A Century of 'Intervention and Non-Intervention' in International Relations

Immanuel Kant had predicted the establishment of moral and humanitarian laws in international relations since the eighteenth century, but it took two centuries for the global community to reach a consensus on this matter. The difficulty of this consensus arose because the idea of humanitarian intervention in the affairs of countries coincided with the idea of territorial integrity and non-interference in the affairs of independent countries, which itself was an effort to commit great powers to refrain from attacking smaller nations and to end the era of territorial conquests. During World War I, the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire had a significant impact on the global community. Until then, it was unprecedented for a government to commit such atrocities against its own citizens, thus drawing more attention to internal issues of countries. After World War I and the establishment of the first global organization to prevent war, namely the League of Nations, laws regarding internal matters of countries against issues such as genocide and the deprivation of national and cultural rights were established for the first time. For example, Czechoslovakia and Poland were obligated to respect the linguistic and cultural rights of German speakers within their countries. Similarly, Iraq's government—under British mandate at the time—was required to respect the cultural and linguistic rights and local governance of Kurds in the northern regions. However, Hitler exploited this issue, intervening in the affairs of these countries under the pretext of defending the rights of German speakers, ultimately providing a pretext for war. After World War II and the establishment of the second international organization, this time called the United Nations, the global community found itself at a crossroads again. On one hand, one of the principles of the United Nations was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, inspired by Kant's ideas and the French Revolution, while on the other hand, concerns about interventions similar to those that Hitler had carried out in Poland and Czechoslovakia led to the adoption of the principle of 'non-intervention'. This principle aimed to prevent the intervention and territorial expansion of great powers, but did not address civil wars. The principle of non-intervention led to three major humanitarian disasters in the three decades following the establishment of the United Nations. In Bangladesh, over one million people were killed, and no power intervened. In Uganda, one and a half million were killed in a civil war, and the United Nations merely observed. In Cambodia, about two million citizens were killed by Pol Pot, and again the United Nations, relying on the principle of non-intervention, did nothing. In all three cases, after the crisis peaked and spilled over into a neighboring country, independent intervention occurred by the neighboring country. In the case of Bangladesh, India eventually intervened. With the spillover of the Ugandan civil war into Tanzania, that country was compelled to intervene, and Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia was dismantled by Vietnam after the two million killings. It seems that the fate of humanitarian intervention from Kant's time to the Syrian civil war has been trapped in a closed loop of contradiction and repetition. The experience of Libya reinforced the idea of non-intervention, just as the experience of World War II led to the adoption of the 'principle of non-intervention'. After these bitter experiences and during the end of the Cold War, the danger of repeating such a disaster, this time concerning the Kurds of Iraq, became serious. Those who had experienced chemical bombings and genocide during Saddam's regime and witnessed the silence of the global community fled en masse towards the borders of Iran and Turkey after the end of the Kuwait war and the threat of Saddam's attack. For the first time, an effort to adopt the principle of humanitarian intervention was proposed. The initial idea was raised by Turgut Özal, the President of Turkey, and John Major, the then Prime Minister of Britain, brought it to the UN Security Council, resulting in the adoption of a no-fly zone resolution in northern Iraq. Following the success of this resolution and the relatively successful NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, the idea of humanitarian intervention gained more supporters, although the experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan again diminished its credibility. Moreover, the non-intervention in Rwanda, which led to another disaster, previously raised doubts that the Security Council or NATO might decide based on whether their interests were at stake. In both cases, Kosovo and Iraq, the United Nations was bypassed, which damaged the credibility of both the UN and the principle of humanitarian intervention, although the outcome of NATO's attack on Kosovo was significantly better than that of the US and UK attack on Iraq. The completely failed intervention of the United Nations in Libya seemed to drive the final nail into the coffin of humanitarian intervention. This intervention, despite the fact that the United Nations was not bypassed and NATO acted following the Security Council's approval and without opposition from Russia and China, resulted in six years of crisis and chaos in Libya due to the very weak execution by France and the UK in leading this operation and not considering the post-Gaddafi era. It should be noted that the main motivation behind the adoption of the principle of non-intervention and the respect for the territorial integrity of countries was to prevent military invasions and conquests like in past centuries, not to allow rulers to massacre their citizens. Nevertheless, what remains unquestionable is the human beings' indifference towards the fate of others. One cannot remain passive in the face of the Syrian disaster merely by referencing the fate of Libya. The global community must learn from these experiences to improve the principle of humanitarian intervention, not to dismantle it. Efforts to democratize the decision-making process, to prevent unilateral interventions, to distinguish humanitarian intervention from 'regime change' policies, and most importantly, to prioritize human lives over national interests can be actions aimed at correcting current shortcomings and preventing the abuse of this principle that Kant envisioned two hundred years ago.