UN auspices, was an early but extreme example o f this: the US utilised the Security Council, its automatic majority in the General Assembly and the pliancy o f the secretary-general, Trygve Lie, to authorise and legitimate an enforcement operation to restore South Korea to the Western capitalist system. But such actions could only be undertaken in extreme circumstances because the basis o f the post-war system remained in principle, i f not in practice, the sovereign equality o f all states. UN peacekeeping with its doctrine o f consent and the use o f ‘disinterested’ forces was a useful innovation precisely because it was at once sensitive to these new modalities, able to preserve the structure and hierarchy o f the post-1945 world order in a manner acceptable to many post-colonial states.
universal sovereign state-system for upholding a private world economy. Put another way, every one o f these interstate operations was intimately part o f a new social order that m aterialised in the post-w ar period that saw the international sphere reorganised along, as Justin Rosenberg has put it: ‘...a public political aspect which concerns the m anagement o f the state-system, and a private political aspect which effects the extraction and relaying o f surpluses.’78 In short, interstate peacekeeping was an intrinsic part o f this new social order in the periphery— concerned prim arily, although as we have seen in Suez and UNEF not exclusively, with the ‘political aspect’, the ‘m anagem ent o f the state-system ’.
But there are a series o f operations that the UN undertook in the early decades o f its existence that went further than simply buttress, institutionalise and protect the new political order and that were actually centrally concerned with the transition from the colonial, to the sovereign. To a large extent, it is these formative operations— in Jerusalem, W est Irian, Leopoldville and W indhoek— rather than the classic ‘interstate’ ones detailed above that are the secret ancestors o f today’s Post- Cold W ar ‘second-generation’ operations. Entrusted with the m anagement o f transfer from one order to another within certain societies, these operations have acted as an important vehicle for the transm ission o f liberal modernity in the borderlands o f the world system.
E a rly UN conveyance o p e ratio n s and th e case o f W est Iria n
In the first decades o f the U N ’s existence, the organisation deployed several operations intended to help facilitate the transition from colonial rule to sovereign independence. Although during this period a far rarer occurrence than the ‘classic’ interstate peacekeeping operations discussed above, these activities are important because they were directly involved in the transfer o f bounded com m unities from one social order to another. In this detail they are important forerunners to ‘second-generation’ peace operations, which have been deployed repeatedly since the collapse o f the Second World in 1989 to preside over a specific restructuring o f the dom estic ‘space’ along neo-liberal political economy lines. For this reason there is m erit in examining these formative UN operations as a category in their own right.
One little discussed example o f ‘transition’ operations was the UN Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) and Security Force (UNSF), which briefly administered the territory o f W est Irian (otherwise known as West New Guinea or Irian Barat) between O ctober 1962 and May 78 Rosenberg, The Empire o f C ivil Society, p. 131.
1963.79 That this formative experience is infrequently addressed is surprising given that UNTEA w as the first operation in which the UN had assum ed executive authority in a territory, and the first occasion in which the UN had been allocated significant nation-building roles and functions.80 O ne o f the most noteworthy developm ents here was the key role that UN officials played in carrying through these tasks and the significant degree o f autonomy bestow ed upon the UN Secretariat in the process. In this regard what becom es striking when exam ining the operation and conduct o f UNTEA is the nascent aptitude o f the UN Secretariat in carrying out intricate political functions within Southern societies on behalf o f its member-states.
Under the N ew York Agreements arrived at by the Indonesian and Dutch governm ents regarding W est Irian, the tasks given to the UN Secretariat included among others: establishing a formal political institution under the UN A dm inistrator’s dispensation (IX and XXIII); reform ing colonial institutions o f law and order; guaranteeing private property (XXII); and preparing the unw itting indigenous population as the agreem ent put it ‘...psychologically for the im pending change to Indonesian authority.’81 This wide ranging set o f activities was all the more rem arkable given that these tasks and functions were carried out in the context o f a substantial proportion o f the population (by some accounts one-third) rem aining outside the centralised control o f the Dutch authorities.82 Overall, as the authors o f the third edition o f the United Nations produced ‘Blue H elm ets’, note: ‘The transfer o f authority implied a need to adapt existing institutions from the Dutch pattern to an Indonesian pattern.’83
In contrast to interstate peacekeeping, what is particularly noticeable in this operation therefore are its large nation-building tasks and civilian dimensions. Here the UN is not so much concerned with policing the separation o f armed forces, the demarcation o f armistice lines or enforcing com pliance to an international regime, although UNSF had key responsibilities in m ost o f these
79 For literature dealing with this event see: John Saltford, ‘United Nations involvement with the act o f self- determination in West Irian (Indonesian West N ew Guinea), 1968 to 1969’, Indonesia, no.69 (April 2000), pp.71-92; Paul Van de Veur, ‘The United Nations in West N ew Guinea: a critique’, International
O rganization, vol. 18, no.l (Winter 1964), pp.53-73.
80 U Thant (acting secretary-general at the time) refers to the West Irian operation on only two pages o f his