Exterior Interventions in Sovereign States

Governments represents only those whose consent they have sought, action to prevent them from oppressing those whose consent they have not sought ceases to be seen as intervention in the traditional sense. Those who try to protect the oppressed would not be interfering in the internal workings of a sovereign territory or trying to break down the walls around a sovereign state. They would be assisting in a conflict between international legal persons. What would previously have been called intervention will take on a different character, more like action taken to assist the self defense of a sovereign government. It might still be called intervention as it will still involve coming between other persons. However, taking such action will lose its normative stigma.

This does not mean that all such interventions will be justified. If you intervene in a bar room brawl, you may do much good or much harm. If you assist the bully, if you exacerbate the dispute, if you increase the harm, or if you just join in the fight with your mates, you will be in the wrong. If you encourage it or precipitate it, you are as guilty of the breach of the peace as they are. If you seek to intervene in place of the lawful authorities you are usurping their authority in a way that generally endangers the peace.

It is easy to see how interventions will be justified to protect the oppression of excluded minorities. However, the future is not necessarily benign. Just as challenges to liberal democratic values may lead to regression towards old ideologies, the breakdown of weaker states may not herald a progression to a new world order. Instead it may involve regression towards interference by strong states in the affairs of weaker states the strong enforcing their will against the weak, claiming moral superiority where only technological superiority is demonstrated. This may lead to modem versions of gunboat diplomacy or its more frightening modem version, cruise missile diplomacy.

The possibility of regression is the key reason why I am not an intervention hawk . Up to this point, you might be forgiven for thinking that I am about as hawkish as one could be; prepared to level the walls around sovereign states to allow intervention by others for the protection of the rights of citizens against those who gain power without consent. But the issue is not just whether intervention is justified; but who is justified in intervening and what processes should be involved in making the decision about who may intervene.

Those who authorize intervention cannot be those who intervene, as that would make them judges in their own cause. Intervention may one day be authorized by treaty within a wide range of states. One might envisage a Democratic League formed by an international treaty between democratic nations. It would set standards for its membership and be authorized to intervene in any of its member nations in a coup situation or if any other action, which fundamentally breached the conditions of membership, arose. The treaty could not justify intervention in countries that had not ratified. This is the sort of club in which voluntary membership is the only kind. Such remedies will take longer but it is more likely to work in the longer term. However, the kinds of nations which are likely to sign up to such a treaty are, coups apart, unlikely to be justifiable subjects for intervention.