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October 1995

Unclassified

Editors Note:

Around the world during 1995, events have been organized for the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations, and to honour those who signed the Charter on 26 June 1945 in San Francisco. The 50th Anniversary has also prompted an accumulation of proposals for UN reform, many of which focus on UN practices and on the UN Charter itself. However, we are pleased in what follows to present a somewhat different perspective on UN reform, from a distinguished Canadian, eminently qualified to comment.

Dr. Michael Oliver, former President of Carleton University, is currently active on the Canadian Committee for the 50th Anniversary and is President of the United Nations Association in Canada. His strong calls for reform of the UN as an instrument of global governance divide into four parts: Common Security, Common Development, Common Rights and Common Participation, and stress the need "to make room for the peoples of the world and their associations, and not just their governments".

Disclaimer: Publication of an article in the COMMENTARY series does not imply CSIS authentication of the information nor CSIS endorsement of the author's views.

The end of the Second World War saw the demise of the ailing League of Nations, the first attempt at global governance. The League had failed because, when faced with major challenges to peace, it was unable to act. Its member states stood by, figuratively wringing their hands, as Japan invaded Manchuria, Germany re-occupied the Rhineland, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and Germany and Italy together helped subvert the legitimate government of Spain. By the time Hitler's Germany began its major moves on Europe, the League meant absolutely nothing as a guarantor of security.

It did leave behind it a network of world institutions in fields other than security: the Universal Postal Union and the World Court, for example. But valuable as they might be, these were peripheral bodies; the central idea of a global institution, embodied in the League of Nations, had to be re-thought and reconstructed.

In the dawn of victory, in the last months (as it turned out) of working alliance, the nations that had won the war put together the Charter of the United Nations. Most of those who re-read that Charter today -- and it has been very little amended -- will still respond to the vision that inspired the UN. And when they look ahead another 50 years and ask where they would want the UN to take them, most observers conclude they would want to build on the UN of 1945, to re-shape and reform¹ it, not demolish it.

That said, complacency ends; the UN as it exists corresponds to no one's dream. It is fitting to celebrate its survival and its real accomplishments, but above all the UN cries out for strengthening, changing and re-charging.

A great deal of what is wrong can be remedied by changes in UN practices and by changes in the Charter itself. It is therefore useful that lists of 'things to be done' are being put before the global public.

Reference will be made to some of the specific reforms that are being recommended, but the focus here is somewhat different. The fundamental reason the UN as it exists does not match the vision of the Charter is that the states and peoples of the world have not wanted it to. The UN has never been assigned the central role in international relations; the values of the Charter have all too often been a background motif played behind the blare of national self-interest, narrowly conceived. If the UN is to be given the chance to be what it could be, 'We the Peoples' have to want it to be vital, want it to be the core expression of a changed international outlook. In essence, the success of the UN during the years ahead depends on a new mind-set, one that can be conveniently analyzed under four headings: Common Security, Common Development, Common Rights and Common Participation.

I. COMMON SECURITY

In 1945, the authors of the Charter assumed that the pursuit of security and development could be undertaken by the nations of the world acting in concert. However, for the next four decades, quite different assumptions prevailed.

National Security and Collective Security

Security was the dominant concern of the cold war period, and states sought it through building up national security forces and through collective security arrangements like NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The models that received the most attention were those of deterrence, of a balance of terror and of mutually assured destruction. Security was to be achieved through playing a deadly competitive game that featured the diplomacy of threat and counter-threat, the escalation of the destructiveness of weapons systems, and the spread of a blanket of arms on every continent.

Yet throughout this period there were quiet voices that promoted quite a different concept of security, one that was consonant with, and indeed derived from, the UN Charter. The crucial phrase was common security.

Common security makes war itself the enemy. The objective is to increase everyone's security by steadily reducing the risk of war: by disarmament, by agreed systems of inspection and surveillance and by shared early warning systems. Common security asks states and peoples to meet and see how they can be less threatening to one another; it is quite different from meeting with allies to map out a collective defence against 'others' who constitute a common foe.

The future would be much more promising if the intelligence and planning resources of defence establishments and the analysts of universities and think-tanks were as concentrated on common security thinking as they have been for so many years on national security and deterrence. Reforming the UN will require not just a set of amendments or new declarations, but the consecration of the best strategic thinking, in Canada as elsewhere, on the of common security. So saying does not belittle the work of peace research institutes, nor of the NGOs that have promoted humanitarian corridors, days of peace, safe havens and all the other imaginative ways of reducing the brutal impact of war. Nor does it underestimate the importance of pre-cedents for humanitarian intervention that have been established over the last five years. But in most countries of the world, the elaboration of common security models and the problematique development of common security discourse still take second place to the preparation of plans, policies and speeches that have their base in national securi