Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

parties, who, if they were unable to find any friends, generally responded to
a negative vote by walking out, while in the UN the famous ‘veto’ for the
five permanent members of the Security Council made such a walkout
unnecessary. However, the universalism of the organizations has made it
difficult for this prerequisite to be explicitly defended, and hence the
persisting sense that the veto was some kind of mistake made in 1945,
rather than an essential feature of the system. The (Security) Council has
been expected to enforce the norms of collective security and universalism,
while, in its very nature, it represents the alternative, Concert, tradition.
A great deal of the rather poor record of these global institutions since
1919 can be explained in terms of the contradictory impulses of these two
traditions. In effect, the system works properly only when they both point
in the same direction, which does happen sometimes, but obviously cannot
be relied upon. The only clear-cut example of a collective security enforce-
ment action occurred in Korea in 1950 as a result of the temporary absence
of the Soviet Union (one of the veto powers) from the Security Council.
Even in 1990, when universal principles and the interests of most of the
Great Powers pointed in the same direction with respect to Iraq’s invasion
of Kuwait, the Coalition that enforced the law acted outside UN control,
albeit with the sanction of a Security Council resolution.
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Nonetheless, it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which the UN
system has failed to address problems of security. As in the case of European
integration, the failure of grand theory has been accompanied by quite a
high degree of institutional and conceptual innovation. When in the 1950s
the UN was stymied by the Cold War, the then Secretary General of the UN,
Dag Hammarskjöld, invented the notion of ‘preventive diplomacy’ – proactive
attempts to keep the Cold War out of particular areas – and, with others,
pioneered the notion of ‘peacekeeping’ (the employment of troops in UN
uniforms with a mandate to assist the sides to a conflict if they wished to
be kept apart). The UN has also offered mediation services, truce observers,
and a number of other ‘good offices’ that parties to a conflict could use.
There can be little doubt that these innovations have been genuinely helpful
in a number of cases – and in the 1990s there were an increasing number of
occasions upon which the UN was called upon to provide such services.
What is striking about these innovations is the way in which they com-
bine the pragmatism of the Concert tradition with a ‘politics from below’
element which is universalist in origin. As with Concert politics, peacekeep-
ing is, in the jargon of social work, ‘non-judgemental’; the UN is able to act
to help preserve order because it does not take sides, and does not concern
itself with the rights and wrongs of the case. This refusal to judge is, of
course, totally against the ethic of collective security, which rests crucially
upon a willingness to identify the wrongdoer – and it is noticeable that the
UN’s attitude is often criticized by those who feel they can actually tell right
from wrong: witness, for example, the resentment of the Bosnian Government
at the apparent willingness of the UN to treat Bosnian Serbs on a par with
the ‘legitimate’ authority. However, the non-judgemental quality of the
UN is much appreciated by many smaller member-states, who fear that if
judgement is to be the norm they are more likely to be in the dock than on
the bench.
Preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping are not substitutes for collective
security; they do not answer the basic question which is whether it is possible
for international institutions to take us beyond a realist, self-help system in
matters of security. Functionalism tries to do this by undermining sover-
eignty directly, but has been no more successful than were the Peace Projects
of the eighteenth century. The attraction of collective security was that it did
not try to undermine state sovereignty as such; rather it attempted to get
sovereign powers to support a wider interest than the national interest. In
the formal sense it failed in that there have been very few cases which have
been overtly collective security operations – however, in an informal sense,
some elements of a collective security system do seem to have taken hold.
The closest analogy to an informal collective security system may be the old
English common law idea of a posse comitatus – men called out by the
sheriff to assist in the enforcing of the law, a notion which encompasses
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