The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (50 page)

As for the resolution of international disputes, the United Nations, which had played an earlier role in reinforcing the division of Korea, now proved a failure in bringing about its reunification. With the PRC, North Korea, and South Korea blocked from membership, the international organization was an unlikely venue for serious negotiations to end the division. And the maintenance of peace on the peninsula rested far more on the commitment to the ROK of the United States and its maintenance of substantial armed forces there than on any memory of past UN exploits.

So the Korean War revealed the United Nations largely as the equal of the sum of its parts. When most of those parts saw an interest in restraining one of its members – indeed, even the most powerful of them – the organization demonstrated a utility of some consequence. Looking forward from 1953, however, the consistent replication of that utility seemed highly unlikely. Even a single repeat performance was far from guaranteed. The best that can be said is that, unlike the League of Nations and the aggressions of the 1930s, the United Nations did play a useful role in Korea and it survived the experience to remain available as a possible venue for significant action in the future.

WM. ROGER LOUIS

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NEURIN BEVAN
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witty yet incisive comment cut to the heart of the division of sentiment in Britain at the height of the Suez crisis in November 1956. On the one side stood those who continued to believe in the supremacy of Britain’s traditional national and imperial mission. On the other were the champions of the United Nations who held that the UN Charter had opened a new chapter in international law, indeed in human affairs, and that the United Nations therefore held the higher allegiance. In fact there was a great deal of ambivalence towards such passionate convictions, but feelings ran high – as high as on any other issue since the debate about appeasement in the late 1930s – and Bevan correctly detected the principal cleavage. At critical points in the Suez crisis, the debate centred as much on what was commonly assumed to be the new world order as on Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Suez Canal. To those who believed in the United Nations, the Suez confrontation represented a supreme test. Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956 not only created a crisis at the United Nations but also, it seemed to many at the time, a turning point in history in which fidelity to international principle came irrevocably into conflict with the self-interest of the European colonial regimes. In 1956 many – and not only in Britain – were cautious about approaching the United Nations to preserve the peace at Suez. This caution was partly because of awareness of the quite different motives and policies of Britain and the United States on this crisis. It may also have been caused by the poor record of the Security Council in the crises between Egypt and Israel in the years before 1956. In 1951 the Council had called on Egypt to stop interfering with goods destined for Israel passing through the Suez Canal.
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In 1955 it had repeatedly called on both sides to observe the existing ceasefire provisions.
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All this was to little effect. As the crisis over Suez unfolded in the summer of 1956, it was not referred to the United Nations until 13 September, nearly two months into the crisis, and then on the initiative of Sir Anthony Eden, not John Foster Dulles or Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Part of the reason for hesitation on the British side was the Prime Minister’s aim to keep options open, to be able to use force against Egypt if necessary. But the possibility of military operations caused soul-searching reflection on Britain’s commitment to the UN Charter, which forbids the use of unilateral action except in extreme circumstances of self-defence. Self-defence was the argument put forward by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, and accepted by Eden as the rationale if force proved to be necessary. But the Prime Minister was well aware that the overwhelming weight of legal opinion held that the invasion of Egypt would violate the Charter – a position tenaciously held by the head of the Foreign Office’s Legal Department, Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice. So persistent and trenchant were Fitzmaurice’s warnings that Eden at one point wrote: ‘Fitz is the last person I want consulted. The lawyers are always against our doing anything. For god’s sake, keep them out of it. This is a political affair.’
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It was in fact both a legal and political affair. It is of considerable interest to those interested in the history of the United Nations that Fitzmaurice, one of the most distinguished lawyers within the British government who later became a judge of the International Court at The Hague, saw the issue clearly in both dimensions throughout. Aggressive action against Egypt, he wrote, would destroy Britain’s moral influence at the United Nations. Fitzmaurice was emphatic about the result: ‘If we attacked Egypt… we should, in my opinion, be committing a clear illegality and a breach of the United Nations Charter.’
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A guarded and sceptical approach to UN involvement characterized the attitude not only of Eden but also and above all of the Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld.
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Though he later acquired the reputation as an activist Secretary-General, the qualities of circumspection and caution defined the early years of Hammarskjöld’s tenure. The Suez crisis marked his emergence as a leader with breadth of vision and galvanizing, nervous energy. On the whole he managed to steer a steady and neutral course. His performance was all the more remarkable because of his critics’ warnings, which would become ever more insistent later in his career, especially during the Congo crisis of 1960–1. His position was vulnerable because neither of the superpowers could rely on him to promote aims other than those of the United Nations. Neither Britain nor Egypt, nor the United States could count on him to defend their interests. Hammarskjöld was his own man. The British referred to him sardonically as the Pope on the East River.
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This chapter will assess British aims and motives, thereby demonstrating some of the underlying reasons for the Security Council’s failure to take effective action. It will also outline the unusually central role of the General Assembly in the outcome of the crisis. The initial British assessment of the prospect of turning to the United Nations was negative. A Foreign Office committee agreed unanimously that it would be better to summon a conference of the maritime powers than to submit the matter to the United Nations. ‘A special session of the General Assembly would be chancy’, according to the Foreign Office committee, nor would the Security Council be satisfactory. In the atmosphere of the cold war that prevailed at the United Nations, the Soviet Union would probably veto any proposal sponsored by the British. The Foreign Office committee also reached a negative conclusion on the possibility of confiding in the Secretary-General because whatever information they gave him ‘would tend to reveal our intentions’. The Committee’s report ended on the further negative note that the Chinese President of the Security Council would probably vote with the Arabs. Clearly not much could be expected from the United Nations.
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Nor did the Prime Minister think it expedient to turn to the United Nations. ‘Please let us keep quiet about the UN’, he commented on 8 August.
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In a manner entirely consistent with his earlier views about the League of Nations, Eden proclaimed himself to be an internationalist but privately he had viewed both the League and especially the United Nations as organizations that might do more harm than good. In the 1930s he regarded the League as an extension of the Foreign Office. The United Nations was much less malleable. Nevertheless he needed to rely on the support of the United States and the Commonwealth, both of which would increasingly insist that Britain show good faith by referring the dispute to the United Nations. Eden did not want to appear as the aggressor in the judgement of world opinion. He therefore acquiesced in the idea of a maritime conference and eventually agreed to submit the issue to the United Nations to prove that Britain had gone to every length to resolve the question by peaceful means. But ultimately there would be a fundamental and irrevocable difference between him and the United States, the Dominions, and not least the Labour Party. Many at the time assumed that the British government would abide by a UN solution to the problem. Yet Eden himself never wavered in the belief that the British must act in their own self-interest regardless of the United Nations.

By late August 1956, and even before, there were signs of internal strain on the British side. Four out of five British voters believed that the dispute should be referred to the United Nations.
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Most members of the Cabinet now thought that the issue should be submitted to the United Nations before force could be used as an ultimate resort. In explaining British wariness towards the United Nations, Lord Home, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, succeeded more conspicuously with Australia and New Zealand than with Canada, Pakistan, and India.
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Much would depend on the attitude of the United States. Within the Cabinet, Harold Macmillan as Chancellor of the Exchequer held a position of particular significance not only because of his estimate of the crisis in relation to the British economy but because of a visit to Washington in September and his assessment of Eisenhower and Dulles. If Eden misjudged the Americans, the misperception was all the more pronounced in Macmillan’s celebrated misjudgement that Eisenhower was ‘really determined, somehow or another, to bring Nasser down’ and would not interfere with British plans.
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Much more accurately, Macmillan wrote of Dulles’s reaction in mid-September to Britain’s submission of the Suez issue to the United Nations. Dulles lost his temper: ‘We should get nothing but trouble in New York.’ As if to lend colour to the exchange, Macmillan added in his distinctive racy style: ‘From the way Dulles spoke you would have thought he was warning us against entering a bawdy-house.’
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Nevertheless Eden went ahead. The British decision on 13 September 1956 to refer the Suez issue to the United Nations marked a turning point in the crisis.
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Eden himself had begun to play it both ways: he wanted to be able to use force, but also to emerge, if necessary and if possible, as a man of peace supporting a solution at the United Nations.

The same wariness demonstrated by the British also characterized the Americans and even the Egyptians. It puzzled the British at the time why Nasser did not protest to the Security Council against the mobilization of troops in the eastern Mediterranean. In fact Nasser was suspicious of the United Nations because he believed it to be an organization still dominated by the Western powers. He saw the danger that the United Nations itself might merely cloak a new form of European imperialism. The United States also viewed the United Nations with considerable circumspection. Dulles feared that he could not rely on either the Security Council or the General Assembly to support an American point of view, more specifically Dulles’s own aims. The general attitude of uncertainty towards the United Nations helps to explain not only the chronology of events but also how the principles at stake in the crisis were articulated.

At the same time that Britain and France continued military planning and mobilization, and eventually entered into the fateful collusion with Israel, the Suez crisis played itself out at the United Nations. The British, French, and Egyptian representatives came close, as will be seen, to resolving the crisis. After the Israeli attack on Egypt in late October, however, the British and French vetoed resolutions by the Security Council. The vetoes demonstrated its paralysis. In striking contrast, the General Assembly played a paramount part in the crisis. This was because of the ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution, which had been adopted in November 1950 after the end of a boycott of the Security Council by the Soviet Union.
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According to this little-used procedure, matters affecting security could be transferred to the General Assembly if the Security Council itself could not agree because of the veto. On 31 October 1956, the Security Council decided, against the votes of Britain and France, to call for an emergency session of the General Assembly to discuss the crisis.
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The General Assembly thus voted on 2 November 1956 to call for a ceasefire.
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Though it lies mainly beyond the scope of this chapter, the General Assembly in the aftermath of the crisis also created the United Nations’ first major peacekeeping mission – the United Nations Emergency Force. In a quite unexpected way, the Suez crisis thus played an important part in the early history of the United Nations.

In a visit to London in early August 1956, Dulles identified Lord Salisbury as one of the strongest personalities in the British Cabinet. Dulles preferred Salisbury to Eden as a social companion because of Salisbury’s ‘intellectuality’, in other words, an ability to discuss abstract or engaging ideas as well as the scope, depth, and complexity of the problems of the moment.
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As much as anyone in the Eden government, Salisbury had an understanding of the way the colonial and Commonwealth system had evolved since the beginning of the Second World War. A British representative at the San Francisco conference in 1945, he helped to create the trusteeship system of the United Nations.
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He was thus one of the founders of the United Nations itself, but he was not uncritical of the organization. At San Francisco he had been on guard against establishing an international body that could interfere in the administration of the British colonies. Though an internationalist in the sense of wanting to learn from the mistakes of the League of Nations and to establish an organization that would preserve peace by preventing aggression, he did not want the affairs of the British Empire discussed, in Salisbury’s own words, by the ‘rag tag and bobtail’ Latin American countries and former colonies that increasingly made up the membership of the United Nations.
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He wanted to avoid, in Churchill’s phrase, Britain being put ‘in the dock’. It is thus a matter of considerable irony that in November 1956 Britain was not only put in the dock but widely condemned as a renegade rejecting the UN code of international conduct. By bombing airfields and other military targets in and around Cairo at the same time that Soviet tanks crushed Budapest, the British found themselves judged as possessing the same brutal and barbaric standards as the Russians.