ABSTRACT
Predictably enough, the end of the Cold War, while generating hopes for a ‘New World Order’, did not fundamentally alter the pattern of international relations based on power politics. By projecting the USA as a single major power, it has actually made the idea of a force directly under the responsibility of the UN more hypothetical than ever perhaps. The USA, historically one of the initiators and main supporters of the idea of a UN ‘Legion’, at the time of the Korean War, has become one of the main obstacles to the concretization of any plan for international force. Beyond the issue of their immediate feasibility, recent proposals for a force directly recruited by the UN raise a number of fundamental questions. Are they a mere re-edition under a different form in a temporarily more favourable context of unrealistic proposals made in the euphoria of the end of the Second World War or generated by the frustration of the Cold War, bound to remain as grounded as their predecessors? Or is the unprecedented revival of the idea of a UN ‘Legion’ revelatory of more profound changes in international relations and in the functioning of the United Nations?
