Page 195 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

1014 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

We should endeavor to do something so that we may say
that we have not lived in vain. That we may leave
some impress of ourselves on the sands of time.
• Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)

the major powers were members. And second, it was conflict. Examples of this sort of activity in the 1990s
designed to try to get around the buck-passing problem. could be found in the former Yugoslavia, in Cambodia,
The U.N. has a General Assembly that, much like that of and in East Timor.
the League, passes resolutions by majority vote. But the
General Assembly is not tasked to enforce the rules of Beyond Collective Security
collective security. In the U.N.’s design, a new body The Security Council is aided in enforcing collective
called the Security Council was created for that task.The security by a variety of additional organizations. Some
Security Council has only a few members at any given prevent conflicts by settling disputes by arbitration,
point in time (originally eleven, now fifteen) and is such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Others
always in session, so that it can deal with threats to inter- are designed to do on a regional basis some of the same
national security quickly and efficiently.The membership things that the U.N. does globally. These include the
includes those nations that were the five greatest military African Union (AU), the Organization of American
powers at the end of World War II, and it can only States (OAS), and the Organization for Security and
authorize the use of force if all five agree. Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). These organizations
range in age; the OAS was created in 1948, whereas the
The U.N. and International AU came into being in 2002, although it incorporates
Peace and Security organizations that had been created several decades
The system never really worked as planned. The U.N. earlier.
authorized the U.S.-led intervention in the Korean War The role of international organizations in ameliorating
in 1950, but after that was not able to successfully inter- the suffering caused by war goes back as far as their role
vene in Cold War disputes because both the United in collective security.The first such organization was the
States and the Soviet Union had a veto in the Security ICRC, created in 1863 to help wounded soldiers and
Council. In 1956, in response to the Suez Crisis, the oversee the treatment of prisoners of war. Although the
Security Council invented a new role for collective secu- ICRC is a nongovernmental organization, it has a semi-
rity, called peacekeeping.This refers to the use of troops official capacity in the international system. For example,
authorized by the Security Council to oversee the imple- its role as the monitor of the treatment of prisoners of
mentation of cease-fires after conflicts, a more modest war is written into the Geneva Conventions on the rules
role than the enforcement of international security but of war. Other ameliorative organizations are intergov-
one that the U.N. has engaged in successfully for ernmental, such as the Office of the United Nations High
decades. Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which traces its
The U.N.’s role in issues of war and peace underwent roots back to the appointment by the League of Nations
a renaissance in response to the end of the Cold War of the first High Commissioner for Refugees in 1921.
around 1990. Freed from the constraints of U.S.-Soviet The UNHCR currently oversees relief efforts to more
confrontation, the Security Council was able to author- than 20 million refugees worldwide.
ize more ambitious missions than it had been able to Other international organizations, most of which can
for three decades. These missions, in places like Iraq trace their roots back to the 1950s, help countries to
and the former Yugoslavia, went beyond peacekeeping, recover more generally from the effects of war by helping
and were much like traditional collective security mis- them to develop their economies and basic services;
sions. The U.N. also got involved in what came to be these include the United Nations Development Pro-
called peace building—missions designed to create gramme (UNDP) and the United Nations Children’s
working political and legal systems in places where the Fund (UNICEF). The efforts of these organizations are
absence of such systems was causing, or was caused by, augmented by a wide range of nongovernmental organ-