 330.

12 David Rieff, “The Lessons of Bosnia: Morality and Power,”World Policy Journal (spring 1995), pp. 76–88.

l3 Ernst B. Haas, Global Evangelism Rides Again, Institute of International Studies Policy Paper, no. 5 (Berkeley: University of California, 1978).

14 Quoted in the New York Times, November 28, 1995, p. A15.

15 Rieff, “The Lessons of Bosnia.”

l6 Hoffmann, “Notes on the Elusiveness of Modern Power” and Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

17 Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

18 Smith, Michael J., “Ethics and Intervention,” Ethics and International Affairs 3 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Michael J. Smith, Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

20 See Arnold Wolfers, “Statesmanship and Moral Choice,” in his Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962).

21 Hoffmann, Stanley, “Politics and Ethics of Military Intervention,” Survival 37 (Winter 1995–96), pp. 29–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfers, “Statesmanship and Moral Choice.”

22 Amir Pasic, “Ethics and Reality: The Hard Case of Bosnia,” paper presented at the International Studies Association meeting, San Diego, Calif., April 1996.

23 Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).

24 Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 21–38.

25 Pierre Laberge, “Humanitarian Intervention: Three Ethical Positions,”Ethics and International Affairs 9 (1995).

26 Franck, “The Emerging Right to Democratic Self-Governance.”

27 Hoffmann, “Politics and Ethics of Military Intervention,” pp. 34–46.

28 The following passage draws on a manuscript in progress written with Stanley Hoffmann; hence the change to the first person plural pronoun.

29 Franck, “The Emerging Right to Democratic Self-Governance.”

30 President Clinton quoted in the New York Times, November 28, 1995, p. A12.

31 See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 102–10.

32 I refer to the character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, General Jack D. Ripper.