By John Amoda

THE Allied Powers in the course of the war against the Axis Powers had a vision of the peace they hoped to harvest from the war and the arrangements that would secure the peace resulting from their successful prosecution of the war. The preamble of the Charter of the United Nations indicated this vision.

We quote from this preamble: “We the people of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life time has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, to unite our strength, to maintain international peace and security, to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.

Accordingly our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organisation to be known as the United Nations”. The Charter was signed on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco, at the conclusion of the United Nations Conference on International Organisation, and came into force on 24 October 1945.

The United Nations was that international machinery through which in unison the Allied Powers aimed to maintain international peace and security as the context for implementing the post-war United Nations World Order. It is important, therefore, to note the fact that in 1945 that the world was made up of a mixture of imperial nation states, empires and peoples living under the League of Nations trusteeship. The world of June 26, 1945 is remarkably different from the post-colonial world of 2011.

The Allied Powers envisaged the Security Council as the uniting of their strength to maintain their international peace and security; “to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest”.

All hopes for this envisaged future hinged on the Allied Powers being that alliance that would limit the use of armed force to the defence of the United Nations built on the foundation of “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”.

The manifesto saw the Security Council as the United Nations Government securing a global community of ideologically compatible societies which were the units of an equalitarian community that affirmed faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.

This resolve of the Allied Powers was codified in Chapter VII of the Charter, a chapter concerned with “Action With Respect to Threats To The Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression”. Article 39 was thus a summary statement of the institution of the Security Council as the government of the United Nations Security Community. It was also the declaration of the Security Council as the State Organ of the United Nations Security Community. Accordingly: “The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, acts of aggression and shall make recommendations or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Article 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security”.

The Security Council shall make recommendations; the Security Council shall decide what measures shall be taken to maintain or restore international peace and security. This is the justification for the authority granted to the permanent members of the Security Council. The prestige of permanent membership implied the correlate responsibility of the permanent members to establish the UN as a global security community. Therefore not to address the issue of the Article 39 Project is to make Article 39 a non sequitur. To provide powers to maintain the international peace or to restore such a peace when breached.

On the one hand, and for the permanent members not to see that it is the establishment of the UN peace everywhere that justifies their role and place in the UN Peace Architecture on the other hand, is to undermine the credibility of the Security Council and of its statecraft relevance in the post-World War II international order.

Articles 39 was and remains viable on the condition that there was and there is a United Nations Peace already instituted, the maintenance and restoration of which peace was the raison d’etre for the provisions in the Charter of the powers and authority of the Security Council. Article 39 implied a post-World War II reconstitution of the pre 1939 world into the United Nation World whose peace was to be secured by the Security Council.

The Cold War was thus dramatic in showing that there was yet no “United Nations World, and thus there was yet no peace of such a world to be maintained or restored when threatened or partially overthrown by a global aggressor. Article 39 instead of being the specification of the executive mandate of the Security Council has become a project for the creation of a Security Council that could execute Article 39 Mandate.