Expeditionary wars: what legitimacy?

After my previous post dedicated to failing, or failed states, I got a reply leaving me in a bad mood, as I was reminded that France's duty was to intervene in Mali at least to rescue its citizens living there (they are said to be around 5,000) and if deemed necessary to protect its national interests. That's right. In my attempt to explain the vacuity of supporting failed/failing states I could have been more accurate.

Well, Let us look a little bit more closely at the reasons for which a democracy may decide to deploy troops in a third country. You will read here below a graph, which still can be improved as this is just a prototype. This graph encompasses two different axis and a green triangle:
The vertical axis depicts the degree of cynicism having lead to the dcision to launch an operation;
The horizontal axis, on the contrary, shows how much universalism can weigh in the balance;
The triangle represents the area in which a good communication policy can drive the support of the public opinion in a democratic country.

Here are some explanations:

War is one of the more complex issues and one can suppose that an expeditionary war is ignited by several factors, some of them never being mentioned, some others being subject to a particularly dense communication.

 I would assess that the more universalist the expedition is, the more support the government will get from the public opinion. On the contrary a war driven by home policy considerations, especially when an election is coming up, won't get any support. Anyway the government will cover its cynicism by a mock universalism.

On the contrary, I still want to believe that Humanitarian relief remains the expression of a purely universalist vision of the World. By the way, what is universalism? Universalism is the strong belief that you can improve the World by your positive actions. Pretty Christian, isn't it?

However, as waging war is always a combination of different factors, this is mainly a mix of all these parameters, some of them being the leading ones, the others being considered as followers.

In the very next weeks, I will explain why those topic got such locations.