The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (18 page)

China, though it played only a modest role in the framing of the Dumbarton Oaks proposals and was not represented at Yalta, consistently supported the notion that a small group of major powers should be in charge of maintaining global security. No doubt, the fact that China was to be included in the inner circle partly accounted for this positive attitude. But its painful experience with aggression and foreign occupation appears to have been the key factor. According to the China Institute of International Affairs, ‘the informed Chinese public was much impressed by the fact that the principal authority to keep peace would now rest with the Council. This would ensure promptness in action which was deemed to be essential to the suppression of acts of aggression.’
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Like many delegates at the opening plenary session at San Francisco, Dr T. V. Soong of China focused on why the new organization would be a marked improvement over the League. ‘The United States and the Soviet Union are now among the chief artisans of the new international order’, he observed, ‘and their overwhelming strength will be joined with that of the other powers to back it. Its authority will be upheld by all the powerful nations of our day.’
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During the bitter debate over the veto, China defended ‘the rule of unanimity as essential for its [the Council’s] strength and effectiveness. The alternative was a voting system, which, though it might be more perfect, might in a given moment weaken the Security Council in its efforts to act promptly and effectively.’
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Even Mao Tse-tung declared his support for the results of the Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta conferences and sent a representative of the Chinese Communist Party to San Francisco.
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Tactically, of course, the unity of the four convening powers and France at San Francisco on permanent membership and the veto was essential to winning over (or, in some cases, running over) the opposition. It had the perversely positive effect of demonstrating that the five could work together effectively, at least when their common interests were perceived to be at stake. As Webster pointed out, ‘there was a Great Power Conference inside of the larger Conference, just as there was at Paris in 1919.’
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In his words, ‘so long as the Sponsoring Powers remained united, the smaller states were bound to acquiesce in their decision, if they wished for an international organisation at all.’
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During the veto debate, a British delegate warned that any structure not resting on great power unanimity ‘would be built on shifting sands, of no more value than the paper upon which it was written’.
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Even more graphic was US Senator Tom Connally’s gesture of tearing the draft Charter to shreds before the committee debating the veto to show what would happen if the opponents prevailed.
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To Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, the Australian delegate who led the assault on the special prerogatives granted to the big powers under the Dumbarton Oaks draft, these tactics worked all too well, as ‘any Charter proposals which could ever be represented as endangering Great Power solidarity or unanimity were very difficult of acceptance.’
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The ‘ambiguous text’ on the veto, he complained, ‘was regarded as sacrosanct! It had been approved by three heads of States, and doubts regarding its meaning or adequacy appeared to some treasonable, indeed almost blasphemous.’
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As noted earlier, however, the sponsoring powers were not alone in defending the veto and permanent membership as, at least, a necessary evil. In reporting on its experience in San Francisco, the New Zealand delegation complained that one of its key proposals ‘was opposed throughout by the Great Powers and by those other delegations whose policy it was invariably to support the Great Powers’.
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Perhaps those delegations should have also been credited with a realistic appreciation of where their national interests and security lay. Egypt, for instance, asserted ‘that all peoples recognized that the war had been won and that the peace would be assured through the unity of the four great powers’.
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To Denmark, ‘a spirit of understanding and collaboration among the nations was something more important than the clauses of the Charter.’ After all, ‘the liberation of Denmark had been possible by their collaboration. Her fate in the future is dependent upon it.’
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‘Speaking for the smallest country represented at the Conference’, one that had been invaded by Germany twice in twenty-five years, the delegate of Luxembourg emphasized ‘that the unity of the four sponsoring governments and France was the cornerstone of the Organization’.
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In 1945, a strong case could be – and was – made that, as a delegate from the United Kingdom put it during the veto debate, ‘the unanimity of the great powers was a hard fact but an inescapable one.’
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Speaking of the convening powers, Leo Pasvolsky observed that, ‘because of their size and strength, these four countries can make or break any system of general security that might be established.’
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Which it would be, however, was less obvious. Webster sounded, as always, optimistic: ‘the union of the three Great Powers was the pivot of all action and the centre of all hopes for the future, and those who had the direction of affairs were very much aware both of their responsibility and of their opportunity.’
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But, as noted above, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman were very aware of the looming shadow of a possible downturn in relations with Moscow should it prove impossible to find mutually acceptable terms for shaping the geopolitical dimensions of the post-war order. The unanimity rule was essential not because the great powers were bound to see eye to eye on all future security challenges, but because they suspected that often they would not. The principle of unanimity would be superfluous when their views converged. When they did not, however, it served both to preserve the institution and to insure that it could not be turned against one of its principal founders. As such, permanent membership and the veto power would not guarantee an active and uniformly effective security organization, only a durable and sustainable one.

The three preceding propositions, and the contentions that shaped them, may sound familiar to a contemporary audience. In several critical respects, the struggles of the first half of the 1940s over establishing the UN Security Council were remarkably similar to the debates today over reforming and enlarging it. Then, as now, the contentions revolved around its composition and voting rules much more than its powers or approach to issues of war and peace. The debate pitted a handful of determined world powers, backed by smaller states facing acute security threats, against the demands from many member states for a larger, more representative, and more accountable Council. However, the core proposition – that the Council should be permitted great flexibility in determining what constituted a threat to international peace and security and how and when to respond to it – was hardly challenged in 1945. It was, in fact, the absence of substantive strictures on Council decision-making that reinforced the priority that countries on both sides of the debate placed on who would sit around the Council table and how they would make decisions. The wider the Council’s writ to interpret what constitutes security, the more non-members worry about perceived inequities in membership and decision-making rules. If such decisions are to be considered political more than legal matters, then the composition of the Council becomes of paramount importance. Thus, it hardly seems surprising either that the current tug of war over the future shape of the Council has coincided with the most active and assertive era in its history, or that the differences of view have remained unresolved over more than a dozen years of deliberation among the member states.
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At the date of writing, despite Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s repeated call for an urgent and radical overhaul of the Council, reform efforts have, once again, reached a stalemate.
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The member states are deeply divided on the most basic elements of what a future Security Council should look like, with few prospects for convergence anytime soon. Though most have advocated a second enlargement in light of the organization’s growing membership – the Council was expanded from eleven to fifteen in 1965 – there is nothing close to a consensus on how large the increment should be or on whether it should include both permanent and nonpermanent seats. For all the talk of making the Council more ‘representative’, a term studiously avoided in the crafting of the Charter, there are deep divisions in each region about which or even whether any of the local countries should be granted permanent status. No criteria have been established for such a selection, as all the candidates to date have nominated themselves (as the Big Three did in 1945). Though the Permanent Members rarely use their vetoes publicly these days and the Council usually acts by consensus, the unanimity rule remains almost as controversial today as it was in San Francisco.

None of this would surprise the core founders, who expected recurring challenges to the seating and voting arrangements that they were able to cajole and compel the other delegations to accept in San Francisco. That is why they insisted on having a veto over any amendments to the Charter. In return, of course, they were to work together as purposely as possible to maintain international peace and security. It is a historically unprecedented accomplishment that such a politically and geographically diverse oligarchy of major powers has managed to pursue such a dialogue and preserve such an institution for so many decades. Their record in maintaining international peace and security, however, is more mixed and more controversial. There is no historic or contemporary comparator. As a unique institution, the Council has set its own standard, leaving others to assess its results from their own subjective perspectives. Obviously the current Permanent Members have often fallen short of public expectations, but can there be confidence that some other or larger group of Permanent Members would do better? The League’s Council had doubled its membership by 1934, as the global conflagration it was designed to prevent was on the horizon. Neither multi-polarity nor multilateral decision-making did the job then.

For all its faults, few would call the current Council lazy. Without a doubt, the Council has been more active – whether measured in terms of meetings, operational and thematic resolutions, peacekeeping and peace-building missions, or enforcement actions – since the end of the Cold War than ever before.
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The global levels of interstate and intra-state conflict, casualties, and refugees have fallen as Council activity has risen.
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Whether a rigorous correlation can be drawn between these two developments is doubtful and well beyond the scope of this Chapter in any case, and it is not certain that either trend can be sustained indefinitely. These developments do suggest, however, that the advocates of radical reform need to make a strong case for why a major transformation of the Council is needed at this point. So far, they have had remarkably little to say about the Council’s performance, what ails it, and how the proposed reforms would cure it.

Some of the reforms that Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a portion of the member states have advocated most vigorously would bend or upend key planks of the arrangements negotiated so painstakingly at San Francisco. All three propositions addressed in this chapter are under challenge. As discussed above, the founders, including both large and small countries, recognized the considerable virtue in not constricting the Council’s freedom of action through lists of rules and guidelines. This has allowed it to be a remarkably adaptable institution, evolving its tools and working methods as conditions have changed in unpredictable ways. Nevertheless, Kofi Annan and his High-level Panel have enunciated a series of conditions or principles to guide Council decision-making on the collective use of force. His 2005
In Larger Freedom
report, reflecting the conclusions of the High-level Panel, declared that:

These principles no doubt echo the concerns of those member states and individuals concerned about how far the heightened Security Council activism and interventionism might go. But they hardly reflect the founders’ intentions. Moreover, as noted above, the common refrain around the UN, repeated by Kofi Annan and his High-level Panel, that the Council should consider the use of force to be a last resort was specifically refuted at San Francisco in the Canadian amendment adopted on the draft language of Article 42. The flat declaration by the last two Secretaries-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali as well as Kofi Annan, that the UN is no longer in a position to organize or oversee the collective use of force for enforcement purposes represents a denial of what was widely believed in 1945 to be the organization’s central responsibility.
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Taken together, these doctrinal proposals and declarations reflect a shrinking view of what the Council should do and of its scope for decision-making – a considerable irony when tied to calls for enlarging its membership. They represent, as well, a stinging rebuke to the spirit and letter of the Charter as it was crafted more than six decades ago.