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3 Peace Operations during the Cold War
Peace operations are not unique to the twentieth century. The idea that great powers have special responsibilities for maintaining peace and security can be traced back to antiquity. The Roman Empire, for instance, established the idea that law enforcement should cross political boundaries (Buzan and Little 2000: 200) and that all peoples were governed by a universal (Roman) law. The origins of modern peace operations lie in attempts by the European great powers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to manage conflicts, protect imperilled Christians, impose their collective will on other powers, and engage in forms of colonial policing (Chesterman 2001; Finnemore 2003).
The key institutions then were the Concert of Europe and later the League of Nations (see Bellamy and Williams 2010: 71–81). Important threads of continuity and parallels exist between these older activities and what we now call peace operations. For example, it was the League of Nations that established the idea of ‘collective security’ which remains at the heart of the UN system today (see table 3.1). ‘Collective security’ is usually understood as ‘a system, regional or global, in which each participating state accepts that the security of one is the concern of all, and agrees to join in a collective response to aggression. In this sense it is distinct from, and more ambitious than, systems of alliance security, in which groups of states ally with each other, principally against possible external threats’ (Roberts 1996: 310). In the case of the United Nations, this idea was the basis for the Charter rules that left it up to the Security Council to decide what constitutes a threat to, or breach of, international peace and security, as well as the appropriate response (Sarooshi 2000: 285). It was also the League of Nations that developed a form of ‘legalized hierarchy’ that remains evident in the structure of the UN Security Council today, which bestows unique rights and responsibilities upon its permanent members (Simpson 2004).
While recognizing these antecedents is important, this book’s focus is on the period after the formation of the UN system. The rest of this chapter therefore provides an overview of how UN and non-UN peace operations developed during the Cold War period. This is when peace operations as we know them today were ‘invented’ but constrained in important ways by the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Table 3.1 The United Nations: lessons learned?
| Problem with the League of Nations | Remedy in the UN |
|---|---|
| ‘Empty chairs’ – absence of the US, the USSR, Germany and Japan | ➔ Permanent Security Council members with veto powers; non-permanent members elected by General Assembly |
| Lack of credible enforcement power and international authority | ➔ Chapter VII empowers Security Council to use all means; Article 43 creates a military staff as prelude to international armed force |
| Lack of universality – League became more about collective defence (of Britain and France) than collective security | ➔ General Assembly is all-inclusive – all states can be members; General Assembly oversees the work of the UN, including the Security Council |
| Inactivity and delay | ➔ Creation of a larger, permanent secretariat with technical expertise |
3.1 United Nations peace operations during the Cold War
The UN was conceived as the successor to the failed League of Nations by the Western allies during the Second World War. The catastrophic loss of life and physical devastation caused by the war, coupled with the invention of the atomic bomb, convinced international leaders that international organization was more necessary than ever. Taking up the idea that great powers should play a legalized executive role in world politics, the main wartime allies (Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States) initially conceived the UN as the vehicle through which they would police world affairs through a system of collective security. The ‘police’, plus China, were given special rights – permanent membership of the Security Council and veto powers – but also bore, in the words of US Secretary of State John Stettinius, ‘the principal responsibility for action’ (in Goodrich and Carroll 1947: 415). For all its problems, this combination of special rights and responsibilities, and the guarantee that the UN could never act against the interests of the great powers (of 1945), ensured their continued participation in the new organization and helped it survive the global chill of the Cold War.
The vision of a UN policing role led by these great powers was severely circumscribed during the Cold War. Assessments of the UN Security Council during this period see it more as an instrument of crisis management than as an institution concerned with policing international law (Lowe et al. 2008). Indeed, it’s important to recall that the UN Charter defines the Security Council’s principal role as maintaining international peace and security, not enforcing international law. But Cold War politics also stymied the potential for consensus among the superpowers and, hence, the Security Council’s ability to live up to this goal. The UN thus faced some profound tensions as to its proper role in global politics, tensions which arose in part from different ideas about the lessons of the Second World War. Three concerns in particular pulled world leaders in different directions.
First, the experience of war created a strong impetus for outlawing it as an instrument of state policy. Second, the monstrosities perpetrated by Nazism, fascism, Japanese nationalism and Stalinism, combined with the immense contribution to the war effort made by colonized peoples in India, Indochina, Africa and elsewhere, strengthened the belief that peoples had a right to govern themselves. This helped discredit the idea of empire and bolster calls for decolonization. But it also presented problems of how to manage the process of decolonization and the subsequent new states from interference by the world’s great powers. In addition to the ban on military force, the key protection afforded to the new states was the principle of non-interference. Finally, the Holocaust and other horrors persuaded states to place aspirations for basic human rights at the heart of the new order. The tension this created within the UN Charter set in train the core dilemma over adopting generally Westphalian or post-Westphalian approaches to global order.
The Cold War meant that the great powers never exercised their global policing functions as the Charter’s drafters had hoped. This shaped the development of UN and other peace operations in important ways. Perhaps the first impact of the Cold War on the UN’s work can be illustrated by its failed attempts to create a standing army and its response to North Korea’s invasion of its southern neighbour in 1950. The first victim of the Cold War was the proposal for the UN to have its own standing army to enforce the decisions of the Security Council. The Charter’s drafters had originally conceived the idea that, in order to avoid the uncertainty that had characterized the League’s collective security system, the UN’s member states would provide the organization with a standing military force. This ‘UN army’ would be politically directed by the Security Council and commanded by a UN Military Staff Committee (Novosseloff 2018). These provisions were written into the UN Charter (e.g. Articles 42 and 43), and negotiations began in 1945 to establish the force. It may be surprising nowadays, but one of the leading advocates of the UN army in 1945 was the United States. The US government went so far as to indicate which forces it would set aside for the new UN force – around 40,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen, including an aircraft carrier battle group (Lorenz 1999). This American activism raised concerns in Moscow that the UN army would be a front for the Western allies, and the Soviet Union pulled out of the negotiations. The idea of building a UN army died in 1948, although there
