Armistice Agreements between Israel and the Arab States of 1949; the have become a matter of direct concern to the third states which in- 1. 2. 3: 4. The existence of deep-rooted hostility, fear and suspicion; the existence of moratorium on "peace" and "all-out war"; 5. the resort to unconventional means of coercion to affect the 6. 7. 29, the maintenance of diplomatic, economic, cultural, etc. the conversion of the United Nations from a collective secu rity agency3l into a "neutral meeting ground," where victory For a detailed treatment of these and other changes in armistice agreements see Tamkoc, op. cit., pp. 13–55. 30Referring to modern armistices, particularly the Armistice Agree ment between Israel and the Arab States, Shabatai Rosenne argues, little purpose is served by trying to fit them into the strait-jacket of a priori dogma," Israel's Armistice Agreements with the Arab States (Tel Aviv: Blumstein's Bookstore, 1951), p. 85. 31For example, the Secretary General of the United Nations U Thant writes: "There has been a tacit transition from the concept of collective security, as set out in Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, to a more realistic idea of peace-keeping. The idea the conventional military methods--or, put it bluntly, war--cannot be used by or on behalf of the United Nations to counter aggression and secure peace, seems now to be rather impractical, an address to the Harvard Alumni Association delivered on June 13, 1963, in Lincoln P. Bloomfield, International Military Force (Boston: Little Brown Co., 1964), p. 260. In this connection it is interesting to note that the United Nations, which has been created for the maintenance of the status quo--called "peace"--as arranged by the victorious war-time coalition, has become an agency for the preservation of armistice condition throughout the world. The Security Council or the General Assembly--when the interests of the Great Powers demanded--call for the establishment of localized armistice condition in order to prevent the aggravation of the situation to be super32 vised by disengagement forces of the United Nations. The provisional measures taken by the Security Council, under Article 40 of the Charter, may be considered as the legal basis for the establishment and maintenance of the localized armistice conditions. It must be pointed out that these arrangements are the result of the tacit agreement of the Great Powers of the Security Council, particularly the United States and the Soviet Union. These two super powers have preferred to let the "Korean War" end in a stalemate armistice condition rather than let it develop into a thermonuclear armed conflict. They have declined to push the Berlin crisis, since 1948, to the point where each side would have no choice but to anihilate the other, and with them the whole world. They preferred to retreat from their positions in the Cuban crisis of 1962 instead of risking a thermonuclear holocaust. They have prevented the escalation of the Suez crisis of 1956, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Congo Crisis of 1960 into an all-out armed conflict. They have agreed in 1963 on the establishment of a direct communication link between Washington and Moscow and on banning nuclear tests on the ground, on sea and in the airspace. They have tacitly postponed, perhaps indefinitely, the settlement of territorial questions such as in Germany, Korea, Viet-Nam, and satellite countries. They have thus tacitly established a de facto global armistice condition which has a direct impact on the very existence of every state in the world." 32These are incorrectly called "peace-keeping forces"; instead they should be called "disengagement forces of armistice condition. For example, the United Nations Special Commission on the Balkans, 1947; the United Nations Observer Group of military officers in Kashmir, 1948; the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in Palestine, 1949; the United Nations Emergency Force in the Middle East, 1956; the United Nations Observer Group in Lebanon, 1958; the United Nations Force in the Congo, 1960; the United Nations Security Force in West Iran, 1962; the United Nations Observer Group in Yemen, 1963; the United Nations Force in Cyprus. 33 Adlai E. Stevenson describes this situation in these words: "I regret that people here at the United Nations seem to believe that the cold war is a private struggle between the two super-powers. It isn't a private struggle; it is a world civil war--a contest between the pluralist world and the monolithic world--a contest between the world of the Charter and the world of Communist conformity. Every nation that is now independent and wants to remain independent is involved, whether they know it or not. Every nation is involved in this grim, costly, distasteful division in the world no matter how remote and how disinterested," U.S. Information Service, Official Text (Ankara), October 24, 1962, p. 6. 33 V. Conclusion Today, the world seems to find itself in complete uncertainty because of the juxtaposition of the old and the new concepts and institutions, such as "freedom" and "slavery," "aggression" and "self-defense," territorial states and blocs of states, the most primitive and the most advanced societies, "the state of war" and "the state of peace." Confusion is universal. Everyone feels insecure and is afraid of his neighbor. There is mutual suspicion and fear. There is a global armistice condition, which may come to an end by the outbreak of a thermonuclear holocaust or by the elimination of mutual fear and suspicion, thus bringing a true "peace" to all. The first alternative, with all due respect to Herman Kahn, is unthinkable. 34 The second is possible only through the long and arduous process of political adjustment of mutual interests in which the Western democracies are well versed. Western democracies are equipped to take this challenge. It is my contention that the establishment and preservation of "peace" depends upon the prevention of "war" and not waging a successful "war" against the "so-called aggressor" nations. And the prevention of armed conflict depends on the art of political adjustment. It seems that there is no other better condition than armistice for this purpose. During an armistice condition, the opponents have to treat each other on a footing of absolute equality and reciprocity. Political adjustments between the opponents have to give no greater advantage to one side or the other. The prolongation of armistice condition may be of benefit to statesmen and nations alike in that they may yet learn to prevent the last "civil war" among men through "successful political process" which "is the dominant feature of government at its best."35 The traditional rules of international law no longer correspond to the global armistice condition. Jurists, therefore, must seriously attempt to weed, to prune, the old rules and introduce new ones based on the realities of contemporary life. 36 Jurists must assign a specific place to the armistice condition between "peace" and "war" in their treatment of international law. Formulation of new rules of armistice condition may exercise a positive influence on statesmen. Then there would be less tendency to see the relations of states in terms of "black" and 34See "Chapter One: In Defense of Thinking" Kahn's highly interesting book Thinking About the Unthinkable. 35Claude, op. cit., p. 263. 36Professor Whitaker observes, "...the function of law is to lead mankind toward progress by finding a realistic balance between current practice is and what we hope future practice will be," op. cit., p. 46. "white," and less likelihood of advocating a preventive or pre-emptive all-out armed conflict. Thus normalcy of limited armed conflict for limited ends would have been regulated. The hostile opponents will probably display greater disposition to negotiate their differences first on minor problems, then make sincere efforts to settle major issues such as disarmament and the problem of German re-unification, the Gordian knot of the 20th Century. Until then the world is bound to live in this gray area, the armistice condition between "war" and "peace." CRISIS MANAGEMENT: LESSONS FROM THE CONGO* by Edmund A. Gullion, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law My topic is "Crisis Management: Lessons from the Congo," which sounds presumptuous. I think it is admissible, however, if it fits into the theme of this conference. I understand that your purpose is to study the phenomenology of crisis, as if it were an illness; or, in the words of T. S. Eliot, "a patient etherized upon the table"; to study cause and effect, to detect any common pattern which might enable us to predict the course of crises or their life span and how to anticipate them, how to cope with them and manage them, and how to deal with aftermath. I stress the word aftermath, because it seems to me that it is in aftermath that the seeds of the next conflict are always present. I need not dwell on this before an audience composed of people interested in international studies, but it has always been true--it was true in World War I, it is true in the Congo today, and in scores of situations which I could oite. I think we should anyway try to begin with definition, so I went to that scholar, Webster, to see if he had anything to contribute. He describes a crisis as "that change in illness after which its course proceeds either to recovery or to death." That seems a little drastic for our international studies. He also refers to crisis as the "culminating point" or "crucial point," and--what I like particularly, as the "turning point." This, it seems to me, is what students of the social sciences should try to identify--the turning point, the hinge of fate, the point which, if recognized, can be worked upon, where you can still exert leverage, where you can manage a crisis and still hope to bring it around to your own ends. I submit, however, that popular opinion is not really concerned closely with definitions of crisis; most people would grade an international crisis according to the inches of headlines it rates, that is, by a kind of quantitative test. This is clear in situations which present a threat to the peace, basically a threat to the security of the United States, and in recent years, of course, it has seemed to mean that a four-star crisis is one that threatens to involve a show-down between the United States and the Communist world. Now, if this were all there were to it, it would be easier to study the anatomy and the ecology of orisis, because crises between the Sino-Soviet world and ourselves have tended to assume certain patterns during the period of the atomic stalemate, especially since the atomic stalemate was recognized in all its implications by both sides, and particularly since the Cuban missile crisis. But again at the risk of pushing in an open door and dwelling on things you know best about, I suggest that as a people we Americans tend too much towards exclusive concern with that kind of a crisis. After all, there are scores of incipient crises all around the world, which come to term even without the intervention of ourselves or the Soviet Union; true, there are certain situa❤ tions which are presently being aggravated by the conflict between the great powers, or by one or two of them, but each of these would move * Extemporaneous remarks by the former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of the Congo, 1961-1963. |