The description of the development of the United
Nations in Basic
Course 2
gave special attention to securing peace - the
central task of the organisation - as an sphere of involvement. It became
clear here that although the world organisation has achieved much in this
area - as the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to the UN Blue Helmets in
1988 and to Kofi Annan in 2001 quite clearly confirms - serious crises and
setbacks have also been recorded.
Primarily, it needs to be noted that the collective
security system, the instrument for securing peace prescribed in the
UN Charter,
has proved ineffective. It is frequently pointed out
that a system of this type would not be capable of functioning anyway,
since it would exhibit structural deficits (see box on the right). What is
certain is that the organ essential to securing peace, the Security
Council, was blocked by the East-West Conflict during the first four
decades of the UNO.
The "invention" of the Blue Helmets was an
innovative answer to the weakness in the structure of the Charter and the
blockade of the Security Council. However, the limits of this instrument
became obvious very early on, both during the Congo Crisis at the
beginning of the 60s, and the catastrophe of Srebrenica, which provided a
sad climax to the crisis in securing peace [Basic
Course 2
sketches out the development of UN peace-keeping in
detail].
Johannes Varwick
sums up the discussion on reform: "The original
and wholly successful orientation of the United Nations towards preventing
intergovernmental wars has radically changed towards innerstate
confrontations since the transformation of the image of war. Spectacular
failures such as Rwanda, Srebrenica and Sierra Leone have increased the
pressure for reform in this area. According to Chapter VII of the Charter,
a sufficient set of instruments for taking measures against a threat to or
breakdown in freedom is available, in practice however, hardly any use has
been made of these stipulations to-date.
According to suggestions made by a group of experts
under the chairmanship of the former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar
Brahimi from August 2000, UN troops ... should always receive a solid
mandate in future and only be sent out on operations if the rules are
clear, and if they can be commanded sufficiently and are well equipped
(...). The system of securing peace should be made more effective in
total, and more attention should also be paid to diplomatic prevention and
peace consolidation.
The question as to whether the Security Council
actually has a monopoly in securing peace, or whether it is acceptable
when intervention - such as the NATO operation in Yugoslavia in 1999 -
takes place in special cases without an outright mandate from the Security
Council remains unanswered."
[taken from: Johannes Varwick, Vereinte Nationen; in: Wichard Woyke (Hg.),
Handwörterbuch Internationale Politik, Bundeszentrale für politische
Bildung, Schriftenreihe Band 404, 8. Auflage, Bonn 2000, P. 503] |
Failings
in the Structure of the Concept for Collective Security
"It has continually been pointed out that both
requirements to which a collective security system is linked -
correspondence and enforcement - contradict one another and
therefore excluded one other at the same time. Either the super
powers agree, then no enforcement is required. If it is used by the
super powers against smaller nations, it no longer has anything to
do with collective security, but with super-power dictatorship. Or
however, the super powers are not 'in concert', then measures using
force are wholly impossible, and the system is incapable of
functioning.
Finally, it can even be argued that the increasing
bipolarisation of the state system after 1946, which can only
function when a sufficiently large number of equally powerful
players as possible is given, ages the system of collective security
before it can even step into action (...).
Both practical embodiments of the concept of
security, the League of Nations and the United Nations, show quite
clearly as a result once and for all that this approach is
apportioned no success at a global level. Its definability simply
masks that it requires a consensus that will not be given worldwide
in the foreseeable future.
This can be encountered regionally, for instance in
the European Community. Although it does not include a system of
collective security, it does not require one, since security has
long been guaranteed and supplemented by higher forms of cooperation (...).
If the procedural principles of collective security
have proven unusable because they are premature, the same does not
apply per se to the whole concept of the international
organisation (...). The United Nations, which moved the principle of
collective security onto an even broader basis including the General
Assemble with the 'Uniting for Peace' Resolution of 1950, gave it up
in favour of a completely different principle in 1956, namely that
of 'peace-keeping'.
The significance of this process cannot be valued
highly enough. It showed for the first time that the peace-strategic
function of the international organisation is not just not linked to
the collective use of force, but is more powerful the further it
distances itself away from it (...).
Dag Hammarskjöld sconverted the function of securing peace to a
principle of consensus, which means approval. The United Nations'
troops securing peace could then only be used in situations where
the conflicting parties approved. The troops were also never meant
to provide a solution to the conflict, but merely prevent it being
expressed through violence.
This task no longer lay within the perspective of
what collective security wanted to achieve and above all was
entrusted with a completely different set of tools. It dispensed
with making accusations of guilt and issuing penalties; and linked
its operations to the approval of the conflicting parties (...).
With this Hammarskjöld created the first real and
lasting success for the United Nations in securing peace (even if it
only appears very minimal); he also steered the international
organisation towards a new and suitable understanding of its
potential and capabilities with regard to security."
[taken from: Ernst-Otto Czempiel,
Friedensstrategien. Systemwandel durch Internationale Organisationen,
Demokratisierung und Wirtschaft, Paderborn u.a. 1986, P. 96-98] |
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