For more than a quarter of a century our political and military elites have adopted the pacifist conception of crisis management that prevails within the United Nations. They have accepted the use of French soldiers in peace operations and the risk involved in placing them between two warring parties, without their action having any other objective than keeping the peace. Without a policy, this employment doctrine conceals the ineffectiveness and insecurity of our Armed Forces. In trying to compensate for this lack of policy, military doctrinal thinking is to some extent led astray.

The Pacifist Concept of Crisis Management

This concept flows from two fundamental contradictions which afflict the UN. The first is well known and is political in nature. The UN approach aims at replacing the resort to force with the peaceful settlement of disputes. World peace is seen as the ultimate result, as a state resulting from the primacy of international law over politics. This idea is incompatible with national interests or the logic of power, but most states find advantages in maintaining the fiction. This was true in the era of Soviet power, whose disappearance has changed nothing. Certainly, the UN has had its successes in areas where the issues were minor. But as soon as a major crisis arises, political and ideological dissensions, sometimes radical ones, come to the fore. Then, the search is on for the lowest common political denominator, often close to zero. There follow proposals, negotiations and, finally, the Security Council adopts resolutions lacking any political resolve.

The second contradiction is ideological. The pacifist dogma of the UN Charter proscribes the ‘scourge of war’. Apart from the situation of one state attacked by another, which legitimises the defence of the victim, recourse to arms is foreign to the UN culture. Nevertheless, involved in current crises, the UN has had to develop methods of intervention which resort to military action. Three principles which flow from the Charter govern these: impartiality, consent of the parties and non-resort to force. These have resulted in the immutable crisis management scheme which failed in Lebanon at the beginning of the 1980s, then in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and in Somalia, and is currently failing to resolve the Côte d’Ivoire crisis. This policy is based on a diplomatic/military combination of a search for a consensus of the parties on a ceasefire, the agreed deployment of an interposition force intended to enforce it, and pressure for negotiations aimed at a lasting peace. The responses to the crisis in southern Lebanon last summer came from just such a scheme.