Taking a Stand on North Korea

Canada's boycott of the UN Conference on Disarmament is little more than diplomatic overkill.

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird’s announcement that Canada would boycott the United Nations Conference on Disarmament so long as North Korea was serving as its chair has resonated across the country.

Check out what the experts are saying about Baird’s announcement here.

North Korea, with its burgeoning nuclear-weapons capacity, has been an enemy of the global disarmament lobby for years. That the Kim Jong-il regime could be placed in charge of a UN body responsible for negotiating an end to weapons proliferation made the international organization a laughingstock. Canada’s temporary boycott was a principled stance.

An examination of the situation with an eye to history, however, suggests that the international organization is working exactly the way its founders intended, and that the minister’s response was therefore an overreaction. The UN’s founders anticipated that some parts of the organization would be dysfunctional, but, curiously, they believed that dysfunction could serve a useful purpose in the long run.

In the early 1940s, the leaders of the United States and Great Britain sought to avoid the errors of the peacemakers of 1919 by designing a framework for a new international order before the Second World War had ended.

The League of Nations, which was created after the First World War and tied to the Treaty of Versailles, had two critical problems: First, it did not include all of the most powerful states. Second, it was created too quickly, and therefore resulted in too many shortsighted compromises. The structure to follow the Second World War would therefore have to be dominated by the great powers in order to overcome the shortcomings of the previous organization. The great powers would need to, in former U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt’s words, “take all the important decisions” and retain veto power in the all-important Security Council. Meanwhile, the General Assembly and its accompanying subsidiary organizations, which were to be much more inclusive than the Security Council, would be designed, said Anthony Eden – Britain’s foreign secretary at the time – to “enable representatives of the smaller powers to blow off steam.”

Only the most powerful states were expected to effect real change in the global security environment.

If one is to trust the words of the UN’s architects, the lesser powers in the organization would contribute to international order only when they pursued approaches to conflict resolution that were consistent with the interests of the great powers.