Inis Claude's United Nations

Abstract

On i October 2012 Canada's foreign minister addressed the United Nations general assembly. Embedded in an otherwise bland text were several sharp jabs at the UN, notably concerning the self-absorption of the organization's internal reform processes and the inadequacy of its response to humanitarian crises such as that engulfing Syria.' These criticisms, predictably echoed in the right wing of the Canadian media, soon evoked ripostes whose burden was that the minister seemed woefully, perhaps willfully, ignorant of the organization he was criticizing: UN reform is a process for which western governments, including Canada's, had pressed for years; and it was some member-states, not the UN as such, that were hesitant over Syria.2 For a brief moment, then, Canadian commentators debated the conduct and even the worth of the UN. Such outbursts as the foreign minister's are, however, rare in a country whose populace has generally held a benign view of multilateral cooperation. Well-informed or not, Canadians have consistently thought of the UN as an important instrument of middle-power policy and a force for global governance.Contrast the United States, where the UN has been deeply divisive from the outset. While it has typically taken up less space in American than in Canadian foreign policy debates, the UN seems both more controversial and less understood south of the border. But when Canadians do get exercised about the UN, we tend to argue as the Americans do. Like them, we divide along a spectrum ranging from passionate humanitarian idealists at one extreme to dismissive self-styled realists at the other, with variants of liberal institutionalism and other mixed breeds spread in between. Americans have exchanged verbal volleys across this spectrum for years, in part because they lack the calming effect provided Canadians by our enduring national consensus over the virtues of peacekeeping and our proprietary view of it. In Canada, peacekeeping kept the public peace over the UN longer than perhaps it should have. In the US, which did not do UN peacekeeping until after the Cold War, the organization had no equivalent political cover to protect it from the critical fire of Congress and the media.What this perennial American debate over the UN has often needed is a moderate, pragmatic spirit of reason, willing to challenge the extremes in a firm, informed, and civilized way. From the UN's very foundation in 1945, one such spirit has animated the writings of Inis Lothair Claude, now Stettinius Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the University of Virginia. A pre-war graduate of Hendrix College in Arkansas with a post-war doctorate from Harvard, Claude taught international relations at Harvard, Delaware, Michigan, and Virginia over a span of some 50 years. Remarkably, he wrote his first work on the UN-a close analysis of its newly-minted Charter-in July-August 1945, while, as a 22-year old American soldier in France, he awaited deployment to the Pacific.5 After completing his dissertation in 1949, Claude published steadily over the next five decades, principally on the grand themes of international relations: the nature, uses, and management of power; competing approaches to world order; religion and morality in world politics; the role of multilateral institutions; and US foreign policy. At the turn of the millennium he was still writing.Claude's best-known work is probably Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, first published in 1956.4 As the preface states, the book aims to analyze the development of the trend toward international organization and to examine the problems, progress, and prospects of some of the most important agencies in which it has found expression. Not intended as a handbook or a textbook on any one organization, Swords into Plowshares (hereafter Swords) focuses upon the theoretical bases, evolutionary trends, constitutional problems, and major operational issues of international agencies. …