Similarities Between West And The End Of The Cold War

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The fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War brought forward unabashed optimism and a grand surge of rhetoric regarding the West's strengthened ability to deal with humanitarian issues, while concurrently having greater power to pursue Western liberal ideas such as democracy, free markets, and liberty without any superpower opposition. The 1990s brought forward a de facto unipolar world, due to the absence of any significant ideological opposition to the norms set by the United States and their Western European allies. As University of Melbourne professor Anne Orford puts it, a new kind of international law and internationalist spirit seemed to have been made possible in the changed conditions of a world no longer structured around the …show more content…

The protection of Kurds by instituting a ‘no-fly’ zone in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq during Saddam’s reign, declaration of war on Serbia by the NATO in 1999, and the intervention of the United Kingdom in Sierra Leone in 2000 appeared to demonstrate practical uses of the West’s military strength to prevent humanitarian disasters such as the Rwandan genocide. These series of events attacked the ideology of national sovereignty in nations where governments purportedly committed humanitarian atrocities against their own citizens, and the policy of humanitarian intervention acquired an implied legitimacy (Nafziger …show more content…

(ICISS 2001)
Although the United Nations restricted the use of military under ‘Responsibility to Protect” (unsuccessfully) to the Security Council, the doctrine demonstrated a dynamic shift from the principle enshrined in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter (United Nations General Assembly 2005).
The precedents set by NATO in the Kosovo War, by acting outside the United Nations’ mandate made the probable utilisation of the “Responsibility to Protect” for dangerous means apparent across the international community. As a result, the Group of 77 nations declared in the Havana Declaration,
We reject the so-called ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention, which has no legal basis in the United Nations Charter or in the general principles of international law ... humanitarian assistance should [only] be conducted in full respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of host countries and should be initiated in response to a request or with the approval of these States. (Group of 77