The U.N.’s New Mission : Nation-Building : With Bosnia and Somalia, the United Nations is now in the business of setting up governments. But isn’t that the people’s choice?

The post-Cold War world is forcing the United Nations to dramatically enlarge its peacekeeping role. Its chief--and best-known--mission of providing emergency assistance and resolving conflicts still comes first. But what is becoming increasingly clear is that unless that undertak ing is reinforced by restoration and reconstruction programs--nation-building--failure will surely come, either now or later. If a country cannot be helped--and guided--in its transition from chaos to a sustainable government and economy, it will revert to violence and deprivation, and the peacekeepers and humanitarian workers will have to return. Peacekeeping and nation-building are inseparable.

In Somalia, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Mozambique, for example, the United Nations is not simply keeping the peace. It is struggling to combine its efforts to stop war and feed people with its efforts to promote--indeed, sponsor--political, social and economic rehabilitation. This is a long-term and high-cost undertaking. It is a much more difficult, much more complicated and much less understood mission. Is the United Nations getting too ambitious?

It has no choice but to try.

There are several manifestations of the U.N.’s changing role. The wrestling and wrangling evident in the Security Council’s early Somalia deliberations on whether relief required security, or security required relief, was resolved by the startling discovery that each was dependent on the other. Similarly, the success of security and relief will not be sustained without political and economic rebuilding. For example, the warlords in Somalia must be replaced or combined with clan elders and other representative leadership to form a government, and jobs must be created, crops harvested and social services reinstituted. Lack of progress at any stage will grease the slide back into chaos.

The truth of this interconnectedness of peace-keeping and nation-building is both mind-boggling and purse-threatening. We resist its inherent complexity and the implicit commitment it demands of us.

The United States was mistaken in its plan to get the Marines in and out of Somalia fast, then turn over mop-up responsibilities to the United Nations. The Marines did a good job. The fighting was stopped. The starving were fed. But the security and stability the Marines created were incomplete and superficial. The United Nations was neither prepared nor equipped to take on the far-tougher countrywide assignment. Now, the U.S. military is active again in Somalia, with relief and rehabilitation programs effectively suspended, because the country’s violent factions were not disarmed and a political restoration had not effectively begun.

Bosnia is, in many ways, a different case, where war is rampant--security and relief efforts are far more daunting and fragile--and the state of economic, social and political development is much more advanced to begin with. To the extent that the United Nations is engaged in nation-building there, it is in the form of activities--political and map negotiations--preliminary to it.

The United Nations recognizes that it is not enough to alleviate the terrible symptoms of a collapsing country. The underlying causes also have to be redressed. There is simply no way to abbreviate the process if dependence is to be shed and self-sufficiency is to be built. This must be done collectively, and can’t happen quickly or without the cooperation of the indigenous population.

But the member states who authorize the United Nations to undertake comprehensive action in Somalia and elsewhere have demonstrated neither the will nor the capacity to back up their Security Council resolutions with the political, financial and institutional power necessary to give the efforts they endorse a decent chance at success. So the United Nations’ intensified peacekeeping and simultaneous nation-building proceed on a lick and a prayer--with little margin for error, hoping for a miracle, but expecting plenty of blame in the event of failure. “Overstretched” as a description of the U.N. presence in Somalia, and in several other countries with similar problems, is a naive understatement.

What the new U.N. challenge comes down to is bringing an afflicted country to the point where it is not automatically doomed and has a fair chance to survive on its own. The 10 priorities listed in the U.N. Office for Somalia’s preliminary relief and rehabilitation plan flush out this role. Among them are the re-establishment of regional and local administrative capacities, the reintegration of refugees and displaced persons, restoration of public health and sanitation systems and basic education. The U.N. efforts in Mozambique, Cambodia and Afghanistan are similarly far-reaching, with electoral, disarming and human-rights responsibilities added. In all these countries, conflict is continuing or is threatening to break out again, and the national government is either nonexistent, transitional or fragile. The United Nations is playing a surrogate role.

There are, of course, many other countries where the United Nations is keeping the peace and helping to build a nation. But both the differences in internal circumstances and in the degree of international recognition and response are confounding. Sometimes, the United Nations is present in force; other times, it is virtually absent. El Salvador is a “success.” Angola is a “failure.” Sudan is a fundamentalist trap. Liberia will be left to the region. What about Zaire? What about Haiti? The former Soviet Republics seem to be in another world. Bosnia-Herzegovina and the rest of former Yugoslavia are caught in a special hell between internal hatred and intransigence and external cynicism and timidity.

The question of by what authority the United Nations intervenes in conflicts and humanitarian emergencies and engage in nation-building is a related problem. In most cases, U.N. assistance will be in response to a request from a needy country, or incorporated into peace accords, as in Cambodia and Mozambique. In some cases, there may not even be a sufficient local authority, as in Somalia. Where a national government or indigenous political factions resist or oppose U.N. involvement, as in Bosnia, the Security Council most dramatically faces the issue of national sovereignty. This usually requires a finding of a threat to international peace and security, and the United Nations must, in any event, assess its own political consensus, will and assets before taking action.

We don’t know what will constitute the Security Council’s criteria for future candidates for intervention. The variables are too complicated to calculate: the degree of consensus among the major powers; willingness of the United States to use its military forces; source of the request; nature of the threat to international peace and security; potential viability of the given state; conditions for warfare; geopolitics; prospect of large losses of life, and so on.

Which brings us to money. On top of shortfalls and deficits as a result of peacekeeping operations, there is certainly not enough money for sustained nation-building. In Somalia, a March appeal for $150 million for relief and rehabilitation in 1993 has attracted only $35 million. In Cambodia, a request for more than $800 million to pay for rehabilitation programs has drawn about $150 million. Mozambique looks better, with pledges from international donors currently approaching the estimated $300 million a year needed for relief and rehabilitation. But in Afghanistan, no special appeal for rehabilitation has even been issued to the international community because of the paltry response to requests for such emergency aid as food, health and mine clearance.

What the United Nations is obliged to do by logic and the basic tenets of its Charter, it cannot pay for. It lacks the political and financial support to do what it is urged to do by its noble mandate--to keep and build the peace--and by its authorities--providers and recipients. So, it goes ahead and tries anyway, on the cheap. The United Nations, writ large, quite understandably but unrealistically, prefers the quick fix to the long haul. This is a big problem that will get bigger.

It is difficult to predict what will happen. There are two alternative scenarios, and both are menacing in their own way.

The first is adequate support for the United Nations to carry out its aspirations. This would require a transformation in perception, values and behavior among the relatively rich and developed, as well as among concerned poorer, nations--which is unlikely to materialize. Or, the United Nations is forced to make painful choices to live within its means. This would require a pulling back and sorting out--selective criteria, triage, exclusion of certain kinds of needs now expecting to be addressed--and would cause demoralization, disillusionment and divisiveness.

The concept of global interdependence--a sense that the prosperity or tragedy of nations across the globe infect each other--remains an empty vessel employed in rhetoric but not operationalized as policy. Whether the international community will have the moral imagination and courage to meet this challenge is another story.