The UN Security Council: A Help or a Hindrance?

That the UN Security Council is a largely impotent body is fairly obvious in an age when North Korea can test nuclear weapons with impunity, Iran is well on the way to doing so, Russia is slowly annihilating Chechnya, NATO can bomb a state outside of its jurisdiction, and fuming injunctions from the Security Council are tossed aside by all manner of states-and so on. If you too thought that the UN's role was faintly absurd, you'd be in distinguished company. The U.S. Envoy to the organisation, John Bolton, was once famously heard to suggest that tearing down the Secretariat building in New York wouldn't make a bit of difference.

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This is, of course, unfair. The UN consists of a legion of administrative bodies, many of which engage in distinctly apolitical work. The bulk of resentment tends to focus, rather, on the UN's involvement-or lack thereof-in issues of conflict. I want to answer three questions here. Firstly, does the UN produce unjust outcomes in this area? If so, why? And finally, does it put the world in more danger than would otherwise be the case should the UN cease to exist? The first two questions have obvious, if often unacknowledged, answers. The third question is considered so absurd that it appears to deserve only unadulterated scorn. I suggest some reasons, however ultimately unpersuasive, for briefly considering otherwise.

Does the UN produce unjust outcomes?

The Economist asked a provocative question in 2002: 'Israel ignores the United Nations and has weapons of mass destruction. So why all the fuss about Iraq?' The question itself, even then, could only be asked in a tone of self-mocking irony. The vilification of the Iraq war certainly required some seriously limited vision, if not outright myopia. Examples of similar short-sightedness are numerous: as NATO aircraft rained down bombs on Serbia in an attempt to halt its campaign against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Turkey continued its own subjugation of the Kurdish people. As Iran seeks to pursue a nuclear program conditionally approved by a majority of the countries comprising the UN, countries replete with functional, ready-to-use warheads sermonise and fume in equal measure.

There are two points to be made: firstly, the law is not applied equally across the board. How else could some states ignore UN Security Council Resolutions, whilst others are subject to armed intervention upon their violation? And secondly, an attempt to actually enforce any kind of law is subject to a veto by any of five countries. Their claim to such legal wisdom consists in their victory of the Second World War. It takes quite a leap of the imagination to conceive of a domestic legal system where powerful individuals-those possessing vast quantities of explosives, let's say-can abolish their equality under the law. One can reasonably predict the nature of the consequences. Where certain members of the Security Council take issue with the acts of others, the council itself is irrelevant to the task at hand, a hindrance to matters of security. In sum, not only can a state attack sovereign territory under unequal laws, it can attack this territory under no laws at all.

Why does the UN yield injustice?

This injustice is a structural feature. Breaking the law at home puts you in jail. In the UN-well, who's asking? One way to understand this is to realise that the law-any law-is rendered meaningless without enforcement. When a single country, or group of countries, assumes the role of judge, jury, and hangman, it would take some almighty self-restraint to act even-handedly. It certainly would not always be in the national interest. The problem lies in the very notion of justice. Since we're all, as Francis Fukuyama gleefully declared nearly two decades ago, liberal democrats now, this is little more than a widely accepted and uncontroversial normative concept. If we violate our codified set of rules, to which we all signed up in the imaginary realm of the social contract, we get our wrists slapped. The world, though, is not a liberal democratic order, despite the best efforts of some. Justice on the international level will only happen when those with power decide that it should.

There can be no other way. Enforceability is a function of the balance of power. What does this mean? It means that the enforcer is a country whose self-interest is deeply intertwined with the subject of its enforcement. For example, in a controversial article in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt outlined how "Sharon and the [Israel] Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed' after the events of April 2002. Domestic political pressure is, of course, like any other form of political 'power'-it can make states act in certain ways, against their will. The US has, since 1982, vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions unfavourable to Israel. This adds up to more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other members of the Security Council. Israel is not at all unique in escaping censure in instances where it has, quite clearly, violated what masquerades as 'international law."

The point is this: if the interest-broadly conceived-of a permanent member of the Security Council is at stake, there is no scope for the law to be applied at all. This is precisely the issue that has motivated 'extra-judicial' action, or international vigilantism. The U.S. was well aware that the Security Council could block any action on Iraq in 2003. France and Russia, both veto-wielding, had made this clear. There are two consequences of a veto. Firstly, the Council effectively assigns immunity from legal action to all five permanent members. Secondly, it demands that armed force, in the case of disagreement, be used without resort to the Council for fear of exposure of the unilateralism of one's actions. In other words, the law need not apply to permanent members of the Council. The use of force without the involvement of the Council is exactly what constitutes an illegal act. The world order has created a space of exception. In this state of affairs, powerful states will either bypass the Council-and likewise, the law-or they can use the Council as a mechanism for protecting or enforcing particular breaches of law that are either in their interest to enforce, or are neutral to this interest.

Better off without it?

Is the world a safer place with the Security Council than without? In one sense, yes. If genuine consensus can be reached, then providing a forum for this is no bad thing. The Council, though, is not supposed to produce action of the lowest common denominator. The responsibility vested in the five permanent members (by themselves, it should be noted) implied that the weight of international justice would lie on their broad shoulders. They were to see 'that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest'. The outcome was quite different. Armed force may have been used in the 'common interest'-but it was also used by outlaw states, by states against their own populations, and in good old-fashioned wars.

If laws are enforced only selectively, they will encourage the kind of behaviour that leads to exemptions. In other words, if enforcement is a function of law breaking, then lawbreaking will be deterred and lawful behaviour will be encouraged. This is the case on the national scale. If however law enforcement is a function of the balance of power, then partial enforcement-even under a system of perfectly fair laws-will create incentives for each state to push the balance of power in their favour. Two examples make this clear. Firstly, history shows that the US does not mess with nuclear powers, or at least it does so with great caution. China is guilty of both human rights violations and the violent suppression of separatist movements. Why was it Serbia, and not they, who were subject to attack in 1999? This is nothing more than to assert that a state must be able to successfully use violence if it wishes to. However the assertion has as its logical corollary the fact that states will, in a world of selectively enforced power, seek to acquire nuclear weapons-the trump card of international power politics. The Security Council therefore, through its weakness, hinders non-proliferation efforts.

We can equally note that the US does not mess with its allies. A strategic alliance with the US is generally sufficient to ensure that the same errors which elsewhere induce intervention will be excused. Pakistan, an alleged state sponsor of terrorism (in Kashmir, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan), is untouched. The example of Turkey was provided earlier. The problem is that if alliances provide exemptions from law, a weak Council will create a polarised world, centred around strong powers. These two problems expose the contradiction at the heart of UN rhetoric. Even with the best of intentions, violence used outside the scope of previously made agreements will constitute a selective enforcement of the law. And that will create strong incentives for states to make a grab for power and line up behind a superpower.

In all these cases, the argument is not against international law; it is against its selective enforcement. Of course, no body will always be able to enforce all violations. To do so requires overwhelming and diffuse power, such as that generally present in a national police body. But the consequences of partial enforcement are clearly dangerous. On the one hand, international law expressed through the Council gives weaker states some right to live under certain rules-sovereignty, for example. Conversely, though, the law restrains precisely these states whilst sanctioning the stronger states to violate sovereignty at will. A world without the Security Council would be one of multilateral action on issues of public and humanitarian importance. It would be one of regional treaties and General Assembly voting blocs. It would not eliminate the self-serving hypocrisy of weak and strong states alike, who would continue to justify strategic action under the 'common interest' and protest at this action on what are often equally spurious grounds.

In international politics, any mature analysis must accept the fact of power. A Council-less world would simply leave the powerful to exercise their will without the façade of a judicial framework. Their shame would be unlikely to hold back armed force. Consequently, it remains that an unfair and selectively applied set of laws is better than none at all. World stability, peace, and fairness-if one subscribes to these notions at all-will be generally served only through strengthening the Security Council and democratising its functions, both by including General Assembly nations and removing the arbitrary veto.