The making of a security community: the United Nations after the Cold War.

• Author: Fromuth, Peter J.
• Position: Keeping the Peace: Conflict Resolution in the Twenty-First Century

In passing from the Cold War to the present, the old alliances of East and West have traded the angst of doomsday for the complexity of community living. During the Cold War period, so long as the alliances' security policies were dictated by the so-called clear and present danger of annihilation, their moral foundations were self-evident. So long as their resources were equal to the threats they faced, the alliances were physically and politically self-sufficient as well. The bipolar structure of the Cold War dispensed with any necessity, and prevented any ability, to build a universal security consensus, much less consult with one. Challenges to the justice or equity of the status quo - often raised by developing countries and lesser states within the Western alliance - were swept aside by the larger challenge of survival itself.

Yet as the danger of Cold War-imposed nuclear doomsday has receded, so too has the global security system that was sustained by the fear of mortal danger. There is no longer a single threat capable of eliciting the same moral clarity or strategic simplicity, nor any ultima ratio to legitimate the same narrow political foundations and exclusive decision-making forums. The world is indeed a safer place, but keeping it that way may now be more difficult.

The difficulty starts with the political and conceptual basis for continued U.S. security, since public support of the required investment will be hard to reconcile with a demonstrably declining risk of attack. Another difficulty is that current global security concerns are geographically and culturally diffuse, unlike the nuclear and ideological challenges from the former Soviet Union. A third complicating factor is that the critical theaters for confronting nuclear security or nationalist violence will more often be within states rather than between them. A further challenge, a derivative of the first three, is that the active support of the international community is essential to meet most security needs - a radical change from the self-sufficiency of the Cold War alliances, and one that requires very different political skills.

Notions of sovereignty also have changed in fundamental ways. While the state remains the basis of international action, the legitimacy of the state now is increasingly seen as coming from the people.(2) This concept of sovereignty poses a threat to those countries who believe that sovereignty derives from the soil or institutional organ of a state. In addition, changes in the concept of sovereignty suggest that "added to the dimension of |right' is the dimension of responsibility."(3) In the post-cold War context, this means that a state's failure to fulfill its responsibility may lead to international intervention, as exemplified in the Iraq and Somalia cases discussed later in this article.

A possible response to these challenges, but an inadequate one, is the proposition that with the end of the Cold War, all countries now belong to a single international political system and thus ignore systemic dangers to the detriment of their safety. Certainly the issues at the top of current U.S. security concerns - violent secessionism in Europe and Eurasia, destabilizing regional conflict and proliferating weapons of mass destruction - support the case for extended self-defense. Yet the members of the international community will never be equally affected by such phenomena, and the United States will rarely be the soonest or most threatened by any of them.

To proceed beyond narrow calculations of national interest, and to meet the geographical, legal and political challenges of global security after the Cold War, a new international security system must answer a question its predecessor was never asked: Whose security is to be preserved? This article argues that the only sustainable rationale for the security of the many is the security of the whole, which requires the designation and the preservation of the international community as both a legal and a normative order.

In this article, the term international community is used to refer to the shared belief of a growing majority of nation-states that international law and institutions, especially the Charter and organizations of the United Nations, are necessary for the arbitration of relations between states, the protection of common principles and the promotion of common values and material well-being. Among the nations of the world, however, sharp differences will continue to arise over the substance of communitarian principles as well as the role, composition and authority of the U.N. Security Council in upholding and protecting those principles. Nevertheless, there is no major challenge to the fundamental premise that in order for global security cooperation to work in the so-called New World Order, stronger standards are needed to promote that security and more forceful institutions are necessary to compel it.

The Evolution of the U.N. Security Council

The Charter of the United Nations charges it with organizing cooperation to enforce peaceful relations among all the countries of the world. In practice, the actual workload was supposed to be balanced, according to Chapter VIH of the Charter, by sharing tasks with regional groups.(4) Yet none of the regional groups in existence today possesses sufficient authority or resources to meet all or perhaps even most of the world's peace-enforcement needs.(5) This reality provides the United Nations with an increased responsibility for defining and addressing the needs of a new security order.

It is often observed that the Security Council is finally fulfilling the role the U.N. Charter assigned it.(6) In fact, although the Security Council increasingly acts as a kind of global hotline for emergency response, the distress calls are not at all what the Charter's framers had intended. In the framers' world, threats to peace were expected to sweep across state borders, not erupt within them. As the atom is to nuclear physics, the nation-state was supposed to be the basic unit of international politics. Yet since the end of the Cold War, the pent-up hatred and frustration of nationalist, ethnic, religious and other forces have exploded, splitting the nation-state atom and sending shock waves across the international system.

The Security Council agenda currently mirrors those disturbances, as it does the general view that however domestic their origins, these disturbances also raise important international security concerns. This new operational focus alters the Council's relationship to the larger community of nation-states it serves. In the past 45 years, excepting its support for decolonization, opposition to apartheid and notorious involvement in quelling Katangan secession in the Congo, the Security Council's writ ended where sovereignty began. Indeed Chapter I, Article 2.7 embedded the Doctrine of Non-Interference in the U.N. Charter, making it one of the strongest redoubts of state sovereignty in current international law. Article 2.7 states:

Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII.

Recent conflicts have cracked this once-solid edifice in several places. In Namibia, the United Nations rejected South African jurisdiction, although it carried out transitional assistance with the consent of the parties concerned.(7) In Somalia, the question of domestic jurisdiction has not arisen, either in response to the deployment of a modest U.N. force or the U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope, in the absence of a government to assert it.(8) In Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Western Sahara the parties requested U.N. involvement,(9) although the role of outside states had internationalized each of these conflicts anyway, thus placing them within the legal scope of U.N. attention.(10) The exception in the final clause of Chapter I, Article 2.7 is the vehicle for intervention in the case of Iraq, as it was in Yugoslavia before Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian secession.(11)

In any one of these cases it may be debated whether the Security Council writ has actually lengthened, or whether special circumstances have caused state sovereignty to yield or be redefined. The so-called special circumstances view is the favored one of some current Council members, who, lacking the votes to obstruct various resolutions, somewhat plaintively asserted that none set a precedent.(12) It is possible that, while the world community claims to be tightly committed to non-interference, in practice it carves up the concept like a Swiss cheese of exceptions. It is more likely, however, that basic changes are taking place.

The essence of these changes is that global political, economic and technological developments attach increasingly concrete and compelling meanings to the notion of international community. As this occurs, it becomes more acceptable to promote claims on that community's behalf - even at the expense of individual states. Reinforcing this trend is the fact that while sovereignty remains the consensus point of departure for organizing international security in the post-cold War period, community-based action is the vehicle of choice for getting there.

Recent Actions of the U.N. Security Council

The Security Council has responded as necessary to the momentous changes in the international political system over the last few years. Several far-reaching steps taken by the Security Council have recently been adding momentum and credibility to the communitarian element in global security.

Iraq: Weapons Monitoring, Inspection and Destruction

A dramatic example was the groundbreaking Resolution 687, passed in 1991, which confirmed...