The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (15 page)

We have included a wide range of opinions. We invited contributors on account of their expertise, not because we agreed with them. While the contributors broadly share our view that the practice of the Security Council is richer, more complex, and more subtle than any prescriptive theory, not all of them would necessarily subscribe to all the assessments of the Council’s role advanced in this Introduction. Here, too, this book reflects the realities of the Security Council itself, where different worldviews, different interests, and different understandings of the UN’s roles all come together in a continuous process in which, at least sometimes, the end product may be more than the sum of the parts.

EDWARD C. LUCK

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is commonplace to observe that the range of threats to international peace and security being addressed by the UN Security Council today is far broader than that envisioned by the founders of the world body at Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta, and San Francisco more than six decades ago. For instance, according to the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, ‘the issues and preoccupations of the 21st century present new and fundamentally different types of challenges from those that faced the world in 1945, when the United Nations was founded.’
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Likewise, the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change convened by Secretary-General Kofi Annan contended that ‘the preoccupation of the United Nations founders was with State security. When they spoke of creating a new system of collective security they meant it in the traditional military sense: a system in which States join together and pledge that aggression against one is aggression against all.’
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Noting that ‘our Organization, as an organization, was built for a different era’, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for an urgent, even radical, overhaul of the Security Council and other intergovernmental bodies.
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Fair enough, most of the matters on which the Council spends its time these days – peacekeeping, peace-building, genocide, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction – were not even mentioned in the Charter. Undoubtedly the founders were determined, first and foremost, to devise an international instrument that could help prevent the outbreak of a third interstate war of global proportions in the twentieth century. But did they have a narrow, rigid, or singular view of the nature of war and the security challenges most likely to confront the Council in the post-war years? And, more to the point, did they therefore tailor the Council and its tools in such a way as to be best suited to prevent a third world war (such that it was hence ill-equipped to address contemporary challenges)? This chapter answers both queries in the negative, while advancing three related propositions:

• First, while the founders were united in their determination to defeat the Axis powers and to build a more effective collective security apparatus than the League of Nations proved to be, they also recognized the danger of planning for a single contingency. They were determined as well, therefore, to avoid erecting a static defence, an institutional Maginot Line, based on a narrow and rigid conception of the direction and nature of future threats.

• Secondly, they strove – successfully – to reserve for the Security Council the maximum possible decision-making flexibility as a political body, unencumbered by too many predetermined rules and guidelines. As the self-appointed Permanent Members of the Council, the four convening powers plus France ensured at San Francisco that, when they could agree, the Council would be in a position to respond to a theoretically unlimited range of possible threats at a time and in a manner of its choosing. This rather open-ended conception of the Council’s mandate was widely accepted by the other founding members as well. At the same time, of course, the Permanent Members did not want to be obligated to act on security problems of lesser interest to them. This gap in the initial conception naturally caused considerable consternation among the smaller and more vulnerable countries represented at San Francisco.

• Thirdly, while the inequities built into the Security Council’s voting and decision-making rules, particularly the veto power for the five Permanent Members, proved highly controversial at the founding conference in San Francisco, the convening powers would not bend on these core elements of their vision. Agreed upon at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta beforehand, the veto and permanent membership were designed to transform a wartime alliance into a big power oligarchy to secure the hard-won peace that would follow. The convening powers offered concessions on numerous other points in the draft Charter in order to persuade other prospective member states to go along with this one-sided bargain, but would not budge at all on these core arrangements (or on keeping the bar high for efforts to amend them in the future).

The founders, in short, as pragmatic diplomats and policy-makers in the midst of a world war, wanted a Security Council for all contingencies. They were much less interested in conceptions of warfare than in who would make the critical decisions. Moreover, on the issue of decision-making, their priorities were performance, unity, and control, not equity. The concluding section of the Chapter addresses, rather briefly and superficially, the current debates over Security Council reform in the context of these three propositions. It contends that today’s polarized struggles largely echo those played out in San Francisco more than six decades ago. It argues that, however asymmetrical and inequitable these arrangements may have appeared then (or now), they have, on balance, given the Council a weight, sustainability, and flexibility that has served the UN (and, to a less certain extent, peace and security) reasonably well over the past six decades. Facing conditions and threats unimaginable by the founders, the Council remains as relevant to the contemporary security environment as it did in 1945, even as a variety of regional, sub-regional, and ad hoc arrangements have emerged to help carry the burden.
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From its earliest conception, the United Nations was to be an all-purpose peace and security mechanism. Neither the planners in the great powers of the day nor the negotiators at Dumbarton Oaks, the wartime conferences, or San Francisco displayed any doubts on this score. The ‘Tentative Proposals for a General International Organization’ presented by the US State Department on 18 July 1944, for instance, stated that the ‘executive council should be empowered to determine the existence of any threat to the peace or breach of the peace, and to decide upon the action to be recommended or taken to maintain or restore peace’.
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This broad-based approach to the determination of both threats and international responses reflected the initial thinking of US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as they floated public trial balloons in early 1943. In February 1943, Churchill shared with Roosevelt his famous ‘Morning Thoughts: A Note on Postwar Security’, which featured his notion of a global organization backed by a series of regional arrangements. He foresaw the establishment by the wartime allies of ‘a world organization for the preservation of peace’, coupled with British and American efforts ‘to organize a coalition resistance to any act of aggression committed by any Power’ and to do ‘the good work of preventing such tendencies to aggression before they break into open war’.
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Though Gladwyn Jebb, then a Counsellor in the British Foreign Office, complained bitterly that the Prime Minister’s remarks on regionalism had not been squared with the policy planning underway in the Foreign Office, with its own Four Power Plan, he did comment that ‘the only hopeful feature was that where the PM’s proposals were vague they were, like the Atlantic Charter, capable of being adapted to almost any scheme for a world system that might eventually be approved by Cabinet.’
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Roosevelt, in contrast, made a public virtue of an open security architecture in terms both of threats and responses. In an April 1943 newspaper article based on a series of interviews with the President, Forrest Davis noted Roosevelt’s ‘doubts that a group of finite statesmen can imprison the future in a rigid world system’.
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Instead, the President preferred the sort of ‘simple, flexible and workable body of arrangements under which the American republics manage their collective affairs’.
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While he ‘[did] not rule out the employment of this country’s power in the interest of collective security for limited objectives and in specific instances’, the President ‘oppose[d] blanket commitments in advance, even one so diluted as Article X of the League Covenant’.
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No doubt Roosevelt wanted to avoid the kind of Senate opposition that had been fed by the open-ended commitment implied by Article X’s pledge to ‘undertake to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League’. For the United States, domestic politics, as well as strategic considerations, dictated a loose conception not only of security but also of America’s responsibilities for its preservation. As the leading military power of the day, the US had strong reasons for avoiding specific or binding commitments in any case.

Moscow and London generally shared this perspective though, given their troubled neighbourhoods, both tended to emphasize the goal of preventing future German militarism more than did Washington, with its more global strategy. This, of course, was a prime reason for Churchill’s early attraction to a mixed regional and global approach to security. For Churchill, post-war organization needed to accomplish three major tasks: retaining London’s balancing influence on the European continent, maintaining, to the extent possible, the British empire, and ensuring US engagement with global security.
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As Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden (Earl of Avon) wrote in 1944, ‘only by encouraging the formation of some World Organization are we likely to induce the Americans, and this means the American Senate, to agree to accept any European commitments designed to range America, in case of need, against a hostile Germany or against any European breaker of the peace.’
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Though accounts vary markedly on the degree of Stalin’s enthusiasm for the emerging post-war organization, there is no doubt about the high priority he attached to any potential it might have for preventing another round of German aggression.
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If there was going to be a post-war order, he surely did not want to leave it entirely in the hands of the capitalist powers. With only a transitional government, France did not participate in the early planning, Dumbarton Oaks, or the wartime conferences.
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Its reaction to the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, as well as its performance in San Francisco, however, suggest an understandable concern with the organization’s capacity for and will to undertake a rapid and forceful response to aggression. In its view, ‘nothing, in fact, would be more dangerous than a system which would have more or less the appearance of guaranteeing the peace and security of everyone without having the capacity to do so. For such a system would lead to a relaxation of vigilance which would encourage aggression.’
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China, another victim of naked aggression, initially took a more legalistic and less flexible approach to security definitions and commitments under the Charter. Neither British nor Soviet leaders were enthusiastic about including China among the great powers, something Roosevelt strongly advocated, and Stalin refused to have direct dealings with the Chiang Kai-shek regime.
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This left the Chinese out of the critical October–November 1943 Foreign Ministers’ Conference in Moscow and relegated them to a truncated second round of the Dumbarton Oaks deliberations in the late summer and early autumn of 1944 (the first phase included the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US, while the latter two joined China for the shorter second phase). US State Department reviews of the Chinese proposals for discussion at Dumbarton Oaks found them to be overly idealistic and too focused on international law and on economic and social issues.
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At Dumbarton Oaks, the Chinese delegation, as the Soviets had at the earlier round, called for a definition of aggression, perhaps through ‘an illustrative list’ of acts to be proscribed.
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China saw this as both a way to boost public confidence in the new security organization and as a deterrent to would-be aggressors. In addition, the Chinese advocated the inclusion in the Charter of a provision guaranteeing respect for the political independence and territorial integrity of member states.
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These ideas, however, were firmly rebuffed by the American and British delegations, as in the first phase with the Soviets.

At both Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco, the insistence by Washington and London on keeping the Security Council free of too many principles, guidelines, and definitions that might inhibit its range of choice and responses won the day. At the founding conference, Australia and New Zealand pressed vigorously the case for the addition of firm guidelines for Security Council action.
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The New Zealand delegation, for example, noted the dilemma between the need to intervene in cases of atrocities committed against domestic minorities, as in Nazi Germany, and the ‘extreme difficulty in finding a form of words that would allow sufficient latitude for the Organization to act in such matters and at the same time to make it plain that the sovereign rights of all members were not to be attacked’.
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During the decisive debate over the veto, the Soviet Union cautioned that ‘the Charter should not be looked upon as a code but as a summary of main principles governing the activities of the future organization.’
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Warning against ‘formulating precise answers to every question that might arise’, a delegate from the United Kingdom contended that ‘the probable consequence would be that commitments would be made on questions which in practice might never arise.’
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As a Chinese delegate put it: