The Creaking Joints of the UN

At the end of the war in Iraq, which excluded it completely, what is left of the UN General Assembly? A balance sheet after almost 60 years of activity

By Maurizio Crippa

“We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save future generations from the scourge of war, which twice in the course of this generation has brought unspeakable affliction to mankind….” Thus begins the Charter of the United Nations, initially signed by 51 countries in the summer of 1945. The adhering nations committed themselves to pursuing “peace and security” and “abstaining in their international relations from the threat or use of force.” These were the intentions of the UN. How has the Charter held out over the 58 years of its history?

Between ethical utopia and deterrence
It is necessary to start from the observation that the UN was born of two parents with very different characters: on one side was the great moral thrust of the refusal of war, veined also with utopian impulses, after the worst thirty-year period in modern history; on the other side, supporting or conditioning (according to the point of view) the ethical intent, were the division of the world effected in February 1945 in Yalta and the burgeoning Cold War. In these conditions, the UN’s role of “peacemaker” has been objectively limited and partial, especially in the face of the great problems it had to deal with practically immediately: Palestine, Korea, and later Vietnam. But it is wrong to consider its experience as nothing more than a modest fig leaf, a moralistic price political realists had to pay to quarrelsome world public opinion. The UN has often acted as an anticoagulant of conflicts within a realistically difficult clinical picture. This is not a bad result.
We have to remember, too, that the General Assembly’s decisions are never binding. The real power lies in the hands of the Security Council. Made up of fifteen members, ten of them on a rotating basis, it is in actuality controlled by the five permanent members, who are nothing other than the winners of World War II (the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China). But even the Security Council is limited by the veto power of the five permanent members, the most evident “realpolitik” concession to the logic of the Cold War.

The fall of the Soviet bloc
The crisis in the functioning of this “compensation chamber” of international disputes began in 1989. The fall of the Soviet bloc rendered obsolete a mechanism that, in the shadow of the General Assembly, was in reality the reproduction of bipolarity in terms of formal law. The first manifest signal was the Gulf War; in 1991, the disintegrated Soviet Union did not have the strength to put up a veto (whether right or wrong) to the coalition against Saddam, an old “client” of Moscow, as would have happened before 1989. For the first time (and it would be the last), the UN found itself leading a triumphant war in grand style under its banners. A step forward? A step backward? To be sure, an epochal turning point. In the meantime, another element of crisis, some middle-sized regional powers were growing and were eager to have greater weight on the international scene: unified Germany, the Japan of the economic boom, and the India of the demographic boom. The time had come to change the rules.

The long march of critics
The fact that the UN as it now stands does not work any more is a truth that in the 1990s could be said aloud. The greatest criticism came from the United States, intolerant of what it considered unjustified constraints, enormous costs, and Byzantine bureaucracy. Then there are the grave political and military failures in the face of the catastrophes that mark the decade: Somalia, the Balkans, Rwanda. Terrible wars, genocide, and the breaking up of entire countries took place without the UN being able either to prevent them or to intervene. These failures dealt the final political blow to the credibility of the United Nations. In the 1990s, the attempt was even made to bypass the UN, keeping it alive only in form, but in fact on the margins of important world decisions. If there is a line of conduct of the Clinton presidency, it is precisely that of having given space to other supranational systems with less certain jurisdiction–from the G8 to the WTO–as “law courts” on an international level.

The shipwreck of the reforms
Attempts to change course shipwrecked on two shoals. The first: it was not possible to reach an agreement between supporters of a reform “lightening” the weight of the UN (making it less “collective” but stronger for crisis intervention, also by abolishing veto powers) and those who wanted more substantial means of action. Along these lines, the plan to create an International Criminal Court, equipped with “military police” and capable of intervening and punishing countries that violated the peace or human rights, is exemplary. The second shoal was the attempt to force a reform of the Security Council, rewarding only two countries–Germany and Japan, candidates for a permanent seat–and downgrading all the rest. This maneuver, viewed favorably by the United States, was opposed above all by Italy that, by the action of its ambassador Paolo Fulci, managed to block the reform and “save” the country’s international rank. But, in hindsight, one wonders if it was not a Pyrrhic victory.