Nonintervention Policy

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NONINTERVENTION POLICY

NONINTERVENTION POLICY honors the principle of noninterference and nonintervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states. President George Washington's guideline for early U.S. foreign relations implied this principle when he warned his peers in his "Farewell Address" to have commercial relations with other nations but as "little political connection as possible." The first statement directly expressing nonintervention as the backbone of U.S. foreign policy came in 1823 in the Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe said in his state of the nation address on 2 December 1823 that American policy in regard to Europe had been and would continue to be "not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers." In that speech he declared a nonintervention policy for European nations on the American continents. This policy was reaffirmed in the Polk Doctrine, announced on 2 December 1845.

American policy prohibiting other nations from intervening in the Western Hemisphere was reinforced at the beginning of the twentieth century, as European governments used force to pressure several Latin American countries to repay their debts. In his annual message to Congress on 6 December 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt stated what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. He said chronic wrongdoing or unrest might require intervention by some civilized nation; in the Western Hemisphere this was a prerogative of the United States. American policy after World War I was based on the principle of self-determination of the people, but the United States did not hesitate to break up and reshape states. On the American continents the Roosevelt Corollary was finally abandoned in 1936, when the United States, at the Special Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace, for the first time bound itself to nonintervention in an international agreement. The nonintervention policy was applied in the Spanish civil war in 1937.

As a guiding principle, nonintervention was reaffirmed in the United Nations (UN) charter of 1945. Article 2.7 of the charter prohibits intervention "in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State." However, in the wake of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 and the development of international understanding on human rights issues, the United States has had increasing difficulty justifying a rigorous nonintervention policy. Since human rights violations and genocide are often committed with the collusion or even the direct participation of the authorities, a strict nonintervention policy began to seem infeasible. In interventions by the United States in the late twentieth century, in Grenada, Panama, Libya, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo, human rights and the American national interest were the guiding forces.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Graber, Doris A. Crisis Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Intervention Policies and Practices. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1959.

Haas, Richard N. Intervention: The Use of American Military Force in the Post–Cold War World. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999. Also available at http://brookings.nap.edu/books/.

Mayal, James. "Non-intervention, Self-determination, and the 'New World Order.'" International Affairs 67, no. 3 (July 1991): 421–429.

MichaelWala