Humanitarian Intervention

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Humanitarian Intervention

In a world plagued with conflict and political instability there are many manners in which the international community is prone to react. In current day the Nobel Peace Prize winning direction of Peace Making, an ideology that has been accredited to former Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, has received much time and attention. A further step beyond the latter movement has been referred to as "Peace Making". This rather new philosophy is founded on the premise of establishing peace even through forceful military presence. The final step is intervention; this is the deployment of an external party into a conflict where the external party has not been invited. The many moral and ethical implications set by such a precedent is subject to much debate and poses one of the toughest philosophical problems today. It is the contention of this thinker that the practice of intervention is one that should never have been used and furthermore must be seized as it is not fit for practice today in our world for the following points of reason: the concept is altruistic in theory but is practiced by political players, there is a dangerous standard set into place that could possibly be used maliciously by parties against the sovereignty of other nations and finally it is very difficult to determine the legitimacy of a nation state considering that the countries of the world do not share the same philosophical criterion to define "legitimate government".

The question of involvement in any sort of intervention is a difficult one to approach because the implications of the ideology are idealistic and altruistic to the point that the notion is completely hypothetical as opposed to being plausible phenomen...

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...yers to serve any interest but there own, making intervention something selfish and not altruistic. The compromising values of self-interest and benevolence are clear reasons in themselves to abandon intervention policy. The potential for malice is more than just great, but it is imminent. It is bound to occur and to be harmful. Intervention today spells intervention tomorrow and paves the road for havoc through a deadly precedent. Finally, there is no example of legitimacy that can be relied upon as the world is composed of so many systems founded on a multitude of cultural beliefs. Thus it is impossible to use intervention policy fairly, ensuring that Sovereignty is not impeded upon for the benefit of politics. Clearly upon the lines of reasoning represented in this paper there is no way that Canada or the world community can support intervention policy.

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