The US-led intervention in Korea in 1950 ostensibly suggested that, unlike the League, the UN had the capacity to play a leading role in collective security. However, the peculiar circumstances in which the intervention was authorized meant that it turned out to be the exception rather than the rule for UN operations during the Cold War. The intervention was facilitated by the Soviet Union’s absence from the Security Council, which left it unable to use its veto power. Moscow’s absence was in protest at the Council’s refusal to recognize the communists as the rightful government of China. When the Soviets realized their mistake and returned to the Council, they ensured that the United States could not continue to use the UN to legitimize its intervention in Korea (Luck 2006: 49–50). The Korean War was the only explicit example of peace enforcement action against a sovereign state during the Cold War.
At the same time, however, the UN was beginning to develop alternative ways of contributing to international peace and security. In 1947 the General Assembly reacted to a complaint from the Greek government that its Yugoslav neighbour was actively assisting communist rebels engaged in a civil war against the government by despatching an observation mission (UNSCOB) to report on cross-border movements. The following year – 1948 – became a ‘pivotal’ year for the Security Council as it engaged in two of the world’s most pressing crises, the Palestinian conflict and the struggle over Kashmir (Luck 2006: 32). The UN despatched a mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte – a Swedish aristocrat who had played a central role in freeing Jews at the end of the Second World War – to the Middle East to facilitate an agreement between the Jews and the Palestinians, but he was assassinated by what the Security Council labelled ‘a criminal group of terrorists’ (Resolution 57, 1948). Bernadotte was replaced by Ralph Bunche. After months of careful and skilful diplomacy, in early 1949 Bunche secured a ceasefire agreement that would be overseen by a UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) (Pelcovits 1993: 9–17). Bunche was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts (Urquhart 1993: 139–200).
UNTSO is often cited as the organization’s first peacekeeping operation (Goulding 1993: 452), and it has maintained a presence in the Middle East to this day. However, it has rarely been able to fulfil its mandate on account of limited cooperation from the belligerents and its own limited capabilities. UNTSO was initially established to support a Truce Commission for Palestine, established by the Security Council to oversee a ceasefire (Higgins 1969: 16). The initial figure of around 572 observers deployed to monitor the ceasefire was reduced after the conclusion of an armistice agreement in 1949, which produced a more stable ceasefire (Ghali 1994a: 94). Since then, its size has fluctuated between thirty and a few hundred personnel. It has suffered fifty fatalities. With its role limited to monitoring ceasefire agreements, UNTSO has proven unable to prevent the periodic escalation of hostilities in the region, but it has played a valuable role as a source of independent information and training ground for peacekeepers.
On 21 April 1948, the Council issued Resolution 47, which called for India and Pakistan to cease their hostilities in Kashmir and permit a plebiscite to determine the wishes of the Kashmiris. The Council also established UNMOGIP to observe the ceasefire and write periodic reports. In the space of a few months, and in the wake of the collapse of negotiations about a UN army, the Security Council started to carve out a role for peace operations in international peace and security.
These missions were created ad hoc. But they formed the basis for a coherent role for the UN through the idea of ‘preventive diplomacy’. Most of the credit for this went to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, though some argued that the UN’s first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie (1946–52), had laid the groundwork (Elabray 1987: 170). This put peace operations at the centre of the UN’s new collective security role (Urquhart 1994: 175–85). Hammarskjöld first set out the concept of preventive diplomacy in his annual report to the General Assembly on 31 August 1960. This document described it as the ‘main field of useful activity of the UN in its efforts to prevent conflicts or to solve conflicts’. By ‘preventive diplomacy’, the Secretary-General meant something more specific than simply the use of diplomacy for peacemaking between warring parties. Instead, he saw the UN’s primary role as intervening in order to prevent the escalation of local conflicts into regional or global wars involving the superpowers. This was spelt out most clearly in reference to the UN’s mission in Congo (ONUC, 1960–4). Such peace operations were justified, he argued, ‘by the wish of the international community to avoid [an] important area being split by bloc conflicts. It is a policy rendered possible by the fact that both blocs have an interest in avoiding such an extension of the area of conflict because of the threatening consequences, were the localization of the conflict to fail’ (in Zacher 1970: 67–8). A few years earlier, Hammarskjöld had instructed his envoy to Lebanon that the operation was a ‘classic case of preventive diplomacy’ designed to ‘keep the Cold War out of the Middle East’ (Urquhart 1994: 265).
The terms of reference for what was widely regarded as the UN’s first selfstyled peace operation, UNEF I – deployed to the Sinai to help defuse the Suez Crisis of 1956 – would play a key role in developing the UN’s subsequent core peacekeeping principles of consent, impartiality and minimum use of force (see chapter 7). However, the force did not set a formal precedent because it was widely perceived as responding to the extraordinary problems confronting the post-Suez Middle East. Moreover, the relevant actors in that case had very different ideas about the mission’s proper purpose. The British and French saw it primarily as a way to extricate themselves from Suez while protecting their interests. The United States, in contrast, saw it as a way of facilitating British and French withdrawal and securing the support of post-colonial leaders. The Soviet Union and most of the world’s new post-colonial states viewed it – and UN peace operations in general – as a vehicle for advancing decolonization. As a result, UNEF I’s terms of reference reflected a political compromise more than an ideal framework for peace operations. In short, the terms of reference represented the most that the Canadian diplomat Lester Pearson and Hammarskjöld calculated they could get away with without breaking the fragile consensus over UNEF I. The UN went on to conduct several more similar operations before the end of the Cold War (table 3.2). But it also undertook limited peace enforcement action in the Congo (ONUC) and a wider set of activities in Dutch West New Guinea (West Irian).
Table 3.2 lists all the UN’s peace operations between 1945 and 1987, when the Cold War era began to end (see Koops et al. 2015: chs 6–18). Only fourteen were conducted during this period, but they were all intimately connected with decolonization. UN peace operations during the Cold War can therefore be understood as a tool for managing one of the most significant structural shifts in world politics – the spread of the sovereign state. Almost half of these UN operations deployed in the Middle East, supporting the view that peace operations were an important part of the UN’s ‘preventive diplomacy’ role. In the Middle East, at least, both superpowers recognized the potential for escalation, and neither was prepared to wage war in order to defend their claims and allies in the region. This created an opening for consensus in the Security Council and helps explain the strong regional bias in the deployment of peace operations towards the Middle East. In contrast, only one UN operation (ONUC) deployed to sub-Saharan Africa, and this too came in relation to a crisis that divided the superpowers. In the Congo case, the United States was keen to prevent the rise of socialism by supporting decolonization while opposing – and assisting in the assassination of – the left-leaning Congolese nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba.
The UN’s operation in the Congo (ONUC, 1960–4) was a larger, more complex, costly and multifaceted operation than anything the organization had attempted previously. Although largely successful in terms of accomplishing its mandate by helping to hold the country together, it proved highly controversial, divided the Security Council and assisted in creating a financial crisis for UN peace operations. At its height, almost 20,000 troops were deployed alongside a significant civilian component, and the mission was mandated to fulfil a number of different roles, including enforcement tasks and consolidating
