Thoughts on the UN at Fifty

Stanley Hoffmann¹

Full text available: PDF format ^*

I

Studies of the United Nations seem to have come full circle. In the years that followed the adoption of the Charter in San Francisco, most of them dealt with the functions that were stressed in the Charter - the maintenance of peace and security, which the League of Nations had signally failed to ensure. The outbreak of the cold war and its effects on an organization whose most important body, the Security Council, could only function if the permanent members - the victors of World War Two - remained in agreement - inspired many works that examined the ways in which the UN was managing to avoid total paralysis. Gradually, after the Korean war, the Suez crisis, and the protracted drama of decolonization in the Belgian Congo, the scholars' attention moved away from the rather unrewarding scene of Chapters VI and VII, toward the other activities of the UN. This shift coincided with the vast increase in membership that resulted from decolonization, and with the growing importance of the developing and non-aligned countries that now made up the majority of the General Assembly.

In the 1970s, scholarly explorations of international economic interdependence and of the `regimes' which were being set up to regulate and manage it thus led to a view of the UN in which the central `peace and security' functions had dwindled almost to the point of disappearance. It is as if the study of world affairs had been split into two halves. The dark half was accounted for by a Realist (or Neo-realist) theory that emphasized the inescapable security dilemma faced by States competing in an anarchic system where the distribution of power largely determined their strategies, and where international and regional organizations other than military alliances were of little significance, except as arenas and echo chambers for the major contests. The light or more cheerful half was the domain of a theory that called itself institutionalism (or, sometimes, liberal institutionalism). It stressed both the services that international and regional institutions and regimes could perform even for States defined as self-interested actors, in areas in which the satisfaction of State needs and preferences required cooperation and common solutions, and in the absence of any rational possibility of using force. It also tried to show how the resort, by States, to the institutions that provided such services could gradually affect the way in which States saw and defined their preferences. Thus, the specialized agencies of the UN were often studied as important actors in this process, and the debates in the General Assembly over the nature of the global economic order were seen as attempts to define, so to speak, the terms and rules of `interdependence' in a world of highly unequal States, with profoundly different views about the best economic system and the priorities for economic development.

After the fading away of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Europe, and the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, there was a brief moment of hope, and great expectations for the UN. It appeared to many statesmen and academics that the optimistic vision of liberal institutionalism might perhaps at last cross the great divide that had separated the realm of economic interdependence from that of strategic and diplomatic interaction, and also that the UN could now at last perform, in the latter, the mission that had been entrusted to it by the Charter for the preservation and defence of peace and security. Gorbachev's `new thinking', which seemed to convert Soviet foreign policy to the key concepts of American institutionalists, the Gulf war which came pretty close to the collective security model of the Charter (despite departures duly noted in the papers of this symposium, but mainly because of the relative harmony of the permanent members), the American hope that the `Big Five' would (as in FDR's scheme) remain united under American leadership, all this allowed for talk about a new world order. Four years after the Gulf war, it is a new disillusionment that prevails.

As in the 1950s, and early 1960s, we have seen a mass of symposia, books and articles that examine the performance of the post-1989 UN in the political-military realm, the role played by the Secretary-General and the Security Council in conflict resolution, peace-keeping and enforcement. The essays which follow provide a scrupulous and comprehensive analysis. But for reasons that are no longer the superpowers' bipolar conflict and the violence it engendered, the conclusions often tend to be gloomy, and to highlight the new obstacles encountered by the UN in its current activist phase. Perhaps because the authors of these essays are lawyers, they tend to emphasize the responsibility of the UN's own institutions, or the misuse of Charter provisions, or mistaken strategies adopted by the political organs. They are right to do so; but it is necessary to step outside the UN. For many of the flaws that are deplored here result from the nature of the current international system, so radically different from the one both the Realists and the Liberal institutionalists had in mind.² It has always been a problem that specialists of international politics dealing primarily with the diplomatic and strategic scene dismissed the UN from their analyses, whereas lawyers and political scientists specialized in the study of the UN's political functions tended to lock themselves up, so to speak, within the UN and to look at the world outside only dimly, as it was filtered into and through the UN.

It is striking, for instance, that the essays deal much more with the (undoubtedly important) distinction between Chapter VI and Chapter VII, between the settlement of disputes and peace-keeping on the one hand, and enforcement on the other, than with the distinction between inter-State conflicts and domestic turbulence or civil wars. It is attempts at dealing with the latter that have dominated the UN agenda in recent years. And when one examines what is at stake in such internal crises, one realizes that the distinction between order and justice, between `police' and `temple' that Prof. Koskenniemi embraces con brio is untenable. Even in inter-State relations, while `anarchy' - the absence of a world centre of power - obliges States to deal first with order (or disorder), every scheme of order incorporates certain conceptions of justice (or injustice), or at least certain forms of justice or injustice emerge from it; and the Charter makes of the Security Council not only a policeman but a `good officer' or mediator: one cannot resolve disputes without being concerned with justice (especially, as Prof. Ratner notes, because the Security Council is not bound to offer only terms of settlement proposed or accepted in advance by the parties). One cannot be in charge of `peace' without worrying about the justice of that peace. In intra-State disorders, rival conceptions of both order and justice are almost always at stake, and while the very `cause' (in the jus ad bellum meaning) that the Council has invoked to justify its interventions in domestic affairs despite the principle of State sovereignty, i.e. the notion that the (internal) trouble constitutes a threat to international peace and security, appears to stress only order, the cases in which interventions have occurred are all instances in which disorder provoked massive violations of justice (ethnic cleansing, famine, refugees) - or else massive violations of human rights, the supreme form of injustice, constituted the disruption of order.

^* The free viewer (Acrobat Reader) for PDF file is available at the Adobe Systems.

1 Harvard University.

2 See my essay, `The Crisis of Liberal Institutionalism', Foreign Policy (Spring 1995).

© 1990-2004 European Journal of International Law
All comments and suggestions should be sent to webmaster
This site is part of the Academy of European Law online, a joint partnership of the Jean Monnet Center at NYU School of Law and the Academy of European Law at the European University Institute.
This file was last modified: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 12:13PM