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Contingencies, Constraints, and Collective Security: Perspectives on UN Involvement in International Disputes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

John Gerard Ruggie
Affiliation:
John Gerard Ruggie teaches in the Department of Political Science, University of Californiaat Berkeley. The author thanks Ernst B. Haas and Hayward R. Alker, Jr., whose encouragement and help made this research note possible, and Mark W. Zacher, who suggested several improvements. Facilities were provided through the Studies in International Integration Project, Institute of Interna-tional Studies, University of Californiaat Berkeley.
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Abstract

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Type
Notes on Theory and Method
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1974

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References

1 Quoted in Inis Claude, L., Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 111.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 110.

3 Quoted in Inis Claude, L., “The Management of Power in the Changing United Nations,” International Organization 25 (Spring 1961): 224.Google Scholar

4 The negotiations in the Military Staff Committee, designed to deal with their formation, came to naught.

5 Claude, “The Management of Power,” p. 221.

6 This concept is taken from Thompson's, James D. fine volume on organizational theory, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967),Google Scholarwhere he de-fines it as: “a set of expectations both for the members of an organization and for others with whom they interact, about what the organization will and will not do. It provides, although imperfectly, an image of the organization's role in a larger system, which in turn serves as a guide for the ordering of action in certain directions and not in others” (p. 29).

7 One author (Forsythe, David P., “United Nations Intervention in Conflict Situations Revisited: A Framework for Analysis,” International Organization 23 [Winter 1969]: 115–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar)suggests that UN behavior related to the notion of collective security may be separated into peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peace-building. In turn, the task of peacekeeping, according to this analyst, is composed of eight roles, arranged in order of progressive degrees of intervention by the organization. These roles are: to symbolize interest, investigate past events, observe current events, supervise agreements, police hostilities, enforce solutions de facto, enforce solutions de jure. The final role is referred to as collective se-curity, or amassing the preponderant deterrent.

As the concept is used in this research note, it refers to the entire array of techniques available to the United Nations to settle disputes which may lead to hostilities, delay hostilities, and localize hostilities, or to use force in intervening where all else fails. In short, the concept refers to the collective attempt to pre-vent or restrain the use of force among national actors, and to the attempt to deal with disputes that may lead to hostilities. The only differentiation employed here—which will be elaborated upon below—is between procedural involvement on the part of the UN and substantive action taken by the Organization.

8 Good discussions of this issue may be found in Young, Oran R., “The United Nations and the International System,” International Organization 22 (Autumn 1968): 902–22;CrossRefGoogle Scholar David Meyer, “Some Basic Issues Concerning Universalistic Se-curity Organizations,” n.d., unpublished manuscript; and Forsythe, pp. 115–39.

9 Alker, Hayward R. Jr., and Russett, Bruce M., World Politics in the General Assembly (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965).Google Scholar

10 Goodrich, Leland M., “The Maintenance of International Peace and Security,” International Organization 19 (Summer 1965): 432–33;CrossRefGoogle Scholar this special issue of International Organization also appeared as The United Nations in the Balance: Accomplishments and Prospects, eds. Norman, J. Padelford and Leland, M. Goodrich (New York: Praeger, 1965).Google Scholar

11 Kay, David A., “The Impact of African States on the United Nations,” International Organization 23 (Winter 1969): 21;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kay's analysis is of the general impact of these states, and not upon the collective security area in particular.

12 The 60 disputes included in the present analysis, and listed in appendix 1, were referred to the United Nations between 1945 and 1965. The original source of these data was Haas, Ernst B., Collective Security and the Future International System, Monograph Series in World Affairs (Denver, Colo: University of Denver, 1968Google Scholar). I partially revised, recoded, and extended the data, which Professor Haas generously made available to me.

Disputes were coded as follows: (1) Issues were coded with respect to their relation to “superissues”: cold war, colonial, or other. (2) UN involvement was coded as: none, procedural, or substantive. Procedural involvement includes referring the dispute back to the parties for direct negotiation, referring the dispute to a regional organization, launching an inquiry, and establishing a “secretarygeneral's presence,” the last being procedural in the sense that it is designed to facilitate adherence to previous UN action. By substantive involvement on the part of the UN is meant: collective mediation/conciliation, appointment of a single mediator to negotiate with the parties, ordering a cease-fire, establishing a truce supervision or police force, declaring sanctions, embargoes, boycotts or military enforcement. In case of multiple actions, that exhibiting the greatest degree of involvement was coded.

13 A word about the character and the techniques of analysis here employed should be added at this point. Were it my intent to construct a rigorous and elaborate model that most economically and effectively predicts UN behavior, more discrete categorizations and more demanding statistical techniques would, of course, have been utilized as the basis for the simulations which follow. This is not my intent, however. In this research note, I wish only to suggest that, what-ever the techniques employed, the major shortcomings of studies of the UN in the collective conflict management area stem from the perspectives with which most such studies are approached. For this, largely pedagogical, aim, the simple cate-gorizations and calculations I use will suffice. Because of the character and the techniques of analysis here employed, absolute figures in any one case are less informative than a comparison of the various perspectives with one another and with the behavior rule that the UN ought never to do anything.

14 Claude, “The Management of Power,” p. 230.

15 Major powers are defined as the permanent members of the Security Council; for the purposes of the decision point in figure 4, all others are considered minor.

16 Claude, for one, would undoubtedly consider a number of disputes included here as being insufficiently salient for an analysis of collective security mechanisms. Hence, the behavior rule represented by figure 4 also was acted out in cases involving hostilities only. The results are not appreciably different from those reported in appendix 2.

17 Claude's formulation, and others like it, have been criticized by a number of students of UN behavior. One, responding directly to Claude's argument, found it “an inadequate theoretical analysis of the various methods of power management and an oversimplified categorization of the contemporary situation” (Russell, Ruth B., “The Management of Power and Political Organization: Some Observetions on Inis L. Claude's Conceptual Approach,” International Organization 15 [Autumn 1961]: 630).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Another has found that “the UN has in the past been able to set up many peace suborgans despite opposition from several, and sometimes important, Members. … a distinction is worth bearing in mind between what is ideally necessary and what is practically possible” (Tandon, Yashpal, “Consensus and Authority Behind UN Peacekeeping Operations,” International Organization 21 [Spring 1967]: 259).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 The most recent analysis, which makes reference to various previous sources, is Haas, Michael, “International Subsystems: Stability and Polarity,” The American Political Science Review 64 (March 1970): 98123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 See, inter alia, Young, Oran R., The Intermediaries: Third Parties in International Crises (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967);CrossRefGoogle ScholarMark W. Zacher, “ United Nations Involvement in Crises and Wars: Past Patterns and Future Possibilities,” paper prepared for delivery at the 66th annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Los Angeles, 8–12 September 1970.

20 Zacher, p. 1.

21 The latter is Zacher's operationalization of Hammarskjold's strategy. Alignment refers to the position of the parties to disputes with respect to the East-West alliance system.

22 A number of different formulations are, of course, available in the literature. Evan Luard, for example, has suggested that out of the need for urgent action, and by trial and error, the UN learns to respond appropriately to conflicts between states. See his “United Nations Peace Forces,” in The Evolution of International Organizations, ed. D., Evan Luard (New York: Praeger, 1966).Google Scholar Hayward Alker is attempting to simulate a number of alternate learning models of UN intervention, which should determine the extent to which learning can be said to take place.

23 I hasten to add that not all of these comments apply to all studies of UN ac-tivities in the conflict management field. See, for instance, Ernst Haas's monograph, and Young, “The United Nations and the International System,” both of which entertain and explore a variety of environmental configurations as determinants of UN behavior. The most extensive and elaborate comparative study is: Haas, Ernst B., Butterworth, Robert L., and Nye, Joseph S., Conflict Management by International Organizations (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1972);Google Scholarit, too, explores a variety of competing hypotheses and configurations.

At the more general level of determining the basic logic of international organization, a particularly promising development has been the exploitation of notions derived from the theory of public goods. See, among others, Olson, Mancur and Zeckhauser, Richard, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,“ in Economic Theories of International Politics, ed. Bruce, M. Russett (Chicago: Markham Publishing Company, 1968);Google ScholarRussett, Bruce M. and Sullivan, John D., “Collective Goods and International Organization,” International Organization 25 (Autumn 1971): 845–65; andCrossRefGoogle ScholarRuggie, John Gerard, “Collective Goods and Future International Collaboration,” American Political Science Review 66 (September 1972): 874–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Emery, F. E. and Trist, E. L., “The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments,” Human Relations 18 (February 1965): 2132.CrossRefGoogle ScholarA review of the literature attempting to relate external factors to organizational structure and behavior may be found in Terreberry, Shirley, “The Evolution of Organizational Environments,” Administrative Science Quarterly 12 (March 1968): 590613.CrossRefGoogle ScholarConceptualizations and analyses of organizational-environmental relations are developed in: Thompson, James D., “Decision-Making, the Firm, and the Market,” in New Perspectives in Organization Research, ed. William, W. Cooper (New York: John Wiley, 1964);Google ScholarLawrence, Paul R. and Lorsch, Jay W., “Differentiation and Integration in Complex Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly 11 (June 1967); andGoogle ScholarLawrence, Paul R. and Lorsch, Jay W., Organization and Environment (Cam-bridge: Harvard School of Business, 1967).Google Scholar

25 For cultural variations, see, for example, Udy, Stanley H. Jr., Organization and Work (New Haven, Conn: Human Relations Area Files Press, 1959Google Scholar). For sociopolitical settings, see, among others, Blau, Peter M. and Scott, W. Richard, Formal Organizations (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1962),Google Scholar chapter 8; and Thompson, “Decision-Making, the Firm, and the Market.” For rapidity of change, see Emery and Trist. And for complexity, see Laporte, Todd R., ed., Organized Social Complexity: Challenge to Politics and Policy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1974);Google Scholarthis is the most extensive and intensive analysis of the concept of organized complexity and of its consequences for organizational and political affairs.

26 For a recent and terribly useful discussion of environmental-organizational links in the context of the specialized agencies of the UN, see Cox, Robert W. and Jacobson, Harold K., “Power, Polities, and Politics: The Environment,” in Cox, and Jacobson, , The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in International Organization (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1973).Google ScholarTheirs is one of the most elaborate and sophisticated discussions of various conceptual issues at-tending the general study of international organization.

27 A more extensive discussion of the formal logic of this process may be found in Ruggie, pp. 874–93.

28 I select this particular operationalization because, as we will see below, it tends to formally subsume several aspects of the three perspectives simulated above. For a more complete explication and operationalization of the concept of complexity in the context of international organizational environments, see Ruggie, John Gerard,”The Structure of International Organization: Contingency, Complexity, and Post-Modern Form,” Peace Research Society (International): Papers 18 (1972): 7391.Google Scholar

29 If two actors, rather than being opposed, were to agree, they would be considered as one for our purposes.

30 The dispersion or concentration of supports, as an important factor in determining dependence relations between the environment and the organization, is discussed by Thompson, Organizations in Action, pp. 26–27. The distribution and clustering of power within the environment are used by Haas to differentiate phases of the UN system; see, for example, Haas, Ernst B., Human Rights and International Action (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1970), pp. 137–38; and Cox and Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence. These conceptualizations are also suggested by and developed inGoogle ScholarHanrieder, Wolfram, “The International System: Bipolar or Multibloc?,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 9 (September 1965): 299308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Were a third actor to join one of the other two, an asymmetric distribution would result.

32 Haas, Ernst B., “Dynamic Environment and Static System,” in The Revolution in World Politics, ed. Morton, Kaplan (New York: John Wiley, 1962), p. 278.Google Scholar

33 Haas, Human Rights, p. 138.

34 A more elaborate discussion of these early years may be found in Claude, Power and International Relations.

35 From the closing communique, cited in Robertson, Charles L., International Politics Since World War II (New York: John Wiley, 1966), p. 216.Google Scholar

36 Haas, in Human Rights, sees the Bandung meeting as a symbol of the break between what he refers to as the “loose bipolar heterosymmetrical” system and the “tripolar heterosymmetrical” system (pp. 138–39).

37 Cited by Young, The Intermediaries, p. 136.

38 For an imaginative treatment of these and related issues, see Young, “The United Nations and the International System.”

39 Zacher, for example, estimates that in 1965 only approxmately 26 percent of all Un members could be referred to as nonaligned—down from a high of 28 percent in 1963 (p. 8).

40 Thompson, Organizations in Action, p. 29.

41 Ibid.

42 See, for example, the analysis in Haas, Butterworth, and Nye, Conflict Management by International Organizations.