In Larger Freedom and UN Reform

                                                                       April 5, 2010

In Larger Freedom portrays an erroneous view of the need of reform of the UN collective security system. The arguments on which that document is based are in my view overbroad and create pitfalls to the legitimacy of the UN and to the success of its main aim to prevent international conflict and violence.

               

The new collective security paradigm that the document intends to fashion argues in favor of an expansion of what collective security implies. It also argues in favor of enhancing the understanding and interpretation of the “responsibilities, commitments, strategies and institutions that come with it”.

               

As it has been noted by academia, the broader understanding of collective security proposed by In Larger Freedom, requires an expanded notion of “threat”. That notion leaves behind the traditional definition given to it by international law, and opens the door for a new extensive meaning, where problems such as economic and social poverty, interstate conflict, domestic violence and war, proliferation and trafficking of mass destruction weapons, terrorism, and transnational crime, come into play.

               

This is highly problematic as the difference between hard, medium and soft threats, is erased. Therefore, significant resources needed in order to prevent or control the explosion of hard threats are misdirected in preventing soft threats that are not as important to the international community.

Subsequently, almost any problematic international phenomenon becomes a pretext for collective action. This creates an additional risk, namely the possibility of almost any state to intervene in other’s country sovereign affairs under the threat to international peace  pretext.

               

A problem of hierarchy of threats could also be raised, particularly in light of the still insufficient tools to assess causation in highly complex scenarios. If violence can be prevented by attacking its roots, causation explanations become of the utmost relevance. The problem is, however, if those causes are in themselves threats to international peace? Are states or the international community entitled to act against them? Which causes are more important? Drug trafficking? Hunger? HIV? Environmental damages?

Finally, other problem is the difficulty in defining in what form it should be responded to the above mentioned type of soft threats to international peace. It doesn’t seem that the UN or the international community has the knowledge, or technical and budgetary capacity to address such problems that - as building operations have shown - have an indiscriminate maturity date. It is possible to know when they begin, but never when they end; all of which is aggravated by non intended consequences of intervention of the UN members or institutions aimed at tackling the threats.

In conclusion, the imprecise and overbroad definition of “threat” implied by In Larger Freedom, as well as the background of myriad of issues likely to trigger the need for collective action, creates an insurmountable task to the UN, that will deviate the efforts and resources of the UN from its immediate and real mission to safeguard international peace and security, toward an elusive goal, that may even have negative consequences for the international community or the host states of the collective action.

In Larger Freedom is too ambitious. It makes of the UN a huge global state aimed at solving the biggest problems on earth, but without the necessary funds and means to correct highly complex social problems, and without the capacity to give clear standards of behavior and intervention to member states and the international community.