Introduction
There can be little doubt that intervention has been one of the most high-profile political topics of the post-Cold War period. Its prominence in foreign policy debates arises not only from the frequent and controversial incidence of military intervention in this period but also the expansion in the range of issues or ‘problems’ to which intervention has been directed. States and international organisations have intervened, for example, to relieve humanitarian suffering, to defend and promote democracy, to degrade hostile transnational movements, to determine the outcomes of civil wars, and to build (and transform) the institutions and capacities of ‘fragile’ or ‘failing’ states. That the record of these interventions is at best mixed is widely acknowledged and in many instances the intervening party's hopes for a swift and decisive action were soon disappointed.Footnote 1 Yet the topic of intervention has also long been of interest to students of International Relations (IR) for what it says about the state of sovereignty and patterns of power and authority in the international system, and in recent years there has been a marked rise of interest in the history of intervention too, albeit with a marked focus on humanitarian intervention.Footnote 2 In fact, however, the policy, the conceptual, and the historical dimensions of the subject are more closely connected than is often realised. Not least, this is because the conceptual and historical analysis of intervention is able to draw out longer term contextual and political shifts in the practice of intervention that in subtle but powerful ways shape the possibilities of policy in the present and how such policies will be interpreted and understood.
Nevertheless, the conceptual and historical study of intervention remains underdeveloped and in a move towards redressing this, the Special Issue develops a historical sociological perspective upon the subject and focuses especially on the place or role of intervention in the ‘ordering’ and ‘reordering’ of the modern world. Specifically, the move to resituate the practice of ‘intervention’ in the ontological context of modernity, as distinct from the more familiar context of the sovereign state system, highlights its particular capacity for coercively regulating the conflicts that arise between bounded territorial political communities and transnational social forces. The centrality of this conflict-prone dynamic between territoriality and transnationalism to the development of the modern world in turn helps explain the continued relevance of intervention as a specific modality of coercion in International Relations. All of the contributions to this Special Issue speak to this core theme, and the chronological arrangement of the articles is designed to draw out the historical, political, and cultural forces that have shaped, and which continue to shape, variation in the practice of intervention and in regimes of intervention over time and space.
The historical sociological perspective developed in the Special Issue also offers a fresh stimulus to those mainstream debates upon intervention which frequently find themselves in a state of impasse. Indeed, debates on intervention have long been locked into a series of well-trodden dichotomies and dilemmas between, for example, interests vs. rules (or norms), selectivity vs. consistency, intentions vs. capacity, legitimacy vs. legality, and surgical action vs. quagmire. These settled frameworks of debate, coupled with the impossibility of anything approximating a definitive answer or ‘solution’ to the puzzles they present, reinforce the point on intervention made by Hedley Bull and Stanley Hoffman some thirty years ago: that ‘there is a sense in which nothing new can be said about it’.Footnote 3 The point is especially telling when one bears in mind that in the meantime the literature on such cognate practices as ‘war’ and ‘empire’ has developed to critically re-evaluate and trace their changing social dynamics and longer term rise and fall.Footnote 4 Paradoxically, however, whilst both major inter-state war and formal colonial empire have withered as international practices intervention would appear at least to be very much alive and as Lawson and Tardelli note in the conclusion to this Special Issue retains support amongst key elites, yet it is at the same time the least theorised.Footnote 5
One factor that does not change much, however, is the difficulty of defining the term, not least due to the problem of drawing a clear line between intervention and the regular business of international relations.Footnote 6 Whilst not wishing to get bogged down in this question, and whilst acknowledging that the practice of intervention has changed over time and that any working conceptualisation is likely to remain fuzzy at the edges, definitions of intervention tend to identify three recurring features which help to distinguish it from other practices of coercion and reordering in IR. Hence as a working guide, intervention is here taken to refer to ‘discrete acts’ of ‘coercive interference’ in the ‘domestic affairs’ of other states, and which do not change the formal juridical status of the intervened party (as would, for example, annexation or colonisation).Footnote 7
The notion that intervention constitutes a ‘social practice’ fits well with the historical and conceptual focus of the Special Issue. For Adler and Pouliot, practices ‘are patterned actions that are embedded in particular organized contexts and, as such, are articulated into specific types of action and are socially developed through learning and training’.Footnote 8 Fundamental to the notion of practice is the question of ‘social recognition’ which in the case of intervention emerged in the vocabulary of diplomats in the early nineteenth century to refer to a set of actions quite different in significance and ‘function’ than ‘war’. Whilst social practices in any particular subject area do not necessarily correspond to any fixed notion of a ‘life-cycle’, they do evolve and change over time, possibly to the point where they are better understood under another head or ‘simply’ wither away. Accordingly, historical analyses of social practices will uncover ‘the generative relationships that made them possible, as well as the socio-political processes that allowed their diffusion’ and in so doing may denaturalise accepted or taken-for-granted patterns of action in the present age.Footnote 9 It is in this spirit that the Special Issue proceeds.
The remainder of this introductory discussion carves out the contextual and conceptual space within which a historical sociological analysis of intervention can emerge. The first of two sections offers a reconceptualisation of intervention as an ordering practice through which states have coercively mediated the tensions that arise between bounded territoriality and transnational social forces in the modern world. The centring of modernity in this account is helpful also for drawing out the point that intervention has been a product of three (overlapping) hierarchies that shape International Relations: the economic and cultural as well as the more familiar hierarchy of the Great Powers. The second section historicises the practice through showing how understandings of intervention have varied in accordance with the development of the modern international system from its early modern heteronomous form, through to a bifurcated system from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and to the universal system of the present, which is itself presently in a period of transition as reflected (and facilitated) by changes in the practice of intervention. A key point that emerges from the discussion in this section is that the weight or burden of expectation that is placed upon intervention in the present age as a means of reordering in third states is in fact historically unprecedented and as such policymakers may simply be asking too much of it. The section closes with a brief discussion of what for many might be a counter-intuitive position: the possibility of intervention's demise.
The contexts and concept of intervention
The study of intervention within IR has tended to be caught in a double-bind that has masked the contribution or role of intervention as a specific modality of coercion in the modern world. The first arises from a tendency to treat intervention as an exception to the non-intervention rule, thereby drawing scholars away from investigating the nature and wider contribution of intervention as a social practice in its own right. The privileged position of the ‘non-intervention’ rule arises from its role in securing the political autonomy associated with the status of state sovereignty as the foundational political principle of the modern world. Hence, for Vincent, ‘the function of the principle of non-intervention in international relations [is] one of protecting the principle of state sovereignty’.Footnote 10 Yet, the notion that states have historically enjoyed autonomy within their respective territorial domain is a myth. It is not only that, as Stephen Krasner and others have shown, states have long accepted limits on their autonomy across a range of sectors or issue areas including human and minority rights, sovereign debt and constitutional structures, either through coercion or consent, and hence sovereign statehood has rarely been synonymous with political autonomy over affairs within its territorial domain.Footnote 11 It is also that historically states developed a discrete set of intervention rights in these areas, which both established and gave form to the notion that intervention is not solely a ‘behaviour’, or a socially meaningful ‘action’, but a ‘practice’, recognised as such by states.Footnote 12 This, accordingly, invites a re-evaluation of the relationship between intervention and non-intervention whilst also raising the question of the function or role of such intervention rights in International Relations.
The second bind is the analytical state-centrism manifest in the view of the state as an autonomous entity, existing outside of a wider set of social relations. From there, typically, the state is represented as a security-centred, interest-maximising actor as in the realist tradition, an order-centred system-maintainer as in the pluralist strand of the English School, or as a form of free-floating juridical-ethical community as in the solidarist strand of the English School and the liberal tradition. Whilst historical sociological analysis has challenged such representations through decentring and resituating the state in relation to wider sets of social relations, it has not to date turned its attentions specifically to the topic of intervention. Its insights are, however, clearly relevant to the study of a practice that has as its rationale the transgression of the internal realm by external actors. As John Hobson has argued, ‘historical sociologists in particular have shown that the domestic and international realms are thoroughly interpenetrated and mutually constituted. Societies and international societies are not unitary but are “constituted of multiple overlapping and intersecting socio-spatial networks of power”.’Footnote 13 Accordingly, historical sociological perspectives that are focused upon the changing political relationship between territorial and social space over time are well suited to the study of intervention and historically specific intervention ‘regimes’.
A key move in the present study is ontological, namely to contextualise intervention through the notion of ‘modernity’, or the ‘modern global system’, rather than the more familiar abstraction of the sovereign-states system (or international society). For Buzan and Lawson, ‘modernity’ refers to the ‘intertwined configuration of industrialization, rational state-building, and ideologies of progress’ and to borrow Giddens’ phrase, ‘is inherently globalizing’.Footnote 14 What this shift enables is the opening of analysis to the fact that the international system is co-constituted through the emergence and expansion of transnational social forces as well as territorially bounded political communities. The point may be illustrated through Arrighi's account of the co-constitutive relationship between capitalism and the states-system.
For Arrighi, the modern state and capitalism emerged and developed in conjunction with one another, interdependent in so far as capital required the state's coercive and regulatory capacities to provide an environment for accumulation and the state required capital in order to expand its own resource base and power. Yet the relationship was also one of dynamic tension, for whereas state power was grounded in a territorialist logic marked by population and size, for capitalists such factors were secondary as power was grounded in command over scarce resources and hence, far from being tied to particular territories, sought the exploitation of opportunities wherever they should arise, generating therein expansive pressures within the system. But besides the play of material forces the transnational flow of ideas too, particularly over principles of political legitimacy, have proved a powerful transformative force over time that illustrate not only the dynamic, reflexive character of the modern world but also, as John Owen shows, the capacity of such ideas to foster conflict within and between territorially bounded units.Footnote 15
These dynamic and reflexive properties of the modern international system in turn underpin its evolutionary character. The cyclical track in the development of the modern world system, as documented by realists and ‘long-cycle’ theorists, is evident in the rise and fall of a succession of hegemonic Powers over time, each possessing certain advantages over their predecessor.Footnote 16 The evolutionary track is manifest in the increasing complexity of modern social life over time, pressing each successive hegemon to undertake more ambitious reordering of a wider range of issues over a geographically more extensive area. The sheer scale of this task has effectively outstripped the capacity of any single state and as such has pushed states towards the development of higher levels of multilateralism and institutionalism over an increasing range of issue areas or sectors.Footnote 17 This trend carries with it implications for the rationality of violence as a policy instrument of states and as will be developed below, part of intervention's history has been the way in which overtly coercive practices may be superseded by more subtle rational-bureaucratic means of reordering and control.
The key point for now, however, is that the dynamic interplay between territorially bounded political communities and transnational forces which is fundamental to the development of the modern world often generates political conflict, and that it is intervention that is (relatively) well-suited to the coercive regulation of the tensions between territorially and transnationalism. By contrast, cognate practices such as ‘war’ between the Powers or formal colonial empire increasingly came to stand in contradiction to the modern world, which in turn hastened their demise. The practice of war between the Great Powers developed to the point where advancements in industrialisation led it to become hugely destructive of that complex and growing web of transnational social interdependencies that are central to modern life. Likewise, the practice of formal colonial empire rested upon a standing denial of the modern sovereign state and the principle of equality of peoples and became untenable in the face of the agency and resistance of colonised peoples and the normative ambivalence and doubts amongst the colonising states. Thus, whereas major war and formal empire negate the dynamic tension between territoriality and transnationalism that drives the development of the modern world, intervention rests upon it; its role or contribution being to (coercively) regulate or arbitrate the crises that it generates.
Intervention's role in coercively facilitating the settlement of tensions between territorial and transnational forces is clearly evident in the specific areas within which states have claimed intervention rights. These include matters of domestic constitutional-institutional form; fear of the spread of revolution; property rights; the rights of creditors in the face of sovereign and private debt; the honour and extraterritorial rights of foreign citizens in relation to local laws; the question of slavery and the slave trade; the rights of minority communities (initially religious co-believers but latterly minorities qua minorities); and the protection of populations against genocide or in the face of egregious violation of their human rights. What conjoins these intervention rights is the will to order this expanding transnational realm of social relations characteristic of modernity, reaching far into the political, cultural, economic, and ethical realms of an actual and imagined global social space.
The shift to modernity as the appropriate context within which to study intervention also helps distinguish and more fully analyse those hierarchies of power that have generated logics and rationales for intervention over time. The familiar focus on the hierarchy of the Great Powers is still important here, but it is one of three (historically but not necessarily) overlapping hierarchies within the international system that have each generated their own rationales for intervention and which continue to provide a valuable analytical context. These comprise the hierarchy of the Great Powers as an ordering principle of inter-state relations;Footnote 18 the hierarchy of production, trade and finance following the expansion of capitalism and industrialisation;Footnote 19 and the hierarchy of culture or civilisation evident for example in notions of the ‘standard of civilisation’, race, and difference.Footnote 20 It is within this complex, evolving system of hierarchies that practices of intervention/non-intervention have played out.
The English School has offered a particularly rich understanding of how the first of these hierarchies, that of the Great Powers, has generated practices of intervention.Footnote 21 For Hedley Bull and Martin Wight, a condition of being a Great Power was that it could not be intervened against (at least in its internal affairs).Footnote 22 The Great Powers within ‘international society’ hold special rights and duties for the maintenance of international order through, for example, the preservation of the balance of power, the limitation or containment of war, or the management of crises or enforcement of the rules or norms of international society.Footnote 23 Others too, such as David Lake, have reinforced the relationship between hierarchy and order, as evident in the point that the ‘capacity for coercion’ is ‘necessary to buttress or sustain authority in the face of incentives to flout rules designed to constrain behaviour’.Footnote 24
Edward Keene in this Special Issue provides the vital prelude to existing work that dates the emergence of the contemporary practice of intervention to the post-1815 peace settlement.Footnote 25 In an account that is of interest for the analyses of longer-term process of change beyond its immediate subject, Keene shows how deep underlying structural changes within the international political system generated the conditions for change in language, practice, and doctrine to take hold. Central in this case was the displacement of the ‘ancient hierarchies of status and precedence’ by the ‘gradation of Powers’ that was clearly discernible by the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This changing nature of international hierarchy and the emergence of ‘Great Powers’ as the leading political actors was a crucial prerequisite for the notion of intervention that is familiar today and which received diplomatic expression following the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.
The second is the hierarchical world economy that expanded rapidly during the nineteenth century in the wake of industrialisation. Whilst balance of power considerations were always present, the leading Powers in the early to mid-nineteenth century were concerned with the establishment and maintenance of stable political conditions for the conduct of commerce. In practice this frequently proved invasive, not least as the various forms of state and proto-state were challenged to demonstrate their abilities to guarantee such conditions for international commerce and to establish their ‘modern’ competencies.Footnote 26 Indeed, with the increasing financial penetration of peripheral economies as the century progressed intervention for the collection of sovereign debt became more frequent, until that is the demise of intervention for this purpose in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, as Woodward, Dodge, and Williams show in this Special Issue the tensions emanating from the hierarchical world economy continue to be evident in practices of intervention in the present.
The third hierarchy is that of culture, or difference, manifest historically in civilisational, racial, and religious terms.Footnote 28 European attitudes towards cultural difference hardened during the nineteenth century such that it became mediated through the notion of a ‘standard of civilisation’. Amongst other things this provided a conceptual language through which to regulate membership of the ‘family of nations’ and, importantly, to ascribe an inferior juridical status to large parts of the non-European world. This quasi-sovereign or non-sovereign status might feature under a range of terms including ‘colonies’, ‘protectorates’, or latterly ‘mandated’ or ‘trustee’ territories.Footnote 29 As sovereign status came in gradations, so too did sovereign rights, not least that to non-intervention. Thus as authors such as Keene, Koskenniemi, and Anghie have emphasised, the European centred ‘family of civilised nations’ maintained a domain of sovereignty coupled with non-intervention amongst themselves and qualified or non-sovereignty with intervention elsewhere.Footnote 30
Robbie Shilliam's argument in this Issue ascribing primacy to the cultural realm follows from his initial major move to shift the frame of analysis to that of ‘colonial modernity’ on the grounds that one finds here a global rule of cultural and in particular racialised difference, as distinct from the ‘provincial drama’ that in practice often characterises sociologies of modernity within IR. In this account Shilliam contrasts the competing hermeneutics of the European ‘civilising mission’ with those of ‘Ethiopianism’ through the case of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The modus operandi of the civilising mission is for Europeans to ‘act upon their remit to save Ethiopians/Africans from themselves and from degenerate European(s)’ through developing a range of techniques for the regulation of colonial difference including the legal bases for intervention and/or war (that is, violence) on African peoples. From this perspective, the question of whether intervention is different from war or empire may itself be regarded as part of a ‘provincial drama’, albeit one with global implications, for from the hermeneutic of Ethiopianism the key question is that of self-liberation through disassembling the full spectrum of ‘legal, political and cognitive mechanisms of colonial difference’. In light of the resurgence of intervention as a means for the domestic reordering of the postcolonial world in recent decades it is especially important not to separate questions of intervention from those of power and agency within the international system. In this vein, Shilliam's underlying questions are perennially important: who ‘saves’, reorders, and speaks for whom?
In drawing this section together two main points emerge. The first is that there is good reason that intervention has found a distinct niche in the modern international system for it provides a discrete modality of coercion that suits the needs of powerful actors in the modern world to mediate the residual, conflict-prone interplay of territoriality and transnationalism, which is itself constitutive of modernity's dynamic and expansive nature. The second is that intervention can rightly be understood in relation to a threefold set of hierarchies in international relations – those of the Great Powers, the world economy and of culture. How the rationales or logics of intervention generated by these hierarchies have varied over time is drawn out in the next section of this discussion.
Historicising intervention
Most analyses of intervention within IR situate the practice within a universal sovereign state system. Yet this is but one of several forms of modern international order and, indeed, one that has been evident only for around fifty years or so since the wave of decolonisation in the 1960s and 1970s. Historicising intervention across a range of modern international orders from the heteronomous, to the bifurcated and the universal shows how the practice has changed over time and enables a greater sensitivity to the indicators of future transformation in the present.
Christian Reus-Smit discusses the form and justification for ‘transgressions of a political actor's domain of jurisdiction or authority’ as it applied in the heteronomous international system of the early modern period. The empirical focus of the discussion is upon Vitoria's analytical navigation of the various authority claims of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor in relation to the Indians of South America, which rested upon the European delimitation of Indian claims over the ‘social space’ of the lands that they owned. That this disarticulation of ‘space’ and ‘place’ has re-emerged as a major theme in the globalisation literature is well-known, but as discussed below it is increasingly a feature of interventions in the present age, particularly those associated with statebuilding and development.
Whilst the nineteenth century is usually associated with the consolidation of modern intervention and non-intervention norms, the bifurcated nature of international order in this period was marked by a formal distinction between the European and non-European worlds. Within the European core intervention did indeed become the ‘exception’ to the non-intervention norm rooted in mutual recognition between sovereign equals. Yet in relations between European and non-European political communities the relationship was one of hierarchy and intervention, with intervention itself being part of a wider family of imperial practices concerned to reorder the peripheral zones of the expanding global system.
As Richard Little shows in his article in this Special Issue, the establishment of the non-intervention rule in the early nineteenth century had much to do with the liberal defence of the principle of self-determination by both Britain and the United States, with the latter's interest triggered by its concern to avoid European interference in the recently independent South American states. Whilst Britain and the dynastic Powers of Europe shared the wish to avoid destabilising the territorial settlement established at Vienna in 1815 following the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the constitutional Powers could not support the Russian proposal for a collective right of intervention in order to guarantee dynastic rule.Footnote 31 The social nature of intervention practice as a rule-bound phenomenon is evident in the contrast Little draws between the relevance of the non-intervention rule to the American Civil War in which key actors shared a broadly common frame of normative reference and the malaise that beset British policy operating in these terms when faced with the radically different political-ideological forces contesting the Spanish Civil War.
At the fringes of Europe practices of intervention had long been undertaken to prevent, halt, or punish massacres or atrocities of co-religionists, particularly in relation to the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 32 Beyond Europe, in relation to that group of states that were themselves sovereign and members of the (European defined) ‘family of civilised nations’, intervention tended to be geared towards the recognition of European primacy and where necessary the forcible expansion of the world economy albeit often through influencing the choice of elites and type of order that would emerge from local contests of power.Footnote 33 In relation to those communities that were both non-European and outside the family of civilised nations, and thereby not regarded as subjects of contemporary international law, the category of intervention was less relevant insofar as control was exercised through a more permissive, extensive, and discretionary series of practices ranging from formal colonisation through to mandates and trusteeships.Footnote 34 One reason why this is particularly significant for the present age is that these more intrusive and longer-term practices were able to take up the ‘heavy lifting’ of imperial reordering that was beyond the scope of a discrete intervention.
Gallagher and Robinson's argument that formal and informal empire in the nineteenth century were essentially interconnected and often interchangeable helps to elucidate the point. Imperialism was informal where possible and formal where necessary (circumstances permitting). Intervention as a discrete act belonged primarily within the informal strand of empire and tended to be used to enhance political security in a prospective market area, serving as part of the coercive socialisation of a local elite who would in turn oversee the development of political structures that would diminish the requirement for further intervention.Footnote 35 However, should intervention fail, the imperial Power may well resort to more extensive measures as when Britain, faced with a lack of sustained Chinese cooperation following the First Opium War, returned to impose more formal structures of regulation over key Chinese ports. Likewise, Britain's formal annexation of Lagos in 1861 followed the failure of three earlier interventions to prevent African Christians being enslaved and despatched across the Atlantic.Footnote 36
The work of positivist international lawyers from the late nineteenth century is valuable as an indication of the way the practice of intervention was understood in this formally bifurcated order. Firstly, it was distinct from ‘war’. Writing the history of intervention in 1922 Winfield stressed the point that within Europe intervention emerged as a category of practice distinct from ‘war’, and that it was associated with a bounded set of ‘rights’. Whereas ‘the causes of war are practically infinite and beyond the scope of international law’:
the causes which confer upon one state the right of intervening in another are regarded as clearly definable by nearly every modern jurist, though little agreement exists as to what precisely those causes are. Yet they are regarded as comparatively few in number, certainly not identical with the causes of war.Footnote 37
That the non-intervention ground rule was not absolute is also evident in Oppenheim's influential account:
Intervention is dictatorial interference by a State in the affairs of another State for the purpose of maintaining or altering the actual condition of things … That intervention is, as a rule, forbidden by International Law, which protects the international personality of the States, there is no doubt. On the other hand, there is just as little doubt that this rule has exceptions, for there are interventions which take place by right, and there are others which, although they do not take place by right, are nevertheless permitted by the Law of Nations.Footnote 38
Those interventions that ‘do not take place’ by right but are permitted by international law tend to arise from the role played by the Great Powers in the maintenance of international order: either in self-defence or for the maintenance of the balance of power. Self-defence aside, however, such permissions withered with the formal institutional and legal development of international society marked by the shift of authority for international security and system-maintenance to more centralised, multilateral forums with the creation of the League of Nations and particularly the United Nations after 1945.
Secondly, the categories through which the areas or types of intervention are identified in Winfield's work and the reach in international law of intervention rights in Oppenheim's discussion illustrates the gradations within the intervention regime that correspond to the imperial character of the international system in this period. ‘External’ intervention was undertaken when, for example, a state held a protectorate over another state or to settle a dispute between states in treaty rights over a third state.Footnote 39 ‘Internal’ intervention, ‘the first and by far the most frequent of these [areas] is that of interference by one state between disputant sections of the community in another state, the matter of dispute being usually … some constitutional change’Footnote 40 and referred to the intra-European practice of intervention as discussed above. But the third type, ‘punitive’ intervention,Footnote 41 is clearly directed towards imperial reordering. The examples Winfield offers shows such actions to be associated with the tensions arising from the economic, social, and cultural expansion of the modern world whilst also clearly shaped by the hierarchies of the Powers and of civilisation. He cites European ‘interventions’ against the Argentine confederation, Mexico, Greece, Portugal, and Korea. Korea aside, these states all enjoyed recognition as sovereign members of the ‘family of nations’, which in turn entailed recognition of their ‘equality, dignity, independence, and territorial and personal supremacy’. At the same time, however, violations of the ‘Personality’ of states during time of peace ‘are excused as are committed in self-preservation or through justified intervention’.Footnote 42
Such intervention ‘rights’ provided the legal language and infrastructure for the expansion and consolidation of the hierarchical and Eurocentric global system into other (at least nominally) sovereign domains in the face of the rapid expansion of global social relations in the nineteenth century. Rights served not only to protect property and investment but to codify the cultural predominance of Europeans within the emerging global system through, for example, the right to intervene for the protection of the ‘honour’ of European citizens and the principle of extra-territoriality.Footnote 43 At the same time, those actors such as the Latin American states that were juridically sovereign but economically peripheral in the hierarchy of production and finance did seem to find some limited protection against intervention under international law, if only in the breach. Thus, in the early twentieth century, the Argentine Foreign Minister Luis Drago argued that the use of force by creditors to collect sovereign debts ‘put the weak at the mercy of the strong and made states like those in Latin America no better than colonies’.Footnote 44 In Africa and Asia, however, beyond this intermediate zone, membership of the ‘family of nations’ and the rights that went with it were tightly restricted and if granted at all then selectively so, such that their discretionary treatment by Europeans was rationalised, ‘especially with regard to war’.Footnote 45
Following decolonisation, the political architecture of the international system changed once again, to a universal system insofar as it was grounded in the universal principle of state sovereigntyFootnote 46 and which in turn brought with it fresh implications for the practice of intervention. During the Cold War, the cultural rationale for intervention diminished in the sense that the superpowers chose not to interfere in the domestic political affairs of their respective allies on, for example, civilisational or humanitarian grounds. Instead, however, whilst the geographical scope of interventions were delimited by the existence of tacit spheres of influence, both the ‘United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics’, with each regarding themselves as representing the vanguard of modernity.Footnote 47
Lee Jones in this Special Issue analyses practices of intervention as manifest in the consolidation of the postcolonial state in Cold War Southeast Asia and shows how specific sovereignty and intervention regimes drove projects of ordering and reordering both within states and across regions. Both sovereignty/non-intervention and intervention were deployed by state elites to control the participants and scope of political contests which in the case of Southeast Asia was the entrenchment and defence of a capitalist social order against a range of transnational ethnic and ideological forces. In revolutionary times in particular, in which the tide of transnational forces runs high, a key aim of intervention may in fact be domestic political stability rather than transformation elsewhere. Indeed, as Jones shows this counter-revolutionary aspect of intervention is of longstanding, reaching back for example to the practice of the Holy Alliance in the early nineteenth century and into the present with Saudi intervention in Bahrain during the ‘Arab Spring’.
Yet the resurgence of military intervention since the end of the Cold War directed to reordering the global South has served to expose the limits of the practice in the present age and can be illustrated through a comparison with the practice of intervention in the bifurcated system of the nineteenth century. As noted above, when intervention in the nineteenth century proved inadequate or insufficient to achieve the intervener's aims, the imperial Powers had at their disposal a wider and more intensive set of coercive reordering practices including formal colonisation. In this regard, ‘intervention’ when situated on a spectrum of imperial practices, could even in the heyday of empire arguably be regarded as ‘empire lite’.Footnote 48 Yet, as is widely acknowledged, interveners in the present age have very little by way of such extra directly coercive imperial capacity. The upshot of this is that in the absence of such extra imperial measures the weight of expectation upon ‘intervention’ as a reordering mechanism is historically unprecedented. It was of limited utility even during the nineteenth-century ‘age of empire’; little wonder it struggles today.
One manifestation of this is the difficulty interveners face in establishing an effective and appropriate mechanism through which to translate whatever military success they might have into political objectives. During the nineteenth century, as discussed by MacMillan later in the Special Issue, successful interventions were able to shape the will of key elite groups within the intervened or target state. Whilst rational cost-benefit calculations on the part of elites in the intervened state could well establish some working utility for intervention, the practice was most effective when the elites, as in the South American cases, shared at some level the wider values, affiliations or aspirations of the intervening party. When this was not the case, as in Qing dynasty China, or indeed when states lacked the capacity to institute change as in Brazil for much of the period of Britain's slave trade abolition campaign, intervention proved a much less effective instrument of policy. In the present age and for reasons including the primacy of local politics and the power of local agency; the limited ‘soft power’ appeal of the intervening states and their limited willingness to maintain an indefinite presence; and the rise of cultural, economic, and political pluralism at the global level as the old hierarchies of Power are in flux, the mechanisms through which military success translates into political objectives are no longer obvious.
Of the post-Cold War period, Susan Woodward discusses the seminal case of the Balkan interventions of the 1990s and Toby Dodge those of Iraq and Afghanistan. Woodward historicises the specific experience of the 1990s in terms of the pull arising from disorder and the solicitations of local actors on the ‘turbulent frontier’ that marks the fringes of empire, historic, or otherwise. Yet for all the appearance of being a novel problem, the response of the Great Powers in the 1990s was markedly similar to that of the Powers in earlier periods of turbulence in this region and was underpinned by the fact that the Balkans have been a region of limited strategic significance. But in a telling account, whilst the intervening Powers may have been unenthusiastic about becoming involved in the crises, a major factor in the emergence of these crises has been the underlying socioeconomic relationship between local actors and the regional Powers. Thus, a recurring feature of these crises is that it has been the economic relations established between the Powers and the Balkan states that ‘best explain the causes of the disorder and turbulence that they intervened to staunch’. This argument, that the disjunctures of modernity foster crises that lead to intervention, the effects of which are often to sow the seeds of the next intervention, adds an important sense of historical perspective to debates upon what intervention can and cannot achieve.
In the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, Dodge highlights the point that despite their initial preferences for a swift intervention and exit, the intervening Powers were unavoidably drawn into much more extensive and expensive (liberal) peacebuilding and statebuilding missions. The tensions and contradictions within these projects have, however, led to resources being concentrated into the coercive capacities of what have become despotic states unable to sustain with credibility even the ‘low-intensity democracy’ favoured by neoliberal elitesFootnote 49 and which comprised an important element in the public justification of military action. The pervasiveness of the liberal statebuilding model and the specific ways in which it is designed to reorder the social space of states is however, theoretically interesting for what it might suggest about a further shift in the configuration of political authority in the international system – the changing terms of sovereignty and associated rights and capacities – and the development of a nascent new model of international order in the form of governance.
This is most obvious in the field of development and statebuilding interventions but is also evident more widely and in keeping with Arrighi's notion above of an evolutionary modern world system. Hameiri draws out the transformative nature of statebuilding interventions evident in the transnationalisation of certain, selective institutions of the state through the routinised involvement of international agencies and non-governmental organisations such as to achieve certain outcomes, whilst leaving the territorial integrity and formal sovereignty of such actors intact.Footnote 50 Mark Duffield situates this development in terms of a ‘biopolitical turn’ in intervention practice since the end of the Cold War such that whilst respect for the territorial integrity of states remains, ‘sovereignty over life within ineffective states has become internationalized, negotiable and contingent’.Footnote 51
Whilst these may be regarded as novel forms of intervention, arguably they are better understood as a cognate practice due both to their origins and for the fact that they mark a subtle shift in the wider sovereignty regime. The roots of such changing practice in ‘development’ thinking is significant here for the way in which, as David Williams shows in this Issue, ‘development’ emerged ‘as an alternative to both colonialism and formal intervention’ at a time when the legitimacy of colonial rule was in decline. Williams teases out both the overlaps and differences between intervention and contemporary development practice and shows how each has become increasingly enmeshed in practices of ‘governance’.Footnote 52 The notion of governance valuably highlights the disarticulation of social space from territory and its rearticulation within multilevel transnational networks of power and authority such as to transform the state, whilst maintaining the formal sovereignty of the state and its elites. For Hameiri, such governance is clearly hierarchical and is indicative of an increasingly authoritarian liberal global order,Footnote 53 but its selective, function-specific nature and the range of different actors involved cannot also but invoke comparison with the model of heteronomy which characterised the early modern international order and with which this section began. Whilst a conservative interpretation might argue that ‘intervention’ stands to ‘governance’ in the present as ‘informal’ stood to ‘formal’ empire in the nineteenth century, a more ambitious interpretation would see in this trend a greater fundamental development as the sovereignty principle is superseded by more complex models of transnational political authority and organisation. Whilst this is most obvious in the weaker states of the world, it is in fact not confined to them as all states become increasingly enmeshed in thick networks of international organisation in interdependence and as such the trend should not be regarded simply as the re-emergence of a bifurcated international system.Footnote 54
The discussion in this section has traced changes in the practice of intervention in accordance with wider changes in the structure or political architecture of the international system evident in changes in the system's ordering principle from heteronomy, bifurcation, universality, and arguably in the present age, governance. Specifically, the discussion has sought to point out how the association of certain bundles of rights with territorial space has changed over time and varied across space in relation to the three hierarchies of the Powers, the world economy, and culture identified in the first section. That the study of intervention has long been in the shadow of non-intervention has served to mask a fundamental difference between the two, which is that whilst non-intervention has been the norm within the core of the modern international system, intervention has long been permissive in relations between core and periphery. Since the end of the Cold War, the practice has been undertaken by a sufficiently unified core which has frequently demonstrated its will to use force to reorder the periphery, whether in the fight against militant Islam, the transformation of fragile states, or in the name of populations that are suffering at the hands of repressive postcolonial states and/or as a consequence of the destabilising effects of globalisation. In this vein, to understand intervention in the modern world is to reckon with the dual frames of the modernity of Marx and Weber on the one hand and of colonial modernity on the other.
But if intervention is a historically contingent social practice, a discussion of the topic would not be complete without considering the question of whether the practice might itself go the way of major industrial war or of formal colonisation. As Keene traces the conditions that generated the modern doctrine of intervention within Europe and Williams engages the changes in sovereignty and intervention practice in the present age, perhaps it is possible to imagine the paths through which intervention too might wither as a social practice? At the most abstract level, however, some notion of intervention is bound to exist, for as Reus-Smit argues later in this Issue if intervention is understood as the transgression of historically specific lines of differentiation then it has a place in any social system. But, if one takes a narrower focus upon military intervention, specifically, then there are a number of factors that could suggest the path-dependencies through which intervention might wither as a social practice for the ordering and reordering of the modern world. Three inter-related dynamics stand out, namely the rise of rational-legal systems of authority and governance, the diminishing utility of force in the face of increasingly complex political problems, and the wider political implications of non-violent civil-resistance (as distinct from civil war) as a means of resisting authoritarian rule.
A significant factor in the demise of intervention for certain purposes historically has been the rise of rational-bureaucratic forms of power which are more appropriate for the complex tasks and collaborative nature of much international ordering activity, as understood in terms of Arrighi's account of the long-term evolutionary nature of the modern world system. Finnemore's analysis of the decline of intervention for purposes of collecting sovereign debt in the early twentieth century ascribes this to the rising influence of international lawyers in providing the discursive space for the contestation and delegitimation of intervention for this purpose.Footnote 55 In other areas, whilst it is difficult to measure specific impact, it is quite plausible that the thickening web of human rights law and the convergence of values over time by certain sets of states may well have lessened the extent of humans rights violations in certain areas and therein obviated the need for intervention on their behalf.Footnote 56 By the same token, as Williams points out below, ‘it is no coincidence that most cases of military intervention certainly in the post-Cold War era have been in those countries where development agencies have not had a substantial presence’.
A second factor is the limited utility and appropriateness of military force in contemporary interventions and the strategic difficulties of coordinating the military and political aspects of such operations. That this is an argument made by both military and humanitarian professionals makes it clear that the practice of intervention is under stress.Footnote 57 Whilst one response to this may be simply to adopt other forms of militarised action such as the use of ‘drones’, special forces, or increased support for local proxies, such tensions have also played out in efforts to develop the non-military aspects of intervention. In this regard, part of the rationale behind the Responsibility to Protect Report (2001) was to shift the balance between the military and non-military dimensions of intervention through an emphasis upon prevention and, through post-conflict stabilisation, the avoidance of a recurrence of mass human rights violations. The report may be regarded as firmly within an evolving liberal episteme on intervention and in this regard read in conjunction with the wider literature on liberal peacebuilding.Footnote 58 Yet the paradox is that as this liberal episteme provides a fuller understanding of the conditions and causes of conflict and in turn aims to tackle these problems at their root, the utility of force in the equation tends to diminish.
Accordingly, a more wholesale and radical approach to the demilitarisation of intervention would be a valuable first step in addressing the complexities and ambivalences of intervention in the present age. The danger of an external militarised response to civil conflict, for example, is that it fuels escalating syndromes of violence and intensifies and polarises the underlying political issues in contention. The alternative rests upon the conceptual affinity between non-violent political and diplomatic pressure and domestic practices of non-violent civil resistance. Non-violence presents a philosophical and political alternative to civil war and empirically non-violent resistance has in the last seventy years or so demonstrated its significance, initially as a means through which to resist colonial rule and foreign occupation and subsequently in the cause of civil rights and regime change in a diverse range of states.Footnote 59 Of course, civil resistance does not come with guarantees, but then neither does armed rebellion, civil war, or of course intervention.
In any case, the question of whether it is possible to credibly imagine the demise of military intervention is not simply of academic interest. For whatever humanitarian or progressive political ends military intervention might be intended to serve, it remains an exercise in lethal violence that can never be entirely discriminate. In what is likely to be a more pluralist but still highly interdependent age, a shift of emphasis from the ‘ends’ to the ‘means’ of intervention may make the greater contribution to bringing into being a world that is both more tolerant and civilised.
