International Interventions and Imperialism: Lessons from the 1990s

The increasing frequency and changing nature of UN interventions over the course of the 1990s led to concern over a new imperialism. In this period, the international community showed an increasing willingness to disregard the notion of sovereignty, and thus anticipated the more extreme doctrine of preemptive intervention recently adopted by the Bush administration. But the experience of the 1990s also shows that, far from imposing a new imperial order, international interventions have had a surprisingly limited ability to bring positive transformation to targeted countries, a dilemma that U.S. unilateralist interventions are likely only to aggravate.