ABSTRACT
The United Nations Security Council picked the hard way to determine the limits of UN military operations: embarrassment and even humiliation on the ground in Somalia and Bosnia, followed by outright retreat in the first and an inevitable hand-off to NATO in the second. How much credibility the UN has left beyond the domain of traditional peacekeeping is not clear. At the same time, the sentiment of retrenchment and retreat that has set in at the United Nations, many national capitals, and the media is premature. For, as a Hungarian scholar has noted, “the disgrace of the UN lies not so much in the fact that it could not get the job done in Bosnia, but that it still recycles the same old arguments about the hamstrungness of the organization, stopping short of actually spelling out what it is that the UN can do” (Sekerez 1996:11). Some of the same muddled reasoning that first pushed the UN into this range of conflicts, in short, is now pushing it back out.
