Five to Rule Them All

Five to Rule Them All

Review by Fraser Harbutt

The universalist impulse, institutionalized in turn by the League of Nations and the United Nations Organization, looks in retrospect to have been a tantalizingly rational counterpoint to the unique miseries of 20th-century international politics. The League’s origins were European in conception but President Woodrow Wilson appropriated the idea in the desperate days of World War I and made its establishment the centerpiece of his postwar vision. Wilson was ahead of his time. America, still emotionally disengaged, rejected the League, making another world war more likely. It was left to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman to create the redemptive United Nations that has ever since been a central, though controversial, preoccupation of American diplomacy.

David Bosco’s book, which has a commendably international focus, takes us from the tentative wartime negotiations between the United States, Britain and Stalin’s Russia, through the inspirational founding conference in San Francisco (where war-exhausted European delegates found delight in what one called “a musical comedy setting”) and then into the disillusioning reality of the U.S./Soviet Cold War. Bosco’s focus is on the Security Council which, dominated by the five permanent “Great Powers,” became a political arena and historical register for the endemic crises of that era. Once again, but from this fresh perspective, we find ourselves contemplating the fate of Berlin, the repercussions of Washington’s refusal to seat Communist China, the extraordinary Korean imbroglio, leading to war under United Nations auspices. Then on through the nightmare 1950s to the Cuban Missile crisis and all the intervening flashpoints that came into the Council’s New York debating chamber, up to the more contemporary saga of Saddam Hussein, the Balkan disasters, the fateful paralysis over Rwanda and the post-9/11 American intervention in Iraq: all long-running dramas exceeded in time only by the prolonged, debilitating Israeli-Palestinian struggle.

The tight focus on the Security Council reminds us that, despite the dramatic enlargement of the United Nations—from 70 in 1955 to 117 in 1975 and many more since—and the consequent transition from Cold War issues to the discomforting concerns and grievances of what John Kennedy called “the expectant peoples,” the Great Powers, despite their own divisions, have used the Security Council to maintain the hegemonic control envisaged by its architects. Bosco’s insightful account, combining narrative, analysis and judicious commentary, shows how this has been managed. He also presents a cavalcade of colorful personalities, notably including the great Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and many American ambassadors from the liberal Adlai Stevenson in the 1960s to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose belligerent nationalism in the 1980s reflected a growing American public disenchantment.

Yet the Security Council has survived. And notwithstanding epidemic criticism for its visible failures and periodic impotence (Stevenson once remarked that the UN ran on “protocol, alcohol and Geritol”), it has, as Bosco’s splendid, well-written account demonstrates, functioned as an indispensable forum, political safety valve and symbol, rendering many peace-keeping and ancillary services to an international community striving to progress from Hobbesian anarchy to something approaching Kantian perpetual peace.

Hardcover: 320 pages

Publisher: Oxford University Press ( August 01, 2009 )

Item #: 64-3215

ISBN: 9780195328769

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 0.75 inches

Product Weight: 16.0 ounces