Saving faces, and maybe the world

PEOPLE regularly call on the United Nations to intervene, or complain of its failure to intervene. But all that is illusion. The UN cannot intervene, anywhere or at any time. It has never been given the equipment to intervene. It has no material power at all. It is basically a spiritual-political institution in the line of descent from the ancient shrine at Delphi and the medieval papacy. As with those institutions, the powerful have recourse to the UN in times of crisis, sometimes seeking to legitimise the use of force, sometimes to legitimise its avoidance.

Like its more overtly spiritual predecessors, the UN has its rituals, the more interesting of which involve saving the faces of powerful people who have blundered and need to climb down.

Let us consider a few historic examples, to see more clearly what can be expected of the UN, and what cannot, in a crisis such as the Bosnian one.

The UN's versatility was best seen in 1956 over Suez and Hungary. The Security Council could not condemn the invasion of Egypt, because Britain and France vetoed that. But the General Assembly condemned it, and that did just as well, or better, to establish the international pariah status of the invading powers.

When Britain and France, under pressure from the two superpowers, decided to back out of Egypt, the General Assembly provided them with a face-saving ritual. The two powers had invaded Egypt in collusion with Israel, but chose to pretend that Israel alone had invaded, and that they were intervening 'to separate the combatants'. The UN, guided by Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden and Lester Pearson of Canada, pretended to believe this pretence, and set up a token expeditionary force to mime 'the separation of the combatants'. Britain and France were thus enabled to retire from Egypt with some semblance of dignity. Their leaders claimed to have fulfilled their missions and their friends affected to believe them.

In the case of Hungary, the role of the UN was to help a great power avoid the use of force without too much loss of face. Eisenhower and Dulles had been talking of 'rolling back the Iron Curtain' and had been encouraging Eastern Europe to rise up. But when the Hungarians actually did rise, Eisenhower decided to leave them to their fate.

The UN was used to camouflage this prudent but ignominious decision. The United States took the matter to the Security Council, where, of course, the Soviet Union applied the veto. The Americans then claimed that, as faithful members of the UN, they were debarred from intervening by the Soviet veto. This was quite untrue (as was clear from the Korean precedent) but it shifted the public debate away from the US decision and on to the harmless ground of 'the powerlessness of the UN' and a futile, but safe, debate about theoretical remedies for that incurable condition.

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis resembled the Hungarian case, in terms of the use of the UN, but with the boot firmly on the other superpower's foot. Khrushchev, as his ships steamed towards Cuba and Kennedy's quarantine, needed to back down in a hurry. To save what dignity he could, he had recourse to the UN. The Acting Secretary-General, U Thant (probably at the request of the Soviet Union), had appealed to both sides: to Khrushchev to turn back the ships, and to Kennedy to end the quarantine. Khrushchev then announced he was turning back the ships out of respect for the UN - ie, not out of fear of the United States - and called on Kennedy to end the quarantine, which was, in fact, no longer needed.

Khrushchev (like Eden) was a vain man as well as a rash one, and it is just possible that the world would have gone over the brink in 1962, if he had had no means of salvaging his precious dignity. So the world is marginally safer because of the existence of the UN and its peculiar panoply of deceptive, but sometimes salutary, rituals.

So far, the cases we have considered are all tales of blunders and the saving of faces. The case of the Falklands in 1982 is different. This was a case in which a leader, knowing exactly what she wanted to do, made use of the UN with an unexpectedly precise sense of the capability and limitations of that institution. Margaret Thatcher took the case to the Security Council and got from that body all she needed and all it could provide: in effect, a blessing on Britain and a curse on Argentina.

She did not ask for - and did not need, and would not have got - a specific authority to use force. The right to self-defence is there in the Charter, and the Security Council's blessing and curse implied that that right was being legitimately invoked in this case. So Mrs Thatcher went ahead, having got all that she needed from the UN.

The performance of Her Majesty's Opposition at that time was abysmal by comparison, in terms of an appreciation of UN realities. As the Task Force approached the Falklands, the leaders of the Opposition were urging renewed recourse to the Security Council before force was used. But there was nothing that the Security Council could do, and nothing that was needed from it more than had already been provided. If the Opposition's advice had been heeded, the Task Force would have been left to steam around the South Atlantic indefinitely.

In the case of the Kuwait crisis, had George Bush decided not to fight, he would have done what Eisenhower did over Hungary. He would have taken the matter to the Security Council and then complained about the 'powerlessness of the UN'. (This time, the Soviet veto would have had to be collusive, but that need not have presented any difficulty.) As it was, Mr Bush decided to go to war, and received a blessing from the UN, which was all he needed from it.

In the case of Bosnia, it is probable that Russia, in the Security Council, will always block the authorisation of military action against Serbia, using its veto power if necessary. As I believe that military intervention in Bosnia would be a disaster, I hope that President Clinton will take the Soviet 'no' for an answer. I hope he will 'do an Eisenhower' and wash his hands of the matter, putting the blame on 'the failure of the UN'. This would be ignominious, as with Hungary, but also, as in that case, it would be preferable to the alternative. And it would be putting the UN to one of the purposes it can actually serve: that of universal scapegoat.

But if President Clinton does decide to attack Serbia, he can do what was done over Korea. He can bypass the Russian veto in the Security Council and go to the General Assembly using the 'Uniting for Peace' procedure. It is true that in law, General Assembly resolutions are recommendations only, whereas those of the Security Council are decisions, binding (theoretically) on all nations. But the general public neither knows nor cares about such distinctions, and everything to do with the UN belongs, and remains, in essence in the domain of public opinion and public relations.

If President Clinton does go to the General Assembly for its blessing on a Balkan war, he will get it, with the help of the Muslim block. Most Muslims do not really seem to care about the Bosnians, but the Islamic bond provides a respectable cover for the ever expedient course of voting with the Americans.

I would hate to see this matter taken to the General Assembly. As long as it stays in the Security Council, Russia can probably hold the United States back from the brink. But if the US takes this matter to the 'vetoless' General Assembly, then we are headed towards a Balkan Vietnam in which, as Field Marshal Sir Richard Vincent has just warned, troops could be mired in Bosnia 'half-way through the next century'. And this time it would be Vietnam with a UN blessing.

(Photograph omitted)