Terrorism and the UN: Before and After September 11

8 Using the General Assembly

173 8 Using the General Assembly M. J. Peterson The General Assembly has addressed international terrorism in two ways: by developing a normative framework that defines terrorism as a common problem and by encouraging concerted government action to develop more particular international and national legal rules for dealing with terrorists. This chapter examines how these efforts by the assembly have influenced government behavior over the last three decades. Assessing the assembly’s efforts requires an understanding of the general institutional characteristics of the General Assembly, the specifics of its debates on terrorism, and the politics surrounding the various streams of debate. Norms and Cooperation: The Business of the General Assembly Institutional characteristics circumscribe the measures the General Assembly can take in its efforts to counter international terrorism.It cannot act as a direct coordinator of action against terrorism because it lacks authority to command governments and other influential actors to take or avoid particular actions. Moreover, the General Assembly oversees no administrative structure capable of implementing its decisions and it lacks the resources needed to provide materialrewardsforgoodbehaviorormaterialpunishmentsof badbehavior.Given these constraints and the fact that it is the only intergovernmental body dealing with broad political issues in which nearly all states of the world are represented and have equal votes, it is able to serve as a developer of normative discourse and an encourager of cooperative action. As Inis Claude has pointed out,1 the General Assembly functions as an organ for collective legitimization or collective delegitimization of normative prescriptions that guide the activity of member governments in some general-issue areas, and it influences the statements, policies, or behavior of individual governments and other actors in particular 174 M. J. Peterson situations. This collective legitimation most often proceeds at the level of generally applicable norms. Related efforts to influence particular governments’ behavior through resolutions praising or condemning their actions or inactions occur, but their impact is often minor or very slow in developing and depends on existence of a strong consensus on the norms applicable to the situation at hand. Like all deliberative bodies, the General Assembly provides members with a tribune for raising matters they regard as important, a forum for exchanging views,and an arena for contending over which problems should be viewed as common challenges and the preferable, or at least acceptable, ways of addressing them.The majoritarian voting rules2 permit coalitions of some states to claim that they are speaking for all. However, most resolutions are recommendations ,3 and all member governments realize that a resolution’s political and moral weight increases as the size of the supporting majority increases. This leads them to seek unanimity, consensus, or adoption without a vote whenever possible, even at the expense of watering down portions of their proposals to attract greater support. However, there are limits to how far majoritarian coalitions will go to secure additional support. They sometimes prefer adoption by a majority vote, particularly when they anticipate that opposition will be scattered or expressed primarily through abstention rather than negative votes. Consensus has been regarded as both the basis and the bane of assembly influence in world politics.A real consensus overcomes some of the problems inherent in the General Assembly’s lack of capacity to implement decisions or impose sanctions by engaging the efforts of the member states.Yet when pursued in the face of strong disagreements among governments, consensus can be achieved only by papering them over,which produces vacuous pronouncements that different member governments can interpret in divergent ways.4 Even when disagreement is less strong, a particular consensus may express a least-common-denominator outcome—a weak statement that hardly seems worth the diplomatic energies expended to develop it. However even a leastcommon -denominator understanding is useful for identifying the state of current opinion about some issue or situation. Over time the General Assembly is also a good register of shifts in the terms of consensus; new resolutions may indicate convergence on the identification of new problems or programs of action or indicate deepening disagreement as tensions among governments’ divergent positions increase and can no longer be hidden behind bland phrases. These institutional characteristics have encouraged the assembly to deal with terrorism as a general problem rather than focus on responses to particular terrorist incidents. Using the General Assembly 175 General Assembly Discussions on Terrorism Although assembly resolutions have commented on particular terrorist incidents , member governments have not sought to...