The limits of intervention: coercive diplomacy and the Jewish question in the nineteenth century

This paper argues that exploring diplomatic responses to the Jewish question casts new light on the purpose of humanitarian intervention within the international system during the nineteenth century. It contrasts international responses to the question of Jewish minority rights in Morocco and Romania during the 1860s and 1870s, with particular reference to the Congress of Berlin (1878) and the Conference of Madrid (1880). The former resulted in a Treaty endorsing the principle of religious equality in the Ottoman Empire and the emerging nation-states of the Balkans, while the latter resulted only in a non-binding Declaration in favour of religious freedom. Thus the international system favoured humanitarian intervention in the Christian polity of Romania but not in the Muslim polity of Morocco: a conclusion that complicates assumptions about humanitarian intervention as essentially directed by Christian powers against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Paradoxically, diplomatic attempts to enforce religious equality in the Ottoman Empire and the emerging Christian states of the Balkans reflected a willingness to recognise these powers as fully fledged members of the emerging international system, provided that they adopted certain constitutional norms. Morocco was given greater latitude, because diplomats and Western observers ultimately believed it incapable of making this leap.