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The Role of the United Nations in a Unipolar World
- University of Massachusetts Press
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268 The Role of the United Nations in a Unipolar World BRIAN URQUHART To call something irrelevant is, I suppose, the most biting insult you can possibly give to anything, a person or an institution, and the word has been used quite a bit about the UN. But I think that its demise is somewhat unlikely, certainly in the near future. The last time this insult was thrown at the UN was by none other than the president of the United States. It was over the failure of the Security Council to reach unanimity on the occupation of Iraq and the regime change. Here we are a year later [February 2004] and, God help them, the Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his remarkable assistant Lakhdar Brahimi, who has been holding things down in Afghanistan for the past few years, are now the ones who have to devise some way of gradually transferring power that is acceptable to all Iraqis. This is not an easy job. The Romans tried it in the second and third centuries a.d. and it killed the Emperor Trajan. This is a poison chalice if ever there was one, because it is extremely difficult to get everybody to agree in Iraq. If they are not successful, we shall hear again about how hopeless the UN is. But never mind, they are going to do it. I must say that it just shows what a difference a year makes and how the word irrelevant may seem applicable in some people’s minds one year but then not at all the next year. The UN was founded, as you know, in 1945. The charter was signed in San Francisco in April of that year, before the war was over. It is important to remember that the UN Charter and the whole concept of the UN was the brainchild of Franklin Roosevelt and something that he seems to have paid more attention to and minded more about than almost anything else, including conducting the whole of World War II. Unfortunately, because it was before the war ended, the charter was founded on a false assumption, which was that the alliance that had won the war would continue to observe the peace and if necessary enforce it. This was the basis of the UN’s peace and security function and the base, of course, of the five permanent members of the Security Council who have a veto. We need to list here the names again: the United States, the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and China. Well, within two or three years the relations between the five permanent members had become the main threat to world peace and remained so for forty years. So the UN was to some extent founded on a kind of geopolitical fault from which, in a way, it has never recovered. From the EPIIC Symposium at Tufts University, “Dilemmas of Empire and Nationbuilding,” February 2004 The Role of the United Nations in a Unipolar World 269 In the Cold War a new function was found for the UN—it just sort of happened like penicillin—and that was what we now call peacekeeping. Peacekeeping was not just a lot of neutral soldiers in blue hats running around the world, it was an extremely important strategic device, which is why the United States very, very substantially supported it though it did not take part in it, and why the Soviet Union never really tried to veto it. They needed it. The importance of peacekeeping was to contain regional conflicts and try to prevent them from igniting the main East-West nuclear conflict; places like the Middle East, Kashmir, Cyprus, later on the Congo, and so on. And if it had never done anything else, I think the UN would have proved its relevance during the Cold War. Then the Cold War unexpectedly ended, taking everybody by surprise. There was no post–Cold War planning like there had been after World War II.There was a year or two of very unwise euphoria, everybody saying the UN at last was going to work as had been written in San Francisco forty years before. And it did do one thing absolutely according to the charter, which was to authorize the operation against Saddam Hussein to get him out of Kuwait. There was a lot of very overeuphoric talk. Then the UN plunged into all sorts of problems, mostly in the debris of the Cold...