CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

and security * ; and that the end of the Cold War was widely perceived as a new dawn for
the UN’s effective primacy in that role. The next sections will examine the failures of
the paradigm, some evident from the outset and, indeed, exacerbated by the Cold War,
others only highlighted as the Cold War ended and the opportunity existed for the UN
Charter to operate as intended.
2.2.2 Structural Difficulties
It was suggested in Chapter One (see p28) that Wight’s ‘three voices’ could all be heard
in the structure of the United Nations: the liberal universalism of the revolutionists in
the growing body of human rights legislation; rationalism in the institution itself, its
embodiment of international law and the one nation-one vote formula of the General
Assembly; but the loud voice of realism in the constitution of the Security Council. If,
like the League of Nations before it, the United Nations owed its existence to the horror
of global conflict, its founding fathers sought, nevertheless, to avoid the utopianism of
the League. Thus it was forged not from the liberal idealism of a Woodrow Wilson, but
from the hard-nosed diplomatic realism of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt. Obvious
from the outset was that only the Great Powers (the US, Soviet Union, the UK and, to a
lesser extent, China) acting in cooperation the way they had in the war would have the
resources to restore normalcy to a devastated world. Great responsibility would fall to
them and special provision would therefore be necessary to protect their own vital
interests. This was fundamental to the organizational structure they initially sketched
out at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. Anjali Patil explains the logic thus:
The Major Powers assumed that whatever obligations were incorporated in the
Charter, each member could hold on to the right to decide whether or not it
would be a party to any projected action relating to the maintenance of peace
and security. Each Major Power regarded the concurrence rule as safeguarding
its own interests and assuring its collective dominance against any proposition
that could be put forward to their disadvantage by any other Powers. 27
* This is an important distinction. Whatever arguments may be made about its failure in this key role,
there can be no disputing the important role the UN has played in facilitating global cooperation in many
other fields – the International Postal Union is a good example of just one of its smaller, but very
effective organs.
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