This dissertation looks around collective security in the round, so it explores theory and practice and normative and legal bases for collective security, the historical roots of current controversies, the potential roles of the UN, the case such as t...
This dissertation looks around collective security in the round, so it explores theory and practice and normative and legal bases for collective security, the historical roots of current controversies, the potential roles of the UN, the case such as the Gulf War and Korean War as experienced.
The aspirations for maintenance of the international peace and security, and the establishment of organization to prevent the war are the eventual ideal of human being, especially after World War I. This effort has been culminated in the concept of collective security.
Collective security insists that there is no realistic alternatives; states, acting together, must control the aggression and protect the weak members of the system, or there will be no order.
Thus, collective security may be defined as the international mechanism designed to prevent or suppress aggression by any the credible threat and to potential victims of aggression, the diplomatic boycott through economic pressure to military sanctions to enforce the peace. It purports to provide security for all states, by the action of all states, against all states which might challenge the existing order by the arbitrary unleashing of their power.
But UN could not play a role that framers of UN had in mind because of the cold war between United States and Soviet Union. From the beginning t h e abuse of veto power by the superpowers, especially by the USSR, in the Security Council obstructed the function of collective security system as being reflected in chapter Ⅶ 'Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression' in the Charter.
Many UN diplomats and reformers are unsatisfied about P-5's the veto, and they want to re-consider the issue, even if the number of Permanent Members does not increase. The Non-Aligned Movement has recently reaffirmed its longtime opposition to the veto, saying it "guarantees an exclusive and dominant role to the Permanent Members of the council and is contrary to the aim of democratizing the UN."
This dissertation suggests that is needed revision of the veto like as The General Assembly can make resolution in case Security Council could not make resolution.
And article 51 stipulates that "nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent hight of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the UN". What article 51 obviously aims at is the recognition of the right of any nation, whether directly attacked or not, to come to the aid of any nation that has been so attacked. However is so far as a violation of international law taken the form of an armed attack, Article 51 reaffirms the decentralization of law enforcement, not only for the immediately injured nation but for all other nations as well. This may also legalize aggressive war.
The United Nations, forged from the battles of two World Wars, was dedicated, above all, to the pursuit of peace and, in the enduring wards of the Charter, to saving "succeeding generations from the scourge of war". Undoubtedly, peacekeeping falls fairly and squarely within the spirit of that pledge. Yet we will search the Charter in vain for any specific provision for such operations. "Peacekeeping", from the start, has been an improvisation.
United Nations peacekeeping, that mission has earned its place in history as the first example of what has come to be known as "peacekeeping". Since 1948, there have been fifty-five United Nations peacekeeping operations, Over 800,000 military and civilian police personnel, and thousands of other civilians, from 118 different countries, have served in United Nations peacekeeping operations. About fourteen thousand peacekeepers are serving this day. No figures, however, can do justice to the ultimate sacrifice that more than about 1,800 peacekeepers have made over this half-century.
Indeed, peacekeeping has been one of many activities through which UN bas shown its ability to adapt to circumstances, to find its way round obstacles, and to make itself relevant to the actual problems at hand. Not that the evolution of United Nations peacekeeping - from patrolling clearly-marked buffer zones and cease-fire lines to the far more complex, multi-dimensional operations of the 1990s has been either smooth or simple.
There, the limits of peacekeeping were graphically demonstrated: we learned, the hard way, that lightly armed troops in white vehicles and blue helmets are not he solution to every conflict. Sometimes peace has to be made - or enforced - before it can be kept.
In recent times the pendulum may appear to have swung away from support for United Nations peacekeeping. But I have no doubt that history will see it as one of the Organization's most important and lasting contributions to international peace and security. The mission of United Nations peacekeeping must continue.
In the experience of collective security, has the collective security system envisioned in the creation of the League of Nations and the United Nations finally been put to use in the Korean War and the Persian Gulf War? The literature on collective security reflects the optimism of the disillusionment with the subsequent collective security failures of both organizations. The disillusionment with the United Nations focuses upon the effects of the Cold War rivalry between the United State sand the Soviet Union as that competition eviscerated the UN's collective security capabilities.
In the case of Gulf War, the UN Charter and other war-related international laws gave t h e legal basis to the U.S. -led collective action. In the Post-Cold war era , the UN Charter played the role of providing the source of universal value in conformity to justice and peace.
In Korean case, Military collective security measures had been invoked for the time in the history of the organization. This demonstration of effective collective measures may have helped to deter aggression elsewhere and may have helped to create confidence in the support by the UN of those countries exposed to threats of external aggression. Although it can be said that those measures were taken in the absence of the Soviet veto, it nevertheless brought forth the willingness of the UN member countries to participate in defending democracy and fighting for the cause of freedom and eternal peace. Although the UN intervention did not bring a clear victory. it demonstrated that aggression does not pay. The Korean experience hastened the development of the General Assembly of the United Nations as an agency of enforcement free from the Soviet veto.
The hypothesis of this dissertation i s that US foreign policy was guided and constrained by UN collective security after the end of the Cold War. The hypothesis is tested through a historical comparison of the collective security actions on the UN' past -the Korean War, during which, the UN did not place real constraints on US actions- and the UN's collective security actions during the Persian Gulf war during which the UN did, place real constraints on US actions. The research finds that the Korean War quickly moved away from any pretensions of collective security toward being a balance of power confrontation. During the Persian Gulf War the UN did not put real constraints on US actions during the months leading up to the shooting war against Iraq. However, once the shooting started, and especially after the ground war, support for the war diminished and disappeared. Consensus among the five permanent members of the Security Council shattered by 26February 1991. The war ended the next day well short of the military goals set by US policymakers.
Although the legal role of the United Nations in the Gulf Crisis of 1990-1991 fell short of the conditions for applying the classical theory of collective security, it was an another landmark in United Nations history and furnished some limited positive contributions to the United Nations practice.
In conclusion, this finding provides empirical evidence that collective security put real constraints on the actions of the sole remaining superpower, the United States. With the end of the Cold War and aftermath of the 9.11 terror, international relations among states are moving away from the balance of power reality of the Cold War and toward a more complex and more collective future, but not easy because of the unilateralism of US, like there appears to be the concept of cooperative security which differs from the traditional idea of collective security.