The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (30 page)

This janus-faced character confirms the ambivalent status of international institutions under conditions of power asymmetry. Institutions are useful for the powerful because they help ensure acceptance of their policies, but this acceptance depends on the institution’s legitimacy, or at least a sense by other states that they play a stronger role in the institution than they would otherwise. Therefore, institutions need to be somewhat shielded from the direct influence of power; they need to enjoy some independence.
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Yet this independence in itself can often cause problems for powerful states, and increase their temptation to act outside institutional channels. In order to support an institution, all sides need to benefit, and this leaves the institution in a precarious balance, constantly subject to readjustment to its environment.
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This instability might disappear once an institution is normalized to the extent that its role and legitimacy is internalized by states. It is not clear that this has happened with the Security Council so far, but overall the Council promises sufficient collective gains to be relatively stable, even in the absence of such strong foundations.

The strength of the Council derives in part from recent changes in its normative environment, which have resulted in a relatively strong convention among states that non-defensive uses of force are unacceptable without Security Council authorization. This convention increases the cost of unilateral options and thus pushes powerful states back into the institutional framework. However one explains these changes – whether as a shift in beliefs, a tightening of discursive constraints, or strategic convergence – they seem to have been triggered by the
increasing normality of Security Council action in crises throughout the 1990s and the resulting consolidation of expectations around it. What might have seemed convenient at the time has shifted the parameters of the later choice of tools significantly. The Council helps the Great Powers to establish ‘world government’, but sometimes, it must also appear to them as a trap.

DOMINIK ZAUM
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W
HEN
the first United Nations (UN) peacekeeping force, the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), was established on 5 November 1956, to supervise the cessation of fighting in the Suez war between Egypt and troops from Israel, France, and the United Kingdom,
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it was not the Security Council, with its primary responsibility for international peace and security, that authorized the mission. Instead, this groundbreaking initiative for the UN had been requested by the General Assembly, to which the Council, paralysed by the French and British vetoes
over the Suez crisis, had passed on the issue under the ‘Uniting for Peace’ procedure.

The 1950 Uniting for Peace resolution has been one of the most important attempts by the US and its allies to change the institutional balance of power between the Security Council and the General Assembly at a time when the Council was deadlocked because of regular Soviet vetoes, and the Assembly could command a safe pro-Western majority. While the Suez crisis has been the most prominent instance of ‘Uniting for Peace’, it has not been the only one. Depending on how one counts, the procedure has been invoked eleven or twelve times to refer questions of international peace and security to regular or emergency special sessions of the General Assembly since November 1950,
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when the original Uniting for Peace resolution was passed by the General Assembly to break the deadlock caused by the Soviet veto in Security Council debates on Korea.
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The latest emergency special session of the General Assembly – the tenth – convened in April 1997 to address the situation in East Jerusalem and the occupied territories. At its last meeting in January 2007, it only temporarily adjourned and therefore could be called again on the request of member states – almost ten years after it was initially established.
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The Uniting for Peace resolution was envisaged as the main pathway for the General Assembly to address issues of war and conflict. However, the way in which the resolution has been used has changed dramatically over the years. What started as an early case of UN ‘reform’, as a US-led attempt to shift the balance of power between two principal organs of the United Nations to break the stifling effect that the Soviet veto had on the UN in its first decade, turned increasingly into an instrument used to raise issues of political importance to the Non-Aligned Movement in the General Assembly, and more specifically into a tool used by Arab states to criticize Israel’s policy in the occupied territories and the American support for Israel.

This chapter examines the role of the Uniting for Peace procedure from its inception in 1950 until its most recent use in 2006/2007. It addresses two questions: first, what has been the contribution of the Uniting for Peace resolution to the United Nations’ efforts to promote international peace and security; and secondly, what does the use of the resolution suggest about the relationship between the Security Council and the General Assembly? As the chapter shows, the use of the procedure has changed over the years from a mechanism to enable the UN to address conflicts despite the veto of a Permanent Member of the Security Council, to a way for some states in the General Assembly to promote political concerns important to them, in particular decolonization and the Palestinian question.

While the Uniting for Peace procedure provided an opening for the General Assembly to get involved more actively in addressing threats to international peace and security, the record shows that it failed to do so effectively. The resolution has thus contributed little to strengthening the UN’s capacity for collective security. Instead, the way the Uniting for Peace resolution has been used reflects the growing marginalization of the General Assembly by the Security Council with regard to addressing conflicts. This marginalization has been the result of the increased unity of the Security Council since the end of the Cold War, which has reinforced the body’s primacy over security issues. Similarly, the growing number of developing and non-aligned countries in the General Assembly as a consequence of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, contributed to the marginalization of the General Assembly, in particular by the US and Western states, who could no longer rely on the support of the majority of states in the Assembly. While the Uniting for Peace resolution has been highlighted as a possible instrument to authorize the use of force in the case of a veto as recently as 2001 in the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s report on the
Responsibility to Protect,
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the increasing divisions between Assembly and Council, visible in particular during the debate about UN reform in 2004–5, make it unlikely that the Council would currently be inclined to use the procedure.

The Uniting for Peace resolution has, however, shaped the development of the core principles of an important UN practice: peacekeeping. In the General Assembly debates on peacekeeping in Suez and the Congo in particular, central principles such as host consent, the financing of peacekeeping missions, and impartiality were formulated, which would have been less salient had it not been for the General Assembly’s involvement in authorizing these peacekeeping missions.

On 1 August 1950, the Soviet Union, which had all but paralysed the Security Council by vetoing forty-five draft resolutions since the creation of the UN, returned to the Council after an eight-month boycott over the refusal to give China’s seat at the Security Council to the communist People’s Republic, rather than Chiang Kai-shek’s pro-American Republic of China. In the Soviet Union’s absence, the Council had authorized a US-led military coalition to assist South Korea in repelling the North Korean attack.
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Realizing that its boycott had failed to paralyse the UN, the Soviet Union returned in August 1950 to take up the
Presidency of the Security Council, preventing any further discussion of the Korean question through manipulating the Council’s agenda,
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and vetoing several proposed resolutions on the conflict.
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In anticipation of the Soviet return to the Council, the US had been looking for alternative ways to enable the UN to take decisions legitimizing US-led military action in Korea.
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When the General Assembly convened for its regular session in September, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson outlined his proposal to turn to the General Assembly to respond to aggression and threats to international peace and security, if the Security Council was prevented from fulfilling its obligations because of a veto. Under the UN Charter, the General Assembly may normally not make recommendations with regard to any issues on the agenda of the Security Council.
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To increase the UN’s effectiveness to respond to conflicts in the light of the paralysis of the Security Council, Acheson suggested among other things that the Assembly should be able to call emergency sessions if the Council was prevented from acting, to establish a ‘security patrol’ to monitor and report on possible conflicts, and that member states should designate units in their armed forces available for service in the name of the UN.
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When the General Assembly passed Resolution 377, entitled ‘Uniting for Peace’, after extensive debate on 3 November 1950, it closely followed Acheson’s original suggestions. It stated that

The resolution contained five proposals: (1) that the Assembly should consider any aggression, threat to the peace, or breach of the peace, if the Security Council fails to exercise its responsibility with regard to international peace and security because of a lack of unanimity between its five Permanent Members (P5), and if necessary call a special emergency session to that end; (2) that states should designate units in their armed forces that could be made available to the United Nations on request of the Security Council or the General Assembly; (3) that a panel of military experts be created to provide technical advice to these units; (4) that a peace observation committee be established; and (5) that states should create a Collective Measures Committee, to write a report on measures to strengthen international peace and security.
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Importantly, the resolution only allowed the General Assembly to ‘make recommendations to Members for collective measures’, in accordance with Article 10 of the Charter.
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Thus, even under Uniting for Peace, the Assembly does not have the power to authorize the use of force against a member state.
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This remains the prerogative of the Security Council. The extent to which the Assembly could step in and take the Security Council’s place if the latter was paralysed by the veto was therefore limited from the beginning by the provisions of the Charter.

The Uniting for Peace resolution was drafted in the context of the Korean war and the perennial threat of the Soviet veto, but was also part of a wider effort by the United States in the early years of the UN to strengthen the General Assembly’s role vis-à-vis the Security Council.
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Already in 1947, the Assembly had established the Interim Committee to make considerations and recommendations between its regular sessions.
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It also involved itself in the domain of the Security Council when advising members to withdraw their ambassadors from Franco’s Spain in 1947, denouncing it as a fascist regime,
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and when taking on the questions of Greece and Palestine from the Security Council after the latter’s failure to come to any agreement.
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Thus, the Uniting for Peace resolution was part of a broader US-led effort to increase the scope and effectiveness of the General Assembly, a development at the time supported, though with reservations, by the UK and
France.
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Crucially, to work as intended by the US and its allies, it relied on the existence of a supportive majority of pro-Western states in the General Assembly, and in 1950, Latin American and European states constituted a majority of the then sixty member states that could generally be relied upon.

While the Uniting for Peace procedure was not formally used with regard to the war in Korea, the principle was invoked when six Council members, following another Soviet veto on Korea on 30 November 1950,
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requested that the General Assembly take up the matter.
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While the Soviet Union voted against the proposal, it could not veto it, as the transfer of an issue from the Council to the General Assembly is considered a procedural issue, and therefore not subject to a veto by a Permanent Member.
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The Council removed the item from its agenda before the General Assembly passed a resolution on Korea on 1 February 1951, thus allowing the General Assembly to discuss it without the need for any transfer under the procedure foreseen by the Uniting for Peace resolution.
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The resolution passed that day makes clear reference to ‘Uniting for Peace’,