The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (6 page)

Article 54 states: ‘The Security Council shall at all times be kept fully informed of activities undertaken or in contemplation under regional arrangements or by regional agencies for the maintenance of international peace and security.’ While this has not happened in every case, there has been much reporting to the Council on this basis.

It was hardly to be expected that the Charter could resolve all the complex issues involved in the UN’s division of security responsibilities with regional organizations. What it did do was to establish the key principle that the UN could not tackle all problems, and would act in conjunction with such bodies. In practice, the relations between the UN and regional bodies have been even more varied and complex than envisaged in 1945, involving for example some regional bodies acting with Council approval outside their own region, and some Council resolutions giving retrospective approval to certain actions of regional bodies.

To understand certain strengths of the UN arrangements for international security, it is instructive to compare them with those of the League of Nations, established at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. While the League had represented a groundbreaking advance in international organization, it also had many weaknesses that the founders of the UN sought to overcome. For example, the League Covenant provided for a Council which can in some ways be seen as a precursor to the UN Security Council; but the arrangements for it proved to be ineffectual.

As regards the League Council’s membership there were three main problems. First, the Council never contained all the major powers of the time: the US never belonged to the League at all, Germany was a member only from 1926 to 1933, Japan also left in 1933, and Italy left in 1937. Secondly, Britain and France, the two powers that were consistently members of the League Council, were colonial powers – a fact which contributed to suspicion of the League on the part of states and peoples that were critical of European colonialism. And thirdly, each member of the League Council,
whether permanent or non-permanent, had a veto. In the 1930s the Council membership progressively increased, and with it the number of vetoes.
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In addition, the arrangements for the League Council’s management of international security were vague on paper and ineffective in practice. The Covenant, while reflecting certain collective security ideas, was notably weak in its delineation of threats to international security, in its procedures for determining such threats, and in its provisions for enforcement. The Covenant generally, and Article 10 in particular, was preoccupied above all with confronting ‘aggression’: not only is ‘aggression’ notoriously difficult to define, but in reality certain international problems, such as systematic violations of treaty regimes in a wide range of matters, can pose major threats to the peace without being classifiable as aggression. Article 10 was also weak in what it said about the League’s response to threats. The deeply flawed text of Article 10, which starts strongly and ends weakly, stated (in full):

Other articles confirmed that the provisions for the League Council to decide upon action against a violator, and to ensure that states took such action, were notably weak. For example, Article 11(1) stated:

If a state resorted to war in defiance of the Covenant, the League was committed only to economic sanctions, and there was much less clarity about military action, which could be merely recommended, but was not made mandatory. As Article 16(2) stated:

A further weakness of the Covenant is that it involved the Council in an apparently strong but actually ineffective commitment to disarmament. This was mainly in Article 8, the first paragraph of which stated:

Article 8 went on to require the Council to formulate plans for such reduction. When states failed to achieve disarmament, especially after the ignominious end of the League’s great set-piece Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments (1932–4), the League was perceived as having set an impossibly high target and then as having failed.

Having learned from the problems of the years 1919–39, the authors of the UN Charter devised a scheme that differed from that of the League in many respects. The key ones are easily summarized. The Charter as a whole was drawn up with the central aim of ensuring that the major powers would be willing to join, and remain in, the organization. At the same time, the Charter’s emphasis on equal rights and self-determination of peoples ensured that the UN was compatible with the cause of decolonization. The provisions for the UN Security Council were different from those for the League Council: by restricting the veto to Permanent Members, the Security Council had fewer vetoes than its ill-fated predecessor; it was empowered to address a broader range of security problems than the case of ‘aggression’ that was supposed to be the focus of the League Council’s concerns; the Security Council was entitled to use force without in every case attempting economic sanctions first; and the Security Council was envisaged as taking military measures in its own right, rather than merely advising or recommending action to states. It was even envisaged as having armed forces continuously available to it, so that it would be in a position to use force to maintain international peace and security. The UN security system was more explicitly envisaged as being paralleled by regional security arrangements. Disarmament was addressed more cautiously in the UN Charter than it had been in the League Covenant. In all of these respects, whatever its defects, the UN Charter represented a deliberate, and major, advance on the flawed terms of the League Covenant.

The UN Charter system provides a much more robust framework for collective action than any previous attempt at global order. It differs hugely from all its predecessors, including the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century and the
League of Nations in the interwar years. As a result, it has often been asserted that the Charter represents a scheme for collective security.
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However, we question whether the Charter, even in theory, provides the basis for a general system of collective security, at least if defined in the classical sense. Still less does it provide a basis for world government. These two issues are explored further below.

The term ‘collective security’, in its classical sense, refers to
a system, regional or global, in which each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all, and agrees to join in a collective response to threats to, and breaches of, the peace
.
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This is the meaning followed here, with emphasis on collective security being a
system
. The assumption is that the threats to be addressed may arise from one or more states within the system. Collective security as defined here is distinct from, and more ambitious than, systems of alliance security or collective defence, in which groups of states ally with each other, principally against possible external threats.

There is a long history of the armed forces of many different states being used in a common cause. There is also a distinguished pedigree of leaders who have sought to establish a system of collective security, viewing it as superior to the balance of power as a basis for international order. Cardinal Richelieu of France proposed such a scheme in 1629, and his ideas were partially reflected in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.
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Sadly, the history of proposals for collective security is a long record of failure.
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There have been some elements of collective security arrangements in the two principal international organizations established in the twentieth century – the League of Nations and the UN. Yet neither was set up as, still less operated as, a full collective security system. The UN Charter, which does not refer to the term ‘collective security’, includes the following main departures from such a system:

• The veto power as laid down in Article 27 ensures that the P5 cannot have action mandated by the UN Security Council used against them, or indeed against a close ally. The veto system is much criticized, but it may have saved the UN from wasting time and political capital in contemplating hazardous actions against
major powers and their close allies; and it is actually less of an obstacle to action than was the more general veto system in the League of Nations Council.

• Article 39 (which is in
Chapter VII
), assigning to the Security Council the duty of determining whether a situation constitutes a threat to international peace and security, grants it a substantial degree of discretion regarding both the types of situation with which it deals and the nature of the measures to be taken.

• Article 51 (still in
Chapter VII
) states, in part: ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.’ While the Security Council retains the right to take measures in such circumstances, this Article recognizes that states retain a right of self-defence, and do not have to put all their eggs in the basket of collective security.

• Article 52 (which is in
Chapter VIII
, on Regional Arrangements), by providing for the coexistence of a UN-based security system with regional arrangements and agencies, implicitly accepts that the Security Council itself may not be able to address all threats to international peace and security. In theory, any gaps in the UN security system might be filled on a regional basis: regional organizations have the advantage of greater knowledge of local societies, but they also suffer from the disadvantage of fear of local hegemonic powers. Some regional security organizations have certain elements of a collective security system as part of their institutional framework, but in no case have these elements been followed consistently in practice.

• Articles 53 and 107 left each of the wartime allies a free hand to handle their relations with enemy states in the Second World War outside the Charter framework. These articles were a significant concession to unilateralism in the conduct of the post-war occupations, but they have been a dead letter for many years, and since the World Summit of September 2005 they face oblivion.
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Thus the Charter is not a blueprint for a general system of collective security – at least if defined in the classical way mentioned above. Nonetheless, there has been a tendency to invest in the UN Security Council hopes for collective security that exceed what can be prudently based on the Charter and on the Council’s record. For example, this happened in 1992, following the first UN Security Council summit, and again in 2000 and 2004–5, in connection with two major UN summit meetings.

Hopes for a UN-based security system were particularly high in 1992. When on 31 January 1992 the Council’s first-ever summit was held – at which the member states were represented by heads of state and government – they met to consider ‘the responsibility of the Security Council in the maintenance of international peace and security’. The fifteen leaders who had assembled in the Council chamber
in New York issued a statement strongly reaffirming ‘their commitment to the collective security system of the Charter’.
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They also invited Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to make recommendations on strengthening the UN’s capacity in peacekeeping, peace-making, and preventive diplomacy. This led to the publication in June 1992 of
An Agenda for Peace
, with its set of ambitious proposals to enhance the capacity of the UN to respond to the challenges of the post-Cold War world. It referred to ‘the concept of collective security as contained in the Charter’ and ‘a universal system for collective security’.
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However, although it usefully defined many terms, it did not define collective security, nor did it address the long-standing and difficult problems that confront the idea.
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When, in January 1995, Boutros-Ghali issued the ‘Supplement to an Agenda for Peace’, its tone was much more cautious, as it was bound to be after the difficulties and failures of international action in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda.
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