UN Action: Lectures and Forums: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
 et me start by suggesting the five things that we can
reasonably have in mind when we talk about the UN. Unless we have in front of
us some conception of the variety of things that we may be invoking whenever we
talk about what the UN can do in the contemporary world, we can only add to our
confusion.
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Presentation by Joe Clark | Presentation by Ernst Haas
© Copyright 1996, Regents of the University of California
he UN is certainly one of many avenues for communication among states and
increasingly between states and non-state actors. It is a distinctive channel of communication. It is,
secondly, a large, not remarkably competent bureaucracy, which is specialized
in performing a limited range of functions in very particular cases where
consequential states, like the United States, find it inconvenient to employ
their own bureaucracies. It is also a bureaucracy which performs intelligence
analysis, information-gathering, coalition-building functions for states with
weak bureaucracies, which are most of the states in the world.
nd finally, it is a school for socializing elites from new states with
confused views about how to achieve their objectives in the contemporary
international system. Maybe it is some other things as well, but clearly it is
all five of those things.
ow in relation to the function of adding to the order rather than the disorder
of the contemporary world, what is the most striking feature of today's UN?
Well, I think it is that the UN is engaged now primarily in activities for
which it is ill prepared and ill structured and which were poorly anticipated
by its founders. If we go back to the paradigm which the founders clearly had
in mind, we would find, it seems to me, a collective security organization
which was committed to guaranteeing a secure life for a multiplicity of
nation-states, an alternative to nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics.
As envisioned by the founder states, governments would continue to enjoy a
virtually unreviewable monopoly of policy choice within their borders over a
great number of subjects, including in the way in which they treated their
citizens. The collective security system would operate primarily, as any of you
who have studied the UN at all realize, through a kind of military staff, a
general staff, built into the UN structure and enjoying the capacity to plan,
communicate with troops, and handle the complicated reconnaissance,
intelligence, and logistic operations of a modern military force. To carry out
its strategies, the staff would deploy units earmarked primarily by the
principal powers and above all by the United States and the Soviet Union. The
main focus of this envisioned apparatus was the threat of conflict between
states of the second, third, or "nth" rank.
ne of the earliest monitoring operations, one long forgotten, I'm sure, except
to those of us who collect and store recondite information, is the UN
monitoring operation in Indonesia from 1947 to 1951, which observed the process
of Dutch withdrawal from its Asian Empire. There were others: a Kashmiri
operation, begun back in 1949, which continues to this day. What they are
monitoring now is the progressive unraveling of Kashmir.
think we can divide the new demands into three categories, and perhaps one of
them isn't fundamentally new, but has some new dimensions to it. The one that
is least novel is associated with the peacekeeping, monitoring/mediation
function which has been evolving during most of the forty-five-odd years of the
UN's existence. There is demand for a much deeper involvement by the United
Nations secretary-general and his staff in the political processes of
societies. Perhaps no clearer case can be El Salvador, where the
secretary-general was asked to mediate what seemed to be an intractable
conflict. Finally, when a solution was achieved on paper, the UN became
practically a participant in the government of El Salvador, even having the
authority to veto shifts in the deployment of Salvadoran army troops. That is
deep involvement in the affairs of another society. In Angola the UN was deeply
involved in a dramatically unsuccessful effort at disarmament, disengagement,
and election-monitoring, in trying to produce a state out of the jumble of
factions which the Portuguese left behind them.
hen you turn to conducting field operations, these aspects of the personnel
system of the UN become very vivid indeed, as I was able to witness last summer
when I found myself in Somalia. Even if the personnel system were more
effective than it in fact is, field operations call for kinds of expertise
unrelated to servicing a multilingual debating and drafting institution. Field
operations call for experts in air transport, telecommunications, construction,
and strategic and tactical planning; you'll find very few of these people with
permanent contracts at the United Nations today.
econdly, there is a problem with structure. On the one hand, there is a lack
of centralization, a lack of integration of all other UN operations (notably
its aid-giving agencies like UNICEF and UNDP), with its peacekeeping
operations, as I could see by sitting in on senior staff meetings throughout
the summer. On the other hand, field operations are plagued by excessive
centralization, which makes it difficult for the directors of field operations
to make rapid day-to-day decisions to spend money and to move things around.
Where the threat or application of force is involved, commanders must be able
to make and implement decisions swiftly. The overcentralization of financial
controls may evidence lack of confidence in the staff, which in turn may be the
result of the UN's self-consciousness about the consequences of its personnel
policies. Finally there is the problem of finances, which has been so widely
discussed that there is no need to discuss it here.
ven if all of the above were dealt with--the problems of personnel, the
problems of structure, to a considerable degree the problem of finances--there
would still remain the final problem, which is the problem of national will.
Perhaps I should conclude by looking at the changing national will of the
United States.
onitoring the presidential election campaign or following President Clinton's
statements at the very beginning of his presidency, one had to be struck by the
tremendous emphasis on multilateralism and particularly on using the United
Nations to deal with the post-Cold War disorder. I recently had an occasion to
look at a speech given by Ambassador Madeleine Albright just as the operation
in Somalia was going rotten. It was clearly one of those speeches that had
passed through the entire U.S. bureaucracy before it was delivered, so that it
was a formal statement of the policy of the Clinton administration. This is
what she had to say, "Let no one doubt that this President is willing to use
force unilaterally when necessary." And then she gives examples, "Last June the
President ordered a strike against Saddam Hussein's military intelligence
headquarters in response to Iraq's plot to kill former President Bush. We
didn't seek anyone's permission to carry out that raid. We didn't ask anyone's
help. We did it by using our own forces. In the future," she added, "if
America's vital economic interests are at risk, as they were in the Gulf, or
the lives of American citizens are in danger, as they were in Panama, or if
terrorists need to be tracked down, as when President Reagan ordered the use of
force to apprehend the hijackers of the Achille Lauro, President Clinton will
not hesitate to act as a commander in chief must act to protect America and
Americans" (italics added). This is a speech that could just as easily have
been given by President Reagan, and it does tell us something about the lack of
national will to commit the United States to multilateral responses to
instances of violent disorder that impinge significantly on its security
interests or domestic politics.
Tom Farer is Professor of International Law at American University in Washington, DC, and the former President of the University of New Mexico. He has served as special assistant to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense and to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. His books include Toward a Humanitarian Diplomacy.