‘Introduction’ – Intervention in World Politics [1]
Hedley Bull
It
may seem somewhat bizarre to make commentary notes on an introductory chapter
in an edited volume, especially a volume of essays devoted to such a significant
issue of international society. Intervention has been a phenomenon of relations
between civic units for as long as such relations have come to pass within the
machinations and calculations of the international system. Although it would be
a mythology of anachronism to simply assume that the phenomenon of intervention
has remained unchanged since the early international system of Ancient Hellas,
the narrative events of a state, or group of states, intervening in the affairs
of other units has become a recurring thematic issue of international politics.
Indeed, from the events that Thucydides chronicles during the Peloponnesian War
(431-404 BCE)[2],
the Swedish intervention in Catholic States during the Thirty Years War
(1640-1648), the intervention of the European Great Powers within the sphere of
Ottoman imperial influence during the nineteenth century[3], Mussolini’s intervention
in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), to interventions in Kosovo (1999), Libya
(2011), Mali (2013-2014), or Russia’s role in the Syrian Civil War (2015
onwards), to name but a few, or proposed involvement by the United States (US)
in Venezuela[4]
and by the United Nations in Israel-Palestine[5], intervention is a central,
contingent and recurring eventuality in world politics.
‘Intervention
and World Politics’ is a collection of essays that explore this very
recurring phenomenon through legal, philosophical, historical and theoretical
approaches. Although only some of the contributors may be considered as central
or peripheral ‘members’ of the so-called ‘English School’, what unifies them
all is the application of the ‘Classical Approach’ to explore a single feature of
International Society.[6] Although some may disagree[7], ‘The English School’
approach to international politics hinges on the twin pillars of (1) its unique
subject matter – international society – on the one hand, and (2) its
methodological pluralism in exploring the topographical and, dare I suggest,
topological qualities of this subject on the other. In this regard, ‘Intervention
in World Politics’ should rightfully be included into the cannon of English
School texts despite its variation of contributors to the usual names we expect
to see in an English School volume.
The
scope of this short piece will be to unpack Hedley Bull’s introduction to the
work. Although only half a dozen pages in length, Bull succinctly and yet
lucidly reveals the central stipulations and questions at the heart of an
English School approach to the phenomenon of intervention within international
society and why the phenomenon is itself so significant to attend to. As I
suggest, although short, in this introductory chapter Bull provides a host of theoretical
tools that are not only instructive but also thought-provoking, whilst laying
out the key tensions that intervention inflicts upon international society as a
whole.
________________
At the beginning of the
chapter, Bull takes as his starting-point a traditionalist legal definition of
‘intervention’. Here, whilst quietly signalling towards the work of L.F.L
Oppenheim[8], Bull states that:
“It [intervention] is dictatorial
or coercive interference, by an outside party or parties, in the sphere of
jurisdiction of a sovereign state, or more broadly of an independent political
community.”[9]
In this vein,
intervention may come to pass as a combination of three dyads: (1) Forcible or
Non-Forcible – such as by military or economic coercion; (2) Direct or Indirect
– as when a larger power may utilise a lesser power as a proxy; and (3) Open or
Clandestine – as when the very instruments of the means employed are prominent
or not. The first concerns the mode of coercion, the second the approach, and
lastly, the third the saliency of the means utilised. From here, the notion of ‘outside
party’ and ‘jurisdiction’ undergo clarification. By the use of the term
‘outside party’, Bull is referring to a single political unit or collective of
units that do not hold authority to rule or govern within the territory or unit
being intervened within. The ‘Jurisdiction’ being interfered with may be that
of a state over its territory, citizens, and self-determination of
decision-making to conduct its internal relations and/or external affairs. All
of the contributors to the volume somehow relate back to this definition, Bull
makes sure to iterate, even if through disagreement. Thus, perhaps it should be
considered the glue of the volume, its conceptual bone-marrow.
There
are conditions that a specific action or policy must adhere to in order to be
considered ‘interventionary’. Before these conditions are discussed,
what it fascinating is that manner in which Bull turns the phenomenon of
intervention, linguistically, into its adjectival form – i.e., interventionary.
This is noteworthy as it implicitly infers that the phenomenon of intervention
can bleed into other action, becoming a qualitative factor of such an action’s
character. To give some illustrative weight to this, for a state to take the
sovereign decision to ground all aircraft except that of the air force, for
whatever purpose, is not interventionary. For a state or coalition of
states to enforce a no-fly-zone over a sovereign territory that is neither part
of this coalition nor invited assistance – as in the case of UN action in Iraq
during the First Gulf War, NATO action during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, or
the 2011 UN Security Council approved activity in Libya – such action is interventionary.
This linguistic adage is thus rather revealing about how activity can be
qualitatively transformed under certain conditions to be considered as
intervention itself. What are these conditions, however?
One
of the conditions specific to an action or policy that would lead it to be
considered interventionary is that the ‘intervener’ is superior in power to the
object of the intervention. In Bulls own words: “It is only because the former
is relatively strong and the latter relatively weak that the question arises of
a form of interference that is dictatorial or coercive”[10]. Aside from the function
of legitimacy construction through the appeal to collective-security via
coalition formation, at least as far as intervention is concerned, the
necessity for coalitions perhaps reveals the strength of the intervened state;
a coalition is necessary to match or preferably exceed the strength of such a
state so to intervene effectively.
From
here, Bull provides an interesting conceptualisation of a ‘Great Power’ through
his understanding of this condition of interventionary action. The
conceptualisation of ‘Great Power’ has historically tended to fall back onto an
assessment of military might or capability, for instance in the works of A.J.P
Taylor, Ranke or even Martin Wight.[11] To give a definition that
is popularly in use, in John J. Mearsheimer’s ‘The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics’, a ‘Great Power’ is defined in the following manner:
“Great powers are largely
determined on the basis of their relative military capability. To qualify as a
Great Power, a state must have sufficient military assets to put up a serious
fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the
world”.[12]
In this typical manner, Mearsheimer
adds his name to the list of those who define the concept in relation to
military capability.
Bull’s understanding of a ‘Great
Power’ is somewhat distinct. Here however, as in his ‘Society and Anarchy in
International Relations’[13], at first glance Bull’s
grasp of what constitutes a great power does not veer much from the traditional
perspective, i.e., in conjunction with conceptualisation by military might or
capacity. Here, Bull contends that “a great power is, among other things, a
power that cannot be intervened against”.[14] Simply put, a state that
has significant enough military capability to become a focal point of the
structure underpinning international order is not going to be interfered
with. Once again, military capability defines a great power – at least on the
surface.
Nonetheless,
Bull’s grasp of what constitutes a ‘Great Power’ is far more than such a
surface parochialism. Bull does not specify that the reason for not wishing to
intervene in a particular state stems from its military capability, but rather
that great powers are those states which cannot be intervened against – for
whatever reason. Here perhaps Bull would equally lean on Joseph Nye’s
conception of ‘Soft Power’, whereby a state cannot be intervened against not
because of their military capacity but because of their quiet command over
international norms and capability to attract favour as opposed to achieving
favourability out of fear.[15] In this manner, a state
such as Switzerland, for instance, that lists in the top ten across indexes of
Soft Power is able to reinforce its position as a power that cannot be
intervened against, despite that Switzerland has continually decreased its
military spending since 1960, to some 0.68% of GDP by 2017, placing it in the
bottom quartile of state defence spenders and amongst states that have
experienced external intervention – such as Sierra Leone or Nicaragua.[16] Similar could be said for
Austria, New Zealand, Ireland or Iceland; states we know as immune from
intervention, not for their military capability but for their explicit soft
power.
I am implying, therefore, that Bull
grasps what defines a ‘Great Power’ not by its military capacity, but
the extent to which it cannot be intervened against, be it due to any mode of
power potential. This may seem insignificant to some, a nuance hardly worth
mentioning perhaps. However, this distinction shows that the inability to be
intervened with, as opposed to raw military might, becomes an indicator of
status within the international order, and as such a gauge as to its structural
dynamics. Subsequently, as Bull shows, a change in status concerning the
inability for a state to be intervened with equates to a change in the
structural dynamics of international order, no matter how slight.
Flux is a central part of
international order, whether willed or not. When a state becomes intervenable,
for whatever reason, it loses its status as a ‘great power’ and subsequently
the structural dynamics of international order shift, even if only symbolically
or aesthetically. In the text, Bull briefly illustrates this with the mention
of Turkey in the nineteenth century and Russia in 1917, showing that the status
of a great power indeed lapses when it can be intervened with.[17] Intervention hence holds
ramifications beyond the implications of its phenomenon, such as the
undermining of sovereignty, but also the epiphenomenal consequences that
intervention can itself insinuate.
There may be incidents in which a
state intervenes in the affairs of one which is stronger or more powerful. As
illustrations, Bull gives the deployment of New Zealanders alongside the US in
Vietnam and those smaller states that formed part of the Warsaw Pact into
Czechoslovakia in 1968, in both cases supporting a great power ally. We could
add to this list of illustrations and include as a more contemporary example a
number of the states that comprised the US led multi-national task force, the
so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’, that participated in the 2003 invasion of
Iraq. Here, states such as Estonia, Honduras, Tonga and Nicaragua supported its
great power ally, the US, in intervening against a far more powerful state than
they. This phenomenon Bull refers to as ‘Vicarious Intervention’ and, in many
ways, occurs as a result of already existing power relations.
Intervention, as conceptualised
above, Bull reminds us, is generally thought to be both legally and morally
wrong. This is so as “sovereign states or independent political communities are
thought to have the right to have their spheres of jurisdiction respected, and
dictatorial interference abridges that right”.[18] At the heart of the
contemporary political order, one evolving naturally from the Westphalian
condition, is the notion of sovereignty – whereby the state holds the right to
be the ultimate decision maker of its own political fate across its locality
and citizenry. Intervention, by definition, undermines this right, instantly
dissolving the previously rigid and impregnable jurisdictional sphere of
self-decisionism. In response to this, with sovereignty being the necessitous quality
to hold so to be a member of either a society or system of states, and is as
such of the ultimate sanctity, our contemporary order has evolved to produce the
principle of ‘non-intervention’ that goes hand in hand with that of
sovereignty; sovereignty implies non-intervention and the principle of
non-intervention ensures the endurance of sovereignty – the two continue to
co-construct one another.
In ‘The
Anarchical Society’ Bull discusses this point in relation to the code of
obligations that states adhere to as agents coexisting within a socially
anarchic world order. Here, he states:
“The rules of coexistence also
include those which prescribe behaviour that sustains the goal of the stabilisation
of each state’s control or jurisdiction over its own persons and territory. At
the heart of this complex of rules is the principle that each start accepts the
duty to respect the sovereignty or supreme jurisdiction of every other state
over its own citizens and domain, in return for the right to expect similar
respect for its own sovereignty from other states. A corollary or
near-corollary of this central rule is the rule that states will not intervene
forcibly or dictatorially in one another’s internal affairs”[19]
This co-construction of judicial
sovereignty (internal sovereignty), sovereign reciprocity (external
sovereignty) and the non-intervention principle is thus something that Bull
touches on in relation to the conduct and obligations of coexisting states.
This in itself is perhaps the foundation of such an anarchical society itself. The
first among many norms and principles that allow for an international society
of sorts to emerge is such a mechanism by which states may achieve
jurisdictional or judicial reciprocity. In our case it is the
sovereignty/non-intervention complex.
This adds another dimension as to
why intervention is considered morally and legally wrong that Bull does not
tend to. Namely, for a single state to intervene in the affairs of another
sovereign state, and as such by virtue of the nature of this act undermine the
intervened state’s sovereignty, is to weaken the grounds of international
society as a whole. Naturally, this would break international law – Article 2.1
of the UN Charter to say the least – but would also undermine the commonality
of interest that is the glue holding international society together. In the
moment of intervention, any semblance of commonality, or adherence to common
interest, that states have forged between them over the course of the modern
system dissolves away in the act of intervention itself.
As a result of the overt illegality
and immorality of intervention, states that wish to engage with a programme of
intervention in the affairs of other states will usually undertake a somewhat
creative process of justification that seeks to reconstitute such a programme
as something other than intervention per se. Indeed, intervention is
understood to be so illegal and immoral that policies of intervention are not
discussed as being justified or unjustified, as they are always unjustified.
Rather, the question becomes whether or not this interference into the autonomy
of another sovereign state constitutes ‘intervention’ or a different moral and
legal phenomenon, such as ‘collective security’ or ‘humanitarianism’. One case
Bull gives to illustrate this point rests in ‘The Anarchical Society’,
whereby he discusses the relationship between the US and the Organisation of
American States (OAS) in Latin America during the Cold War. Here, Bull
highlights that the non-interference principle was considered so sacrosanct
within the OAS that if a communist government were to be installed or amongst
them that this would ipso facto equate to aggressive intervention, and
as such would require the US to counter-intervene in order to uphold the
principle of non-intervention itself.[20] Thus, intervention is
unanimously understood to be wrong morally and legally – intervention by
another name, for ulterior purposes other than power, is acceptable.
There are four points to be made
here about this postulate. The first concerns it’s ‘Realist’ undertones as an
assertion. States will find a way to justify intervention via a creative route
of conceptual and phenomenal gymnastics, intervening in the affairs of other
states if it be truly prudent to the national interest.
The second concerns its ‘critical’
undertones as an assertion. In this statement, Bull exposes the machinations of
power politics that lie beneath the surface of those agents that proselytise to
be purporting universal values concerning ‘the good’, questioning the
status-quo of international political power dynamics and state behaviour.[21]
Thirdly - and I think that this is
important in relation to Bull – such creative justification for intervention
implies that the discourse has shifted away from one of a Grotian kind where
intervention is discussed in relation to a ‘Just War’ framework, as was once
the case. Question such as ‘Can intervention adhere to jus ad bellum?’
are answered – explicitly not; intervention is morally and legally wrong, there
is no just cause of an interventionary war. Rather, the rich juristic curiosity
that moved Grotius to write ‘De Jure Belli ac Pacis’ have been suspended
in the place of classificatory questions concerning whether or not a policy constitutes
‘intervention’ – which would be unjust – or something more palatable. This is
significant as it implies that the yoke of the questions Grotius asks concerning
the line between a just and unjust cause of war, for instance, are neglected,
and with them the normative discourse that informs statesmen and political
practitioners alike.
Lastly, as the questions asked veer
away from whether or not a particular mode of action is justified or not, for
whatever purpose, but whether or not a mode of action really constitutes
intervention as such, Bull reveals to us that the perceived ‘truth’ of a given
interventionary act is constituted in the discourse about the act itself. An
intervention can only be considered so if international discourse deems it to
be so and is as such by definition immoral. Thus, through the illustration of
the discourse surrounding the clear normative and legal revulsion against
‘intervention’, alongside the linguistic and semantic gymnastics states
undertake to subsequently change opinion about the nature of their activity to
be non-interventionary, the ‘truth’ concerning international political activity
is exposed to emerge discursively. This reveals a profounder political character
of international relations as a mode of activity in which its grounds, its very
scaffolds, are constructed out of a discourse interwoven with power relations.
Nonetheless, Bull tells us that
although there is a normative consensus that intervention is a moral and legal
wrong, it is a ubiquitous feature of international relations, perhaps even an
inherent feature.[22] To ignore this, or even
that there are indeed some instances where we could all justify intervention –
be it humanitarian or otherwise – is to admit that one is not a serious student
of international politics. What is interesting, briefly, is the distinction
that Bull and Wight make between ‘features’ and ‘institutions’ of international
society. An institution of international society would be such phenomena as
‘war’, ‘diplomacy’ or ‘alliances’, those guiding principles that ground the
very qualities of such a society; whereas ‘features’ are connected to the
temporal flux of norms and values that are dependent on the development of, but
remain within, the purview of the international society’s key institutions.
‘Arms control’ or ‘the balance of power’ are exemplary features in our case.
Returning to the issue at hand, Bull makes it clear that there are recognised
instances in which the principle of non-intervention can be undermined. Here, Bull
presents five scenarios in which intervention is deemed to be permissible.
The first manner in which
intervention may be considered permissible concerns the notion of an invitation
to intervention. An invitation to intervention changes the very character of
the activity itself. In this case, an incumbent government invites another
state to intervene within its affairs. Essentially, this permits intervention
without undermining the notion of sovereignty that the non-intervention
principle is based upon. How so? Simply put, the decisions of the government of
a sovereign state are exactly that – an extension of sovereignty. As such, an
invitation by the government of a state to intervene in its own affairs becomes
sovereignly consented-to action, creating a differing moral and legal situation
to that of coercive intervention.[23] A good illustration of ‘Intervention
by Invitation’ would relate to the arguments made by the US in relation to
their intervention in Vietnam during the 1960s, or even Russia’s intervention
in the Syrian Civil War since 2015, following Bashar al-Assad’s request to the
Putin administration for assistance to tackle Islamic Salafi-Jihadists (such as
the Islamic State group or the Al-Nusra Front) and the anti-governmental
‘rebel’ Syrian National Coalition.[24]
Secondly,
intervention can be thought of as acceptable when it takes the form of
counter-intervention. Counter-intervention occurs when assistance, be this
financially or militarily, is given to a state in order to repel an
intervention that another party or state has already begun. This is of course
increasingly controversial as this is the argument that was often invoked by
the superpowers during the Cold War, seeking to uphold policies of ideological
expansion and containment. As was discussed above, the US intervened throughout
Latin America during the Cold War, in states such as Panama, Guatemala or
Nicaragua, to name but three, in order to stop the spread of Soviet Communism within
the American hemisphere, a dissemination of ideas that the US considered to be
intervention in the first instance. Interestingly, the notion of
counter-intervention in order to restore the status-quo of non-intervention is
put forward in the international thought of none other than John Stuart Mill as
an act justifiably distinct from ‘intervention’ proper. In his ‘A Few Words
on Non-Intervention’, Mill states that:
“The doctrine of non-intervention,
to be a legitimate principle of morality, must be accepted by all governments.
The despots must consent to be bound by it as well as free States. Unless they
do, the profession of it by free countries comes but to this miserable issue,
that the wrong side may help the wrong, but the right may not help the right.
Intervention to enforce non-intervention is always rightful, always moral, if
not always prudent”.[25]
Although Mill’s overall argument is
that intervention for self-determination is legitimate, but not in order to
establish democracy, and that freedom from tyranny is something one must fight
for, as opposed to receiving it externally, what Mill insinuates is that
intervention for the blank canvass, the status-quo, of non-intervention, for
the sake of sovereignty and the sheer potentiality contained within such a
notion, is legitimate.[26] By seeking to simply
restore the status-quo of non-interventionism, interventionary action is to
uphold the rules-based order that deems it a legitimate activity in the first
instance.
Thirdly, intervention can be
thought of as acceptable when it is undertaken on the grounds of self-defence. Once
again, self-defence is an extension of sovereignty. In order for a state to be
the ultimate decision-maker over its own territorial jurisdiction, it must be
protected from external forms of violence; it must be able to protect citizens
in order to cash in on the obedience that protection extends to and
co-constructs. If a state cannot enforce order by ensuring peace in some
territories within its jurisdiction, then it is not the god-like omnipotent
decision maker over that territory that sovereignty entails. A good
illustration of this, one that Bull himself references and is yet still
apparent in 2021, is how Israel takes a stand against militants outside of its
borders in Lebanon, Jordan, or Syria, responding to violence with violence out
of claims to self-defence in order to reassert and consolidate its sovereignty.[27]
Fourthly, intervention is deemed
acceptable and justified in order to defend the rights of foreign subjects
against an oppressive ruler. This is an argument that extends all the way back
to Grotius in his discussion of jus ad bellum in ‘De Jure Belli ac
Pacis’ and has been part of the ‘Just War Theory’ discourse since. In the
contemporary world, this is often associated with humanitarian intervention,
once again a distinction from ‘intervention proper’, and the United Nation’s
key principle of ‘The Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P). In this manner,
interventions such as that in Kosovo in the late 1990s or the Australian led
intervention in East Timor from 1999-2000, two of the many potential
illustrations that could have been utilised, are apt examples of this manner in
which intervention is deemed justifiable. As always, this is not the
transcendence of power politics, but merely a guise by other means. Even the
greatest of normative intentions always appeal to some state’s power interests,
whether intended or not.
Lastly, and perhaps the most
contemporary excuse for just intervention, concerns collectively and
internationally authorized intervention. A key tenet of liberal international
society is collective security and the multilateralism that this entails. This
implies that security is achieved for all when states act collectively, in
mutual defence of one another against threats to the whole. Such notions have
underpinned liberal internationalist institutionalism for the past century. International
institutions – The League of Nations, the UN, NATO, regionalist institutions -
have sought collective security as both a means of defence and as a mechanism
for justifying interventions of their own. Interestingly perhaps, it has been
oft noted that as far as the League of Nations was concerned, its rigid
upholding of non-intervention and its inability to trigger such a mechanism of
collective security against Japanese, Italian and German aggression became a
factor abetting the total moral collapse of human civilisation characterising
the era and leading to war.[28]
The first to speak of such an
exception to the rule of non-intervention, according to Bull, was none other
than Christian Wolff, the first to explicate the principle of non-intervention
in its most absolute and uncompromising terms.[29] Wolff contends that the
foundation of the law of nations is the notion of a civitas maxima,
which literally translated means the ‘largest city’, but we should take to
imply as the largest civic unit possible – the civic community of humankind. As
Wolff asserts that the basis of the law of nations concerns the desire and
wellbeing of such a civitas maxima, if intervention were to be
sanctioned through such a multilateral framework of interconnected peoples and
nations, then such intervention would be itself legitimated.
This we can clearly see in our own
politics today. For Wolff, contextually, the expression of the civitas
maxima either sat within the power of the church to decide upon, or was in
itself only theoretically deducible through certain precepts of reason; the
extension of a certain philosophical idealism still nonetheless. In our own
era, the signat tempora of liberal internationalism has brought us those
international institutions in which the expression of the collective will of
the civitas maxima is, apparently, clearly discernible, observable and
articulatable. Unilateral interventionism can be legitimated or delegitimated
with reference to the authorisation of such a collective will. How do we see
this?
In the contemporary international
political system, if the UN refuses to authorise any mode of intervention –
authorisation that would by definition be the expression of the civitas
maxima as collective action – such action is deemed illegitimate. The
failure of the ‘coalition of the willing’ to secure UN approval prior to the
invasion of Iraq in 2003, or that of NATO prior to airstrikes in Kosovo, have
led to such interventions as being considered unjust and lacking legitimacy by
many precisely because collective action was neither informally sanctioned by
the community of humankind as a whole, nor by the institutional expressions of
such a community legally.
The same could be said of the inverse.
Where action is authorised by the international community it ascertains a
certain sense of legitimacy on both a judicial and moral level. For instance,
the counter-interventionary action of the first Gulf War in Kuwait was
authorised with the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 678, adopted on
the 29th November 1990, making it clear that if Iraq had not
withdrawn from Kuwait by the 15th January 1991 that member states
cooperating with the government of Kuwait would be authorised under Chapter VII
of the UN Charter to use all necessary means to uphold and restore
international peace and security in the area.[30] Thus, empirically we can
observe that collective authorisation provides an exception to the foundational
principle of non-intervention.
From here, Bull goes on to discuss
the debate surrounding intervention in world politics more broadly. The nature
and scope of these exceptions takes place against the background that
intervention is in general wrong. In this manner, Bull reveals that the
obligation of non-intervention by states co-constructs their right to external
sovereignty and the idea that states are equal in such rights. On a somewhat
pedantic note of personal intrigue, what Bull does not differentiate between is
the extent to which obligation to the principle of non-intervention leads
international society to be characterizable as an Isonomy [ἰσονομία], an
Isoarchy [ἰσοαρχία], or even an Isocracy [ἰσοκρατία] in terms of
equal legal capacity, at least in its theoretical ideal type. This becomes
important to ask as each of these are distinct in their character with major
ramifications upon the qualities such an international society would display.
The notion of ‘equal right’ or ‘sovereign
likeness’ that Bull centres some focus on becomes even more significant in that
he claims the internal features of any given state’s political system holds no
bearing on the co-construction of external sovereignty, obligation,
non-intervention and the equal rights of all states. Simply put, what or whom a
state is holds no consequence on those states right to external sovereignty and
on its obligation to uphold the external sovereignty of others. Interestingly,
what we might see here is a quiet overlap of Bull and Kenneth Waltz.
In his famed ‘Theory of International
Politics’, the behaviouralist Kenneth Waltz formulated his theory of
international relations, one that came to be contentiously referred to as
‘Structural Realism’ or ‘Neo-Realism’, whereby states act calculably, to a
certain degree, in response to the power structure and dynamics of the
international order. Part of this, for Waltz, concerns that “one cannot infer
the condition of international politics from the internal composition of
states”, and that the internal character of a state holds no bearing on its
relation to the dynamics of structural power politics; no matter the policies,
principles, culture or ideology of a nation-state it will always seek to structurally
act in its best interests in the anarchical self-help system of international
order – “The explanation of states’ behaviour is found at the international,
and not at the national, level”.[31] This has come to be known
as the ‘Black Box’ model, in which internal forces and qualities hold no
bearing on the phenomena of the international.
Now, I do not wish to suggest that
Waltz and Bull hold a considerable overlap in their thinking.[32] Although there may be
some shared principles between them, they arrive at this shared status from
increasingly different approaches, and a such, the perspective in which they
view the very phenomena of international politics is coloured differently.
Waltz is a behaviouralist, Bull opts famously to be the champion of the ‘Classical
Approach’ in International Relations. This would be a markedly large
distinction to ignore between them. Nonetheless, perhaps in this instance, we
see a certain sense of international statism that unifies the two, i.e., that
the current international order, however characterised, functions and operates in
the space between nation-states, and that by virtue of being nation-states
these units hold certain rights to agency that are influenced and executed
primarily by the character of those agent’s interaction. This being said,
although there may be a weak link between the two thinkers, such a link remains
perhaps even coincidental, arriving at such ‘back box’ thinking from such
different perspectives that their mutuality may just be simple parallax.
Returning to the topic of
sovereignty at hand, Bull moves his attention, all be it briefly, to that of
the “the rhetoric of sovereignty”.[33] Here, Bull asserts that
the claim to respect the equal rights of all states to external sovereignty and
refraining from interfering in one another’s recognised jurisdictional spheres
is proclaimed increasingly in the contemporary era than ever before. This has
not been done more so than the developing economies that were once referred to
as the ‘Third World’ in the de- and post-colonial era as an extension of their
consciousness that their sovereignty was continually up for compromise and
susceptible to endemic intervention. In this manner, the rhetoric of
sovereignty becomes one of the few means at their disposal to reinforce and
defend it. What fascinates me here about this claim is its performative
character.
The very notion of ‘performativity’
is often associated with the work of the Ordinary Language philosopher John L.
Austin. Speaking at the 1955 William James Lectures, Austin developed his
theory of what he penned as ‘speech acts’, going on to be transcribed in to his
famed ‘How to Do Things with Words’. Austin shook the foundations of the
philosophy of language by claiming that certain statements may be more than
merely descriptive, ‘constative’, utterances of fact or falsity. In doing so,
he emphasised that specific utterances can themselves function as an act that
reaps an effect on the world in which it was uttered – a speech act.
Austin highlights that certain speech
acts can be ‘performative’. In this, he stresses that such performative utterances:
(a) do not describe, report or constate anything at all, are not ‘true’ or
‘false’, and (b) are, or are a part of, the doing of an action which would not
normally be described as, or ‘just’, saying something.[34] Performative speech acts
hold three forces: Locutionary (in the linguistic meaning of the language),
Illocutionary (the performative function as the linguistic action of the
speaker – these being: representatives, expressives, directives, commissives,
and declarations[35]),
and the Perlocutionary (as the perceived effect through the linguistic
inference of the utterance’s locutionary and illocutionary force by the addressee).
The
perlocutionary force of the performative speech act is external to the
utterance itself, as the effect of the illocutionary force by the locutionary.
As Austin clarifies in reference to the perlocutionary force of the
performative speech act, being beyond that of a mere statement:
“Saying something will often, or
even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings,
thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons:
and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them”.[36]
Thus, the performative speech act
concerns linguistic utterances that form actions in themselves and change the
very milieu of the world in which they are uttered. It is in the combination of
the locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary forces that the performative
speech act retains the character it holds.
How is this relevant to Bull and
intervention? Simply put, Bull discusses the rhetoric of sovereignty being a
guard against the breakdown of the non-intervention principle. In this way,
especially for post-colonial states in the previously thought of ‘Third World’,
the rhetoric of sovereignty acts as a constant performative speech act in that
the perlocutionary force of rhetoric is the reinforcement, or perhaps even
constitution, of external sovereignty. Bull concedes that the rhetoric of
sovereignty is one of the few tools by which states that are susceptible to
interference hold in their arsenal in order to reinforce their claims to
self-determination and ultimate decision-making capability over their
territorial jurisdiction. Bull, whether conscious of this or not, provides a
route by which we can understand that (a) external sovereignty is
co-constituted with the rhetorical utterances that make-up international
political discourse, and (b) that such rhetoric can be mobilised, or rather
mechanised, in order to create a perlocutionary effect that would be in the
national interest, for the sake of upholding sovereign power through the very
rhetoric of sovereignty itself. This, interestingly, adds one more possibility
to Austin’s illustrations of what one ‘can do with words’ – one can construct,
reinforce and uphold a state’s external sovereignty through rhetorical
utterances.
Moving on from this, no matter how
fascinating the role of language may be in sovereignty formation and
consolidation, Bull makes it abundantly manifest that these concepts concerning
intervention and sovereignty are modern inventions, and even then thoroughly
Eurocentric. For instance, it is not until the likes of Wolff, Vattel or
Puffendorf that the most basic foundations of international law and the
grounding normative principles of international politics as we understand it
were laid. Concepts such as ‘non-intervention’ and the ‘equal rights of
sovereignty’ are only first stated in the 18th Century, and since
that time the impact of these concepts has indeed been limited, even in Europe.
This limitation, Bull concedes, has occurred in two ways. Firstly, through the
hierarchies of status and precedent amongst the European powers that were
curtailed, but not eliminated, at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. And, secondly,
new hierarchies of rights and power that are constantly developing, for example
as posited in the rights crystallised and proselytised by the power of five
permanent members of the UN Security Council. In this illustration there have
been a number of instances in which this
evolving network of power structures undermines the concepts of international
law that ground the ‘rules based international order’ all states claim to
uphold.
Equally,
with the growing Liberal influence within international politics, especially
following Woodrow Wilson’s administration and effect on international diplomacy
in the last century, there manifested a feeling that non-intervention may be an
obstacle to progress.[37] It is no secret that the
paradox of contemporary liberal international relations has become overt,
whereby principles such as ‘non-intervention’ and a ‘respect for sovereignty’
are considered to be sacrosanct, and yet intervention in Libya (2011) or the twenty
year intervention in Afghanistan by the US and its allies are equally considered
to be a normative necessity in order to uphold a certain notion of a ‘just’
international order in which grave internal injustices and mass-crimes of
sovereign states against its people are brought to an end.[38] This paradox I think is
best summarised by James Mayall in his ‘Nationalism and International
Society’, where he discuses the principle of non-intervention at length.
Mayall states:
“Non-Interference is the most problematic
entailment of sovereignty, however, because, by asserting an absolute
prohibition, it appears to make an immoral principle a crucial structural
support of the system…Modern attempts to breach the non-interference principle
in the interests of protecting fundamental human rights (and I am referring
here to the theoretical and legal debate on this issue rather than to state
practice) invariable, and inevitably run up against the core doctrine of
sovereignty”.[39]
As Mayall explains, attempts to
engage in a programme of global humanitarian action must inevitably ‘run up’
against sovereignty, in this moment undermining the principle of
non-intervention and thus removing the only normative assurance of external and
mutually recognised sovereignty. This is the paradox Liberal Internationalism
faces, whether it choses acknowledges it or not.
In
this respect, the upholding of sovereignty and non-intervention seem remote
today, and this Bull openly concedes. In the past century, European powers
intervened across the non-European world, be it France in Algeria or Britain in
Egypt, and Non-European superpowers are equally as guilty, be it the US across
Latin America and the Pacific in order to uphold the Monroe Doctrine, Russia in
Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, or both through proxy wars in Korea or Angola. Subsequently,
we have seen since the last century a “lack of effective application to the
non-European or non-Western world” of the principle of non-intervention and the
equal rights of sovereign states.[40] Nonetheless, this does
not prevent states from taking measures to reinforce the notion of
non-intervention. This, I think Bull himself summarises succinctly in the
following passage:
“Today, it would seem, at least at
first sight, that the rule of non-intervention, and the rule of mutual respect
for sovereign jurisdiction, of which it is part, are remote from the facts of
international life. On the one hand, under the influence of Third World
majorities in the political organs of the United Nations, legal prohibitions of
intervention have multiplied; om the other hand, interventionary activity of
one kind or another is so widespread that it is sometimes said to be endemic or
‘structural’ in nature”.[41]
Perhaps this is the case. Perhaps,
as Bull claims here, intervention is more than just a ‘feature’ of
international society, as he claims earlier. Rather, if intervention is endemic
or embedded into the structure of international order then it is an
‘institution’ of international society, in which case the principle of
non-intervention and the equal recognition of external sovereignty is not as
interwoven into the fabric of international order as we may think.
This reversal of the significance
of intervention as a defining characteristic of international society is not
explored by Bull, sadly. However, from here he goes on to discuss what he pens
as the three main broad categories of question concerning intervention in world
politics that the volume as a whole explores. Firstly, what is the place of
intervention today? Who intervenes? Which forms of intervention prevail, and
how endemic can we say intervention has become? Secondly, what is the gap
between non-intervention and the fact that such a ‘rule’ has been dissolved.
Thus, would it be better to dissolve the rule of non-intervention or is it a
vital part of the normative structure of international order? And lastly, if we
find that the rule of non-intervention is essential, how should it be
formulated, adapted, or modified for contemporary times?
________________
In conclusion, Bull’s introduction
to this edited volume is bitterly short, but rich in content. He not only
provides essential conceptualisations, but at every step his thinking prompts
further thought, the implications of such thinking are laid out and different
avenues explored. Lastly, the questions he himself concludes the introduction
with are as relevant today as they were then, providing us with the open end of
a puzzle piece that we can build from today. Therefore, all in all, it is not so
bizarre to explore such a short introductory chapter after all, and I hope that
these commentary notes have gone some way in making the case for this
introduction’s inclusion into the cannon of the so-called ‘English School’ of
International Relations.
[1] Hedley Bull
(1984) “Introduction” in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention in World Politics,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1-6.
[2] Thucydides (1910) The History
of The Peloponnesian War, London: J.M. Dent. Emphasis should be placed upon
Books 2-5 of this seminal work. Intervention after intervention is chronicled,
such as that of the Theban and Spartan sieges of Plataea, the seizure of
Amphipolis, or the infamous episode whereby the strength of Athens forced the
weaker Melos to ‘suffer what it must’, to give but three illustrations.
[3] For more information, see: Davide
Rodogno (2016) “Humanitarian Intervention in The Nineteenth Century”, in Alex
J. Bellamy and Tim Dunne (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of The Responsibility to
Protect, Oxford: OUP, pp. 19-37.
[4] BBC News (5th May 2019)
‘Venezuela crisis: Guaidó 'considering asking US for military intervention', BBC
News, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-48172520 (Accessed 2nd
June 2021).
[5] Abdelwahab El-Affendi (1st
June 2021) ‘Palestine and the UN’s ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine’, Aljazeera.com,
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/1/the-uns-responsibility-to-protect-doctrine-in-palest
ine (Accessed 2nd June 2021).
[6] For more on the ‘Classical
Approach’, see: Hedley Bull (1966) ‘International Theory: The Case for a
Classical Approach’, World Politics, 18(13), pp. 361-377.
[7] Specifically, I am thinking of
those more recent contributors to the ‘School’ who have sought to introduce a
certain empirical positivism to its temporally common ‘methodology’. I find
this problematic as it is to jettison part of the framework that the original
members of The British Committee on The Theory of International Politics
thought central to their treatment of the subject matter. This critique, yet to
be formally constructed, would be directed towards works by thinkers such as
Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver or Richard Little, who interlace constructivist security
studies with classical English School International Theory. Despite these
texts, of which I would refuse to in any way belittle the enormously
significant contributions of, for a restatement of the Classical Approach, see:
Cornelia Navari (Ed.) (2009) Theorising International Society: English
School Methods, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
[8] L.F.L. Oppenheim (1905) International
Law – Volume One, London: Longmans.
[9] Hedley Bull (1984) “Introduction”
in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention in World Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
p.1.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Jack S. Levy (1983) War in the
Modern Great Power System, 1495-1975, Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky, pp. 10-19. Wight states that: “a great power is a power that can
confidently contemplate war against any other existing single power”
[emphasis added], see: Martin Wight (1995) Power Politics, New York:
Continuum, pp.52-53. I would like to make a note that in a world of
superpowers, such as the US or China, where war against these powers cannot be
contemplated by any state but another superpower, does this erase the
phenomenon of Great Powers altogether, phenomenally, or has the conceptual
phenomenon of ‘Great Powers’ simply morphed into ‘Superpowers’, where we could
replace ‘great power’ in Wight’s conceptualisation with ‘super power’? Equally,
does this mean that as certain powers are extant that cannot have war
contemplated against them, that the ‘great power’ is itself extinct? Of course,
Mearsheimer (2001: 39) may argue that the existence of a Hegemon does indeed
undercut the existence of great powers as such.
[12] John J. Mearsheimer (2001) The
Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, p.5.
[13] Hedley Bull (1966) “Society and
Anarchy in International Relations”, in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight
(Eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in The Theory of International
Politics, London: Allen & Unwin, pp. 35-50.
[14] Hedley Bull (1984) “Introduction”
in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention in World Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
p.1.
[15] Joseph S. Nye Jr. (2009) Soft
Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, New York: PublicAffairs.
[16] For Soft Power Indexes, see: The
Soft Power 30 (2019) ‘The Soft Power 30: Overall Ranking 2019’, Softpower30,
https://softpower30.com/ (Accessed 24th June 2021); Brand Finance
(2021) ‘Global Soft Power Index 2021’, Brand Finance Plc., https://brandirectory.com/globalsoftpower/download/brand-finance-global-soft-power-index-2021.pdf
(Accessed 24th June 2021). For Military Spending, see: Max Roser and Mohamed
Nagdy (2017) ‘Military Spending’, Our World in Data,
https://ourworldindata.org/military-spending#citation (Accessed 24th
June 2021), data taken from World Bank and Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute (SIPRI).
[17] Hedley Bull
(1984) “Introduction” in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention in World Politics,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.1-2.
[18] Ibid, p.2.
[19] Hedley Bull (2012) The
Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, Fourth Edition,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, p.67.
[20] Ibid, p.211.
[21] There is of course an oft
discussed connection between Critical Theory and Realism, especially as far as
Morgenthau and Carr are concerned. For more information, see: Milan Babík (2013)
‘Realism as Critical Theory: The International Thought of E. H. Carr’, International
Studies Review, 15(4), pp. 491-514; Seán Molloy (2021) ‘Theorizing Liberal
Orders in Crisis Then and Now: Returning to Carr and Horkheimer’, International
Studies Quarterly, 65(2), pp. 320-330; Hartmut Behr and Michael C. Williams
(2016) ‘Interlocuting classical realism and critical theory: Negotiating
‘divides’ in international relations theory’, Journal of International
Political Theory, 13(1), pp. 3-17.
[22] Hedley Bull
(1984) “Introduction” in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention in World Politics,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, p.2.
[23] This is something that Wight
discusses within his chapter concerning intervention in his earlier work, see:
Martin Wight (2004) Power Politics, London: Continuum, pp. 191-199.
[24] For more on ‘Intervention by
Invitation’, see: Cóman Kenny and Seán Butler (2018) ‘The Legality of
‘Intervention by Invitation’ In Situations of R2P Violations’, New York
University Journal of International Law and Politics, 51(1), pp. 135-178; Laura
Visser (2020) ‘Intervention by invitation and collective self-defence: two
sides of the same coin?’, Journal on the Use of Force and International Law,
7(2), pp. 292-316; Olivier Corten (2010) The Law Against War: The
Prohibition on The Use of Force in Contemporary International Law, Oxford:
Hart Publishing, pp.249-310.
[25] John Stuart Mill (1867) “A Few
Words on Non-Intervention”, in J.W. Parker (Ed.), Mill, Dissertations and
Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical - Vol. III, London:
Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, pp. 153–78, p. 176.
[26] For more information, see: Stanley
Hoffman (1984) “The Problem of Intervention”, in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention
in World Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 7-28, pp. 24-26; Michael W.
Doyle (2015) The Question of Intervention: John Stuart Mill and The
Responsibility to Protect, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. For an
interesting usage of Mill’s argument in an increasing contemporary frame, see
the discussion of Mill throughout: Michael Walzer (1977) Just and Unjust
Wars, New York: Basic Books.
[27] For a contemporary discussion of
this, journalistically, see: Patrick Kingsley (July 20th 2021)
‘Israel Briefly Shells Southern Lebanon After Militant Rocket Fire’, The New
York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/2 0/world/middleeast/israel-lebanon-rockets.html
(Accessed 24th July 2021).
[28] Two critiques immediately jump to
mind. Firstly, that concerning the League’s tacit role in appeasing
interventions and occupations in the 1930s, see: A.J.P Taylor (1991) The
Origins of The Second World War, London: Penguin Books, passim. Secondly,
that concerning the underlying utopianism and idealism of the League in being
able to achieve such collective action at the expense of power politics and
individual state interest, see: E.H. Carr (2016) The Twenty Years’ Crisis:
1919-1939, London: Palgrave Macmillan, passim.
[29] This Wolff achieved in his
rationalist application of what he believed to be universally valid reason,
breaking away from traditional natural law thinking of international
jurisprudential thinking that had characterised much of the discipline up to
that point, for instance by Puffendorf, contending that the law of nations was
not just simply because God had declared it, but rather God had declared such
laws because they were just. For more information, see: Christian Wolff (2021) The
Law of Nations Treated According To The Scientific Method, Carmel, IL:
Liberty Fund Inc.
[30] United Nations Security Council
(1990) ‘S/RES/678(1990)’, undocs.org, https://undocs.org/S/RES/678(1990)
(Accessed 25th July 2021); specifically point 2.
[31] Kenneth N. Waltz (2010) Theory
of International Politics, Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., p. 64;
(1996) ‘International Politics is Not Foreign Policy’, Security Studies,
6(1), pp. 54-57, p. 54.
[32] For a greater discussion of the
interconnectivity between English School thought and positivist IR theory, see:
Barry Buzan (2001) ‘The English School: An Underexploited Resource in IR’, Review
of International Studies, 27(3), pp. 471-488; Richard Little (1995)
‘Neorealism and The English School: A Methodological, Ontological and
Theoretical Reassessment’, European Journal of International Relations,
1(1), pp. 9-34.
[33] Hedley Bull (1984) “Introduction”
in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention in World Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
pp.3-4.
[34] J.L. Austin
(1975) How to Do Things with Words, Second Edition, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, p. 5.
[35] John R. Searle (1976) ‘A
Classification of Illocutionary Acts’, Language in Society, 5(1), pp.
1-23. I have chosen to employ Searle’s taxonomy as opposed to that of Austin’s
precisely because Searle clarifies the notion of the illocutionary act and
rectifies some issues that he isolates with Austin’s taxonomy of illocutionary
speech acts.
[36] J.L. Austin (1975) How to Do
Things with Words, Second Edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
p. 6.
[37] Of course, this notion of progress
towards an increasingly solidarist notion of ‘World Society’ or ‘Global
Community’ is questionable and begs evidentiary support. A number of thinkers
that we can consider part of the English School have investigated this notion,
i.e., the idea that, since Kant, the liberal notion of linear, perhaps even
‘whig’, history is apparent within international political discourse, moving
constantly towards a certain non-statism or justice based global
communitarianism. For more information, see: David Armstrong (1999) ‘Law,
Justice, and The Idea of World Society’, International Affairs, 75(3),
pp. 547-561; Andrew Hurrell (1990) ‘Kant and The Kantian Paradigm in
International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 16(3), pp. 183-205.
[38] For a fantastic contemporary
discussion, and illustration, of this critique within the framework of
international relations is: Phillip Cunliffe (2020) The New Twenty Years’
Crisis: A Critique of International Relations, 1999-2019, Montreal:
McGill-Queens University Press.
[39] James Mayall (1990) Nationalism
and International Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 20.
[40] Hedley Bull (1984) “Introduction”
in Hedley Bull (Ed.), Intervention in World Politics, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
p.4.
[41] Ibid, pp. 4-5.