ISSUE 40: NOVEMBER 2005-FEBRUARY 2006

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UN has an "Einstein" moment on reform

Ramesh Thakur is senior vice rector of UN University. This commentary first appeared in the Japan Times on October 3. These are his personal views

By Ramesh Thakur

The optimists had hoped for a "San Francisco moment" in New York, as decisive and momentous as the signing of the U.N. Charter 60 years earlier in the city by the bay. Critics might well conclude that instead the United Nations had an Einstein moment, recalling his definition of madness as doing something over and over again and expecting a different result each time. The organization has been a graveyard of every previous major reform effort.

Shaken by Iraq and beset by allegations of fraud and mismanagement, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan brought together a group of 16 distinguished experts to probe the nature and gravity of today's threats and recommend collective solutions to them through a reformed U.N.

Saying that he had "resisted the temptation to include all areas in which progress is important or desirable" in order to concentrate on items on which "action is both vital and achievable," Annan drew on its report to present "an agenda of highest priorities" for forging a new consensus on key challenges and collective action.

With respect to internal conflicts, the high-level panel argued, and Annan agreed, that "the issue is not the 'right to intervene' of any state, but the 'responsibility to protect' of every state." This is one of the few substantive items to survive. The summit's "outcome document" contains acceptance of the new norm of the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, and willingness to take timely and decisive action through the Security Council when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to do it. I have a proprietary interest in this norm as a member of the international commission that promulgated it, and as one of the principal authors of the report.

Both the panel and Annan proposed a simple definition of terrorism. Its focus on the nature of the acts breaks the unhelpful link with causes and motivations. The proposed definition brought clarity and rigor, removed the ideological edge from the debate and muted the charges of inconsistency and double standards.

Because terrorism deliberately targets civilians to achieve political goals, it always represents a conscious choice of one tactic over others. The strong condemnation of terrorism "in all its forms and manifestations," no matter what the cause, is reiterated in the outcome document. The call for a comprehensive convention is endorsed. But there is no agreed definition.

The triple crisis of nuclear weapons arises from noncompliance with obligations of the Nonproliferation Treaty by some states engaged in undeclared nuclear activities and others that have failed to honor their disarmament obligations; states that are not party to the NPT; and non-state actors seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. Annan warned that "Progress in both disarmament and nonproliferation is essential and neither should be held hostage to the other."

The NPT Review Conference in May collapsed into complete failure. The summit failed to come to any agreement on nonproliferation and disarmament, a failure described as "inexcusable" and "a disgrace" by Annan. More and more countries are bumping against the nuclear-weapons ceiling at the same time as the world energy crisis is encouraging a move to nuclear energy.

There is agreement on a weakened Human Rights Council and Peacebuilding Commission, and on "early reform" of the Security Council through continued efforts. After a decade of talks, they agreed to talk some more. And they wonder why the U.N. is falling into disrepute.

There are two possible explanations for the underwhelming outcome, one cynical, the other charitable. For a U.N. official, it is a tossup as to which is the more dispiriting.

The cynical explanation is that all sides pushed their own interests, blocked items not of interest to them, and criticized others for not elevating the common interest. While pushing items of importance to themselves, they rejected others as not being all that urgent and distracting attention from their own pet reforms.

Canada's Paul Martin expressed "profound disappointment" at the failure to agree on an operational and powerful human-rights council and criticized the fondness for "empty rhetoric" over concrete results, ignoring Canadians' spoiler role in thwarting an enlarged permanent membership of the Security Council.

South Africa's Thabo Mbeki criticized "rich and powerful nations" for blocking attempts to widen the Security Council to include more developing nations, ignoring how the head of momentum built by the G-4 (Brazil, Germany, India and Japan) was stalled by the African Union's insistence on full veto powers for all new permanent members. Washington wanted to focus on nonproliferation and management reform, but betrayed an instinct for mismanaging international diplomacy in presenting a list of demands for hundreds of amendments at the 11th hour to a text that had been under negotiation for months, and in the refusal to link nonproliferation to disarmament.

But Americans have yet to receive a convincing answer as to why the world's only superpower should acquiesce in its own "Gulliverization," bound and tethered by the many fine strands of international treaties and conventions. Or why they should not seek to refashion institutions to reflect their pre-eminence. Or why indeed the growing circle of democratic countries should accept moral equivalence with regimes which are anything but when it comes to collective decision-making.

Westerners blamed the developing countries for blocking efforts at management reform that would give greater discretionary authority to the secretary general in hiring and firing U.N. personnel. This ignores how the senior ranks of the U.N. system are already disproportionately dominated by Westerners. Developing countries fear that Americans and Europeans would commandeer even more positions if the General Assembly surrendered its prerogatives.

The charitable interpretation is that the sense of shared values and solidarity that makes up an international community may have frayed a thread too far. U.N. membership has not just quadrupled since 1945, but grown far more diverse. There are many more states today, with markedly diverging interests and perspectives. The range of issues they have to confront are more numerous, complex and challenging, for example, hot-button items like global warming, HIV/AIDS and nuclear terrorism that were not on the international agenda in 1945. There are also many more non-state actors.

A "community" exists if members share core values and agree on legitimate behavior. The struggle for U.N. reform is a battle over policy, not just process and management. Should it be the forum of choice or last resort for collective-action solutions to global problems: less or more environmental regulation, nonproliferation and/or disarmament, counter-terrorism vs. human rights, a strong state that provides social protection and regulation or an unobtrusive state that lets capital and markets rule? It is a struggle between international Keynesianism and neo-liberalism.

The serious disagreements between the countries of the world on the answers to these questions and other key issues may be evidence of the growing loss, not betrayal, of the sense of international community on which the U.N. is predicated.

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