One immediate result of the end of the polarization which characterized international relations in the Cold War era has been the movement to the front burner of political crises arising from ethnic animosities, social and economic inequalities, and regional and internal political competition. Previously masked by Cold War dynamics, these long-existing problems have emerged in a rash of so-called "complex emergencies"--either political or humanitarian. How to deal with them is a problem for the international community as a whole, specifically for local actors and neighbors, and at least occasionally for the United States as the sole remaining global power. These problems are especially troublesome as most of them appear devoid of specific relevance to U.S. national interests. Yet they persist--from Bosnia to Haiti--and similar future crises with more direct potential concern for the United States loom on the horizon. What to do?
Ambassador Edward Marks, U.S. Department of State, is a Senior Fellow in the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, Washington, D.C. Previously, he was a senior officer in the (Permanent) U.S. Mission to the United Nations.
Washington's first reaction was to ask the United Nations to help in its traditional peacekeeping role. The Bush administration did so pragmatically, and the Clinton administration enthusiastically. However, the UN has not proved to be a completely successful deus ex machina. First of all, the attempt to expand the UN's peacekeeping role into an interventionist mode has caused enormous political problems. It has also raised practical questions of UN capability in personnel and resources. Given these concerns, is a there a useful role for the UN in dealing with complex emergencies? If so, is that role potentially of interest to the United States?
The answer is yes. Without an effective multilateral option, the United States would find itself with only two responses to any given emergency: unilateral action (to include organizing a coalition) or doing nothing. Either may be perfectly appropriate in a given situation, but obviously there will be other situations where a multilateral response is both best and prudent. Because this option will not exist unless a multilateral mechanism and process exist, the UN would appear to be the best choice for creating both mechanism and process.
A UN Option
The UN's existing capability in traditional peacekeeping is limited, however, and the proposed new interventionist role is controversial. Nevertheless, an alternative exists in the form of an enhanced UN peacekeeping role, one which would integrate the UN system's capabilities in the economic and social areas with its political and military elements to produce an intensified UN capability appropriate for the new category of complex emergency. For the United States, a UN capability of this type offers a third arrow to the policy quiver, supplementing unilateralism and do-nothingism.
What are called in the United Nations environment "complex emergencies" or "complex political emergencies" are crises of sufficient magnitude to engage the attention of the world community (or at least the UN), but of a restricted local character arising out of some combination of humanitarian crisis, breakdown of national political authority, or regional political confrontation that has moved into the violent stage. Although mankind remains addicted to war, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Mrs. Sadako Ogata has recently observed that internal war has become the prevailing pattern. Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq are all internal wars. All pose a serious threat to the well-being of significant numbers of innocent people, and all make some claim on the attention of the international community.
The UN has stepped into this breach, or maybe more accurately, has been pushed into it by a newly activist Security Council spurred in turn by widespread international opinion. The United States has played a major role in fostering this activism--sometimes called second-generation peacekeeping. Building up the operational and diplomatic authority of the UN to deal with complex emergencies was an essential part of Bush and at least initial Clinton administration policy. Reflecting the intertwined American concerns for international law and order, support for democracy, and market economics, as well as a reluctance to turn Cold War "victory" into American political hegemony, Washington has viewed the UN as a useful agent to deal with these relatively minor, albeit potentially dangerous, developments called complex emergencies.
This more active role for the United Nations has raised serious questions of capability, in addition to the more obvious ones of mandate and authority. Interventionism, or the use of force by the UN, touches many sensibilities, and raises many questions. While a specific situation such as Somalia calls out for action, the implications of UN military and political interventionism bother large numbers of countries. With respect to implementation, the difference between those who might wish to authorize a UN intervention, and those who would have to provide the human and financial resources raises another whole set of concerns. Quo bono (who benefits) is one thing, but who pays is another. As the latter category obviously refers primarly to the United States, the cost of UN interventionism has become an American domestic political question, especially in the wake of recent events in Somalia.
Yet the right--and some would say the duty--of humanitarian intervention already exists, arising out of international agreements and documents such as the International Covenant on Human Rights, in addition to the well known UN authority to react to threats to international peace and security. Obviously a mandate for intervention on human rights or humanitarian grounds by the international community creates a conflict between national and collective interests, so governments are reluctant to act on this human rights-based authority. (Here again, there is asymmetry in government reactions as certain Western countries such as the United States consider human rights a foreign policy priority.)
Despite these conceptual and practical questions, public and official opinion increasingly view serious humanitarian crises as situations calling for international action, because of moral considerations spurred by broad public disclosure via the media--the "CNN factor," and because they are viewed as threats to peace and security. Dealing with the questions and problems of humanitarian intervention (as distinct from humanitarian assistance) requires more agreement on principles and procedures than currently exists. Even accepting the general thesis that humanitarian intervention can be justified and may be necessary, three considerations must be dealt with in any specific situation:
These considerations call for an orderly process for considering humanitarian intervention--a process that does not exist at present. While the Security Council provides a forum for making an international decision on threats to international peace and security, its mandate in humanitarian situations is less clear--even where the humanitarian crisis arises directly from the political and military situation (as in the former Yugoslavia).
To complicate the situation further, there is a growing interest in viewing peacekeeping plus humanitarian operations in a longer term perspective, to ensure that the conditions which created the crisis in question do not return. During the UN general debate of 19 November 1993 on strengthening the coordination of humanitarian assistance by the UN, a number of representives expressed the view that peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance should be part of the continuum to rehabilitation and development. However, this is a slippery slope as definitions become so broad and all-inclusive that peacekeeping and peace-making become synonyms for world governance tout court. Peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance in an emergency situation are different from long-term development in practice if not in theory.
Even if the motivation and justification for assistance in situations of conflict remain essentially humanitarian and reasonably limited in scope, the necessary decisions to provide assistance in such situations are political in nature. But when the Security Council assumed the decisionmaking responsibility, it found itself swamped when the number and complexity of these emergencies expanded. Apparent early success in dealing with the problems of the post-Cold War era has been largely illusory, although some situations (e.g., Cambodia) have been greatly ameliorated. The situation in the former Yugoslavia has proved especially difficult; the Security Council found it could not manage this crisis with the same approach used elsewhere. This frustration, combined with difficulties in implementing the Somalia decision and the likelihood that other crises are lurking in the wings, have led to serious reconsideration--especially on the part of the United States. At first blush the traditional wisdom about the intrinsic limitations of UN peacekeeping has been reaffirmed; expanded UN intervention in political conflict is done neither easily nor safely.
A retreat to traditional peacekeeping, however, may not be possible. Humanitarian emergencies continue to arise and carry serious political implications--both as cause and effect. As a recent UN High Commissioner on Refugees' report noted, there are 44 million refugees and displaced persons in the world today who not only pose an obvious threat to international peace and security, but represent a moral challenge as well. Certainly, the separation of political and humanitarian activities in UN operations in complex-conflict situations is no longer possible,so both a new rationale and modified organizational arrangements are necessary for dealing with this new situation.
The UN's Two Operating Cultures
It often comes as a surprise to many to learn that more than 70 percent of the UN's people and budget is devoted to programs and activities in economic, social, and related areas. The prominence of the Security Council and its political activities such as peacekeeping tends to overshadow the more mundane economic and social work. As a result, there is much concern over the dramatic rise of the budget for UN peacekeeping activities even though that increase still does not significantly alter the ratio of political to economic and social budgets. As the peacekeeping budget has risen in the past few years from $200 million annually to over $4 billion, so have humanitarian assistance appeals. Furthermore, demands for increased economic development assistance related to post-crisis rehabilitation are beginning to appear.
The UN's general culture has always agreed with the traditional (and invidious) distinction between political and economic affairs--so common in the management of foreign affairs in most governments. Political affairs have high priority while economic and social questions generally are placed below the salt. Certainly this is the situation in most foreign offices (and most definitely in the U.S. Department of State). The appearance, for example, of the Permanent Representative of one of the Permanent Five (United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France) in the Second (economic) or Third (social) Committees of the General Assembly or in the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is a rare event worthy of note.
This hierarchical organization of the culture of the UN is not without historical justification. The major Western countries, especially the United States, have always argued that the General Assembly and the central UN system are not appropriate places for serious consideration of international economic matters, which, they maintain, are the responsibility of the so-called Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Therefore, while a large number of UN funds, programs, and agencies were created to deal with a wide range of economic and social questions, these bodies were organized--if that is the proper word--in a highly decentralized fashion. The UN Development Program (UNDP), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and the High Commissioner for Refugees--to name only a representative few--were each created with almost autonomous mandates and organizational structures and a governance system consisting of separate intergovernmental governing councils or boards. Nominally the head of each of these organizations is subordinate to the Secretary-General (SYG) of the UN, who is formally designated by the UN Charter as the system's Chief Administrative Officer, but in fact the SYG does not appoint most of these officers and has little authority over their personnel systems, their mandates, or their budgets. Nominally the inter-governmental governing boards of these organizations are under the overall authority of the General Assembly and reflect the broad foreign policy perspectives of their member states, but in fact most government delegations to these relatively narrow bodies represent the fairly specialized views of specific ministries, e.g., agriculture and health.
Politics, Humanitarian Assistance, and Peacekeeping
The United Nations, therefore, is not really a single political or bureaucratic institution with a distinctive character or personality, much less independent authority. Most specifically, it is not a government and does not react as one. This somewhat obvious condition is misunderstood by many observers, commentators, and public officials who persistently urge the UN to "do something" or criticize it for failure to act. As a Swedish official, B. Stjernfelt, put it recently, "The UN is often subject to criticism that should be directed instead at member states." The UN, as knowledgeable people rightly insist, is a sort of permanent in-session conference, a parliamentary not an executive creature, and a highly decentralized one at that.
In this desegregated system, the predominant concern of policy-level participants in the UN during the Cold War--including UN officials and member government representatives--was political. The Security Council was the center ring where Washington and Moscow confronted each other. Elsewhere in the UN system this competition existed but was modified by the interests of other states in pursuing less than cosmic objectives. For instance, the so-called Third World (the states of the Non-Aligned Movement) attempted to obtain more favorable consideration of their development needs and the anti-colonialist program; the Arab countries of the Middle East attempted to improve the lot of the Palestinians; and the Nordic countries attempted to find a middle ground between Washington and Moscow. But all of this took place within the context of the Cold War; the perspective was determinedly political despite the efforts of some to create a meaningful economic and social development agenda for the UN. Even the growing interest in human rights was pursued in this political environment and atmosphere.
Peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance were conducted in this environment as separate activities involving completely different organizations. Peacekeeping operations (now called "traditional" peacekeeping) were the responsibility of the Security Council to be implemented by the Secretary-General and his subordinates in the political departments of the central Secretariat, always on a case-by-case basis. Humanitarian assistance--essentially a question of dealing with natural disasters--was entrusted to various UN organizations as a regular part of their mandate or duties. Should a cyclone hit or an earthquake occur, UNICEF, UNHCR, the World Food Program, and their sister agencies would do whatever was necessary, providing emergency medical assistance, shelter, and food.
In other words, humanitarian crises have traditionally been dealt with by bureaucratic organizations authorized to respond almost automatically to non-political crises. (Given that they were largely the result of natural catastrophes, this was not an unreasonable position.) Traditional peacekeeping (i.e., political crises) was dealt with by the Security Council and the Secretary-General on a case-by-case basis. Rarely did the two meet. Now, however, the most dramatic humanitarian crises are man-made and increasingly involve political decisions. The existing humanitarian assistance organizations (UN, non-governmental, and national) can no longer behave as if politics were not a factor, if only because the scale of resources needed to deal with these problems requires national government decisions to provide such resources. At the same time, the political instrumentalities can no longer consider humanitarian crises as none of their business. The end of the Cold War ended this situation, leading to calls for a reshuffling of the deck. With the end of the bipolar organization of international policymaking and side-choosing, numerous local and regional problems have moved to center stage, to national governments, regional organizations, and the UN. The new dilemmas caused by complex emergencies now fill the in-boxes of decision makers.
As noted above, these complex emergencies include both political and humanitarian disaster. Humanitarian assistance operations are increasingly major elements of UN peacekeeping operations and in some cases are the purpose and justification for a peacekeeping operation (PKO). Somalia is the obvious example, but the agonizing character of the Bosnian situation arises from the horrendous impact of the conflict on the civilian population. While the international political community is rightfully concerned about the political implications arising from Serbian and Croation "nation building," the international community is equally concerned about the physical suffering and fate of the civilian population and the abuse of human rights. More than classic political questions are at issue.
Therefore we find now that the international response requires a mixture of classic political and humanitarian elements. Political and military officers find themselves working shoulder-to-shoulder with humanitarian fieldworkers from UNICEF, World Food Program and non-governmental organizations such as CARE and Medecins Sans Frontiers. The two cultures find themselves in tandem, but their operating assumptions, tactics, and objectives are not necessarily congruent and may--even with the best will in the world--actually conflict. This potential conflict manifests itself most dramatically when the UN peacekeeping operation moves into the new world of peace enforcement, where the two sides of the UN operation may find themselves pursuing contradictory policies. There can be a serious policy conflict between feeding a refugee and solving the political crisis which made him a refugee.
An Agenda For Peace
Recognition of this need to merge peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance was an important point in the Secretary-General's report to the Security Council entitled "Agenda for Peace." In this document, Boutros Boutros-Ghali outlined a comprehensive approach to UN involvement with the new plague of complex emergencies afflicting the post-Cold War world. He presented a policy spectrum involving preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, peace-making, and peace-building. The spectrum would involve economic and social programs way beyond the limited traditional deployment of a few UN political officers and a comparatively small number of Blue Berets (all to deal with a specific short-term emergency--the long life of the Cyprus and other operations notwithstanding). Boutros-Ghali now called for mobilization of the whole UN system--economic as well as political--to deal with ostensibly "political" crises.
The SYG's "Agenda for Peace" also called for an expanded UN role in the world--that of peace enforcement with its implication of intervention in the internal affairs of nation states. This new role, based on the actual experience underway in Iraq and Somalia, was to be justified by humanitarian as well as political considerations, on the grounds that massive humanitarian crises were threats to international peace and stability. If they were, then at least certain types of intervention (peace-building, rehabilitation, and reconstruction) could be authorized. "Blue Berets" would now be worn by civilian relief workers operating on the authority of the UN and not by invitation of the responsible local government. This proposal is as significant for relief workers as it is for the military.
But the UN is neither organized nor experienced in operating in such a multidisciplinary manner. As noted above, in traditional UN parlance and thinking, peacekeeping is a "PKO" and humanitarian assistance is "HA" and never the twain have met. It was to deal with this lack of joint experience and perceived need that the General Assembly created the new UN Department of Humanitarian Assistance in late l991. The DHA was a controversial innovation because, again notwithstanding the actual ongoing agony of Somalia, many countries were fearful that the creation of a coordinated if not centralized UN organization for humanitarian assistance would introduce a humanitarian justification for intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign and independent countries. As a result, the new department is a carefully limited entity with a circumscribed coordination authority. It is not surprising that DHA has not managed to resolve all UN implementation problems in the humanitarian assistance area in its brief existence. Even with much broader authority, it would have run into difficulties. Americans should remember the "Revolt of the Admirals" in 1948-49 arising from the difficulties the new Department of Defense had in exercising its coordinating role in the American defense community. The newcomer is always resisted, especially one charged with "coordination." Nevertheless, DHA does represent the concept of an integrated, system-wide reaction to humanitarian crises, both natural and man-made (i.e., political).
Necessary Reform
Successful implementation of an integrated humanitarian assistance program--both integrated among the various relevant UN economic and social organizations and with peacekeeping operations--requires further change in the UN system itself. Reform of the UN has been a subject of discussion, negotiation, and newspaper comment for many years now. Proposals range from restructuring of the Security Council to redrafting procurement regulations. With respect to integrated peacekeeping/humanitarian assistance operations, there are four central points where change (in attitude, function, and/or organization) is necessary:
Linking these four institutions into a system-wide governance and management network is required if the UN's currently disparate economic and social organizations are to function as a more or less unified United Nations in pursuit of the goals and objectives outlined in the "Agenda for Peace."
This reorganization of the UN system--at both the policy and implementation level--is necessary if the UN is to successfully pursue peacekeeping in complex emergencies. At present, PKO are considered and authorized in terms of "traditional" components: a Security Council resolution providing a mandate, authorization for deployment of a PK force, and a budgetary assessment limited to the politico-military operation. But the character of modern peacekeeping includes significant humanitarian assistance and rehabilitation responsibilities, which constitute the essence of meaningful "exit strategies" for UN peacekeeping forces. For instance, the importance of the integration of the "police" function of a PKO with political objectives cannot be overestimated, as Somalia is proving. As Professor Walter Clarke of the Army War College has noted on the basis of the Somali experience:
In future peace-making or peace enforcement operations, the United States and its coalition allies must develop a strategy that integrates military end states with effective political action. Failure to do so will invariably provide local Rambos the opportunities they seek to get inside UN and coalition decision processes and turn events to their own advantage.1
The UN peacekeeping operation in Cambodia did deal openly with this question in the Paris Accord which set out the operation; those in the former Yugoslavia and in Somalia did so less successfully. Unfortunately, as pointed out so dramatically by Ambassador Gerald Helman and Mr. Steven Ratner in a recent article in Foreign Policy, the likelihood of similar "failed states" and consequent threats to at least regional peace and security, not to mention human rights, is growing.2
Unfortunately, the character of the UN system--described above--makes it difficult to design and fund an integrated operation. The obvious desirability of doing so raises some difficult questions. The most obvious relates to financing. Is the Security Council now to include "non-political" items such as humanitarian assistance and rehabilitation of local institutions in its peacekeeping budgets? If not, then where is the money to come from? The budgets of UN agencies are under severe strain as they are called upon to fund humanitarian assistance and rehabilitation associated with peacekeeping operations in complex emergencies. The appeals for voluntary funding of specific crises are falling short. And many developing countries are becoming concerned about the already under-financed long-term development effort (i.e., Official Development Assistance) as funds are siphoned off to meet emergencies.
It is to deal with these inter-related questions that some reform and reorientation of the UN system is called for, to integrate UN peacekeeping operations. Without such integration, to include total budgeting and political exit strategies, the unknown factors facing decision makers will severely inhibit the willingness of national leaders to take advantage of the UN's unique qualification for dealing with thorny and sensitive international problems. Failure to use the UN in this fashion limits the alternatives available to these decision makers--leaving only unilateral action or no action.
One final thought involving a detail which often stirs the devils who frustrate change: money. The annual UN peacekeeping budget has risen in the past few years from approximately $200 million to over $4 billion. This development somehow shocks governments, legislators, and journalists. Yet, during the same period, the annual demand for short-term emergency humanitarian assistance has also increased to over $4 billion annually. At the same time, the annual combined donor country budgets for Official Development Assistance is in the neighborhood of $50 billion annually; the current estimates for the implementation of the UN's Agenda 21 program to meet the sustainable development needs of the world is about $120 billion per year, and the current annual global expenditures for military budgets is just about $1,000 billion. Surely somewhere in this range of financial expenditures and estimates the funds can be found to finance necessary international community operations to deal with the various emergencies (both man-made and natural) which afflict human beings as individuals and as nations.
Specifically, if the United States wishes to have at hand a UN system and process capable of dealing with some of the current or future rash of political and humanitarian emergencies which appear inevitable (that is, have a multilateral option), it will need to pursue a reform effort consisting of the following elements:
1. A coalition of like-minded member states, not limited to Western countries or the Permanent 5 members of the Security Council, committed to serious reform along the following lines;
2. Pressure on and support for the Secretary-General to play a more active leadership role within and for the total UN system;
3. Insistence that the Inter-Agency Standing Committee be reconstituted as a management body responsible for implementation of peacekeeping operations in complex emergencies;
4. Strengthening of the Department of Humanitarian Assistance as the coordinating organ for complex emergency operations, to include, if necessary, increased authority over UN funds and resources, and a clear mandated relationship with the political and peacekeeping departments and the IASC.
5. Effective use of the reformed Economic and Social Council so that it may assume system-wide inter-governmental governance authority for the UN organs and agencies involved in development, humanitarian assistance, and related social programs;
6. Reform of the UN's budgetary system to integrate political, peacekeeping, and humanitarian assistance budgets.
Exit Strategies
The Secretary-General's call for preventive diplomacy and peace-building or enforcement identifies possible UN activities prior to the despatch of a peacekeeping mission in an effort to prevent a political crisis which might threaten international peace and security. Such activities would involve mediation and negotiation, but might also require economic development programs, humanitarian and electoral assistance, and support for human rights. Peace enforcement, at the other end of the spectrum, calls for some sort of institution rehabilitation or building so that the UN peacekeeping mission can withdraw--in other words, an exit strategy.
The expansion of UN peacekeeping operations to include economic and social programs is not dependent upon the expansion of the UN's peacekeeping operations to include enforcement and intervention. Even in traditional, limited peacekeeping, the new interest in the post-Cold War world to have the UN play a larger role in dealing with complex emergencies on the behalf of the world community calls for involving more of the UN system than its political/peacekeeping units. Military force may be a necessary element in peacekeeping, but it is no longer a sufficient one. Therefore we need a UN which can integrate political and economic/social policy, and can coordinate political and economic/social programs.
Central to the decision to engage in peacekeeping, of whatever kind or scope is the question of local governmental authority. Does the authority exist or not? Does it function or not? Where local authority does not exist in any meaningful way, then its recreation or rehabilitation becomes crucial to the end product of the peacekeeping operation, not to mention its success. Without some level of functioning local authority, it is difficult to envisage how a UN peacekeeping mission--once engaged--can withdraw. Peacekeeping is increasingly a politico-economic-social task requiring use of the UN's politico-economic-social agencies. Modern peacekeeping by the UN, in other words, requires harnessing its "civilian" wagons to its "military" horses.
1. Walter S. Clarke, "Testing the World's Resolve in Somalia," Parameters, Winter 1993-94, pp. 42-58.
2. Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, "Saving Failed States," Foreign Policy, Winter 1992-93, pp. 3-20.