Overcoming Opposition at the UNSC: Regional Multilateralism as a Form of Collective Pressure

Military interveners often seek endorsements from regional international organizations (IOs), in addition to approval from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), to reassure international and domestic audiences. Toward that end, interveners should seek the endorsement of continent-wide regional IOs with the broadest and most diverse membership, which are most likely to be independent.
In practice, however, interveners often seek endorsements from subregional IOs with narrow membership and aggregate preferences similar to their own, writes STEFANO RECCHIA in the Journal of Global Security Studies. This should weaken the reassurance/legitimation effect significantly.
In his research article titled ‘Overcoming Opposition at the UNSC: Regional Multilateralism as a Form of Collective Pressure’, RECCHIA argues that such narrower regional endorsements are sought not so much to reassure skeptical audiences, as to pressure reluctant UNSC members to approve the intervention by putting those members’ relations with regional partners at stake.
To illustrate this argument and probe its plausibility, the author reconstructs France’s successful efforts to obtain UNSC approval for its interventions in Côte d’Ivoire (2002-2003) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2003) at a time when the United States was hesitant to support France because of the two countries’ falling-out over the Iraq War.
“Both cases provide strong evidence that France used regional endorsements to overcome opposition at the UNSC,”  RECCHIA states. In the Côte d’Ivoire case, it is possible that Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) regional support pressed a hesitant US administration to come on board, not only by putting Washington’s relations with regional partners at stake, but also by depriving the administration of the argument that this was an illegitimate intervention.
By contrast, in the DRC case, the European Union (EU)’s endorsement can less plausibly be seen as having legitimized the intervention internationally, as the EU could in no way signal regional consent from within Africa. Hence, in the DRC case, it is very likely that if the United States ultimately voted in favor of the French-led intervention at the UNSC, in spite of clear misgivings, it did so to avoid harming US political and economic relations with other EU members.
The motivation for seeking regional endorsements theorized in the article – pressuring hesitant UNSC members –was especially visible in the Côte d’Ivoire and DRC cases. Yet since the mid-1990s, France has systematically sought endorsements from regional IOs for its interventions in Africa before requesting UNSC approval, for the most part working through ECOWAS and/or the EU.
“It is likely that in many of these cases, French leaders viewed regional multilateral endorsements as a way of smoothing the path toward UNSC approval by stepping up pressure on hesitant UNSC members,”  RECCHIA states.
In the run-up to the 2011 Libya intervention, for example, the main advocates of military action, France and the United Kingdom, secured endorsements from two regional multilateral bodies – the Gulf Cooperation Council and the League of Arab States. These regional bodies were in a position to put pressure on China and Russia, the principal UNSC holdouts in this case.
“This raises the question whether military interveners are free to ‘forum shop’ and seek the endorsement of regional IOs whose opinion on how to respond to a particular crisis ‘happens to coincide with their own’”.
The goals that military interveners pursue through regional multilateral endorsements should influence which particular organizations they approach. If the goal is reassuring skeptical audiences internationally and domestically, then interveners should seek the endorsement of regional IOs that appear especially legitimate in terms of the breadth and diversity of their membership and/or that can plausibly claim to represent the ‘collective will’ of the region targeted by the military action.
If, instead, the goal is to exert political pressure on hesitant UNSC members, then interveners should seek the endorsement of regional IOs whose members are enmeshed in close political, military, and economic relations with the principal holdouts on the UNSC; the diversity and ‘representativeness’ of the regional IO’s membership should be secondary. The ability of a military intervener to ‘forum shop’ is thus likely to be constrained by the types of benefits it hopes to achieve through regional backing.

Recchia, Stefano (2020) Overcoming Opposition at the UNSC: Regional Multilateralism as a Form of Collective Pressure. Journal of Global Security Studies, ogaa013, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogaa013