A 'global-regional security mechanism': an emerging vision of global security? Kennedy Graham reviews the sixth in a series of high-level meetings between the United Nations and regional and other inter-governmental organisations.

• Author: Graham, Kennedy
• Position: Cover Story

The sixth high-level meeting between the United Nations and regional (and other inter-governmental) organisations was held in New York recently (25-26 July) with scarcely audible fanfare. Yet the process embodied in these meetings holds better prospect of building an operational partnership for international peace and security than most of the higher profile public debates currently underway in other UN fora.

The search for a sustainable organising principle to underpin global security continues without closure. Shifting great power alliances of the 19th century gave way to abortive attempts at a centralised oligarchic control through collective security of the early 20th, and the adversarial diumvirate of the late 20th.

The past decade has seen a tense and hitherto inconclusive struggle between two visions of a future world. On the one hand, a burgeoning 'imperial' order--the first of its kind in the global age--aspires not only to set the rules but also to determine who may abide by them. On the other hand, the classical universal order struggles to consolidate, through the machinery of international organisation and the principle of collective security. The outcome over the next decade--the triumph of one or perhaps a loose modus operandi of the two--should determine the structure of global security for the 21st century.

Universalism triumphs

The founding of the United Nations rested on the judgment that sufficient commonality of great power interest would yield effective co-operation for a centralised universal security system. The Wilsonian ideal of propagating collective security in 1920 from the regional to the global level was reaffirmed through American planning of the 1940s. Against the preferences of a majority of founding states, universalism trumped regionalism a second time. Churchill's preference for regional security councils in Europe, Asia and the Americas was dismissed in favour of a strong UN Security Council and a committed United States--ready, in the first flush of enthusiasm, to devote 20 divisions, 1250 bombers, 2250 fighters and a large naval force to the new world body.

It was not only Britain and its Commonwealth that perceived regionalism to be an idea whose time had come. The Soviet Union preferred it as a guarantee of strategic space for its perimeter defence to the west. The Arab nations, having founded the first regional body of the modern age, were also in favour. And above all the Latin American states, with their pan-American system of hemispheric security and fearing a combined Soviet aggression and veto in the new global body, argued for the right to respond on a regional basis.

The outcome at San Francisco was to prove fateful in two ways. To reassure the Latins, Article 51 was inserted in the Charter near the end of the negotiations. Any nation was thus accorded the right to use force in self-defence with only ex post facto notification to the Security Council and no substantive explanation formally required. With the limitations on collective security, self-defence has ballooned out ever since into the principal justification for the use of force.

Seeds laid

As part of the same package, Chapter VIII was introduced, acknowledging the future possibility of UN member states using regional arrangements or agencies for peace and security. No great import was accorded to this in 1945--only the Arab League existed at the time plus a nascent new regional body for the Americas. Indeed the Charter conveyed, in the words of one commentator, a 'mild discouragement' of regionalism.

Yet through no great strategic prescience the seeds were laid for a different kind of institutional structure that may yet prove to be of greater magnitude than might have been conceived at the time. For in the intervening half century, regional organisations have come into existence in successive waves of independence (1950-90) and broadened their foci of concern from economic to security issues (1990-95). In the past decade they have taken initiatives that have prompted the United Nations to seek to transform these otherwise ad hoc arrangements into a more formalised partnership.

High-level meetings

In this there is, ten years later, a long way still to go. Since 1994 the UN Secretaries-General have convened six high-level meetings with regional organisations (1994, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2003 and 2005). Such meetings have grown ha the number of participating agencies (10 to 20) and have been well attended at head-of-agency level. The early meetings took a general approach to the discussions, but they have more recently focused on specific themes of operational collaboration--such as 'modalities of conflict prevention' and...