Trustee for the Human Community: Ralph J. Bunche, the United Nations, and the Decolonization of Africa

Chapter Six Decolonization through Trusteeship: The Legacy of Ralph Bunche

93 C h a pt e r S i x Decolonization through Trusteeship The Legacy of Ralph Bunche n e t a c . c r aw f o r d R a lph B u n ch e was born in 1904, the same year that the Germans began their genocide of the Herero and Nama people of South-West Africa, now Namibia. In that episode, for which Germany apologized in 2004, the Germans articulated and enacted what they then called an extermination policy.The policy was remarkably successful —they shot, drove into the desert, and starved thousands, 50 to 75 percent of the Herero and Nama peoples. Germany had entered the imperial game and the Scramble for Africa late but was not unusual in any other respect in its tactics, and few outsiders took notice at the time of the genocide. It is a remarkable change in world politics that such a policy—brutal colonial occupation accompanied by genocidal killing—is today abhorred and outlawed. Ralph Bunche was an important actor in the long process that brought about that shift in beliefs and policy. In 1947, Bunche, perhaps optimistically, told a scholarly audience, “The international conscience has gradually recognized the essential anomaly in the profession of democratic principles as the basis for world order and the ruling of one people by another.”1 Bunche was a pioneering scholar of trusteeship and, unusual for an academic political scientist, an equally important policymaker and administrator. However,Bunche’s contributions to diplomacy have overshadowed his perceptive doctoral dissertation on colonial administration and mandates and his later work administering the United Nations trusteeship program. Bunche’s analysis of the tensions of foreign rule—even in 94 neta c. crawford the context of trusteeship intended as benevolent administration— points to the perils and pitfalls of trusteeship arrangements as well as their possible amelioration. Indeed, even as the paradox Bunche articulated—the “essential anomaly” of the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of subjection—was apparently resolved by the end of formal colonialism, new tensions emerged. Just as the last of the former UN trust territories were achieving full independence in the early 1990s, as the UN Trusteeship Council was finishing its work and closing its doors,and as the first of several proposals to eliminate the council were made at the UN,a call for the return to trusteeship arose in respected policy journals and newspapers across the political spectrum.2 In Foreign Policy, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner wrote about saving failed states by reinstituting trusteeship.3 The historian Paul Johnson argued for the return of international trusteeship managed by the “civilized” nations:“The Security Council could commit a territory where authority has irretrievably broken down to one or more trustees . . . empowered to not merely impose order by force but to assume political functions.”The trusteeship, according to Johnson, would “usually be of limited duration—5, 10, 20 years . . . but a mandate may last 50 years, or 100.”4 Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk proposed trusteeship for Palestine, arguing that the “concept of trusteeship has been used to good effect in other places—such as EastTimor and Kosovo—where the collapse of order and the descent into chaos have necessitated outside action.”5 And even more to the point for those who live in postconflict states, the United Nations has played an increasingly active role in transitional administrations. Richard Caplan examines the new UN transitional administrations in the post–cold war era in an Adelphi Paper,“A New Trusteeship,” and a new book, International Governance of War-TornTerritories .6 Caplan argues that despite the practical difficulties of these forms of administration, they generally do good. Others are less sanguine and fear that the new practice is a return to colonialism. Thus, despite the invocation of trusteeship as a worthy model for rebuilding contemporary failed states,trusteeship remains an ambiguous institution;under trusteeship a people is not fully self-determining, but nor are they a colony.The history of trusteeship embodies that tension; begun as an adjunct of imperialism, trusteeship evolved into a route out of colonialism and toward full independence. In the contemporary era, trusteeship has reemerged in the form of international 95 Decolonization through Trusteeship: The Legacy of Ralph Bunche administration as, simultaneously, the paradigm of responsible Western humanitarianism and,as seen by some in the South,renascent paternalism .Thus, even as General Assembly members at their...