The United Nations and Global Governance: A Pre and Post

©Institute of International Relations and Area Studies, Ritsumeikan University

Abstract

This article reviews the role of the United Nations in practicesof global governance since the aftermath of the Cold War. BeforeSeptember 11, the UN was expected to establish security, order, andusher in peaceful governance internationally by mostly using sur-veillance, disciplinary power, and peacekeeping techniques. This re-empowering of the UN did not succeed and, after interventionistfailures, the international organization suddenly vanished fromglobal governance operations in the late 1990s. But the events ofSeptember 11 and the war in Iraq since 2003 have given the UN anew global mission. These events have granted the UN the ability torediscover important global governance functions such as resistinghegemony and preserving global and local justice. This articleargues that it is a stronger United Nations that emerges from theaftermath of the war in Iraq.

Keywords:

The United Nations, surveillance, disciplinary power, vanishingmediation, Iraq.

The United Nations and Global Governance:A Pre and Post-September 11 Reflection*

François DEBRIX**

RITSUMEIKAN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS Vol.3, pp.39-61 (2005).* Parts of this article are derived from my book Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping: The United

Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). An earlyversion of this essay was presented at the Global Governance and Human Security ProjectSeminar on 8 March 2004 held by the Institute of International Relations and Area Studies.

** Professor, Department of International Relations, Florida International University, U.S.A.I would like to thank Tsugio Ando, Clair Apodaca, Makoto Kobayashi, Akihiro Matsui,Hideo Yamagata, and all the graduate students of the Department of InternationalRelations and the Law Program at Ritsumeikan who attended this seminar and kindlyprovided me with invaluable critical insight on this article.

INTRODUCTION

This article critically reviews the place and meaning of the UN and itspeacekeeping/peace-enforcing missions throughout the world since theearly 1990s. It suggests that the UN’s practice of global governance oftentook place in the 1990s by means of techniques of surveillance designed toachieve order and compliance on the part of rogue states in the interna-tional community (Iraq and North Korea mostly). The case of the UnitedNations’ surveillance system in the context of the global monitoring ofweapons of mass destruction since the end of the Gulf war is exemplary ofthe post-Cold War deployment of global surveillance disciplinary tactics ininternational relations. The argument that this article makes is that theUN’s general modality of governance as surveillance, particularly after thefailure of peacekeeping in Somalia and Bosnia, slowly but surely gave wayto a new method of visualizing/understanding the UN on the part of theinternational community. In the second part of the 1990s, Western stateswho had turned to the UN to achieve governance, either through forcefulpeacekeeping (Somalia, Bosnia) or surveillance (North Korea, Iraq), decid-ed that other agents/institutions could implement Western visions of glob-al governance in places in crisis (Rwanda, Kosovo) better than the UN.Thus, in the latter part of the previous decade, the UN abruptly stoppedoperating as an agent of global governance for the West. The UN’s mostlysurveillance-based modality of governance gave way to the impressionthat, in matters of global order, the UN was a “vanishing mediator.” Atthat time, the practice of governance (through surveillance or peacekeep-ing mainly) left the UN and moved on to “substitute” agencies and inter-national actors, such as NATO or Non-Governmental Organizations.

After detailing how the UN functioned as an agent of surveillance andgovernance in the early 1990s, this essay will explain the notion of the UNas “vanishing mediator.” It will argue that the UN became the unintendedbut necessary victim of Western regimes of global governance that hadmoved to more useful and disciplinary methods of enforcement (usingNATO in Kosovo for example). Finally, in the last section, this essay exam-ines what has happened to the UN and its mission of global governance inthe aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. I will argue that,interestingly, the war on terrorism launched by the United States afterSeptember 11 and the US military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq

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have allowed the UN to regain a distinct and unique status and standingin international affairs and in matters of global governance in particular.No longer an agent of disciplinary governance and surveillance for theWest as it was in the early 1990s, and finally free from its paralyzing roleas a “vanishing mediator” (albeit a failed “vanishing mediator” as we willsee) in the late-1990s, the UN has recently been able to play a more inde-pendent role, and especially in relation to the new US policies of preemp-tive intervention and forceful hegemonic order. In an age when the UnitedStates, behind its President George W. Bush, has decided to almost single-handedly dictate for the rest of the planet what governance will be andlook like (and it mostly means getting rid of regimes that support terrorand in return imposing a US-based model of democratic governance), theUN has found itself in a strange position as an international agent capa-ble at times of confronting US military and hegemonic tendencies.Constantly reminding its member-states, and particularly the UnitedStates, that the principal issue is to find ways of globally combating ter-rorism effectively and collectively, and not by individually and sometimesblindly embarking upon risky, unpopular, and at times militarily aggres-sive interventions in countries where links to networks of terror or sourcesof mass insecurity and destruction are tenuous at best (in Iraq for exam-ple), the UN has become a voice of global sanity and reflected resistance inthe face of US global ambitions. In so doing, and since the SecurityCouncil’s stalemate over Iraq in January-February 2003 in particular, theUN has been able to shed its image of “vanishing mediator” and hasinstead endorsed the cause of global justice, fairness, and respect for therule of law, something which the current modality/practice of US-led glob-al military governance obviously lacks. Before I address these more recentconsiderations in the last section of this essay, I first return to the placeand time where and when the UN, in the post-Cold War era, started itsglobal governance missions: in the early 1990s, by imposing surveillanceregimes over North Korea and Iraq.

The United Nations and Global Governance（DEBRIX）2005】 41

Ⅰ. THE UNITED NATIONS AND SURVEILLANCE AS GOVERNANCE

For the international community, whose authority was generally rep-resented by the United Nations and its agencies in the early 1990s (partic-ularly since the Gulf war), North Korea and Iraq had a lot in common.They were both parts of the United States-formulated “rogue states” doc-trine and, as such, North Korea and Iraq had been treated as similartypes of cases. As then US President Bill Clinton remarked, both stateswere “unwilling to comply with the will of the international community.”1)

Still, and more interestingly, North Korea and Iraq shared another, morematerial, experience at the time. They were both under the constantscrutiny of the United Nations and some of its member states. Due to alack of space and time in this essay, I will only present the case of theUN’s surveillance regime over North Korea.2)

1. North Korea

Between the Spring of 1993 and the Summer of 1994, North Korea’sthreat to block on-site inspections by the International Atomic EnergyAgency (IAEA) personnel3) of its nuclear-processing sites (some of whichwere suspected of housing nuclear weapons facilities) revealed NorthKorea as a key rogue state in the post-Cold War era. Despite signing theNuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1987 and being bound by thistreaty’s safeguards agreement,4) North Korea decided to reject the interna-


1) William Jefferson Clinton, “Status on Iraq,” Communication from the President of theUnited States, January 4, 1995, 104th Congress, 1st Session, House Document 104-11.(Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office), p. 1. It is interesting to note howClinton’s successor in the White House, George W. Bush, tried to modify this approach in2003 when his administration claimed that Iraq and North Korea were two drastically dif-ferent situations (hence going to war against one, Iraq, would not necessarily imply waragainst the other, North Korea).

2) For more on the regime of surveillance by the UN over Iraq, see François Debrix Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping: The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 72-8.

3) The IAEA was created in 1957. The IAEA is an intergovernmental agency related to theUN. It is relatively autonomous but reports regularly to the General Assembly and theEconomic and Social Council. In certain cases, it may report directly to the SecurityCouncil. Recent events in North Korea and Iraq have clearly demonstrated the close linksbetween the IAEA and the UN. For more on the IAEA, see The United Nations, BasicFacts about the United Nations (New York: UN Publications, 1992), pp. 223-4.

4) North Korea ratified the safeguards agreement in April 1992. This agreement is part ofthe NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) system and allows international inspectors from the

tional legal process that entitled IAEA and UN experts to control and veri-fy North Korean facilities at any time and under any circumstance.

On March 12, 1993, North Korea upped the ante and announced thatit would withdraw from the NPT.5) In the summer of 1993, the NorthKoreans went further in their rejection of the NPT regime. They let thesurveillance cameras remotely placed on nuclear sites by the IAEA runout of film.6) IAEA officials immediately ordered North Korea to let inter-national inspectors visit the testing sites.7) With the support of the UN’sSecurity Council, the IAEA turned to the United States and chose to relyupon satellite intelligence technology in order to see what the NorthKoreans were apparently attempting to hide. Spy photos and other intelli-gence information were produced and showed that, at an undeclared butsuspected test-site, North Koreans were trying to hide nuclear reprocess-ing equipment.8)

In May 1994, Pyongyang was about to allow UN and IAEA inspectorsto return to the nuclear sites when the crisis exploded again. Without anyprior notice, North Korea “shut-down its 25-megawatt reactor” and “withIAEA personnel barred from the site, removed all of its fuel rods.”9) Thissecond showdown with the IAEA and the UN was more serious than thefirst one. Adhering to its rogue states doctrine, the United States indicat-ed that it would ask the UN to impose economic sanctions on North Korea.If such sanctions were imposed, Kim Il Sung, the North Korean leader,would be likely to respond by using military means, probably directed atSouth Korea.

Beyond the issue over the shutdown of the nuclear reactor and NorthKorea’s compliance with its international obligations, the Spring 1994 cri-sis between North Korea and the international community had anotherdimension. For the UN and most of its member states (particularly


IAEA to periodically verify declared nuclear facilities. To facilitate those inspections, thecountry party to such an agreement is required to provide a list of its nuclear testing sites.This agreement also entitles the IAEA to monitor a country’s nuclear resources and usesby any means deemed appropriate and recognized as such by the NPT.

5) Michael Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New ForeignPolicy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), p. 139.

6) Tim Weiner, “Shift on Cameras by North Koreans,” New York Times, October 30, 1993.7) Michael Mazarr, North Korea and the Bomb: A Case Study in Non Proliferation (New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 93.8) Ibid., p. 95.9) Klare, supra note 5, p. 140.

Western states), the crisis was about imposing transparency and clarity ina country that was hermetically sealed from the rest of the world and thatstubbornly refused to abide by the new post-Cold War principles of goodconduct of the international community. The main issue with North Koreawas undoubtedly nuclear non-proliferation. But the desire to open NorthKorea to full transparency offered an extended perspective on this diplo-matic crisis. Opening up North Korea or forcing transparency there couldbecome the springboard for this nation’ s final acceptance of the newlydeclared and apparently universally unchallenged neoliberal and democ-ratic rules of governance of the post-Cold War world.10)

The strategy of opening North Korea to the outside world, startingwith its nuclear program, instead of isolating it, explains many of thediplomatic maneuvers that took place throughout the summer of 1994.Among the many diverse negotiators who came to Pyongyang in 1994 totry to resolve the stalemate, American emissary Bill Taylor was, if not themost successful of all Western envoys, at least the most symbolic one inthe context of global transparency.11) Hoping to add to the visibility ofNorth Korea (only partially achieved by means of satellite surveillance),Taylor had the support of the US administration and, more importantly,brought with him international television crews such as CNN and NHK.These media were able to broadcast some of the first scenes of NorthKorean life that could ever be seen by the rest of the world. Althoughthese TV images had a great commercial impact on the networks thatwere given the opportunity to capture them, they also played a symbolicpart in the overall surveillance and transparency regime of UN-sponsoredgovernance in North Korea.

In October 1994, Pyongyang finally appeared to bend to internationalsurveillance pressures by signing what was referred to as an “AgreedFramework” with the United States. This agreement imposed three majorconditions to North Korea in exchange for US promises of technical andeconomic assistance. Specifically, North Korea would freeze its existingnuclear activities; it would not build new reactors; and finally it wouldallow the return of regular inspections by the IAEA and the UN.12) In thefall of 1994, after a crisis of eighteen months and the work of a long and


10) For more on this dimension, see Debrix, supra note 2, pp. 69-71.11) Mazarr, supra note 7, pp. 153-4.12) Klare, supra note 5, p. 173.

sustained disciplinary surveillance aimed at opening up North Korea tothe rest of the world, the infiltration of global tendencies and values hadtaken a significant step forward, specifically but not exclusively in thecase of North Korean nuclear compliance. Even though since then, andinterestingly as a result of the abandonment in the late-1990s of this UNregime of surveillance, the North Korean nation has once again rejectedthe basic norms of order/governance of the international community, it isperhaps more than ever placed in a relationship of dependence vis-à-visthe rest of the world as it periodically raises challenges to the UnitedStates, Japan, and South Korea in an attempt to try to force Westernstates into bilateral economic assistance. To some degree, in North Korea,UN-sponsored surveillance showed in the early to mid 1990s that, givencertain conditions, it could facilitate international governance.

2. Surveillance, Discipline, and International Governance

Governance has been understood by some scholars as “the establish-ment and operation of social institutions—in other words, sets of rules,decision-making procedures, and programmatic activities that serve todefine social practices and to guide the interactions of those participatingin these practices.”13) Governance is not an act of unilateral power or cen-tralized control that is applied to governed subjects (states or individuals)by means of force or violence. It is rather the establishment of a complexand intricate web of interaction and interdependence between individualunits and institutional elements that come to form a society. Governanceis a horizontal mode of organization that does not require vertical struc-tures of power to produce social relations.

Governance, it has been argued, can be “without government.”14) Butit cannot be without discipline. Governance, national or international, ismore likely to take place and offer durable social structures when the cen-tralized exercise of power and control is done away with and disciplinarymechanisms take its place. What governance requires is discipline or, asMichel Foucault suggested, the deployment of three complementary prin-


13) Oran Young, “Rights, Rules and Resources in World Affairs,” in Global Governance:Drawing Insights from the Environmental Experience (ed., by Oran Young, Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 4.

14) James Rosenau and Ernst Otto Czempiel (eds), Governance without Government: Orderand Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

ciples of (disciplinary) social ordering: clarity, docility and utility.15) Theapplication of these principles is what Foucault called “governmentality.”Governmentality is the discovery and operationalization of “techniques ofinstrumental rationality to the arts of everyday management.”16) To pro-duce governance as governmentality, what is required is the ability todevise the appropriate mechanisms of docility and utility that will manip-ulate the social elements in need of management (the governed subjects)in such a way that their differences, their proliferation, and possibly theirdisorder will be effectively regulated. In this manner, subjects can be gov-erned without having to be tortured, repressed, physically marked or evenkilled.

In the early-1990s, as practices of global governance turned to theUnited Nations, governmentality and disciplinarity became major comple-mentary modes of social organization in the international community.This took place mostly through the exercise of UN surveillance as wit-nessed in North Korea. In North Korea (but also in Iraq throughout muchof the 1990s), the UN sought to achieve order for the purported benefit ofthe international community by imposing a regime of calculable distribu-tions. As has been clear since the creation of this international institution,the United Nations does not possess the ability to enforce internationalrules, procedures and principles on its own.17) The UN does not haveautonomous power but, rather, is dependent upon the amount of force andintent that its members are willing to provide. Yet, the UN in the early1990s possessed another important form of power, what can be called dis-ciplinary power. The UN cannot force states into abiding by the principlesof international law supposedly recognized by the international communi-ty by using traditional (military) means. But it can place some states (theso-called rogues) in a programmed, controlled, and managed internationalenvironment where these “outlaw” states are deterred from fulfilling theirself-interested objectives. This is what the UN and its agencies did inNorth Korea in the early 1990s. In the early years of the past decade, theUN could thus be viewed as a “monitory regime” of international gover-


15) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: VintageBooks, 1979).

16) Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality(ed., by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1991), p. 102.

17) Debrix, supra note 2, pp. 16-7 on this matter.

nance or, perhaps, what one might call a “disciplinary regime” of gover-nance.18)

Disciplinary governance, through its insidious power of surveillance,has the distinct advantage of keeping members of the international com-munity satisfied by giving the appearance that the “outlaws” have beentamed, but not directly violated. The dilemma over forceful interventionand/or disciplinary governance was clearly demonstrated in another testcase of post-Cold War governance. In Somalia (from 1992 to 1994), the UNchose to abandon its surveillance mode of governance used in Iraq andNorth Korea, and opted instead for a more direct modality of governancethrough peacekeeping interventions that, in the end, proved costly andfatal. Today, Somalia, instead of being closely monitored and contained,remains as disorderly as it was prior to the joint UN-US intervention. Theissue that the UN was sent to solve in Somalia was no doubt of a differentnature than that of the weapons of mass destruction it could more easilycontrol by using disciplinary power and surveillance in North Korea andIraq. But what the UN lost in Somalia was a clear sense of utility or, toput it differently, an adequate notion of how regimes of docility can be putto the service of international utility.19) In a way, this is perhaps also some-thing that the United States has lost track of since the arrival of GeorgeW. Bush in the White House in 2001 (as we will see below).

Ⅱ. THE UNITED NATIONS AS “VANISHING MEDIATOR”

From the mid-1990s on, UN surveillance as a modality of global gov-ernance became widely discredited. Although not unsuccessful at imple-menting its postulated goals of uniformity, docility, and disciplinary power(as described above), surveillance as governance fell victim of what wasbelieved to be the UN’s inherent failures at keeping and maintaining thepeace in places like Somalia and Bosnia. As the end of the decade


18) This notion of the UN as a “monitory or disciplinary regime” is derived from Nicholas Onuf’swork. See Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory andInternational Relations (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 146-7.

19) Thus, although contemporary to the Somalia intervention, the North Korean and Iraqioperations by the UN and its agencies have demonstrated the disciplinary potential of theUN whereas, by contrast, “the international community’s efforts in Somalia clarify UNlimitations.” See Thomas G. Weiss, “Overcoming the Somalia Syndrome —‘OperationRekindle Hope’?” Global Governance, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1995), pp. 171-87.

approached, member states of the UN, starting with the United States,began to withdraw their support and funding, refused to provide morepeacekeeping troops, and called for the removal of Secretary GeneralBoutros Boutros-Ghali whose initial Agenda for Peace was thought (notincorrectly) to have been the new blueprint for UN action in the early1990s. Suffering from what some scholars termed a “Somalia syndrome,”20)

the UN’s operations of global security and governance were suddenly incrisis. As Western states were more interested in calling in NATO forforceful interventions (as finally happened in Bosnia after 1993, and laterin Kosovo in 199921)), the UN’s mission of surveillance slowly but surelyreceded. Instead, the UN practice of governance was suddenly restrictedto post-conflict nation rebuilding, police management, and humanitarianoperations where the UN’s logistical and institutional apparatus, its abili-ty to work closely with NGOs, and the know-how of some of its specializedagencies (like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, theWorld Health Organization, and the Department for HumanitarianAffairs) became desirable. While these UN agencies were able to conductimportant tasks in a perspective of global governance, their operationswere generally secondary to interventions by other institutions (NATO inparticular) or to conflict (as happened in Rwanda in 1994). Thus, the gen-eral sense was that UN peacekeeping and its accompanying surveillanceand disciplinary machinery had been relegated to secondary or tertiaryranks in the mid to late 1990s perspective on international governance.

This change of attitude on the part of mostly Western states towardthe UN had important practical consequences for all sorts of humanitari-an actors, and NGOs in particular. From now on, before assuming a pro-tective role for NGOs, the UN was more likely to be seen as an agent thatwould let a humanitarian situation unfold. Only after NGOs had inter-vened in the first place and established a humanitarian basis, a modicumof humanitarian governance in places in crisis, the UN would then finallyconsider whether or not to provide some of its logistical and normativesupport, but only so long as this could take place in a fairly risk-free fash-ion. This was clearly evidenced in November 1996 when a humanitarian


20) Weiss, ibid., pp. 171-87.21) For more on NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, see Audrey Lustgarten and François Debrix,

“The Role of the Media in Monitoring International Humanitarian Law: The Case ofKosovo,” Peace and Change, Vol. 30 (forthcoming 2005).

crisis involving Hutu refugees who had fled from Rwanda ignited in EasternZaire where they were cramped in camps riddled with cholera and werethe target of many periodic attacks at the hand of Tutsi populations fromZaire. Instead of exerting its post-conflict mission or perhaps using disci-plinary surveillance as it had done before in North Korea in the early1990s, and thus sending the message that it was unwilling to let futurehumanitarian tragedies go unchecked, the United Nations instead letsome of its own humanitarian agencies but mostly various NGOs assessthe situation first and then provide first-aid relief under the spotlights ofWestern cameras.22) According to this new scenario that unfolded inRwanda and Zaire, NGOs were sent first and, subsequently, judging fromthe signals that the NGOs displayed, the UN Security Council chosewhether it was appropriate for the UN to act or not. The UN of coursedecided not to intervene, and thus only superficially contributed to avision of joint UN-NGOs governance as humanitarian assistance inRwanda in 1994 first, and later in Eastern Zaire throughout November-December 1996.

In practice, the Rwandan crisis of 1994 and its extension into Zaire in1996 actually contributed to the development of a new but unexpectedconceptual model of UN-NGOs interaction and governance. What can becalled a “substitute theory” of non-governmental humanitarian gover-nance emerged then.23) Based on the example provided by NGOs’ actionsin Rwanda and Zaire, this approach suggests that, in the absence of aneffective, prompt, and disciplinarily effective UN response to what isdetermined to be a severe humanitarian crisis, it is up to specific NGOs,the most appropriate for the specific tasks at hand, to meet the basicrequirements of international humanitarian governance. NGOs’ humani-tarian actions could of course still be commensurate with the UN’s and ingeneral Western states’ post-Cold War governance policies. But the “sub-stitute theory” model implies that the UN would let NGOs assume themajority of the humanitarian governance task. This is precisely what theUN did in Rwanda and Zaire by letting medical NGOs take care of andreport about the situation both in the first months of the conflict (April-May, 1994) and later all the way until the end of 1996 with the refugee sit-uation in Zaire. This “substitute theory” of NGOs’ interventionism and


22) I recount this episode in Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping (supra note 2), pp. 203-4.23) Ibid., pp. 202-3.

governance suggests that, if UN-led governance (by means of peacekeep-ing or surveillance) cannot effectively impose order in what have been rec-ognized to be troubled regions of the globe, other agents that are less tiedto the politics of sovereign states and are technologically more flexible canperform a similar task more swiftly and often more adequately. In otherwords, other international agents can implement global governance inpractice in a more effective and less politically ambiguous fashion thanthe UN.

Practical global governance by NGOs in the mid to late 1990s and thesimultaneous incapacity of the UN to act and impose regimes of discipli-nary power and surveillance finally allow us to critically reconsider therole and place of the UN in global governance designs at the end of thetwentieth century. Based on the developments presented above, I arguethat the UN in the late 1990s moved from being an agent of governancethrough surveillance to being what I have called a “vanishing mediator.”24)

“Vanishing mediation” is an important notion to understand the symbolicand strategic position of the UN in the late 1990s. The concepts of “vanish-ing mediation” and “vanishing mediator” are Hegelian notions that wererevived by critical political theorists Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek inthe 1980s and 1990s.25) A vanishing mediator is a person or institutionwhose main purpose is to perform a specific intervention, to fulfill a par-ticular ritualistic mission. The mission asked of the vanishing mediator isto operate change, or at least, an “illusion” of change.26) The vanishingmediator is an agent that makes possible a rite of passage from an oldsocial or political system to a new one, but who also must disappear oncethe new order or system it announces has been established.

The role and place of the UN in the symbolic and ideological landscapeof post-Cold War global governance in the late 1990s were those reserved toa vanishing mediator. Once again, one must locate vanishing mediation inthe context of a rite of passage. The passage made possible by the UN was


24) Ibid., pp. 205-7.25) Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986, Vol. II, (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 1988). And Slavoj Zizek, For They Know not what They Do:Enjoyment as a Political Factor, (New York: Verso, 1991); and Tarrying with the Negative:Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

26) Both Zizek and Jameson agree that the mission performed by the vanishing mediator isfirst and foremost an exercise in illusion and make-believe. It does not matter if a changeof ideology actually takes place as long as an illusion of change takes place.

from one specific international order (the Cold War system of internationalrelations) to a new one (the New World Order of global governance champi-oned by Western states after the Cold War). UN’s peacekeeping and sur-veillance missions in the early 1990s were designed to be the selectedmoments of change, the specifically visible and highly identifiable pointswhere the old anarchic and dualistic system of split hegemony (betweenthe East and the West) was to give way to a new visible neoliberal order ofgovernance controlled by liberal-capitalist transactions and liberal-democ-ratic policies on a global scale. In an ideal perspective (which however didnot materialize), once the United Nations’ visually mobilized operations ofgovernance had achieved this goal (and had facilitated this passage to anew order of global governance), the UN would then have had to simplyoperate a “withdrawal into the sphere of privacy.”27)

The United Nations at the end of the 1990s was, however, a case offailed vanishing mediation. As the Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda episodesblatantly demonstrated, the United Nations’ operations of change wereunsuccessful efforts of vanishing mediation. The relative disappearance ofthe United Nations after the Bosnian and Somali crises, and its replace-ment by NATO (in Bosnia and later Kosovo) and NGOs (in Rwanda andZaire), do not correspond to the fate reserved to a successful vanishingmediator. Rather, these cases evoked a different mode of disappearance orvanishing. It was the disappearance of an international agent who hadbecome all-too visibly painful for many Western states (starting with theUnited States) and their global governance designs. Vanishing mediationwas supposed to be based on the principle of the final invisibility of themediator, who then gives way to the high-visibility of newly created insti-tutions, structures, and orders. In the case of UN governance in the 1990s,the reverse actually took place. As the new international order was con-fronted to the opposition of contingent singularities in regions and soci-eties that the United Nations should have transformed, the UN’s failuresand operational difficulties became instead the most visible events. Globalgovernance in the late 1990s was less assured than ever as the picturesfrom the UN’s failed missions in Somalia, Bosnia, and later Rwandademonstrated the artificiality and vulnerability of the early 1990s UNgovernance system.


27) Zizek, supra note 25, p. 183.

Paradoxically, the failure of the UN’s mediation in the latter part ofthe 1990s may have brought relief to the international organization.Detached from its messianic role and its ideological positioning, theUnited Nations in the late 1990s was no longer placed at the center ofglobal governance operations (surveillance, peacekeeping, humanitarian,or otherwise). Boutros-Ghali’s early 1990s vision of a new global orderorganized around a new disciplinarily powerful global UN diplomacy hadtaken a back seat to other strategies of international compliance, inter-ventionism, and governance.28) Boutros-Ghali himself had been replacedby Kofi Annan whom some considered to be a more pragmatic SecretaryGeneral. At the end of the decade, if and when the UN was still to be used,it was more as a vague and broad legal and institutional reference orframework than as an effective agent or implementer of global gover-nance. Accordingly, in the late 1990s, the UN was relegated by the inter-national community to a less daring and less visible role, to the type ofplace and function it was believed to occupy before the end of the Cold Warwhen it was far less proactive in matters of international order and gover-nance. Interestingly, it would take the events of September 11 in theUnited States, and several subsequent unilateral US military actions, togive the United Nations a new global mission in the early twenty-first cen-tury, a new role and place in the structure of global governance. I nowturn to these post-September 11 considerations and to their implicationsfor the UN and global governance.

Ⅲ. THE UNITED NATIONS AS A NEWLY EMPOWERED AGENT OFCHANGE, RESISTANCE, AND GLOBAL JUSTICE?

A recent symposium in the American foreign policy journal TheWashington Quarterly on the role of the United Nations after September11 and the war in Iraq suggested that the UN had four main tasks toundertake in this new era. First, the UN should monitor and further solid-ify the existing global non-proliferation regime for nuclear, chemical, andbiological weapons of mass destruction.29) Second, the UN should take the


28) Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 2nd ed. (New York: United NationsPublication, 1995).

29) Richard Butler, “Improving Nonproliferation Enforcement,” The Washington Quarterly,Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn 2003), pp. 133-45.

lead in the global struggle against terrorism.30) Third, the UN shouldupdate and improve its post-conflict reconstruction and peace-buildingoperations.31) And fourth, the UN should expand its existing mandates tofight the spread of global epidemics such as AIDS for example.32) The par-ticipants in this symposium were rather upbeat and optimistic about theUN’s ability to perform such new or renewed tasks. Although none of theparticipants in the Washington Quarterly symposium directly said so, theyall assumed that the United Nations after September 11 had rediscovereda new sense of hope and purpose. The UN, these scholars implied, wasonce again capable of tackling some of today’s main obstacles to the real-ization of global governance in the twenty-first century. What caused sucha drastic change of attitude on the part of UN experts? What suddenlyallowed the United Nations to escape its late 1990s status as a “vanishingmediator” to become a new beacon of international hope, justice, and glob-al security?

While the specter of global terrorism may be a tempting answer tosuch questions, a more appropriate answer has to do with the attitude andbeliefs of the United States vis-à-vis much of the world after September11, or perhaps since George W. Bush began his term in the office of thepresidency in January 2001. Even before he made it an official doctrine ofUS foreign policy, Bush’s views on foreign relations were based on theideas of preemption and offensive engagement of potential enemies.33)

Contrasting the strategies of containment of rogue states and constructiveengagement of foreign leaders developed by his predecessor Bill Clinton,Bush placed the United States on a path toward unilateralism. AsEuropean Union Commissioner for external relations Chris Patten hasnoted, even before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States


30) Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, “Combating Terrorism,” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 26,No. 4 (Autumn 2003), pp. 163-76.

31) William Durch, “Picking up the Peaces: The UN’s Evolving Postconflict Roles,” TheWashington Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn 2003), pp. 195-210.

32) See J. Stephen Morrison and Todd Summers, “United to Fight HIV/AIDS?,” TheWashington Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn 2003), pp. 177-93.

33) A recent justification and defense of the new American doctrine of preemptive diplomacyand war is David Frum and Richard Perle’s book An End to Evil: How to Win the War onTerror (New York: Random House, 2003). The doctrine was elaborated in a 2002 documentemanating from the White House. See The National Security Strategy of the United Statesof America, September 2002, at <http:// www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/print/20020912-1.html>.

under Bush was functioning in a “unilateralist overdrive” mode.34) FormerFrench Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine referred to this new US foreign pol-icy posture as a matter of self-interested hyper-puissance or hyper-power.35)

The term “hyper-power” is well chosen. Hyper-power suggests that,once control and domination have been achieved and a large part of theworld’s territory has been carved out to form this superpower’s maingeopolitical and economic zone, this unchallenged super-state does notstop here. Instead, this state must constantly seek new territorial, politi-cal, and economic opportunities, and going to war is its main continuousstrategy of foreign policy.36) A hyper-power is thus akin to ancientMediterranean and Far-Eastern military empires, always preoccupiedwith having to fight the next war, and desperately seeking new enemies.

The war on terror since the aftermath of September 11, 2001 furtherboosted US unilateralism. As is now well known, the United States didnot wait for the UN’s approval to launch a war against the Taliban-ledregime in Afghanistan in October-November 2001. Although this interven-tion received the overall support and legal backing (a posteriori though) ofthe international community and the United Nations, it is worth notingthat the United States first chose to act, and only subsequently sought toobtain legal validation for this military intervention. The United Nationshad no difficulty accepting the US claim of self-defense against theTaliban, but this move was already indicative of Bush’s post-September 11foreign policy preferences. If anybody had any doubt whatsoever as to thenew approach to US foreign policy and military action, the decision to goto war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on the grounds that he was stilldeveloping a program of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and thatthe UN’s inspection regime had been incapable of deterring him wouldconfirm the newly established trend. After months of unsuccessfulattempts at trying to mobilize UN member-states, particularly inside theSecurity Council, against Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, the UnitedStates, with only the help of those other states “willing” to go along, final-ly launched its military campaign against Saddam’s regime in March


34) As quoted in Thomas Weiss, “The Illusion of UN Security Council Reform,” TheWashington Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Autumn 2003), p. 156.

35) Quoted in Weiss, ibid., p. 152.36) Critical philosopher Slavoj Zizek has recently developed a rather similar argument. See

Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 19-23.

2003. Against the will of the UN expressed at the Security Council (whereseveral permanent veto members refused to vote in favor of a militaryintervention), the United States nonetheless chose to attack Iraq to, asBush would claim, put an end to Saddam Hussein’s program of WMDs, tobreak the suspected link (since then discredited) between the Iraqi gov-ernment and al Qaeda, and to restore democracy to the Iraqi people.

The UN’s standoff in late 2002 and early 2003 against this unilateralUS decision to go to war in Iraq and not allow the UN inspectors moretime to complete their investigation was a bold and unexpected move onthe part of the UN. Although this move was spearheaded by some crucialmember-states (and not by the UN itself), it is symptomatic that thesestates’ opposition to US ambitions took place at the United Nations andwithin the context of the UN system. By making their claim for the exten-sion of the inspections regime in Iraq and their larger point about UShyper-power designs at the UN, these member-states like France,Germany, Russia, and to a lesser extent China appeared to have the sup-port of a majority of states and people in the international community (USDefense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s claim that the United States repre-sented an unprecedented international coalition notwithstanding). Bymobilizing the UN in this kind of endeavor, these states also were able tocloak their own (often self-interested) preferences behind a veil of globallegitimacy and legality, something which the United States and its fewallies could not really claim as they ignored the will of the United Nations.

While many in the United States, particularly in conservative foreignpolicy and national security circles, argued that the inability of the UnitedNations to authorize the intervention of the United States in Iraq was fur-ther proof that the international organization had failed and was for sureirrelevant in matters of international security and global governance,37)

the outcome was strangely and interestingly positive for the UN. Within afew months of the beginning of the conflict in Iraq, the United Statesfound itself in the position of actually having to ask the UN for assistanceand support. With a protracted conflict in Iraq on their hands, and havingto face guerrilla and terrorist attacks almost daily, the US-imposed andrun administration of Paul Bremer and the US military command soon


37) See, for example, the views of Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol in their book The Warover Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission (San Francisco: Encounter Books,2003).

started to realize that restoring order and establishing democracy (not tomention finding WMDs) after the removal of Saddam Hussein was goingto be much more arduous than they had anticipated. Involved in a vastpost-conflict reconstruction operation for which they were ill-equipped inthe first place (not enough troops, not enough planning, not enough expe-rience in this domain), US troops found themselves in a situation some-what reminiscent of what had happened to them some ten years earlier inSomalia where US special forces had been sent to perform peace-makingoperations for which their traditional offensive training had not preparedthem.38) Thus, and quite ironically, a few months only after rebuffing theUnited Nations by deciding to go to war in Iraq, the United States wentback to the UN and asked the international institution to provide neces-sary post-conflict rebuilding assistance for both Iraq and Afghanistan. TheUnited Nations, as the United States’ insistence, returned its personnel toBaghdad in late Spring 2003 (the UN had moved most of its non-essentialand non-Iraqi personnel to neighboring countries immediately before thefirst US strikes on Baghdad in March 2003). In Baghdad, under the super-vision of UN special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN established itspost-conflict reconstruction headquarters. Working closely with the USadministration of Paul Bremer, the UN took charge of rebuilding publicfacilities (schools, hospitals, roads), restoring basic public amenities(water, electricity), and making sure that food and medical suppliesreached those Iraqis most in need. Interestingly though, the UN was byand large kept away from discussions regarding the political reconstruc-tion of Iraq. In this domain, as well as with the issue of creating new Iraqipolice forces, the United States and Great Britain still retained much con-trol over most crucial decisions, for the time being at least.

Things took a dramatic turn on August 19, 2003. On that day, the UNheadquarters in a Baghdad hotel were destroyed by a terrorist attack. 21UN officials died, including top UN official Vieira de Mello. In the daysthat followed, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan decided to withdraw allUN presence from Iraq, declaring the situation unsafe for any UN person-nel and unfit for any UN post-conflict reconstruction effort. As of October2003, all UN non-Iraqi staff was removed from Iraq.39) After the late 2002


38) I have written on this matter in Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping, Chapter 3. 39) See “UN Won’t Return to Iraq until Security Assured: Annan,” Agence France Presse,

January 28, 2004, no page given.

and early 2003 diplomatic standoff at the UN Security Council against theUS push for war, these August 19, 2003 attacks on the UN represent asecond major turning point in post-September 11 US-UN relations. Afterthe refusal to sanction the US military intervention of March 2003, theUN revealed a strangely unexpected capacity of resistance and oppositionto US unilateralism. This resistance at the Security Council though didnot prevent the United States from launching its military campaign. Still,seeds of a different UN attitude were sown in the winter of 2002-03. Thefall of 2003 would further confirm this change of perspective on the part ofthe UN, and on the part of many states in the international communitynow willing to work with and within the United Nations structure to chal-lenge US hyper-power, over Iraq mostly. Indeed, after the August 19attacks and the subsequent pullout of UN personnel, and with a politicaland military situation fast deteriorating in Iraq and to a lesser extent inAfghanistan too, the United States started to grow desperate for UN sup-port and assistance. With political pressures inside the United Statesmounting, the US president began to indicate that the United Stateswould be willing to relinquish authority to an Iraqi-elected government asearly as June or July 2004. But, if the United States were to relinquishauthority to a democratically elected Iraqi government, much reconstruc-tive work would have to be performed. Political institutions would have tobe created. A culture of democracy and participation would have to beinstilled. A new Iraqi constitution would have to be crafted. And a generalsense of social justice, fairness, and political security would have to berestored. Clearly, the mostly US military occupation of Iraq was and stillis ill-suited to allow these kind of political transitions to take place. Bycontrast, the UN has both the experience and the global legitimacy to per-form these tasks of political governance for the new Iraq. In the late1990s, as previously indicated, in places like Kosovo or East-Timor forexample, the UN was mainly used for democracy-instituting and post-con-flict reconstruction tasks. Unfortunately for the United States afterOctober 2003, the UN was no longer present in Iraq to provide similar ser-vices. Thus, once again in a fairly ironic twist, the United States in the fallof 2003 found itself desperately needing the UN in Iraq.

After several months of negotiation, compromising rhetoric, andappeasing discourse on the part of the Bush administration, the UnitedNations was officially asked to return to Iraq in early 2004, mostly in


order to help prepare the return to Iraq’s self-rule scheduled to take placeon July 1, 2004. The United Nations, in the person of its SecretaryGeneral, replied on January 27, 2004 that Iraq was still not sufficientlysecure for the UN to return. Kofi Annan further stated that the UN couldnot return to Baghdad until “appropriate security measures” were provid-ed by the US command.40) If the United States wanted to help restore anIraqi-based (and supposedly sovereign) government in Iraq, the Americansand their allies would have to do it by themselves. This was clearly a seri-ous rebuff for the United States, and the Bush administration in particu-lar that, as Columbia University Middle Eastern Studies Professor GarySick recently put it, was “extremely anxious to [now] have the UN play aconstructive role.” This “constructive role,” Sick continued, was two-sided:first, the presence of the UN could provide the United States with “adegree of legitimacy that a lot of Iraqis do not feel applies to theAmericans alone;” and second, the UN would bring “a tremendous amountof technical expertise in these transitions from one form of government toanother.”41)

More importantly perhaps, the UN’s apparent refusal to return anddeploy a full-blown peacekeeping mission in Spring 2004 was a direct blowto the United States’ ambitions as a hyper-power. The United Statesunder Bush had chosen Iraq as a test case for its new policy of global uni-lateralism. American unilateralism is the United States’ post-September11 model of global governance, one which relies on military superiorityand the spread of US ideas of democracy, free trade, and institutionsbuilding. According to this uniquely American model of global governance,there is no place for any international agent other than the United Statesitself and a few of its friends and allies (the so-called coalition of the will-ing). Certainly, there is supposed to be no place for the United Nations inthis new unilateralist global governance model. Yet, in complete contradic-tion to this alleged model, the one place where this new approach was sup-posed to be launched for all of the world to see-Iraq-turns out to be a landwhere the United States has no choice but to call upon the UN for help.Both to gain legitimacy and to provide the necessary “know-how,” the UN


40) Ibid., no page given.41) See “Interview: Gary Sick Discusses US Attempts to Convince the United Nations to

Return to Iraq,” National Public Radio, Transcript of “Day to Day” Show with Host AlexChadwick, January 19, 2004, no page given.

was called back in repeatedly throughout the Spring of 2004 to help boostthe United States’ so-called unilateralist governance operations in Iraq.Interestingly though, in response to such a desperate appeal on the part ofthe United States, the UN chose to resist, defy, relent, and thus endlesslypostponed the moment when it would return to help in Iraq. While onecould claim that this attitude on the part of the UN has been childish,petty, vengeful, and selfish (as many Iraqi people have been suffering), itis nonetheless partly justified. Legally, the United Nations did not con-done the US intervention in the first place. It is technically under no oblig-ation to intervene on behalf of a member state that did not follow theproper course of international law and whose actions may have posed alarger threat to international security. Moreover, the UN can remind theUnited States and some of its allies involved that, as occupation forces oradministrators of another sovereign state’s territory (and, as of August2004, the United States is still largely present in Iraq through its mili-tary), they primarily have the responsibility to maintain order, securityand peace. Finally, the UN did stay in Iraq and in fact sent more of itsadministrative and technical personnel once the military campaign ofMarch-April 2003 was over. The UN worked in Iraq and stayed there onbehalf of the Iraqi people until the occupation and administration forcescould no longer guarantee the safety of UN’s staff. The UN has a duty tothe Iraqi people, but also to the people of the world represented by the UNpersonnel who are from all member-states.

In any case, the UN’s resistance to US governance designs in Iraq islikely to usher in a new era for the international organization. As of thewriting of this article, the UN continues on this resistant path. Recently,the UN indicated to the United States that Iraq was not ready to holddemocratic elections as early as the summer of 2004 as the United Stateshad initially hoped.42) Instead, the earliest possibility for elections in Iraqhas been set for January 2005. Moreover, despite Bush’s half-heartedacceptance of the fact that he would need the support of the internationalcommunity after all in order to stabilize Iraq (and that he probably wouldhave to work through and with the UN to achieve this), the UnitedNations is still not back in Iraq. Now that technically Iraq has been givenits sovereignty back (in principle at least), it is possible that the UN might


42) See, for example, Betsy Pisik, “UN to Study Elections in Iraq,” The Washington Times,January 27, 2004. Online edition, no page given.

return sooner than it wished. Still, the developments of the past sixmonths in Iraq further demonstrate the unwillingness of the UN to cutcorners on post-conflict reconstruction and governance issues. If recon-struction and governance are to take place in Iraq (and popular electionsare no doubt a crucial step in this direction), these need to be performedwell and professionally. A half-baked form of governance and democratictransition, quickly put together and imposed onto the Iraqi people to allowUS troops to escape the Iraqi quagmire as soon as possible (as it looks likewas the main American impetus in June-July 2004) is unlikely to be satis-factory for the UN.

CONCLUSION

After September 11 but, more importantly, after the US interventionin and occupation of Iraq, the United Nations has discovered a new globalsymbolic and political function. This function is still about global gover-nance, even if, for the moment at least, the UN is not the main agent ofgovernance. The UN’s new role is to resist, challenge, and at times coun-teract US unilateral and hyper-powerful global governance schemes,43) notso much for the sake of being anti-American (as many US neo-conserva-tives believe), but rather because, in Iraq primarily, the US model of uni-lateralist governance has proven to be unsuccessful, warlike, and possiblydangerous and unjust to many people in Iraq and beyond (and in theUnited States too). Obviously, the United Nations is not alone in this task,as many of its member states, openly or more secretly, have supported thiskind of approach. Let us be clear. I am in no way advocating that the UNshould automatically reject some of the ideas and principles that theUnited States believes in. Fundamentally, the United Nations, like theUnited States, believes in democracy, human rights, security, and order.And the UN has also demonstrated that it is willing to develop ways ofglobally fighting terrorism wherever and whenever it must be opposed.But it seems also that the UN has made it clear in the recent past that it


43) International Peace Academy President David Malone detects a similar attitude on thepart of the UN. Malone suggests that the challenge for the UN is to see whether it can con-tinue to “engage the United States, modulate its exercise of power, and discipline itsimpulses.” See David Malone, “Conclusions,” in The Future of the UN Security Council(ed., by David Malone, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publisher, forthcoming 2004); also quotedin Thomas Weiss, “The Illusion of UN Security Council Reform,” p. 156.

will be unwilling to accept and perhaps will be downright opposed to theidea of letting unilateral global governance in the hands of one single mili-tary power (even if it is the world’s super-hegemon or hyper-power) gounchallenged and uncriticized, and particularly when such a unilateralistapproach to world governance does not result in the implementation ofgreater local and global justice. In the early twenty-first century, I wouldargue that this kind of UN, with this type of resistant attitude, has moreto offer to the international community and to global governance practicesthan it may have had in the entire previous decade.


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The United Nations and Global Governance: A Pre and Post