Abstract
This chapter focuses on the debate over who can authorize humanitarian intervention in contemporary international society. The first section examines the Security Council’s role in authorizing the use of force and how in the post—Cold War period it has expanded its definition of threats to international peace and security to encompass humanitarian crises. In the next section, I analyze the legal and philosophical positions on “proper authority” and make two central claims: (1) that international law on the use of force suggests that interventions for humanitarian purposes currently require Security Council authorization; and (2) that the Council should be considered not as the “proper authority” for international society in matters of peace and security but rather as an entity whose pronouncements are “authoritative.” In the process, I suggest how the authoritativeness of the Council has been weakened by questions about representation and decision making, as well as by problems of capacity and delegation. The third section focuses on the politics of authorization and identifies the actors in contemporary world politics who hold various positions on the value of and need for Council authorization. I conclude with an analysis of the implications of the debate on authorizing humanitarian intervention for our understanding of the role of the United Nations (UN) in global security and the state of global multilateralism, more generally.
Among statesmen, the lovers of naked power are far less typical than those who aspire to clothe themselves in the mantle of legitimate authority; emperors may be nude, but they do not like to be so, to think of themselves so, or to be so regarded.
—This Claude, 1966
I would like to thank David Malone, Nicholas Wheeler, and the editors of this volume for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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Notes
Iris L. Claude, Jr., “Collective Legitimization as a Political Function of the United Nations,” International Organization 20(3) (Summer, 1966 ): 367–379.
Simon Chesterman, Just War? Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 ), 121.
Ian Hurd, “Legitimacy, Power, and the Symbolic Life of the UN Security Council,” Global Governance 8 (2002): 35–51 (p. 35).
See, for example, Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000 ).
Michael Byers and Simon Chesterman, “Changing the Rules about Rules? Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention and the Future of International Law,” in Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas eds. J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert O. Keohane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 ), 178.
See, for example, Christopher Greenwood, “International Law and the NATO Intervention in Kosovo,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 49 (2000): 926–934.
Allen Buchanan, “Political Legitimacy and Democracy,” Ethics 112 (July, 2002): 689–719, (pp. 689–692).
Thomas Franck, The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1990 ), 24.
John G. Ruggie, “International Authority,” in Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization ( London: Routledge, 1998 ), 59–61.
John Ruggie, “Measuring the legitimacy of UN vote,” Financial Times (March 14, 2003 ).
Adam Roberts, “Intervention: Suggestions for moving the debate forward,” submission to The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Round-table meeting (London, February 3, 2001 ).
Edward Mortimer, A Few Words on Intervention: John Stuart Mill’s Principles of International Action applied to the Post Cold War World (John Stuart Mill Institute, 1995).
See Danesh Sarooshi, The United Nations and the Development of Collective Security ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999 ).
Zhang Yunling, “China: Whither the world order after Kosovo?” in Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention eds. Albrecht Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2000 ): 117–127.
Nicholas J. Wheeler, “Legitimating Humanitarian Intervention,” Melbourne Journal of International Law 2(2) (2001): 550–568 (p. 566 ).
Edward Luck, “The United States, International Organizations, and the Quest for Legitimacy,” in Multilateralism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ambivalent Engagement eds. Stewart Patrick and Shepard Forman (Boulder: Lynne Reiner Publishers, 2001 ): 47–74.
See, for example, Richard Perle, “United they fall,” The Spectator (March 22, 2003 ), 22–26.
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© 2004 Richard M. Price and Mark W. Zacher, eds.
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Welsh, J.M. (2004). Authorizing Humanitarian Intervention. In: Price, R.M., Zacher, M.W. (eds) The United Nations and Global Security. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980908_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980908_11
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