Two Cheers for the Blue Flag!: Assessing the United Nations
Williams, Ian
ACROSS THE POLITICAL spectrum in the United States, the United Nations excites strong feelings, but these are usually based on preconceptions and misconceptions rather than on an objective look...
...Then as the occupation began to take its toll, and as the number of war dead surpassed that of the 1991 Gulf War, the White House began to reconsider its earlier views and to expand the UN bridgehead...
...Indeed, ethically, it would make more sense to reward South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina, countries that could have had nuclear weapons but chose not to...
...We think that war should only be a last resort, and that the international community acting in concert is vastly preferable to lawless military action...
...And, at least sometimes, the UN can be an impediment to unmitigated American supremacy...
...Only the "West European and Other" group actually elects its nonpermanent member...
...So while there was a frisson of leftist excitement last fall when the United States lost its position on the committee, a sense of perspective should remind us that many of the votes against American membership were cast by regimes that make John Ashcroft look like a spineless liberal...
...He announced in March that when Saddam Hussein went, he would "take the UN down with him...
...Just because Tony Blair has decided that some vetoes are unreasonable, the United Kingdom is no more likely to give up its prerogatives than other Security Council members...
...DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 39...
...The secretary general can bring issues before the members and make recommendations, but in the end, as Bosnia proved, if no one is prepared to act forcefully, to send sufficient troops to defend safe havens, for example, there is little he can do about it...
...Considering economic heft, and contributions to the organization, the two most logical candidates are Japan and Germany...
...We can be sure, in any case, that any reform supported by the United States is unlikely to strengthen the UN's independence...
...Its record, in Bosnia or Rwanda, for example, has been close to disastrous, and even its heralded triumphs, such as Cambodia or East Timor, were far from unqualified successes...
...To the frustration of neocon empire builders and American exceptionalists, instead of a Hobbesian domination of the strong over the weak, the UN provides a forum, a mechanism where the weak can (sometimes) influence outcomes...
...To invoke the UN's normative role, Washington has to persuade a majority of other states...
...But the international balance of power has shifted since 1945, and a decade ago the United Kingdom, bowing to the inevitable, suggested a committee to study the "enlargement"—not the "reform"— of the Security Council...
...This latter role offers considerable potential as a bully pulpit...
...Indeed, at no time was the UN's ability to reflect the real world shown more clearly than in the final debates on the impending war when more than seventy diplomats rose to denounce it, and yet all refused to put their countries in the firing line by sponsoring a resolution and forcing a vote...
...However its use, and even its abuse, comes with conditions, which are not always welcome...
...For Asia, should the new member be India, Pakistan, or Indonesia...
...It is a legislative organization, in that it creates international law and sets standards...
...ACROSS THE POLITICAL spectrum in the United States, the United Nations excites strong feelings, but these are usually based on preconceptions and misconceptions rather than on an objective look at the strengths and weaknesses of the organization...
...It is indeed, DISSENT I Fall 2003 3 5 ASSESSING THE UN as some pacifists say, dedicated to peace, but it was set up to fight for peace if necessary...
...Annan has proven an adept tightrope walker...
...So how many members does it take to make the Council representative...
...I N TANDEM with this normative role, however, the UN also mirrors the real world in which the United States is by far the most powerful state...
...Size in this case does not necessarily matter...
...This goes to the heart of the organization's normative role, which is often overlooked in the face of its enforcement failures...
...This has not made the organization a puppet, but it has certainly made it less independent, and it has weakened the hand of the secretary general, who is at once office manager for the institution and also the custodian of the UN Charter...
...The ability to get away repeatedly with such canards follows from the lack of public attention to how U.S...
...When the UN takes executive action on its own, however, it is much less successful...
...No matter how much Israeli governments try to exclude the UN and its inconvenient resolutions from the negotiations, they know that in the end, any settlement will need UN endorsement if it is to have legal authority...
...Right-wing pundits criticized the UN for its failure to act during the Rwandan genocide, although it was actually Madeleine Albright who threatened to veto any resolution to send additional peacekeeping forces there...
...He phrases his criticisms finely enough to make points for the record while keeping his diplomatic powder dry...
...Keeping public scrutiny on what the existing delegates are doing would be far more effective than juggling with numbers...
...Sadly it is all too representative of much of the world, as this incident suggested...
...Even more cynical were the conservative attacks on the organization in the run-up to the Iraq War...
...The real problem at the moment is less the proportions of representation than the quality of the representatives...
...A truly honorable man, he suffered a nervous breakdown as a result...
...But that does not stop American conservatives from insisting that it is trying to do the former...
...The Conventions on the Law of the Sea, on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, on Climate Change, on Disarmament, on Human Rights, and International Tribunals, are all major steps forward that would have been inconceivable outside the framework of the UN Charter...
...The present veto holders are all nuclear powers, which implies that Pakistan, India, Israel, and maybe even North Korea should now be rewarded with permanent seats, though no one has suggested this...
...Pragmatists, who believe with Henry Cabot Lodge that "This organization is created to prevent you from going to hell...
...But 38 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 Washington is not ready to abolish the veto...
...The UN is the only body that can make a conquest legitimate...
...UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has struggled, in tandem with Secretary of State Colin Powell, to keep links open between the White House and the rest of the world, the UN, and international institutions...
...Across the world, no one would buy Iraqi oil until the UN had authorized its sale and thus given clear title...
...The UN Charter allows permanent members to veto any changes in the Charter, and neither Britain nor France is rushing to give up this symbol of global status...
...But that is a falsely idealistic conception of the UN...
...Indeed, the British envisage a second-class, permanent membership without a veto...
...And the answer to that is very much in the hands of the American public...
...Security Council decisions are sometimes driven by bullying and financial lobbying, just like congressional legislation...
...And of course the world does not recognize Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza, despite all the facts created on the ground...
...Indeed, some go further and regard even the last resort as unjustifiable: the UN is a peacekeeping organization...
...They think it is essential to keep the United States involved and entangled in the organization, even if it does occasionally lurch up and break the strings...
...No rational person who has observed the UN at work could ever suspect that it had either the ambition or the ability to dominate the United States, let alone rule the world...
...And the president or prime minister whom he condemns one day, he may have to rely on only a few days later...
...Italy suggested an EU seat, replacing both Britain and France and preempting Germany, but the prospect of perpetual abstention from a hamstrung Brussels would not improve the effectiveness of the Council...
...From Kyoto to landmines and the ICC, an uninformed and silent public has let a deeply ideological minority hijack its voice in international councils, in contrast to most other democracies where multilateralism has strong political support among politicians and public alike...
...If the members could agree on their candidates, that would leave ten permanent members and ten rotating...
...When we succumb to calls for a more representative UN, we should beware lest we get what we ask for...
...From the very beginning, UN senior officials have been patronage appointments by the permanent five...
...imperialism if it had actually voted to support the attack (as it did and they did during the 1991 Gulf War...
...While Annan and Powell maintained friendly relations, some of the Arab and non-aligned diplomats played for the gallery back home by attacking Annan for inaction...
...Of course, the best way to avoid disillusion is to avoid having illusions...
...Some on the left denounced the Americans and British for attacking Iraq without a UN mandate, but many of those same people would have been as quick to denounce the organization as a cover for U.S...
...But it is important, and it has been neglected for too long by the American left...
...representatives behave at the UN...
...It is executive, in that it carries out member states' decisions in the fields of economic development, humanitarian relief, and peacekeeping...
...And if, as they want, the five new members have vetoes as well, the body would make the U.S...
...control...
...There is, for example, a statistically significant number of human rights violators who get themselves on the Human Rights Committee...
...And it is almost refreshing to note that the United States is not his only critic...
...With the help of the United States, Indonesia averted Security Council action and even managed to produce a majority of abstentions in the General Assembly for any reaffirmation of condemnatory resolutions...
...Increasing representation is likely to come at the expense of relevance...
...Actually, what most liberals or socialists want is precisely what the UN achieves simply by being there—and this is what the right hates...
...The other regions pick their Security Council representatives on complicated Ptolemaic cyclical systems, which often propel weak and bendable countries into the chamber...
...On the one hand, such failures can often be ascribed to the behavior of major member states, but, on the other hand, the occasions when UN officials have resisted such behavior or even pointed out its consequences are strictly limited...
...it can even ease them along to do "the right thing...
...Bill Clinton, for example, blamed the UN for the "Black Hawk Down" incident in Somalia, even though that was an operation conducted without informing the UN forces, which, unthanked to this day, rescued the survivors...
...It cannot order a member state to send in the marines, when the marines are necessary, but in most of the world, the fact that the UN asks can itself be a potent force in domestic politics...
...nor does it stop liberals from complaining that it is not successfully doing the latter...
...This is where the equation falls apart exactly the way, one suspects, the British planned...
...The enlargements that make sense, they knew, are sure to encounter strong opposition...
...But that isn't a view that puts fire in the bellies of supporters...
...Saddam's projected fall was just another peg on which to hang his message of justified and untrammeled American supremacy...
...The UN can indeed be boring, exasperating, foolish, wrongheaded...
...foreign policy...
...This was not a philosophical conversion but, again, a pragmatic accommodation to a reality in which the UN is more important than Pentagon strategists wish it were...
...That is not to say that the United States does not use the organization for its own ends: it has done so repeatedly and successfully...
...One often hears complaints that the UN is unrepresentative...
...But global politics rarely pays tribute to virtue...
...Nuance is often lost on the edges of the political spectrum: in fact, one of the first decisions the Iraqis had taken was to come to the UN so as to bolster their legitimacy against continuing U.S...
...So the secretary general has DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 37 ASSESSING THE UN moral authority, but has to be wary about using it, because ineffectiveness has a price...
...The United States, by far the most frequent wielder of the veto for the last three decades, was incensed because other countries dared even to threaten a veto during the Iraq debate...
...For Africa, would Nigeria, South Africa, or Egypt take the crown...
...And so the UN needs, and deserves, as the old phrase has it, critical support...
...The wise guys in Whitehall predicted the ensuing stalemate...
...Every UN office should have on its wall an icon of Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian peacekeeping commander left without supplies, reinforcements, or direction in Kigali at the height of the Rawandan killing...
...The Lilliputians collectively can negotiate with Gulliver when ASSESSING THE UN bilaterally they would be stomped...
...In recent years, for example, Ireland and Jamaica had an honorable record in risking Washington's disapproval on issues of principle...
...However, when Rwanda's rulers were killing their own people, they had a seat on the Security Council, because it was their "turn" to sit there...
...It often looks like pandering, and in some measure it is...
...But it could never sway enough votes to legalize its occupation, and that failure kept the dispute alive until it culminated in a UN protectorate and independence...
...This may be an occasional role thrust upon it by member states...
...At the other extreme, when the White House decided to give up on gaining Security Council support for an Iraqi invasion, the usual suspects hit the op-ed pages heralding the end of the organization...
...In the Western Sahara after a similar period, Morocco's occupation is still not recognized (some international oil exploration companies have pulled out as a consequence...
...Although it is true that threats and checkbook diplomacy have often played a role in securing majorities, in the end compromises are possible and indeed likely...
...Senate look decisive...
...One constant worry is the unrepresentative nature of the Security Council, particularly its permanent veto-bearing members...
...The United States, correctly for once, warns that once a body such as the Council starts numbering above two dozen, it is a mass meeting, not an effective committee for action...
...And if we are aiming at representativeness, shouldn't we insist that any new members be democracies, responsible to their own people (even though ASSESSING THE UN it would be difficult to throw off China) and that they lose their seats in event of a coup...
...But abolition of either the UN or the U.S...
...But in the end, the question comes down to what we want from the organization...
...And some small countries are as likely to vote against the United States as the Ukrainian delegate was to defy Moscow in the old Soviet days...
...In fact, Perle and his colleagues had been saying similar things for a long time, with all the fervor of true believers predicting the rapture and the Second Coming...
...By being a global organization, with a generally high public standing, the UN symbolizes the principle that there are indeed "meta-laws" above the brutish sovereignties of nation states and that a global society needs global means of mediation and regulation attuned to those laws...
...The issue is, how effectively can the UN be used to win desirable ends...
...UN resolutions are something that the United States preaches about and enforces upon others (because they are often useful), but is not bound by itself (whenever they're not useful...
...Certainly the epitaph from Richard Perle was somewhat premature...
...Even American oil companies operate in a global environment, where the vast majority of customers' governments are ready to enforce international law, so the Pentagon had to bow to Powell's pragmatism or bear the entire cost of administering Iraq itself...
...The only surprising thing about the Indian refusal to send seventeen thousand troops was that Washington seemed surprised, which shows the need for frequent reality checks...
...Congress would be a drastic step...
...IAN WILLIAMS, author of The UN for Beginners and commentator on international affairs, is the UN correspondent for the Nation...
...There is one use both political parties have agreed on: the organization is a useful scapegoat for American policy setbacks...
...it is no more the organization's purpose than enforcing American wishes...
...But placating a restless giant is a more sensible strategy than grandstanding...
...Still, most people on the center and left consider the UN and the growing body of international law to be, overall, a good thing...
...Bearing in mind that it took World War II to fix the League of Nations, it is unlikely that any of us really wants World War III so as to reform the United Nations...
...Most member states agree with the American neoconservatives that one of the functions of the UN is to give the Lilliputians strings to restrain the global Gulliver...
...But ad hoc lists of bullyable micro-states do not cut the mustard...
...If it did not reflect reality, it would be out of touch and hence unable to influence it...
...Despite the frequent dismissive remarks of many Bush administration members, in the end the UN's normative role forced the White House to come back to the Security Council for a resolution about the Iraqi occupation...
...There is a strong and genuine argument for not trying to fix something that works, as the Security Council sometimes does...
...The State Department, and others in the Bush administration, certainly feel the need for external validation, as proven by their extraordinary efforts to mount a "coalition" for the Iraq War: the effect was intended to counter the lack of a UN mandate...
...The Economic and Social Council of the UN provides a nice example: it started off the same size as the Security Council and is now up to more than fifty members—and its work is, mostly deservedly, ignored...
...The rest of the world wants proportionality and is pushing for additional permanent members from the South or from each continent— and also more non-permanent representation...
...Reform or Revolution...
...In the three decades of Indonesian occupation of East Timor, often cited as an example of UN ineffectuality, Jakarta never got clear 36 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 title to the territory...
...In some ways, though, the UN is more important as a catalyst for global developments than as a legislative or executive body...
...In Latin America, Brazil, or Argentina...
...It isn't created to take you to heaven," are probably the UN's soundest defenders...
...It is perhaps typical that when representatives of the Iraqi Governing Council addressed the UN Security Council on 21 July, members of "Iraq Occupation Watch" disrupted proceedings from the public gallery, accusing the UN of "collusion" with the United States...
...It is a typically solipsistic American worldview that measures the UN's value by its usefulness to U.S...
...So the Pentagon has discovered that other governments are not prepared to send troops to stand guard over a hornet's nest while the United States pokes sticks in it...
...It makes no more sense for Nauru to have the same voting power as China than for Wyoming to weigh equally with California in the Senate...
...And it has in fact adapted its practices to reality even while the Charter remains unchanged...
...The resulting resolution, number 1483, was a classic case of diplomatic doublespeak: without quite legitimizing the invasion, it regularized the result and opened up the possibility of deeper UN involvement...
...It is an instrument through which genuine coalitions of willing countries can be assembled, their legal doubts resolved...
...Bush simply had no option, at least so long as he is attempting his bold economic experiment of simultaneously running a war, cutting taxes, and dealing or, better, not dealing with a massive balance of payments and budget deficit...
...Can the UN be "fixed...
...Similarly, some see the organization's main purpose as resisting the United States...
...Congress...
...The Mixed Record The different roles of the UN often blur into some form of multilateral indeterminacy that can cause confusion to friend and foe alike...
...Annan did much to keep the organization from falling totally in the mud during the last trying year, although it sometimes came close...
...That also means, however, that it has little independent initiative in the face of American, or even lesser power, resistance...
...It is flawed, like the U.S...
...Too many of them, like the landmine treaty, the Kyoto Accords, and the International Criminal Court, have met with active opposition from the United States, but the rest of the world has gone ahead anyway...
...They want the legitimacy of a UN resolution and an assurance that their troops will not be dying as latterday sepoys for an American occupation...
...All too often, by contrast, those without honor are promoted...
Vol. 50 • September 2003 • No. 4
