week 6 - reading 2 part 2 (no enchanted place, Mazower) Flashcards
UN - end of the cold war
- expanded peacekeeping role
- more robust mandate for UN soldiers
- Boutros Boutros-Ghali
- could take active role in resettling refugees + facilitating reconciliation, rebuilding bureaucracies, supervising elections
- mission to oversee global social and eco. dev. + provide assistance and advice to the world’s poor
- only UN legitimacy to defend human rights + intervene in members’ affairs on behalf of humanity of law
problems:
- corruption came to light
- criticism of impotence: civil wars Balkans and Africa + genocide Rwanda
- NATO bombed Kosovo without UNSC approval in the name of humanitarian intervention
- W. Bush admin. national security doctrine with preemptive war (didn’t match with UN principles)
UN reform?
Mazower: UN is in vain for a raison d’etre more suited for the needs of the present (as it originally was to adapt empire to a nation-time), it is devoid of any substantial strategic purpose beyond preventing a world war
suspicion that UN is too far gone is pervasive/dominant
some/others want:
- streamlined to allow fast military action (e.g. UNSC enlarged, veto power weakened, UN military staff)
- move more toughly against human rights offenders + do more to stamp values on the world until it is too late (before the Chinese take over)
- call to promote ‘‘human security’’: development goals and rights
historical understanding in the debate about the relevance/reform of the UN
= not extensive:
- great deal is assumed based on cursory readings of foundational texts (little ackn. of mixed motives behind their drafting)
- scholarly accounts have special pleading and wishful thinking : internationalism presented as positive, globalization inevitable/wishable (!historians shouldn’t confuse the utopianism of their subject with their own)
*mostly reaction to nationalistic Bush cabinet
->body of literature with ne-sided view of what the UN was set up to do, generates expectations the founders never intended to be met -> deepens the crisis facing the UN
!historians and IR scholars have failed to do justice to the complexity of ideas and ideologies that lie behind the UN
(he argues that IR focuses to much on generalizability + rational choice models)
more critical look at what the UN founders had in mind
- commentators in the 40s had a more wary view of the UN than historians currently tend to: saw it as hypocrisy, as veil masking the consolidation of great power directorate, imperious attitude to how the world’s weak should be governed
*Webster: UN as alliance of the Great Powers embedded in a universal organization - Charter can be read as preamble (along with declaration of human rights + genocide convention) OR as promissory notes the UN founders never intended to be cashed (e.g. talking about human rights was a way of doing nothing and avoiding commitment to intervene)
!1940s not beginning of rights regime, that came later (author earlier wrote that UN human rights rhetoric masked big 3 powers abandonment of earlier commitments)
how has IR failed to do justice to the complexity of ideas and ideologies that lie behind they UN?
- anxiety to demonstrate that it’s a self-contained discipline, capable of generating general theories about world politics: science envy -> focus on abstractions of game theory and rational choice + depreciate role of ideology
- realists were against pretensions of idealistic internationalists -> story of UN as instrument of great powers (!that’s not all that it is)
- didn’t take institutions seriously until the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (trade US dollar for gold) and erosion of US hegemony
- neoliberal institutionalism: focus on ‘preferences’ for analyzing choices for multilateral action rather than on ideas/philosophies of multilateralism in their ideological/cultural context
- liberal democratic peace thesis -> naturalization liberalism -> American liberalism seen as unviolent and pragmatic (focus on making rules rather than ruling)
where do the ideological origins of the UN lie?
general thought = Woodrow Wilson: Wilsonianism
*Wilson ignored existing American strains of internationalism + own thought had ambiguities -> commentators pick and choose among his various pronouncements
Mazower: contribution of British imperial thought
Mazower challenges:
+ instead he argues
1.
idea that the UN rose from WW2 pure and uncontaminated by any significant association with prewar failure of the League of Nations:
- many ideas UN came from same people who were involved with the League
- main difference was the emphasis on inclusion all big 3 of WW2 -> veto powers -> great powers both more willing to support and ignore it (as UN couldn’t act against them)
- some differences: abandonment of collective rights, greater respect nationality, waning confidence in international law as impartial expression of civilization
- league and UN bore close resemblance to one another
2.
idea that the UN was/is above all an American affair
- Washington was not driving force in the UN
- UN as product of evolution, not revolution -> goes back to ideas about international order, community, and nation in early C20 British Empire
he argues:
UN further chapter in the history of world organization inaugurated by the League + linked with question of empire and vision of global order that emerged out of the British Empire in particular in its final decades
Jan Smuts and Jawaharlal Nehru
- Jan Smuts = South Africa
- Jawaharlal Nehru = India
= outstanding statesmen of the late phase of the British Empire
their UN experiences define the rise and fall of the idea of an imperial internationalism (articulated by Smuts in aftermath of the Boer War + demolished by Nehru in a series of pol. moves 1946~1955)
What to make of the fact that Jan Smuts helped draft the UN’s stirring preamble?
Mazower’s starting point
Jan Smuts:
- segregationist policies in South Africa
- racial superiority: believer in white rule over the African continent
-> how can he have contributed to UN’s commitment to universal rights?
- at the time no one noticed the shadow this brought to the UN
*African American activist W.E.B. Du Bois noticed: slammed Smuts for presiding over the worst race problem of the modern world - Smuts was a supporter of international organization (as a way of keeping the settler colonies safe in the empire’s embrace + to ensure that white world leadership would continue)
- Smuts also played a role in shaping the League of Nations
- it was Smuts appeal to a higher morality that constituted his main contribution to the preamble of the UN Charter
Alfred Zimmern
- classicist, political theorists, wartime drafter of the League blueprint in Whitehall
- played a role in the formation of UNESCO (focus on ideas and educatoin)
- placed faith in ‘civilization’ and values of British liberalism
has a form of ‘international-mindedness’: ethical conception of community that trusts mainly on education and transformation of men’s minds rather than on laws and institutions
interwar European crisis -> Zimmern saw that Britain’s world leadership role was doomed -> him and others went to train the young US democracy
- told Americans to see the UN as instrument for global responsibilities
imperial internationalism
- articulated in a world that took empire for granted (pre-WW2)
- Wilsonian talk for self-determination confined almost entirely to Europe + allowed imperial powers to expand
possibilities narrowed in the 40s: American debate about post-war fate of Jews shows how thinking about nations had changed:
- League: minority rights regime made new states treat minorities properly + granted them rights under international law
- Roosevelt took over the leadership on the issue of refugees and stateless peoples (was committed to restricting Jewish immigration)
Raphael Lemkin and Joseph Schechtman
two emigre Jews considering the postwar fate of the Jews and its international implications
- Lemkin: wanted to restore minority rights + perhaps extend reach of international legal protections
*1948 Genocide Convention was his (but was not a move forward, but last tribute to a past in which international law had more weight than in the late 40s) - Schechtman: wanted to stop interfering in member states’ internal affairs and bring stability by uprooting the minorities themselves
!’right to protect’ of UN reformers was at the table in 1945, but was rejected -> minorities less protection under the UN than under the League
!!UN emphasis on national self-determination and sovereignty = doctrine that trampled over rights of others (-> minorities eastern Europe disappeared + formation Jewish national state)
late 1950s and 1960s
principle of self-determination was globalized in a rapid fashion -> UN turned from being an instrument of empire into an anti-colonial forum
-> shows UN had potential to be something different than was imagined by the wartime great powers
*e.g. Smuts did’t see it coming: UNGA supported Indian delegation demand for South Africa to justify its policies
