The United Nations In The Post-cold War Era, Second Edition

Karen Mingst,Margaret P. Karns

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000306743
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Politik

The United Nations faced unprecedented opportunities and heightened expectations when the Cold War ended in 1990. By the time of the UN's fiftieth anniversary in 1995, the mood had shifted. Peacekeepers were bogged down in Bosnia and Somalia. Iraq continued to test the UN's resolve to enforce arms control inspections. In much of the world, the gap between haves and have-nots was increasing. Everyone agreed that UN reform was needed, yet the political will to effect change was absent. With unmet challenges throughout the world, the limits to UN power and effectiveness were being realized. From regional conflicts to areas of environmental degradation and human rights abuses, the UN's success depends more than ever on the way in which three dilemmas are resolved–the tensions between sovereignty and the reality of its erosion, between demands for global governance and the weakness of UN institutions (as well as the reluctance of states to commit), and between the need for leadership and the diffusion of power. In this second edition, the authors have undertaken major revisions along with thorough updating. They explore the three dilemmas in the context of the UN's evolving role in world politics, including its experience in maintaining peace and promoting development, environmental sustainability, and human rights–the focus of an entirely new chapter. They also consider the role of various actors in the UN system, from major powers (especially the United States), small and middle powers, coalitions, and nongovernmental organizations to the secretaries-general. The need for institutional reforms and specific proposals for reform are examined. Because multilateral diplomacy is now the norm rather than the exception in world politics, the UN's effectiveness has been challenged by the new demands of the post–Cold War era. This completely revised and updated text places the UN at the center of a set of core dilemmas in world politics and provides a series of case studies that probe the politics and processes of UN action.

One

The United Nations in World Politics

The Cold War’s end in 1989–91 is associated with a series of dramatic images: students hammering down the Berlin Wall; Boris Yeltsin atop a tank in the streets of Moscow declaring that there would be no turning back the clock in the Soviet Union; Iraqi tanks crossing the desert into Kuwait; Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat embracing on the White House lawn; and a new flag being raised over a democratic, black-ruled South Africa with Nelson Mandela as its president. These events marked the ending of the ideological, political, economic, and military conflict between communism and democracy, known for forty-five years as the Cold War. They produced fundamental changes in the very structure of international politics, which had been defined by the bipolarity of two superpowers and their competing alliances.

The Cold War’s end found the United Nations in greater demand than ever before to deal with peace and security issues as well as environmental and development issues, population growth, humanitarian disasters, and other problems. UN peacekeepers have been called on to play roles in rebuilding Cambodia; disarming combatant forces; organizing and monitoring elections in Nicaragua and Namibia; monitoring human rights violations in El Salvador; and overseeing humanitarian relief in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and many other post–Cold War problem areas. Beginning with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the UN’s enforcement powers have been used more in the post–Cold War era than at any previous time.

By 1995, however, the early post–Cold War optimism about the United Nations had diminished substantially. The peacekeepers in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda found little peace to be kept, although their presence did alleviate much human suffering. Despite almost continuous meetings of the UN Security Council and numerous resolutions, the UN’s own members lacked the political will to provide the military, logistical, and financial resources needed to deal with these complex situations. In addition, the UN faced a deep financial crisis because of the increased cost of peacekeeping and other activities and the failure of many members, including the United States, to pay their assessed contributions. The UN celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1995 but failed to use the occasion to enact necessary reforms in its administration, financing, and structure.

What is the role of the UN in world politics? In light of the substantial changes in the world since the UN’s founding in 1945 and the very different needs it faces today, how has the UN itself changed?

The United Nations in World Politics: Vision and Reality

The establishment of the United Nations in the closing days of World War II was an affirmation of the desire of war-weary nations for an organization that could help them avoid future conflicts and promote international economic and social cooperation. The UN’s Charter built on lessons learned from the failed League of Nations created at the end of World War I and earlier experiments with international unions, conference diplomacy, and dispute settlement mechanisms. It represented an expression of hope for the possibilities of a new global security arrangement and for fostering the social and economic conditions necessary for peace to prevail.

The United Nations and Politics in the Cold War World

The World War II coalition of great powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China), whose unity had been key to the UN’s founding, was nevertheless a victim of rising tensions almost before the first General Assembly session in 1946. Developments in Europe and Asia between 1946 and 1950 soon made it clear that the emerging Cold War would have fundamental effects on the UN. How could a collective security system operate when there was no unity among the great powers on whose cooperation it depended? Even the admission of new members to the UN was affected between 1950 and 1955 as each side vetoed applications from states that were allied with the other.

The Cold War made Security Council actions on peace and security threats extremely problematic. One result was that some conflicts, such as the French and American wars in Vietnam and Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were never brought to the UN at all. The UN was able to respond to the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 only because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council at the time.

In order to deal with a number of regional conflicts, the UN developed something never mentioned in its charter, namely, peacekeeping. This has involved the prevention, containment, and moderation of hostilities between or within states through the use of multinational forces of soldiers, police, and civilians.

Peacekeeping was a creative response to the breakdown of great-power unity and the spread of East-West tensions to regional conflicts. UN peacekeeping forces were used most extensively in the Middle East and in conflicts arising out of the decolonization process during the Cold War period. A total of thirteen operations were deployed from 1948 to 1988. The innovation of peacekeeping illustrates what the Cold War did to the UN: “It had repealed the proposition that the organization should undertake to promote order by bringing the great powers into troubled situations…. Henceforward, the task of the United Nations was to be defined as that of keeping the great powers out of such situations.”¹

The Effects of the Nuclear Revolution

The UN Charter had just been signed when the use of two atomic bombs on Japan on 6 and 10 August 1945 unveiled a scientific and technological revolution in warfare that would have a far-reaching impact on the post–World War II world. At the United Nations the earliest and most obvious effect of nuclear weapons was to restore the issue of disarmament (and its relative, arms control) to the agenda. Disarmament as an approach to peace had been discredited during the interwar era. The UN almost from its inception in early 1946 became a forum for discussions and negotiations on arms control and disarmament. Hence, the nuclear threat not only transformed world politics itself but also made the UN the key place where statespersons sought to persuade each other that war had become excessively dangerous, that disarmament and arms control were imperative, and that they were devoted to peace and restraint.

The Role of the United Nations in Decolonization and the Emergence of New States

At the close of World War II few would have predicted the end of colonial rule in Africa and Asia. Yet twenty-five years after the UN Charter was signed, most of the former colonies had achieved independence with relatively little threat to international peace and security. Membership in the UN increased from 51 states in 1945 to 185 in 1998, as shown in Figure 1.1. The United Nations played a significant role in this remarkably peaceful transformation, much of which took place during the height of the Cold War. Twenty-six new states were later seated in the UN after the Cold War’s end, mostly as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

Figure 1.1 Growth in UN Membership, 1945–1999

Sources: Compiled from Robert E. Riggs and Jack C. Plano, The United Nations: International Organization of World Politics, 2d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1994), p.45, and updated from United Nations Handbook 1998 (New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade).

The UN Charter endorsed the principle of self-determination for colonial peoples. Already independent former colonies, such as India, Egypt, Indonesia, and the Latin American states, used the UN as a forum to advocate an end to colonialism and independence for territories ruled by Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal. Success added new votes to the growing anticolonial coalition.

By 1960 a majority of the UN’s members favored decolonization. General Assembly Resolution 1514 condemned the continuation of colonial rule and preconditions for granting independence (such as lack of preparation for self-rule) and called for annual reports on the progress toward independence of all remaining colonial territories. During this time the UN provided an important forum for the collective legitimation of a change in international norms (that is, colonialism and imperialism were no longer acceptable patterns of state behavior) and the full internationalization of the international system.

The consequences of decolonization and the expanded number of independent states were manifold. The former colonies (old and new) formed a strong coalition within the UN known as the Group of 77 (G-77), which after 1960 commanded a majority of votes on a broad range of issues. Old issues became defined in new ways. Whereas the Cold War had shaped politics in the UN until 1960, the G-77 and what became known as “North-South issues” shaped much of the politics thereafter. The two sets of issues became entwined in complex ways: the Soviet Union often sided with the G-77, and the United States often found itself in a small minority.

During the 1960s new issues proliferated on the UN’s agenda, many at the urging of the G-77. For example, in 1967 Arvid Pardo, the representative from Malta, argued on behalf of newly independent states that the resources found on the deep seabed were the “common heritage of mankind,” not the property of any specific nation. Of all the issues pushed by the G-77, none received more attention than the drive for economic and social development. Yet the divisions over these issues opened a new conflict in world politics between the more developed states of Western Europe and North America (plus Japan and Australia) and the less developed, often newly independent states of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The North-South Conflict

By the late 1960s the agenda of the UN and its subsidiary agencies was heavily tilted toward issues of economic development and relations between the developed countries of the industrial North and the less developed countries of the South. The ideological leaning of the G-77 toward a heavy government role in economic development and redistribution of wealth shaped many UN programs and activities. In the 1970s the G-77 pushed for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), marshaling support in the UN General Assembly for “A Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order” and “A Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.” The NIEO debates dominated and polarized the UN system during the 1970s. The deep divide between North and South at times made agreement on both economic and security issues impossible to achieve.

The North-South conflict continues to be a central feature of world politics, and hence of the UN, although the rhetoric and issues of the NIEO sharply diminished in the late 1980s and 1990s. For example, the UN’s treatment of environmental issues, which first emerged on the agenda at the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, has been permeated by North-South differences. At the 1997 Kyoto Conference on Climate Change there were echoes of the North-South conflict in developing countries’ insistence that industrial countries make the first reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

Changes in Post–Cold War World Politics: Integration and Fragmentation

The world on the eve of the new millennium is very different from the world in 1945. The rapid growth of international trade, the expansion of transnational corporations, and the emergence of global financial markets have produced a truly global economy and globalization of production, markets, labor, and technology in many sectors.² The world has been brought together by the revolution of instantaneous communication. The post–Cold War world has also been marked by a rise in ethnic conflicts, by failed states in Africa, by violence against refugees and immigrants in Europe, Asia, and the United States, as well as by protests against the adverse consequences of free trade and globalization.

These developments illustrate two simultaneous, yet contradictory patterns in world politics. One involves greater integration and interdependence between peoples and states; the second entails increasing fragmentation and even disintegration. Integration is the process by which societies or nations are economically and politically brought closer together. Interdependence arises when increased trade, monetary flows, telecommunications, and shared interests heighten the sensitivity and vulnerability of states to each other’s actions.

The integrative trend has been facilitated particularly by the communications revolution and the current preeminence of two core philosophies, economic liberalism and democracy. Economic liberalism emphasizes the role of the private sector over the state (that is, government) in economic development. The demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union discredited socialist economic systems, while economic difficulties in many less developed countries (LDC) with state-dominated economies forced them to liberalize and privatize. Many former socialist states as well as developing countries have changed their economic policies, opened their borders to trade and investment, and become more integrated into the global economic system. More than 130 countries are now members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and many participate in regional trade blocs, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. The integration process is most advanced among the fifteen countries of the European Union (EU).

Likewise, democratization spread to all regions of the globe in the 1980s and 1990s. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union to Africa and Asia, many authoritarian governments have been forced to open the political process to competing political parties, to adopt more stringent human rights standards, and to hold free elections. The UN has been in heavy demand to provide observers for elections in countries around the world. In many cases democratization has been linked to adoption of the principles of economic liberalism. UN-sanctioned intervention in Haiti in 1993 marked the first time the UN took action to restore a democratically elected government. In El Salvador (1991–95) and Guatemala (1995–97) the UN undertook human rights monitoring for the first time.

These trends toward global integration and interdependence are contradicted by disintegrative tendencies that have drawn the UN into a number of intrastate conflicts, in contrast to the interstate conflicts for which it was designed. The Cold War’s end clearly contributed to the resurgence of nationalism and ethnic conflict, especially in the regions formerly under authoritarian, Communist-dominated governments. The result has been a further fragmentation of the state system with the creation of new states, new demands for self-determination, a...