Humanitarian intervention is merely a pretext for states national interests

Résumé du document

After the Second World War in 1945, the notion of ‘crime against humanity' emerged to condemn the killing of the Jews by the Nazis. In reaction to this shock, several countries stood in favour of conveying a new way of thinking about international relations, and tried to set up a new kind of intervention. This concept is commonly called humanitarian intervention, and is associated with the normative theory. If an intervention has been traditionally defined as a breach in the sovereignty a state which interferes in this state's internal affairs , the humanitarian intervention claims to reach a different goal. It aims at preventing any potential mass killing and genocide in the future, at helping people and at guaranteeing the respect of the Human Rights. However, there is actually no exact definition, as it remains a controversial theme. There are various types of humanitarian interventions, which can be classified such as the forcible ones, the non-forcible ones, the long-term ones or the short-terms ones.

Extraits

[...] Is it preferable to let an unjust situation going on rather than worsen it by intervening and create a chaos? Indeed, in many cases, and especially in the Middle East, humanitarian interventions brought more troubles than there were before. The non-interventionist doctrine asserts that –forcible- interventions, even leaded by humanitarian purposes, would undermine the international order, and generate negative consequences as material destruction or innocent deaths. Last, I should point out a particular way of intervention, the one from the non-governmental organizations, usually called under the acronym NGOs. [...]

[...] Regarding to the normative theory, the humanitarian intervention concept is based on new sets of norms and on a moral criteria. Indeed, the post-war era is a key period in the international relations framework. The millions of deaths the war caused, the experience of the Nazi ‘Final Solution' and the big threat of nuclear weapons had succeeded in convincing the world community that they had to act and to think differently to preserve future generations. From then on, many thinkers put forward the concept of normative theory: this new interpretation of international relations is at the root of the humanitarian intervention justification. [...]

[...] Thus, the states seem to base their intervention on their own interests. Let us study the example of the conflict in Bosnia in the early 1990s and the one in Kosovo in 1999. The conflict in former Yugoslavia started in 1988, when the Serb President Slobodan Milosevic wished to unify the Serb community within a big Serbia. The fact is that here, as Allan little explained[11], European countries considered it as natural to see Balkan countries fighting each other for independence, then they thought there was no need to be opposed to such a situation since it has always been like that. [...]

[...] The second argument often claimed by the humanitarian intervention opponents is the incoherence in the actions. For Morris, the fact that the US condemned in different ways the Vietnam intervention in Cambodia in 1979, the one of Tanzania in Uganda, and the one of India in East Pakistan makes him think that states do not act on humanitarian criteria, but rather on strategic ones. As for him, there is too little place for humanitarian considerations in states' policies. Then, Noam Chomsky pointed out an important issue: the problem of selectivity. [...]

[...] Thus, NGOs can represent an alternative to states' intervention, even if they are now strongly linked with the UN. Indeed, they aims at helping and providing food, clothes, medical care or psychological support to suffering populations, regardless of any distinction of race, religion or political consideration. They are most of the times non-lucrative; therefore they do not seek to make profits. Moreover, most of the people working in this kind of organization are volunteers. That is why we should say that their action is partly devoid of interest. [...]