IR203 Exam Revision LON & UN PDF

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IR203 EXAM REVISION: LEAGUE OF NATIONS & UNITED NATIONSQuestions: Does the United Nations matter? (2015)  How can we explain differences in the effectiveness of the UN and the League of Nations in maintaining international peace and security? (2013)  Why do powerful states when they could...

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IR203 EXAM REVISION: LEAGUE OF NATIONS & UNITED NATIONS Questions:       

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Does the United Nations matter? (2015) How can we explain differences in the effectiveness of the UN and the League of Nations in maintaining international peace and security? (2013) Why do powerful states when they could act unilaterally still seek endorsement by the UNSC? (2012) Does UN peacekeeping work? (2011) How did the drafters of the Charter of the UN seek to avoid the failure of the LON system? (2010) What has the UN done to promote normative development in disarmament? (2010) IOs resist change even when developments in the international system have transformed the challenges that they were set up to address. Discuss with regard to EITHER the UNSC or NATO or the IMF. (2010) ‘Collective security is compelling in theory but inevitably selective in practice.’ Discuss with reference to the League of Nations AND the United Nations. (2010) How adequate was the covenant of the LON as an expression of collective security? (2009) What has the UN added to the practice of the LON in EITHER methods of peacemaking OR approaches to disarmament? (2009) Should the use of armed force always require prior authorization by the UNSC? (2009) What are the main obstacles blocking reform of the UNSC? (2009) Explain the failure of the LON to fulfil the expectations of the Covenant. (2008) How successfully has the UN promoted EITHER disarmament OR human rights? (2009)

Essential Readings:  

Back to the League of Nations by Susan Pedersen Coercion through IOs: The Security Council and the Logic of Information Transmission by Alexander Thompson

Additional Readings:       

The History and Politics of UN Security Council Reform by Dimitris Bourantonis The New Politics of Voting Alignments in the United Nations General Assembly by Soo Yeon Kim and Bruce Russett The United Nations Security Council and War: The Evolution of Thought and Practice Since 1945 by Vaughan Lowe, Adam Roberts, Jennifer Welsh and Dominik Zaum The United Nations, Peace and Security by Ramesh Thakur Third World Solidarity: The Group of 77 in the UN General Assembly by Keisuke Ida Transgovernmental Processes in the League of Nations by Martin David Dubin The Transnational Dream: Politicians, Diplomats and Soldiers in the League of Nations' Pursuit of International Disarmament, 1920–1938 by Andrew Webster

Themes:     

Disarmament Peacekeeping and security (including collective security): successes and failures of the League of Nations and UN Legitimacy provided by the UN Problems with the League of Nations: institutional structure The UNSC: scope, principles and reform

Architecture and Objectives:

League of Nations  

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Chamberlain found the League to be an invaluable staging ground for the face-to-face contact between foreign ministers on neutral territory that a policy of reconciliation required A first task laid upon the League was to keep the peace; a second, however, was to reconcile the ideal of a world to be composed of formally equal sovereign states, all operating according to agreed administrative and ethical norms, with the reality of member states of very different types and possessed of vastly unequal geopolitical reach and power From the outset, then, and throughout its twenty-five-year history, the League found itself in the business of adjudicating, managing, and delimiting relations of sovereignty The third task of the league was of fostering international cooperation to address transnational problems or traffics that had been the subject of humanitarian concern and rudimentary intergovernmental collaboration before the war The League’s founders expected this to be a minor adjunct to its work, but serious postwar humanitarian crises and the continued absence of the United States combined to alter that balance By the late 1930s, more than 50 percent of the League’s budget went to this misnamed “technical” work, with plans afoot to relocate those functions within an autonomous body incorporating member states and nonmembers alike Minorities and their defenders (notably Germany) routinely protested that the system was too secretive and biased toward the “minority states.” The mandates system granted administrative control but not formal sovereignty to those victors The mandates system proved to have little discernible effect on the timetable to self-rule, and once the last mandates fell under the supervision of the successor United Nations Trusteeship Council and then moved to independence, the system faded from view The mandates system, say Anghie and Callahan, had no consistent impact on either governance or economic policy Anghie and Callahan strain too hard to detect uniform impact when what locally grounded studies show is that the system affected different mandatory powers, and different mandates, differently Explaining this variation must take into account not only local factors and the interests of mandatory powers, but equally how the discursive (and not coercive) practices of mandatory oversight shaped interests and actions alike On the one hand, the League was to promote emerging norms related to trusteeship and human rights; on the other hand, it was to do so without undermining the principle of state sovereignty Colban’s quiet personal diplomacy and the Mandates Commission’s more distant but public scrutiny sought to reconcile those two goals If these League systems could not coerce states or override sovereignty, they did contribute powerfully to the articulation and diffusion of international norms, some of which proved lasting The League’s ‘technical’ bodies set in motion a different dynamic of international cooperation in 3 ways: League’s technical areas proved to be more expansive, and more genuinely global, than its security or state-building operations. The specialized bodies reconciled state interests and the demands of mobilized publics more successfully than the security bodies as well, often by incorporating experts and activists directly into their work Where goodwill was present but state interests were not closely involved, a single crusading individual or organization could have a decisive impact On most issues officials played the key roles The League’s specialized agencies proved to be more expansive, flexible, creative, and successful than its security or state-building arrangements; they were also more lasting

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The League was an association of sovereign states that many of its supporters hoped would evolve into something much greater—a genuine association of peoples, an embryonic world government Those hopes were always utopian, for the League was founded upon and remained devoted to the principle of state sovereignty; indeed, insofar as these ideals led politicians to play to the stands or alienated the great powers, they may have been counterproductive Competing national interests were not easy to reconcile, and as we have seen, on some matters—security, minority rights—the glare of publicity and pressure from mobilized publics probably narrowed the scope for pragmatic agreement In some areas—epidemic management, drug control, refugees—it midwifed regimes that exist to this day, and in other areas it articulated norms that, very partially observed at the time, have gained in authority. If that is the case, however, it is due in large part to the innovative structure and processes of the institution itself As an organisation composed of sovereign member states – the sole source of its authority – the primary purpose for which the League of Nations was created was to maintain peace through a system of collective security We are now able to sketch out three different but not mutually exclusive narratives of the League, one still focused largely (if less pessimistically) on its contribution to peacekeeping, but the other two concerned more with its work delimiting, and to a degree managing, the shifting boundaries between state power and international authority in this period If one considers its work in stabilizing new states and running the minorities protection and mandates systems, the League appears as a key agent in the transition from a world of formal empires to a world of formally sovereign states. By contrast, if one notes its efforts to regulate cross-border traffics or problems of all kinds, it emerges rather as a harbinger of global governance Locarno, Cohrs insists, was only one part of a British-led and American-supported effort to moderate Franco-German antagonism and craft a stable framework for European peace and recovery after the Ruhr crisis of 1923 Chamberlain was convinced it had to take the form of the Covenant of Europe (and that Cohrs shows it for a time did take) to do any useful work Steiner does not overlook the numerous disadvantages hampering the League— among them the formal (if not always actual) absence of the United States, a lack of coercive powers, and a link to a treaty reviled by the defeated states—but she does not agree that it was impotent from the start. Its procedures for dealing with disputes proved flexible enough to resolve problems without arousing resentment; Germany’s willingness to join in 1925 was predicated on the assumption that doing so would enhance its status and interests Amid laments for its lack of achievement in the political arena, commentators still recognised that it was ‘in the sphere of public health, of the suppression of the traffic in drugs, and of the White Slave Traffic, in the improvement through suasion of the standards of hygiene and public morals in the more backward countries, that the League has so far done its least spectacular but most efficient work’. Though initially of precarious existence, the survival of the Secretariat was an enduring accomplishment of inter-war internationalism. Indeed, the ability of the League and its various organs to function at all, even on the most basic level of language, is something of an overlooked triumph: Geneva did not turn into a second Tower of Babel

United Nations 

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While many of the UN Charter provisions were borrowed directly from the Covenant, others represented substantial codifications of League procedures or logical developments of nascent League ideas Some of the other innovative ideas that were carried over from the League experiment to the UN included respect for the rights of small nations, economic and social cooperation, the habit of public debate on international crises, the formation of an international civil service, and the establishment of a world court

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Seemingly the most significant advance from the League to the UN lay in the area of enforcement. The UN incorporated the League proscription on the use of force for national objectives, but inserted the additional prescription to use force in support of international, that is UN, authority As proof of the added potency of the new organisation, the UN Security Council (UNSC) was given the power to decide whether international peace was threatened, whether sanctions were to be imposed and, if so, the nature of the sanctions, including military force. Most importantly, such decisions by the UNSC would be binding upon all the members of the United Nations, even those who had voted against the measures. The appearance of enhanced UN effectiveness was a major argument advanced in its favour in 1945 in comparison to the discredited and discarded League. The UNSC, it was argued, would be the equivalent of a supreme war-making organisation of the international community Of the principal UN organs, the General Assembly (GA) is the plenary body made up of all UN member states, each one of whom has one vote. There were 51 original members of the United Nations; by 2005 there were 191 The newest entrants, both of whom joined in 2002, were Switzerland, one of the world’s oldest nation-states, and East Timor, the world’s newest The UNSC has fifteen members, of whom five are permanent and known colloquially as the P5: China, France, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom Of the remaining ten members, five are elected each year for two-year terms by the GA on the basis of ‘equitable geographical representation’ from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe No country is eligible for immediate re-election. The UNSC is the executive decision-making organ of the UN system. With virtually unlimited powers for the maintenance of international peace and security, it has shown the biggest gap between promise and performance Its decisions are made by a majority of nine of the fifteen votes, including the concurring vote of each permanent member (Article 27.3): a requirement known as the veto power The Secretariat is a 9,000-strong international civil service headed by a Secretary-General (SG) elected for five-year terms by the GA on the recommendation of the UNSC The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) has the responsibility for coordinating improvements in the social and economic conditions of the people of the world, including human rights It consists of fifty-four members, with eighteen being elected to three-year terms each year. Immediate re-election is possible The legal part of the UN system is the International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court. Its statute is an integral part of the UN Charter It consists of fifteen judges elected for nine-year terms (and eligible for re-election) in their personal capacity, but nevertheless as a group representing the major regions, civilisations and legal systems of the world The election takes place separately in the UNSC (where the veto does not apply) and the GA, with an absolute majority being required in each organ. The Court sits at The Hague. Its principal function is to decide cases submitted to it by states in accordance with international law. It also gives advisory opinions to the Assembly and the Council on any legal question

Disarmament League of Nations 

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While extensive consultation and wide publicity may have helped the League to hammer out agreements on controlling epidemics, those same factors could hamper disarmament negotiations The inability to rise above the specific concerns of each nation-state was central to the League’s failure in perhaps its greatest challenge, the pursuit of international disarmament, and clearly revealed the limits of the transnational dream

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Disarmament was among the most complex of the political problems of the inter-war world. The League was bound to the task in 1919 by the peace settlements that followed the carnage of the First World War In practice, all of the League’s efforts over the next two decades met with only the most limited success as it failed to achieve either quantitative disarmament, through substantial reductions in the military forces of states, or qualitative disarmament, through regulation of the production and use of certain types of weapon Between 1920 and 1925 the League adopted a broadly based approach to the issue, including attempts to regulate the global arms trade, to limit national military budgets and to link disarmament to new security regimes From 1926 until 1930 a new body known as the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference (PCDC), composed of political and diplomatic delegates, conducted the interminable negotiations to produce a single draft disarmament treaty covering all nations and all spheres of armaments Its years of work, filled with diverse and often contradictory initiatives, led up to the climax of the inter-war dismament process: the meeting of the mammoth World Disarmament Conference (WDC), held between February 1932 and June 1934 While the conference’s lengthy and unproductive deliberations were tedious, its eventual failure was spectacular, with the high drama of Germany’s simultaneous withdrawal from the conference and the League itself in October 1933 After its final collapse some months later, a denouement saw new approaches to disarmament still being considered almost until the outbreak of another world war, though in a haphazard and admittedly unenthusiastic fashion The task of implementing disarmament drew in representatives from every single member of the League of Nations, as well as from the most important non-member states. Significantly, for most of these countries the same people tended to be assigned to deal with disarmament year after year. As a result, a core of individuals set themselves apart over time as the main voices and chief experts on disarmament These national delegates arrived at the meetings of the innumerable committees, commissions and conferences dealing with disarmament bearing instructions to advance or defend their own state’s respective political, military, economic and security interests That this awareness did not produce a genuine international disarmament regime was the result of a variety of factors, the most important of which was always the widely divergent political and security interests of the great powers The hopes that an independent, transnational community might emerge among this group of experts foundered on the clash of the national perspectives they represented. In this sense, the disarmament process sponsored by the League remained dominantly ‘inter-national’ rather than ‘trans-national’. Whereas ‘international’ means ‘between nations’ and so reinforces the idea of dealings between states, ‘transnational’ means ‘extending beyond or across national boundaries’ and so represents a crossing of the boundaries that separate nations or states The contradiction that emerged in the League-sponsored disarmament process was between the ‘international’ approach preferred by the governments of the major powers in particular, who viewed disarmament from the viewpoint of their own strategic interests, and the ‘transnational’ ambitions of those League enthusiasts who viewed disarmament as an issue which the world war had shown intimately to affect all humanity regardless of nationality. As a consequence, the disarmament talks took on a truly transnational dimension only briefly and within narrow confines; on the larger scale, they never escaped from the control of the governments of the major powers Disarmament was and is tied absolutely to the issue of security, and this was always likely to be its downfall during this period. Fundamentally, its potential effects on national security were too great for the individual governments of the major powers to view it from anything other than a strictly national strategic perspective or to allow any effective transnational community either to form or to have its way

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The politicians, diplomats and soldiers who took on the problem of disarmament at Geneva, nominated by their respective governments, were always going to be national representatives in the first instance The disarmament clauses in the Covenant had called for the ‘full and frank’ exchange of information on the scale of national armaments; this became the basis for efforts by first the PAC and then the Temporary Mixed Commission to draft and carry out surveys of the extent of armaments around the globe The Disarmament Section’s initiative was exactly the sort of independent action, outside the control of the main powers, that the French intended to prev...