Diseños experimentales – Diseño Estadístico

Developments in the early 20th century limited the impact of this changing normative attitude towards interventions on humanitarian grounds however. Dominated by the common experience of two world wars, states appeared convinced that recourse to the use of force to solve international disputes was not only a violation of state sovereignty, but, over the long term, also proved detrimental to international society as a whole (Rytter, 2001: 123). Based on this understanding, the UN Charter, which formally created the United Nations in 1945, prohibited the use of force between states, except under two strictly proscribed circumstances. First, states were permitted to resort to the use of force as a means of self-defence against an armed infringement of their territorial integrity and sovereignty, as outlined in Article 51 of the Charter. Second, states were permitted to resort to the use of force as and when authorised by the UN Security Council as enforcement action, as allowed for under Chapter VII of the Charter. All other forms of the use or threat of the use of force between states were strictly prohibited. The Charter therefore made no formal provisions for interventions on humanitarian grounds, which had already been developing conceptually at the international level. The scope for creative interpretations of the Charter was also limited. Article 2(4) of the Charter, for example, set aside a state’s historic right to resort to the use of force, arguing that member states should refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Article 2(7) of the Charter further proscribed intervention, armed or otherwise, in international society, arguing that:

nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorise the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the jurisdiction of any state […] but this principle shall not prejudice the application and enforcement measures under Chapter VII (Charter of the United Nations, 1945: Article 2(7)).

Chapter VII dealt with collective responses to threats to international peace and security, whereby the Security Council had authorised the use of force on the part of Member States. Article 2(7) therefore vested in the UN Security Council the sole legitimacy for authorising the use of force in international society. Interestingly however, for the purposes of the present study, is historical evidence that the notion that a state could conduct its affairs in any manner it pleased within its own territorial confines, and therefore the prohibition on the interference in the domestic affairs of states enshrined in the UN Charter, did not receive automatic endorsement. Rather, as Connaughton notes, this prohibition had more to do with the fact that, in the new post-war relationship between states, there was no clear vision as to the precise place of domestic sanctity

in world order. John Foster Dulles noted this concern in 1945 when the United Nations was founded, writing that:

Article 2(7) is an evolving concept. We don’t know fifteen, twenty years from now what in fact is going to be within the jurisdiction of nations. International law is evolving, state practice is evolving. […] Let’s just let things drift for a few years and see how it comes out (in Connaughton, 2001: vii).

Whilst Dulles could not have known how prophetic his words may have been at the time, several challenges to the new norm of non-interventionism (and to the concept that the Security Council should be the sole body vested with the right to authorise the use of force in international society) were to emerge throughout the Cold War, which dominated the work of the United Nations for the first half-century of its existence. Yet these challenges were slow to be recognised, and even slower to be addressed. The first genocide in Rwanda, for example, which occurred between December 1963 and January 1964 and in which thousands of Tutsis were killed, passed largely unnoticed (De Heusch, 1995: 5). Indeed, the routine response to humanitarian emergencies throughout the Cold War was one of disinterest and non-intervention, and thus large-scale massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, of Ibo in Biafra, and of East Timorese passed did not elicit widespread condemnation or international moral outrage. Where interventions were conducted, these were always done so on a unilateral basis, and the humanitarian credentials presented by the interventions were consistently rejected; so much so that India, Vietnam and Tanzania framed their justifications for intervention in East Pakistan/Bangladesh (1971), Cambodia (1978 – 1979) and Uganda (1979) respectively within the predominant norms of self- defence, military retaliation or Cold War politics (or a combination of the three). Indeed, even India and Tanzania, which had both initially attempted to frame their interventions within a logic of appropriateness based on humanitarian grounds and human rights norms soon abandoned these efforts and repositioned their justifications based on a normative discourse of self-defence (Wheeler, 2000[a]; Finnemore, 2003; Cotton, 2001; Rytter, 2001; Howard, 2008; Berdal and Leifer, 1996).

State practice and the discourse surrounding this practice throughout the Cold War strongly indicated a restrictionist approach to the principle of interventions on humanitarian grounds. Indeed, the norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention were periodically reinforced throughout the Cold War. In 1965 the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention which denied the legal recognition of intervention on any grounds. In 1970 the General Assembly, without holding a vote, adopted theDeclaration on the Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States, which accepted that any use of force between states not explicitly allowed for in the UN Charter was incompatible with international law and reaffirmed that:

no state or group of states has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatsoever, in the internal or external affairs of any other state (in Rytter, 2001: 139).

In the 1975 Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE – now Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe [OSCE]), the then 35 participating states, including the Soviet Union and the United States, adopted a Declaration on Principles which, on the principle of the non-use of force, referring to Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, argued that

no consideration may be invoked to serve to warrant resort to the threat or use of force in contravention to this principle (in Rytter, 2001: 140).

In 1986 the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its Nicaragua Case, investigated whether any legal exceptions to the non-intervention norm existed. The case was brought before the court by Nicaragua against the United States of America, the former arguing that by supporting armed movements and mining its ports, the United States was acting in contravention of international law. In its judgement the Court found no support in state practice for a customary right of intervention. The Court further argued that establishing such a right would require a “fundamental modification of the customary law principle of non-intervention” (International Court of Justice, 1986). In its judgement the Court drew on the findings of the International Law Commission (ILC), which had previously established that the prohibitions on the use of force contained in the UN Charter had the character of jus cogens, that is, a norm which is accepted and recognised by states as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character (Wheeler, 2000[a]: 45). Notably, the findings of the Court should not be weighted too heavily, as it did not consider interventions in cases of mass human rights violations. Nonetheless, in 1987 the trend of reinforcing traditional interpretations of the norms of state sovereignty and non-intervention continued with the adoption by the General Assembly of theDeclaration on the Enhancement of the Effectiveness of the Principle of Refraining from the Threat or Use of Force in International Relations, which affirmed that:

no consideration of whatever nature may be invoked to warrant resorting to the threat or use of force in violation of the Charter (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 42/22, 1987).

As Martha Finnemore notes, the critical feature of international society throughout the Cold War for the development of a norm of intervention on humanitarian grounds was the nature of sovereignty under the Cold War spheres of influence system, translating into a general acceptance during the Cold War and the struggle for ideological supremacy that sovereignty in international society was strongly tied to territorial integrity. A firm transition from a conceptualisation of the ruler serving as the embodiment of the state (l’etat,c’est moi) in the 18th century to physically demarcated territory serving as the state had been made since the Second World War, and had become firmly entrenched during the Cold War period. This was a process strongly reinforced through the collective experience of decolonisation, in which states in the global South were granted or fought for their independence and territorial sovereignty; something that was keenly defended during the Cold War, or at least hawked to the highest bidder in the ideological warfare that characterised this period in history. Governments could rise and fall, ethnic compositions could shift with migration, but territorial boundaries remained fixed, and could not be violated under any circumstances. This norm became reinforced and indeed entrenched in declarative terms both in state discourse and in state behaviour during this time (Finnemore, 2003: 126).

3.3 Humanitarian Claims in the Post-Cold War Era: