Stayin' Alive: The Rumors of the UN's Death Have Been Exaggerated

THE END OF AN ILLUSION

In "Why the Security Council Failed" (May/June 2003), Michael J. Glennon provides a singular service by insisting that our understanding of international law should take historical practice and prevailing security and power realities fully into account. His commonsense approach offers a refreshing contrast to the tendentious claim (too often heard during the Iraq debate) that the proper role of the UN Security Council is to pass judgment on when member states can or cannot use force in defense of their national security.

Such a definition of the council's job is based on an overly narrow and selective reading of the UN Charter. The charter's provisions limiting the use of force were adopted as part of a larger system of collective security that the Security Council was meant to enforce. By repeatedly failing over the past decade to take effective action against Iraq, those permanent members now claiming to be the guardians of international law have, in fact, done the most to undermine it.

Up to this point, Glennon's analysis is right on track. But his commendable effort to apply the cold logic of political realism goes too far: what we are witnessing today is not the death of the actual Security Council, as he suggests, but of the illusion that it is meant to function like a court. Glennon takes three wrong turns in reaching the overly dramatic conclusion that the council is finished.

First, to conclude as he does that the council's failure to act as a global legal arbiter will leave the body unemployed and irrelevant requires adopting the absolutist standards of the legal purists, standards that Glennon elsewhere rejects. In fact, abandoning a maximalist view of what the council is meant to do will have a positive impact, allowing its members to refocus their energies on seeking common ground and on identifying joint projects for maintaining international peace and security. There are plenty of these missions to go around: the successful completion of the UN's 14 existing peacekeeping operations and the amelioration of the continuing violence in western Africa, Congo, and Sudan should provide the council with ample challenges in the months ahead.

No doubt the council faces an acute identity crisis. As Glennon aptly points out, the efforts of medium powers to employ it to counterbalance American primacy have debilitated the already weakened body. Neither Paris, Moscow, nor Washington, however, is ready to drop the council from its political tool kit. France wants its help in Côte d'Ivoire, the United States wants to use it for North Korea and the larger war on terrorism, and the whole council recently embarked on a fact-finding trip to western Africa. Chances are that a wounded, and hopefully chastened, Security Council will find a way to muddle through, as it has so often in the past.

Second, in seeking to draw a sharp distinction between the normative and political dimensions of world affairs, Glennon fails to take account of the critical ways in which the two interact. The fact that power politics predominates does not mean that norms, values, and even legal rules are not also relevant in shaping both the ends to which the powerful give priority and the means by which they choose to pursue them. Power gives a state capacity, but these other factors help determine what the state will do with that capacity. It is hardly coincidental that both sides in the Security Council debate on Iraq sought to invoke legal as well as political symbolism. They recognized the pull that such claims, however cynical or superficial, have on both domestic and international constituencies.

Third, Glennon, again like the legal purists, asserts that one must choose between realism and multilateralism, between power and the council. They argue for the latter, he for the former. But this is a false dichotomy, one that has been promoted by those most resistant to invoking the muscular enforcement provisions of Chapter VII of the charter. The UN's founders had quite the opposite worry: that U.S. power, already predominant in 1945, would not be sufficiently integrated into the UN's structures and capacities. This fear was based on a stark realism forged by world war, not on vague pieties or abstract ideals.

Glennon's trenchant arguments, although they ultimately miss the mark, serve as a pointed reminder of just how far the UN community has drifted from that founding calculus. Rebuilding the bridges between power and law could prove to be a daunting task, but it beats a premature burial for such a promising partnership.

Edward C. Luck is Professor of Practice in International and Public Affairs and Director of the Center on International Organization at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

MISREADING THE RECORD

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Michael J. Glennon makes four fallacious arguments to support his claim that the Security Council has failed. First is his historical claim that the establishment of the UN represented a triumph of legalism in foreign policy. As early as 1945, Time magazine, reporting from the UN's founding conference in San Francisco, concluded that the UN Charter is "written for a world of power, tempered by a little reason." Or as Arthur Vandenberg, the Michigan senator whose switch from isolationism to internationalism was indispensable to U.S. ratification of the UN Charter, described it, "this is anything but a wild-eyed internationalist dream of a world state. ... It is based virtually on a four-power alliance." Such comments make clear that the UN always was, and remains today, a legal framework for political bargaining. Glennon's central insight -- that the UN's effectiveness depends on the power and will of its members -- was in fact the world body's point of departure.