UN Peacekeeping in the Congo

From the power vacuum in the wake of World War II stepped two new superpowers and a new world order of bipolarity. The war destroyed Europe, once a force on the international stage. The United States and the Soviet Union were left to compete against each other in all forms and arenas for sole dominance. Their decades-long struggle was nowhere more apparent than in the United Nations (UN). This international organization, designed to promote peace and provide a forum for state cooperation, became anything but, as the two superpowers vied in an all out struggle of power politics until the end of the Cold War. A prime example, and perhaps, as Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General from 1953 to 1961, argued, the most important UN peacekeeping operation of the Cold War was the UN intervention in the Congo, Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC), that began in 1960. The Congolese crisis demonstrated that the Cold War cleavage was powerful enough to penetrate even the very international organization created to eliminate the influence of individual state interests; the clear East-West divide not only further escalated the internal Congolese conflict but also further strained US and Soviet relations in all aspects of the UN.

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Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject History Europe - Germany - Postwar Period, Cold War, grade: A, Colby College (-), language: English, abstract: From the power vacuum in the wake of World War II stepped two new superpowers and a new world order of bipolarity. The war destroyed Europe, once a force on the international stage. The United States and the Soviet Union were left to compete against each other in all forms and arenas for sole dominance. Their decades-long struggle was nowhere more apparent than in the United Nations (UN). This international organization, designed to promote peace and provide a forum for state cooperation, became anything but, as the two superpowers vied in an all out struggle of power politics until the end of the Cold War. A prime example, and perhaps, as Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN Secretary-General from 1953 to 1961, argued, the most important UN peacekeeping operation of the Cold War was the UN intervention in the Congo, Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (ONUC), that began in 1960. The Congolese crisis demonstrated that the Cold War cleavage was powerful enough to penetrate even the very international organization created to eliminate the influence of individual state interests; the clear East-West divide not only further escalated the internal Congolese conflict but also further strained US and Soviet relations in all aspects of the UN.