Global Policy Forum

By Martin Woollacott

In the spring of 1948 a collection of French, American, Belgian and Swedish colonels and majors assembled in Cairo. This first UN force had a typically rocky start, as the truce between Arabs and Jews they were supposed to oversee collapsed almost immediately. But by July a new one was in place, and the colonels were soon out there, with clipboards and binoculars, keeping the peace from sandy outposts in Palestine and neighbouring countries. They did not wear blue helmets or berets and had no guns. Those only came in with the UN Emergency Force that was deployed after Suez.

The hopes engendered by these early missions were largely unfulfilled. The Middle Eastern forces were removed or ignored when the parties wanted to go back to war, the Kashmir missions achieved little, the Congo was a terrible debacle and the Cyprus force ended the shooting but effectively sustained partition. Also, the number of UN operations remained small because the cold war antagonists more often blocked the use of UN forces than they permitted it.

Half a century later we do not know what is to become of peacekeeping, peace enforcement and peacemaking after their late blooming in the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s. This is partly because of disillusion with the results of some UN operations, strongest in the US but by no means confined to America. It is also because September 11 has brought in a whole new set of criteria, overlapping and conflicting with the largely humanitarian considerations which shaped most recent interventions.

The impulse for such intervention was to help citizens of countries affected by wars and internal breakdown. It has been justified most recently, and elegantly, by the report of the International Commission on the Responsibility to Protect, which posits that governments have a duty of care toward their citizens and that if they seriously fail in this the international community has the right to take over. But a new interventionism governed by the drive against terrorism is not primarily about rescuing "them" but about rescuing "us". Tony Blair finds it possible to sit these two things side by side, presenting Afghanistan as both a pre-emption of terror and a humanitarian intervention. Of course this is correct, but we know which came first.

The problem is one of concentration of aim, with the Americans wishing to devote most resources to targeting the enemy, the Europeans attached to the idea of rescuing others and attending to the conflicts which breed resentment of the west, and most other countries uneasy about both philosophies, which they fear conceal ulterior motives. Underlying that is another level of difference, with the Americans, unusually, taking the view that there are some things that can't be fixed, some conflicts that are not ready for resolution and some state breakdowns that cannot be reversed.

The argument here is that the international community could all too easily find itself sustaining, with aid and troops, an increasing number of dysfunctional societies which they have stabilised without curing, an old problem in UN peacekeeping. To which the response comes back, as with Afghanistan, that this is precisely why more resources should be devoted to such cases. These are not easy issues.

The row between the US administration and the UN over immunity for American personnel in peacekeeping operations may conceal, the Washington Post has suggested, "a back-door effort to get US troops out of peacekeeping in general and the Balkans in particular". The president, after all, campaigned on a platform of hostility to "nation building," whether in Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti or Bosnia. Of course, it is reasonable to assume that some way will be found out of the impasse over the International Criminal Court and that the US will not systematically close down UN operation after UN operation as they come up for renewal.

It is also fair to say that American military personnel are not in any way a necessity in most UN operations. They were historically not present in any number except in situations, like Korea, Kuwait, and Kosovo, where they led a coalition of the willing in wars which received UN blessing.

But large UN operations need American technical, logistical and intelligence assistance as well as American support in the broad political sense. If the US should reach the point where it does not see the UN as a natural field for the pursuit of policy and as offering instruments of unique value in that pursuit then both are in trouble. But the sheer usefulness of the UN to a super-power makes that unlikely. Who, for instance, is going to broker and police a settlement of the Sudanese conflict, a matter of great concern to the Christian right in America, if it is not the UN?

As the cold war wound down there was a flowering of UN activity in many territories, frequently going beyond peacekeeping toward peace enforcement and what later came to be called nation building. By 1994 there were 75,000 UN soldiers and police operating in more than a dozen countries at a cost of $3bn a year, a figure quoted in Marrack Goulding's excellent account of the brief golden age of peacekeeping.

Then came disasters in Angola, Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia, and disappointment, above all in Washington, even though in all of these cases the US bore much responsibility for what went wrong. America had been a prime mover in early UN operations, and it was ready and willing to seek its ends through UN institutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But Somalia and later Bosnia changed that. As Goulding observes: "Success bred over-confidence in member states and secretariat alike. As a result some unwise decisions were taken ... and the UN ended a dizzy decade with its peacekeeping reputation tarnished."

It became politically difficult for the US to take a large direct role in UN peacekeeping. Even the British, in Sierra Leone, preferred to stay out of the UN structure. European military men, meanwhile, agreed with their American counterparts that serious enforcement operations can only succeed if they are led by serious military powers, another lesson of the 1990s. The Europeans put their own drag on the prospects for future intervention by going so slowly with the creation of the Rapid Reaction Force.

But a certain clarity about humanitarian intervention, its justifications, techniques and limitations, and the various ways the UN could be involved, was in the process of being laboriously achieved both inside and outside the UN, as various level-headed studies and reports attest. The consensus was that intervention was here to stay but could and should be better done.

That has now been thrown into disarray by the emergence of rival objectives in the campaign against terror. How to reconcile the two, if it can be done, is the critical question.

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