More Than Smoke and Mirrors
COLLINS, MICHAEL
More than Smoke and Mirrors United Nations: The First Fifty Years By Stanley Meisler Atlantic. 386pp. $24.00. Reviewed by Michael Collins_ IN THE PAST eight years, the United Nations has gone...
...President, Haq lamented, the Summit, although fairly teeming with heads of state, was Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark...
...But instead of specifics, he offers a roundup of ongoing arguments...
...But the complementary "An Agenda for Development" is never taken up...
...Meisler is also correct to decry the hypocrisy of a bloc that has not infrequently turned a blind eye to brutality within its ranks...
...Without the U.S...
...Yet not all the initiatives of the new countries were "self-indulgent, adolescent [acts] of folly," as Meisler tends to characterize them...
...Today it would be farcical for a Secretary General to make such a statement...
...That would have afforded readers a better appreciation of the United Nations concept and of the organization's place—if any—in the future of their world...
...Seeking to secure a peace dividend while mending fences with the United States, Europe and China, he further announced unilateral troop reductions and vowed Soviet law and foreign policy would be brought into line with "the values of all mankind...
...Meisler blames the Cold War paralysis in the Security Council and the rise of a "strident" Third World...
...companies through sales of equipment, supplies and consulting services...
...The dramatics were encouraged, Meisler notes, by the fact that "the most histrionic ambassadors [accomplished] the most for their governments...
...initiatives...
...greater than the Organization in which they are embodied," he maintained, "and the aims which they are to safeguard are holier than any single nation or people...
...But only the United States can make the broke and demoralized world body work...
...a sometimes inspired statesman and an important figure in the Non-Aligned Movement ( nam ) —though a lousy economist—get only walk-on roles in this book...
...If the Secretary General's thrust is correct, the top peacekeepers of the future may be economists...
...Even the last superpower feels it has no sovereignty to spare, however, and the UN lives on borrowed sovereignty...
...anti-Semite and all-around xenophobe whom Nyerere forced from power, is quoted at some length...
...in movement toward a new world order...
...In the context of his discussion of "An Agenda for Peace," Meisler agrees that the U.S...
...and other powers have to take a longer, more nuanced view of international crises and the UN's proper role in helping to resolve them...
...Certainly that document, together with years of "anti-imperialist" rhetoric against America's Cold War interventions, did much to discredit the UN...
...More important, the activism that helped spur the transition to majority rule and potential prosperity in southern Africa is belittled as a function of knee-jerk conformity to a party line...
...They established a "tyranny of the majority," says Meisler, epitomized by the passage of the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution of 1975...
...The principles of the Charter are...
...Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson outdueled his Soviet counterpart, Valerian Zorin, and demonstrated for a rapt television audience that the Russians had transported nuclear weapons to Cuba...
...U Thant was indispensable, though, in providing John F. Kennedy and Nikita S. Khrushchev with a way to formally retreat from their nuclear rhetoric...
...In addition, no mention is made of the State Department observation that "a large part of U.S...
...Of course, the United Nations would not have lasted for half a century if all had been smoke and mirrors, appropriate as those tools sometimes are...
...Indeed, he quotes Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole's statement that "The real choice is whether to allow international organizations to call the shots—as in Somalia and Bosnia—or to make multilateral groupings work for American interests—as in Desert Storm...
...The First Fifty Years, in short, is less than an objective account of the strengths and weaknesses of the UN...
...This phoenix cycle arguably began December 7,1988, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev outlined before the General Assembly the "new thinking" behind his deciding to pay the USSR's $200 million UN tab and use peacekeepers to verify the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan...
...These numbers are remarkably wrong...
...When the United States refused to lead, the UN did not know where to go...
...What went wrong...
...and the European nations as being irritated by Third World domination, but their combined assessment has been closer to 70 per cent than 75, while the developing world's assessment has been over 5 per cent...
...Similarly, it might come as a shock to some of Meisler's readers that 80 per cent of the UN's work involves development and democracy-building activities...
...O'Brien cites a number of other instances, too, where, the world body has provided "dramatized legitimation, an aura of dignity and piety, for the clothing of a great power" whose "climb down" from a dangerous position "preserved the peace...
...As historian and former UN staffer Conor Cruise O'Brian wrote in United Nations: Sacred Drama, "officially, the Soviet Union turned back its ships from their Caribbean course at the request of the Secretary General...
...In places like Burundi, tilted budgets create some 170 soldiers per doctor...
...He earned widespread respect, and cooperation, in part by insisting on the independence of his office...
...The developing world consists of almost 4 billion people, not 90 million...
...Nevertheless, once he sets to summing up why "The UN was at a crossroads on its 50th birthday," he puts his finger on the key to the organization's meaningful survival: "There was much need in the United States for a serious debate about the UN...
...airmen charged with espionage in China...
...Thus figures like the former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere...
...With the planet on a hair trigger, a vital safety device was provided by then Secretary General U Thant, whose years of unflappable performances gave him ulcers...
...This feeds smoldering conflicts that do not respond to "fitful interventions," the 1994 Human Development Report shows...
...Missing, therefore, is an important aspect of Boutros-Ghali's strategy in exercising what may be the most vital function of his office: defining an issue with a clarity that compels action...
...Most effective in such circumstances, the volume suggests, would be the least sexy UN activities: de-mining, reducing regional disparities, improving literacy, pursuing inoculation campaigns, and establishing early warning systems to predict Rwanda-like disasters...
...Meisler's counterargument is that the UN has been involved in the half-century's most momentous events, and that the Bosnia and Somalia missions "were dragged down by the lack of resolve in the United States and Europe...
...During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis there was "world theater" in the Security Council, he writes, when U.S...
...The lack of sound economies and civil institutions, he maintains, is a major contributor to most of the bloodletting the blue helmets (and nato forces) are asked to mop up...
...His image of the UN transcended the secular...
...financial contributions to the UN is returned to U.S...
...That is why Mahbub ul Haq, principal coordinator of the UN's influential annual Human Development Report, threw up his hands last year at the World Summit on Social Development, an ambitious Copenhagen meeting whose an-tipoverty agenda he helped shape...
...Meisler identifies the U.S...
...Whatever its political calculations, the developing world contributed significantly to UN successes from El Salvador to Mozambique that transformed "armed movements into political parties," to use the State Department's phrase...
...Idi Arnin Dada...
...Stanley Meisler, in a sweeping popular history, has set out to show why a strong United Nations would be worth the price...
...It does contain a personal portrait of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the current Secretary General, that is worthy of an accomplished novelist, plus an insightful critique of his "An Agenda for Peace...
...It was a player as well in the creation and extension of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty...
...Especially because Meisler has made a sincere and often engaging attempt to jump-start this still necessary debate and redefinition, it is a pity The First Fifty Years is not more balanced...
...a tyrant...
...An] American definition of its own relationship with the UN would determine the direction that the UN would take...
...But its suspicions that Washington holds its interests in contempt reduce the odds of cooperation with U.S...
...Meisler asserts that the "real negotiations were going on in reams of pages transmitted between Kennedy and Khrushchev...
...The 1992-96 series of UN conferences on the environment, human rights, population, women, social development, and cities have so far unfolded like an extended answer to Gorbachev's call to "search for a consensus...
...He makes his case with numerous vivid character sketches and a storytelling style that fulfills his promise of a tale as exciting as "a well-plotted movie...
...He is fully aware of the charges that the body is irrelevant at best, tyrannous at worst...
...In describing the most terrifying moment of the Cold War, though, Meisler sets the movie camera aside for metaphors more suited to UN forums: those of the stage...
...His disdain for the Third World and its influence in the UN distorts his portrait of the organization...
...Reviewed by Michael Collins_ IN THE PAST eight years, the United Nations has gone from peacekeeping triumphs in Cambodia and Namibia to public relations immolation in Somalia and Bosnia...
...U Thant's predecessor, Dag Hammarskjold, who died in the service of the UN, established his reputation by cannily negotiating the release of U.S...
...Neither is the financial breakdown on the mark...
...By contrast...
...Governments that together paid 75 per cent of a budget," he writes, "chafed whenever they were outvoted on Third World economic issues by a two-thirds majority that together paid less than 1 per cent of that budget...
...Meisler is so incensed by the developing world that he occasionally stumbles into odd inaccuracies...
...Nor did it seem to make sense when countries with a total population of only 90 million could outvote countries with a population of almost 5 billion...
...During the 1960s and '70s, newborn countries gained a voting majority in the General Assembly...
Vol. 79 • January 1996 • No. 1
