Sir Brian, who joined the United Nations at the very inception of the Organization, retired 41 years later as Under-Secretary-General, after a career which saw direct association with the formative and innovative years of international peacekeeping. He has continued to be an active and articulate commentator on issues related to the United Nations, as writer, scholar and thinker; his published works include a biography of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Here are some of the thoughts he shared:

How Peacekeeping Came into Being

When the major European empires began to disintegrate, a whole series of power vacuums developed, which had to be filled in some way, and we needed some kind of a buffer arrangement as a pretext for not having conflict. The structure of the UN Charter was not going to work, since it was what President Roosevelt called "the four policemen", the alliance which had won the war—the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and China—who were to remain together to supervise and, if necessary, enforce the peace and provide the whole basis of Chapter VI and Chapter VII of the UN Charter. And then it became very clear that that was a complete non-starter, it was not going to work.

There was a fundamental common interest on both sides in the cold war in not being dragged into a nuclear conflict. Fortunately, they both felt very strongly about it—otherwise, we would not be here to discuss this today. When we got a really dangerous situation, then we got agreement. Take the Congo (the Republic of the Congo, now Zaire). Both the Soviet Union and the United States were extremely uneasy about what could have been a direct clash between the two in the middle of Africa, for which neither of them was properly prepared. And so they both originally welcomed the idea of putting a UN force into the Congo, which would be the pretext for neither of them for taking it over.

The Post-Cold-War Years

One of the many troubles with the United Nations is that it is not a rational or logical organization. Governments do things for political or emotional reasons, very often not thinking where it's leading them. At the end of the cold war, it suddenly became clear that the members of the Security Council could actually agree on a great deal more than they had been able to agree on before. And there was all this talk about the "new world order"; there was Desert Storm, which ostensibly was a great success, which had shown that the United Nations could sponsor a major action.

And I think there was a lot of foolishness as a result. Whenever some particularly disagreeable and unexpected problem cropped up, like Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, it seemed easiest to send a UN peacekeeping force. I had been out of the UN by that time for six years.

Problems and Pitfalls that Emerged

I was horrified at the total lack of understanding of what peacekeeping was based on and what the success of it had been due to, which was an extremely careful study of the conditions, of giving mandates that were workable, of nurturing the political support that you need to make these operations work. I think that after "Desert Storm" everybody became obsessed with the idea that you could just go there and everything would be fine—use force sometimes and, at other times, not. Well, that's disaster: if you have to use force, you have to really use force; and that's not a peacekeeping operation.

I think, for example, it was a scandal to put a peacekeeping force into Bosnia. There were no conditions at all for a peacekeeping force. And, of course, the reason it was put there was because NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) could not go in because the United States didn't want to put their troops on the ground during the fighting. So they put a UN peacekeeping force during the war and then, when the war was over, they put in a NATO enforcement force, which did not make any sense whatsoever. I think the UN has paid a great deal for this sort of expediency.

Also, of course, peacekeeping forces—with one major exception, within the Congo—were mostly between sovereign States. When you are dealing with Governments, they are usually bound by the UN Charter and by international arrangements. But when you are dealing with thugs, warlords, criminals and factional leaders, they don't give a damn about the Charter, they couldn't care less. It's a completely different state of affairs. And then the UN is involved in the whole humanitarian business, human rights, in arranging elections, and so on. It all gets very complicated.

Where We Go Now

I believe we have to have a very serious rethinking of what the functions of the UN are. It's obvious that the old tactics of peacekeeping are not really what you need now, because there are actually very few situations between States. What you now have is chaos within boundaries of States. And the UN really doesn't have the legitimacy or the resources to deal with that. I think it's a miracle that so many of those operations went reasonably well, not that three of them failed.

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