The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (27 page)

• Working out a concept for those UN operations which are distinct from both peacekeeping and enforcement against aggression, or encompass elements of both approaches.

Such measures are critically important to a system which, while undoubtedly imperfect, does actually exist. It is more diverse and complex than the idea of a UN standing force. It might well fail the Darfur test. Yet the story of advocacy of a UN standing force over six decades leads to the conclusion that such measures represent the most likely, and perhaps also the best, way forward.

NICO KRISCH
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I
NTERNATIONAL
institutions and great powers often coexist in an ambivalent relationship. From the perspective of powerful states, institutions tend to appear as unwelcome constraints, as a ‘strategy of the weak’ intended to tie them down.
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For weak states, international institutions often represent precisely the opposite: tools of the powerful that are intended to conceal or even legitimate dominance. In a different form, these two perspectives are replicated in international relations scholarship, with realists (and Marxists) regarding institutions as mere reflections of the distribution of material power,
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and idealists (and to some extent constructivists) seeing in them civilizing forces in and through which fairness and justice can Xourish.
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This sharp contrast is, of course, overdrawn. In most cases, both perspectives contain part of the truth, and recent writing has rightly emphasized the particular benefits for powerful states that derive from the restraining and legitimating effect of international institutions.
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In the case of the Security Council, though, this more balanced picture might appear forced, given the far-reaching privileges of its Permanent Members which, already in 1949, led Hans Morgenthau to interpret the Council as the ‘international government of the Great Powers’.
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For the Great Powers acting in concert, constraints seem largely absent; and for any single Great Power, the only real constraint is that it needs to ensure the consent (or acquiescence) of the other Permanent Members. Even if this consent is not forthcoming, the Security Council does not truly operate as a constraint: given it cannot act against a Great Power, the Council merely fails to be a useful instrument. Thus, for the Great Powers, the Council seems to be at best a good tool, at worst irrelevant, just as one would expect from a Great Power concert.

Yet such a picture is hardly accurate. Even though depictions of the Council as a ‘lofty legalist shrine’
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or a site where ‘the power of the better argument’
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counts are certainly exaggerated, the practice in and around the Council provides evidence of significant constraints on the Great Powers. In this chapter, I try to shed light on both the privileges and constraints that come with Council membership, and in particular on how both are connected: how using the Council as a tool requires accepting significant (and perhaps increasing) constraints, and over time also leads to limits on acting outside the Council framework. I will begin by sketching how the exceptionally dominant institutional position of the Great Powers in the Council has been established, defended, and informally even extended over the last decades. I then turn to the limits on the capacity of the Great Powers to take advantage of the Council, observable from Council practice. In a third section, I ask why the Great Powers are willing to accept these constraints and outline the benefits Great Powers derive from using the Council, as compared with acting outside the Council framework. Finally, I inquire into how these dynamics have changed over time.

The extent to which Great Power privilege is institutionalized in the UN Charter is exceptional in the landscape of international organizations. Elsewhere, attempts to formalize dominant power have always been highly contested and have often had only limited success. While institutionalized privilege characterizes important organizations such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, most other formal international organizations operate on the basis of sovereign equality, and this often makes them unsatisfactory in the view of powerful states.
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When the UN Charter was negotiated, precedents for a deviation from sovereign equality were even scarcer.
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The Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century operated largely outside formal structures, and still at the beginning of the twentieth century, many states rejected attempts at formalizing dominance, thus provoking the failure of efforts to establish a permanent international court in 1907. This sentiment shifted, however, after the First World War, when the need for strong institutions became so great as to make many states compromise on issues of sovereign equality. As a result, the Covenant of the League of Nations embodied privileges for the Great Powers, even though it often led to an uneasy balance with aspirations of formal equality.

In the negotiation of the UN Charter, the Great Powers exploited this precedent in their favour.
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At Dumbarton Oaks, the US, the UK, the Soviet Union, and China reached agreement on the general shape of the Security Council, and Yalta made possible a compromise on the voting issue that had proved intractable before. Precisely because negotiations over voting arrangements, especially over the extent of the veto, had been so long and difficult, none of the Great Powers was willing to accept changes later on, and they signalled this very clearly to the participants in the San Francisco Conference. Still, many smaller states made proposals to limit the veto, to limit the role of the Permanent Members in the Council, or to limit the powers of the Council as such – hardly any of them were successful. On the veto, only Australia’s proposal to exclude the veto from all arrangements relating to the peaceful settlement of disputes was put to a vote, but it failed to attract enough support. Other, more far-reaching attacks on the veto had no chance of success, and there was no attempt to call into question the
privileged position of the Great Powers as such.
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Given that this position was presented as a
sine qua non
by the sponsoring powers, the smaller states understood that they had to choose between an organization with Great Power privilege, or no organization at all.
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The Great Power privilege in the Security Council has withstood attacks ever since. The reform of the Council in 1965 only resulted in an increase in Non-permanent Members,
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and in the 1990s, attempts to abolish the veto soon gave way to greater realism.
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Even if numerical expansions of the institution complicate the exercise of Great Power dominance to some extent, at least in formal terms they hardly reduce the voting power of the Permanent Members as long as no new veto rights are created.
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Over time, with the rise in power of other states, such as India or Brazil, this might result in a widening gap between actual Great Power ‘status’ and formal privilege; but at least for the time being, full Permanent Membership also confirms the Great Power status of the current holders of privilege – in some cases, such as that of France, the symbolic force of Permanent Membership might even create Great Power status.
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During most of the Cold War, when the Council was largely blocked by superpower opposition, these formal privileges did not matter much (except of course to bring the blockage about). Yet this has changed radically since 1990. The greater unity of the Permanent Members allows them to make effective use of their privileges, and it has also given them space to strengthen their dominant role further. They have done so in part by extending the scope of Security Council powers – an issue to which I will return below – but also through new and informal procedural mechanisms. Thus, starting with the discussions on the Iran–Iraq war in 1986, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly conducted informal negotiations prior to Council meetings; more and more often, other Permanent Members were included only in later stages of negotiations; and in the 1990s, most decisions of the Council were prepared in meetings of the P5 prior to any debate in the Council as such.
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The more the Permanent Members were able to agree on a common position beforehand, the
smaller the chances for Non-permanent Members to influence the decision. Likewise, the role of non-members of the Council has become increasingly weaker. As most of the actual work of the Council now takes place in informal consultations behind closed doors, and public meetings are often held only for a formal vote,
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non-members frequently have little information about Council discussions and no opportunity to express their views in the Council. At the same time, Permanent Members are under less pressure to defend and justify their views publicly. Thus, while the formal use of the veto has decreased radically since the end of the Cold War, its use in informal consultations seems to remain common.
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A move in a similar direction is the increasingly central role of ‘Groups of Friends’ with respect to issues before the Security Council. Composed of states with a particular interest or special influence in a conflict, these groups often coordinate operations and also draft Council resolutions. Most Non-permanent Members are usually not part of those groups, and their role in actual decision-making is thus often reduced to rubber-stamping decisions.
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All these shifts may help make the Council more efficient, but they also allow the Great Powers to extend their control over the institution further.
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These shifts in favour of the Great Powers are, however, only one side of the story. The counter-movements are just as interesting, and indicate some limits to the utilization of the Council by the Great Powers, even when they act in unison.

Non-members of the Council in particular have made sustained criticism of the move away from open Council meetings to informal for a, and since the mid-1990s,
the Council has seen it necessary to respond with efforts at greater transparency and inclusion. For example, the use of informal consultations has been reduced; draft resolutions and presidential statements debated in them are now circulated among non-members, and they are followed by open briefings by the Council presidency; a growing number of public and private meetings are held to allow non-member states to express their views on specific issues and to allow Council members to present their positions to a broader audience; periodical ‘wrap-up sessions’ have been introduced as a means to discuss the Council’s work with the broader UN membership; and the Council now also reaches out to a broader audience by holding regular meetings with non-governmental organizations.
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Likewise, while welcoming the role of Groups of Friends, the Council has emphasized that ‘the drafting of resolutions… should be carried out in a manner that will allow adequate participation of all members of the Council.’
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These measures might not lead to actual equal participation of members or to fully effective communication with non-members, but they help to remedy some imbalance.
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And they represent the success of an effort by weaker states to mobilize norms to counter Great Power attempts at strengthening procedural dominance – a success reflected in the General Assembly’s insistence in 2005 that the Security Council ‘enhance its accountability’ and ‘increase the transparency of its work’.
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The mobilization of norms has proven to be a limit to utilization of the Council by the Great Powers in yet other cases. For example, Libya drew upon normative resources in its struggle against sanctions throughout the 1990s, in part by invoking norms of procedural justice that the US and UK had relied upon in justifying the sanctions initially,
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but also by appealing to broader principles that made the Organization of African Unity (OAU) eventually declare the sanctions ‘unjust’ and biased against developing countries.
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Sanctions in general became vulnerable to normative challenge in the mid-1990s when the humanitarian consequences of the Iraqi sanctions regime became more and more apparent and the UN Secretary-General came to call sanctions a ‘blunt instrument’, prompting the Council to shift
to more limited and targeted measures.
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Soon, however, these too became the object of criticism because they were occasionally directed against innocent individuals. In response, the 1267 Sanctions Committee introduced a procedure for lifting sanctions against wrongly targeted individuals after countries like Sweden successfully invoked transparency and rule of law concerns against potentially arbitrary decision-making in the Council.
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Much of the weight of such normative claims stems from the fact that, in order to give Council decisions effect, the Permanent Members need to ensure acceptance among a broader range of states. The positive votes of nine Council members on a resolution, though legally sufficient, are usually not enough to secure sufficient compliance. Most Council decisions are therefore adopted unanimously and great efforts are made to achieve this unified stance, which helps make the Council appear as the voice of the ‘international community’ as a whole.
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For example, in the case of Libya, the US and the UK were so keen on unanimity that they delayed their proposal for a resolution until after the Council membership of two likely no-voters, Cuba and Yemen, had expired.
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In other cases, regional support for Council action is crucial. For the intervention in Haiti, the US and the Group of Friends of the Secretary-General on Haiti sought to secure backing from the group of Latin American and Caribbean states, and they were particularly intent on dissuading Brazilian resistance, which would have undermined the enterprise in much of Latin America. As a result, Brazil was able to moderate the interventionist stance and to water down various provisions in the resolution that authorized a multinational force.
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Thus, even if according to formal calculations the voting power of elected members is small,
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in reality it often carries significant weight.