The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (22 page)

This bold proposal for a ‘UN Guard Force’ had to be modified. Already by September 1948 it was watered down in name, functions, and size to an 800-man ‘UN Guard’, which, although uniformed and armed with light defensive weapons, would be ‘entirely non-military in character’.
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In due course this modified proposal led to the creation of a committee to consider the matter.
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When, on 24 June 1949, Trygve Lie gave the committee a version of his proposal, it was in yet further truncated form. As the committee’s report stated:

Lie should not be blamed for his successive retreats from his bold original idea. Many states – including not only the Soviet Union and its allies, but also others including the US, the UK, and France – had been nervous about the UN Guard proposal. The US had stated: ‘We are inclined to think that the original proposal was somewhat too ambitious, and that it did encroach somewhat on the military theme.’
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Even nominal supporters of the UN force idea had reservations, some arguing that they would have preferred a directly recruited force to one consisting of personnel supplied by member states.

Following closely Lie’s twice-truncated proposal, the committee’s report, issued in October 1949, noted that two new bodies, which were additional to the existing
Headquarters Guard Force, were to be established: the UN Field Service, and the UN Panel of Field Observers – the latter term being seen as a more accurate description of Lie’s proposed ‘Field Reserve Panel’. The functions of both elements were defined in extremely modest terms. The UN General Assembly approved this conclusion.
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In nomenclature, in size, and in functions, this was a tiny mouse to have emerged after Lie’s much more ambitious proposals made in 1948.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, and the UN authorization of a US-led force to repel North Korea’s armed attack on South Korea, brought the focus back to collective uses of force. The General Assembly’s famous ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution of November 1950 included a call for member states to keep forces trained, organized, and equipped for UN service – an early version of the standby concept. The same resolution also established a Collective Measures Committee, which started work in 1951.
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Shortly thereafter, Lie proposed a ‘UN Legion’, to be composed largely of over 50,000 volunteers for military service under the UN. Once again, the title of a proposed force had to be changed, this time to the more anodyne ‘UN Volunteer Reserve’. Lie admitted that it ‘was administratively, financially and militarily impractical at the present time’.
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No action was taken. The final death-knell of the UN Legion idea came in 1954 when Dag Hammarskjöld, who had succeeded Trygve Lie, indicated that ‘the Secretary-General did not wish for the time being to proceed with the proposals.’
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Lie said in his memoirs that in the early Cold War years ‘the time was not ripe for attracting the necessary governmental support.’ While recognizing all the factors that had preoccupied governments, he concluded wanly: ‘I continue to feel that this was one of those lost opportunities which, if seized, might have contributed substantially to building up the influence of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.’
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Peacekeeping forces developed, especially from 1956 onwards, along different lines: they were composed of national contingents which were made available for particular UN operations through specific agreements with the troop-providing
governments. This ad hoc method of cobbling together a UN force was, quite naturally, seen as cumbersome. With many asking ‘Why not make such machinery permanent?’, the idea of a standing UN force was revived.

This revival was most marked in the US. In 1957 the major US foreign policy think-tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, produced a book advocating the creation of a UN force.
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In the following year two leading American international lawyers produced an ambitious scheme for a ‘UN peace force’, to consist of individual volunteers formed into a Standing Force of between 200,000 and 600,000 persons, plus a Peace Force Reserve of between 600,000 and 1.2 million: so far as the projected size of a UN standing force is concerned, this is the high-water-mark.
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More modest proposals were discussed extensively at the UN in the late 1950s, including in the General Assembly. The focus was less on standing forces than on standby arrangements, which many saw as the most practicable means of making a quick response possible. US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s letter to Dag Hammarskjöld of 18 November 1958 is an early example of the enthusiasm of states for standby forces: ‘As you know, the United States… has a strong interest in the early establishment of standby arrangements for a United Nations Peace Force.’ He went on to mention the need for consultations,

In subsequent decades, virtually all developments in the UN were about relying on, and periodically attempting to improve, standby arrangements for UN peacekeeping forces. The UN Special Committee on Peacekeeping frequently discussed the issue with a view to improving the UN’s rapid-reaction capability. In the Cold War, even in its periods of detente, this was probably the best that could be hoped for.

The more ambitious idea of standing forces still attracted interest, especially from academic international lawyers. In 1964, fine British study of UN forces looked not only at the many peacekeeping and other forces that had actually been created by then, but also considered the various proposals for a permanent UN force, the methods by which it might be raised, and its possible command structure. This study reflected the contemporary view, shaped by the Cold War divide – that the General Assembly was at least as likely as the Security Council to provide the framework within which such a force might be created:

Despite their development by scholars, proposals for a permanent UN force seemed unrealistic in a period of rivalry between the two superpowers. In addition, they were to lack urgency in periods when – as in the years 1979–87 – no new peacekeeping operations were initiated.

In the period 1992–5 there were more proposals and developments relating to standing forces under UN control than at any time before or since. These were partly, like
An Agenda for Peace
, the products of the optimism of 1992. The ending of the Cold War in the years 1986–91, the active role of the UN in addressing regional conflicts at that time, and the decline in the use of the Security Council veto, all led to heightened expectations of what the UN could achieve. However, the new focus on standing forces was also the product of sober appreciation of the limitations of the UN in addressing certain crises of the period, especially in Rwanda. This section looks in turn at the successive proposals, the crises that gave rise to them, and the development of standby arrangements that occurred in this period.

In
An Agenda for Peace
, published in June 1992, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros–Ghali responded to the new situation in which the UN Security Council had vastly increased potential for reaching decisions about action; increased obligations; and a perceived need to act faster, or more forcefully, than had sometimes been possible in the Cold War years. This report contained three distinct proposals touching on the question of standing forces:

1. The idea of
Article 43 agreements
for making armed forces available to the Security Council was revived. This was in a brief two-paragraph discussion of ‘Use of Military Force’, which sought to resuscitate what was termed ‘the concept of collective security as contained in the Charter’. The report proposed ‘bringing into being, through negotiations, the special agreements foreseen in Article 43 of the Charter’, the aim being to ensure ‘ready availability of armed forces on call’. Such forces ‘may perhaps never be sufficiently large or well enough equipped to deal with a threat from a major army equipped with sophisticated weapons. They would be useful, however, in meeting any threat posed by a military force of a lesser order.’
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Their purpose would be ‘to respond to outright aggression, imminent or actual’; but Boutros-Ghali conceded: ‘Such forces are not likely to be available for some time to come.’
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2.
Peace-enforcement units
were proposed, mainly or exclusively to buttress peacekeeping forces by providing a capacity to respond to ceasefire violations. The principal task of such units, to restore and maintain a ceasefire, was one which ‘can on occasion exceed the mission of peace-keeping forces and the expectations of peace-keeping force contributors’. The report proposed the use of such units ‘in clearly defined circumstances and with their terms of reference specified in advance. Such units from Member States would be available on call and would consist of troops that have volunteered for such service. They would have to be more heavily armed than peace-keeping forces and would need to undergo extensive preparatory training within their national forces.’
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3. Regarding the provision of contingents for peacekeeping forces, the report highlighted the importance of
standby arrangements
whereby member states would specify ‘the kind and number of skilled personnel they will be prepared to offer the United Nations as the needs of new operations arise’.
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Although they pointed in the same general direction, none of these proposals was for a permanent UN standing force. However, in 1992 some proposals for such a
force were made, mainly in the USA. For example, Timothy Stanley and others proposed a UN Legion of some five thousand troops, supplemented by a Quick Reaction Force of troops earmarked by members of the Security Council and a second lower-readiness backup force.
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A similar proposal was made by the United Nations Association of the United States.
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The idea of a standing UN Volunteer Military Force comprised of professionals recruited on an individual basis was advanced in June 1993 by Sir Brian Urquhart. The central issue to be addressed was the increasing difficulties faced by UN peacekeeping operations. Two aspects of this were weakness in face of violent harassment (as in Cambodia and Angola); and delays in getting states to contribute forces to an urgent UN mission (as in Mozambique and Somalia). Former Yugoslavia exemplified both aspects:

What was the exact nature and function of the proposed force? He indicated that he was thinking in terms of ‘a five-thousand-strong light infantry force’ that might cost in the region of $US380 million a year to maintain and equip. As Urquhart succinctly wrote elsewhere at that time: