Collateral Benefit: Iraq and Increased Legitimacy for International Trusteeship

...UN action in Namibia and East Timor was a way of dealing with the unfinished business of decolonization...

...If it does not, it won't be only the idea of trusteeship that will be lost but also the trust of those people unlucky enough to live in regions where the state has all but vanished...

...The September 2005 UN summit endorsed the call for a permanent commission to fund and oversee "peacebuilding"—UN jargon for state-building in conflict-ridden societies...

...DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 75...

...A few of these multilateral protectorates are run directly by the UN, though usually as part of a consortium that includes other international bodies, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, the African Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe...

...Sierra Leone is another state where the breakdown of the rule of law in the mid-1990s led to intervention by the UN, which then proceeded to coordinate TRUSTEESHIPS the rebuilding of governmental authority...

...This is not to deny that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq delivered a terrible double blow to the UN's standing: the Security Council showed itself incapable eiDISSENT / Spring 2006 n 73 TRUSTEESHIPS ther of pressuring Saddam—sanctions were a joke, as the Volcker report has shown, and international resolve to strengthen them was, if anything, weakening—or of restraining the United States from taking matters into its own hands...

...One widely cited report, by Jaret Chopra [Survival 42:3 (2000)1, even referred to misrule in "the UN's Kingdom of East Timor...

...presence makes American soldiers easy targets for insurgents...

...If it doesn't do that, will the UN prove unable, as opposed to unwilling, to act effectively in Sudan...

...Rather than discrediting the idea that failed states should be governed as multilateral protectorates, the perceived illegality of the U.S.led invasion of Iraq and the patent ineffectiveness of its state-building efforts have instead focused attention on the need for such actions to possess legitimacy...

...that is, reestablishing the rule of law domestically and re-integrating a once-failed state into the international community...

...So, please, subscribe now, and while you are at it, subscribe for two years: that is an even bigger help...

...Increasingly, however, trusteeship-like arrangements are designed to respond to "state failure...

...Afghanistan's government is in a different though not altogether dissimilar situation...

...Throughout 2005, the secretary general's representative in Sudan, former Dutch minister of international development Jan Pronk, quietly but firmly increased the UN's influence over the country's levers of power...

...Although the country enjoys a nominal form of what is sometimes called "international legal sovereignty"—recognition by the international community of Afghanistan's right to enter into treaties and incur sovereign debt—the Kabul regime's tenuous hold over its territory (the sine qua non of domestic sovereignty) depends on a NATO force that operates under a UN mandate...

...But so long as it increases the authority of the secretary general to initiate even limited action and provides funding that will relieve the pressure on special representatives to plead continuously for money from donors whose priorities shift with the tides of public opinion, the new commission has to be an improvement over the shockingly ad hoc arrangements under which state-building activities are currently conducted...

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...Each of the years since the Iraq invasion has also seen an increase in the number of troops assigned to UN peacekeeping missions worldwide...

...liberals feared the damage to international law—critics have found a patch of common ground...

...Increasingly aware of the immense cost that more or less unilateral occupation in Iraq has entailed, Americans (the public, if not the current administration) may even have begun to see the virtues of the UN as an institution through which the burdens of state-building can be shared...

...backing for Kofi Annan's proposal to replace the African Union's underperforming contingent of peacekeepers Put DISSENT on Your Credit Card...

...troops from Iraq is that the illegitimacy of the U.S...

...The flawed intelligence on which the invasion was justified, the apparent violation of international law, and most important, the disastrous planning and execution of the reconstruction effort have been the subject of unremitting criticism...

...A consensus is emerging that any attempt to repair a failed state (which may or may not be what Saddam's Iraq was, depending on one's definition) requires international legitimacy if it is to stand a chance of success...

...Strengthening the UN's role in "troubled societies"— as Stephen Krasner has described countries that fall short of complete failure— is the most likely response from those who might earlier have called for the international community to scale back its ambitions...

...This is widely translated as a need for such actions to be conducted under UN auspices...

...The silver lining in the cloud that looms over Iraq is that criticism of the UN's various missions, while still voluble (and rightly so in many cases), is far less vitriolic than it might have become had the United States not shown what incompetent, unaccountable state-building on a truly massive scale really looks like...

...Although the international community grudgingly accepted U.S...

...To be sure, "the new trusteeship" has not met with universal acclaim...

...The UN's role in Cambodia from 1992-1993 was confined mainly to overseeing the conduct of multiparty elections...

...Trusteeship also featured prominently in the postwar settlements of 1919 and 1945, allowing the victorious powers in both world wars to hold the losers' colonial possessions "in trust"—and under at least nominal international supervision—until their inhabitants were sufficiently schooled in the art and science of civic affairs to earn the right of self-government...

...Perhaps because their reasons for opposing America's invasion of Iraq vary so widely— realists saw Iraq as peripheral to America's interests...

...The definition of what constitutes a failed state is highly subjective, and the appropriate response to the breakdown of civil authority is among the most controversial issues facing both the UN and its member states...

...It still receives substantial UN assistance to sustain itself, including help in bringing to justice those charged with crimes against humanity...

...For many people, it is too reminiscent of the old trusteeship, the doctrine under which European colonial powers justified their "civilizing" missions in Africa and Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

...Post Office, in good social democratic fashion, is the cheapest means of distributing magazines, we make money on subscriptions rather than bookstore or newsstand sales...

...The prospect of slipping into something more closely resembling multilateral trusteeship might cause Sudan's government to change the policies that have produced the country's dire human rights situation...

...THE UN Is ALSO taking steps to improve its institutional capacity to cope with a potentially large increase in demand for trusteeship-like arrangements...

...Some international agencies speak of "fragile states...

...Depending on how it works in practice, a UN Peacebuilding Commission could make the installation of hybrid forms of international trusteeship far more feasible, effective, and sustainable...

...74 n DISSENT / Sprin2 2006 TRUSTEESHIPS with a UN force may indicate not only a recognition of the need to improve the UN's capacity in Sudan but also a readiness in the international community to ratchet up the pressure on states that engage in massive and continuing human rights abuses...

...And the Bush administration obliged...

...Although the operational meaning of that phrase is still under discussion, it surely represents another nail in the coffin of the extreme doctrine of sovereignty that for so long prevented external intervention in states on the verge of implosion...

...The global upsurge of anti-imperialism threatened to spill over into a wider insistence on restoring the extreme conception of state sovereignty that prevented humanitarian intervention both during the cold war (in Pol Pot's Cambodia, for instance) and after its end (during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda...

...This is good news for people whose only hope of a better life is the willingness and ability of multilateral institutions to resuscitate states whose demise has in many cases been worse than the misrule over which they once presided...

...Even prior to the Iraq invasion, the UN had received intense criticism for the lack of accountability with which its "viceroys" ruled its Balkan protectorates in Bosnia and Kosovo...

...Because the U.S...

...But look hard enough and it's possible to discern one: enhanced legitimacy in the international community for what has been called "neotrusteeship," an arrangement whereby multilateral institutions temporarily govern states that have collapsed in spasms of misrule and violent conflict...

...With so much media focus on Iraq, it is not surprising that many people are unaware that several countries are currently under some form of international trusteeship, and that this trend was well underway prior to the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq...

...Rightly or wrongly, the failure for the rule of law to take root in Iraq is routinely blamed not on foreign occupation as such, but on occupation by an external actor widely seen as motivated by imperial ambition...

...You can use your credit card on our Web site (www.dissentmagazine.org) or on the order form printed in this issue...

...Note, for instance, that the underlying logic of Representative John Murtha's call for a rapid withdrawal of U.S...

...Because these are inevitably seen by at least some domestic actors as transitional-authorities-in-waiting, such missions often wield more power than the formal agreements authorizing their presence might suggest...

...The United States has long been accused of imperial tendencies...

...America's failure in Iraq, and the extent to which it is attributed to a lack of legitimacy, domestic and international, has placed the UN and other advocates of international trusteeship in a strong position, rhetorically at least...

...sO THE SEEMINGLY intractable problems faced by the United States in Iraq appear not to have soured the international community on the idea of temporarily transforming failed states into externally governed protectorates or of intervening less comprehensively in those that threaten to descend into lawlessness...

...America's Iraq misadventure, while equally depressing, has (rather surprisingly) shifted the debate away from whether international trusteeship is too tinged with colonial overtones to cope with state failure...

...If anything, the instability associated with porous borders and global interdependence will push even more barely functioning states from crisis to outright collapse...

...The international community now has a fairly wide 72 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 range of options, including less extreme measures, to cope with what are sometimes called "crisis states"—those at risk of failing...

...September's summit also approved the idea that UN member states face a "Responsibility to Protect...

...ROB JENKINS is Professor of Political Science at Birkbeck College, University of London, and currently a fellow at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where he is researching the origins and evolution of the UN...

...Since the early 1990s, these "transitional administrations," as they are sometimes called, have operated under various provisions of international law...

...There are faint signs of improvement on this score...

...Bosnia and Kosovo are clearly at the extreme— full trusteeship—end of the response spectrum...

...Short of actually improving its record on the ground, the best thing that could have happened to the UN's reputation as an agent of trusteeship was for an even worse form of transitional administration to emerge on the international scene...

...With a heightening of the anti-imperial mood worldwide, UN-run administrations in Kosovo and elsewhere could be tarred with the same brush...

...The results of that experiment, including such problem cases as Ethiopia, Somalia, and Libya, were sufficiently grim to undermine many people's enthusiasm for yet another revival of international trusteeship...

...The Bush doctrine of preemption has not undercut, and may even have strengthened, enthusiasm for preventive international action to forestall state failure...

...One view is that the Bush administration's handling of Iraq has damaged not only America's credibility in the world but the entire idea of external intervention in, and especially multilateral administration of, failed states...

...Despite a number of appalling cases of sexual abuse involving its peacekeepers, the UN is seen as the only actor with the moral authority required to undertake the complex task of reconstructing state sovereignty...

...By comparison, the UN now oozes legitimacy...

...In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the hard-won legitimacy of international trusteeship, which had to overcome earlier disasters in places such as Somalia, appeared at risk...

...WHAT DOES ALL this have to do with Iraq...

...There are good reasons to suspect that the Peacebuilding Commission, the basic structure of which was approved by the General Assembly in December 2005, will prove less than optimal...

...Over the past two years the United States has worked with France, its nemesis on Iraq, to mount international responses, under UN auspices, to two other states on the verge of collapsing (and which may still collapse), Haiti and Cote d'Ivoire...

...The outright assumption of sovereign authority by the UN is in fact rare, but the mere existence of this very real possibility can motivate states to accept "offers" from the UN to dispatch "peacekeeping," "stabilization," or "support" missions...

...Both territories are governed by UN missions, headed by appointees who exercise wide-ranging executive authority...

...Instead, the question is how best to make transitional administration under multilateral stewardship legitimate enough to be effective...

...America's failure to construct a functioning state in Iraq appears to have given a boost to those, like UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who advocate an expanded role for international trusteeship in a world where failed states threaten to export political instability...

...Sadly, the supply of failed states will not decrease any time soon...

...overthrow of the Taliban, it almost unanimously condemned the invasion of Iraq, so that the labeling of America as the new Rome has become routine and is now a rallying point for political discontent around the world...

...East Timor was ruled as a UN protectorate—though on the basis of a different legal justification—for three years before becoming an independent state in 2002...

...For these borderline cases, as well as those recovering from failure, the World Bank uses the term Low-Income Countries Under Stress...

...The UN must seize this opportunity to show its ability to strengthen the rule of law...