The Pen is Mightier than the H-Bomb

Abstract

Through discourse analysis of interviews with United Nations Security Council diplomats, this essay attempts to deconstruct the binary that opposes power politics and international law and morality. It intends to show that the context (or ‘conditions’) of production of UNSC documents – international law – does not counterbalance the hierarchies that define international power politics, but depends on and reinforces such hierarchies. International law makes the privileged position of some members more acceptable even in a context where the ideal of nations’ self-determination and democracy would seem to demand otherwise. It also allows the most powerful to determine what is to be considered fundamental for the international community, and who is to be constrained by force in these contexts, with important material effects.

• discourse analysis
• hegemony
• United Nations Security Council
• international relations
• international law

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Campus France [grant number 749116F].

Notes

1 ‘Previously germinated ideologies become “party”, come into confrontation and conflict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to prevail, to gain the upper hand, to propagate itself over the whole social area – bringing about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity, posing all the questions around which the struggle rages not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups’ (Gramsci 2000, 205).

2 It is also worth mentioning the power of institutional memory. Diplomats tend to talk in the first-person plural when describing negotiations. The ‘we’ is supposed to represent their embodiment of the country they represent. It also allows individual diplomats to mention their country's position and behavior in a negotiation at which the individual diplomat was not present. In one interview that asked about a past negotiation, the recurrent use of ‘we’ by the diplomat had me asking more questions until the point where she had to say, ‘I am not sure, as “we” were there, but I wasn't’.

3 To keep the identity of the interviewees secret, no names will be cited. Excerpts from interviews are identifiable using the following criteria: position, status as member (permanent or non-permanent) and regional group. Interviews were conducted in English, French and Portuguese; translations from French and Portuguese are all mine.