The new politics of intervention.
| Author | Chalmers, Malcolm |
| Position | Features - Essay |
While the role of Britain's armed forces in territorial self-defence has diminished since the end of the Cold War, the political appetite for intervention has grown. All Britain's major political parties have embraced the case for a 'Responsibility to Protect', the doctrine that countries have a moral responsibility to intervene, where they can, to halt massive abuses of human rights. As one of the world's leading democratic powers, it is argued, the UK has a particular responsibility to do so.
The humanitarian argument for military intervention is not new. Yet, during the Cold War, fear that local conflicts could escalate into Great Power confrontation--together with the sensitivities of developing countries just emerging from colonialism--supported a strong norm of non-intervention. The major powers united to condemn the overthrow of Idi Amin in Uganda (by Tanzania) and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (by Vietnam), despite their strong humanitarian rationales.
The aftermath of the 1991 war to expel Iraq from Kuwait marked a partial turning point. While they rejected the option of full-blooded regime change, and stood by as Saddam brutally re-imposed his authority in Shi'a-dominated southern Iraq, the US, UK and France used air power to back the creation of a Kurdish 'safe haven'. A few months later, President Bush senior dispatched US troops to Somalia in an effort to stem the catastrophe unfolding there.
This interventionist trend was reversed under President Clinton, determined to assert the primacy of US domestic and economic concerns and instinctively more sceptical of the utility of military force. While the Kurdish safe haven remained in place, US troops were rapidly withdrawn from Somalia. Neither the US nor the UK were willing to support action to halt the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The UK and France (although not the US) deployed significant forces to Croatia and Bosnia during 1992-95 as part of a UN peacekeeping mission, but their limited remit prevented them from ending Europe's most damaging conflict since 1945, which went on to claim 200,000 lives and led to three million refugees fleeing to Western Europe. It was only in 1995, after years of atrocities, that the US stepped in to broker the Dayton accord, backed up by the threat of military action.
A revolution in foreign affairs?
Moral revulsion at these events had a profound political effect, and helped ensure that the new UK government that took office in 1997 embraced a more interventionist approach. As the Kosovo crisis deepened in late 1998 and 1999, President Clinton remained reluctant to take action that would risk the lives of US service personnel. But Prime Minister Blair pushed for a robust approach to the threat of another Serb campaign of ethnic atrocities, urged that a threat to use US ground forces had to be made, and pledged a large part of the British Army to support such an effort. At the height of the crisis, and in a direct public challenge to US caution, he used his speech to the Economic Club of Chicago to argue for a new 'doctrine of the international community', directly challenging existing norms of non-intervention.
Whether it was this threat that produced success, or pressure from Russia on Belgrade to accept a settlement, the result was widely seen as a vindication of humanitarian intervention. Within weeks, an international peacekeeping force was in place under a UN mandate, and Kosovo's refugee population was returning home.
Fuelled by the success of Kosovo, Blair went on to sanction the use of British troops in Sierra Leone, helping to turn the corner in the fight against rebel forces, and subsequently committing substantial resources to train local security forces. After years of neglect, the Sierra Leone intervention was widely believed to demonstrate that a relatively small and timely military commitment can have a transformative effect on the prospects for peace in fragile developing states.
Strong support for military intervention in Kosovo and Sierra Leone helped to consolidate the government's reputation as being 'strong on defence', even as it continued (like the Major government before it) to give the armed forces a low priority in budget allocations. It thus helped to protect the government from the renewal of past Conservative charges that it could not be trusted on defence. At the same time, the emphasis on human security as a rationale for military action garnered widespread support from constituencies that had been more sceptical of intervention in the past. The government's decision to establish the Department for International Development, and to commit itself to sharp increases in aid, gave further credibility to the view that development and security commitments were mutually reinforcing rather than competing objectives.
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