A Security Council meeting in progress. Credit: United Nations

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Apr 12 2021 (IPS)

Commentators talk about a “new Cold War” between the United States and China. They sometimes conclude that the geopolitical rivalry between these two major powers has ruined the effectiveness of the UN Security Council through hostile vetoes and other barriers to Council action.

In fact, however, damaging rivalry on the Security Council is nothing new. The Council has always been hobbled by vetoes and other special privileges of the Permanent Members.

Geopolitical rivalry between the Permanent Five – the US, UK, France, China and Russia –has been a standard feature of the Council since its earliest meetings seventy-five years ago, repeatedly preventing the body from fulfilling its mandate.

Today’s US-China clash has affected the Council, of course, but not nearly as severely as Great Power rivalries in the past.

Some analysts have argued over the years that the Council’s ten Elected Members have moderated the body’s oligarchic tendencies and given it a more effective and “democratic” character. But this is a pipe dream.

Elected Members have a very secondary role, even when they are rich or very populous, like Germany or India. They have a short, two-year term in office and the Council’s rules are stacked against them. The Permanent Members act ruthlessly (if decorously) to hold onto their privileges and to gain global advantage.

Planning for the foundation of the United Nations was undertaken during World War II, by the “Big Three” – or the “Three Policemen” as President Roosevelt liked to say in private. The US, Britain and the Soviet Union sought to take control of world “security” and ensure domination over their own spheres of influence.

As the archives make clear, they wanted control over natural resources and markets for their products and other material benefits – though of course this control was presented in more palatable terms like “preserving the peace.”

Eventually, before the UN Charter was finalized, France and China were invited to join the oligarchy as junior partners. The rest of the nations had to accept the arrangement: take it or leave it.

Over the years, there have been many forms of conflict among the five. The first systemic rivalry pitted old imperial rivals – Britain and France – against more recent powers – the United States and the Soviet Union.

As independence movements challenged the colonial overlords and liberation wars erupted, “Big Three” solidarity collapsed and the Council was unable to act. Britain and France, using vetoes and other means, systematically blocked Council action that would threaten their colonial authority.

The Council could not even hold debates or discussions on most colonial conflicts, not matter how brutal and bloody. Algeria, Kenya, Vietnam, and many other wars disappeared from the Council’s purview.

From the earliest years, then, it became clear that the Security Council was not an instrument for even-handed peacemaking (as many internationalists and peace-advocates had hoped) but a scene of politely ferocious diplomatic rivalry and maneuvering for global advantage.

The colonies won their independence eventually, with help from the UN General Assembly, but not thanks to the Security Council.

Then there was the “Cold War” between the United States and the Soviet Union, flaring up in the late 1940s and continuing until the late 1980s. Each sought hegemony in the decolonizing global order.

This rivalry, too, had a great impact on the Security Council and led to many vetoes and organized inaction on wars and conflicts worldwide. The Soviets used the veto on conflicts in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other places, while the United States and its allies similarly blocked Council action on Vietnam, Palestine, Cuba, Cyprus, Western Sahara, and many other lands.

The multiple rivalries around the globe resulted in Council gridlock that was considerably worse than what we see today. The Council in those days met infrequently and its production of resolutions and statements was sparse.

UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden holding a press conference at UN Headquarters on 24 March 1960. Credit: UN Photo

UN military action in the Congo in the early 1960s appeared to be an exception, but the results in the end were hardly encouraging. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld perished in a highly suspicious airplane crash in the African jungle; a military dictator soon emerged in Congo to protect Western mineral interests.

In 1989, after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a brief period of Council cooperation and more jointly-agreed activity. Council Meetings increased in frequency, vetoes waned and resolutions increased dramatically in number.

There was brief hope that the Council would at last be effective. But this honeymoon did not last long and rivalries soon re-emerged. China, the least active member of the Council, began to extend its global ambitions and to take its Council role seriously.

Russian vetoes and blockages came to the fore again. The Western three, as always, did not hesitate to use their muscle and their blocking power –and they frequently denounced their Council rivals in heated terms. Inevitably, Council action suffered.

But the Council remained far more active than it was in its first fifty years. Wherever we look, past and present, there is no idealized period of lasting cooperation and commitment to peaceful outcomes.

Rivalry and proxy wars still prevail in the global landscape between the titans. What a tragedy that these powers are in charge of solving the very problems that – much of the time – their rivalry creates!

China’s huge economic success and its large population give it a big advantage in the geo-strategic sweepstakes today. It’s hard to remember the passive China that did so little in the Council just two decades ago.

Whatever its current self-interest in Council matters, China is not hostile and negative towards the UN as is its nemesis, the United States. China’s alliance with Russia adds to its clout in the Council and in diplomacy more broadly.

The United States, meanwhile, is hobbled by its negative approach to multilateralism. Bristling with military power and inclined to bullying other countries, the US is still the capo dei tutti capi, the boss of bosses on the world stage. But for how much longer and with what impact on the Council’s future?

The US-China rivalry has not altered the Council dramatically, but it reminds us that there is now a fifth rival that the other four must take closely into account. Council decision-making has a radically new geometry.

The US-China clash may last for years, but it certainly will not be the last major Council fault-line. As long as the oligarchy of the Permanent Five persists, there will future diplomatic battles and future barriers to constructive Council action.

We can and must hope for more. To be truly effective in the future, the Council must be substantially reformed. The Five Policemen, the Council’s oligarchs, should have no place in a democratic and peaceful institution.

But how do we successfully change this archaic structure? Certainly not by creating new Permanent Members and endorsing new national power centers. There are already five too many foxes in the global chicken coop!

Fundamental change will have to come from below, from public pressure, from campaigns that demand a real peace, not Cold Wars without end.

* As Executive Director, James Paul was a prominent figure in the NGO advocacy community at the United Nations and a well-known speaker and writer on the UN and global policy issues. He is the author of “Of Foxes and Chickens”—Oligarchy and Global Power in the UN Security Council.

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Excerpt:

Expressing his deep sadness over Sir Brian’s passing, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered his condolences to the family of the “legendary long-time United Nations official” as well as to his “legions of admirers within and beyond” the UN. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Jan 5 2021 (IPS)

Sir Brian Urquhart, who died on January 2 at the age of 101, served the United Nations in high posts for four decades, beginning in the organization’s earliest days.

Celebrated for his diplomatic skills and his creative organizing abilities, he has often been seen as the embodiment of the UN and its most respected civil servant. After his retirement he lived in New York City, advising Secretaries-General, giving lectures, and writing articles and books. He often appeared at UN-related functions, well into an advanced age.

I heard him quip once, when he had reached the age of eighty-five, that he had become a holy relic, brought out on occasion to add gravity to the proceedings. In reflecting on his death, we should learn from his self-awareness and his skepticism about relics – and we should take his words to heart. The uncritical worship of Urquhart is not a useful activity, even in such a moment.

The UN is understandably seeking to spotlight him, to treat him precisely as a relic in hard times, as a way to celebrate the organization’s history and rally support for its work. But we should see Urquhart as he really was, shortcomings as well as achievements, not as some invented icon from a falsely idealized past.

Urquhart was born in England and trained in two of the most prestigious institutions of the British education system – Winchester school and Oxford University. His was a recruitment path of those who were expected to take important positions in finance and government and to act as managers of the British Empire.

He left university early and enlisted in the army in 1939 at the outset of World War II, joining British intelligence and apparently serving in various secret service capacities throughout the conflict. Late in the war, at the age of just twenty-five, he participated in postwar planning operations at the highest levels of government, including plans for the newly-created United Nations.

Urquhart’s talents were recognized. He was soon brought into the small cadre of top British civil servants assigned to staff the upper echelons of the UN. He is credited with working diligently and effectively to establish the new organization, aided by a keen intellect and a self-effacing humor. When the UN got under way in 1945, he was only 26 and already in a high and influential position.

However “internationalist” Urquhart’s work may have been, his perspective on the world was very different than how we might see things today. He was deeply influenced by conservative British values about the international order and Britain’s place in it.

This included a strong anti-Communist commitment, skepticism about calls for colonial independence, and a determination that the world would be safer in the hands of the great Anglo-Saxon partnership. At the top of the world body, he worked closely with hard-nosed US nationals, including Ralph Bunche, and he shared much with them, including quite likely an ongoing secret service connection.

Though Urquhart was working in a global political context, he had little sense of the personality and geography of the colonial world – “cultural ignorance” says one definitive book on the Congo conflict. Urquhart later confessed that he didn’t know where Congo was located when he first arrived as a key representative of the Secretary General.

“I didn’t even know which side of Africa it was on,” he said later, “I thought it was on the Indian Ocean and I was much surprised to learn that it was on the Atlantic.” Though responsibility for the Congo crisis is shared by many others, Urquhart participated in the dangerous mindset of decision-makers in Washington, London and New York that led to tragedy. He was an influential voice and he helped shape policy that produced awful results.

The Congo crisis saw the first, step towards the militarization of UN peacekeeping. Urquhart is often credited with setting up the earliest peacekeeping missions in the 1940s and 50s, operations that involved interposition of very lightly-armed UN forces between two sides in a conflict. He deserves praise for this.

But in the early 60’s, under pressure of the crisis in the Belgian Congo, peacekeeping went off the rails, setting a dangerous precedent that continues to this day. Urquhart must be held partly accountable for this negative development.

In Congo, the Western powers sought to rein in the country’s first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. A militarized UN peacekeeping force was formed and deployed into the resource-rich territory in response to Lumumba’s own pleas for assistance.

As it turned out, the UN proconsuls showed little respect for the elected government. Urquhart was part of the inner circle around Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold that promoted the ouster of Lumumba, the one leader who might have held the country together.

Urquhart and the UN top brass knew almost certainly that the CIA was working all-out in this regime-change operation, bribing Congolese politicians and even (we now know) seeking to poison Lumumba. Sadly, the UN failed to prevent the nightmare outcome. Congolese army leader Joseph Mobutu seized power with US backing and long ruled over a broken land.

Lumumba was brutally assassinated by Congolese enemies not long after his ouster, a process for which the UN also bears indirect responsibility. Tragically, the bloodshed did not stop there. Secretary General Hammarskjold himself was later to die in an attack on his airplane, while he sought to broker a Congo peace.

Urquhart, who was an admirer and friend of Hammarskjold, later played the loyal guardian of the secrets. He constantly rejected substantial evidence that the Secretary General had been assassinated – not killed in an unfortunate air accident as the official story insisted.

In his noted biography of Hammarskjold and his many lectures and articles on the subject, Urquhart (more than anyone) closed off serious discussion and investigation of the crime for nearly six decades. The hand of the Western secret services in this infamous murder is now increasingly clear. Did Urquhart know the truth?

Urquhart was a tenacious player in the game of survival at the top of the UN. While Secretaries-General came and went and other top staff faded away, he continued his grip on the top posts. That meant that he had to please the most powerful countries, of course, but it also meant that he had to know how to work diplomatically with all the member states and to keep his friendships among the senior staff too. His wit and his understatement helped him survive in the UN’s complex personal and national rivalries and to maintain friends in every quarter.

During Urquhart’s many active years of retirement he wrote widely on the reform of the UN. The Ford Foundation gave him a special post to carry out this work and to burnish his image. He was certainly extremely knowledgeable on the UN’s inner workings, as was his principal collaborator, the radical Irishman Erskine Childers.

Many observers like to point to these writings, especially the three books they wrote together, as a sign of Urquhart’s more enlightened, “multilateral” and democratic views when free from the constraints of UN office. While he did mellow in later years, it should be said that he never abandoned his basic conservative persona.

The progressive current in the books, their bid for a more “democratic” UN, is due almost entirely to the influence of Childers, who complained bitterly in private at the brakes that Urquhart put on their work and the traditionalism that Urquhart brought to the project. Urquhart deserves our thanks, though, for allowing Childers, here and there, to propose inventive and far-sighted ideas.

Much will of course be said about Urquhart’s intelligence, his diplomatic skill, and his many positive accomplishments. We would do UN history a disservice, however, if we do not see him (and the early UN) as they really were – not as relics of an idealized past but as real, often-flawed actors in a contested and still unfinished drama.

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Excerpt:

UN Security Council in session. Credit: United Nations

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Jun 15 2020 (IPS)

Many UN supporters expressed disappointment that Secretary General Antonio Guterres said almost nothing, until last week, about police violence against African-Americans in the United States, or about the massive protest movement that has erupted and the repressive response to the protests by US authorities and police forces.

This moment of grievance towards UN silence and impotence prompts us to look for answers in the structure and history of the UN: why is it unable to call to account its most powerful member when the most basic rules of human rights and democratic conduct are so clearly violated?

The answer is that the UN was created in 1945 to operate under the control of its most powerful members – the United States, in particular, and also the other four Permanent Members of the UN Security Council (the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China).

The UN Charter makes this perfectly clear, but so also does the history of the Organization and the way in which it has grappled with global conflicts over the years. The Charter gives to the Permanent Members a near monopoly over the selection of the Secretary General.

Anyone holding this office has been carefully selected to avoid controversy and to act cautiously when it comes to these sponsors.

A variety of reforms have been proposed over the years to give the UN and its Secretary General more autonomy. NGOs and smaller states would like to see a stronger UN and a leader that could call the big powers to account.

Some have proposed more financial independence for the UN, so that major dues contributors could not withhold financial support as a means of pressure. A global tax could serve this purpose but mere mention of such a tax by a UN think tank drew such fire from Washington that UN officials immediately disavowed the idea.

Today the UN is teetering on the brink of insolvency in spite of its compliant posture.

Another reform idea is to make the Secretary General more independent of pressure from Permanent Members by changing the rules of the election process and by mandating a single, seven-year term.

A 1996 study by two former UN officials proposed the seven-year term as part of a larger reform project. Instead of the standard arrangement of two five-year terms, the authors proposed a single seven-year term in hopes of lessening the pressure that re-election inevitably brings.

https://www.ipsnews.net/2020/06/un-chiefs-silenced-big-powers-vetoes/

This idea is useful perhaps but not by itself a very powerful tool to shield the UN leader, as there are so many means of pressure and threats (and re-election is only effective, anyway, as a means of pressure in the first term).

No person acting as Secretary General can be unaware of the ultimate danger that too much independence can bring. Dag Hammarskjold, the greatest Secretary General of them all, died in an aircraft crash in Africa that most observers now believe was the result of a direct attack on his plane, organized with the direct involvement of three of the five Permanent Members.

More recently, Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his second term, made cautious statements that were critical of the US-UK role in the Iraq War. Washington and London read him the riot act and came close to removing him from office.

In the end, he was allowed to continue to serve, but most of his closest advisors were forced out of office.

Antonio Guterres knows UN finances are under threat and he knows that if he acts there will be serious consequences. If we want him to be able to speak out, we must insist on the transformation of his office and of the UN itself.

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Credit: United Nations

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Apr 15 2020 (IPS)

The coronavirus pandemic has set off an unprecedented institutional crisis at the United Nations – funds are drying up, key meetings are cancelled and the world body is fighting for its future.

The chief management officer of the world body, Catherine Pollard, wrote a dire memo on 1 April, setting out the breadth of the crisis, the depth of the financial shortfall, and the emergency steps to be taken immediately to head off ruin.

This UN emergency comes as no surprise, since the pandemic has brought so many governments and institutions to the brink of collapse.

As of the end of March, the UN faced arrears in its dues for regular operations and peacekeeping of $5.43 billion. Worse still, future payments during the course of the year may not arrive as planned, erasing the UN’s scant reserves.

So, the organization faces what Pollard described in her memo as a “liquidity crisis” – that is, the UN may simply run out of money at some point and be unable to pay for its operations and staff. Will the doors be shut and the UN cease to exist?

Depending as it does on government dues and grants, and by statute unable to borrow money, the UN is in an especially difficult position. Can its squeeze through the crisis and return to normalcy?

This is the question that is preoccupying Secretary General Antonio Guterres and his team. But their prognostications are clouded by the fact that UN budgets have already been cut repeatedly in recent years and a hostile president sits in the White House.

Further, UN activities focus so heavily on meetings, negotiations and other settings in which virus transmission is especially likely. The critically important climate conference, scheduled for November 2020, has already been cancelled. Other cancellations have been announced and more are sure to come.

What cards does Guterres have to play? He must, of course, emphasize the need for common global action, both now and in the future. Narrow nationalism, however in vogue in certain countries, clearly cannot protect the world from corona, climate melt-down, species extinction and other existential crises.

The UN and its system of specialized agencies can and must be at the forefront of any reasonable program for a viable planetary future.Another card in Guterres’ hand is the extraordinarily small cost of the UN in comparative terms.

The UN’s regular and peacekeeping budgets are together less than $10 billion. The regular budget of $3 billion, covering all the UN’s global activities except peacekeeping, is about a thirtieth of the budget of the city of New York!

Any needed assistance for the UN would be very small indeed in comparison to the massive bailouts, some well over a trillion dollars, being announced by major governments, the European Union, and the IMF.

A rescue package for the UN is easy to imagine in that context, but would there be the necessary political support? That would depend on leadership from supportive governments, media and, of course, civil society groups, at a time when many other concerns beckon.

It will not be easy, but neither was the rescue of the UN from its financial crisis in the 1990s.

The hardest part of a bid for special consideration will be to envision the UN in an inventive way in the new world that will emerge post-corona. What can the UN bring to that future world that will be unique and indispensable?
How might it offer a way forward that would win the backing of a broad coalition of thinkers and organizers and ordinary people? Bold moves will be called for, not mere survivalist strategies.

Obviously, much depends on how long the shutdowns last and how different the post-corona world proves to be. If the virus is in substantial retreat by the summer and economies open up “normally” again, the flow of funds to the UN might resume relatively swiftly.

Then a shaky status quo for the UN would be most likely. But if governments open their economies prematurely and those moves are followed by renewed outbreaks and then a broad political crisis, all bets will be off.

That would be the time of greatest danger for the UN but also its greatest opportunity. We can hope that the virus would eventually succumb to human ingenuity and that in its wake a new era of solidarity and internationalism, nurtured by a stronger UN, would eventually prevail.

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A meeting of the UN Security Council. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Dec 8 2017 (IPS)

Since the end of the Cold War, the UN Security Council has dramatically increased its activity and authority. Though the Council has exercised unprecedented global power, it has remained a very insular, secretive and undemocratic body, dominated by its five Permanent Members, armed with their notorious vetoes and benefiting from perpetuity in office.

The United States holds the leading position in this oligarchy. It is the “capo dei capi” – the boss of bosses – ruling with overwhelming authority and towering above the other four: the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia.

The Council’s 10 Elected Members, serving for only two years, have very little ability to influence Council action even though they have the electoral backing of all the other member states.

For the past 25 years, most of the world’s governments have insisted on the need for Council reform to overcome these retrograde arrangements, made more than 70 years ago in a very different world.

They have sought to create a more open, representative and democratic Council. In 1994, the UN General Assembly set up a Working Group to consider far-reaching reform for a new era.

The New Zealand ambassador, who had served on the Council during the Rwanda genocide, said that the Council’s practices were “nothing short of primitive.” The Mexican Ambassador told the General Assembly that Permanent Membership was “obsolete.”

From that time to the present, the Council oligarchy has continued to infuriate the international community by defending the status quo, while the UN General Assembly has continued to press for Council reform.

Some proposals, especially reform in Council membership, involve a change in the UN Charter, requiring a two-thirds vote in the General Assembly, followed by a two-thirds endorsement by all national parliaments – subject, of course, to P5 veto.

Assembly members are well aware of this high hurdle, but they have examined hundreds of specific proposals and engaged in spirited debates on the issues. In light of the difficulty of Charter change, opposition by the Permanent Five (P5), and other problems, the Assembly has been unable to adopt noteworthy reforms.

In the shadows of all the debates, the P5 have firmly defended their privileges. To those that want to change the Council’s stifling procedures, they have said that the General Assembly has no right to interfere in the Council, no right to tell the P5 how to run their shop. P5 resistance to change has at times been fiercely aggressive. Washington has forced governments to recall prominent UN ambassadors who have pushed too hard for change.

To blunt public engagement with the reform debates, the US has also pushed for heavy cuts in the UN’s public affairs budget. P5 anti-reform leverage is backed up by economic and military power.

Beyond the oligarchs’ opposition, there is another source of blockage – the inability of the other 188 member states to stand together and take up a common reform program. Most countries believe that new members on a reformed Council should be elected, but the so-called “rising powers” want to become permanent members themselves.

They want to join the Council oligarchy rather than to work to eliminate this odious privilege. So those who have the most clout to push through significant reforms have hijacked the reform debate to promote their own narrow interests.

The aspirants include Germany and Japan, India and Brazil, South Africa and Nigeria. They have insisted self-servingly that they themselves are the key to a diverse and fair Council, working to promote the peace.

The aspirants have insisted that their permanency would be a “realistic” approach to reform, but in fact their approach has proven to be far from realistic. The P5 remain unwilling to accept them into the inner circle. Nor do the aspirants command the two-thirds majority needed to advance their cause in a Charter amending process.

A bloc of regional rivals oppose new permanencies. Italy works against a German seat; South Korea and China are against Japanese permanency; and Argentina is unhappy about the elevation of Brazil. Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa vie for the hoped-for two African permanent seats. This complex political geometry makes success for the aspirants virtually impossible.

Adding a proposed six new permanent members, each with a veto, would create an impossible blockage on the Council. With more than twice as many veto-wielders, each one protecting their particular interests and manipulating the Council’s machinery to suit their purposes, the Council would be even more oppressive than it is today.

The P5’s multiple advantages in the UN system raise another set of issues. Would the new permanent members expect to have the same privileges as the P5 — their own judge on the World Court, for example, or control of certain high-level appointments in the Secretariat?

The campaigning aspirants say nothing negative about the institution of permanency and they mute their comments about the existing system and its many abuses. They curry favor with the P5 so as to avoid a future veto – if and when their candidacy reaches the ultimate stage.

This favor-currying has been going on for twenty-five years and it has had poisonous effects on the reform process and on the regular business of the Council too. In recent years, when the aspirants have joined the Council as Elected Members, they have generally played a muted and unimpressive role. This is definitely not a pathway towards constructive Council renovation.

For years, the aspirants’ campaign for new permanent members has overshadowed all other reform discussions. It has diverted energy from serious alternatives. Smaller states alone simply cannot challenge P5 domination without hefty assistance from the middle powers.

Presently, reform progress depends on the support of strong non-aspirant states like Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Korea, Indonesia, Egypt, Mexico and Argentina, in combination with the rest of the democratically-inclined UN membership.

Germany, where elite opinion about a permanent seat has long been divided, could break the ice and renounce its aspirations for permanency, leading the march towards a different future.

Political crises over the past twenty-five years have revealed the Council’s despotic failures. They have shown that the foxes cannot be expected to protect the global chicken coop.

As crises multiply, it is time to step up efforts to radically reform this outworn institution, to mobilize broad support for fundamental change and to energize a world-wide citizen movement for Council transformation and UN renewal.

Excerpt:

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Jun 25 2015 (IPS)

While member states, weakened in the neoliberal era, have pulled back from the U.N. and cut its budgets, a charity mentality has arisen at the world body. Corporations and the mega-rich have flocked to take advantage of the opportunity. They have looked for a quietly commanding role in the organisation’s political process and hoped to shape the institution to their own priorities.

Courtesy of Global Policy Forum

The U.N. Global Compact, formed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 1999-2000 to promote corporate “responsibility,” was the first sign that the U.N. as an institution was beginning to work with the corporations and listen closely to them.

Critics point out that the corporations were getting branding benefits and considerable influence without any serious change in their behaviour, but the U.N. was happy to lend its prestige in exchange for proximity to the czars of the global economy.

The World Economic Forum, organisers of the Davos conferences, soon afterwards installed conferencing screens, disguised as picture frames, in the offices of top U.N. officials, so that corporate chieftains could have a spontaneous chat with their counterparts at the world body.Rather than waiting for disaster to arrive in full force, citizens should demand now a functional, effective and strong world body, democratic and proactive, protecting the environment, advancing peace, and working in the people’s interest.

By that time, it was clear that Ted Turner’s dramatic donation of a billion dollars to the U.N. in 1997 was not a quirky, one-off gesture but an early sign that the U.N. was a target of Big Money. Today, the U.N. is riddled with “public-private partnerships” and cozy relations with the corporate world. Pepsico and BP are hailed as “partners.” Policy options have shifted accordingly.

As corporate voices have amplified at the United Nations, citizen voices have grown considerably weaker. The great global conferences, organised with such enthusiasm in the 1990s on topics like the environment, women’s rights, and social development, attracted thousands of NGO representatives, journalists, and leaders of grassroots movements.

Broad consultation produced progressive and even inspiring policy statements from the governments. Washington in particular was unhappy about the spectacle of citizen involvement in the great matters of state and it opposed deviations from neo-liberal orthodoxies.

In the new century, the U.S. warned that it would no longer pay for what it said were useless extravaganzas. The U.N. leadership had to shut down, downsize or otherwise minimise the conference process, substituting “dialog” with carefully-chosen interlocutors.

The most powerful governments have protected their domination of the policy process by moving key discussions away from the U.N. entirely to “alternative venues” for invitation-only participation. The G-7 meetings were an early sign of this trend.

Later came the G-20, as well as private initiatives with corporate participation such as the World Economic Forum. Today, mainstream thinkers often argue that the U.N. is not really a place of legislative decisions but rather one venue among others for discussion and coordination among international “stakeholders.”

The U.N. itself, in its soul-searching, asks about its “comparative advantage,” in contrast to these other events – as if public policy institutions must respond to “free market” principles. This race to the bottom by the U.N. is exceedingly dangerous.

Unlike the other venues, the U.N. is a permanent institution, with law-making capacity, means of implementation and a “universal” membership. It can and should act somewhat like a government, and it must be far more than a debating society or a place where secret deals are made. For all the hype about “democracy” in the world, the mighty have paid little attention to this most urgent democratic deficit.

Though the U.N. landscape is generally that of weakness and lack of action, there is one organ that is quite robust and active – the Security Council. It meets almost continuously and acts on many of the world’s most contentious security issues.

Unfortunately, however, the Council is a deeply-flawed and even despotic institution, dominated by the five Permanent Members and in practice run almost exclusively by the US and the UK (the “P-2” in U.N. parlance). The ten Elected Members, chosen for two-year terms, have little influence (and usually little zest to challenge the status quo).

Many observers see the Council as a power monopoly that produces scant peace and little enduring security. When lesser Council members have tried to check the war-making plans of Washington and London, as they surprisingly did in the 2003 Iraq War debates, their decisions have been ignored and humiliated.

In terms of international law, the U.N.’s record has many setbacks, but there have been some bright spots. The nations have negotiated significant new treaties under U.N. auspices, including major human rights documents, the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Conventions on the Rights of the Child, the Rights of Women and the Rights of the Disabled.

The Montreal Protocol has successfully reduced the release of CFC gasses and addressed the dangerous hole in the earth’s ozone layer. But the treaty bodies tasked with enforcement are often weak and unable to promote compliance.

Powerful states tend to flout international law regularly and with impunity, including treaty principles once considered inviolable like the ban on torture. International law, the purview of the U.N., is frequently abused as a tool of states’ propaganda, to be invoked against opponents and enemies.

Legal scholars question the usefulness of these “norms” with so little enforcement. This is a disturbing problem, producing cynicism and eating at the heart of the U.N. system.

The U.N. may not have solved the centuries-old conundrum of international law, but it has produced some good thinking about “development” and human well-being.

The famous Human Development Report is a case in point and there are a number of creative U.N. research programmes such as the U.N. Research Institute for Social Development, the U.N. University, and the World Institute for Development Economic Research. They have produced creative and influential reports and shaped policies in good directions.

Unfortunately, many excellent U.N. intellectual initiatives have been shut down for transgressing powerful interests. In 1993, the Secretary-General closed the innovative Center on Transnational Corporations, which investigated corporate behaviour and economic malfeasance at the international level.

Threats from the U.S. Congress forced the Office of Development Studies at UNDP to suddenly and ignominiously abandonment its project on global taxes. Financial and political pressures also have blunted the originality and vitality of the Human Development Report. Among the research institutions, budgets have regularly been cut and research outsourced. Creative thinkers have drifted away.

Clearly, the U.N.’s seventieth anniversary does not justify self-congratulation or even a credible argument that the “glass is half full.” Though many U.N. agencies, funds and programmes like UNICEF and the World Health Organisation carry out important and indispensable work, the trajectory of the U.N. as a whole is not encouraging and the shrinking financial base is cause for great concern.

As climate change gathers force in the immediate future, setting off mass migration, political instability, violence and even food supply failure, there will be increasing calls for action among the world’s people.

The public may even demand a stronger U.N. that can carry out emergency measures. It’s hard, though, to imagine the U.N. taking up great new responsibilities without a massive and possibly lengthy overhaul.

Rather than waiting for disaster to arrive in full force, citizens should demand now a functional, effective and strong world body, democratic and proactive, protecting the environment, advancing peace, and working in the people’s interest.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Part One of this article can be found here.

Excerpt:

By James A. Paul
NEW YORK, Jun 24 2015 (IPS)

It is hard to imagine today the public enthusiasm that greeted the founding of the U.N. in 1945.  After massive suffering and social collapse resulting from the Second World War, the U.N. seemed almost miraculous – a means at last to build peace, democracy, and a just society on a global scale.

Courtesy of Global Policy Forum

Everywhere, hopes and aspirations were high.  Seven decades later, results have fallen far short.  On this anniversary, we can ask: what might have been possible and what is still possible from this institution that has inspired such passion, positive and negative, over the years?

The organisation, of course, was not set up by the United States and its allies to fulfill the wishes of utopian thinkers.  Though the Charter of 1945 invokes “We the Peoples,” the war victors structured the U.N. as a conclave of nation states that would express the will of its members – particularly themselves, the richest and most influential countries.

Despite statesmen’s pronouncements about noble intentions, the U.N.’s most mighty members have never seriously considered laying down their arms or sharing their wealth in an unequal world.  They have been busy instead with the “Great Games” of the day – like securing oil and other resources, dominating client states and bringing down unfriendly governments.Faced with urgent needs and few resources, the U.N. holds out its beggar’s bowl for what amounts to charitable contributions, now totaling nearly half of the organisation’s overall expenditures.

Nevertheless, through the years, the U.N. has regularly attracted the hopes of reforming intellectuals, NGOs, humanitarians and occasionally even some governments – with ideas about improvement to the global system and well-being on the planet. In the run-up to the Fiftieth Anniversary in 1995, many reports, conferences and books proposed U.N. institutional reform, some of which advocated a direct citizen role in the organisation.

Among the ideas were a chamber of directly-elected representatives, a vitalised General Assembly and a more representative Security Council, shorn of vetoes.  Some thinkers wanted an institution “independent” from – or at least buffered against – the sordid arena of great power politics.  But most reforming ideas, including relatively moderate changes, have come to naught.

Governments of all stripes have had a very short-term perspective and a narrow, outmoded conception of their “national interest” in the international arena.  They have shown remarkably little creativity and far-sightedness and they have taken care not to threaten powerful status quo interests.

The U.N.’s seventieth anniversary has come at a moment of exhaustion and frustration among reformers that has sapped belief in creative change. We are at a low-point in U.N. institutional prestige and public support.  Not surprisingly, the organisation has attracted few proposals and initiatives this time around.

As we know, the planet is facing unprecedented problems that the U.N. is in business to address: poverty, gross inequality, civil wars, mass migration, economic instability, and worsening climate change.  Secretaries General have regularly appointed panels of distinguished persons to consider these “threats,” but member states have not been ready to produce effective solutions.

Most of the money and energy at the U.N. in recent years has poured into “peacekeeping,” which is typically a kind of military intervention outsourced by Washington and its allies. The organisation, dedicated in theory to ending war, is ironically now a big actor on the world’s battlefields. It has a giant logistics base in southern Italy, a military communications system, contracts with mercenaries, an intelligence operation, drones, armored vehicles and other accouterments of armed might.  Meanwhile, the Department of Disarmament Affairs has seen its funding and status decline considerably.

The richest and most powerful states like to blame the smaller and poorer countries for the U.N. reform impasse (fury at the “G-77” – the group of “developing” countries – can often be heard among well-fed Northern diplomats at posh New York restaurants).  But in fact the big powers (with Washington first among them) have been the most ardent “blockers” – strenuously opposed to a strong U.N. in nearly every respect, except military operations.

The big power blocking has been especially strong when it comes to global economic policy, including proposals to strengthen the Social and Economic Council.  The same powers have also kept the U.N. Environment Programme weak, while opposing progress in U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations.

Poor countries have complained, but they are not paragons of reform either: their  leaders are inclined to speak in empty populist rhetoric, demanding “aid” while pursuing personal enrichment. We are far from a game-changing “new Marshall Plan” or a global mobilisation for social justice that reformers rightly call for.  Well-meaning NGOs repeat regularly such ideas, with little effect, in comfortable conference venues.

The U.N. has weakened as its member states have grown weaker.  The IMF, the World Bank and global financial interests have pushed neo-liberal reforms for three decades, undermining national tax systems and downsizing the role of public institutions in economic and social affairs.  Governments have privatized banks, airlines and industries, of course, and they have also privatized schools, roads, postal services, prisons and health care.

The vast new inequalities have led to more political corruption, a plague of lobbying, and frequent electoral malfeasance, even in the oldest democracies.  As a result, nation states command less loyalty, respect and hope than they did in the past.  Traditional centrist parties are losing their voters and the public is sceptical about governing institutions at all levels, including the U.N.

When nations cut their budgets, they cut the budget of the U.N. too, small as it is.  Bold steps to improve the U.N. would require money, self-confidence and a long-term view, but member states are too weak, politically unstable, timid and financially insecure to take on such a task.  As states slouch into socially, economically and politically conservative policies, the U.N. inexorably follows, losing its public constituency in the process.

Tightening U.N. budgets have tilted the balance of power in the U.N. even more sharply towards the richest nations and the wealthiest outside players.  Increasingly, faced with urgent needs and few resources, the U.N. holds out its beggar’s bowl for what amounts to charitable contributions, now totaling nearly half of the organization’s overall expenditures.

This “extra-budgetary” funding, enables the donors to define the projects and set the priorities.  The purpose of common policymaking among all member states has been all but forgotten.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Part Two of this article can be found here.

Excerpt: