How can people compare ASEAN and UNSC in international relations? What are the similarity and differences?

Alfonso Llanes, studied at Florida International University

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Since its establishment in 1967, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has promoted exceptional levels of regional economic, political, and security cooperation. However, the process of regional integration is limited to stressing economic cooperation rather than on establishing an effective method to resolve regional crisis such as the South China Sea issue.

Regional Organizations in the context of the United Nations universality and the responsibility for peace

Recently, Jacob Zuma president of South Africa took advantage of the rotating presidency of the UN’s Security Council and introduced a resolution to stiffen the relationship between the UNSC and regional organizations stating that “Africa must not be a playground for furthering the interests of other regions ever again.”

Francis Fukuyama notes that we live in a world of “multi-lateralism,” while the Trump administration wants to go back to bi-lateralism to bully the weaker party. Many foreign policymakers are struggling to keep up with collective frameworks beyond the United Nations to manage conflict and trade. The UN however, retains its well accepted authority and legitimacy with its universal charter and legally binding Security Council decisions.

The challenge is of course, to ensure that reliance on ad hoc and regional arrangements complement and reinforce, rather than undermine, the UN’s legitimacy and capacity which becomes a pointed conundrum in the wake of African opposition to the Libyan intervention, as many African governments perceived the United States, France, and the United Kingdom fixing UNSC Resolution 1973 into a license for regime change. This scene hardens the determination of the AU long standing principle of “African solutions to African problems”, to become the gatekeeper of military intervention on the continent.

Chapter VIII of the UN Charter identifies the important role of regional organizations, mainly in the areas of peace and security. Nevertheless, it subordinates this function to the higher authority of the UN Security Council. The South African initiative would represent a radical shift of UN policy, toward co-determination of what has been traditionally one of equal partners.

Arguments over adopting universal or regional approaches to manage conflict are nothing new. But by 1945, however, American Multilateralism and UN universalism had definitively been widely accepted principles of national behaviors.

Today, there is a perceived need to include regional organizations to legitimize UN enforcement action and peacekeeping efforts but enlarging the Security Council to include permanent members from the developing world. This is a particularly sensitive issue in Africa, because it is where most UN peace operations are taking place. Many Africans rightfully ask whether the Security Council should be permitted to authorize Chapter VII actions on the continent, without input from the AU.

As a matter of practice the UN and regional organizations are already intertwined in peace enforcement and peace operations efforts. Recent classic UN operations, use a variety of “hybrid” models, where the Security Council authorizes a mission that is implemented by “either an ad hoc coalition (such as the NATO-led Libyan intervention) or a regional organization (as in the AU’s AMISOM mission in Somalia), or some combination of the two”.