An armed conflict between nations horrifies us. But the economic war is no better than an armed conflict. This is like a surgical operation. An economic war is prolonged torture. And its ravages are no less terrible than those depicted in the literature on war properly so called. We think nothing of the other because we are used to its deadly effects.

– M.K. Gandhi, Non-Violence – The Greatest Force (1926)

 

I) Introduction

 

This paper will illustrate that despite the principle of non-intervention in the postwar era, transnational capital has beseeched intervention into the Global South to further its interests. Such intervention has been both military and economic, often inaccurately referred to as free trade. By restricting the policy making space of Southern states, free trade arrangements and international institutions act to de-legitimize the sovereignty of Southern states and peoples, thus limiting their ability to develop their economies. The aim of this paper is to draw out similarities from historical interventions and more recent ones to illustrate a continuation of the influence capital has over the twin spheres of non-intervention and free trade in the postwar era.

 

The social sciences, unlike the applied sciences, rarely provide controlled experiments within which one can isolate particular variables and determine causal relationships with certainty. However, history does allow one to contrast relatively comparable situations to isolate important variables. As Daniel Tarullo notes, one’s appreciation of society occurs by actively organizing data, and such organization is contingent as opposed to necessary.[1] The dominant discourse in respect of the law on the use of force and international economic law organizes data in a particular way. This paper seeks to deconstruct such organization and proposes an alternative organizing framework that reveals the role capital plays in normalizing such discourses. As a result, this paper will not explore in great detail any one case, but rather summarizes many cases to illustrate a trend in international law and relations that prioritizes the interests of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) over substantial majorities.

 

The importance of empirical data, particularly when dealing with issues that affect the law, should be self-evident. Ignoring or dismissing the historical record is commonplace in discussions of non-intervention and free trade. George Orwell notes in his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm that ‘unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark’ in democratic England ‘without any need for any official ban’ because an education reveals that there are some things ‘it wouldn’t do’ to say. Evidence, particularly when it reveals an inconvenient truth, should not be dismissed; rather, it – along with elementary moral truisms like universality – should be taken seriously. Noam Chomsky, a vociferous proponent of the ‘most elementary’ of moral principles, particularly with respect to interventions, writes that the principle of universality is ‘so obvious that it is rarely even mentioned… we are subject to the standards we apply to others [and those] who cannot accept this truism should have the decency to keep silent’.[2]

 

Finally, though terms like the ‘Developing World’ or ‘Developed World’ imply a ‘monolithic political entity’ or a ‘homogeneous cultural domain’ and fail to account for diversity amongst states, this paper nevertheless refers to the Global North as, approximately, Western Europe, its off-shoots (e.g. North America) and recent additions (e.g. Japan). The Global South generally refers to previously subjugated colonies and territories of the Global North.[3]

 

 

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II) Principle of ‘Non-Intervention’

 

A) Historical Interventions

 

Spain’s 16^th century conquest of the Americas marked an expansion in claims to the right to intervene, contrary to the regulation of force in the late medieval period. The primary justifications advanced by Northern states for their Southern interventions were: (i) religious, ‘the right to preach the gospel without hindrance’; (ii) economic, the right to free trade; and (iii) secular, ‘the right to prevent or punish violations of the laws of nature’ (referring to the barbarism of the ‘unpeoples’[4] of the world).[5] As Nico Krisch notes, reliance upon one or a combination of these justifications depended upon strategic considerations. ‘For Spain, exclusive rights such as those derived from the Papal Bulls or based on discovery, were advantageous since they excluded latecomers in the colonial contest; for the Dutch, in contrast, the insistence on a right to free trade allowed [them] to challenge earlier conquests by the Portuguese’.[6] The parallels with today’s justifications are similar; with the (arguable) exception of religious justifications, economic (free trade) and secular (democracy promotion and human rights) justifications for intervention are common.[7]

 

Moving to the 19^th century, nearly all of Africa and much of Asia were subjected to Northern intervention, now appreciated as colonialism. Breaching the principle of universality, only Northern interventions into the South were legitimate; characterized by Gerry Simpson as a ‘legalized hegemony’.[8] Northern states were endowed with the legal principle of sovereignty, while Southern states were accorded the privilege of intervention. Southern states would only be admitted to the ‘family of nations’ if they met the arbitrary standard of ‘civilization’ as determined by the North thereby ‘providing a formal basis for the [Northern] civilizing mission of the time, and it also served as justification for the extensive use of fore that accompanied this mission.’[9] The ‘lasting social meaning imparted to the fact of colour (and hence of race) by philosophers like John Locke and David Hume, made it axiomatic by the middle of the nineteenth century that Europeans ought always to rule non-Europeans’ and that ‘certain territories and people require and beseech domination’.[10]

 

In 1859, John Stuart Mill wrote, in A Few Words on Non-Intervention, that there ‘seems to be no little need that the whole doctrine of non-interference with foreign nations should be considered’. England was so much ‘a novelty in the world’ that ‘it would appear that many are unable to believe it when they see it’. Mill extolled England’s ‘extent of dominion’, ‘wealth’ and ‘foreign policy’ which was to ‘let other nations alone’. No state ‘apprehends or affects to apprehend from [England] any aggressive designs’; moreover, ‘if other nations do not meddle with [England], [England] will not meddle with them’. The interventions England carried out to ‘exert influence over’ other states, ‘even by persuasion, is rather in the service of others, than of itself’. Altruism in foreign affairs was self-evident, as not ‘only does [England] desire no benefit to itself at the expense of other[s], it desires none in which all others do not freely participate… The cost of war is its own; the fruits it shares in fraternal equality with the whole human race’… including the ‘barbarians’. England’s self-appointed moral authority was unquestionable because of all states having the potential, it was ‘the only one [for] whom mere scruples of conscience would suffice to deter’ it from being dangerous, given that it was ‘in realty better than other’, including ‘backward’, states.

 

However, ‘[in] general, the history of imperialism and of imperialist apologia, particularly as seen from the point of view of those at the wrong end of the guns, should be a central part of any civilized [discourse]’.[11] In the century prior to the Charter of the United Nations’ (UNC) prohibition on the use of force, the ‘unwillingness or ineffectiveness of local authorities in discharging international obligations’ was a primary justification for intervention by the Global North. The historical record led to Thomas Jefferson’s observation that:

 

[w]e believe no more in Bonaparte’s fighting merely for the liberties of the seas, than in Great Britain’s fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth, and the resources of other nations.[12]

 

B) Law on the Use of Force

 

In response to the widespread slaughter that interventions had led to, the middle of the 20^th century witnessed a prohibition on the use of force in international relations in an effort to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’.[13] Arguably a jus cogens norm,[14] derogation from this prohibition is limited to two exceptions under the UNC: self defence until the UN Security Council (SC) acts as per article 51 and SC authorization as per chapter VII.[15] Both of these exceptions have been subjected to extreme and debilitating stress as the North has attempted to expand the scope of these exceptions, with the use of force against Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 being the most obvious recent examples.

 

1. Self Defence

The use of force in individual or collective self defence is an inherent right of all States,[16] when such force is both necessary and proportionate,[17] and when the need is "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation".[18] Precisely when such an inherent right materializes is a matter of some dispute as evidenced by the overlapping use of anticipatory, pre-emptive and preventative self defence.[19]

 

2. SC Authorization

In the event that the SC determines the existence of a threat to the peace, breach of the peace or act of aggression,[20] the SC may, after considering measures short of the use of force, authorize the use of force.[21]

 

Though the purpose of the UNC was ostensibly to prevent interventions and respect sovereignty, an honest review of the empirical record reveals that this purpose has not been met. Moreover, the recent normative push for a ‘more liberal international legal order’ (see Humanitarian Intervention below) that formally erodes state sovereignty, further undermines the UNC.[22]

 

C) Postwar, Cold War Intervention

 

The Cold War (like the War on Terror) was portrayed as a grand clash of civilizations, a momentous struggle of ideology. An alternative framework, however, would position the Cold War as a specific, albeit significant, side-bar in the 500 year, economically exploitative North-South relationship.[23] The expansion and extension of US foreign policy in the postwar period did not result from a perceived threat from Communism, but rather from the need to sustain the wants of American capital.[24] The Cold War provided the framework within which the wants of the TCC could be met; domestically, this justified unprecedented non-wartime state intervention in the US economy – primarily the military-industrial complex. The containment strategy of the Cold War was ‘the product, not so much of what the Russians [did], or of what happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States… What is surprising is the primacy that [was] accorded economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the exclusion of other considerations.’[25] The former US under-Secretary of Defence, Charles Duncan Jr. stated:

 

[Why], you may ask, do some have the view that the Soviet Union has become the world’s number one military power? The answer is that, to a large extent, we have created that image ourselves… in the understandable desire to reverse the anti-defence mood and propensity for reduced defence budgets…[26]

 

The conventional Cold War paradigm provided the justification for US interventions, economic and military, in the South; such interventions being necessary to ensure continued access to raw materials, markets and labour. When diplomatic, political and economic pressure was insufficient to ensure such access, the North resorted to the use of force to ‘maintain regimes favourable to US interests, and to stifle or overthrow movements considered inimical to US interests’.[27] According to the ‘father’ of containment, George Kennan:

 

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population… Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this position of disparity… We should cease to talk about vague and… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.[28]

 

The US wanted ‘economic policies that would enable American capital to operate as freely’ and ‘monopolistically as possible’ with the hope of creating an ‘integrated, United States-dominated capitalist world economy’.[29] Moreover, high levels of postwar state intervention in the morbid prewar economy provided a necessary public subsidy to American capital enabling it to innovate, particularly in the high-technology industries, and grow. This socialization of investment risk coincided with the privatization of profits.[30] US and Northern foreign policy continued the North-South exploitative relationship as movements, parties or policies emanating from the South that sought to redress this relationship attracted economic and military intervention.[31]

 

A century earlier, when the UK was the dominant intervening power, Mill criticized European ‘politicians, especially those who think themselves particularly knowing’ for revealing the motivation behind England’s interventions as based upon ‘the incessant acquisition of new markets for [its] manufacturers’ going so far as to ‘trample on every obligation of public or international morality’ for the sake of capital. Northern states were entitled to their ‘Oriental possessions’ because ‘to suppose that the… rules of international morality’ apply equally as between states with a ‘high’ degree of ‘social improvement’ and those with a ‘very low’ degree was plainly wrong; the ‘rules of ordinary inter-national morality imply reciprocity’ and ‘barbarians will not reciprocate’ as ‘their minds are not capable of so great an effort’.[32]

 

1. Cuba

 

Northern contempt for the socioeconomic sovereignty of others is transparent in the case of Cuba. ‘The extensive influence of "Castroism" is not a function of Cuban power… Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change’.[33] As noted by the State Department Policy Planning Council, overt and covert efforts (including economic intervention, the use of force and terrorism) have been justified because ‘[t]he primary danger [the US] face[s] in Castro is in the impact the very existence of his regime has upon the leftist movement in many Latin American countries… The simple fact is that Castro represents a successful defiance of the US, a negation of [its] whole hemispheric policy of almost a century and a half,’ dating back to the Monroe Doctrine.[34] Arthur Schlesinger, informed Kennedy of the dilemma with self determination, namely ‘the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands’. Schlesinger went on to warn that ‘[the] distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes… [and the] poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living’.[35]

 

This response was reminiscent of US foreign policy at the turn of the 19^th century when sweeping social reforms, including land redistribution, ‘struck fear into the hearts of American businessmen’ prompting President McKinley to order ‘the battleship Maine to leave its place in the Atlantic Fleet and head to Havana’ after having requested and received authorization from Congress for ‘forcible intervention’.[36] ‘Seldom can history have recorded a plainer case of military aggression; yet seldom has a war been started in so profound a conviction of its righteousness’.[37] Castro ‘was a pure product of American policy toward Cuba’ resulting from US support for repressive dictatorships including, finally, Fulgencio Batista.[38] Recently, the Judicial Commission of the Organization of American States (OAS) condemned, and the EU challenged, ‘three decades of American Cuba policy’. In response, the Clinton administration withdrew the US from the proceedings and noted that the WTO lacks competence to rule on US national security or to compel the US to change its laws.[39]

 

In March 1960, the US resorted to military intervention against Castro, despite his popularity.[40] These efforts began with the arming of militants inside Cuba and quickly escalated to bombing and incendiary raids on Cuba by US based Cuban exiles.[41] Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was asked to ‘lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage… to topple’ Castro and to visit the ‘terrors of the earth’ on Cuba.[42] Included amongst such operations were, speedboat strafing attacks on a Cuban seaside hotel ‘killing a score of Russians and Cubans’, attacks on British and Cuban cargo ships, and contaminating sugar shipments.[43] This campaign of terrorism, vociferously denied by the US at the SC,[44] contributed significantly to the emergence of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the threat of nuclear holocaust.[45]

 

2. Columbia

 

In 1962 General William Yarborough was sent by President Kennedy as part of a Special Forces mission to Columbia advising ‘paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents’.[46] Alfredo Carrizosa, the president of the Columbian Permanent Committee for Human Rights and former Columbian Minister of Foreign Affairs, notes that the Kennedy administration ‘took great pains to transform [Columbia’s] regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads… known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine… not defence against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game… [having] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Columbian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, or who are assumed to be communist extremists’.[47] The purpose of the National Security Doctrine was ‘to destroy permanently a perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority’ or the ‘popular classes’.[48]

 

Northern intervention into Columbia continues to the present. The US administration recently requested $98 million from Congress for ‘a specially trained Colombian military counter-insurgency brigade devoted solely to protecting the US multinational Occidental Petroleum’s 500-mile long Cano Limon oil pipeline in Columbia’.[49] The funds would be used to ‘train and equip two brigades of the Columbian armed forces to protect the pipeline’ so the US is not deprived of a ‘source of petroleum’; the tacit assumption being that the North owns the resources found in the South.[50] State promotion of TCC interests was transparent from US Ambassador Patterson’s comments noting that though the funding was not provided under the pretext of a war on drugs, it was necessary ‘for the confidence of [US] investors’.[51]

 

Columbian organizations seeking to ‘challenge prevailing socioeconomic conditions, are constructed by the US government as potentially subversive to the social and political order, and in the context of counter-insurgency, legitimate targets for paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist attack’.[52] The consequences of intervention in Columbia have been devastating; the paramilitary has eliminated the social-democratic party, killed 4,000 human rights, indigenous and community activists and 141 journalists, been responsible for three out of every four trade union activist deaths worldwide, committed 8,000 political assassinations in 2002 alone and displaced 2.7 million people.[53]

 

Even if one were to give credence to the US arguments in favour of the drug war, the underlying assumptions are scandalous. Imagine the reaction to a proposal that Columbia or China [or Thailand] should undertake fumigation programs in North Carolina to destroy government subsidized crops used for more lethal products – which, furthermore, they not only must import at risk of trade sanctions but for which they must allow advertising aimed at vulnerable populations.[54]

 

As George Washington noted ‘[t]he fundamental reason why countries invade other countries, or seek forcibly to depose their governments, has not changed over the course of history… The search for markets, and for access to natural resources, is as central to American history as it has been to the history of every great power in every age’.[55]

 

3. Iran and Guatemala

 

Covert action in the 1950s to secure transnational corporate (TNC) interests in the oil fields of Iran and in the plantations of Guatemala was authorized by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Such action ‘deposed [nascent democratic] regimes that embraced fundamental American ideals but that had committed the sin of seeking to retake control of [their] own natural resources’.[56]

 

Referring to US interventions in Guatemala, in 1999 President Clinton stated that ‘[f]or the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake’. At that time, however, the US was actively supporting a much more atrocious military regime based in Jakarta that was ethnically cleansing the East Timorese population (discussed below).

 

4. Chile

 

Salvador Allende came to democratic power in Chile behind a progressive platform of holding TNCs accountable and putting large sectors of the economy under government control. On 15 September 1970, the decision to overthrow Allende was taken ‘in an effort to protect American business interests abroad… and suppress challenges to United States hegemony in the Western Hemisphere’.[57] This decision came after nearly six years of spending millions to prop up a Chilean government friendly to Northern capital’s interests.[58] TNCs in the mineral, telecommunication, finance and beverage industries sought to keep Chile open to their operations and prevent government regulations. A decision was taken to ‘[c]ontact the [Chilean] military and let them know [that the US] wants a military solution and that [the US] will support them now and later’. The support was for ‘a military move [to] take place, to the extent possible, in a climate of economic and political uncertainty’.[59] President Nixon sought to ‘smash’ Allende and wanted the Chilean economy to ‘scream’ from ‘economic warfare’.[60] This began through the offices of the Export-Import Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Agency for International Development ‘acting under classified instructions from the National Security Council’, and the WB, where Chile’s credit rating was downgraded from B to D, loans were cancelled or suspended and new commitments were no longer considered.

 

Affected TNCs met in Vina del Mar and decided that the Allende was ‘incompatible’ with ‘freedom’ and ‘private enterprise… and that the only way to avoid the end was to overthrow the government’ by ‘prepar[ing] specific alternate programs to government programs that would systematically be passed on to the Armed Forces’.[61] The alternative programs resulted in cuts to public health and education spending, privatization of state-owned companies and banks, the removal of trade barriers, the loss of 177,000 jobs and a reduction in manufacturing as a percentage of the economy to levels seen during WWII, prompting the Economist to call such programs ‘an orgy of self-mutilation’[62] and Business-Week to refer to them as a ‘Dr. Strangelove world of deliberately induced depression’.[63] The result was that by 1988, ‘45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line’. [64] The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, saw their incomes rise by 83 percent. Chile remains one of the most unequal societies in the world.

 

Paul Sigmund summarized this period as an attempt by the North to ‘prevent a freely elected president from taking office by fomenting a military coup,’ assassinating a Chilean general, ‘brib[ing] the Chilean Congress’, subsidizing ‘a quasi-fascist extreme rightist group’ and having unduly close relations with ‘a major corporation’.[65] The concern that Allende would attempt to develop Chile’s economy independently and set an example for the region elicited Nixon’s response that ‘[n]o impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this, that its safe to go this way’.[66] In Chile, this meant ‘[r]egression for the majorities and "economic freedom" for small privileged groups’.[67]

 

As with Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, the US overthrew Allende in Chile when yet another democratically elected Southern leader put the interests of his citizens ahead of the interests of foreign TNCs. According to Allende, the Southern states ‘are potentially rich countries, yet [people] live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital’, through TNCs.[68] These interventions were motivated by ‘valuable natural resource[s], a large consumer market, or a strategic location that would allow access to resources and markets elsewhere’. Each country was ‘brought back into the [Northern] orbit… at a staggering human and social cost… Directors of large corporations were the first to wish Mohammad Mossadegh, Jacobo Arbenz, and Salvador Allende overthrown’.[69]

 

D) Post Cold War, ‘Humanitarian Intervention’

 

Military intervention on humanitarian grounds is justified because insufficiently democratic states or ‘deeply divided societies not truly represented by state institutions, or unable or unwilling to meet the plethora of international demands for adequate regulation, institutions and policies, ought to lose their legitimacy’ and have such legitimacy forcibly restored by the North.[70] Rather than the traditional view that sovereignty implies non-interference, some commentators advocate a redefined concept of sovereignty as responsibility implying the right of interference if a community of responsible states deems a state is failing to meet its responsibility.[71] International peace and human rights, it is argued, are advanced through cosmopolitan frameworks where liberal democratic states take responsibility for the interests of common humanity – in the interests of the victims.[72] Unsurprisingly, according to such commentators, if failed states are to be rebuilt, it does not necessarily follow that complete Westphalian sovereignty is the most appropriate model for such Southern states.[73]

 

Thus, a third exception to the prohibition on the use of force, human

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