And a fine evening too

Blogging has been pretty much non-existent for the last week, partly because of work pressures (yeah, I know, what sort of blogger lets a lousy day job interfere with the really important stuff), but also because I was getting ready for a debate at Trinity College’s College Historical Society. The students who run the society were my hosts, and very good hosts too. The motion was “That this house believes that the UN is another League of Nations.” Mark Little of RTE chaired the debate. The other guests were Denis Halliday, who used to be in charge of the oil-for-food program in Iraq until he resigned in protest in 1998, Erik Povel of NATO, Deaglan de Breadun of the Irish Times, and Gernot Biehler, a law professor at Trinity. There were also nine student speakers, and a very energetic bunch they were too. Mark Little, an RTE correspondent who used to be their US correspondent chaired the session. It was nice to see a European intellectual criticise Fox News who had actually seen it.

Denis Halliday denounced US war crimes, because he is, well, a very charming, eloquent, and amiable version of Robert Fisk (who I confess is pretty charming himself). We got along nicely, thank you very much. Deaglan de Breadun thought that Guantanamo Bay was just awful, but he did wonder why so many people were utterly indifferent to people who got much worse treatment on the rest of the island. (In Irish intellectual circles, that is very, very right wing talk.)

Trinity College is a cool place, thoroughly steeped in tradition. I stayed overnight in a guest house in the middle of the campus, which was very nice, and the drunk students on a Wednesday night did not bother my sleep one bit.

If you are bored, I put the text of my comments below, but keep in mind that it is not exactly what I said, because, well, when I give a talk, I feel really silly just reading what I wrote. And keep in mind as well that it was intended as a debate talk, not a scholarly paper, so I was not citing evidence. I have, however, added some links to the places some of the ideas came from.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the College Historical Society

Calling the United Nations the League of Nations is a metaphor. Metaphors are useful, but it is best not to let them do your thinking for you. Clearly, the UN is not literally the League of Nations. It has lasted longer, and unlike the League’s collapse when it failed to stop Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, the UN has not fallen apart under the strain of its failures.

The UN is like the League of Nations because too many people have invested their hopes in the UN as the fix for both war and oppression, and it is neither.

It would be easy to pick on the UN for its track record. But that would be petty and vindictive. Then again, I’m an academic, and petty and vindictive is part of the job description.

The UN played no role in:
the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that ended Pol Pot’s rule

the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda that ended Idi Amin’s rule

the rescue operation in Rwanda. What rescue? Exactly. Kofi Annan has taken a lot of criticism for UN inaction in Rwanda, and he certainly deserves it, but the fact remains that no major or minor power showed any interest in doing anything.

Kosovo in 1999

The UN was castigated for
Ineptitude in East Timor, sending in a top heavy contingent more suited to running political interference in New York than in doing anything in East Timor, and still trying to micromanage the operation from New York

The growing scandal over the food for oil program, which the UN let Saddam use to pay off backers overseas. Besides the allegations against George Galloway, there are allegations against high ranking members of the French government, and now there even allegations against the assistant Secretary-General in charge of the oil-for-food program
But the irrelevance of the UN is a consequence of far more than ineptitude and scandal. It is a consequence of geo-political reality.

In the period following World War II, America guaranteed the security of Europe, in large measure because it was in the interests of the US to do so. The US faced the Soviet threat, and Europe did not have a particularly good track record of keeping the peace. The last thing the US needed was trying to stop Soviet expansion while dealing with European quarrels. Consequently, the US did not only bear the bulk of defense expenditures, it actively discouraged European military build-up.

The end of the Cold War changed all that. The world was left with only one superpower.

Whatever the origins of the UN, its primary function today is to tie down the United States, as the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver. When France, Germany, Russia, and China tried to block intervention in Iraq, the primary reason was not to protect Saddam. It was to establish control over US power on the cheap. Why on the cheap? The combined GDP of the non-US NATO countries exceeds the US, but their combined defense spending is roughly half, and spent more for pork barrel than in the US.

It is clear that France, Russia, and China have sought to use the Security Council as a way to offset the power of the United States. The French have stated this openly through the 1990s (i.e., during the Clinton years).

Much as it is in the interests of other countries to use the UN to control and direct US power (I emphasize “control and direct”, not “limit”), it is not the interests of the US to be controlled and directed that way.

In last year’s State of the Union address, President Bush remarked
the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others

Don’t waste your time living under the currently fashionable Euro-illusion that somehow all this will go away when George Bush leaves office. Bill Clinton, while unwilling to take on Iraq, did so largely because his foreign policy team thought Iraq insufficiently important to dedicate resources to. He would play on the international stage, signing Kyoto and the International Criminal Court, but he knew that neither would ever survive a ratification battle in the US Senate, so he did not even bother to submit them.

During the Truman administration, the first post-WWII administration, US policy towards the Soviet Union was containment, as laid out by George Kenan. No direct war with the Soviets, just regular attempts to deter Soviet expansion. The Republican Party regularly denounced Truman’s policy as appeasement, but when the Republicans came into power, they stuck to the policy because they had no feasible alternative that could survive the voters. And so when Hungary rebelled, and Soviet tanks crushed the rebellion, the Republican administration did nothing.

Similarly, a President Kerry will behave pretty much like George Bush. All his talk about multilateralism in the Democratic primaries is already being thrown back at him as jibes that multilateralism means getting a permission slip from the French, which is why he will probably lose the general election. If he does win, it will be because he finds a way to bury that talk and get back to talking about American interests. Granted, John Kerry would be rhetorically nicer than the Bush administration (not a hard task), but it will be of the form “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning” before he screws you.

The Security Council was unimportant during the Cold War, because with two major powers, the Security Council could always be deadlocked by the veto. With the fall of the Soviet Union, and with only one superpower, the veto system encourages the US government to simply bypass or ignore the Security Council. Witness Clinton in Kosovo as much as Bush in Iraq.

Without any means of enforcing its demands, the Security Council is irrelevant. North Korea is ardently seeking a nonaggression pact with the US. Why? It is already central to the UN Charter. But the UN is like the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the 1928 treaty in which the signers agreed not to use war as an instrument of national policy. It was signed by every major country that would enter World War II.

I think, finally, that there is a fundamental inconsistency in the very foundations of the UN that make it unworkable. Every society has some form of a constitution. Those constitutions lay down guiding principles.

The UN’s founders proclaimed that they wanted an end to war between sovereign states and a proclamation of human rights. An end to war was to be established by a defense of state sovereignty. Human rights were to be defended by proclamation.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is fundamentally at odds with protection of state sovereignty. For example, Article 4 prohibits slavery, and Article 5 prohibits torture. The Sudan practices slavery. Iraq under Saddam was famous for torture. If a regime is monstrous, it violates human rights, but the principle of state sovereignty says the UN can do nothing. [International relations types may suspect at this point, correctly, that I have been reading Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles]

Now granted, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not something taken too seriously at the UN. For example, last year the UN Commission on Human Rights had before it a report on torture in the Sudan, from its own special investigator. It described the penalty of “cross amputation” – the right hand and the left foot – for armed robbery, as well as execution by crucifixion. The report also noted cases where Sudanese women had been stoned to death for adultery after trial in a language they did not understand and without legal representation. A draft resolution condemning this sort of treatment was opposed by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference on the grounds that it was “an offense to all Muslim countries”. The resolution was defeated. And for good measure, the investigator position was shut down.

A motion last year to condemn Russian behavior in Chechnya was successfully opposed by Syria and China on the grounds that it interfered in the internal affairs of Russia.

You cannot have a proclamation of universal human rights and protect state sovereignty. Even if the UN were to be treated seriously by its members, it is not clear what it would do.

Even if the idea of the UN were a good one, it is an illusion to think it matters. Living by illusions is not humane; it is murderous.