UNO: WHAT TRIBE IS THAT?

Panel 2 of a triptych: A book review for Peacehawks of Hammarskjoeld: a Life, by Roger Lipsey, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2013.  738 pp; illus, footnotes, indexed, bibliography.

by Jamie Arbuckle

Introduction

There have of course been several books about Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations.  The most authoritative was Sir Brian Urquhart’s Hammarskjoeld[1] first published in 1972; Urquhart combined immediacy – he was there – with scholarship. More recently (2011), there has been the extremely useful and readable work by Manuel Froehlich. [2]

Do we need another biography of Dag Hammarskjoeld?  As we wrote in the first panel of this triptych[3], we believe that there are some stories that are so important to us that they need to be retold afresh in each generation, and there is no redundancy in the retelling.  Each generation needs to hear, in  its own voice and in its own time, the vital stories of the times.  The past is not necessarily fate, but it is often prologue. And living in history is like map reading: if you know where you were and how you have gone, you should know where you are, and you can have a good idea where you are going. Updating the map from time to time can never be of no use.

And so, just over a half-century after his untimely death, another biography of Dag Hammarskjoeld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, should be a welcome addition to our knowledge toolkits. We therefore offer this review to our followers at Peacehawks.

This review will cover four points, the literary high ground, as it were, of this book and of the story it tells:

1.     The first area we will cover is to review the book as an excursus on  Markings[4];

2.     We will review the birth of peacekeeping operations, which occurred on Hammarskjoeld’s watch and under his ultimate responsibility;

3.     Hammarskjoeld more or less invented the role and the functions of the special representative  of the secretary-general; and

4.     Finally, Hammarskjoeld gave form and enduring substance to the role of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

PEACEKEEPING IN OUR TIME: PAST THE AGE OF CONSENT?

PEACEKEEPING IN OUR TIME:

PAST THE AGE OF CONSENT?

By Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks

Introduction

Have you heard the one about how many Peacekeepers it takes to change a light bulb?

Actually, any number will do – but the light bulb has to want to change.

To know where we are going, we need to know where we are, and to know that, we usually need to know where we have been.  To look ahead, then, we often need to look back.

One of the most critical factors in modern peace operations has, since the creation of the United Nations, been the issue of consent to and the continuing support for an operation.  The  UN is hard-wired for consensual operations; it’s in the DNA, in the Charter:

Article 2.1: “The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all of its members”; and

Article 2.7:  “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state … “

The consent issue has several forms; among these: the consent of the hosts and of the parties to a conflict; of the people living in the conflict area; that of the troop contributors to a peace force; and the consent of the major powers, especially the permanent members of the Security Council of the UN (the P5). The first two are often the most critical: we might refer to them as the consent of the parties and the people. We certainly cannot ignore the importance of the consent of the troop contributors – without them we have no force, or of the Security Council – without them we have no mandate. Nevertheless, I will generally focus on the issues of local consent: in which I include the host government, the sub-state parties, and the people. These, which I by no means take to be the same thing or even in some cases very much alike, are nevertheless in my view collectively the true conditio sine qua non of a successful intervention.

There has since late in the last century been a growing tendency to contemplate and to mandate peace operations founded under Chapter VII of the Charter, which is implicitly non-consensual in its tone and presumably, in its intent.  It might seem that peace operations are indeed beyond the age of consent.  That is in principle; however in practice peace operations  have continued to be very conservatively structured and even more cautiously  executed, and missions have continued to negotiate the terms and the extent of operations specifically intended to enforce peace. This is no less true of the current vogue for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), than it was of the rash of “enforcement operations” of the 1990s.

To see why this has been, and largely remains, the case, I want to review the origins of the issue of consent in peace operations, and  see what that has subsequently come to mean. To do this, we will review the first modern peacekeeping mission, the United Nations Emergency Force, as it formed up  in the autumn of 1956, where the issue first arose and was to be of fundamental importance. We will then fast-forward to Eastern Slavonia almost 40 years later, and we will visit there the birth-place of the practice – and only later the concept – of “induced  consent.” (Alex Morrisson, the founder and President of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Nova Scotia, once said, while a student at the Canadian Army Staff College, “It certainly seems to work in practice, but how will it stand up in theory?) It is a large part of the story of peacekeeping that practice often and necessarily precedes theory.

 Finally, having  established where we really  are, we will peek briefly through that R2P looking glass to see where we might be going  with 21^st Century peace operations. As written, that “policy” largely describes non-consensual military intervention to “protect”, but its authors have been back-pedalling on that almost since before their ink was dry – and no wonder. We know what they said, but it seems that may not have been what they meant, and we need to look critically at this “new norm.”  We can only hope this will allow us at least a glimpse of what John le Carre has called “the recent future”.

Sometimes, to get ahead, we need to go back.

In preparing this posting, I need to thank Russia, China and Syria, who in fanning the flames of tragedy have provided me with further  insight into the importance of consent at multiple levels. 

And that is what I want to share with you in this posting.

Introduction to Peacehawks

Peacehawks is a mom-and-pop academic ngo, founded by Ingrid Lehmann, Ph. D. and Jamie Arbuckle, O.M.M., C.D. Peacehawks is based on the principle that international peace can and must be enforced, just as are national and local laws. The international community has the firm obligation to protect the rights of peoples as defined by customary international law, taking "all necessary measures" to ensure the safety and security of nations and peoples, and "to maintain international peace and security."

It is clear that, in the long term, interventions will require the consent of the "hosts", however "all necessary measures" must be taken to include the creation of a climate of consent, whether by carrot or stick; consent may and sometimes must be induced. There is thus a requirement for muscular peacekeeping, and many occasions when nothing less will do. When peace descends, it is to be treated with respect, hence our logo (for which many thanks to Jason), which shows a hawk with an olive branch, and our motto:

Whatever it Takes!

About Ingrid

Ingrid A. Lehmann is the author of Peacekeeping and Public Information: Caught in the Crossfire (London: Cass, 1999) and many articles on issues of international political communication. She is a practitioner who worked in the United Nations Secretariat for over twenty-five years, including service in the Department of Public Information and in two UN peacekeeping missions. Ingrid has an MA in history from the University of Minnesota and an MA and a doctorate in political science from the University of Berlin. In 1993–94 she was a fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University; in 1996–97 she was a researcher at Yale University’s UN Studies Program; and in 2004 she was a fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. Ingrid now lives near Salzburg, Austria, where she has been teaching in the Department of Communication Science of the University of Salzburg.

About Jamie
Jamie Arbuckle is a Canadian but, like a lot of Canadians, he wasn’t born there. He was born in Dayton, Ohio, the result of an earlier Dayton Agreement. At 18 he immigrated to Canada and joined the Black Watch, as a private. Three years later, having become a Canadian citizen, he was commissioned a 2Lt in The Royal Canadian Regiment. He retired from the Canadian Army in 1995. In his 36 years in the Army, he served in airborne, mechanized and light infantry units. He served 12 years with Canada’s NATO Brigade in Germany, including two postings with the Bundeswehr. As a peacekeeper, he served three tours with the United Nations Forces in Cyprus (UNFICYP), and with UNPROFOR in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia in 1992.
Jamie was a member of the Faculty of the Lester B. Pearson Canadian International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Nova Scotia from 1995 – 1999. From 1999 to 2003, he was a member of the Capacity Building and Training Section of the OSCE in Vienna. He was in that period principally responsible for assisting in the design and delivery of the New Member Induction Programme for the OSCE. He also delivered seminars on Conflict Management for the OSCE Secretariat in Vienna and for missions in Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Albania, as well as at the Austrian Peace Support Command, the German Foreign Ministry Training Centre in Bonn and at York University in the UK.
Jamie has written several articles on military issues for professional publications, and a book entitled The Level Killing Fields of Yugoslavia: An Observer Returns, published by the Pearson Press in 1999. He was the English copy editor for the Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations, published by Kluwer Law International in 2002. His book on the military role in humanitarian operations, entitled Military Forces in Twenty-first Century Peace Operations: No Job for a Soldier?, was published by Routledge /Taylor and Francis in 2006.
Jamie lives in the Salzkammergut in Austria.