UN Action: Lectures and Forums: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

UN Action in a Disorderly World

Ernst Haas

y theme is how can the United States help to rescue the United Nations from sliding down the slippery slope of ineffectiveness. I will make four simple points. I will argue that the discrediting which peacekeeping and peacemaking have suffered in Somalia, in Croatia, in Bosnia, in Cambodia, and in Haiti is due to what I call sliding down the slippery slope of unthinking overcommitment. I shall also argue that on the contrary, the UN pioneered effective peacemaking without slipping down that slope in many other situations, but particularly recently in Namibia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and apparently in Mozambique, of which we heard a moment ago from Tom Farer. I shall also argue that the UN continues to perform very, very effectively in traditional peacekeeping operations. And I'll argue that despite the fact that we have a new scene, despite the fact that the Cold War is over, despite the kind of disputes Joe Clark called to our attention, traditional peacekeeping will continue to be important because old-fashioned inter-state disputes will continue; they will not go away just because the Cold War is over. f we want to rescue the UN, we should maximize what it can do well and try to stay away from situations that will discredit the organization, because by discrediting it in the Somalias and the Haitis of this world, we will eventually discredit those peacekeeping operations which the organization is able to carry out effectively. I suggest that the failures are due to two causes: an incompetent UN staff headed by an unreflective secretary-general, and the leadership of an uncertain and inconsistent United States, which has made waffling into a fine art. These conditions are all correctable, and we can talk about that later. My bottom line is that we should not attempt multilateral intervention if the task of that intervention is too comprehensive, too open-ended, and too ambitious. hy did the UN fail in Somalia, in Haiti, in Yugoslavia thus far, and almost in Cambodia? Because each one of these situations was not an inter-state war but a civil war. The art of peacemaking has just been invented, so to speak, and it was invented for purposes of dealing with civil wars. Civil wars are inherently much harder to deal with than inter-state wars, because the parties are elusive. Unless both parties have tentatively agreed, as they did in El Salvador and Nicaragua, that further fighting will not gain either one anything very important, outside intervention will fail. In Somalia the parties have not agreed to cut off the civil war. In fact, I'm willing to bet that as soon as the UN pulls out, a few weeks from now, the civil war will be resumed, and that Aidid will be president of Somalia by the end of 1994 at the latest. hat does the slippery slope consist of? It begins with a mandate for humanitarian aid: feed people, keep them from dying. Well, pretty soon someone takes potshots at the people who do the humanitarian aiding, and pretty soon a military force is sent to ride shotgun with the trucks that deliver the food and the medical supplies. Why is that necessary? Because food and medical supplies are important in civil wars. You don't want your enemy to have them, but you want to have them for yourself. So willy-nilly, the humanitarian aid convoys are drawn into a civil war which was the cause of the intervention in the first place, whereupon a new mandate is issued and the Security Council passes a new resolution, scolding the parties and declaring the need to end the civil war: "You must now negotiate with each other and get ready to draft a democratic constitution." How do you do that? This could be a country that doesn't have one, or maybe it had one but nobody paid any attention to it. You say to fifteen warlords (or whatever the number is), "Okay boys, now lay down your arms, be good guys; let's sit around and draft a constitution." Sure, you can say that, but that is not what they will do. The Security Council understands that disarmament is a precondition to the end of civil war, but what started out as a harmless humanitarian aid operation has become an operation to disarm people who don't want to be disarmed, an enforcement action taken without the legal process of UN procedure. If you don't have the troops and if you can't stand the casualties, if you worry about the first body-bags coming home, it won't work. That is why Somalia isn't working. The lesson the U.S. government drew from this was that if it didn't work in Somalia, it won't work in Haiti, so we shouldn't even try it very seriously. I don't have to draw any further pictures. he unwillingness of countries who are asked to participate, to accept casualties, and to pay the money in these slippery-slope operations, and the inability to foretell when they might end, mean that the more of this kind of operation that you have, the more the UN is discredited in the eyes of the very people who have done all the peacekeeping in the past, notably our friends in Canada, for example. Let me repeat that it doesn't have to be that way. A long string of successful peacekeeping operations did not contain this slippery-slope phenomenon because the parties had agreed ahead of time that they welcomed a UN presence to monitor or actively promote a peaceful solution. m interested in maximizing situations in which UN success is likely and minimizing situations in which it is not, such as Somalia. With respect to enforcement actions such as in Iraq, I would again say that if the preconditions for success are met--an agreement among the major powers to either participate or at least to abstain, and the willingness to incur the casualties needed to punish aggression as defined under Chapter Seven of the Charter--such enforcement actions are desirable. And I would argue further that from that point of view, the Gulf War was a distinct plus for the UN, as my two predecessors have also argued. But again I want to caution that if these preconditions are not met, if substantial, tacit, or overt opposition exists, as it will if we try to do now in North Korea what we did in Iraq, then we will discredit enforcement exactly as we are now discrediting peacekeeping. I started to mean-mouth the secretary-general a moment ago, so let me finish with Boutros Boutros-Ghali. outros-Ghali, in his famous 1993 memorandum to the Security Council on the future of peacekeeping and peacemaking, committed himself and the organization to a form of military intervention much more intrusive than peacekeeping had been in the past, but less intrusive than full-scale enforcement. This is a gray area between conventional peacekeeping and conventional enforcement for which we still don't have a name. We three today have slipped into calling it peacemaking, but Boutros-Ghali actually did not use the word peacemaking in that sense. He was, however, convinced that some mode of intermediate action between traditional peacekeeping and traditional enforcement was necessary. In a sense, the Namibia operation, which was a total success, and the Cambodia operation, which was not a total success but wasn't a total failure either, were illustrations of what he had in mind. He was either unable or unwilling last year to specify just how these intermediate operations, legally and as defined, ought to differ from peacekeeping and enforcement as hitherto understood. Even though he was unwilling to do this, he nevertheless was not slow to blame a number of governments for the failure of such intermediate operations. outros-Ghali, in my judgment, made the enormous mistake of arguing that all conflicts in the world are equally important, that all threats to the peace are threats to everybody's peace. He suggested, therefore, that you can't solve issues of world peace piecemeal--a little operation here, a little operation there--instead of ignoring a few crises that are less important. If all crises are equally important, you must attack them all at the same time. He made the further mistake, in my judgment, of arguing that nationalism and national sovereignty are not only compatible with, but actually prerequisites for global operations and global security. ut that is not the worst thing that is wrong with Boutros-Ghali. He seems to believe that all evils in the world are interconnected and that all virtues must be attained at once and simultaneously. I quote him: "Thus from every angle of vision, chronological, practical, functional, conceptual, individual, institutional, we come to one conclusion: humanity's project is now truly universal, and to cope with it, we must fashion comprehensive and integral projects, policies, and efforts." That is from the 1993 report to the General Assembly on the work of the UN. Well, I submit to you that if we--I mean humankind--must simultaneously work for peace, for sustainable development, and for democracy in all 180-odd member states, all together, all states, all at the same time--moreover, we can't have one without the two others, they are totally interdependent, we can't have clean water or clean air unless the country is democratic--what kind of nonsense is that? That is what he said. And that is what a lot of people say. This is the self-defeating hubris of globalistic thinking. he Clinton administration has done nothing to help with any of these problems. It has made them worse because of its inability to speak with one voice or decide what it wants, and because of its constantly shifting and confusing signals. According to one spokesperson of this administration after another, the United States is committed to the global diffusion of democracy and the global diffusion of capitalism. We are in the business of making both democracy and free-market capitalism universal institutions. These will save the world. he post-Cold War order, to which Republican and Democratic administrations both have dedicated themselves, is a democratic capitalistic one. The United States is to foster both in its foreign policy. Both Clinton and Bush dedicated themselves to the generous use of multilateral institutions for the attainment of those two objectives. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake said in a speech on September 21, 1993, that this dual objective, democracy and capitalism, would be achieved by gradually increasing the number of market democracies, provided we also combat earnestly any aggression committed by nondemocratic states and provided we see to it that in such nondemocratic states, after they have been defeated, market and democratic institutions are introduced by means of humanitarian intervention. ccording to this the United States is committed to making sure that in a future Somalia, there is (a) democracy, and (b) capitalism. Fine. Is the United States really so committed that we will help bring this about? Now, I ask you, is this really the case? On September 27, 1993, six days later, President Clinton said in his address to the UN General Assembly that the United States would participate in future peacekeeping operations only if the following questions could be answered affirmatively: Is there a real threat to international peace? If the answer is no we don't get involved. Does the proposed mission have a clear objective? If not, we don't participate. Can an end point to the mission be identified? If not, we stay away from it. How much will such a mission cost? If it's too much, the United States won't participate. agree that the first two conditions really ought to be met. If the particular operation envisaged is not a real threat to world peace, I am reluctant to get involved in it. And if the proposed mission does not have a clear objective, I would certainly not wish to be involved. On the other hand, if you also insist that a clear end point be specified, then the UN would never launch any operations at all. And if you could say ahead of time how much it will cost, the same conclusion applies. Nobody would ever go in because you can't tell what it will cost and you can't ever predict when it will end. he United States cannot at the same time talk big but run away when the first body-bags come home. Suffering casualties is part of peacekeeping; it is a bigger part of peacemaking; and it is the biggest part of enforcement action. If we are not willing to pay the cost of doing these things, then we must become isolationists. That is the only alternative. Suffering casualties, unfortunately, is part and parcel of the kind of aggressive peacekeeping that is now being pushed, the kind Boutros-Ghali advocates but then is reluctant to practice when he is called upon to do so. linton is right to insist on some conditions for American participation, but these are conditions that attach to classical peacekeeping and classical enforcement. The United States ought to participate far more energetically, far more consistently in both, even if the command of these forces might not be in American hands. But we can't do that as long as both the UN leadership and the U.S. presidency remain as confused as they currently are about the possibilities and desirabilities of multilateral action.

Ernst Haas, Robson Research Professor of Government at UC Berkeley, specializes in international relations and international organizations. He is author of eight books, the most recent of which is When Knowledge is Power. I am interested in maximizing situations in which UN success is likely and minimizing situations in which it is not, such as Somalia. Boutros-Ghali seems to believe that all evils in the world are interconnected and that all virtues must be attained at once and simultaneously. This is the self-defeating hubris of globalistic thinking. The United States cannot at the same time talk big but run away when the first body-bags come home. Suffering casualties is part of peacekeeping.

Presentation by Joe Clark | Presentation by Tom Farer

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