The UN's weakest link: its inability to take action
GEORGE KEREVAN
THE moment of maximum human danger always sees the best jokes. This from America: news comes that Paris is about to be hit by a giant asteroid in 12 hours. The US emergency services phone the White House to ask what should be done. The president goes into conference. It’s a tough call - should he watch the event live on CNN, or tape it to watch at his leisure?
The French newspapers are just as bad. Commenting on perfidious Albion: what do you call a beautiful woman in Blair’s England? Answer: a French tourist.
The point, dear reader, is that the global crisis that comes to a head this week is no longer about a jumped-up, ramshackle Middle Eastern dictatorship - if, indeed, it ever was. With the French foreign minister - the immaculate Dominique de Villepin - in Africa as we speak, deliberately trying to get Security Council members to vote against the British-American second resolution, the diplomatic split between the "old" West and the "new" has become seismic.
The French put it this way: we either stick with a world where conflict is mediated through the United Nations, or we accept a 21st century where international law is dictated by the all-powerful United States. Most folk in Britain probably agree with them. However, that is decidedly not the true range of options, whatever side of the Iraq question you are on.
The original UN was never intended as a talking shop. It was crafted as an organ of world collective security whereby the aptly-named Security Council would wage war against aggressor nations. That is why Sweden was originally excluded from UN membership because she was not prepared to abandon her neutrality if the Security Council took military action.
In this, the UN was consciously designed to be the opposite of the earlier League of Nations, which was constructed to resolve conflict through diplomacy. The League failed miserably and ended in the Second World War. First, the League became a diplomatic fig leaf for national self-interest. The best example is the knowing failure of the League arms inspection regime in Germany. The League had 7,000 weapons inspectors in Germany. Their job was to police the Versailles Treaty that forbade Germany from, among other things, building or possessing an offensive airforce.
The Germans got round this disarmament regime in many ways. For instance, those nice Bolsheviks - anxious for German technology - leased them secret military bases in the Soviet Union. Being in Russia, these could not be inspected by the League. A bit like the military camps of the Iranian opposition inside Iraq, which have never, ever been inspected by the UN since 1991 - because they are "extra-territorial". Again, Japanese League inspectors - also anxious for German knowhow - happily informed the Germans of impending inspections so that aircraft companies could hide their wares. Not that that happens today, of course.
The final nail in the League of Nations was the failure of members to deal with rogue states. In 1935, Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and got away with it. The British made a half-hearted attempt to rally the French into retaliatory action. But the French - what’s new? - preferred a "diplomatic" solution as they wanted Mussolini as an ally against Hitler, so they blocked demands for oil sanctions against Italy.
All this is very prescient, for the UN is going the way of the League. The implicit strength of the original UN Security Council was that the Allied nations of the Second World War - effectively the US, Britain and the USSR - would agree between themselves to police the world against further aggression. The weakness of this system was that it stalls if the main powers cannot agree to act in concert - like now.
Curiously, the Cold War split between the West and the USSR did not see the immediate redundancy of the UN. Both sides eschewed nuclear war and rigorously kept their proxy states under control in case things got out of hand. When that ended in 1989, the central weakness of the UN reappeared with a vengeance - its inability to act rather than talk. Hence the UN wrung its hands in Yugoslavia as did the League in Abyssinia.
Never mind the terrorists with anthrax, the result is going to be global anarchy. You may not like America policing the world, but no-one else is prepared to do it. Ask yourself this: if America and Britain back down, will the world be a safer place in ten years’ time? We obviously need something more permanent as a collective security structure - but not based on the illusion that diplomacy will always counterbalance national self-interest.
The French diplomatic attitude to this is interesting - and not what British pacifists think it is. The French certainly want the UN as a taking shop but more as a stage for French diplomacy. Privately, the French are pursuing a global balance-of-power strategy based on a Franco-American co-dominion (with continental Europe, Russia and China as bit players on the French side). France is thus happy to intervene around the globe, blowing up Greenpeace activists or de-stabilising the Rwandan government (then ducking when 800,000 folk are massacred as a result). Don’t expect the French to obey UN rules if it doesn’t suit them. That, and not Saddam, is what the present crisis is about.
Result: the UN won’t disappear, but expect a rash of local security arrangements built around the US. Yet such regional pacts can destabilise each other, so we do need a collective global policeman that isn’t just the White House. We need a regency of the big democratic nations, including - pivotally - a democratised China, prepared to act rather than talk. That will require common defence arrangements and common equipment.
But how to keep American interests in check? One of the curious contradictions about the debate around the UN is that those forces which support its (titular) supremacy are often the very ones who attack the legitimacy of other global bodies such as the World Trade Organisation. But engaging America in free trade is precisely the way of keeping it bound to the common interests of the democratic nations.
Out of this new international trading regime is emerging not US hegemony but a common global interest that is finally undermining the ruinous self-interest of nation states and their elites which is the basic cause of war - the self-interest the French still stand for. From it will emerge the new security system.
Which explains both the frenzy of the current French diplomatic manoeuvres and the fact that they are built on sand. There are only 77 million native French speakers. Their economy is precariously based on protection: they’ve railroaded the EU into letting them keep their state-owned and subsidised electricity company. Emerging Spain, on the other hand, is a global free market player. Spanish banks control large chunks of the economy in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. The Spanish language is the mother tongue of 400 million people, including at least 30 million Americans. Hence, Spain has sided with America in the need to discipline Saddam.
The lesson of the League of Nations and the UN is clear: collective security demands the willingness to deter aggression by force. Whereas a diet of diplomatic concessions, even combined with sanctions, but based on national self interest, merely encourages evasion, manoeuvre and ultimate aggression. And that’s no joke.
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