In order to describe the ‘political will’ of states to engage in humanitarian intervention (HI), Thomas Weiss has used the metaphor of the ‘roller coaster’ (Weiss, Reference Weiss2004: 146). Despite an unclear legal basis (Simma, Reference Simma1999), in 1999, NATO leaders believed that it was necessary to undertake a humanitarian operation in Kosovo, even in the absence of a formal authorisation by the Security Council. Things started to change after the decision of the USA) and the UK to invade Iraq in 2003, and whose questionable justification contributed to giving HI a bad name. On that occasion, Prime Minister Tony Blair did not hesitate to use humanitarian arguments, by, for example by making Saddam Hussein responsible for the massive violations of human rights against the Iraqi people.Footnote 1 Even though the humanitarian argument was not the only one used, the perceived failure in Iraq affected subsequent debates on the utility of using force, with Western societies becoming more distrustful about this possibility (Hehir, Reference Hehir2010, Reference Hehir2011).
The UK is an example of this shift. First, in 1999, a comfortable bipartisan majority of the Parliament agreed that the Kosovo operation, although not fully legal, was legitimised by the necessity ‘to avert a humanitarian catastrophe’.Footnote 2 Then, in 2003, a similar majority voted in favour of the intervention against Iraq, with opposition limited to the Liberal Democrats and a minority of the Labour Party.Footnote 3 Later, in 2011 the Parliament overwhelmingly voted in favour of the intervention against Libya.Footnote 4 Nevertheless, in 2013 the Parliament refused to back a strike against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and, in 2014–2015, accepted to support the air campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), mostly due to its limited scope and nature. By drawing on the literature on the influence of historical analogies on foreign policy-making (Khong, Reference Khong1992; Kaarbo and Kenealy, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2015), this paper explores the 2011–2015 British debate on the Syrian crisis, and explains the decreasing will of the Members of Parliament (MPs) to support the use of force for humanitarian reasons. A majority of MPs rejected intervention, by recalling the experience of previous interventions in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011, as negative historical analogies that should limit the use of British force.
The paper analyses how domestic actors, namely the Government and the political parties represented in the House of Commons, debated the existence of a legal right to HI and engaged in several discursive strategies with the goal of influencing the decision to use force against Assad's regime. The main perception of a majority of MPs was that previous governments from different ideological affiliations substantially failed to conduct successful interventions, especially in Iraq and Libya. This perception favoured the development of an ‘intersubjective understanding’ (Dunne, Reference Dunne1998: 181–192) that reflects a weak domestic consensus about HI. The paper explains how the historical analogies of operations Iraqi Freedom and Unified Protector shaped the perceptions of MPs and pushed them to encumber HI, by putting serious limitations to its implementation. With some exceptions, the majority of the Conservative and Labour parties still viewed the use of force for humanitarian reasons as a legitimate option. What has changed is their reduced confidence that these operations can be effective and benefit the UK's interests. A bipartisan majority subjected the possibility of supporting intervention to the Government's capacity to satisfactorily solve three policy dilemmas related to: the legality of the intervention, the evidence of its necessity and its strategic dimension.
This paper further analyses the debate as a case of domestic ‘horizontal contestation’ (Gaskarth, Reference Gaskarth, Cantir and Kaarbo2016: 107–108) between the Government and MPs about the role that the UK should have in the Syrian crisis. This contributes to the literature on domestic role contestation (Harnisch et al., Reference Harnisch, Frank and Maull2011; Cantir and Kaarbo, Reference Cantir and Kaarbo2012) by explaining the unprecedented decision by the Parliament to curb the authority of the Government as an example of contested understanding of past humanitarian operations. This corroborates recent findings about the influence of ‘historical analogical reasoning’ on the capacity of parliaments to shape foreign policy-making (Kaarbo and Kenealy, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2017), by explaining how, during the Syrian crisis, the Parliament resorted to several analogies with past interventions, which successfully limited the Government's authority to use force for humanitarian reasons. Finally, given the frequent participation of the UK in many post-Cold War military interventions, it is important to study the decreasing will of its Parliament to back these operations because of the consequences that this could have for the global effort to end atrocities.
1. Domestic actors, roles and historical analogies
Structural approaches have traditionally disregarded the influence of domestic factors in international politics, especially because of their limited capacity to conceptualise state interests and identities as constructions that are not fixed but subjected to transformation. Both neo-realism and systemic constructivism have been criticised for ignoring that actors can react differently to similar international norms or ideas and this is often a ‘function of domestic structures’ (Checkel, Reference Checkel1997: 477). For example, for Christian Cantir and Juliet Kaarbo ‘conventional international relations… (e.g. varieties of realism and Wendtian constructivism)…offer little theoretical insight into the importance of state agency’ (2016: 3). Roles are defined as ‘social positions…that are constituted by…expectations regarding the purpose of an actor in an organised group’ (Holsti, Reference Holsti1970; Harnisch et al., Reference Harnisch, Frank and Maull2011: 8). By relying on this concept, Cantir and Kaarbo have observed that ‘states frequently articulate, argue about, and legitimise actions based on what they believe to be their proper place in the realm of international relations’ (2016: 1).
Contrary to the assumptions of unitary approaches, roles are not fixed but can change depending on who is in power and on the political context. Domestic actors often engage in an argumentative competition with the goal of imposing a certain view of how their state should operate at the international level (Gaskarth, Reference Gaskarth2014: 561). Thus, the roles that a state can assume in its foreign policy-making are subject to ideological and policy disagreement. Foreign policy can be contested both horizontally – among the elites – and vertically – among the elite and the public (Cantir and Kaarbo, Reference Cantir and Kaarbo2012). In this paper, I focus on a case of horizontal contestation through the study of the argumentative strategies that executive leaders and parliamentary representatives employed to define the UK's position during the Syrian crisis.
The necessity to operationalise the process of role contestation and measure the consensus among domestic actors motivates the decision to focus on executive leaders and political parties. Parliaments ‘allow for the representation of a wide range of viewpoints and thus may be a forum for discourse on and contestation of national role conceptions’ (Cantir and Kaarbo, Reference Cantir and Kaarbo2016: 12). Several scholars have shown how parliaments in Western democracies are increasingly more able to exert control over foreign policy (Kesgin and Kaarbo, Reference Kesgin and Kaarbo2010; Raunio and Wagner, Reference Raunio and Wagner2017). Among the domestic factors that can favour parliamentary influence over foreign policy-making, they have identified ‘coalition governments’ (Hagan et al., Reference Hagan, Everts, Fukui and Stempel2001), ‘intra-party factionalism’ (Hazan, Reference Hazan2000), public opinion (Reiter and Tillman, Reference Reiter and Tillman2002) or partisan politics (Wagner et al., Reference Wagner, Herranz-Surralles, Kaarbo and Ostermann2018). These studies concluded that legislative assemblies can at times have the power to influence foreign policy-making, which contributed to challenging the conventional wisdom that assumes that foreign policy is insulated from parliamentary control, especially in the British political system (Heffernan, Reference Heffernan2005). Nevertheless, this does not mean that there would be an ineluctable tendency towards the parliamentarisation of foreign policy. These scholars maintain that parliamentary control is a dynamic process subject to contestation (Mello, Reference Mello2017). This paper investigates the Syrian debate in the UK as an example of contestation between the Government and the Parliament over the possibility of using force against Assad.
The main reason that explains the successful action of the Parliament is the influence of a set of historical analogies that shaped the process of domestic contestation in a way that gave leeway to the Parliament. The study of historical analogies on foreign policy-making has a long tradition (May, Reference May1973; Neustadt and May, Reference Neustadt and May1986). Drawing from studies of ‘social psychology’, Yuen Foong Khong defined analogies as ‘cognitive devices that “help” policy-makers perform’ several tasks, such as defining the problem, assessing the stakes, and evaluating alternative policy choices (1992: 10). Analogies act as ‘short cuts’ which allow human beings to ‘process information more cheaply and expeditiously than would otherwise be possible’ (Houghton, Reference Houghton1996: 524). In his seminal study on perceptions, Robert Jervis found that decision-makers tend to ‘avoid policies that have failed in the immediate past’ (Jervis, Reference Jervis1976: 275). Scholars who have recently analysed the influence of legislative assemblies on war powers have similarly found that the level of legislative control over the executive can be related to ‘the experience of lost wars’, especially in cases of ‘high number of casualties’ (Peters and Wagner, Reference Peters and Wagner2014: 321).
This paper situates the British debate about the Syrian crisis in the context of the emerging literature about the influence of historical analogies on the capacity of parliaments to shape foreign policy (Kaarbo and Kenealy, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2015, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2017). Some studies have explored the impact of the memory of the Srebrenica massacre on the capacity of the Dutch Parliament to influence decisions on the use of peacekeepers (Hoekema, Reference Hoekema, Born and Hanggi2004) or on the deployment of troops in Afghanistan (Saideman and Auerswald, Reference Saideman and Auerswald2012). The history of a country and its previous foreign policy experiences ‘can shape today's national role conceptions’ (Harnisch et al., Reference Harnisch, Frank and Maull2011: 29). The British debate on the Syrian crisis can be studied as an example of how analogies with past historical events can modify the balance of power between executive and legislative actors during debates about the use of force for humanitarian reasons.
The decision to study the influence of historical analogies on a process of horizontal contestation limits the possibility of including public opinion or civil society movements in the analysis. There are some polls available on the mood of the British public during the Syrian crisis.Footnote 5 Moreover, there are studies that have located the reasons for MPs' scepticism about the use of force in a progressive disenchantment of public opinion with military intervention (Reifler et al., Reference Reifler, Clarke, Scotto, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley2014). Nevertheless, Kaarbo and Kenealy have also warned about the difficulty to establish causal relationships between the public opinion's mood and decision-making about warfare. For these reasons, they conclude that horizontal contestation, which means between and within the main parties and the Government, is the main process to be analysed (Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2014).
Finally, the paper focuses on a debate about HI, which is usually defined as ‘the threat or use of force across state borders…aimed at preventing or ending widespread and grave violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals other than its own citizens, without the permission of the state within whose territory force is applied’ (Holzgrefe, Reference Holzgrefe, Holzgrefe and Keohane2003: 18). As an emerging norm (Ambos, Reference Ambos1999; Glennon, Reference Glennon1999), HI was highly contested and, for this reason, there was an attempt to substitute it with a less controversial concept – Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – which assigns to states the main responsibility for the protection of human rights. The World Summit Outcome, through which the UN General Assembly adopted R2P in 2005, had the merit to move the focus of the debate from the use of military force to prevention, and to require states to always act through the Security Council (Bellamy, Reference Bellamy2006). Nevertheless, R2P is still highly contested, with many governments doubting its legal status. This was, for example, the position of the British Government which, during the Syrian debate, argued that, ‘if action in the Security Council is blocked, the UK would still be permitted under international law to take exceptional measures in order to alleviate the scale of the overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe’. Both executive and legislative actors based their arguments about the possibility of intervening in Syria in terms of HI, and not R2P, which they mostly considered a political doctrine with no legal status.Footnote 6 For this reason, this paper focuses on the former.
2. UK foreign policy and the Syrian crisis
According to a part of the literature, state attitudes towards HI usually have a partisan nature, meaning that they can vary as the result of changes in the government (Rathbun, Reference Rathbun2004). This explanation identifies an important factor of change in the position of a country towards these norms. In a similar way, during the Syrian crisis, MPs divided along party lines (Strong, Reference Strong2015).
Nevertheless, the debate shows that there were other factors behind the sceptical position of the Parliament that partisanship cannot directly explain. The Coalition Government faced a domestic milieu in which MPs from different parties shared the view that using military power to enforce HI should be a limited enterprise, subject to strict criteria. During previous debates, such as Kosovo in 1999, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011, comfortable bipartisan majorities usually supported, at least initially, the governments' decisions to use force. Nevertheless, the traumatic memories of the post-conflict situations in Iraq and in Libya contributed to diffusing among MPs a negative image of these types of operations. Historical analogies can act as ‘mechanisms by which critical junctures…translate experience (such as military loss and other foreign policy failures) into procedural change’ (Kaarbo and Kenealy, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2017: 75). The Iraqi and Libyan analogies entered the domestic debate on Syria and created divisions about how to interpret the UK's military interventions. These divisions took place not only between but also within parties.
In May 2010, David Cameron became Prime Minister thanks to a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. While still in the opposition, Cameron had already tried to mark a difference with New Labour, by criticising its attempt to impose democracy through regime change.Footnote 7 The main consequence of this approach was a moderate stance on the use of force. The Strategic Defence Review emphasised the necessity to deploy troops only ‘where we have a clear strategic aim…a viable exit strategy and where justifiable under international law’.Footnote 8 The National Security Strategy provided that ‘there is no standard model for democracy’.Footnote 9 Instead of investing huge resources to democratise other countries, the UK should focus on the prevention of conflicts. Finally, the Coalition censured New Labour's tendency to limit decisions to a restricted circle of close collaborators which did not ‘encourage the full flow of information and decision-making across Whitehall’.Footnote 10 To guarantee a more collegial decision-making, the Coalition created a National Security Council – which brought together the relevant ministers, the Chief of the Defence Staff and the heads of the intelligence agencies.Footnote 11
Nevertheless, despite these differences, the two governments also presented several similarities. One of the most prominent was the idea that interests and values cannot be conceived as separated. According to the Coalition, ‘to address instability and conflict overseas…is both morally right and in Britain's national interest’.Footnote 12 Along these lines, the Government initially framed the Arab Spring as a great opportunity for security and democracy in the Middle East. The UK participated in the UN-authorised Operation Unified Protector, which enforced a no-fly zone to protect civilians from the human rights violations of the Libyan Government.Footnote 13 The Parliament overwhelmingly voted in favour of intervention, although the vote took place after the operation had already started.Footnote 14 A posthumous manifestation of support had also taken place during the debate about the intervention in Kosovo in 1999, with the Foreign Affairs Committee endorsing the operation several months after its start.Footnote 15 The debate about Iraq in 2003 was the first in which the Parliament was given the chance to express a formal vote on the use of force, although it took place only a few hours before the start of the operation.Footnote 16 Nevertheless, what matters here is that both in the cases of Iraq and Libya, the subsequent criticism about the lack of a legal basis to topple Saddam and Gaddafi from power (Brockmeier et al., Reference Brockmeier, Stuenkel and Tourinho2016), together with the difficulties of two extremely complex post-conflict situations, generated in the Parliament a sentiment of distrust about these kinds of operations. In addition to 179 British fatalities,Footnote 17 Iraq left a series of traumatic memories within British society, especially in terms of the lack of urgency to use force, the questionable evidence provided by Intelligence, and the lack of a solid legal basis.Footnote 18 Intervention in Libya did not cause the same amount of criticism, especially because it was more limited in time and based on the authorisation of the UN Security Council. Nevertheless, the management of the post-conflict was particularly traumatic, with Western forces unable to find a solution for the civil war.
A few months after the intervention in Libya, the escalation in Syria pulled the Government into a debate about how to stop the violence. That the Syrian crisis was not going to be easily solved became clear between October 2011 and February 2012, when Russia and China vetoed two resolutions that condemned the ‘grave and systematic human rights violations…by the Syrian authorities’.Footnote 19 The attitude of the Government towards the decision-making paralysis in the Security Council allows us to appreciate a second similarity with the previous New Labour governments, which is its ambiguous stance about how far the Security Council should be considered as the final arbiter of the use of force for humanitarian reasons. These ambiguities became visible in August 2013, when allegations on the use of chemical weapons by the Assad Government started to emerge. In order to justify an operation that was not going to be authorised by the Security Council, Government officials were often forced to construe international law in a way that was not so divergent from the previous New Labour's controversial interpretation of HI.
In sum, various elements established a relative continuity between the two experiences. As Oliver Daddow and Pauline Schnapper have argued, both governments can be framed in terms of a ‘bounded liberal tradition’, which comes with a ‘propensity to draw boundaries…between “us” the good citizens and “them” the dictators’ (Reference Daddow and Schnapper2013: 341). Thus, when locating the reasons for the differences behind their interventionist policies, it is particularly important to focus on the type of ‘policy-dilemmas’ that they had to face. A dilemma ‘captures the way people are capable of modifying [historical] inheritance to incorporate novel experiences or ideas’ (Bevir et al., Reference Bevir, Daddow and Hall2013: 167). Even though the intervention in Libya was more clearly justified in humanitarian terms than the one in Iraq, both influenced the subsequent debate about Syria, in the sense that they contributed to questioning the utility of using British military force and favoured the development of an intersubjective understanding to put serious limitations on HI. This attitude determined the unprecedented decision of the Parliament to prevent the UK from participating in the air strikes against Assad's chemical installations.
A few months down the line, the Government was still able to obtain the support of the Parliament for two subsequent military operations. In September 2014 the UK joined the international coalition that struck ISIL in Iraqi territory. On this occasion, the Parliament overwhelmingly voted in favour of the operation.Footnote 20 One year afterwards, the collapse of the border between Syria and Iraq obliged the international coalition to extend the air strikes against ISIL to Syrian territory. At the end of a heated debate, Parliament finally authorised the Government to participate in the operation that started in December 2015.Footnote 21 In these two latter cases, the negative memories of Iraq and Libya still exerted considerable influence on the debate. However, a majority of MPs accepted these interventions, mostly because of their nature, which was quite limited in terms of target, means and timeframe.
If compared with the large support in favour of intervening in Kosovo, and with the initially large support in favour of intervening in Iraq and Libya, the Syrian debate represents a shift in the will of the Parliament to support these types of operations. The will of the Parliament to subject the Government's decision about Syria to a clearer control indicates that what has changed is the reduced confidence of MPs about the reasonable possibility that these operations might succeed, and about the convenience of leaving their decision-making to the prerogative of the Government. A bipartisan majority of MPs did not find convincing the attempt by the Government to solve three specific policy dilemmas related to: legality, which means the capacity to justify intervention on the basis of a clear legal basis so that sufficient international support can be reached; agency, understood as the capacity to adequately involve domestic actors by providing reliable evidence of the necessity to intervene; and strategy, intended as the capacity to plan these operations on the basis of clear goals and exit-strategies.
3. Methodology
In order to trace back the shift in the will of the Parliament to support interventions and the influence of historical analogies on its capacity to curb the authority of the Government, the paper conducts a qualitative analysis of a ‘historical juncture’ – the UK's involvement in the Syrian crisis. Junctures are moments of perceived crisis or opportunity in which relevant political actors extensively discuss the content of specific norms and propose interpretations that aim to be transformed into policy-making (Reus-Smit, Reference Reus-Smit1999). The paper studies the ‘discursive strategies’ of domestic actors, which means how they ‘seek to frame and present particular themes…with a view to shaping the context of political debate’ (Kettel, Reference Kettel2013: 265).
Arguments and discourses are not causal mechanisms that can alone determine policy-making (Neumann, Reference Neumann, Klotz and Prakash2008). As interpretative scholars have argued, they should not be seen as elements that ‘determine later performances’ (Bevir et al., Reference Bevir, Daddow and Hall2013: 167). Nevertheless, arguments are relevant variables to reconstruct the reasons behind actions because they define the ‘parameters of what is politically possible’ (Ralph et al., Reference Ralph, Holland and Zhekova2017: 5). Political actors engage in a ‘battle to control meaning, and define events and identities, in order to enable, shape and constrain policy outcomes’ (7). Along these lines, I develop a detailed narrative (George and Bennett, Reference George and Bennett2005: 210) of the 2011–2015 British debate on Syria in order to understand the meanings that government leaders and MPs assigned to HI during the Syrian crisis.
In terms of techniques, I employ a document analysis of a variety of documents by examining their content, the context in which they were produced and how actors debated these (Risse, Reference Risse2000). As to the sources, I have relied on documents produced by the Government and political parties. Moreover, I have conducted an in-depth analysis of the main statements of MPs and members of the Government. This permits identification of the main arguments in favour or against intervention, the recurrent key concepts that shaped the debate, and the argumentative resources employed by the actors involved (Cantir and Kaarbo, Reference Cantir and Kaarbo2016: 19).
4. The domestic debate on the use of force against Assad (2011–2013)
The analogies with the previous traumatic experiences of post-conflict management in Iraq and Libya influenced the debate about the possibility of using force against Assad's regime. Furthermore, before that, for example during the debate about Libya, Cameron attempted to mark a difference with past interventionism, by issuing a reminder that the operation should not be seen as controversial because it fell ‘fully within the authorisation of the United Nations Resolution’.Footnote 22 The confidence of the Coalition in the success of the Libyan operation was initially so high that, in his 2012 address to the UN General Assembly, Cameron did not hesitate to link the Libyan and the Syrian crises by arguing that ‘for decades, too many were prepared to tolerate dictators like Gaddafi and Assad’.Footnote 23 Nevertheless, as soon as it became clear that, following the NATO intervention, the country was falling into a civil war, the Government increasingly refrained from using Libya as a virtuous example. From that moment on, Libya would appear in the debate mostly in the arguments of MPs as a negative reference. This further reduced the argumentative leverage of the Coalition in favour of an intervention in Syria.
A bipartisan majority of MPs, especially in the Labour, Liberal-Democrat and Conservative parties, still perceived HI as a legitimate option. Consequently, debates centred more on the viability of these operations. The memories of interventions in Iraq and Libya reduced the confidence of MPs in the capacity to solve these types of crises. This does not mean that all the MPs used the ‘Iraqi analogy’ in the same way. MPs divided between those who believed that the Iraqi experience was reason enough to limit, and even impede, participation in these types of operations, and those who believed that Iraq should not become an excuse for inaction. What is interesting is that party affiliations only partially motivated these disagreements. Arguments that used the Iraqi analogy in a negative way, which means as enough reason not to intervene, could be found in all the main parties, and so could arguments on the need to learn the lessons of Iraq without necessarily encumbering British interventionism. There were significant examples of MPs that ignored the whips and voted against their own party. Eventually, even though the Coalition Government managed an absolute majority in the House, sceptics about HI prevailed.
4.1 Searching for an adequate legal basis
One of the main elements of the Government's policy towards Syria was that any action should be based on a clear legal basis. In 2011, the Government argued that in case ‘national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations, collective action can be authorised by the UN Security Council’.Footnote 24 However, it did not explain how to act in the case of there being no agreement to authorise a Chapter VII resolution. At the beginning, British diplomacy worked to favour a political transition that could sideline Assad out of power. However, in October 2011, after the first Russian and Chinese veto against a resolution that called for a transition in Syria, the Government became aware that a solution based on the agreement of the permanent members of the Council would be difficult to reach. This complicated the goal of guaranteeing an adequate legal basis and forced the Government to rule out the possibility of a military operation.Footnote 25
Nevertheless, during 2012, with the situation for civilians worsening, the Government started to support the possibility of an air strike against Assad by referring to a legal right to HI. In January 2013, Hague declared that ‘in a situation of overwhelming humanitarian need with no clear alternative a strong legal case can be made’.Footnote 26 To many MPs, this sounded like a re-proposition of the ambiguities that had characterised New Labour's interventionism. When, at the end of August 2013, the Syrian Government was allegedly found using chemical weapons against civilians, the Government published a position which based the legality of a possible strike on the doctrine of HI. Given the blockade at the UN and the impossibility to tolerate the use of such weapons, ‘the UK would still be permitted under international law to take exceptional measures in order to alleviate the scale of the overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe’.Footnote 27 An official report by UK Intelligence complemented this position and confirmed the use of these weapons by the Syrian regime.Footnote 28 Liberal-Democrat leaders supported the Government by underscoring that the use of these weapons is an international crime that cannot go unpunished (Clegg et al., Reference Clegg, Hughes, Ashdown and Williams2013).
During the debate on the legal basis, many MPs recalled the NATO Operation in Libya, often in a critical way. At the start of 2012, the Defence Committee criticised the change of regime in Libya, for not being coherent with resolution 1973.Footnote 29 With the worsening of the Syrian crisis, the debate revolved around the need of a formal authorisation by the Security Council to intervene against Assad. This debate was particularly intense within the Labour Party. On the one hand, Ann Clwyd observed that force can be justified on the grounds of ‘overwhelming humanitarian necessity without a UN Security Council resolution’.Footnote 30 On the other hand, Douglas Alexander invited the Government not to bypass the Security Council.Footnote 31 Aware of the divisions within his own party, Opposition Leader David Miliband initially maintained a cautious position. At the end of August, Miliband tabled a motion, in which he argued that it was necessary to ‘adhere to the principles of international law’.Footnote 32 Nevertheless, in his speech, Miliband also provided that intervention could still be legal in the case of ‘convincing evidence…of extreme humanitarian distress’.Footnote 33 This was not very different from the justification the New Labour Government had provided in 1999 to justify the intervention in Kosovo and which had obtained the bipartisan support of the House.Footnote 34 Not surprisingly, Miliband referred to that intervention in his speech. This indicated that there was still a bipartisan consensus in the House about the fact that HI can be legitimate even without UN authorisation, in the event that it is ‘time limited with specific purpose and scope’ and ‘has regard for the consequences of any action’.Footnote 35 In the end, Miliband announced that the Opposition would vote against the Government's proposal not because it was not based on a UN resolution but because of its lack of clarity in terms of strategy. This was not sufficient to eliminate the ambiguities of an internally divided party.
Although the Conservatives showed more unity on this subject, divisions also existed within this camp. MPs, such as John Baron, ruled out the military option due to the impossibility of reaching a consensus of the Security Council.Footnote 36 James Arbuthnot raised doubts about the applicability of HI because it required ‘considerably wider international consensus than currently exists’.Footnote 37 Taking the opposite view, Andrew Mitchell supported the Government's proposal by referring to the unacceptability of using chemical weapons.Footnote 38 According to Brooks Newark, Russian and Chinese attitudes of vetoing any possible measure against Assad represented the strongest evidence that ‘the UN is failing to live up to its mandate to protect’ and that action was justifiable also without its sanction.Footnote 39 Finally, the Liberal-Democrats faced the dilemma between opposing an intervention that was not based on a clear UN mandate and the necessity to be loyal to the Coalition Government. Menzies Campbell showed distrust about the ‘absence of a proper role for the United Nations’ but also satisfaction with the fact that in case of air strikes the Government would present to the Parliament an additional motion to be discussed and voted on.Footnote 40
4.2 Agency and the search for domestic support
Since Blair's decision to submit Operation Iraqi Freedom to the approval of the House in 2003, the UK has been characterised by a debate on an emerging constitutional convention that could affirm the right of the Parliament to authorise these operations (Strong, Reference Strong2015). Nevertheless, various legislative committees criticised Blair's decision to submit the operation to the House only a few hours before the start of the air strikes and recommended the necessity to provide enough time for the scrutiny of the Parliament.Footnote 41 The Coalition Government decided to mark a difference from the Iraqi experience and promised that any UK military involvement, including the possibility of arming Syrian rebels, would be subject to the consent of the Parliament. During the debate on the possibility of air strikes against Assad in August 2013, the Government explicitly mentioned the ‘damage done to public confidence by Iraq’.Footnote 42 The Secretary of Defence Liam Fox admitted that ‘there is widespread scepticism in the British public about any further military involvement overseas’.Footnote 43 For this reason, the Government promised that the motion would only authorise the start of a ‘careful path of steps that would need to be taken before Britain could participate in any direct military action’.Footnote 44 In the event that Western countries decided to use force, a second motion would be presented to the House to authorise British participation. This way, the Government tried to make sure that MPs did not see the motion as a blank cheque for unlimited action.
Many debates centred on the necessity to make a clear case for intervention, based on reliable evidence, in order to obtain the support of the public. Since the intervention in Iraq, MPs supported in a bipartisan way the necessity to involve the Parliament in the decisions that concerned the use of military force. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee affirmed that the House should be given the ‘opportunity to debate the matter before troops are committed’.Footnote 45 On this basis, in summer 2013, MPs from different parties forcefully requested the Government to consult the Parliament before taking any action against Assad's chemical arsenal. For example, Labour Paul Flynn generated a heated debate with MPs of his own party when recalling the experience of Iraq, in which the ‘House was bribed, bullied, and bamboozled into voting for the war’.Footnote 46 Other Labour MPs took the opportunity to defend the legality of acting against Saddam, such as former FCO Secretary Jack Straw. Nevertheless, they too recognised that the intelligence failure on that occasion ‘made the public much more questioning…about whether we should put troops in harm's way’.Footnote 47 Conservative Phillip Lee reminded the House that ‘in Iraq… the public have lost faith in the democratic process in relation to how Britain engages in military conflicts’.Footnote 48 The necessity for the Government to provide reliable evidence characterised many statements. As Conservative David Davis observed, ‘we must have clear evidence that if there is a casus belli, it is real, not confected’.Footnote 49 Notwithstanding their position about the Syrian crisis, most MPs expressed the obligation to recover their relationship with the public that the intervention in Iraq had damaged.Footnote 50
4.3 Debating the strategic aspects
The final element through which the Government tried to make a clear case for intervention regarded its strategic aspects. The Government was aware that the experience of interventions, which had lasted much longer than expected, left in the Parliament considerable distrustfulness about the possibility of ‘mission creep’. In the Government's arguments, ‘future interventions must not be open-ended’ but based on a clear ‘strategy for what we seek to achieve’.Footnote 51 After the first allegations on the use of sarin gas by Assad, the Government maintained caution and argued in favour of supporting the Syrian rebels. Facing the doubts of MPs about their reliability, Under-Secretary for FCO Affairs Alistair Burt stated that ‘all the evidence…indicates that a greater degree of atrocities have been committed by the regime than by elements of those opposed to it’.Footnote 52 Except for that, nobody in the Government was able to provide more details about the rebels' credentials. Under these circumstances, the Government could only reiterate that intervention would not open the door to a long-term commitment. The Government's motion at the end of August 2013 explicitly provided that ‘it [was] not about regime change’ but exclusively aimed at ‘alleviat[ing] humanitarian suffering by deterring use of chemical weapons’.Footnote 53 Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg guaranteed that a tight schedule would avoid the risk of an escalation.Footnote 54
The Parliament manifested a particular interest in the strategic aspects of using force. For instance, the Public Administration Select Committee criticised post-Cold War British governments for their lack of precision about what should characterise the UK's interests: ‘the national interest is expressed in terms so broad…that “there is little concrete idea of what…our national strategic purpose should be”’.Footnote 55 In July 2011, the Defence Committee observed that, ‘the Government should state from the outset…the capabilities that will be deployed and the consequences that this may have’.Footnote 56 In sum, since the inception of the ‘constitutional convention’ on warfare, the Parliament has shown a strong determination to fix clearer criteria about how military force should be used. The main aspiration was to avoid the arbitrariness perceived by British society during previous military interventions.
This attitude became more evident during the Syrian crisis. The Government was now requested to make a clear case for using force, with the Parliament operating as the institution to evaluate and authorise such case. For Labour Straw, one of Iraq's main consequences was ‘to raise the bar that we have to get over when the question of military action arises’.Footnote 57 In a more critical fashion, Conservative Guy Opperman observed that ‘the Iraq…experience… has poisoned the well of public confidence’.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, for a bipartisan majority of MPs, the negative outcome of these operations should become an opportunity to better define their criteria and not a reason to oppose any use of force. Conservative Ben Gummer, for example, warned against the possibility of allowing the ‘ghost of Iraq to influence our decision’.Footnote 59 Labour Pat McFadden similarly argued that ‘if the lesson we drew from Iraq was that we must never again intervene…that would be a dismal conclusion for victims of repression around the world’.Footnote 60 Along these lines, Liberal Democrat Clegg noted that ‘it would be a double tragedy if the memory of that war now caused us to retreat from the laws and conventions that govern our world’.Footnote 61
One of the strategic issues that MPs most extensively debated was the necessity to identify a clear exit strategy before intervening. For example, Labour Denis McShane cautioned about the risk of becoming involved once again in the Middle East.Footnote 62 Conservative Gerald Howarth saw a similar danger of getting ‘drawn into further military operations’.Footnote 63 Liberal Democrat Campbell expressed preoccupation because ‘intervention in civil wars has a long history of failure’.Footnote 64 For several MPs, a possible intervention in Syria contained even more unknown variables than the one in Libya: ‘Syria is not Libya. It is far stronger… backed and reinforced by Russia…There is a very real danger of the west being sucked into a long-term war that it cannot win and that will only expose its impotence’.Footnote 65
The second strategic issue that occupied the Syrian debate concerned the possibility of taking side between the factions in the civil war. At the beginning of the Syrian crisis, the report by the Defence Committee on the Libyan operations underscored that under resolution 1973 the main goal of the coalition was the protection of civilians from ‘casualties caused by the National Transition Council's actions as well as those of pro Gaddafi forces’.Footnote 66 This did not mean that the Committee considered as illegitimate the decision to use force per se. It was, rather, an indicator that the policy of siding with one specific faction during these types of crises, which NATO countries had experienced, for example, during the intervention in Kosovo, was now perceived as detrimental to the success of these operations. In summer 2012, the Government announced its will to support anti-Assad rebels, although not through lethal equipment. For many MPs, this could pave the way for the arming of these factions.
The Labour Party showed considerable unity on this point. Towards the end of 2012, Peter Hain argued that it was difficult to identify possible allies in the battlefield because the conflict was ‘an increasingly deepening civil war’.Footnote 67 The Party especially doubted the democratic credentials of the opposition. For example, Flynn indicated that ‘the most merciless slaughter of women and children has been carried out by the al-Nusra front, which is linked to Al-Qaeda’.Footnote 68 The only significant exception in this sense was Straw, for whom it was correct ‘not to rule out the option of direct lethal military supplies’.Footnote 69 However, his position was quite isolated within the Labour Party. Moreover, the majority of the Conservative Party was quite sceptical about the possibility of supplying one specific faction with military capabilities. For Edward Leigh, this would have been the repetition of the ‘terrible mistake of arming rebels in Afghanistan’.Footnote 70 In order to block this possibility, Baron tabled an amendment in summer 2013 stating that ‘no lethal support should be provided to anti-government forces in Syria without the explicit prior consent of Parliament’.Footnote 71 The amendment did not directly prevent the Government from supplying weapons to the rebels as it only obliged it to involve the Parliament before making such a decision. Nevertheless, it was representative of the diffused distrustfulness about the possibility of identifying allies among the Syrian opposition. Not surprisingly, the House almost unanimously passed it.Footnote 72
The main parties, especially the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, had several difficulties to guarantee an adequate control of their backbenchers. Nine Liberal Democrats voted against the Government, while 14 of them did not vote. Thirty Conservatives voted against the Government, while 31 did not vote. However, not enough members from the Labour voted in favour of the Government to compensate for this loss. A majority of Labour, together with a minority of Conservative and Liberal-Democrat MPs, defeated the Government's motion by a 272-285 vote. Cameron was forced to accept that ‘the British Parliament…does not want to see British military action’.Footnote 73 The Government's proposal was perceived as too broad and not sufficiently precise about fundamental questions of legality, domestic consensus and strategy. For those MPs that voted against a possible intervention, the Government's failure to solve these issues resembled the inadequate decision-making of previous operations in Iraq and Libya. In a debate that took place within, and not only between, parties, those who believed that previous military failures were sufficient arguments to curb the Government's authority prevailed over those who believed that they should not justify inaction.
5. The debate about ISIL (2014–2015)
When the Government was able to offer solutions to the three policy dilemmas outlined in the previous section, which MPs could find sufficiently clear, the use of force found the authorisation of the Parliament. This was the case of two operations that the Parliament authorised in 2014 and 2015 to fight ISIL in the territories between Iraq and Syria. Most MPs still perceived HI as a legitimate norm that the international community should at times invoke and implement. The negative experience of Iraq and Libya did not make liberal interventionism alien to the values of British parties. What changed was the perception that these norms are increasingly more difficult to enforce. MPs were available to military operations that are limited and clear in terms of goals and possible consequences. Interventions that excessively politicise international and domestic debates; that are based on questionable legal bases; and that rest on a superficial analysis of the strategic aspects were unlikely to meet the expectations of MPs.
5.1 Legality, domestic consensus and strategy
After the parliamentary defeat, the Government found in the emergence of ISIL in Iraq the opportunity to maintain focus on the region. In an official statement, the Government took advantage of the explicit invitation by the Iraqi Government and defended the legality of a possible intervention: the ‘prohibition [to use force] does not apply…if the territorial state so requests or consents’.Footnote 74 Moreover, the Government presented the operation as a limited one, with no boots on the ground. Western states would conduct air strikes only to facilitate the action of Iraqi and Kurdish forces. Finally, the Government framed ISIL and Assad as ‘twin evils’, in the sense that Assad's human rights violations were considered responsible for the diffusion of radicalism in the area, with Iraq as the most affected country.Footnote 75 Along these lines, Cameron stressed the necessity to create ‘a new and genuinely inclusive Government in Iraq and to bring about a transition of power in Syria’.Footnote 76 Liberal Democrats endorsed this position, with Clegg arguing that the request of the Iraqi Government constituted a safe legal basis.Footnote 77 At the same time, the Government was determined to distinguish this intervention from the 2003 Iraqi war. For Cameron, the simultaneous presence of a ‘comprehensive strategy for action’, ‘a clear request from the Iraqi Government’ and of a ‘substantial international coalition, including many Arab partners’ were sufficient reasons to make this operation different. Even though he was aware that the ‘shadow of the UK's last military involvement in Iraq hangs heavy over this Chamber’, Cameron forcefully argued that the two situations could not be compared. Moreover, the 2003 Iraqi failure could not become ‘an excuse for indifference or inaction’.Footnote 78
The majority of MPs generally shared these arguments. Labour Miliband supported the Government, on the basis that this time there were no doubts about the legal basis, and boots on the ground were explicitly excluded. Even though he understood the ‘weariness…in the country about whether this is a repeat of 2003’, for Miliband these elements showed that it was ‘demonstrably not’ a repeat.Footnote 79 Most of the Party approved. McFadden implied that the mistakes of 2003 should not be seen as being responsible for ‘violent jihadism’.Footnote 80 Despite her opposition to intervening in Syria in 2013, Gisela Stuart supported the Government because ‘on this occasion we have the clearly outlined strategy that we did not have a year ago’.Footnote 81 In general, most Labour MPs united around the idea that ‘this is not another invasion of Iraq…it is a response to the desperate plea by the new Iraqi Government for outside help to combat…an existential threat’.Footnote 82
The similarities between the Government and the opposition's arguments created the conditions for a bipartisan debate. Conservative Kenneth Clarke supported the motion because of its limited character – ‘our participation in these military attacks is almost symbolic’– and because it could give the UK ‘a positive influence in the diplomacy and the unfolding politics’.Footnote 83 Conservative Dominic Grieve expressed satisfaction with an intervention that was ‘reasonable, necessary, and proportionate’.Footnote 84 For Liberal-Democrat Campbell, the legal element was enough to conclude that ‘there is no parallel between today's debate and the debate on Iraq in 2003’.Footnote 85 The opposition to this motion was limited to 23 Labour MPs, six Conservatives, one Liberal-Democrat and the representatives of the Green and the Scottish National Parties. Labour Jeremy Corbyn expressed a typical pacifist position by arguing that violence was not the solution against ISIL.Footnote 86 Other Labour MPs, such as Diane Abbott voted against the motion by emphasising the risk of mission creep: ‘I do not see the strategy, and I do not see the endgame’.Footnote 87 Conservatives, such as Richard Bacon, opposed the motion by directly recalling the past failures in the use of British force: ‘The evidence suggests that each time we do it, we make things worse’.Footnote 88 Despite these exceptions, the motion was comfortably passed by a 524-43 vote.
5.2 Extending intervention to the territory between Syria and Iraq
After this debate, the Government dedicated itself to building a consensus in favour of extending the air strikes to the territory between Iraq and Syria occupied by ISIL. Two independent events favoured the Government's strategy. First, in May 2015, the Conservative Party won an absolute majority of seats in the general elections. This meant the end of the Coalition Government and the return of the Liberal-Democrats to the opposition. Second, on 13th November 2015, ISIL committed a series of terrorist attacks in Paris that profoundly impacted on Western public opinion. As a response, the Security Council unanimously passed resolution 2,249, which called upon ‘Member States…to take all necessary measures…in Syria and Iraq…to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by ISIL’.Footnote 89 Whether this resolution was enough to authorise air strikes in Syrian territory has been the object of a legal dispute – which goes beyond the scope of this paper (Weller, Reference Weller2015). For the Government, resolution 2,249 provided a solid legal basis for intervention.
Cameron invoked the right to intervene when arguing that ‘the Assad regime is unwilling and/or unable to take the action necessary to prevent ISIL's continuing attack on Iraq’.Footnote 90 Nevertheless, for many MPs the link between Assad and ISIL was not evident. For this reason, the Government also resorted to the self-defence argument, according to which states who were ‘taking action in Syria are doing so on the basis of collective self-defence of Iraq’.Footnote 91 Various MPs and legal scholars have considered this interpretation an ‘overstretch’ of Article 51 of the UN charter (Akande and Milanovic, Reference Akande and Milanovic2015).Footnote 92 However, in its response to the Foreign Affairs Committee, the Government assured them that this was not an attack against the Syrian regime. This way, the Government could present the strikes as having the sole goal to ‘degrade and dismantle [ISIL's] economic and military capability’.Footnote 93 Unlike 2013, this time the Government was more successful at making the case for a limited intervention against a specific target. Cameron often stressed ‘the importance of only targeting ISIL…not deploying ground troops in combat operations…and the commitment to regular updates to the House’.Footnote 94
The debate was more partisan than the one about Iraq. One of the reasons was that for many MPs, the Government's motion was not based on a clear strategy. In February 2015, the Defence Committee recognised that using force against ISIL in Iraq had been a vital security interest but also raised several doubts about the lack of credible allies within Syrian territory and the incapacity to diplomatically engage with non-Western actors on the ground, such as Russia and Iran.Footnote 95 In a similar way, the Foreign Affairs Committee directly criticised the ‘something must be done’ rhetoric that was so popular during the 1990s. In the absence of a carefully planned strategy, ‘taking action to meet the desire to do something is…incoherent’.Footnote 96 This indicated the emergence of a new commitment to interventionism, less ideological and more based on the rational calculation of the possible consequences of using force.
In September 2015, the Labour Party Conference further complicated the possibility of having a bipartisan debate. The Conference not only elected a representative of the pacifist left, Corbyn, as new Leader, it also fixed four stringent conditions to authorise UK intervention, the most important being, ‘authorisation from the United Nations’.Footnote 97 Given the divisions in the Security Council, this was enough to oppose any plan of the Government. As with the intervention in Iraq in 2003, for Corbyn and the left wing of his Party, strikes would further diminish the reputation of the West in the region, which would mean more risks of terrorist attacks on British soil. Along similar lines, for Gerald Kaufman, Shadow Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the only likely effect of the operation would have been to ‘kill innocent civilians’.Footnote 98 The remaining Labour MPs who voted against the intervention did so mostly for reasons concerned with strategic aspects. For example, Albert Owen opposed the motion despite his previous support for the strikes against ISIL in Iraq. In that case, ‘the Prime Minister convinced us that…there were solid troops on the ground and a solid Government. We do not have those things in Syria’.Footnote 99 Only seven Conservatives voted against the Government. Among them, there was once again Baron who recalled ‘the errors that we made in Iraq…and Libya’ and presented an amendment to the motion, which ‘decline[d] to authorise military action in Syria’.Footnote 100 Such an amendment found the support of the majority of the Labour Party but not of his own Party and was rejected by 211-390.
The motion was finally passed thanks to the unity of the Conservative Party that massively voted in favour of the Government. This time, most of its members relied on the ‘Iraqi analogy’ but not as a reason for not acting. Alan Duncan invited to take ‘the decision today based on the merits of today…and not of yesterday's mistakes and regrets’.Footnote 101 Despite her opposition to using force during the 2013 debate, Sarah Wollaston supported the motion because of the presence of terrorism, which was ‘bringing the fight to…the streets of Britain’.Footnote 102 Finally, for many Conservative MPs, the intervention did not present as many controversies as the one proposed in 2013 because it was mostly ‘extending the existing campaign’ started one year before against ISIL in Iraq.Footnote 103 Conservatives were especially satisfied with the fact that ‘it is [ISIL] exclusively that will be targeted’.Footnote 104 The other element that favoured a comfortable majority in favour of the Government's motion was the partisan dynamics internal to the Labour Party. Sixty-six Labour MPs ignored the party whip and voted in favour of the Government. Most of them distanced themselves from the pacifism of the new leadership and shared with the Conservatives the idea that past failures were not sufficient reasons for not intervening. Margaret Beckett recalled the experience of Kosovo to refute the arguments of those who thought that HI is not effective: ‘if there had not been any bombing… perhaps 1 million Albanian Muslim refugees would be seeking refuge in Europe’.Footnote 105 For Dan Jarvis, there was ‘no logic in opposing [ISIL] only in that country, as it does not recognise any border between its bases in Iraq and its stronghold in Syria’.Footnote 106 The argument about ‘finishing the job’ started in Iraq was the most direct link between the position of the 66 Labour MPs and those of the Government. Finally, few Labour MPs employed a typical left-wing rhetoric to justify intervention. Hilary Benn received the longest applause when comparing ISIL activists to ‘fascists’ who ‘hold our values in contempt’.Footnote 107
The Government motion would have also passed without the support of the 66 Labour MPs, thanks to the absolute majority won by the Conservative Party in 2015. However, the Labour internal dynamics was revealing of a debate on the interpretation of HI that created divisions as much within and not only between parties. This time, a majority of MPs felt reassured that the operation was going to be limited in time and scope.
In conclusion, the 2011–2015 debates about the Syrian crisis show that most MPs still viewed the use of force for humanitarian reasons as a legitimate goal of British foreign policy. However, MPs also wanted it subjected to precise limitations, in terms of legality, domestic support and strategic aspects. The perceived incapacity of the Government to solve the policy dilemmas related to these three dimensions was at the root of the MPs' scepticism about using force. Moreover, most of the MPs who voted in favour of using force against Assad in 2013 considered these limitations necessary. However, when the military commitment is limited in time and space, the goal is clear, and the exit strategy is spelt out from the beginning, a bipartisan majority of MPs can still be available to support these kinds of operations. The traumatic memories of Iraq and Libya did not make HI alien to British political parties. Many of the MPs that supported the strikes against ISIL argued that the mistakes committed during previous interventions were not good reasons to stop any use of military force.
Nevertheless, these debates also show that the intersubjective understanding about the use of force for humanitarian reasons that characterised British politics during the 1990s has partially changed. Consensus has diminished and MPs are less open to give governments blank cheques in the management of these operations. In February 2016, the Foreign Affairs Committee reflected on the ‘lessons learned’ and underscored the necessity to maintain a less confrontational attitude with non-Western powers, especially Russia.Footnote 108 MPs seem to be less available to muscular versions of HI and consider it necessary to invoke it in a way that can reap adequate domestic and international support.
6. Conclusions
Historical analogies are not the only factors that can explain the UK's reluctance to intervene. Factors located at international level, such as membership of military alliances or decision-making processes in the Security Council (Daalder and O'Hanlon, Reference Daalder and O'Hanlon2000; McCourt, Reference McCourt2013) can help us understand the context in which domestic actors interpret historical analogies. Nevertheless, structural analyses tend to neglect the fact that foreign policy decisions are often the result of internal dynamics, such as processes of contestation between parliaments and governments. A domestic approach is able to unpack the interests and identities of states as concepts that are not fixed but subject to dispute and redefinition. During the 1990s, HI norms were perceived as problematic especially outside the West.Footnote 109 Today this perception is observable in significant, at times even majoritarian, sectors of Western societies. The British debate about the Syrian crisis is an example of ‘horizontal contestation’ between the Government and political parties that contributes to our understanding of these ongoing dynamics, especially the necessity for governments to win arguments at home in order to conduct humanitarian military operations.
During the 2011–2015 debates on the Syrian crisis, MPs showed considerable distrustfulness about the possibility of invoking and operating HI. A majority of MPs from different parties shared the view that it was increasingly more difficult to implement these norms and obtain the expected results. The historical analogy of previous interventions, especially in Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011, convinced MPs of a similar difficulty by ideologically different governments to pursue these operations in an effective way. Even though the intervention in Iraq cannot be easily defined as an example of HI, its memory contributed to spreading doubts within British domestic actors about the utility of using force.
MPs did not oppose HI per se, but, rather, raised doubts about its practical implementation. Gaskarth has convincingly argued that between 1998 and 2003, Britain became a ‘revisionist state’, which decided to ‘subvert existing rules to create a new order based on sovereignty as responsibility’ (Gaskarth, 577). The Syrian debate does not provide enough evidence to argue that Britain is now taking the opposite path and returning to a more moderate ‘status quo’ interpretation of its role in the world. Nevertheless, a decrease in the will of the Parliament to back humanitarian operations is evident. A majority of MPs was dissatisfied with the Government's incapacity to provide solid evidence of the necessity to intervene, to ground the intervention on a clear legal basis, and to effectively plan the strategic aspects. For many MPs, this perceived incapacity resembled the decision-making failures of previous operations in Iraq and Libya. They showed acceptance of these operations only in cases of limited action with clear targets and exit strategies, such as the one against ISIL. Moreover, they showed concerns with operations that aim to get rid of local leaders, rebuild nations or impose specific forms of government, especially in consideration of the huge resources necessary to achieve these goals.
The Syrian crisis has been taken into account as a ‘historical juncture’ in which domestic actors extensively debated the legality and viability of HI. The historical analogies of Iraq and Libya generated divisions that did not necessarily follow party lines, between those who used these negative experiences as reasons to oppose further intervention, and those who preferred to use the lessons of the past to improve these types of operations. Until 2003, MPs seemed to be more willing to support these operations in a bipartisan way and more available to delegate their implementation to incumbent governments. The Syrian debate shows that since 2003, this consensus has diminished. As James Strong has observed, the controversy over Iraq undermined the idea of having ‘an overarching bogeyman to justify armed adventures’ (2015: 605). Now, governments are required to make clear cases for using force, based on the involvement of relevant legislative actors.
This does not mean that governments have become incapable of invoking these norms without parliamentary approval. The impact of historical analogies with previous traumatic operations should not be overstated. British governments still maintain ‘considerable ability to bypass parliament…when making security policy’ (Kaarbo and Kenealy, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2017). During the Syrian crisis the government generally supported the constitutional convention on the necessity to have a parliamentary vote to authorise the use of force. Nevertheless, it also added that this did not apply ‘where there was an emergency’.Footnote 110 Along these lines, Prime Minister Theresa May announced in April 2018 that the UK was going to participate in a new round of air strikes against ISIL in Syria without parliamentary approval.
The important point is that it is increasingly more difficult for governments to invoke situations of emergency without taking into account the mood of the Parliament. As Gaskarth has argued, ‘Parliament is now being used to interpret, mediate, and manage role contests in a far more regular fashion than in the past’ (2016: 112). The cautious British attitude towards intervention is a consequence of this contestation. Along these lines, this paper corroborates recent studies about the influence of historical analogies on the parliamentary capacity to limit the decisions of executive actors on the use of force (Hoekema, Reference Hoekema, Born and Hanggi2004; Kaarbo and Kenealy, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2017). Moreover, it goes in a similar direction to those studies that recognise an independent effect of analogies on foreign policy-making (Khong, Reference Khong1992). Scholars that have been sceptical about the effect of analogies have generally argued that when decision-makers resort to them it is because they need post hoc rationalisations of policy choices, ‘which may be influenced by other factors, such as ideological orientation’ (Houghton, Reference Houghton1996; Peterson, Reference Peterson1997). Nevertheless, the Syrian debate in the UK shows that the analogies of Iraq and Libya were used in a bipartisan, and not only in a partisan way. Moreover, their use was not univocal. Some MPs presented them as reasons to limit British interventionism, while others used them as episodes from which to extract teachings that could improve British interventionism. In sum, the Syrian debate provides evidence to keep on thinking that analogies are ‘prisms, through which a current policy choice is perceived, evaluated, and acted upon’ (Kaarbo and Kenealy, Reference Kaarbo and Kenealy2015: 16).
Nevertheless, even though analogies are not mere rationalisations of previous decisions, this does not mean that they are necessarily reliable instruments with which to interpret and conduct foreign policy. As Paul Pierson observed, decision-makers often misuse history, because their ability to ‘draw inferences and judgments from their experiences have systematic biases’ (116). Problems of biased understandings and lack of consensus about the past need to be taken into account in the study of the viability and legality of humanitarian operations, especially in an increasingly multi-polar international system, which augments the possibility of contested interpretations of HI.
For David Chandler, the liberal discourse of redefining sovereignty in terms of responsibility, which was hegemonic during the 1990s, is now limited by the lack of consensus about using force for humanitarian reasons (Reference Chandler2011). According to Aidan Hehir, states, such as China and Russia, interpreted NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 as the ‘culmination of a decade of pressure by the US and the UK against the legal framework of the Charter’ (2010: 233). Nowadays, emerging powers are much better positioned to prevent Western powers from carrying out interventions. Other scholars have been more optimistic. For Weiss, the inconsistency in the application of HI norms should not be seen as reason enough to declare their decline. In a world still dominated by national interests, ‘occasional action is preferable to no action anywhere’ (Weiss, Reference Weiss, Murray and McKay2014: 37).
The importance of this debate resides in the necessity to investigate the future of intervention in an international system in which Western states seem to be increasingly less able to impose their preferred interpretations of international norms. This requires more analysis of both the way these norms are perceived within non-Western societies (Foot, Reference Foot2017) and of the changing perceptions of Western public opinions. Considering that the UK has been one of the main supporters of humanitarian interventionism since the end of the Cold War, the decreasing will of the British Parliament and society to back these types of operations can have major implications for the global effort to end mass atrocities. Moreover, conflictive interpretations of these concepts, even among NATO allies, are likely to proliferate in the near future, which casts a shadow on the possibility of providing protection when necessary.
Supplementary material
The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi%3A10.7910%2FDVN%2FDD5IW6.
