Dealing with dictators: Westphalian and American strategies

The 1648 Westphalia settlement contained a recipe for the toleranceof political and religious diversity within states. Until the twentiethcentury, European governments generally tolerated a pluralityof political forms. Breaking with the Westphalian tradition,the Bolsheviks were the first to deny moral and diplomatic legitimacyto ‘bourgeois’ regimes. Although the United Stateshas recognized, placated and supported a number of dictatorships,it has also used extreme measures to oust regimes that do notmeet unspecified tests of democracy. The United States, breaking rankswith the UN Security Council strategy of containing Hussein,has sought to destroy him through bombing. The Rambouillet agreement,I argue, was a case of ‘faux’ diplomacy, an ultimatumdesigned to provoke Milosevic to war. American responses topolitical diversity in the world raise a number of importantquestions about the continuation of the Westphalian tradition.Are we to have a world of political heterogeneity or homogeneity?If the latter, who will decide on the criteria for inclusionin the club of states, and how will the decisions be made?     

Squaring the circle? Collective and distributive effects of United Nations Security Council reform

Changing the composition and voting system of the Security Council, in an effort to increase the institution’s global legitimacy, is proving to be one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome for the global community of states represented in the United Nations (UN). This paper demonstrates that due to institutional hurdles, it is considerably more difficult today than it was in the early years of the UN to reach a winning coalition in the General Assembly to secure Security Council reform. In addition, the paper analyzes the effects that adapted patterns of voting, as prescribed by recent reform proposals, would have on the distribution of power among UN member states in the Security Council and on the probability that this institution can form a winning coalition, i.e., reach decisions. Our power and decision capacity computations are based on (modified) Penrose-Banzhaf-Coleman measures.     

United Nations Security Council Reform Revisited: A Proposal

The United Nations [UN] came into being following the Second World War. Resembling earlier efforts of co-operation by the most powerful states of the international system, it was an attempt to effect global governance through the maintenance of international peace and security amongst states. However, led by its main executive organ, the Security Council, the UN has been unable to prevent and effectively deal with armed conflicts and mass atrocities in a number of situations. Over the years, the inability of the UN Security Council to take collective action has resulted in its ineffectiveness in dealing with war and humanitarian crises. This situation has led to calls for Security Council reform and has generated several initiatives to that end. This analysis discusses major shortcomings of the Security Council, analyses prominent reform initiatives, and introduces a proposal, the “Two-Layered Regional Model,” for Security Council reform.     

Diplomacy at the United Nations: The dual agenda of the 1992 security council summit

The Security Council summit meeting of 31 January 1992 was supposed to be a momentous event that would determine the course of the world body and international peace and security in the post‐Cold War era. Despite high expectations, though, the actual meeting did not produce much more than a broadly‐phrased declaration of good intentions. The article examines the hypothesis that the meeting had a dual agenda, with a hidden as well as a public part. It is argued that the main item on the hidden agenda was the confirmation, beyond any doubt or potential challenge, of Russia as the rightful successor to the USSR permanent seat on the Security Council. This suited well the weakened major remnant of the former Soviet Union as well as the other permanent members of the Security Council, especially the UK and France, who had good reasons to want to defer indefinitely any reexamination of the Council's composition and powers.     

Diplomacy at the United Nations: The dual agenda of the 1992 security council summit

The Security Council summit meeting of 31 January 1992 was supposed to be a momentous event that would determine the course of the world body and international peace and security in the post-Cold War era. Despite high expectations, though, the actual meeting did not produce much more than a broadly-phrased declaration of good intentions. The article examines the hypothesis that the meeting had a dual agenda, with a hidden as well as a public part. It is argued that the main item on the hidden agenda was the confirmation, beyond any doubt or potential challenge, of Russia as the rightful successor to the USSR permanent seat on the Security Council. This suited well the weakened major remnant of the former Soviet Union as well as the other permanent members of the Security Council, especially the UK and France, who had good reasons to want to defer indefinitely any reexamination of the Council's composition and powers.     

Civilizing interventions? Race,war and international law

Over the past decade there has been an explosion in literature on imperialism and international law. This scholarship has focused on the use of force, especially humanitarian intervention and the war on terror. These accounts foreground the issue of race, arguing that these legal arguments reproduce the dynamic of the civilising mission. This article argues that such analyses miss some key elements. Contemporary interventions must be counterposed to the First Iraq War, which was enabled through the uncontroversial authorization of the Security Council. Humanitarian intervention and the war on terror emerged in reaction to the fear that other states would veto Security Council resolutions. Consequently, the ‘racial’ discourse around intervention cannot simply be read as ‘othering’ the peripheries, but was also a response to inter-imperialist rivalry. The article then advances a conception of the arguments as an attempt to articulate hegemonic coalitions against emerging rivalries, and reads racialization in this light.     

The humanitarian responsibilities of the United Nations Security Council: Ensuring the security of the people1

The United Nations Charter confers on the Security Council prime responsibility for maintaining international peace and security. Yet these very concepts are undergoing radical change. More than the absence of war, peace has come to mean harmony both within and among nations. It has acquired a dimension far larger than the original State-centred notion of the Charter. Security connotes inclusion, cohesion, and integration - a sense of belonging to a society and a prevailing international order that is predicated on fairness and respect for differences and human dignity. Today, especially given the rise in conflicts of a non-international character, the Council musturgently review the appropriateness of existing instruments and traditional diplomacy. The author calls for better links between the UN, the Security Council, NGOs, and civil-society organisations; and proposes legal and practical mechanisms both to afford better protection to aid workers and to ensure that, when they are applied, sanctions regimes are effective means of placing pressure on those responsible for the abuse of power.     

The Security Council and Counterterrorism: Global and Regional Approaches to an Elusive Public Good

ABSTRACT

This paper explores contemporary counterterrorism efforts as an instrument for attaining peace as a ‘global public good’. It notes the lack of an agreed definition of terrorism, the distinction between freedom-fighting and terrorism, and the issue of ‘excessive use of force’ by the state. It assessed the extent to which US counter-terrorism policy has influenced policy in the UN Security Council, and the shortcomings in Council policy that require redress. The paper concludes that counterterrorism will be successful only when a ‘global law enforcement’ approach prevails over the national security-driven ‘war-on-terror’ and when genuine efforts are undertaken to address the root causes of terrorism, including the forward basing of US forces in the Arab world.     

A New Barometer for the Evolution of Multilateral Counterterrorism: Introduction to the Materials,Methods, and Results of the UN Security Council and Terrorism Dataset (UNSC-TDS)

There is a general tendency among analysts to treat the activity of the United Nations Security Council as a barometer for measuring the evolution of global security issues. However, despite the Council's central role in multilateral counterterrorism since 9/11, there exists no comprehensive and coherent empirical measurement of its activity on terrorism. This research gap has resulted in contradictory assessments concerning the beginning, the regularity, and the consistency of the Council's activity on terrorism. In an effort to introduce more academic rigor to terrorism studies, researchers need to systematically address this deficit. This article makes a fundamental contribution by introducing a new dataset, the UN Security Council and Terrorism Dataset. It outlines the problems of previously available data and specifies the materials and methods used for the creation of the dataset. It continues by presenting key results from this unprecedented data collection effort and illustrates general trends in the Council's activity on terrorism. Based on this extensive empirical research, it finds that the UN Security Council's activity on terrorism has evolved more regularly and consistently since 1946 than previously thought. This conclusion indicates new directions for future research.     

The beginning of a new cold war?

The proactive policies of the United States in expanding NATO, its bombing of Iraq in December 1998, NATO's air war on Yugoslavia in 1999 in which the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was accidentally bombed, and the United States’ new perspectives on the use of force in the global arena have led to increasing resentment and tensions on the part of Russia and the PRC. As Washington is seeking new rationales for the unilateral use of force worldwide, or circumventing the use of sanctions, of the UN Security Council before taking military actions, Russia and China are becoming increasingly convinced that the United States is bent upon establishing its global hegemony. Obviously, neither Russia nor China will let this increasing proactivism go unchallenged.     

Blundering into Baghdad: an analysis of strategy,structure, principals and agents

Some postmortems of the Bush Administration's pre-Iraq war decision-making have focused on a dysfunctional National Security Council (NSC) structure as the major reason for the lack of a thorough strategic assessment prior to the March 2003 invasion. Other academic and journalistic accounts have focused on a lack of a first rate conceptual thinker at the top levels of the Bush Administration as an important cause of the strategic shortcomings in Iraq decision-making. This article will assess the relative impact of decision-making structure versus quality of strategic leadership in explaining poor performance in the first five years of the Iraq war.     

The imperial moment: A European view This article is based on developments up through June 9, 2003, the date it was submitted for publication

This article will first review the essential characteristics of the old exceptionalism in US foreign policy, then compare it with the specific features of the new strategy of the Bush administration and finally address the challenges and risks that this enterprise entails. The article provides an analysis of realist and liberal critiques of the Bush administration's foreign policy in terms of both objectives and results. It concludes that the war in Iraq constituted a truly imperial moment in US history. Preventive war is a flawed strategy, which runs against US principles in world affairs and against its security interests in the current international environment. For this reason, Bush's imperial policy will not last. The author writes here in a personal capacity, and not in the name of the European Union Institute for Security Studies.     

In Search of a European Dimension in the UN Security Council

Both Belgium and Italy want to give their current mandate in the UN Security Council a European dimension. Yet, the conclusion that they are natural partners in doing so may be premature. Before focussing on Belgian and Italian objectives, the article presents the current state of the ongoing reform processes in Brussels and New York and of EU actorness in the Security Council more generally, as both are critical for estimating the prospects for a stronger European profile. It concludes by discussing the possibilities and constraints that the non-permanent members face within this framework.     

Does Membership on the UN Security Council Influence Voting in the UN General Assembly?

Recent studies report that temporary members of the UN Security Council receive favorable treatment from the IMF, the World Bank, or in US foreign aid in exchange for their political support for permanent members. Nevertheless, few studies have examined whether this favorable treatment and these benefits have actually made any significant changes in the member states’ voting behavior in the United Nations. To explore this question, we investigate whether membership on the UN Security Council influences a state’s voting in the UN General Assembly. In the analysis of panel data for 197 countries over the period from 1946 to 2008, the empirical results show that elected members of the UN Security Council tend to behave similarly with permanent members, especially with the United States, as the number of loan programs signed with the IMF and the World Bank increases. Also, US foreign aid significantly increases temporary members’ vote coincidence with the United States and other permanent members. In this regard, this article contributes to our understanding of state voting behavior and power politics in international organizations.     

UN sanctions burden sharing: Article 50 of the UN charter and assistance to third states

This article proposes the establishment by the UN Security Council of a system of mutual support for third states whose economies have been adversely affected as a result of UN non-military sanctions. This system consists of several components: (1) creating new markets for the sale of goods and services of third states; (2) crafting of a logical UN sanctions costs methodology; (3) bringing into UN Security Council for a those bilateral and regional efforts involving cases of UN sanctions compensation; (4) devising norms and procedures for acquiring and pooling of the requisite funds out of which states' claims for damages attributable to UN sanctions might be satisfied; and (5) establishing a mechanism for the adjudication of such claims. While many obstacles admittedly exist to creating such a system of mutual support, the article argues that effective UN sanctions burden sharing is nevertheless important to international relations theory and practice, since UN sanctions appear to be increasing in frequency as they undergird many of the Security Council's contemporary enforcement actions.     

UN sanctions burden sharing: Article 50 of the UN charter and assistance to third states

abstract

This article proposes the establishment by the UN Security Council of a system of mutual support for third states whose economies have been adversely affected as a result of UN non‐military sanctions. This system consists of several components: (1) creating new markets for the sale of goods and services of third states; (2) crafting of a logical UN sanctions costs methodology; (3) bringing into UN Security Council for a those bilateral and regional efforts involving cases of UN sanctions compensation; (4) devising norms and procedures for acquiring and pooling of the requisite funds out of which states’ claims for damages attributable to UN sanctions might be satisfied; and (5) establishing a mechanism for the adjudication of such claims. While many obstacles admittedly exist to creating such a system of mutual support, the article argues that effective UN sanctions burden sharing is nevertheless important to international relations theory and practice, since UN sanctions appear to be increasing in frequency as they undergird many of the Security Council's contemporary enforcement actions.     

“争常”失败后日本与印度的非洲政策比较

"争常"失败后,日本与印度对非洲有基本的共识,即非洲国家对日、印两国争取加入联合国安理会常任理事国具有举足轻重的作用.基于这一共识,日本和印度加,强了对非洲的外交攻关,扩大了对非洲的援助,但日本和印度的非洲政策仍存在重大差异.日本主要通过经济援助方式扩大该国在非洲的影响;而印度在同非洲的交流与合作中,强调向非洲输出技术和文化等软实力的"新模式".深刻了解和认识日本与印度对非洲政策的异同,对于中国制定对非洲政策及发展中非关系具有一定的启示.     

Attitudes toward Consent-Based and Non-Consent-Based International Law in a Regional Power Context

International legal scholars have identified and argued for and against new forms of non-consent-based international law. We study variation in Brazilian public opinion about adherence to international law created in three different ways: through a consent-based multilateral treaty, by the U.N. Security Council with the participation of Brazil, and by the U.N. Security Council without the participation of Brazil. Information that Brazil has participated in creating the international legal obligation through a multilateral treaty or membership on the Security Council yields levels of support for adherence to the legal obligation that are similar to those found when the origins of the legal obligation are generic. Information that the international legal obligation was created without Brazil’s participation, on the other hand, results in reduced support for compliance. This difference, which is particularly concentrated among highly educated respondents, is not driven by reduced concerns about reputational consequences or sanctions. Our results suggest that the increased use of non-consent-based forms of international law might be challenged by a lack of public support for compliance.     

中美俄:三边关系互动新趋势

中美俄三边关系是当今世界上最重要的三边关系。在共同应对国际金融危机的大目标下,特别是在奥巴马就任美国总统之后,三边关系出现了一些新的转机,其中处于较低水平的美俄关系出现了较大的调整。作为联合国常任理事国的中美俄三国,其相互关系的良性互动必然有利于世界的和平、稳定与发展。因此,不排除未来三国之间建立某种对话与协调机制的可能。     

U.S.—Soviet relations: The global village and the free flow of information∗

For the past sixty‐seven years, the Council on Foreign Relations has dedicated itself to enlarging the public dialogue on matters affecting U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. This effort is to be commended. It stands as a testimony to your strong sense of civic responsibility, and it illustrates yet another way in which America's private and public sectors cooperate in matters of national concern.

Forty‐one years ago, Foreign Affairs published the landmark article—"Mr. X"— calling for a bold new approach to the challenges of the post‐war world. At that time, the international structure and order inherited from the nineteenth century had collapsed, and attempts to replace it were directed from two philosophically distinct and antagonistic power centers. This was the era of the Cold War.

America met those challenges with a sense of daring and determination. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO—these stand as testimonials to imaginative leadership and effort. The renewed vitality of Western Europe and Japan—protected by the shield of a strong and effective deterrence—are a measure of its success.

Today, America faces another historic challenge occasioned neither by war nor post‐war dislocations. Rather, it results from changes set in motion by a new and powerful dynamic which in recent years has exploded onto the world scene—the grand spectacle of the Information Revolution.