ABSTRACT
Foreign policy is becoming a moral enterprise when it aims at deterring or catching war criminals, excluding authoritarian governments from arms transfers and foreign aid, committing troops to peacekeeping missions or toppling tyrannical regimes. All these activities can be observed in the post-cold war period. This trend towards a politico-ethical interventionism neither signals a return to imperialism nor can it be fully explained in terms of an emerging transnational civil society which some believe is thriving on the growing sensitivity of Western middle classes to new ‘global’ problems and the human suffering induced by them.
