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As the world watches the events unfold in Ukraine, the United Nations moves deeper into the abyss. Set up in 1945 in the backdrop of the culmination of the Second World War, the UN was expected to usher in an era of international co-operation, peace and security. But the intergovernmental organisation has failed to live up to its Charter and is en-course to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor, the League of Nations. Much deliberation and effort is needed to help the UN avoid the same fate as the League of Nations and maintain its relevance in the fast-changing global order.
Founded in 1919 as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that followed the end of the First World War, the League of Nations was designed to prevent armed aggression through collective security and disarmament. However, it lacked its own armed force and had to depend on member-nations to enforce its resolutions. With the United States refusing to become a member of the League and deciding to act unilaterally, the League of Nations, without military force to back up its protestations, became nothing more than a forum for discussion with states acting in their self-interest.
France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr in 1923 after Germany failed to repay its share of reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles while Japan demonstrated its power in Asia by invading the province of Manchuria in China in 1931-33 and left the League in 1933. Italy annexed the Greek island of Corfu in 1923 and Abyssinia in 1935 which only warranted namesake economic sanctions from the League. Germany followed suit in 1936 by re-militarising Rhineland to violate the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaty and to further undermine the authority of the League of Nations.
As the Second World War drew to a close, the victorious Allied powers met to formulate plans for the creation of an international organisation on the lines of the League of Nations but with stronger political and military support from the five most powerful nations at the time: the United States, U.S.S.R., France, China and Britain. As other countries struggled to recover from the financial and personnel losses suffered in the war, the U.S. was forced to shoulder the responsibility of guiding the UN through its early years of rebuilding and restructuring.
Despite all the successes since its inception, the United Nations has failed at the most crucial mandate mentioned in its Charter; preventing international conflict and ensuring world peace. The UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, known by its French acronym MONUC, embodies the failures and contradictions that the United Nations has embodied since its inception. UN troops were sent into the country in 1999, in the midst of a civil war that killed more than 3.3 million people as it drew in many of Congo’s neighbours, including Rwanda and Uganda.
The UN troops withdrew in 2002 on orders from Rwandan soldiers and the UN has seemed reluctant to disturb the status quo[i]. The organisation was ineffective in preventing the genocide during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War while a similar fate awaited the people in the Darfur region in Sudan when the Arab Janjaweed militias, supported by the Sudanese government, committed repeated acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide as the UN forces stood by powerless under lack of financial and military support.
Chapter VI of the UN Charter mandates minimum use of force, only as a last resort and only in self defence as the peacekeepers are intended to be enablers rather than enforcers and any use of force by a Chapter VI UN peacekeeping operation beyond self-defence is illegal under the UN Charter. However, Chapter VII of the Charter authorizes the use of force for enforcement purposes with respect to threats to peace, breaches of peace and acts of aggression. The essential problem lies in the fact that the problems faced by the peacekeeping operations were unforeseen when the UN Charter was drafted and is inflexible to amend. As a consequence, the Charter has been reinterpreted to sanction undertakings which were not intended.
The functioning of the UN has been marked by elitism, US hegemony and a presumed support to globalised philosophies. Saudi Arabia turned down a freshly-acquired seat on the UNSC in October 2013 after it was elected as one of the 10 non-permanent members expressing displeasure over the organisation’s handling of the crisis in Syria[ii].
There is an urgent need to reform the veto structure as the five permanent members no longer represent the most stable and powerful countries in the world. The economic and political spectrums of the global order have changed dramatically since 1945. A World Bank report lists the world’s top five economies in terms of purchasing power parity as US, China, India, Japan and Germany[iii]. Brazil and India have been two of the largest contributors to UN peacekeeping missions while Japan and Germany are second and third largest funders to the organisation.
But none of the four countries that constitute the G4 find a permanent seat in the Security Council. There is also a need to find a place for an African country in the UNSC to represent the interests of the least developed continent. The current veto structure of the UNSC allows the permanent members to halt any possible action that the organisation may take. The United States has vetoed 32 resolutions critical of Israel despite the country not ever being elected to the Council. The need of the hour is to move from forming a unanimous-decision to a majority-decision to avoid deadlock and ensure smooth governance on important global issues.
The world order since the end of the Second World War has changed from bipolar to unipolar but the 21st century has marked the emergence of a multi-polar world. As countries battle to find their place in the new world order, the United Nations must reform to adjust to the changing realities and reclaim its rightful place as world’s leading inter-governmental organisation.
By Special Arrangement with The Centre For Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) (http://www.claws.in)