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Reshaping the concept of shared responsility for global security

By Ramesh Thakur

In a number of key meetings during and after World War II, world leaders drew up the rules to govern international behaviour and established a network of institutions to work together for the common good.

Both the rules and institutions - the system of global governance with the United Nations as the core – are under serious challenge. The UN has to operate today in a global environment that is vastly more challenging, complex and demanding than the world of 1945. On the one hand, the crisis over Iraq was as much a symptom of underlying seismic shifts in world politics. On the other hand, the war itself
further damaged UN authority.

In order to forge a new consensus on the norms and laws governing the use of force in world affairs, Kofi Annan brought together a group of 16 distinguished experts, including former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, to probe the nature and gravity of today's threats and recommend collective solutions to them through a reformed UN. The composition of the panel was initially ridiculed for its average age (around 70) when the task was to look to the future: "Alzheimer's commission", "relics trying to reform a relic", and "a cross between nostalgia and deja vu" were among the (unattributed) choice descriptions.

In the event the panel's report has confounded the most sceptical and exceeded the expectations of most, even while it falls short of the boldness of vision and action demanded by the most keen.

The report is both comprehensive and coherent, presenting a total of 101 recommendations in furtherance of the conviction that "The maintenance of world peace and security depends importantly on there being a common global understanding, and acceptance, of when the application of force is both legal and legitimate."

The overarching themes are our shared vulnerability and the primacy of the rule of law embedded in universal institutions and procedures that are efficient, effective and equitable. The central thesis is that no country can afford to deal with today's threats alone, and no threat can be dealt with effectively unless other threats are addressed at the same time.

For example, the failure of a poor or fragile state to contain an emerging mass infectious disease can have a devastating impact on the life and security of the citizens of the most affluent and powerful state. And we have just witnessed the raw power of a natural catastrophe across southern Asia.

The report identifies the major threats as war and violence among and within states; the use and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; terrorism; trans-national organised crime; and poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation. The threats can come from state and nonstate actors and endanger human as well as national security. 

Collective security is necessary because today's threats are interconnected, cannot be contained within national boundaries, and have to be addressed simultaneously at all levels.

The primary challenge to the international community is to ensure that imminent threats do not materialise, and distant threats do not become imminent. This requires early, decisive and collective action against all the threats before they can cause the worst devastation. Such a prophylactic approach must emphasise development as a structural prevention approach while including the possibility of preventive military action.

The panel endorses UN-authorised preventive action, but not unilateral preventive action. Because the use of force is legal does not mean that it is thereby also ethical and wise. Instead the panel proposes five criteria of legitimacy: seriousness of threat, proper purpose, last resort, proportional means and balance of consequences.

With respect to internal conflicts, the panel argues that "the issue is not the "right to intervene" of any State, but the "responsibility to protect" of every State." The mutual vulnerability and "multiplier effects" of threats help to explain why sovereignty today has to include the state's responsibility to protect its own people and obligations to the wider international community alongside the privileges of sovereignty.

Hence too the need to enhance state capacity in order to enable it to exercise sovereignty responsibly. The legitimacy criteria will simultaneously make the Security Council more responsive to outbreaks of humanitarian atrocities and make it more difficult for individual states or ad hoc "coalitions of the willing" to appropriate the language of humanitarianism for geopolitical and unilateral interventions.

But can any criteria overcome the problem of competing ideologies and divided interests? Or, to put it bluntly: how can the UN be empowered to enforce resolutions against recalcitrant regimes like Saddam Hussein's but not take any action against Israel? Without such selectivity, Washington may not re-commit to the UN. 

With such double standards, many other countries could walk way from the UN. No amount of articulation and clarification of agreed criteria can compensate for their selective application.

Much of the recent selectivity has come in the context of the so-called war on terror. The report's section on terrorism achieves a good balance between immediate threats and root causes, between short term tactics and comprehensive strategies, between assistance and sanctions, and between local, national, regional and global efforts.

This is buttressed by three significant strengths. First, it proposes a clear yet simple definition of terrorism: "any action that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act." Second, it affirms that "terrorism is never an acceptable tactic, even for the most defensible of causes" and therefore "must be condemned clearly and unequivocally by all." And third, recalling that existing normative instruments with regard to the use of force by states are well developed and robust, the panel calls for a similar degree of normative strength concerning the use of force by nonstate actors.

Many NGOs should take heed of this: sometimes states can be the good guys.

Ramesh Thakur is senior vice-rector of UN University. This commentary appeared in the Canberra Times. These are his personal views.

© 2005  United Nations University