Chronicle

Intervention principles - disguised Western dominance?

The principle of sovereignty is one of the simplest and most fundamental agreements in international relations: each state has the right to self-determination within its own territory. Therefore, no state has the right to intervene - that is, to intervene - in other states. However, there are several exception rules, established by the UN, which justify intervention on special occasions. These exceptions are often justified for some humanitarian reason, for example to protect a national people when their own state has been judged to have failed to do so. And even though these principles of legitimate intervention create an image of a secure safety net, they are not merely moral obligations of the international community. Nor do they apply universally, but are used selectively on the basis of dominant interests in the Western world, such as when no assistance has been given to Palestine, despite the fact that intervention is justified in assistance to popularly initiated outbreak processes. The fact that Palestine is not recognized as a state by the North American and most Western European states creates a connection that cannot be ignored. At the same time, US illegitimate interventions in Afghanistan in the early 2000s have been accepted without major consequences. This selective use shows that the principles of intervention have an inherent and unequal distribution of power where the Western world has succeeded in creating loopholes in the principle of sovereignty that re-establishes the prevailing world order and thus Western dominance.

This dimension of power is illustrated even more clearly in opposite situations: while US intervention in Afghanistan was accepted (albeit with some criticism), vice versa could never have occurred without the notion that the principle of sovereignty had been violated and with enormous sanctions. The very subjectively formulated and used principles of legitimate intervention do not serve a major global interest. Rather, they are used as tools to justify the Western world's violations of the principle of sovereignty. Intervention principles are therefore disguised as Western dominance - something that must be noticed and never allowed to pass without a critical examination

This is a chronicle. The author is responsible for analysis and opinions in the text.

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