ABSTRACT

T he un charter’s requirement for unanimity among the permanent members of the Security Council reflected the realities of the power politics of the day and historical norms of European interstate relations. The council was created less out of naive idealism and more out of a hardheaded effort to mesh state power with international law, a traditional approach to effective enforcement. However, the underlying requirement that members would agree was not borne out with any frequency during the Cold War. The veto held by the UN’s five permanent members (P5)—the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), the United Kingdom, France, and China—was not the real problem; disagreement among those with power was. Still, with the help of the second UN, specifically the secretary-general, member states tried to craft multilateral responses to threats to international peace and security. They innovated with peacekeeping and experimented with multilateral sanctions as mechanisms to restore order.