The U.N.: Now Less Than Ever: There must be a way out.

An American, looking back over the recent conflict with Iraq, is likely to wonder how it is that a petty tyrant could have defied the world for so long, despite the determination of the United States to unseat him. The answer is to be found in the institution designed to ensure that negotiation will replace force in the dealings between states: the United Nations. For a while, the U.N. was out of the conflict. And during that time something at last was done. Then the U.N. came back -- not thanked by the terrorists for covertly backing them, but, in Baghdad, becoming a victim of one of their most cowardly and despicable crimes. And once again the U.S. may be succumbing to the illusion that it cannot act legitimately without the U.N.'s approval. It is worth asking ourselves, therefore, how U.N. decisions are made.

Ambassadors to the U.N. are sent by the people who have obtained power, by whatever means, in the territories recognized by that body as sovereign. In effect, the U.N. simply legitimizes whatever elites and tyrants have gained power over the particular nations named in its list. Hence it has helped Arab despots to stay in power long after they would have fallen in a world that refused to recognize their legitimacy. When Syria can be a member of the Security Council, and when the U.N. commissioner on human rights can be appointed by Colonel Qaddafi, even the most resolute defender of the U.N. institutions might begin to wonder whether everything had gone according to plan. Add to such anomalies the well-documented corruption of the U.N. bureaucracy, and the seeming ineffectiveness or counter-productivity of U.N. resolutions in settling the conflicts of recent decades, and it is understandable that people should have begun to question whether we should go along with an institution whose claim to our respect is founded in so much wishful thinking and so few real achievements.

The United Nations emerged in the wake of a world war in which the victor powers were anxious to ratify their victory and to ensure that the balance of forces then achieved would not be disturbed. Although one of those powers -- the Soviet Union -- had shown scant respect for such niceties as law, negotiation, compromise, territorial sovereignty, and human rights, the illusion prevailed that the Soviet Union would simmer down in time, to become a normal member of the community of nations. The fact that it was not a nation, and had even managed to elevate one of its constituent nations -- the Ukraine -- to independent membership in the General Assembly, was overlooked in the interests of diplomacy.

Since that time, things have changed in two very radical respects. First, the Soviet Union has collapsed, leaving the Russian Federation in possession of its ill-gotten corner of the Security Council. Second, new powers have emerged in the world, which claim neither legal authority nor territorial sovereignty, but which simply exert their force wherever they can, and in defiance of all who would oppose them. Major threats to peace and stability in the modern world come from terrorist organizations that, by their very nature, can play no part in the dialogue of nations that the U.N. is supposed to represent. Of course, the sovereign powers could do much to control such organizations, by refusing them any kind of recognition, attacking their sources of funds, and outlawing them within their respective territories. But it is only since September 11 that even the U.S. has thought of doing such a thing, and U.N. conventions on asylum and refugees operate in any case to guarantee protection to terrorists in just about every country where they do not commit their crimes. Indeed, it is thanks largely to U.N. conventions that terror networks have been able so easily to internationalize themselves.

Hence it is no longer important for terrorists to gain control of a sovereign territory. Power can be achieved and deployed more effectively without assuming the burdens of the nation-state. Terrorists used to aim at obtaining sovereignty, as Lenin and Hitler did. Even the IRA (in its original form) was aiming for such an outcome. Increasingly, however, terrorists use sovereignty purely as a mask, either by imposing themselves as guests on sovereign states to whose future they are more or less indifferent -- like al-Qaeda in Afghanistan -- or by establishing global networks that can evade all national jurisdictions, while freely operating anywhere.

For these reasons it is impossible to believe now, even if it was possible to believe before, that the U.N. contains the institutions and procedures that can guarantee world peace. The principal terrorist factions are not represented in the U.N., and those states that harbor terrorists cannot be effectively coerced by the sanctions that the U.N. is able to apply to them. As the experience of Iraq demonstrates, U.N. sanctions hurt populations but increase the power of elites, who can always evade the impact of punitive measures on their own lives -- and who can in fact use them to widen the gap between the power that they enjoy and the enfeebled masses over whom they wield it. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War has not abolished the distinction between those powers that wish to use the U.N. to establish legal order and human rights, and those that see law and rights as a threat to their dictatorship.

One may be skeptical of the utopian ambitions of those who drafted the Charter; one may even acknowledge the dangers to stability in a declaration of "human rights" that claims precedence over all local jurisdictions and all inherited ideas of legal order. Nevertheless, the fact remains that conventions upholding human rights can be incorporated without pain into Western legal systems, since those systems are instruments for defining and protecting rights. That, however, is the legacy of Roman law, Christianity, and the common-law jurisdictions of medieval Europe. Elsewhere no such legacy exists, and the continuing insistence on human rights falls on deaf ears. This means that, while U.N. resolutions and sanctions will guide the conduct of Western states, they will be ineffective against those states which in fact pose the most serious threat to peace. For they will be demanding a change of political order that cannot be effected without removing from power those who are supposed to be bringing it about.

The U.N., to put it bluntly, shows the error of optimism when addressing the real conflicts of human beings. The experience of world war notwithstanding, those who drafted the Charter were inspired by an abstract liberal philosophy that sees the end of government as the maintenance of human rights. They refused to countenance the possibility that government is more a device for controlling base instincts than a means to foster noble freedoms. The necessary gloom and misanthropy, without which no serious government is possible, failed to visit those who were planning the "world after fascism," and the result was a set of "mind forged manacles" (to borrow from Blake) that tied the hands of peace-loving people while leaving the villains scot-free. Hence the U.N. has acquired the habit of substituting liberal pieties for hard-headed judgments when faced with the serious threat of war. Its institutions and bureaucracies give sanctimonious Scandinavians of the Hans Blix variety their longed-for opportunity to put us all in our place, and its secretaries-general are usually more anxious to preserve their reputation as moral figureheads than to dirty their hands with violent actions, however necessary they may be.

Without exception the European opponents of the Iraq war invoked the U.N. as the authority for their claims that British and American intervention was "illegal." This spurious invocation of a legality recognized by no member of the U.N. apart from the few who are intrinsically obedient to it, has been used to solidify an anti- American posture toward the world, and an exaltation of the "European way" as the way of law, as opposed to the American way, which is the way of force. As Robert Kagan has pertinently argued in Of Paradise and Power, the rhetorical dichotomy between virtuous Europe, pursuing solutions through international law, and vicious America, imposing solutions by force of arms, is fast becoming internalized by European elites as a way of painting their inability to act as an exalted refusal to act. Without the U.N. this posture would be seen for the priggish nonsense that it is. The fact is that U.N. resolutions concerning the real threats to world peace have been ineffective, or effective only when they have coincided with American resolve to do something, as in Bosnia.

The U.N. was invented by people steeped in the ethos of the nation- state, and it is designed to resolve conflicts between such states. It erects into a transnational goal the notion of a rule of law -- a concept that rests on the particularly Western view of sovereignty as based on territory rather than faith or ideology. And there is no doubt that nation-states that subscribe to the U.N. Charter are on the whole eager for legal solutions to conflicts, and for a shared obedience to an "empire of laws." That is why the U.S. and Canada can exist peacefully side by side. Elsewhere, the search for legal solutions may often be little more than a sham. Syria's occupation of Lebanon certainly shows how a conflict may be resolved: but it was a conflict caused by the party that solved it, and the solution was conquest, in which the sovereignty of Lebanon was effectively extinguished by an occupying army.

This is the way conflicts in the Middle East tend to be settled. For how can a state be trusted to seek legal solutions when it is not itself governed by law, but only by factional interests under a resolute dictatorship? Hence, to grant equal status in the U.N. to dictatorships like Syria, Libya, and Sudan on one hand and nation- states in the Western mold on the other is to put an obstacle in the way of negotiated solutions.

But that leads naturally to the question of whether we need the U.N. at all. And if we do, in what form? When we ask such a question it is interesting to note that "we" denotes the Western powers. We are not asking whether the world needs this institution, or even whether the Third World needs it; we are asking whether it adds anything to the peacekeeping efforts that we, the nation-states of the world, are engaged in. As for those other states -- dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, theocracies, and failed states -- we have little confidence in their commitment to peace, and certainly little concern to advance their interests. The question in our mind is always whether the U.N. is a useful means of dealing with them, not whether it gives them any means of dealing between themselves. And the example of Iraq suggests that it is no longer useful. U.N. sanctions proved ineffective, and the Security Council and General Assembly combined to delay the necessary military action to the point where it was far more costly than it should have been. By impeding the first President Bush from pursuing Gulf War I to its logical conclusion, the U.N. ensured the repression and massacre of those involved in the uprisings at Basra and elsewhere. By failing now to endorse President Bush's pressing decision of Realpolitik, it has made the task of reconstructing Iraq and winning the confidence of its people so much the more difficult. Its effect on the whole decision-making process, in short, has been negative.

But there is another, more dangerous effect of the United Nations, one that is insufficiently pondered by our politicians. Both the U.N. and many of its ancillary and subordinate institutions have legislative powers. They can use the original force of the Charter to bind national legislatures to measures that may be profoundly against the national interest. These measures will often be a huge burden to law-abiding states but no burden at all to dictatorships. Yet the dictatorships have as much right to press for them as the law-abiding states. In effect, the lawless have acquired, through the U.N., the power to bind the law-abiding in chains that they themselves escape.

One pertinent example is the U.N. convention on refugees and asylum, adopted in 1951, which obliges every signatory to offer asylum to those fleeing from persecution. This means that Western states, which are bound by their own laws, are forced to admit hundreds of thousands of unwanted immigrants every year, simply because well-briefed lawyers invoke the convention on asylum on the immigrants' behalf. Most of these immigrants stay, even when their claims to asylum are exposed as bogus. The result, in Europe, is a demographic crisis that threatens to rock the foundations of domestic policy.

Of course, the dictatorships don't have any problem in accommodating asylum seekers: They have never had any. On the contrary, the convention on asylum enables dictators to export their opponents without earning the bad name that would come from killing them. The entire cost of the convention is borne by the law-abiding states, whose legal systems, moreover, are jeopardized by the increasing number of people who settle within the jurisdiction while acknowledging no loyalty to the nation-state that is founded on it. The worst of our Islamist agitators in Europe are also people who have been granted asylum from the regimes whose violence they import.

The example is of vital concern to all of us in Europe. And it shows the way in which the grant of legislative powers to a transnational body poses a serious danger to the nation-state. Delicate matters, over which our legislators and judiciary have expended decades of careful reflection and decision-making, are thrown into instant disarray by a measure imposed on us by fiat. Like the EU, the U.N. confronts its members at every juncture with an absolute choice: Accept the edicts, or leave the club. By leaving the club, Western nations will free themselves from the burden of transnational legislation. They can then rebuild through bilateral treaties the kind of international relations that protect their sovereignty.

Among Mr. Scruton's many books are The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat and The Meaning of Conservatism.