Naturalism vs. positivism: Debates over coercive protection of human rights in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo

This essay analyzes the largely political causes behind the incipient norm for enforcing human rights protection, what is often called 'collective humanitarian intervention', that has emerged in the peacemaking and peacekeeping missions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. It does not take a legal approach to determining what is or should be this new international law. Rather, three political science paradigms are used to explain why Western states have adopted a natural law approach to humanitarian intervention, rather than defer to a consensus understanding of the text of the UN Charter's rules on the use of force. This new trend away from positivism is crucial because humanitarian intervention is likely to be the more frequent kind of war that most NATO states are likely to fight. NATO leaders did not undertake, indeed they probably tried to avoid, debates over the UN Charter and international jurisprudence. Yet, international law is based on how states behave. The natural law proclivities of NATO leaders, to the extent that they represent state policy, were unambiguously expressed when British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for defense of the 'values of civilization and justice'.1