If, as this volume has tried to show, there were many interventions for humanitarian purposes before 1980, their number increased exponentially after the end of the Cold War. This chapter briefly summarises the interventions of the 1990s, and considers in more detail their political and conceptual underpinnings, paying particular attention to debates within Britain, whose Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair, emerged as a torchbearer of ‘liberal’ and ‘humanitarian’ ‘interventionism’.

Its starting point is the fact that with the end of the Cold War in 1989–90 hopes were widespread that power politics would increasingly be replaced in international relations by moral and ethical considerations, mediated by the newly non-polarised United Nations and imposed, where necessary, by its Security Council. In particular, with the breakdown of the bi-polar balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union, many hoped that the number of humanitarian interventions, authorised and overseen by the United Nations, predicated upon the rule of law and principle of collective security, would increase. At least in Western countries, there was enthusiasm among statesmen, scholars, media commentators and the public, for using diplomacy and military power to protect human rights.