RE: Should we interfere in other countries affairs?
For me this is something of a dilemma (not for a small part because i have some philosofical doubts about the practical usefulness of the nation state). It makes perfect sense if countries are not allowed to purposely mingle in another country’s business – simply because they don’t have jurisdiction outside their own territory. The other side of the very same medal is that actions of country A should then have no influence whatsoever on people in country B, since that could be an intervention in country B’s affairs.
Some foreign interventions really worked well. The Vietnamese invasion into Cambodia, and the Tanzanian attack on Uganda (both in the late 1970s) put an end to a lot of human suffering. Yet on the other hand there are plenty of interventions which made matters a whole lot worse.
I think one of the first requirements for a direct physical intervention (like an invasion) should be that the intervening country has a decent grasp of the situation in the country which is intervened, both in the short and long run. It appears that neighbouring countries generally know more about a certain situation then a country halfway across the world. One can think of more recent cases like Timor (Australian-led) or Albania (Italian). Of course nearby interventions also often enough go astray (Soviets in Afghanistan, Americans in post-Batista Cuba) yet i think those are generally more sucessful and have a higher degree of acceptability then halfway-across-the-world interventions. Countries which like to perform the latter should reconsider the jurisdiction under which they can act like that… perhaps the whole world should go voting somewhere in early November 2004?
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