The controversy about Iraq is ultimately also about global governance - conflicting models of how to police the post-Cold War world, writes Peadar Kirby
Far more than war on Iraq is at stake in the events presently dominating world attention. For the outcome of the diplomatic stand-off will help define the nature of the world's security system and its capability to cope with the new security threats emerging in a globalised world.
With the collapse of the Cold War in 1989, the world seemed content to depend on the US to provide its security cover. Yet the Bush administration's decision to target Iraq changed all that, sparking in the debates and actions of the United Nations the embryonic outlines of an alternative multilateral security order.
The outcome of these debates will determine whether this alternative is stillborn or viable.
The decade of the 1990s showed clearly the risks of basing world security on the foreign policy interests of the last remaining superpower. At times, as in Rwanda, the world stood by horrified as the inaction of the US resulted in a failure to prevent barbarity. At other times, as in the air strikes on Serb positions surrounding Sarajevo, the world cheered when at last the US decided to intervene. In Palestine, US policy stymies the international community and prevents implementation of its will.
On Kosovo, the US, Britain and, finally, France engaged in a dubious diplomatic ultimatum to President Milosovic of Serbia as a prelude to a war that probably worsened the humanitarian disaster.
On East Timor, public pressure resulted in feeble US diplomatic pressure on Indonesia and a belated UN military intervention, far too late to prevent bloodshed and destruction. On Sierra Leone, it took a limited British military intervention to restore some semblance of civil order. On Burma, no one has been bothered to do very much against a repressive dictatorship.
Neither did the United Nations offer a viable alternative in these instances, showing its woeful inability to back up words with effective actions to prevent the killing of millions of innocent civilians.
Instead, the UN was far too easily used by the US to offer a fig leaf of legitimacy to what it chose to do.
When the US decided again to make Saddam Hussein the target of its hostile attentions, there was no reason to believe anything would be different.
Indeed, it even appeared it would not bother going to the UN, so unilateralist is the mood in Washington at the moment.
Yet, what have emerged against all the odds are the contours of an alternative basis for securing order in this highly volatile world, one that expresses the will of the international community and that fashions peaceful means to enforce that will.
Two elements are crucially new here. One is the content of the debate about whether war against Iraq is justified.
Never before can the international community have witnessed such a determined and refined expression by leading world powers of the limits of the right to resort to war.
The second is the fact that a peaceful alternative to war appears available as the arms inspections painfully but surely yield more results.
Here, then, lie the foundations of an alternative way to deal with threats to the world's security. It would rest on the ability of the United Nations to determine the nature of such threats and the appropriate response, and it would require the elaboration of more effective peaceful mechanisms capable of defusing such threats. While threatening an armed response as a last resort is necessary in some situations (as it clearly is in the present one), again the UN remains the most appropriate forum to determine this.
To reduce the issues at stake here to a pro- or anti-American stance is dangerously parochial. Instead, they relate to how best to deal with the new and very severe threats to all our security that are proliferating in a globalised world. For it is becoming ever clearer that the erosion of the power of states in a market-driven global economy is resulting in the emergence of global criminal and terrorist networks with good reasons and effective means to target ordinary citizens. September 11th 2001 stands as the awful expression of such threats.
The key question facing the world, therefore, is how to deal with such threats. In his contribution to the debate on war in the British House of Commons this week, the foreign secretary, Mr Jack Straw, spoke about "the issue of what we do with tyrannical states".
Yet, as many opponents of war including the Pope have pointed out, the danger of an armed attack on Iraq is that, in eliminating one tyranny, it propagates another. In President Chirac's words, the danger is that it would create many little bin Ladens.
To many outside observers, US policy and actions around the world seem again and again to sow such long-term resentments. In the past, these found few opportunities for expression as states had a more effective monopoly of the use of force.
All that has changed in a globalised world, heightening the dangers to us all of reliance on the US for our security.
What, therefore, is the prospect that present events could lay the foundations of an effective multilateral security order? On the one hand, what has been made clear is the relative powerlessness of small states in determining the outcome. On the other, in the wave of globalised protest we see the emergence of a popular constituency around the world actively supporting a new world security order.
The ability of the US to impose its will on the smaller members of the Security Council is very evident for the world to see. This illustrates another reality of a globalised world since the greater dependence of most countries on US investment and markets makes them ever more vulnerable to US diplomatic pressure.
This is very evident in the cases of Mexico and Chile, the two current Latin American members of the Security Council.
The situation the Irish Government perceives itself to be in, and its difficulties in defining a clear stance consistent with the principles of Irish foreign policy, is therefore by no means unique.
For, as we have come to depend more and more on US multinational investment over the 1990s, so the gap has grown between what we see as our self-interest and our traditional foreign policy principles.
In this situation, the emergence of a globalised "people power" takes on greater significance.
While it will not in its own right determine the outcome of Security Council debates, it is clearly strengthening the position of those governments, particularly France and Germany, who are leading the opposition to the US.
Furthermore, it is making clear the political costs to leaders who are vocally supporting the US, particularly Prime Ministers Blair and Aznar. In Ireland, it has resulted in some clearer definition of our Government's line.
Whatever happens over the coming weeks, therefore, much is at stake in how it happens.
Though war seems inevitable given the US military build-up, a refusal by the Security Council to sanction it would show that much of the world supports a more co-ordinated and peaceful way of addressing security threats. It is an option vital to all our future security.
o Dr Peadar Kirby is director of the Centre for International Studies, Dublin City University, and a senior lecturer in the School of Law and Government. His next book, Introduction to Latin America: Twenty-First Century Challenges, is to be published by Sage in April.