Is this likely to diminish the authority of the Security Council and the UN? Only time will tell.
The experience of the last decades has – time and again – confirmed a simple and fundamental truth. There are no “military lite” or “diplomacy lite” options available to the responsible decision-makers. Military options, when deemed necessary and legitimate, must be designed to ensure their declared objectives. Diplomatic options should include the will to engage diplomacy to the full, including doing the necessary diplomatic “heavy lifting”.
It goes without saying that political and diplomatic approaches to security achieve little if they are not supported by real power, including military power. But the opposite is also true: force and military power can achieve little if not used in the framework of values, norms and institutions. This is the only way to move beyond the type of international politics in which the strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must.
(Keynote Address at the Closing Ceremony of the 27th Training Course of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Geneva, 7 June 2013)
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Notes
1. 1 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book Five, 89.
2. 2 Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XVIII, opening paragraph.
3. 3 Quoted from: Douglas Hurd, Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary, 200 Years of Argument, Success and Failure, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2010, p. 24.
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An Organized International Community: The United Nations
It is said that if we wish to imagine the future, we first need to look at the past.
Therefore, it is useful to mention again that more than two centuries ago, in 1805, the then British Prime Minister William Pitt (The Younger) articulated an important vision. In his seminal memorandum “Deliverance and Security in Europe,” he reflected on the world to be reorganized after the Napoleonic Wars. He proposed an arrangement that would enable “a general and comprehensive system of Public Law in Europe, and provide, as far as possible, for repressing future attempts to disturb the general Tranquility.”1
This idea expressed in a politically powerful document in 1805 served as the point of departure for the creation of the Holy Alliance and all subsequent multilateral arrangements designed to serve the “general Tranquility” and to provide the basis of what was later coined “collective security”.
Looking back at that document, one is struck by two concepts which remain central even today. The first is “a general and comprehensive system of Public Law” and the second, the need to repress the attempt to disturb the general Tranquility “as far as possible”. These two concepts represented the central challenge of the League of Nations and later of the United Nations and continue to be the main challenge.
Modern international law developed by or with the assistance of the United Nations has become a solid framework for international cooperation but is still not ←19 | 20→a “comprehensive system of public law” today. Public law remains, strictly speaking, the domain of sovereign states. Norms and institutions of international law must be strengthened further and there is much work to be done.2
The practice of maintaining peace in the framework of the United Nations can be described as going “as far as possible”. However, what is possible is usually less than what is desirable or even necessary. The possible and the necessary seldom match and this gap gives rise to disappointments. The challenge is how to expand the scope of the possible.
The UN is not a world government, nor can it be one. Nevertheless, it is a vital ingredient of contemporary global governance, defined as the system of existing norms, values and institutions which were created to help address the problems of our world. This system of norms defines the space of governance, its scope and limitations.
The UN Organization is based on the principle of “sovereign equality” of its member states. This is a necessary principle, a sine qua non condition for the organization’s inclusiveness and universality. On the other hand, in an increasingly globalized world, sovereignty can be an obstacle in finding solutions to the growing number of “problems without passports” such as global warming, global pandemics, transnational organized crime and others. Coordination of the national interests of sovereign states in these matters has proven very difficult. In addition, the provisions of the UN Charter provide for the necessary institutional stability, but not for the desired adaptability of the UN structure. The challenge today is how to use UN institutions effectively.
The UN represents a valuable distillation of historically accumulated wisdom which can, when taken seriously, help in solving a variety of problems. Time and again, states and individuals have turned to the UN. Today no serious commentator advocates its abolition. To the contrary, the ongoing discussion on UN reform, which started in the early days of the organization, reaffirms the organization’s indispensability.
The discussion points towards a different problem: the problem of UN relevance. While the indispensability of the organization cannot be questioned, its relevance is continuously subject to doubt. And relevance is a matter of degree. Therefore, it is appropriate to focus a discussion like the one today on the relevance of the UN in the three key areas of its activities: security, development and human rights.
The UN is an organization of collective security and as such, indispensable. The aspiration formulated two centuries ago by William Pitt continues to be valid. Pitt’s careful wording regarding the task to provide peace “as far as possible” was wise and still resonates today. Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General ←20 | 21→of the United Nations, gave it a modern expression in his famous remark that the UN is not here to take the world to heaven but to prevent it from descending into hell.3
The UN has been instrumental in this preventative role. It has contributed its own share in the prevention of a World War III and in addressing a wide variety of threats to peace. This must never be ignored or underestimated.
Moreover, the UN has demonstrated its ability to innovate. Peacekeeping, a function not envisaged in the UN Charter, has become the “flagship activity of the UN”, to borrow a phrase used by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the eighth UN Secretary-General. UN peacekeepers have made a major contribution to the maintenance of international peace and security and have deservedly received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.4
Over time and especially in the past two decades, UN peacekeeping has grown in size, diversity and complexity. Since 1948, there have been 71 peacekeeping operations. In early 2019, there are more than 100,000 peacekeeping personnel deployed in 14 operations. Peacekeeping, as an instrument for maintaining peace and security has proven
