The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (29 page)

Why are states generally (though within limits)
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ready to accept and follow Security Council decisions? Several explanations are possible. One would be that a Council decision provides a focal point for other states: if the general aims of a certain action are not contested, states might go along with the Council’s determination of the particular means by which to achieve those aims, merely because the coordination of an alternative is too difficult.
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Also, if the provision of a public good is at issue, and only its precise definition and the means to provide it are contested, many states might prefer the provision of the good despite some remaining discontent.

This would, however, still not explain why states follow a Security Council decision more readily than an informal agreement among the Great Powers, or even the unilateral decision of a dominant power: both would also provide powerful focal points.
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Yet from the perspective of other states, following a Council decision is clearly preferable to those alternatives, simply because their influence on the decision, and the constraints on the powerful, are greater in the context of the Security Council. Not only is the circle of decision-makers in the Council wider, which provides for greater restraint, but the elected members of the Council are also accountable to the states that elected them, at least to some extent.
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The level of representation and opportunities for influence on the Council are, of course, far from ideal, but delegitimizing the Council is only likely to shift decisions into other, even less desirable, fora. As long as no better alternative is available and most states are interested in some kind of enforcement mechanism in the area of security, they generally choose to follow the Council.

Given the rather mixed views about the United Nations in different parts of the world,
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this following is unlikely to be generally based on a deeper conviction that it is ‘the duty of a good international citizen’.
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We have also seen above that the Great Powers have to undertake constant efforts to bolster acceptance of Council
decisions by trying to reach unanimity among all members, and by responding to procedural critiques and other normative demands. Implementing Council decisions is still not a routine matter; the Council’s authority is far from internalized.
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The fact that Council decisions are legally binding might explain a general inclination to follow them, especially since most states have an interest in maintaining the international legal order in general,
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but this alone might not be enough to ground stronger political acceptance in situations in which the stakes are high. The foundations on which Council authority rests are shaky, and it is always vulnerable to challenges.

Yet while acceptance of action through the Council may be somewhat unstable, its alternative – the use of force outside the Council – is more clearly regarded as unacceptable. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), for example, regularly emphasizes the Council’s indispensable role in authorizing the use of force
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The only potential exception that enjoys some sympathy in different parts of the world is humanitarian intervention.
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Support for a norm that sees Council authorization as a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for the use of force is sometimes explained on the basis of ‘legitimacy’.
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However, insofar as legitimacy can ground genuine normative beliefs, its explanatory value in this case is not obvious.
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Legitimacy in this sense would require an
internalization of norms in states and their decision-makers that either takes certain actions entirely off the table, or at least shifts considerations in such a way as to place a particular argumentative burden on norm violators. Such an internalization is easier with respect to routine action in relation to which habits are formed and strategic choices are not made in every instance, yet one can also observe it with respect to non-habitual, high policy decisions such as the use of particular weapons in war.
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In the case of the use of force, too, we can observe indications of such an internalization, in particular in European discussions over the Kosovo and Iraq interventions. In public and parliamentary debates in Europe, Security Council authorization was very much at the centre of attention, and without it, public opinion was far more reluctant to endorse military action.
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However, while this might be true for Europe, it is not clear that it holds in a similar way for other parts of the world. US public opinion usually favours Security Council authorization, but does not prefer it much to other ways of building multinational coalitions. Public opinion is likely to be based on an assessment of consequences rather than normative beliefs.
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For other parts of the world, we lack conclusive data, but if opinion polls are any measure, they evidence European idiosyncrasy more than anything else. In Russia and several Muslim countries, for example, the belief that the use of force requires UN authorization is about as weak as in the US and significantly lower than in Europe.
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These data are limited, but they are in line with anecdotal evidence and suggest that belief in that norm is indeed concentrated in Europe.

Yet we do not need to resort to a strong concept of legitimacy in order to understand the position of governments here. From a strategic perspective, most states are well-advised to defend the inadmissibility of force outside the Council. For small states, the risk of being invaded has always been greater than the potential benefits from using force – an institutional restraint on the use of force is therefore
generally desirable for them. For more powerful states, the position might not always be so clear, but in a unipolar order with a one-sided distribution of capacities for intervention, it will certainly hold for most. And for states like China and Russia, though they might not face much risk of being attacked, the benefits derived from influencing US military action in the Council probably outweigh the additional costs for their own potential military endeavours. The situation is less clear for European states. Europe is disproportionately well represented on the Security Council and should thus have an interest in upholding Council authority. However, in the current world order, European states are much more likely to intervene than be the object of intervention: their stance on Kosovo and certain European states’ position on Iraq in 2003 reflects this ambiguity. Nevertheless, except perhaps for the issue of humanitarian intervention, we can observe a convergence of interests of most states around upholding, as a minimum, a strong anti-interventionist norm with the Security Council at its centre. Given this convergence, there are few coordination problems in defending this norm against revisionist powers, and its relative strength is thus not surprising.

The relatively strong defence of the norm prohibiting intervention without Security Council authorization represents a significant shift in the parameters of the use of force since the Cold War. While the legal norms have essentially stayed the same, the readiness of states to defend them seems to have grown considerably.
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Also before 1990, there was widespread opposition to and condemnation of interventions, and large parts of the developing world, in particular, mobilized against uses of force.
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Yet there were hardly any claims about a need for Security Council authorization; the debate focused instead on the substantive grounds for the use of force.

This was certainly in part due to the futility of any hope for a Council role as long as the superpowers were opposed. It was clear that, when the superpowers intended to use force, the Security Council would be automatically barred from censoring or authorizing them. The only exception – Korea in 1950 – resulted from Soviet absence, and the Council’s ability to act was short-lived. Apart from that, since there was no practical possibility for Council involvement, the focal point of a
convergence of interests as described above was simply missing. With the end of the Cold War, and particularly with superpower agreement in the Gulf War in 1990/1991, this object appeared, and it remained in place for long enough to allow that convergence of interests to consolidate and embed the norm in international discourse. Initially, this also seems to have been beneficial to the US: reaching agreement in the Council did not seem to pose excessive obstacles, and focusing on Council authorization was a way to displace the more restrictive anti-interventionist positions that developing countries had defended before. Thus, when the first serious challenge to the norm arose with the Kosovo crisis, the norm was sufficiently stable to resist attempts at displacing it. It is telling that NATO states engaged in Kosovo, like the US and the UK in the Iraq war in 2003, primarily relied on Security Council resolutions rather than rights of unilateral action.
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Given their prior support for the restrictive norm, Western states have problems changing track (if they actually want normative change).
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Even the US, which had made strong statements for extended rights of pre-emptive self-defence in 2002, later did not rely on it as a justification for the war against Iraq.
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The states that used the Council in the 1990s might now be ‘entrapped’ by the norm requiring Council authorization for the use of force
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– whether because other states now believe in the norm’s legitimacy and defend it; because inconsistency in argument incurs reputational costs; or because it provides a ready focus for the coordination of other states’ resistance.

Yet the relatively sudden change in states’ support for the Council as a gatekeeper for the use of force might not only be due to the new possibility for agreement in the post-Cold War world; it might also reflect a change in the structure of state interests in the new unipolar world. In the bipolar setting of the Cold War, many developing states had a great interest in restrictive rules on the use of force. However, within both blocs, there were many more states that sympathized with the notion of intervention to uphold (or spread) their own political system. In this situation, it might have been desirable to restrain the other side from intervening, but it was hardly in the interest of states to tie their own side to the need for Security Council approval that would be blocked by the other.
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After the end of the Cold War, this situation has shifted and, as pointed out before, the capacity to intervene is much more concentrated, so most states see themselves as potential
objects rather than subjects of intervention, and thus have a greater interest in restraining intervening powers. Even US allies will often have an interest in imposing institutional restraints on the US, simply because this allows them more influence on the shape of the action – knowing that when the West is united, it will usually have the means to bring about Security Council approval.

Change can be observed not only in the rejection of force outside the Council, but also in the measure of acceptance of the Council’s own action. In this respect, shifts might not be spectacular: even during the Cold War, Council action seems to have enjoyed relative acceptance in the rare cases it came about. Perhaps states had even stronger grounds to follow it because of the greater inclusiveness that stemmed from the institutionalized agreement of the two main blocs. In this respect, not much has changed. As we have seen, the Council is still exposed to serious challenges to its legitimacy and constantly has to regain it. However, change is apparent in the acceptance of the breadth of the Council’s powers. Such change had occurred before, as with the acceptance of the Council’s power to establish UN peacekeeping missions since the 1950s,
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but it accelerated after the Cold War. When, in 1990, the Council eschewed the Charter’s non-functioning provisions providing for the establishment of a UN force and turned to authorizing action by member states, some states voiced principled criticism. However, over the years, as the practice became more common, such objections faded away.
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Likewise, in the early 1990s, there was significant debate over whether the Council could intervene in internal conflicts or for merely humanitarian purposes; and in its first decisions, it still emphasized the exceptional character of the situation. Later on, reservations about this practice largely disappeared.
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This expansion of the Council’s powers is remarkable, and it reflects a process of incremental normalization of practice. In most of the cases mentioned, some states initially questioned the powers of the Council in principle, but because they shared the Council’s aims, they did not object much to their use in the cases concerned. When such instances were repeated, the principled argument broke down under the weight of precedent, and the practice was (even legally) consolidated.
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One might interpret this as a shift in states’ normative beliefs, or merely as the breakdown of focal points of resistance. On either interpretation, it amounts to considerable change.

The relationship between the Security Council and the Great Powers is hardly stable. In the scope of this short chapter, I have not been able to explore that relationship thoroughly, but I have tried to highlight some of the ways in which the Great Powers have constantly tried to expand their (already unprecedented) privileges through changes in the informal operation of the Council. I have also described how they have faced resistance by other states, and have had to give in to these demands to a significant extent. The authority of the Council, precious to the Great Powers as it facilitates stable cooperation and limits resistance, is vulnerable and has to be gained and regained at a considerable cost. As a result, the Council appears janus-faced: it remains a tool of the Great Powers, but it is also an instrument for constraining them.