The Rwandan genocide (1994), coupled with the wars in Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003), have led member states and observers of the United Nations Security Council (SC) to question the effectiveness of the institution and its legitimacy with regard to authorizing the use of force. Some Western commentators, particularly in the United States, highlight the nondemocratic character of certain Council members and the paralyzing divisions between democratic and autocratic states on issues such as Kosovo, and more recently Darfur and Iran. On the other hand, states from the developing world regularly protest the underrepresentation of large parts of the world in the Council, as well as the “democratic deficit” of an institution with secretive decision-making procedures and a privileged position for its five veto-wielding permanent members (the P5).

Yet, despite these criticisms, the UNSC continues to be widely regarded as a central part of the international security architecture. Although it lacks the hard power envisaged by the original drafters of the UN Charter, the Council's endorsement enhances the legality and political acceptability of military campaigns, and in some cases offers tangible benefits by enabling those leading a military action to obtain troops and financial support from others. As a result, states continue to invest significant diplomatic capital in garnering Security Council authorization for their actions. The recent UNSC-sponsored action in Libya is a case in point.

The three books reviewed here all contribute to this “glass half empty/glass half full” debate about the UNSC. Mark Mazower's contribution is perhaps the most novel, as it asks us to put aside the entrenched folklore about the UN's lofty and liberal internationalist origins and face up to some key facts about what it was actually set up to do. Only a deeper historical understanding of the real ideological underpinnings of the UN, he argues, will help us determine whether the many contemporary predictors of its demise will prove right.

Mazower's deceptively short book challenges two commonly held views. The first is that the UN was created by the United States, and reflects the aspirations of two of its wartime presidents (Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt). The second is that the UN was decidedly different from the League of Nations, and that its founders ensured that it would be “uncontaminated by any association with that prewar failure” (p. 14). Instead, as Mazower demonstrates, the UN can in many ways be seen as a “warmed-up League” (p. 15)—due in no small part to the fact that many of the officials involved in drawing up plans during the 1940s were the same men who had taken part in the establishment of the League. Like the earlier body, the new United Nations was intimately associated with the British Empire and was designed (at least at the outset) to allow those with colonies to keep their valuable possessions. In short, it was not anticolonialism that inspired the United Nations, but rather the idea of “imperial internationalism” (p. 18).

In presenting this alternative account, Mazower does battle with what he calls the “idealist historiography” of the UN (p. 8), a body of literature that, in his view, overplays the UN Charter's human rights provisions (and additional covenants like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Genocide Convention). Rather than viewing these treaties as precursors of a new world order based on liberal ideals, he writes, historians should treat them as “promissory notes that the UN's founders never intended to be cashed” (p. 8). But Mazower also mounts a strident critique of the discipline of international relations, for depreciating the role of ideology in its quest to create general laws about world politics, based on rationalist assumptions about state behavior.

It is somewhat unfair to condemn all scholars of IR for the same sin of “science envy” (p. 9). Not all of us are uninterested in the role of ideas in shaping institutions. And some of us have written books and articles about the very same figures that Mazower highlights in No Enchanted Palace (e.g., David Long and Peter Wilson, Thinkers of the Twenty Years Crisis, 1995). But one can forgive Mazower for this generalization, given his rich and lucid account of the men whose ideas did so much to shape the contours of the United Nations: the South African statesman Jan Smuts (who, despite being a segregationist at home, helped to draft the Charter's lofty preamble); the British thinker and civil servant Alfred Zimmern (who encouraged his American counterparts to view the UN as an instrument for its “civilizing” mission, in the same way that Britain had viewed the League); and the émigré Jew Joseph Schechtman (whose writings on forced population movements helped to move the UN away from the protection of minority rights and toward its stringent protection of national sovereignty).

By the end of Mazower's book, we come to see that the UN—despite the rhetoric of its supporters was much less committed to international law and egalitarianism than its predecessor, the League. The Security Council ensured that power politics and special rights for the P5 would rule the day. Indeed, his research reveals that many of those who left the San Francisco conference in 1945 were worried about whether the new organization would survive the hypocrisy that marked its core: “a great power directorate that was not as different from the Axis powers, in its imperious attitude to how the world's weak and poor should be governed, as it should have been” (p. 5). Its crowning achievement had been to improve the “machinery” governing the relations among the great powers.

David Bosco is not at all troubled by this conclusion. Like Mazower, he believes that negative assessments of the UN, and more specifically the Security Council, usually stem from a misunderstanding of what the institution was created to do. Rather than evaluate the Council in terms of an ambitious governance role—as Article 39 puts it, to “maintain international peace and security”—Bosco believes that we should ask whether and how the Council has helped prevent conflict between its members. “This concert vision,” he writes, “focuses less on how the Security Council interacts with the rest of the world and more on its role as a mechanism for producing consensus among the major powers” (p. 5—emphasis in the original).

The core argument of Five to Rule Them All is that the Council has fulfilled this concert function rather well. In more than 60 years of crises and conflict (which Bosco surveys chronologically in seven chapters), there has never been a sustained military clash among the P5. Considering that all of them possess nuclear weapons, he concludes, this is no small feat. Furthermore, the author's engaging narrative—peppered with insights from former and current ambassadors—demonstrates that the Council has done more than simply “keep the great powers from each other's throats” (p. 5). It has also allowed them to save face in difficult situations (for example, in Berlin in 1948 or Cuba in 1962), to hone their skills in crisis management (which were tested in the Middle East crises of 1967 and 1973), and to expand and deepen the diplomatic networks that link them together.

For IR scholars who have studied the Security Council as an institution, Bosco's account of what actually goes on inside its chamber—and his portrayals of some of its most fascinating and controversial personalities—is an important check on the temptations of abstract theorizing. In addition, his central thesis challenges readers to reflect on their normative standards and commitments. There are two main hierarchies of values he asks us to accept.

The first is between representativeness (in the form of enlargement of the Council's membership) and effectiveness. As his first chapter demonstrates, the creators of the UN insisted that effectiveness required a small council, composed of those who were given an explicit responsibility to make judgments about what constituted a threat to international order. Bosco contends that despite the urge to democratize and enlarge, the Council must remain an elite club in order to fulfill its concert function. He also defends the idea—Wikileaks notwithstanding—that calls for greater transparency should be resisted; in order to compromise, the great powers must be able to deliberate behind firmly closed doors.

The second hierarchy of values is that between the avoidance of great-power war and the amelioration of conflict and suffering in the broader international system. Here, Bosco's expectations seem too low. As his analysis reveals, even in those rare cases when the Council is able to agree on the need for a response to an international threat, it proves unable to chart a consistent course toward its stated goal. The episode used to introduce his book, the recent UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo, is perhaps the best illustration of the Council's weaknesses in managing the implementation of its own resolutions.

Does this mean that we should continue to accept this underperformance—and rest comfortable in the knowledge that at least the P5 are not killing each other? One only need consider the possibility that regional or local conflicts can escalate (even if they have not thus far, as Bosco notes). Beyond this possibility, one could ask whether the Security Council risks irrelevance if it proves unable to respond to the new security threats that dominate contemporary international relations. Perhaps, until now, the great powers have been able to isolate themselves from bloodshed and atrocities in many parts of the world. It is worth asking, however, whether such splendid isolation can continue.

While Mazower and Bosco take a long view of the Security Council and its history, Alexander Thompson's book focuses on a single—albeit long—episode in recent history: US policy in the Security Council with respect to Iraq from 1990 to 2003. The variation in US approaches to the UN (ranging from a broad-based coalition in 1991, through the use of targeted air strikes in the late 1990s, to a narrow US-led coalition in 2003 without a Security Council mandate) provides the empirical case material for his key theoretical question: Why do powerful states sometimes choose to work through international organizations when using force, while at other times they act unilaterally?

Thompson's rationalist approach to answering this question represents precisely the kind of research Mazower is so suspicious of: It treats the state as a self-contained and unitary actor, motivated by a cost–benefit calculation (with costs being equated to constraints). An institution such as the UNSC, Thompson posits, constrains powerful states by reducing their flexibility in deciding when and how to use force, and for what ends. In theory, it can also hold great powers accountable for their military activities—although, as Bosco shows, in practice the ability of the Council to monitor, let alone control, a state in using force is rather limited. On the benefits side of the ledger, obtaining authorization from the Security Council creates opportunities to share both the risks and burdens of an intervention, and reduces the political costs of using military force.

It is with respect to political cost that Thompson makes his most significant claim. While many authors argue that a powerful state may choose to work through international organizations because of their capacity to endow an operation with political legitimation (e.g., Thomas Franck, The Power of Legitimacy Among Nations, 1990; Ian Hurd, After Anarchy, 2007), Thompson instead argues that an institution's authorization transmits information to two key audiences, thereby limiting the costs of coercion. Firstly, it communicates restraint and benign intentions to other governments, which might feel threatened by the powerful state's use of force. Second, authorization by a body like the UNSC signals to the publics of other states that the use of force is justified and its consequences desirable (pp. 27–33), thereby reducing the domestic opposition to the use of force in these countries.

Building on these insights, Thompson develops six hypotheses about powerful states and international organizations, and carefully tests these against the US government's policy in the Council with respect to Iraq. Supporters of institutionalism will embrace his findings about information transmission, given their potential to add to that theory's capacity to explain why and how states “work through” international organizations. Thompson's work also helps to address the criticism that institutionalism has focused too much on political economy, and has not done enough to advance our understanding of security institutions.

The strength of Channels of Power as a work of political science is also the essence of its weakness, however. In striving for general propositions, we forget that we are talking about not just any international organization but the United Nations Security Council—with all the quirks and baggage that Mazower and Bosco highlight. We also forget that we are talking not just about any great power but the United States—which has a very particular relationship with international organizations.

Beginning with the first observation, it is worth asking why endorsement from the Security Council sends the kind of signals that Thompson's theory relies on, especially those relating to the “desirable consequences” of a military action. Does the Council's membership really give other states confidence in its political independence, as Thompson seems to suggest (p. 37)? The continuous calls for reform and enlargement would suggest not. Moreover, as illustrated by Bosco, it is in fact the P5, and not the wider Council of 15, that drafts key resolutions (often in informal, closed meetings).

With respect to Iraq, two questions serve to highlight the limitations of Thompson's information-transmission argument. What if the elusive second resolution on Iraq had been tabled and passed in 2003? Would this have addressed the concerns and suspicions of states about US intentions in Iraq and the wider Middle East? Many diplomats in the non-Western world insist that UNSC authorization in 2003 would have forever compromised the Council's aspirations to be perceived as independent and impartial (a reputation that presumably is important for Thompson's theory). And second, what does public opinion tell us about the capacity of the United States to signal that its intentions are “right” and that the effects of the war are “desirable”? It is interesting to note that although option 1—the use of force authorized by the UN—polled higher in all countries than option 2—the use of force without UN authorization, only in very few cases did this lead to support of the war in Iraq by a majority of people. Opposition to the war continued to be the majority opinion (p. 190).

If we take the second fact on board—that it is the United States doing the transmitting—it is difficult to keep ourselves within the confines of institutionalist theory. Particularly when we consider the case of US policy in 2003, it is clear that the dynamic and complex nature of American domestic politics—and the belief among two-thirds of the US public that it was necessary for the administration to go to the UN—was intricately connected to the Bush administration's strategy (Songying Fang, “The Informational Role of International Institutions and Domestic Politics,” American Journal of Political Science 52 [April 2008]: 304–321). In downplaying the role of domestic factors in explaining the use or non-use of Security Council authorization by the United States, Thompson fails to consider the possibility that international support was primarily a tool for generating domestic support (the real concern of George W. Bush).

The Iraq episode, as chronicled by Thompson, is a reminder of one of Bosco's key messages. When the Council is united, there is almost no limit to what its members can do: wage war, redraw boundaries, impose blockades, unseat governments, or impose sanctions. But those same members, as distinct nation-states, have diverging interests and competing pressures. No surprise, then, that they are so rarely united.