Abstract
Termination of the Cold War reinvigorated the United Nations (UN) and simultaneously reinforced the trend toward security regionalism. The newfound unity of the Security Council enabled the world organization to act in a relatively large number of conflicts, and in the process raised the expectations with regard to its ‘primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security’. The UN had several successes — the Gulf War, Cambodia, Mozambique, El Salvador and Haiti — but there have also been several tragic failures — Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda. These failures and the growing political, financial and operational problems have greatly tempered the earlier enthusiasm and support. Unable to meet the ever-increasing demand for help, the United Nations has actively explored task-sharing and cooperation with other intergovernmental (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well as coalitions led by major global and regional powers. Regional institutions (regional arrangements and agencies) have been increasingly looked upon as one way of addressing the growing gap between demand and supply, and reducing the burden on the United Nations. In the words of Boutros Boutros-Ghali ‘regional arrangements or agencies in many cases possess a potential that should be utilized’.
Under the Charter the Security Council has and will continue to have primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, but regional action as a matter of decentralization, delegation and cooperation with United Nations efforts could not only lighten the burden of the Security Council but also contribute to a deeper sense of participation, consensus and democratization in international affairs. Regional arrangements and agencies have not in recent decades been considered in this light. … Today a new sense exists that they have contributions to make.
(Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 1992)
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Notes
For an elaboration, see Muthiah Alagappa, ‘Regionalism and conflict management: a framework for analysis’, Review of International Studies, 21 (4), 1995, pp. 359–87.
For a good account of the deliberation on regionalism versus globalism in the context of the formulation of the UN Charter, see Inis J. Claude, Jr, ‘The OAS, the UN, and the United States’, International Conciliation, 547, March 1964, pp. 3–60. See also his Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 102–17.
Gareth Evans, ‘The United Nations: Co-operating for Peace’, address to the Forty-Eighth General Assembly of the United Nations, 27 September 1993.
For an overview of the effort to define a region, see Bruce M. Russett, ‘International regions and the international system’, in Richard A. Falk and Saul H. Mendlovitz (eds), Regional Politics and World Order (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), pp. 181–7.
On the effort to define a regional subsystem and specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for it, see William R. Thompson, ‘The regional subsystem: a conceptual explication and a propositional inventory’, International Studies Quarterly, 17 (1), 1973, pp. 89–117.
Among the few definitions of regionalism are those by Donald J. Puchala and Stuart I. Fanagan, and by Joseph Nye. See Puchala and Fanagan, ‘International politics in the 1970s: the search for a perspective’, International Organization, 28 (2), 1974, p. 259,
and Nye, International Regionalism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), p. vii.
On issues and issue-areas, see Ernst B. Haas, ‘Why collaborate? Issue-linkage and international regimes’, World Politics, 32 (3), 1980, pp. 364–7.
On ‘nesting’, see Vino Aggarwal, Liberal Protectionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 27.
On negative and positive peace and the debate among peace studies scholars, see Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, peace and peace research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6 (6), 1969, pp. 167–91;
and Carolyn M. Stephenson, ‘The evolution of peace studies’, in Michael Klare and Daniel Thomas (eds), Peace and World Order Studies: A Curriculum Guide, 5th edn (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 9–19.
See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 102–28.
On the security dilemma, see John H. Herz, ‘Idealist internationalism and the security dilemma’, World Politics, 2 (2), 1950, pp. 157–80;
Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, pp. 72–6;
and Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1991), Chapter 8.
Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1992), p. 6.
See also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), pp. 317–19.
For a discussion of the formation of national-territorial states in the Third World, see Anthony D. Smith, State and the Nation in the Third World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), Chapter 7.
The phrase ‘internal colonialism’ is used by Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
For an expanded discussion of the problem of political legitimacy, see Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), Political Legitimacy in Southeast Asia: The Quest for Moral Authority (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), Chapters 1–3.
For the differences between conflict settlement and resolution, see C. R. Mitchell, The Structure of International Conflict (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), pp. 275–7.
See Karl Deutsch, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, Press, 1957), pp. 5–7.
See Claude, Swords into Ploughshares, pp. 245–85. See also Jerome Slater, A Re-evaluation of Collective Security: The OAS in Action, Mershon National Security Program Pamphlet Series No. 1 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), pp. 9–23;
George W. Downs (ed.), Collective Security Beyond the Cold War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994);
and Thomas G. Weiss (ed.), Collective Security and Changing World Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993).
On intermediation, qualifications required, and the intervenor’s repertory of practice, see Oran R. Young, The Intermediaries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp 50–79.
For a discussion of the evolution of the principle of non-intervention in the inter-American system, see G. Pope Atkins, Latin America in the International Political System (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), pp. 215–18.
See Laura W. Reed and Carl Kayson (eds), Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993).
On the growing force of human rights regime in Latin America, see Kathryn Sikkink, ‘Human rights, principled issue-networks, and sovereignty in Latin America’, International Organization, 47, Summer 1993, pp. 411–41.
On the weakness of the regime in Africa, see Claude E. Welch, ‘The OAU and human rights: regional promotion of human rights’, in Yassin El-Ayoutty (ed.), The Organization of African Unity Thirty Years On (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 53–76.
Richard J. Bloomfield, ‘Making the Western hemisphere safe for democracy? The OAS defense-of-democracy regime’, The Washington Quarterly, 17 (2), Spring 1994, pp. 157–69, quote at p. 162.
For a similar discussion of a somewhat different list of factors, see Michael Barnett, ‘Partners in peace? The UN, regional organizations, and peace keeping’, Review of International Studies, 21 (4), 1995, pp. 420–24.
Jarat Chopra and Thomas G. Weiss, ‘The United Nations and the former Second World: coping with conflicts’, in Abram Chayes and Antonia Chayes (eds), Preventing Conflict in the Post-Communist World (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1996), p. 529.
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Alagappa, M. (1998). Regional Arrangements, the UN, and International Security: a Framework for Analysis. In: Weiss, T.G. (eds) Beyond UN Subcontracting. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26263-2_1
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