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238 The United Nations and War in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries ROBERT WEINER The United Nations was created in 1945 to prevent another world war. It was designed, as the preamble to the UN Charter states, to eliminate the scourge of war that had befallen humanity twice in the first half of the twentieth century. The United Nations, as the successor to the failed experiment of the League of Nations, embodied Wilsonian idealism. It represented the liberal internationalist approach to world politics, which offered an alternative model to realism,1 dealing with the central problem of international relations—the avoidance of world war. From a realist perspective, there were elements in the British government that saw the League as a means of bringing the United States into the security structure of Europe.2 France was also interested in using the League as an instrument to resolve its security dilemma vis-à-vis a revenge-seeking Germany in the future. Unfortunately and tragically for Woodrow Wilson, the United States never joined the League of Nations because of the resurgence of isolationist sentiment after the Great War.3 The United Nations was based on the neo-liberal assumption that international institutions can make a difference in preventing and resolving wars in the international system.4 The centerpiece of the war-prevention and conflict-resolution system of the United Nations was the philosophy of collective security, which was supposed to offer an alternative method of maintaining international order, in comparison with the amoral, Machiavellian, balance-of-power politics that had led to the collapse of the international system twice in the twentieth century and had brought untold suffering to humanity.5 More important, the United Nations was supposed to represent the best impulses of world civilization, in the sense that it would prevent another Holocaust and genocidal slaughter of the innocents, plunging humanity into the dark ages once again. Collective Security To accomplish this objective, the central principle on which the United Nations was based, as had been the League of Nations before it, was that of collective security , to represent the will of the international community to deter and punish acts of aggression committed in interstate conflict. “Evil doers” who committed acts of aggression would be faced with the overwhelming might and righteous wrath of The United Nations and War 239 the international community.6 It is very important to point out, in connection with this, that the United Nations was not originally designed to deal with internal or intrastate wars, which have emerged as the major form of conflict since the end of the Cold War, but rather was designed to deal with interstate conflicts.7 Indeed, Article 2, Section 7 of the UN Charter prohibits the United Nations from intervening in matters that fall within the domestic jurisdiction of a state, unless there is a Chapter VII enforcement action under way there.8 But this article may need to be rewritten and adapted to a new concept of sovereignty that has emerged in connection with the recent trend toward humanitarian intervention (two recent cases are Kosovo and East Timor in 1999), which has been driven by the neo-liberal philosophy that the international community has a responsibility to protect human rights that takes precedence over the traditional Westphalian notion of state sovereignty, which is based on the idea that a government can do whatever it wants to on its own territory.9 On one hand, as Michael Walzer writes, “humanitarian intervention is a response to acts that shock the moral conscience of mankind.”10 On the other hand, an obstacle to humanitarian intervention stems from the developing nations that object to international intervention in matters that are perceived as falling within the domestic jurisdiction of a state.11 The idea of collective security is based on a number of assumptions, the basic features of which could be attributable to Wilsonian idealism and its precursors. Collective security is supposed to represent the organized will and power of the international community, which in a Manichean sense, from a moral point of view, would personify the forces of good. Those forces would oppose any real or potential aggression, which was depicted as synonymous with the forces of evil. The use of force by the international community in this fashion was collectively legitimized, even though a hegemonic power like the United States could turn a collectively legitimized action to its own national interest, as in the case of the...

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