The International Community: A Fractious Past and a Vital Future

Sir David Hannay is Britain’s special representative for Cyprus. From 1990 to 1995 he was Britain’s permanent representative to the United Nations.

As the page is turned on the twentieth century and every newspaper and periodical is awash with millennial futurology, there is a crying need to put as much intellectual effort into drawing the right lessons from the period behind us, and then applying them in a systematic and sustained fashion, as there is to giving ourselves over to the joys of crystal-ball gazing. Trying to predict the future is at best a chancy business and never more so than now when the pace of change is so unrelentingly hectic. Just set yourself a very simple test. How many of the important developments of the last decade of the twentieth century—the end of the Cold War, the collapse of apartheid, the irresistibly rising tide of globalisation—did you predict, or were predicted by the leading gurus of the day, just ten years before they occurred? The honest answer is likely to be none. But, in that case, what grounds are there to believe that our capacity to predict the future has radically improved just because we have two noughts on the dateline of our calendars? And, if it almost certainly has not, what is the utility of trying to make out where we, or rather succeeding generations, will be at the end of the new century?

In any case, predicting the future is surely an overrated skill, particularly when applied to a field as confused and complex as that of international affairs. It is not like knowing the winner of tomorrow’s race, where the gain is immediate and measurable. Even if you did succeed in guessing or calculating correctly the broad trend of events in a particular country or region, how does that help governments or international organisations take the day-to-day decisions necessary to deal with the crises and challenges of the period in between? And, unless you are a devout believer in predestination, how can you be sure that your guess or calculation is not going to be blown off course by completely unexpected and uncontrollable developments which did not enter into your original calculations? What the international community really needs is a decent compass and a soundly rigged boat in which to navigate the uncharted waters ahead, not a map or blueprint with a cross marking where the buried treasure is to be found.

The Twentieth Century

A brief overview of the past century is a sobering experience to anyone who believes that history, or at least modern history, represents a steady progress towards a safer, fairer and more prosperous world. Two hugely destructive world wars and a narrow escape from a third, whose consequences would have dwarfed those of the first two, together with an economic slump which ruined and impoverished many millions worldwide and which provided the seedbed for some of the most pernicious and murderous political doctrines ever experienced, is hardly a record of which to be proud. The century does of course divide rather neatly into two, with many of the worst events concentrated into the first half and a second half which can reasonably claim a fair score of achievements. During that first half, a century which had begun with much promise and a surge of economic and technological developments—in that way not too unlike our prospects now—foundered, and left Europe, the main focus of earlier power and growth, a ruined battlefield.

There are many causes of the series of catastrophes that marred the first half of the century. The sheer Eurocentricity of that world, built on the domination of a few imperial powers, was in itself a factor of instability, as were the bitter rivalries between those powers, the advanced state of decay of several empires and the burgeoning arms races between them. Economically, too, a world of free trade, with the gold standard providing what was effectively a single, global currency, had been gradually superseded by protectionism, rising tariffs and other barriers to trade and investment and a rash of competitive devaluations.

But perhaps the sharpest contrast between the two halves of the century was the almost complete absence from the first half of any effective machinery for international co-operation, for dealing with threats to peace and security, for avoiding excessive armaments, for encouraging the role of international law and for boosting trade and prosperity. Peace was meant to be provided by a vague concept known as the Concert of Europe, which at the best of times only operated fitfully and failed completely to arrest the slide towards the First World War. When, in the aftermath of that disaster, a first serious attempt was made with the founding of the League of Nations to remedy previous failings, the effort was virtually stillborn. The United States stood apart and the main European powers failed to give it the backing in resources and political will that it needed if it was to be effective. The International Court of Justice in The Hague existed but it was hardly ever used for serious disputes and its jurisdiction did not gain wide acceptance. Negotiations to limit armaments and to ban particularly horrific categories of weapons filled time but produced few results. Economic problems were treated with a combination of neglect and beggar-my-neighbour policies.

The second half of the century showed that many of these lessons had been taken seriously to heart. In the aftermath of the Second World War a number of international organisations were established with the clear objective of remedying the failings of the preceding decades. The United Nations, and particularly its Security Council, was given more far-reaching powers to impose economic sanctions and to use, or authorise the use of, force against aggressors than the League had ever had. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were set up to fill the vacuum which had existed internationally in the economic field and to roll back the tide of protectionism which had resulted in a shrinking world economy and massive unemployment. And even though the Cold War, with the resultant division of the world into two armed camps and the competition between market and commercial economies, did much to hamper the new organisations, it did not prevent them surviving nor registering a number of achievements. The unexpectedly sudden and clear-cut ending of the Cold War and the discrediting of command economics removed most of the obvious constraints which had hobbled these organisations for forty years and made it a great deal easier for them to carry out their original mandates. But the end of the Cold War did not in itself solve the main problems that confronted the world; it merely removed some of the main obstacles which had hitherto hampered their solution. The twentieth century may have taught us that we need intensified international co-operation and the organisations and rules to underpin it if we are to overcome challenges to peace and security and fight poverty and environmental depredation, but it did not show us how to do that very effectively or efficiently.

Global Problems

Increasingly, the problems and threats that face us are found to be global, or at least transnational in character and quite incapable of being dealt with in a solely national framework. But when we talk about the international community taking action, we need to think through what this implies in terms of empowering international organisations to act on our behalf. What resources are we prepared to put at their disposal, and what limitations are we prepared to accept on our own freedom of action? In recent years, particularly perhaps since the end of the Cold War, there have been all too frequent occasions when rhetoric has run ahead of performance, when the international community has been prayed in aid and then not given the tools to do the job, or has been asked to do a job which was beyond a particular organisation’s capacity. The gap between the demands that governments make of that collectivity known as “the international community” and the resources they put at its disposal has grown wider. At the same time the support for international action remains wide but shallow. Ordinary people do not understand, nor are they helped to understand, how international organisations go about their business, what can reasonably be expected of them and what cannot. So when things go wrong, as they are almost bound to do at some stage, because of inadequate support to see a particular programme or operation through, there is a search for scapegoats which ends by further undermining support for the international community whose actions we depend upon to such an extent.

The Role of the United Nations

So what needs to be done if that international community to which we so often turn is to be capable of responding? The answer surely has to start with the United Nations, an organisation whose reputation goes up and down on a rollercoaster of excessive expectations and denunciation. In 1999 the United Nations touched rock bottom when it was completely marginalised in the early stages of the crisis in Kosovo and when the referendum on East Timor’s future status led to mayhem in the province. And yet by the end of the year the United Nations was running the civil administration of both Kosovo and East Timor and preparing to take on a major peacekeeping role in the latter. Quite simply it remains indispensable; but it also remains chronically under-resourced and starved of the political backing of its main members, without which it cannot be expected to operate effectively when there are threats to peace and security. If the latter is to be achieved there will have to be a renewed effort, in particular by the five permanent members of the Security Council, to work together instead of against each other. When the Cold War ended it looked as if such co‑operation was sustainable; but in the last year or two it has almost seemed in New York as if there was still a Cold War, even if a glance around the world showed there was not—the endless manoeuvring over how to handle Iraq’s clear breaches of Security Council resolutions was a case in point. But the resumption of co-operation cannot be achieved without give-and-take by all concerned. The United Nations cannot simply become the tool of any one power, to be used when that power wishes and not when it does not. But nor should it be prevented from acting when a massive humanitarian crisis is brewing, just because of concerns by some that awkward precedents might be created for intervention elsewhere. Let us hope that new presidents in Russia and the United States will put high on their agenda the need to work together through the United Nations.

The problem of resources is every bit as intractable as that of lack of political will. It is simply not serious to expect the United Nations to mount a complex peace operation at the drop of a hat without any planning or prior earmarking of resources. It is equally not serious to expect the United Nations to work without a sound financial basis or one that is not subject to the whims of any legislature. No doubt enforcement operations will remain beyond the capacity of the United Nations itself to mount for the foreseeable future. They will remain the domain of coalitions of the willing, acting in future, we must try to ensure, under a Security Council authorisation. But coalitions of the willing are emergency, short-term expedients. So a new and systematic effort needs to be made to equip the United Nations with the means to conduct complex peacekeeping operations, with every bit as much emphasis being given to the civilian side of such operations—policing, judicial work, administration, the preparation and organisation of free and fair elections—as to the military.

As for finance, the fact that the US Congress has, however belatedly and inadequately, recognised the need to settle the US arrears, provides an opportunity to seek a long-term basis for financing the organisation that will respond objectively to changes in the relative prosperity of its members. Negotiating such a basis cannot however be done on arbitrary, unilateral determinations of one country’s contribution to which all others then have to adopt; it must be done, and there is no time to lose, by subjecting all to a single set of rules and determinations with serious penalties for any who fall again into arrears in the future.

Regional Co-operation

The United Nations needs to work much more closely with regional and subregional organisations, particularly in continents such as Africa, where the problems are manifold and remedies so far inadequate. There is no more common error than to regard the United Nations and regional organisations as an “either/or” choice rather than as a “both/and” one. Regional and subregional organisations have a considerable potential capacity for conflict prevention and should be encouraged to be proactive; but they frequently need to be able to threaten recourse to the Security Council, and to measures which only the United Nations has the authority to deploy, if they are to be fully effective. Often their founding charters allow more flexibility and a more intrusive role than the UN Charter—that is certainly the case of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Nor is there anything inherently discriminatory or pusillanimous about seeking, for example, African solutions to African problems. In many cases African peacekeepers and mediators will fit the bill better than those from outside. But it is pusillanimous and politically unacceptable to believe that a continent as poor as Africa, with armed forces often not fully equipped for the tasks in hand, can afford to take them on without generous support and backup from outside. Africans can contain Africa’s problems only if they receive sustained help from outside in the form of finance, training, heavy lifting and specialist technical units.

Through much of the last century, the control of armaments, particularly weapons of mass destruction, was on the international agenda but was often viewed as a subject for discussion rather than for binding decisions and action. Nevertheless gradually, and not without setbacks along the way, the world has acquired a considerable panoply of international provisions banning the proliferation and testing of nuclear weapons and the possession of chemical and biological weapons. In recent years action has been taken against landmines and is now being contemplated against the use of child soldiers. The future challenges in these fields are more ones of enforcement than of further negotiation. We have already seen examples of these obligations being flouted—by Iraq and North Korea—and they will not be the last. What is clear is that if the international community cannot find better ways to detect breaches of these obligations and to enforce respect for them, all the legal texts we have will avail little and will gradually be discredited.

The United Nations, of course, is about a lot more than peace and security. In recent years, as the evidence of global warming and other forms of environmental degradation has built up, the first hesitant steps towards accepting internationally binding obligations to protect the environment have been taken. But one sometimes has the feeling that only some global catastrophe will in the end propel reluctant governments into taking serious action on environmental issues and then, no doubt, too late. The negotiations are bedevilled by the familiar quarrels between developed and developing countries about who is more responsible for the problems and who should bear the brunt of the solutions. This is surely extraordinarily short-sighted. No one doubts that the sharpest disciplines will have to fall on the developed countries; no one doubts that developing countries must be given proper scope to achieve rapid economic growth. But it will avail developing countries little if, in the process, they destroy their own environment and contribute massively to global problems. There now needs to be a steep change in the nature of these discussions, with binding obligations, differentiated between developed and developing countries, accepted by all.

Progress on Trade

In no field was the breakdown of international co-operation and discipline more complete during the first half of the twentieth century than on trade and currency issues, and in none were the consequences more disastrous; similarly it was in these two areas that the greatest progress was made in the second half of the century. Trade, liberalised in successive rounds of Gatt negotiations, became the motor of economic growth instead of a brake on it. At the end of the Uruguay Round a framework for the unimpeded arbitration of trade disputes was for the first time put in place. Beggar-my-neighbour devaluations became a thing of the past and, while there have been periods of currency instability and of economic stagnation since the Second World War, the IMF and its network of co-operation have ensured that they were relatively short and had an infinitely smaller impact than the massive dislocations of the 1920s and 1930s.

But it is an inescapable fact that the gap between the rich and the poor nations remains wide, and in some cases has widened. Relatively few countries have yet crossed the divide between developed and developing, and a range of new issues such as environmental and labour problems and excessive flows of short-term capital have cast doubt on the validity and fairness of the international machinery which has been so laboriously built up over the past half century. What is needed now is neither a fundamental shift in direction, nor a period of deconstructing existing disciplines and machinery, but rather a serious effort to adapt what we have achieved to new challenges and conditions and to take account of the lessons of recent years. Above all in trade it is essential to push ahead with a new round of negotiations and not to allow the debacle at Seattle to derail the processes which have brought so much benefit over recent years.

The other priority is to try to break free from the “we” and “they” categorisation of developed and developing countries. The idea that exclusive caucuses of these two groups can best promote the interests of their members is frankly contrary to all the experience of the last thirty years. It is also intellectually unconvincing when we are all made continually more aware that globalisation creates global problems which require global responses. The World Trade Organisation is now far more inclusive than was its predecessor the Gatt. The new negotiating round offers an opportunity to work for an outcome which will benefit all its members, developed and developing alike, and it would be a tragedy if wrangling over the agenda were to delay or even prevent that objective being tested in the only effective way—at the negotiating table. The IMF has just begun, with the establishment of the G20, to take a more inclusive approach. It is surely high time that the G8 also reached out to some of the main developing countries such as China, Brazil and India and brought them within the scope of its deliberations.

International Law

The rule of law in international affairs has for long been the poor relation of diplomacy and never more so than in the twentieth century when for much of the time the law of the jungle prevailed. Even now, when quite a body of international law has been built up, when tribunals have been established to deal with some of the most flagrant and hideous war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, when an International Criminal Court is well above the horizon and when trade disputes are subjected to international arbitration, we should not delude ourselves that we have decisively turned our backs on the Hobbesian experiences of the past. The International Court of Justice is grossly under-utilised as a mechanism for settling international disputes, even though its track record when it is allowed to operate is a highly encouraging one. Can we not look forward to a time when complex and contentious territorial disputes such as those in the Aegean, in the Gulf and in the South China Sea are submitted to the court and not left to the winds and waves of international diplomacy? Of course, there is a catch. International courts and panels do sometimes come up with judgements which one or another party or interest finds uncomfortable or even painful and they do inhibit the scope of national jurisdictions. But those drawbacks are ones that every country has confronted internally at some stage in its evolution and every country that is now a working democracy has reached the collective conclusion that the benefits derived from the rule of law outweigh the disadvantages. Is this a lesson which we can continue to restrict to national jurisdictions?

A thread which has run through the whole of this survey of the past century and the glance ahead into the present one just beginning has been the fundamental difference between a world where might is right and the balance of power is the only way of achieving even short-term stability, and a world that is gradually edging its way towards a rule-based, legally bound set of disciplines administered collectively by international organisations which we respect and which we enable to carry out the various tasks we transfer to them. International organisations on their own do not achieve much. They easily turn into glorified debating societies, which was what the United Nations often seemed to have become in the Cold War years. Nor are they even a particularly efficient way of transacting business. It will never be difficult to caricature the inefficiencies and wastefulness of international organisations, however hard we work to reform them and to cut back on the worst examples.

Nor are we likely to gain solid support for international organisations if we champion them as the forerunners of world government and the rivals in a fight to the death with national governments; that is as big a trap as the belief that you can achieve international co-operation without pooling some of the powers that were formerly exercised separately by national governments. We need to bear all this carefully in mind when we call for the intervention of “the international community”. We need to learn to answer a whole string of questions before reaching for that sometimes rather facile phrase. Is the task one that actually requires an international response? Is the task one that the international organisation to which we turn is capable of handling? Are we providing the resources, both material and political, which will enable it to succeed? Are we acting within the framework of international law in a way which is impartial and designed to promote the common good, not just the good of one country or of one group of countries? And we must surely also learn that, when we cannot answer these sort of questions positively, we should go back to the drawing board or perhaps even admit that some challenges are simply beyond the capacity of the international community as it is currently structured. Otherwise we risk discrediting the very organisations on whose ability to act effectively our own future security and prosperity depend.

Democracy and Human Rights

But there are two other threads which run through this analysis: democracy and respect for human rights. Both are distinctly controversial. It is sometimes argued that it is none of the business of the international community to go around promoting democracy, that that is a job for each individual country. But surely that confuses two points. It clearly is not an international task to tell each country what precise form of democracy and what exact balance among its institutions it should have. The days when it was thought right to impose or to imitate a precise model—Westminster or the French Revolution or the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia—are long past. But to argue that the promotion of parliamentary institutions, derived from free and fair elections, criticised by a free press and adjudicated by a judiciary which is not under political control, is nothing to do with the international community, is to ignore a lot of recent experience. Although wars do break out between democracies, you can reasonably assert that they do so a lot less often than when authoritarian or totalitarian states are involved. Moreover, democracies are a lot less likely to squander limited resources on an excess of armaments. And democracies have inbuilt stabilities which enable them to handle economic and financial shocks and dislocations more successfully—just look at the relative performance of South Korea and Indonesia during and after the recent Asian economic crisis. So, while one does need to be cautious about the means used to promote democracy—a crusading approach envisaging the use of force and sanctions will not always be appropriate—the idea that this should be one of the guiding lights for the international community in the twenty-first century seems hard to contest. After all, is there really much doubt that, if by the middle of this century every country in the world was a working democracy, we should be living in a safer, more prosperous world than we are now? And, if that is so, why not set that as our objective?

Respect for human rights had an even worse twentieth century than democracy. At least the latter ended on a rising note. But the last decade of the century saw human rights abuses as savage and sanguinary as almost any other. Here, as with democracy, there is a utilitarian as well as a moral or ethical case to put forward. Countries where human rights are systematically abused have instability built into them. Sooner or later that ends in bloodshed and not only the blood of the victims of the abuses. Countries where economic and social rights are systematically repressed seldom make steady progress in terms of economic growth and reducing poverty. Progress towards respect for human rights is bound to be uneven. Progress made through the internal dynamics of democracy will almost always be preferable and more soundly based than that imposed from outside. But that is not to say that external pressure should not be exerted. Both the United Nations and regional organisations such as the OSCE have an important role to play and will need to avoid discouragement when their criticisms provoke anger and resistance. Above all we must always insist that the rights set out in the United Nations’s declaration of 1948 are universal. Double standards may be a fact of international life but we should not legitimise them.

I have tried in this survey to avoid both detailed prescription and excessive futurology—to follow my own precept and try rather to design a sound boat with a serviceable compass with which to navigate the unexplored waters ahead. I suspect the greatest dangers we in the developed world face are those arising from complacency and isolationism. Our sins currently are more those of omission than ones of commission. It is all too easy in this period of sustained non-inflationary growth to believe that Dr Pangloss lives after all and that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. It is all too easy to regard the wars and civil strife that still disfigure the world as taking place in far away countries of which we know little. But these are short-sighted views which, if espoused by the majority, will lead us relatively soon to disaster. If we doubt that, we should just glance back to the beginning of the last century when to many commentators the prospects looked fair and the challenges and threats ahead looked entirely manageable. And yet within a few years that relatively tranquil, sunlit world was plunged into a sequence of events far beyond the imagining of the gloomiest doom-monger. We had better ensure that that does not happen again.