Intervention in the 21st Century: Feasibility and Legitimacy
This column by I William Zartman is part of Global Policy’s e-book, ‘Lessons from Intervention in the 21st Century: Legality, Legitimacy and Feasibility', edited by David Held and Kyle McNally. Contributions from academics and practitioners will be serialised on Global Policy until the e-book’s release in the summer of 2014. Find out more here or join the debate on Twitter #GPintervention.
It has often been pointed out that the notion of intervention is highly encompassing, to the point where even non-intervention can be intervention, just as no policy can be a policy. On the other hand, the focus of the discussion is on Pillar 3 of the Right to Protect (R2P), a focus that does not devalue the first two pillars but concentrates on appropriate policy in the case where they fail. The concept of Pillar 3 is narrowed here to military intervention. Most narrowly, the term refers to “boots on the ground,” but it would also be relevant to consider any time of physical military involvement, including military aid, personnel, and advisors. This expanded notion will have to be kept in mind as the discussion relates to the cases such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Abkhazia, Libya, and the non-case of Syria.
To set the stage, this essay considers the framing concepts to be Feasibility and Legitimacy; Legality is merely one of the ingredients in Legitimacy. Others can be purpose, participants, and proportionality, to name the most important. Hence, the debate becomes one of ends and means, not one of some transcendental justification. As every lawyer and theologian knows, law and scripture are the basis of argument to prove a case, and almost any case has law and scripture of some strength to legitimize opposite positions on the issue.
That said, the remaining two justifications are of unequal status—as the debate over ends vs means reflects. Although common wisdom holds that the end does not justify the means, it is obvious that it does. Killing, for example, is unjustified as a pastime but is justified for self- and national defense. Means certainly do not justify ends; that would mean that might makes right, which common wisdom also decries. Yet, as Lippman, pointed out long ago, a state’s ends and means in foreign policy always end up in balance, even if there may be a bit of a lag time. Even earlier than that, the Melians asserted that “the question of justice arises only between parties of equal strength, and that the strong do what they can and the weak what they must,” a cardinal axiom of the Realists. But for the rest, the debate over Legitimacy continues.
Feasibility
An appropriate opening is, first, to begin consideration of Feasibility with the ICISS Report on the Responsibility to Protect. The Report lays out a number of operational principles for military intervention, which can be summarized as the two sides of proportionality. On one hand, the military means should be proportional to the ill to be overcome, in other words a kind of demand-side proportionality. On the other hand, intervention is to be proportional to the challenge, with reasonable prospects of overcoming it through sufficient but not oversufficient means, in other words not overkill, a kind of supply side proportionality. This is to provide a limit to the Powell Doctrine that requires means sufficient to crush the enemy, the corrective to the Vietnam Experience of gradual entrapment. Force should also be used as the last resort, the ultima ratio regis as the old cannons used to say.
These criteria bring out the fact that feasibility is clearly a function of purpose, the end for the means. The ends can be grouped into two: either elimination of the ill or creation of a stalemate which would bring about some conciliatory negotiations. Sufficiency of means depends on what they are expected to accomplish, specifically whether the cause of the ill is negotiable or not Anticipating the discussion on legitimacy, it can be assumed that the nature of the goal is protection or prevention, the right intentions cited by ICISS. The question then becomes, How much force does it take to protect or prevent damage to the endangered population? Would it have been possible in the cases cited to have achieved either goal without military intervention? An important consideration is Hippocrates’ injunction, “Do good, or at least, do no harm,” which should emended, for the interventionist, to “Do no net harm.” Of course intervention will do harm, and, beyond Hippocrates, the matter of collateral damage is a serious consideration. But the relevant measure is proportionality.
It is not the purpose nor is there the space here to enter into an exegesis of the six relevant cases. But it is relevant to ask whether a negotiation-friendly stalemate was present or possible in any of the cases and whether the authoritarian rulers in any case would have been amenable to protective or preventive negotiations. Suffice it to say that serious attempts at such negotiations were made in all six instances, without results. The intervention brought a new order into the five areas where it was practiced, although the new order compares badly with the old in Abkhazia, Iraq and Afghanistan; Kosovo seems well on track and Libya is still a work in progress. There is no order in Syria.
Legitimacy
The criteria for legitimacy are even more difficult to establish, let alone to fulfill. It has been suggested that they include participants and purpose. The first represents an important, if imprecise, element of progress in the current norms of international politics. To begin again with ICISS, the need for intervention to be collective in order to be legitimate is clearly stated; no more unilateral interventions, Abkhazia notwithstanding (French interventions in central Africa were condoned by the international community). Collective action is limited to the UN Security Council or, if not available, to UN General Assembly Uniting for Peace action or action by regional organizations; ICISS sidesteps coalition of the willing, although it mentions and deplores “other means to meet the gravity and urgency of the situation,” which soften the clear statement. Assuming the last provision does cover the willing, five of the six cases would be covered but not Abkhazia.
There is more of course to legitimacy than participants. The most important for R2P and indeed humanitarian intervention is the magnitude of the ill, large scale loss of life or ethnic cleansing. Since the purpose is protective and preventive, it is future oriented and therefore a judgment call. It is not punitive, except to the extent that punition may be effective prevention. In this Legitimacy joins the discussion on Feasibility. An intervention is forced by its own logic to proceed and escalate if necessary to the end, lest it prove itself illegitimate, the ultimate but not necessarily the initial undoing of Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, most confusingly and uncertainly for policymakers, the legitimacy of the initial intervention is dependent on its outcome. Hence it is conclusionary, the validity of which is established only by subsequent events, i e whether it worked.
The other side of the justification of legitimacy is the illegitimacy of the opponent, a curious twist that at best goes back to the large scale loss of life and ethnic cleansing. Again the criterion has two parts. Illegitimacy, like legitimacy but with a different basis, is of course a judgment call: is the situation or the ruler bad enough in these terms to warrant intervention? But also, is intervention an appropriate and assured way of removing the illegitimacy? More specifically, is the illegitimacy the result of a complex situation or attributable to an egregious ruler? In the case of Abkhazia, Afghanistan and Kosovo, the agent was diffuse or collective; in the case of Iraq, Libya and Syria, it is identifiable and personal. In the first group of cases, the situation was variously judged as corrected in Abkhazia and Kosovo, but not in Afghanistan a decade later. In the second group of states, the egregious ruler was or is to be removed, but even in the case of an identifiable agent, the situation is relevant: back again to Feasibility, will intervention, as the introduction of foreign forces, worsen or handle the situation? There are no a priori answers to these questions, just a priori questions awaiting judgment calls.
And what about the proposed third criterion of legality? The Syrian government maintains that Russians arms sales to it are legal as bilateral defense assistance whereas Western and Arab arms deliveries to the rebels is illegal and illegitimate interference in internal affairs. So much for the criterion of legality; there is enough uncertainty to handle with legitimacy and feasibility.
Ira William Zartman is Professor Emeritus at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.
