Envisioning the United Nations in the Twenty-first Century

CONTENTS

Introduction: Envisioning the United Nations in the Twenty-first Century
Takashi Inoguchi

Part I. The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century: Two Perspectives

1. The Peace and Security Agenda of the United Nations: From a Crossroads into the Next Century
Olara A. Otunnu

2. Ten Balances for Weighing UN Reform Proposals
Bruce Russett

Part II. Rethinking International Security

3. Human Security and the United Nations
James S. Sutterlin

4. The Future of Humanitarian Assistance
Antonio Donini

5. UN Peacekeeping Operations: Legitimacy and Effectiveness
Hisako Shimura

Part III. Redefining Sustainable Development

6. Effective Financing of Multilateral Development Cooperation: Proposals for a New Policy Framework
Inge Kaul

7. Post-conflict Peace-building: Development and Humanitarian Assistance
Joan T. Seymour

8. Human Rights in Development
Philip Alston

Part IV. States and Sovereignty in the Twenty-first Century

9. The Future of Sovereignty: Rethinking a Key Concept of International Relations
Volker Rittberger

10. The Articulation of Global Interests in a Changing UN System
W. Andy Knight

Part V. Global Citizenship

11. NGOs and the United Nations in the Twenty-first Century
Leon Gordenker

Part VI. Regionalism in the Twenty-first Century

12. The United Nations and Regionalism in an Era of Globalization
Benjamin Rivlin

13. Regionalism and International Security
Muthiah Alagappa

14. UN Cooperation with Regional Organizations in Peacemaking and Peacekeeping
John Renninger

Notes

FOREWORD

Rarely has the international community been so intensively focused as now on the need to revamp and adapt our international institutions and organizations to the requirements and needs of a new age. Discussions of this kind are by no means unprecedented. For what is commonly described today as "UN reform" has always been on the agenda of the organization in one way or another. But the radically novel situation created by the demise of the Cold War, the continuing and deepening rift between North and South, together with short-term pressures and concerns, have given to this debate a new sense of urgency and acuity. Such essential questions as the place of the United Nations in international affairs, the functions it should be assigned in the international arena, as well as the services the international community can expect from it, are being scrutinized through the ongoing deliberations now taking place in no fewer than five different groups established by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

There are significant areas of agreement among the actors involved. But some questions remain politically controversial. Others are highly con- tentious. In brief, the search for a durable consensus is likely to be a lengthy and delicate one. The stakes of this grand debate, however, are high, as its implications are global in scope and significance. For this reason alone, it would need to be nurtured and sustained by a vigorous process of intellectual policy reflection and policy analysis.

A key raison d'être of the United Nations University is to act as a bridge between actors and observers, between scholars and practitioners, between the worlds of knowledge and policy-making. It is against this back- drop that the University organized last fall in Tokyo a symposium which brought together scholars, UN officials and policy makers from all over the world. The purpose of the meeting was to flesh out and launch a major research effort focused on the "United Nations System in the Twenty-first Century" (UN21). UN21 is an extension and integral part of a long-term programme of study and reflection spelled out in the report of an advisory team which I convened last year to define a focused framework for UNU research and advanced training in the broad field of peace and global governance. The specific objective of the project is to examine how international organizations, especially the United Nations, are coping with challenges in five key issue areas - peace and security, economic development, the environment, human dignity and political governance - and to explore alternative models that would best meet the needs of the international community in the next century. Global citizenship, market forces, regional arrangements, states and sovereignty and international organization will provide the substantive foci of this work. UN21 will of course draw from previous work carried out by the University, most notably the Multilateralism and the United Nations System project (MUNS), which was recently concluded.

As a research, training and dissemination exercise, UN21 is expected to span the next five years. It will be carried out under the umbrella of a high-level international advisory board which will provide advice about evolving research priorities. Specific substantive research objectives will be defined at annual agenda-setting workshops which will meet in the spring of each year. Annual symposia held in the fall will provide outlets for the work accomplished in each research issue area. The highest priority will be given to the dissemination of the work as it progresses. Occasional papers and specific reports will be issued at regular intervals highlighting research outcomes. The papers presented at the annual symposia will be published in yearly reports. The entire process should lead to the publication of bound volumes by the end of the project. The aim is to produce a steady stream of academically sound, timely, politically relevant and action-oriented studies shedding new light on some of the key questions now raised about the United Nations, the foundations of its authority and the scope of its legitimate role in a rapidly evolving environment. It is our hope that these studies will promote the deliberative process now unfolding among scholars and practitioners both within and outside the United Nations.

I would like to acknowledge here the support received for this initiative from the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS), the International Cooperation Research Association (ICRA) and the Japan Foundation. I would also like to note here our appreciation for the official support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun for the November 1995 symposium.

Heitor Gurgulino de Souza
Rector, The United Nations University

INTRODUCTION: ENVISIONING THE UNITED NATIONS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Despite the worldwide celebrations for its fiftieth anniversary, the United Nations had little to celebrate in reality. As the post-Cold War euphoria faded, the future of the United Nations became clouded by widespread scepticism and disillusionment about its roles and capabilities. Moreover, the world organization is crippled by heavy debts and entrenched bureaucracies. Nonetheless, pessimism about the United Nations should not limit its possibilities for the future. The United Nations is a product of its Member States. It is malleable to their wishes and political will. The governments and peoples of the world determine the future of the United Nations. If they wish to reconstruct the world body as an effective institution, they must do so. But if they refuse to allow it a meaningful role, it will be reduced to a historical relic. Thus, we are confronted by fundamental questions at this juncture. Do we need, and want, the United Nations? Can the United Nations address the challenges of a world which is so different from that of 1945? Can it answer evolving peace and security demands and sub- and trans-state challenges, which are increasingly apparent? Can an organization which was established on the basis of relations between stable states adapt to issues and problems which do not conform to this paradigm?

Conceptual Confusion

Neglecting this most basic observation, political leaders, journalists and scholars all present questionable views on the United Nations and attempt to apply dubious notions of success and failure. In particular, they criticize it as if it were a separate entity unrelated to themselves and their country. However, the United Nations is not a third party separated from member governments: it belongs to, and reflects, its members.² Thus, the lack of a coherent image of the United Nations not only hinders our collective understanding of the organization, but undermines our efforts to resolve the problems that confront it.

While mindful of its various images and the subsequent conceptual disarray, let us assume that we need the United Nations. Then, what kind of United Nations do we want in the next century? To answer this, we need to address a more fundamental question: In what kind of world should we like to live in the future? A world in which states cooperate through the United Nations to maintain security and to advance welfare? Or a world in which states continue to play power politics and wage wars, and civil war and state collapse continue unchecked? A world in which the United Nations will be taking the lead in preserving the global economic system and coordinating effective development programmes? Or a world in which strong states pursue their national interests at the expense of weak ones and the environment? These questions underline the need for a serious debate about the future of international cooperation, multilateralism and internationalism. The most fundamental issue is how to encourage the states of the world to renew their commitment to work together. Who should, and can, play a central role in international cooperation? The United Nations? States? Regions? Or transnational communities of civil society actors such as scholars and professionals?

Central to these questions is the role of international institutions. The raison d'être of the United Nations is the belief that international institutions promote peace and human welfare. However, as UN operations in many trouble spots became entrenched in practical and political difficulties, confidence in international organizations has been rapidly evaporating. As pessimism over its effectiveness has grown, the cardinal tenet supporting the existence of the United Nations has been called into question: Do institutions really affect the prospect for war and peace in significant ways? Can the United Nations make a difference in world affairs? Answers to these questions will fundamentally affect the future of the United Nations.

The United Nations as Actor

The United Nations as Global Manager

The United Nations as Global Counsel

In reality, the United Nations has acted as both global counsel and global manager for the past 50 years. For example, the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq has played the role of global manager in destroying Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. Likewise, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), the most complex and ambitious peacekeeping operation in the history of the United Nations, supervised national elections, repatriated hundreds of thousands of refugees and even rebuilt the country's infrastructure. A similar example can be found in Namibia. In a number of humanitarian operations, including controversial and unsuccessful ones such as Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, the United Nations and UNHCR have been acting as global manager in delivering emergency assistance. To varying degrees, the United Nations has been the global manager in such operations as economic sanctions and peacekeeping. Although quite rare, the enforcement of collective security - the war against Iraq being the most graphic example - highlights the organization's role as global manager most vividly. Security Council resolutions have often enabled the United Nations to play the role of global manager by creating mandates. In a broader sense, the Trusteeship Council was a global manager in its decolonization processes.³

In the economic, social and environmental areas, the United Nations has also played the role of global manager. Two specialized agencies of the United Nations, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) have managed the world food systems by legislating rules and enforcing procedures.⁴ The Law of the Sea created the authority for the exploration and exploitation of the deep seabed. Future possibilities, such as taxing currency trading or carbon dioxide emissions, would constitute additional examples of the United Nations as global manager.

The United Nations has served as global counsel in numerous issue areas. Typical examples include most resolutions adopted by the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council, programmes of action adopted at UN conferences, opinions issued by the International Court of Justice and reports of the Human Rights Commission. Although none of them has binding force, Member States have often heeded them voluntarily.

In the area of peace and security, the mediation efforts of the UN Secretary-General and his special representatives often constitute the role of global counsel. In the socio-economic field, the United Nations Development Programme has acted as global counsel through its Human Development Report, although it has been quite controversial. Similarly, but in a much more influential manner, the World Bank and the IMF have pressed their structural adjustment programmes on developing countries. In promoting democracy, the role of the United Nations as an election monitor is a good example of its role as global counsel. Finally, in the environmental area, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio produced a number of multilateral treaties and actions such as the Rio Declaration and Agenda 21. In this process, the United Nations served as global counsel to its Member States in a very effective way. Across these various issue areas, however, its advisory role is not necessarily honoured. Member governments often ignore the decisions and counsels of the world body.

Thus, the United Nations is sometimes global counsel and sometimes global manager. In some cases, it plays both roles. However, the organization's respective roles in the past half-century provide useful clues to the answer to what it can realistically do.

The United Nations as Arena

Until recently, the United Nations was viewed as an arena solely for the political manoeuvring of its Member States. However, as an increasing number of non-state actors participate in UN politics, a more sophisticated approach to the analysis of the United Nations as an arena has been called for. Viewed from an actor-specific angle, there are four levels of participation in UN politics: (1) states; (2) non-governmental organizations (NGOs); (3) regional organizations; and (4) international organizations. In addition to the growing importance of these four types of actors, there have been increasing interaction and interdependence among them. The relationship between states and NGOs, for example, is symbiotic on some occasions but conflicting in others. A separate investigation of each of the actors and their mutual interaction is essential to grasping the dynamics of political processes in the arena of the United Nations. Finally, but no less significantly, market forces have emerged as critical factors in world politics and the UN system.

Compounding the complexity of UN politics, the United Nations and its affiliated agencies play roles of both actor and arena. While the General Assembly and the Security Council seem to be the epitome of an arena or forum, their actions often have significant ramifications throughout the global system.⁶ Consequently, there is ambiguity inherent in the distinction between actor and arena. Therefore, research on the UN system must attempt to establish the link between these concepts. In this regard, the four levels of participation and the global manager vs. global counsel framework allow us to examine the relationship between the United Nations as actor and as arena. How do the four actors behave in the arena of the United Nations in a bid to influence its constitutive process as global actor or, in Cox and Jacobson's words,⁷ "service organization"? How do the four actors, including the United Nations itself, try to shape the organization as an arena? How do these different roles interact?

The United Nations as Tool

Every single Member State sees the United Nations as a policy instrument. For small countries, it is a place for collective bargaining with larger states. Moreover, the General Assembly guarantees that all member countries, however small or poor, be given a chance to present their grievance before the world. For NGOs, UN conferences provide an entry point to the organization's agenda setting. Regional organizations, too, often look to the United Nations for a variety of assistance. Therefore, almost every actor participating in the UN forum recognizes the world body as a useful policy tool and utilizes it to advance their interests.

The accelerating process of globalization only increases the importance of the United Nations as a policy instrument. Owing to the growing interdependence of societies states often cannot deal with transnational issues by themselves. The United Nations, as a truly universal organization, facilitates a collective and concerted response to such issues.

The usefulness of the United Nations as a policy instrument vacillates over time. For example, the United States embraced decolonization and fully utilized the United Nations as a means to achieve it. Indeed, the General Assembly and the Trusteeship Council were effective tools for the United States. However, as newly independent states joined the United Nations in the 1960s, Washington grew disenchanted with the world organization because these states - with the encouragement of the Communist bloc - used the United Nations as an arena to disseminate anti-American propaganda. The United Nations thus became a liability for the United States: it no longer produced desirable results. As the Cold War wound down, the organization re-emerged as a useful instrument for Washington. In particular, it was a very important vehicle for the United States to mobilize world opinion against Iraq and build a coalition for its military action. Yet most recently, the organization's utility to American diplomacy has been affected by its allies' increasing financial contributions. As Japan and Germany expanded their share in the UN budget, the United States found itself more constrained by their policy preferences. As Tokyo and Bonn pursue a more independent policy in the United Nations, Washington becomes less able to utilize it for its foreign-policy goals.

Thus, any research on the future role of the United Nations requires a critical evaluation of its utility as a policy tool. By comparing how different actors attempt to use the organization as an instrument, it would become clear what kind of UN role is feasible in the twenty-first century. Analysis of the United Nations as an instrument is indispensable to enhancing policy relevance in the study of international organizations.

The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century: Research Methods

The following themes highlight the evolving context which will inevitably condition the United Nations' outlook.

States and the Evolving Nature of Sovereignty

In both developing and developed regions, ethnic minorities continue to challenge the legitimacy of national governments. The conventional concept of the state does not seem to provide a solution for ethnic and irredentist conflicts. The relationship between nation and state needs critical enquiry. How can international organizations address the problems facing state sovereignty? Another key question concerns the state's capability to govern. The most pressing issue concerns weak and failed states. In the developing world, an increasing number of governments are incapable of maintaining law and order, which has, in the worst cases, resulted in civil wars. In the developed world, governments find it more difficult to control private violence and to prevent terrorism. When states cannot manage internal violence, is there a role for the United Nations?

Global Citizenship

As the activities of NGOs have become more visible and important their international networks have also been growing. Yet the NGO community is far from monolithic. As a group, NGOs are immensely diverse, and their networks vary from issue to issue. One of the most pressing tasks of this research stream is to investigate the nature of their networks and grasp their role and capacity as a prerequisite for understanding the relationship between NGOs and the United Nations and its Member States. At a time when the Secretariat and UN agencies are facing acute shortages in resources, NGOs' contributions to the UN system are particularly valuable. There is an immediate need to explore the most effective arrangements between NGOs and UN agencies and ask a number of questions. What role can non-state actors play in securing world peace, enhancing human welfare and dignity? Which issue areas can NGOs address more effectively when governments are unwilling or unable to act? When and over what interests do governments and NGOs clash? How will this conflict of interests affect the United Nations? Answers to these questions should help us to assess the possibilities and limitations of non-state actors.

The international media have increasingly influenced leaders and occasionally made a critical difference in governments' decision-making. Humanitarian intervention in Somalia and northern Iraq are cases in point. Yet media coverage frequently distorts the image of the United Nations and represents its activities inaccurately. The media's tendency to highlight trouble spots inevitably leads to negative reports of UN "failure", rather than of quiet successes. Hence, the role of the media - the "CNN effect" - on international and domestic politics needs to be thoroughly studied.

Similarly, as a transnational community, scholars, scientists and other experts exchange views and information across borders and influence national and world leaders. Although the role of the academic community has long been debated among international relations scholars, it still remains unclear as to what extent and how it has an impact. Nevertheless, the power of ideas and knowledge is central to the role of the United Nations as global counsel. Yet the gap between theory and policy is always hard to bridge. It is true that many scholars take refuge in "ivory towers", but cooperation between academics and practitioners has made remarkable progress in the field of empirical studies, particularly information collection and data processing. How can academic work increase its policy relevance without sacrificing academic independence?

Market Forces

Multinational corporations have long been a primary driving force behind the accelerating trend of economic globalization. For large international companies, geography and state boundaries are no longer significant obstacles to their activities. With the advent of a truly global market place, particularly in international finance, big businesses are becoming ever more globalized and powerful. This creates implications for the economic sovereignty of governments, especially in small states. Moreover, multinational firms are advancing global interests which have also created tensions with local, national and regional business concerns. This is also true for political actors, including local and national governments. In this context, multilateral companies have emerged as important actors in the international political process in various fields, particularly trade, investment and the environment. What role can, or should, international businesses play in promoting global development? How can we reconcile competing interests between multinational businesses and indigenous economies? How can the international community utilize global capital markets to finance economic growth in the developing world?

Regional Arrangements

International Organizations

This volume forms a part of the United Nations University's programme on the United Nations in the Twenty-first Century. The programme aims to promote and facilitate constructive debate on the future of the United Nations in the areas of peace and security, development, the environment, human dignity and governance. The central premise behind this research is that it is essential to explore the constraints and opportunities of the United Nations in the context of evolving global politics and human aspirations. It is only through such an approach that the world can hold realistic expectations of what the United Nations can and cannot do in the next century.

Part I: The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century: Two Perspectives

THE PEACE AND SECURITY AGENDA OF THE UNITED NATIONS: FROM A CROSSROADS INTO THE NEXT CENTURY

The peace and security agenda of the United Nations has developed gradually and in phases.¹ In a period spanning some 40 years, from the first mission that was established in 1948 to supervise the truce in Palestine (UNTSO), to the launching of the first major multidimensional peace- keeping operation in Namibia (UNTAG) in April 1989, the United Nations organized 15 peacekeeping operations. Most of these operations were concerned with conflicts between states. The mandates of the missions consisted principally of monitoring or supervising truces, ceasefires, troop withdrawals and buffer zones. Significantly, these were consent-based operations, marked by adherence on the part of the peacekeepers to the principles of cooperation, impartiality, and non-use of force except in self-defence.

This generation of operations defined what many commentators now call "traditional peacekeeping". The development of this mechanism in itself represented a major innovation by the United Nations. Indeed, the very idea of peacekeeping is not mentioned at all in the UN Charter, although the practice was developed in the spirit of Chapter VI of the Charter. The United Nations also developed techniques in fact finding, good offices, and mediation as part of its repertoire of peacemaking activities during the Cold War.

This situation underwent a significant change in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The end of the Cold War, the success of an ambitious operation in Namibia and a certain sense of triumph emanating from the Gulf War all injected a new lease of confidence in the United Nations. In an atmosphere of liberal internationalism enlarged expectations surrounded the organization. Responding to this new mood, it embarked on a more ambitious programme of peace activities, with its operations growing in number and complexity. In a space of only six years (1989-1995), the United Nations established 20 new peacekeeping operations.

Unlike in the previous era, most of these missions (17) operated in the context of conflicts within states. The tasks of peacekeepers now expanded to include implementation of complex peace agreements; overseeing transition to democratic governance through supervision and observation of elections; demobilization and integration of previously opposing armed factions; rehabilitation of collapsed state structures; provision of broader support to humanitarian missions, including the protection of "safe areas" and escorting relief convoys; and removal of anti-personnel mines. This development represented the second phase of peacekeeping, the high points of which were marked by the successful completion of the operations conducted in Namibia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cambodia and Mozambique.

In spite of these remarkable achievements, the evolution of the peace and security agenda of the United Nations is now caught at a difficult crossroads. The rapid expansion of complex operations has generated serious political and financial stresses on the organization. These stresses, combined with the tragic failures in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina, have produced a mood of retrenchment for the present and serious uncertainties about future directions.

As we look to the future, what are the principal lessons of almost 50 years of multilateral peacemaking and peacekeeping? This is a time for stocktaking by the United Nations; it must also be a time for sketching, however tentatively, the outlines for a peace and security role for the next century. I am concerned that the United Nations should not swing from one extreme to another, from being committed to too much to undertaking too little. In charting this path, there are major challenges that will need to be addressed. The purpose of this commentary is to highlight some of these challenges.

Restoring a Sense of Perspective

The first area of imbalance concerns the growing tension between peacekeeping operations and development activities. A serious disequilibrium is beginning to emerge between resource allocations for peacekeeping and relief operations, on the one hand, and resources available for long-term peace-building on the other. The resources devoted by the United Nations, other international organizations and by donor governments to peacekeeping and emergency humanitarian activities are beginning to outstrip the resources for long-term peace-building and development. In fact, a number of governments and other donor institutions have started to divert resources from their development budgets to peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief. In one example of this, the European Union drew on funds from its development budget to finance the Belgian peacekeeping contingent in Somalia. As the UN budget for peacekeeping has increased from $230 million in 1987 to $3.6 billion in 1994, the aggregate development assistance expenditure of OECD countries (albeit a larger absolute amount) has witnessed a stagnation. In 1993, OECD members' Official Development Assistance (ODA) declined by 6 per cent (in real terms) from the previous year; in contrast, the proportion of OECD spending on emergency assistance has risen sharply in recent years.² In general, there has been a notable decline in funding for development activities within the UN system in contrast to funding for emergency relief operations. In recent years, for example, there has been a 15 per cent reduction in the core resources of the UNDP as compared to an almost doubling of resources for the World Food Programme (WFP), the bulk of which is devoted to relief food assistance.³

This trend needs to be questioned. Investing in social and economic development is one of the surest ways to build a solid foundation for long-term peace within and between societies. This, in turn, means that development strategies must seek to address the roots of conflict: gross imbalance in the allocation of development resources is bound to provide a fertile ground for conflict. There is, therefore, a need to consciously build a conflict response component into the design of development projects, especially in countries where the potential for conflict or its escalation is high.

The second area of imbalance concerns preventive action. It is imperative that the United Nations and other international actors invest a great deal more in preventive measures. Successful preventive action can be highly cost-effective, saving lives and sparing general destruction. In addition, it is considerably cheaper than an operation to restore a broken peace.

Preventive action involves a broad spectrum of activities, going well beyond the traditional notion of preventive diplomacy and the new mechanism of preventive deployment. Preventive action must encompass a broad range of political, economic, social and humanitarian measures aimed at averting or de-escalating the development of conflict. This is a project for long-term peace-building. It is for this reason that preventive action should be viewed as the link between An Agenda for Peace and An Agenda for Development.

Conflict prevention should not be viewed as the abolition of all conflicts in society. After all, conflict - by which I mean competition for power, resources and prestige - is entirely natural to society. Indeed, it constitutes the essence of the political process. The challenge of preventive action is different. It manages this competition without plunging a society into a spiral of violence. It seeks to build equitable patterns of development, democratic institutions, and political cultures that can mediate such competition peacefully and routinely.

Preventive action must encompass the consolidation of peace in the aftermath of violence or following a political settlement. Unless systematic political, social and economic measures are taken to consolidate peace and rebuild confidence, conflict can recur, thereby leading to a "cycle of violence". The examples of Burundi and Rwanda illustrate this tendency. Both countries have been caught in the throes of cyclical pogroms, in large measure because after each tragedy little or no effort was made to address the underlying causes of the conflict, or to embark on a serious project of national reconciliation. On the other hand, Cambodia, El Salvador, South Africa and Mozambique have emerged from years of protracted conflict. After achieving negotiated political settlements, they each now face a tenuous period of transition. It is in this post-conflict phase that internal and external measures must be taken to consolidate their new-found peace and avert a possible recurrence of violent conflicts in the future. In this respect, the evolution of Franco-German relations since World War II provides an example of a successful strategy of peace consolidation. Over the last 50 years, a deliberate process of political confidence building and economic cooperation has transformed these erstwhile historic enemies into partners in the construction of European unity, so much so that today it seems inconceivable that the two countries could ever again go to war against each other.

It is in this context that we should note that the evolution of conflict often follows a circular rather than a linear path. Thus, a political settlement should not be viewed as an end in itself, but rather as the beginning of a new political process. To build enduring peace, this process must lead to a credible project of reconciliation and consolidation. In its absence, there is a real danger that a political settlement will fracture, thus leading to the outbreak of another cycle of violence. External actors can play an important facilitating role in the process of peace consolidation by encouraging reconciliation and providing material incentives, but the impetus for a new beginning must ultimately germinate in the local soil.

While we must probe the boundaries of preventive possibilities to the utmost, we should not lose sight of some serious constraints inherent in this enterprise. How, for example, shall we overcome the shield of state sovereignty, a country's sense of national pride, and the tendency to misread a developing situation until it is too late, or the lack of interest or will on the part of international actors at critical moments? Indeed, efforts to intervene at the earlier stages of a conflict are likely to prove particularly frustrating for outside actors: it is during this phase in particular that they are likely to come up against the wall of sovereignty. This is especially so when dealing with a strong state, a state which is itself the instrument of repression or is a major party to the conflict in question. In such cases, the challenge is how to induce the opening of the door sufficiently to allow for preventive initiatives.

Finally, it is critical that a body of both serious knowledge and serious practice be built in the area of preventive action, through systematic preventive engagement in specific situations of actual or potential conflict. This will require innovation and long-term commitment. The objective must be to develop, in the area of preventive action, something akin to what has been built over the last 50 years in the peacekeeping sector. Unless this is done, I fear that preventive action will remain an easy but largely empty slogan.

The third area of imbalance concerns the preoccupation with humanitarian action in a conflict situation vis-á-vis the need for a political process. It is important that humanitarian action be located within an overall vision of a society in conflict. This means, in particular, that humanitarian action should move in parallel with a political process aimed at addressing the underlying causes of a conflict and achieving a political settlement. Otherwise the tremendous efforts being deployed on the humanitarian front will inevitably count for very little. The experiences of Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique represent examples where a combined strategy of humanitarian and political action was successfully employed. In sharp contrast to this stands the current situation in and around Rwanda, where a major humanitarian operation is in place but no comparable concerted efforts are under way to find a political settlement to the conflict itself.

Building Institutional Capacities: Towards a Division of Labour

In the light of recent experience, it would seem most effective for the United Nations to concentrate its efforts on preventive action, traditional peacekeeping, humanitarian missions, mediation, and peace-building activities through its various agencies.

In time, regional organizations must come to assume greater responsibility for peace and security. Alas, that time is not yet here. Most regional organizations are still far from being able to play the role envisaged for them in Chapter VIII of the UN Charter, mainly because of a lack of relevant experience, financial resources, political prestige and credibility, impartiality and operational capacity. This places a particular responsibility on the United Nations, the major powers, traditional peacekeeping countries, and other bilateral and multilateral donors to work together to help build the capacities of regional organizations. Until then, however, we must guard against exaggerated expectations. For the time being, the areas of distinct advantage for regional organizations would seem to be preventive action, peacemaking, and confidence building at the regional and subregional levels, while allowing for a more gradual development of peacekeeping capabilities.

In discussing a division of labour, there is a tendency to concentrate on the roles of the more established institutions, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the League of Arab States (LAS), the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the European Union (EU), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). This is a mistake. We must not overlook the increasingly significant and innovative roles being played by less traditional regional arrangements. In particular, three types of formations deserve more attention: subregional organizations such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) or the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC); international political-cultural associations based on shared historical affinities, such as the Commonwealth; and ad hoc arrangements put in place for the purpose of undertaking particular regional projects, such as ECOMOG in relation to Liberia, the former Front-line States in the context of the liberation of southern Africa, the former Contadora Group in relation to the Central American peace process, or the committee constituted by the countries of eastern Africa for promoting a peace process in Sudan.

The comparative advantages of these associations and arrangements lie in part in their ability to cultivate a local rapport. In addition, they are often able to move more lightly and respond more quickly to unfolding events than the United Nations or larger regional organizations. These features can translate into distinct advantages, especially for preventive initiatives, mediation, and confidence building among their members.

However, the emphasis on the role of regional organizations must not lead to a tribalization of peacekeeping activities, whereby, for example, conflicts in Europe are viewed as the responsibility of the Europeans or African con- flicts as the domain of the Africans. This notion goes against the United Nations' commitment to universality and its worldwide responsibility for maintaining peace and security. Moreover, the problem is compounded by the uneven spread and varying capacities of regional organizations in different parts of the globe. Clearly Member States from a particular region should be encouraged to spearhead an international response to a conflict situation within their region, but this must not detract from the importance of wider international participation in these efforts. This is necessary for broader reasons of legitimacy and solidarity, as well as for practical reasons of capacity.

For the foreseeable future, enforcement action will have to be subcontracted out to "coalitions of the willing and able". Inevitably this option is only viable when the national interests of key countries are sufficiently engaged by a particular case. In such a situation, the Security Council should not, however, simply give blanket authorization but also be closely associated with the execution and the conclusion of the operation. When it is envisaged that the United Nations should take over a situation following the completion of enforcement action, as was the case in Somalia and Haiti, early and adequate preparation should be made for assuming that responsibility. In this context, particular attention needs to be given to responsibility. In addition, attention needs to be given to formulating and organizing clear transition arrangements.

We are also witnessing the emergence of independent actors in the field of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Drawn from the ranks of international civil society, these actors are increasingly making direct contributions to peace processes. On account of their informal and flexible character, such non-governmental organizations can often complement official efforts, particularly in the areas of early warning, preventive activities, peacemaking, humanitarian action and peace-building. Different independent organizations tend to specialize in various aspects of these activities.

Peacekeeping and the Challenge of the "Grey Zone"

At the other end of the spectrum, a more radical mode of response available to the organization is collective enforcement action: collective military coercion authorized by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter for the purpose of restoring compliance with international norms following a major breach of the peace or an act of aggression. In its 50-year history, the United Nations has so far sanctioned the prosecution of two full-fledged enforcement operations, namely in Korea in 1950 and against Iraq in 1990-1991.

Before embarking on enforcement action, at least three prerequisites need to be in place: adequate political will, including the will to bear the human cost of the military operation; the will and capacity to assume the necessary financial cost; and the availability of troops adequately prepared and equipped for the task. This is a tall order, especially as most peace and security crises are not inter-state in nature. It is for this reason that, for the foreseeable future, it is more practical for the United Nations to continue to farm out such operations to coalitions of the willing and able. In practice, it is difficult to mobilize the requisite political will to commit national forces for enforcement action against a party in gross breach of international norms, unless such a development also impinges in a crucial way on the national interests of the major powers.

Recent experience, especially in Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, has demonstrated that on the ground there is a growing "grey zone" between peacekeeping and enforcement. The grey zone is in effect the thin end of the enforcement wedge; it is the space between traditional peacekeeping and all-out war fighting. Situations encountered in the grey zone often require responses that are neither traditional peacekeeping nor full-blown enforcement action, but something in between.

Confusion between peacekeeping and enforcement action, including the tendency to slide from peacekeeping to enforcement action and then back again, has proved to be very dangerous. This is essentially what we witnessed in the operations in Somalia, Liberia and the former Yugoslavia, with disastrous consequences in all three cases. This confusion has arisen precisely because no effective mechanisms have yet been devised for responding to the challenge of the grey zone, especially in the domestic context.

A number of hazards and problems have arisen on the ground within this grey zone. Armed factions engaged in conflict have unilaterally obstructed the distribution of humanitarian aid; "safe areas" under the protection of the United Nations have been attacked or overrun by armed forces; peacekeeping contingents have come under attack from factions with superior firepower; peacekeepers have been taken hostage; peacekeepers have been expected to engage in duties not anticipated at the outset; and no-fly zones have been violated. These tend to arise in the context of an ongoing armed conflict within a state in which several factions are contending for control and when there is no general agreement governing the role of peacekeepers or when initial cooperation has collapsed.

These developments have placed peacekeepers in an untenable position. At the practical level, because they are lightly armed, peacekeepers usually lack the capacity for escalated armed response. The effectiveness of peacekeeping is dependent not on the ability to impose their will by force, but rather on the moral authority conveyed by their multilateral presence. From a political perspective, peacekeepers are supposed to remain impartial vis-á-vis the warring parties. For peacekeepers to engage in a military confrontation is to compromise that impartiality and thereby forfeit their political usefulness in the conflict situation.

The predicament of peacekeepers in the grey zone is further compounded by the sentiment of public opinion, which does not always appreciate why the United Nations seems powerless to respond to force by force, even in the face of aggressive actions or atrocities. The fact that peacekeepers are there to play an essentially diplomatic rather than a military role is little understood by the public.

All of this underscores the need for a less ad-hoc and a more systematic response to contingencies arising in the grey zone. But this will require that at least two projects be explored more fully. In the immediate term, the United Nations should develop clear guidelines regarding the conditions for a more forceful response, whenever necessary. This should include a determination of decision-making responsibilities between the contingent commander on the scene, the overall mission commander and UN headquarters in New York.

More fundamentally, there may be the need to develop a third mechanism, separate from both traditional peacekeeping arrangements and massive enforcement action. In particular, the United Nations should examine more seriously the various ideas that have been put forward for creating some form of rapid response capability. A rapid response force could be dispatched immediately to a conflict in order to avert or minimize the deterioration of the situation to crisis proportions. Intervention of this kind would go beyond traditional peacekeeping, but still fall short (by its scope and duration) of a full-scale enforcement action. And being the thin end of the enforcement wedge, actions in the grey zone should necessarily be mandated by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the Charter.

In exploring the prospects for a rapid response capability, several questions will need to be examined more fully. To begin with, how should the proposed force be organized? Ideas range from an autonomous volunteer force recruited directly by the United Nations; a force assembled on a standby basis from national contingents earmarked for that purpose; to an ad-hoc coalition force organized outside the United Nations, but acting with the authorization of the Security Council. How many situations could be covered simultaneously by a rapid reaction force? Given that the deployment of such a force would be authorized by the Security Council, how would this affect the perception of impartiality of the United Nations in relation to its other functions, particularly its mediation and traditional peacekeeping roles? Most importantly, are governments prepared to accept either the creation of an autonomous force at the disposal of the United Nations or, alternatively, the exposure of their own national contingents to the risks in the grey zone?

These are important but not insurmountable problems, provided sufficient political will can be generated. Without an adequate response to the challenge of the grey zone, the peacekeeping role of the United Nations risks becoming seriously discredited. This could well be part of the lasting legacy of the combined failures in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Seeking Additional Revenue Sources

The time has now come to think more boldly and creatively about ways to generate additional revenue for multilateral peace and security activities. There are several possibilities that deserve to be explored more fully in this context. First, there are activities that benefit in a general way from a peaceful international environment. These include international travel, telecommunications, international financial transactions and the activities of transnational corporations. Over the years, various schemes for direct surcharges or fees on these activities have been proposed. Some of these proposals seem quite practical, while others may appear somewhat far-fetched. A direct surcharge on international air travel, which is regulated by the IATA, or on international telecommunications, which is regulated by the ITU, could generate considerable revenue which would be relatively easy to collect. The levels of surcharge do not have to be exorbitant. In fact a contribution of $1 per international air ticket (which is less than what a traveller might pay today for a cup of coffee at most international airports) could yield $315 million annually.⁴ A direct surcharge on international financial transactions has also been suggested as another possibility in this category - a surcharge rate of 0.5 per cent on foreign exchange transactions could generate $1.5 trillion a year at the same time as dampening speculation in the foreign exchange markets.⁵

Second, there are corporate actors who benefit in a particular way from access to certain facilities which depends on the restoration of peace in a zone of conflict. Such was the situation with the Suez Canal during the crisis of 1956. In the aftermath of the crisis, at the suggestion of the then UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjšld, the cost of clearing the canal was partly met through a surcharge on the normal tolls levied on ships using the waterway. The Panama Toll is an analogous arrangement that has existed in a peacetime context. Following the opening of the Panama Canal in 1912, a toll was levied on all international vessels navigating the canal, a practice which continues today. More recently, the use of the sea lanes and seaports in the Gulf were greatly affected during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 and in the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991. Why not consider the feasibility of obtaining a contribution for the United Nations from the commercial users of these facilities?

A third category could be special contributions that may be sought from some of the peacekeeping recipient countries, the direct beneficiaries of the operations. This category may also include states which, for reasons of special historical, political or economic association, have a particular interest in the restoration of peace in a conflict area. There have already been some ad-hoc examples of this kind of contribution. The cost of the United Nations Yemen Observer Mission (UNYOM) of 1963-1964 was borne by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Similarly, Indonesia and the Netherlands shared the cost of mounting the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority in West New Guinea (West Irian) (UNTEA) of 1962-1963. Today Cyprus contributes one-third of the operational cost for the UN peacekeeping force in that country (UNFICYP), while Kuwait is responsible for two-thirds of the cost of the UN military observer mission on its border with Iraq (UNIKOM). These ad-hoc arrangements need to be developed into a more systematic framework for seeking special contributions from some of the beneficiary countries, especially those with strong revenue bases.

In order to explore more fully the various options on extra-governmental funding, Member States should first be prepared to modify a kind of ideological prejudice that has conditioned discussions of this matter: the view that the financing of UN peace operations should be an exclusive affair of governments. This position cannot be sustained in the long run. However, it must be recognized that Member States have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed in any discussion of extra-governmental sources of revenue. Of particular significance in this regard are the concerns about loss of control over decision-making and derogation from collective intergovernmental responsibility for peace and security activities.

The recent experience of the OAU may be of some relevance here. Traditionally all the activities of the OAU have been supported through a system of assessed contributions from member states. In the 1992-1993 discussion leading to the establishment of the new OAU Mechanism for Conflict Prevention, Management and Resolution, a controversial issue arose as to whether the OAU should solicit and accept financial contributions from funding sources outside Africa for the operation of the Mechanism. Was there not a danger that outside contributions would compromise the independence of the OAU and expose its agenda to external manipulation? After a difficult debate, the decision was made in favour of accepting such contributions. This decision was accompanied, however, by a carefully defined policy to ensure transparency and control over contributions to the OAU. So far this innovation has worked well, affecting neither the primacy of member states in these matters nor their control over the new Mechanism.

The OAU experience would seem to demonstrate that it is at least possible, through clearly designed policies and procedures, to meet the legitimate concerns of Member States. It must be emphasized, moreover, that the idea of extra-governmental funding is not meant to supplant, but rather to supplement, governmental sources of revenue. It is appropriate that governments should bear the primary financial responsibility for the peace and security activities of the United Nations; this corresponds with their political responsibility in this area.

Reforming the Security Council

The first theme of reform is the need to clarify the scope of the Security Council's mandate. Under the UN Charter the Security Council is entrusted with the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the dominant concern was understandably over threats of cross-border aggression. This concern translated directly into the central mandate of the Security Council. In the past, therefore, the notion of a "threat to international peace and security" was generally understood to encompass an act of inter-state aggression or a breach of the peace.

By contrast, the preoccupation of the international community today is with the rampant breakdown of peace and security within state borders. A survey by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in 1993, for example, recorded 34 major armed conflicts in the world in that year - all of them situations of internal strife. In response to this, a more expansive interpretation of the concept of a threat to international peace and security has emerged, with a number of measures being adopted by the Security Council.

Recent examples of situations which have been determined by the Council to constitute threats to international peace and security include: the internal repression of the civilian population in northern Iraq, including cross-border flow of refugees (Resolution 688 of April 1991); the failure of the Libyan government to extradite the suspects in the bombing of the Pan American jetliner that exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 (Resolution 748 of March 1992); the human suffering caused by conflict within Somalia (Resolution 794 of December 1992); and most recently the reluctance of the military junta in Haiti to restore power to the democratically elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (Resolution 940 of July 1994). It remains open to debate whether all of these situations fall truly within the meaning of a threat to international peace and security as envisaged in the Charter.

If the Security Council is to remain relevant, it must adapt to this new reality by developing a more progressive interpretation of what constitutes a threat to international peace and security. It must embrace a pragmatic response. But the legitimacy of the Security Council would suffer if its practice was seen to depart too radically from the explicit stipulations of the Charter. For the immediate term, this dilemma underscores the importance for the Security Council to seek to build broad-based international support for its decisions. If the present trend continues, however, it may well raise the issue of amending the UN Charter to take account of the preponderance of intra-state conflicts and their ramifications.

Another issue relating to the scope of the Security Council mandate concerns non-military aspects of security. A broader understanding of threats to security is emerging. At its first summit meeting on 31 January 1992, the Security Council declared, "The absence of war and military conflicts amongst States does not in itself ensure international peace and security. The non-military sources of instability in the economic, social, humanitarian and ecological fields have become threats to peace and security. The United Nations membership as a whole, working through the appropriate bodies, needs to give the highest priority to the solution of these matters." The question arises as to whether all these issues of security should be within the agenda of the Security Council. This has implications for the division of labour between the Security Council and the other organs of the United Nations, particularly the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

The second theme of reform concerns the restructuring of the membership of the Security Council. Two developments in particular have given impetus to this movement: the dramatic growth in UN membership from 51 in 1945 to 185 in 1995; and the emergence of a complexion of power which is today quite different to that of 1945. In this context, there is broad agreement that the re-emergence of Japan and Germany as major powers deserves special recognition. But there is less common ground as to what constitutes appropriate recognition. Should they assume permanent seats in the Council? If so, with or without the right of veto?

It would be difficult, however, to accord a special status to Japan and Germany without at the same time addressing the issue of overall balance in the composition of the Council. This may entail the creation of a new category of membership - they may be called "tenured" or "standing" members. Such members would occupy their seats for an extended period of time, but less than permanently (say 5-7 years), with provision for re-election or rotation. The crucial point is that the selection of tenured members should combine the need for both regional and global representation.

Regional representation would, in the first place, be a response to the concern about the "Northern" dominance of the present Council, a situation that would be further compounded by any dispensation for Japan and Germany. Equally important, this would provide a constructive opportunity for promoting good "regional citizenship", since election to a tenured regional seat would necessarily depend on the goodwill and support of members of a particular region. Although this in itself would not stop the emergence of regional hegemony, it could provide a powerful incentive against overbearing behaviour.

Selection to global tenured seats, on the other hand, would be through direct election by the General Assembly from an open slate of candidates. This exercise would be designed to promote "good citizenship" at a broader level, by recognizing significant contributions to the work of the United Nations and, in particular, to its peace and security activities.

Whatever formula for recomposition may be adopted in the end, it is important that the composition of the Security Council not be set in stone. It will be necessary to review any new arrangement on a periodic basis, perhaps every 10 to 15 years, in order to ensure that the Council membership reflects the evolving power relations in the world.

The third theme of reform is about the right and use of veto power. There is a general reluctance to extend veto entitlement to new members. In addition, there is disquiet about the unbounded use of existing veto powers. A formal move to curtail this power would lead to a direct confrontation with the five permanent members, all of whom are likely to oppose any formal modification of their present prerogative.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, it would be more practical to encourage self-restraint, while exercising peer pressure. In recent years a trend has set in for an occasional rather than a trigger-happy use of the veto that was prevalent during the Cold War era. Since the beginning of 1991, the veto has been used only three times: twice by the Russian Federation (in May 1993 to prevent converting the funding arrangement for the Cyprus operation from voluntary contributions to mandatory assessments, and in December 1994 to stop the Security Council from imposing stringent restrictions on imports and exports to and from the Bosnian and Krajina Serbs), and once by the United States (in May 1995 to block the adoption of a resolution criticizing Israel for the confiscation of 53 hectares of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem).

In the period between 1948 and 1991, an average of six vetoes were cast each year, as compared to a total of three over the last four years. This is a positive trend that needs to be encouraged and strengthened through peer pressure by the general membership of the United Nations. One such device could be a declaration by the General Assembly expressing concern about the use of the veto and providing a guideline to narrow the range of issues on which the veto may apply. The veto should be a defence mechanism to be used in extremis, only when a truly vital interest of a permanent member is at stake.

The fourth theme of reform relates to the need for more transparency and broader participation in the work of the Council. The challenge is how to achieve this objective without compromising the equally important goal of ensuring prompt and effective action. There are two areas where the work of the Council could be improved in this respect.

The first area of concern relates to the fact that the Security Council remains the only major decision-making body of the United Nations which does not have a channel of communication for receiving information, ideas and proposals from independent non-official sources. In other activities of the organization, notably in the humanitarian, economic, environmental, social and cultural spheres, the input of NGOs is now well developed and accepted. There is no reason why the peace and security sector should remain an exception. The presidency of the Council could be the initial focal point of communication. The president could receive information from, and hold informal audience with, representatives of civil society and independent public figures. To avoid opening a floodgate, the interaction would have to be selective, restricted initially to organizations and public figures with known "track records" and credibility, and who have specific contributions to make to issues under consideration by the Council. This arrangement could be extended gradually, by invitation, to include informal audiences with the Council as a whole, whenever this is judged to be useful.

The other area of concern in this regard is the need to broaden the base of participation by the wider UN membership in the decision-making process of the Council. After all, the authority of the Security Council derives from the special responsibility conferred upon it by the membership of the United Nations as a whole; the 15 members of the Council act on behalf of the entire 185 members of the organization. Several measures could help reduce the present sense of exclusion felt by the general membership.

First, more opportunities should be accorded to the wider UN membership to provide substantive inputs before final decisions are made by the Security Council on important questions. In addition to the frequent informal consultations, which are private and held behind closed doors, the Council should make it a practice to schedule some special open sessions as a means for wider consultations. Second, the Security Council needs to develop a more systematic method for consulting Member States which are likely to be especially affected by measures under consideration. Recently a process of consultation with troop-contributing countries has been instituted, but this practice needs to be broadened and deepened. Third, there is a need to develop a better briefing system that would provide all members of the Council, especially some of the non-permanent members with limited independent means, the essential elements they need for making informed decisions. This could be organized by the Secretariat. It is also necessary to improve the briefing system between the Council and the rest of the UN membership. The idea is to ensure that relevant information is readily available to all concerned.

The fifth theme concerns the credibility of the Security Council in relation to its own decisions. There is a growing dissonance between the flow of resolutions from the Council and developments on the ground. The work of the Council is driven by the speed of events, public pressure to "do something" and contradictory pulls from different political quarters. This sometimes results in a lack of coherence and inadequate attention to the provision of resources and means necessary for the implementation of the Council's resolutions.

The experience over the former Yugoslavia has particularly highlighted this problem. Since 1992 the Security Council adopted some 80 resolutions concerning the situation in the former Yugoslavia. Some of these resolutions appeared to contradict each other, while others did not relate well to the developments on the ground, and few were accompanied by the necessary means and resources for implementation. This placed the UN Secretariat, and the peacekeeping and peacemaking missions in the field, in a very difficult situation.

As a political organ, it is inevitable that the Security Council should respond politically to the competing pressures on its decision-making process. On the other hand, if the present trend continues, it could seriously erode the credibility of the Council. The authority of the Security Council ultimately depends on its capacity to adopt measures that are credible, carry weight and have prospects of implementation.

Generating a Collective Will: Building Domestic Support for International Action

Today, there is a growing list of transnational threats which are general in scope and unpredictable in their evolution. This list includes the spread of nuclear weapons and materials as well as other weapons of mass destruction; terrorism, both domestic and cross-border; the production and consumption of narcotic drugs; life-threatening epidemics; galloping population growth relative to diminishing resources; mass migration of peoples; armed conflicts; and natural as well as human-caused humanitarian catastrophes. These problems stand out because they defy the traditional logic of state boundaries and state-centric solutions. To tackle them effectively requires concerted international action. Global interdependence is here to stay - it is an inescapable fact of modern international life. This basic reality needs to be articulated more clearly and consistently.

Beyond interdependence, there are specific interests that tend to shape national responses to international crises. Among the interests at play are the following:

• Direct interests of major powers. When the vital interests of the major powers are at stake, as was the case in the Gulf crisis, international action is easier to mobilize because of the highly motivated leadership on the part of the countries directly affected.

• Regional interests. The need to avoid regional instability as well as the desire to demonstrate good regional citizenship can often provide a strong incentive for countries to contribute to peace initiatives and operations within their region. Australia, Japan and the ASEAN countries, for example, played a leading role in the Cambodian peace process. France and the United Kingdom have contributed the largest peacekeeping contingents for the former Yugoslavia, while the United States and several Latin American countries have spearheaded the operation in Haiti. In a similar way, the countries of West Africa were propelled by the force of events in neighbouring Liberia to mount the ECOMOG operation; this was in effect a subregional self-help project.

• Indirect impact. Civil wars may rage for the most part within the borders of particular countries in remote corners of the globe, but it is impossible to throw a cordon sanitaire around them. Local conflicts have a tendency, sooner or later, to spill across national borders, spreading violence and refugees in their paths and destabilizing entire regional neighbourhoods. Thus, the war in Rwanda has caused instability in, and imposed a major humanitarian burden upon, the neighbouring countries of Burundi, Tanzania and Zaire. The conflict in Liberia has shaken a large zone of West Africa, and directly contributed to civil strife in Sierra Leone and a military coup d'Žtat in Gambia. Similarly, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia could spread to engulf most of the Balkan region, and war in Chechnya could affect stability in the Russian Federation as well as some of the neighbouring former Soviet republics. It is sometimes the case that the fate of a particular country in conflict is unable initially to arouse much external concern. But the stakes soon change when the same conflict expands to affect neighbouring countries whose stability has greater impact on international relations.

• Burden sharing. Collective international action provides a framework for sharing the political, financial and human costs of an operation. The burden of the enforcement action against Iraq, the peacekeeping operations that restored peace to Cambodia and Mozambique, and the operation in the former Yugoslavia would have been difficult to bear without broad-based international cooperation. It is also important to emphasize that the earlier collective action is engaged, the cheaper is the cost in all respects.

• Humanitarian concerns. There are some situations where the primary impetus for international action remains humanitarian concern. Such was the case in Somalia in 1992-1993 and in Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide in 1994. The pressure of public opinion, especially in democratic societies, often makes it difficult for governments to abstain from some measure of response to major humanitarian tragedies. That being said, public opinion is by nature unpredictable and sways both ways, providing at different times either a spur or a brake on international action. Leaders' perceptions of public opinion also play a role in defining policy.

• Umbrella of legitimacy. A multilateral response can also serve the purpose of providing internal as well as external legitimacy for difficult and politically risky undertakings. US President George Bush invoked UN resolutions in his efforts to mobilize congressional and public support for the Gulf War. Both Japan and Germany have also invoked the legitimacy conferred by the United Nations to allay public disquiet about their involvement in any military-related engagements abroad. Yet there is need for vigilance here. The broader legitimacy of the United Nations would suffer if the organization was viewed too much as a vehicle for providing multilateral blessing for "pre-cooked" national projects.

• Moral imperatives. In which situations relating to international norms or human welfare is the international community prepared to undertake enforcement action as a matter of collective obligation? It is one thing to express moral outrage, but quite another to translate such sentiment into concrete action. It remains very difficult to mobilize sufficient collective will to take action primarily on the basis of a moral imperative, without a compelling coincidence of direct national interests being at stake as well, as was the case in the Gulf crisis. However, in the case of Somalia international action was mobilized on humanitarian grounds. Ironically, it is in no small part the disastrous experience of Somalia which has led, at least for the time being, to a retreat from such engagements. This is what we have witnessed in the cases of Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

• Role of information. Another important factor in shaping national response is the role of information and the part played in it by the media. Wars and scenes of mass suffering tend to attract extensive media coverage. But averting, mediating or ending a conflict is not nearly as news creating. Public awareness and reaction are largely dependent on what is received through the media. This underscores the importance and responsibility of the media in providing a more balanced coverage of conflict situations. It also highlights the responsibility of the United Nations to convey a clearer picture of peacekeeping, its possibilities and constraints, its successes and failures, as well as its objectives and costs.

Providing Leadership

An adequate multilateral response to the growing peace and security agenda will require political imagination and leadership at the national as well as international level. At the domestic level, leadership needs to articulate the nexus between national interest, broadly conceived, and international responsibility, by explaining how national well-being can ultimately be affected by seemingly faraway dangers. This is the reality of interdependence. Furthermore, there exists a largely untapped reservoir of humanitarian concern in many societies. The question is whether national leaders are prepared to galvanize this resource and channel it in support of international action.

The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union have thrust the United States into a position of unparalleled pre-eminence. The United States is presently perhaps the only nation in a position to project its power in a sustained fashion on a global scale. This raises a challenge. To what political ends is the United States prepared to project this considerable influence? What kind of leadership is the United States prepared to offer the world today? The United States acting alone cannot lead the world. But the role of the United States, acting in concert with others, providing leadership through engagement and the force of ideas, is crucial to the viability of any major multilateral enterprise today.

But a general mood of political reticence seems to have descended on the United States. There appears to be little political support in the country for the financial costs or human risks of international engagement, except when vital American interests are involved. Fundamentally, this is a debate about the international vocation of the United States now that the Cold War is over. This debate is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, however, we must not overlook other levels of contribution that the United States could provide right away in support of multilateral peace and security activities. These might include: contributing to the development of a system for preventive action; helping to build the capacities of regional organizations for conflict management; sharing the burden of the costs of peacekeeping and peacemaking; providing logistical and other support systems to countries in need of assistance in deploying their contingents in peace operations; and playing a leading role in humanitarian relief operations.

Selecting Priorities for UN Engagement

While selective engagement is perhaps a necessary response to the present realities, it also poses a serious moral predicament as a long-term policy. Under selective engagement, conflicts will inevitably fall into one of two categories: on the one side, those "adopted" by the United Nations or other international organizations and, on the other, the ones that are allowed to fall between the cracks of the international system. These latter conflicts would be left to run their course and would effectively constitute the forgotten tragedies of the world. This moral predicament provides a poignant reminder of the necessity to encourage, as a matter of priority, preventive action, and to build the capacities of regional organizations to assume more responsibility for peace and security in the world.

A Regime of International Norms: The Evolution of Sovereignty

The issue of interference is not so sensitive as long as an operation is being conducted with the consent and ongoing cooperation of the competent national authorities. But in the absence of consent, two principles come into competition. On the one hand, the stability of the present international system depends in large measure upon accepting and respecting the sovereign rights of states. On the other hand, there is a major evolution in thinking at the level of international public opinion that can no longer accept that massive suffering should go unchallenged behind the walls of national sovereignty.

The search here is for an acceptable threshold. When is the level of human suffering within a given country of such magnitude as to warrant an energetic international response? This problem cannot be resolved through a juridical design. The appropriate threshold is more likely to emerge slowly over a period of time, through judgement on a case-by-case basis. This judgement needs to be informed by some general considerations.

First, national sovereignty has always been a relative rather than an absolute principle. The growth of global interdependence, human rights standards and humanitarianism in general have further accentuated the relative quality of this principle. In effect, the very notion of what constitutes the domestic affairs of a state is shrinking. Furthermore, sovereignty is under pressure simultaneously from forces of both integration and fragmentation. The movement towards globalization and regional integration is chipping away at sovereignty from above, while devolutionist pressures, internal fragmentation and collapse undermine it from below.

Second, the concept of national security has traditionally been confined to the narrow sphere of the security of the state. In non-democratic polities, there has developed a perverse situation whereby the security of the state has often been organized at the expense of the security of the very people whose protection and welfare constitute the raison d'être of the state in the first place. Because of this contradiction, there is need for a broader concept of security, one that encompasses the well-being of the citizens of a country as well as the legitimate security needs of a democratic state.

Third, there is the need for a sense of measure. It is not just any incident of human rights violation or an act of petty repression that must give rise to a dramatic international response. Forceful international intervention is a drastic move; it should be applied as a measure of last resort, only when all other means of inducing change have failed to yield results.

Fourth, there continues to be a North-South cleavage on this issue. This cleavage arises in part because the Security Council, as the principal decision-making organ on these questions, is dominated by the major Western powers, while the "recipient countries" are predominantly located in the South. One way to counter this imbalance is to ensure that greater efforts are made to arrive at decisions which command broad support within as well as outside the Security Council.

Finally, there is a growing paradox surrounding the question of intervention today. In the past, this issue was marked by apprehensions of unilateral intervention by the major powers of the West and the East. Although this tendency has not disappeared, the greater danger today may come from the opposite direction - the prospect of too much disengagement, if not outright indifference. This is due in part to the proliferation of apparently intractable armed conflicts, particularly those raging within states. Another reason is the fact that, with the end of the Cold War, the major powers have redefined their interests and shifted their focus to domestic preoccupations.

Building a Community of Values

At the global level, the United Nations has been instrumental in the development and dissemination of a core of normative standards, covering such areas as human rights, environmental ethics, the peaceful settlement of disputes, women's rights and minority rights. These universal principles can best be taken seriously when applied at lower levels of the international system. A regional organization or a subregional arrangement can provide a more concrete and local framework for the application of universally accepted principles of governance. The core principles might comprise the following: the general observance of universal human rights standards; the promotion of democracy; the peaceful settlement of internal and inter-state conflicts; and the protection of minorities and other seriously disadvantaged groups. A formal and common commitment to these principles would then become the basis for assessing good citizenship within a particular region or subregion as well as the criteria for participation in the regional association. The idea here is to create a form of regional "code of conduct" by which the actions and policies of member governments can be judged. Unless translated into regional commitments of this kind that can give rise to regional discipline and peer pressure, universal norms can seem remote and abstract.

Today the experience of Europe reflects the most advanced efforts at building a community of values at the regional level. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 led to a long political process that culminated in the Charter of Paris of November 1991. This sets out a common pan-European commitment to certain basic principles of democratic governance and a regime of rights. In Western Europe, with its well-rooted democratic tradition, this may not be breaking any new ground. But more important is the fact that the states which have just emerged from the former communist bloc should accept to be judged by these same standards, even as they struggle to put them into practice.

In Latin America, an important step has been taken in the Santiago Declaration of June 1991. This includes a common regional commitment to change governments only through democratic elections, which was successfully invoked to challenge the military junta in Haiti that had toppled the democratically elected government in September 1991.

On the other hand, the regions of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, by and large, have not yet joined in this process of building a community of values at the regional and subregional levels. In order to respond effectively to the rising incidence of conflict which besets those regions, especially at the intra-state level, it will be necessary to address this issue more directly.

Everything I have said argues for exploring the full potential of the United Nations. Yet in doing so, we must not lose sight of the organization's political and material limitations. It is for this reason that the United Nations should always strive to identify its comparative advantages in any given sphere of activity, in relation to other actors on the international scene. This is particularly pertinent today as the United Nations contemplates the future evolution of its peace and security agenda.

The United Nations is not a world government; it is an association of sovereign states. As such, the effectiveness of the organization depends largely on the role that the constituent governments are willing to entrust to it. In this regard, the United Nations cannot operate solely on the basis of ideals and principles, divorced from the realities of the world of power politics. On the other hand, the United Nations should not become merely an instrument of realpolitik. The United Nations should be the place where power relations are recognized, but mediated by ideals and principles. It is within this context that the United Nations must formulate a credible peace and security agenda for the next century.

TEN BALANCES FOR WEIGHING UN REFORM PROPOSALS

Several major proposals for restructuring and reinvigorating the United Nations have recently appeared. All derive from a certain liberal internationalist perspective, and are addressed to achieving a broad vision of human security, defined as attentive to the security of individuals as well as states, and attentive to a broad range of human rights: political, social, and economic. Any set of proposals, to have a chance of acceptability, must strike a balance between various competing goals and perspectives. This article offers 10 such balances, and illustrates the application of some of them by considering one report, that of the Independent Working Group on the Future of the United Nations, sponsored by the Ford Foundation.

This is a time, around its fiftieth anniversary, for renewed interest in re- forming, restructuring and reinvigorating the United Nations. By reasonable standards parts of the United Nations have worked well much of the time, and others have not. The challenges facing the organization have changed, with new emphasis on civil conflict (within rather than between states),¹ population growth, massive voluntary and involuntary migrations, environmental degradation, economic justice, expanded concepts of human rights and belief in the necessity and possibility of representative government. The resources the United Nations commands, and the will of its Member States to employ the organization, are inadequate to meet those challenges.

Consequently, several comprehensive proposals to restructure the United Nations have been put forth, as well as many partial ones.² Even at its creation, the United Nations was, for all the "realism" attached to its new institutions of collective security, also in substantial degree a "liberal internationalist" project in the sense derived from the vision of Immanuel Kant's essay, Zum ewigen Frieden (Perpetual Peace). That vision, for which we mark the two hundredth anniversary, saw peace built on a solid tripod of free political institutions, networks of economic interdependence and international law and institutions.³ The vision was reflected, for example, in the Bretton Woods financial institutions, the United Nations Development Programme, the Commission on Human Rights and the Centre for Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice.

The vision was also, in current terms, one of "human security";⁴ that is, security not just of states but of individuals, attentive to a broad range of human rights: political, social and economic. By this vision, the elements of international law and organization are quintessentially represented by the United Nations. The United Nations in turn can do more than just directly support a regime for peace and security; it can indirectly undergird peace by promoting and helping to manage economic interdependence, and by supporting and protecting the political rights of representative government. With sympathy towards, if not full acceptance of, this vision, it is appropriate to judge reform proposals with these Kantian, or liberal internationalist, criteria in mind: criteria which inform the contemporary discourse on the United Nations even more than they did for the organization's founding.

To evaluate such proposals one must furthermore decide how well they should, and do, strike various balances. Some degree of balance is needed not merely because everyone will bring different values and perspectives to the task, but because of the complexity of the social phenomena at issue. Rarely can any balance be successfully tipped all the way in one direction. In the spirit of stimulating discussion, I propose 10 balances for consideration. Sometimes I will illustrate the effort to strike a balance with reference to the report I know best, namely that of the Independent Working Group on the United Nations.⁵ But in doing so I do not intend to offer a full explication, let alone a defence, of the particular balances achieved in that report. The purpose is rather to offer a set of criteria for evaluation, leaving it to every reader to make her or his own judgement on where a balance should be struck, and where it was struck in any individual proposal. These balances are interrelated, often closely. None operates alone from others.

1. The Balance between the Interests and Perspectives of States and Those of Broad-Based Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Other Non-state Actors

2. The Balance between the Preservation and the Erosion of State Sovereignty

Yet, at the same time, states' practical sovereignty has in many areas been eroded in the modern world.⁶ Some of these erosions have happened consciously and voluntarily - most strikingly in the case of the European Union - and in other instances by a variety of treaty commitments binding states to common legal norms and procedures. Some others are intended but involuntary, such as when extreme repression or humanitarian distress become the basis for international intervention in what would normally be the domestic affairs of a state, for example in Iraq and Haiti. Still others have been both involuntary and unintended, as when states lose to international banks and currency speculators much of their ability to control their national budgets and foreign exchange rates, or their ability to manage the effect of transnational flows of pollution or the erosion of resources in the global commons. Humanitarian disasters and massive refugee flows from civil conflict may defy the practical ability of a state to insulate itself and its policies from events in its neighbours. Indeed, the collapse of civil authority in a country - for example in Somalia - may mean that there is no government capable of exercising the practical rights of sovereignty to which the country may still nominally be entitled.

In these and other instances the role of an international organization may well come down to that of helping to strengthen or even rebuild civil authority, and hence enabling the government to exercise its sovereign rights - to manage its economy, to limit the effects of pollution, to restore a system of public order and justice - which it could not otherwise exert. International organizations must, therefore, strike some balance between replacing and building the sovereignty of their member states. This is true even when the proponents of a particular reform consciously wish to diminish state sovereignty in certain areas. No other course will be acceptable.

The delicate nature of this balance is illustrated by the problem of "collapsed states" or, as it is called more tactfully in the Report of the Independent Working Group (p. 53), "weakened societies under stress". In such cases the United Nations or other legally sanctioned external actors must try to rebuild the administrative, political, judicial and economic structure of the state so it can again exercise its legal sovereign rights - but in a form that respects human rights broadly, and that involves some supervision based on both an international consensus and some agreement between the international organization and those local authorities that do function. It implies some mixture of at least temporary voluntary and involuntary surrender of formal sovereignty, for the sake of regaining essential elements of real sovereignty later.⁷

The mechanism proposed by the Independent Working Group for coordinating the rebuilding of a "state under stress" is a new social council, working in collaboration with a new economic council. Both would be new principal organs of the United Nations, replacing ECOSOC; the membership of each would be chosen with regard to accepted international principles of representation. But the social council would be empowered to act only "with the consent of the local government if it retains authority" (p. 38) or, if not, as authorized by the Security Council and some political groups within the country concerned. Obviously this is a very difficult balance: the United Nations must not be seen as a neocolonial usurper of state sovereignty, but as ultimately restoring it. And if weak states are to permit it to assume certain "conservancy" functions, it must have at its disposal the very substantial human and material resources needed to restore effective and humane government.

3. The Balance between Practicality and Vision

A relevant illustration here is the Independent Working Group's treatment of financing the United Nations. The Report makes all the right practical noises about the need for greater efficiency in the organization's use of existing resources, the need for states to pay their legally mandated assessments in full and on time and the need for a revision of the assessment formula to mitigate existing perceived inequities. Yet it admits that the requirements of enforcement, peace-building, development, human rights, preservation of the commons and so forth are likely vastly to exceed what Member States will be willing to pay as assessments.

Thus the report also creatively calls for (p. 48) "additional sources of funding that are not dependent on the political and budgetary constraints under which most governments operate", to take the form of "some sort of levy on the utilization of the global commons". It recognizes that it will be very hard to decide what form that tax might take.⁸ Any global tax will face enormous resistance, from those on whom it is levied, on political grounds, and from problems of administrative difficulty. In the current environment of domestic politics in many countries, instituting any form of tax seems unthinkable. And it is not just a matter of cost. A reasonable case can be made for tight fiscal control over any organization. The need always for the United Nations to persuade member governments to pay their dues provides a powerful restraint on the United Nations; imposition of some type of global tax would dissolve states' existing fiscal restraint. In proposing such a tax there-fore, the working group puts an important and even necessary idea on the agenda for discussion, but certainly also pushes the envelope of practicality.

4. The Balance between Particularity and Universality

Nonetheless, the need to respect cultural and political diversity, to balance individual rights with conceptions of group rights within states as well as between them, lies at the core of intra-state and inter-state peace. Devising principles, procedures and institutions to do so requires a never-ending and ever-contestable balancing act. Minority rights need protection from the potential tyranny of the majority - even sometimes from a democratically chosen majority. For any proposed increment in the powers and purposes of international institutions, this balance is crucially related to the sovereignty balance.

5. The Balance between Civil and Political Rights on One End, and Economic Rights on the Other

There is no evidence that, on average, a democracy with civil liberties is costly in terms of economic development. If anything it may be the other way around, that a democracy with civil liberties promotes economic development.... But establishing democratic institutions is not the "deus ex machina" that resolves all the problems of development. A sound and stable political-economic development is essential.⁹

Representative government can facilitate balanced and equitable econom- ic development in the following ways: An equitable distribution of income, and political stability, are important contributors to successful growth.¹⁰ By providing stable, legitimate governance and a restrained rule of law, representative government strengthens the property rights necessary to encourage long-term investment.¹¹ By providing a base of widespread access to the political system, it discourages the engorgement of inefficient state monopolies and prevents secret environmental abuses of the kind that have emerged from the communist era in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It offers some check on corruption by officials operating behind opaque barriers of state security and without any inquiry by free public media. (Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko exemplifies the kleptocracy of a leadership whose interest in economic development extends only to enriching itself.) Mass famines occur only in political systems where information can be suppressed and protest repressed.¹²

In particular instances there will always be an element of contradiction between some kinds of rights and others. But they are not inevitably in any kind of severe dialectic. The elements of complementarity on the whole outweigh those of contradiction. Those times when they do come into conflict and are not sufficiently mutually reinforcing may be precisely the times for international organizations to use their influence to preserve a balance, for example standing up for the principles of representative government as well as the necessity for achieving decent material living conditions.

6. The Balance between Enforcement and Neutrality

"Peace enforcement", as it emerged in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's Agenda for Peace, represents a precarious effort to balance enforcement and impartiality, using force as "a provisional measure" when deemed necessary to avert large-scale humanitarian disaster.¹³ The need arises in the context of increasingly common civil wars and the breakdown of order, and requires an immensely difficult balancing act. Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia all illustrate, in different ways, the hazards. Perhaps most of the time the United Nations will lack the consensus, the will and even the capability to engage in peace enforcement. Writing - and if necessary adjusting - the mandate for every such activity offers a formidable challenge. But sometimes the international community, acting through its designated institutions, will decide it to be necessary. The Independent Working Group, for example, calls for establishing a small UN rapid reaction force, available for urgent deployment by the Security Council so as to prevent certain situations from deteriorating into chaos and disaster. The force would be capable not only of a peacekeeping mission, but also to "provide security for UN personnel; hold an airport; establish one or more safe areas for the civilian population; limit evacuation and assist in ending the violence. ..." These are in large degree peace-enforcement tasks, not those of traditional peacekeeping.

7. The Balance between Power (or Effectiveness) and Legitimacy (or Justice)

On the other hand, power cannot long be exercised in raw form, divorced from concepts of equity and legitimacy. Despite the Security Council's necessity to represent power, and to maintain the procedures and small size required for timely and judicious action, its legitimacy will be questioned if it is seen as no more than a concert of great powers - especially of rich industrial ones. In the long run, its composition must change and it probably must be expanded. It must reflect the financial power of the states essential to the organization's fiscal health and to its peacekeeping operations in particular. In this respect Japan and Germany are now key contributors to the United Nations' budget. But if these states become permanent members, it is hard to see how, without also adding some major representatives of the less-developed countries, it can retain legitimacy in the eyes of the great majority of UN Member States. In sum, however, the more numerous and diverse the permanent members wielding veto power, the more difficult it will become to act promptly and effectively when the world community wants action.¹⁴ An ineffective Security Council will not retain legitimacy either. Hence the need, however great the resistance of powerful states to relinquishing any of their privileges, to think about some restriction of the scope of the veto, perhaps limiting it to the realm of military action that might threaten a great power's vital interest, the original idea of most of the organization's American and British founders.¹⁵

8. The Balance between Specificity and Plasticity of the Charter