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The Limits of U.N. Intervention in the Third World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Ernest W. Lefever
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Extract

The strangely unreal debate on the feasibility of United Nations intervention in Rhodesia or South Africa (to overthrow “colonialist” regimes) or in Vietnam (to stop or deescalate a war) would benefit from a more serious examination of the largest and most daring U.N. experiment on record. The Congo peacekeeping operation was unique, controversial and costly. The growing body of empirical data about this four-year operation provides a solid basis for understanding the severe limits of the United Nations as an instrument for political reform and crisis management in the Third World, to say nothing of the more difficult tasks of state-building and nation-building.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , January 1968 , pp. 3 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1968

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References

1 The term, intervention, is used in this essay in a broad and nonperjorative sense, and includes any official U.N. mission concerned primarily with political or security questions and operating within a state, with or without the permission of the government. All U.N. missions to date have had the consent of the host government or governments.

2 It is widely though erroneously assumed that the Belgian Government supported the cause of Tshombe against that of the Central Government. From the first day of independence the Belgian Foreign Ministry sought to help the new state succeed, even when certain Belgian interests were supporting secessionist Katanga. The role of Brussels throughout the first four years is elaborated in the author’s Uncertain Mandate: Politics of the U.N. Congo Operation (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 131–48.Google Scholar

3 van der Meersch, W. J. Ganshof, Fin de la Souveraineti Beige au Congo (Brussels, 1963), p. 460.Google Scholar

4 Hoskyns, Catherine, The Congo Since Independence: January 1960- December 1961 (London, 1965), p. 142.Google Scholar

5 See GeVard-Libois, Jules, Katanga Secession (Madison, 1966), especially pages 277–89.Google Scholar

6 See Lefever, Ernest W., Crisis in the Congo (Washington, 1965), pp. 171–81.Google Scholar

7 Hoskyns, op. cit., pp. 364–65.Google Scholar

8 Harold Karan Jacobson makes a useful distinction among the terms “nation-building,” “state-building,” and “state-preserving,” in “ONUC’s Civilian Operations,” World Politics, Vol. XVII, No. 1 (10, 1964), pp. 75–107.Google Scholar