United Nations Peace Forces and the Changing United Nations: An Institutional Perspective

At its founding one of the UN's most publicized advantages over its predecessor, the League of Nations, was the fact that it was a peace organization “with teeth.” This somewhat unattractive phrase referred to Chapter VII of the Charter and the possibility of military force being put at the disposal of the Security Council. In fact this provision of the Charter was one of the first victims of East-West disagreement, and, although the Military Staff Committee met regularly for many years and in the early years held voluminous discussions, the actual military arrangements foreseen in Chapter VII never became a reality. The assumption of the continuing unanimity of the great powers, which particularly affected this part of the Charter, proved to be illusory almost at once, while the idea that the Organization could not and should not take collective action against one of the great powers has continued, with the partial exception of Korea, to be respected. Thus it has become increasingly clear that the United Nations can neither deal with an aggression arising from a great-power conflict nor use the military resources of the great powers directly in dealing with other breaches of the peace, since such a use might all too easily project the great-power struggle onto the situation being dealt with. The development of new forms of peace-keeping machinery have in part been the response of the Organization to this dilemma.