Voluntary decisions on the part of a people may change a nation's values. Trading in goods and ideas can change a society, yet such changes should not, for the most part, be deemed interventionist. Changes in culture and language that result from the voluntary decisions of many individuals cannot be tied to any form of interventionism, for the policy of interventionism is a policy of threatening or using coercion or force of some description. Whether such examples exist is hard to ascertain, for commonly the expansion of freedom of trade that has led to an exchange of ideas and hence of cultures is historically almost universally connected with imperialist policies that do aim at explicit forms of intervention. However, critics may point out that previous military interventions could be considered as necessary precursors to changes in the culture of the people.
Coercion is a form of interventionism.
Coercion implies offering choices that normally would not be accepted, but which leave the individual to choose the option preferred by the coercer, or by default one that is less acceptable. Domestic interventions entail restricting the choices of individuals or groups or altering their activities through legislative coercion. On the international level, interventionist activities involve threatening, coercing, or forcing another group or nation to alter its behavior or change its government or policies. Other positions offer more principled cases for interventionism, for example on epistemological grounds, political realism or rights analyses. Back to Table of Contents Epistemological Reasons Intervening can be justified on grounds of the government possessing better knowledge than individual agents, or from paternalistic reasons, which presume the target agents are incapable of making informed choices themselves.