Challenges and Prospects in International Conflict Management

The Marshall Plan as a Template for Conflict Management

The process of reconciliation following civil or international conflict is beset on all sides by difficulties: maintaining precarious ceasefire agreements, distributing the resources and assistance necessary to restore order, and delivering some actionable form of punitive justice. Today, a consensus among members of the United Nations holds that repairing fractious intra- and inter-state conflicts must involve a high degree of compromise designed to defuse long-standing geographical, political, or ethnic tensions. Simultaneously, this process must remove from influence, power, and threat those responsible for the atrocities that incline global peacekeeping intervention.

Those engaged in such intervention are most commonly members of an international peacekeeping force commissioned by the United Nations, a global alliance such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — conceived following World War II as a way to steer former Axis Power states toward democracy — or a singularly influential, unilaterally acting nation such as the United States. The intervening actor will typically address the array of challenges associated with local and regional conflict in a series of steps given precedent by the prosecution of World War II. There, the challenges associated with conflict management were forged as "three distinctive undertakings — the 1945–46 Nuremberg Trials, 1945–48 denazification proceedings, and the 1945–57 transatlantic and inter- and intra-European reconstruction, reindustrialization, and integrative institution-building process." (Lecture Notes, 2)

Called the Marshall Plan, this framework clearly delineated the responsibilities imposed upon the parties responsible for dismantling a global threat and ending the conflict within it. Specifically, the challenges that came to be seen as incumbent upon intervening actors in the years following the Cold War were grounded in the initial process and eventual success experienced in the context of Germany.

Germany Divided: Cold War Origins and the Reconstruction Model

A fundamentally and physically divided Germany emerged from the ruins of the Second World War. One half was shaped in the image of its Western conquerors, while the other took on the mantle of one of Soviet Russia's most prized creations. As one half of Nazi Germany — which had been the seat of World War II and the Holocaust — East Germany's twentieth-century history was stained by the active participation of its leadership and populace in the instigation of worldwide carnage and the mass murder of millions of European Jews in its concentration camps. Its subsequent Soviet occupation oversaw a bleak humanitarian scenario. By clear contrast, American-occupied West Germany became a model for democratic reconstruction, ultimately serving as a template for global conflict management, for better and for worse.

The end of World War II was also a pivotal moment for the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, producing a significant ripple effect. Former partners in the defeat of Germany, they now began a struggle to define the future of Germany, Europe, and indeed the world. These two world powers held distinctly different visions for how to do so, resulting in the division of Germany into East and West and the alignment of the global community on either side of a long Cold War. In the period following the Second World War, East Germany and West Germany were among the most significant national formations to occur during a time of global power redistribution and the complex demarcation of international boundaries, and they became significant fronts in the Cold War that would shape the fate of the globe for nearly the remainder of the twentieth century.

The End of the Cold War and German Reunification

In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, East Germany could be looked to as evidence of policy failure. In 1989, the first and most emotive signal of the end of the Cold War came with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. A generation of failed economic policies, overreaching military priorities, and repressive social conditions had instigated the end of an empire and the fall of the Eastern Bloc. The period known as détente — during which an opening up of the former Soviet republics finally allowed those essentially held captive in such societies to move freely about the world — marked a turning point. (U.S. Department of State, 1)

Within less than a year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, East and West Germany began the discourse toward a return to German sovereignty. "During the 1990 negotiations on German unification, the decision was taken to confirm, and partially extend, West Germany's existing provisions on compensation. This decision was formalized in Article 2 of the 'Agreement on the Enactment and Interpretation of the Unification Treaty' of September 18, 1990, that unified Germany." (U.S. Department of State, 4) At this juncture, the nation of East Germany fundamentally ceased to exist, with those territories formerly known as such now recognized as subject to the same principles and policies governing West Germany.

After five decades of international conflict waged between the imperial champion of communist ideology and the frontrunner for western democracy, the latter prevailed in the peaceful revolution of 1989. With the reunification of Germany, and two years later the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War ended with little violence or resistance — providing a long view of the most optimistic weathering of such challenges. From the perspective that the invasive and draconian presence of Soviet-supported regimes had fallen in Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, the end of the Cold War appeared to light the way toward the spread of civil liberty, capitalist evolution, and democratic policy representation in a host of nations. Consequently, much of the policy concerned with the challenges of intervening in conflicts on the smaller scale created in the fallout of the Cold War focused on the successful strategy of prosecuting those responsible for conflict, removing the cultural elements of conflict from the population, and infusing the context with Western features of technological, commercial, and infrastructural development.

Yugoslavia, the Hague Tribunals, and the UN's Role

Today, this process of nation-building can be evidenced in perhaps the most prominent modern example of the United Nations as a conflict management force — both with respect to its strengths and its flaws. The splintering of Yugoslavia, which devolved into war and ethnic cleansing in the power vacuum created by the collapse of its Soviet sponsorship, became a crucial early test for the UN's conflict management capabilities following the Cold War.

This struggle represented a new achievement for the international human rights movement, as reflected in the potential of the United Nations to try international war criminals for the abhorrent deeds of which they were accused. In the case of Slobodan Milosevic's arrival at The Hague in February 2002, Bass (2003) writes that "this was an amazing triumph for the human rights movement, but at the same time the realization of a nightmare that had haunted the allied officials who planned the Nuremberg tribunals nearly 60 years ago. They had worried that Nazi leaders would be able to use those trials as a forum to justify their actions and present themselves as martyrs to subsequent generations. Milosevic has tried to do the same." (Bass, 83)

Much of the discussion on this subject also focuses on the slow and bureaucratic pace at which conflict management occurs when the United Nations is involved. In the case of the eventual tribunals for those said to be guilty of wartime atrocities, Bass (2003) notes that "when NATO finally struck against the Bosnian Serb army and oversaw the Dayton accord that ended the war, the tribunal still had to wait almost two years, until July 1997, for NATO troops to begin arresting war crimes suspects in Bosnia. Even then, the nationalist regime in Croatia and Milosevic's regime in Serbia excoriated its efforts and frequently refused to cooperate." (Bass, 84)

These challenges demonstrate that even where a model exists — as in what had been accomplished in Germany — the process remains frustrated by practical obstacles to intervention and action. Just as those who sought to try Nazi war criminals learned of the monumental difficulty in holding individuals accountable for the crimes of whole nations and governments, so too do those who attempt to clear the debris from modern cases of wartime atrocity find that the process of assigning accountability is impacted by moral relativism, legal rationalization, and sheer practical difficulty.

Conclusion: American Responsibility and the Future of Global Peacekeeping

The promises of the Marshall Plan indicate that America's self-evident dominance in world affairs, and its paralleled presumption of itself as a supporter of constitutional democracy, saddle it directly with the responsibility to help address crises like Darfur and to take a lead role in any such future conflicts. Specifically, the doctrine indicates that the cost of its dominance, as well as the pursuit of its foreign interests, together contribute to its obligation to bring about peace, stability, and the rectification of justice in venues where such is needed. Thus, if the United Nations is to be considered an effective punitive force, the United States must work to support local alliances and international agreements aimed at conflict reconciliation.

Works Cited

Bass, G. (2003). Milosevic in the Hague. Foreign Affairs, 82(3), 82–96.

Buchanan, Pat. (2002). A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny. Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Kunz, D. (1997). The Marshall Plan reconsidered. Foreign Affairs, 76(3), 162–170.

Reynolds, D. (1997). The European response. Foreign Affairs, 76(3), 171–184.

U.S. Department of State. (1952). German compensation for National Socialist crimes. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Week 4 Lecture. (2008). Lecture notes. International Relations.