ABSTRACT

Throughout the Cold War, it was common practise that major powers did not participate in peacekeeping operations. Similarly, NATO members were also commonly excluded from such operations. There were exceptions; most notably the Canadians, Danes and Norwegians, and the British provided contingents for UNFICYP principally because that Force could not operate without the support of the British Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) on Cyprus. The MSC was therefore seen as unable to exercise any command and control of operations in which the nations which they represent took so little part, operations of which they were so little representative. This was especially true as matters of international peace and security were seen as almost entirely of regional significance, and were generally regulated by regional treaties.2 There were of course no peacekeeping operations in Europe. Thus the largely Euro-Atlantic MSC, quite aside from the East-West split characteristic of a bi-polar world, and a polarized world body, was considered unsuitable even to advise on the very issues and operations it had been created to help oversee. The situation was allowed to drift on like this with little (if any) re-examination, despite indications of changing circumstances as we began to emerge from the Cold War. This drift was likely due in no small part to a generally suspicious attitude towards, when not a distinct hostility to peacekeeping operations, on the part of just those powers who provided the MSC. There was (and there remains) as well an institutional resistance by some of those same members to any measures that might have strengthened any of the capacities of the United Nations.