Mark Mazower is a distinguished historian of Europe, and a professor of history at Columbia University. He has a piece in the latest World Affairs that sheds useful light on the rise and fall of the concept of humanitarian interventions. But it also reveals some common misconceptions about the relationship between sovereignty and international institutions, and presents a thoroughly contradictory vision of the road forward.
Mazower’s theme is that the liberals and neo-conservatives (such as Michael Doyle, Samantha Power, and Michael Ignatieff) who spent much of the late 1980s and 1990s arguing the case for humanitarian interventions were wrong, and that President Obama is doubly right to wind down “the rights rhetoric and the democracy initiatives of his predecessor.” First – and here it is hard to argue with Mazower – because interventions justified solely on the grounds that they will do good for others are publicly unsustainable when the going gets tough, as it almost invariably does. Second, because liberals are showing a “new maturity” by recognizing the value of domestic and international institutions, and of “clear legal norms, and . . . international stability” in securing human welfare.
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