In the twentieth century war was pronounced, belatedly, to be too important to be left to the generals; in the twenty-first century peace, prosperity, and security have already turned out to be much too complex to be left to the politicians. In a dangerous, high-speed, information-logged, globalized world, disastrously divided between the prosperous and the impoverished, the old distinctions between war and peace, civil and military, national and international, private and public, have become increasingly blurred.
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Rebuilding nations is also the subject of Simon Chesterman's You, the People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building. Prospective readers should not be deterred by the somewhat ponderous subtitle. Chesterman, director of an international institute at New York University, has made an original study of how new institutions can be created in such war-damaged countries as Bosnia, Cambodia, and East Timor. In his book the weight of the subject and the depth of the research are supported by wit, candor, brevity, and analytical writing of a very high order. Although the occupation of Iraq is just one of many cases that Chesterman considers, his book provides, among other things, a guide to the problems of transitional occupation that is extraordinarily relevant to America's current difficulties. Chesterman's list of the common challenges of transitional administration—peace and security; the quasi-governmental role of the transitional authority; economic reconstruction; and an exit strategy—reads like a checklist of the difficulties now being experienced in Iraq. Stating a by now familiar truth that the US failed to grasp in time in Iraq, he writes, "Unless security is established on the ground, none of the political purposes of a transitional administration can be achieved."
Chesterman's opening paragraph summarizes the underlying theme of his book:
Is it possible to establish the conditions for legitimate and sustainable national governance through a period of benevolent foreign autocracy? This contradiction between ends and means has plagued recent efforts to govern post-conflict territories in the Balkans, East Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq —just as it plagued the colonies and occupied territories that are their political forebears. Such state-building operations combine an unusual mix of idealism and realism: the idealist project that a people can be saved from themselves through education, economic incentives, and the space to develop mature political institutions; the realist basis for that project in what is ultimately military occupation.
After September 11, and al-Qaeda's use of Afghanistan as a base, the world is far more conscious of the importance of strong state governments willing to oppose terrorist groups. "Nation-building," despised and rejected by presidential candidate George W. Bush, has, as Zinni also points out, now become an important part of US policy, and not only in Iraq. Chesterman makes the same point Zinni has made in a different context, that in nation-building operations a balance must be struck between high international standards and standards that can be sustained on the ground. In listing various misapprehensions of occupying authorities, he mentions the common illusion that when state institutions collapse, politics cease to happen, whereas in fact—shades of Somalia— "the control of power becomes more important than ever."
As to the process, "the transfer of power to a legitimate and sustainable local authority, typically mediated through an election, is the central purpose of any transitional administration." There is a common belief that democracies do not fight one another. As the experience in Angola, the Balkans, and Cambodia, among other places, suggests, "first elections can, however, mark an extremely unstable period in the life of a country emerging from conflict—indeed, quantitative research has produced the embarrassing finding that autocracies in the process of democratization actually become more likely to go to war."
Chesterman raises the basic question whether the UN and other international organizations, often lacking the means to establish security, should be undertaking this sort of function at all, and he considers the changing role of the UN and its relationship to the United States. "Where the United Nations cannot see transitional administrations as military occupation, the United States sometimes appears unable to see them as anything else." For the UN, Chesterman writes, the use of force in peacekeeping operations—in the Congo in the 1960s, and in Somalia and Bosnia—"were traumatic experiences for the organization; the controversies to which they gave rise were surpassed only by two occasions on which force was not used at all, in Rwanda and Srebrenica."
Chesterman covers, with an exemplary clarity and conciseness, a wealth of cases of transitional administration, starting with the League of Nations, which, apart from the mandates system, conducted five such operations, all in Europe, in such places as the Saar Basin, Danzig, and Upper Silesia. He goes on to consider the Allied occupation of Germany and the Marshall Plan, and the evolution by the United Nations of complex peacekeeping operations and various transitional administrations in thirteen countries on three continents. He examines different experiences with the use of force. Typical of his forthrightness is his account of how the UN mission in Cambodia (UNTAC), supposedly empowered to use "all available means of force,"
failed to resist harassment from Khmer Rouge elements. In May 1992, a confrontation took place between the Khmer Rouge and the Special Representative and Force Commander at a Khmer Rouge roadblock in north-west Cambodia. In what was seen as a humiliation for UNTAC, they were turned away at a bamboo pole across the road. Criticism for failing to challenge the Khmer Rouge did not only come from outside the mission. The Deputy Force Commander, French Brigadier-General Jean-Michel Loridon, was dismissed after advocating the use of force against the Khmer Rouge.
He has much to say about relief, reconstruction, and humanitarian assistance, and about both elections and strategies for leaving a country after a new government is established.
Chesterman's final chapter, on the future of state-building, makes imaginative proposals for change and sums up the inconsistencies and lack of clarity of both governments and the United Nations in carrying out nation-building operations—or, as the UN prefers to call them, "peace-building" operations. Such activities have suddenly, by a single terrorist act, assumed a much higher place on the world's agenda, but Chesterman documents the ephemeral nature of international interest in post-conflict operations. He cites as an example President Bush's call, in the early stages of the overthrow of the Taliban, for a program in Afghanistan comparable to the Marshall Plan, and of his commitment to rebuild the devastated country. Only twelve months later, the White House failed to include any money for Afghan reconstruction in the 2004 budget it submitted to Congress. Such amnesia is by no means limited to the United States.
For all his skepticism, Chesterman is in no doubt that demands for some form of state-building will recur in the future. He alludes to the UN's deplorable corporate habit of forgetting the lessons of previous operations and of starting new ones from scratch. A high secretariat official describes this tendency as an unwritten rule: "No wheel shall go un-reinvented." Senior UN officials, Chesterman writes, now acknowledge that "Kosovo got the operation that should have been planned for Bosnia four years earlier, and East Timor got that which should have been sent to Kosovo." If those concerned will read his book—and for a book of this kind it is extraordinarily readable—perhaps those lessons may no longer be lost for future operations.
In their different ways both these books use past history and experience to suggest a road to the future. They remind us also that criticism and analytical thinking, new ideas, and well-informed dissent are the lifeblood of a free country and, for that matter, of any international community worth the name.