The emergence of this network of forms of global governance was not straightforward. It involved many setbacks and aroused much resistance from those who felt their power and privileges threatened by such a trend. For every voice favoring global cooperation there was another, warning against the erosion of national sovereignty. The debate is just as heated today as it was generations ago. Nevertheless, were a diplomat or editor of the year 1900 to be transported to our present world, he or she would be astonished at the role that international bodies play on behalf of global society.
To be sure, this increase was conditional and constrained, for the UN could never escape the central paradox of all international bodies. The paradox is this: Since the world organization was created by its member states, which acted like shareholders in a corporation, it can function effectively only when it receives the support of national governments, especially those of the larger powers. Nations can ignore the world body, as did the USSR in 1950 and the US in 2003 (and many a “rogue state” in recent years), but that usually comes at a price. Conversely, the organization cannot pursue proposed actions if a Great Power — that is, one of the five countries possessing the veto — is opposed. Then tension between sovereignty and internationalism is inherent, persistent, and unavoidable. Unless the reader understands that this tension was built into the system from the beginning, it is impossible to follow the UN’s story over the six decades since 1945.
Ultimately, all these stories and actions have to be brought together in order to establish a holistic understanding of the world organization; but that aim is best achieved by looking at the strands separately before weaving them together.
Like it or not, humankind requires something out there that is more than egoistical nation-states. The question is, can we do it, practically? Can we modify our fears and egoisms to the common good and our own long-term advantage?
It comes as no surprise that most of these texts were composed near the end of, or shortly after, a great and bloody war. They were efforts to find a way out of the international anarchy, to escape the repeated struggles between cities, monarchies, and states, and to establish long-lasting peace. All of them sought to constrain selfish, sovereign power, usually by some form of league of nations that would take action against a country that broke the existing order. The mechanisms were therefore reactive, assuming humankind’s propensity to conflict but trusting that such dangerous drives could be headed off. They were devices to chain national egoism; as St. Pierre argued, all members must be placed in a “mutual state of dependence.” From this negative intent there would flow positive benefits: global harmony, rising prosperity, the pursuit of the arts, and so on.
The creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (1864) was recognition of the need to treat prisoners of war fairly and a signal advance in “the laws of war” it was, arguably, the first treaty-bound international organization.
Truly, the era from 1871 to 1914 was a bizarre and puzzling one, with great and increasing evidence of international integration existing side by side with ethnic-nationalist passions, warmongering, and social Darwinist notions about the primacy of struggle. In many regards it is not unlike today’s world, where theories about the rise of new Asian superpowers and growing awareness of the possibility of a terrorist cataclysm jostle with evidence of the ever greater globalization and interdependence of all peoples.
The losses of human life, along the western front, the Isonzo, and the eastern front, in the Balkans, the Atlantic, and Mesopotamia, were beyond all measure and comprehension. When, for example, the British army retired, bloodied and hurt, at the end of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, it had taken nearly 60K casualties, around 20K fatal. (To give some perspective, US forces’ losses in more than 25 years’ fighting in Vietnam were around 68K.)
The war also led, in almost equal measure, to unexpected and radical domestic consequences. It furthered the cause of labor, since modern warfare could not function without the recruitment of the masses. It advanced the liberation of women, at least in the West, since they, too, could not be recruited without trade-offs. It encouraged the growth of the welfare state, since politicians on all sides promised their warring proletarians “a home fit for heroes.” It increased the Exchequer’s penetration into the economy, since this total war called for vastly increased expenditures, and vastly increased taxes, upon virtually everything that moved or stayed still. The First World War, in a nutshell, created the modern age.
All were for a more open and inclusive international order, but none intended to rock the boat.
The founders of the League accepted the independent sovereign state as a basic entity, the great powers as the predominant participants, and Europe as the central core of the world political system. They felt no sense of failure or inadequacy when they created a League which did not represent a fundamental alteration of the old system, since they regarded that system as basically sound and workable. WW1 was to them not an indication that war is the typical and necessary result of the existence of sovereign states, but a warning that accidents can happen. The task to which they set themselves was that of creating safety devices to obviate the repetition of such unfortunate breakdown as had occurred in 1914.
It was only later that the view developed that the League experiment had been worthless. In its early states, though, the optimism seemed justified. Here, for the first time in the history of humankind, there existed an international organization, with headquarters in a settled neutral state, which was committed to ways of solving problems through peaceful means and thus avoiding the recourse to war. Much of the world was to be fascinated at the regular and extraordinary meetings in Geneva, and many rejoiced at the promise it offered. Small states especially — such as Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and Columbia — felt that at last they had some place at high table.
Although there was much grumbling, Zara Steiner is surely correct in remarking that the League’s participation in these tricky disputes “made it easier for the loser to accept unwelcome judgments.”
To begin with, it was never a real world organization, only a partial one. About half of the globe was still in a condition of colonial dependency, lacking representation. The vast Russian lands, torn by civil war and then transformed into the mysterious, isolated Soviet Union, had no place in the system — indeed, although Moscow joined certain technical agencies, it regarded the League itself as a form of capitalist conspiracy that had to be opposed. Japan paid mere lip service to the League. The defeated Germany was not allowed membership until 1926; Hitler marched it out in 1933.
Britain, by contrast, saw the League as a pacifier, an emollient, not as a stern international policeman. Successive governments in London felt that they had too much on their plate already without becoming embroiled in Continental Europe’s myriad problems. Britain’s electorate had recoiled, massively, against any idea of a Continental commitment to France and pushed for social and economic improvements at home rather than strong armed forces. The dominions were straining for greater independence. India, Egypt, and much of the Middle East were full of unrest. The British economy was dislocated, a 19th-century creation in a 20th-century world. The country’s navy, army, and air force were reduced and stunted, yet required to police one-quarter of the globe. This was not a time for generosity toward an agitated France or toward far-off countries of which Britain knew nothing.
The fact that the League’s Covenant did not compel member states to take economic or military actions against an aggressor, but required them only to consider a collective response — which any single member could object to — indeed made the organization toothless except in those cases where the interests of the Great Powers were not involved and they could compel a smaller state to cease a rogue action.
In sum, the classical balance of power was fatefully upset and dismantled. Over the preceding four centuries, as the great German historian Ludwig Dehio reminds us, the European-centered states system had enjoyed “a precarious balance.” Every so often, a European aspirant had attempted to upset that balance to gain mastery; but those ambitions were contested by other nations and ultimately destroyed by the interventions of the two “flank” powers, Britain and Russia. The 1814-15 settlements made that system clearer than ever, guaranteeing a century of Great Power peace. However, the architecture of international affairs that followed WW1 was totally different. The “flank” powers, now the US and the USSR, seemed to have pulled out of the system, and Japan, another outlier nation, was distracting rather than supporting.
Three dissatisfied powers, Germany, Japan, and Italy, nursed revisionist aims and waited on their chances to achieve them, adding further to the confusion of the status quo countries — just who was the greatest danger to the peace by 1935, Germany in Central Europe, Italy in the Mediterranean, or Japan in the Far East? And if you stood forthright against one, surely you had to appease the other two, or at least look away from their transgressions?
Europe’s economic health had seemed to recover by the mid-1920s owing to the inflow of American funds, but when the Wall Street Crash occurred, many of those investments were called. And the League of Nations, though not much involved in monetary affairs, took a body blow because its major players were so at odds with one another.
Before 1914, the exchange system ran on its own, based upon the gold standard and upon the Bank of England’s role as the lender of last resort that would always repay. By 1919, and given the cost of the war, Britain was an international debtor, no longer a lender. The weight of financial power had moved from Lombard Street to Wall Street. Therein lay the problem. The British strove mightily after 1920 to recover their prewar eminence in global economic matters but never had the resources to do so. The Americans had resources enough but not the will to take the lead. The resulted produced yet another structural flaw that could be cured only by unusual — indeed, unnatural — American broadness of spirit. This would come in the 1940s. In the 1920s, this was not going to happen.
With millions of their workers thrown out of jobs, every nation retreated into its hole and abandoned the Cobdenite dream. Those mid-Victorian forecasts of free trade, liberal internationalism, and goodwill among nations collapsed in a world of anger and suspicion.
The Japanese invasion and conquest of Manchuria of 1931-33 was the first bit challenge of the post-1919 system. And the system failed. The British government was paralyzed by its financial crisis, the collapse of the Labour administration, and domestic unrest — which included the first mutiny in the Royal Navy since 1797. This was not a time to be bold-faced in the Far East, especially when London was renegotiating relations with the dominions that would give them the right to separate foreign policies, including the right to neutrality.
A large nation had blatantly ignored the governing principles of 1919, and the other large nation had done little, apart from making plain their divisions and incapacities. And the League’s real weaknesses were clearly exposed.
The response by the League to this invasion of Ethiopia was pathetic. It was also a striking confirmation of the argument, which realists love and consensualists hate, that international organizations work effectively only when the Great Powers, motivated by their own interests, are agreed to take action.
A clumsy attempt by the British and French foreign ministers — the Hoare-Laval Pact of 1935 — to let Mussolini have the lion’s share of Ethiopia but to offer fringe territories from Somaliland as compensation to the much reduced Abyssinian state produced enormous criticism in Britain, where public opinion was simultaneously pacifist and in favor of strong League action (provided no fighting was called for). The whole thing was a mess.
Moreover, negotiating with Hitler and Mussolini made sense only if you put the Royal Navy to sea, patrolling offshore as the diplomats came to agreement. A few Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, their 15-inch guns bristling off Wilhemshaven or Genoa, would have been a remarkable reminder. If the Fascist states acted aggressively, their economies would be ground to dust by maritime blockade. But with the French economy in free fall by the mid-to late 1930s, the French army petrified by the prospect of a joint war against Germany and Italy, the Royal Navy obsessed by dangers in the Far East, the army reduced to pitiful levels, the dominions threatening to stay neutral, India in revolt, and the USSR and the US sitting on their hands, Cooper’s belligerent arguments — and those of his fellow antiappeaser Churchill — seemed risky and ridiculous to their contemporaries. So they were, by normal reasonings. But they were right in the long run.
Neither country had fond memories of the League of Nations. America, as we have seen, had abandoned it even before signing. The USSR had not been permitted membership in 1919, was belatedly brought in during the mid-1930s, and was then expelled after the invasion of Finland. Each also believed that it would gain victory chiefly through the power of its own resources and will. So why be hamstrung now?
The belief was simply this: What the 1930s taught them was that militarily weak countries like Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Ethiopia, and Manchuria were inherent “consumers” of security. They could not provide for themselves, not because of some lapse of national character, but because they lacked the demographic, territorial, and economic resources to resist the aggressions of larger neighbors. By contrast, the bigger powers were, or had been forced to become, the “providers” of international security — again, not because of any special virtues of character, but because only they had the capacity to withstand and then defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan. The basic distinction between countries requiring outside help to preserve their security and countries that committed themselves to provide it had to be made clear this time. If it was fudged, the world’s democracies might once again be thrown into confusion should a future Manchurian crisis or Austrian Anschluss occur.
An eventual victory for the Grand Alliance seemed increasingly likely, but German and Japanese resolve was impressive, and who knew what dreadful secret weapons the German (especially) might be developing from their massive technological resources? These were not folks to be taken lightly. Only 15 years after German’s epic defeat in the last war, it had been ready to challenge the prevailing system again. Most people in the West and USSR were convinced that their foes possessed a “natural,” inexorable tendency toward aggression and atrocity.
Small nations ought therefore to cease carping about the unfairness of the veto and be grateful that the Great Powers were now going to take their international responsibilities seriously.
Ultimately, two things were clear. First, unlike in 1919, in 1945 every one of the Great Powers was willing to help construct and then enter into a new international security system. Second — although this awkward fact was never spelled out openly — despite all the language of the UN Charter requiring compliance with Security Council resolutions, if a powerful state should decide to defy the world body and go it alone, there was little that could be done to prevent that happening, unless, of course, the other powerful states were willing to move military enforcement and thus run the strong risk of starting WW3. If lesser states broke the rules, they might well get spanked. In this regard, at least, little had changed — Great Powers would do what Great Powers choose to do.
The other great lesson that Western planners and politicians drew from the interwar years related to the economic and social collapse of the open market system, a disaster that they believed was the root cause of the political unrest and extremism that led to the wars: Desperate men do desperate things. American and British working parties therefore spent much time exploring ideas for improved financial, banking, and commercial architecture that would, positively, advance international prosperity and interdependence and, negatively, head off any dire threats to instability in currency and stock markets.
And a deliberative body such as a General Assembly representing the governments of all UN member states, and with various committees and agencies whose membership rotated and could be regionally representative, was to be welcome — always provided they respected the special powers of the Security Council.
Leg one involved measures to obtain international security and therefore stressed cooperative diplomacy and arbitration to settle disputes, backed up by shared military force to deter aggression or, if that failed, to defeat the aggressors.
Leg to rested upon the belief that military security without economic improvement was short-term and futile. Instruments, whether within the UN family or “in relationship” to the world body (such as the Bretton Woods institutions), therefore had to be devised to rebuilt the world economy.
Leg three was arguably the most interesting of all and clearly picked up the idealist legacies of Kant, Wilson, and others. It argued that however strongly the first two legs were constructed, the system would fold — would collapse — if it did not produce ways of improving political and cultural understandings among people. Since war begins in the minds of men, it was (and is) in that realm that important advances were required.
As if to compensate for the boldness of these pledges, the chapter ends with the famous declaration, “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the UN to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”
The secretary-general was to be appointed by the General Assembly “upon the recommendation of the Security Council,” so once again the P5 had a controlling interest.
The diplomats who had toiled day and night in the Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta, and San Francisco vineyards were altogether more secular and apprehensive. In the State Department, George Kenna was already venting his view that the Charter promised too much and its wording was too ambiguous and that this would lead to future quarrels with the suspicious and untrustworthy USSR. And Gladwyn Jebb, the British diplomat who had worked so hard on so many of the drafts, came away from the whole experience fearing that the negotiators had aimed too high for “this wicked world.”
Remarkably, for the first 25 years the US found no cause to use the veto — which, of course, suggests that the UN agendas normally went in America’s direction.
Yet the fact that Washington and the other four powers could block proposed resolutions and actions provided in its way a pressure valve. Few foreign representatives at the UN would acknowledge it, but it was better that the US be obstructionist than that it walk out of the organization altogether. What some critics saw as a terrible weakness in the system could be viewed by realists as a redeeming feature, affirming in fact that it was better to have the larger nations inside the UN system rather than on the outside.
Finally, Beijing would resist (and still does today) any action that might suggest a precedent for interference in a member’s sovereign domestic affairs.
After Lie’s reluctant resignation in later 1952, his successor, Dag Hammarskjold, turned out to be the perfect person for this impossible job — firm, politic, a pragmatic idealist, and an innovator. Even in his first few, relatively quiet years, he developed a special place in discreet, behind-the-scenes diplomacy to solve tricky issues. Where Lie had proclaimed, a little too publicly, the so-called good offices role of the secretary-general, Hammarskjold simply performed them.
Who could object that? But the stakes had been much bigger when his predecessor U Thant sought, despite US suspicions, to negotiate an end to the Vietnam conflict; and bigger still earlier, in 1962, when he had taken initiatives to defuse the Cuban missile crisis. In the latter case, it was clear that the ultimate decisions about war and peace were going to be made in Washington and Moscow and that everyone else played a minor or nonexistent role: This was the nature of the bipolar, Cold War world. Crudely put, the UN and the Secretariat would play second fiddle during larger emergencies, while the “Big Two” tacitly agreed to leave the world body to handle decolonization, development, and so on, provided this did not interfere in their security interests.
The blunt fact was that if one or both parties to a conflict preferred fighting to negotiation, or if a Great Power poured cold water on a mission, neutral mediation could not work.
But the irony was that this expansion of the secretary-general’s activities depended solely upon the consent of the superpowers. There really was no change in the underlying power structures.
In retrospect, it is clear that Saddam Hussein made many miscalculations in launching that attack — miscalculations regarding American resolve, US military technology, Arab attitudes, and wold opinion. But perhaps one of his greatest mistakes was to fail to realize that he had offered the classic case for the UNSC to authorize military action. Here was the perfect example of what the planners of 1944-45 contemplated, even more than the Korean case because it did not involve an absent or angry veto power.
Geography would often play as large a part as regard for international law — was the conflict close to home or far afield? After all, apart from the US, none of the other permanent members, or large regional powers like India or Brazil that asserted claims to a permanent seat on the Council, had much of the “lief” or the firepower to operate successfully on the other side of the globe. Thus, if distant but sizable conflicts erupted, it would have been unwise to have insisted upon aggressive and extensive peace enforcement as a regular policy. If the conflict was a smaller-scale civil war, UN diplomats would be employed to negotiate a peace, and then perhaps blue helmet peacekeepers could play a role. But why commit blindly in advance?
Had this been the end of peacekeeping and peace enforcement in the 1990s, the UN’s officers and its outside supporters would have looked forward to the century’s end with contentment. However, just as this classic case of Security Council resolve and purpose was drawing to a close, some very different and much more difficult challenges were emerging that were to shake the UN system to its roots and pose an even larger question about the world organization’s ability to fulfill the Charter’s lofty aims for humankind.
Second, there were simply too many appeals for UN help in too short a time. Understanding each crisis fully, therefore, and then deciding what to do with it, was virtually impossible when the Security Council faced one pressing issue — Cambodia, Rwanda, Mozambique, Haiti, Kosovo and so on — immediately after another. Yet the urgency to do something was fueled by the crying needs of so many human beings and by the no less important fact that the world’s media were bringing these tragedies to popular notice every day. For the UNSC to have understood and handled well one-quarter of these cases would have been an outstanding feat of organization; to handle them all, even moderately well, was in conceivable. But that is what they were bidden to do by the Charter and what parliamentarians, voters, and, of course, distraught communities expected them to carry out.
With no effective Military Staff Committee and with no standing forces from member states, every deployment had to be put together from scratch. It was all very well for the Council to authorize a new operation in a certain part of the world. But it was left to the luckless secretary-general to go around to UN members, cap in hand, asking them to contribute soldiers, police forces, administrators, logistical support, and food supplies.
Finally, there were the soaring costs of all this activity. The peacekeeping budget was always separate, and assessed differently, from the general UN budget. If it was hard enough to persuade all countries to pay the normal operating costs of the world organization, finding the necessary funds for every new peacekeeping action was a terrible challenge. These additional burdens feel more heavily upon the shoulders of the P5 than upon poorer and less privileged members — as indeed was only proper, since it was chiefly they who authorized the missions to begin with. But not everyone saw it like that, and the problem became exacerbated by the shift to the right in the US Congress in late 1994 and the latter’s demand that the American contribution (about 28% of the peacekeeping budget) be renegotiated.
And the triple disasters of Somalia, Rwanda-Burundi, and Bosnia during the mid-1990s had not only cast dark clouds over the UN’s competence, but also raised awkward questions about sovereignty, accountability, and fairness. What should UNSC guidelines be when member states collapsed and the Charter offered no principles? Was it not overstepping its remit by authorizing so many interventions and then expecting non-Council nations, which had no part in the decision making, to respond repeatedly to the secretary-general’s appeals for help? And if, say, a country like India contributed more than most nations to UN peacekeeping / enforcement missions, why shouldn’t it have a permanent seat on the Security Council?
It was good, and important, for the world body to reexamine its own structures now that 50 years had passed and the organization had changed so much; to many critics, it was well past time. Japan and Germany, the foes of the Grand Alliance a half-century ago (and still referred to in the Charter as “enemy states” in Article 53), were by now the 2nd and 3rd largest contributors to the UN’s budget and felt they had claim to a permanent seat. But the greatest complaints about the existing situation came, rightly so, from developing world nations, particularly the larger ones like India, Brazil, and Mexico. That the five victor powers of 1945 should still possess their special privileges had long seemed to them an anachronism, especially given the reduced world position of Britain and France. From the viewpoint of New Delhi or Brasilia, the idea of adding further rich states like Japan and Germany to the UNSC, without any from the developing world, was simply a further insult. Unless things were altered, and dramatically, the Council’s authority and respect in the minds of much of the world would be further weakened.
The secretary-general was acutely aware of the awful and growing gap between the world’s needs and its resources, and he recognized the tempered willingness of the richer member states to help. But he also saw no point in lecturing them; far better to go for a policy of quiet education.
Were the international body now to be refitted and refocused into a crusade against terrorism, wherever it lurked — a stunning addition to the remit of the original Charter — then any member state suppressing internal dissenters such as ethnic splinter groups could be tempted to justify its actions by describing the opposition under the same rubric. Taken too far, and used cynically, this would further weaken an international human rights regime already finding it difficult to handle the many current abuses and transgressions.
Since 1950, the vast majority of American military actions were either not sanctioned by the UNSC at all (Vietnam, Central America) or were “contracted out” operations where the Council felt it had no real purview (Korea, the First Gulf War, Mogadishu, Afghanistan).
A year later, those liberal fears were realized in the White House’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein, which could hardly be described as an act of “self-defence” by any stretch of Article 51. The UNSC quarrels over going to war with Iraq in 2002-3 showed, even more emphatically, the special problem of how and whether the US could and would fit into the system. To anti-American critics in France, Germany, and many other parts of the world, this seemed as big a problem as terrorism itself. How could the parliament of man handle a single assertive nation that by 2003 was spending as much on armaments as the rest of the world together?
France was insisting, once again, on its constitutional right to veto unless Washington’s proposed military action against Iraq came under closer control by the Council; and the US, losing patience over the fact that Saddam Hussein had defied 17 earlier resolutions, decided to go ahead without yet another specifically authorizing it. The tone of mutual disparagement in Paris and Washington was regrettable, often juvenile, but if anything it could be argued that the system worked, since the veto powers were always different from the rest. Those who claimed that the UN had “failed” miss the point. What had happened was that one of the breaker points (fuses) built into the 1945 system had been triggered.
Ultimately, the world organization relies on the widespread trust of peoples and governments, both American and all others, that it can provide international public goods; should that faith waver, the urge to selfish solutions is bound to rise.
This was a long list, yet its most powerful member was insisting that certain items — the war upon terror and the campaign in Iraq — must claim prior attention, or else Washington would engage only selectively with the UN.
Yet is the existing Council, deep-frozen in time and so often fractured, the body to provide genuine international security for all? There are few who think that. Yet can the 1945 system be amended absent great turbulence, wars, and the remaking of the world order? There are few who think that, either. Hence we all live, whether we like it or not, with this giant conundrum. Everyone agrees that the present structure is flawed; but a consensus on how to fix it remains out of reach.
And if the fighting resumed between the countries in the dispute, their task was to stand aside, not to try to prevent it. UN contingents in these areas therefore could not act as international policemen, warning the local pugilists to cease fighting or be locked up. This mildness of approach was different from the actions being pursued at the same time by the massive UN forces on the Korean peninsula. Indeed, it was hard to believe that both types of operations were, technically, authorized by the same world organization.
This novel system is not without problems. The peacekeeping arrangements had to be both consensual and neutral. Without the agreement of the host governments and recent belligerents, UN forces could not take up station; and the same government could insist on their departure, as Nasser rather foolishly did before the 1967 war. Should any incidents occur, the peacekeepers still could not take sides even if they witnessed one party doing wrong — unless, of course, they were given a new and very different mandate by the Security Council. This was to embarrass the world organization repeatedly in future conflicts, where their troops labored under these general instructions to stay out of things even as atrocities were being perpetrated before their eyes. In the Middle East struggles, it is doubtful that they could have done very much in any case; they were scattered, lightly armed units operating amid some of the most powerful armies and air forces in the world — a fate that many later missions would also endure.
Yet perhaps the UN’s incapacity to intervene in these disputes was something of a blessing in disguise. Both the Algerian and Vietnamese wars were extraordinarily violent, complex, and expensive. Even if there had been no threat of a veto, the idea that the Security Council might send in peacekeeping forces to either struggle, as it had done in the Congo, beggars the imagination; they would almost certainly have been blown away in the fighting. All that the world organization could reasonably do was offer its diplomatic “good offices,” as it did many times during both wars. But if the belligerents didn’t respond to the idea of mediation, little else could be done.
The first indication of major troubles ahead lay in the sheer number of crises occurring in so short a time, combined with the Security Council’s post-Cold War willingness to authorize UN responses. In the 40 years since the 1948 UNTSO decision, there had occurred only 13 peacekeeping operations, and 8 of those had been formally ended. In 1988 and 1989 alone, 5 new ones were set up to deal with new challenges.
This was not good for the world body itself, for although the swift defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces was to be welcomed, the nature of this operation contributed to a widespread belief that UN operations were ineffective, whereas American military actions were decisive, efficient, and swift.
And relations between the UN and its most powerful member plummeted to a new low. Angry congressmen stated that never again should “American boys” be placed under UN command, and they sought to embarrass their own government by withholding funds to the world body. Boutros-Ghali was never trusted by Washington again.
The ethnic and religious rivalries in this land went back to the early Middle Ages; here was the triple fault line between the Catholic West, the Slav-Orthodox world, and the northwest borderlands of the Muslim Empire. The hatred had been papered over with the creation of the “south Slav” state of Yugoslavia in 1919 and were again disguised with the creation of Josip Tito’s federated Communist regime after 1945. But during the WW2 itself, they had exploded into cruelties that took even the Nazi invaders by surprise. if there was one place left in Europe where genocide was possible, even at the end of the 20th century, it was probably here.
It would burst the bounds of this chapter to give a blow-by-blow account of all that went wrong in the years following 1992, and which involved what were to become no fewer than 8 peacekeeping missions. The road to this particular hell was paved with good intentions, and many outstandingly intelligent and courageous individuals gave their best to contain war and restore peace. But time and again, well-meaning bodies that sought to play a role — the UN itself, NATO, the EU, the OSCE — were stopped by the blunt fact that peacekeeping is impossible if there exist powerful angry forces who prefer fighting to compromise.
Most of the early Security Council resolutions merely called upon the parties to cease firing and work together. When that route was obviously not being taken, later resolutions cautiously increased the UN presence on the ground, but the contingents were small and their powers to act, except in self-defense, very constrained. Little wonder their home contributing governments feared that their contingents were hostages to fortune. Repeatedly the secretary-general advised against bolder resolutions, not because they seemed wrong in themselves, but because he was well aware that contributions to effect such plans would not be forthcoming.
It was a crisis not at a single level, but at virtually all levels and at the same time. The basic cause was clear: There was simply too much chaos in the world, and the UN was being asked to do too much. As the 1995 Yale-Ford Foundation report on the world organization noted, “Of the nearly 100 armed conflicts in the world since 1989, all but five were, or are, internal.”
How can one rank the list of exposed weaknesses? To begin with, the UN was becoming financially bankrupt, trapped between the twin pressures of rising operational costs and the unwillingness or inability of major states such as Russia, Japan, and the US to pay their dues on time. Developing countries rightly complained that as more moneys went to conflict prevention and humanitarian relief, less was available for investments in education and infrastructure among poorer nations far from the conflicts. Right-wingers wanted the UN stables cleansed, the bureaucracy cut, the budgets — regular and peacekeeping — drastically slashed. They were in no mood for generosity. What was the point of the Secretariat urging large and decisive operations, and the Security Council agreeing, when both knew that member states would not pay?
It was one thing to insert a battalion of Gurkhas or Royal Marine commandos into a country ravaged by youthful gangs and see the public violence shrink when the heavy men came in. But to expect ill-equipped and scarcely trained units from many newer nations to perform under pressure far from home was too much to hope for; some of their governments had contributed troops simply so that they would get the foreign currency for themselves (since governments were remunerated for each soldier at the same high, Western daily rate). Lack of expertise, lack of coordination, and lack of sheer fighting competence diminished a UN mission’s capacity to get the job done. All too often, a volunteered unit had no means of getting to the operation unless it was airlifted in by a resentful US, which had sworn not to get directly involved and sometimes demanded compensation. Far too many arrived late, as in Rwanda, to find the massacres finished. Failures in the field thus frustrated the completely overworked Department of Peacekeeping Operations.
Above all, there was the lack of clarity about the mandates for so many missions. The fault here clearly lay at the door of the Security Council. Many of their authorizations and resolutions had been too vague, or too restrictive, or too rash. But this failure needs to be understood in the pressing, confused circumstances of the time. Reports from the field were unclear or contradictory. Council members who pressed for firmer action would be cautioned privately by others that the proposal would not get a majority or would be vetoed; so they withdrew their motion.
It was scarcely surprising, then, that the Secretariat came under fire from all sides. Some voices accused the secretary-general of being too weak and not standing up to the P5 as Hammarskjold was said to have done. Developing nations said the office was too obsessed with peacekeeping, to the neglect of the UN’s many social and economic functions. Conservatives in the US accused the world body of arrogating too much power to itself and of threatening the sovereign of member states.
Above all, one can conclude that the practice of announcing (through a Security Council resolution) a new peacekeeping mission without ensuring that sufficient armed forces will be available has usually proven to be a recipe for humiliation and disaster. If the major powers can learn that lesson, a great gain will have occurred.
But the blunt fact was that a Great Power, indeed the strongest nation of all, could not be constrained from unilateral action by international organization and opinion; it therefore could do things that other, lesser powers could not, a further confirmation that not all member states were equal — as if they ever had been. The UN will never be in a position to block “warmaking” by a determined Great Power, not, that is, without the strong chance of another great war.
Many would employ harsher terms, with conservatives regarding the whole enterprise of a world organization charged with pursuing higher standards of living a fraud and a chimera, and liberals feeling that this one never had enough power, resources, and political commitment to get off the ground.
The relationship between economic distress and political violence that the UN planners often referred to was easy to appreciate. While Fascism and Communism possessed strong psychological appeals, both had flourished in the seedbeds of economic despair — unemployment, malnutrition, poverty, poor health, and vast social inequalities. Those of our present generation who regard the world organization as having only “security” functions need this constant reminder that, to some of the UN’s founders, the application of force by the world body was regarded as a reactive measure to be employed only when aggression had occurred. By contrast, the more successful the cooperative steps toward global prosperity, the less likely the need for recourse to military action by the world community. Thus, the inclusion in the Charter of the goals of higher standards of living and full employment was no mere verbiage.
What could be more natural than to carry thoughts about the domestic agenda into the international agenda? It is quite common for those who believe that institutions can play a major role in improving society at home also to have a high regard for international governance, whereas opponents of “big government” domestically are often profoundly suspicious of global organizations.
By contrast, decisions within ECOSOC were to be made by majority vote, where no countries had any special status or privileges; if the Great Powers had thought vital interests were involved, they would have insisted on some form of veto. Moreover, the language used in the Charter with respect to development was fragile and ambiguous compared with the purposeful and direct language used with respect to peace. Members were bound to work for international security, but only encouraged to cooperate for global prosperity.
This created an obvious tension, not so much with the technical agencies, but between the General Assembly’s membership and the Bretton Woods institutions. The IMF and the World Bank, as mentioned earlier, are not democratic in the decision-making structures, being much closer to the makeup of the Security Council itself. Voting power in the IMF depends upon the size of a nation’s quota of funds, and its Executive Board, which determines all regular business and policies, has to contain representatives from the world’s five largest economies. Similarly, of the World Bank’s 24 executive directors, 5 are automatically from countries holding the largest number of loan shares, while the other 19 are elected every 2 years from the rest of the world. This was purposefully done so that the biggest economies would retain “the power of the purse” in dispensing loans and aid and not have their resources taken over by a majority of poorer countries.
Tied into a tight tariff systems by their metropolis, they were either exploited for the raw materials by the colonial power or neglected on the excuse that it would be unwise, even unfair, to change traditional societies too swiftly.
By the 1953 the Bank had lent only a total of $1.75B (of which $497M was for reconstruction), while the Marshall Plan had transferred $41.3B. So even in the North, the Bretton Woods institutions were minor players now that the Cold War set the international agenda. In the South, their roles were even smaller; the IMF hardly considered the developing world until the late 1960s, while the World Bank, bemoaning the lack of projects, had dispersed only $100M to poorer countries by 1950.
It is therefore unsurprising that when, around 1950, the first thoughts by officials in these international bodies were given to development policies in the colonies — or lands soon to be become independent — the emphasis was upon ways to improve internal structures, or what was coyly termed “measures requiring domestic action.” The richer parts of the world were doing just fine. All that a newly independent Asian or African state needed to do, therefore, was to join the club and obey the club’s rules: Buy and sell on the world market and don’t go Communist; and build up local infrastructure, education, and society.
The specialized autonomous agencies with their chiefly technical functions were both the easiest to understand and the least controversial or political — everyone could agree on the continued need for the Universal Postal Union, for example, and be happy with its simple governing structures. Then there were the IMF and World Bank, in a league of their own and, some critics even then felt, in a world of their own. Finally, there was that large cluster of bodies that did indeed report to the ECOSOC and get supervision from it; these ranged from the Council’s main committees, concerned chiefly with coordinating all this agency business, to its many functional commissions (on transport and communications, the status of women, narcotics), to the regional economic commissions, to certain special organizations like UNICEF and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Concerned in part by what it saw as unmet needs and frustrated by its own restricted powers, the General Assembly was already developing the habit of creating newer bodies that would report to it, even if this created policy overlap and bureaucratic overload.
Along with this zest for change came anger and frustration at the existing system, and especially at the existing power balances. Much of this feeling was natural. Many of the leaders of the newly independent states had been imprisoned for years or had fled into exile; all had been witnesses to foreign rule, which was rarely without exploitation. The West might now be welcoming them into the club, but sometimes with condescension and self-congratulation and a too swift forgetting of the damage that had been inflicted. More important than that, the older and richer members of the club seemed to have found ways to preserve their privileged position — in the Security Council, in the World Bank and IMF (whose chiefs were almost by tradition an American and a European), in their technical domination of the specialized agencies.
The newly independent states chiefly produced raw materials and foodstuffs whose prices were low, but needed to import much more costly manufactures and services; the Northern economies had large resources of educational, institutional, infrastructural, and financial capital with which to grow further and of which there was little or nothing in the South; many of the UN investments made in developing countries were unwisely chosen and poorly administered; and so on.
To developing countries, this was an evasion. In their eyes, they had at last entered the world community only to find that the “playing field” of supposed sovereign equality was badly tilted against them. Not only had centuries or decades of colonial dependency prevented them from being able to compete with the modern world, but the present structures conspired to restrain them further. The terms of trade — raw materials versus manufactures and services — were daunting. Capital was expensive. Loans came attached with difficult conditions. “Conditionality” itself was humiliating to many governments: Were you “sovereign” or not? Agricultural lobbies in richer countries kept food tariffs high. Far from being free and self-standing economies, the newer nations were still in a condition of dependency; “neocolonialism,” the Ghanaian leader called it. Most annoying of all, the greater part of the export enterprises operating after decolonization — mines, vegetable oil plantations, rubber companies, fruit growers, petroleum and natural gas giants, banking and shipping services — remained with foreign firms that usually took their profits out of the country. Seen form this view, the North’s undemocratic multinational corporations were global capitalism’s tools to keep the South in a subject condition.
And it was accompanied, inevitably enough, by a barrage of attacks upon Western capitalism for having “underdeveloped” the South. By the 1970s, this propaganda had its bizarre side when the PRC, having broken with Moscow, also entered the development assistance game, accusing both the West and the USSR of malevolent policies toward the former colonies.
If one looks back at the 1960s and 1970s, it seems there was no existing idea, practice, policy-making structure, or cultural habit that was not under attack as being either irrelevant or a dangerous obstacle to “progress.” This was a violent swing of the pendulum and probably could not last; but at the time, it appeared that much of the developed world was also heading leftward and demanding changes in the status quo both internally and internationally.
Put crudely, the “have-nots” (the South), encouraged by the socialist bloc and First World radicals, were challenging the “haves” (the North and its institutions) about the existing balance of power. Distribution, not growth, was back on the agenda. Here again, the domestic and international agendas marched to the music of the same drummer. If you were intent upon changing the “unfair “ and privileged socioeconomic system inside, say, West Germany or California or Brazil, you also sought to alter the 1945 international socioeconomic order.
The 1973 oil “shock” had slowed economic growth everywhere. Whether caused by it or by some cyclical / structural domestic change, the fabulous US productivity growth slowed to a crawl after 1973 and would not really take off again until the 1990s. And And Europe was also far less vibrant than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Only in parts of the Far East was the economic outlook rosier, but that seemed merely to offer a special regional exception to the general trends.
As a result, when the term structural reforms was used, that increasingly meant reform of domestic structures within a country seeking help rather than alterations in the international power order. And the accompanying slogan level playing fields was in effect a defeat for the earlier argument that developing countries needed special consideration and should not necessarily be tied to the principles of the market. In other words, if the 1990s saw some institutional compromises in the North-South debate, it was chiefly because a weakened South felt forced to make concessions.
When major IMF rescue operations failed, or when a country receiving vast sums of aid still found itself in trouble (Mexico, Russia, and Brazil), the IMF was bitterly attacked for misjudgment, for loaning too recklessly to governments that were corrupt and inefficient, and generally for wasting other people’s money. But it was criticized perhaps even more harshly by the Left, which always disliked the principle of “conditionality” and accused the IMF of compelling home governments to impose austerity programs that hurt the poor. “Conditionality” is, of course, the hallmark of bankers everywhere; no financial body loans money without asking for some safeguards.
In all cases, the intention was good — improving communications, increasing power and water supplies — and the Bank and the UNDP were fulfilling their stated purposes of giving financial aid to poor countries. But things were not going well on the ground, and that was what attracted the most attention from the Left. Conservatives, on the other hand, felt confirmed in their belief that giving international aid was likely throwing money down the drain.
It probably had been necessary for the world organization and its members to go through the financial and political crises of the 1970s and 1980s — including the backlash — because it helped agencies and governments to see what worked and what didn’t, what was politically feasible and what was not.
Agencies and governments, like human beings themselves, are all capable of learning from errors. But by their many early mistakes, the world’s financial and development agencies left an impression of misuse and incompetence that would be hard to shake off.
The greatest lesson that emerges, surely, is that domestic policies rather than international help counted most in a country’s rise to prosperity. There was no substitute for wise internal policy measures or the encouragement of enterprise. Over the longer term, good governance and prudent policies are a better national resource than gas in the ground.
Yet it remains true that the UN’s own development agencies cannot answer two larger charges: namely, that (1) they have not had the capacity to assist the truly poor, lowest one billion people of this world, despite their best efforts; and that (2) they have had little role, if any, in the story of the amazing rise in the standards of living of hundreds of millions of families worldwide, but chiefly in Asia. It’s a fair thought that both occurrences might be beyond the reach of global agencies ever to affect their downward or upward spirals. Perhaps, then, UN agencies can operate only at the margins or in specific, favorable contexts.
The two sisters were returning to their separate responsibilities, with the IMF being point guard and fireman for rescuing countries in financial trouble and the World Bank concentrating more upon long-term help to the poorest of the poor.
But the biggest controversy about the international trading order that the WTO policies and UNCTAD resolutions sought to promote was whether, by its open market principles, they inherently favored the powerful over the weak. This debate must appear as a dialogue of the deaf. Advocates of the level playing field held that good governance and encouragement of trade will attract foreign investment, increase incomes, and improve the quality of life in all countries without the need to distort market principles or grant special treatment. Critics in the South complained and continue to complain that unrestricted globalization is tilted against developing countries, which have inadequate resources to negotiate WTO accords (which are done behind closed doors), have no control over the inflow and outflow of capital, are far too dependent upon a few export commodities, and therefore have no chance of handling giant corporations possessing much greater powers. Liberals in the North protest that the push for globalization and modernization everywhere is threatening individual cultures and ways of life and that it can only create further pressures upon damaged environments on land, at sea, and in the air. Union leaders fear that a totally free market system hurts the living standards of Northern workers, whose labor could not compete with the far cheaper costs of enterprises in the South.
Outside of Africa, especially perhaps in Latin America, countries that began to climb from their poverty in the past two decades have found their gains fragile or short-lived when financial crises erupt, capital flees abroad, and new austerity measures are introduced — as if they had not known enough austerity already. In the North, battered former socialist economies are in better shape but still struggling to survive the new competitiveness. And many a socioeconomic group even in the richer countries feels job insecurity and concern about the future. Even if a greater part of humanity enjoys higher standards of living today than was the case in 1945, the deficiencies that remain are so large that there is no room for congratulation. The task is still incomplete, and by a large margin.
The military and economic tasks entrusted to the UN by its own Charter are often regarded as the “hard” edges of global cooperation; they imply strength, purpose, practicality. They suggest a man’s world. By contrast, the agendas covered in this chapter are sometimes described, condescendingly, as the UN’s “soft” purposes — feminine agendas — women and children, international public health, population issues, care for the environment, respecting and encouraging cultural diversity, pursuing social freedoms.
Behind the UN structure as a whole is a troika of converging thoughts: security, prosperity, and understanding. To prevent war and aggression, the founding fathers thought there needed to be set in place robust security and military mechanisms, a reactive system controlled by the UNSC. And to stop states being driven into conflict by despair, there should be more positive and proactive economic policies, aimed at creating commercial and financial integration, and shared prosperity. Yet the founders of 1945 didn’t stop at proposing military and economic instruments. They also thought that instability, jealousy, nationalism, and aggression were affected by massive cultural, religious, and ethnic prejudices. So they tried to put in place an apparatus to advance the social and cultural aspirations that were embedded in the language of the original Charter. In the early years, it should be stressed, these were little more than aspirations. Perhaps the important point was simply that the lofty aims had been declared and publicly agreed to.
As it happened, however, implementing the social and cultural policies of the UN soon slowed, because too many other fields claimed prior attention. The Cold War obviously hurt those early hopes. It was hard to generate appreciation for cultural diversity in the midst of the Berlin, Korean, Suez, and Hungarian crises. Since it was assumed that little or nothing could be advanced in the social and cultural domains without achieving economic growth and prosperity, the soft items took second place.
Given the disruptions of WW2, the UN’s founders felt they were groping in the dark, so it is not surprising that as early as Feb 1946, the ECOSOC set up a Statistical Commission.
Once again, the language was lofty and ambitious. The preamble to the Stockholm declaration proclaimed that “man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality, and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being.”
Of course, both positions had sense. If development and growth could not be pursued, there was no chance of lifting billions of people out of poverty; but if they were pursued without regard to the environment, that might threaten the sustainability of humankind itself.
The result, as so often with UN and other international conferences, was a compromise in the concept of “sustainable development.”
Of course, a few Nordic or British Commonwealth countries like Denmark and New Zealand complied with virtually everything, but that simply pointed to the problem — it was much easier to fulfill international environment accords if you were a homogeneous, rich, democratic, liberal, and educated (and non-American) society than if you were not.
It took the world organization — or rather, its member states — a long time to recognize that preserving and sustaining the planet was part of its remit; and that many governments still do not commit to that responsibility. Impoverishment, dire social need, and dreadful religious and ethnic conflicts that blind people from admitting their common humanity retard the process. Scorn for international efforts by some richer nations make it difficult agreement on common global arrangements to improve environments and help the poorest of the poor. And the UN has sometimes been its own worst enemy. The location of UNEP headquarters in Nairobi has proved to be a mistake and an embarrassment that lasts until today. The weaknesses of the host government make it an uninviting place, high-quality international staff cannot be tempted there, and it is grossly underfunded.
The women’s agenda has certainly advanced since 1945, but it has done so in a very disproportionate manner. It has been most visible in places that hardly need UN assistance, like Stockholm and San Francisco, but it scarcely noticeable in Somalia and Senegal. Ancient gender prejudices account for much of this, but so (perhaps even more) does poverty.
It is too heavy a load, yet little of what it does in those cultural fields attracts sustained attention from the powerful member states.
The real reason the organization caused controversy was that it became the venue for the venting of ideological and racial prejudices — exactly the opposite of the founders’ intentions. Ideas are never neutral, and during the Cold War in particular there was indeed a struggle for the minds of men — especially for the minds of those in the Third World. Already during the Korean War, US conservatives had expressed anger that UNESCO had not come out on the side of the West. By 1954, the USSR, which had declined membership a decade earlier out of the (justified) suspicion that its purpose was to advance free market liberalism, decided to join, as did various other Communist states. UNESCO became the venue for expressing anti-Western sentiments.
So what is one to make of this — a great step forward for humankind or a compromised and insincere document? There was a view among many governments at the time that since this text originated from the General Assembly, and not the UNSC, it was in no way binding upon states; that it was, literally, a “declaration” of principles of which one might take as much of as little as was desired. Indeed, the US delegation had been firmly warned by the State Department to avoid any language in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that would involve implementation or regulation, and no doubt most other governments felt the same way. In other words, it was one thing to proclaim that everyone has the right to “just and favorable renumeration,” but quite another to compel government policies to be structured to that end.
Proponents of a single covenant held that it would be artificial and wrong to separate political from socioeconomic freedoms; that if the former existed without the latter, human existence would be hollow and the prescribed rights no more than nominal; and that the ability to speak and vote marched hand in hand with some basic economic dignity.
Advocates of separate covenants contended that civil and political rights were the really “inalienable” ones, could be protected through the courts, concerned “negative liberty” (that is, protecting the citizen from unjust action by the state), and were immediately applicable. By contrast, economic, social, and cultural rights were more declaratory in nature, a vision of an ideal society, a set of objectives to be striven for but not instantly required.
Given the transgressions of these resolutions detailed in the pages that follow, it might seem that all this merely confirmed the opinion of the UN’s conservative critics — that the world organization was high-minded but unrealistic, good at creating well-paid jobs for its bureaucrats in Geneva and NYC but poor at getting things done. Yet it can also be argued that the simple act of data collection and reportage in the follow-up process was the best way of keeping the world’s attention on human rights issues and of embarrassing transgressor governments.
Try as it might, the Reagan administration could not sustain a two-faced policy of asking the Soviet leadership to “pull down that wall” on the one hand and supporting brutal Central American governments on the other. By now, Human Rights Watch had set up an America Watch, and later an Asia Watch — no region was to go without scrutiny.
Governments in Southeast Asia and China feared that influential NGOs, politically correct foundations, and socially liberal nations in developing countries were going to push for tougher international standards on feminist agendas, challenges to state authority, and conditionality regarding development aid. There was an attack upon the universality of Western norms, and a major debate erupted about “Asian values” — a term favored particularly by Malaysia and Singapore. ASEAN foreign ministers actually met in Singapore to forge a combined statement that insisted that due regard be paid to “specific cultural, social, economic and political circumstances,” which was a coded way of saying that they did not want to be judged according to the liberal gender and individualist lifestyle norms of Sweden and California.
But most of the latter groups were, by definition, nonstate actors, and the Vienna UN conference was, also by definition, a meeting of the representatives of sovereign nation-states. The NGOs had to learn this the hard way. They had come into Vienna with great expectations, riding on the prominence gained at Rio, believing in a new world order (their order), and passionate about spreading human rights. Angry governments would not allow this.
And there were many in the world’s most powerful country who increasingly claimed that the pretensions of the UN were a threat to American liberties or that peace enforcement worked only when the US got reluctantly engaged. By contrast, the defenders and supporters of the UN system preferred to point to the successes, the slow advances, the jobs well done, from Central America to Namibia to the new human rights regime itself.
The transition from authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy in South Africa and Namibia, as noted earlier, had taken place under UN electoral monitoring — in fact, this was a function that showed the world organization at its best. Who else had the legitimacy to guard ballot boxes, count votes, and declare election results in countries seething with suspicion and discontents?
Writings upon the Security Council probably outnumbered those on the General Assembly by about 100 to 1. There have also been many more writings about, and attention paid to, the role of NGOs, multinational corporations, or the global media. It is difficult to believe that this absence of mention of the General Assembly is because people at large are so content with its record that they see no reason to change things: It is probably because they do not care about it, or do not think that it is important enough to try to improve it, or do not even know what it does.
Now, it must be said again that its claim to representativeness is weakened by every single government that itself has not been voted into office by open, democratic elections. It lays itself open to further criticism when, because of its strict rotation principles, an inappropriate member state becomes president pro tem of an important General Assembly body. It is also true that the Assembly can, by majority vote, pass extremely silly resolutions, which become even sillier because they have no binding force in international law and politics.
“Even an initial weak assembly,” they maintain, “could offer some democratic oversight of international organizations such as the IMF, the WTO, and the World Bank.” The British radical journalist George Monbiot has argued on numerous occasions that the existing system is so corrupt, so tilted in favor of a few states (the P5), vast corporations, and, in general, white men, that it should be superseded by a world parliament of 600 members, each representing 10M constituents. And he is not alone. Some people — indeed, a lot of them — take the idea seriously.
It is worth noting that the European Parliament, which is elected democratically, can do little because of its limited authority. In any case, even if one could organize 10M-member constituencies and send them off to debate and vote at the designated global headquarters of a third forum, what powers — of the purse, of constitution making, of voting the executive in and out of office — could they possibly claim without nation-states having somehow surrendered their sovereignty, without the implicit and explicit assumption behind the UN Charter itself — an agreement among countries — being set aside?
The further implications of this scheme are even more mind-boggling. At 10M an MWP, and with an assembly of 600 members, China would have 140, India 120 and growing, Britain and France about 5 or 6 each, Russia about 14 but shrinking — and the world’s superpower around 27 members! It’s a lovely, idealistic proposal, but it’s destined for the dustbin of history.
To their supporters, these organizations represented an authentic flowering of a citizen-led politics that could speak directly for the voiceless and powerless. However, to their critics they were unelected meddlers, special interest groups that had allowed their self-proclaimed virtue to go to their heads.
The media got us into Somalia and then got us out. TV has changed the way the world reacts to crises.
This makes it extraordinarily difficult to suggest where advances might be made and where the chief obstacles to progress lie: The story is so complex and contradictory that it confuses the mind. But that is precise the point. The message from the six parallel tales in Part Two is that the UN’s record is a mixed one. Who could be surprised at that, since it is a human-based and fallible organization so dependent upon the whims of powerful national governments and the foibles of individual UN senior administrators?
Then there are the objections of the smaller member states, which don’t want any additions to the privileged club: Five veto powers are bad enough.
One is left only with the hope that the 5 nations enjoying these remarkable privileges will always recognize how sparingly they should be used and how heavy a blow they deal — to the world body and to themselves — when the veto right is abused. Truly, the establishment of a hard-to-alter constitution for the UNSC in 1945 has come at a very high price.
The amount of aid and technical assistance is never enough. And when the foreign legions go home, so too many NGOs (usually to a new crisis) and much of the world’s media. What is clearly needed here is a better “after-care” or “after-sales” service, something that a partially rebuilt country may find difficult to obtain when open civil war and genocide is occurring in other regions, unless, of course, it suffers its own further relapse. When that happens, it may attract less help form richer states burdened by donor fatigue and prone to ask: “But I thought we had fixed the problem in Haiti?”
American enthusiasm for joint staff arrangements, which might mean US troops being under a foreign commander and US war aims being compromised by the demands of allies, has never been strong; it reached a (medium) high point under FDR and Marshall in WW2, but since then has slid continually downhill. The two wars against Iraq simply confirmed the Pentagon’s prejudice: It could act more swiftly and decisively when not hampered by layers of multinational consultation and decision making. Peacekeeping operations were bad enough; reporting to a UN command would be anathema. From a strictly military standpoint, such concern about effectiveness is probably valid, and one supposes that the defense ministries of the other P5 nations hold similar (though less strongly expressed) reservations.
In some places like Afghanistan, it is indeed possible that various of these formats may operate alongside one another — clumsy on paper, no doubt, but not outrageous if they prove to work on the ground. This seems to be the general drift: Do not insist upon a uniform recipe for peacekeeping and peace enforcement, but let each case be considered in its own context.
But it is far easier to state the problems than to propose the solutions, and in all cases the reason for the difficulty is political. Take the case of global fiscal and currency instabilities. It is nice for neoclassical economists to echo Adam Smith and proclaim that what is needed for prosperity is good governance, fiscal probity, and an encouragement of fruitful industry. Alas, politicians and publics often do not act that way. Governments run fiscal imbalances, mortgaging themselves to the markets. They keep their currencies artificially high or artificially low, as if either will help them in the long run. They protect insecure and inefficient sectors of the economy (agriculture, heavy industry, old bureaucracies) and thus throttle world growth. When they allocate foreign aid, a vast proportion is not an open gift at all but tied firmly to domestic agricultural subsidies and military transfers. There are few good Samaritans in this story.
What, finally, can one say about the General Assembly? This is, after all, the closest manifestation we have of the parliament of man, yet its limpness is evident to all. Forbidden (essentially) to discuss and decide upon security issues, emasculated in its socioeconomic remit by the distance of the Bretten Woods insititutions and the intergovernmental organizations, limited by the amount of time it is in session, camped by its plethora of committees, paperwork, and formal bureaucratic practices, and weighed down by the need to be representative of its 191 members (with the recognition by most of them of the loss of efficiency), this is neither an effective nor a happy principal organ of the UN. No serious person suggests that it might be a candidate for abolition, as is often said about the Trusteeship Council or the ECOSOC, but that merely returns us to the big question: How can the GA be made more effective and more respected?
Perhaps it can’t. The 19th-century English writer Walter Bagehot made the distinction between the “dignified” branches of government (the queen, the House of Lords) and the “effective” branches (the cabinet, the House of Commons, the civil service). Perhaps the GA is a sort of global House of Lords — a collection of peers, rich and poor, large and small, all entitled by their heritage as sovereign states to a single vote, all willing to pronounce upon matters political, economic, and social, but not really able to exert much power.
This study began by quoting those famous lines of Tennyson’s poem about a future “Parliament of man, the Federation of the world … lapt in universal law.” How optimistic those early Victorians could be! It is bittersweet today to read that poem and others like it. Did Tennyson not understand that the advent of new technologies and awful world wars, should they occur, might drive peoples not to a universal peace, but to the opposite result: mistrust, arms races, and genocides? Or that his Enlightenment ideas ignored the fact that many human beings have a stubborn, instinctive dislike of a universal order and prefer their own national control of policies, even if, time and again, they have led to war, bloodshed, and mayhem? Did he ever consider that he was a comfortable resident of a nation that was steadily acquiring about one-quarter of the surface of the globe, the inhabitants of which saw only a Hobbesian world of foreign conquest and strife rather than a Kantian vision of perpetual peace? Finally, did it not occur to him that humankind might simply be resistant to liberal and utilitarian dogmas, even if, to his own early-Victorian generation, the signs of progress were promising?
For every two steps forward, the statesman suggested, there would usually be one step back. Overall, though, the movement went forward. The river did flow to the sea.
However, without repeating the simple listings of “here the UN did good,” the overall record is clear: Without the actions and existence of the world organization, humankind would be a lot worse off than it is today, warts and all. It would be much more fragmented, and countries would be much less understanding of others and much less capable of taking collective action in the face of grave crises. Did the international body did not exist, we would have to be constructing it or parts of it.
So the only answer, as far as I see it, is by trying; by repairing weaknesses, coaxing reluctant governments to accept change, understanding what works best and where international organization has problems — or even should not be involved at all — and not giving up. A hard-nosed realist approach to the world order will not work here. Nor will an overimaginative idealist belief that everything will be okay if we just pull together. The world needs both skeptical intelligence and vision. Mixed properly, as they were between 1942 and 1945, they can work wonders.