VJC History P1

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VJC l History 8814/01 & 9731/01 l JC2 Preliminary Examination | 2014 2 Section A: The Political Effectiveness of the United Nations, 1945-2000 You must answer Question 1. THE UNITED NATIONS AND BIG POWER INTERESTS 1 Read the sources and then answer the question. When answering Question 1 candidates are advised to pay particular attention to the interpretation and evaluation of the sources both individually and as a group. Source A As chairman of the Security Council, I have been sent a letter by the Cuban delegate to the UN … demanding an urgent convocation of the Council to discuss the USA's aggressive actions and its blockade of Cuba as acts of war. During the examination of the issue in the Council, we will declare our objections to the misleading American formulation of it… we will point out that the USA' s aggressions against Cuba cannot be evaluated as anything other than a provocation pushing the world to the verge of nuclear war. We will demand a condemnation of the USA aggressions, the immediate cessation of the blockade they have declared and all infractions of mariti me freedom; and an immediate end to all forms of intervention in the domestic affairs of the Republic of Cuba. … In coordination with the Cub an delegation, we will introduce a draft resolution that includes the above-mentioned points. We will of course vote against the American draft resolution. Telegram from the Soviet representative at the UN Security Council, Valerian Zorin, to the USSR’s Foreign Ministry, 23 October 1962. Source B The veto powers of the Big Five constitute the very essence of the United Nations. The international organisation is not democratic. It s members do not have equal rights. The five countries which reaped the fruits of victory in World War II were accorded special privileges. Indeed, the structure of the inte rnational organisation charged with maintaining world order was based on the premise that what is considered legal is only what is acceptable to these five privileged members concomitantly… Nowhere are t he workings of the system more graphically illustrated than in the Arab-Israe li conflict, where we have seen countless resolutions passed by the General Assembly condemning this or that as pect of Israeli policy only to be nullified by a US veto. The veto system was established initially to prot ect the interests of t he founding members of the United Nations… For peace and security to be upheld and bipolarity sustained, no resolution unacceptable to any of the Big Five could be allowed to pass. Granted, this was a small price to pay for peaceful coexistence. But there is no logic in continuing to apply this type of veto system after the collapse of the bipolar world order. Opinion piece from the Cairo Al-Ahram, a widely circulating Egyptian newspaper published in July 1999.

VJC l History 8814/01 & 9731/01 l JC2 Preliminary Examination | 2014 3 Source C It is only through multilateral inst itutions that states can hold each other to account. And that makes it very important to organi se those institutions in a fair and democratic way, giving the poor and the weak some influence over the actions of the rich and the strong. … [That] applies to the UN Security Council, whose membership still reflects the reality of 1945, not of today's world. That is why I have continued to press for Security Coun cil reform. … The Security Council is not just another stage on which to act out national interests. It is the management committee, if you will, of our fledgling collective security system. As President Truman said, ‘The responsibility of the great states is to serv e and not dominate the peoples of the world.’ He showed what can be achieved when the US assumes that responsibility. And still today, none of our global institutions can accomplish mu ch when the US remains aloof. But when it is fully engaged, the sky is the limit. Kofi Annan, in his final speech as UN Secretary General, in Missouri, USA, 2006. Source D The realpolitik of big power rivalry cannot be wished away for that indeed has been the human condition for most of history. But we can confine that ri valry and, by a combination of pressures, prevent any power from pushing its claim excessively. In this, international institutions like the UN play a civilising role. International institutions cannot stop big power riva lry but can channel it, and ensure that the common interests of the human fa mily are not completely disregarded. For this reason, the smaller count ries have a strong vested interest in seeing international institutions strengthened. The reform of the UN taking into acc ount the changes in the world since the end of the Second World War is an absolute necessity. Speech by Singapore’s Minister of Foreign Affairs at the United Nations General Assembly, September 2008. Source E In the UN's first decade and a half the General Assembly may not have enjoyed avid media attention but comment on it was benign. Those, of course, were the years when there was so comfortable an American-led ma jority that a young Burmes e delegate named U Thant observed that ‘it was like a one-party system’. But when t he ‘new majority’ arrived, the General Assembly became a ‘useless talking shop’, and has been so dismissed in