The United Nations in international relations

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Review of International Studies (1996), 22, 95-106

Printed in Great Britain

The United Nations in international relations MATS

BERDAL

Erskine Childers with Brian Urquhart, Renewing the United Nations System (Uppsala: Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, 1994) Kevin Clements and Robin Ward (eds.), Building International Community: Cooperating for Peace Case Studies (Canberra: Allen & Unwin, 1994) Rosemary Righter, Utopia Lost: The United Nations and World Order (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995) John L. Hirsch and Robert Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington, DC: United States Institute for Peace, 1995)

Writing about the United States and its highly ambivalent relationship to the United Nations, Conor Cruise O'Brien once noted how, in 'the land which houses the United Nations, and which does most both to support and to use it, discussion of the functioning of the United Nations is almost all on [a] quasUsupernatural plane, whether it be in terms of the strengthened Platonic UN, or in terms of a UN of evil enchantment—God or the Devil'.1 With some exaggeration, much the same can be said about the public debate of the UN's role in international relations in recent years. It is heartening, therefore, as the UN celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, to see a growing number of studies prepared to examine critically the performance of the organization; to explore its possibilities in a world where interdependence and transnational processes require greater cooperation; but also to acknowledge its limitations in the same world where the autonomy and primacy of the state remain unchallenged in vital spheres of activity. The need to re-examine the UN's role in international relations has been prompted by the unprecedented demands placed on the organization in the field of peace and security in recent years. Specifically, the organization has become increasingly involved in attempts to mitigate, resolve or simply alleviate the humanitarian consequences of brutal intra-state conflicts.2 Less attention, however, has traditionally been given to the UN's role in facilitating international cooperation in the economic and social areas. Erskine Childers and Brian Urquhart's study of the 'UN system' and Rosemary Righter's new book, Utopia Lost: The United Nations and 1 2

Conor Cruise O'Brien, The United Nations: Sacred Drama (London, 1968), p. 17. Of the eleven operations launched since the UN Security Council summit meeting in January 1992, nine have been related to intra-state or internal conflicts. A number of these operations are examined in Clements and Ward, Building International Community.

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World Order, provide a detailed, critical and valuable look at this aspect of the UN's work.

Conflict studies, the UN and international security

In Cooperating for Peace, Gareth Evans, Australian Foreign Minister since 1988, sought to 'bring some conceptual clarity and positive prescription to the debate about the most effective means for generating stable peaceful relations within and among states'.3 Originally written as background material for Evans's much-quoted study, Building International Community by Kevin Clements and Robin Ward contains a number of detailed and diverse case-studies, ranging from the Balkans to the management of potential conflict in the South China Sea. As with Cooperating for Peace, the study is based on the premise that 'the current inability of the United Nations to respond adequately to the diverse crises before the international community underlines the failure of old conceptual frameworks to guide timely analysis and effective multilateral intervention'.4 In its overall approach, the Australian project draws heavily upon many of the concepts and insights offered by behaviouralist-inspired conflict research in International Relations, especially with regard to conflict resolution and management techniques.5 Two of the central assumptions that have suffused work in this area, whether explicitly stated or not, have been a belief in an underlying harmony of human interests (of which the common interest in peace is given) and 'in the sufficiency of reason to promote right conduct'.6 It is on the basis of these assumptions that the introductory chapter stresses how 'conflict resolution experts faced with an entrenched and apparently intractable conflict have to move cautiously in order to "map" it by identifying the key protagonists, their positions, interests, needs and fears. This involves expert awareness, careful listening, and taking time to break the conflict into its constituent attitudinal, behavioural and situation components'.7 Whilst it is acknowledged that this degree of attention may be difficult to sustain for 'harassed national and international leaders', the broader implication is clear: UN intervention based on faulty or wrong analysis is likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate both the presenting and underlying problems. Sophisticated conflict analysis, therefore, far from being an optional extra, is fundamental to problem-solving.8 At one level, this is a proposition with which one can hardly argue. However, the implicit assumption that 'faulty or wrong analysis' with regard to intervention stems from lack of 'sophisticated conflict analysis' is meaningless unless the criteria upon 3

4 5

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Ibid., p. 1. See also Gareth Evans, Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond (Victoria, 1993). Clements and Ward, Building International Community, p. 1. See in particular the works of C. R. Mitchell, The Structure of International Conflict (London, 1982), and John Burton, Global Conflict: The Domestic Sources of International Crisis (Brighton, 1984). E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 (London, 1984), p. 26. Clements and Ward, Building International Community, p. 5. Ibid.


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which the analysis for or against intervention is based are spelled out. Yet it is precisely with regard to such criteria that member states have tended to disagree most profoundly. The great merit of the many excellent case-studies collected in the book is that they demonstrate that these disagreements are, more often than not, rooted in conflicts of interest and value among member states. This also serves to explain why the overall, fairly predictable conclusions reached—'building and maintaining international peace and security' require greater emphasis on early preventive action, including the 'processes of economic and social development, international regime-building, support for democratisation'—are more easily applied in the abstract than in practice. To that extent, and paradoxically in view of the stated intention behind the book, the collection of case-studies serves to highlight the limits of theoretical abstraction and 'conceptualization' in the study of intra-state conflict and motives of state behaviour. This holds true particularly for those four cases which above all, so it is argued, have 'challenged the old conceptual framework of the United Nations in relation to the maintenance of peace and security': the Gulf conflict, the Balkans, Cambodia, and Somalia. Having first described the Gulf War as an 'extreme case of failure of preventive diplomacy', the study of it in Clements and Ward's book accepts that 'preventive diplomacy and peacemaking might not have worked in any case given the Iraqi leadership's perception of itself and the international community', distorted as this was by 'Saddam's view of the world'.9 Similarly, the study of the UN's performance in Angola during the UNAVEM II operation in 1992 concludes that it was 'doubtful whether anything less than the top job would have satisfied Savimbi'.10 Under the circumstances prevailing at the time of the elections in September 1992, Savimbi's insistence was tantamount to a return to full-scale civil war. This is not to suggest that the UN performed optimally in Angola. In fact, UNAVEM II's operation in Angola was fraught with self-inflicted problems in terms of mandate, logistics support and finance." Nevertheless, if Savimbi was indeed determined to reject all outcomes short of complete victory to UNITA, there was not much that sophisticated mediation techniques and 'careful listening' could have done to avert a return to war. The case of Cambodia is particularly interesting, in part because it is often presented as a model of successful UN intervention, not least by the Australian government that played such a central and commendable role in the negotiations leading up to the Paris Agreements. The UN did successfully organize elections in the country, repatriated a large number of refugees and oversaw the formation of a government with a degree of popular legitimacy unheard of in recent Cambodian political history. This in turn provided the basis, as the sponsoring powers had envisaged, for long-term economic growth and the consolidation of democracy to 9

Ibid., pp. 58 and 94. Ibid., p. 310. In the Bicesse Peace Accords, Jonas Savimbi, Leader of UNITA, had committed himself to accept the outcome of the elections. However, as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Joan Anstee, was later to remark, 'the Accords relied on a kind of "Boy Scouts' honour" in a situation which had not exactly been conducive to the development of the Boy Scout spirit'. Evidence has since emerged that does indeed suggest that Savimbi was convinced he would win the elections, and would simply not abide by any other outcome. " For an excellent review of the Angola operation and its problems, see Margaret J. Anstee, 'Angola: The Forgotten Tragedy, A Test Case for UN Peacekeeping', International Relations, XI, no. 6 (December 1993). 10


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proceed. Yet, as events since 1993 have shown, the 'Cambodian conflict' was 'solved' only as a global and regional problem; nearly two years after the elections, the country has reverted to civil conflict, albeit on a smaller scale. The UN was never able to 'overcome the internecine strife of a political culture in which power-sharing is a contradiction in terms'.12 The UN's involvement in Cambodia, a success when compared to UN operations in former Yugoslavia and Somalia, still reveals the limits of what the UN can realistically hope to achieve within a finite time period and with limited resources. The Cambodian case does highlight, however, an important and more positive lesson: international consensus and support behind the peace process—unambiguously and repeatedly expressed by the Security Council throughout the UNTAC operation—greatly facilitated the task of the UN in the field. This was in sharp contrast to events in former Yugoslavia and Somalia. It is the international response to the disintegration of Yugoslavia which perhaps fits most uncomfortably with assumptions inherent in the conflict resolution perspective. In this context, three issues stand out. First, as Michael Wilson's study clearly shows, the policies of the major powers were determined by considerations other than 'sophisticated conflict analysis'. In the latter half of 1991, the US government, the international mediators, Lord Carrington and Cyrus Vance, as well as UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar, all advised against the premature recognition of Croatia. The French and British governments initially supported the policy of withholding recognition, rightly fearing that it would force Bosnia-Herzegovina into an impossible position.13 Moreover, the Badinter Commission had been unable to certify that Croatia had met the EC's criteria with respect to minority rights. But this opinion was ignored, Germany's insistence on early recognition won the day and it was duly granted by the EC in mid-January 1992. The British and French part in this did not, however, stem from any change in conviction about the wisdom of such a policy. Indeed, British and French officials privately concede that recognizing Croatia at that particular moment in time (though not recognition per se) was likely to exacerbate the conflict and that their foreign ministries understood this. Yet, as the Yugoslav case-study makes clear, those hitherto opposed were 'swept along by the desire to make a success of the proposals for closer European integration at the Maastricht Summit (December 1991), at which Germany's role would be crucial'.14 The interest in 'European unity', or simply the avoidance of isolation, took precedence over a policy which might have averted the disastrous course of events in Bosnia in 1992.15 The qualification 'might' is important because it highlights the second basic problem with the conflict resolution perspective as applied to former Yugoslavia; namely that some people view the resort to violence and armed conflict as a 12 13

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'Cambodia: The Road From Peace', USS Strategic Comments, no. 1 (January 1995). Following another visit to the area by Cyrus Vance in December 1991, Perez de Cuellar warned that an 'early, selective recognition would widen the present conflict and fuel an explosive situation especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina'. Quoted in Age Eknes, Blue Helmets in a Blown Mission? UNPROFOR informer Yugoslavia (Oslo: Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, December 1993), p. 22. Clements and Ward, Building International Community, p. 146. In the words of Jonathan Eyal, the 'real tragedy was to be found not in the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as such but, rather, in the Community's determination to take any risk in order to maintain the semblance of unity'. Jonathan Eyal, Europe and Yugoslavia: Lessons from a Failure (London, 1993), p. 49.


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'rational' option. At the outset of his seminal study on the immediate background to the outbreak of world war in 1939, Donald Watt notes that despite all the revisionist work that has been done, 'the Second World War was willed to happen'; Hitler conceived of a war which was 'willed, aided and abetted' by 'his minions and followers for their thousand and one different motives'.16 The evidence strongly suggests that key players in the Yugoslav tragedy, most notably Slobodan Milosevic, by their actions willed the war to happen.17 Finally, the disintegration of former Yugoslavia has highlighted real tensions between two principles which for a long time have been espoused as central to the normative structure of the international society of states. Specifically, as with the conflicts raging in parts of the former Soviet Union, the wars of the Yugoslav succession have highlighted the potentially violent consequences of basing the principle of self-determination rigidly on the principle of the inviolability of frontiers corresponding to internal borders (i.e. within federal states). In early 1993, the continued precariousness of the humanitarian situation in Somalia, and the general state of anarchy characterizing many aspects of Somalian society, were deemed by the UN Secretary-General to require a more forceful mandate for the UN forces preparing to replace the US-led Unified Task Force that had arrived in December 1992. Consequently, the Second United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II) was 'endowed with enforcement powers under Chapter VII of the Charter' and became the 'first operation of its kind to be authorized by the international community'.18 It was the largest of all UN field operations and it is useful to remind ourselves of the sheer ambition of its original aims. According to the implementation plan approved by the Security Council in late March 1993, it was to assist 'the Somali people in rebuilding their shattered economy and social and political life, re-establishing the country's constitutional structure; achieving national reconciliation, [and] recreating a Somali State based on democratic governance'.19 It is arguable whether these objectives could ever have been achieved without some kind of trusteeship arrangement, a notion to which there remains deep-seated opposition on political, economic and ideological grounds. What should at any rate have been clear, was that these objectives could only be achieved by working with the Somalis. It was essential, therefore, to ensure that military operations were subordinate to and closely coordinated with the broader political objectives set for the operation. This in turn meant that the third-party and impartial status of UNOSOM II had to be maintained throughout. As John Hirsch and Robert Oakley's comprehensive and candid study shows, however, the UN became party to a civil war with disastrous consequences. Once the decision had been made in June 1993, after the killing of more than twenty Pakistani peace-keepers, to 'hunt down' Mohammed Farrah Aidid and the leadership of the Somali National Alliance (SNA), any pretence of impartiality had to be abandoned. As a UN-appointed 16 17

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D. C. Watt, How War Came (London, 1989), p. 2. In this respect, see the excellent and penetrating portraits of Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman painted by the last US ambassador to Belgrade, Warren Zimmerman, in 'The Last Ambassador', Foreign Affairs, 64, no. 2 (March/April 1995). S/25354, 3 March 1993, paras. 58 and 101. See S/25354, 2 March 1993, para. 91. For UNSC 814, 26 March 1993, and other key documents see the appendix to Hirsch and Oakley, Somalia.


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commission of inquiry later concluded, the UN had effectively opted for war.20 The disagreements over strategy and doctrine which already existed within the multinational (though heavily US-dominated) coalition that made up UNOSOM II were gravely exacerbated by the decision. Furthermore, public unwillingness, especially in those Western countries providing troops to the operation, to accept casualties on what was seen as a humanitarian mission unrelated to traditional conceptions of national interest, ensured that it was a 'war' the UN was bound to lose.

Economic and social cooperation within the UN

The importance that Childers, Urquhart and Righter all attach to the need for an overhaul of UN structures supporting economic and social cooperation stems from a common conviction of the need 'to come to terms with an increasingly transnational world' and the 'realities of interdependence'. Indeed, according to Righter, the UN has little choice but to adjust to a 'new multilateralism driven by what is, not what ought to be'; a form of multilateralism which 'responds to the globalisation of banking and financial markets, the transnational integration of investment and manufacturing strategies by the major corporations, and the increasing vulnerability of each national body politic to political, environmental, or economic mismanagement elsewhere'.21 These developments, it is argued, are also rendering traditional notions of sovereignty meaningless. Yet, whilst the UN may not be structurally equipped to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world economy, the precise relationship between 'transnational flows' and the 'erosion of sovereignty' (not a new debate in International Relations) is more complex and, indeed, the evidence more ambiguous than the authors seem to imply.22 Certainly, the 'evidence' adduced in the books under review does not point to any inherent or necessary relationship between the growth of 'transnational flows' and the 'erosion of sovereignty'. Righter's detailed survey of the 'UN system'—a term she rejects as deeply misleading—does indeed highlight the dysfunctional manner in which social and economic cooperation under UN auspices has been organized and developed. It is, above all, the loose and ill-defined relationship that exists between the UN's principal organ in this area of activity, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and the specialized agencies, originally set up to address functional and sectoral concerns (e.g. World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization), which accounts for most of today's problems. The Charter 'endowed the infant United Nations with the fiction' that the links between specialized agencies and 'political' UN in New York amounted to a 'system'. This was done 'by devising a non-binding formula under which the agencies would be co-ordinated 20 21 22

S/1994/653, Report of Commission Established Pursuant to UNSC Resolution 885 (1993), 1 June 1994. Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 370. For an excellent and critical discussion of the supposed erosion of sovereignty and its implications for order in the international system, see Andrew Hurrell, 'Order in International Society', in The English School of International Relations: A Conference Report, ed. Iver Neumann, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Report no. 179 (Oslo, 1994).


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from the centre by the UN General Assembly and ECOSOC'. 23 Below ECOSOC, whose general responsibility remains that of overseeing UN economic and social policies, specialized agencies have their own constitutions and governing bodies. With 'polycentrism' firmly enshrined as the organizing principle at the outset, the creation of a network of institutions to address an ever-wider agenda of issues has been carried to an extreme. Further complicating the problem of coordination, as Righter notes, has been the fact that most 'UN specialized agencies have expanded the range of their activities far beyond anything envisaged in 1945'. The consequences of this development are well described: The hope had been that, despite their autonomous status, the specialized agencies would still look to New York for general guidance and co-ordination—even though ECOSOC had no powers to impose its views and the secretary-general of the UN was not, and was never intended to be, primus inter pares. In the absence of prime minister or cabinet or means of agreeing priorities between different kinds of activity or expenditure, the UN sprouted principalities whose powerful heads were sovereignly indifferent to external pressures either from New York or the capitals of member states.24 An important consequence of this development, according to Righter, has been that the UN has acquired a 'complexity beyond the grasp of all but a handful of specialists, and quite beyond the control of national bureaucracies'.25 Any formal mechanisms of control, such as the Administrative Committee on Coordination (ACC) chaired by the Secretary-General three times every year, is quite incapable of effecting coordination since any of its recommendations may be rejected by the governing boards of the agencies. Coupled with a highly politicized system of appointments for senior personnel and a proclivity (now much less pronounced than it was in the 1960s and 1970s) for ex-colonial countries to use UN forums first and foremost as an 'anti-Western grandstand', the overall result has often been destructive inter-agency rivalry and little concrete progress. The practical problems engendered by this 'system', including the potential for duplication of effort, waste of resources and lack of coherent policy, have been revealed in a number of recent UN multi-functional peace-keeping operations. While Childers and Urquhart are anxious to correct the myth (created by 'distance and media distortion') of an 'intractably large and reform-defying bureaucracy', there is much evidence to support Righter's basic contention that several of the agencies have taken on a life of their own, in some cases with disastrous results.26 It is also the case that historically the UN has found it peculiarly difficult to close 23

24 25 26

Apart from the five regional economic commissions of ECOSOC, fifteen bodies are formally related to it (for example, UNICEF, UNHCR, World Food Programme). In addition, a number of 'special bodies and programmes of the UN' have been set up dealing with issues such as disaster relief (UNDRO) to the UN Centre for Human Settlements. Finally, fifteen UN specialized agencies have been created over the years, including bodies such as the WHO, UNESCO and IAEA. See Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 380. Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., p. 43. Childers with Urquhart, Renewing the United Nations, p. 26. Childers and Urquhart do nevertheless provide very useful data concerning the true size of what is often misleadingly presented as a 'vast, sprawling bureaucracy'. For example, the total number of UN civil service staff is below that of public-service employees of the city of Stockholm. They also stress, unlike Righter, that 'executive heads are only civil servants who should be instructed by their governors', p. 34.


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down agencies, divisions or offices that have clearly outlived their usefulness. Too often, the 'Secretariats have abused its agenda setting powers, and expanded the range of their activities for reasons that have far more to do with buying the support of government X for a director-general's re-election or with interagency rivalry than with their ability to make an impact on the problem in question'.27 The disastrous reign of Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, UNESCO's Director-General for many years; Dr Hiroshi Nakajima's re-election to head the WHO in 1993 in spite of clear indications that he was not qualified for the job; the FAO's performance under the leadership of Edouard Saouma, highlighted by the inadequacy of its response to the Ethiopian famine of 1984-5; all reflect poorly on the organization. Indeed, as Righter suggests, whatever the true motives of US policy towards the UN in the early 1980s, the Reaganite assault on UN bodies and practices, including the formal withdrawal from UNESCO in 1983 and demand for reform of UNCTAD, was probably necessary in order to jolt the Secretariat into considering substantive reform. The argument that the Secretariat (broadly defined) controls the agenda, and the member states have lost the ability to exercise influence and effect change within agencies, can easily, however, be taken too far. In particular, it should not obscure the fact that in many cases member states deliberately choose to play a double-game when other national interests, usually unrelated to any concern with the effective workings of the organization, are seen to be at stake. Indeed, in the aforementioned case of UNESCO's performance under M'Bow, France chose not to become engaged in the heated discussions on reform. As Righter points out, France was far from anxious to engage in an open and potentially damaging attack on UNESCO and its Senegalese Director-General; it was after all an agency which in the past had worked well as a tool of Francophone policy.28 But there is a further consideration here. The basic assumption underlying much of the recent writing on the need for UN reform is that the very relevance of the organization is at stake because 'economic interaction and political fragmentation, two major post-war phenomena, make the reconstruction of multilateral cooperation essential'.29 In the absence of reform—which the authors all sensibly agree should be selective and concentrated on 'what works' rather than root-and-branch 'constitutional' change—the demands of the 'new multilateralism' will lead to new forms of cooperation, if necessary outside an outdated and dysfunctional UN framework. One example of such cooperation, was the transformation of GATT into the World Trade Organization (WTO) following the protracted Uruguay round of negotiations. As Righter observes, the WTO represents a much-needed strengthening of the multilateral system, 'essential to the realisation of the twentyfirst century's economic and technological potential'.30 Yet, while the 'new multilateralism' may be an inescapable phenomenon of contemporary international relations, the brief history of the WTO has already shown that perceptions of national interest and domestic political pressures may lead governments to adopt policies that threaten to undermine the very 'institutions' or regimes in which the 27 28 29 30

Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 17. Ibid., 241.. 1 U I U , , p. \J. A*tl Ibid., p. 258. Ibid., p. 368.


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'new multilateralism' is played out. In May 1995, the US government unilaterally decided to impose punitive trade sanctions against Japan in a manner which flagrantly ignored fundamental obligations to the WTO, thus threatening the credibility of an organization and a fledgling trading regime which it had taken years of painstaking negotiations to establish.31 The motives behind the US action, however construed and presented, cannot be divorced from domestic political considerations facing the administration at the time. Whilst it may be the case, as Righter asserts, that 'a government's domestic political standing is increasingly profoundly and publicly connected with its success in handling the matter-of-fact business of managing interdependence', this particular case shows that the definition of 'success' may have very little to do with the apparent 'realities' or 'inescapable' demands of interdependence. What this suggests perhaps, more broadly, is that with respect to both international security and social and economic cooperation, the extent to which member states use the principal as well as the subsidiary organs of the UN for their own specific purposes is underrated. Indeed, according to Conor Cruise O'Brien, 'taking the blame for the mistakes of national leaders . . . is one of the things the UN is about, and is a large part of its utility to national governments'.32 What Righter aptly calls the 'routinisation of the unreal' in UN forums and debates is usually linked to this particular, albeit unstated, function of the organization. A new interventionism? According to Righter and Childers, the requirements of multilateral cooperation driven by the ever-increasing volume of transnational flows have led to a growing appreciation among member states of the obsolescence of traditional notions of sovereignty. 'The taboo that customarily rules out of order even discussion of wars, tyrannies and disasters, unless they clearly impact on other states, began to weaken in the 1990s'.33 Particularly significant is seen to be the change of attitudes among developing and non-aligned countries, traditionally the staunchest guardians of the principle of sovereignty as enshrined in Article 2(7) of the Charter. Childers and Urquhart see a growing readiness among developing countries to find 'genuinely disinterested and UN-directed humanitarian intervention without formal government request or sanction', while Righter considers the 'demythification of sovereignty' as having begun in the poorest countries.34 An important stage in this process is thought to have been the passage of UN Security Council Resolution 688 of 5 April 1991, which, although not itself a Chapter VII resolution, identified 'the repression of the Iraqi civilian population' as a 'threat to international peace and security'. It provided 31

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In the first place, the US action simply ignored the WTO dispute-settlement system. More significantly, it violated two of the fundamental principles underlying the WTO: that member states should not discriminate among trading partners, and should not raise tariffs above agreed levels. See 'Mr Kantor's Outrageous Gamble', The Economist, 20 May 1995, p. 81. Conor Cruise O'Brien, 'Faithful Scapegoat to the World', The Independent, 1 October 1993. Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 77. Childers with Urquhart, Renewing the United Nations, p. 18. As evidence for this, they cite intimations of readiness from India and Zimbabwe to develop 'general principles and guidelines' for intervention to create 'corridors of peace or tranquillity' during the Security Council summit in January 1992. Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 20.


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the basis for Operation Provide Comfort, a US-led multinational operation that offered protection and relief for Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq. As with the transnational processes outlined above, the implication is that the general trend undermining the doctrine of non-intervention is both inevitable and necessary. Inevitable, because it is inextricably tied to the 'political and economic mutations that the concept of sovereignty is undergoing in the 1990s'; necessary, because the UN will continue to be marginalized from the 'world's killing field . . . unless its members can agree on some basis for effective international control of the wars that most typically ravage the poorest countries'.35 Additionally, it is asserted that in 'the new international climate, non-intervention will be increasingly harder to defend to the public' because the end of the Cold War has 'greatly enlarged the arena of the possible, publics know it, and governments will be forced to respond'.36 Resistance to this trend is seen by Righter as residing within the UN Secretariat and is said to have manifested itself in a reluctance to develop or seriously consider the creation of an effective response capability for humanitarian intervention. Thus, Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar initially opposed the dispatch of Western troops to northern Iraq, and James Jonah's proposal in 1989 for the development of a capacity to intervene in humanitarian emergencies without 'host' state consent was quietly shelved.37 While it is true that the Secretariat has not developed an effective response capability to intervene in intra-state conflicts, the trends outlined above are far more ambiguous than would seem to be implied. Although Resolution 688 did provide the basis for Allied relief operations in northern Iraq, no formal determination regarding a threat to international peace and security was made under Chapter VII. More importantly, that resolution must properly be seen within the context of the political and humanitarian situation that prevailed at the end of the Gulf War when the victors were in a unique position to impose conditions on a vanquished power which had persisted in committing gross human rights violations after suffering a crushing defeat. It is nevertheless true that, over the past five years, the formal determination of a 'threat to peace and security' under Article 39 of the Charter before a Chapter VII action is authorized has increasingly come to be treated more as a procedural than as a substantive hurdle.38 This is evident with regard to Somalia, but also in the numerous resolutions passed concerning the war in former Yugoslavia. This does not, however, indicate that member states have abandoned traditional concerns about sovereignty and non-intervention. Indeed, the decidedly mixed success of several large-scale UN field operations since the first Security Council summit meeting was held in January 1992 have prompted member states to reassert the importance of basing action firmly 'within the framework and provisions of the Charter'.39 35 36 37 38 39

Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 344. Ibid., p. 348. The arguments of French jurists and humanitarian NGOs in support of a droit d'ingirence, first voiced in the late 1980s, is viewed as a manifestation of the same trend. Ibid. James Jonah was the UN Assistant Secretary-General in charge of the now defunct Office for Research and Collection of Information (ORCI). 'Legal Constraints of UN Military Operations', 1ISS Strategic Comments, no. 3 (22 March 1995). The phrase is used as the premise of the discussion in An Agenda for Peace, the Secretary-General's much-vaunted report of June 1992. As such, it highlights the inherent difficulties of addressing issues of intra-state conflict within the UN.


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Ever since the revival of UN peace-keeping in the late 1980s, non-aligned and developing countries have expressed concern about the tension they perceive between the new-found activism of the UN with regard to internal conflict and the cardinal principal of international society of states: the sovereign equality of states and its corollary that there is a duty of non-intervention by states in the internal affairs of other states. In the preamble to the resolution that authorized the dispatch of a US-led task-force to Somalia in December 1992, African states insisted that the following phrases be inserted in the text: 'Recognising the unique character of the present situation . .. and mindful of the deteriorating, complex and extraordinary nature, requiring an immediate and exceptional response'.40 Moreover, among the permanent members of the Security Council, the People's Republic of China has remained a consistent champion of the concerns expressed by the non-aligned. Whilst supporting the aforementioned decision to send the task-force to Somalia, the Chinese delegate was instructed to make it clear that the military operation authorized by the Council was 'an exceptional action under the unique situation in Somalia'.41 With respect to the evolution of UN peace-keeping practices, the Indian submission to the UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping in April 1993 (the expressed concerns of which were reiterated in 1994 and 1995) succinctly summarized priorities widely shared among developing countries. It noted that the new 'dimensions of peacekeeping' had also resulted in 'a new responsibility for the UN and its member states to ensure that these new departures in peace-keeping operations are in conformity with the principles and provisions of the UN Charter .. . Most important amongst these principles and guidelines are respect of the sovereignty of the State, non-interference in matters under the domestic jurisdiction of a State and the requirement of consent of all concerned parties for such operations'.42 Further echoing the concerns of developing countries, the Indian submission concluded that: ... the focus, it would seem, has shifted from development to peacekeeping. We hope and trust that this is only a transient phenomenon and that in the not too distant future, the UN can dedicate its energy and resources to the realization of wider objectives of the UN charter and its intrinsic balance.43 It is much too easy to dismiss such statements as ritualistic lip-service paid to outdated notions which in the 1990s have little resonance beyond the committee rooms of obscure UN bodies; beneath the rhetoric they do reflect genuine concerns about the power and influence of developed countries and their ability to set the terms and conditions for cooperation in international relations. None of this is to suggest that the humanitarian impulse has dissipated altogether, or that the law on humanitarian intervention has not evolved in important directions

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41 42 43

Quoted in Adam Roberts, 'A More Humane World: The Evolution of International Responses to Situations Involving Massive Human Rights Suffering', paper for Commonwealth Secretariat, December 1994, p. 12 (my emphasis). 'Statement by Ambassador Li Daoyu, Permanent Representative of China to the United Nations, at Security Council in Explanation of Vote on Somalia Questions', press release, 3 December 1992. Statement by Permanent Representative of India, 'Comprehensive Review of the Whole Question of Peacekeeping in All their Aspects', 20 April 1993. Ibid.


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since the late 1980s. Moreover, although no international consensus can be said to have crystallized with regard to the basis for outside intervention in humanitarian emergencies, recent innovations in UN peace-keeping have facilitated positive outcomes (e.g. Namibia, Cambodia and Central America) which should not be obscured by the failures and inadequacies of collective action elsewhere. Indeed, the effectiveness with which important new tasks have been undertaken and developed by the UN—most notably electoral support, various forms of humanitarian assistance and human rights monitoring—has gone largely unnoticed. It is, however, altogether more questionable whether a 'reassessment by the major powers of the UN's collective security functions, coupled with a more sophisticated approach to international stability, will begin to weaken the foundations of sovereign autonomy on which the global organizations are so unrealistically constructed'.44 The 'progressive development of a working world community', which Childers and Urquhart call for, has some considerable way to go. The precise relationship between transnational processes in which hope is so often reposed, and the formation or emergence of a 'community' on a global scale, is more complex than simplistic notions of 'global village' and 'world community' suggest. Indeed, with respect to the spread of global communications, Leszek Kolakowski argues the opposite case: there is 'no greater falsehood than to maintain that thanks to the development of communications, we now live in a giant village extending over the entire surface of the world; . . . reality, instead of becoming closer and more palpable, is converted into a literary fiction; the dense mass of visual and verbal information we try in vain to digest, instead of giving us the opportunity to participate in world affairs, offers us a world with which we identify only esthetically, with some pleasure and no responsibility'.45 The extraordinary diversity and, one may well argue, shameful selectivity of the international response to humanitarian tragedies in recent years reveal that global peace and security are not viewed as 'indivisible'. The continued fighting in Afghanistan; the lack of an international response to the relapse of Angola into civil war in 1992; the failure to respond to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994; Western policies over Bosnia; all suggest that peace is viewed as 'divisible' and that calculations of interest are still critical determinants of policy. As for the UN, the tension is well encapsulated in the delightfully ambiguous comment by Ivor Richard, then Britain's Permanent Representative to the UN, who in 1975 criticized excessive American moralism in UN chambers and noted that his own 'function is to use the United Nations, not to purge it'.46

44 45 46

Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 376. Leszek Kolakowski, 'The Search for Community', in Experiencing the Twentieth Century, ed. N. Hagihara, A. Iriye, G. Nivat and P. Windsor (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1985), pp. 155-6. Quoted in Righter, Utopia Lost, p. 240.