Decisiveness and accountability as part of a principled response to nonstate threats: "a threat to one is a threat to all": nonstate threats and collective security.

Keohane, Robert O.

The moral authority of an institution depends on the belief that it is legitimate by those who are to be governed by its rules or who support it. Legitimacy implies a right to make rules. This fight is conferred either through the quality of the processes used to produce the rules--"inputs'--or the quality of the results achieved--"outputs." Input legitimacy is achieved through following established procedures of authorization and activity that are consistent with standards conforming to prevailing concepts of fairness, even if not of perfect justice. The procedures must include considerable transparency, mechanisms for accountability, and integrity--that is, a pattern of practices consistent with the stated purposes of the institution. Output legitimacy is achieved through a record of accomplishments that can be judged, on the whole, to be good--and, crucially, better than any feasible alternative institutional arrangements would have produced.

The central institutions of the United Nations have substantially lost moral authority since the Millennium Summit of 2000. The inability to act on issues involving the use of force, the failure at the 2005 World Summit to agree on a definition of terrorism, the Oil-for-Food scandal, and the perceived cronyism of so many delegations have undermined the moral authority of the General Assembly and the Security Council.

Principled responses to international problems are always desirable for ethical reasons. At a time when the legitimacy of international institutions is challenged, they become important also for political reasons. If an international organization loses legitimacy, its effectiveness suffers. Without legitimacy, the best the United Nations could do with respect to threats by nonstate actors, the topic of this roundtable, would be to serve as a channel for concerted state action. Its decisions would merely reflect the individual decisions of powerful states without significant input from UN leadership, thus undermining any belief that the decisions are worthy of respect because they have the imprimatur of the UN.

NONSTATE THREATS

In discussing nonstate threats, I emphasize such human actions as the use of nuclear weapons by terrorists and the creation of diseases through biological processes. I distinguish between "threats"--which I limit to potentially very harmful conditions created deliberately by human beings--and two other categories of problems: (1) adverse changes in our social or natural environment created inadvertently by human beings (such as climate change, or violence possibly engendered by increasing acceptance of violence in the media); or (2) more fundamental social problems, such as world poverty and premature death due to preventable disease. The latter two categories of problems are very serious-quite possibly more so than nonstate threats--but I focus in these brief remarks on threats as defined above. (1)

When does a threat become so severe that international action is essential? In my view, this occurs when one of the following three conditions obtains:

* When it could directly affect all of us (such as biological terrorism)

* When the enormity of intentional harm is so great as to profoundly affect our view of the human race (such as the Holocaust during World War II, Rwanda in 1994, or a possible explosion of a nuclear weapon by terrorists)

* When clear abuses are preventable at moderate cost (such as Bosnia in 1993, or probably Sudan now). In such cases, a failure to act implicates us and affects our fundamental view of ourselves and our species.

Under any of these conditions, acceptance of an unacceptable practice may be as problematic, and thus pose almost as much of a threat, as the occasional bad practice itself. Acceptance of evil affects our moral character and therefore shapes our response to other abuses. We can live with occasional acts of terrorism and probably will have to. We cannot live so easily with a failure to attempt to take action, much less with the justification of the willful killing of innocent people to intimidate others in a political cause. We may not be able to do much about such justifications, but we should not respect them as morally valid statements. Ethical concerns should not, however, be divorced from considerations of efficacy. A key feature of threats is that timely strategic action may be required to prevent their materialization. Prompt, targeted action may be required to respond to these threats; such action may well involve the use of force; and the actions themselves may have to be shielded by some degree of secrecy to be effective. The problem I wish to address is how to engage in decisive strategic action in a principled way: without violating the principles for which those of us who believe both in democracy and human rights stand.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ACCOUNTABILITY

My fellow roundtable participants have mentioned a number of important principles. The key principle that I want to discuss--which is not necessarily the "most important," whatever that would mean--is accountability. Accountability is a democratic principle. It means that policy-makers have to "give an account" to accountability holders--publics or otherwise. This requires three things: (1) a set of standards to which they are held to account; (2) relevant information available to the accountability holders; and (3) the ability of the accountability holders to sanction the policy-makers.

Democratic accountability is participatory and facilitates popular rule. But much accountability simply follows from delegation and is designed to prevent abuses of power; for example, the executive leadership of the World Bank is accountable to a board of state representatives. In the United States and other democracies, there is a more or less coherent public, and democratic accountability is feasible. At the global level, now, it is not. So the "domestic analogy" does not work. But other methods of accountability exist when we think of it in terms of limitations on the abuse of power.

As the table on page 222 indicates, several types of accountability mechanisms are already in place in world politics. Hierarchical and supervisory mechanisms exist by which those entities that delegated powers--states or larger-scale multilateral organizations--supervise the exercise of those powers. Fiscal mechanisms also exist, ensuring that international organizations will respond to their supervisors (even if grudgingly) for fear of having funding cut off. The Oil-for-Food scandal illustrates the weakness of UN supervisory and fiscal mechanisms and the need to assure that UN financial procedures provide for more accountability. Legal and market accountability are less directly relevant to the UN, although they are highly relevant, respectively, to legalized bodies such as the World Trade Organization, with its Dispute Settlement Mechanism, and to multinational corporations. Peer accountability refers to ways in which organizations may criticize the operations of similar organizations. Were the central organs of the UN to lose respect both among governments and other international organizations, the consequences for its effectiveness, and ultimately for funding, would be significant. Finally, reputation matters. The reputational accountability of the United Nations refers to the fact that, as emphasized in this article, a loss of reputation for the United Nations would have a negative impact on its legitimacy and its effectiveness.

The table below lists seven nonelectoral methods of accountability.

It is important to strengthen accountability mechanisms, which are weak in general in world politics. They are weak in the UN, in NGOs, with respect to multinational corporations, and in the governmental networks discussed by Anne-Marie Slaughter. (2) They are particularly weak relative to great powers, such as the United States, which are only accountable internally to national publics, rather than externally to outsiders whose lives they affect. The most successful solution to the accountability problems of domestic bureaucracies has been administrative law, and as a result, it is worthwhile to begin to develop a coherent system of global administrative law. (3)

The Oil-for-Food scandal demonstrates that the UN needs more systematic processes to assure accountability. So, in a broader sense, does the Security Council when authorizing or not authorizing the use of force, as the 2002-3 debates before the Iraq war demonstrate. Security Council authorization is like someone writing a blank check: the council neither directs the use of the military forces involved, nor can it hold the great powers that use them accountable for their actions. The UN has no systematic procedures for monitoring military activities that it authorizes. The Security Council has no established practices either of interrogating leaders of the states employing force or of modifying authorizations in light of such questioning. Finally, it cannot punish powerful states that exceed the limits of UN authorization.

As a result, even when a strong case for forcible action can be made, states not in the inner circle of interveners are bound to be skeptical. The gap between proclaimed future actions and the actual deeds is often large. Without the ability to hold the interveners accountable, and impose sanctions on them if they violate their pledges or if their justifications for intervention turn out to be wildly wrong, these states may prefer to take the course of inaction. Accountability can therefore be a precondition for decisiveness: for the willingness of large numbers of states to support forcible interventions.

Accountability is compatible with decisiveness because it operates ex post, to assess decisions and assign rewards and penalties to decision-makers, rather than ex ante, to control decisions. Ex ante, arrangements may be agreed to for ex post accountability, but the essence of accountability is that the accountability holders observe actions by power wielders, which they judge according to a set of standards. Holding power wielders accountable avoids the twin dangers of indecisiveness due to group decision-making with multiple vetoes and irresponsible, arbitrary action. As the table indicates, various mechanisms of accountability can be devised that do not involve elections. So it should in principle be possible to structure institutions such as the UN to make them more accountable, on the basis of public standards, without reducing their capacity for decisive action.

THE NEED FOR ACTION TO ENHANCE UN LEGITIMACY

Unfortunately, the 2005 World Summit and the subsequent General Assembly session did not produce the combination of decisiveness and accountability that the UN needs. Many states seem so much to fear concentration of power at the UN in the hands of the secretary-general and the great powers that they would prefer the UN not to have the ability to act at all. But either the UN will gain greater capacity for decisive action, including both enhanced cohesion in the Security Council and more powers for the secretary-general to run the organization itself, or it will be weakened. Weakening can take place in at least two ways: through greater unilateralism and reliance on "coalitions of the willing," as in the case of the United States' war against Saddam Hussein and occupation of Iraq; or through more reliance on regional organizations (such as NATO), transgovernmental networks, or nongovernmental organizations. Maintaining the status quo in UN procedures is a recipe for a less legitimate, and weaker, organization.

The legitimacy of the UN will be bolstered only if the organization is able to act decisively against nonstate threats, as well as to solve a variety of problems inherent in the unequal growth that characterizes the world economy. But decisiveness without accountability is ultimately arbitrary, and will not generate sustained support. An organization that is decisive without being accountable would also not be legitimate. Legitimacy requires both decisiveness and accountability, and accountability may be a precondition, as we have just noted, for decisiveness. Principled action against nonstate threats by the UN therefore requires a bolstering of the organization's accountability mechanisms.

(1) I am grateful to Professor Philip Cerny, who was in the audience at the Carnegie Council Roundtable on December 13, 2005, for clarifying this distinction in subsequent correspondence.

(2) Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

(3) Richard Stewart and Benedict Kingsbury at NYU Law School have a very interesting project organized on this subject.

Robert O. Keohane, This article draws heavily, without further citations, on my previously published work, including especially two coauthored papers: Ruth W. Grant and Robert O. Keohane, "Accountability and the Abuse of Power in World Politics," American Political Science Review 99, no. 1 (2005), pp. 29-44; and Allen Buchanan and Robert O. Keohane, "The Preventive Use of Force: A Cosmopolitan Institutional Proposal," Ethics & International Affairs 18, no. 1 (2004), pp. 1-22.

Table 1. Seven Mechanisms of Accountability in World Politics

 Accountability
 Mechanism holder Power wielder

Hierarchical Leaders of Subordinate official
 organization

Supervisory States Multilateral
 organization
 and executive head

Fiscal Funding agencies Funded agency

Legal Courts Individual official
 or agency

Market Equity- and Firm
 bondholders,
 and consumers

Peer Peer organizations Organizations and
 their leaders

Public Peers and Individual or agency
Reputational diffuse public

 Mechanism Cost to power wielder Examples

Hierarchical Loss of career Authority of UN
 opportunities secretary-general

Supervisory Restraints on ability World Bank and IMF
 to act, loss of office governance by their
 executive boards

Fiscal Budget restrictions Withholding of
 UN dues

Legal From restriction of International
 authority to Criminal Court
 criminal penalties

Market Loss of access to, or Refusal of capital
 higher cost of, capital markets to finance
 developing-country
 governments during
 world financial crises

Peer Effects on network ties Independent marine
 and therefore on certification body's
 others' support evaluation of the
 Greenpeace-Shell
 controversy

Public Diffuse effects on Effects on U.S.
Reputational reputation, prestige, "soft power" of
 self-esteem unilateralism

Source: Ruth Grant and Robert O. Keohane, "Accountability and Abuses
of Power in World Politics," American Political Science Review 99,
no. 1 (February 2005), pp. 29-44.