Send in the peacekeepers: sovereignty isn't sacred.

During the cold war, when nuclear weapons were an overriding concern, much discussion on international ethics centered on the just-war stipulations regarding civilian immunity and proportionality. Since the end of the cold war, when a series of local conflicts have led to a number of humanitarian interventions by the international community, the ethical conversation has dwelt on the limits of national sovereignty and the justifications for possible intervention.

This change in focus is natural, given that the distinguishing feature of these recent interventions is their essentially humanitarian justification - to stop genocide, mass suffering, or widespread human-rights abuses. In the first post-cold war case, United States and Allied forces intervened in northern Iraq to feed and protect Kurds fleeing Iraqi troops after the Gulf War. Since then, UN or multinational forces have been sent to Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, and Bosnia to establish conditions that allow humanitarian aid to reach populations threatened by state collapse, civil war, and genocide. Safe havens were created in Bosnia to protect civilian populations under siege, and U.S. troops were sent to Haiti to restore an elected government, staunch refugee flows, and further the process of democratization.

Pope John Paul II helped to define the fundamental grounds for intervention in his 1992 address to the International Nutrition Conference. He told the conferees, "Humanitarian intervention [is] obligatory where the survival of populations and entire ethnic groups is seriously compromised. This is a duty for nations and the international community."

While humanitarian intervention often is understood to involve the use of military force in the internal affairs of a nation without its consent, the pope uses the term more broadly to refer to a range of diplomatic, economic, and military responses to politically generated humanitarian crises. The pope's main concern is to counter indifference in the face of these crises by arguing that the international community has not only a right but a duty to intervene. When a state is not able or willing to defend the common good, defined in terms of basic human rights, it falls to third parties who can supply that protection. In these exceptional cases, human rights trump principles of sovereignty and nonintervention.

Critics of humanitarian intervention often see it as a kind of international social work, driven by heartrending TV images and political pressure from relief agencies, human-rights activists, and churches. On the other hand, spokespersons for the traditional driving forces of foreign policy, like business and national security interests, are put in the awkward position of explaining why stopping genocide in Rwanda and starvation in Somalia are not vital national interests. To a considerable degree, the critics are correct, at least about the pressures for humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian groups are often the new activists in international affairs, and it has frequently taken the foreign-policy elites a longer time to become convinced of the need for action in regional conflicts and humanitarian emergencies.

Humanitarian agencies, of course, are on the ground, among the suffering people in global hot spots: with refugees, the innocent casualties of war, the victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and populations suffering from famine. Their involvement with mass suffering gives those groups a people-centered perspective on the unfolding of crises.

In addition, humanitarian agencies often share with human-rights, religious, and similar groups what some call a "cosmopolitan" approach to international affairs. By that they mean a view of international politics which, at least in some circumstances, gives greater weight to human rights and the fate of people than to the prerogatives and interests of states and the customary routines of statecraft.

The Catholic church has long held such a cosmopolitan view of international relations. More than thirty years ago Pope John XXIII's encyclical Pacem in terris recognized the limits of traditional statecraft for meeting the needs of the human family. The encyclical identified the common good as the end of politics, and the global common good as the goal of international relations. It noted, even then, a need to establish political institutions to meet the crises that existing international arrangements, long held hostage to concerns of sovereignty and competing national interests, could not.

Pope John Paul II's admonition to the diplomatic corps in his 1993 address that "there is no right to indifference" when whole populations are at risk upholds the same view of international politics. Since the pope is known for his reluctance to endorse the use of force and his praise of the practitioners of nonviolence, the Holy See's calls for international action in Bosnia and Rwanda have served to illuminate his thinking about the restricted, but nonetheless morally imperative conditions under which intervention may and ought to take place and limited force may be employed.

The succession of humanitarian interventions over the last several years, with the consequent curtailing of a strong doctrine of sovereignty, has given cosmopolitan views of international affairs a new persuasiveness. Of course international policy decisions will continue to balance state-based and cosmopolitan considerations. For that reason, the international community is still trying to find a better way to respond to humanitarian emergencies.

Each emergency, and each stage in each emergency, results in its own ad-hoc solutions. In Bosnia alone, a whole array of international bodies are at work on a plethora of tasks: the NATO-led implementation force does peacekeeping, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees handles refugee questions, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe supervises elections, the World Bank handles reconstruction, the Office of the High Representative oversees civilian aspects of the Dayton accords, and so on.

Humanitarian intervention, despite its obvious shortcomings, has become a reality. The older prohibitions and inhibitions against intervention are increasingly overridden. A set of justifications for intervention has been advanced and tested, and in some cases these considerations have led to action. The moral question is no longer, "Is it ever permissible to intervene in another country?"; nor is it "What conditions, if any, justify intervention?" With the experience of several interventions behind us, the moral question is one of means, or more precisely, the linkage between ends and means. In other words, what means are permissible to use with what policy goal?

While debate usually takes place over the use of troops and less often over the application of sanctions, intervention takes place in many forms. It can be intrusive but nonviolent, as in Operation Lifeline Sudan, which for many years provided emergency relief to civilian populations in the Sudanese civil war against the wishes of the recognized local authorities. It can take the form of civilian measures such as election monitors in Serbia provided by the European Community. Even private, voluntary groups may intervene in this way, as Witness for Peace did with its encampments in Central America.

Governments may intervene by coercive but nonmilitary means. Such coercive diplomacy includes the suspension of aid, denial of credit, boycotting of international events, suspension from membership in international organizations, and arms embargoes. The pre-eminent tool in coercive diplomacy, of course, is economic sanctions (see Himes, page 13).

Even military options need not involve the active use of force. Peacekeeping troops, with the consent of the warring parties, monitor the cease-fire lines and oversee demilitarization. Of course, a decisive moral threshold is crossed when moving from peacekeeping missions to those that call for limited use of force. Protective engagement, for example, uses troops to establish and maintain civilian safe havens and to protect aid convoys and refugee columns. In postconflict situations, troops may be used to protect returning refugees, prevent renewed ethnic strife, and ensure peaceful elections. Protective engagement may be seen as a form of international policing.

Finally, two other forms of military intervention, deterrence and peace enforcement, involve a willingness to be involved in large-scale war fighting. The United Nations force in Macedonia, for example, is intended to constitute a deterrent against expansion of ethnic conflict in the Balkans. Peace enforcement, the strongest form of intervention, involves full-scale military invasion to impose a solution, as the United States threatened to do in Haiti in 1994.

In the light of several years' experience with UN-backed interventions, the pressing moral question now is not so much whether to intervene but how. Let us concede that, where genocide is threatened, large-scale military intervention may be justified. In such cases, more limited interventions, such as establishing "safe havens" in Bosnia that are protected only by impartial peacekeepers, may fail morally because though the ends are legitimate, the means are not adequate to achieve them. Haiti is a different kind of case. Some form of intervention was justified to restore the democratically elected government and to stop human-rights abuses, but was military intervention justified? In a country that lacks democratic traditions and where human-rights abuses do not rise to the level of genocide, should intervention be limited to lesser means, such as economic and political sanctions?

Similarly, are comprehensive economic sanctions warranted in efforts to overthrow dictators of desperately poor nations, such as Saddam Hussein or Fidel Castro? Might there not be a threshold, even among types of sanctions, such that selective sanctions may be justified but comprehensive ones, adversely affecting an already severely needy population, may be morally unacceptable?

Questions may even be posed to private actors. Does the involvement of relief organizations in certain types of civil wars demand the suspension of aid? Relief organizations in Liberia, where there has been on-again, off-again civil war, came to that conclusion last year.

In short, humanitarian intervention takes myriad forms. A few cases, like the prevention of genocide, may demand the use of military force when other means fail. But, in this era of humanitarian emergencies, policymakers, ethicists, and opinion makers need to make more careful examination of the appropriateness of the means they recommend to the ends they pursue.

Drew Christiansen, S.J., is director of the Office of International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Catholic Conference. Gerard Powers is its foreign-policy advisor.