Rethinking intervention

There are few issues more pressing to contemporary world politics than intervention. On the one hand, intervention is a routine policy tool employed by states to quell disorder abroad and transform other polities. On the other hand, the use of intervention as an instrument of statecraft often sparks intense public debates both in intervening and target states: over the rights of states to suspend sovereignty rights; over the utility of intervention as a policy tool; and over the relationship between intervention and other tools of coercive reordering, from sanctions to war. Intervention, therefore, embraces a range of thorny normative, analytical, and substantive concerns.

Such debates make this Special Issue timely. What makes it even timelier is its extension of debates beyond the limited ways in which the topic is often approached. For their part, most policymakers see intervention as a relatively uncontroversial ‘end of the line’ for instances in which other tools of coercive diplomacy have been tried and have failed.Footnote ¹ For most academics, debate centres on the ‘ought’ of intervention: whether and when states should intervene; the balance to be struck between interests and ethical concerns; the power asymmetries between intervening and target states, and so on. If the former see intervention as a relatively uncontroversial policy instrument to be used in the face of an incalcitrant problem, the latter reduce intervention to a boo-hooray conversation that yields much noise, but little light.Footnote ² In this sense, there is no lack of quantity to policy-oriented and scholarly work on intervention.Footnote ³ But there is a discernible lack of analytical and historical quality to much of this work.

This Special Issue, therefore, is both timely and important. The collection makes two major contributions to the study of intervention. First, rather than see intervention as an exceptional practice vis-à-vis the norm of non-intervention, the contributors demonstrate that intervention is an important mechanism in its own right, fundamental to how core strands of international order have spread around the world.Footnote ⁴ Second, the Special Issue moves away from the contemporary fixation with intervention as a practice that belongs primarily to the post-Cold War world. The collection both historicises intervention and embeds it within the emergence of modern international order. This represents a shift away from normative, presentist concerns with the rights and wrongs of recent interventions towards a longer-term assessment of the sociological dynamics that shape interventionary policies over time and place. For contributors to this Special Issue, intervention is a persistent social practice that mediates the two basic drivers of modern world order: the extension of markets, governance structures, and symbolic schemas to a global scale at the same time as sovereign territoriality has been instituted as the ground-rule of a global inter-state system. In this concluding article, we add to the collective concerns of the Special Issue by: first, tracing the emergence of the modern concept of intervention; second, examining its place in the contemporary world; and third, offering some reflections on why, and in what ways, the practice of intervention is likely to endure in upcoming years.

The past of intervention

While the contributors to the Special Issue agree that intervention is a modern social practice, they disagree about what this means. Most papers associate intervention with the ‘long nineteenth century’ and the advent of modernity, a configuration of industrialisation, rational statebuilding, and ‘ideologies of progress’ that bifurcated the world into core and peripheral polities, and constructed an international order in this image.Footnote ⁵ As the introduction to the Special Issue makes clear, intervention is the ‘will to order’, a modality that regulates the dual dynamics that lie at the heart of modern international order: first, the drive towards the globalisation of social space; and second, the fixing of political authority within territorially bound sovereign states. As Eddie Keene shows in his contribution, ideas about intervention, rooted in the formulations of Vattel, Wolff, and others, were linked to changing ideas about hierarchy that, in turn, constituted a shift in how international order was imagined. Rather than associating international order with a ‘ranking of powers’ based on precedence, title, and position, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a shift towards the ‘grading of powers’ based on power capabilities. The ‘grading of powers’ led to the formal recognition of ‘Great Powers’. Great Powers possessed special rights (for example, over intervention) and responsibilities (such as a duty to maintain international order). They also agreed to recognise sovereignty between each other. It was only with such mutual recognition, and a concomitant hardening of notions of inside and outside, that intervention as a discrete social practice could emerge. The recognition of sovereignty acted as a brake on territorial transgressions. In turn, intervention became a specific right afforded to the Great Powers by the Great Powers.

Other contributors, however, offer more expansive understandings of intervention, seeing it as common to any international order in which polities transgress another unit's realm of jurisdiction. The article by Chris Reus-Smit, for example, argues that intervention is a practice that involves the reconfiguring of identities, institutions, and practices of one political entity by another. As such, intervention is not limited to an international order constituted by sovereignty, but is premised on a broader conception of individual rights and mutual recognition. This understanding of intervention chimes with some recent scholarship that traces intervention to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, associating it, as does Reus-Smit, with the development of rights over religious conscience.Footnote ⁶ The European Reformations, it is argued, were central to the development of intervention rights in that they arose from competing claims to political authority: the transnational (as vested in the Pope) vs. the territorial (as vested in absolutist monarchs).Footnote ⁷ The tying together, it is argued, of issues of confessional solidarity with notions of ‘liberty’, generated the first interventions against foreign ‘tyranny’.Footnote ⁸ These, in turn, became the forerunners of later campaigns that deepened notions of human rights beyond an association with religious (particularly Christian) conscience.

Although it is possible to detect interventionary practices in earlier periods,Footnote ⁹ in our view modernity fundamentally altered the concept and practice of intervention in three ways: it differentiated intervention from war both for policymakers and within public discourse; it established intervention as a tool for both the containment and the promotion of revolutionary ideologies;Footnote ¹⁰ and, by opening up issues of when and where intervention was legitimate, modernity generated the space for normative debates about intervention to emerge. In this sense, applying modern conceptions of intervention to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries runs a twofold risk: first, projecting modern political and normative questions onto historical periods where intervention was associated with a different – and less problematic – set of issues; and second, buying into a parochial concern with the Peace of Augsburg and the Treaties of Westphalia that are said to underwrite modern conceptions of territorial sovereignty. We do not have the space to rehearse the extensive debates that have accumulated around this latter issue except to note that the peace treaties of the early modern period were limited in scope, setting few boundaries to interventionary practices.Footnote ¹¹ Nor is it clear that there was a distinction to be drawn between intervention and war during this period. Although it is often difficult to distinguish war and intervention, such a distinction is vital to understanding the specific qualities of the latter. Whereas war disregards sovereignty, intervention qualifies or suspends it. Before the nineteenth century, there was no understanding of intervention along these lines. Rather, debates about intervention were swallowed within broader discussions about war, particularly the just war tradition.Footnote ¹²

Far more important to the emergence of intervention as a social practice was the clash between ideas of nationalism and transnational solidarities such as liberalism and socialism, the caging of capacities in rational bureaucratic states that went hand in hand with the extension of these polities into imperial territories, and the globalisation of market relations. These dynamics belong primarily to the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹³ During this period, a deep intensification of connections between polities was matched by the development of acute power differentials between them.Footnote ¹⁴ The result was the construction of a core-periphery international order in which sovereign territoriality was widely recognised between states in the core, but interventionary policies were considered normal for those in the periphery.Footnote ¹⁵ This bifurcated international order was mediated through the ‘standard of civilisation’ and policed through colonialism, which worked hand-in-hand to regulate the frontier between civilised and barbarian peoples.Footnote ¹⁶

Intervention, therefore, emerged as a regulating force between increasingly invasive transnational social forces and increasingly rigid political boundaries, constituted through the mutual recognition of sovereignty. In short, intervention belongs primarily to modernity. However, to associate intervention with modernity does not mean giving it a single tenor. To the contrary, intervention has been deployed in two apparently contrasting ways: as a tool of ‘order transformation’ and as a means of ‘order maintenance’. During the nineteenth century, intervention became associated with a family of practices, including blockades and sanctions, which were responsible for the coercive restructuring of ‘other’ societies. Intervention was a means through which to transform ‘backward’ places, whether this backwardness was conceived as a deficient economy, an illegitimate polity, or an uncivilised culture. Some of these legacies live on, as exemplified by interventions in former colonies during the Cold War and after. It is only with post-World War Two decolonisation and the emergence of a fully global sovereign order that intervention became a practice mainly constituted between sovereign states. In previous iterations, it is better seen either as an inter-imperial practice or as one carried out within imperial domains.

If ‘order transformation’ in the periphery is one component of intervention, a second component is ‘order maintenance’ in the core. As noted above, core states tended to respect non-intervention within the Family of Nations. However, there were exceptions to this norm. For example, during the nineteenth century, a range of insurgent ideologies, from nationalism to republicanism, destabilised absolutist states. Intervention was a tool through which absolutist regimes sought to forestall these challenges.Footnote ¹⁷ The best-known example of this tendency is the Concert of Europe system instituted after the 1815 Treaty of Vienna. The Concert was constituted out of Burkean concerns to preserve the ‘European Commonwealth’ in the face of the multiple challenges represented by the Atlantic Revolutions of the late eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ For Burke, the French Revolution defiled the fabric of the European states-system, trampling on European traditions of order and custom, and standing for the rejection of property rights and absolutism. More importantly, even if the English were ‘neither the converts of Rousseau nor the disciples of Voltaire’, other states around Europe were not similarly immunised against the three symptoms of the French disease: regicide, Jacobinism, and Atheism.Footnote ¹⁹ Burke made the case for active suppression of the French Revolution justified by what he called the ‘law of neighborhood’: that radical change in one state affected others to the extent that, if necessary, revolutions could be suppressed by force. Such conceptions were central to interventions carried out by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Naples (in 1821), the French in Spain (in 1823), and the Prussians in Bavaria and Baden (in 1849).

Burke's doctrine of counterrevolution had two major consequences for the practice of intervention. First, the Concert of Europe explicitly linked domestic and international security – instability at home threatened instability abroad.Footnote ²⁰ In this way, the internal organisation of states became seen as a potential threat to international order.Footnote ²¹ This permitted counterrevolutionary interventions in situations when domestic unrest was seen as unsettling to international affairs, such as the reinstating of Ottoman authority in Lebanon/Syria in 1839–40. Far from being a neutral tool of statecraft, intervention maintained a form of state sovereignty that limited forms of political expression considered threatening to incumbent elites, whether this took the form of alternative religious beliefs, republicanism, socialism, nationalism, or anti-colonialism. Second, intervention became a means through which to preserve the balance of power. Not only was this important during the nineteenth century, it also served as a justification for a range of interventions during the Cold War, when both the United States and the Soviet Union intervened in order to preserve a sense of global balance. Henry Kissinger, for example, justified US interventions around the world in the interests of preserving the global correlation of forces.Footnote ²² And for their part, the Soviets limited the sovereignty of satellite states and intervened frequently to maintain the homogeneity of their bloc, including in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

This analysis yields two conclusions. First, intervention should be understood as both a means of ‘order maintenance’ and ‘order transformation’. If, as noted above, intervention was a tool used by absolutist regimes and Cold War superpowers to maintain order and preserve international balance, it was also a practice with a more radical purpose – the opening up and transformation of foreign spaces. Groups such as the French parti du mouvement favoured intervention in defence of oppressed ‘nationalities’ in Poland, Italy, and Belgium, while Britain carried out self-declared ‘liberal’ interventions against the slave trade, in Greece, and in the Iberian Peninsula during the early part of the nineteenth century. As Richard Little points out in his contribution to the Special Issue, the rising power of Britain – and later the United States – accompanied a shift away from the use of intervention as a duty to support other Great Powers towards the recognition of a right to self-determination, exemplified by the emergence of the legal category of ‘belligerency’ within civil wars. The United States (in 1815) and Britain (in 1819) used this category to proclaim their neutrality in the Latin American wars of independence rather than affirm their support for Spain and Portugal. In such cases, the focus on self-determination meant that the liberal position favoured non-intervention.Footnote ²³ However, this contrasted with the development of overtly humanitarian concerns, such as the campaigns against the slave trade and the practice of sati, that were linked both to developments within Britain (including parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, and the Chartist movement) and outside it (including the emergence of transnational advocacy groups and International Non-Governmental Organisations, most notably the International Committee of the Red Cross).Footnote ²⁴ As explored below, the relationship between liberalism and humanitarianism was to become much starker during the twentieth century, with considerable consequences for the development of intervention as a social practice.Footnote ²⁵

Second, rather than assuming a single form, intervention has changed in character over time and place. During the nineteenth century, intervention served the dual purposes noted above: the maintenance of order in the core and the transformation of polities, economies, and symbolic schemas in the periphery. In this context, intervention was used for a variety of purposes: to preserve the balance of power, to observe treaty obligations, to collect debts, to protect minority rights, to defend Christian populations, to halt atrocities, and to secure the extraterritorial rights of Europeans vis-à-vis indigenous populations. At first, the extension of the sovereign state system after World War Two expanded the possibilities of intervention as the Third World became deeply immersed in superpower competition. Hans Morgenthau, amongst others, stressed the need for the superpowers to prop up newly decolonised states given the weakness of indigenous governance structures.Footnote ²⁶ The provision of military and economic aid created ties of inequality that the provider could exploit by either supplying or withdrawing aid, thus dramatically influencing local political developments.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, local elites often invited external aid as a means by which to counter domestic rivals and implement development projects. Given this context, the Cold War in the Third World can be characterised as a clash between two ‘regimes of global intervention’.Footnote ²⁸

Over the past thirty to forty years, the suspension of formal sovereignty rights for states in the global south has become less straightforward. Postcolonial states, aided by the power of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) states and other international collectivities, have re-emphasised their right to non-intervention. As modes of intervention are constituted by the international orders in which they are embedded, practices of intervention are changing in accordance with this new context. As chronicled by David Williams in his contribution to the Special Issue, intervention is, at least to some extent, shifting from overt methods of coercive restructuring towards ‘everyday’ forms of ‘interventionism’. The next section assesses these changes in the context of contemporary debates about intervention.

The present of intervention

Scholarly attention on intervention has soared in the post-Cold War world. The onset of a wave of humanitarian, usually multilateral, interventions after the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted considerable work on the ‘ought’ of intervention.Footnote ²⁹ At times, this work has sought to contextualise contemporary debates by reaching back to earlier instances of intervention claimed to have been carried out for humanitarian motives or to have had humanitarian outcomes: the British campaign against the slave trade; Gladstone's lobbying for action in the face of the ‘Bulgarian horrors’; or India's intervention in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh).Footnote ³⁰ However, buoyed by the possibilities opened up by the collapse of the Soviet Union, most commentators stress the newness of debates about intervention in the post-Cold War world. As Brendan Simms and David Trim write, humanitarian intervention is usually treated as ‘a subject without a history’.Footnote ³¹

The problem with this presentist frame is that it fails to situate contemporary concerns within longer-term debates about intervention. This denudes contemporary debate to the extent that much of it takes place in a vacuum, seemingly unaware that normative questions about intervention have been the subject of considerable debate for over two centuries. The long-term nature of these discussions should tell present-day commentators that such issues are, at root, irresolvable. All interventions are contested because they require taking sides in disputes in which there are competing claims. Not only are such competing claims irresolvable in ethical terms, a world of plural states representing plural positions and plural interests cannot take an a priori position on whether a particular intervention is justified. The only fully consistent normative position is that contained in Star Trek's Prime Directive: ‘no interference in the internal affairs of another civilization’.Footnote ³² But there are as few people who rule out intervention under any circumstances as there are true pacifists. In reality, most people favour intervention sometimes – the debate is not whither intervention, but where, when and how to conduct it. Such issues cannot be solved in any definitive sense. Rather, they take place within a context that is itself shaped by the historical development of the concept of humanitarianism, a development that, as the contributions to this Special Issue makes clear, is deeply contested.

A preoccupation with the humanitarian motives or outcomes of the interveners generates two problems. First, it is a one-sided view that fails to pay sufficient attention either to the target or to the dynamic between the intervener and the target. We return to this point in the final section. Second, the ethical intentions or outcomes of interventions can never be clearly identified. Regardless of the difficulties of ever knowing ‘true intentions’, interventions take place for a number of reasons: to maintain order, to support allies, to spread ideas, to safeguard strategic assets, to collect debts, to bring humanitarian relief, and more. As such, intentions are multiple, and ethics and interests interlace – there is no way of fully abstracting one from the other.Footnote ³³ At the same time, there is no way of knowing humanitarian outcomes in advance – a point emphasised by the Brazilian government in their recent work on ‘responsibility while protecting’, an attempt to underscore the importance of civilian harm, whether this is caused by states or as a by-product of military intervention.Footnote ³⁴ Generating a binary, or even a rank order, between ethics and interests serves to occlude the necessarily political dimensions of intervention. This is particularly evident in debates about the Responsibility to Protect, whose advocates attempt to dissolve political debates within a ‘neutral’ set of technical mechanisms.Footnote ³⁵ Such an approach elides the power asymmetries involved in interventions, as well as the necessarily selective implementation of decisions to intervene and the strategic interests involved in these decisions. In this sense, it represents a step backwards from humanitarian intervention, which at least linked ethical concerns with judgements about ‘doability’ and interests.Footnote ³⁶

This Special Issue has sought to go beyond these debates. The contributors tackle conceptual, theoretical, and analytical issues that are not wedded to normative debates about intentions and outcomes, nor restricted to contemporary instances of intervention. What the articles collectively demonstrate are the ways in which present-day discussions of intervention rest on debates that are themselves a response to long-term dynamics, not least the clash between transnational social forces and sovereign territoriality. This exemplifies the need to historicise intervention and, thereby, chart both changes and continuities in its practice. By taking on this task, the Special Issue highlights the sociological dynamics that underpin interventionary dynamics over time and place. As the articles collectively demonstrate, intervention is an enduring social practice.

However, if intervention is an enduring social practice, a range of scholarship argues that contemporary forms of global governance, aid and development programmes are making direct military intervention obsolete.Footnote ³⁷ Both public and private actors, it is argued, are now ‘intervening’ in polities around the world to such an extent as to coercively reshape state-society relations without resorting to military force. In the introduction to this Special Issue, John MacMillan highlights three forms of asymmetrical power that lie behind interventions: Great Power status; market control; and the construction of forms of symbolic ‘difference’, such as race or religion. These, in turn, can be loosely associated with different types of intervention: the first with military interventions; the second with economic interventions, such as those to open up markets or collect debts; and the third with ideas such as the ‘standard of civilization’ that underpinned a range of interventions during the nineteeth century and the early part of the twentieth century. The continuing hold of these three forms of hierarchy is discussed in turn.

As discussed in the previous section, Great Powers represent the ‘great intervening parties of modern history’.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, the very definition of a Great Power is that it is able to carry out interventions, but is itself secure from intervention.Footnote ³⁹ We have already noted the ways in which the notion of ‘Great Powers’ assumed its significance during the early part of the nineteenth century, when some states took on the right to intervene. Hierarchical social relations were linked to understandings of who could intervene and when they could intervene; intervention was an illustration that states were not de facto equal, even if they were de jure sovereign.Footnote ⁴⁰ In part, the right to intervene held by Great Powers rested on superior power capabilities; in part, it rested on status. The link between intervention and status was important in that it pressed Great Powers to commit troops to interventions even at significant cost to themselves.Footnote ⁴¹ For example, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape argue that the sixty year campaign to end the slave trade cost Britain more than 5,000 lives, as well as an average of nearly 2 per cent of national income per year.Footnote ⁴² This dynamic was equally strong during the Cold War when interventions by both superpowers had the potential to turn into damaging wars, most notably for the US in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The ‘blowback’ of intervention has also been pronounced in the post-Cold War world as repeated failures have taken their toll on intervening as well as target states: the US has spent over $150 billion on relief and reconstruction alone in Iraq and Afghanistan.Footnote ⁴³ In this sense, if superior power capabilities make intervention something Great Powers can do, their concern for status makes intervention something Great Powers must do, even when this is at considerable cost to both their capabilities and reputation.

Some aspects of the Great Power ‘right to intervene‘ remain central to the governance of the contemporary world, most notably in the obligations of the UN Security Council to uphold international order and, following the agreement on the Responsibility to Protect, to intervene in order to halt genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. There are two factors, however, that mitigate these obligations. First is the uncertain implementation by the Security Council of their role in guaranteeing international peace and security, including via the Responsibility to Protect. In 2011, the Security Council authorised the use of force for human protection purposes against the wishes of a functioning state (Libya) for the first time.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, five states (Brazil, China, Russia, India, and Germany) abstained from the vote. Further disagreements over the scope of Responsibility to Protect in relation to Syria and the Cote d'Ivoire demonstrate the difficulties of turning agreement on principles into decisive action.Footnote ⁴⁵ Second is the emergence of new units of global governance, ranging from the BRICS to the G20, which place considerable stress on non-intervention. Of the five states that abstained on the Security Council vote to authorise force against Libya, four are BRICS states. China, in particular, consistently stresses its adherence to the norm of non-intervention. Beijing's approach to intervention is discussed below. For now, it is worth making the general point that the system of Great Powers that first claimed the right to intervene was closely tied to Western ideas and practices. In a world in which Western power no longer serves as the fulcrum of international order, it is not axiomatic that Great Powers will take a comparable view of intervention, particularly when emerging powers have spent many years struggling for non-intervention to be recognised in de facto as well as de jure terms.

The second form of hierarchy noted in the introduction is market control. During the nineteenth century, intensified trade, improved transport and communication systems, and coercive practices such as colonialism generated a highly integrated international political economy. These changes eroded local and regional economic systems, and imposed global price and production structures. As a consequence, levels of interdependence rose, making societies more exposed to developments elsewhere. However, this interdependence was conjoined with the opening of a huge power gap between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ societies. Those with access to the raw materials wrought from colonialism gained a pronounced advantage over those with limited access to these sources of power. By the end of the nineteenth century, four states (Britain, France, Germany, and the United States) provided two thirds of the world's industrial production. And one of these powers (Britain) claimed a quarter of the world's inhabitants and territory.Footnote ⁴⁶ During this period, it is little surprise that many interventions were tied to the opening of markets, as chronicled by John McMillan in his contribution to the Special Issue.

Once again, the contemporary world is witnessing challenges to this strand of hierarchy. Crucial here is the role of the financial crisis in accelerating changes within the global economy. Over recent years, banking, securities, insurance, accounting, auditing, corporate governance, insolvency, creditor rights, and money laundering have become subject to international standards by bodies ranging from the G20 to the Financial Stability Board. Such a regulatory environment marks a lessening of Western control – the centre-of-gravity in the global economy is moving eastwards.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although the US still produces around a quarter of the world's total output, this position is weakening. Whereas in 1971, over half of the world's largest manufacturing corporations were American (providing two thirds of global sales), now this is true of only a third (providing 34 per cent of global sales).Footnote ⁴⁸ Not only do BRICS states hold around half the world's foreign exchange reserves, they are increasingly trading with each other: China is now Brazil's major trading partner, while Sino-Indian trade is worth $60 billion per year. Whether or not such changes herald an increase or decrease in interventionary practices is an open question. What is clear is that the economic interventions associated with Western control of trade, production and financial circuits are likely to recede.

The third strand of hierarchy noted in the introduction is the construction of ‘difference’ through ideas like the ‘standard of civilisation’ and practices such as racism. As Robbie Shilliam points out in his contribution to the Special Issue, much international law in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century sanctioned inequalities between states through denying the competences of non-European, non-white polities. These polities were quasi-sovereign – the wards of imperial powers that retained the right to intervene in order to correct deficiencies in practices, institutions, and cosmologies.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this way, a legally constituted ‘standard of civilisation’ sanctioned a ‘global rule of racialized difference’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Intervention was a central tool through which this system was maintained.

As with the two other components of hierarchy discussed above, there are a number of challenges to the continued construction of hierarchy through difference. Most notably, racism is no longer a viable mode of differentiation. Indeed, advocates of intervention in the contemporary world tend to deny any fundamental source of difference between peoples around the world. Rather, inequality is the result of temporary conditions: deficient institutions, weak governance, poor leadership, a corrupt ruling elite, and so on.Footnote ⁵¹ This means that there are no longer formal barriers to intervention. Rather, the claims of present-day advocates of intervention are universal: ‘if the UN truly was to reflect a humanity that cared more, not less, for the suffering in its midst, and would do more, and not less, to end it, the organization has to be an agent of intervention in every sphere of human security’.Footnote ⁵²

Kofi Annan's remarks speak to a world without frontiers in which boundaries of inside-outside, no longer resting on racial differentiation or constrained by norms of sovereign territoriality, are dissolved. Rather, the bundling of territoriality with rights of reciprocal sovereignty is to be replaced by a fluid notion of sovereignty that is contingent on meeting standards of human protection.Footnote ⁵³ This is an important reformulation of the sovereignty norm. Rather than sovereignty being associated with the control of a territory, it is now seen as a responsibility that comes into force only when states pass a certain ‘yardstick’.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Anne Orford notes, this conception of sovereignty is, in many ways, a reversion to Hobbesian accounts of state authority, with the proviso that, this time, Hobbes's absolutist state is being constituted at the international level.Footnote ⁵⁵ Forms of international administration, including international courts, territorial mandates, and peacekeeping forces are the ‘neutral’ mechanisms through which an international state assumes the functions of states around the world, particularly in the global south. The UN is now the second largest deployer of troops in the world (after the US); in 2013, the organisation was responsible for 100,000 peacekeepers in 15 operations.Footnote ⁵⁶ All of these operations are taking place in the global south, the vast majority of them in Africa. At the same time, peacekeeping operations are assuming increasingly expansive roles – of the 49 UN mandated peacekeeping operations undertaken between 1989 and 2011, 34 contained a commitment to statebuilding.Footnote ⁵⁷ In this sense, the line of civilisational apartheid that separated core from periphery and which made the sovereignty of the latter contingent on the caprice of the former has not disappeared, but is being reinscribed through the functions of international organisations, even as such differences are denied through claims of universality.Footnote ⁵⁸

Important as these observations are, they tend to overstate the bounded nature of political authority in modernity. In reality, states have always found it difficult to exclude external actors from their domestic authority structures – indeed, as Steven Krasner argues, states have often invited violations of their sovereignty by signing up to human rights agreements or contracting powers to international and regional organisations.Footnote ⁵⁹ Transnational solidarities from revolutionary movements to diaspora communities and indigenous groupings have consistently challenged the sovereign territorial frame.Footnote ⁶⁰ At times, as Lee Jones points out in his article for this Special Issue, intervention has been conducted in solidarity with such movements; at other times, it has been used in their violent suppression. However effective international organisations are at reorganising the authority structure of particular polities, such action does not take place on the same scale or with the same intensity as the colonial projects that decimated, starved, and dispossessed entire continents. What is clear is that, if intervention is bound up with the tensions that arise between competing, exclusive claims over a particular polity, then the universal jurisdiction rights – and activities – of powerful states, collections of states, and international organisations must be seen as intervention by another name.Footnote ⁶¹ And this ‘full spectrum’ interventionism is taking place within a global imaginary that does not see anywhere as off limits. When there are no longer ascribed differences (such as race) through which to separate people into civilised and uncivilised, then claims of humanitarian solidarity assume universal form. The contribution by Toby Dodge to this Special Issue demonstrates starkly the centrality of such formulations to the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The future of intervention

Intervention, therefore, is changing in form rather than waning as a practice, even if the formal inequalities that sustained it for nearly two centuries are diminishing. There are two further reasons to suggest that intervention will remain a core feature of world politics in years to come. The first lies in the relationship between intervention and international heterogeneity.Footnote ⁶² The antithetic conceptualisations of legitimate order held by states in heterogeneous systems erode cooperation between them. This, in turn, makes intervention a viable policy tool for policymakers operating in these systems.Footnote ⁶³ Examples of this tendency were common during the Cold War, when each side intervened to maintain the homogeneity of its bloc. Various contributors to this Special Issue have further underscored the ways in which interventions are tied to attempts by elites to maintain their position in the face of heterogeneous social forces, ranging from transnational ideological networks to cross-border sectarian or ethnic ties.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Susan L. Woodward shows, such dynamics have been crucial to Western interventions in the Balkans. And as David Williams illustrates, elite homogeneity is both the driver and outcome of development programmes that promote synergies between international actors and local ‘partners’. Despite this, there has been no creation of a single universal demos. Rather, even as the world has become more intimately connected, so centrifugal tendencies have heightened particularities of governance and culture. The contemporary world is one of ‘decentred globalism’ in which no single power – or cluster of powers – is pre-eminent.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such an order retains considerable heterogeneity. As such, it is fertile ground for intervention.

Second, as this Special Issue has shown, intervention is not tied to a particular motivation or aim. Rather, the great strength of intervention is its fungibility as a policy instrument – intervention is a response to a range of problems, whether these are conceived in humanitarian or security terms, or out of a broader concern for international order. In this sense, intervention represents an enduring political practice. As Lee Jones argues in his contribution, sovereignty limits the scope of political action by guaranteeing the borders of a territory. The ordering function of sovereignty is, therefore, highly partisan. Intervention lays bare what policymakers consider threatening to both domestic order and international security. This is not a transient phenomenon. Rather, it is likely to become increasingly influential in an international order in which experiences of colonialism remain live and sovereignty is guarded jealously. In this sense, even if the character of intervention shifts in order to accommodate new contexts, the recurrent feature of intervention in modern history can only be explained if we take account of how political dynamics shape not just a decision to intervene, but a necessity to intervene. Intervention is not simply a response to considerations of state security; rather, it responds to the more fundamental concerns highlighted in this Special Issue: modes of international order; regime security; concerns about capabilities and status, etc. The ‘necessity to intervene’ stems from how deeply such logics shape the interests and objectives of policymakers. Intervention is ‘necessary’ when other options (for example, aid, diplomacy, sanctions, etc.) are perceived as being either impractical or ineffective.Footnote ⁶⁶ This makes intervention a routine, if ‘end of the line’, policy instrument. In short: intervention is here to stay.

If intervention will remain a core feature of world politics in years to come, the diffusion of power around the international system demands two changes in thinking about intervention as a social practice. First, it requires paying attention to the ways in which interventions in the periphery have been constitutive of developments in the core.Footnote ⁶⁷ Examples include Vietnam and Iraq for the US, Suez for Britain, and Lebanon for Israel. Second, it means focusing more on interventions that have been carried out by non-Western Great Powers, such as the Soviet Union and China. Both cases offer a picture of increased interventionism. After being the target of multiple interventions during the Russian Civil War, Soviet leaders authorised intervention in the Spanish Civil War.Footnote ⁶⁸ During the Cold War, having secured its grip on its European satellites, Soviet interventionism was characterised by a dual dynamic: counterrevolutionary and defensive (‘order maintaining’) in Eastern and Central Europe; revolutionary and offensive (‘order transforming’) in the Third World.Footnote ⁶⁹ Since the demise of the Soviet Union, Russia has intervened both directly and indirectly in its ‘near abroad’, most notably in Georgia in 2008.

Chinese intervention expresses a similar, if somewhat more complex, dynamic. Certainly, China's direct military interventions have been more limited in frequency and scope then those performed by other Great Powers.Footnote ⁷⁰ After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in the late 1940s, the party elite highlighted non-intervention as one of five principles of ‘peaceful coexistence’. As Chou Enlai claimed, ‘we are against outside interference; how could we want to interfere in the internal affairs of others?’Footnote ⁷¹ The US-Chinese Shanghai communiqué of 1972 contained a pledge to non-intervention. And since its ‘opening-up’, China has repeatedly claimed to be carrying out developmental programmes without Western-style conditionalities. Even when it has provided limited, often covert, support to national liberation movements, China has done so on the grounds of self-defence and, it is argued, in order to safeguard sovereignty. Chinese leaders have regularly denounced the ‘neointerventionism, neogunboat diplomacy, and neoeconomic colonialism’ of Western powers.Footnote ⁷² And at the 2005 World Summit, Hu Jintao reiterated China's concerns about the threat posed by the West's ‘forceful interference’ in the internal affairs of other countries.Footnote ⁷³

However, China's imperial and revolutionary past tells a different story. Under the Chinese imperial system, the emperor enjoyed a ‘latent right of intervention’, as exemplified by China's intervention in Vietnam in 1788 to restore the ruling family and in Korea a century later. During the Cold War, China intervened indirectly in the Third World, for instance in Angola, through the provision of arms and supplies to national liberation movements. Most notably, China intervened directly in Korea and supported North Vietnam in its struggle against the United States.Footnote ⁷⁴ Beijing's decisions responded partly to strategic concerns and partly to ideological considerations reinforced by close elite ties.Footnote ⁷⁵ China's subsequent offensive against Vietnam was aimed at both countering Soviet influence in Indochina – targeting what Deng Xiaoping defined as the ‘Cuba of the East’ – and at Vietnamese decisions, notably Hanoi's intervention in Cambodia, Beijing's principal ally in the region.Footnote ⁷⁶ Intervention was meant to punish Hanoi or, as the Chinese authorities put it, to ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this sense, the reaction by Chinese leaders to Vietnam's intervention closely resembles the paternalistic attitude used to legitimate interventions by other Great Powers.

Although Vietnam represents Beijing's last unilateral intervention, the end of the Cold War has seen a partial relaxation of Beijing's non-interventionist stance.Footnote ⁷⁸ First, China has steadily increased its contributions to UN peacekeeping operations and UN missions, most notably in Afghanistan.Footnote ⁷⁹ Second, China has endorsed the World Summit Outcome Document of 2005, including its references to the principle of Responsibility to Protect, albeit with the caveat that the UN Security Council must sanction any operations prompted by the principle.Footnote ⁸⁰ Third, China is now the world's second largest aid donor, providing ‘development assistance’ to over 100 states in the global south, including those that are ‘off limits’ to Western donors such as North Korea, Burma, and Iran.Footnote ⁸¹ The Export-Import Bank of China provides a greater volume of loans than the G7 states combined; along with the China Development Bank, it lends more to developing states than the World Bank.Footnote ⁸² Furthermore, even if China has not, as yet, done much to promote a ‘Beijing Model’ of socioeconomic development, there are signs that China sees its rapid development as linked to its own ‘special’ characteristics.Footnote ⁸³ As discussed in earlier sections of the article, this sense of cultural superiority is a common ‘push’ within interventionary practices. Continued growth is only likely to reinforce this tendency.

These two dynamics – Beijing's continued attachment to the norm of non-intervention and its increasing interventionism – are not necessarily contradictory. In fact, they represent two mutually reinforcing dynamics that are shaped by China's deeper embedding within international society. On the one hand, non-intervention is an attempt to secure domestic stability in a context of increased interdependence. On the other hand, China's extensive stake in contemporary international order encourages its leaders to cooperate with multilateral efforts aimed at minimising disruption to this order. In this sense, both China's non-interventionism and interventionist impulses are ‘order maintaining’; they represent different tools used by Chinese leaders to secure stability, both at home and abroad.

However, these two dynamics also highlight an ongoing tension on which rests much of the future of intervention as a social practice. As China becomes more closely integrated within transnational circuits – and has more interests to protect – it is likely that it too will see intervention as a solution to problems where other policies have been tried and have failed. Furthermore, if China's lack of allies and limited ties to foreign elites has so far limited the likelihood of interventionism, this too may change as Chinese influence grows. Interdependence with other states will raise Beijing's stake in its allies' survival and stability, thereby opening up the space for intervention. At the same time, significant political crisis in key allies such as North Korea could trigger a Chinese response. Despite the strong links shaped by historical ties, military alliance and aid, the disruptive behaviour of North Korea and the reduced importance assigned by younger Chinese leaders to close ties with Pyongyang raises the questions of how the Chinese would react to the collapse of the North Korean regime.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the event of such a collapse, Beijing has prepared contingency plans to perform both humanitarian operations aimed at assisting Korean refugees and ‘order keeping’ [sic] operations.Footnote ⁸⁵

Importantly, the prospects for a heightening of Chinese interventionism could emerge at just the same time as the relative decline of Western powers creates increased incentives for them to intervene militarily. Intervention is a means through which Western states could try to protect their position (using intervention as a means to preserve access to markets and resources), reaffirm their status (using intervention as a means to counter transnational threats), and forestall their own decline (using intervention as a means to maintain influence over allies). In more general terms, the combined effect of both China's integration in transnational capitalist circuits and the ongoing financial crisis raises further concerns. For example, the export driven growth of both prominent developing economies (such as China) and major developed economies (such as Japan and Germany) depends on the spending power of Western consumers, spending power that has been repressed by the financial crisis. This slack is unlikely to be taken up by consumption in developing countries where, since their own crash in the late 1990s, policies have tended towards promoting high levels of savings, the maintenance of sizeable foreign-exchange reserves and currency undervaluation. Taken together, this combination of uncertainty, imbalance and inequality is increasing strains on international monetary, financial, and trading regimes. Such analysis points towards a future of inter-capitalist competition.Footnote ⁸⁶ And increased Great Power competition may, in turn, engender a renewed appetite for intervention.

If the global ‘power shift’ presents insights into one set of likely interventionary pressures, a second set of pressures arises from the possibility of intervention in the absence of a clearly defined ‘core’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In this regard, it is worth noting that interventions have not always been conducted by core states against peripheral polities. Examples from the Cold War include Egypt's intervention in Yemen, Syrian and Israeli interventions in the Lebanese Civil War, Cuba's intervention in Angola, Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia, and Tanzania's intervention in Uganda. More recent examples include the support by some Arab states for direct intervention in Libya in 2011 and, more indirectly, in their support for opposition forces during the Syrian Civil War. Periphery-periphery interventions respond to the same dynamics highlighted in the sections above. For instance, Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia was shaped by strategic interests, a desire to foster elite homogeneity and a sense of superiority vis-à-vis its neighbour. Not only did Vietnam establish local allies through whom it could pursue its objectives, it also organised a Cambodian guerrilla group out of Cambodians living in Vietnam that could stand as a ‘new’ leadership for a ‘new’ Cambodia.Footnote ⁸⁸ Hanoi defended its presence in Cambodia by underscoring its role in helping both this group and the Cambodian people establish a ‘correct’ version of socialism.Footnote ⁸⁹ These views were informed by experiences of success, particularly Vietnam's wars with France and the United States, generating a ‘big brother’ mentality in the Vietnamese leadership that fuelled and legitimised the intervention.Footnote ⁹⁰ As in the case of China's intervention in Vietnam, ideological factors combined with historical experience to nurture both paternalistic attitudes and concerns about status that, in turn, fuelled an interventionist stance.

Yet there are four less familiar elements that characterise periphery-periphery interventions. First, peripheral states have limited options in terms of targets. With few exceptions (such as Cuba's intervention in Angola), they tend to intervene only in neighbouring countries. For the same reasons, smaller powers are more likely to act via regional organisations, as exemplified by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) intervention in Bahrain in 2011 and the calls by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) for intervention in Cote d'Ivoire during the same year. Second, given the limited pool of resources a peripheral state commands, intervention may serve to increase the intervener's need for external support, making it more reliant on the support of a patron and/or regional powers. This, in turn, can heighten levels of inequality, as highlighted by Vietnam's increasing dependence on the Soviet Union after its intervention in Cambodia and Syria's increasing dependence on the Soviet Union after its intervention in Lebanon.Footnote ⁹¹ Third, linkages between the intervener and the target state are particularly threatening for peripheral states. For instance, Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976 was a response not just to Syrian strategic and political interests, but also to the danger that the civil war in Lebanon posed to the stability of the Syrian state.Footnote ⁹² Finally, peripheral states are more vulnerable to the international and domestic repercussions that interventions entail. For example, Nasser's regime was weakened extensively by Egypt's failed intervention in Yemen in 1962, as was the wider cause of pan-Arab nationalism on which much of his status rested.Footnote ⁹³

The ‘problem’ of intervention

Intervention, we have argued, is a social practice that arises from the tensions that emerge in modernity between transnational social forces on the one hand and sovereign territoriality on the other. If intervention in theory is the mediating force through which the tensions between transnational social forces and sovereign territoriality have been mediated, intervention in practice has shifted in character across time and place. During the nineteenth century, core states tended to respect non-intervention within the Family of Nations, while core-periphery relations were marked by regular interventions. During the Cold War, both sides of the conflict pursued intervention as a means of extending their sphere of influence and maintaining the balance between them. In practice, this entailed ‘intervention within the blocs, non-intervention between them, and a tenuous non-intervention outside them’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the post-Cold War world, intervention has changed again, becoming associated with ‘everyday interventionism’ even as direct military interventions have remained a routine tool of statecraft and extended into the remit of international organisations. At the same time, the rise of China and other BRICS states speaks to the continued salience of the mutual recognition of sovereign territoriality as a basis for international cooperation. And as long as tensions exist between transnational social forces and territorially bound polities, intervention will remain a core feature of world politics, a policy tool that regulates tensions and mediates crisis points.

Over the past few centuries, therefore, intervention has evolved as a social practice. As it has evolved, so intervention has become more expansive, shifting from a discrete practice reserved for the Great Powers to one that is permanent in form and universal in aspiration. In many ways, the capacity of intervention to transmute within different forms of international order is concerning – interventions have, at best, a patchy record.Footnote ⁹⁵ As Toby Dodge argues in his contribution to the Special Issue, interventions in the post-Cold War world have been limited by their inability to construct durable institutions. The result of such interventions is not attractive: a return to authoritarianism in Iraq and the failure to consolidate a viable state in Afghanistan. Yet inaction is no better. At the time of writing (August 2013), the Syrian Civil War had killed more than 100,000 people; over a million Syrians have registered as refugees and nearly a quarter of the population has been displaced.Footnote ⁹⁶

So what is to be done? All too often, as chronicled in the sections above, contemporary policymakers and analysts of intervention are constricted by unreflective, presentist, ungrounded debates that fail to do justice to the complex history and ongoing tensions contained within intervention as a social practice. In truth, there are no easy answers either to the ‘problem’ of intervention or to the problems for which intervention is employed as a solution. The history of intervention suggests that coercive interference in other polities is fraught with difficulties, not least in its disruption of the principle of non-intervention that conditions orderly coexistence.Footnote ⁹⁷ Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is a healthy scepticism about the utility of intervention as a policy tool. And alongside this awareness of the limits of intervention, the recognition that intervention is an inherently contested practice, one that is defined and enacted through often-conflictual political decisions rather than abstract assertions. In seeking to address the changing form, but enduring presence, of intervention, it is to be hoped that this Special Issue will serve as the first port of call for those charged with the difficult task of conceptualising and implementing interventionary practices.