The United Nations, we learn from its charter, must “maintain international peace and security”, “develop friendly relations among nations” and “achieve international co-operation in solving international problems . . . and in encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms”. Few doubt that the UN has achieved some good during its existence; but its success has been painfully limited. The world has changed since its foundation and the UN is struggling to keep up.
As crises go, Iraq in 2003 was small fry. Nevertheless, whatever the merits of the various cases for war, it was illegal. Two permanent members of the Security Council and assorted hangers-on went to war in violation of the charter; nobody could stop them and the UN failed to censure them. The military action in Kosovo in 1999 was similarly illegal (even though widely regarded as better justified than Iraq) and also went unpunished.
Yet these cases of illegal action pale in comparison to the legal inaction in Rwanda. In 1994, Hutu extremists seized control of the government and began to annihilate the Tutsi population. Roughly 800,000 people were butchered in just over three months. UN peacekeeping missions are underfunded and ill-equipped at the best of times, but the force in Rwanda was gutted. Governments withdrew their troops and neutrality was insisted upon. The force that was left was virtually paralysed, banned from engaging with the murderers except in self-defence. The scale and purpose of the massacres were known, and yet the Security Council did not intervene until it was too late.
A major weakness of the UN is that, while it is widely seen as an impartial moral and legal authority, it is more a theatre of realpolitik where members (the powerful ones, in particular) pursue their own interests. The General Assembly has little power and the Security Council is constrained by the vetoes of the permanent five (China, France, Russia, the UK and the US). The resolutions that are passed reflect coincidences of national interests more than judgements about right and wrong, with the result that the rules do not prevent atrocities and may even forbid action to stop them.
The subservience of the UN to its member states was suggested by Madeleine Albright, the former US ambassador to the UN, when she noted that it has “no armed forces of its own, no power of arrest, no authority to tax, no right to confiscate, no ability to regulate, no capacity to override treaties” and a budget dwarfed by that of New York City. Albright knows just how weak the UN is, having been intimately involved in preventing action in Rwanda. The local UN commander there, Romeo Dallaire, had argued that a modest show of force would deter the militias, but politics worked against him. The US was still smarting from the deaths of 18 soldiers in Somalia the previous year. Nor was Rwanda strategically important to any powerful countries, and when ten Belgian soldiers were killed there, Belgium’s government and others discovered a phobia of body bags.
States are required under the 1948 Genocide Convention to prevent genocide and punish its perpetrators. But if the genocide is not officially recognised, this obligation doesn’t apply. The Security Council resolution on Rwanda, more than three weeks into the carnage, avoided the word. This, coupled with the withdrawal of troops, was carte blanche for the Hutus. Effective action to deal with ethnic cleansing was likewise shunned in Bosnia, particularly in the case of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, when UN peacekeepers displayed pathological neutrality out of respect for their limited mandate.
Another major weakness of the UN is its charter’s virtual sanctification of state sovereignty. Nothing, it declares, “shall authorise the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state”, except where there are threats to international peace and security. During the 1990s, there were growing calls to allow humanitarian intervention, but the dogma of non-interference cast a long, dark shadow. Some have tried to bypass it. In 1999, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, argued that “acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries, then they can properly be described as threats to international peace and security.” In portraying humanitarian intervention as enlightened self-interest, Blair suggested that states could pursue it while acting within international law – or at least being able to claim that they were doing so.
While this may be practised at times, support for the principle is still far from universal. Many maintain that respect for state sovereignty is the bedrock of international order. Yet the phrase “state sovereignty” is a misnomer, as it is governments that are sovereign. They have power over their people and exert it through the institutions of the state. National sovereignty exists only where the people of a nation are able to hold their government to account. Without democracy, “state sovereignty” is just a noble-sounding way of placating dictators and opting for a quiet life.
So how can we close the gap between the legality and legitimacy of intervention? The Security Council could simply decide to start allowing it more often, but that would be ad hoc and arbitrary. It would be more beneficial to formalise, in the charter itself, the right – and the duty – to intervene in certain situations. The better the UN can endorse such action, the more pressure interventionists will be under to go via the UN and the less scope they will have to abuse the principle for selfish motives.
Many states, particularly in Asia and Africa, are more against intervention than are western nations, a suspicion based on their experiences of colonialism and cold-war power games. The expansion of the Security Council to include permanent members from these parts of the world could alleviate this concern. Countries mooted include India, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria and Japan (there is broader agreement on the principle than on the list). One problem is that more permanent members would mean more vetoes and fewer decisions. It has been suggested that new members could lack the right of veto, or that vetoes could apply only on certain issues. Another possibility is for all permanent members to have half a veto, so that any two could block a resolution.
These would be less bitter pills for the existing powers to swallow than outright abolition of the veto or even the Security Council itself, which has been suggested by George Monbiot. Reform can proceed only with broad consensus.
But, in particular, it requires the blessing of the powerful states. This dependence on the interests of its members may seem to paint a depressing image of the UN’s future. Yet membership can change the interests of governments, particularly in cases where enlightened publics are able to put pressure on their governments to do the right thing.
The secretary general, Kofi Annan, has recognised the need for the UN to be able to deal not just with genocides, but also with the threats from terrorism and weapons proliferation. “It is not enough to denounce unilateralism, unless we also face up squarely to the concerns that make some states feel uniquely vulnerable, and thus drive them to take unilateral action. We must show that those concerns can, and will, be addressed effectively through collective action.” He supports the enlargement of the Security Council and changes to the charter that could help to keep the powerful states happy. But many people feel that the biggest problem facing the UN is how to constrain, rather than appease, a superpower – namely, the US.
One telling sentence in the National Security Strategy of the USA reads: “No doctrine can anticipate every circumstance in which US action – direct or indirect – is warranted.” In other words, it will do (or not do) anything it wants. Yet it has a point, and one that has a bearing on more than one country’s policies. We used to worry about how the UN was dealing with the cold war; then, in the 1990s, it was genocide; now it’s terrorism. Who knows what problems the world will face in the coming decades? We cannot really judge whether the UN is fit for purpose in the 21st century, as we cannot be sure what purposes it will need to serve.
A highly beneficial reform, therefore, would be to make reform easier, enabling the UN to adapt in order to deal with new problems. If the whole structure required renewal every 15 years, there would only ever be a limited period before the chance arose to incorporate recent, accepted practice into the rules. Agreements on change would still be hard to reach, but there would be less emphasis on preserving the status quo and more motivation to get agreement for the sake of the whole system’s survival.
Confronted by the weaknesses of the UN, it is easy to forget that it does great good. For example, it helps to negotiate and monitor ceasefires and elections. It builds infrastructure in failing and war-torn states. Despite having seemed irrelevant in Kosovo, it now plays a vital role in the reconstruction and administration there. Its agencies do crucial humanitarian work: the World Food Programme feeds more than 70 million a year; Unicef improves health, education and quality of life for children in most countries. The writer David Rieff has argued of the UN that “if all it can now be is a giant diplomatic talking shop and a giant relief and development institution, then the case for abolition is far stronger”. If anything, the opposite is true: if the UN were simply a set of aid agencies and a talking shop, it would do much good and little harm, and would be very popular. It may be tempting to discard a deeply flawed tool for global security, but it is important to remember that there is more to the UN than that, and that dirty drinking water kills many more people than terrorists.
This is an edited version of an essay that was awarded joint first place in the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust/ New Statesman New Political Writing Prize 2004, which asked: “Is the United Nations fit for purpose in the 21st century?” The other winning essay was published in the NS of 13 September
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