Contents

1. Police and armed forces - two polar types of coercive organizations
2. Decentralized Conflicts and Enlarged Policing Ambitions: the New Era of Global Policing.
3. Ambiguities, Dilemmas and Incompatibilities: The New Problems of Policing Militaries
• Unspecified intervention criteria, strategic goals and functional expectations
• Policing soldiers: ambiguous role models and uneasy relationships to civilian society
• The growing significance and broadening range of non-combat goals
• The challenges of "centralized decentralization"
• The growing tension between centrifugal informality and integrative formal structures.
• Ambivalent environmental relationships
• Acceptance or rejectance of the political Status quo ?
4. Conclusions
5. References
6.  

1. Police and armed forces - two polar types of coercive organizations

In the following, it is argued that organizational sociology offers many concepts, theoretical insights and empirical regularities that may be fruitfully applied for understanding how peace-keeping and peace-enforcing acitivities affect the internal structure and environmental relationships the of deployed troops as well as the situational conditions, motivational states skills and role behavior of individual soldiers.
As a most fundamental premise, organization theory assumes that all formal organzations and informal cooperative groupings are profoundly shaped by the characteristics of their salient environment and the kind of tasks they have to fulfill.
Among many others, two major determinants have proved to be particularly consequential:

1. "Task complexity": resulting from the degree of variability , unpredictability and idiosyncracy of emerging problems as well as from the lack of knowledge about effective problem solving procedures.
2. "Resource tension" : resulting from the scarcity of time, personnel and various material means of action. (Lawrence 1981).

Seen under the perspective of task complexity , organzations dealing with the application of violence typically fall into two opposite categories: police and military organizations.

For police forces, it is most important to react quickly and adequately to any type of disturbing events occurring at any unpredictable points in space and time. Adapting to this turbulent conditions, a bottom-up organization is installed where the lowest ranking members are burdened with the responsibility of scanning the environment, taking notice of relevant events, deciding immediately on the spot whether and in what way intervention shall occur, and whether it is necessary to mobilize higher levels of the organization.
Given the limitless manifold of salient events on the one hand and this high discretion on the other, it is evident that the roles of policemen are notoriously complex and conflictive because three extremely diverging functional expectations have to be reconciled:

1. enforcing law and public order (the "guardian of society "- role)
2. mediating and solving conflicts (the "peacekeeper" - role)
3. helping in cases of emergencies (the "public servant" - role) (Regoli /Poole 1980).

In addition, successful policing relies heavily on cooperative relationships with many civilian citizens and institutions (e.g. for getting relevant information). This again implies that police forces are accepted by the population as representing a legitimate societal order and political regime.
On the other hand, the major concern of armies is is to focus huge amounts of resources for decisive violent actions against enemy forces or other clearly defined targets. This goal definition is giving rise to a top-down organization , because effectiveness in focussed striking is heavily dependent on adequate strategic and operational planning, well-coordinated supply systems and highly elaborated systems of centralized leadership and hierarchical controls.
Compared to policemen, soldiers occupy a much more specialized and precisely prestructured roles, and their behavior is far more shaped by intraorganizational structures and processes than by autonomous perceptions, judgments and external interactions.

Of course, structuring security forces in such dichotomous ways is most adequate when only very centralized and very decentralized events of violence are likely to occur.
And it is is least adequate when attacks spread over the whole continuum between scattered individual attacks on the one hand and focussed military attacks on the other, or when most events are of a semi-centralized nature (e.g. involving brigades of terrorist movements, militias of tribal clans or military units no longer obeying central commands. )
For instance, many police organizations have also to deal with rather centralized deviant actors (e.g. Narco-Mafias or terrorist groupings), while many countries usw military organizations to cope with "semi-centralized" intranational violence (e.g. by dissident army fractions or rebellious regions and tribes).

With the exception of totalitarian regimes, modern societies are characterized by a rather neat separation between police and military forces: each maintaining very different principles of recruitment, training and organizational funcioning and operating under completely different frameworks of legal rules and political supervision.
This correlates with an evolutionary trend toward a steadily increasing hiatus between

1. the peacefulness and comforts of normal civilian life and the need to keep the highly compex and vulnerable structures of modern societies protected from violent disruptions.
2. the extremely destructive and dehumanizing conditions associated with modern (particularly nuclear) warfare and combat situations.

2. Decentralized Conflicts and Enlarged Policing Ambitions: the New Era of Global Policing

1. On the intra national plane, very decentralized violence prevailed because organized criminality was relatively weak, terrorism was quite sporadic and larger insurgencies (by dissident provinces , ethnic minorities etc,.) almost inexistent.
2. On the inter national level, the major threat to be dealt with was unquestionably the contingency of (worldwide) nuclear war : giving rise to an extremely centralized system of mutual deterrence on the basis of encompassing military alliances, highly specified structures of strategic and operational planning and extremely complex logistics and socio-technical organization.

On the one hand, terrorist activities called for new kinds of police action characterized by higher levels of planning and cooperation; on the other hand guerilla warfare (e.g. in Viet Nam, Cambodia or Afghanistan) proved to be an embarrassing challenge for too highly centralized and bureaucraticed military organizations (Gabriel,/Savage 1978).
But as both phenomena were ssen to be rather marginal and transitory, they didn't give rise to major measures of reorganization - and even less to the emergence of "third kinds" of coercive organizuations filling the large gap between the two conventional polar types.

In the following, it is argued that recent international developments have brought a major shift toward new types of security problems which are too complex and too variable to be be assigned either to police forces nor to military forces, Instead, search processes for new organizational forms have to started in order to combine high-level police and military capacities on the level of political goal-setting and strategic planning as well as on the level of operational activities.

This change is caused by two very different, causally independent factors:

1. On the level of geopolitical power structures, the end of the Cold War has substituted the single nuclear threat by a multitude of smaller and less predictable international security problems associated with local and regional conflicts all over the World. This is mainly caused by the fact that in this posthegemonic age, no authority structures are effective to supress manifold conflicts between states as well als within nations.

Europe is particularly affected by this change, because the central nuclear threat by the Soviet Union has been replaced by many smaller risks stemming from conflicts in its many "potential mini-Weimar Republics" at its Eastern and Southern Border. (Freedman, 1991:12; Asmus/Kugler/Larrabee 1993).

On a global scale, tt is now understood that the main problem of world peace-keeping is no longer the prevention of wars, but the confinement (or at best: the solution) of many local and regional conflicts going on at the same time (see Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Angola, Rwanda etc.).
This may imply that actual conflicts are allowed to develop and to be acted out , because to prevent them is not possible and to end them would imply too high costs (in terms of infringements in intranational affairs, loss if life etc.) .
Instead, the conflicts are "administrated" in order to prevent them from escalating and/or to shorten them by discouraging the use force and facilitating processes of mediation.

2. On the cultural and normative level , the last decades have been characterized by major redefinitions in the basic values and goals of international policy and law. There is a growing tendency to define "peace" not only as the absence international warfare, but as a more ambitious conditions of "civil order" including the absence of intranational warfare and famine, the respect for minorities and the observation of basic human rights. (Däniker 1992: passim).

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In fact, most actual missions (in Somalia, Bosnia, Angola etc.) are partially or even predominantly motivated by humanitarian reasons, and modern international law has changed to lend more legitimacy to acts of foreign intervention in cases where the fundamental rights of (individual citizens or subnational collectivites (like ethnic or religious groups) are drastically violated (Greenwood 1993:40; Berdal 1993: 3).
At least since the end of World War II, the preservation of "national sovereignity" has lost its place as the single dominant goal to which all other considerations have to be subordinated. Instead, a more complex, multidimensional conception of internationbal law (more in accordance with the German notion of "Völkerrecht") seems to be emerging where equal weight is assigned to the rights of subnational collectivities and human individuals. (Dimitrijevic 1992). These changes may at least partially be explained by a shift toward "postmaterialist" values in highly develpoed western countries (Gobbicchi 1994).
Thus, it would be short-sighted to attribute the recent increase in UN peace-enforcing and peace-keeping missions solely to the geopolitical changes precipitating since 1989.
Since several decades, the rising salience of human rights considerations has steadily paved the way for the humanitarian interventions we see at the present. Of course, the end of the Cold War is causal insofar as some major obstacles inhibiting such interventions (particularly the fear that they may engender escalating conflicts between the two superpowers) have been removed.

On the one hand, the emerging system of peace-enforcing and peace-keeping institutions may be conceptualized as a "global police service" because its main task is to deal reactively with a multitude of smaller, highly unpredictable disturbances and to maintain or re-establish an integral civil order.
On the other hand, it is equally justified to call it a "global military organization" because the troops must be prepared to apply potent means for defending themselves and/or their clientele, for imposing sanctions or mediated arrangements and for deterring conflicting parties from using force.
As a consequence, international missions are "ianus-faced" activities in the sense they can only be successful when highly focussed coercive potentials (needed for generating encompassing states of order) and highly decentralized and flexible applications of violence (essential for the deterrence or diversion of unpredictable small disturbances) are effectively combined.
While the ongoing missions may represent the rather modest and awkward first steps in exploring new ways of dealing with such new problems, is to be expected that "global policing" will become a regular and widerspread activity in the future, so that a framework of institutionalized values, norms, programs, procedures and organizational arrangements will develop for making it more effective and channelling it into regular forms.

In the following, it is argued that the way toward stable organizational forms may be rather stony because the blending of military and police functions engenders a multitude of ambiguities and dilemmas for which there are no ready-made solutions.

3. Ambiguities, Dilemmas and Incompatibilities: The New Problems of Policing Militaries

3.1 Unspecified intervention criteria, strategic goals and functional expectations

1. In the case of police forces , it is clear ex ante which kind of "disturbing events" necessitate intervention, and what is precisely implied by the duty to "restore civil order".
2. Military forces have the unequivocal task of serving the vital interests of their nation by deterring or diverting foregn attacks, and it is quite consensual to everybody whether they are successful or not.

By contast, all international peace-keeping and peace-enforcing missions are plagued by th lack of clearly stated criteria concerning the rationale , courses and aims of their missions.

First of all, the number of salient conflicts has increased so much that very many policing missions seem "justified" or even "necessary", while only a few are "possible" (for any political, organizational , logistic or financial reasons,.
It is evident, that the preservation of world peace as well as regional peace is still a consensual goal, but it is less and less clear what kind of interventions are necessary or at least helpful to achieve it, so that "national interest" (or in German: "Staatsraison") is no longer a clear-cut criterion for deciding what shall be done or omitted.
This is problem is particularly salient for the United States whose major role in preserving world peace is clearly underdefined, because it cannot be made evident to everybody that starvation in Somalia or ethnical struggles on the Balkan are conditions that endanger the security of the nation.

Secondly , the policing goals to "enforce human rights" , to "provide humanitarian help", to "protect discriminated minorities" or to "restore political order" are so diffuse and encompassing that they generate inflationary expectations concerning the number and duration of "necessary" interventions as well as the range of goals missions should achieve.
Thus, neither political nor moral criteria are sufficiently selective to determine ex ante the where, when and how of international intervention, so that such specifications have to be produced ad hoc by cumbersome and rather unpredictable processes of consens-buidding and deliberation:

1. More elaborated mechanisms and procedures of internal communication, coordination and negotiation will be necessary in order to generate consensual cognitive defintions (e.g. about the salience and urgency of different threats or conflicts),as well as consensual opinions about when and how to respond.For instance, the decision of the NATO to support international peace-keeping 'on a case-by-case basis' (instead of formulating standing rules) implies that in every single case, a fundamental deliberation process has to be enacted for deciding if and to what extent the alliance will participate in a mission.
2. Compared with former periods where foreign policy and military policy was structured by rather exclusive elite in the perspective of "national interests", actual security policies tend to be specified by a multitude of different actors and a broad range of competing values and ethical considerations.In particular, the mass media are very active and influential in informing public opinion about the existence, nature and salience of different conflicts and in constructing opinions about what should be done or omitted.

Thus , the public emotions stirred up by the mortar attack against the central market in -Sarajevo (occurring at the 5. of February 1994) were so pervading that they provided a sufficient reason for the UN and NATO to prepare for air-strikes against the ">The larger the number of different conflicts coexisting at the same time, the more it depends on the focus of the media which of them are given attention and which sink into oblivion¹.
It may be hypothesized that media influence promotes the "moralization" of foreign policy because attention is focussed mainly on crises going along with manifest suffering on the individual levels, while blending out many other international conflict developments that may result to be more detrimental in the longer run (e.g. by promoting a longer and more extensive war).
Democratic western nations have no choice than to give public opinion its due weight :even to the degree of not being able to subordinate foreign politics and defense policy to "classical" goals of preserving national security and power in the long run.
As a consequence, military organizations have to face a second "unpredictable environment" within their own country: generated by a political regime unable to act consistently and predictably because of its constant responsiveness to public opinion and various moralistic concerns.

Future military missions are very likely to be motivated exclusively by humanitarian considerations, because its is far more likely to mobilize world public opinion for providing help to suffering people (particularly children) than for achieving any of long-range geopolitical goals (because on this level, extremely divergent or even opposing positions have to be reconciled)².Consequently, only troops with highly cooperative relationships between officers and soldiers should be chosen for policing missions. (O'Reilly 1978).

3. When a military mission is started, it is highly probable that such value conflicts are intrinsic to its task definition, so that commanders as well as individuals soldiers find themselves in the uneasy position of not being able to live up to all major expecations at the same time (e.g. preserving overall security of a region without causing heavy casualties).

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Given the multitude of tasks and goals, it is difficult to determine in advance what kinds of recruitment, training, military organizations and technical equipments are optimally functional for a conducting a specific mission.
Thus, the institutionalization of a "standing global intervention force" is severely hampered by the basic premise that it cannot be known when what types of tensions and conflicts are arising at which places on earth, in what ways they will evolve and what kinds of military action will be adequate in the light of given political, cultural and socio-economic condtions.

Therefore, pre-prorgammed strategic planning has to be restricted to rather general purposes (e.g. instituting decision procedures, access to logistic capacities etc.)
All decisions on more specific levels have to wait until the actual crisis is actualized and has been properly recognized and evaluated.
Actually, UN-missions are oustanding by their almost complete lack of strategic planning and programming (Berdal 1993: 9) This is not only conditioned by a conspicous lack of organizational resources, but also by the fact that deployment decisions are based on very fluid and unpredictable processes of political deliberation, because in "posthegemonic age", all countries are free to take sides.
As a consequence, UN missions have to be initiated in a very short time, so that the way they are specified is very much dependent on current opinions and on the positions of the countries ready to participate.

As a consequence, each strategic mission necessitates a process of fundamental military organization: tailoring a specific combination of forces and a specific course of action according to the given cirumstances.all Therefore, all military units have to be disposed to be mobilized for very different kinds of action and to be asked to cooperate with any other units (of various national origin). (von Ondarza 1993).
As precise strategic goals and operational programs are conspicously lacking, specification has to made largely by using the hierarchy for emitting and implementing orders : so that the discretion of military leaders is very much increased.
In fact, operative units "at the front" may result to be most influential because their "first-hand knowledge about local conditions is unmached by anybody else, so that they acquire a monopoly in "defining the situation" and in prescribing the required course of action.Finally, the lack of common problem definitions and consensual goals makes difficult to get an objective,encompassing and consensual assessment whether a specific mission has been "successful" or not.

Typically, blue helmet troops are only rather small causal agent in a set of different developmental factors involving the local governments and military forces, regional alliances etc³.
Consequently, actions of UN troops may be plagued by the basic fact that means-end relationships are very uncertain: so that no learning processes can be started in order to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of policing missions.

3.2 Policing soldiers: ambiguous role models and uneasy relationships to civilian society

The cold war era provided optimal conditions for making the the outbreak of open military hostilities a very remote contingency. (Kuhlmann 1994). The doctrine of nuclear response (particularly under the heading of "massive retaliation") implied that not more than a small percentage of military personnel had to be committed to operative combat activities, while all the others could be allocated to various (technical or administrative) occupations not strictly specific to military organizations. (Janowitz 1971:20; van Doorn 1979:9; Freedman 1991).

On the level of role qualifications, , this implied that on the one hand, the military could make extensive use of people transferring occupational capabilities over from the civilian sphere, and on the other hand, military training was to a large extent functional for subsequent civilian careers. (a motivating factors for many soldiers, particularly from lower classes and minority origins) (Biderman/Sharp 1967; Janowitz 1971; Browning, Lopreato/Poston 1973).

On the level of norms and values , there was ample room for redefining the status and role of soldiers in higher accordance with the status of civilian citizens: emphasizing their obligations to defend fundamental human dignitiy and their rights to refuse obedience in case of immoral orders. ("Bürger in Uniform") (vgl. Kuhlmann 1994).
It is quite evident that this high interconnection has contributed much more to "civilizing" the military than to a countervailing militarization of civil society (Biderman/Sharp 1967); thus maximizing the functional synergies and minimizing the potential tensions and conflicts between civilian and military sectors.

Recent UN-Missions have demonstrated that under these conditions, involvement in combat is likely and risks of casualties soldiers have to face an environment where scattered and unpredictable outbursts of violence are the rule (Berdal 1993:10)⁴.
Infantry troops with light equipment and low logistic needs are best able to deal with such contingencies, because they can operate even under various unpredictable and quite unsatisfactory conditions ( e.g. in very poor and devastated third world regions, where supply of fuels or heavy ammunitation cannot be secured, supply by air is impossible etc).

This emphasis on infantry deployment implies that almost every country of the world is potentially capable of making a contribution. In fact, many smaller countries are particularly disposed for policing activities because their armies mainly consists of infantry forces⁵.

On the other hand, the new need for combatting soldiers setting their physical life at risk collides with the growing weight given to humanitarian considerations, paerticularly in highly developed, "postmaterialist" societies." (Rühle, 1993; Gobbicchi 1994).
Especially under democratic conditions, governments find it increasingly harder to expose their citizens to such risks in "out-of area"-conflicts not clearly related to national interests.
Paradoxically then, the growing concern given to moral considerations and "human rights" engenders two contradictory consequences.
On the one hand., it legitimizes or even demands active intervention into domestic affairs of certain countries; on the other hand, it makes such interventions less tolerable because governments are less able to win domestic support for risking its citizen's life in military activities far away from home. (Berdal 1993: 31, Rühle 1992).

The high priority given to the prevention of casulaties may easily act as a catalyst for the escalation of war. For example,when blue helmets are getting in a very dangerous situation, they may be successful in getting protection by NATO air-strikes (which may again evoke more aggression by the attacked parties).
On the other hand, the deployment of UN infantry troops may work as a constraint on war escalation because it is envisaged that in the case of larger attacks, they may be seized as hostages or suffer various kinds of retaliatory measures.

On a more general level, fundamental ethical dilemmas are inherent in the notion that the achievement of humanitarian goals justifies not only policing measures, but also the application of potent military force.
The growing global consensus on this issue - contrasting with the bluntly pacifist tendencies of the late Cold War period - does not solve the problem that on every single occasion, explicit thoughts have to be given to the question whether the "proftis" are worth the costs (including in the calculation the more indirect "collateral damages" always associated with any violent activities)⁶.
In simplified Weberian terms, it might be said that the international policing perspective implies "Wertrationalität" : in the sense that n contrast to converntional warfare between nations, the use of force is no longer harnessed to rather precise utilitarian interests , but to the furtherance of diffuse (humanitarian) values .
The problem with values is that they are a rather shaky basis for justifying concrete policing commitments, because they are too general (as well as too conflictive among each other) to imply definite courses of action.
For example, humanitarian considerations may equally justify dozens of innumarable long-term and extensive interventions all over the world, so that evidently, non-axiological cvriteria have to be added in order to decide where something should be done and where not.

Thus, there may emerge an urgent need to define new normative constraints in the application of violence in order to prevent processes of uncontrolled self-escalation which may finish to cause much more damage than good.

3.3 The growing significance and broadening range of non-combat goals

Given such unspecific goal perspectives, it is also clear that military missions can no longer be confined to combat actions (even in the largest sense of this term), but many other more "civilian" functions have to be included.(like providing security for civilians, organizing or supervising the distribution of food, mediating between tribal "warlords", providing provisional forms of political and judicial authority when endogenous political structures are in decay, securingelementary services of medical treatment etc. )
Particularly, the new notion of "post-conflict peace-building" (Boutros Ghali) implies an encompassing role for military forces after all fighting activities have ceased: to maintain a framework of public security for political structure to evolve, for economic institutions to develop and for daily life to normalize.

As a consequence, military missions as a whole become more complex and variable kinds of actions. Typically, the type and mixture of problems and tasks to be coped with cannot be forseen, because - as was seen in Somalia - pure humanitarian missions may easily transform into combat situations (Berdal 1993:76; Sertorio 1994:5).
Therefore, it is not possible to allocate these different functions to different organizational subunits or individuals (e.g. by segregating "public service" units from classical combat troops).
Thus, the new "miles protector" (portrayed by Gustav Däniker) is necessarily a polyvalent soldier : ideally combing classical combat qualities with capacities for providing protection, humanitarian help, medical treatment and with empathy for humans of different cultures⁷.
The spectrum of "necessary" (or at least "useful") qualifications is so large that is is likely to be unmatched by any civilian occupation,. Consequently, there is no clearly delimitated "field of competence" or "professional knowledge" on which specific training programs and occupational role definitions could be based.
Like social workers, modern soldiers will rather follow the model of "semi-professionals" (Toren 1969) : combining various kinds of acquired capacities with qualfications that cannot be acquired at all because they are intrinsic to individual character (like: personal sense of justice, empathy for foreign cultures, talents of persuasion etc.).
Thus, the paradox is created that despite the growing significance of civilian tasks, policing soldiers will find that participation in international missions is not very instrumental for specific civilian careers, because they are not given the opportunity to acquire specific occupational qualifications. On the other hand, blue helmet missions have their own charm and attractiveness because they offer younger people opportunities for rich personal experiences and for displaying many kinds of capabilities and character traits which have no place in normal civilian life (Allemann 1993).

The low degree of role specialization makes it very difficult to assess personal capabilities and to predict individual behavior.
Even in conventional military organization, optimal recruitment and role allocation are difficult task because neither diagnostic tests nor other evaluative procedures proved to be very adequate predictors of combat proneness or leadership ability. (Nelson 1971). All these problems are intensified in policing armies, because the range of needed qualifications and character traits is so broad that and a multitude of competing selection criteria will persist and no standardizable procedures for optimizing rercruitment , role allocation and promotion will ever be in sight

Nevertheless, a strong professional identity of the "policing soldiers" may emerge on the basis of a highly elaborated system of ethical values and rules.
The "miles protector" is a specialist in "Verantwortungsethik" : applying all means (explicitly included the "ultissima ratio" of killing people) in his effort to maintain or restore peace, law, order and welfare in the perspectives of individual human rights and minority self-determination.

The need for a professional "service ethic" is also evident from a motivational point of view.
In conventional national armies, soldiers tend to be strongly motivated by feelings of patriotism, by a wide-spread commitment to defend the borders of their native country and the autonomy of their ethnic group. Thus, individual motivations are largely coincident with the strategic goals
In the case of international out-of area policing missions, this coinicidence will usually not exist. (Kuhlmann 1994). In fact, very determinate and fixed motivations would even undermine the possibility to redefine the goaals of missions or to deploy the same soldiers in missions with verry different aims.
Therefore, the morale of soldiers has to be based on factors not much related to the level of fundamental mission purposes and strategic goals. Pure "extrinsic" incentives (like pay and career mobility) may be indispensable, but unlikely to motivate sufficiently for such complex and polyvalent tasks.
Success is more probable when soldiers maintain an intrinsic role-related (=professional )motivation: e.g. when their major aspiration is to "do their things right" and to participate in the realization of certain values and normative standards they have acquired in previous training and education (Gobbicchi 1994).
 

Seen in this perspective, it is evident that global policing missions will function as laboratories where such an encompassing "global ethic" is worked out and tested.
While the traditional UN was conceived for defining an implementing "macro-ethicical" norms governing the relationships between nations, the new UN will have to add to this a much richer pool of "microethical" values and behavioral standards designed to produce orderly and humane relationships between individuals and (infranational) collective groups.

3.4 The challenges of "centralized decentralization"

1. The missions can be based on the most far-reaching consensus international achievable in the contemporary World community, so that their legitimacy is very high.
2. The widely spread international participation (on the level of stragic decision, military command and specific operations) offers the best premises for neutrality and impartiality , because multinational troops are better able than regional forces to maintain equidistance to all conflicting parties.

• a multitude of different missions are proceeding simultaneously in very diffferent regions
• the idiosyncracies and rapid changes in local conditions make it difficult for the command centers to keep themselves informed and to update constantly their decisions.

Consequently, superiors tend to be heavily burdened with vertical interactions (receiving information and exerting leadership), so that they have less time for being involved in horizontal staff interactions (for deliberating, planning etc.).
As the need for supervision rises, a larger percentage of high ranking personnel has to be allocated to line positions. Thus, the disproportionate growth of higher staff positions (observed by Kurt Lang during the Cold War era (Lang 1968:180) may be stopped or even reversed.

The more imprecise the defintion of the mission and the more variable and mutlifaceted the encountered problems and tasks, the more need for permanent vertical communication in order to redefine constantly the mission in accord with higher-order goals. (Berdal 1993: 43).
In the case of UN commitment, the vertical upward links between the local operational units and the headquarters in New York are known to be very weak (Berdal 1993: 31ff.) Consequently, there has evolved a growing dissociation between ongoing operational activities on the one hand and the production of free-wheeling security council resolutions (thought to be "self-executing") on the other. (James 1993).
Given the insufficiency of formal channels, effective coordination depends heavily on informal social networks and personalized ad hoc contacts among the responsible role incumbents. (Berdal 1993: 56,59).

A most problematic consequence of policing missions stems from the fact that regardless of the real causes an responsibilities, mission failures are readily attributed to the UN headquarters, thus undermining the reputation and credibility of the World organization as a whole.
As the negative course of events in Somalia and Bosnia has shown, peace enforcement activities are particularly risky endeavors for a World organization which has to base legitimacy and authority on the reputation of being a strictly neutral arbiter universally disposable for any kind of intermediation.

The problems are stemming from the two facts that

1. any involvements in active battles are exposed to extremely different interpretations by the fighting parties;
2. such involvements cannot be precisely pre-planned and strictly kept within intended limits, because they are exposed to uncontrollable processes of mutual reactions and escalation.

1. to the role of the UN vis-avis the specific conflict: because whenever peace is enforced, the UN is not likely to be accepted as an impartial mediation agent by all the conflicting parties
2. to the authority and legitimcacy of the UN in general: because it gets the repution of "imposing" peace settlements (according to the preferences of the member states in the security council).

Given this basic condition that there is so much to lose and relatively little to win, , it seems extremely unwise of the UN to undertake policing missions under its own guidance.
A a more promising way may b be to create missions as "joint ventures" created ad hoc by intergovernmental cooperation, so that the UN could constrain its function to provide them with legitimacy and various kinds of "support".

Thus, it is rather improbable the UN will continue to deploy international missions without finding ways to divert responsibilities to lower decision making bodies.
Undeniably, this is highly imperative because the World has no ready substitute for a discredited UN which has lost its credibility and good reputation.

3.5 The growing tension between centrifugal informality and integrative formal structures.

1. A trend toward increasing bureaucratization (=centralization, formalization and standardization) that was particularly prominent between the 16th and the 19th century.
2. A development in the direction of increasing decentralization and informality that has gained momentum during the two World Wars.and subsequent guerilla warfare. (van Doorn 1976: 13).

This development is in accordance with one of the most general hypothesis of organization theory: the more variable and heterogeneous the tasks an organization has to cope with, the less ongoing processes can be guided by standardized formal rules or continous hierarchical supervision. Instead, lower level individuals have to rely either on their internalized subjective judgments or on informal orientations on the level of small informal groups.(Hage/Aiken 1969; Reimann 1974; Ziegler 1968:30).

As cold-war armies had specialized in preventing combat (instead of conducting it), informal structures could easily be suppressed by the formal structures dominating during "normal periods of peace".

In the new era of policing missions, operational activity resumes its traditional status as the "normal state of affairs" , and in comparison with strict combat activities, there is far more room for informality because many new kinds of problems (e.g. humanitarian help, mediation of local conflicts) have to be solved for which no formal procedures have ever been worked out.
When conventional soliders in combat are rather autonomous to decide when and where to use their gun or other weapons, modern policing soldiers are typically confronted with the much more fundamental problem to decide between the use of force and many other possible courses of action.
As in any other organization with highly fluid and unpredictable tasks, almost all participants in policing forces occupy "boundary roles" in the sense that they are burdened with the tensions and conflicts stemming from the discrepancies between intraorganizational rules and orders on the one hand and the exigencies of environmental conditions and external interactions. Reimann 1974; Neghandi/Reimann 1973).

As a consequence, there is a dramatic change in the kind of norms an rules governing the behavior of soldiers.
Compared to traditional combat activities where ethical rules focus on restraining the use of force, there is much more room for a wide range of prescriptive norms that encourage or demand a specific kind of active behavior. For example, soldiers distributing food or providing medical help or commanders called to mediate between conflictive parties have to care about obeying rules of impartiality and justice in their treatment of different categories of people.
Many of these prescriptive norms vary significantly across different cultures, so that there may be discrepancies in the behavior of different national contingents , and helpers always are always run the risk of acting in disaccordance with the values and expectations of the domestic population.

As the decentralized character of policing missions makes it difficult for the encompassing formal organization to set and enforce common standards, the different units are very likely to rely on the ideas and habits brought from their country of origin.

Actually, these tendencies toward "multiculturalism" are encouraged

1. by various organizational characteristics of mission battalions: e.g. by the autonomy of the participating nations to apply their own military lawm within their contingents, , to define their role in direct bilateral negotiation processes with the UN headquarter and to withdraw them anytime when they disagree with the course of a mission (Siegenthaler 1994: 16);
2. by the fact that stragegic mission goals are typically imprecisely defined and variable induring time: a condition which invites the national contingents to develop their own views about action priorities and the relative importance of different aims.

As it is quite typical for new organizations directed toward innovative goals, much guidance has to be produced on the basis of personalized (e.g. "charismatic") leadership in order to substitute the lack of established, well-tested rules and procedures.
Thus, UN missions may offer excellent opportunities for quite idiosyncratic "military entrepreneurs" not fitting into the far more institutionalized military organizations of their native countries.
This revival of personalized leadership is another correlate of the growing dissociation between civilian and military life, because it contrasts with the increasingly depersonalized social controls in private firms and other organizations.

Beside this need for leadership, a high demand for explicit formal rules is created because very small units or even individual soldiers often face the need to take their own decisions "on the spot", without having time and opportunity for consulting higher command levels and awaiting their authoritative orders.
As research studies in social psychology have shown, individuals tend to evoke their most routinized responses when they have to act very quickly, without having much time for reflections and deliberations (Fentress, 19 ).
This regularity implies that the disposition of policing soldiers to display presdictable and uniform responses in urgent situation is critically dependent on habitualized routines acquired in prior training.
When no thorough transnational training for blue helmet missions is installed, they will certainly "fall back" on more conventional (combat-related) role behavior learned in previous (national) processes of socialization.

It is evident that at least at the beginning if their deployment, blue helmet may experience a state of "anomie" because they feel confronted with quite unfamiliar surroundings and ambigous tasks for which they have not been explicitly prepared (Mackinley 1989: 8; Gobbicchi 1994).
During this initial phase, they will be quite responsive for new norms and role expectations directed at integrating them into a new cohesive organization.
But as long as the national battalions cling to their particularistic prerogatives, there is no room for such encompassing strategies of formal integration.

3.6 Ambivalent environmental relationships

However, such relationships are difficult to achive for three reasons:

1. As the troops are at least partially also acting as aggressive (or at least self-defending) military forces, they are likely to evoke inimical reactions: thus undermining the most basic preconditions for later policing work.As the inconsistent behavior of US troops toward the Somalian Clan Leader Aidid has illustrated, it may be hard to decide at certain moments whether certain persons have to be defined as criminals to be pursued and arrested (1) ,as commanders of enemy forces that have to be defeated in warfare (2), or as legitimated military and political leaders with whom one sould seek harmony and cooperation (3).
2. Given the fact that mission battalions are composed of very different national contingents and deployed without thorough prior training, they are not likely to display empathy to the specific population and their culture, to adapt effectively to local climatic conditions, to make maximum use of helpful contacts with internal leaders etc. Even under optimal conditions, the cultivation of "good relationships needs much time - thus colliding with the conventional practive to replace servicing soldiers (and even officers) every six months (Berdal 1993: 48).

In addition, different national contingents cannot be prevented of displaying quite diverse kinds of behavior - some of it judged to be quite unfriendlly or distatesteful in the view of domestic population.
Policing missions would be most effective when deployment could be restricted to soldiers being highly qualified in combat a well as non-combat tasks and having been familiarized with the physical, social and cultural conditions in the respective region.
In addition, it would be helpful if they would be homogenoeus in terms of their own culture and language, so that problems of leadership and coordination (needing so much communication because of the idiosyncratic character of each mission) would be minimized.

Taken all together, a major challenge of "global policing" is to find procedures for circumventing the inconsistencies and paralysing effects stemming from simultanous display of

1. conflict-escalating and conflict reducing procedures
2. dissociating and associating kinds of behavior.The solution may be to entrust the primary goals of "peace-enforcement" and the subsequent goals of "post-war peace-bulding to completely different kinds of troops - the first more "military" and the second more "police-like" in their organization, mentalities and styles of action.

3.7 Acceptance or rejectance of the political Status quo ?

In a very general sense, any commitment to maintain peace logically implies a cetain disregard for other, competitive values which may be more important to at least one of the parties : e.g. the restoration of "justice" by regaining lost territories, revenging hostile cruelties etc etc.
In some cases, the very goal of sustained peace-keeping may be jeopardized because
the short-run goal of preventing the outbreak of - even small - hostilities dominates over the more strategic considerations of dissoluting underlying tensions which may engender new hostilities in the future.

On first sight, this analysis seems not to apply to peace-enforcing missions which typically take place in situations where no normative agreements have yet been settled.
But also in these cases, policing troops can only function effectively within the framework of an encompassing authoritative order. As this protecting umbrella is not provided by the local and regional powers, it has to be generated by an external miliary power (e.g. by the NATO in the Bosnian War).
Of course, such dependencies hamper the capacity according to universal and impartial rules, because it is evident that such protection is provided selectively for specific world regions, time spans and situational conditions, and that the protective powers maintain continously their capacity to determine the course of missions.

Thus, peace enforcement troops may also be blamed of "taking sides" : by accepting the goals and regulations set by nations or alliances willing and able to extert international control.
By providing the actions of these national and regional actors with additional legimacy, UN troops may well contribute to the suppression of short-term violence. But at the same time, they may spread the seed of new future conflicts by evoking the impression the the "West" is engaging anew in colonialist and imperialist endeavors. (Elliott 1994).
 

The use of militias armies is particularly restricted in very democratic political environments, because it proves very hard for any national government to convince public opinion that citizens shall risk their life in a foreign war" (Rühle 1993).
In particular, the new concept of a "rapid deployment force" implies professional soldiers with completed training and with a psychological disposition to participate anytime in any diferent mission.

Particularly within the framework of UN-missions, professionalization is highly needed because mission-specific training and preparation are so minimalistic that everything depends on the resources , qualifications (and leadership capabilities) provided by the national contingents (Berdal 1993: 9).

4. Conclusions

As a consequence, international policing missions are plagued by a number of ambiguities, dilemmas and conflicts stemming from the basic fact that contradictory functional expectations, environmental relationships and principles of organizations have to be reconciled.

The concept of "global policing" must not blurr the basic fact that peace-enforcement tasks will always differ fundamentally from any civilian police action , because they typically don't take place in a legitimated and pacified societal and political order.

Among many oher things, this implies, that

1. action is not triggered as an automated response to observed events , but necessitate highly centralized political decisions (e.g. by the NATO or the UN security council)
2. policing work (e.g. the gathering of information) is typically hampered by lack of acceptance and cooperative support by domestic populations and civilian institutions;
3. beside dealing with micro-level problems, mission goals include quite far-reaching societal functions (institution-building, restoration of political and legal order etc.) completely outside the reach of police organizations.

The inadequacy of existing organizational structures may either discourage future policing missions because the associated risks of frustration and failure are hard to tolerate for a reputable World organizatiomn like the UN. Or the may work as an engine for organizational evolution: by encouraging the search for new structural forms and procedures better compatible with their hybrid tasks.

Thus, contemporary UN missions may have a signficance rather unrelated to the achievement of their manifest goals: as the first "test runs" for exploring empirically new ways of dealing with complex security problems on a global and intercultural basis.
As the best procedures cannot be known a priori, they have to be found out by "trial and error".
Consequently, i it would be very fruitful to install various mechanisms of collective learning: e.g. by inviting participating officers and soliders to explicate their experiences and conclusions , or by conducting systematic comparative research studies in order to assess causes and conditions of success and failure.
From the perspective of organzation theory, it is evident that successful system learning presupposes that

1. personnel is stable rather than rotating: so that individuals are able to accumulate experiences in oder to improve their own behavior.
2. informative bottom-up communication rather than commanding top-down communciation predominates, so that superiors get sufficient knowledge about successes and failure on the operational levels.
3. future mission planning as well as organizational reforms should rely heavily on the expertise of operationally experienced officers and soldiers.

According to Hondrich, War has not ceased to be an indispensable "teacher of mankind" because it catatalyzes processes of collective learning which are much more profound than any preceedings of "rational discourse" or "peaceful negotiation" (Hondrich 1992).
If this is accepted , we may add that international policing missions are very useful indeed because all nationscan instrumentalize them for such learning processes without engaging themselves in destructive conflicts or even setting their own existence at risk.

On a political and strategic level, the new tendency to justify foreign intervention and the application of force in the name of various high-standing values (human rights, minority rights, human welfare, ecological protection etc.) has very disturbing implications.
Compared to "classical" international law which allowed war only in cases of foreign aggressions, such multidimensional value systems are dangerous because they provide limitless opportunities for legitimizing almost any kind of violent action⁹.
Are we no longer aware of the fundamental merits of classical international law which has painfully evolved out of centuries of fruitless war in order to limit intergovernmental aggression?
Don't we recognize that the traditional principle of respecting national sovereignity was particularly apt to preserve the security of smaller and weaker countries , which nowadays are becoming the preferred targets of international policing missions.?

On the one hand, the the notion of "global policing" implies the attractive perspective of providing the whole planet with a kind of "civil order" that has been realized up to now only within some (predominantly western and highly developed) nations. On the other hand, it risks to be self-defeating because the rules and goals of interventions are so fuzzy and the conditions for monopolistic instititutional enforcement are still so far away.

As a consequence, UN missions may notoriously fail to reach their intended aims because they are too much inspired by whimsical moods of world public opinion and the fluid contingencies of intergovernmental accordations, and because the organizational forms badly needed for their fulfillment are not (yet) in existence.

The conclusion may well be that at least in thew forseeable future, the UN should avoid any responsibilities for operational actions, so that its most precious status as a neutral (=uninvolved) international arbiter is not impaired.

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Footnotes

 
1. Thus , the public emotions stirred up by the mortar attack against the central market in -Sarajevo (occurring at the 5. of February 1994) were so pervading that they provided a sufficient reason for the UN and NATO to prepare for air-strikes against the Serbs, despite the fact that it didn't cause any change in the basic strategic situation and equally heavy (but much less visible) murdering went on in smaller Bosnian cities
2. see for instance for public opinion in Italy: Battistelli 1994).
3. This is particularly true for peace-keeping , because the mere absence of open violence may be attributed to very different causes. For instance: have the UN troops in Cyprus really been the decisive factor for the long-term peace along the critical borders?
4. Most extreme dangers are emerging particularly when very heavy arm equipments all into the hands of infranational actors like ethnic groups, competing clans etc. (e.g. in Georgia, Azerbaijan and potential other territories of the former Soviet Union (Berdal 1993: 10).
5. for the case of Switzerland, see: Roost 1976)
6. For instance, it cannot be ruled out that policing soldiers will "infiltrate" national armies with the - rather rude and "militaristic" - views, value orientations and behavioral habits they have acquired in international combat missions;
7. In the long run, it he outcome may be that armies internalize e more and more the functions, of the Red cross and other non-combattant" organizations, because these civil institutions are not able to provide the "umbrella of security" needed for the undisturbed exercise of humanitarian actions (e.g. by diverting violence against convoys or preventing discriminative practices in the distribution of food).
8. It has to be noted that highly formalized and coercive hierarchical relationships (as they are cultivated in traditional armed forces) are a heavy obstacle to the free flow of upward communication , because suboordinates have to fear sanctions when they transmit critique and negative information. (Julian 1966). Consequently, only troops with highly cooperative relationships between officers and soldiers should be chosen for policing missions. (O'Reilly 1978).

Also in domestic policy, this changes has far-reaching consequences, because national regimes may feel more legitimated to make war against autonomist minorities by stating that these groupings follow practices that violate "fundamental human rights."

University of Zurich, Switzerland - Institute of Sociology, 

Prof. Hans Geser, Andreasstrasse 15, 8050 Zurich (Switzerland)
++41-44-6352310
Comments to author: hans@geser.net.