The European Council on Foreign Relations

Europe’s moral victory at the UN

Date: 15th February 2012  |  Author: Richard Gowan,

Categories: Middle East and North Africa,
Tags: , europe, syria, un

The last couple of weeks have been disorienting for veteran observers of the United Nations. The spectacle of the U.S. and Europeans lining up with the Arab bloc – and many developing countries – to put pressure on China and Russia over Syria upsets many assumptions about the balance of power in the UN system. Over the last decade the Chinese and Russians have been able to harness the majority of non-Western states to oppose Western initiatives in New York and Geneva. Their success in doing so was the theme of an ECFR report I wrote with Franziska Brantner in 2008: A Global Force for Human Rights?

Back then, we caused quite a rumpus with our argument that the Europeans - admittedly struggling to manage the Bush administration’s anti-multilateral tendencies - were having a rough time at the UN. But we also had two underlying strategic messages that seem relevant today. The first was that, faced with dwindling support, the Europeans had to build up new coalitions on human rights across the UN system. Secondly, this coalition-building would be necessary because China and Russia were likely to get more assertive in the UN Security Council. Going back to the report, I rediscovered this paragraph:

The EU must be ready to adapt to a period in which Russia and China are increasingly ready to threaten their vetoes. Rather than retreat, the EU will sometimes have to be bold in forcing them to veto (and take the associated flak) or back down in such cases - EU Member States should conduct a strategic discussion of how to use this tactic. But the tactic will only succeed if the EU is sure that the mass of opinion is on its side at the UN.  [ . . . ] Coalition building is not an alternative to toughness at the UN: it is a prerequisite.

I’m not sure if Franziska or I drafted that passage, but it looks pretty prescient now. This month, the Europeans and U.S. faced Sino-Russian opposition to a Security Council resolution calling for support to the Arab League’s peace plan for Syria. After attempting to cut a deal for some days, they went ahead and forced the Chinese and Russians to veto. They did so knowing that they have the support of a majority of non-Western countries in the Security Council, General Assembly and Human Rights Council.

The level of support was forcefully underlined at this week’s General Assembly meeting on Syria. The coalition of countries ranged against Syria at the UN isn’t a perfect one. It’s hard to be 100% comfortable that the one of the EU’s new best friends on human rights issues is Saudi Arabia.  And European diplomats are being careful not to look like they are imposing a Western agenda on the Arabs.  

However, as I argued a few weeks ago in a piece for the EU Institute for Security Studies, the European powers have followed a pretty coherent strategy towards Syria, which involves:  “(i) backing UN and League attempts to monitor the situation in Syria in an effort to restrain the Assad government; (ii) putting pressure on Damascus through sanctions; and (iii) using debates at the Security Council and the wider UN system to reinforce the case for pressure.”  It looks like the moral dimension of this strategy is gradually eroding even Russia and China’s confidence: both have gone out of their way to insist that they truly want peace in Syria, and that they don’t like the Assad regime that much really.

So the EU can claim a moral victory over Syria. The tragic reality is that this has not translated into an end to the violence. Still, the balance of power at the UN has changed a little in the EU’s favor of late.

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