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20 Denv. J. Int'l L. & Pol'y 9 (1991-1992)
Self-Determination and Humanitarian Intervention in a Community of Power

handle is hein.journals/denilp20 and id is 17 raw text is: Self-Determination and Humanitarian
Intervention in a Community of Power
JAMES A.R. NAFZIGER*
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
-W. B. Yeats'
In the gradual transition from a balance of power system of interna-
tional relations to a community of power,' forces of both integration and
fragmentation have gained momentum.s Economic integration of the Eu-
ropean Community, for example, has been offset by political disintegra-
tion to the east and a resurgence of policy differences throughout the con-
tinent. In the Middle East, Iraq's acceptance of greater Kurdish
autonomy may be a trade-off for reintegrating Iraq into regional and in-
ternational relationships and restoring its access to foreign trade markets.
China, Taiwan and the two Koreas acknowledged their political divisions
in return for greater integration into global institutions. As these adjust-
ments to a new order demonstrate, short-term fragmentation may en-
hance or detract from long-term integration. The forces are both comple-
* Professor of Law, Willamette University College of Law; B.A., M.A. University of
Wisconsin; J.D. Harvard University.
1. Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, in SELECTED POEMS AND Two PLAYS OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS 109 (Macha Louis Rosenthal ed., 1962). This passage, which concludes the
stanza that begins, Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare [rlides upon sleep, reflects
on the Irish Troubles following the 1916 Easter Rebellion during World War I. In The
Second Coming, Yeats opens on a similar note of despair about the centrifugal tendencies of
the world around him:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Id. at 91. The anxious, contemporary ring of these lines may soften if one considers the
Wilsonian legacy from the same period of international institutions to help restore and
maintain order.
2. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized
rivalries, but an organized common peace. Address by Woodrow Wilson to the United
States Senate (January 22, 1917), reprinted in 40 THE PAPERS OF WOODROW WILSON: Nov.
20, 1916 - JAN. 23, 1917, 536 (Arthur Link ed., 1982).
3. See John L. Gaddis, Toward the Post-Cold War World, 70 FOREIGN AFF. 102 (1991)
(discussion of the forces of integration in global communications, economics, security, ideas,
and peacemaking; and fragmentation, especially of states such as the Soviet Union and Yu-
goslavia under internal pressures for self-determination by constituent republics and
regions).

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