By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Mar 12 2003 (IPS)

The options for a response to the Iraq crisis – unilateral or multilateral – reflect a tension that has been at the forefront of international politics since U.S. President George W. Bush took office in 2001, and is manifest in two international bodies headquartered in Geneva, the Conference on Disarmament and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Critics lambaste the United States for swimming against the current of the international community on global issues. Acting in its role as the sole superpower, Washington is going it alone on matters as diverse as climate change, the creation of the International Criminal Court, and particularly security since the Sep 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

But the Conference on Disarmament, the world’s only multilateral forum dedicated to debate on weapons control, has been bogged down since before 2001, largely because the United States has favoured a bilateral approach to arms treaties.

The main criticisms against Washington on the disarmament question are the result of its refusal to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty, and its abandonment of the negotiations to adopt a protocol for implementation of the convention against biological weapons.

The United States has also been dubbed "unilateralist", accused of obstructing Conference negotiations on nuclear disarmament and on ending the arms race in outer space.

U.S. assistant secretary for arms control, Stephen Rademaker, says "it has become fashionable in some circles to charge the U.S. with ‘unilateralism’," and he criticises the brand of multilateralism practiced by the Conference.

"In fact, the United States was committed to multilateralism and its policies were profoundly multilateralist," he argues.

In practice, the blockage of multilateral actions by the Conference on Disarmament do not come only from the United States, but also from the rest of the established nuclear powers (Russia, Britain, France and China) and from other countries that possess nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan.

Independent disarmament experts had already forecast a very gloomy future for the Conference, including the possibility that it might disappear altogether. An invasion of Iraq, with the unforeseeable consequences it would entail, could put an end to the disarmament forum once and for all, says a Latin American diplomat who requested anonymity.

And in the trade arena the outlook is not much better.

Negotiations at the WTO have usually ended up pitting the wealthy countries of the North against the poor countries of the South.

On top of these differences, accentuated recently during the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks, come the tensions arising amongst the industrialised countries about how to handle the Iraq crisis.

The WTO is convening the ministers from its 145 member states for a conference in September in the Mexican resort city of Cancun, where they will assess the progress and direction of the trade talks mandated at the last ministerial meet, in Doha, Qatar, in late 2001.

But prior assessments by diplomats in Geneva are gloomy. The WTO director-general himself, Supachai Panitchpakdi, admitted that "things are not going well," particularly in the case of talks on liberalising farm trade.

But Supachai has always called attention to the attitude of world’s trade ministers in Doha, where "they showed the determination to make multilateralism work" in spite of "a climate of dangerous international uncertainty."

Brazil’s foreign minister Celso Amorim, in Geneva this week, noted that the difficulties that have arisen are forcing negotiators to "rethink agriculture," which he says is the equivalent of "rethinking the Doha Round."

The current "rise in protectionism – directly linked with unilateralism – and occurring at a crucial moment for the evolution of the multilateral institutions," says Brazilian expert Welber Barral, professor of international economic law at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.

The future of other intergovernmental organisations in Geneva will depend to a large extent on what happens at the U.N. headquarters in New York, where the political fate of the multilateral system is decided.

However, Swiss academic Víctor-Yves Ghebali, of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, in Geneva, ruled out fatal threats to the U.N. in the case of an invasion of Iraq without the approval of the Security Council.

While it is true that the U.N. is in the middle of one of its worst moments, the international forum has withstood other crises, said Ghebali.

If the United States launches an attack without the authorisation of the U.N. Security Council, or in spite of the announced vetoes from France and Russia, it would first convert the United States into an invasive power, and then into an occupying power, he added.

However, the United States would escape condemnation. An unwritten rule, says Ghebali, is that sanctions against aggressor states, as stipulated in the U.N. Charter, are not applied in the case of the Security Council’s permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia, United States.

For this reason, the U.N. never issued a condemnation of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, nor of the Soviet troops entering Hungary or Afghanistan, commented the expert.

But there are alternative visions about the future of intergovernmental organisations, such as those formulated by civil society groups.

Claude Martin, director-general of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund), says that despite disappointment in the results of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, held last year in South Africa, he is confident that new alliances will be able to "mitigate the current flaws in the multilateral system."

Martin listed among such alliances "new constellations of enlightened governments, intergovernmental institutions, environmental and development NGOs, forward-looking companies, and creative thinkers."

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