The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (47 page)

The Middle East Peace Process, as it is optimistically labelled, has been affected more than any other agenda item by the threat or the use of the veto. While many observers of the UN accept that the veto was the price that had to be paid at the beginning to secure the support of the strongest powers, the majority of member states now resent the privilege more than any other aspect of the UN’s machinery. It adds to the frustration felt by Palestine’s supporters, which has boiled over into many other UN issues as they seek to raise the cost of the failure to resolve the conflict. The question of Palestine symbolizes, even more emphatically than Iraq, the limits of the UN’s powers when member states are divided. It is also a manifestation of the absence of democratic principles and practice at the global level, even when democracy is so strongly advocated at the national level as a principal remedy for conflict.

Since the United Nations was established in 1945, the size and nature of the organization has evolved and the world has changed. It is much harder to elicit effective action from an organization of 192 members with little inclination to accept guidance or leadership from any particular elite than it was with the original membership of 51 and the circumstances of the Cold War. The legacy of the colonial era, the memory of competing superpowers, and the dominance of security issues, including the real risk of nuclear annihilation, still influence national and regional attitudes in the new millennium, even when the substantive priorities of the majority are focused on the unequal distribution of global wealth and a rapidly changing balance of global power. Nevertheless there is a growing sense of political independence everywhere, which encourages polarization rather than coherence. With this evolution, it is remarkable that the UN remains an organization so much in demand and doing so much good. The Security Council continues as a magnet for political attention and, when it gets its mandate right, can play a considerable role in maintaining international peace and security.

Yet there are severe strains. One of them surrounds the right to a veto resting with the five Permanent Members. This no longer has as much relevance to the balance of superpower interests as it did in the Cold War context. It is seen more as an anachronistic privilege, used too often for narrow national reasons to have
retained any real credibility. The UK, which has avoided the use of its veto since 1989, recognizes that it has to earn its status in the Security Council by making, and paying for, a concrete and effective contribution to problem-solving and peacekeeping arrangements wherever it can. The UK’s unilateral effort to turn around the situation in Sierra Leone was valuable in this context, as well as signalling the strength of its relationship and debt to a West African partner in desperate need.

That, however, is an example of a rare Permanent Member intervention in peacekeeping, which illustrates another problem: the reluctance of countries with modern, technologically driven armed forces to contribute to peacekeeping operations run along less than modern lines by a hard pressed Department of Peacekeeping Operations. There is strong resentment across the UN membership over the burden, mainly carried by states in the developing world, of providing forces to UN peacekeeping operations.
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Several attempts have been made to form a basis of cooperation between developed and developing world military philosophies to provide a harder cutting edge to operations in more difficult areas. But these have not so far resulted in a successful format.

There have also been problems over the use of another instrument of the Security Council, sanctions (see
Chapter 8
). Economic and other non-military penalties have to be available to the Security Council, which otherwise has no enforcement mechanism between the power of words and military intervention. But sanctions, as the record shows, too often do damage to innocent civilians rather than to the regime which has incurred the displeasure of the Council. Again, reforms to make sanctions better targeted and less economically destructive have not yet found the balance between over-comprehensiveness and irrelevance. The history of the various conflicts in Sudan, for instance, illustrates the difficulty for the international community in having a real effect on those responsible for massive abuses of human rights, while respecting the sovereign interests of a member state.

While their wisdom and relevance have in many ways survived the test of time, the Charter provisions of 1945 have not provided the complete answer to today’s international peace and security problems. It would have been a miracle if they had, with the world changing so fast. Yet the dangers of revising the Charter, or of starting again with a new global institution, are all too clear. Increasingly, therefore, the UN risks preserving what is still valuable at the cost of a diminishing credibility when it is mixed with the elements that are no longer effective. This applies to the Security Council less intensely than to the General Assembly and some other parts of the organization, but it is still a relevant criticism. Because the United Nations
remains a rule-based organization, Security Council practice is tied to the provisions of the Charter, but neither the Security Council nor the Charter completely fit the bill of the world’s security requirements.

This chapter has not sought to analyse the Security Council’s case history in any depth. Other sections of the book will bring out in greater detail some of the trends which have characterized the UN’s attempts to eradicate the scourge of war. The record suggests, nevertheless, that a mountain remains to be climbed if a truly global approach is to be forged from the swirl of national interests and cultural identities which make up the world community. What is at present missing from the UN scene is a comprehensive strategy for world security which aligns a proper understanding of the principal threats with linked mechanisms for addressing all their constituent causes. As recommendation 6(a) in Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s 2005 treatise
In Larger Freedom
puts it, heads of state and government should

The successful implementation of such a strategy appears beyond the reach of the community of nations as they operate at present, unless both governments and their constituencies reorder their priorities and respond to the longer-term requirements of a decent, sustainable world. The members of the Security Council, in dealing with just a part of this vital agenda, cannot be expected to do more than reflect the tendencies and interests of those they represent. Until the UN creates its own constituency of global citizens who put their collective concerns first, the picture is unlikely to change.

The Security Council, then, has tried its best to address real security issues in effective ways and has recorded some successes. Its scope and power are constrained by the structural weaknesses in the UN system, and by the impact of national politics on international and collective interests. Improvements will not
come from any tinkering with procedure or process, and although an expansion of its numbers would deliver a fairer representation of the wider membership, reform would have to address a range of other questions to bring a noticeable upgrading of its performance. The 2005 UN World Summit asked many of the right questions. Will member states be able to find the right answers?

WILLIAM STUECK

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25 June 1950 North Korea launched a conventional military attack on South Korea. As an active participant in the creation of the now threatened Republic of Korea (ROK), the United Nations faced the first test of its capacity as an instrument of collective security. Although in important ways it passed that test, the experience of the Korean War that followed reflected the limitations of the United Nations at least as much as its potential strength. In particular the Korean case reaffirmed the limited utility of the Security Council in the Cold War context of sharp division between the world’s two strongest powers. Indeed, in September 1950 the General Assembly emerged as the leading UN body regarding Korea, and it continued in that position not only until the shooting stopped with the signing of an armistice on 27 July 1953 but for the remainder of the Cold War.

On a superficial level the role of the Security Council in the Korean War is straightforward. Although Article 39 of the UN Charter gave that body authority to ‘determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, and … make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken … to maintain or restore international peace and security’, the veto power of each of the five Permanent Members, which the Soviet Union had used liberally prior to June 1950, appeared to make Security Council action unlikely in the event of a North Korean attack.
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In January 1950, however, the Soviet Union began a boycott of the Security Council allegedly in protest of the Council’s failure to replace the Republic of China in China’s seat with the recently established People’s Republic of China (PRC), which now controlled virtually all of the country except Taiwan and some offshore islands. So when war began in Korea on 25 June, the Soviet Union was absent from the Security Council and the United States took the opportunity to push through two resolutions. The first, passed just over twenty-four hours after hostilities began, declared that North Korea had launched an attack on South Korea, called on North Korea to withdraw to the thirty-eighth parallel, the boundary between the two, and requested that members assist in executing the resolution.
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The second resolution, passed two days later, noted that North Korea had refused to cease hostilities and withdraw to the thirty-eighth parallel. It recommended that UN members ‘furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea [South Korea] as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area’.
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On 7 July, with US forces already committed to the peninsula, the Security Council passed a third resolution recommending that members providing assistance under the previous resolutions make it ‘available to a unified command under the United States’ and requested that the United States ‘designate the commander’.
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At the end of the month the Security Council passed a fourth resolution placing responsibility for the relief effort in Korea entirely under the unified command.
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This six-week period of successful US initiatives on Korea in the Security Council came to an abrupt end on 1 August, when Soviet delegate Jacob A. Malik returned to the body as its president, a month-long rotating position. The Security Council quickly became a debating society in which the United States and its allies battled the Soviet Union for world opinion rather than seeking solutions to the problems of war and peace. When on 19 September the General Assembly convened its annual session in New York, it largely replaced the Security Council as the focal point at the United Nations for diplomatic manoeuvring on Korea. After November the Security Council became merely the recipient of periodic reports from the UN command and of occasional Soviet and North Korean reports of alleged US misdeeds in the war.
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Indeed, the United States used the occasion of the Korean crisis and the Soviet stymieing of Security Council action to persuade allies in the General Assembly to pass the ‘Uniting for Peace Resolution’, which sought to strengthen the larger body’s capacity to respond effectively in crisis situations.
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When we delve below the surface of this narrative, a variety of conclusions suggest themselves regarding the nature of the Security Council’s role in the United Nations and in international politics during the early Cold War. The most obvious is that that role was narrowed severely by the Soviet-American conflict. The United States submitted the Korean issue to the Security Council, and in all likelihood would have done so first even had the Soviets not been absent; but from the beginning State Department officials calculated that, in the event the Soviets returned and blocked action there, the United States would press for a special session of the General Assembly.
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Under Article 20 of the Charter, such a session could be ‘convoked’ by the Secretary-General if requested by a majority of its members.
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