Description
Considering the great ambitions of global government and cosmopolitanism that have inspired political thinkers and practitioners since the Enlightenment, the helplessness of the United Nations (UN) in the face of military conflicts in our global age is surprising. This paper posits that we need a historical perspective to explain the simultaneous proliferation of international organisations and their continuing ineffectiveness in resolving rather than mitigating or avoiding conflicts. It reviews several Cold War conflicts—the Kashmir conflict shortly after the partition of India in the late 1940s, the Congo Crisis of the early 1960s, and the East Pakistan crisis of 1971—to examine the role played by the UN, the great powers, and other intervening forces. The paper argues that decolonisation and the prevalence of state sovereignty forced intervening powers, including the UN, to find strategies to circumvent international law, stretch and often overstep their mandates of engagement, or, increasingly, pursue intervention covertly behind a smokescreen of humanitarian aid and political impartiality. The result was the weakening of overt global governance and conflict management and an implicit strengthening of the Cold War status quo. The paper concludes with some reflections on potential historical lessons and makes a few suggestions as to how the UN system and global governance more broadly might become both more effective and legitimate.
