The Security Council in the 20th Century - Essay Example

?The Security Council in the 20th Century The United Nation Security Council is one of the most prominent and important intergovernmental platforms for international conflict resolution and the first body established for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security. It has the power to levy sanctions against offending regimes and issue resolutions, thereby establishing international opinion regarding the actions of governments, as well as the option to authorize military action. While opinions on the effectiveness of the Security Council vary widely, with some citing the continuing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians and other ongoing situations as evidence of the lack of real authority, most agree that the U.N. Security Council is a transformative agency of international politics. In his book The U.N. Security Council: practice and promise, Luck (2006) points out the very different nature of warfare and armed engagement since the establishment of the Security Council. Since the end of World War II, the world has seen very little large-scale conflict between militarized nations. The majority of the battles with which the 20th century seems to have been so heavily populated, were civil wars and limited engagements. The wars of the 20th century were largely unconventional in nature, often involving ideological or ethnic motivations rather than the nationalistic concerns of the past. While some, like Kristol and Fry in the Weekly Standard (2010), have characterized the U.N. Security Council’s efforts toward containing Iran as an ongoing “tragicomedy,” Luck notes that, partly through the United Nations and the Security Council, the largest conflict of the 20th century never occurred: a war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Luck provides a comprehensive list of the tools the Security Council has at its disposal in authorizing the use of force and sometimes marshalling force itself. While Luck doesn’t give sole credit to the nature of conflict and warfare in the 20th century to the Security Council, he does note the dramatic changes in the manner in which sovereign states develop and assert international influence and credits the tools employed by the Security Council with a role in those changes. Remarks made regarding the limited enforcement authority of the Security Council and the effectiveness of United Nations Peacekeepers, such as Somini Sengupta’s New York Times article (2003), do not take into account the position described by Luck: that the existence of the U.N. has accompanied a decline in armed conflict and has contributed to global security. He also notes that the Security Council is the first organization of its kind, so there is no basis for comparison to gauge its success or failure. Rather than holding the Security Council to idealistic standards, Luck chooses, instead, to compare the Security Council to itself, gauging how it responds to situations and issues by how well it did in the past. That past, as he sees it, is largely one of success. Peacekeeping missions in South America and Africa ended armed conflict in the ‘80’s, and the peaceful warming of the Cold War is itself a tribute to the effectiveness of the Security Council as a mediation body. Understanding the role and history of the Security Council, as well as the nature of international power before the establishment of the United Nations is the proper lens through which to look at the success of the Council in the 20th century. The result, he says, gives some hope for a successful and responsive Security Council in the future. This is an assessment shared by Alan Vaughn Lowe (2008). In his book, The Security Council: Evolution and War, he also argues against accusations that the Security Council is slow and ineffective in its dealing with threats to international security. No law enforcement agency can be expected to enforce every law all of the time, he writes, because of the monetary and social cost of law enforcement, and the Security Council is forced to confront these concerns when contemplating actions against offending states. Many complaints, such as those of Virgil Hawkins (2003), who says the Security Council is not seriously engaged in African affairs, are based on the appearance of inaction of the Security Council, or inconsistency in their treatments of states like Iran and North Korea who attempt to secure nuclear weapons. Lowe points out that the Security Council’s role is not that of law enforcer, but of a stabilizing agency established to help avoid armed conflict and, in some cases, gross abuses of human rights. As such, the expectation that the Security Council would enforce all laws equally is based on flawed expectations based on a misinterpretation of its mission. Like Luck, Lowe also describes the transformative effect the Security Council has had on the principles by which states deploy force. Each period in human history has been dominated by a few large, usually imperial, forces exercising military strength to increase or centralize power, to defend or promote their own narrow interests. By submitting to Security Council authorization, the powerful countries of the 20th century now agree to have the purposes of engagement examined by a third party, subject to international opinion. Although the system is far from perfect, as Howe readily agrees, it does represent a turning point and a new paradigm for the establishment of security, particularly for less-powerful states formerly subject to the whims of larger, more dominant entities. The Cold War, the defining logic of international politics in the 20th century, pushed many other concerns to the wayside or, by contrast, elevated isolated regional conflicts to the status of major international priorities. In the decades since the end of the Cold War, the Security Council has finally been able to concentrate on more local crises, human rights abuses, and the international threats posed by fascism. Thomas Weiss offers a more critical view of Security Council operations. In his Current History article, “Intensive Care for the United Nations,” Weiss (2010) agrees with the ideology of and necessity for the United Nations and the Security Council, but points out that efforts of the international institution are hampered by member nations who make decisions and cast votes based on those very same narrow national interests the Security Council was intended to avoid. Weiss (2010) cites the American government’s unwillingness to join international treaties banning land mines or limiting greenhouse gas emissions as evidence of how one nation’s perceived self-interest takes wind from the sails of international efforts. In the same issue, Ikenberry (2010) notes how the Security Council is dominated by Western democracies, while emerging nations such as China and Brazil are seeking permanent seats at the table and formerly regional conflicts are becoming global threats. China’s well-documented support of Iran and North Korea are based on its economic interests, to the detriment of the effectiveness of the Security Council. The national interests of both groups of countries are the center of the debates around the Security Council. While some American conservative critics such as Cristol and Fry (2010), mentioned above, regard the United Nations as a threat to national sovereignty, and the Security Council as a threat to the precious rights of a nation state to unilateral military action, Weiss (2010) maintains that the Security Council is ineffective precisely because of this allegiance to the idea of national autonomy and national interests. Weiss’ portrait of the U.N. and the Security Council is of an overly redundant and complex edifice of autonomous agencies too slow and cumbersome to fulfill the promise of its charter and too limited to the perspectives of its constituent members. He, in addition to Fry and Cristol, fail to take into account the successful U.N. – authorized American campaign against Milosevic which, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a 2010 interview on Lateline, saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Problems such as global terrorism and rogue nation states are not only too important to be decided by the interests of a few nations, but will also not be easily solved with unilateral military action. One element of the Security Council on which all three authors agree is its representation of a mid-20th century global power arrangement that has since become outmoded, particularly since the end of the cold war (Luck 2006). The rise of developing nations and the waning influence of the United States as the world’s remaining superpower not only do not fully represent current world politics, but fosters resentment among developing nations. David Malone (2003) describes the dynamic of the Security Council, with elected representatives often feeling marginalized and ignored by the permanent members, who set the agenda and effectively manage the Council. Weiss (2010) also cites the makeup of the Security Council as a source of its perceived powerlessness. Not only do the developing powers of the world lack equal representation on the Security Council, but the perceived contention between developed and developing nations provides grounds for un-cooperation on both sides. A case in point would be the United States refusal to sign onto the Kyoto Protocol, protesting that developing nations were not subject to the same regulations as fully industrialized economies. The lack of cooperation effectively killed the accord. Another element agreed upon by Weiss, Luck, and Lowe, and often overlooked in the popular media, and even sometimes by scholars, such as Michael Glennon (2003), who proclaimed the Security Council a failure because of the situation in Iraq at the time, is the revolutionary nature of the Security Council. For all the posturing decried by Weiss in his article in Current History, he acknowledges that the Security Council has been instrumental in solving and averting crises in the 20th century. Where Glennon says the great experiment is a failure, Weiss, Luck, and Lowe agree that the Security Council is an ongoing experiment worth performing. In a rebuttal piece in Foreign Affairs, Luck (2003) cites fourteen successfully completed peacekeeping missions as the real work of the Security Council and that it was never intended to be used as a court of international law. With this view in mind, the Security Council’s success is as an evolutionary idea. Regardless of how its role in the 20th century is perceived, each author agrees on the necessity for a well-regarded and highly-functioning Security Council in the current. As Weiss (2010) points out, the United Nations was established by the victorious nations in the war against fascism to safeguard a secure future for humanity. In the years since, no large-scale armed conflict has occurred, but the security challenges facing the world, and the Western industrialized nations in particular, are less and less susceptible to unilateral action. Global terrorists and rogue nations in pursuit of nuclear arms will continue to attempt to destabilize the world, so global cooperation in the 21st century will be more necessary than ever to solve problems and confront agitators who are not constrained by traditional notions of national boundaries. Reference List Charter of the United Nations, Chapter 5 [online]. Available from: . Fry, Jamie, & Cristol, William. 2010. The Weekly Standard. A Period of Consequences [online]. 15. p. 7. Available from: [Accessed 07 Jan 2011]. Glennon, Michael J., May/June 2003. Foreign Affairs. Why the Security Council failed [online]. Available from: [Accesed 07 Jan 2011]. Hawkins, Virgin, 2003. African Security Review. Measuring UN Security Council Action and Inaction in the ‘90’s [online]. 12. Available from: [Accessed 07 Jan 2011]. Hitchens, Christopher. 2010. Lateline, interview by Tony Jones. Inkenberr, J., 2010. Current History, A Crisis of Global Governance [online]. 109. Pp 315-321. Available from: [Accessed 07 Jan. 2011]. Lowe, Alan V., 2008. The United Nations Security Council: the evolution of thought and war. Oxford: Oxford University Press Luck, Edward C. 2003. Foreign Affairs. Stayin’ alive: the rumors of the UN’s death have been exaggerated [online]. Available at: [Accessed 07 Jan. 2011] Luck, Edward C. 2006. The U.N. Security Council: practice and promise. New York: Rutledge. Malone, David, 2004. The UN Security Council: from the cold war to the 21st century. Boulder: Lynne Reiner. Sengupta, Somini, 2003. The New York Times. Congo violence surges unabated / Peacekeepers defied as rival armies continue slaughter [online]. Available at: http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-05-27/news/17492335_1_bunia-ituri-congo> [Accessed 07 Jan, 2011]. Weiss, Thomas G., 2010. Current History. Intensive Care for the United Nations [online]. 109, pp.322-328. Available from: [Accessed 07 Jan. 2011 ]. Read More