Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 1 – July/August 2010
In search of assistance.
IT must have been a slow news day. Recently, IPOA and a collection of member companies (guilty by association apparently) along with the U.S. and British governments, were lambasted in the media for “blocking” a proposed U.N. Convention on the Regulation, Surveillance and Monitoring of Private Military and Security Companies.[1] Of course, the central headline of the article was baseless, and a correction was later issued – to change “blocking” to “voicing concerns” – but not before the article was seized on by bloggers to prove the evils of the industry. It also highlighted an interesting issue that has begun to creep into the debate regarding the stability operations industry from the perspective of the media, government, international organizations and other critics alike.
A decade ago, industry critics rightly pointed out that there was a dearth of effective – and international – regulation, and especially enforcement, for private firms supporting international peacekeeping, stability, reconstruction and disaster relief operations. Of course, a significant hurdle in the process of actually finding some kind of resolution was that there were those who conflated private sector operations with mercenarism, and tried to fit the square peg of private firms into the round hole of mercenary conventions. Now that even the most virulent in the “mercenary regulation” camp (such as the U.N. Working Group on Mercenaries) have become more realistic in their views, there seems to be some progress on the horizon.
Journal of International Peace Operations
Volume 6, Number 1 – July/August 2010
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door. . .
- W.H. Auden
Away to a six-horse town.
IN 1935, the General Post Office commissioned England’s poet laureate to write a poem celebrating the rail service that carried the overnight mail from London to Glasgow. Set to music by the renowned composer Benjamin Britten and produced as a short film by the great socialist filmmaker John Grierson, Auden’s “Night Mail” quickly became a national icon.
With a clickety-clack rhythm and, as Auden read it, a bland, thoroughly reliable voice, “Night Mail” captured the role that the postal service has played (in most countries around the world) by reinforcing our sense of national community.
Not even classical liberals questioned the government’s monopoly of the mail. Adam Smith thought that the post office was perhaps the only mercantile project that had been successfully run by government. For John Stuart Mill, the postal service ranked alongside coinage and weights and measures as activities that increased the public’s sense of nationhood.
