The making
of a security community: the United Nations after the Cold War.
Fromuth, Peter
J.. Journal of International Affairs01/01/93
46:n2. 341-366
In passing
from the Cold War to the present, the old alliances of East and West have
traded the angst of doomsday for the complexity of community living. During
the Cold War period, so long as the alliances' security policies were dictated
by the so-called clear and present danger of annihilation, their moral
foundations were self-evident. So long as their resources were equal to
the threats they faced, the alliances were physically and politically self-sufficient
as well. The bipolar structure of the Cold War dispensed with any necessity,
and prevented any ability, to build a universal security consensus, much
less consult with one. Challenges to the justice or equity of the status
quo - often raised by developing countries and lesser states within the
Western alliance - were swept aside by the larger challenge of survival
itself.
Yet as the
danger of Cold War-imposed nuclear doomsday has receded, so too has the
global security system that was sustained by the fear of mortal danger.
There is no longer a single threat capable of eliciting the same moral
clarity or strategic simplicity, nor any ultima ratio to legitimate the
same narrow political foundations and exclusive decision-making forums.
The world is indeed a safer place, but keeping it that way may now be more
difficult.
The difficulty
starts with the political and conceptual basis for continued U.S. security,
since public support of the required investment will be hard to reconcile
with a demonstrably declining risk of attack. Another difficulty is that
current global security concerns are geographically and culturally diffuse,
unlike the nuclear and ideological challenges from the former Soviet Union.
A third complicating factor is that the critical theaters for confronting
nuclear security or nationalist violence will more often be within states
rather than between them. A further challenge, a derivative of the first
three, is that the active support of the international community is essential
to meet most security needs - a radical change from the self-sufficiency
of the Cold War alliances, and one that requires very different political
skills.
Notions of
sovereignty also have changed in fundamental ways. While the state remains
the basis of international action, the legitimacy of the state now is increasingly
seen as coming from the people.(2) This concept of sovereignty poses a
threat to those countries who believe that sovereignty derives from the
soil or institutional organ of a state. In addition, changes in the concept
of sovereignty suggest that "added to the dimension of |right'
is the dimension of responsibility."(3) In the post-cold War context, this
means that a state's failure to fulfill its responsibility may lead to
international intervention, as exemplified in the Iraq and Somalia cases
discussed later in this article.
A possible
response to these challenges, but an inadequate one, is the proposition
that with the end of the Cold War, all countries now belong to a single
international political system and thus ignore systemic dangers to the
detriment of their safety. Certainly the issues at the top of current U.S.
security concerns - violent secessionism in Europe and Eurasia, destabilizing
regional conflict and proliferating weapons of mass destruction - support
the case for extended self-defense. Yet the members of the international
community will never be equally affected by such phenomena, and the United
States will rarely be the soonest or most threatened by any of them.
To proceed
beyond narrow calculations of national interest, and to meet the geographical,
legal and political challenges of global security after the Cold War, a
new international security system must answer a question its predecessor
was never asked: Whose security is to be preserved? This article argues
that the only sustainable rationale for the security of the many is the
security of the whole, which requires the designation and the preservation
of the international community as both a legal and a normative order.
In this article,
the term international community is used to refer to the shared belief
of a growing majority of nation-states that international law and institutions,
especially the Charter and organizations of the United Nations, are necessary
for the arbitration of relations between states, the protection of common
principles and the promotion of common values and material well-being.
Among the nations of the world, however, sharp differences will continue
to arise over the substance of communitarian principles as well as the
role, composition and authority of the U.N. Security Council in upholding
and protecting those principles. Nevertheless, there is no major challenge
to the fundamental premise that in order for global security cooperation
to work in the so-called New World Order, stronger standards are needed
to promote that security and more forceful institutions are necessary to
compel it.
The
Evolution of the U.N. Security Council
The Charter
of the United Nations charges it with organizing cooperation to enforce
peaceful relations among all the countries of the world. In practice, the
actual workload was supposed to be balanced, according to Chapter VIH of
the Charter, by sharing tasks with regional groups.(4) Yet none of the
regional groups in existence today possesses sufficient authority or resources
to meet all or perhaps even most of the world's peace-enforcement needs.(5)
This reality provides the United Nations with an increased responsibility
for defining and addressing the needs of a new security order.
It is often
observed that the Security Council is finally fulfilling the role the U.N.
Charter assigned it.(6) In fact, although the Security Council increasingly
acts as a kind of global hotline for emergency response, the distress calls
are not at all what the Charter's framers had intended. In the framers'
world, threats to peace were expected to sweep across state borders, not
erupt within them. As the atom is to nuclear physics, the nation-state
was supposed to be the basic unit of international politics. Yet since
the end of the Cold War, the pent-up hatred and frustration of nationalist,
ethnic, religious and other forces have exploded, splitting the nation-state
atom and sending shock waves across the international system.
The Security
Council agenda currently mirrors those disturbances, as it does the general
view that however domestic their origins, these disturbances also raise
important international security concerns. This new operational focus alters
the Council's relationship to the larger community of nation-states it
serves. In the past 45 years, excepting its support for decolonization,
opposition to apartheid and notorious involvement in quelling Katangan
secession in the Congo, the Security Council's writ ended where sovereignty
began. Indeed Chapter I, Article 2.7 embedded the Doctrine of Non-Interference
in the U.N. Charter, making it one of the strongest redoubts of state sovereignty
in current international law. Article 2.7 states:
Nothing contained
in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene
in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or
shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the
present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application
of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.
Recent conflicts
have cracked this once-solid edifice in several places. In Namibia, the
United Nations rejected South African jurisdiction, although it carried
out transitional assistance with the consent of the parties concerned.(7)
In Somalia, the question of domestic jurisdiction has not arisen, either
in response to the deployment of a modest U.N. force or the U.S.-led Operation
Restore Hope, in the absence of a government to assert it.(8) In Cambodia,
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Western Sahara the parties requested U.N. involvement,(9)
although the role of outside states had internationalized each of these
conflicts anyway, thus placing them within the legal scope of U.N. attention.(10)
The exception in the final clause of Chapter I, Article 2.7 is the vehicle
for intervention in the case of Iraq, as it was in Yugoslavia before Croatian,
Slovenian and Bosnian secession.(11)
In any one
of these cases it may be debated whether the Security Council writ has
actually lengthened, or whether special circumstances have caused state
sovereignty to yield or be redefined. The so-called special circumstances
view is the favored one of some current Council members, who, lacking the
votes to obstruct various resolutions, somewhat plaintively asserted that
none set a precedent.(12) It is possible that, while the world community
claims to be tightly committed to non-interference, in practice it carves
up the concept like a Swiss cheese of exceptions. It is more likely, however,
that basic changes are taking place.
The essence
of these changes is that global political, economic and technological developments
attach increasingly concrete and compelling meanings to the notion of international
community. As this occurs, it becomes more acceptable to promote claims
on that community's behalf - even at the expense of individual states.
Reinforcing this trend is the fact that while sovereignty remains the consensus
point of departure for organizing international security in the post-cold
War period, community-based action is the vehicle of choice for getting
there.
Recent
Actions of the U.N. Security Council
The Security
Council has responded as necessary to the momentous changes in the international
political system over the last few years. Several far-reaching steps taken
by the Security Council have recently been adding momentum and credibility
to the communitarian element in global security.
Iraq:
Weapons Monitoring, Inspection and Destruction
A dramatic
example was the groundbreaking Resolution 687, passed in 1991, which confirmed
terms for a formal cease-fire between Iraq and Kuwait.(13) It was the first
occasion on which the Security Council used the extraordinary power of
Chapter VII to define conditions for peace with programmatic specificity.
Among these conditions was a compliance-monitoring plan described by former
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering, as mandating "the
strongest, most extensive verification procedures and the most effective
enforcement provisions in the history of arms control."(14) An array of
institutions with mandatory powers was also brought to life to demarcate
the Iraq-Kuwait boundary, uncover and destroy weapons and design and administer
compensation for Iraq's victims.(15) In a provision reminiscent of the
post-war restrictions on Germany, Iraq was permanently prohibited from
the acquisition or development of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.(16)
The weapons
of mass destruction plank in Resolution 687 establishes the principle that
a country that violates international law may have its sovereignty permanently
- and uniquely - restricted in order to better secure the interests of
the wider international community.(17) The weapons-monitoring regime is
similarly far-reaching. It signals to developers and stockpilers of weapons
of mass destruction that such measures may target them also. In fact, the
intrusive inspections used to identify and monitor Iraqi weapons-related
activities are already influencing the practice and design of multilateral
control regimes for nuclear, chemical and other weapons of mass destruction.
Another consequence is that the role of the Security Council as enforcer
of nuclear non-proliferation, long-neglected despite its basis in the statutes
of the International Atomic Energy Agency, is now regarded seriously.(18)
Of course Iraq is a special case: As a defeated state, subject to mandatory
actions and sanctions under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, its sovereignty
is legally restricted. Nonetheless, Resolution 687 was revolutionary and,
as noted above, its implementation has already strengthened multilateral
arms control.
Iraqi misbehavior
provided the stimulus for a path-breaking expansion of the Security Council's
role in the area of humanitarian security as well. In April 1991, alarmed
by Iraq's persecution of its Kurdish minority and the mounting humanitarian
and political costs of the Kurds' flight into neighboring Turkey and Iran,
the Security Council adopted Resolution 688.(19) The sweeping writ for
international humanitarian action created by Resolution 688 was without
precedent: The resolution found that Iraqi repression of the Kurds constituted
a threat to peace and security in the region; it insisted that the repression
stop immediately; it called upon Iraq to permit immediate access to all
in need of assistance within the country; it requested that the Secretary-General
pursue his humanitarian activities in the country and report on any further
repression by Iraqi authorities; it appealed to all member-states and humanitarian
organizations to contribute to these efforts; and it demanded Iraqi cooperation.
Although Resolution
688 was negotiated under Chapter VI and therefore lacked compulsory power,
Iraq was already subject to the mandatory enforcement provisions of Chapter
VII. This status, combined with the resolution's findings that Iraqi repression
was further endangering regional peace and security, opened a legal space
for international military action to provide relief and support for the
Kurds.(20) By responding as it did to Iraqi treatment of its Kurdish minority,
the international community directly challenged the sovereign exercise
of butchery, refusing to permit the non-intervention doctrine to shield
a state's genocidal practices against its own population.
In adopting
Resolution 688, the Security Council also took another unprecedented step:
It affirmed that humanitarian crises can have security consequences. The
linkage established a new principle of communitarian security: Governmental
mistreatment of a minority group is a legitimate concern of the Security
Council if that mistreatment raises broader international security concerns.
The proviso that a crisis must raise wider security concerns reflects the
view of many developing countries that Security Council involvement in
humanitarian matters may encroach upon national sovereignty. At the same
time, this condition is obviously elastic.
Somalia:
Humanitarian Relief
The Security
Council's resolutions on the Somalia crisis are pathbreaking for precisely
this reason. Starting early in 1992, the Security Council concluded that
the Somali internal situation itself "constitutes a threat to international
peace and security."(21) This language lacked the formulaic expression
of regional danger that had been de rigueur as recently as the negotiations
on Yugoslavia the previous fall, and Iraq the prior spring.(22) Of course
starvation, civil war and anarchy in Somalia would eventually have security
consequences elsewhere in the Hom of Africa. Yet that reality is less important
than the fact that the Security Council felt no need to use the imminent
threat to regional security as a basis for taking a series of progressively
more forceful actions to ensure international humanitarian relief to the
victims of the Somalia famine.
The first of
these initiatives, the U.N. Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM), mandated the
deployment of more than 4,000 troops to escort relief convoys and guard
ports and distribution points.(23) UNOSOM, however, was deployed under
Chapter VI of the Charter and relied on the consent of the most powerful
armed Somali clan factions in designating its areas of operation.(24) When
these individuals were unable or unwilling to honor agreements made with
UNOSOM representatives - instead often directly threatening the U.N. presence
- UNOSOM was kept from fulfilling its mission and famine conditions continued
to deteriorate.
When UNOSOM
was stalled, the United States proposed and the Security Council authorized
the use of combat troops to create secure conditions for famine relief.
In Resolution 794, the Security Council determined that "the magnitude
of the human tragedy caused by the conflict in Somalia, further exacerbated
by the obstacles being created to the distribution of humanitarian assistance,
constitutes a threat to international peace and security."(25) Acting under
Chapter VII, the Security Council then authorized the Secretary-General
and cooperating member-states to use force to "create an environment for
humanitarian relief operations in Somalia."(26)
As of this
writing, the U.S.-led international military force in Somalia, entitled
the "Unified Task Force," has made rapid progress toward establishing secure
conditions in the famine-stricken areas of the country. Intensive preparations
for a transition to an augmented U.N. peacekeeping force are underway.
While Somalia's future as a national entity is impossible to predict, given
a secessionist movement in the northwest and the total collapse of a civil
government infrastructure, Resolution 794 and the actions it authorized
dramatically extend communitarian security. Unlike the international community's
response to the mistreatment of Iraqi Kurds, which relied in part on the
threat to countries in the region and in part on Iraq's status as a country
already subject to Chapter VII enforcement measures, Resolution 794 stands
independently. The critical difference between the two conflicts is that
Iraq, though a pariah, has a sovereign government, whereas Somalia does
not. It remains unclear whether the Somalia experience will affect international
willingness to take similar action against a comparably great human tragedy
when a sovereign government is present.
The
Former Yugoslavia: Nationalist-Ethnic Warfare
Compared to
Somalia, the acceptable scope for Security Council action in the former
Yugoslavia seems cramped, despite the initially larger scale of the peacekeeping
operation there.(27) History offers a powerful argument to confront egregious
humanitarian abuses in the center of Europe, where the ghost and motive
for genocide still linger. Yet a consensus for resolute action to halt
those abuses has so far been stymied by factors not present in the Somalia
conflict.
Comparison
with Somalia can shed some light on the difference in the situation in
the Balkans. Except for the Somali National Movement, whose goal is an
independent Somaliland in the northwest, no major Somali party seeks secession.
Hence, while difficult to limit, the goals and results of the ongoing intervention
are less likely to alter Somali territorial integrity. Similarly, however
tangled the surface relations of the Somali factions appear to be, there
is a firmer subsoil in which a network of village elders, a common religion,
culture, ethnic origin and identification may ultimately support national
reconciliation and the establishment of a reasonably unified federal or
confederal governmentally, the flat desert terrain and weakly organized
opposition to the U.S.-led - or a future U.N.-led - force in Somalia present
manageable risks to well-directed and well-armed troops.
None of these
conditions is present in the former Yugoslavia, where humanitarian abuse
has occurred largely unchecked in a region engulfed in secessionist struggles
and torn apart by bitter ethnic differences. Any U.N. intervention capable
of curbing the worst abuses would have to involve a large measure of territorial
control. However, given the fact that much of the former Yugoslavia is
a guerrilla's paradise, achieving this goal would require an open-ended
commitment of troops and potentially high casualties, since controlling
the territory would promote or prejudice the ambitions of one or more parties.
Security Council
failure to halt or stem the Yugoslav tragedy overshadows the steps already
taken, but does not remove the significance of these efforts for promoting
collective security. Since first addressed by the Security Council in 1991,
the situation in the former Yugoslavia has sparked an extraordinary streak
of U.N. activity, extending the post-resolution 688 humanitarian order
in significant ways." To begin with, humanitarian relief for the former
Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina was authorized under Chapter
VII's mandatory powers, a step beyond the action taken in Iraq(29) that
prefigured the more dramatic initiative in Somalia later in the year.(30)
Second, Resolution 770 specifically permitted member-states to take alone,
or through regional arrangements, "all measures necessary in coordination
with the United Nations" to ensure aid delivery.(31) At the time of its
adoption, Resolution 770 thus represented the most explicit acceptance
of the use of U.N. force ever employed in an internal conflict. Notwithstanding
this legal authority, however, the U.N. Protection Force in Yugoslavia
(UNPROFOR) is not configured to fight a war in Bosnia and Hercegovina and
thus continues to avoid involvement in hostilities that could lead to war
with any of the parties. Third, the Security Council did not require, nor
did the Secretary-General secure, agreement of all the parties before deployment
of U.N. forces. Finally, to discourage Serbia from attacking Bosnian forces
from the air, it established a no-fly zone, banning all military flights
in Bosnian airspace, and deployed observers to monitor military airfields.(32)
As of this
writing, the situation in the former Yugoslavia continues to deteriorate.
Winter has significantly worsened conditions for the three million refugees
and displaced peoples, the effect of sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro
is intensifying and the possibility of conflict in Kosovo, Macedonia and
Vojvodina continues to grow. Despite ceaseless U.N. activity and increasingly
pointed Western warnings, Serbian aggression remains undeterred. Finally,
as seven European countries share borders with the former Yugoslavia, the
risk of spillover is a daily preoccupation in nearby capitals.
In this worsening
environment, the United States and other countries are exploring more forceful
measures to stem or stop the conflict, and to apply greater pressure and
penalties against Serbia, the primary aggressor. One step now being considered
by the Security Council is the use of military means to enforce the military
no-fly zone over Bosnia and Hercegovina, regularly defied by the Serbian
airforce. Other more forceful measures are possible.(33) Overshadowing
any consideration of the use of force, however, is uncertainty as to how
to limit its purpose and effects.(34)
Libya:
International Terrorism
Outside of
the humanitarian security focus of its actions toward Iraq, Somalia and
the former Yugoslavia, the Security Council further extended its mandate
through its confrontation with Libya over its alleged involvement in terrorism
against one U.S.-and one French-registered aircraft. This case established
the appropriateness of the Security Council's involvement in the enforcement
of international criminal law. While the case raised several controversial
issues, one question is of special relevance: Was international terrorism
within its jurisdiction?
The United
States, Britain and France demanded that two Libyan citizens be turned
over for trial to one of their countries, in connection with the bombings.
Tripoli asserted, however, that the so-called extradite-or-try principle
applied to the case, and argued that since it had no extradition treaty
with any of the countries in question, it had the option to try the individuals
in a Libyan court. As an alternative, Tripoli also suggested that the allegations
were a matter for arbitration or mediation under the terms of the Montreal
Convention.(35)
In countering
the Libyan claim, the three countries argued that international terrorism
was a crime recognized under customary international law, not a bilateral
difference of interpretation of the Montreal Convention. Furthermore, the
extradite-or-try argument lacked force where state sponsorship of criminal
acts was clearly implicated, suggesting that an independent judicial investigation
was not possible. Finally, it was maintained that even if extradition treaties
existed, relevant international conventions treated air piracy and aircraft
bombings as exceptions to the so-called political offense exception, under
which the Libyan agents were attempting to avoid extradition.
Security Council
debate revealed deep ambivalence. While strongly condemning terrorism and
supporting the need to bring the responsible parties to account, several
countries were clearly uncomfortable with the Security Council's involvement
in the sphere of international law enforcement in general, and specifically
with the notion that its jurisdiction over individual persons may in some
circumstances exceed that of the person's government. A narrow Security
Council majority disagreed with these arguments.(36) While some in the
majority were concerned by the unprecedented nature of the issue, and the
makeshift character of the Council's involvement, in the end, such sensitivities
were overruled by the need to affirm the Charter-based right of all states
to defend their citizens.(37)
The long-term
significance of the Libyan episode remains unclear. The second of the two
Libyan resolutions,(38) establishing an air embargo to induce Tripoli to
hand over its two nationals for trial in one of the three accusing states,
divided the Security Council along less-developed country (LDC) and industrialized
country lines.(39) Several of those nations opposed to the embargo, however,
did not oppose U.N. measures against individual acts of international terrorism;
rather, their concern was with the manner in which the Security Council,
a political body, two hats of judge and enforcer.
Defining
Communitarian Security
An Arab critic
of the Security Council's enlarged sphere of action finds it to be symptomatic
of the United Nations' "inherent tendency to fluctuate between immobility
and excessive activism."(40) But the United Nations is not a closed system.
Its "activism" - or lack of it - moves in sync with the current of global
politics. Today, that current brings challenges to international order
whose future management will unavoidably reinforce the new preference for
collective action and for a common political identity.
Weapons
of Mass Destruction
Weapons of
mass destruction are not a new or understudied challenge to security. In
accordance with Cold War logic, they are external threats, they affect
the balance of power and their effects may be offset by adjusting that
balance. Indeed, Clausewitz, the paterfamilias of the balance-of-power
school, would probably acknowledge the role of such weapons - however Caliban-like
- within it.(41)
Whether nuclear,
chemical, biological or massively lethal high-tech conventional weapons,
the increasing dispersal of weapons of mass destruction threatens to raise
a twenty-first century Leviathan. Yet curbing this diffusion, to say nothing
of deterring the use of or stimulating actual reduction of world stocks,
is a project well beyond the capacity of a single state or alliance of
states.
A sampling
of the reasons for this makes a cogent case for community-based security.
First, the number of countries with access to the resources and technology
to produce or disseminate internationally banned or restricted weapons
systems is large, and growing. Surveillance of arms movements into, among
and out of this group is a monumental task. Even if the United States and
a handful of allies had the requisite technological and financial resources,
they would lack the human access to monitor adequately these flows.
Second, dual-use
precursors complicate the monitoring of weapons imports and manufacturing
because, in addition to their use in nuclear, chemical or biological weaponry,
by their very nature they have an array of common commercial, industrial
or research uses. The job of sorting the sinister from the legitimate uses
requires expert sifting and second-guessing of voluminous data. Much of
the data may contain or border on commercial secrets, raising the threshold
of disclosure and access needed for reliable monitoring, while increasing
the sensitivity of the operation.(42)
A made-in-America
example of the latter is the text of the new Chemical Weapons Convention.
The draft adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in November 1992, and soon
to be submitted to the U.S. Congress, mandates a challenge-inspections
regime, whose language had to be crafted to satisfy the U.S. constitutional
prohibition on warrantless searches.(43) While the problem was remedied,
it highlights the fact that attempts to design stricter arms-control regimes
will have substantial implications for a state's sovereignty in its domestic
affairs.
The extreme
improbability that such supply controls can ever be leak-proof draws attention
to the demand side, which further supports the case for collective action.
With confrontational politics driving competition for nuclear and other
weapons on the Korean Peninsula, in South Asia and the Middle East - particularly
the Persian Gulf - reducing tensions in these regions offers the best hope
for long-term arms control. Multilateral actors are well-equipped to provide
this sort of creative doctoring since their interests and goals tend to
connect peace in the neighborhood with stability in the world.(44)
Third, the
ever-present possibility of gross violation of weapons restrictions by
a state completes the case for making non-proliferation a global norm to
be enforced through collective action. Only the prospect of harsh punishment,
supported or executed by the major powers, makes nuclear blackmail a high-risk
policy for an ambitious regional power. The failure of Saddam Hussein's
explicit chemical and implicit nuclear threat helped make this prospect
credible, as has the dismantling of Iraqi weapons programs conducted by
the United Nations. The extended nuclear guarantee proposed by President
Bush at the 47th General Assembly also should reinforce the norm of collective
responsibility in this area.(45)
However, greater
tests lie ahead: Meeting these challenges is likely to require the Security
Council to add enforcement of non-proliferation to its already expanding
job description.
Ethnic Fragmentation
and the Threat to the State
In contrast
to weapons proliferation, the violent ruptures of old or weak state structures
in the former Yugoslavia and other parts of Eurasia are so far from the
classical tradition as to become a kind of nemesis to the nation-state
assumption on which it is based. The very term nation-state initially meant
that a state's legitimacy derived from the nation or people composing it,
and expressed a kind of ethnic entitlement to a unique territorial and
political identity.(46)
The philosophy
fit Clausewitz's Germanic Prussia and was the orthodoxy of late-nineteenth
century Europe. It even resonated across the Atlantic, where John Jay rhapsodized
in The Federalist Papers about Americans as "a band of brethren," "a people
descended from the same ancestors."(47)
Yet Americans
no longer descend from the same ancestors, and European homogeneity is
a relic of the past. Today less than 10 percent of the world's more than
170 countries are ethnically homogeneous and only half of the remainder
contain more than a 75 percent ethnic majority."(48)
The imperial
break-up that began after the First World War, accelerated after the Second
and was repeated with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union, made multinational
states the norm. Those states surviving longest have promoted the notion,
as in the United States, that peoples belong to states and not the other
way around. Supported by popular sovereignty and citizenship, such ideas
can prevail over, though rarely eclipse, ethnicity as national identity.
By contrast, many of the new states are struggling to force-fit demography
and territory to outdated ethnic notions of national identity. An alarming
number covet the hoary ideal of ethno-territorial matching, undissuaded
by the memory of Hitler's desired Judenfreies Deutschland.
One recent
study found 60 "current and emergent conflicts in Europe," counted another
14 in the Caucasus region of Eurasia alone and noted that inclusion of
strife in Central Asia and eastern Russia would raise the tally again.(49)
Most of these conflicts involve ethnic groups whose territorial ambitions
are at odds with existing state borders. Many, like the former German Herrenvolk
of Sudetenland, now a part of the Czech Republic, are minorities that would
become majorities if only they crossed or moved a nearby frontier. The
brutality of Bosnian Serbs may be unusual, but their territorial predicament
is not. Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, Romanians in Transylvania, Hungarians
in Vojvodina, Albanians in Kosovo, Russians in Estonia, Moldova, Abkhazia
and many other minorities elsewhere have no lesser motive.
Under such
circumstances, is violent nationalism a threat to global security? In a
world of mingling peoples and porous borders, treatment of peoples and
borders matters. Self-determination at gunpoint invites imitation. Moreover,
minorities at the losing end of the politics of exclusion, and discrimination
or so-called ethnic cleansing tend not to fade away but to revise - or
at least revenge - history by force. They may or may not succeed, but their
efforts become a permanent source of instability. Today, violent nationalism
has become a systemic danger with systemic effects - general conflict in
swaths of Europe and Eurasia, widespread attacks on minorities, forceful
border changes or use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction
in ethnic battles. If the international community is unprepared to accept
these consequences, it must develop the means to over-come them.
Humanitarian
Intervention
Such challenges
are part of the larger international dilemma that occurs when governmental
misconduct or civil war causes massive human suffering. For much of the
twentieth century and especially during the Cold War, humanitarian crises
were not seen as providing outside states with legal grounds for taking
forceful action against an abusive state to assist the victims. It was
feared that rights of intervention invoked on humanitarian grounds would
be exercised for political aims. These concerns of the superpowers were
undergirded legally by the strength of the non-intervention provision in
the U.N. Charter.(50) In addition, the fashionable post-second World War
view that war itself is the worst humanitarian abuse added ethical reinforcement
to the principle of non-intervention.
In the context
of communitarian security, there were two problems with the conventional
twentieth-century view of humanitarian intervention.(51) First, domestic
humanitarian crises can have consequences for international security. Refugee
movements across borders can destabilize neighboring countries, and governmental
oppression can trigger more widespread conflicts as members of the same
ethnic or religious group come to the victim's aid. Second, the implicit
view that humanitarian abuse, however atrocious, is less evil than forceful
action to arrest it has not survived the spectacles of Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge, Uganda under Idi Amin, Haiti under Jean-Claude Duvalier or
the Nigerian army's campaign against Biafra.
During the
Cold War, neither security nor ethical grounds seemed sufficient to offset
the bias against humanitarian intervention, rooted in the fear of giving
casual invasions a moral pretext. While the end of the Cold War has not
removed such fears, it has lessened them. In fact, in certain cases, Western
interests are less threatening to many LDCs than fear of disinterest. Somalia,
where the United States is now leading an international military force
to create a secure environment for famine relief, stirred such fears prior
to the U.S. initiative. Similar concerns are often voiced, particularly
by Islamic countries, about the plight of the Bosnian Muslims.(52)
In other cases,
like the Sudan or Haiti, the balance tips the other way. A reflection of
this ambivalence is the fact that, beside eloquent calls by the current
and immediately previous U.N. Secretaries-General and other leaders for
a humanitarian exception to the doctrine of non-intervention, are familiar
admonitions to preserve sovereignty against intervention.(53)
Conclusion
Speaking at
the Security Council summit in January 1992, President Rodrigo Borja of
Ecuador declared that the premise of a U.N.-based security system was to
establish a worldwide community of states capable of resolving, on the
basis of unity and consensus, problems that states could not have been
able to resolve individually and in isolation.(54)
Borja's argument
is essentially for the efficiency of international cooperation. Yet efficiency
is a shallow foundation for a security community. Against the challenge
of weapons proliferation, the superiority of collective versus unilateral
action is obvious: Proliferation cannot be solved by one or a few states,
and its dangers encompass everyone. Yet in a war against Saddam Hussein
- or Serbia - the choice is not so clear; one, or a few countries, may
be better suited to the military task than a broad and deeply integrated
U.N. force, but at the same time many states will not regard themselves
as directly threatened. For nation-states to act as a community it is therefore
not enough to solve what is not solvable in isolation; it is also necessary
to agree upon what needs solving and how.
In exhorting
the United Nations to assume long-deferred security responsibilities, its
members have backed into a debate about the ends and means of world order
that echoes the tone of the North-South antagonism of the 1970s. In today's
so-called North, the former Cold War foes and the industrialized nations
are converging around democracy and free markets. Their goal, continuously
refined by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)
to which all belong, is an international civil society where public order
among members depends on the civil principles within them.(55)
In the South,
which includes the world's LDCs in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the
Middle East, there is no comparable consensus. In the Organization of American
States, a common aspiration to defend democracy is gaining ground, but
this would appear to be an exception.(56) Generally speaking, a CSCE-type
coalescence in philosophy and civil values is currently impossible in the
South, in part because the political slope is steeper. Many governments
in the South have a narrow popular base, while others rule weakly unified
multinational populations. Economic patterns are also poorer and therefore
less congenial to cooperation.(57) The deterrents to regional conflict
are weak - as are the incentives for loosened sovereignty - because trade
and financial relationships with Europe and North America tend to be more
important than intra-regional ties.
Social engineering
such as that engendered by the CSCE, however, is a long and difficult road
to global security. After all, the Paris Charter did not invent its members'
common security interests, however valuable its contribution to addressing
them. In a world where political philosophies still differ significantly,
making conformity a condition of cooperation will bring less cooperation,
not more, whether on security or any other matter. If a global security
system is possible, it is because a universal conversion to democracy,
however welcome, is not a necessary deterrent to the ills of proliferation,
violent nationalism, massive humanitarian abuses, interstate aggression
and terrorism.
Acceptance
of communitarian security goals, however, imposes obligations. Security
obligations are meaningless without means of verification and enforcement.
Inevitably, this confers regulatory powers on the global community, which
brings it deep inside the traditional sphere of sovereignty and provokes
the suspicion or opposition of weaker nations.
These cross-currents
erupted into a vigorous debate late in 1992, as the members of the United
Nations took up the Secretary-General's proposals for strengthening its
role in global security. As stated in An Agenda for Peace, these proposals
envisioned a significant enlargement of U.N. involvement in all aspects
of peace and security.(58)
A total of
17 countries used the debate on Agenda for Peace to call for restructuring
the Security Council, some calling for elimination of the veto as well.(59)
An even larger group demanded an increased security role for the General
Assembly in order to check the Security Council's activism, and some challenged
the fairness and impartiality of Council decisions.
In fact, opposition
to the expanding Security Council writ arises more often from resentment
of its exclusivity than from adislike of specific actions.(60) Nonetheless,
that opposition is real and growing. Failure to provide a credible response
may erode the Security Council's legitimacy. Since its decisions are not
self-executing but require vigorous compliance by member-states, legitimacy
matters. Perceptions of illegitimacy lead a large number of states to non-compliance
or outright opposition, and their actions could nullify any measures the
Security Council might adopt, threatening a return to the paralysis of
the Cold War years.
The chorus
of criticism of the current composition of the Security Council on demographic,
regional or economic grounds has not produced agreement on how to address
these deficiencies. Certainly world order is ill-served by so-called illegitimate
power; but authority without power invites chaos. This has not dissuaded
some from preferring that the Security Council simply be legitimate, rather
than that it do anything.
It is worth
recalling that the process for managing peace and security at the League
of Nations was irreproachably legitimate, A single opposing vote cast by
any member - the notorious liberum veto - could, and did, prevent League
action. To be effective, the Security Council must reflect and mediate
fundamental power relations. Views vary on how to weigh those values, but
not on the need to improve their balance.
It is axiomatic
that the larger the U.N. body, the more protracted its decisions, and there
is no reason to believe that the Security Council can escape this unhappy
fact. Yet there may be ways to offset these effects, and delayed review
of the Council's is becoming costly.
Other institutional
refinements would also spur the development of a multilateral security
system. Some ideas in the public domain include:
1. The very
slow deployment of U.N. security forces to stricken Somalia, prior to the
authorization of a U.S.-led force, underscores the unreadiness of the United
Nations to provide combat-worthy forces when circumstances require. It
may be time to explore the merits of command, operational and logistical
preparation of small-scale forces that might be used to give effect to
a Security Council decision.
2. The readiness
and legitimacy of U.N.-employed force could be enhanced by negotiation
of agreements with militarily capable countries, making forces available
to the Security Council and specifying the terms of their use.
3. Economic
sanctions are an imperfect but essential tool for enforcement of the U.N.
Charter. They can be made more effective and more fair if accompanied by
action to freeze a party's foreign assets to: (1) defray the most serious
losses sustained by embargo participants, and (2) ensure that national
elites in a target country are not protected while citizens bear the full
penalty for their leaders' conduct.(61)
4. International
action has failed to bring to trial the Libyan terrorists accused in the
Lockerbie case. As a champion of the rule of law, the United States should
intensify its efforts. Justice in the Lockerbie case should be secured
by means applicable against future crimes involving universal jurisdiction.
An ad hoc tribunal should be drawn from the countries currently comprising
the International Law Commission. Capable of making its own evidentiary,
procedural and sentencing rules, such a tribunal would provide experience
useful in designing a much-needed international criminal court.
A necessary
complement to these and other institutional steps are adjustments in strategic
thinking. An area where the United Nations has been justifiably gun-shy
is intervention. Certainly, interventions are notoriously hard to confine.
A so-called right to intervene may be impossible to exercise without raising
practical and political dilemmas involving issues of scope and effects
that exceed the resources or mandate of an intervener. Yet domestic events
like civil wars or massive humanitarian emergencies may threaten consequences
for international security that are too grave for only normal intervention.
This seems likely to force the United Nations, sooner rather than later,
to grapple with the Protean challenges of pacification and trusteeship.
Finally, it
is critical to distinguish order from status quo. The end of the Cold War
left massive inequities and other enormous and variously caused forces
for change. The order the world community's interests require it to promote
is not things as they are, but a just order. The measure of legitimacy
the Security Council can gain will come from the diffusion of material
benefits and from the promise and processes of principled change. If, on
the other hand, the Security Council emerges as defender or apologist for
the status quo, it will become the agent of the disorder it strives to
avoid.
Near the close
of the general debate in the 1992 U.N. General Assembly, Ambassador Tan
Sri Razali Ismail of Malaysia gave the Cold War his own bitter epitaph:
After 45 years,
countries do not have to live under the shadow or threat of being vassals
of one so-called superpower or the other.(62)
Imprisonment,
of one kind or another, was a way of life during the Cold War, no less
true of the alliances of East and West than of those affected by their
antagonism. The end of the Cold War has removed those constraints, leaving
a freedom of international action unknown in recent years. But as Andre
Gide once observed:
To free oneself
is only the beginning. The real challenge is to live in freedom.
(1.) The author
presents these views in his individual capacity. None of the statements
made or opinions expressed represent views or positions, whether official
or unofficial, of the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. government.
(2.) For a persuasive presentation of this view see Michael Reisman, "Sovereignty
and Human Rights in Contemporary International Law," American Journal of
International Law, 84 (Fall 1990). (3.) Provisional Records of the Security
Council, U.N. Doc. S/PV.3046 (New York: United Nations, 31 January 1992)
p. 9. (4.) Article 52.2 of Chapter VIH directs U.N. members who are also
members of "regional arrangement" to "make every effort to achieve pacific
settlement of local disputes through such regional arrangements or by such
regional agencies before referring them to the Security Council." Article
53 extends the burden sharing to enforcement actions: "The Security Council
shall, where appropriate, utilize such regional arrangements or agencies
for enforcement action under its authority." (5.) The strength of such
groups vanes widely. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has and may
soon employ the operational apparatus under U.N. authority to enforce a
no-fly zone in Bosnian airspace, but NATO's restricted membership makes
it resemble a so-called bloc more than a regional group, and there is continuing
internal debate over the scope of its mission and authority. The Conference
on Security and Cooperation in Europe has the cohesion and mandate to engage
in conflict prevention, but its operational apparatus is weak and limited
in scope. The Organization of African Unity (OAU) remains handicapped by
internal divisions, despite the activism of its recent leadership. The
League of Arab States is also seriously handicapped by internal strains.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has largely limited
its attention to economic issues, although its Cambodian role is an exception
to this. Asia, as a whole, lacks an inclusive regional group. (6.) See
U.N. Charter, Chapter V, Articles 24-6, and Chapters VI and VII. (7.) In
February 1989, the Security Council created the U.N. Transition Assistance
Group in Namibia (UNTAG) (March 1989 to March 1990), which mandated the
creation of conditions for the people of Namibia to exercise, by free and
fair elections for a Constituent Assembly, their right of self-determination.
At the time of UNTAG's establishment, Namibia was under the de facto control
of South Africa. (8.) For the mandate of the U.N. force in Somalia see
U.N. Security Council Resolutions (S.C. Res.) 751 (24 April 1992) and 775
(28 August 1992). For the mandate of the U.S.-led Unified Task Force (Operation
Restore Hope), see S.C. Res. 794 (3 December 1992). (9.) Cambodia, U.N.
Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), S.C. Res. 718 (31 October 1991);
Nicaragua, U.N. Observer Group in Central America (ONUCA), S.C. Res. 644
(7 November 1989); El Salvador, U.N. Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL),
S.C. Res. 693 (20 May 1991); Western Sahara, Mission for the Referendum
on Western Sahara (MINURSO), S.C. Res. 690 (29 April 1991). In the case
of Western Sahara, the international character of the conflict arises from
Algeria's historic support of the POLISARIO and direct opposition to Moroccan
sovereignty over the territory. (10.) The clause in Article 2.7 limiting
the prohibition on U.N. intervention to matters "essentially within the
domestic jurisdiction of any state" also permits the Security Council some
discretion to conclude reasonably that characteristics of a domestic matter
make it a legitimate subject of concern to international peace and security.
(11.) The noted exception, which appears at the end of Article 2.7, states:
"This principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures
under the Charter." These measures are set forth in Chapter VII of the
U.N. Charter, which states that the Security Council may undertake measures,
including the use of force, to counter "threats to the peace, breaches
of the peace or acts of aggression." (12.) The Security Council membership
in 1992 was: (permanent) United States, United Kingdom, Russia, France
and China; (temporary) Austria, Belgium, Cape Verde, Ecuador, Hungary,
India, Japan, Morocco, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. (13.) S.C. Res. 687 (3 April
1991). (14.) Testimony presented by Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering, former
U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, before the House of
Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on Human Rights
and International Organizations, and Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle
East, 21 October 1991, p. 2. (15.) S.C. Res. 687 established several institutions
to monitor the cease-fire and deal with the consequences of Iraqi aggression.
A three-part arrangement was created for dealing with Iraqi financial liability:
a fund to compensate injured parties; a settlement process to handle claims;
and a commission to manage the process and award payments from Iraqi oil
revenue. A boundary commission was established to define the common border
between Iraq and Kuwait under the aegis of the Security Council, acting
as guarantor with the mandatory authority of Chapter VII, An elaborate
structure was erected to locate, gain control of and oversee the destruction
of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile weapons and
weapons research, development and manufacturing capabilities, and to carry
out long-range monitoring to ensure against their re-introduction. For
this purpose S.C. Res. 687-established a U.N. Special Commission on Weapons
of Mass Destruction to manage the non-nuclear weapons aspects, and directed
the International Atomic Energy Agency to carry out the nuclear weapons
issues requirements. Both were granted extraordinary rights of access under
S.C. Res. 687. These rights were occasionally backed up by threats of U.S.
force. See, for example, the comments by Marlin Fitzwater at a White House
briefing on Iraq, 22 July 1992. (16.) S.C. Res. 687, section C, subsections
10 and 12. (17.) ibid. (18.) Statute of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, Article 12, paragraph 7-C. (19.) S.C. Res. 688 (5 April 1991).
(20.) Many of the Kurds and Iraqis who took refuge in the mountainous northern
and northeastern border areas in Iraq, Turkey and Iran were given assistance
and protection under Operation Provide Comfort by the military forces of
the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and others. (21.) S.C.
Res. 746 (17 March 1992); S.C. Res. 751; S.C. Res. 767 (24 July 1992);
S.C. Res. 775 (28 August 1992). (22.) For resolutions on the former Yugoslavia,
see S.C. Res. 713 (25 September 1991) and S.C. Res. 721 (27 November 1991);
for Iraq, see S.C. Res. 688. (23.) S.C. Res 751 established the U.N. Operation
in Somalia (UNOSOM) with the mandate to carry out humanitarian activities;
monitor the cease-fire and contain potential hostilities; provide for security,
disarmament and demobilization; and promote national reconciliation and
the peace process through mediation and good offices. See also the following
reports by the Secretary-General: U.N. Doc. S/24343 (New York: United Nations,
22 July 1991) and U.N. Doc. S/24480 (New York: United Nations, 24 August
1992). (24.) UNOSOM's operational zones were to be located in Berbera,
Bossasso, Mogadishu and Yismayo. United Nations, Report of the Secretary-General
on the Situation in Somalia, U.N. Doc. 9/24343 (New York: United Nations,
22 July 1992). (25.) S.C. Res. 794, third paragraph of the preamble. (26.)
ibid., operative paragraph 7. (27.) By late November 1992, the U.N. Protection
Force in Yugoslavia (UNPROFOR) had deployed 22,063 personnel, of which
21,084 were troops. United Nations, Department of Peacekeeping Operations,
internal report. (28.) U.N. measures have included: an arms embargo, S.C.
Res. 713 (25 September 1991); a sanctions committee to enforce the embargo,
S.C. Res. 724 (15 December 1991); appointment of former U.S. Secretary
of State Cyrus Vance as Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General in October
1991; the development of military liaison officers to observe a cease-fire,
S.C. Res 727 (8 January 1992); a peacekeeping force of 15,000 in Croatia,
S.C. Res. 743 (21 February 1992); an economic embargo of the Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), S.C. Res. 757 (30 May 1992); deployment
of peacekeepers to Sarajevo, S.C. Res. 758 (8 June 1992) and S.C. Res 761
(29 June 1992); further expansion of UNPROFOR to the "pink zones," S.C.
Res. 762 (30 June 1992); Security Council authorization, under Chapter
VII, of all states to take nationally or through regional agencies "all
measures necessary" to facilitate delivery of humanitarian relief to Sarajevo
and other areas of Bosnia and Hercegovina where needed, S.C. Res. 770 (13
August 1992); first Emergency Session of the U.N. Human Rights commission,
13-14 August 1992; establishment of Special Rapporteur on Human Rights
in the former Yugoslavia (14 August 1992); resumption of session of the
General assembly on the situation in Bosnia and Hercegovinia, 26-27 August
1992 resulting in U.N. General Assembly Resolution (G.A. Res.) 46/242 (25
August 1992); Security Council action, S.C. Res. 777 (19 September 1992)
and General Assembly action, G.A. Res. 47/1 (22 September 1992), denying
the continued U.N. membership of the former Socialist Federal Republic
of Yugoslavia and requiring the reconstitued Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
(Servia and Montenegro) to re-apply; establishment of a Commission of Experts
- or so-called War Crimes Commission - to submit evidence of grave breaches
of the Geneva Convention and other international humanitarian law committed
on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, S.C. Res. 780 (6 October 1992);
creation of a ban on military flights in the airspace of Bosnia and Hercegovina,
S.C. Res. 781 (9 October 1992); authorization of deployment of UNPROFOR
and E.C. military observers to airfields in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Serbia
and Montenegro and Croatia to monitor the ban on military flights, S.C.
Res. 786 (10 November 1992). (29.) As discussed in this article, S.C. Res.
688, dealing with Iraqi mistreatment of Iraqi Kurds, was adopted under
Chapter VI, which has less force than Chapter VII. (30.) S.C. Res. 794.
(31.) S.C. Res. 770, operative paragraph 2. (32.) See note 28. (33.) In
mid-December 1992, U.S. officials floated the possibility of seeking a
Security Council agreement to lift the arms embargo as it applies to Bosnia
and Hercegovina. In an interview on the 20 December 1992 airing of the
television show Meet the Press, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger
commented, "Nobody other than the Turks within the NATO alliance really
wants to lift the embargo, so I'm afraid it's going to stay there, whether
we would like to see it lifted or not, and we have begun to think maybe
it would have been better if it were lifted." (34.) These concerns are
already inherent in the simultaneous presence of a Chapter VII humanitarian
security operation side-by-side with the pre-existing Chapter VI peacekeeping
mission, producing a complex structure fraught with internal tensions and
external risks. S.C. Res. 743 authorized the original peacekeeping force
under Chapter VI of the Charter, guided by traditional peacekeeping rules
of engagement. The relief escort operation, authorized under S.C. Res.
770 and S.C. Res. 776 (14 September 1992), was expressly established under
Chapter VII, and will be guided by enhanced rules of engagement. United
Nations, Report of the Secretary-General, U.N. Doc. S/24540 (New York:
United Nations, 10 September 1992) section I, paragraph 9. Officials at
the United Nations have expressed concern that significant use of force
by troops engaged in the escort operation could result in against personnel
carrying out traditional peacekeeping duties pursuant to S.C Res. 743.
(35.) Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety
of Civil Aviation, signed in Montreal, Canada (23 September 1971) Article
14.1. (36.) S.C. Res. 748 (31 March 1992). The Council vote was ten in
favor, zero against and five abstaining, one more than the minimum needed
for passage. Arab press commentary was particularly sharp, as in this comment
in Al Ahram, Egypt's leading, pro-government daily: "The seventh chapter
of the United Nations Charter, which the United States finds easy to use
against Arabs, and only Arabs, is the same one upon which they rely for
imposing sanctions against Libya.... This seventh chapter which has been
so oppressively and hastily applied against Iraq and Libya, has never been
applied against Israel. Will Chapter Seven remain restricted to use against
Arab states?" (USIA Daily Digest, 23 March 1992). Bahrain's leading, semi-official
Akhbar Al-Khalij, warned the Western countries that: "It is not in their
interest to have confrontation with the Arabs. In addition, a U.N. resolution
imposing sanctions on LIbya would increase and strengthen calls (by radical
Muslims) on Muslim countries to withdraw from the United Nation," (USIA
Daily Digest, 23 March 1992.) (37.) The Security Council is not an international
court with evidentiary and adjudicative rules, procedures and competence.
(38.) The first resolution was S.C. Res. 731 (21 January 1992), urging
Libya to "provide a full and effective response" to requests by the United
States, Great Britain and France for cooperation in establishing responsibility
for the attack. The second resolution, imposing sanctions on Libya until
it complies with the first, was S.C. Res. 748 (31 March 1992). (39.) The
Western Council members were joined by Venezuela and Ecuador, while China,
India, Zimbabwe, Morocco and Cape Verde abstained. (40.) Clovis Maksoud,
"The Arab World's Quandary," World Policy Journal, VIIII (Summer 1991)
p. 551. (41.) See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter
Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). In William Shakespeare's
play The Tempest, "Caliban" was the name given by Prospero to a monster
with supernatural powers, whom he had temporarily enslaved. (42.) The plans
for monitoring Iraqi weapons of mass destruction prepared by the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. Special Commission (known as UNSCOM,
and established under S.C. Res. 687, section C-10) illustrate the depth
and detail of information required. See U.N. Doc. S/22872/Rev.1 (New York:
United Nations, 20 September 1991) and U.N. Doc. S/22871/Rev.1 (New York:
United Nations, 2 October 1991). (43.) To avoid conflict with the Fourth
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on warrantless searches,
the following language was added to the treaty: "In meeting the requirement
to provide access, the state party will be under obligation to allow the
greatest degree of access taking into account any constitutional obligations
it may have with regard to proprietary rights or search and seizure." The
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling
and Use of Chemical weapons and Their Destruction, Annex on Implementation
and Verification (10 August 1992) p. 163. (44.) For a useful treatment
of this subject as it relates to nuclear proliferation see Lewis Dunn,
"Containing Nuclear Proliferation," Adelphi Papers, 263, International
Institute of Strategic Studies (Winter 1991). (45.) "Reaffirming assurances
made at the time the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was negotiated, I
propose that the Security Council reassure the non-nuclear states that
it will seek immediate action to provide assistance in accordance with
the Charter to any non-nuclear weapons state party to the Nuclear Proliferation
Treaty that is a victim of an act of aggression or in object of a threat
of aggression involving nuclear weapons." Speech by President Bush, U.N.
General Assembly (New York: 21 September 1992) in U.S.-U.N. Press Release
84-(92) (21 September 1992). (46.) The term "ethnic entitlement" is used
by Donald Horowitz in a discussion of ethnic politics in Donald L. Horowitz,
Ethnic groups in Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1985) p. 186. This excerpt is from a longer passage quoted by Hurst Hanuum
in an illuminating discussion of the issues of ethnicity and nationalism.
See Hurst Hanuum, Autonomy, Sovereignty and Self-Determination (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). (47.) John Jay, in The Federalist
Papers, chapter 3, reprinted in Clinton Rossitor (New York and Scarborough,
Ontario: New American Library of World Literature, 1961) p. 38. (48.) Joseph
S. Nye, Jr. "What New World Order?" Foreign Affairs, 71, no. 2 (Spring
1992) p. 91. (49.) Hugh Miall, New Conflicts in Europe: Prevention and
Resolution, (Oxford, UK: Oxford Research Group, July 1992). (50.) U.N.
Charter, Article 2.7, see p. 344 of this article for text. (51.) The post-second
World Warbias against humanitarian intervention contrasts sharply with
longstanding practices and legal conventions such as erga omnes, forcefully
enunciated by Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius. See Theodor Meron, "Common
Rights of Mankindoin Gentili, Grotius and Suarez," American Journal of
International Law, 85 (Spring 1991) pp. 110-116; or David Scheffer, "Toward
A Modern Doctrine of Humanitarian Intervention," The University of Toledo
Law Review, 23, no.2 (Winter 1991-92). (52.) On 8 September 1992, the Egyptian
government-owned Al-Akhbar decried lack of international protection for
Liosnia aid Hercegovina as "a stamp of shame on the international organization
to which the world had looked to protect the safety and security of all
its nations." On the treatment of Bosnian Muslims, the New Nigerian stated
that "the United States and Europe have found a convenient excuse to play
their time-tested game of a application of multiple standards in conflict
resolutions as dictated by their vested interests." USIA Media Reaction,
10 September 1992. (53.) In a speech at the University of Bordeaux, then
Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar spoke of "an irresistible shift
in public attitudes fowards the belief that the defense of the oppressed
in the name of morality should prevail over frontiers and legal documents."
Secretary-General's Address at University of Bordeaux, U.N. Press Release
SG/SM/4560 (24 April 1991). Current Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali stated
at a summit meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992, "Violation
of state sovereignty is, and will remain, an offense against the global
order. But its misuse also may undermine human rights and jeopardize a
peaceful global life. Civil wars are no longer civil, and the carnage they
inflict will not let the world remain indifferent." Provisional Records
of the Security Council, U.N. Doc. S/PV.3046 (31 January 1992). (54.) ibid.
(55.) For a text of the Paris Charter, see U.N. Doc. A/451/859 (New York:
United Nations, 31 January 1990). (56.) For example, the OAS now has a
legal instrument, an "automatic anti-coup mechanism," authorizing strong
action, including use of diplomatic and economic sanctions, to reverse
coups against democratically-elected governments. (57.) The author's appreciation
of the importance of regional economic links to the weakness of regionalism
in the South, and its strength in the North, benefitted from the excellent
commentary on this subject by James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, "Periphery
in the Post-Cold War Era," International Organization, 46, no. 2 (Spring
1992). (58.) Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda For Peace (New York: United
Nations, 1992). The major proposals in An Agenda for Peace include: recommendations
on strengthening preventive diplomacy; early warning; preventive deployment
of peacekeeping troops; demilitarized zones; direct involvement of the
Security Council in dispute settlement; inviting the Secretary-General
to seek advisory opinions of the World Court; development of measures to
offset economic damages incurred by states supporting trade embargoes;
negotiation of agreements (under Article 43 of the U.N. Charter) making
troops available to the Security Council for peace-enforcement; creation
of heavily armed "peace-enforcement units" to restore cease-fires; strengthening
peacekeeping support by shifting peacekeeping financing to members' defense
budgets; creation of standby logistic units; enhancing U.N. stockpiles
of generic peacekeeping items; enhancing military staff in the planning
and logistics area; systematic attention to peace-building by directing
assistance and resources to economic and social factors affecting conflict;
pursuing burden-sharing with regional organizations; and an array of measures
to strengthen peacekeeping finance. (59.) The 17 countries supporting some
form of Security Council reform or structural review, however mildly stated,
were Brazil, Bulgaria, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Japan, Libya, Mongolia,
Nepal, Palestine, Philippines, Senegal, Tanzania, Thailand, Vietnam and
Zambia. (60.) Although Security Council decisions like the one on Libyan
sanctions are an obvious exception, for every Libya there seem to be several
Somalias or Bosnias, where comment among developing countries is more critical
of too little action of too much. (61.) For example, poor Haitians are
especially vulnerable to the trade embargo that was adopted by the OAS
against Haiti on 2 October 1991 following the overthrow of the Aristide
government, while the foreign assets sustaining the de facto government's
purchases from the E.C. and elsewhere remain intact. (62.) Permanent Mission
of Malaysia to the United Nations, Statement by Ambassador Tan Sri Razali
Ismail on Agenda Item 10: Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of
the Organization, p. 2.
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