Document created: 31 December 03
Air University Review, January-February
1972
There has always been something fascinating about the idea of an international organization to maintain world peace just as a police force maintains order in a community. From the seventeenth century “Grand Design” of the Duke of Sully (or even earlier) to the founding of the United Nations, philosophers, Utopians, international lawyers, and even statesmen have dreamed of such an organization. Generally it embraced the idea of the “great powers” acting together against a common or definable enemy or to preserve order in their areas of common interest. To some extent the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth century answered this prescription, and the United Nations, as originally conceived, was to be no exception. The great powers, the victors of World War II, acting together in the United Nations Security Council, were to maintain peace by ready forces taking common action against any disturber of international order.
Only in
Gradually the United Nations began experimenting with the “peacekeeping” alternative to collective security. As Larry Fabian says in his recent book,* “peacekeeping” . . . required no finding that anyone was guilty of aggression, no application of armed force by the UN against a delinquent state, and no enforcement of political settlements on disputants not voluntarily accepting them.” The U.N. thus assumed the role of an “impartial” intermediary in small conflicts or crisis situations. This meant that the military arm of the United Nations would not be, as originally envisioned, mainly the forces of the great powers. Instead, the peacekeeping role was assumed by a group of middle and smaller powers, and it became not so much military operations in the traditional sense as a matter largely of noncoercive presence and services.
Fabian’s book covers this transition in great detail, from Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold’s first departure from conventional collective security through the various national preparedness proposals reflecting U.N. concern for peacekeeping, and concludes with a number of “guiding proposals” for future preparedness objectives. It is interesting, if not puzzling, that so much active peacekeeping responsibility has been assumed by so few nations—mainly the Nordic countries and Canada. The peacekeepers are “warriors among diplomats,” says Fabian, reversing Robert Murphy’s phrase; and despite all the space devoted to peacekeeping preparedness by Fabian, Boyd, and many others, it is not peacekeeping know-how that is in short supply so much as the diplomatic consensus to apply it.
Russian foot-dragging in peacekeeping has been influenced by the fact that
all the first such operations coincided with
The detail Fabian lavishes on peacekeeping preparations is extraordinary—one section on preparedness is entitled, “The 38th Floor and the Administrators,” and he devotes pages and pages to staff meetings and other details. At the end, however, he can only say: “What ought to be evident from this short survey of the three preparedness generations is that each has been the product of a specific set of factors and their interrelations.” Is there any historical event or development about which this could not be said?
Like all writers on U.N. peacekeeping, Fabian cannot resist issuing a prescription for the future. His includes superpower disengagement from peacekeeping operations, formal abandonment of collective security, emphasis on what is involved at the national level, and providing the U.N. with adequate resources for planning peacekeeping. But, as Fabian says, we would then still be light-years away from” . . . a standing, internationally controlled and recruited peacekeeping force able to be dispatched on the U.N.’s own authority to trouble spots around the world.” The fact remains, Fabian goes on, that”. . . holders of the power, responsibility, and influence needed to bring such a permanent force into being unreservedly do not want one—and these include the U.N. and all of its important members.”
Another book on the subject* should be of special interest to Air Force readers, for the author, Colonel Boyd, not only studied U.N. peacekeeping as the Air Force Research Associate at Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies but was Deputy U.S. Air Force Representative and Chief of Staff of the U.N. Military Staff Committee during 1965-69. Boyd focuses on three major crises—Suez, the Congo, and Cyprus—and in each one considers the background of the decision to employ U.N. forces, the alternatives to U.N. involvement, and the legal bases for the peacekeeping operations. He examines the characteristics of each peacekeeping force, the problems of creating such forces, and their composition, organization, and command and control. He then discusses the concept of “preventive diplomacy” underlying peacekeeping operations, looks at the political, legal, and financial problems involved, and spends considerable time on the military readiness implications. He concludes that
. . . there are many things that can be done within the realm of the politically possible to improve the readiness posture of military forces earmarked for possible United Nations use and to insure that field operations, when and if undertaken by these forces, have a greater chance for success.
He recommends that one key to getting such operations under way is to augment the staff of the Military Adviser to the Secretary-General and authorize him and his staff to initiate steps “along these suggested lines.”
Both authors are to be congratulated for having trod with relative surefootedness among the vast accretion of murky U.N. documents on peacekeeping. (Rosalyn Higgins, incidentally, has edited two big volumes of them, with astute commentary.) Likewise, both Fabian and Boyd, along with other authors who have examined U.N. peacekeeping, naturally overstress what in the complicated history of our times is a relatively minor collection of activities. Indeed, with the lush flowering of new national entities after World War II and all the internal and external disorder consequent to their fragmented structure, absence of effective self-governing traditions, and narrow nationalist aims, the part played by U.N. peacekeeping would seem to have an even less significant future. But in the long history of humankind the trend has been toward larger and more effective social organizations. There is every reason to believe that international society will be no exception and that we shall see more substantial international organizations, with the armed forces needed to maintain world order. All of us have a stake in this, for if, as H. G. Wells said, “human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe,” it is also a race between the forces of dissolution and anarchy and mankind’s capacity to develop large-scale effective organizations for the enforcement of peace.
* Larry L. Fabian, Soldiers without Enemies: Preparing the United Nations for Peacekeeping (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1971, $7.50), 315 pages.
* James M. Boyd, United Nations Peace-Keeping Operations: A Military and Political Appraisal (New York: Praeger, 1971, $15.00), 261 pages.
Colonel Harold L. Hitchens (Ph.D.,
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