The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (28 page)

In still other ways, normative resources limit the capacity for the Great Powers to dominate the Council, exhibited, for instance, by the impact of the human rights arguments against targeted sanctions mentioned above. Unlike informal settings, a formal institution such as the Security Council provides a focus and a site for argument, which can push states towards positions they can justify on a basis that is not purely arbitrary or self-regarding. Merely dismissing human rights concerns, for example, becomes more difficult in such a context.
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Moreover, because the
Security Council is a formal institution that much resembles a government (especially in its exercise of enforcement powers), it creates normative expectations in a similar way that a government would. Human rights concerns are therefore more powerful than they would be vis-à-vis informal or unilateral action, if only because states want to see their domestic normative commitments honoured when they transfer governmental functions to the international level.
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Likewise, selectivity of action becomes a more serious problem for an institution that, if regarded as public power, raises expectations that it will grant equal treatment to all its subjects.

Thus far, I have identified notable (though modest) constraints on the use of the Security Council by the Great Powers when they act in unison. However, by presupposing commonality among the Permanent Members, this has left out the most important check on the Great Powers in the Council: the requirement of the ‘concurrent votes’ of all Permanent Members for any substantive decision.
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The practical impact of this check obviously depends on the actual extent of disagreement among them. During the Cold War, the differences among the Permanent Members not only made it impossible for the Council to act, but also opened up substantial opportunities for other states to influence negotiation outcomes by playing the Great Powers off against each other. The Non-Aligned Movement in particular was able to exploit this situation and, given its numerical strength among elected members, its support was often crucial to reaching the necessary number of nine positive votes.
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This influence has waned with the advent of greater unity among the Permanent Members since the end of the Cold War. When the P5 adopt a common position, it becomes very difficult to stop them, especially given the informal means of pressure they have at their disposals.
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While such common positions are increasingly the norm, they often do not reflect an actual unity of views on a given issue, but are rather the result of the coordination efforts that the P5 now usually undertake before moving an issue into the Council as a whole. This coordination allows compromises to be struck between the Permanent Members and insulates the result of their negotiations from later challenges by other Council members. Whether or not a common position can be reached depends, however, on the extent of diverging interests. In some cases, it
will require substantial side-deals, as presumably when the US gave up resistance to World Bank loans to China, and generally relaxed its policy towards the country after the Chinese government agreed not to block the Council’s authorization of military action against Iraq in 1990.
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Likewise, it is likely that, in return for Russian and French support in the case of Haiti in 1994, the US gave up opposition to Council authorization of peacekeeping by the Commonwealth of Independent States in Georgia and French-led intervention in Rwanda.
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In other cases, compromise has resulted in language vague enough to allow diverging interpretations by different sides, as for example when the Council authorized a maritime blockade against Iraq in August 1990 but thanks to the open wording allowed China to interpret the resolution in a face-saving way as not implying the use of force.
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‘Agreeing to disagree’ has become a common strategy for overcoming difference, often resulting in declarations on the meaning of a resolution after the vote, but sometimes, as with Kosovo in 1998 and Iraq in 2002, only postponing open clashes.
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As is clear from these examples, P5 agreement on Security Council action has often been reached despite the fact that it ran counter to the interests of particular Permanent Members, and this has happened even in the absence of immediate compensation.
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The US, the UK, and France have been dominant in shaping Council policy since the end of the Cold War, despite Russia’s and China’s veto power and their often diverging interests. This has been explained as a result of the existence of outside options: because dominant powers can credibly threaten to act outside an institution, they can shift negotiating results in their favour if their opponents have an interest in keeping them within the institution (for example, because this allows them greater influence on the shape of the action).
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This probably explains, for example, why Russia went a long way towards accommodating NATO states in the run-up to the Kosovo intervention, and why it afterwards allowed the Security Council to establish a transitional administration based on NATO presence in the territory.
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However, in most cases, Russian and Chinese accommodation of Western interests is more likely to be due to a general desire not to weaken the Council as an institution and also to maintain a positive
relationship with the dominant powers.
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Yet even despite these dynamics, gaining Council support often requires dominant powers to make serious concessions.

Gaining support for a desired action might be difficult, but sometimes it is even more difficult to redirect Council action later. In the case of Bosnia, for example, the US initially supported the general arms embargo but after realizing its biased effects on the conflict, reversed its course and wanted the embargo lifted. Yet it could not muster enough support for its position, and the embargo remained in force.
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Difficulties are even more obvious with respect to the ‘reverse veto’: if only one of the Permanent Members objects to ending a measure, it continues to apply.
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This problem became particularly acute with the Iraq sanctions from the mid-1990s on, and even though it is increasingly mitigated by sunset clauses, the risk of being trapped in a decision that is later difficult to reverse continues to exist.
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Initiating action through the Council can thus put considerable limits on later freedom of action.

Working through the Security Council comes, as we have seen, with considerable costs for the Great Powers: achieving unity among the Permanent Members is often difficult and requires compromises and side-payments. Even once unity is established, the need to gain broader acceptance in the international community imposes further (though certainly more limited) constraints. Yet Great Powers do choose to incur these costs regularly today:
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the diplomatic effort expended and compromises generated by US and UK efforts to gain Security Council approval of their intervention in Iraq in 2002/2003 are telling.
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Yet why is Council approval important enough to Great Powers to justify such costs?

Rational institutionalists usually see the main advantages of international institutions in their information and enforcement functions: by detecting and punishing violators, they are able to enhance the stability of a common regime.
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In the case of the Security Council, little of this applies. The Council is not set up as a law-enforcement agency but deliberately as a political organ; and it is not surprising that the Council has so far hardly ever branded a state an aggressor or apportioned blame for the use of force at all.
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It has been established largely as a policeman, not as a jury, and it operates in an essentially political fashion.

Certainly more important is the Council’s establishment of the terms of cooperation: in situations in which the interests of the Great Powers are not diametrically opposed, they can expect benefits from collaborating. Yet how precisely to cooperate will often not be clear; the Permanent Members might all gain in a number of scenarios, but the gains will be distributed differently depending on which terms of cooperation are chosen. In this situation, the institutional setting of the Council will help to single out one approach.
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This is most obvious in the adoption of uniform multilateral sanctions instead of a multitude of unilateral measures, all dealing in widely diverging ways with a commonly perceived threat. Setting the terms of cooperation in the Council is facilitated by the concentration of the decision in a single act, around which states can create issue linkages and exchange side-payments. All elements of a bargain then come together at the same time, and once a decision is taken it is difficult to repudiate – in part because of the reputational costs of breaking promises, but also because the collective interest in continuing collaboration would be endangered in cases of defection.
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Such collaboration among the Great Powers is also useful with respect to other states as it sets a focal point for the latter, thus providing the Great Powers with a significant first-mover advantage in shaping issue-specific sub-regimes.
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If this seems plausible when the Great Powers are relatively equal, it is not obvious in situations of significant power disparities. In the latter case, the weaker
Permanent Members will have a strong incentive to work through the Council, not only because of general collaboration gains, but also because it allows them disproportionate influence on decision-making. But for a dominant member, the situation looks different, especially when unilateral alternatives exist. As we have seen above, a dominant state might be able to shift a decision in its favour, thanks in part to such outside options, but it will still have to accept compromises and make side-payments, both of which might seem unacceptable. The current tension between the US and the Security Council testifies to this problem.
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However, even a dominant power gains significantly from working through the Council. Such collaboration creates, for example, opportunities for risk- and burden-sharing, particularly when action is taken through UN peacekeeping operations with assessed contributions. Similarly, in multinational coalitions, the willingness of states to contribute is generally higher than in situations without Council authorization.
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Even greater gains will lie in pacification: because of the commitment of the other Permanent Members to the decision, later resistance by them becomes more unlikely and associated costs decrease. Reaching agreement in the Council removes the most powerful challengers, and it also performs signalling functions as to the expected costs of an action. All these gains are stronger in the Council than they would be in more informal or ad hoc situations, precisely because of the interest of other members in maintaining an institution that is favourable to them, which will lead them to make wider concessions and will prevent them from defecting later. The resulting reduction in risks and costs also makes it easier for a dominant power to gain domestic support for an operation:
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in general, military action has stronger domestic approval rates if authorized by the Councils.
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Another very particular benefit from using the Security Council is that it provides a particularly advantageous mechanism for law-making and regulation. Normally, international law-making proceeds through the cumbersome methods of treaties and customary law, fraught with the principle of sovereign equality. But thanks to the
Chapter VII
powers in the UN Charter, the Security Council allows the Great Powers to make law quickly and with very limited participation by other states; and to make rules that apply only to others, not to themselves.
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Until recently, this was possible only in narrow circumstances, limited to particular
conflict situations. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, however, the Council has taken a much broader (though still contested) view of its powers and started to engage in genuine legislation and more intense regulation, thus opening up opportunities for further Great Power control of the international legal order.
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The argument so far has focused mostly on interaction among Council members, and in particular among its Permanent Members. However, probably the greatest gains, both for the Great Powers together and for a single dominant power, can be expected from the Council’s role in garnering acceptance among other states.
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The resistance of other states might be costly, and often their cooperation will be important for the success of an action. The practice of states, in particular around the Kosovo intervention in 1999 and the Iraq war of 2003, shows that a Council decision is important to garner support for military action, and the same holds for public opinion in many countries.
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The Security Council has indeed become the source of ‘collective legitimization’ that Inis Claude had already identified in the UN in the 1960s.
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This provides considerable benefits for the Great Powers as it facilitates their exercise of dominance and, as institutional privilege is somewhat insulated from shifts in material power, it also stabilizes their continuing dominance into the future.
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In order to understand why this is so, we should distinguish between two aspects of states’ attitudes towards the Security Council: their readiness to accept (and not
resist) Security Council decisions, and their rejection of military action outside the Council. Both are obviously linked, but they pose somewhat distinct problems.
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