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Still, the track record of interventions to restore democracy has shown that these legal
difficulties are more important on a doctrinal than on a practical level. Proponents of
democratic interventionism may have achieved a partial victory for the time being.
6. The Intermarriage Between Pro-democratic Intervention,
Humanitarian Intervention, and the Responsibility to Protect
From the discussion above we may draw two preliminary conclusions which
have significant implications for those that are unsatisfied with the law as it stands.
First of all, the international community seems to have raised a conceptual wall
between intervention in the name of human rights and regime change. Hence, any
intervention of the former kind is suspected as being abusive if it involves domestic
overhaul, regardless of whether as a by-product or an intended outcome.60
Conceptually, however, intervention for humanitarian purposes, be it under the
banner of humanitarian intervention or the responsibility to protect, is inherently
connected with the idea of pro-democratic intervention. Both proceed from the
premise that sovereignty is not an end in itself but conditional upon a certain quality
of relationship between the state/the government and its people. If this requirement is
not satisfied, a state’s sovereignty may be overruled – it is not far from taking military
action to prevent a regime from using force against its own people to end its rule
altogether. After all, a regime that perpetrates human rights violations that warrant
military intervention can also be said to have forfeited its legitimacy to such an extent
that it is due to be overthrown. Going even further, such a regime never possessed any
legitimacy in the first place – the perpetration of human rights violations would thus
only constitute an occasion to topple a government that could have been overthrown
ever since it came to power. In other words: an oppressive government by itself
provides for a just cause and the changed attitude of other states in light of massacres
against the civilian population has had an impact on another requirement of just
wars, namely the prospect for success. It is for this very reason that many states are so
sceptical about the concept of humanitarian intervention. For, by its very nature, it
essentially implies the possibility, often even the need of regime change.
For this very reason, proponents of just war theory usually do not only argue in
favour of humanitarian intervention but also endorse the idea of forcible democratization.
Fernando Tesón, one of the fiercest proponents of the expansive view on military
interventions in the name of human rights, for instance, explicitly established a link
between these two causes for war. Already in his seminal A Philosophy of International
Law, he described the party to any given conflict that resorts to violence in order to
(eds.) Democratic Governance and International Law (CUP,2000) 328. Cf. David Wippmann, Treaty-
Based Intervention: Who Can Say No?’ (1995) 62/2 University of Chicago Law Review 607.
60 See, among the countless examples, e.g. the statement of the Indian representative to the United
Nations in the wake of the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, R2P selectively used for regime change: India,