The decision by Russia and China to veto sanctions against Zimbabwe should finally remove the scales from peoples’ eyes about the role and purpose of the United Nations. The UN’s founding purpose, at which it has been effective, was to prevent great power conflict. That is why the UN cannot act without the consent of every one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Two of the Council’s members–Russia, a ‘managed democracy’, and China, a Communist dictatorship—have no interest in embedding in international affairs the idea that internal repression and the failure to hold free and fair elections justify the international community taking action against a country. Those waiting for the UN to act morally are hoping against type.
Britain and America are right to think that an arms embargo and a travel ban on members of the Mugabe regime should be imposed. So a mechanism other than the UN needs to be found for such sanctions. The best idea to date for how this could be done is a League of Democracies. The League would enable the democracies of the world to act in concert when they believed that it was necessary to do so in defence of the basic liberal freedoms.
Another benefit of the League would be that it would encourage countries to think of themselves as democracies first. This would hopefully result in African democracies looking at future Zimbabwes through a democratic rather than a post-colonial prism.
PS Bob Kagan lucidly explains the consequences of the return of ideological competition to the international state system in The Return of History and the End of Dreams; considering their surprise at the Russian and Chinese vetoes, Gordon Brown and David Miliband would be well-advsied to take it with them as holiday reading this summer. You can read my assessment of Kagan’s case for a League of Democracies here.
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