Accounting for Humanitarian Intervention: Some Remarks about the Cost of Taking Sides

JVF Conference Papers

Periods of warfare are probably the best times in which to witness the strange overlapping of morals, politics and law.

Today, we can perceive many different reactions to this confusion (apart from the ever prevailing disgust and dismay): appealing to rational arguments in order to establish a lawful consensus, withdrawing from politics in order to safeguard one’s moral integrity, praising the role of power and interest in order to identify the true motivations behind any moral claim. What all these approaches have in common is the urge to purify our everyday language, to monopolize our discursive choices, to dissolve the clash of claims between morals, politics and law – typically by contending that we can reveal a single explanatory structure underlying the semantic chaos if we finally consider the supreme importance of … what: morals, politics or law? At this point some key difficulties come to the fore. Any seemingly objective description of a real humanitarian intervention works with hypotheses that ultimately rest on normative decisions. Some of these assessments are made explicit, whereas others remain latent.

A full proof of this fact is the debate between leading jurists about the status of humanitarian interventions, as I will show below. If these legal scholars determined a “humanitarian intervention” to be a straightforward war of aggression, this would have tremendous effects i.e. their judgment would virtually create a criminal matter of fact. To talk about “value-free science” (à la Max Weber) in this context would be mere self-deception.

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