Volume XV – Number 1
James Wolfe
Abstract: This article argues that international law has been too broad in the use of the word “intervention,” and that there needs to be a way to distinguish between different international actions based on the state’s objective. To illustrate the need for such a distinction, the article examines the case of Turkish and Greek military and diplomatic activity in Cyprus in the mid 1970s. One of Cyprus’s founding documents, the Treaty of Guarantee, tasked the signatory states Greece, Turkey, and Great Britain with the duty to ensure that the other provisions of the treaty were upheld, and it granted these states the ambiguous right to “unilaterally intervene” in the event that multilateral cooperation fell through. When President Markarios of Cyprus sought to change the style of government in the state to adopt majoritarian rule, the governments of Greece and Turkey, despite having notably different foreign policy objectives, both used military intervention, claiming legality under the Treaty of Guarantee. This case provides a perfect example of the need for a more exact definition of “intervention” in international law. In order to enhance the specificity of foreign policy behavior and its legality, this article proposes the introduction of two new terms called interference and intercession. Together with a traditional definition of intervention, these three words could serve as a scale in international law for typifying foreign policy actions and determining their legality.
Keywords: Cyprus, intervention, legality, international law, foreign policy, military intervention, multilateral cooperation
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