The EU, the UN and Collective Security

Making Multilateralism Effective

Joachim Krause, Natalino Ronzitti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415699174
• eBook ISBN: 9781136295591
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book examines the effectiveness of multilateralism in ensuring collective security and, in particular, the EU's role in this process.

In 1992, shortly after the end of the Cold War, a Security Council Summit in New York reaffirmed the salience of the system of collective security and stated the determination of the Heads of State to maintain it as the prime international instrument for preserving peace. Twenty years later, however, the record of collective security as well as of multilateralism has not been very encouraging. The system of collective security, as enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Charter, failed repeatedly to accomplish its mandate in the 1990s and has led to controversial debates in the United States and Europe that reached a climax during the Iraq crisis in 2002/03.

The volume draws upon both theoretical and empirical research to answer the following core questions:

• What are the reasons that have made multilateralism either effective or ineffective in the field of peacekeeping, peace preservation and peacebuilding?
• How can multilateralism be made more effective?
• How can attempts made by Europe to render UN multilateralism in the security area more efficient be assessed?

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding/peacekeeping, EU policy, the UN, security studies and IR in general.

Part I

Theoretical approaches to and historical developments of global governance in the field of collective security

1 Global governance in the field of collective security

How to make multilateralism more effective

Joachim Krause

Multilateralism and global governance have become common features of today’s international relations (IR), which is a positive development. Very little attention, however, has been given to the question of whether multilateralism has always been effective, or: what makes multilateralism effective, and what makes it ineffective? While it would be difficult to devise general rules on the effectiveness of multilateralism as such, there is a point in looking at the effectiveness of multilateralism in a given policy area. This chapter intends to provide a broader framework for dealing with the issue of the effectiveness of collective security, which is a special form of multilateralism that falls under the responsibility of the United Nations (UN).¹ The UN system of collective security – which is to keep peace on a worldwide scale and which has the task of providing cooperation among states in the field of security policy – is not only the linchpin of successful multilateralism in the field of security governance; its functioning is also the precondition for the effectiveness of other forms of multilateralism. Without peace, international cooperation will be endangered.

The system of collective security has been in a crisis since the early 1990s. There have been many fruitful developments to solve the ongoing problems, but so far the record is limited, or with regard to the reform of the Security Council (SC) and of its performance in general, or with regard to the peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions of the UN at large. In the following sections, the crisis of collective security will be described and the resultant political debates in the Western world will be taken up. The different positions as well as attempts towards overcoming these differences will be outlined. In the second section of this chapter, these political differences are brought into relationship with the theoretical debate within the academic discipline of international relations. It is argued that in looking for concepts to bridge political differences, it may be useful to first have a look at the theoretical differences. Taking up the differences in theory and making them transparent, one might be able to devise a framework for applied research that could be helpful in finding answers to some of the most pressing issues the Western community of states is wrestling with.

The crisis of collective security in the 1990s

The system of collective security under the UN Charter is an existing international order, subscribed to by all 194 member states of the United Nations. It is based on the renunciation of the use of force in interstate relations as well as on the entrustment of the main responsibility for maintaining and preserving international peace to an international body (the UN Security Council). Seen from a social science perspective, the United Nations system of collective security establishes a kind of global social contract by which states are to renounce one crucial aspect of sovereignty – the use of force – and where one multilateral committee – the Security Council – is entrusted with the task of supporting states in their endeavours to solve problems peacefully and of guaranteeing security, either through mediating efforts or through sanctions and punishment (including military interventions) in cases of threats to international peace. The main instruments of collective security are laid down in chapters 6 and 7 of the UN Charter. While chapter 6 embodies a system of instruments for the peaceful solution of conflicts among states, chapter 7 details how to proceed in the case of states that violate international peace.

What is often overlooked is that while chapter 6 sees the United Nations more as a provider of services for states being principally inclined to resort to mediation, chapter 7 stipulates that the United Nations (acting through the Security Council) is to uphold international order and that the authority of the United Nations has to be defended against actors defying this order. This peculiar role of the Security Council to uphold international order reflects historical experience of at least two centuries, in particular of the 1930s. European history of the past three centuries contains ample evidence that international order can only be secured if a group of strong and responsible states work together and are ready to defend this order against actors who challenge it. History is also full of examples where international order collapsed owing to the lack of such cooperation and resolve

– the latest example being the collapse of the system of collective security of the League of Nations.

For many decades the United Nations had never been able to fulfil the functions outlined in chapter 7 of the Charter, with the Korean War being the only exception. After 1989, no formal agreement on the nature of the future international order was concluded; however, as was reaffirmed during the summit meeting of the members of the UN Security Council in January 1992, the UN system of collective security was considered by the community of states as the only existing international order.

In looking at the record of the Security Council in dealing with the task of upholding international order and authority since 1989, the picture is quite bleak, in particular with regard to the 1990s:

• While the UN response to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in August 1990 could be considered – albeit with many qualifications and reservations – a successful case of collective security, the subsequent establishment of an arms control regime suffered under a lack of consequentiality and a massive mission creep. It led to an endless prolongation of the sanctions regime, which – due mainly to a lack of cooperation on the side of the Iraqi authorities – resulted in starvation among the Iraqi population and claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, most likely 800,000 to 900,000 human lives. Ultimately, the UN regime over Iraq was discredited and compromised to a degree unforeseeable in the early 1990s.

• The Serbian attacks against Croatia and Slovenia in 1991 and against Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, involving strategies of ruthless shelling of cities and of ethnic cleansing, generated lukewarm responses by the UN Security Council. Until 1995, only half-hearted measures were applied by which no major impact on the scene could be achieved. During this period, the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina became a textbook example of how fast international humanitarian and political norms erode if there is no international institution upholding these norms and acting on its behalf. While the level of atrocities in early summer 1991 was limited, it increased considerably later that year as it became obvious that international intervention on behalf of political and humanitarian norms would not take place. About 250,000 people were killed during this time until NATO ended the war.

• The Security Council responded with no sufficient action against the repeated breaches of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by North Korea.

• The Security Council failed to intervene in the civil war in Rwanda in 1994, even though all indications suggested that a major humanitarian catastrophe, a genocide, was pending. The resultant massacre of up to 800,000 (mostly) Tutsis in spring 1994 could have been prevented had the Security Council been ready to mandate the dispatch of a small military contingent of 5,000 to 10,000 soldiers in time.

• The Kosovo crisis in 1997 and 1998, which again resulted in Serbia practising ethnic cleansing and ethnic killing, found the Security Council deeply divided over how to react. Eventually, NATO took over under U.S. leadership and managed to solve the problem by first threatening and then by executing military force against Serbia in the spring of 1999.

This list could be complemented by other cases, be it the inactivity of the UN with regard to the bloody wars in Sudan or in Central Africa, or the vacillations with regard to the Middle East conflict. Many observers concurred that the system of collective security has not been able to solve (or even address) the major and strategically relevant challenges to world security. In particular, it had not been able to deal with actors directly defying UN authority. The authority upholding side of the social contract had not been fulfilled sufficiently. The Security Council itself has been either too reluctant to authorize the use of force, or the lack of unity, resolve and consequentiality among its members prevented the Security Council from taking measures that were necessary.

While most observers agreed that there was a need to improve the effectiveness of collective security, the opinions about what to do differed greatly. The Brahimi Report of 2000 as well as the recommendations made by the Secretary General’s High Level Panel (HLP) in 2004 clearly acknowledged these problems and tried to bridge them with proposals to improve peacekeeping and peacebuilding. Their recommendations boiled down to reforming the composition of the Security Council and to making preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping and peacebuilding the cornerstone of collective security. This was a wise proposal, because the task of keeping international order is something the permanent five members of the Security Council have to address first. However, the resultant reforms of the system of collective security remained incomplete.

A look at the past two decades reveals that the crisis of collective security has to be viewed against the backdrop of a broader crisis of multilateralism. As John G. Ruggie put it, this crisis has been a crisis of its effectiveness.² Just at the moment in history where most of the world seemed to be in agreement that multilateralism was to become the preferred modus operandi of the ‘international community’, not only the UN system of collective security failed, but there were other cases of failed multilateralism too: since the end of the 1990s the negotiations on further reductions in tariffs and trade restrictions within the World Trade Organization (WTO) have brought no results. On the contrary, old and new protectionist sentiments are stronger than ever, and there is continually more public resentment and even resistance to globalization and free trade.³ In the field of global climate policy, where it seemed that a new promising form of multilateralism – global governance – would emerge, the failure of the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009 has signalled that here also the effectiveness of multilateralism remains in question.

Different conclusions in the political debate

While the above-mentioned debate within the UN was oriented towards finding practical solutions to problems that seemed solvable, a more fundamental debate has emerged in the United States and later in Europe since the 1990s. During this debate, in particular in 2002 and 2003, it became obvious that there are different conceptions on both sides of the Atlantic on multilateralism and the role of multilateralism in today’s international relations. The United States, for instance, had considered itself since the late 1940s to be a global power of order that might resort to multilateral cooperation as well as to unilateral military intervention. Most Europeans draw different conclusions. For them, historical experiences of reconciliation after World War II as well as of the peaceful end of the Cold War were seen as proof that any kind of traditional power politics would not pay off and that multilateralism was the most promising concept for the future. As a consequence, most Europeans are inclined to favour a greater role of multilateral institutions, although there are differences within Europe that have been analysed earlier.⁴

To understand these differences between Europeans and Americans, one has to start with the role of multilateralism in U.S. foreign policy. Multilateralism has been a tool of U.S. foreign policy since the 1920s, and has been revised and reshaped by various administrations since then. Indeed, most of today’s existing forms of multilateralism go back to initiatives by the United States. Their creation formed part of the U.S.-led approach to reorganize international relations after World War II. The role of multilateralism was mainly seen as instrumental, i.e. multilateralism was conceived as an instrument to achieve certain purposes and to solve problems, which otherwise might have a negative influence on international order. For U.S. diplomacy after World War II the resurrection of European economies, the re-establishment of a global financial system and of free trade as well as the containment of communism and the Soviet military threat were the main concerns. Multilateral institutions were being measured along their ability to contribute to the solution of these problems. Hence, the effectiveness of multilateral institutions with regard to their ability to solve problems had already moved into the centre of attention in the late 1940s. As a consequence, many global institutions were either abandoned (such as the League of Nations) or sidestepped. In some ways, the United Nations became more or less irrelevant after 1947. Its main tasks – providing peace, free trade and the protection of human rights – were effectively taken up by either Special Organizations (such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) that were under some control of the United States and its allies or by institutions outside the UN system (such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations in the field of free trade or NATO in the field of security). The main task that remained for the UN to do in these policy fields was primarily providing a space for international debates.

Despite its crucial role in bringing about multilateralism, the United States has never relied on multilateral institutions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Effectiveness of multilateralism in the field of collective security
• PART I. Theoretical approaches to and historical developments of global governance in the field of collective security
• PART II. The UN Security Council
• PART III. UN peacekeeping
• PART IV. International peacebuilding and state-building
• Appendix 1. the UN Security Council reform process – recent developments
• Appendix 2. Joint Declaration on UN–EU cooperation in crisis management
• Appendix 3. Joint statement on UN–EU cooperation in crisis management
• Appendix 4. Major stages of the institutionalization of UN–EU cooperation
• Appendix 5. Contributions of EU member states to UN peacekeeping operations
• Appendix 6. EU autonomous operation in support of UN peace operations
• Appendix 7. Operations involving UN–EU cooperation since 2003
• Index