What Can the Post–Cold War Tell Us About the Post-1945 Institutions for International Security

This paper examines what the post-Cold War can tell us about the post-1945 institutions for international security. Following World War Two, statesmen developed new institutions designed to preserve international peace. Yet, these institutions, most importantly the United Nations Security Council, could not function as their creators had hoped until forty years later when the Cold War came to an end. As the contentiousness of the Cold War faded, the victors of World War Two were finally able to work together as the five permanent members of the Security Council. They passed resolutions, imposed sanctions, and authorized military operations. In many ways, the post-Cold War Security Council appeared to be transforming into the institution for which liberal internationalists had hoped in the post-World War Two period. Yet, throughout the 1990s the permanent members of the Security Council increasingly found themselves at loggerheads over the Balkans, Iraq, and other contentious issues. The conflicts within the Security Council in the 1990s shed new light on the contradictions in the international system following World War Two. The international community had not resolved tensions between concepts like sovereignty and human rights following 1945. These tensions increasingly stressed the international system when statesmen attempted to apply the post-World War Two settlement to the post-Cold War. As such, a post-1945 order was not still born into the Cold War as the literature often suggests. Its core tenets were never fully fleshed out, and even without the bipolarity of the Cold War, it proved unworkable.