CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

(which is essentially non-interventionist). Walzer, however, argues that this does not
preclude intervention; it only denies it legal recognition. We must recognise, then, that
intervention decisions ‘belong not in the realm of law but of moral choice, which
nations, like individuals must sometimes take.’ 165 That nations must make their own
moral judgements and not abrogate such decision-making to the UN, was an argument
made by Margaret Thatcher in 1990 166 , seeking to persuade a reluctant United States
Administration to take forcible action to reverse Saddam Hussein’s annexation of
Kuwait, without reverting to the UN for specific authority.
Removing intervention-decisions from the legal field to the moral does not necessarily
imply unilateralism, the dangers of which we have noted; nor does it deny a role for the
international community, whether or not recognised as represented by and through the
UN. For even if we accept nations’ rights – or indeed obligations – to make unilateral
decisions to intervene when certain criteria are met, we can insist that those decisions,
more often than not necessarily post hoc, are subject to the moral, not legal, scrutiny of
the community of states. This leads us to reach, then, a slightly awkward compromise
that reserves to states the proper authority, required by just war doctrine, to determine
when intervention is justified, but they must expect that their actions are subject to the
moral scrutiny of the world at large. Readiness to intervene must then be a function of
immediacy of crisis or pressing national interest, considered against degree of
international support. The more pressing the requirement for action, in a nation’s own
eyes, the less it need concern itself with international support and vice versa as
represented at Figure 3-3. The more widespread the international support, and the more
such support spans cultural divides, the more obvious that the intervention is justified;
the less obvious the international support, or the narrower its base, then the more
reluctant should a state be to intervene. It should then intervene if, contrary to the
opinion stacked against it, it has a sincere belief in the urgency or criticality, from its
own perspective, of action.
216