Anthony Parsons

The United Nations in the Post-Cold War Era

United Nations to live up to the expectations aroused when the Charter came into effect in 1945 was due to the divisiveness of the East/West confrontation, the corollary being that were this rivalry to end and the cooperation of the wartime alliance be resumed, all would be well. I remember my old boss, the late Lord Caradon, saying on many occasions: ’There is nothing wrong with the Charter, only with the members’. Today our vision is no longer distorted by the Cold War aura which surrounded international relations for forty years, while the spirit of cooperation within the UN membership West, former East and Non-Aligned (whatever that may now mean) majority is warmer than at any previous time including the period of the marriage of convenience when East and West, drawn together in opposition to Axis aggression, formulated the Charter at Dumbarton Oaks

Book Reviews : Utopia Lost - The United Nations and World Order by Rosemary Righter. New York: The Twentieth Century Press, 1995. 420pp.

Parsons attributes the down-side of the UN’s recent record to be partly due to the Security Council’s ’unfortunate habit’ of trying to combine in single operations the two distinct activities of peacekeeping and peace-enforcement. In connection with the Somali fiasco, he wonders whether ’Washington was not told that the mighty British empire pursued the so-called Mad Mullah of Somaliland for thirty years until his death from natural causes in 1920!’

29.95 cloth;

Her discussion of the IDA X campaign launched by American NGOs, especially environmental organizations, significantly ignores the disputes within the NGO community which their call for a substantial cut in the replenishment initiated. She notes that European and African NGOs rejected the call to cut the replenishment while ignoring the fact that African NGOs, while critical of the IDA’s performance, specifically called for a real increase in IDA funds when meeting with IDA deputies. In contrast to Udall’s unremitting negativism, Gerster’s contribution is rooted in constructive criticism of the Fund and the relative absence of NGO activity vis-à-vis the IMF when compared to the Bank. He points to fundamental problems of governance which permeate the power relations within the institution, and he advocates a return to the status quo ante, the proportion of basic votes to total votes established by the institution’s founding fathers. Other areas of achievable reform proposed include increased institutional transparency, acknowledged to be a responsibility of the member country as well as the IMF, the establishment of an evaluation unit within the Fund similar to the Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department, and increased risk-sharing, bringing IMF practice more into line with the operations of the free market. Gerster correctly points out that, unlike its Bretton Woods sister, the IMF does not borrow on the international capital markets and so cannot lose its AAA credit rating. The collection of essays, however, does serve as a useful gathering in one place of ’radical’ NGO critiques of the Bretton Woods institutions; and careful reading throws light on the different (western) political traditions which underlie the different approaches. But the arguments which are presented here are dangerous not because

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This book is not recommended for light holiday reading. It is a reference work, densely packed with detail which can be held in the mind only by those needing, for whatever reason, to master the mind-boggling complexity of the frontiers of the Arabian peninsula. For all its worth as a piece of scholarship, £50 seems to me an outrageous price while some of the maps at the end (essential adjuncts) are so poorly reproduced as to

Book Reviews : Islam in Central Asia by Ludmila Polonskaya and Alexei Malashenko. First English edition. Reading: Ithaca Press, 1994. 171 pp. £30

Liesl Graz is an experienced journalist, particularly knowledgeable about the Gulf. She has written a valuable book for the general reader. My only quarrel with her is over the title. In fact, until Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait (which the author just manages to cover in a Note dated 7 September 1990) the Gulf states have been the reverse of turbulent compared to the rest of the Arab world, indeed the rest of the world as a whole. The smaller countries, namely Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the seven components of the United Arab Emirates and Oman have, as Ms Graz notes, been ruled by the same families by the same traditional methods since the nineteenth century and, in many cases, earlier. The ruling family of Saudi Arabia has had its ups and downs but it has been a leading player in the Arabian peninsula since the mideighteenth century. How many regimes and political systems can claim so long a record of continuity? The countries in question, and their rulers, have a stronger claim to legitimacy than the artificial creations of the post-First World War settlement such as the Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. It is true that the Gulf states would not have survived either the attentions of the regional predators of the nineteenth century or the storms which have swept the Arab world in the past fifty years had it not been for British protection up to 1971. But they have survived, even into full independence after the British withdrawal until threatened by the ambitions of Iraq’s current dictator, an

Book Reviews : Arabia's Frontiers: The story of Britain's Boundary Drawing in the Desert by John C. Wilkinson. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991, 400pp. £50

I wrote this article in June, at a time when it looked as though the United States Administration might at last be gearing itself to ’persuade’ the Israeli government to enter into negotiations with representative Palestinians in order to move the so-called ’peace process’ off dead centre. However, any prospects which there might have been of early progress towards negotiations have been delivered a serious setback as a consequence of the Gulf crisis precipitated by Sadam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The Arab League has split to an extent unparalleled even in its stormy history; it is on the cards that it will never recover and that any form of pan-Arab consensus on anything has become a will-of-the-wisp. Specifically, the stance adopted by Yasser Arafat has made the resumption of a dialogue between the United States and the Palestine Liberation Organization under his leadership virtually inconceivable. Equally, no serious Arab state such as Egypt or Saudi Arabia, nor the European Community, nor anyone else for that matter, is likely to try

Book Reviews : The Turbulent Gulf by Liesl Graz. London: I.B. Tauris, 1990. 256pp. £17.95

Since the end of the Second World War, the decolonisation of the British Empire and the withdrawal of protection from territories in British spheres of influence have brought into being over 50 independent states, almost all of which have become members of the United Nations. They comprise a third of the total of the so-called international community. It is worth noting that the process of termination of British rule was accompanied by ’armed struggle’, terrorism or serious inter-communal violence in only eight cases, including the partition of the Indian sub-continent into two states. The most serious problems arose where there were deep-rooted religious and/or ethnic differences amongst populations, as in India, Palestine and, on a smaller scale, Cyprus, or where British rule was unduly prolonged by strategic considerations, as in Aden (also in Cyprus), or where there had been minority colonisation from the motherland as in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. This is not to say that everything in the post-independence garden has been lovely. Subsequent strife has broken out in many places, some of it being attributable to a legacy of imperialism Uganda, the Sudan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka are examples but I am concerned in this article with one specific instance of the decolonisation

The Palestine Problem - Options for Settlement

It is a fact that contemporary politicians are so preoccupied with meetings and in-trays that they have neither the time nor the inclination to read anything except summaries; in certain cases even these have to be reduced to strip cartoon form to be understood. It is therefore sad that this excellent book will not be studied in full by those who direct our destinies. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that some of them will read the concluding chapter. It is only sixteen pages long but is so packed with good sense that it cannot be boiled down to a series of cue cards without risk of misunderstanding. On the first page of the first chapter, Peter Calvocoressi states &dquo;This book is about one of the most important ideas evolved by man, the idea that killing and war, which is multiple killing, are wrong.&dquo; He goes on, starting from the Sermon on ahe Mount, to describe how this notion has made little headway against the homicidal proclivities of society, in particular the nation state, and how theologians, philosophers, individual pacifists and peace movements have been either co-opted or ignored as technological and political advances have respectively enhanced destructive power and the ability of governments to mobilize even democratic communities to support, indeed to clamour for, warfare. However, he makes the point that, in the late twentieth century, two factors have combined to swell public protest against violence and increase public pressure on governments to perform more responsibly: first, the fear of nuclear war, and second, the growing disrespect for the competence of so-called statesmen. Calvocoressi writes of the &dquo;decline of the American presidency into a chilling ineptitude and curdling vapidity&dquo; and of ruling classes everywhere being portrayed &dquo;as an elite with the wrong values and the wrong priorities&dquo;. I suppose I am attracted to Calvocoressi’s arguments because they are so close to what I myself have been saying and writing in lectures and articles over the past few years! Let me paraphrase a few of the conclusions. Peace is not threatened by the existence of weapons but by the behaviour of those who have them. The prevention of wars lies chiefly in the hands of those who govern states, who have a duty to prevent those states from coming to blows, and who need standing machinery (this is the crux) to support them in this task. It is a mistake to pay more attention to arms control and disarmament than to monitoring the causes of war and taking steps to settle these conflicts before they turn violent. The United Nations, for all its defects, is the only machinery we have got and the great powers could improve its performance if they so wished. Instead, by their own lamentable

From Southern Rhodesia To Zimbabwe, 1965-1988

West of public agitation about the danger of nuclear war. There are many reasons for this phenomenon, including the abrupt end to the era of detente between the super-powers following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the &dquo;modernisation&dquo; of Intermediate Nuclear Forces in NATO leading to the controversial deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles, the propagandist attempts by the Kremlin to encourage Western public opinion to oppose this deployment, and the extravagantly ideological rhetoric emanating from the Reagan Administration between 1981 and 1984. Peace

A Time for Peace, Peter Calvocoressi, Hutchinson, 1987, £12.95

We are thus inclined to overlook the appalling devastation which war has wreaked in Africa, Asia and Latin America since 1945. During this period, between ten and twenty million people, military and civilian, have died in or as a result of over one hundred armed conflicts. Similar numbers, now around 15 million, have been reduced to the misery of refugees. Social and economic development in many countries has been vitiated by the damage and disruption of war, to say nothing of the crushing financial burden of armaments assumed by states which consider themselves threatened by bellicose neighbours. As I speak, the flames of war are rising in a horrifying number of places. An incomplete list includes Iran/Iraq (where the total casualties on both sides probably amount to 1.5 million), the Lebanon, Cambodia, el Salvador, Nicaragua, the Horn of Africa, Angola, Afghanistan, Chad and the Western Sahara.