Allen Lane £25 pp384
It is astonishing that the United Nations still remains the hope of so many good people when it is so abused by its owners. Each of the five permanent members of its security council — the P5 as they are known in a thousand diplomatic cables — has at some time used the veto to keep the UN away from an aggressive action they decided on unilaterally.
Sometimes they have done so for more trivial national purposes, such as blocking membership of countries they did not like. Meanwhile, they have passed resolution after resolution setting up peacekeeping forces, but have rarely contributed many men to these themselves. No wonder that enlarging the council is a constant theme of those who aspire to enjoy the same privileges, and that abolition of the veto is the constant theme of the rest.
The UN charter seems inspired by noble ideals (“We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . .”), but it is founded on power; and since power is unequally distributed, the charter is one of the most unequal treaties ever written (the nuclear non-proliferation treaty runs it a distant second). It is useful to have an evaluation of the UN from a historian rather than a lawyer or a philosopher. And especially from a historian of power such as Paul Kennedy, professor of history at Yale university, and the author of, among many other books, the bestselling The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
Article 2 of the charter tells of the sovereign equality of its members. But, if you read on, you find that the part of the organisation that makes the decisions on war and peace is the security council, and that its decisions require positive votes from the P5.
Other parts of the UN are concerned with economic development or human rights, but these have either floated off on their own, like the World Health Organisation, or they are largely ineffective, like the now defunct Human Rights Commission. Kennedy’s book tells the story of its three dimensions over 60 years but inevitably it is the UN’s role in peace and security that is at the heart of this book, since this is its core business, and neither development nor human rights can flourish where there is no peace.
As a realist, Kennedy understands that it is the veto that explains the UN’s success compared with that of its predecessor, the League of Nations. Peace comes not from virtue but from the management of power. The veto was granted because it reflected reality. Neither America nor the Soviet Union would have joined without it and it was their absence that doomed the league. The veto does not stop great powers, especially veto powers, from attacking the weak; but it does stop the UN from taking on the strong. The veto was a way of avoiding both irrelevance and a third world war.
The proof of this was seen in the Korean war, which was the nearest the UN ever came to sponsoring a clash of great powers. As it was, Truman sacked General Mac-Arthur rather than attack China. But the situation only got so far because neither the Soviet Union (absent) nor China — represented by Taiwan — was there to veto an action that would have led the UN to disaster. The right of veto thus belongs not to those who make a positive contribution but to those with vast destructive power. On that basis, for the latter part of the cold war, the P5 might have become the P2. Perhaps P1 would be enough today. But, since there is a veto on removing the veto, such a change, however logical, is inconceivable. Great projects such as the UN, the League of Nations and the Concert of Europe come out of the destruction of general war, and we must hope that never comes again.
As Kennedy makes clear, our destiny increasingly presents itself in global terms: global information, global warming, global terrorism. Never has global governance been more needed. But what do you do when the most powerful player seems not to want to play? The moment may not be far away when it will pay America to freeze its assets into institutional power. Perhaps the same vision that led America to establish the UN will lead it to help it function.
The best part of this book is its conclusion, where Kennedy’s perspective as a historian enables him to make the case that, for all its faults and failures, the UN is a remarkable existence, historically unprecedented. UN agencies may be inefficient but they kill fewer people than the imperial regimes they replaced. It may not have brought universal democracy, but UN election monitoring has changed the face of many countries. Where the UN succeeds, in El Salvador or Namibia, there are many others to claim credit; where it fails — as is the norm in foreign policy — everyone finds it easy to blame the UN. Even Kennedy seems to hold the UN responsible for the Somalia debacle where 16 American rangers were killed and dragged through the streets. In fact, the forces were under American command covered by a security council resolution drafted by America.
The ambition of Kennedy’s project prevents him from giving much detail of the thousand dramas of the past 60 years, each one vital to those involved. The history of institutions misses the fear and the violence that lie behind the debates in the security council (“Far off, no matter what good they intended, / Two armies waited for a verbal error”, wrote WH Auden). Anyone wanting a sense of this reality should read General Romeo Dallaire’s account of what it was like to lead an inadequate force in Rwanda with little backup from headquarters and no apparent interest from the great powers who sent it. Who was to blame for the genocide? The killers themselves, of course, and the UN for timidity and poor organisation, but also the P5 who sent the wrong force with the wrong orders, and either didn’t know or didn’t care. Among these, only the UN (in the person of Kofi Annan) has examined its record in public instead of blaming others.
The UN is a mess, badly run by competing powers, badly organised, with staff ranging from useless timeservers to the talented and dedicated. But it is better, one would have to conclude with Kennedy, than the great powers that own it, and therein is the best hope for our future.
Noble ideals
Kennedy draws a trenchant parallel between the UN in Yugoslavia and the pre-1914 Balkans. “Bismarck sometimes cursed aloud at the way rivalling and murderous ‘Balkan sheep stealers’ (his term) threatened the peace of Europe. He might not have been too surprised at what happened after . . . 1991.”
Read on...
websites: www.un.org/
United Nations official website
Robert Cooper is the director-general for external and politico- military affairs at the Council for the European Union. The Parliament of Man is available at the Books First price of £22.50 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585
