Intervention and non-intervention in international political theory

Contrary to international law, international political theory and political philosophy paid scant attention to the ethics of intervention in the long nineteenth century.¹ As for humanitarian intervention per se, there is nothing, apart from cursory remarks by John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Mazzini. On the wider question of intervention and non-intervention we will refer to their views and to those of Kant, Hegel and Cobden. Based on today’s distinction between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism one would expect that cosmopolitans would be inclined towards intervention for humanitarian and other principled reasons, while communitarians would adhere to non-intervention.² Yet Kant, regarded as the