Edmund Burke's Changing Justification for Intervention

Abstract

Burke's justification for intervention in French internal affairs in the name of the international community has formed a powerful strand of thought in both diplomacy and international relations theory. However, the strength and openness of Burke's advocacy, traced here, changed according to his target audience, the domestic, and the international political context. Crucially, when he came to justify the case openly, the arguments changed completely. Beginning with a Grotian argument drawn from Vattel and premised on states as isolated rights-holders in a pre-social ‘state of nature’, Burke always struggled to draw a justification for intervention in the case, allowed by Vattel, of irrevocable political disunion. This conflicted both with Burke's general conception of states as corporate wholes and his linked policy aspiration to restore the totality of French ancient institutions. Ultimately abandoning this, his final argument, fully set out only in the Letters on a regicide peace, is completely new. It is premised not on modern international law but on remedies to be found in Roman domestic law, invocation of which he justifies by claiming Europe to be a single juridical enclave, drawing on an eighteenth-century discourse of shared manners, law, and culture as constitutive of political identity and community.

The origins of the idea of humanitarian intervention

“…116 Worth alluding to also is intervention in the 'regicidal' French Revolution as conceived by Edmund Burke. 117 Burke, 'in defending magnificently an historically doomed position', 118 tried to make it more convincing by referring to the arguments of Vattel on intervening on the side of the just party. 119 Burke also…”

Intervention and Non-Intervention in Classical International Political Theory: Immanuel Kant and J.S. Mill

“…66 To conclude, Kant was guarded on intervention, not wanting to open a Pandora box for various forms of armed or other interventions, given his views on war and peace, autonomy and morality. He wrote Perpetual Peace in the wake of the French Revolution and apparently one of his aims was not to give grounds for foreign interventions against the Revolution 67 (as advocated, say, by Edmund Burke 68 ). Furthermore, Kant as a cosmopolitan was not an advocate of conquest and colonialism (especially in his mature years), to bring in the less fortunate non-Europeans in the European fold.…”

Triumphing over evil: Edmund Burke and the idea of humanitarian intervention

“…The historian, Iain Hampsher-Monk, has addressed the issue of intervention in Burke’s writings and argues against those commentators who maintain that Burke’s justification is based on an unchanging theoretical position. Hampsher-Monk (2005) rightly remarks that Burke ‘soft-pedalled any outright championship for intervention for strategic reasons’ (2005: 66) and, although he increasingly relied on Vattel as an authority, the restoration to be achieved by intervention was not congruent with the latter’s principles. Hampsher-Monk argues that international law, or what was then termed the law of nations, did not supply Burke with grounds for the kind of ideological campaign he was pursuing.…”