What does the UN Security Council do, exactly? The answer, it turns out, is more than you think, and less than you might hope.
David Bosco, Foreign Policy, September 23, 2009
INTRODUCTION
The United Nations (UN), established immediately after World War II, originally comprised only the Republic of China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all allies during the war that promoted the fledgling institution as “peace loving” nations combining “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
1
Many of my generation born before World War II clearly remember postwar elementary school classes where the UN flag stood proudly with the American flag. We expectantly learned geography, cultures, and languages as we added the names of new UN member states, exchanged our prized collection of country flags (then only 51) and fell silent as our teachers, some of whom had fought in the war, offered our first lesson in “humanitarianism” as we learned the plight of those left destitute, hungry, and sick by prolonged war and conflict. It was seen as a hopeful time that guaranteed all wars would finally end.
The potential for the UN and its Charter remained a dominant subject in schools and communities into the 1950s, focused especially on those Charter promises to provide an effective and collaborative system protecting member states “against violators of the peace.” The Charter spelled out the original system of collective security as outlined in Chapter VI, which covered the voluntary settlement of disputes, and Chapter VII, which dealt with enforcement action. Chapter VII’s Article 39 first authorized the Security Council (SC) to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.” Article 42 was designed to take such action by “air, sea or land forces as may be necessary,” and Article 43 committed all UN member states “to make available to the SC, on its call, armed forces, assistance, facilities, including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.”
1
Whereas much hope for the future was placed in the ratification of Article 43, it was never implemented.
This paper follows the course of Article 43 throughout the UN Charter’s history to date, making an argument that current and unsettling security demands once again dictate that its ratification and implementation must be reconsidered to ensure the conservation and enforcement of global peace and security.
THE COLD WAR: DEATH KNELL FOR ARTICLE 43
Despite the promises of the Charter, caution loomed quickly among the major UN Charter benefactors. Even before the UN Charter was adopted in San Francisco in 1945, Korea, occupied by Japan during the war, was divided at the 38th parallel; this established North Korea, led by Communist Kim Il-sung, while the anticommunist autocrat Syngman Rhee led South Korea. Also in 1945, the Yalta agreement argued for consensus on the anticipated “postwar world order” and eventually settled on two contradictory agreements: one to respect democracy throughout Europe and the other to recognize a de facto sphere of influence in Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union (this led to the division of occupation zones in Germany).Reference Gaddis
2
Within a year, the idealistic expectations of the UN’s “one world view” were shattered by confusion over East–West antagonisms, rivalries between a growing list of new UN members, and questions about whether member states were communist or not. The US policy called for containment of Soviet expansion, labeling the Soviet Union as a rival and no longer a partner in peace. Winston Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain speech and Truman’s pledge to officially establish communism as a “vital national security interest” put a lid on many dreams tied to the UN Charter.
3
It was Article 43 and the singular estimation that such an army would finally cease attempts at narcissistic domination by the Hitlers, Stalins, and Mussolinis of the world that caught the attention of the world. Hope faded as students of my generation struggled to make sense of the seemingly contradictory concept of a “Cold War” and the meaning of UN-recognized “proxy wars” operationally defined by a widening split between East and West during the Chinese civil war, the Berlin Blockade, the Congo War, the Korean War, and my generation’s Vietnam War.Reference Ram
4
By 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established, which was binding to all nations,
5
along with the Convention Against Genocide, which the Soviet Union summarily disregarded and often crushed with force.
6
With the UN unwilling to act upon such atrocities, Chapter VII promises were rendered meaningless for those world populations that needed them the most.
Throughout the Cold War, the defined value of the UN slipped into one that was remarkably different from what was initially intended under Article 43. Consequently, nothing of Article 43 and related provisions designed to maintain international peace and security has ever been implemented, nor has the SC’s Military Staff Committee, its longest standing subsidiary body, ever advised the SC to intervene in civil wars, despite such wars being major breaches of peace. The SC’s right to “take measures” would become restricted to response to breaches of “international peace,” leaving the internal affairs of countries as “out-of-bounds” internal matters.
7
As such, future generations were rarely aware of the original existence and intent of Article 43.
Despite the demise of Article 43, several redeeming features of the Charter remained. While the Charter does not permit the use of force against another state for nonviolent purposes, the one exception in the language would permit the use of force in “humanitarian interventions” which could not be rejected by the state itself.Reference Henkin
8
To this end, the UN, overcoming what appeared to be a paralyzing effect of the superpower veto, invented peacekeeping operations (PKO), a term which does not appear in the Charter itself. Over the ensuing decades, PKOs emerged as the major fallback for UN survival in every official document and press release. They allowed a compromise where “limited and impartial defense weapons” were to be used to intervene, only following a cease-fire.Reference Betts
9
It was argued that PKOs “came about out of necessity” by the UN to contain international conflicts as a nonviolent use of military force to facilitate the settlement of the growing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union by peaceful means.Reference Ram
4
Peacekeeping missions, representing a hybrid somewhere between UN Chapters VI and VII, began in 1948 to “observe and maintain cease-fires.” Despite the lack of a clear legal mandate for PKOs in the Charter, no legal challenge to their deployment has occurred.Reference Findlay
10
Admittedly, for over 40 years during the Cold War, UN peacekeeping forces served an important role in monitoring cease-fire agreements, separating the parties to a conflict, and monitoring elections. However, Hempson, looking at the challenges of PKOs, asserts that there is a deficit in the “inability to confront the hard questions of whether or not the United Nations is equipped for missions that now entail more peace implementation and enforcement than peacekeeping, especially in an environment of ever more diminishing resources and international will for prolonged and complex peacekeeping initiatives.”Reference Hempson
11
From the humanitarian side alone, the Cold War exemplifies the failure behind the United Nations Charter. Without Article 43, no watchdog function over international conflicts existed. Clearly, the real power of the UN, then and now, resides with the original 5 members, split along the Cold War divide, who enjoy absolute veto power. Each side traded veto votes, 279 during the Cold War,Reference Weiss, Forsythe and Coate
12
many of which stifled crucial humanitarian needs resulting in preventable deaths judged to be in the millions.
END OF THE COLD WAR
With the end of the Cold War and victory over communism, there were immediate renewed calls to ratify Article 43 and for the UN to finally become the agency for achieving world peace through creating a system of international collective security.Reference Conetta and Knight
13
Disappointingly, this chapter in the life of the UN proved disjointed, focusing more on defining operational intent of UN military actions rather than on Article 43 implementation.
Peace Enforcement or Article 43 by Another Name
The UN involved itself in three general types of operations involving military units: peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and full-fledged defensive wars or wars of “counteraggression” like the 1990 Persian Gulf War conducted formally under the authority of Chapter VII of the UN charter as “peace enforcement actions.”Reference Houck
14
These actions strengthened the hopes for the future role of the UN in maintaining international peace and security. Unfortunately, the Persian Gulf War became the last case of the traditional kind of interstate conflict in the post–Cold War era, while many intrastate conflicts, kept frozen during the Cold War, exploded. As such, there was a dramatic demand for UN PKOs and debates on what conflict operations the UN should partake in all over the world.Reference Roberts and Kingsbury
15
,
Reference Weiss and Daws
16
Confusion resulted when “peace enforcement,” as it is used by the US military, calls for the physical interposition of armed forces to separate ongoing combatants to create a cease-fire that did not previously exist. On the other hand, Boutros-Ghali, the UN’s Secretary General at the time, used “peace enforcement” to “refer to actions to keep a cease-fire from being violated or to reinstate a failed cease-fire.” Snow emphasizes that “unlike peacekeepers, peace enforcers are often not welcomed by one or either side(s). Rather, they are active fighters who must impose a cease-fire that is opposed by one or both combatants; in the process, the neutrality that distinguishes peacekeepers will most likely be lost.”Reference Snow
17
As Hempson wrote, “The United Nations was forced to expand its understanding of what peacekeeping entailed to include long-term conflict resolution. Peacekeeping quickly evolved from a limited role of symbolic deterrence primarily charged with monitoring an existing cease-fire to an active one that involved in-depth conflict resolution and peace enforcement. UN peacekeeping crept ever closer to peace implementation and enforcement,”Reference Hempson
11
. . . which by any other name appears to be compatible with what Article 43 was originally designed to do.
Among policy wonks, military experts, and diplomats, the end of the Cold War signaled renewed belief that the UN could now start performing the role it was originally designed for in the Charter. Dormant high-level supporters came out of the woodwork proposing that it was now time to recognize and empower Article 43. Policy briefs and journalists strongly argued that membership in the UN entails an additional obligation specified under Article 43. In 1992, then US presidential candidate Bill Clinton expressed support for a voluntary UN rapid deployment force, and in 1993, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher informed the UN SC that the US would back proposals for a UN rapid deployment force, the resolution proposing that the president had the authority to make American troops available to the SC on its call without requiring the authorization of the Congress.Reference Langille
18
Also in 1993, then-Senator Joseph Biden, during his senatorial campaign, urgently introduced a resolution to reduce congressional oversight of the use of American military force. He believed that the president should be restricted in his ability to defend purely national interests, but free to commit forces in defense of more “noble” multinational causes.Reference Sheehy
19
Indeed, the 1994 Presidential Decision Directive-25 was an attempt by the Clinton administration to 1) express its desire to have the UN play a greater role in maintaining international peace and stability, 2) prevent or limit the United States’ ability to use PKOs as the centerpiece of its foreign policy, 3) establish that UN peacekeeping missions were in the best interests of the United States and required domestic support, and 4) ensure that with the demands of both the government and the American people the United States would retain control over the US forces that are required for the UN.
20
,
Reference Snyder
21
Interestingly, according to Langille, Russian statesmen on various occasions also endorsed UN standby forces, the negotiation of Article 43 agreements, and even expressed readiness to commit forces to a UN army.Reference Langille
18
Rostow revealed that during the Cold War, a major theme of Russian diplomacy was, all along, a general belief that “only the policy of expansion pursued by the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1989 prevented the implementation of Article 43.”Reference Rostow
22
They now agreed that time had come to carry out the original intention of the Article under Chapter VII. Furthermore, a “strong recommendation to the same effect” was issued by the former chancellor of the German Republic and “former prime ministers of Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, Zambia, Nigeria, and Portugal,” along with many former diplomats.Reference Rostow
22
Other advocates, especially “Third World” countries resistant to anything that seemed to support US supremacy, suggested that a UN army is necessary to keep America from becoming a “global policeman.” Then–Oklahoma Democrat Senator David Boren assured that in any standing UN army the US would be sharing the burden with other nations, satisfying the naysayers by declaring that “while Americans want something done, they do not want to do it alone.”Reference Sheehy
19
Proposed Article 43 Force Models
Debate advanced enough that the conversation questioned what a potential UN force under Article 43 would look like. Conetta and Knight concluded that if the goal is a truly rapid, multilateral capability to deploy, there is no good substitute for a UN standing force.Reference Houck
14
In 1993, Dennehy and colleagues, all US military officers fulfilling graduate degrees at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, provided a “possible futuristic glimpse of what would actually constitute a UN multinational peace enforcement model for the 21st century.” Reminding that “peace enforcement” is, at its “greatest extreme, full-scale combat which implicitly demands a professional well-trained military force to ensure operational success and minimum personnel casualties.” They advocated for 3 types of force models with the “greatest potential for success” for multinational peace enforcement, the structure of which remains valid today:
∙ a standing force of relatively small numbers under control of the UN Secretary General,
∙ a standby force comprised of earmarked units from members of the SC and General Assembly, and
∙ an ad hoc or UN coalition force similar to the one assembled for the Persian Gulf War, which compelled Iraq’s compliance with the UN resolutions demanding its withdrawal from the region.Reference Dennehy, Doil and Harper
23
,
Reference Quigley
24
The Dennehy analysis further argued that one reason Article 43 was never implemented was the reluctance of UN member states to commit forces permanently to the United Nations. Instead of invoking Article 43, their “Blue Helmet Combat Force” report suggested that the UN community embrace the spirit of Chapter 43 through the less formal mechanism of memoranda of understanding, proposing that a UN standby force be based on the model of US military corps comprising approximately 55 000 troops. Composition of the force would have integrated command, control, communications and intelligence capabilities, reliable logistics, and common training with a capacity to coordinate with UN planning and administrative staff and the ability to deploy on 72 hours’ notice. Composition would include no more than 5 national forces with at least 1 from a nation not serving on the SC.Reference Dennehy, Doil and Harper
23
That same year, the Cambridge University’s Global Security Program proposed a Chapter VII Committee to assist the SC in “framing resolutions that properly balance a desired political outcome with the military means required to achieve it.”Reference Whitman and Bartholomew
25
However, what emerged in the 1990s was, once again, the tragedy of numerous UN authorized missions “in the gray area between traditional PKO missions and peace enforcement,” leading to some of the most disastrous events in the history of UN peacekeeping, especially in Srebrenica and Rwanda in 1995, where the “unwillingness to act in the face of genocide”Reference Schaefer
26
was particularly egregious. The ongoing debate related to the question of how robustly UN missions should operate in enforcing their mandate, with growing awareness within the UN of a widening disjoint between the expectations placed upon peacekeeping forces and what they actually achieved.Reference Schaefer
26
This series of debacles led to a reexamination of UN peace enforcement operations and culminated in the 2000 Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (better known as the Brahimi Report). The report questioned the appropriateness of pre–Cold War traditional peacekeeping missions. While acknowledging “the need for robust peacekeeping operations at times,” it emphasized unequivocally that “the United Nations does not wage war. Where enforcement action is required, it has consistently been entrusted to coalitions of willing States, with the authorization of the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the Charter.”
27
The report cited that peacekeeping missions had been unsuccessful due to the lack of involvement of “troop-contributing countries,” which forced a critical “gap between the physical means provided and the aims of the mission,” a factor that became worse when the war on terror began in 2001.
27
The ongoing stationing of large contingents of Western troops in Afghanistan and Iraq limits the availability of forces for other operations, ensuring that both UN and non-UN troops, primarily from “ad hoc coalitions of willing states,” remained overstretched.Reference Williams and Bellamy
28
Actually, “very few of the Brahimi report recommendations were implemented or implemented properly but the document highlighted PKOs operational and doctrinal flaws”Reference Durand
29
which would, more sensibly, have been considered ongoing operational tasks and preparation requirements under force models linked to Article 43 if it existed. Interestingly, the report underscored the real problem, noting and clarifying once again that the UN member states had not yet implemented a standing UN army or standing UN police force and were suffering the consequences.
The last of the proposed force models was authorized because of prolonged and highly contentious PKOs in Sierra Leone, Sudan, and the former Yugoslavia. After nearly fourteen years in the war-weary and conflict-stricken Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN established “a new, more aggressive force called an Intervention Brigade” in March 2013. Referred to as the UN Force Intervention Brigade, it constituted part of the ongoing UN stabilization mission in the Congo and marked the first “targeted offensive of the UN” calling for military action to “neutralize and disarm” the M23 militia group, as well as other Congolese and foreign rebel groups that threaten civil security.Reference Tull
30
Critics asked whether the Force Intervention Brigade itself was legal, impartial, and neutral in its aggressive mandate, raised concerns within the UN about a widening disjoint between the expectations placed upon peacekeeping forces and what they can actually achieve, and warned that the SC inadvertently made the Force Intervention Brigade and the PKO mission a party to the armed conflict, and thus risked loss of legal protections from attack afforded to them under international law.Reference Tull
30
,
Reference Benson
31
For the original proponents and current supporters of Article 43, this report illustrated another failed attempt to sidestep explicit Article 43 language for “enforcement” by other legal and diplomatic means.
Disappearance of Article 43 From United Nations Consciousness
The UN’s “Repertory of Practice of the UN Organization” lists all reports representing legal publications that contain analytical studies of the decisions of the principal organs of the United Nations under each of the Articles of the Charter of the United Nations.
32
Because agreements under Article 43 were never concluded in 1945, and there is no recorded UN practice of Article 43 forcing the UN to develop practical arrangements to carry out military operations in the absence of such agreements, any and all legal review regarding Article 43 in the UN Repertory ended in 1993. The last recorded statement was “It cannot be said that the Charter has left the SC impotent in the face of an emergency situation when agreements under Article 43 have not been concluded. . . . While Article 43, as well as supportive Articles 44, 45, 46, and 47, has been invoked in the SC communications, some of which expressed the readiness of Member States to place armed forces at the disposal of the SC, the reference to those Articles in these instances has, however, occasioned no constitutional discussion.” No further mention of Article 43 can be found in the UN Repertory of Practice documents, nor did the SC explicitly refer to or be involved in constitutional discussions concerning Articles 43 to 45 in any of its decisions.
32
However, when the SC does not have any armed forces at its disposal, it utilizes circuitous and often hotly debated arrangements short of Article 43 to carry out military operations using Chapter VII, Article 42 to “maintain or restore international peace and security if it considers nonmilitary measures to be or to have proven inadequate”
32
or Article 41, to use measures not involving the use of armed force employed to achieve “complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.”
33
The SC authorized the use of force by several peacekeeping missions and multinational forces in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Middle East, the Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Liberia, and Somalia.
32
,
33
Under these operational conditions, the number of uniformed personnel serving in UN peace missions has steadily increasedReference Williams and Bellamy
28
to reach almost 100 000 in 2010, 5 times more than the number in 2000, and as of May 31, 2017, a total of 71 operations of uniformed, civilian, and volunteer personnel have been completed with 112 207 personnel in 16 current PKOs.
34
IS ARTICLE 43 IN THE FUTURE OF THE UN?
The UN of 1945 is not the UN of 1990 or 2017. What has been consistent over the decades is that the problems of global security and the UN’s role in mitigation and prevention have become increasingly complex and essentially unaddressed. Studies support that the reasons for crises and how the world responds to them change dramatically every 10 to 15 years.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough
35
Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, and others see the “current UN as a 20th century institutional structure and culture struggling to adapt to new 21st century realities.”Reference Rudd
36
With the 75th anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter in 2015, many world diplomats spoke of fears that the UN will cease to exist without a stronger and reformed mandate in global governance and security. The consistent priorities to consider are the following:
∙ Moving from current “unipolarity” of the SC to “multipolarity” with the focus on reforming the governance composition of the SC, which no longer reflects “geopolitical realities”Reference Rudd
36
; granting permanent SC status for Africa and Latin America and an increase in seats for the Asia Pacific region, which today contains 55% of the world’s population.Reference Garrie
37
,
Reference Sachs
38
∙ Combining the SC with the General Assembly to ensure that the UN is at the center of global affairs and functions optimally as a task-oriented “collective security system” organization, where terrorism, climate change, and the current 65.6 million displaced people escaping drought and conflict are managed.
39
,
Reference Burkle
40
∙ Stressing a strong collective security focus for the UN SC and General Assembly designed to disarm and eliminate all nuclear weapons and prevent superpower cancelling of UN nuclear agreements, without which a nuclear-free world will not be realized.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough
35
The Cold War nuclear weaponry status in the 1950s has changed from 2 countries (United States and Russia) to 9 countries and over 15 000 nuclear weapons.Reference Kristensen and Norris
43
With Resolution 71/258, the General Assembly decided to convene in 2017 a United Nations Conference to negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.
44
∙ Enforcing a global order grounded by international law and backed by a standing task force that maintains the collective security system of small states and protects them from subjugation by larger states as seen in the Ukraine and Crimea and threatened in the Balkan states.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough
35
Unfortunately, the post–Cold War brought with it chronically failed states and an absence of effective leadership. This led to a vacuum too often filled with opportunistic despots with identifiable character disorders and a tedious familiarity to those responsible for World War II. They are similarly driven to seek the ultimate power to control and subjugate countries that disagree with them. Only the presence and authority of a global task force, beyond that of regional organizations such as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), will mitigate their predictable destructive advances.Reference Burkle
45
As a student of UN Article 43 since 1945, I predict that if the responsibility to protect agenda alone was successful then both the SC and General Assembly would immediately lobby to implement Article 43 as a strong message that current moves toward superpower hegemony were no longer allowed. A sizeable ongoing budget for both the US military and those of other nations is already earmarked for the training of small country militaries for both national security and peacekeeping, and it would easily be translated to requirements under Article 43, especially given the unique demands of urban warfare, terrorism, and cyberterrorism.Reference Keck
46
,
47
It is rarely recognized and appreciated that Finland has contributed 50 000 PKO troops over the years without complaint or fanfare; this suggests that similar contributions will occur from many other countries if the SC protections under Article 43 are expanded and assured.Reference Garrie
37
UN members recognize that the scope and complexity of violent conflicts has surpassed the world community’s capacity and capability to address them properly. The humanitarian community recognizes the “unprecedented number of humanitarian emergencies,” admitting that “governments, UN agencies, multilateral organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations will need to put aside differences and relinquish authority, influences, and funding” to manage future crises.Reference Spiegel
48
It is a folly to believe that any one country’s military can adequately address the current conflicts. The 2015 UN secretary general’s report described the “deteriorating armed conflict environments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Yemen that are intertwined with terrorism, with violent extremists exploiting national, regional, and local vulnerabilities, including ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, and political tensions. The rapid emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or Daesh, has reshaped the violent extremist landscape and amplified the already substantial threat posed by older extremist groups such as Al-Qaida, Boko Haram, and Al-Shabaab. ISIL has carried out, inspired, or claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in Bangladesh, Belgium, Egypt, France, Germany, Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and the United States of America.”
49
Article 43 will ensure that the Boko Harams in Africa and the chemical weapons violations in the Syrian war are dealt with expeditiously at the local, regional, and global level and are no longer dependent on the decisions of one president who did not respond to the “red line chemical violation” in Syria because he failed to obtain permission from Congress. Those days are behind us, especially in the United States, where the current administration plans to cut UN funding more than 50%, and NATO countries feel they can no longer rely on the United States for their security.Reference Birnbaum and Noack
50
The integration of global peace and security can only be accomplished legitimately by ratification and implementation of Article 43 with a “ready-reaction” force capability that responds rapidly to country, regional, and global crises before warring has advanced to the point that public health infrastructure and protections essential for survival are destroyed, as they are today in northern Syria.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough
35
For the uninitiated, this may be first seen by current world superpowers as “the small country army,”Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough
35
but with time it will turn into a much-appreciated force shared by all countries to ensure that no country is above the law and that conflicts do not progress beyond the point of no return. The United States is no longer the “world’s indispensable nation,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described it. As the United States withdraws as the global leader and protector, a more respected and modern-day interpretation of “enlightened self-interest” would be to transfer that responsibility and role to the UN.
The UN has been the global voice for economic and social programs and can claim ownership of many accomplishments that have gone unnoticed. Rudd emphasizes that the UN has “strived to respond to the globalization of everything” from financial stability, reducing poverty, climate change, forced migration, and advancing new technologies to the developing world, to name but a few.Reference Rudd
36
The millennial generation see themselves less as nationalists and more as global citizens, suggesting that they will embrace a greater role of global security ownership for the UN.
What does the UN Security Council do, exactly? The answer, it turns out, is more than you think, and less than you might hope.
David Bosco, Foreign Policy, September 23, 2009
INTRODUCTION
The United Nations (UN), established immediately after World War II, originally comprised only the Republic of China, France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all allies during the war that promoted the fledgling institution as “peace loving” nations combining “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” 1 Many of my generation born before World War II clearly remember postwar elementary school classes where the UN flag stood proudly with the American flag. We expectantly learned geography, cultures, and languages as we added the names of new UN member states, exchanged our prized collection of country flags (then only 51) and fell silent as our teachers, some of whom had fought in the war, offered our first lesson in “humanitarianism” as we learned the plight of those left destitute, hungry, and sick by prolonged war and conflict. It was seen as a hopeful time that guaranteed all wars would finally end.
The potential for the UN and its Charter remained a dominant subject in schools and communities into the 1950s, focused especially on those Charter promises to provide an effective and collaborative system protecting member states “against violators of the peace.” The Charter spelled out the original system of collective security as outlined in Chapter VI, which covered the voluntary settlement of disputes, and Chapter VII, which dealt with enforcement action. Chapter VII’s Article 39 first authorized the Security Council (SC) to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression.” Article 42 was designed to take such action by “air, sea or land forces as may be necessary,” and Article 43 committed all UN member states “to make available to the SC, on its call, armed forces, assistance, facilities, including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.” 1 Whereas much hope for the future was placed in the ratification of Article 43, it was never implemented.
This paper follows the course of Article 43 throughout the UN Charter’s history to date, making an argument that current and unsettling security demands once again dictate that its ratification and implementation must be reconsidered to ensure the conservation and enforcement of global peace and security.
THE COLD WAR: DEATH KNELL FOR ARTICLE 43
Despite the promises of the Charter, caution loomed quickly among the major UN Charter benefactors. Even before the UN Charter was adopted in San Francisco in 1945, Korea, occupied by Japan during the war, was divided at the 38th parallel; this established North Korea, led by Communist Kim Il-sung, while the anticommunist autocrat Syngman Rhee led South Korea. Also in 1945, the Yalta agreement argued for consensus on the anticipated “postwar world order” and eventually settled on two contradictory agreements: one to respect democracy throughout Europe and the other to recognize a de facto sphere of influence in Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union (this led to the division of occupation zones in Germany).Reference Gaddis 2 Within a year, the idealistic expectations of the UN’s “one world view” were shattered by confusion over East–West antagonisms, rivalries between a growing list of new UN members, and questions about whether member states were communist or not. The US policy called for containment of Soviet expansion, labeling the Soviet Union as a rival and no longer a partner in peace. Winston Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain speech and Truman’s pledge to officially establish communism as a “vital national security interest” put a lid on many dreams tied to the UN Charter. 3
It was Article 43 and the singular estimation that such an army would finally cease attempts at narcissistic domination by the Hitlers, Stalins, and Mussolinis of the world that caught the attention of the world. Hope faded as students of my generation struggled to make sense of the seemingly contradictory concept of a “Cold War” and the meaning of UN-recognized “proxy wars” operationally defined by a widening split between East and West during the Chinese civil war, the Berlin Blockade, the Congo War, the Korean War, and my generation’s Vietnam War.Reference Ram 4 By 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established, which was binding to all nations, 5 along with the Convention Against Genocide, which the Soviet Union summarily disregarded and often crushed with force. 6 With the UN unwilling to act upon such atrocities, Chapter VII promises were rendered meaningless for those world populations that needed them the most.
Throughout the Cold War, the defined value of the UN slipped into one that was remarkably different from what was initially intended under Article 43. Consequently, nothing of Article 43 and related provisions designed to maintain international peace and security has ever been implemented, nor has the SC’s Military Staff Committee, its longest standing subsidiary body, ever advised the SC to intervene in civil wars, despite such wars being major breaches of peace. The SC’s right to “take measures” would become restricted to response to breaches of “international peace,” leaving the internal affairs of countries as “out-of-bounds” internal matters. 7 As such, future generations were rarely aware of the original existence and intent of Article 43.
Despite the demise of Article 43, several redeeming features of the Charter remained. While the Charter does not permit the use of force against another state for nonviolent purposes, the one exception in the language would permit the use of force in “humanitarian interventions” which could not be rejected by the state itself.Reference Henkin 8 To this end, the UN, overcoming what appeared to be a paralyzing effect of the superpower veto, invented peacekeeping operations (PKO), a term which does not appear in the Charter itself. Over the ensuing decades, PKOs emerged as the major fallback for UN survival in every official document and press release. They allowed a compromise where “limited and impartial defense weapons” were to be used to intervene, only following a cease-fire.Reference Betts 9 It was argued that PKOs “came about out of necessity” by the UN to contain international conflicts as a nonviolent use of military force to facilitate the settlement of the growing tensions between the US and the Soviet Union by peaceful means.Reference Ram 4 Peacekeeping missions, representing a hybrid somewhere between UN Chapters VI and VII, began in 1948 to “observe and maintain cease-fires.” Despite the lack of a clear legal mandate for PKOs in the Charter, no legal challenge to their deployment has occurred.Reference Findlay 10 Admittedly, for over 40 years during the Cold War, UN peacekeeping forces served an important role in monitoring cease-fire agreements, separating the parties to a conflict, and monitoring elections. However, Hempson, looking at the challenges of PKOs, asserts that there is a deficit in the “inability to confront the hard questions of whether or not the United Nations is equipped for missions that now entail more peace implementation and enforcement than peacekeeping, especially in an environment of ever more diminishing resources and international will for prolonged and complex peacekeeping initiatives.”Reference Hempson 11
From the humanitarian side alone, the Cold War exemplifies the failure behind the United Nations Charter. Without Article 43, no watchdog function over international conflicts existed. Clearly, the real power of the UN, then and now, resides with the original 5 members, split along the Cold War divide, who enjoy absolute veto power. Each side traded veto votes, 279 during the Cold War,Reference Weiss, Forsythe and Coate 12 many of which stifled crucial humanitarian needs resulting in preventable deaths judged to be in the millions.
END OF THE COLD WAR
With the end of the Cold War and victory over communism, there were immediate renewed calls to ratify Article 43 and for the UN to finally become the agency for achieving world peace through creating a system of international collective security.Reference Conetta and Knight 13 Disappointingly, this chapter in the life of the UN proved disjointed, focusing more on defining operational intent of UN military actions rather than on Article 43 implementation.
Peace Enforcement or Article 43 by Another Name
The UN involved itself in three general types of operations involving military units: peacekeeping, peace enforcement, and full-fledged defensive wars or wars of “counteraggression” like the 1990 Persian Gulf War conducted formally under the authority of Chapter VII of the UN charter as “peace enforcement actions.”Reference Houck 14 These actions strengthened the hopes for the future role of the UN in maintaining international peace and security. Unfortunately, the Persian Gulf War became the last case of the traditional kind of interstate conflict in the post–Cold War era, while many intrastate conflicts, kept frozen during the Cold War, exploded. As such, there was a dramatic demand for UN PKOs and debates on what conflict operations the UN should partake in all over the world.Reference Roberts and Kingsbury 15 , Reference Weiss and Daws 16
Confusion resulted when “peace enforcement,” as it is used by the US military, calls for the physical interposition of armed forces to separate ongoing combatants to create a cease-fire that did not previously exist. On the other hand, Boutros-Ghali, the UN’s Secretary General at the time, used “peace enforcement” to “refer to actions to keep a cease-fire from being violated or to reinstate a failed cease-fire.” Snow emphasizes that “unlike peacekeepers, peace enforcers are often not welcomed by one or either side(s). Rather, they are active fighters who must impose a cease-fire that is opposed by one or both combatants; in the process, the neutrality that distinguishes peacekeepers will most likely be lost.”Reference Snow 17 As Hempson wrote, “The United Nations was forced to expand its understanding of what peacekeeping entailed to include long-term conflict resolution. Peacekeeping quickly evolved from a limited role of symbolic deterrence primarily charged with monitoring an existing cease-fire to an active one that involved in-depth conflict resolution and peace enforcement. UN peacekeeping crept ever closer to peace implementation and enforcement,”Reference Hempson 11 . . . which by any other name appears to be compatible with what Article 43 was originally designed to do.
Among policy wonks, military experts, and diplomats, the end of the Cold War signaled renewed belief that the UN could now start performing the role it was originally designed for in the Charter. Dormant high-level supporters came out of the woodwork proposing that it was now time to recognize and empower Article 43. Policy briefs and journalists strongly argued that membership in the UN entails an additional obligation specified under Article 43. In 1992, then US presidential candidate Bill Clinton expressed support for a voluntary UN rapid deployment force, and in 1993, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher informed the UN SC that the US would back proposals for a UN rapid deployment force, the resolution proposing that the president had the authority to make American troops available to the SC on its call without requiring the authorization of the Congress.Reference Langille 18
Also in 1993, then-Senator Joseph Biden, during his senatorial campaign, urgently introduced a resolution to reduce congressional oversight of the use of American military force. He believed that the president should be restricted in his ability to defend purely national interests, but free to commit forces in defense of more “noble” multinational causes.Reference Sheehy 19 Indeed, the 1994 Presidential Decision Directive-25 was an attempt by the Clinton administration to 1) express its desire to have the UN play a greater role in maintaining international peace and stability, 2) prevent or limit the United States’ ability to use PKOs as the centerpiece of its foreign policy, 3) establish that UN peacekeeping missions were in the best interests of the United States and required domestic support, and 4) ensure that with the demands of both the government and the American people the United States would retain control over the US forces that are required for the UN. 20 , Reference Snyder 21
Interestingly, according to Langille, Russian statesmen on various occasions also endorsed UN standby forces, the negotiation of Article 43 agreements, and even expressed readiness to commit forces to a UN army.Reference Langille 18 Rostow revealed that during the Cold War, a major theme of Russian diplomacy was, all along, a general belief that “only the policy of expansion pursued by the Soviet Union between 1944 and 1989 prevented the implementation of Article 43.”Reference Rostow 22 They now agreed that time had come to carry out the original intention of the Article under Chapter VII. Furthermore, a “strong recommendation to the same effect” was issued by the former chancellor of the German Republic and “former prime ministers of Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, Zambia, Nigeria, and Portugal,” along with many former diplomats.Reference Rostow 22
Other advocates, especially “Third World” countries resistant to anything that seemed to support US supremacy, suggested that a UN army is necessary to keep America from becoming a “global policeman.” Then–Oklahoma Democrat Senator David Boren assured that in any standing UN army the US would be sharing the burden with other nations, satisfying the naysayers by declaring that “while Americans want something done, they do not want to do it alone.”Reference Sheehy 19
Proposed Article 43 Force Models
Debate advanced enough that the conversation questioned what a potential UN force under Article 43 would look like. Conetta and Knight concluded that if the goal is a truly rapid, multilateral capability to deploy, there is no good substitute for a UN standing force.Reference Houck 14 In 1993, Dennehy and colleagues, all US military officers fulfilling graduate degrees at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, provided a “possible futuristic glimpse of what would actually constitute a UN multinational peace enforcement model for the 21st century.” Reminding that “peace enforcement” is, at its “greatest extreme, full-scale combat which implicitly demands a professional well-trained military force to ensure operational success and minimum personnel casualties.” They advocated for 3 types of force models with the “greatest potential for success” for multinational peace enforcement, the structure of which remains valid today:
∙ a standing force of relatively small numbers under control of the UN Secretary General,
∙ a standby force comprised of earmarked units from members of the SC and General Assembly, and
∙ an ad hoc or UN coalition force similar to the one assembled for the Persian Gulf War, which compelled Iraq’s compliance with the UN resolutions demanding its withdrawal from the region.Reference Dennehy, Doil and Harper 23 , Reference Quigley 24
The Dennehy analysis further argued that one reason Article 43 was never implemented was the reluctance of UN member states to commit forces permanently to the United Nations. Instead of invoking Article 43, their “Blue Helmet Combat Force” report suggested that the UN community embrace the spirit of Chapter 43 through the less formal mechanism of memoranda of understanding, proposing that a UN standby force be based on the model of US military corps comprising approximately 55 000 troops. Composition of the force would have integrated command, control, communications and intelligence capabilities, reliable logistics, and common training with a capacity to coordinate with UN planning and administrative staff and the ability to deploy on 72 hours’ notice. Composition would include no more than 5 national forces with at least 1 from a nation not serving on the SC.Reference Dennehy, Doil and Harper 23 That same year, the Cambridge University’s Global Security Program proposed a Chapter VII Committee to assist the SC in “framing resolutions that properly balance a desired political outcome with the military means required to achieve it.”Reference Whitman and Bartholomew 25
However, what emerged in the 1990s was, once again, the tragedy of numerous UN authorized missions “in the gray area between traditional PKO missions and peace enforcement,” leading to some of the most disastrous events in the history of UN peacekeeping, especially in Srebrenica and Rwanda in 1995, where the “unwillingness to act in the face of genocide”Reference Schaefer 26 was particularly egregious. The ongoing debate related to the question of how robustly UN missions should operate in enforcing their mandate, with growing awareness within the UN of a widening disjoint between the expectations placed upon peacekeeping forces and what they actually achieved.Reference Schaefer 26
This series of debacles led to a reexamination of UN peace enforcement operations and culminated in the 2000 Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (better known as the Brahimi Report). The report questioned the appropriateness of pre–Cold War traditional peacekeeping missions. While acknowledging “the need for robust peacekeeping operations at times,” it emphasized unequivocally that “the United Nations does not wage war. Where enforcement action is required, it has consistently been entrusted to coalitions of willing States, with the authorization of the Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the Charter.” 27
The report cited that peacekeeping missions had been unsuccessful due to the lack of involvement of “troop-contributing countries,” which forced a critical “gap between the physical means provided and the aims of the mission,” a factor that became worse when the war on terror began in 2001. 27 The ongoing stationing of large contingents of Western troops in Afghanistan and Iraq limits the availability of forces for other operations, ensuring that both UN and non-UN troops, primarily from “ad hoc coalitions of willing states,” remained overstretched.Reference Williams and Bellamy 28 Actually, “very few of the Brahimi report recommendations were implemented or implemented properly but the document highlighted PKOs operational and doctrinal flaws”Reference Durand 29 which would, more sensibly, have been considered ongoing operational tasks and preparation requirements under force models linked to Article 43 if it existed. Interestingly, the report underscored the real problem, noting and clarifying once again that the UN member states had not yet implemented a standing UN army or standing UN police force and were suffering the consequences.
The last of the proposed force models was authorized because of prolonged and highly contentious PKOs in Sierra Leone, Sudan, and the former Yugoslavia. After nearly fourteen years in the war-weary and conflict-stricken Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN established “a new, more aggressive force called an Intervention Brigade” in March 2013. Referred to as the UN Force Intervention Brigade, it constituted part of the ongoing UN stabilization mission in the Congo and marked the first “targeted offensive of the UN” calling for military action to “neutralize and disarm” the M23 militia group, as well as other Congolese and foreign rebel groups that threaten civil security.Reference Tull 30 Critics asked whether the Force Intervention Brigade itself was legal, impartial, and neutral in its aggressive mandate, raised concerns within the UN about a widening disjoint between the expectations placed upon peacekeeping forces and what they can actually achieve, and warned that the SC inadvertently made the Force Intervention Brigade and the PKO mission a party to the armed conflict, and thus risked loss of legal protections from attack afforded to them under international law.Reference Tull 30 , Reference Benson 31 For the original proponents and current supporters of Article 43, this report illustrated another failed attempt to sidestep explicit Article 43 language for “enforcement” by other legal and diplomatic means.
Disappearance of Article 43 From United Nations Consciousness
The UN’s “Repertory of Practice of the UN Organization” lists all reports representing legal publications that contain analytical studies of the decisions of the principal organs of the United Nations under each of the Articles of the Charter of the United Nations. 32 Because agreements under Article 43 were never concluded in 1945, and there is no recorded UN practice of Article 43 forcing the UN to develop practical arrangements to carry out military operations in the absence of such agreements, any and all legal review regarding Article 43 in the UN Repertory ended in 1993. The last recorded statement was “It cannot be said that the Charter has left the SC impotent in the face of an emergency situation when agreements under Article 43 have not been concluded. . . . While Article 43, as well as supportive Articles 44, 45, 46, and 47, has been invoked in the SC communications, some of which expressed the readiness of Member States to place armed forces at the disposal of the SC, the reference to those Articles in these instances has, however, occasioned no constitutional discussion.” No further mention of Article 43 can be found in the UN Repertory of Practice documents, nor did the SC explicitly refer to or be involved in constitutional discussions concerning Articles 43 to 45 in any of its decisions. 32
However, when the SC does not have any armed forces at its disposal, it utilizes circuitous and often hotly debated arrangements short of Article 43 to carry out military operations using Chapter VII, Article 42 to “maintain or restore international peace and security if it considers nonmilitary measures to be or to have proven inadequate” 32 or Article 41, to use measures not involving the use of armed force employed to achieve “complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.” 33 The SC authorized the use of force by several peacekeeping missions and multinational forces in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Middle East, the Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Liberia, and Somalia. 32 , 33
Under these operational conditions, the number of uniformed personnel serving in UN peace missions has steadily increasedReference Williams and Bellamy 28 to reach almost 100 000 in 2010, 5 times more than the number in 2000, and as of May 31, 2017, a total of 71 operations of uniformed, civilian, and volunteer personnel have been completed with 112 207 personnel in 16 current PKOs. 34
IS ARTICLE 43 IN THE FUTURE OF THE UN?
The UN of 1945 is not the UN of 1990 or 2017. What has been consistent over the decades is that the problems of global security and the UN’s role in mitigation and prevention have become increasingly complex and essentially unaddressed. Studies support that the reasons for crises and how the world responds to them change dramatically every 10 to 15 years.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough 35 Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, and others see the “current UN as a 20th century institutional structure and culture struggling to adapt to new 21st century realities.”Reference Rudd 36 With the 75th anniversary of the signing of the UN Charter in 2015, many world diplomats spoke of fears that the UN will cease to exist without a stronger and reformed mandate in global governance and security. The consistent priorities to consider are the following:
∙ Moving from current “unipolarity” of the SC to “multipolarity” with the focus on reforming the governance composition of the SC, which no longer reflects “geopolitical realities”Reference Rudd 36 ; granting permanent SC status for Africa and Latin America and an increase in seats for the Asia Pacific region, which today contains 55% of the world’s population.Reference Garrie 37 , Reference Sachs 38
∙ Combining the SC with the General Assembly to ensure that the UN is at the center of global affairs and functions optimally as a task-oriented “collective security system” organization, where terrorism, climate change, and the current 65.6 million displaced people escaping drought and conflict are managed. 39 , Reference Burkle 40
∙ Reforming the archaic individual right to veto that has made the SC “moribund” for decadesReference Farrell 41 to reflect the UN’s role as a critical instrument for managing global security. Recommendations vary from proposals that the 5 permanent members of the SC agree “not to use their veto power to block action in response to genocide and mass atrocities which would otherwise pass by a majority” to endorsing the “responsibility to protect” principles endorsed by member states but ignored by the 5 permanent members of the SC; and to recognize that history with the UN confirms that “it will reach sensible solutions and vote down unreasonable ones.” 42
∙ Stressing a strong collective security focus for the UN SC and General Assembly designed to disarm and eliminate all nuclear weapons and prevent superpower cancelling of UN nuclear agreements, without which a nuclear-free world will not be realized.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough 35 The Cold War nuclear weaponry status in the 1950s has changed from 2 countries (United States and Russia) to 9 countries and over 15 000 nuclear weapons.Reference Kristensen and Norris 43 With Resolution 71/258, the General Assembly decided to convene in 2017 a United Nations Conference to negotiate a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination. 44
∙ Enforcing a global order grounded by international law and backed by a standing task force that maintains the collective security system of small states and protects them from subjugation by larger states as seen in the Ukraine and Crimea and threatened in the Balkan states.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough 35 Unfortunately, the post–Cold War brought with it chronically failed states and an absence of effective leadership. This led to a vacuum too often filled with opportunistic despots with identifiable character disorders and a tedious familiarity to those responsible for World War II. They are similarly driven to seek the ultimate power to control and subjugate countries that disagree with them. Only the presence and authority of a global task force, beyond that of regional organizations such as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), will mitigate their predictable destructive advances.Reference Burkle 45
As a student of UN Article 43 since 1945, I predict that if the responsibility to protect agenda alone was successful then both the SC and General Assembly would immediately lobby to implement Article 43 as a strong message that current moves toward superpower hegemony were no longer allowed. A sizeable ongoing budget for both the US military and those of other nations is already earmarked for the training of small country militaries for both national security and peacekeeping, and it would easily be translated to requirements under Article 43, especially given the unique demands of urban warfare, terrorism, and cyberterrorism.Reference Keck 46 , 47 It is rarely recognized and appreciated that Finland has contributed 50 000 PKO troops over the years without complaint or fanfare; this suggests that similar contributions will occur from many other countries if the SC protections under Article 43 are expanded and assured.Reference Garrie 37
UN members recognize that the scope and complexity of violent conflicts has surpassed the world community’s capacity and capability to address them properly. The humanitarian community recognizes the “unprecedented number of humanitarian emergencies,” admitting that “governments, UN agencies, multilateral organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations will need to put aside differences and relinquish authority, influences, and funding” to manage future crises.Reference Spiegel 48 It is a folly to believe that any one country’s military can adequately address the current conflicts. The 2015 UN secretary general’s report described the “deteriorating armed conflict environments in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Yemen that are intertwined with terrorism, with violent extremists exploiting national, regional, and local vulnerabilities, including ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, and political tensions. The rapid emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or Daesh, has reshaped the violent extremist landscape and amplified the already substantial threat posed by older extremist groups such as Al-Qaida, Boko Haram, and Al-Shabaab. ISIL has carried out, inspired, or claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in Bangladesh, Belgium, Egypt, France, Germany, Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, and the United States of America.” 49 Article 43 will ensure that the Boko Harams in Africa and the chemical weapons violations in the Syrian war are dealt with expeditiously at the local, regional, and global level and are no longer dependent on the decisions of one president who did not respond to the “red line chemical violation” in Syria because he failed to obtain permission from Congress. Those days are behind us, especially in the United States, where the current administration plans to cut UN funding more than 50%, and NATO countries feel they can no longer rely on the United States for their security.Reference Birnbaum and Noack 50
The integration of global peace and security can only be accomplished legitimately by ratification and implementation of Article 43 with a “ready-reaction” force capability that responds rapidly to country, regional, and global crises before warring has advanced to the point that public health infrastructure and protections essential for survival are destroyed, as they are today in northern Syria.Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough 35 For the uninitiated, this may be first seen by current world superpowers as “the small country army,”Reference Burkle, Martone and Greenough 35 but with time it will turn into a much-appreciated force shared by all countries to ensure that no country is above the law and that conflicts do not progress beyond the point of no return. The United States is no longer the “world’s indispensable nation,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described it. As the United States withdraws as the global leader and protector, a more respected and modern-day interpretation of “enlightened self-interest” would be to transfer that responsibility and role to the UN.
The UN has been the global voice for economic and social programs and can claim ownership of many accomplishments that have gone unnoticed. Rudd emphasizes that the UN has “strived to respond to the globalization of everything” from financial stability, reducing poverty, climate change, forced migration, and advancing new technologies to the developing world, to name but a few.Reference Rudd 36 The millennial generation see themselves less as nationalists and more as global citizens, suggesting that they will embrace a greater role of global security ownership for the UN.
An abridged version of this article (without references) was published by the Harvard International Review, Fall 2017. Harvard University granted permission to republish this version.