Cambridge University Press
9780521870191 - International Organisations and Peace Enforcement - The Politics of International Legitimacy - by Katharina P. Coleman
Excerpt

1
Introduction

In the 2004 US presidential debates, Democratic nominee John Kerry strongly criticised the manner in which the Bush administration had launched the war in Iraq in 2003. His foremost criticism was that the campaign was not sufficiently multilateral, leaving the USA to bear ‘90 percent of the casualties in Iraq and 90 percent of the costs’.¹ He suggested that closer attention to alliance-building and more engagement with the United Nations would remedy the situation. This line of attack was well calculated to appeal to US public opinion. George W. Bush responded that he had in fact engaged the UN and that Kerry was undervaluing the coalition that had been built for the Iraq campaign. However, he was clearly on the defensive and struggled to fend off Kerry’s repeated charge that ‘we can do better’ at coalition-building.

Kerry’s second line of criticism was decidedly less successful. He charged that the Iraq campaign failed ‘the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you’re doing what you’re doing and you can prove to the world that you’re doing it for legitimate reasons’.² Kerry suggested that the Bush administration’s refusal ‘to deal at length with the United Nations’ was part of the reason for this failure. This line of attack backfired. Bush immediately challenged the notion of a ‘global test’ as undermining the USA’s right to protect itself and referred to it in subsequent debates to portray Kerry as insufficiently committed to US security. Bush administration officials echoed this argument on various news networks. Sensitive to the political weight of this accusation, Kerry declined to defend his concept, reiterating instead that he would ‘never give any country a veto over [the USA’s] security’.³

The irony of this episode is that Kerry’s second criticism showed a far greater understanding of the role of international organisations in military interventions than his first one. The notion that the UN could guarantee fair burden-sharing in an enforcement operation was a red herring. As this book will show, obtaining the auspices of an international organisation for a military intervention does not obviate the need to form a coalition of the willing or save the lead state from shouldering a disproportionate share of the resulting costs. On the other hand, a UN mandate would have greatly improved the Iraq campaign’s international legitimacy – which is why the Bush administration did in fact seek such a mandate. In doing so, it mirrored the efforts of lead states in all contemporary peace enforcement operations. What distinguished the Bush administration was its willingness to proceed with its intervention despite its failure to secure an international mandate. In the presidential debates, George W. Bush’s rhetoric masked this failure by suggesting that the USA had no need to concern itself with international legitimacy and John Kerry failed to forcefully contradict this stance. Both men were framing their remarks to appeal to the US electorate. The US experience in Iraq, including both US attempts to secure a UN mandate and the international hostility that resulted from intervening without one, has confirmed a different reality: international organisations remain crucial gatekeepers to international legitimacy for interstate military deployments.

This book highlights the central role of international organisations in the politics of international legitimacy surrounding peace enforcement operations. In the contemporary international system, there is a strong norm against interstate aggression but military intervention to bolster international peace and security is increasingly considered acceptable or even laudable. In practice, however, it can be difficult to distinguish between peace enforcement and an act of aggression. Both types of intervention involve substantial and often unsolicited movements of combat-ready troops across international borders, and, regardless of their actual objectives, all intervening states have a strong incentive to portray their activity as benign peace enforcement. The danger, therefore, is that increasing international acceptance of peace enforcement opens the door to partisan invasions for ostensibly altruistic ends. This dilemma has received more widespread attention since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, but it predates that crisis. In fact, it has been raised by every peace enforcement operation, from the Nigerian-led intervention in Liberia in 1990 to the 1998 US-led Kosovo campaign and the intervention in East Timor spearheaded by Australia in 1999. The issue has surfaced most recently in the 2006 negotiations about an international intervention in Lebanon, and will continue to arise whenever a third-party military intervention in a sovereign state is being considered.

How does the contemporary international system cope with this danger? International relations practitioners frequently invoke international organisations as bulwarks against abuse of the concept of peace enforcement. Despite their inherent problems and limitations, these multilateral organisations have a more credible claim to speak for the international community than any other international entity. Moreover, since their collective decision-making procedures require at least some transcendence of individual states’ particularistic interests international organisations are seen as able to make less biased distinctions between genuine peace enforcement and aggression. Thus the 2001 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty reported an ‘overwhelming consensus … around the world’ that the United Nations Security Council was the most appropriate body to authorise military interventions.⁴ It also identified substantial international support for regional or sub-regional international organisations assuming this role, but it did not mention unilateral authorisation by individual states as a viable option. A mandate from an international organisation is crucial to establishing the international legitimacy of a military intervention.

It is this legitimising function that makes international organisations so central to contemporary peace enforcement operations. Although some pooling of resources does take place through international organisations (e.g. the emerging NATO Response Force), no international organisation can mount a peace enforcement operation on its own. States have stubbornly resisted relinquishing their monopoly on the means of warfare by placing significant forces at the disposal of international organisations. They therefore remain the only actors capable of launching and executing peace enforcement operations. However, states almost invariably choose to launch their interventions through international organisations. This book argues that this regularity can only be understood in light of the role that international organisations play in differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate military interventions in the contemporary international system. The importance of this argument is theoretical as well as empirical. In contemporary international relations theory, international organisations are often viewed as creations of international law, instruments of hegemonic power, or facilitators of interstate cooperation and burden-sharing. Their central role in the politics of international legitimacy has been neither adequately recognised nor fully explored.⁵ This book helps fill that gap.

Within this larger empirical and theoretical project, this introduction serves three main purposes. First, it establishes the central empirical observation that modern peace enforcement operations virtually always occur under the auspices of an international organisation. Second, it describes the methodology used within this book to analyse the role of international organisations in launching peace enforcement operations. Finally, it provides an overview of the remainder of this book.

The empirical pattern: international organisations and peace enforcement

This project is inspired by a simple but as yet inadequately explained empirical pattern. Virtually all contemporary peace enforcement operations take place within the framework of an international organisation. This section will define the core concepts of this assertion and demonstrate its empirical validity. The remainder of this book is dedicated to explaining this regularity.

Peace enforcement operations

Peace enforcement operations are forcible military interventions by one or more states into a third country with the express objective of maintaining or restoring international, regional, or local peace and security by ending a violent conflict within that country. They can be distinguished from invasions in that they do not overtly seek to alter the political or geographical status quo to the invader’s benefit. As ideal types, they are also distinct from peacekeeping operations, which despite increasingly robust rules of engagement fundamentally aim at implementing a peace or truce that has already been agreed upon at least in principle by the parties to a particular conflict.

The formal legal basis for peace enforcement operations is Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which authorises UN Security Council ‘action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression’. Specifically, Article 42 allows the Security Council to ‘take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security’. Initially intended to promote collective action against interstate aggression, this provision remained largely dormant during the Cold War, partly because superpower rivalry paralysed the Security Council⁶ and partly because the UN’s disastrous first experience with intrastate peace enforcement in the Congo (1960–4) discouraged any further experimentation. The UN restricted itself mainly to peacekeeping missions, where lightly armed military observers were deployed to monitor the implementation of interstate ceasefire agreements. These operations were conducted under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which deals with ‘Pacific Settlement of Disputes’. Since they represented a striking innovation from the mediation and fact-finding strategies that chapter was originally intended to cover, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarsjold famously referred to them as belonging to ‘Chapter Six and a Half’. Nevertheless, these operations fell far short of enforcement action since they could not apply military force: UN personnel were allowed to use force only in self-defence.

By the early 1990s, the international strategic environment had changed dramatically. The Cold War had ended, but the much-expected ‘peace dividend’ did not materialise. Instead, the disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia and the collapse of Cold War client regimes in the developing world highlighted a new kind of global instability. The international response to the ‘new world disorder’ of state failure and civil war was not only a proliferation of peacekeeping operations⁷ but also a dramatic evolution in the concept of peacekeeping. Most of the new operations in the early 1990s sought to address civil wars and in so doing took on increasingly ambitious tasks, which included organising elections, demobilising combatants, resettling refugees, and in some cases even assuming temporary administrative authority in the host country. Despite the unprecedented breadth of their mandate, however, these so-called ‘second-generation’ peacekeeping operations remained peacekeeping rather than peace enforcement missions: they did not envision using military force to pursue their mandates and impose a settlement on warring factions.

However, peacekeeping reverses in Angola, Somalia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the apparent effectiveness of military might during the 1991 Gulf War, led many policy-makers to re-evaluate the role of military force in addressing contemporary civil conflicts. These circumstances allowed UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to coin and develop the concept of peace enforcement in 1992–3.⁸ He originally proposed the creation of ‘peace-enforcement units’ capable of protecting ceasefires against recalcitrant factions. This idea rapidly evolved into a more general concept of peace enforcement operations as authorised under Chapter VII and independent of the consent of the parties to a particular conflict. The failure of UN peacekeeping forces to prevent massacres and genocide in Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1993), and Rwanda (1994) was widely interpreted as demonstrating both the limitations of peacekeeping methods and the need for enforcement operations that can impose a peace on an on-going conflict, if necessary against some combatants’ wishes. Unlike peacekeeping missions, therefore, peace enforcement operations are launched in the expectation that the use of military force will be required. Their personnel are deployed fully armed and are permitted to use force to accomplish their mission. Peace enforcement operations can thus be understood as that small but increasingly significant sub-set of modern peace operations that embrace the use of military force.

International organisations

For the purposes of this study, international organisations are formal associations that comprise three or more states. They are created by an international charter, sustained by regular meetings of member states, and supported by a permanent secretariat. These organisations are thus the most concrete and visible sub-set of the universe of international institutions, which also includes international norms, international laws, and international regimes surrounding particular issue areas. Much of the attention within contemporary International Relations theory has focused on these less tangible international institutions, yielding valuable insights into the evolution and effectiveness of international norms, laws, and regimes. This project, however, focuses on international organisations, which unlike norms and regimes have a physical presence in the world. They generally have physical headquarters as well as staff who are not only employed by but can also speak for their organisation. In 2004, the Union of International Associations recognised some 238 international organisations of this kind.⁹ They vary widely in purpose, membership structure and requirements, and in the amount of resources and staff at their disposal. Nevertheless all international organisations are fundamentally formal arenas of regular state interaction created by interstate agreements and sustained by at least a minimal organisational infrastructure.

Peace enforcement operations and international organisations

A brief overview of interventions that either meet or approximate the definition of peace enforcement operations elaborated above confirms that virtually all contemporary peace enforcement operations are launched under the auspices of an international organisation.

Table 1.1 comprises the eighteen interventions since 1945 that are most commonly accepted as peace enforcement operations. They all correspond closely to the definition of peace enforcement offered above: these are interstate military interventions explicitly justified by intervening states as aimed at ending a violent conflict within the host country in order to maintain or restore international, regional, or local peace and security. The table lists each intervention’s location (target country) and date, indicates the nature of the intervening force (force status¹⁰), and where appropriate identifies its primary contributing state (lead state) and mandating international organisation.

Table 1.1: Peace enforcement operations

Crucially, all but one of these operations were launched from within the framework of an established international organisation. The sole exception, the 1997–8 intervention in the Central African Republic (CAR), proves rather than disproves the general rule. This intervention was launched by Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Mali, Senegal, and Togo, and financed by France. These states did not share membership in a regional organisation that could have mandated intervention.¹¹ Instead of intervening without international auspices, however, they established the International Mediation Committee, which then dispatched an inter-African force to the CAR.¹² Thus in the absence of an established international organisation, states preferred to create an ad hoc international body rather than intervene without any institutional international auspices.

Table 1.1 also reveals three other interesting trends: First, while the UN is the most active international organisation in peace enforcement, it is not the only one. Only ten of the eighteen operations in table 1.1 were launched under a UN mandate, with the remainder occurring through smaller international organisations. Second, although international organisations are ubiquitous as mandating bodies for peace enforcement operations, their presence within these operations is more limited. In eight of the eighteen cases, the mandating international organisation did not assume command of the intervention force it authorised. Instead, it authorised the creation of a multinational force (MNF) that it did not directly control. This trend is particularly noticeable for the UN, which selected the MNF formula in seven of its ten peace enforcement operations. Third, most peace enforcement operations occur under the direction of a lead state. In thirteen of the eighteen operations in table 1.1, a single country officially accepted responsibility for coordinating, launching, and leading the military intervention force. In three further cases (indicated by state names in parentheses), individual states assumed prominent operational roles without declaring themselves lead states. Thus in the vast majority of cases, international organisations effectively ceded immediate operational control over the interventions they mandated to a single nation-state.

The overarching lesson from table 1.1, then, is that all generally recognised contemporary peace enforcement operations occurred under the mandate of a formal international organisation. The mandating organisation was almost always an established formal international organisation, although not necessarily the United Nations. However, the role of these mandating organisations did not always extend to implementing the peace enforcement operation.

Table 1.2 identifies sixteen additional military operations since 1945 that have some peace enforcement attributes even though they do not strictly correspond to the definition elaborated above. These operations

Table 1.2: Interventions with peace enforcement attributes

must be considered to ensure that the observed ubiquity of international organisations in peace enforcement operations is not simply due to an excessively restrictive definition of this term. Like table 1.1, table 1.2 provides information about the interventions’ locations and dates, the nature of the intervening forces, and the identity of any lead state and/or mandating international organisation.

This additional evidence does not substantially detract from the core proposition that virtually all peace enforcement operations are launched from within the framework of an international organisation. Two facts stand out. First, the interventions in table 1.2 that most resemble peace enforcement operations follow the pattern of seeking the auspices of an

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