Peace (41 page)

One World, Many Peaces

The “one world” paradigm, a combination of ideology and global geography, was first actualized with the extension of colonialism into imperialism. At that time, nation-states and religion, backed by zero-sum mercantilism, were driving forces behind conflicts aimed at control of land, labor and resources worldwide. As a result, and as for the Romans in antiquity in more limited geographical and ideological senses, the sole way for one world to be and stay at peace was by the unquestioned domination of one peace on the basis of a nation-state, an empire and an economy. These confluences were a recipe for disaster from the start because they attempted to make compulsory for many groups the peace of one, a misconstrual of social as collective peace that, in effect, made “one world, one peace” impossible. The world wars made this recipe into a two-course meal, and the Cold War was its desserts, but did not change the fact that it was poisonous to begin with. Some peacemakers tried to make themselves antidotes or digestive aids, others into emetics, and they succeeded as such to the extents of one world, one peace allowed. Only during the Cold War did they collectively cook a new recipe with old ingredients, and in so doing put forth a paradigm along Ancient Eastern harmonic lines: one world, many peaces.

Still directly related to the Cold War but in stark contrast to its primary multinational military organizations, NATO and the WPO, was the explicitly peace-oriented Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of states. The term “Third World,” based on parallels with the French Third Estate, became a broad term referring to all developing nations not part of the first two, US or Soviet, “worlds.” In affirming that this other world
existed, the NAM also affirmed that another paradigm for peace did too. The NAM's origins are sometimes traced to a series of agreements reached between India and China in 1954, aimed at easing tensions between them after China's occupation of Tibet. Hoping to avoid conflict that would cripple the two new countries' development, their leaders adopted a policy of Panchsheel, Five Principles: 1. Mutual respect for territory; 2. Mutual non-aggression; 3. Mutual non-interference; 4. Mutual equality and benefits; ultimately, 5. Peaceful coexistence.
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More than containment, less than complete cooperation and conflict resolution, this bilateral agreement was formative of a multinational movement that proposed collectivity as a basis of world peace.

In 1955, an historic conference of newly independent African and Asian countries was held in Bandung, Indonesia, to promote economic and cultural cooperation and affirm opposition to the old European colonialism and any new colonialism by the superpowers. Six years later, the NAM as an organization was established on principles similar to Panchscheel at a summit in Belgrade, led by Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Nasser of Egypt. African, Asian and Latin American leaders agreed their countries would cooperate in exerting political pressure to ease Cold War tensions and stimulate economic development. The NAM did not and could not reflect socio-political systems of its members because they were heterogenous, defining its novel collective approach to world peace but also allowing its membership to include oppressive states under military regimes in no way internally peaceful. Soon forming a majority in the UN Assembly and representing a majority of the world's population, NAM countries proposed and passed resolutions calling for the independence of all remaining colonies and declared the 1960s a “decade of development” to be backed by global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in theory not practice free from Cold War motives. As it became clearer that increasing numbers of supposedly non-aligned states were now superpower satellites, and disparities between quickly and slower-developing nations became evermore acute, the Bandung's spirit of collective unity dissipated. By highlighting the possible benefits of one world, many peaces, the NAM also underscored its challenges.

Disputes arose at NAM summits and a splinter group of 77 states, the G-77, was formed to pursue limited, definite economic aims, such as fixed commodities prices to boost economies of developing nations, but its result disappointed. A G-7 of developed states created a counter-organization whose aims were similarly one-sided. Another NAM offshoot, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), tried using the growing reliance of developed nations on oil to influence world affairs in favor of developing nations. Culminating collective efforts was
a UN proposal for a New International Economic Order in which NAM nations would play greater global and regional roles. A resolution to this effect was passed in the Assembly, but in response the US refused to pay its UN dues and the resolution was unimplemented. By the late 1980s, the paradigm of harmonized, coordinated development the NAM had originally offered as an alternative to discordant Cold War militarism had become polarized on a hemispheric North–South line, along which debts due to developed from less developed countries turned into instruments of control. What the NAM and its offshoots achieved, if indirectly, was heightened competition between developed nations for the benefits the markets and products developing nations had to offer, though with little concern with welfares of their populations. Within NAM nations, this competition tended to amplify rather than overcome structural violence and all but ended the use of violence between some of them.

If the NAM, NATO and the WPO were stages upon which their underlying paradigms of world peace played out, the UN was the theater. Formed a year after the Second World War at a conference in San Francisco, its purpose was essentially to prevent a Third, and by this standard it has so far triumphed, though it did not do so on its own. It could not do so by its design coupled with the Cold War conditions in which it was born and raised, only one of which has changed. The unequivocal terms of the UN Charter's preamble outlines its goals:

to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.
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How the UN surpassed the League of Nations and made many contributions to world peace becoming more of an actuality is explored below. But its victories and losses in peacemaking may make more sense by first explaining three of its inherent limitations, easily distinguishable from its problems then and now. For example, problems during the UN's formation included the roles of regional organizations, and it was agreed that they could be agents of settlements and enforcements. Another was the status of treaties of outside origin, and it was agreed that they could be registered with, ratified and amended through the UN. Still another was the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, and it was agreed that it would be voluntary but only on a compulsory basis. In contrast to these problems the UN's limitations were also extensively debated but inadequately resolved because they have added to difficulties of completing its intrinsically
difficult missions.

One limitation the UN shares with its defunct predecessor is a self-inflicted inability to take independent action from its member nation-states, stemming from a self-perpetuating total dependence on the wills of and support from them. Of course, this limitation was a practical impracticality since there were no other wills and support to depend on since this was, after all, a United Nations, but it was also an outgrowth of longstanding principle. A second limitation of the UN it shares with the Westphalian System is the inviolability of state sovereignty, to the point that historically nearly no violation of peace of any kind within states has been reason enough for the UN to intervene without governments' permission, even when governments are responsible for the violations. The rock and a hard place between which this limitation puts the UN is understandable, as doing so would call into question the basis upon which its members exist and therefore its own existence, a position perhaps impossible to get out of. The third and last limitation to be mentioned here is the veto powers of the “Big Five” permanent members of the UN Security Council, the US, Britain, France, Russia and China, also the largest arms-producing nations in the world. The most contentious issue by far in San Francisco, delegates from the other countries contended, was that veto power would render the Security Council powerless if one of its members became a menace to peace and that they could act in their own interests regarding matters between non-Big Five nations. The Big Five gave other nations two choices: either accept the veto or forsake the UN. They chose the former, and within years their prescient nightmare came true within their magnanimous dream.

The Security Council was designed to be the UN's primary decision-making body with regards to the preservation of international peace. Composed of the Big Five permanent members and six temporary members elected by the General Assembly on an equitable regional basis for two-year terms (increased to ten in 1965), non-member nations may also participate in Council discussions affecting them upon its request but may not vote. The Council is continuously in session and one of its members' delegates must be present at UN headquarters in New York at all times in case of emergency, measures aimed at improving the League of Nations' slow response time. Article 33 of the Charter, dealing with “Pacific Settlement of Disputes,” states

The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.
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If a member nation fails to comply with this or other peace-preserving provisions, the Council is empowered to investigate the infringement,
make recommendations, and to enforce political and economic sanctions or use voluntary member-state force to uphold the Charter. By the letter, then, world peace was to be maintained one conflict resolution at a time.

The Council passes Resolutions in two ways. In cases of disputes between nations, any nine votes of the Council suffice; where peace has been breached or is threatened, the nine votes must include those of the Big Five. The latter mechanism embodies the Big Five veto, which has often prevented peace-related Resolutions from being passed, as when France and the UK vetoed measures to resolve the Suez Crisis (1956). Since the Council's inception, the veto has been used five times by China, 18 by France, 32 by the UK, 81 by the US and 122 by the USSR/Russia. Reasons have ranged from blocking admission of new member states to the UN to refusing to issue statements against aggressors based on politico-economic interests. During the Eastern European revolts against Soviet rule in the 1950s and 60s and wars for independence in Northern Africa in the 1960s, the Big Five sometimes based their vetoes on the Charter's clause stating that the Council may not intervene in internal affairs of member states. In other cases, the Council has decided to intervene in the internal affairs of countries to promote intra-national peace upon their request as during the Greek Civil War, and has imposed sanctions aimed at the removal of structurally violent intra-national policies, as against apartheid in South Africa. However, abstentions have not always been considered vetoes, as when the Council went ahead with its planned operations in Korea, led by American armed forces, even though the USSR was then boycotting the Council. Yet despite Cold War frictions, the UN did achieve a number of its peace-oriented objectives when the Council failed, thanks to the Assembly.

The Assembly, in which all member states are represented, was intended as a deliberative and advisory body, but like the office of the Secretary General it soon developed the capability to circumvent Council deadlocks through its agencies. For example, in 1950 the Assembly passed a Uniting for Peace Resolution asserting that it may take action on peace-threatening issues if the Council is veto-paralyzed. Thus, although Britain and France used vetoes in the Suez Crisis, they heeded Assembly calls for cease-fires and troop withdrawals. Pursuant to the Charter, it may discuss and make recommendations on peace, security and UN operations issues except if they are not under Council consideration, then only upon its request. In 1948, a committee headed by Eleanor Roosevelt presented a Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserting “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” passed unanimously by the Assembly.
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Today comprising 192 voting members and non-voting observer non-governmental organizations in a wide
variety of fields, aside from the unparallel international forum it provides, the Assembly has also initiated studies and sponsored agencies on human rights, economic, political, education or health issues affecting its member states, vastly improving on the multi-pronged approach to world peace pioneered by the League of Nations, beginning with disarmament. One world, many peaces were thus also to be achieved by simultaneously actualizing each of their components.

The Assembly's first resolution dealt with atomic power, not yet used when the UN was formed, creating the Atomic Energy Commission to abolish atomic weapons, which it has not, and to ensure that atomic energy would be used only for peaceful purposes, which it has. A year later the Assembly further resolved to regulate to reduce all weapons, for which the Security Council convened the Commission for Conventional Armaments. Within five years, all the Big Five except China had growing nuclear arsenals, and China would a decade later, and it became evident that the two Commissions' proposals were being systematically rejected along Cold War lines. So in 1952, the Commissions were united in a comprehensive Disarmament Commission of five USSR-aligned, five US-aligned and eight non-aligned nations charged with drafting mutually acceptable treaties for monitoring, controlling and eventually eliminating all militaries. Significant progress towards disarmament was made in treaties of which numbers of signatories continue to increase, generally along with the size of their militaries. At the Assembly's First Special Session on Disarmament in 1978, the Disarmament Commission increased to forty members and a periodic Conference on Disarmament was initiated. The Special Session produced a Final Document consisting of a Declaration of Principles, a Program of Action, and Machinery for Disarmament, guiding lights of contemporary demilitarization efforts. With the Final Document, every UN member state became part of the Disarmament Commission as an advisory body, and the Conference became the single multilateral negotiating forum on the issue.