The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force

Abstract

Martha FinnemoreIthaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. x, 173pp, US$26.00 cloth (ISBN 0-8014-3845-4)All societies regulate the use of force among members. In international society, those states with the means to use force against others have enforced understandings of right and permissible conduct and punished actions branded as illegitimate through military intervention. Martha Finnemore argues that the reasons and meanings behind military intervention, as well as the ways in which it is carried out, have changed dramatically over the history of the states system. These changes in the patterns of military intervention, she further contends, cannot be explained merely by alterations in material factors, such as the balance of power or military technology. Instead, what has changed are states' understandings about the purposes to which they can and should use force. These changes have been global in scope.Finnemore examines three cases of systemic change in intervention behavior: 1) military intervention to collect debts owed to nationals by other states (sovereign default)--a practice which stopped in the early twentieth century; 2) humanitarian military intervention--a practice which has continued for two centuries but has changed in terms of whom states protect and how they intervene; and 3) military intervention to enforce international order--a practice which has changed with the definition by powerful states of their geostrategic interests and security needs.The book advances several arguments that target different audiences. Targetting realists, Finnemore's humanitarian cases show that states have consistently intervened for reasons other than purely geostrategic and economic interests. Indeed, state interests, she claims, are indeterminate, and that is why decision makers debate over whether and when to intervene. Recognizing that the primary function of the political process is to determine the national interest, Finnemore examines these political debates to explain the coordinated shifts in perceptions of interests among states and how they understand the utility of intervention as a form of statecraft. With constructivists and legal scholars in mind, Finnemore offers a theory of strategic social construction, whereby powerful states consciously set out to change the values and perceptions of others regarding the use of force. The issue is how one set of rules that regulate military intervention are replaced by a different set of equally self-interested rules. Here Finnemore advances the argument that purposive agency by powerful actors, as well as historical context and contingency, explain changes in the legitimate use of force. …