Forward to the Beginning: Widening the Scope for Global Collective Action

Human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth.

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism ₁

From its establishment in 1945 until 1990, the United Nations was constrained from exercising its mandate to build peace and promote development.

The institution's paralysis had multiple causes but probably the most significant was the Cold War. The United Nations reflected and was inhibited by the East-West division of the world. Between 1945 and June 1990, 279 vetoes prevented the Security Council from taking action on behalf of a common purpose. These vetoes had a larger effect of inhibiting the global imagination as to what could be done to alleviate world suffering and foster peace. Even problems of Third World development, which should have evoked a unified response, became zero-sum contests in which either the United States or the Soviet Union helped or harmed a particular poor country in an attempt to secure some advantage for itself.

The watershed was crossed with the demise of the Cold War and the new Russian desire to co-operate with, or at least acquiesce in, United States approaches to global problems. This permitted the United Nations to take many actions that it would not have considered before. Some might describe the United Nations as moving `backwards to the future,' but what really occurred was that it leaped forward towards its original goals. Since 1987 it has initiated more peacekeeping operations than it had from its inception until that year. ₂ Some new operations, like the occupation of northern Iraq, the preparation for elections in Mozambique, or relief efforts in Somalia, are unprecedented for an intergovernmental organization.

The rapidity of change and the scope of these new collective efforts have turned on its head the long-standing question of whether the United Nations could do anything useful. Today, the question is whether the United Nations can do everything. Some have begun to talk and write about `the twilight of sovereignty. ₃ Others implore states to get out of the way of transnational corporations or humanitarian relief groups. These calls are symptoms of an exuberance for a still undefined new world order, but the truth is that sovereignty is not in its twilight, nor is it at bay. When sovereign interests and human rights collide, states rarely lose.

The changes in the world have stirred new transnational dreams, but if hopes are to be translated into actions, then one must begin with a better understanding of the original debate between sovereign and human rights. The United Nations and the other international organizations were born with an internal contradiction that has not been resolved and is seldom even addressed: their members are states, but their goals are human values. Despite a commitment to defend human rights, international organizations are theoretically prohibited from interfering with the way in which states treat their citizens.

The issue, therefore, is not whether new collective norms can be established to permit international organizations to address the world's problems. It would be hard to define a more comprehensive set of norms than those already embedded in the United Nations Charter. At a technical level, the question is whether these general norms can be defined precisely enough to permit them to be monitored and enforced. But the fundamental issue is not the existence of a norm or its operational definition; the problem has always been the extent to which the international community is willing to bend the will of sovereign states to enforce these norms.

Collective action includes a wide range of possible activities - from involvement that implies consent to intervention that implies the use of force. Collective intervention is rare; more often, the international community has been able to solicit an invitation of some kind from the host government. This paper explores ways to widen the scope of legitimate collective action on behalf of the universal norms of peace, development, and social justice.

I will begin by surveying the old boundary line between sovereign and international rights and analysing how that line eroded in various issue-areas over time and under the pressures of integration and interdependence. Then, I will step back from the survey and reconceptualize the boundary issue. Instead of trying to locate the proper place to mark the line between domestic and international concerns, I propose that we try to view the problem in terms of a matrix formed by two continua: (1) threats and injuries to the international community: from aggression to global poverty; and (2) options for the international community: from collective action to inaction or non-intervention. The purpose of the matrix is to refocus the debate, away from a theological cul-de-sac - human or sovereign rights - towards a more practical, policy-oriented approach to global problems. Finally, I will offer some thoughts on ways the international community can move towards more effective collective action. In particular, given the increasing burden on the United Nations, I explore whether more tasks ought to be delegated to regional organizations, although this only becomes possible when the causes of the regional organization's own maladies are understood and corrected.

A SURVEY OF OLD BOUNDARIES

The charters of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) juxtapose apparently contradictory principles. The United Nations Charter begins: `We the peoples of the United Nations' and reaffirms `faith in fundamental human rights,' but then (article 2) describes its membership as sovereign equal states and prohibits any intervention `in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.' The charter of the OAS, signed in May 1948, begins: `In the Name of Their Peoples, the States [are] Confident that the true significance of American solidarity and good neighborliness can only mean the consolidation on this continent, within the framework of democratic institutions, of a system of individual liberty and ... respect for the essential rights of man.' But article 15 of that charter bars any interference direct or indirect `for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs' of any state.

How could these two organizations proclaim the sanctity of human rights and democracy and then deny themselves and the international community the right to pursue those rights within the national jurisdictions in which they are most affected? F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. Were the writers of these two charters trying to pass that test? Did they display a lack of seriousness or a trace of hypocrisy?

There is an alternative explanation. The preamble of the United Nations Charter begins by declaring the determination of its members `to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.' Its framers focused most of their attention on the past. While they were concerned about human rights and the way abuses in one country affected those in another, they did not foresee the extent to which internal wars and other scourges would replace international aggression as the world's chronic security problem. Leland Goodrich notes that human rights concerns were an important part of the debate on the Charter, distinguishing the United Nations from the League of Nations, but that the founding fathers deliberately reinforced sovereignty as a defence against foreign intrusions and the effect was to make difficult, if not impossible, efforts by the international community to correct a member's human rights problems. ₄

Prior to World War II, the line separating domestic from international politics was clear and incontrovertible; it was the boundary of the sovereign state. The United Nations sought a solution to the problem of armies crossing borders. The twin thoughts of defending sovereignty and advancing human rights were not contradictory if one's goal was to prevent cross-border aggression. Moreover, advocates of Realism provided an intellectual defence of this approach with arguments that chaos was the consequence when states interfered in each other's affairs and that world order demanded respect for sovereign boundaries. ₅

The Cold War sculpted in sharp relief the boundary line between domestic and international affairs on security-related issues, and then the boundary froze. The model implicit in the norm of deterring aggression by collective security was enshrined in the charters of international organizations and has continued to influence the thinking of many government leaders and scholars, even though the cases of outright aggression by one state against another have become fewer and fewer.

The significance of the United Nations war in the Gulf was not how long it took to win, but the length of time between the founding of the organization and its first use of collective force to repel an attempt by one member-state to annex forcibly another member-state. Forty-five years. While the United Nations was often criticized for accomplishing so little, its greatest achievement may have been what it prevented by its existence during those years, although other factors, especially the balance of power and nuclear deterrence, may have been more important. Today, however, with the United States as the sole superpower, there are more opportunities for international organizations to play larger roles.

The boundary between domestic and international affairs that served as the implicit model for the United Nations' collective security provisions was not applicable to civil wars, the most common conflicts in the post-World War II period. Nor has the distinction between internal and external affairs been helpful in understanding the way in which civil wars have been connected to international rivalries in such cases as Nicaragua or El Salvador. Just because armies did not cross borders did not mean that a security problem did not exist for the international community, or that these conflicts were less serious than previous wars. But the international organizations were established to deal with a different kind of war - aggression by one state against another - and they did not have the capability or their members the political will to solve these problems.

Other security problems arose from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and conventional arms races. To attempt to control nuclear weapons and technology, an elaborate non-proliferation regime was established under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to enforce treaties aimed at preventing the use of civilian nuclear technology or materials for military purposes. Some believe it has effectively limited the spread of weapons; others acknowledge problems in gaining access to inspect facilities and in finding the means to enforce its decisions. Its most spectacular failure occurred in not recognizing the advanced state of the Iraqi nuclear programme; but its greatest success has been in developing a highly intrusive plan after the war. ₆ In that case, the IAEA, backed by military force, has been able to pry open a very closed political system in Iraq and to remove or destroy weapons and technology against the will of the Iraqi government.

In the case of conventional arms races, there is an emerging norm that poor countries that receive foreign aid should not use these scarce resources for purchasing weapons. But there is no firm agreement and no specific provisions to enforce such a norm, in part because of the intractable problem of reconciling the sovereign's right to buy weapons and the international community's responsibility to limit or restrict sales.

Beyond the security area, the boundary line has become ever more elusive as the world has become compressed by innovations in technology, communications, and transportation, and as economies have become more interdependent. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover called trade policy `solely a domestic question.' ₇ Few would make such a statement today when 116 nations are negotiating their trade policies under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Indeed, when tariffs were replaced by non-tariff barriers in 1974 as the principal item on the agenda of world trade talks, domestic economic policy could be said to have begun to merge with foreign economic policy. Many of the items on the agenda in the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations that began in 1986 relate to issues that most people would have considered solely within the domestic jurisdiction of states - agricultural subsidies, national laws on copyrights and patents, and regulations on services, banking, and insurance.

Similarly, the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by the presidents of the United States and Mexico and the prime minister of Canada on 17 December 1992, will eliminate tariffs and other trade barriers over a fifteen-year period, but it is much more than a free trade agreement. It also seeks to harmonize or modify the policies of the three nations on such matters as environmental standards, anti-trust legislation, agriculture, telecommunications, immigration, and government procurement. These domestic issues are now international. Indeed, in an age of growing international interdependence, few, if any, issues can be considered solely domestic because any policy that can be judged to provide an unfair advantage to a nation's exports or a disadvantage to its imports becomes a legitimate issue for international discussion.

The modern human rights movement can be said to have been born in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to have grown with new international institutions like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Helsinki Accords. But human rights really did not achieve the gravitas of an international movement until President Jimmy Carter of the United States made it the `soul' of his foreign policy in 1977. When American government officials explained to the leaders of governments that violated the human rights of their citizens that such actions would affect bilateral relations, these leaders, whether from Chile, Guatemala, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, or Uganda, invariably argued that this policy constituted intervention in their internal affairs. Carter administration officials rebutted this argument by saying that its policies were consistent with the collective responsibilities mandated in international conventions - notably the Universal Declaration, the International Covenants, and the American Convention on Human Rights.

Neither side convinced the other, but during the last fifteen years repressive governments have found their traditional sovereignty defence less credible as more governments have joined in criticizing violations of human rights. The human rights of citizens in repressive countries are now debated routinely at the annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, in Washington at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in Costa Rica at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and in nations all over the world.

The global spread of democratic governments - many of which are quite fragile - has had the effect of placing the most sensitive `internal' political issues on the international agenda: electoral fraud, for example. After General Manuel Noriega annulled the election in Panama in May 1989, the OAS held an emergency meeting of foreign ministers to pass a resolution condemning the action and sending a delegation of three foreign ministers to try to mediate a solution of the political conflict. This followed the model of the OAS resolutions on Nicaragua in September 1978 and June 1979. Tragically, both mediation efforts failed, but the important precedent - that international organizations have a right and responsibility to address internal political issues - was established. Since then, the OAS has debated other internal political issues raised by coups in Haiti and Suriname, the self-initiated coup in Peru, and the attempted coups in Venezuela.

In brief, in the security, economic, and political domains, the traditional boundary line between domestic and international affairs has been trespassed so often as to no longer constitute an inviolable border. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the secretary-general of the United Nations, acknowledged the obvious in his report, Agenda for Peace: `The time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty ... has passed.' ₈

The conceptual boundary that has separated the sovereign rights of states from collective responsibility for universal rights has often been defined by the most nationalistic regimes. No country has been more zealous in defending its sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention than Mexico, but in the spring of 1990 its young president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, proposed a free trade agreement with the United States. That initiative, as much as anything, symbolized the redefinition of economic nationalism, the shift of the boundary on economic sovereignty, and a new willingness by strong governments (albeit in weak nations) to risk the erosion of their power for the sake of development.

In a similarly surprising fashion, the nationalistic Sandinista government in Nicaragua redefined political sovereignty in its precedent-setting invitation to the international community - the United Nations, the OAS, and the Council of Freely-Elected Heads of Government, a non-governmental group of current and former presidents and prime ministers chaired by Jimmy Carter - to observe its elections in February 1990. Actually, these external groups did much more than just observe the elections; they mediated the rules of the political game. The opposition did not trust the government or the electoral process, and the government did not trust the opposition, but both trusted the international mediators to ensure a fair election or to denounce a fraudulent one. So the observers became the surrogates for a free electoral process. They assisted all parties, despite their deep suspicions, to participate in the election and to accept the results, permitting the first peaceful transfer of power in the nation's history.

The decisions to open the Mexican economy and the Nicaraguan polity to international forces and actors are significant in that they represent shifts by two nationalistic Third World regimes in their definition of the boundary line between sovereignty and universal rights. In both cases, the regimes invited the international community into their internal affairs in ways that their governments would never have contemplated previously. These invitations are good precedents for widening the scope of international action.

RECONCEPTUALIZING THE PROBLEM

The search for the right boundary line between domestic rights and international responsibilities is a futile one, based on an errant premise of bifurcated jurisdictions. In the contemporary world, it is hard to find an issue or an interest which is either wholly domestic or completely international. Most issues or problems are domestic with a residual component that is international. For example, the famine in Somalia has domestic origins and in the long term its underlying causes can only be resolved by Somalis, but the international community has a residual humanitarian responsibility to prevent massive starvation. The United States budget deficit is primarily a domestic economic problem, but the international community suffers from the consequent high interest rates and has a justifiable interest in promoting a reduction in that deficit. Obviously, these two cases elicit different responses, but they serve to illustrate the point that virtually all domestic problems have an international dimension and that the international community has a legitimate interest in solving them.

The search for a boundary between domestic and international affairs is worse than useless; it is misleading. The primary issue should not be the division of responsibilities between governments and international organizations but rather how the international community should perceive and respond to collective problems. To refocus attention, away from local and national perspectives and towards a cosmopolitan viewpoint, requires an heroic leap. To facilitate that journey, I will use a matrix (figure 1). The horizontal axis ranges from threats to international peace like cross-border aggression, to potential injuries such as refugee flows, to legitimate concerns like human rights abuses. The vertical axis describes ways that states and non-state actors address these problems, from non-intervention to collective military action.

Horizontal axis: redefining security

One of the reasons for the confusion in the debate on sovereign versus human rights is that the essence of security - the defence of sovereignty - is in need of wholesale redefinition. Many new concerns that would never previously have been linked to security, such as human rights and environmental degradation, need to be incorporated into our view of security.

The Security Council is only supposed to act in response to `threats to international peace.' The rigidity of this criterion and the fear of setting a precedent caused it to hesitate in considering sending security observers to monitor elections in Haiti and an international force to protect relief workers in Somalia. During the Cold War, the Security Council was either unwilling or unable to deal with civil wars whether they were linked to an international rivalry (and thus subject to veto) or not. The OAS had a similar problem. The wars in Central America were a principal preoccupation of inter-American relations in the 1980s, but the OAS never dealt with them.

Beyond these security concerns lie issues related to arms proliferation, environmental degradation, refugee flows, human rights violations, electoral fraud, social injustice, and poverty. These are the issues on the agenda of the international community, and while they are often handled in different compartments, it is useful to visualize them as points on a continuum of global issues, ranging from threats to injuries.

The premise is that unattended injuries can fester and eventually become threats.

War is the most obvious threat to international peace, but it takes many forms. One is cross-border aggression that threatens the existence of a member of the United Nations - for example, Iraq's attempt to annex Kuwait. Some cross-border aggressions involve an attempt to annex part of a state - Iraq-Iran or Somalia-Ethiopia, for example. Other forms of cross-border aggression have sought different objectives. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the United States invasion of Panama, and the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea aimed to replace hostile leaders with friendlier ones. China attacked Vietnam to punish it for the intervention in Kampuchea.

A more common threat in the postwar period arose from civil wars that were linked to international rivalries. Recent cases include the conflicts in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, and Ethiopia, and the Indian invasion of Sri Lanka. Most of these cases were linked to the Cold War, and the veto in the Security Council either precluded or limited a United Nations role. The Cold War exacerbated these conflicts, but it did not create them, and the demise of the Cold War will not end regional conflicts.

The main factor that externalizes local strife is the absence of a framework for peaceful change. `Outsiders,' whether they represent an ideology, a class, or an ethnic group, despair of being able to change the system or take power peacefully. They therefore seek help from abroad. More likely than not, they ask the enemy of the incumbent government. That is the source of the connection between internal conflict and international intervention, and that tie will not be cut until all parties accept a framework of peaceful change. ₉ The election mediation in Nicaragua offers both a precedent and the opportunity to disconnect civil war from international intervention.

A third threat is a civil war without clear links to international conflicts but based instead on divisions within a country, whether they be ethnic, geographical, ideological, political, clan, or economic. Recent cases include the ethnic disputes in the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union; or sub-national conflicts like that of Biafra; or ideological struggles like those in Colombia or Peru; or cases that mix ideology and ethnic problems, like that of Guatemala or Fiji; or clan wars, such as the one in Somalia. These wars are not connected to international rivalries and, as such, governments and international organizations have found less need to address them. But the potential for an external connection always exists. Indeed, in the case of the war in Bosnia, Islamic fundamentalists from the Middle East joined Bosnian Muslims in a new kind of crusade against the Christian aggressors from Serbia. The international community obviously has an incentive to try to prevent a civil war from becoming internationalized, but the only way to do that is to deal with the political causes of the dispute.

A fourth threat stems from nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction. An important threshold is crossed when one's attention shifts from wars to the possession of weapons. While there is a global consensus that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is undesirable, the fact that the most powerful nations already posses an abundance of such weapons makes it more difficult for the international community to prevent their spread. International treaties and regimes regulate the transfer of this technology, but once a country has acquired these weapons, the range of options available to the international community to deal with this development narrows. A related but more indirect threat stems from arms races involving conventional weaponry.

As one moves across the horizontal axis from left to right, the threats diminish, and it becomes more appropriate to describe the problems facing the international community as injuries - either potential or actual - to global society.

A fifth concern is environmental degradation. Environmental issues can be classified according to three different jurisdictions. Most environmental problems are local or national in scope - meaning that their consequences are felt within nations and that the solutions to them must also be fashioned at that level. The second category, transnational environmental problems, are problems that affect neighbours, like air (acid rain) or water pollution in river, lakes, or oceans, and they require bi-national co-operation to resolve them. The only set of issues with global implications are those which endanger the planet (global warming, ozone piercing) or affect the oceans or large land areas (rain forest destruction, desertification). The international community has legitimate concerns about how nations deal with the latter set of environmental problems because if these injuries to the climate or the ozone layer continue, the world will face new and catastrophic threats.

The sixth concern is the increased flows of refugees. Massive exoduses - such as occurred from Cuba and Vietnam - raise legitimate concerns and sometimes generate instability in the neighbours of these governments. The Mariel boatlift coincided with riots in Miami and in the town near Fort Chafee, Arkansas; Vietnamese boat people provoked riots in Malaysia; and refugees from eastern European contributed to the rebirth of neo-Nazism in Germany. The receiving governments have to devote scarce funds to alleviate social tensions and to integrate the new refugees. How should the international community respond to refugee flows? Currently, individual governments deal with the collective problem at its destination, but shouldn't the international community also deal with it at its source?

A seventh concern is human rights (rights of the person) and civil and political rights (free elections). Historically, few governments have argued that the violation of human rights or the absence of democracy constituted a threat to the peace of the international community. (United Nations actions against apartheid in South Africa and the unilateral declaration of independence by Rhodesia constituted exceptions, although the strength of these actions derived more from the Third World's justifiable concern with racial discrimination than from the absence of civil liberties.) Concerns over human rights violations and electoral fraud should be included in our expanded definition of international injuries for two reasons. First, the charters of international organizations and various international conventions declare these rights to be shared by all the world's citizens and therefore all have a responsibility to respond when rights are injured anywhere. Second, repression and electoral fraud are two of the most potent causes of instability. Noriega's fraud in Panama led to instability and, within six months, foreign intervention. Repeated efforts by Anastasio Somoza and Rafael Trujillo to rig elections and silence opposition created the conditions for, respectively, revolution in Nicaragua and assassination in the Dominican Republic.

When people are tortured or `disappeared,' the international community suffers and needs to find an appropriate way to respond. Besides the obvious humanitarian reason, the international community should respond to a repressive regime before it becomes a threat not only to itself but to others. A related issue is the problem of the rights of minorities. It might be too delicate a question for the international community to determine which minorities have a right to separate states, but it is within the current bounds of human rights conventions to ensure the protection of individuals regardless of their ethnic background.

The eighth concern is global poverty and social inequities. Whether poverty and inequality breed revolutionary conditions or just despair, the world has a responsibility to help. The establishment and continued growth of the World Bank, the most important global institution to promote development, is a recognition of that point.

Vertical axis: the range of options

Every threat or problem does not evoke a response by the international community. Even the traditional security crises that constituted threats to international peace rarely generated a response, let alone an effective one, from international organizations.

Nonetheless, not all problems were ignored. To identify patterns in the collective responses, we shall look at a select group of options available to the international community on the vertical axis - from collective action to non-intervention. The options axis ranges (downwards) from the coercive to the consensual: (1) collective intervention, as in the Gulf; (2) a United Nations or OAS peacekeeping force or blockade; (3) a United Nations or OAS resolution that could permit and legitimate action by individual members on behalf of a shared objective; (4) United Nations or OAS sanctions, including embargoes and diplomatic isolation; (5) a Security Council resolution requesting the secretary-general to send a fact-finding envoy to an area and make recommendations to the Security Council; (6) a resolution in the General Assembly of the United Nations or of the OAS condemning a particular government or promoting a particular outcome; (7) a meeting - perhaps of foreign ministers - at the United Nations or the OAS to deal with an emerging problem; (8) a co-operative, aid-granting approach; and (9) no collective response.

There are three comments to make about this continuum. First, these nine steps cover a spectrum of options, but there are many intermediate actions that could be inserted along the way. The eighth step alone includes a multitude of routine cooperative approaches to many of the world's social and economic problems. A complete list of these co-operative actions, including advice and funding for development and health projects, could stretch as long as the vertical axis.

Second, a focus on collective responses without considering national policies can provide a false idea that international organizations can stand apart from nations. Yet international organizations, as Stanley Hoffmann, Ernst Haas, Joseph Nye, and others have long noted, reflect and affect the international system and particularly the balance of power between its principal players. In the final section of this article, I will try to relate national policies and collective actions.

Third, there is an important distinction that needs to be emphasized between unilateral action like the United States invasion of Panama in 1989 and multilateral efforts like the United Nations intervention in the Gulf in 1991. The unilateral action was unjustified and condemned by both the OAS and the United Nations. It weakened these international institutions, reinforced the idea of the United States as an arrogant hegemon, and made the new government of Panama tragically dependent on American military forces. Conversely, international norms and the United Nations were strengthened in the Gulf affair.

One could argue that in the cases of the Dominican intervention in 1965 and the United States blockade of Cuba in 1962, the multilateral dimension was just grafted onto American policy. It is true that United States first decided on its approach and then obtained collective support in the Organization of American States. That support came quickly in the case of the missile crisis; it came reluctantly and with side bargains in 1965. Nonetheless, multilateral support gave the action weight and legitimacy.

Just as congressional consent for a military action by the United States gives the president a cushion of political and constitutional support for a risky decision, so too is collective action more effective in forging an international community in the long term. This point is more compelling when one considers its converse: independent and unilateral military action by the president, as in Vietnam or in Panama, is resented and destructive of the kind of relationship that the president should try to build with Congress, and that the United States should try to develop with other nations.

The matrix provides a visual image of how the traditional conception of sovereignty has been eroded over time and by changes in the geopolitical landscape. On the more traditional, security-oriented left side of the horizontal axis, the principal factor explaining past inaction by the international community is the Cold War; the recent active role by international organizations can be attributed to new co-operation among the five permanent members of the Security Council. Take the cases of El Salvador, Angola, and Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the implicit veto by one superpower or the other precluded the United Nations from addressing these regional conflicts effectively, and neither the United States nor Latin America wanted to bring the issue of the Salvadoran civil war to the OAS. However, within one year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United Nations was engaged to varying degrees in all three conflicts and, indeed, co-operation was so complete that the international organizations did not need to climb above `co-operative approaches' on the vertical axis of the matrix.

The far more interesting and gradual transformation has occurred on the right side of the horizontal axis. Over time, the international community has defined global security in ever broader terms to include civil liberties, social justice, the environment, and economic development, and it has been prepared to increase resources to pursue these goals and to deny resources to governments that abuse their citizens.

The treatment of human rights offers an illustration of the gradual process by which an issue yielded an effective collective response. At the level of rhetoric, human rights was important in international organizations from their establishment but, in practice, these organizations shunted the issue to isolated committee rooms where debate was muted, and action was rare. In the late 1970s, the OAS, prodded by the United States government, began to debate human rights reports prepared by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and its assembly then debated and often passed resolutions of condemnation. The mediation in Nicaragua in 1978-9 was partly justified on the grounds of gross human rights violations by the Somoza government. A decade later, the United Nations Human Rights Commission came alive, and strong resolutions followed from its meetings as well. The international community has not yet pushed this issue to the top of its options, although `ethnic cleansing' in the former Yugoslavia and military repression in Haiti were the reasons for the imposition of embargoes and severe sanctions.

The environment provides another example of an issue that was only dimly perceived as an international problem until 1972 when the United Nations convened a meeting in Stockholm. Since then, the international community has identified many global environmental problems and has proposed solutions, including the Montreal Protocol and, most recently, the global agenda that emerged from the Rio Conference in June 1992.

Over time, one can see that the international community has come to understand the global dimension of national problems. Because of divergent national perspectives, however, it takes more time before a collective response becomes possible and still more time before harsh measures are contemplated, let alone adopted, in pursuit of solutions to these problems.

THE EMERGING GLOBAL CONSCIENCE AND THE NEED FOR WORLD ACTION

The United Nations seems to be accelerating its progress towards a return to its original purpose, which was not to protect states, but to stop war, defend rights, and promote justice and development. The marshalling of a grand United Nations coalition to defeat Iraq was interpreted, by some, as the beginning of a new world order. But in many ways it was more clearly the herald of the end of an era when governments would attempt to annex their neighbours. Of potentially far greater significance was the less spectacular United Nations occupation and protection of the Kurdish areas in the north of Iraq and the intensive follow-up operations to ensure that all the weapons of mass destruction and the related technology were dismantled.

Also of great importance was the decision, albeit a reluctant one, by the United Nations to observe the elections in Nicaragua and Haiti and to oversee the implementation of the peace accords in El Salvador from the signing in January 1992 to full demobilization of the guerrilla groups in December 1992. In Asia, the United Nations took almost complete responsibility for Cambodia in order to try to disarm the rebel groups and conduct free elections. In Africa, the secretary-general pushed the international community to intervene with military force to keep the Somali population from starving. These actions - even more than the Iraqi war - presage a new beginning as the international community takes up challenges that had formerly been ruled out or not considered.

The Organization of American States, for its part, has grappled with the difficult problem of what to do when democracy breaks down. It was easy for the organization to congratulate Venezuela's president, Carlos Andrés Pérez, for defeating two coup attempts in February and November 1992. A far more difficult issue was what it should do about Haiti, where a military coup in September 1991 sent a democratically elected president into exile, and about Peru, where a democratically elected president closed down congress and the supreme court in April 1992.

The principal geopolitical obstacle to collective action was removed with the end of the Cold War. The global landscape nevertheless still contains many other impediments, some of which were obscured by the Cold War and others which arise from fears about the remaining superpower or about interference by the dominant in the internal affairs of the weak. Some of the new concerns might be attenuated by making the decision-making structure of the United Nations more democratic; others by utilizing regional organizations.

The goal of seeking collective approaches to these problems is buttressed by an emerging transnational consciousness. Suddenly, the international community has identified the full spectrum of problems in the matrix, and the agenda of the United Nations secretary-general is full, perhaps overloaded. The regional organizations have tried to deal with some of the challenges - the OAS in Haiti, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Liberia - but both have failed. Why? Can the United Nations and the regional organizations divide up responsibilities and establish criteria for judging which problems should be addressed first?

In this section, I want to try to suggest a model for dealing with the most serious set of issues that challenges the international community at this time - `failed states,' ₁₀ states that can no longer maintain order, or states that are the sources of refugees, famines, and other problems. Then, I want to outline a process by which collective norms can be transformed into achievable goals for the international community.

There are many reasons why the OAS failed to restore democracy to Haiti. First and foremost, Haiti has had no experience with democracy, and its newly elected leaders did not treat each other or the constitution with the respect essential to the maintenance of a democratic system. Second, the OAS tends to look on its role as that of judge when it should look on itself as a problem solver. Right after the coup, the foreign ministers met and condemned the coup and called for the reinstatement of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. They sent a team that was completely unprepared and was attacked. They returned to Washington angry and passed a still stronger resolution declaring an embargo and diplomatic isolation. The problem was that the OAS had asked itself the wrong question. It asked itself to judge the coup instead of asking what needed to be done to restore democracy. It failed to connect diplomacy to the credible threat of force and, as a result, it worsened the situation in Haiti instead of achieving its objective.

In the case of Liberia, the ECOWAS countries, led by Nigeria, used enough force to be an actor but not enough to be an arbitrator. Moreover, the organization allowed itself to become viewed as partial to one of the parties in dispute.

These two cases, although briefly described, suggest the difficulty of peace-making by regional organizations. The problem is that these organizations have numerous burdens that may make them less effective than the United Nations or than they could be. It is instructive that the Central Americans have consistently placed more faith in the United Nations than in the OAS.

In the cases of the elections in Haiti and Nicaragua, the fact that both the United Nations and the OAS sent missions discomfited both organizations. Tragically, each institution spent much more time defending its turf than trying to solve problems. The decision of the United Nations secretary-general to appoint a special envoy on Haiti on 11 December 1992, just two days before the OAS met on the subject and without consulting any of the Latin American or Caribbean ambassadors closest to the problem, was just another indication of how each organization sometimes seems more interested in scoring points against the other than in helping solve problems. Still, it is also true that the competition encourages each to do more.

Perhaps the principle that should be considered in dividing up responsibilities is the one built into the United States constitution: separate institutions that share powers not only check and balance the other but also provide an additional opportunity to address problems. The existence of Congress means that individuals or groups always have a second chance to vent their concerns if the executive displays no interest. Similarly, the existence of multiple international organizations gives the world's problems another chance to be heard and resolved.

In contemplating new ways to address global problems, one might want to examine the model of international trade and finance. If a country cannot pay its debts, no bank or international institution will provide it with the credits necessary to trade. If it wants to trade again, its economic team needs to work with one from the International Monetary Fund on a new economic programme that will permit it to become solvent. The self-executing nature of the system is very attractive, and the fact that the plan is negotiated by international civil servants, not a superpower's officials, makes it easier to accept.

The question is whether it is possible to devise a similar, self-executing regime in the political area. States that fail to maintain order or that engage in repression or other behaviour judged contrary to international norms by the international community would be compelled to accept a `political receivership' - a kind of political `chapter 11' - whereby the international community would help that state to restructure its political system and maintain order for a certain period of time or until it becomes politically solvent. As with bankruptices, it would be preferable if the government would voluntarily request a restructuring, but the Security Council ought to be able to take necessary action even if the de facto government rejects United Nations action.

There are many techniques - primarily in the area of election mediation - that an international group could use to assist countries to forge a new pact on the political rules of the game. ₁₁ The end of the Cold War and the spread of democracy means that the United States and other powers have less of a stake in the outcome of internal political struggles and more of a stake in a free electoral process for settling such contests. This will improve democracy's prospects.

The final question is how to transform a general norm into an achievable goal. In the case of human rights, the road began with the signing of charters and conventions that defined norms; then international institutions were created to monitor the performance of governments. These international organizations were not very effective, however, until certain leading governments, notably the United States, began to use their weight in their bilateral relationships and their contributions to the international organizations on behalf of the defence of human rights. The initial reaction by much of the international community and the multilateral development banks was negative, but within a decade, other donors and the banks themselves began to adopt similar approaches, and the combined leverage had its effect.

An analogous pattern occurred on election monitoring. At first, the idea was rejected by most governments. But it has proven to be a very useful instrument for resolving intranational conflicts, and the norm has gained ground. In the western hemisphere, only Mexico and Cuba now reject the idea. Other governments have encouraged the OAS to participate in election monitoring as an important device to give legitimacy to free elections.

One can argue that the international community has grounds for being concerned with the diversion of scarce resources from economic development to the purchase of weapons and by the instability that often parallels an arms race. However, only the barest outline of an international regime for dealing with these problems can be detected and that outline involves little more than signals of disapproval sent out by donor countries and the development banks if a government spends an excessive amount of its funds for arms. If clear operational norms were established - say a reduction by half of all arms sales as a percentage of gross national product by the year 2000 - and if the signals were replaced with sanctions, then such a norm would begin to bite into conventional arms races.

The end of the Cold War provides the international community with a unique opportunity to redefine sovereignty and expand the concept of security so that it includes the full range of global concerns - from aggression through civil wars, fraudulent elections or coups, environmental degradation, human rights violations, and poverty. The old boundary line between international and domestic affairs is no longer functional. The world is beginning to realize that it has responsibilities over a wider range of concerns and that sovereignty should not be an insurmountable barrier to resolving these problems.

Some have expressed concern that the United Nations has neither the resources nor the human resources to address all of the world's collective problems, and in the absence of the Cold War, many are looking for a new lodestone to judge which crises should be handled first. The matrix offers some guide. But if the question - which international problems should be dealt with first? - seems so difficult to answer, then perhaps one should ask which criterion is used on the domestic front. The answer is that newspapers and the media shape public opinion and help set a nation's agenda at home and, increasingly, abroad. The political system responds to this agenda and determines whether the state has the capability and the resources to solve the problem of the moment. As the foreign arena becomes more democratic, it behaves more like the domestic one. But the expanding shape of its agenda and operations requires some hard budgetary and personnel decisions.

To President Harry Truman, the central reason for international law and a `political community' was self-evident: `When Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over the water in the Arkansas River, they don't call out the National Guard in each state and go to war over it. They bring a suit in the Supreme Court of the United States and abide by its decision. There isn't a reason in the world why we cannot do that internationally.'

There were good reasons why nation-states would not submit their disputes to the World Court or the United Nations, as Kansas and Colorado are compelled to do with the Supreme Court, but those reasons have diminished in importance, and the growing awareness of the transnational dimension of local problems has increased the need for collective action. The issue is no longer whether to maintain the sanctity of sovereignty, but rather what are the problems that face the world's citizens and what are the most appropriate and effective actions to address these problems.

Footnotes

Note 1: Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1973), ix. Back.

Note 2: Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace: Preventive Diplomacy, Peacemaking and Peace-keeping, report of the Secretary-General pursuant to the statement adopted by the Summit Meeting of the Security Council on 31 January 1992 (New York: United Nations 1992). For the number of vetoes, see page 7. From 1945 to 1987, the United Nations conducted thirteen peacekeeping operations; since 1987, it has initiated fourteen (page 28) as well as that for Somalia, which was authorized on 3 December 1992. Back.

Note 3: Walter B. Wriston, The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming our World (New York: Scribner 1992). Back.

Note 4: Leland M. Goodrich, Edvard Hambro, and Anne Patricia Simons, Charter of the United Nations: Commentary and Documents (3rd and rev ed; New York: Columbia University Press 1969), 10, 35. Back.

Note 5: This is the essence of the argument of Hans Morgenthau's Politics among Nations. Back.

Note 6: John Simpson, `A review of nuclear non-proliferation policies,' and Joseph S. Nye, Jr, `Is non-proliferation policy mistaken?' Harvard Political Review (spring 1992), 4-9. Back.

Note 7: William Starr Myers and Walter H. Newton, The Hoover Administration: A Documentary Narrative (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1936), 493-5. Back.

Note 8: Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 9. Back.

Note 9: For an elaboration of this argument, see Robert A. Pastor, Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1992), chaps 2, 7, 10, 13, 15. Back.

Note 10: See Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner, `Saving failed states,' Foreign Policy, no 89(winter 1992-93), 3-20. Back.

Note 11: See Robert Pastor, Whirlpool, chap 13; and Jennifer McCoy, Larry Garber, and Robert Pastor, `Pollwatching and peacemaking,' Journal of Democracy 2 (fall 1991). Back.