Interventionist or internationalist? Coercion,self-determination,and humanitarianism in Third World practice

Introduction

This article argues that contemporary debates around intervention, and especially humanitarian intervention, have misunderstood the meaning of these concepts in Cold War international society. By comparing a specific kind of humanitarian interventionism with a specific kind of internationalism, that of a revolutionist strain of Third World practice, it shows that existing studies have paid too little attention to discursive entanglements of coercion, self-determination, and humanitarianism. The Angola case provides a significant illustration: at a 1991 rally in Matanzas, Nelson Mandela commended revolutionary Cuba, whose ‘commitment to the systematic eradication of racism is unparalleled’. Mandela was in his prison cell when he heard about Cuba’s 30,000 troops dispatched to Angola in 1975. When apartheid was shielded by a Western coalition which saw in Pretoria an anti-communist bastion, internationalists halted a South African march toward Luanda, marking a decisive moment in the history of the continent and breaking ‘the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressors’. ¹

From one view the Cuban operation was a legitimate international act – in light of its effects having to do with the prevention of large-scale human rights abuses and crimes against humanity. In this sense Mandela might have been praising one of the most significant humanitarian interventions of the 20th century. Yet Fidel Castro never did understand his military operation as ‘intervention’, to say nothing of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Nor did the Non-Aligned Movement. Why? Put differently, can there be a distinction between coercive acts of internationalism (in this case, a particular sort of revolutionist internationalism) and coercive acts of humanitarian intervention (typically defined as dictatorial or coercive interference for the prevention of large-scale human rights abuses)? Has there been? In reflecting on these questions, the article makes a comment on the historical constitution of intervention in international society and on the relationship of humanitarian coercion with the principles of state sovereignty, independence, and non-intervention in domestic affairs.

Previous writings on the normative development of intervention presuppose an understanding of what it means to intervene, definitively and everywhere: the focus is often on, for instance, how far the society of states recognises the legitimacy of using force for the prevention of large-scale human rights abuses. ² But what we need to know is what ‘intervention’ was, where, and when, including how particular internationalist traditions, applied and institutionalised by Third World networks, relate to re-orderings of the concept in global order. In doing so we can show that that the extent to which states have converged on the use of force for humanitarian purposes is not interchangeable with the extent to which states have converged on intervention. In actual practice, how far international society recognises the legitimacy of international humanitarian protection is not equal to how far international society recognises an exception to the rules of sovereignty and non-intervention.

Contemporary writing in this way neglects some of the most important and historically influential dimensions of intervention as a problem; practices of intervention in the Cold War often drew on notions of self-determination, as well as norms of anti-colonialism and anti-racism, in a context of solidarity among colonised and formerly colonised nations. A number of related case studies and institutional developments provide a clear counterpoint to those outlined in prevailing accounts of saving strangers in the society of states. By exploring the ways in which states described and justified their actions in Angola, it seems possible to show how a different understanding of intervention once ordered international life. The point is not to explain why a particular practice of internationalism, recovered from the past, ought to be taken as superior to familiar forms of humanitarian intervention. Rather we should want to trace multiple different practices of coercive atrocity prevention even if those practices, taken collectively, betray the mixed objects of their praise: the aim is to bring us closer to a global understanding of what it has meant to intervene.

The article moves in three steps:

The concluding section reflects on the type of solidarism expressed by the internationalist arguments of interest, and by a particular Cold-War understanding of non-intervention, providing an alternative response to leading defenses of humanitarian intervention.

Cuba’s internationalist duty

As Mandela concluded his speech at Matanzas, Castro draped over his neck of the Order of José Martí (Cuba’s highest civilian honour). There were, suggested Castro, important similarities between Martí and Mandela: Martí too was imprisoned by a colonial power and dedicated his life to national liberty. And it was Martí who quipped, before leaving for the War of Independence that would take his life in 1895, ‘Patria es humanidad’ (‘Homeland is humanity’). Internationalism became official government policy shortly after the 1959 revolution, but has been remembered as a component of the country’s much older revolutionist identity.

Internationalisms encompass a view of the international system, which, as Third World organising suggests, are not necessarily incompatible with nationalist or state-based projects. ³ For a particular sort of revolutionist internationalist, nationality is in fact a prerequisite to the enjoyment of all fundamental human rights: ‘revolutionist’ then not in the sense of a Kantian cosmopolitanism or federalism, but more in the sense of a broad Mazzinian revolutionism, whereby the promotion of humanity moves through an association of nations. ⁴ Interpreting Cuban practice in this way – at a level at which commitments of Mandela, Martí and Mazzini generally intersect – we can begin to see how the internationalist responsibility is a humanitarian responsibility, but humanitarian responsibility by means of liberated nations; humanitarian protection comes through and not at the expense of national association and sovereignty. For Cuba and much of the historical Third World, the internationalist duty to prevent particular atrocities and crimes against humanity, including genocide, was also the duty to promote the right of all peoples and nations to self-determination.

Not surprisingly for a country which also defended categorically the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states, such a practice of internationalism existed in a delicate relationship with the intervention concept. For this sort of internationalism often incorporated actions that Western allies considered interventionist in the extreme: less so when it involved ‘benign’ developmental assistance, like that of Cuba’s sending of thousands of physicians, teachers and aid workers to Africa between 1963 and 1991, but certainly when it took the form of military assistance to liberation movements abroad.

To begin with: the 1976 Cuban constitution itself proclaims a commitment to both non-interference and internationalism in Article 12. Section C recognises ‘the legitimacy of the struggle for national liberation, as well as of armed resistance to aggression; and considers that its solidarity with those under attack and with the peoples that struggle for their liberation and self-determination constitutes its internationalist duty’. ‘Peoples’, says the following section, have the right ‘to repel imperialist and reactionary violence with revolutionary violence’. ⁵ Yet in advocating the ‘unity of all countries of the Third World against the imperialist and neocolonialist policy’, in condemning imperialism in its ‘fascist, colonialist, neocolonialist, and racist manifestations’, the same article then rejects all forms of ‘direct and indirect intervention in the internal affairs of any State’ as well as ‘interference in, and threats to, the integrity of the States and the political, economic, and cultural components of Nations’. ⁶

The immediate effect, in the light of prevailing interpretations of intervention as a concept – ‘coercive interference’ or the threat or use of force – seems to preclude international assistance to the very liberation movements that the constitution seeks to protect. ⁷ Not so, says the revolutionist perspective and similar viewpoints adopted by Third World radicals in the 1960s and 70s. There did exist a resolute commitment to the principle of non-intervention, but it would be wrong to consider this a rejection of all actions conventionally understood as ‘intervention’. ⁸

I am concerning myself here with the discursive practice of Cuba, which settles the ostensible contradiction in Article 12. And in clarifying their internationalism, a common move of the revolutionaries was to draw out moral arguments through historical illustration; internationalists themselves frequently approached the intervention problem through, for instance, a particular account of Cuba’s creation as an independent state. This was a kind of instructive history not unlike narratives more recently told about ‘Westphalian/post-Westphalian’ sovereignty, the ‘never again’ promise and ‘centuries of indifference’ in the face of ‘problems from hell’ – historical illustrations used by liberal-interventionists to outline particular understandings of humanitarian intervention and the ‘Responsibility to Protect’. ⁹ It seems useful to consider internationalist arguments in this way; the point of doing so is not to provide an ‘objective history of Cuba’, but to characterise opposite meanings of intervention and internationalist aid.

In its simple form the revolutionist narrative begins with two incidents described as severely interventionary: first, the colonisation of the Americas and arrival of the conquistadors (Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550: a just war to desist the ‘barbaric, impious, and uncivilized’ from ‘the wildest and most abominable of crimes’), and second, the culmination of the liberation struggle against Spain, in which the United States intervened on behalf of Cuban rebels (President William McKinley in 1898: a ‘war for humanity’ and strangers in peril, to ‘protect them in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights’). ¹⁰ Yet after triumphing over the Spanish Empire, the United States established colonies of its own in the Philippines, in Guam, in Puerto Rico, and in Cuba, which suffered effective protectorate status through the Platt Amendment of 1901. Cuba may have claimed the status of an independent state in 1902, but the terms of its de jure formal freedom masked its de facto oppression – not by a process of continuous war (though war might have been its instigation) but continuous foreign domination, as continuous foreign interference into Cuba’s internal affairs. After colonialism came statehood, but with statehood came neocolonialism: the economic penetration of the United States into Cuban industry, the foreign exploitation of Cuban workers and natural resources, external controls over the island’s cultural affairs, and the constant threat (sometimes executed) of military occupation.

The first century and a half of Cuba’s existence becomes, in this account, a period of systematic dispossession of self-determination. And the key point is that such an experience of dispossessed collective rights is also the definition of intervention itself. Intervention is not simply the crossing of borders by a foreign army, as Western theorists and the ‘traditional international legal-publicists’, from Oppenheim to Lawrence, would have us believe. ¹¹ Closer to the writings of alternatively ‘traditional’ jurists of Latin America, like Carlos Calvo, intervention refers instead to the effect of foreign domination, not merely the means through which that domination occurs. ¹² A more familiar liberal-interventionist reading would deprive us of an understanding of the permanence of intervention in Cuban affairs; intervention would be historically present in Cuba, but it is only intermittent, as the application of military force. But here the methods by which intervention transpires (military violence, economic sanctions, donor control, sabotage, propaganda, etc.) do not modify its more essential character – in the revolutionist-internationalist reading, the denial of self-determination, including as a human right. Where intervention is a suppression of the legitimate will of the nation – as constraint or pressure – an amicable interposition is to be understood as invited by peoples, plausibly as distinct from the state. This includes peoples suffering under a tyrannical government sponsored and controlled by foreign powers, not unlike the one that was the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s.

And it is through resistance to Batista and the oppression that he represents that the story takes its next turn. If the essence of an interventionary act is the consequence of foreign pressure, as obstruction of self-determined futures, then logically the directly opposite consequence, as the non-denial or protection of self-determination, is non-interventionary. And there is a direct antithesis of Batista: according to the revolutionist narrative – which again is of course the discourse of the 26th of July Movement – it is Fidel Castro, who after his release from prison, organises guerillas in Mexico, lands in southeastern Cuba on the yacht Granma in 1956, and launches resistance from atop the Sierra Maestra mountains, prevailing in 1959.

In the late 19th century Martí’s internationalism was a call to expel foreign domination from the continent. His internationalism, we are told, was humanitarian and anti-racist – the Latin American wars for independence become a kind of melting pot. Oppressed Latin American nations closed ranks to achieve their liberty and left behind particular boundaries of ethnic identity, permitting abolitionism and anti-colonialism to arrive, tied together, at the same historical stage. Cited here are examples like Máximo Gómez, a Dominican who becomes commander-in-chief of the Liberation Army of Cuba; Lieutenant General Antonio Maceo, the son of a Venezuelan émigré and an Afro-Cuban woman, who invites Cuban slaves to join the insurgency (‘here there are not little Blacks or little Whites, only Cubans. . .dedicated to humankind above all else’); and Hatuey, a Taíno leader from the island today known as Hispaniola, who as ‘the first fighter, the first chief, and first martyr’ leads a struggle against invading Spaniards in the early 16th century. ¹³

Internationalism becomes remembered then not just as an expression of Latin Americanism, but of humanitarianism, rendered as universal anti-colonialism and anti-racism. In the context of the earlier independence wars, it is contended that Chileans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, Argentinians, Venezuelans, Colombians and others, whether black, white, indigenous, mixed, or otherwise, sought a common goal. They crossed political boundaries asserted by the colonialists, but those boundaries meant and mattered little, because they failed to reflect the will of peoples. The promotion of such a popular sovereignty, at the expense of rival claims to legitimate rule, is non- as well as anti-interventionary.

How then are we to resolve non-intervention and internationalism in the Cuban Constitution? 1959 becomes moment at which internationalism is portrayed as reawakened in Cuba; Castro becomes the inheritor of a long historical tradition. Che Guevara, an Argentine whose anti-colonial organising involves peoples of multiple developing countries, comes to take on a global internationalist identity. This sets the stage for modern applications of internationalist concepts, whereby Third World actors, working in solidarity and across state borders, are understood as liberators and rescuers but not interventionists.

The key symbol – which will not be explored in this paper – is the Tricontinental Conference of 1966, where 83 groups from countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America – ‘representing different philosophical ideas or positions’ – meet in Havana to stand united against ‘colonialism and neo-colonialism, against racism’, as extremities of foreign oppression. In his closing speech, Castro called for ‘a common strategy, a joint, simultaneous struggle’. Accordingly ‘Cuban fighters can be counted on by the revolutionary movement in any corner of the earth’. If colonialism is permanent aggression and permanent encroachment upon basic human dignities, then the coercive solidarity of peoples represented a defensive, humanitarian obligation. ‘Without boasting, without any kind of immodesty, that is how we Cuban revolutionaries understand our internationalist duty’. ¹⁴

The slave rebellion in Southern Africa

The historical and political discourse of the revolutionaries contains arguments about the meaning of intervention; these are arguments which have moral, political and international-legal dimensions, but are not merely conclusions about the law. Along these lines it seems possible to understand Cuba and other members of the radical Third World as having contributed to formalistic debates about the international ordering of intervention, not just as having put them aside in favour of deeper revolutionary designs or commitments. Intervention, in the revolutionist reading, is about the denial of self-determination, manifested across a spectrum of pressures, applied against the political, economic, and cultural preferences of the intervened upon. Hence internationalist action, undertaken for humanitarian purposes such as freedom from colonialism and extreme racism, does not constitute intervention.

And yet it would of course also be easy to treat foreign support (including through the delivery of arms, soldiers, and perhaps economic sanctions) for national liberation movements abroad as highly interventionary, particularly according to a positivist international-legal tradition or classic Oppenheim view of the subject. This is the approach that takes as wholly correct the treatment of the intervention concept in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter – that is, as the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Certainly this was the position taken by Western governments at the end of the Second World War, and it would also be the position adopted in major definitions in the academic discipline of International Relations, especially from the 1980s onward. ¹⁵

What I would like to suggest now is that the internationalist understanding weighed upon significant conflicts of the Cold War. Operation Carlota was named after an African-born Cuban woman who led the Triunvirato slave rebellion in 1843 – and it was as a kind of slave rebellion that internationalists understood the Angola issue. ‘Some imperialists ask why we’re helping the Angolans, what our interest is. They assume that countries only act out of a desire for petrol, copper, diamonds or some other resource’. ¹⁶ It was 22 December 1975, and Fidel Castro was telling a story to the First Communist Congress of Cuba. ‘No. We have no material interest. . .We are fulfilling an elementary, internationalist duty in helping the people of Angola!’ ¹⁷

But what had happened in November 1975, in what sorts of contexts, and how does this relate to the intervention debate in international society? Piero Gleijeses as well as writers like Edward George, William Minter, George Wright and Victoria Brittan have analysed this case in detail, often in ways that foreground Third World solidarity and socialist foreign policy. ¹⁸ My aim is not to revise these explanations, but to approach the case in a way that might enable us to say something new about the meanings of intervention and non-intervention in Cold War international society, specifically in relation the intersections of coercion, self-determination, and humanitarianism. And to do so we need to start by laying out a set of widely-agreed-upon facts, particularly from standpoint of the revolutionist; by taking on this role we can better understand internationalist practice.

Along these lines Cuban involvement could be summarised as follows: it was through the 1960s and 70s that civil disobedience and civil war had forced the question of decolonisation in the African continent. The ‘winds of change’ had been declared by Harold Macmillan in Cape Town in 1960 (‘whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a matter of political fact’) and while some began to more or less peacefully liquidate their empires, others held on more tightly. ¹⁹ None seemed more pernicious than the Portuguese. Yet armed repression failed to snuff out demands for independence in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. The struggle against empire, and the toll it took on Portugal’s strained economy and popular-political conscience, became an important component of the 1974 Carnation Revolution. Inside the Portuguese government, a military coup ousted Prime Minister Marcello Caetano; on the streets, demonstrations signaled the collapse of the authoritarian Estado Novo and the country’s far right.

Meanwhile Angola was scheduled to be handed over to the Angolan people on 11 November 1975. Peace accords had been signed in Alvor in southern Portugal about 1 year earlier, but the coalition government envisioned by those accords never came to be; civil war broke out instead. There were three rival factions. The first, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), was led by Jonas Savimbi. The second, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), was led by Holden Roberto. Both Savimbi and Roberto were notoriously corrupt, and often allied with Pretoria; Savimbi, for instance, explicitly condoned South Africa’s illegal occupation of modern-day Namibia. The country’s third faction, the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), was headed by Agostinho Neto, a Marxist and non-tribalist. Only the MPLA stood to uphold the anti-colonialist and anti-racist commitments of the UN-based international human rights and humanitarian agenda; only the MPLA stood to challenge South Africa. And by August 1975, it was the MPLA that controlled Luanda.

Then just 4 weeks before independence day as agreed at Alvor, Angola was invaded. On 14 October South African soldiers entered the country and began their rush toward the capital. The invasion had the support of the United States, apparently conveyed in winks and nods; not only would it advance South African ‘total strategy’ against the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believed the collapse of socialism in Angola would strengthen American morale, given the loss of South Vietnam just 3 months earlier. ²⁰ Pretoria’s goal was twofold: wipe out the MPLA, and install an apartheid-friendly regime that would contribute to South Africa’s strategic foothold in the continent. Were the South Africans to arrive at their destination, the surrender of the liberation fighters and their supporters would soon follow: the MPLA was too weak to withstand the SADF’s mechanised brigades and mercenary units.

In an article for the Washington Post in 1977, the Columbian author Gabriel García Marquéz compared the advance to ‘a Sunday stroll. . .In the north, the leader of a mercenary column directed operations from a Honda sports car, seated beside a blonde who looked like a movie actress. . .In the woman’s overnight case there was only a party dress, a bikini and an invitation to the victory party Holden Roberto was already planning in Luanda’. ²¹

But the invaders, operating out of South West Africa (Namibia), were caught off-guard by Cuban troops. Internationalist assistance, in various forms, had already been extended to dozens of liberation movements by the time of Pretoria’s invasion. In once-classified CIA intelligence memos, Castro’s interventions were portrayed as relentless through the early and mid-1960s – ‘almost every Latin American country has felt his interference at least once’, and in Africa and the Middle East, Cuba took as its target ‘colonial regimes and white-minority governments’. ²² In early 1965, for instance, Che Guevara visited the Congo as part of a tour of various African states. Not far from where Henry Morton Stanley had found David Livingstone a century earlier, Guevara established the first high-level Cuban contacts with Neto – in Brazzaville, where the MPLA was organising military units with Cuban instruction. ²³ Cubans had arrived in and around Angola prior to the South African invasion: military involvement had begun as resistance against the Portuguese colonial government. But Pretoria’s invasion precipitated a shift in scale. Cuba’s response was ‘unilateral’ and ‘designed in great haste’ – Brezhnev in fact opposed the move and refused for 2 months to airlift Cuban troops. ²⁴

Approximately 30,000 arrived between October 1975 and April 1976, tipping the scales of war. ‘The intervention of Cuban combat forces came as a total surprise’, conceded Kissinger in his memoirs, ‘we thought [Castro] was operating as a Soviet surrogate’, ‘evidence now suggests that the opposite was the case’. ²⁵ But there would be no American retaliation, despite what Pik Botha called Washington’s ‘approval and knowledge’ of the SADF operation. ²⁶ Months of fighting followed. South Africa withdrew. A Cuban military presence would remain in Angola for decades. ²⁷

Justifications and allegations of intervention

Whatever the facts on the ground, it is the interpretation and assessment of those facts that bind together something called intervention – because intervention is not just an event, it is a socially-meaningful description and evaluation of action. ²⁸

So far I have avoided the sort of question that is usually of central concern to studies of intervention in international society – the extent to which involvements like Cuba’s gained legitimacy among states or the extent to which it was internationally institutionalised. The Cold War, it is commonly assumed, was a period in which intervention was absolutely proscribed, in which acts of intervention were everywhere but nowhere appropriate. ²⁹ Liberal-interventionist critics argue that the end of the Cold War represented a break from this trend; humanitarian justifications for the use of force are thought to have largely lacked legitimacy among states until the 1990s. ³⁰ And on the face of it the argument seems convincing. A right to classical humanitarian intervention, at least, was very widely doubted; the 1964 and 1981 UN General Assembly declarations on the inadmissibility of intervention referred to intervention ‘for whatever reason’, ‘in any form’. ³¹

But what most accounts fail to appreciate is that while intervention had been banned, the substantive meaning of the concept varied significantly across international practices through the 1960s and 70s. The action commonly known as humanitarian intervention – the threat or use of armed force for the prevention of large-scale human rights abuses – was understood differently then, at times it was recast so as to secure it a non-interventionary status. A major omission has to do with the ways in which, at the international-societal level, international coercive action for the eradication of colonialism and genocide, through the promotion of particular forms of self-determination, was once widely comprehended as legitimate.

Accordingly I will try now to lay out the ways in which Cuba comprehended the moral and legal coherence of its military operation, and the ways in which other states agreed or disagreed. This question of how the Cubans explained their behaviour is related but distinct from the question of motives, which is of less interest here. Again what seems so crucial about the Angolan case is that it was not justified as something called humanitarian intervention – even though the criteria for falling into its conventional ambit had been met. In fact, ironically, it was South Africa, in justifying its own military action, that came closest to a familiar sort of humanitarian-interventionist argument, insofar as it accepted the suspension of sovereignty in emergency circumstances, and defended a temporary foreign administration. The way in which South African and Cuban arguments came to be understood is a testament to the centrality of self-determination in Cold-War humanitarian protection norms.

In his speech before the General Assembly on 8 October 1975, Ricardo Alarcón:

In Angola the conspiracy of imperialism, its allies and lackeys, has found concrete expression in the brazen interference designed to frustrate true decolonization while threatening its territorial integrity. . .Cuba renews the expression of its full solidarity with the MPLA – yesterday heroic in its struggle against the European colonizer; today firm in its defence of true independence. In the face of the scandalous interference of imperialists, colonialists and racists, it is an elementary duty to offer its people the effective assistance that may be required for that country to ensure its true independence and full sovereignty. ³²

Furnishing ‘effective assistance’ was a matter of protecting Angolans from violence and crimes against humanity (importantly, the vocabulary of genocide and ‘brutal atrocities’ often did appear in relation to the Angolan liberation struggle – the OAU, for example, declared that Portugal was ‘conducting a real war of genocide in Africa’). ³³ But protection was being understood in the context of broader international human rights regime, in which self-determination took a central place. ³⁴ The international struggle against apartheid (what Castro was calling ‘the most beautiful cause’) was always tied to an international duty to promote self-determination. ³⁵

Six days after Alarcón’s speech, the South African army crossed into Cuando Cubango. Over the next 4 weeks – during which time was declared the People’s Republic of Angola – a new argument appeared: the MPLA, according to Cuba, now represented an independent country, and given that every state had the right to request assistance from any other state or group of states, Cuba was behaving lawfully. This was not intervention: independence day had passed, and Angola was the victim of a serious aggression. Nothing could impair its sovereign right to individual or collective self-defence.

When Angola was under discussion in the Security Council in early March 1976, Cuba again took this position. Though the agenda item referred to ‘the act of aggression’ committed by South Africa, the range of actual debate went further, it was in near equal proportion concerned with alleged Cuban interventionism. In a letter to the UN Secretary-General dated 24 January 1976, Alarcón explained:

Cuban military combat personnel were sent to Angola, Sir, in response to an appeal which, on account of the cowardly and criminal aggression by South Africa, was made to us by the legitimate government of the people which, led by President Neto, has now been recognised by more than 40 countries in the international community, including 23 African countries. ³⁶

If applied to Cuban military action in late 1975, when Operation Carlota was launched, this justification was the weaker of the two: during the period of South Africa’s assault, much of the world had yet to agree that the MPLA represented the Angolan people. In October 1975, Luanda technically remained the seat of the Portuguese Overseas Province of Angola (when hundreds of Cuban combat personnel were already present in the country), and even after the declaration of the People’s Republic of Angola in November 1975, the MPLA was not yet commonly recognised in the United Nations (UNITA had declared a rival independence in Huambo, as had the FLNA in Ambriz). Perhaps this is why in Alarcón’s letters and speeches, the collective self-defence argument was often conjoined with the internationalist line more prominent before independence day. The right to collective self-defence argument supplemented, not supplanted, a revolutionist-internationalist logic:

We are fighting the fascist and racist regime of South Africa, which has been censured by the United Nations and banned from the international community on account of its atrocities against 14 million black inhabitants of South Africa and against the enslaved population of Namibia, and which is now reaching out towards the territory of Angola with a view to gaining control of it. ³⁷

All this was very different, however, from an interventionist justification – like the one being used by South Africa. Briefly it seems useful to compare these formulations, both being justifications of actions called ‘intervention’ by others, before tracing how these two arguments, or which components of these arguments, were being taken up in international society.

The sort of argument being used by South Africa – even if disingenuously – held that its own military action amounted to a ‘humanitarian task’ to which sovereignty was to yield. ³⁸ Intervention is legitimate insofar as it alleviates extreme forms of human suffering. Though infringing upon sovereignty, and self-determination, this infringement is a good one: an international society that prioritises human well-being is one that justly recognises special responsibilities for states capable of rescue, even if the upholding of those responsibilities implies a transfer of authority or control.

To quote the South African delegation in the Security Council: in crossing borders, the SADF ‘was motivated by essentially protective and humanitarian considerations’, it ‘sought to protect a hydroelectric project which was constructed at great cost for purely peaceful purposes’, and ‘it was forced to undertake the purely humanitarian task of caring for 1000s of displaced persons’ when no local government seemed capable or willing to do so. ³⁹ It was because of Portugal’s ‘inability to provide the necessary protection’ before Angolan independence, and because of the absence of ‘a stable government’ after independence, that South Africa had ‘no choice’ but to take control and safeguard human welfare in the form of property, workers and refugees. ⁴⁰

Pik Botha before the Security Council on 30 March 1976:

I confess that I am profoundly disappointed, I am shocked, by the obvious disregard for the plight of these unfortunate people. . .Surely we can leave technical and tactical matters aside, because, when a man is dying, what does it matter who is technically in charge of a country? What does it matter to destitute human beings whether a certain government has the right to save them from starvation? Surely our efforts are worthy of something better than condemnation. ⁴¹

At ‘no stage did South Africa become involved, nor did it desire to become involved, in the civil war’, Pretoria would hand over the task of ‘protecting both the works and workers’ as soon as Angolans were able to uphold their own responsibilities – but until that point, temporary administration was necessary. ‘South Africa has on many occasions, both before and after the independence of Angola, declared that it would terminate its protective measures as soon as Angola was in a position to take over this task’. ‘Those refugees came to us in their multitudes. . .What were we to do?’ ⁴²

Two foreign powers had stepped into Angola, but their justifications were not the same. What was common to each was their use of force and professed humanitarian aims, as if to express a program of solidarity among states with respect to the enforcement of related international norms and laws. But there were essential differences. Consider in each case the precise character of the relationship between the guardians and the guarded. First there can be no doubt that the South Africans recognised themselves in a legitimate position of authority, albeit temporary, over the rescued – such a subordination corresponded to a claim about the dependents’ best interests. A prototypical humanitarian interventionist becomes responsible for the security of those who cannot or will not care for themselves. For the interventionist, there emerges a limitation of self-determination in extraordinary circumstances – rescuers transcend self-determination in the name of the supreme public good that is human lives.

Yet if the interventionist recognises a temporary suspension of national liberty, in an embrace of provisional dependence, the internationalist adopts a logic of non-dependence and non-domination. The hierarchical aspect of protection was always missing from Cuban moralising, it was replaced by a more horizontal fraternity. Theoretically there is no tutelage, no paternalism in revolutionist-internationalist practice: there is no dominion, however temporary, in humanitarian assistance. True, prior to the MPLA’s ascension to power, the Cubans did not receive consent from the affected state; arguably, its coercive action contravened the sovereign authority of Portuguese Angola. But the revolutionist Third World argument was of course that the legalistic authority of the metropole was also a false and internationally-discredited authority, that to answer the call of the national liberation movement was an expression, not surrender, of self-determination.

Is there another approach to explaining the disjunction between these two logics? Conceptions of trusteeship also seem helpful. ⁴³ An interventionist fosters the self-government of the protected, and hence is joined in a relationship structured around inequality in the distribution of welfare. For the interventionist, there is, implicitly or not, fleetingly or otherwise, a trustee and beneficiary. Yet if such a logic of trusteeship stands opposite to a logic of self-determination, then it also stands opposite to internationalism. An internationalist is neither a trustee nor an administrator nor a tutor; an internationalist, in the language of the revolutionaries, is an ally in a shared struggle for liberation. In strict adherence to the rules of non-intervention, an internationalist is accountable to the distance between interference in internal affairs and the international responsibilities of human rights. To quote related international declarations: all nations and peoples have a right ‘to freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development’ without foreign pressure. ⁴⁴

Internationalism and world public opinion

The point is not that all conceivable interventionisms or internationalisms correspond to the above formulations – but that these two basic arguments did appear in relation to Angola, and, as this final section will show, were being inversely appraised in the society of states. It was in terms of self-determination, and not just in terms of dictatorial or coercive interference across borders, that the intervention problem was constituted in international society. Disagreements concerning the interventionary or non-interventionary nature of Carlota tended to relate to assessments of whether, as a consequence of Cuban action, self-determination was being promoted in Angola – rather than about whether international-coercive prevention of colonial oppression and apartheid, through the promotion of self-determination, constituted a legitimate guide of conduct. For many involved: it did.

The international rejection of South Africa’s interventionist argument moved on two levels. The first and more obvious one was about deception of purpose, that Pretoria’s ‘humanitarian task’ was a lie. The Kenyan delegate in the Security Council: regarding the claim that South Africa had intervened in Angola to ‘safeguard lives and property’, ‘were we not engaged in discussing a serious matter of aggression, I would be tempted to laugh’. ⁴⁵ ‘[T]his so-called reason for intervention’, claimed India, also in the Security Council, ‘was nothing more than an excuse for expanding the territory under the illegal occupation of South Africa’, in the words of the Malagasy delegation, a ‘pretext which cannot hold up’. ⁴⁶

But the more interesting level had to do with deferral of authority, with the hierarchy implied by South Africa’s responsibility to protect works, workers, and refugees. What we need to consider here are the components of the justification that were rejected assuming that its expressed humanitarian motivations were true (even if, by all accounts, they were not). And what we find in the record of international debate is a set of positions which would seem to suggest that while international coercion for the prevention of colonialism, apartheid and other large-scale human rights abuses was plausibly legitimate, the denial of self-determination – that is, intervention – was, in any form, for whatever reason, absolutely unacceptable.

Intervention in Angola was a problem tied up fundamentally not just with the use of force, but with force for humanitarian reasons: ‘[p]ut succinctly’, claimed Tanzania, ‘South Africa’s invasion of Angola was an attempt to perpetuate, perhaps in different forms and styles, the enslavement the Angolan people had suffered during hundreds of years of Portuguese colonialism’. ⁴⁷ This was ‘not simply an isolated act. . .South Africa’s actions in Angola follow the systematic pattern and scheme of that regime of oppression and suppression from within and expansionism abroad’. ⁴⁸ They could thus be read, elaborated the Egyptian delegate, as ‘an attempt at consolidating its racist policies but also a prelude to the extension of its pernicious policies of apartheid, exploitation, and oppression over southern Africa’. ⁴⁹

Yet a theory of humanitarian protection through self-determination was also the basis of major rejections of the Carlota operation. From the American perspective, neither South Africa nor Cuba had acted as humanitarians, and both had become interventionists:

Just as the end to South Africa’s wrongful intervention is very welcome, so the continuing Cuban and Soviet intervention is wrong: wrong because it deprives the Angolan people of the ability to exercise self-determination freely. . .wrong because of its massive size. . .wrong because it can no longer be related to any of the alleged purposes it pretended to serve; and wrong because of its implications for the future in Africa and elsewhere in the world. ⁵⁰

‘I say this because the United States supports African independence. We support the principles of non-intervention, territorial integrity, and the non-use of force in Africa’. Cuba acted before Angolans could choose a government for themselves: ‘armed intervention in Angola began long before the date cited by the Cuban representative, that is, 5 November 1975’, it was an ‘an adventure which is based on the assumption that Cuba can introduce itself as an arbiter of intra-African affairs’. ⁵¹

What was undeniable is that Cuban forces had crossed the borders of a country without the permission of a universally-recognised sovereign: Washington and some of its allies, including Portugal, rejected the Neto government as a Soviet conspiracy, and when the MPLA appeared before the Security Council, Albert Sherer Jr., the American representative, declared that ‘participation in this debate of representatives of the MPLA. . .in no way constitutes an act of recognition’. ⁵² A kind of parallel was therefore being drawn between Cuban and South African behaviour: the draft resolution under discussion at the time was wrong because ‘it cites South Africa’s unwarranted violation of Angola’s territorial integrity, yet it is totally silent on the continuing presence of the Cuban expeditionary force’ which had also obstructed the will of the Angolan people. ⁵³

Hence by portraying Cuba’s Angola intervention as an issue of socialist neo-colonialism, rather than an issue of anti-apartheid or decolonisation, the United States, Britain, France, and others were attempting to turn the internationalist argument upon the internationalists – not to discard it or deny its premises. For Sherer what was to be rejected was not the notion of an emancipatory international military mission, but rather the argument that this particular mission amounted to emancipation: ‘the fact is that more than 13,000 Cuban soldiers remain in Angola’, a country that had, claimed the United States, not yet clearly chosen a national government. ‘Who are the real imperialists?’ ⁵⁴

‘Who are the real imperialists’ was also the point of departure for champions of the Carlota mission in the Non-Aligned Movement – it was upon respect for self-determination that assessments of legitimate foreign protection were turning. ‘Who are the real imperialists?’ was a question of having imposed internal-political choices from the outside – choices of government, external relations, economy, culture, etc. The crux of debate was really then about allegations of ‘intervention’ as constituted by internationalist practice, rather than the meaning of intervention symbolised by Article 2 (4). When a news reporter asked whether Cubans had become interventionists in Angola, Castro had this to say:

I think it is truly ridiculous to talk about Cuban interventionism in Angola. What we have done is to comply with the mandate of the international community, of the United Nations, of the people. If we are interventionists, why is it that the great majority of United Nations countries support our presence in Angola? If we are interventionists, why does the Non-Aligned Movement, almost unanimously, support the presence of our internationalist combatants in Angola? Where there is interventionism, the people revolt, they condemn the interventionists, and the non-aligned become upset. Because there is a great difference between playing a revolutionary, internationalist, and solidarity role [and] being an interventionist. ⁵⁵

The non-aligned did applaud the Carlota operation, and it is true that they were using their majority in the General Assembly to assert its legitimacy. At its 1976 summit in Colombo, the Movement ‘congratulated the government and people of Angola for their heroic and victorious struggle against the South African racist invaders and their allies; and praised the Republic of Cuba and other states which helped the people of Angola foil the expansionist and colonialist strategy of the South African regime and its allies’. ⁵⁶ In 1977, at New Delhi, the ministerial meeting of the Bureau of Non-Aligned Countries re-endorsed the Columbo Declaration and condemned again Pretoria for its ‘systematic acts of aggression’ as ‘the pillar of racist and colonial domination in Southern Africa’. Recognising ‘the role of the Front Line States, as the strategic rear base for the liberation movements in Southern Africa’, the Movement ‘urgently called upon the international community to provide them with all necessary support to enhance their ability to contribute effectively to the fight for liberation’. ⁵⁷

These were also the sorts of claims being made by non-aligned states in the Security Council in early 1976. The allegation of Cuban interventionism might be set against the interpretation of Ambassador Gil Fernandes of Guinea-Bissau, for example:

. . .I should like to emphasise and forcefully state in this Council that my Government does not regard the Cuban troops in Angola as mercenaries; nor do we categorise Soviet material help with arms as ‘adventurism.’. . .In fact our only regret concerning this question of support in assisting the Angolan people for their just struggle for independence is that Guinea-Bissau is too small and too poor; otherwise I can assure you that, if we had a larger population and greater resources, for every Cuban soldier in Angola there would have been two from Guinea-Bissau. ⁵⁸

India’s comments on 30 March referred to a shared international struggle against apartheid and colonialism: ‘The racist character of the South African government gave its intervention a malignant aspect whose repercussions were felt far and wide and went beyond the African continent. There was no doubt that this racist intervention had to be stopped at all costs’. ⁵⁹ Saudi Arabia’s statement one day later compared Cuba’s actions to another historic act of coercive internationalist assistance, notably one that in recent academic writings has been understood as humanitarian intervention:

. . .helping a people to liberate itself is worthy, regardless of the source of the aid or assistance. For example, who aided the Greeks in 1824, when they got their independence? The British sent Lord Byron, the poet, and many extolled the British for that matter. Of course, the Turks did not like that, but those who believed that liberty should be served thought the British did something good. ⁶⁰

In July 1976 the OAU met to discuss the issue of foreign intervention in Africa. At Khartoum, resolutions declared the Organisation’s concern ‘with the policy of interference, aggression, intervention, and the encouragement of expansionism. . .especially since the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire’, to the effect that ‘the security of Africa is the concern of Africans only, and that no power or group of powers outside Africa is to interfere in this respect’. ⁶¹ Some did portray these resolutions as condemnations of Cuba’s involvement in Angola. Mohamed Siad Barre, for instance, decried the ‘henchmen’ of a meddling superpower, and Léopold Senghor expressed his disappointment that Luanda was now ‘occupied’ by ‘international communism’. ⁶²

Yet not only was there a distinction to be made between Cuban aid in Angola and the separate matter of Cuban assistance to Ethiopia in 1977 during the Ogaden War (it was the latter that provoked the ire of Somalia), intervention-related arguments, in every case, referred to the extent to which Cuba had, or had not, betrayed its non-aligned credentials and commitment to anti-imperialism. In the OAU, as in the Security Council, the problem was again not about the legitimacy of the internationalist cause, but about whether Cuba had adopted an internationalist guise to pursue neo-imperialist ends. The OAU’s resolution on non-intervention was, to be precise, a strong denunciation of ‘interference from any source whatsoever against Africa to recolonize the continent’. ⁶³

During a session on 19 July, prompting what the New York Times itself described as a ‘storm of applause’, Samora Machel strongly defended the ‘internationalist sacrifice of Cuban people’ that ‘concentrated on support for liberation movements’ formally recognised by the OAU. ⁶⁴ It ‘often happened that ‘protection troops’ have been cynically used to topple the local government and to substitute with a team of cupidinous, easily manipulated men’, admitted Sékou Touré. But not in this case. ⁶⁵ If Cuban forces in Angola had ‘saved that country’ from a regime ‘hostile to the idea of independence and self-determination for African peoples’, then ‘we cannot reasonably refer to ideological differences. . .let us agree on a minimum programme: the defence of freedom that is so dear to all of us’. ⁶⁶

In the Security Council Nigeria argued that it was a ‘misconception’ that ‘Cuba has carried out a policy of intervention and communist expansion in Africa’. ‘This, as everyone knows, is not true’. ⁶⁷ At Khartoum, Olusegun Obasanjo had explained that while condemning ‘all external interventions without reservation’, Nigeria was of the view that ‘we need to be quite clear about what we mean by external intervention in the context of contemporary political developments in Africa’.

We are aware of the West’s concern at what they consider to be Soviet and Cuban intervention in Africa. . .The fact of the matter is that Africa was colonised by Western powers and not the Soviets. In the struggle for independence and freedom, the only source of effective support was the Eastern bloc countries. The Soviets were therefore invited into Africa for a purpose, and that purpose was to liberate the countries to which they were invited from centuries of cruelty, degradation, oppression, and exploitation. . .we should not be overconcerned by the presence of those we invited to fight for specific causes and no more. The Cubans are, of course, much of a newcomer to Africa. Their presence has the same background as the Soviets. . .We have no right to condemn the Cubans, nor the countries which felt they needed Cuban assistance to consolidate their sovereignty or territorial integrity. ⁶⁸

And so it is true that at its much-discussed 1976 summit the OAU rejected all intervention, from any source, for whatever reason (similar declarations had of course been made elsewhere and earlier – at Bogota, Bandung, Belgrade, in the UN General Assembly’s 1965 Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention, etc.) But from a radical perspective none of this amounted to a rejection of the Carlota operation – by condemning interventionism, the Organisation was not condemning a shared, international struggle against white-supremacist empire. All in all, Africa was ‘not about to throw off one colonial yoke for another’: there was a common understanding that protectors were not to ‘overstay their welcome’. ⁶⁹

The major point is that there was comprehended a coercive humanitarian duty in important spheres of international society at the time, which was cast in the language of self-determination as part of the UN-based human rights regime, and seemed to correspond with internationalist practice. As things stood, the countries lending assistance were often ‘the socialist countries’ – identified by Tanzania were Cuba, the Soviet Union, and China – but Africa would surely welcome it ‘if our American and our British colleagues, as well as our other Western European colleagues, if they were in a position to do so, also provided equipment and material for the liberation struggle’. ⁷⁰

We should finish on the words of the then-Chair of the UN Special Committee against Apartheid, Jeanne Martin Cissé of Guinea, who also appeared before the Security Council in March. Cissé referred to the recommendations of the Special Committee ‘to implement the UN resolutions on the elimination of apartheid from South Africa’ and cited resolution 3517 (XXX) of 15 December 1975, in which the General Assembly called for ‘individual and collective action’ to put an end to ‘all forms of foreign aggression and occupation, apartheid, and colonialism’. The same resolution recalled ‘the duty of all states’ to ‘provide assistance to the countries, territories, and peoples concerned’. ⁷¹ She continued:

South African aggression against Angola was a test of the loyalty of the Member States to this commitment. I shall not mention those who, in Angola and elsewhere, have been the accomplices of or encouraged racist South African aggression. I will let history be the judge. But we cannot fail to recall here the fact that, in the face of South African aggression and the rush of mercenaries to Angola, we witnessed the encouraging example of the international solidarity of mankind against apartheid and racism. ⁷²

Conclusion

This article has explored two divergent practices of international coercion for the protection of human rights. In 1975, from a conventional view, Cuba played interventionist. Yet Havana always objected to the notion that Operation Carlota was an interventionary act. It did so according to a particular understanding of the intervention concept drawn from a revolutionist-internationalist tradition; that is, intervention as the suppression of self-determination, as the outcome of foreign pressure against self-determined futures rather than the means – usually coercive – by which that pressure occurred. In the discourse of the revolutionaries, a distinct practice of internationalism, associated with symbols like Martí and the Tricontinental, and which seems marginalised or missing from existing studies of intervention and non-intervention, contributed to the eradication of apartheid and colonialism in Southern Africa. The primary facts of Cuban involvement in the Angolan episode, from this view, are the facts of its prevention of crimes against humanity and large-scale human rights abuses; here the universal object or aim of humanity was furthered by the threat or use of force, yet through, not at the expense of, nationality and national authority.

From other perspectives, including that of the prevailing academic definition, an act of intervention – an act of coercive interference – had occurred in Angola. Carlota infringed upon the principle of non-intervention in light of its forcible nature and its crossing of borders without the consent of a recognised sovereign government. But what seems interesting is that ‘coercive interference’ was not the logic according to which the legitimacy of Cuban involvement was actually disputed. The deliberative conditions of the United Nations, for example, suggest that a more classical humanitarian-interventionist justification – notably invoked by South Africa – was being differentiated from the sort of internationalist justification provided by Cuba. What was contested in relation to the Carlota operation was not so much its self-described higher purpose – its anti-colonialist and anti-racist humanitarianism, through the promotion of self-determination – but whether Cuba’s behaviour constituted intervention according to its own internationalist criteria. When South Africa attempted to make use of a humanitarian-interventionist argument to justify its invasion, it was widely rejected not just on account of having failed to actually protect, but also on account of the structure and content of its protection argument. Normative critique turned upon not just the use of force across borders, but the extent to which foreign rescuers actually secured self-determination in an Africa which sought African solutions to African problems: ‘Who are the real imperialists?’

In other words the point is not just that Cuba claimed solidarity with the government of Angola and that its presence was sovereignty-affirming, but that it was self-determination-affirming. One contribution of the case has to do with clarifying broader international debates concerning self-determination, human rights, the use of force, particularly in reference to the international alleviation of colonialism and apartheid. International coercion (including as armed force for the prevention of large-scale human rights abuses, and not necessarily with the consent of a recognised sovereign) was, for the radical Third World, a very crucial component of the internationalist duty. And it was a duty that was understood as wholly consistent with the absolute non-intervention of the Cold War period, on account of the ways in which the intervention concept was being constituted. It was according to a logic of intervention as the constraint of self-determination that Carlota could be seen as legitimate despite the inadmissibility of intervention ‘for whatever reason’, in ‘whatever form’. According to the principle of non-intervention among states, all states were to respect the right to self-determination. Consequently, all states were to contribute to the elimination of genocide and crimes against humanity, such as apartheid, and colonialism in all its forms.

Yet all this seems very different from what we usually know of the legitimacy of saving strangers and the character of Third World organising during the Cold War.

In historical international society there is a conceivable difference between internationalist aid and the act of intervention; to grasp that difference is to begin to see how, for a large number of states in the 1960s and 70s, international assistance ‘by all necessary means’ to save the victims of gross human rights abuses was not understood as a violation of the UN Charter. It is no doubt true that the rules of international society, including the rules of non-intervention, inhibited states from raising some types of humanitarian claims to justify some types of international coercion, but the question that deserves our attention is: which types of humanitarian claims and which types of coercion? A more global and empirically-accurate account of the intervention debate needs to trace evolutions and pluralities in the meanings of its major concepts, according to the practices of various parts of the world.

Important Third-World understandings of self-determination, and of its place at the heart of the struggle against colonialism and racism in Southern Africa, show that while Cold-War international society was not, according to the self-descriptions of its members, humanitarian-interventionist, it was much more plausibly humanitarian-internationalist in specific circumstances. There is evidence that particular sorts of coercive humanitarian claims were accepted as legitimate in Cold-War international society; it is too easy to say that the period’s rules of non-intervention precluded the legitimate international prevention of atrocities and related crimes. To say so would be to ignore the ways in which self-determination, and its relationship with non-interventionist rules, provided a basis for doing precisely that: for justifying various forms of coercion on humanitarian grounds, but also for enforcing international human rights treaties, including the Genocide Convention.

There is then a kind of solidarism present in leading defences of humanitarian intervention that seems very different from the sort of solidarism associated with Cuba and other non-aligned states. The revolutionist-internationalist tradition moves through nations, not cosmopolitan associations of individuals; scholars have insufficiently engaged with a solidarist practice that reinforces the nation-state as a means towards universal and humanitarian ends; saving strangers is no longer a project of dismantling sovereignty or justifying interference in internal affairs; a shared internationalist duty stands opposite to colonialism, extreme racism and manifestations of a ‘standard of civilisation’; non-intervention refers to non-dependence and non-domination, as well as non-indifference. The addition of revolutionist-internationalist practice hence escapes many of the tensions set up by the liberal-interventionist account, which has had significant influence on our contemporary understanding of humanitarian protection, but does not reflect the actual area of global cultural convergence among states. ⁷³

To look at Carlota is begin to document this area of agreement and to recover its implications: to a large number of states, there was a ‘great difference’ between an interventionist and an internationalist – there was a great difference between foreign protection that became interventionary and that which played ‘a revolutionary, internationalist, and solidarity role’. ⁷⁴ The key point is not that measuring the people’s will was easy or universally resolved – clearly it was not – but that self-determination was once a significant feature of constituting intervention and of ordering the intervention problem. We can conceive of forcible rescue as something other than intervention, and we should explore in greater detail how guardianship without trusteeship is consistent with intermittent features of the discourse of international society, as well as particular international norms and traditions.