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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Interview with Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul:
“Financial resources must not be pooled”
Bastian Loges and Ulrich Menzel:
State disintegration and humanitarian intervention
Anne Jung:
Neither war nor peace in Sierra Leone
Interview with UNDP-Administrator Mark Malloch Brown:
“Aid needs to be more evenly spread”
Sheila Mysorekar:
DynCorp and the privatisation of wa
4/2004
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State disintegration and humanitarian intervention
The humanitarian catastrophes of the last decade had their roots in the erosion of state structures. What the experience of the 1990s taught is that, where there is no state monopoly of coercive power, societies get caught in cycles of worsening violence. UN interventions can stop such escalation and the world organisation already has operational rules and procedures for such action. To implement this policy systematically, however, it needs more political support.
[ By Bastian Loges and Ulrich Menzel ]
Examples of the devastating effects of state erosion can be seen in the break-up of Yugoslavia and its aftermath, in the disintegration of Somalia and in the genocide in Rwanda. But the international community has learnt little from these events. A systematic study of the lessons they teach has yet to be undertaken. At Braunschweig Technical University’s Institute of Social Sciences, a research project launched under the “Peace and Conflict Research in Lower Saxony” banner looks at “US Policy in the UN Security Council and the Humanitarian Intervention Regime”. We report here on the initial results.
Lesson 1:
State disintegration generally gives way to a spiral of violence
State disintegration encompasses a wide range of developments, which result in a state being unable to meet its obligations to citizens. However, a distinction can be made between two types of state disintegration: “failed states” and “quasi-states”. The classic example of a “failed state” is Yugoslavia. Once a functioning state, it broke up, became engulfed in civil wars over power and resources and plunged into a state of anarchy and escalating violence. Without the disintegration of the state, there would have been no ethnic cleansing, no genocide. In the case of the Democratic Republic of Congo, however, the problems arose in a “quasi-state”. Former Zaire was a constant problem for the international community after de-colonisation. UN intervention in the 1960s was followed by the military dictatorship of Mobutu and, later on, by Congolese infighting that spread and drew nine countries into a major regional conflict. Africa’s third-largest country never managed to establish functioning state structures. It, too, descended into anarchy and escalating violence.
What the examples of Yugoslavia and Congo show is that ultimately it makes little difference whether state structures exist and then break down or whether they were never more than an intellectual construct in the first place. State disintegration means violence.
Lesson 2:
The international community needs a uniform concept
As can be seen from political events in the 1990s, the international community has responded to the “internal affairs” of different states in widely different ways. In some cases the UN intervened, in others it didn’t, even though the conflict situations were often similar. This kind of selective involvement by the international community will not be tenable in the future – for moral, economic and security reasons.
The moral argument is that in the post-national constellation that has characterised the international system since the 1990s, human rights are gaining precedence over states’ rights. Humanitarian missions launched in the last decade have mostly been justified by massive human rights abuses in the wake of state disintegration. This is what paved the way for robust humanitarian interventionism. Even though some interventions have been prompted by more than just humanitarian concerns, it has to be acknowledged that the humanitarian grounds on which they were based provided sufficient justification. Where no moral grounds exist or where intervention flies in the face of accepted international standards – as was the case in Iraq in 2003 – international public opinion swings against it. Pictures from war zones like Liberia or the Congo, on the other hand, gave rise to public pressure that Western governments could not wholly ignore.
The economic argument goes as follows: One of the reasons intervention has been selective is that it was hoped wars would simply run out of steam. When warring factions were exhausted, it was claimed, comprehensive conflict resolution would be possible. But the reality of civil war is different. In West Africa especially (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea), recent history shows that conflicts tend to spread rather than fizzle out. The reason they keep going on is that they are embedded in full-blown war economies – and they are integrated in a global web of illicit trade. War becomes self-perpetuating because the rent seeking actors involved have an interest in prolonging it. In West Africa, this has even resulted in the total destabilisation of the once emerging economy of Côte d’Ivoire. The security argument is that the problems of disintegrating states does are not locally or regionally limited. The question of security figures just as prominently in the debate as do the illicit economic links. There is a fear of “Third World conflicts” spreading to the developed world. The aspects particularly stressed are migration, drug-trafficking and terrorism. The Bush administration, for example, sees the September 11 terrorists as actors with bases in disintegrating states.
Lesson 3:
The UN’s search for rules
The debate about peacekeeping missions and humanitarian intervention can also be seen as a debate about limiting the impact of state disintegration. Its origins date back to the expansive phase of UN peacekeeping activities in the early 1990s. Even though the international community’s interventions in those days were of dubious success or legitimacy, they showed that multilateral intervention under the umbrella of the United Nations was the only way to stop or at least slow down the process of state disintegration and its consequences. Conceptual considerations and their implementation in the UN have already progressed further than might be assumed at first glance. This is shown by the following three examples.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s “Agenda for Peace” (1992) marked the beginning of a normative regulation process, which continues to this today. The report delivered a large number of concrete proposals which, taken together, served as a model for the UN in a world that had changed. For the business of securing peace, Boutros-Ghali developed four fundamental tools (preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding). The biggest difference the report made was in the UN itself. While member states were slow to respond to the Agenda’s call to put up money and manpower for UN peacekeeping missions, the UN set about implementing the secretary-general’s proposals. Part of the reform process involved restructuring the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) and developing the Standby Arrangement System (UNSAS), in which member states can commit military units as well as police and civilian personnel to the forces “on call” for UN operations.
In 1994, two years after the launch of the Agenda for Peace, the international community’s enthusiasm for UN peacekeeping missions waned considerably. The Somalian fiasco and the disaster in Rwanda severely undermined confidence in the tools at the UN’s disposal. In the wake of these two failures, member states have been less willing to contribute to new missions. The criticism that the organisation was ineffective and inefficient prompted a comprehensive review of UN security and peacekeeping activities by an international commission headed by former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi. The “Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operation” (2000) presented its principal findings in four thematic groups:
1) recommendations on the doctrine, strategy and decision-making processes of peacekeeping missions;
2) recommendations for improving the UN’s ability to dispatch missions fast;
3) recommendations for reforming the resources and structures of UN headquarters and
4) recommendations for peace missions in the information age.
Most of the proposals related to peace mission planning and implementation and came with concrete figures and demands addressed to the UN and the member states. The UN managed to implement important proposals such as the formation of integrated mission task forces. The implementation of other recommendations, however, was blocked by the member states.
Another step in the normative regulation process came with Canada’s efforts to implement the recommendations of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) within the United Nations. The Canadian-financed, but independent commission delivered its report in 2001. Its title – “The Responsibility to Protect” – points unequivocally to what the ICISS perceived as the principal problem. Not all states, the commission concluded, fulfilled their responsibilities to protect their citizens. In such cases, the international community needed to help. This could be done in three ways: through conflict prevention, through intervention and through post-conflict assistance. For all three forms of help, the ICISS made a series of operational proposals. The work of the commission is also important because it addressed more than just the issue of humanitarian intervention and its legitimacy; in focusing on the “responsibility to protect”, it also tackled the phenomenon of state disintegration.
Altogether, the initial findings of our research project show that a broad-based effort has been made to draft rules and procedures for UN peacekeeping operations. Their development, in the 1990s, has had practical implications. Classic peacekeeping, as defined in chapter VI of the UN Charter, and the once little-used instrument of peace enforcement described in chapter VII – as well as various mixtures of the two – have been joined by an as yet fairly unstable mechanism for prevention (UNPREDEP in Macedonia) and a growing capacity for post-conflict assistance (e.g. UNMIK in Kosovo). The UN has thus developed an extensive tool box compliant with international law for helping disintegrating states and their populations.
Lesson 4:
UN intervention policy needs more political support
The lessons of the 1990s are clear: the disintegration of states is a problem with at least regional implications and is no longer tolerable for moral, economic and security reasons. As a result of the UN reform process, tools and means are now available to deal with humanitarian disasters. Nevertheless, many actors in many areas still lack the political will to take the logical steps indicated by these lessons. The United States’ cool attitude to humanitarian interventions under UN command is a notable example. What the Americans gathered from their experience in Somalia was that humanitarian interventions should be treated with caution – especially if conducted under the umbrella of the UN. This was put to paper back in 1994, in Presidential Decision Directive 25 signed by Bill Clinton, which contributed to the USA’s generally reserved stand on multilateralism (Menzel, 2004, chapter 5). In particular, preventive diplomacy is still insufficiently institutionalised in the UN context. There certainly are possibilities of monitoring conflicts for signs of human rights abuse, but findings rarely reach the Security Council in time for preventive action. Post-conflict assistance also seems to be only loosely anchored in the UN so far. It can only be hoped that the experience of missions in Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia and Kosovo started a learning process in this respect. Today, the provision and training of troops for UN peace missions can be described as a classic UN problem.
But there are positive developments, too. The German government and the German Bundestag have set up the Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF), an organisation that trains and recruits civilian personnel for peacekeeping operations and conducts analyses of such missions. Another example showing how UN efforts can be supported is Denmark’s SHIRBRIG initiative. The “Multi-National Stand-By High Readiness Brigade for United Nations Operations” (SHIRBRIG) can now mobilise troops from 16 countries. And finally, the UN itself is pressing ahead with its process of reform. In January 2004, ten years after the genocide in Rwanda, Stockholm hosted the fourth International Forum on “Preventing Genocide”. At it, Kofi Annan proposed the creation of a permanent UN commission on genocide. Even if the practical implications of the secretary-general’s proposal still need to be clarified, there can be no doubt about its symbolic significance.
Documents on the Internet:
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros,1992: An Agenda for Peace.
www.un.org/Docs/SG/agpeace.html
Brahimi-Report, 2000: Panel on United Nations Peace Operations.
www.un.org/peace/reports/peace_operations
ICISS, 2001: The Responsibility to Protect.
www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/iciss-ciise/report-en.asp
Stockholm Conference (2004):
www.preventinggenocide.com
Bastian Loges
is a researcher at Braunschweig Technical University’s Institute of Social Sciences.
bastian.loges@planet-interkom.de
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Menzel
teaches International Relations and Comparative Governance at the Braunschweig Technical University’s Institute of Social Sciences.
ulrich.menzel@tu-braunschweig.de
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