World order dreaming: a guide to conversations about the United Nations - Page 2

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 1: Insecurity in the New World Order
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Frank Moorhouse

Page 2 of 2

The dream of the new pacifism

In conversations, street demonstrations and letters to the press about the war in Iraq, I detected a "New Pacifism" – that is, an impulse towards a non-military stance regardless of the given situation.

A letter from a reader of my books wrote to me after the outbreak of the Iraq war and said, "Australia will go to war!! This is beyond words! I feel so sad! I feel angry, and I feel perplexed! Especially after reading your books in which the prime, central concern was Peace ... how on earth would Edith Campbell Berry [the main character in my books] feel??! ... I feel overwhelmed by all this ..."

The New Pacifism, as I have called it, is not new in its sentiments – pacifism was widespread between World War I and World War II – but it is new on the contemporary political landscape. It seems to be an impulse towards always using peaceful means for the settlement of disputes, for people to refuse to join armies and to fight, for the world to disarm.

Because New Pacifism arose during the invasion of Iraq it is tangled up with an anger and resistance to American dominance and difficult to separate out.

In some ways it is a position in direct opposition to that of President George W. Bush when he said that the US was "making war to secure the peace". The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) was one of the first to use the expression: "We make war that we may live in peace."

And this is the eternal paradox that pacifists have tried to break.

But if a sufficient number of nation states do come to feel that they share "a community of fate" and if these states accept that people in crisis – disenfranchised minorities, helpless victims, the children, refugees, people caught in the crossfire, oppressed women – are grounds for overriding the conventions of national sovereignty, they will have to stomach gruelling armed interventions or, in UN terminology, "peace enforcement".

I am sure that if an international survey of opinion were held tomorrow it would show that most people would favour world disarmament and the calling of another international conference.

Seven (maybe eight) new political realities

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

The Security Council has real power. When the Security Council of UN is unanimous or, in fact, when its five permanent members (the US, the UK, France, China and Russia) decide to do something militarily it is immensely powerful, unstoppable (as in Korea, East Timor and Cambodia).
It is probably unstoppable if four of the Perm-5 (other than the US) vote for military action and where the US abstains from lack of interest in the issue.
There is a new situation in world affairs. It is the assumed supreme power of the US - that is, the US can do just about anything it wants and cannot be stopped. However, while the US may ‘act' in whatever way it chooses, it is uncertain that it can always ‘achieve' what it wishes (as in Somalia, Haiti, Vietnam, maybe Afghanistan, maybe Iraq). But it is a dominance that the international community has to learn to live with and learn how to restrain when necessary (if that is at all politically or militarily feasible). The US in turn has to learn to live with respectable nations which disagree with it (eg France and Canada).
For the first time in our lives, there are two very powerful agents in world affairs (maybe three, see item 5) - the UN Security Council (under certain conditions as outlined above) and the US. And, as happened with the invasion of Iraq, the members of the Security Council do not always share the same goals or methods.
In a recent editorial, The New York Times said that international public opinion is now a "world superpower". Although we are better placed than at any other time in history to be able to determine the opinion of most people on an issue through statistical polling, it does not yet seem to influence the behaviour of individual nation states. It would become a significant factor if "world opinion" translated into disaffection by senior officials in a government and in the military, changes in the mood of the domestic electorate, brought about effective worldwide citizen boycotts, or resulted in the hostile behaviour, say in the Iraq case, against US citizens travelling and living overseas.
Despite the fact that, militarily, the US alone is probably almost unstoppable, the US still, for diplomatic or "moral" reasons, seems to need allies -"coalitions of the willing" - and some assumed UN endorsement - for it to feel able to take military action. The US continued to claim that it had UN authorisation for the invasion of Iraq flowing from the earlier resolutions of the Security Council. In the case of Iraq, the US even attempted to buy support from some members of the Security Council with promises of aid and other inducements but those members who were approached rejected the bribes.
Militarily, the Security Council is probably impotent on an issue if the US chooses to disregard it.
There are still situations where the members of Security Council may want to act but cannot practically do so because of US opposition and its use of veto, for example, the US has used the veto 35 times to to protect Israel from UN action against it (see Facts and figures).

Kant would call this the loss of international "hospitality", something he valued highly, that is, "the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another".

But, despite strong world opinion against the Iraq invasion, these things didn't happen in any dramatic way (except some loss of the freedom of travel for US citizens).

Interestingly, Kant foresaw this sort of political behaviour and laid down as his second rule of perpetual peace that "no independent states, large or small, shall come under the dominion of another state ... by exchange, purchase or donation".

So we have now to live in two World Orders. One where the UN can sometimes matter and a second, parallel World Order, where combinations of nation states led by the US (or the US alone) can take military action according to their perceived national interests or moral standards, where the world organisation can do nothing. This is a return to a World Order that existed before any world body had been formed – pre-UN/League of Nations – before World War I.

That is, we have to live in a world of the UN with its peacekeeping and peace-enforcing missions and in a world of ad hoc groupings of nation states that may at times act militarily – coalitions of the willing and multinational forces outside the UN such as NATO and the emerging European Union Rapid Reaction Force.

Is dreaming a form of political realism?

The reality of our world is messy and it is no wonder that people seek comfort in idealistic dreaming with its appeals to a distant partly imagined world body that has answers to all questions and can solve all problems, relieve all suffering.

Ultimately, the discomfort that believers in the UN experience is over a political paradox – whether it is better to allow a nation state to destroy and oppress and cruelly ill-treat its people or some of its people (South Africa under apartheid, Nazi Germany, Iraq) or to bring an end to this oppression through armed intervention.

We have also to face the question of whether we should use a military force to protect our economic interests upon which our values, our standard of life and way of life depend?

And there are continuing disagreements about what is just, fair and compassionate although the UN continues to establish world "norms" for international conduct (hence the Court of International Justice – which the US has refused to join but which Australia has).

The world is still far from agreement on "norms" – for instance, on the status and proper place for women in the scheme of things.

Is it that believers in the UN have no option but to throw the weight of their personal presence and voice onto the side of the co-operative, the compassionate, the hopeful, the tolerant and rational, as they see it?

Imaginative dreaming can produce policies, and policies can produce action. The imagination is an instrument of inquiry – lateral, feral, inquiry, if you like and the UN processes themselves can be seen as a gigantic instrument of inquiry and an experimentation into the nature of things.

Historically, we have a tendency as a species both to go to war but also to design structures of peace (the League and the UN) – so in the past 100 years we have evolved non-violent solutions to international conflict – ideas such as sanctions, peacekeeping, international mediation, international criminal courts, war tribunals, multinational forces, a range of diplomatic sanctions (non-recognition, trade embargoes), the notion of international opinion, the notion of authorised and unauthorised military actions.

The status of military action and attitudes towards war in many cultures has also shifted from a simple glorification to a sober acceptance of the place of the military in an imperfect world. The avoidance – just – of the word "victory" by Prime Minister Blair and President Bush after the Iraq war was an interesting sign of this – a sensitivity about and uneasiness with "triumphalism".

Though they have not gone as far as Kant would have them go, he suggested that nations that have just successfully concluded any war, rather than celebrating victory, should have a day where they seek forgiveness for their annihilation of other human beings.

For all the cynicism about the futility of international intervention, pragmatically, people are being helped daily by the UN (see below in Facts and figures).

Even more than domestic governments, the UN is imagined to have unknown potentials.

These imaginings are also part of political reality – not in the sense that "all things are possible" – but in the sense that we know that visionary and innovative international missions can sometimes be conceived and achieved (both inside and outside the UN). I suppose the short answer about the UN is this: the UN can do good things, which no one else can do, in some places, sometimes.

To end on a light note

Kant took the title of his famous essay Perpetual Peace from a sign in a Dutch inn and he mused whether the sign and the promise of the "perpetual peace" and solace of alcohol was intended for those rulers "insatiable of war" or the philosophers "who dream this sweet dream". Or both. ♦

Facts and figures

The UN is made up of: a Security Council (five permanent members and 10 elected from the Assembly as temporary members for two years); the General Assembly which is made up of the 191 member states of the UN; the Secretariat of international civil servants, about 61,000 (for comparison the Victorian Government has 240,000 public servants), which is headed by the Secretary-General; and the 15 agencies of the UN such as the World Food Program, World Health Organisation, High Commission for Refugees and so on.

Most focus is now on the Security Council and its five permanent members (the Perm-5) – the US, the UK, Russia, China and France – all with the right to veto any action, which any other member or members of the Security Council proposes.

The United States has used the veto 76 times. Britain 32 (23 times with the US), France 18 (including 13 with the US and UK) and China five. The old USSR used the veto 118 times and since its collapse Russia has used it twice.

One of the reforms under discussion is to make the Security Council more representative of the world by including India, Germany, Japan, Brazil and Indonesia (an idea being pushed by John Howard among others).

About 150 of the 191 members of the General Assembly are in arrears with their contributions. Twenty-six nations can be depended on to pay their contribution regularly.

Australia is one of the five nations that has regularly paid its dues to the world organisation since the beginning of the League of Nations in 1920 to the present.

The UN now has 50,000 peacekeepers serving in 15 operations. Last year it distributed $US30 billion ($46 billion) in development assistance, assisted in elections in 80 countries, gave 44 million people emergency aid and cared for 26 million refugees.

– From United Nations sources and my research

<< Prev - Next

World order dreaming: a guide to conversations about the United Nations 2 All