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Ethics and Intervention1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Michael Joseph Smith
Michael Joseph Smith
Affiliation:
MICHAEL J. SMITH teaches international politics at the University of Virginia, and is the author of Realist Thought From Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
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Abstract

The moral complexity surrounding intervention is influenced by a broad spectrum of both ethical and practical assumptions and considerations. “All these issues,” Smith writes, “affect one's ultimate position on intervention, and different assumptions lead, obviously, to different conclusions.” The bulk of this article is a useful survey of some of the key ethical issues of disagreement among contemporary authors who represent a variety of approaches to the subject: traditional and prudential realists, statists, cosmopolitans, ideologists. Smith's own view, clearly articulated in his concluding section, is what he labels “tempered nonintervention”: “a reaffirmation of the principle of nonintervention, tempered by the possibility of humanitarian intervention when undertaken with specific safeguards.”

Type
Ethics and Intervention
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 3 , March 1989 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
© Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1989

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References

2 Pfaff, William, “A Case Against Interventionistm,” in A Dissenter's Guide to Foreign Policy, ed. Howe, Irving (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1968) p. 95Google Scholar; Wight, Martin, Power Politics (New York: Penguin, 1979) p. 191Google Scholar; McMahan, Jefferson, “The Ethics of International Intervention,” in Political Realism and International Morality: Ethics in the Nuclear Age, eds. Kipnis, Kenneth and Meyers, Diana T. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987) p. 78Google Scholar; also compare Hoffmann, Stanley, Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Politics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987) chapter 8Google Scholar.

3 Compare Vincent's definition: “Intervention [is] that activity undertaken by a state, a group within a state, a group of states or an international organization which interferes coercively in the domestic affairs of another state. It is a discrete event having a beginning and an end, and it is aimed at the authority structure of the target state.”Nonintervention and International Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974) p. 13Google Scholar. Apart from the problematic phrase “coercive interference,” the limitation of the “aim” of intervention to the “authority structure of the target state”—a limitation borrowed from James Rosenau—seems unduly restrictive. See Rosenau, “Intervention as a Scientific Concept,”Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. XIII (June 1969) p. 163. States often intervene on behalf of the authority structure, as McMahan (op. cit.) notes.

4 Brierly, J. L., The Law of Nations, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963) p. 403Google Scholar; Walzer, , Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977) pp. 105–8Google Scholar. For good discussions of the question of human rights intervention and international law, also See Lillich, Richard B., ed., Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Donnelly, Jack, “Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, and American Foreign Policy: Law, Morality, and Politics,”Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 37 (Winter 1984) pp. 311–28; and Jerome Slater and Terry Nardin, “Nonintervention and Human Rights,”Journal of Politics, Vol. 48 (February 1986) pp. 86–96Google Scholar.

5 See, e.g., Higgins, Rosalyn, “Intervention and International Law,” in Intervention and World Politics, ed. Bull, Hedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 30Google Scholar; and Nye, Joseph S., “Ethics and American Foreign Policy,” in International Ethics in the Nuclear Age, ed. Myers, Robert J. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987)Google Scholar.

6 Halpern, Manfred, “The Morality of Politics and Intervention,” in The Vietnam War and International Law, ed. Falk, Richard A. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) pp. 42–43; Wight, Power Politics, p. 191Google Scholar.

7 For a fuller analysis of these assumptions, see the essays by Keohane, Robert O., Gilpin, Robert, and others in Neorealism and its Critics, ed. Keohane, Robert O. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, as well as my own Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987) chapter 9Google Scholar.

8 Morgenthau, Hans J., “To Intervene or Not to Intervene,” in A New Foreign Policy for the United States (New York: Praeger, 1969) p. 117Google Scholar.

9 Pfaff, , “A Case Against Interventionism,” pp. 105–106Google Scholar.

10 Morgenthau, , “To Intervene or Not to Intervene,” p. 243Google Scholar.

11 Tonelson, Alan, “The Real National Interest,” Foreign Policy, No. 61 (Winter 1985/86CrossRefGoogle Scholar)

12 Vincent, , Nonintervention and International Order, pp. 361–62Google Scholar.

13 Luard, Evan, “Western Europe and the Reagan Doctrine,” International Affairs, Vol. 63 (Autumn 1987) p. 567CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Ibid. Events since 1987, especially in Afghanistan and Angola, would seem to belie Luard's categorical certaintyGoogle Scholar.

15 Tucker, Robert W., “Intervention and the Reagan Doctrine,” in Intervention and the Reagan Doctrine (New York: Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1985) p. 13Google Scholar.

16 Haas, , Global Evangelism Rides Again, Institute of International Studies Policy Paper, No. 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)Google Scholar; also See Donnelly, Jack, “Human Rights, Humanitarian Intervention, and American Foreign Policy: Law, Morality, and Politics,”Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 37 (Winter 1984) pp. 311–28Google Scholar.

17 Walzer, , op. cit., p. 90Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., p. 104; also Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics,”Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 9 (Spring 1980) pp. 227–28Google Scholar.

19 See Beitz, Charles, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979)Google Scholar especially pp. 71–105; Gerald Doppelt, “Statism Without Foundations,”Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 9 (Summer 1980) pp. 398–403; and David Luban, “Just War and Human Rights,”Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 9 (Winter 1980) pp. 160–81. I have also benefited from David Mapel, “Human Rights, Law and Morality in Nardin's Theory of International Society,” a paper presented at the International Studies Association, March 1986.

20 Luban, , “Just War and Human Rights,” p. 165; McMahan, “The Ethics of International Intervention,” p. 97Google Scholar.

21 Nardin, Compare Terry, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

22 Quoted in New York magazine (March 9, 1981)Google Scholar.

23 Krauthammer, Charles, “The Reagan Doctrine,” reprinted in Intervention and the Reagan Doctrine, ed. Tucker; originally published in Time (April 1, 1985)Google Scholar; and Krauthammer, Charles, “The Poverty of Realism,” The New Republic (February 17, 1986) pp. 14–22Google Scholar.

24 Krauthammer, , “The Reagan Doctrine,” pp. 20–22Google Scholar.

25 Ibid., pp. 23–24Google Scholar.

26 Krauthammer, , “The Poverty of Realism,” pp. 17 and 22; Christopher Layne, “The Real Conservative Agenda,”Foreign Policy, No. 61 (Winter 1985/86); Krauthammer, “Let It Sink,”The New Republic (August 24, 1987)Google Scholar.

27 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, pp. 231–32Google Scholar.

28 Krauthammer, , “The Poverty of Realism,” p. 20; Tucker, “Intervention and the Reagan Doctrine,” pp. 16–17Google Scholar.

29 “Three Paradoxes,”The New Republic (October 11, 1975) p. 17Google Scholar.

30 This section draws on a forthcoming book on the general problem of ethics and international relations written with Stanley Hoffmann; I can only baldly summarize our approach hereGoogle Scholar.

31 Hoffmann and I follow John Rawls's analysis of the categorical imperative procedure, as outlined in his unpublished lectures on KantGoogle Scholar.

32 Frankena, William, Ethics: An Introduction, 2nd edition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973) p. 51Google Scholar; Rawls, of course, derives two principles from his interpretation of the categorical imperatives concerning equal liberty and social and economic inequalities: Rawls, see, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971) p. 302Google Scholar.

33 Rawls, , ibid., p. 20Google Scholar.

34 Reiss, Hans, ed., Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 105Google Scholar.

35 For a penetrating argument that acceptance of the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention in extreme cases of genocide or enslavement also requires one to accept a broadened conception of humanitarian intervention, see Slater and Nardin, “Nonintervention and Human Rights,”op. cit.Google Scholar