United Nations, an Organisation on Life-Support?
UNITED NATIONS, 21 Feb 2011
Kanya D'Almeida – TerraViva Europe
While a mass uprising was toppling a dictatorship in Egypt and tens of thousands were marching for radical change at the World Social Forum in Dakar, a high-level group of ambassadors and experts came together at the United Nations late last week to discuss the future of global governance.
Convened by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation, an organisation dedicated to social democracy and international cooperation, the Feb. 10 event drew ambassadors, civil society leaders and policy pundits to a lavish luncheon that belied the somber nature of the issue in question, namely: what is the role of the U.N., the largest multilateral body tasked with managing the world’s crises, conflicts and imbalances, in the ecological, economic and political climate of the 21st century?
Harking back to the words of Dag Hammarskjöld, the second secretary-general of the U.N., Hardeep Singh Puri, permanent representative of the Mission of India to the U.N., reiterated the fact that “the U.N. was created in 1945 not to raise humanity to heaven, but to prevent it from descending to hell.”
Puri blasted the U.N. for having lost ground to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the G20 and other multilateral institutions, citing the fact that NATO possesses almost as many peacekeeping troops as the U.N. as a sign of crumbling institutional failure.
He noted that only 10 percent of development flows and a little less than 10 percent of humanitarian aid is actually channeled through the U.N., indicating that it is lagging even in its core protectorates.
Puri’s formulation of the U.N. posited its primary failure in the realm of innovation, or lack thereof, claiming that an organisation conceived over six and a half decades ago must constantly evolve to meet the unprecedented challenges of the day.
In a world that bears virtually no political or economic resemblance to the post-World War climate, the U.N. does not appear fit to mete out solutions to the gaping inequalities and exhausting conflicts that currently plague the earth, he said.
“How does the U.N. intend to navigate its way through the thicket of national sovereignty?” Puri asked. “How does it transcend the perception that its interventions are guided by narrow political considerations rather than the lofty ideals of the charter? What measures is the U.N. taking to strengthen national ownerships and national responsibility, without which its conflict management and development mandate will be implemented sub-optimally?”
While these questions are provocative and necessary, some experts cannot help but acknowledge that they have all been asked before, with little having been done to address them.
Back in 2005, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations based in New York, stated unequivocally that, “Reforming the U.N. will not matter because organisational issues are not at the core of the problem.”
Haass added, “The real reason the U.N. is in trouble is because there is very little consensus among the major powers of today as to how international relations ought to be structured. The U.N. is not the cause of that problem; it is simply a reflection of it.”
Sadly, experts note, this prognosis is still painfully relevant six years later, as the power struggles within the Security Council keep major international concerns – such as the Palestinian question, global warning and the impending threat of nuclear warfare – off the table.
Last week’s discussion did not suffer from a lack of criticism, though it came up short in terms of fresh new ideas.
According to Martin Lees, an international affairs expert with Gorbechev’s Climate Change Task Force, “The scale and urgency of the issues we face today are greater than ever before in this Anthropocene age, where human actions are impacting on all the natural system of the planet.”
“We are gambling with the future,” he said. “We cannot sustain a business as usual path of economic growth without destroying the natural capital and ecosystems on which we depend, and widening inequality within and between our countries.”
Lees added, “The world economy and financial system are unbalanced, unfair and unstable. Over one billion people today remain in dire poverty in a 60-trillion-dollar world economy, while another billion are excluded from the benefits of progress.”
While all the speakers expressed a desire to involve youth in the reformation process of global governing institutions, their words smacked of an old order that is unwilling to relinquish its control, imagined or otherwise, over the world system.
“You are dealing with a world that does not operate simply on good will and reason and logic,” Lees told IPS. “The world isn’t like that, there is a lot of brutality, a lot of conflict in the world and whatever system you choose to employ cannot be based purely on first principles of decency and warmth and friendship.”
“In philosophy we have Hobbes and Locke – the two opposing philosophers – and we can’t be one or the other,” Lees added. “In fact, we have to be both. Where we can solve our problems by reason, we will endorse Mr. Locke, and where we can’t, we will realise that Mr. Hobbes was correct.”
According to Lees, the Security Council reflects the Hobbesian logic, which stated that, “The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”
“The Security Council was never designed to make logical sense,” Lees told IPS. “It was designed to function, for good or for ill.”
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