The Justification of Responsibility in the UN Security Council

Practices of Normative Ordering in International Relations

Holger Niemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351336932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The UN Security Council has been given the primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. The precise meaning of this responsibility, however, is contested. This lack of clarity is frequently criticised as a source of incoherent and selective decision-making, undermining the legitimacy of the Security Council. In case studies of the Security Council's controversies on Iraq and Syria, this book instead reveals contestation and competing interpretations of responsibility as crucial conditions for the constitution and negotiation of normative order. The case studies also underline the importance of public Security Council meetings as dynamic sites for coping with a plurality of normative orders and how their symbolic and material manifestations shape processes of collective legitimation. This book concludes that these processes demonstrate the crucial role of justification and critique as practices of normative ordering in the Security Council.

The Justification of Responsibility in the UN Security Council argues that normative orders in international organisations are constructed by multifaceted processes of questioning, reaffirming and coordinating claims of normativity and legitimacy. Connecting research on norms and legitimacy in international relations with pragmatist sociology, the book provides an account of the complexities and inconsistencies of decision-making processes and their normative foundations in international organisations. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of international organisations, international relations theory and global governance.

1 Introduction

The primary responsibility of the Security Council is to maintain international peace and security. The meaning of this responsibility, however, is contested. During the Syria crisis, for example, Council members disagreed about not only the proper response to the atrocities in Syria but also what would be an appropriate implementation of the Council’s responsibility. During a Council meeting in early 2012, some, such as the Portuguese representative, argued that “inaction is not only unacceptable but also irresponsible”, calling on the Council to actively live up to its responsibility and the demands of the Syrian people (Portas, Portugal, 31 January 2012, S/PV.6710: 20). Others argued that, to the contrary, by authorising sanctions or the use of force, the international community would be acting in an irresponsible manner since “the role of the international community should not be to exacerbate conflict […] it should foster dialogue” (Churkin, Russia, 31 January 2012, S/PV.6710: 24). These statements illustrate the complex role of responsibility in the Council: Council members obviously disagree about its meaning, but they nevertheless refer to it as if there were a shared understanding of the Council’s appropriate role in global politics. This book is about the relationship between contested meaning and shared references, and how normative controversy shapes the meaning of Security Council responsibility.

These argumentative processes are practices of normative ordering. As such, they allow us to take seriously the empirically observable contestation of normative meaning as it is expressed in speech acts. At the same time, these processes should be seen as a productive and structuring element, rather than as evidence of an incomplete or dysfunctional normative order. Practices of normative ordering are best accessed by looking at justification as the act of giving reasons in situations of normative dispute. Competing justifications give different meanings to Security Council responsibility, allowing us to understand how normative ordering unfolds. As I argue in this book, such a perspective not only elucidates norm contestation about Security Council responsibility but also points to a different understanding of the Security Council and its social constitution. Much literature exists on Council decision-making and on the legal and procedural framework of Council politics, but what actually happens during a Council meeting often remains unexplored. Since there is surprisingly little knowledge about the social accomplishment of public Council meetings, the task of this book is to study justification in public Security Council meetings as sites of normative ordering during controversy.

UN Security Council responsibility and its contested meaning

Article 24 of the UN Charter defines the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security. The ability to authorise the use of force makes the Security Council the world’s most powerful international organisation (Chesterman/Franck/Malone 2008). At the same time, legally the meaning of this responsibility is only vaguely defined. What exactly falls under the Council’s responsibility, therefore, has never been a question of legal consistency but mostly the subject of political discussions in the Council (Voeten 2005: 536). Unlike legal obligations, political processes require Council members to engage in negotiating its meaning. Consequently, over the decades the Council’s understanding of what its primary responsibility includes, and what it does not, has evolved. It has developed new decision-making mechanisms as well as new forms of Council action, such as peacekeeping missions, to implement this changing interpretation of its responsibility. These changing meanings, then, are not novelties. What is novel are the increasingly normative interpretations of responsibility in recent years. Following the Cold War era and the politics of the “new interventionism”, the Council developed a new understanding of its responsibility to protect people rather than states (Debiel et al. 2009: 53). Instead of focusing on traditional notions of state sovereignty, the Council now considers it has a “responsibility to protect” (RtoP) vulnerable groups of people and respond to transnational security threats. This is the most striking development in the Council’s understanding of its primary responsibility and a demonstration of how normative change affects Council decision-making and its legitimacy (Bellamy 2016).

However, this development has implications. The Council cannot implement its decisions itself and requires the consent of the UN members. Therefore, the powers of the Council are inextricably linked to its legitimacy (Hurd 2007a), and as a consequence Council members attempt to legitimise their decisions by claiming them as rightful. Responsibility defines the normative principles of Security Council action and provides the resources for legitimising or delegitimising Council decisions. It constitutes the Security Council in not only legal but also normative terms. This changing understanding of responsibility in recent years has made the normative foundation of the Council more complex, while creating new commitments and new fields of activity for the Council. Although this contributes to a denser web of shared understandings, furthering normative order in the Council, it also increases the need to engage in processes of interpreting the actual meaning of Security Council responsibility.

These processes are puzzling, as they bring together two effects which seem to be contradictory. First, the persistence of normative controversy is surprising because the development of shared understandings about the Council’s responsibility would suggest more consistency and less ambiguity in its implementation. At least in mainstream constructivist norm research, this would be the assumption, as shared understandings about the appropriateness of norms should lead to more predictable and routinised behaviour (Björkdahl 2002; Finnemore/Sikkink 1998; Klotz 1995). Furthermore, achieving greater consistency in implementation has been precisely the purpose of developments within the Security Council since the late 1990s, given that faction and paralysis were understood by many as causes of the Council’s failures in cases such as Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Kosovo during the 1990s (Thakur 2006). Second, the prevalence of normative controversy is also surprising because it challenges conventional views of the Council. The popular view in academia as well as in public opinion is that the Council is primarily driven by national interests and power politics, and is used and abused as an instrument by the great powers (Einsiedel/Malone/Stagno Ugarte 2016; Krauthammer 2015; Krisch 2008; Luck 2006; Malone 2007). From this perspective, it would not be rational for Security Council members to engage repeatedly in normative controversy; instead, simply moving to vote on a resolution or, for the permanent five Council members (P5), making use of the veto privilege would be the most effective way to make decisions.

This is certainly an oversimplified description, but one that frequently fits the Security Council and its activities. As Bruce Cronin and Ian Hurd argue, many approaches to the Security Council tend to conceptualise the Council in “preconceived paradigms” because of an unwillingness to think beyond familiar and established notions of the Council in “sovereign-state associations” (Cronin/Hurd 2008: 5). Research on the Security Council is thus often driven by rationalist approaches. In this understanding, the establishment of the UN was based on a contract among UN member states delegating authority to the Council (Voeten 2008: 45), making it a neutral servant to member states (Thompson 2006) or a “meeting place” (Voeten 2005: 552) for the exchange of member-state interests. Furthermore, in rationalist perspectives, efficiency is seen as of paramount importance to the principals, and Council activities are discussed primarily in terms of costs and benefits. Overall, this leads to an understanding of the Council which rarely examines the Council’s normative foundations and the development of its understanding of responsibility. If responsibility is addressed at all, it is in a narrow legal sense, and much criticism of the Council as ineffective (Berdal 2003) or simply unable to fulfil its responsibilities (Buchanan/Keohane 2011; Glennon 2003; Gray 2007) stems from this understanding.¹

Constructivist approaches to the Security Council, on the other hand, do not question that the Council is indeed often an instrument of powerful states and that rational cost–benefit strategies shape Council action. However, they emphasise that due to the importance of legitimacy for the Council’s authority and power, the Council is also a site for processes of collective legitimation (Hurd 2007a; Welsh/Zaum 2013).² A focus on these processes and their social constitution reveals the Council as essentially a social community using deliberative and discursive practices to identify shared understandings (Johnstone 2011; Mor 2007). We see, then, that the Council is driven by member states using “rhetorical resources” in processes of legitimation and delegitimation (Hurd 2007b: 206) and, in doing so, relying on a normative framework. This does not preclude that member states might have strategic purposes which could have disturbing effects for the organisation (Hurd 2005: 501). It redirects the focus of analysis, however, to the underlying normative principles of the Security Council, which allows us to explain the occurrence of some Council practices. One example is the symbolic power of Council membership. While rationalist approaches stress reputational or material gains as motivations for becoming an elected Council member (Vreeland/Dreher 2014), constructivist approaches highlight the symbolic value of becoming a Council member (Hurd 2002). Although being an elected Council member has formal limitations and is often an operational challenge for the permanent missions during their two years of tenure, election to the Council is still highly attractive for most UN members (Hurd 2007a: 118). This perspective on the Council adds to our understanding of Council responsibility because it helps us to understand why Council members talk of responsibility while they are driven by an interest to legitimise or delegitimise something or someone.

Normative orders and their contestation

This understanding of the Council corresponds with a view of controversy as an inherent and productive part of the constitution of normative order. Unlike a focus on the formal or legal dimensions of order, a focus on the normative dimension inevitably points to controversy as a necessary condition for establishing and maintaining order. Normative orders are seen as “grit” for legitimising the foundations and institutionalisations of a society (Forst/Günther 2011: 15). They are normative in the sense that they implicitly or explicitly address expectations about an “oughtness” to following their rules, and thus by definition require us to engage in practices of justification and critique (Forst 2011: 972). As a type of social order, they are characterised by a lesser degree of formality and the permeability of their boundaries (Forst/Günther 2011: 12; Möllers 2015: 382). In such an understanding, order is necessarily a subject of legitimation as well as in need of constant renegotiation, reflection, and readaptation to its circumstances (Nullmeier/Geis/Daase 2012: 24–26). Considering normative orders a subject of contestation also points to the ambiguity of international norms as tenets of normative orders. In contrast to a conventional view of norms leading to greater stability and predictability of behaviour, norm contestation asks us to consider the meaning of norms as inherently contested and subject to continuous interpretation (Niemann/Schillinger 2017; Wiener 2014; Zimmermann 2016). These processes constitute social orders as well as their related communities; they define inside and outside groups, how members participate and engage in communities, and shared understandings of appropriateness (Clark 2003: 80; Vetterlein/Wiener 2013: 89). Rather than presenting a fixed and stable framework for guiding action, normative orders rely on processes of structuration. However, participation in normative orders is not necessarily evidence of a genuine belief in their normative rightness; it might also be the result of strategic action (Kornprobst 2014: 195). Norms matter, from such a perspective, not because of their causal effects, but because they provide “zones of permissibility” (Kratochwil 2001: 63). In this account of responsibility, I do not think of it as leading to an appropriate behaviour, but I am interested in its role in social constitution. The Security Council is viewed as engaging in moral action without focusing on whether that engagement constitutes moral agency, a position often discussed with regard to international institutions (Ainley 2011; Brown 2001; Dobson 2008; Erskine 2003). By examining how justifications refer to the Council’s responsibility, we see instead how context and conditions shape its capacity to enact moral actions (Hoover 2012).

Given that responsibility is ultimately a question of moral judgement (Peltonen 2010: 242), focusing on its conditions sensitises us to the implications of referring to responsibility, such as its legitimation of authority and power (Mondre et al. 2017). These insights change our view of Security Council responsibility. Instead of obstructing order, normative controversy constitutes and reconstitutes order, or even furthers it. At the same time, once we accept that order cannot be taken for granted and that it is neither stable nor coherent, we are better able to think of it as the dynamic product of social interaction, in constant need of negotiation. This is by no means a novel perspective on the role of disputes, but nevertheless is a crucial one. Almost a century ago, Georg Simmel noted that the inherent ordering capacity of disputes is so much taken for granted that it often gets lost in its study (Simmel 1992: 287).

Justification and the turn to pragmatist sociology

An approach which seems promising for an endeavour such as I undertake in this study is provided by Luc Boltanski’s pragmatist sociology of critique, focusing as it does on the tensions between “the constitution of an order and the critical move that calls it into question” (Boltanski/Thévenot 2006: 39). Pragmatist sociology studies how people give these reasons to each other, the actual consequences of doing so, and why this is genuinely a normative practice with an ordering capacity. Boltanski’s pragmatist sociology has been praised for restoring a scholarly interest in the underlying normative groundings of social interaction during disputes (Honneth 2010; Susen/Turner 2014). As part of the ongoing “practice turn” in the social sciences (Gad/Jensen 2014; Nicolini 2012; Schatzki/Knorr-Cetina/Savigny 2000), which has also attracted interest among scholars in political science and international relations (Adler/Pouliot 2011; Bueger/Gadinger 2014; Leander 2011; Neumann 2002), pragmatist sociology draws our attention to the contingency and uncertainty of the social world and points to the normative meaning of social interaction. This allows us to grasp how controversy shapes the meaning of responsibility in the Council. Boltanski’s approach relies on three premises which respond to the puzzle discussed above: justification is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The changing meaning of Security Council responsibility
• 3 Approaching normative controversy
• 4 The moment of justification: pragmatist sociology and the turn to practice
• 5 Practices of normative ordering during the 2002/2003 Iraq crisis
• 6 Practices of normative ordering during the 2011/2012 Syria crisis
• 7 Public Security Council meetings from a practice theory perspective
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index