Intervention Compromises
National Sovereignty

Since the end of the Cold War no foreign policy issue has provoked wider, deeper, and more fractious political controversy in the legislatures, media, and Cabinet rooms of the largest Western democracies, no issue has involved more loss of life, than that of intervention--in Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, Bosnia, and in Kosovo.

Witness the debates of the United States' 2000 presidential campaign. The candidates discussed intervention deeper than any other international affairs issue. When moderator Jim Lehrer grilled the candidates on this issue, Gov. George W. Bush favored intervention only where strategic and economic interests were at stake, a position he later affirmed as president when he appointed intervention skeptics as secretary of state and national security adviser. Vice President Al Gore claimed human rights disasters could warrant intervention.

At the end of the Cold War, scholars studied mostly conflict between states--the causes of war, the rise and fall of great powers, balancing behavior, polarity, and patterns of alliance. But intervention in the 1990s has eluded these emphases.

First, like all intervention, the recent operations are directed at affairs within states. Secondly, the major great powers, including Cold War rivals, have mutually sanctioned intervention through international organizations: the United Nations, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, and others. Third, a departure from Cold War behavior, is the occasion for intervention--typically, some broadly humanitarian disaster.

Repeated throughout the 1990s, this "new intervention" has punctured the traditional sanctity of sovereignty. This is revolutionary, for the principle of sovereign statehood had become one of the least-questioned principles of international order. We still take it for granted that virtually all of the earth's land is parceled by invisible lines that we call borders. Within borders, supreme political authority typically lies in a single source--a liberal constitution, a military dictatorship, a theocracy. This is sovereignty.

Hobbes and Bodin and Grotius first wrote of the modern version of the principle in the 16th and 17th centuries; a generation ago, the sovereign state captured nearly the entire land surface of the globe when European colonies achieved independence. Sovereignty has come closer than any other political principle in history to enjoying universal, explicit assent.

This is why it is surprising that internationally sanctioned intervention has become one of the most important foreign policy issues following the Cold War. And this is why one of the most conceptually innovative developments in international relations of the past decade has been formation of the European Union in the Maastricht Treaty of 1990. Here, 15 states banded together to continue an amalgamation of governance that began in 1950 with the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community. Eleven of these states even agreed to adopt a common currency, one of the most important principles of statehood.

Will these trends continue? It seems likely. It was only two years ago that the Clinton Administration ordered the sustained bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo under the auspices of NATO. Although President Bush has promised to intervene more sparingly, we should not surprised if he makes an exception or two: His father intervened in Somalia and on behalf of beleaguered Kurds in Iraq.

A transition to a wholly new principle of international order is still far distant. The formation of sovereign states, first in Europe, then throughout the globe, occurred over a period of 800 years. But such gradualness should not obscure the innovations and developments that intimate new authorities or new political forms.