17/10/2005 La conférence sur l'ONU organisée par l'Ifri en collaboration avec l'Ambassade de la Suède en France. Avec la participation de : Hans Blix, Michel Camdessus, Gareth Evans, Jean-Marie Guéhenno et Thierry de Montbrial.

The Conference on the UN

Institut Français des Relations Internationales (ifri)

October 17, 2005

Introduction

Dag Hammarskjöld Secretary-General of the UN, 1953-1961: In the Service of Peace

By Gunnel Torén, Librarian at the Dag Hammarskjöld Library

Summary of the Conference

The United Nations And Conflict Prevention

By Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group

The UN And Arms Control

By Hans Blix

Introduction

One month after the spectacular 60th anniversary summit, the basic questions remain:does the UN have any means to take on the status change, and the inevitable institutional consequences, imposed by the end of the bipolar world? Can it fulfill the requirements regarding international security? The UN is the international society, with its progresses, its conflicting objectives, its vague desires and its weakness. What concrete role will have this international society, for preventing the deterioration of international crisis, for managing these crisis turning into conflicts, and organizing a sustainable recovery for the societies to avoid repeated failures?

Ifri organized, on October 17th, 2005, in collaboration with the Swedish Embassy in Paris, a conference on the future role of UN concerning security issues. These global questions have been raised in remembrance of Dag Hammarksjöld, UN General-Secretary from 1953 to 1961 - his name being always connected to endeavors of multiple crisis settlements and to the reinforcement of diplomatic and technical means of UN action.

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Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary-General, 1953-1961: In the Service of Peace

By Gunnel Torén, Librarian at the Dag Hammarskjöld Library

When Dag Hammarskjöld became Secretary-General of the United Nations in April 1953, to many people he was no more than an unknown Swedish government official. But during his years at the UN he successfully expanded the roles of the UN and of its Secretary-General in world politics. Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Dag Hammarskjöld's birth in 2005 is a way to commemorate his faith in the potential of the UN.

"You are about to take over the most impossible job on earth." With these words, Norway's Trygve Lie passed on his mandate as Secretary-General of the United Nations to Dag Hammarskjöld. The world organization was in the midst of a serious crisis and Lie had decided to step down.

The quiet diplomat

In many respects, Hammarskjöld was an unknown quantity when he assumed his post, but he soon showed that he had the capacity to make the sluggish UN organization more effective. He gained a reputation as a highly dedicated, self-sacrificing official with a very far-sighted vision of his position.

He was driven by a personal desire to act quickly, since he believed that problems should be solved at an early stage, before they become more complicated. During his period as Secretary-General, he introduced quiet diplomacy at the UN. He felt that in certain situations, this method was preferable to open debates, which often led to more serious conflicts.

Peacekeeping forces

Dag Hammarskjöld gave the office of UN Secretary-General a whole new authority. In his negotiating tasks, he maintained a neutral stance and emphasized the duty of the UN to protect small countries against the major powers. Hammarskjöld also shaped the UN's mandate to establish peacekeeping forces, which became a permanent feature of its crisis management efforts.

Three global crises

During his period at the UN, Hammarskjöld successfully ameliorated the consequences of three difficult world crises: the 1956 Suez War and the conflicts in Lebanon and Laos. In 1960, civil war broke out in the Congo. Hammarskjöld was instrumental in the UN's decision to send forces there, and he personally tried to mediate between the combatants. During one of these missions, Hammarskjöld died when his plane crashed in what is now Zambia on September 18, 1961.

Dag Hammarskjöld was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961. A leading cultural figure, he was also a writer and translator and one of the 18 members of the Swedish Academy.

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Summary of the Conference

Thierry de Montbrial

The founding fathers of the UN took the support by the major powers for collective security into account when the UN Charter was written. In order to avoid a similar stalemate as occurred during the League of Nations, they created the five permanent members in the Security Council.

The Security Council is currently in need of reform to make it more representative of today's world. This however is a complex process which might open up a "Pandora's box" and even put the Council in a situation potentially similar to what happened to the League of Nations.

Mr de Montbrial also discussed the issue of nationalsovereignty and the need to legitimate actions through UN endorsement.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno

Mr Guéhenno discussed peacekeeping operations.

The peacekeeping concept, initially formulated by Dag Hammarskjöld, is a paradox not foreseen in the UN Charter. It is today one of the most important tasks for the UN.

Since the end of the Cold war, almost all peacekeeping operations have been deployed to areas where a civil war has taken place. Mr Guéhenno underlined that long-term reconstruction efforts only begin with a deployment of a peacekeeping operation.

Many "Lessons Learned" have been drawn over time. It is important that a post-conflict peacekeeping operation be robust and be engaged in the country for a long period of time. While this kind of operation often take place in fragile states, rigorous coordination is imperative between the international actors (and inside the UN system itself) and between the civilian and military components.

The majority of the participants in the UN-led peacekeeping operations come from the third world. On the ground this might cause practical problems (less developed materiel, but also sometimes lack of respect), and, on a more political note, it raises questions about the developed countries' political credibility.

In addition, command and control structures clearly need to be more efficient. This also requires a strong UN Secretariat. Mr Guéhenno underlined the need to find a balance between the secretariat's role and the member states interests.

Michel Camdessus

Mr Camdessus elaborated on the theme of UN and development, hence how the Bretton Woods-institutions could contribute to peace and security. He underlined the necessity to adopt these institutions to new challenges (e.g., flow of resources, management and governance, tailor-made missions). The management today is not representative; the US and Europe should be required to give up some seats on the boards of the institutions.

The need for an efficient and relevant tool-box, and ability to react more rapidly was also stressed.

Gareth Evans

Gareth Evans elaborated on UN and crisis management. Referring to the newly released report from Human Security Watch, he noted that the number of armed conflicts, as well as the number of deaths, had declined radically since the end of the Cold War. The best explanation was the increase of preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping operations and the end of the Cold War itself (and consequently the end of large-scale conflicts).

During the last 15 years, many useful "Lessons Learned" have been drawn. The ability to prevent conflicts was underlined, and also the need for a more elaborate early warning mechanism. Mr Evans noted that it was not always possible to avoid conflicts (as seen in the Balkans), while the discussion on "Responsibility to Protect" was imperative. He also highlighted the importance of a robust mandate, as well as a long-term perspective when a peacekeeping mission was planned. The importance of coordination between the different international actors in complex multifunctional missions was also underlined. Such coordination would take place in the Peace Building Commission (PBC).

Hans Blix

Hans blix discussed the UN and Arms Control. Using a metaphor, where the US was said to be like an impatient Mars and Europe more like a patient Venus, he illustrated the difference in approach regarding the search for negotiated solutions.

Arms control inside the UN framework has often been an issue on balancing the interests of the big powers. The current situation in the UN shows how difficult this task is even today, especially since the US does not want to make any commitments under the UN aegis.

Although the situation is complicated, Mr Blix estimated that some projects in the sphere of nuclear weapons issues in the UN were still on track, including the additional protocol strengthening the IAEA safeguards. Resolution 1540 was characterized as an interesting innovation that gaveproof of the UN's ability. Acting inside the UN gave legitimacy but also the possibility to bring about measures throughout the entire global community-results could be attained that limited alliances of willing could not achieve.

Concerning the demand to refer the case of Iran to the UN Security Council, Mr Blix underlined that this was an issue of a different nature. Such an action would be possible given the IAEA's statutes. But if the aim of the demand were to demonstrate that the Council would not agree on sanctions and to make a case for unilateral use of force, it was not certain that such an aim should be pursueed. According to Mr Blix, the efforts to persuade Iran voluntarily to suspend activities aimed at the enrichment of uranium had not as yet been exhausted in any way. He also argued that the efforts made so far to negotiate with Iran had been rather meager, especially regarding security assurancesand in comparison with the offers that were made to North Korea.

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The United Nations And Conflict Prevention

By Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group

Today in New York at the United Nations, the long-awaited Human Security Report is being launched. A project supported by five major governments (Canada, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK), edited by Andrew Mack of the University of British Colombia and formerly Director of Kofi Annan’s Strategic Planning Unit, and published by Oxford University Press, this seeks to bring together for the first time in a really comprehensive way data about wars within and between states, terrorist acts and atrocity crimes that is presently not collected by any international agency. Among its key findings are these:

• There has been a dramatic decline in the number of armed conflicts since the early 1990s – by 80 per cent in the case of conflicts with 1000 or more battle deaths in a year. Although some 60 conflicts of varying degrees of intensity (most of them quite low) are still being waged around the world, war between states has almost completely disappeared – now less than 5 per cent of all conflicts – and the overall environment is one of really major reduction.

• Paralleling the number of conflicts, the number of battle deaths is also dramatically down, both in absolute numbers, and in terms of the deadliness of each individual conflict. Whereas back in the 1950s and for years thereafter the average number of deaths per conflict per year were 30-40,000, by the early 2000s this number was down to around 600 – reflecting the shift from high to low intensity conflicts, and geographically from Asia to Africa. Of course violent battle deaths are only a small part of the whole story of the misery of war: as many as 90% of war-related deaths are due to disease and malnutrition rather than direct violence. But the trend decline in battle deaths is a significant and highly encouraging story.

• Notwithstanding the horrors of Rwanda and Bosnia, and other situations like Darfur that continue to cause us acute concern, the number of genocides and other mass killings plummeted by 80 per cent between the high point of 1989 and the early 2000s.

• There has been a dramatic increase in the number of conflicts resolved by active peacemaking, involving diplomatic negotiations, international mediation and the like: the Human Security Report states that approximately half of all the peace agreements negotiated between 1946 and 2003 have been signed since the end of the Cold War. (The High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change which reported to the Secretary-General in the lead-up to this year’s UN Summit, and on which I served, came up with the even more startling, but well-researched, statement that more civil wars have been ended by negotiation in the last 15 years than in the previous two centuries.)

• The only unequivocally bad news is the dramatic increase in high-casualty terrorist attacks since 9/11 – but even here the annual death toll from international terrorist incidents remains only a small fraction of the annual war death toll (so far anyway: things will be different if terrorists ever manage a nuclear attack).

There are a number of reasons contributing to these turnarounds in relation to the prevention and resolution of conflict. They include the end of the era of colonialism, which generated two-thirds or more of all wars from the 1950s to the 1980s; and of course the end of the Cold War, which meant no more proxy wars fuelled by Washington or Moscow, and also the demise of a number of authoritarian governments, generating internal resentment and resistance, that each side had been propping up.

But as the authors of the Human Security Report argue, the best explanation is the one that stares us in the face, even if a great many don’t want to acknowledge it. This is the huge increase in the level of international preventive diplomacy, diplomatic peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations, for the most part authorised by and mounted by the United Nations, that has occurred since the end of the Cold War. In particular there has been:

• a six-fold increase in UN preventive diplomacy missions (to stop wars starting);

• a four-fold increase in UN peace operations (both to end ongoing conflicts and reduce the risk of wars restarting); and

• an eleven-fold increase in the number of states subject to UN sanctions (which can help pressure warring parties into peace negotiations).

The UN of course has not been the only player: regional intergovernmental organizations have played an increasingly significant role, as have the international financial institutions and individual states. And, in a development which deserves more systematic attention than it has received, a very much more central and important role has been played in recent years by NGOs and other civil society actors, working alongside the UN system and governments, needling them into action, acting as partners in delivery, or playing critical support roles in, variously, institutional capacity building, community dialogue and confidence building and actual peacemaking through mediation and conciliation. My own International Crisis Group, which didn’t exist ten years ago, but which now plays quite an influential role with our analysis and advocacy across some fifty actual or potential conflict situations worldwide, is a case in point.

But it is the revitalization of the UN system that has been at the heart of nearly all the recent process, and the UN – the only international organization with a global security mandate – that has been the central player. And that is at least some cause for celebration in a year in which those of us committed to major necessary UN reform – to make the system work very much better still, fully realizing the kind of capabilities for which Dag Hammarskjold was such a visionary pathfinder – have had reason to feel more than a little desolate about the outcome of the September Summit.

What have we learned over the last fifteen years or so from all that has gone both right and wrong in our efforts to prevent deadly conflict, in particular as this relates to the UN’s role? For present purposes, I will leave to one side the issue of terrorism (which requires an overlapping but for the most part distinct policy repertoire); nor will I plunge on this occasion into issues related to arms control and disarmament (which are obviously very directly related to conflict prevention, but being dealt with at this seminar by Hans Blix), or into those related to peace enforcement and peacekeeping (also highly relevant, but Jean-Marie Guehenno’s territory today); nor will I even begin to touch upon development issues (often directly bearing upon conflict prevention, but being addressed by Michel Camdessus).

But I will take – as Crisis Group does – a broad view of conflict prevention, treating it as involving not only the prevention of outbreak of conflict (conflict prevention in the classic, core sense) but also prevention of its continuation, and prevention of its recurrence. Let me give you a quick check list, from my own experience, of the major lessons we have learned – or should have learned – for each of these crucial stages of the conflict cycle.

Preventing Conflict Outbreak

• The first rule for preventing deadly conflict is not to start it, a message the U.S. is certainly now pondering after its rush to war in Iraq. There are circumstances in which there will simply be no alternative to taking military action, to respond to real and immediate cross-border threats, and – in the case of man-made internal crises of the kind we confronted in the Balkans and Rwanda and elsewhere so often in the last decade – to do so in the context of the principle of the ‘responsibility to protect’ now endorsed by last month’s UN Summit (one of its very few positive achievements). But military action should only ever be undertaken in the most serious cases, as a last resort, and in circumstances where it will do more good than harm: unfortunately, one of the many things the UN Summit failed utterly to do was address the guidelines for Security Council action in this respect that had been proposed by the High Level Panel, and the Secretary-General in his own In Larger Freedom report.

• The second rule of conflict prevention is to understand the causes: the factors at work – political, economic, cultural, personal – in each particular risk situation. The basic point about conflict is that it is always context specific. Big overarching theories – whether cast in terms of clash of civilizations, ancient tribal enmity, economic greed, economic grievance, or anything else – may be good for keynote speeches, and certainly good for royalties. They may also be quite helpful in identifying particular explanatory factors that should certainly be taken into account in trying to understand the dynamics of particular situations. But they never seem to work very well in sorting between those situations which are combustible and those which are not. For that you need detailed, case by case analysis, not making assumptions on the basis of experience elsewhere, but looking at what is under your nose.

• The third rule is to fully understand, and be prepared to apply flexibly as circumstances change, what’s in the conflict prevention toolbox – the range of possible measures, both long-term structural and short-term operational, that can be deployed to deal with high-risk situations. Broadly speaking, there are political and diplomatic tools (eg negotiation of new power or resource-sharing arrangements), legal and constitutional tools (eg human rights protections for individuals or groups – of the kind often negotiated by the OSCE’s High Commissioner for National Minorities), economic tools (eg development measures to redress inequities, or targeted sanctions) and military tools (including security sector reform, preventive deployments and, in extreme cases, the threat of military force) – and we know a lot more about how to use them now than we did even just a decade ago.

• The fourth rule is to be prepared to put in the necessary government and intergovernmental resources, when and where they are needed, and particularly at the early prevention stage, where any investment now is likely to be infinitely cheaper than paying later for military action, humanitarian relief assistance and post-conflict reconstruction - something the international community is still much better at talking about than doing. Early warning and response capability is a critical requirement for effective early prevention, and one of the long-running battles in the UN system – brought to a head by the Brahimi Panel on Peace Operations recommendations in 2000 – has been about giving the Secretariat increased capacity in this respect, over the objections of those who think this might identify them sooner as suitable cases for treatment. It may be that this battle is now being won. One of the little-noticed achievements of the UN Summit was the incorporation, in the ‘responsibility to protect’ section of the outcome document (para 138), in the context of prevention of genocides and other crimes against humanity, of the following words: “The international community…should support the United Nations to establish an early warning capability”.

• The fifth rule is for governments to leverage those resources by using all the extraordinary capability that is now available from non-governmental organizations and civil society generally in the ways I have already mentioned.

Preventing Continuation: Conflict Resolution

When prevention fails, and the task becomes that of conflict resolution – hopefully achieved by peacemaking negotiations rather than the use of overriding military force. In this context, again, there are a number of lessons we have painfully learned about what makes a successful peace accord:

• First, it is not an event so much as a process, and signing the agreement is not the end of it.The critical need is to generate commitment to, and ownership of, the peace by the warring parties: so their commitments are not just formal, but internalized, and will stick. That takes real skill on the part of those mediating or otherwise assisting the negotiation, a conspicuously variable quality among UN special envoys and representatives. The UN Summit did agree ‘to support the Secretary-General’s efforts to strengthen his capacity in this area’ of good offices, but it remains to be seen what this means in terms of new resources, and the need for better selection and training of envoys (about which the High Level Panel was a little more direct in its report than was the Secretary-General in his).

• Second, any peace accord must deal with all the fundamentals of the dispute: all the issues which will have to be resolved if normality is to return. Sometimes that can be done in a sequential or stage-by-stage way, with confidence building measures now and some key issues deferred: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the Caucasus might be such an example. But the failed Oslo process for Israel-Palestine shows how risky that approach can be.

• Third, any successful peace accord must get the balance right between peace and justice. The South African truth and reconciliation commission model, with its amnesties for the perpetrators of even serious crimes, is widely admired, but in other cases sustainable peace will not be possible without significant retributive justice: visible trial and punishment. What is clear is that the people of every country, whether it’s Cambodia or Rwanda or East Timor or Liberia, have to resolve what works for them.

• Fourth, the terms of any accord, and the method of its enforcement and implementation, must be sufficiently resilient to deal with spoilers – those who would seek to undermine or overturn it.

• Fifth – and this follows particularly from the last point – a peace accord to be successful must have the necessary degree of international support: with all the guarantees and commitment of resources that are necessary to make it stick.

Preventing Recurrence: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding

The biggest lessons of all about the handling of conflict that we have learned in recent years - not least from Rwanda (where the 1994 genocide, taking 800 000 lives, followed the Arusha peace deal just a year before), Angola (where the 1991 Bicesse Agreement to end the war in was followed by a relapse into bloody conflict for another decade with another million or more lives lost), Haiti, Afghanistan and now Iraq, is the critical necessity of effective post-conflict peacebuilding, to ensure that the whole weary conflict cycle does not begin again. We know all too well that the best single indicator of future conflict is past conflict – reflecting the reality that over and again the critical underlying conflict-causing factors have simply not been properly addressed.

My quick checklist here of what we have learned about what is necessary to make international peacebuilding missions successful:

• First, sort out who should do what and when - immediately, over a medium transition period and in the longer term: allocate the roles and coordinate them effectively both at headquarters and on the ground. High-level coordination is one of the critical roles envisaged for the new Peacebuilding Commission, approved at the UN Summit–if it’s detailed operating arrangements can now be agreed.

• Second, commit the necessary resources, and sustain that commitment for as long as it takes: this again is envisaged as a critical role for the Peacebuilding Commission, given the long and lamentable history of ad hoc donors’ conferences, and rapidly waning attention, and generosity, once the immediate crisis is over.

• Third, understand the local political dynamics–and the limits of what outsiders can do. Iraq is an unhappy example of how much can go wrong when that understanding is lacking.

• Fourth, recognise that multiple objectives have to be pursued simultaneously: physical security may always be the first priority, but it cannot be the only one, and rule of law and justice issues, and economic governance and anti-corruption measures, deserve much higher priority than they have usually been given.

• Fifth, all intrusive peace operations need an exit strategy, if not an exit timetable, and one that is not just devoted to holding elections as soon as possible, as important as it obviously is to vest real authority and responsibility in the people of the country being rebuilt. Every peacebuilding situation has its own dynamic, but many of the worst peacebuilding mistakes of the last decade have had more to do with leaving too soon or doing too little than staying too long or doing too much.

There never seem to be many good news stories around when it comes to crisis and conflict: for the media, the rule is that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, and for the UN, its triumphs inevitably get less attention than its disasters. Moreover the hopes and expectations we had of this year’s Summit have mostly turned to dust. The embrace of ‘responsibility to protect’ was a shaft of light, but last week’s extraordinary lineup of the US, China, Russia and Algeria to deny a Security Council hearing to Genocide Adviser Jean Mendez on the still very troubling situation in Darfur is an indication of just how far we have to go, case by case, in applying it. We have a shell, but not yet the substance of a Peacebuilding Commission; we have barely even the shell of a new Human Rights Council; and we have all movement on management reform, as on other issues, still hostage to the spoiling of a hard core of antagonistic developing states. We have blank pages on disarmament and arms control, on principles governing the use of force, and on a new definition of terrorism; and indefinite postponement, yet again, of any structural changes to the Security Council to enhance its representativeness and legitimacy.

For all that, and for all that has gone wrong and continues to go wrong when it comes to war and civil war, not to mention mass violence and terrorism, conflict is not inevitable. We have learned a great deal about how to prevent and resolve it, particularly over the last decade, and the record of achievement is very much better than most people think it is. We can as an international community do very much better still, but for those of us who spend our lives in trying to prevent and resolve conflict, the good news is that we have not been wasting our time.

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The UN And Arms Control

By Hans Blix

Disclaimer: I am not speaking in my capacity of chairman of WMDC. The report that the commission is preparing will be a collective endeavour.

Dag Hammarskjöld was born in Uppsala, Sweden, 100 years ago. I am pleased to note here in Paris that the French government was instrumental in his election as SG of the UN. He demonstrated exceptional skill and integrity and enabled the UN and the office of the SG to take on important new tasks.

He became famous for using the SGs office for quiet diplomacy to help solve various crises.

But he also used his office as a platform to publicly criticize state actions which, in his view, gravely violated the UN Charter.

His most famous innovation was the idea and practice of sending “UN helmets” to calm and control areas of conflict. Peace keeping was born under his watch and he died in 1961 on a visit to the UN peace keeping mission to the Congo.

Hammarskjöld had a vision how the world community could take on some of the features, which allow states to maintain peace, uphold the rule of law, promote economic development and bring about greater equality for their citizens.

I agree with this thinking and believe that in the very long run this is how the world will develop. At the regional level Europe is slowly but clearly moving in this direction.

It has been suggested that the US is like an impatient Mars quick to use force to solve problems, while Europe is like a patient Venus, eschewing force and endlessly negotiating to solutions. Without denying that the use of force may be indispensable sometimes I prefer Venus. The whole world would do well to become a bit more feminist.

In the area of arms control the states of the world is still like a primitive community in which families, clans and tribes have their own arms and use them to maintain peace by deterrence and blood revenge. Not long ago states also used their weapons to grab territory or to spread one faith or another.

A fundamental feature of the state community is that a monopoly has been secured on the possession and use of arms (apart from small caliber arms). In most cases some chieftain or king achieved it by martial means; occasionally unification and power monopoly was attained with the help of Venus and marital vows. The monopoly on power and arms came first. The rule of law controlling power came later. Democracy came last.

The question I now see is whether the monopoly on arms and the use of arms in the international community will be brought about by Mars or Venus. In Europe Mars was at work from time immemorial but the job has eventually been done by Venus.

What about arms control in the world?

Hammarskjöld, active during the Cold War, recognized that the UN Charter’s outlawing of the use of armed force ‘save in the common interest’ was undermined by the possibility to claim the right to self-defense. The idea of collective security written into the Charter must have looked like a very remote vision in the 1960s, when two heavily armed antagonistic blocks stood against each other.

Hammarskjöld also recognized – naturally in the world of military blocks – that direct disarmament negotiations between a few key countries were needed. The Big Powers with their security interests, could not, he wrote, ‘automatically’ accept majority verdicts. However, there should be an effort to balance the interests.

Well, we have seen in the past year how difficult it is to achieve that balance. The UN summit, the world’s largest ever gathering of heads of states and governments, could not balance a priority interest of a majority in getting commitments about disarmament from the big powers, notably the US, and the interest of the US to commit all primarily to non-proliferation and action against terrorism.

Similarly, at the NPT review conference a little earlier this year no compromise could be attained. Many non nuclear weapon states considered that the US was walking back on commitments in the field of disarmament and were, in such circumstances, not willing to accede to US requests.

I find it hard to avoid the impression that since the early 90s Mars has dominated the scene in Washington and has an ambition not to be restrained in his exercise of benign dominant power in the world. For Mars the UN must appear both as an undesirable restraint and as a potential ally.

In the US National Defense Strategy published earlier this year by the Department of Defense, I find the following:

“Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.”

The esteem for international organizations – including, one would assume, the UN – and judicial processes is evidently not very high, when they are lumped together with terrorism and seen mainly as obstacles. The vision of the doctrine is a different one. I quote:

”The end of the cold war and our capacity to influence global events open the prospects for a new and peaceful state system in the world.”

How much room there is in this vision for the concept and rules of collective security and a reliance on and use of global institutions is not clear. Recently, an article by one of the chairmen of a bipartisan US congressional task force on UN reform carried the title “A limited UN is best for America” [IHT 13 Sept. 2005].

Global institutions, like the UN, are not, of course, the only churches working for peace in the global village. Other multilateral, unilateral, bilateral or regional action may well be helpful to many or all – whether in the field of disarmament or in the combat of terrorism. I shall touch on some of them. Let me first, however, illustrate how much of the global disarmament effort has ground to a halt.

The Conference on Disarmament at Geneva has not been able to agree on an agenda for many years. This in a period of continued global détente! At the UN summit the US apparently objected to any reference to “disarmament”, a term that was deleted quite some time ago in the organizational charts of the US State Department.

• Most serious, in my view, is that the US at present is determined not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In all likelihood, a US ratification would trigger a Chinese and a Chinese would trigger an Indian, an Indian a Pakistani and so on. On the other hand, the informal moratorium, which is currently observed, might be broken. In the US there are groups, which want to develop nuclear weapons with new missions and to test. The freedom of action seems to be valued higher than the risk that the moratorium would break.

• The Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty, which would stop the production of highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons, is still supported by the US, but it rejects any verification claiming that it could not be reliable. It is perfectly true that there will be uncertainties in the amounts of HEU and Pu that are produced in large installations but inspections of installations are not the only way to obtain confidence about compliance. One is tempted to think that a reason for the newly developed objection might in reality be a wish to retain freedom and flexibility for the future.

• The US has similarly flatly rejected a protocol on verification of compliance prepared during many years for the Convention against Biological and Toxin Weapons. Again, there are some valid objections and there might well be reasons for some new or modified approaches. Yet, it is hard to avoid the impression that some doctrinal aversion to accepting outside inspection is at play.

I shall not prolong the list of global projects that are currently at a dead end in the sphere of arms control and disarmament [trilateral could be mentioned] – in large part, I think, due to a wish in the US administration to avoid international inspection in the US and to preserve flexibility and freedom of action for itself, even at the risk of giving others the same latitudes.

In the sphere of nuclear weapons, some projects of restraint are still alive in the global UN sphere:

• The additional protocols strengthening IAEA safeguards still enjoys widespread support to become the modern standard of verification. The US seems also to remain positive to IAEA safeguards in general and the integrated safeguards in particular. It is clear that even with much stronger teeth these may be insufficient in a zone free from weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

• A hint that they may also be deemed insufficient in the case of North Korea came a few days ago, when the US negotiator suggested that the P 5 in the Security Council might have a role in the verification of a denuclearization in North Korea. This is an intriguing idea, which reminds me that in the autumn of 2002 a US draft resolution on inspections in Iraq would give the P5 a dominant influence over the inspections. I did not think it would be wise to have guidance from five powers with possibly five different views

• Resolution 1540 of the Security Council is an interesting innovation. Generally the Council uses its power to adopt binding decisions under Chapter VII of the Charter for concrete actions or measures, like sanctions. This resolution, however, is used to oblige member states to adopt internal legislation, to implement treaty obligations (which they would be obliged anyway to implement) and to set up commissions to monitor and promote implementation.

• In a world of very uneven effectiveness in state action to implement international obligations, for instance in the struggle against terrorism, the resolutions should be welcomed. It also illustrates in a flash the power that exists in the United Nations to bring about measures throughout the whole world community of states. It is not only legitimacy that follows from decisions supported by UN organs representing the global community By acting within the UN and in accordance with its rules results can be attained that limited alliances of willing cannot achieve.

• The demand to refer the case of Iran to the Security Council is of a very different nature. It certainly would constitute an action that made use of available procedures in the IAEA statute. However, that a procedure is available does not mean that it is necessarily wise to use it. If the aim of the demand were to be to demonstrate that the Council will not agree on sanctions and to make a case for the unilateral use of force, it would be an unwise move. The Israeli destruction of the OSIRAK reactor in 1981 was condemned by the Security Council. The US maintained in the Council on that occasion that the peaceful means had not been exhausted.

• The efforts to persuade Iran voluntarily to suspend activities aimed at the enrichment of uranium do not seem at all exhausted. Such an agreement would be desirable and should be possible to avoid an increase of tension. Iran has hardly any strategic interest in building an enrichment capacity of its own and the project seems even less meaningful in economic terms. However, much has been invested and there is understandable pride in the matter. Iran can request a substantial quid pro quo for a voluntary suspension. In my view, the offers made so far to Iran have been rather meager, especially regarding security assurances and especially when you compare with the offers made to North Korea.

Some proposals have been made in the past few years seeking restrictions on the building of plants for the enrichment of uranium and the production of plutonium – fuel cycle activities. Several of these proposals would involve placing highly ambitious managerial functions some international body, e.g. deciding whether a state was in good standing from the point of view of non-proliferation, before granting a request to deliver low enriched uranium fuel for power reactors. What can now be purchased on an international competitive market would thus become subject to an international decision.

Why are these proposals made?

• It seems clear that they have been triggered by the cases of North Korea and Iran. It also seems clear that the general proposals will not be of any importance to influence the two countries in the ongoing negotiations. They are much more likely to be influenced by proposals to keep their specific neighbourhood free from fuel cycle activities.

• It is suggested more plausibly that if nuclear power were to expand substantially in the future to give the world more electricity without adding CO2 to the atmosphere, more plants may be needed to produce the low enriched uranium needed. It is argued that more such plants might mean a greater risk for proliferation and that restrictions might be prudent. However, the risks lie rather far away and contrary to what many seem to assume, the world is not milling with would-be proliferating states.

• At the present time the proposals appear to me almost as distractions from the two highly relevant and worrisome current questions, namely, how to dissuade North Korea and Iran from fuel cycle activities. Further negotiations on these cases and efforts to move toward peace on the Korean peninsula and in the Middle East are, in my view, more important than in any search for further restrictions on fuel cycle activities.

Let me conclude by mentioning two arrangements championed by the US and having no link to the UN or other global institution.

• SORT is an understanding reached between the US and Russia about the retiring of deployed strategic nuclear weapons into storage. Welcome as this is we must note that the weapons need not be dismantled and there is no verification mechanism. At first the US even first balked at making it a binding agreement.

• PSI (the Proliferation Security Initiative) is an arrangement under which states participating may intercept ships or planes suspected of illegal transport of items relevant to weapons of mass destruction. Ambassador Bolton praised it as being an ”activity” rather than what he contemptuously called “a treaty based bureaucracy”. In substance it appears mainly as a useful means of enforcing export restrictions on wmd related items.

• As far is known it has only been applied with results in one case, a German ship intercepted on the way to Libya with enrichment related equipment. Nevertheless, it is hailed as a very major scheme, happily unrelated to any existing UN organization or treaty. Perhaps its greatest importance lies in the cooperation that is calls for between intelligence agencies.