With the disaster happening in SE Asia and the NGO's rushing into help, just exactly what is the UN's part in this? Interesting article in the Scotsman on the UN: Wed 5 Jan 2005 Has impotent UN finally outlived its usefulness? George Kerevan THE Boxing Day earthquake is proving to have many unintended political consequences, not least its impact on the United Nations. Isolated diplomatically over Iraq, beset with financial and sexual scandals and manifestly failing to halt genocide in Sudan, the UN must prove its mettle in dealing with the humanitarian crisis in South-east Asia or face a threat to its very existence. Already, there are serious (and sensible) calls for the UN to be superseded by an expanded grouping of the G8 industrial nations, taking in China, India and Brazil. Such a powerbrokers’ club might be better able to achieve global consensus than the sprawling bureaucracy by New York’s East River. Such is the internal crisis that last month, Kofi Annan, the UN’s beleaguered secretary general, hosted a secret meeting of his supporters with the aim "to save Kofi and rescue the UN". This was followed on Monday by a major reshuffle at UN headquarters. The British high-flyer Mark Malloch Brown, a former journalist with the Economist magazine, was brought in as Annan’s chief of staff to impose order on the ramshackle agency. That Annan and his bureaucrats are more concerned with their own skins than with the tragedy unfolding in South-east Asia says volumes about the current state of the UN. No wonder the heading under "United Nations" in the authoritative Oxford Companion to World Politics begins succinctly (and correctly): "The UN is a deeply flawed institution." The UN was founded as the institutionalisation of the victorious wartime alliance of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. That model collapsed with the onset of the Cold War and the UN quickly degenerated into a diplomatic battleground for the two power blocks to court the newly independent colonies of the Third World. With the end of the Cold War, there was a brief honeymoon while the UN flag flew over the broad international coalition assembled to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Thus emboldened, the UN actually warmed to the notion of being a world policeman (the original 1945 model) and sanctioned the overthrow of the vile Haitian dictatorship in 1994. But the dream fell apart once again. The UN stood idly by as the Balkans descended into medieval savagery: only the unilateral NATO bombing of fascist Serbia in 1999 ended the ethnic cleansing. In fact, the UN’s signal contribution to the Balkan debacle was when cowardly Dutch UN peacekeeping troops let Serbian militia enter Srebrenica in July 1995 and murder 7,000 Muslim men and boys in cold blood. During the decade, UN peacekeepers on the ground similarly failed to prevent mass slaughter everywhere from Rwanda to Somalia. Scandalous enough, but it merely implied the nations of the world were again too divided (or preoccupied) to support collective action through the UN to deal with the world’s basket cases. With Soviet expansionism a thing of the past, with the Oslo Accords having seemingly taken Palestine off the international agenda, and with the 1990s economic boom bringing prosperity to Asia, few nations cared about the UN as a global peacekeeper. That should have left the autonomous UN agencies - tasked with everything from feeding refugees to protecting world heritage sites - to get on with their unglamorous but invaluable role. However, two inter-related crises then erupted, and these have now brought the UN not only to impotence (a regular occurrence), but to institutional meltdown under Kofi Annan. The 9/11 attacks and the rise of al-Qaeda’s terrorist jihad created a new kind of threat to world order that the UN was never designed to deal with. The UN Security Council is a forum for the big players to settle their differences, eyeball to eyeball. You can’t do that with Osama bin Laden. Besides, membership of the Security Council is out of date, with the EU, Germany, Japan, India and Brazil excluded as permanent members. Either the Security Council is reformed or an expanded G8 is created to replace it. The advantage of the G8 proposal is that it mixes political debate with trade issues - and the only way to get China to stop blocking action against genocidal Sudan or nuclear-mad Iran, which it does in the Security Council, is to link economic matters directly with security issues. The other new crisis is the descent of the permanent UN bureaucracy into wholesale corruption. There has always been petty sleaze, but it was accelerated vastly by the UN’s oil-for-food programme in Iraq. This was supposed to allow Saddam to trade oil to feed the Iraqi people, while denying the dictator personal access to cash or arms. Instead, Saddam used the colossal billions at his disposal to bribe UN officials to look the other way. No wonder there was a reticence to get rid of him. Annan is the first secretary general to be recruited from the ranks of the UN permanent staff. As such, he lacks the political experience of previous secretaries general and is more prone to defend his bureaucrats from outside criticism. An official inquiry is currently examining why large UN contacts went to a company that employed Annan’s son. There may be an innocent explanation, but at the very least it suggests the UN has become very lax in its procedures. The best solution is a new secretary general - perhaps a former prime minister or president - who carries respect in the major world capitals. It might also be more efficient, in the light of the tsunami experience, to hive off the UN’s overlapping civil emergency organisations. These should be merged into a single international rescue agency, led by a senior military figure. Let’s keep politics and humanitarian aid separate. Today’s world is economically and culturally interdependent in a way it was not 50 years ago. In one sense, that has already made the standalone UN organisation obsolete. Rather than find a new role for the UN, it might be best to give it an honourable burial and create a new economic and political forum for the major powers to manage globalisation. If that is to be the G8, the first steps can be taken at that body’s summit meeting this July, here in Scotland. This article: http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=10392005 George Kerevan: http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=104 Websites: New Years day sprint http://www.sportingworld.co.uk/newyearsprint/
It's better to post a link than to quote an entire article of copyrighted material. This thread belongs on the politics forum.
The U.N. is Porky Pig I didn't know that the U.N. was ever useful in the first place. In theory, the U.N. is great. In reality, it stinks to high heaven with graft and corruption. There isn't enough accountability, yet American money is still thrown into the organization to keep it afloat, without which, it would have sunk into the annals of history long ago. The U.N. is the epitomy of a pork project.
It's worse than the above: The UN hase been claiming credit for US, Aussie, and other nation's heavy lifting! anonymous State Department types report: Saturday, January 01, 2005 _ UN Death Watch . . . Well, we're heading into Day 7 of the Asian quake/tsunami crisis. And the UN relief effort? Nowhere to be seen except at some meetings and on CNN and BBC as talking heads. In this corner of the Far Abroad, it's Yanks and Aussies doing the hard, sweaty work of saving lives. Check out this interview (on the UN's official website) with SecGen Annan and Under SecGen Egeland shows, "Mr. Egeland: Our main problems now are in northern Sumatra and Aceh. <...> In Aceh, today 50 trucks of relief supplies are arriving. <...> Tomorrow, we will have eight full airplanes arriving. I discussed today with Washington whether we can draw on some assets on their side, after consultations with the Indonesian Government, to set up what we call an 'air-freight handling centre' in Aceh. "Tomorrow, we will have to set up a camp for relief workers – 90 of them – which is fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything, because they have nowhere to stay and we don't want them to be an additional burden on the people there." ***I provided this to some USAID colleagues working in Indonesia and their heads nearly exploded. The first paragraph is quite simply a lie. The UN is taking credit for things that hard-working, street savvy USAID folks have done. It was USAID working with their amazing network of local contacts who scrounged up trucks, drivers, and fuel; organized the convoy and sent it off to deliver critical supplies. A UN 'air-freight handling centre' in Aceh? Bull! It's the Aussies and the Yanks who are running the air ops into Aceh. We have people working and sleeping on the tarmac in Aceh, surrounded by bugs, mud, stench and death, who every day bring in the US and Aussie C-130s and the US choppers; unload, load, send them off. We have no fancy aid workers' retreat -- notice the priorities of the UN? People are dying and what's the first thing the UN wants to do? Set up "a camp for relief workers" one that would be 'fully self-contained, with kitchen, food, lodging, everything.' The UN is a sham. http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/ [Jan 1, 2005] =============================== Orson's comment: The UN is French: big on talk, self-importance, corruption and lying. MORE amazing chutzpa above from Diplomad.
unless the UN really becomes a truly world body, UN has outlived its usefullness. I mean that the Security council should be expanded. We have 3 european permanent countries and only 1 Asian coutry and as we can all see and read that Europe is losing to Asia ... However I do support UNICEF as it is doing a tremondeous job inspite of all odds.
The fundamental problem with the U.N. Charter is that it entails a nation surrendering a significant amount of sovereignty. During the Cold War, the U.S. could profit by thereby acquiring allies against the USSR, especially when the Russians were foolish enough to boycott the Security Council meetings. In any event, the Security Council provided the U.S. with "legitimacy" (read: fig leaf) for our military adventures. It also provided the Communist Block with a safe place to challenge us. But now, the UN has nothing of value to offer us in return for subjecting our hegemony to an international veto. International cooperation in everything from taxation to law enforcement pre dated the UN and will continue whether the UN survives or not. The U.S. isn't going to back down from the Bush Doctrine of unilateral pre emptive military force. Even if we did, our unchallengable ability to exert force whenever and wherever we like would make such a submission an empty promise. In short, there's no reason to trust us and every reason NOT to. I think Prime Minister Blair (that simpering toady) prostituted himself and betrayed his allies in the European Union exactly because he saw this handwriting on the wall. The U.K. does not, and will not, dominate the EU. A large number (majority?) of Britons are "Euroskeptic". Note that the U.K. did NOT adopt the Euro. Mr. Blair may well feel that he can earn a place by the American hearth by cozying up to President Bush. History will tell whether he receives the reward he bargained for. History also suggests that the answer will be "No." The UN will either survive as a device for the extension of American dominion a la the Athenian League or it will wither into irrelevance as did the League of Nations. Actually, it has already withered, for all practical purposes.
I don't think that the UN is dead. It remains controversial and inefficient, but paradoxically, that may be part of its strength. One problem that the UN faces is that it has little infrastructure that it can call its own. There aren't fleets of UN ships and planes. What the organization does is call upon the resources of its member states when they are needed. But actions generated by that cumbersome process are almost guaranteed to be slower and less focused than when individual states act independently. We see that in South Asia right now. Another problem is larger and more philosophical. Some 60 years on, we still haven't really decided on what we want the UN to actually be. Is it just an international forum, a place for countries to express their views? If so, then it already works fine and it's unrealistic to expect it to wield the powers and to supply the services provided by nation states. Or do we want the UN to be a world government in the making, some global version of the EU's vaguely-defined "ever closer union"? But if that's the ambition, how many nations really want to surrender their soverign rights to the world body? I think that the UN has a fine record when we look at the specialized agencies under its umbrella. The creation of international air-traffic control standards. The World Health Organization. The UN has a valuable record in smaller peace-keeping operations around the world. The blue-helmets aren't very effective as combat troops, and some of their failures have come when they were inadvisedly thrust into that inappropriate role. But they make decent military police. I think that the UN might have even more intangible clout today than it has had in the past. During the Cold War, the UN was completely overshadowed by the global confrontation between the West and the Communists. But since the end of the Cold War, and along with the rise of globalism, there's a growing sense that nations need the fig-leaf of UN approval, the imprimatur of UN legitimacy, before they take large-scale military action. The first Gulf War was a classic example of a new-style international war, and though the US was acting more unilaterally in the second Gulf War, we stil felt it necessary to go to the UN and to cite UN resolutions. To an extent that we haven't seen before, the UN is subtly becoming the arbitor of what is and isn't a legitmate war. Some of the criticism that the US receives in some circles for "unilateralism" is really a complaint that we aren't playing by the new unwritten rules of internationally sanctioned war. All in all, I like the UN, but I recognize that it will always be a lightening rod. If it wasn't controversial, then that's when it would be dead. It costs money and it requires bureaucracy. If the UN lacks money, permanent staff and facilities, it won't be able to ape a nation-state when people demand that it provide services. So the world needs to decide whether it wants to create, fund and support another distinct level of government. It also represents a threat to national rights and soverignties. If we create a body with real power and with the means to enforce it, each country has to think about what will happen when that power is turned against them, about what it means when that power is wielded in ways that they profoundly disagree with and when the agendas of those in power are not their own. So perhaps the UN that we have now, lame as it is, is really kind of an ideal balance between nothing at all and a monolithic world government. It provides a means to coordinate things like transport and telecomunications, it gives the world a forum in which even the smallest countries can express their views, it provides a mechanism by which the considerable weight of international consensus (assuming that it exists) can be exerted, and it creates a mechanism to coordinate international projects. Concerning this South Asian disaster, the UN will probably start to shine in months and years ahead. The time will come when the most pressing needs aren't the helicopters and immediate aid shipments, but will transition from emergency response to longterm reconstruction efforts. The crisis will slip off the front pages, even though hundreds of thousands or even millions will still be homeless, without jobs and living in tents. That's when the UN will probably be doing good albeit unenviable grunt-work, coordinating the international cleanup and reconstruction efforts, while being resented by absolutely everyone. The affected nations will resent what they see as the meager trickle of aid, the donor nations will resent the cost and added international bureaucracy. Everyone will grumble their heads off, but the work is necessary and somebody's gotta do it.
What's really odd about all this anti-UN talk is that in the '60's, all across the South, one could see billboards saying "Get the US out of the UN." The message was sponsored by the John Birch Society! Now, many of us who despised the JBS, and still do, are calling for the US to get out of the UN. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows!
Actually no... This is exactly what they have been the worst at. Being a military policeman means being able to enter combat. UN troops are notoriously unwilling to do that. Worse in a large number of missions they have actually had a negative influence...
BillDayson, INTERESTING post! So the UN becomes a sort of tribunal, passing judgment on a nation's acts backed by nothing more than the moral force of world opinion? In other words, the UN becomes the organ for expressing world opinion? I would have more faith in that model if the UN actually represented PEOPLE rather than STATES. I would like to point out, BTW, that at least ONE of the "umbrella organizations" for which you give the UN credit, the International Telecommunications Union, grew out of a highly successful series of multilateral treaties governing international telegraph, radiotelegraph, and broadcasting services that came into being in the ninteenth century. These agreements functioned very, very well decades into the age of radio and long before the UN was born or thought of. The same is true for the International Postal Union, the Safety of Life at Sea conventions. The UN, with all of its expense, corruption, and ideological noise making, is simply unnecessary for such international agreements to function. I say get rid of it.
There's that. Getting prior approval from the UN before undertaking military action can help a country avoid appearning as the aggressor. There's also stuff like trade sanctions and the desire of nations to avoid international pariah status. Libya is an example of what can happen when a country deviates too far from the world consensus, I guess. Who was it who asked "The Pope? How many divisions does he have?" Stalin? The will of the people may have considerable moral force, if we adhere to democratic theory at least. But states wield more tangible forms of power. Of course, in the 19'th century half a dozen European neighbors controlled most of of the earth's surface. Treaties that were written in that gentleman's club environment became the basis for world standards, with newly independent former colonies gradually signing on. I'm not sure that world bodies can be created or managed that way any more. I'm not even sure that it's ethical to govern over the heads of the world in that high-handed manner. I couldn't disagree more vehemently. I think that in the 21'st century, when the world is shrinking and becoming ever more tightly integrated, the world NEEDS a general body to discuss issues, reach compromise and consensus where that's possible, and to undertake joint projects that extend beyond the national interests of individual players. The real questions as I see it, are what kind of functions the UN should have, and how much of their own soverignty individual nations should cede to it. Personally, I prefer a modest UN with member states retaining their own national soverignty. That means that I don't expect the UN to act like a national government. Nor do I see the UN as a danger to the United States or even a real problem. I think that it does pretty well, actually, given its constraints. It's interesting to compare the UN with the similar situation in Europe with the EU. That body seems determined to become a super-national government and most of the Europeans (or at least their leaders) seem determined to cede their national soverignty to Brussels. That's not the direction that I would like to see for the UN. I don't think that the world should (or even can) be homogenized. I don't think that it can be given a single direction and a unified agenda. But the world's countless voices definitely need a place to make their voices heard, to hash out their differences, and to cooperate where they can.
I like a lot of what Bill has said. I think there needs to be a public forum where nations speak to each other on a range of important issues. My own sense is that much of the dissatisfaction that is expressed regarding the UN comes from the fact that its reach exceeds its grasp. They make lots of noise about doing things, preventing things, correcting things but then they refuse to follow through. Of course, I'm referring to Iraq. They cranked out resolution after resolution but then never actually did anything about the fact that there was no compliance. I'd say, don't pick a fight if you're unwilling to actually fight and don't start a fight that you're unwilling to finish. I think a good case could be made for the continued existence of the UN. I also think that the UN needs to acknowledge that it doesn't really have any authority or control and act within those bounds instead of pretending that they can actually force a sovereign nation to do something against its will. They only succeed in making themselves look foolish. Jack
