The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (45 page)

The United Nations is often criticized for being ineffective in preventing conflict or restraining aggression. Yet the record shows a remarkable reduction in the number of wars between states to settle a clash of interests or to enlarge territory since 1945. The freezing effect of the Cold War, with its built-in threat of nuclear annihilation, played a strong role in this. So did the spread of freedom and democracy and the rejection of colonialism, in both moral and political terms. The impact of the UN, however, should not be underestimated. The existence of a forum for the discussion and resolution of problems between states, within which flowed a gradually strengthening current of condemnation in relation to the use of force against the collective interest, made it increasingly more difficult for individual states to resort to military action to promote national interests without incurring real penalties. The innate justice of the UN Charter in allowing force to be used for self-defence, but in hardly any other circumstances without collective authority, established lines of legitimacy and illegitimacy with genuine impact in the modern world. The UN has proved to be the most effective institution in history for aligning the security interests of the strong and the weak at the global level.

Yet plenty of problems remain. There are those who do not hear or respect what the UN stands for. In the post-Cold War era, these have tended to be political leaders in one of two categories: autocrats more concerned with their hold on national power than with international standards of human behaviour; and local warlords or heads of militias in weak societies where force and brutality are unlikely to be punished. Increasingly, the international system is beginning to reach these more remote areas of social and political collapse, but the UN’s mechanisms were not originally designed to focus on them. Adapting UN and other international procedures to allow a more effective response to political and humanitarian abuses has come into conflict with the compulsion to keep the international order steady and unchanged in other respects. We shall see how this dilemma is played out from time to time in the Security Council. We shall also need to note instances where the strongest members of the UN decline to subordinate their vital national interests to collective international judgement, even though they loudly support the rule of law, and their stake in an effective global order is high.

In examining the subject of this chapter, certain fundamental facts have to be kept constantly in mind: the UN is not a global policeman or court, nor does it have resources of its own with which to maintain international order. UN funding comes primarily from the richer states, and its military capability (though not necessarily the greatest number of foot soldiers) from the more powerful. Where serious force has had to be used in the UN’s name, it has usually been applied by ad hoc coalitions of states rather than by UN-directed forces as envisaged in the Charter. In practice, therefore, effective action has depended on the decision of the strongest nation states to contribute resources under their own national criteria. This has created, however unintentionally, a double burden on the stronger and larger states: the need to concede an equal vote at the UN to states of much smaller sizes and capabilities, and the need to pay the bill for almost all the executive activity. For governments that have to justify to their domestic constituencies how they expend available national resources, explaining why the call of the international system has to be given priority has proved more difficult the further the origins of the UN have receded in time.

Later chapters in this book will go into detail regarding the major instances of Security Council involvement, successful and unsuccessful, in seeking to restore peace or constrain conflict. In the early years – and the story of the Korean War brought this out well – the maintenance of peace was seen as a continuation of the struggle between the Great Powers and their contrasting political systems. The creation of the Military Staff Committee as a subordinate body of the Security Council, one which still exists in the structure though it never meets on substantive business, was intended to bring together the military representatives of the Permanent Members to ensure cooperation and prevent conflict between them when their forces were to be used in a UN capacity. Only in 1992 was the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) established as part of the UN Secretariat to support peacekeeping operations, and only gradually did it begin to gather a capability to organize and lead a multinational assembly of military units from member states. With no more than a few hundred UN headquarters staff available, DPKO has never generated the strength or ability to conduct complex and powerful military operations. On several occasions, a debate has developed over the possibility of having member states allocate standing forces for the UN to deploy as necessary, but it has always ground to a halt when the cost and political commitment has been weighed in the relevant capitals.

The theme of national commitment to the ideals and purposes of the UN thus makes itself felt in a number of ways. The structure of the world, divided into states and related groups of states, lends itself poorly to the business of global government. Human societies have always needed an ethnic, racial, or territorial identity – and the motivation for war is often related to the requirement to express or defend a territorial, tribal, or national interest. Such interests may be disguised inside UN headquarters, but they nevertheless exercise a very real force. While globalization has
had a strong impact in the economic and communications fields, opening up commercial, professional, and indeed criminal opportunities for individuals, businesses, and other sub-national groups in quite remarkable ways, political structures have not evolved to keep up with it. The tensions that result are often felt within the UN, not least in both explicit and implicit appeals, on the one hand, to the sections of the Charter which protect state sovereignty (Articles 2(4) and 2(7)) and, on the other, to the Charter’s human rights and collective security provisions. These factors are far more significant than any procedural or institutional considerations in limiting the capacity of the UN to promote peace, and will continue to make it difficult to create the international security consensus for which Kofi Annan has called.

The Security Council comprises the national representatives of fifteen member states, five of whom are permanent and ten of whom are elected for a tenure of two years. The Charter enjoins them all to think and act in the collective interest of the UN membership as a whole.
³
The Permanent Members – China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States (often referred to as the P5) – generate the greatest influence on the substance of the Council’s business, partly because of their veto power, partly because of their inherent size and capability, and partly because of their continuity in and familiarity with the system. The ten Non-permanent Members, however, often determine the character of the Council in a particular year. Because they are its changing face, they represent more sensitively and actively than the P5 the interests of the wider UN membership and they can capitalize on the unpopularity of the privileged few. The Non-permanent Members sometimes act together to resist the power of the P5 and prevent them from dominating the proceedings. This has happened on numerous occasions in the Council’s handling of the question of Palestine. A further example is the creation of the Amorim Panel of international experts on Iraqi disarmament in January 1999.
⁴
But the Nonpermanent Members can also be paralysed when the P5 are bitterly divided between themselves. This happened most frequently over Iraq, but was also a feature on occasion in the Council’s handling of the Balkans, the International Criminal Court, and Western Sahara, to take instances from my period as the UK’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York between 1998 and 2003.

The Security Council’s agenda is set by agreement between the members at the start of each month, when a new President of the Council takes over (in the English alphabetical order of countries). The UN Secretariat, whose Department of Political
Affairs handles liaison with the Council, offers good professional advice on the issues demanding attention, but the Council decides its own business. Most items on the agenda are carried over from the previous month, as there are numerous long-running matters requiring regular updates or new decisions. A new item can be introduced either by the Secretary-General, in person or through his designated subordinates, or by a member of the Council, many of whom may regularly consult their constituency in the wider membership. If, say, a violent upset has occurred in a particular country, or two neighbouring states which had been growling at each other start to move troops up to their common border, a member of the Council can call for a briefing from the Secretariat and a debate begins. On occasion this can happen in a formal meeting of the Council in the main chamber, but more frequently the first discussion of a new problem takes place in informal consultations in the side-room reserved for the Council. Here, the exchanges are restricted to Council members and relevant members of the Secretariat. The choice of topics is normally made in a common-sense way and the discussion proceeds in an informed and sensible manner. It sometimes takes a day or two for all Council members to catch up with events and receive instructions from their capitals, but the Security Council can move remarkably fast when it has to. The usefulness of informal consultations away from the public gaze is evident when sensitive information has to be included in a briefing or when action to restrain a particular UN member state may be more effective without public fanfare.

The Security Council remains the UN body with the greatest executive authority, since it often deals with headline issues and its resolutions can be binding on all member states. Moreover, it operates with the most efficient committee structure – no more than fifteen members meeting virtually every working day. Nevertheless, it also operates under two real constraints. First, its duties are limited to the maintenance of international peace and security: it is not supposed to stray into economic, social, funding, or other issues which are properly the preserve of different UN organs. This makes it very hard in the daily business of the UN to handle the interlinked nature of many of the modern world’s security issues, especially when most members of the developing world place greater emphasis on the economic causes of violence and instability than on rogue behaviour, terrorism, or criminality. An attempt was made by the UK in 2002 to bring together the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council in informal communications and address the linkage between political and economic considerations, but the move was halted by internal suspicions and institutional jealousies. It was an illustration of the failure of the intergovernmental system at the UN to take a comprehensive approach to security matters and reflected the weakness of the General Assembly as an operational body. The 2005 World Summit made a healthy attempt to improve this issue by creating new bodies such as the Peacebuilding Commission and the Peacebuilding Support Office in the UN Secretariat. It will have to be seen whether these bodies will make a real difference in practice. The rather more fundamental problems associated with the practices and effectiveness of
the General Assembly may continue to be a more consistent drag on the power of the UN to address the more difficult issues.

The second major constraint is that the Council has few instruments at its disposal with which to implement its decisions in a compelling way. In the real world of power struggles, disorder, and greed, a seemingly haphazard collection of state representatives in New York pose a very remote threat to a determined political leader facing a crisis on his or her home territory. The Council can react to recalcitrance with verbal condemnation, moving on to a range of sanctions which are hard to direct at a precise target, with the ultimate choice being the authorization of military action if the situation appears to require it. The firmer the penalty, the more controversial it is likely to be within the Council and the broader the collateral or unintended effects of the action taken. The Council is a long way from being able to act as a global policeman.

A high proportion of the Security Council’s business since the end of the Cold War has been in Africa, where armed factions rejecting the authority of central governments, sometimes with the assistance of a neighbouring state, have been the most frequent cause of conflict and political division. Control over natural resources, such as minerals for the export market, often fuel these conflicts. Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been classic examples of this kind of conflict, with Angola representing something close to a typical civil war between major internal factions, and the DRC demonstrating how a whole region can become embroiled in a breakdown of ethnic relationships and political order. It is the civilian population which tends to suffer most in such crises. International efforts to treat the causes of conflict have to run in parallel, and sometimes in competition, with action to address a humanitarian catastrophe. When the UN is attempting to cope at the same time with comparable disasters in Sudan, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, and Western Sahara, it is not surprising that the Security Council comes close to despair as it calculates its capacity to make a difference in one, let alone all, of these formidable challenges.

Action in the Council typically tends to start with a briefing by the Secretariat about the deteriorating situation, often accompanied by informal recommendations. The Secretariat cannot initiate action until it has obtained authorization from the member states and knows that it has funds to cover the operation. The Secretariat’s suggestions are couched in language which carefully respects the structural sensitivities: for example, ‘the Council may wish to consider whether to authorize a further study/fact-finding mission/preliminary peacekeeping operation.’ The Council may decide to signal its intentions with an informal public statement, a formal Council Declaration or, if serious action is immediately required, a resolution authorizing specific remedial action or demanding a response from a government closely involved. An open debate in the main chamber might be scheduled to allow other member states to comment and to draw public attention to a worsening trend, although discreet action is usually tried first. The
Council might have to escalate its decision-making through all these stages before it catches the attention of its targets. The UN in New York might start to liaise with the regional organization – for instance, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in the case of Sierra Leone or Liberia – to share the burden of necessary action.