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The Dual Use of an Historical Event: 'Rwanda 1994', the…
The Dual Use of an Historical Event: 'Rwanda 1994', the justification and Critique of Liberal Interventionism (Muller and Wolff 2014)
Introduction
In many ways 'Crimea' and 'Kosovo are similar and different. Similar in their forced annexation without UNSC approval and differences in context and the situation.
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In Rwanda as opposed to Kosovo 1999 and Crimea 2014 is that no state opposed military activities as a legitimate interference with a soverign state, all accept a humanitarian intervention would have been legitimate to prevent or stop the Rwandan genocide. Didn't require a legal justification but was preventing something that was universally unacceptable
The problem was a general lack of interest from democratic governments. However has also been used as a justifier of an almost unlimited international agenda of liberal interventionism and social engineering. Used to make the case for an ever expanding agenda of liberal 'just' war.
From Liberal Universalism to Militant Liberalism, from democratic peace to democratic war
Democratic peace has moved from a deductive philosophical enterprise (Immanuel Kant) through a deductive, but empirically enriched political-theory approach (Ernst-Otto Czempiel and Michael Doyle) to a positivist ‘large N’ research programme with the inevitable counter-statistics, with rationalist and constructivist branches and Marxist and post-modernist critic
If successful will lead to democratic peace, but neglects the dark side of peace between democracies: democratic war democracies attacking autocracies without a self-defence justification. Don't attack other democracies, however might overcome this by re-defining the 'other' as non-democratic
Kant defined the internally and externally unlawful 'unjust enemy' as a legitimate object of preventive democratic defence, post-war interference in the system of rule of the vanquished country with a view to help its citizens establish a less unlawful and thus less dangerous rule.
practical judgements struggle with 'reality' and subjected to the risk of error, reasonable people disagree on the character of the 'other' and the seriousness of the situation. Democracies vary significantly in their attitudes towards the sword depending upon the ideology of the government
All democracies do agree that once the defeat is accomplished, instil democracy!
The liberal rationale that is used to justify democratic wars is therefore not explicitly democratic missionarism
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the conviction that democracy is beneficial for peace (and human rights) is enough to justify a continuing presence of ‘intervening forces’ in Afghanistan or Iraq until consolidated liberal democracies have been established
Conclusion
the reference to Rwanda is used to justify a comprehensive agenda of liberal interventionism that includes the illegal use of military force and the responsibility (‘to rebuild’) supposedly triggered by such military interventions.
Using ‘Rwanda’ with a view to empowering military intervention in different contexts and with different purposes.
‘Rwanda’ takes on a suspicious meaning: it might be a tool to silence justified criticism and eliminate doubts on the wisdom of a proposed intervention by ascribing to opponents a willingness to condone large-scale homicide.