Introduction

There are many examples after 1989 of the international community's interventionist tendencies on the international stage. Kuwait, Cambodia, Somalia, former Yugoslavia and East Timor have all been the objects of a newly found, albeit selective, interventionist policy. While geopolitical and economic interests – and more traditional rules of public international law – have often shaped the rationale of the powerful state actors instigating and enacting these interventions, the prime catalyst in securing wider state support in both word and deed has been ethical and humanitarian concerns. Humanitarian intervention is the catchphrase that came to embody this concern in the 1990s, especially in the foreign policy declarations of Western states and the proclamations of the major international organisations such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN).

In the West, the state that most vociferously proclaims the newly acquired moralism in its post-Cold War foreign policy is the United Kingdom (UK). Only ten days into the tenure of the New Labour government, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook explained that the UK's foreign policy would be bound by an ‘ethical dimension’ and that ‘the Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business’ (FCO, 1997b). This was headlined as the most important departure in British foreign policy under a new government.