RE-INVENTING THE UNITED NATIONS
This
piece appeared in the September 2006 issue of The Foreign Service Journal,
the official magazine of the American Foreign Service Officers
Association. It was part of a six-article special section on
"How to Achieve Meaningful UN Reform." (All six articles
are available to subscribers of the American Foreign Service Association
Journal.)
[Download a PDF of the full article from FSJ
here (7 pages, 287k; right-click, save-target-as to your harddrive)]
By Tad Daley and David Lionel
Tad
Daley, who led an initiative called the "Campaign for a New UN Charter"
during the UN's 50th anniversary year in 1995, is now Peace and Disarmament
Fellow in the Los Angeles office of Physicians for Social Responsibility,
the Nobel Laureate anti-nuclear organization.
David Lionel, President of the Earth Television Public Education
Foundation, is a veteran producer of documentaries portraying the
historic UN civil society forums of the past 15 years, including those
in Rio in 1992, Istanbul in 1996, and the Millennium Forum in New York
in 2000. He is developing a weekly digest of the vast quantity of UN-produced
TV programming that is presently unseen in the United States.
* * * * * * * *
Drive
from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge and turn left, and you
will arrive before long at John Muir Woods, home of the oldest living
things on Planet Earth. Walk along the path back into the forest for a
few miles, and you will come across a heavy metal and stone plaque set
squarely into the earth.
It's dated April 29, 1945 - ten days before the surrender of Nazi Germany,
more than three months before the atomic devastation of Japan, less than
three weeks since the death of arguably the greatest statesman of the
age. The plaque says this: "Here in this grove of enduring redwoods,
preserved for posterity, members of the United Nations Conference on International
Organizations met on April 29, 1945, to honor the memory of Franklin Delano
Roosevelt: Thirty-Second President of the United States, Chief Architect
of the United Nations, and Apostle of Lasting Peace for all Mankind."
The work of that architect has stood the test of time. But the challenge
that apostle chose to take on is at least as acute today as it was a long
six decades ago. And a whole host of new challenges have emerged, ones
simply not on the radar screen of the framers who met in San Francisco
during that fertile spring.
Today the world faces non-state terror networks, failed states, intractable
poverty, AIDS and other pandemics, the challenge of governing transnational
corporations, climate change, and other forms of chronic environmental
degradation. We see genocides wearily repeated in Bosnia, Rwanda, now
Darfur -- places remote from great power interests and therefore unlikely
to motivate great power interventions. We witness one state try to stem
the tide of nuclear proliferation while insisting on retaining and indeed
improving its own vast nuclear arsenal -- seemingly oblivious to both
the contradiction in that position and the futility of such an enterprise.
The structure of the institution, too, has become embarrassingly anachronistic:
Britain and France are only medium-rank world powers by any reckoning,
yet both hold Security Council vetoes. In contrast, Germany, Japan, India,
Brazil, and many other nations possessing significant geopolitical weight
have virtually no voice.
Since the U.N.'s inception, those who feel like they weren't invited to
the party have pleaded to make the United Nations more legitimate, more
accountable, and more representative of the peoples of the world.
Several initiatives marked the organization's 50th anniversary in 1995,
including the Commission on Global Governance, the Independent Working
Group on the U.N. in its Second Half-Century, the Preferred Futures for
the U.N. symposium, and the South Center's For a Strong and Democratic
United Nations report.
Many of these plans were backed by Nobel laureates, former heads of state,
and distinguished scholars and practitioners with vast experience in the
global governance arena.
Yet, they all went nowhere.
Nearly a decade later, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's High-Level
Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change issued a report in December 2004,
offering several recommendations to revitalize the UN system. A follow-up
document, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights
for All further explored those ideas in March 2005.
At a summit just before the opening of the U.N.'s 60th General Assembly
session in September 2005, world leaders intended to inaugurate a package
of UN reforms that, it was hoped, might equip the world organization with
at least some promising new tools to cope with challenges likely to arise
over the next six decades or so. For six months before that meeting, Annan's
panel focused upon identifying politically attainable results that governments
might actually adopt. These were compiled in an imaginative 38-page "Outcome
Document" that contained many genuine advances.
Enter, stage right, John Bolton, the new U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations. Despite Republican control of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Bolton was so unpopular that President George W. Bush ended up sending
him to New York in August 2005 under a recess appointment through the
end of 2006. His first act? Of the 38 pages on which a tenuous agreement
had already been laboriously forged, Bolton immediately rejected 35. A
frantic three weeks of negotiations restored barely 10 watered-down pages,
which is all that was left for signing at the summit. Some excellent proposals
survived, including a Human Rights Council, a Peacebuilding Commission,
and a Democracy Fund. But it was hardly the profound revitalization of
the United Nations system it might have been. And thanks to perfunctory
media coverage, most Americans barely knew the summit took place -- let
alone the dimensions of the missed opportunity.
A THIRD GENERATION WORLD ORGANIZATION
If
the League of Nations was the first generation of global multilateral
organization and the United Nations the second, it is high time to begin
considering the architecture of a third-generation world organization.
What kind of United Nations system would we create if we were designing
it from scratch today? Here are some of the issues that, for the most
part, have been conspicuous mostly by their absence from the global governance
policy debate:
The UN Security Council -- Its Rules and Its Composition
In the past decade or so, several important initiatives have advanced
not so much by changing the Security Council, but by going around it.
The Rome International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty and Ottawa landmine
treaty, for example, were both initially kept off the UN agenda by the
United States. In response, smart coalitions of middle power governments
and civil society organizations generated enough political momentum to
actually bring into being two brand new multilateral treaties, despite
Washington's intransigent opposition. The ICC and the landmine ban are
clearly here to stay. And we have likely not seen the last of this new
technique for changing the international political status quo.
Still, those near-term successes hardly obviate the need for longer-term
structural transformations. Perhaps the most important single one of these
is the single most important feature of the original San Francisco Charter
- "the veto." Few things could be more profoundly undemocratic
than a rule that allows a single state to stand opposed to the rest of
the world, and command the rest of the world into impotence and inaction.
Even when a veto vote is not actually cast, veto calculations dominate
virtually every decision the Security Council makes.
Why? Because it is always necessary to get all five permanent members
on board. Has there been any exercise in the past decade more inequitable
(or cynical) than the one in December 1996, when the vote to reappoint
UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to a second term tallied up
at 14-1 ... but the one won?
If we believe, as Churchill insisted, "democracy is the worst form
of government -- except for all those others," then we ought to aspire
to democracy at every level of human governance.
Many schemes have been put forth over the decades for modifying the veto.
Perhaps it could be limited to only the most vital matters the Security
Council considers - rather than extending to everything on its docket.
Perhaps for other matters it could be transformed into a “supermajority”
requirement - say, 3 of 5 permanent members and 9 of 15 total members.
In American elections, after all, 60% is usually considered a landslide.
It's often declared as self-evident that the U.S. "would never give
up the veto" -- that is, give up our ability to prevent the rest
of the world from doing something we don't want it to do.
But the veto's existence also allows other countries to keep us from doing
something too. Consider an initiative Washington wants very much to pursue,
which garners the support of 10 or 11 or even 14 Security Council members.
If it is Russia, China, Britain, or France that stands opposed, the U.S.
is forced to choose between dropping the initiative or pursuing it without
Council authorization and in defiance of international law. This, of course,
is why curtailing Iran's nuclear program has been so difficult, because
the five have consistently had very different ideas about how to proceed.
This too, of course, is what happened in early 2003, when the U.S. abruptly
dropped its efforts to secure a resolution authorizing a U.S. invasion
of Iraq, and launched such an invasion anyway - in the view of most international
lawyers, illegally.
Inextricably intertwined with the question of the veto is the question
of the composition of the council. Few things could be more profoundly
anachronistic than a body owned and operated by the five victors of a
war that ended in the first half of the last century.
Many schemes for democratizing the council have been put forth over the
decades. There is little point in rehashing the respective merits of various
plans here. Virtually all of them focus on bringing a small number of
new great powers to the table, to provide a voice to presently unrepresented
regions. Perhaps one day we will see the emergence of enough political
will to actually bring one of these schemes into being.
But if humanity wants to avoid some of the cataclysmic scenarios that
are all too easy to conjure today, we must try to envision much more dramatic
changes in our global public policymaking processes, changes that will
bring a much larger transformation in representation, legitimacy, accountability,
and universality.
A Broader Democratization
Some have described the often-ineffectual UN General Assembly as "one
nation, one vote, and no power." Surely the time has long since come
to give serious consideration to a weighted voting system in the General
Assembly - similar to those already used in the International Labor Organization,
the European Union, and the international financial institutions. One
longstanding idea is the "Binding Triad" proposal, promoted
for years by the indefatigable Richard Hudson of the Center for War/Peace
Studies, who died earlier this year.
Here, vote tallies would calculate not only the number of states voting
for some measure, but also the number of people represented by those states
and the number of dollars contributed by those states. Consider how much
legitimacy would be conveyed on initiatives that had secured support from
a majority of states, a majority of people, and a majority of those paying
the bills. In Hudson's vision, such a system of "three simultaneous
majorities" would have enough credibility to grant to the General
Assembly the same kind of power to enact binding international law over
other matters that the Security Council now possesses over war and peace
matters. In other words, to legislate.
Professor Joseph Schwartzberg of the University of Minnesota has done
elaborate mathematical analyses of how both the "Binding Triad"
and other weighted voting schemes might actually operate in practice.
Non-governmental advocacy organizations (NGOs) ought to start counting
and promoting those tabulations now - to illuminate the simple proposition
that the mechanism for representation decided upon in San Francisco in
1945 is not the only possible kind. Many ideas have also been advanced
to provide a voice at the UN for more than just the appointed representatives
of national governments. One is to establish a "UN Parliamentary
Assembly," where elected representatives from various national legislatures
would convene together in an international forum. Even if only advisory,
they could provide for citizens a more direct voice on the world stage
than executive branch diplomats.
Such an assembly could lead to the emergence of true transnational political
parties -- a historic step forward for democratic political participation.
Even better might be to create a directly elected "UN People's Assembly."
Here in Los Angeles, the two of us get to pick our representatives for
the city council in Los Angeles, the state assembly and state senate in
Sacramento, and the national house and senate in Washington. Not, however,
beyond. But why not beyond? We already have a directly elected transnational
assembly in at least one place -- the European Parliament. A woman in,
oh, Aberdeen, for example, elects someone to represent her in Aberdeen,
in Edinburgh, in London, and in Strasbourg.
Why can't all citizens of the world do something like this at the level
of the world? Even if only advisory, such a world assembly could make
people feeling impotent and powerless suddenly have somewhere to go to
express themselves on the great challenges facing the human race. It might
even move some to choose this as the vehicle for conveying their beefs
... rather than suicide bombings or crashing airplanes into skyscrapers.
Who Pays the Bills? One obvious advantage to the "Binding Triad"
scheme described above is that it would provide a tangible incentive for
nations to fulfill their funding obligations to the UN - promptly and
consistently. The more you pay, the greater your clout.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, under the suzerainty of Senator
Jesse Helms a few years back, might not have been so quick to withhold
our dues to the UN had our voting power at the UN been directly diminished
as a consequence. Many other alternative financing schemes has been advanced
over the years. The most well known of these is the "Tobin Tax,"
that would fund UN activities and other worthy international undertakings
through a trivial levy on international currency transactions. Other proposals
include similar levies on national defense expenditures, international
arms sales, or national carbon emissions. Among the most crucial of the
innovations that Mr. Bolton so cavalierly purged was a proposed "International
Finance Facility," a central repository for aid and disaster funds
contributed in advance ... rather than in panic mode after the fact.
A PROCESS TO GET THE BALL ROLLING
One strategy to actualize many of these potentials might be the one envisioned
by the San Francisco framers themselves. They included in their U.N. Charter
an Article 108, for making particular Charter revisions, and an Article
109, for summoning "a general conference... for the purpose of reviewing
the present Charter." Moreover, convening such a conference is not
subject to the great-power veto. Such a meeting can be called by a vote
of 2/3 of the General Assembly and any 9 of the 15 Security Council members.
(Incidentally, the language of Article 109, Section 3 indicates that the
framers expected the member states to summon such a "general conference"
after only 10 years... in 1955.) A call for an Article 109 Charter review
conference could become a powerful mobilizing force in civil society.
It would provide something tangible and specific to urge upon our governments,
while leaving open what might ultimately emerge from the process. It could
assemble a broad coalition of supporters who might hold a number of different
world order visions, but who could all agree on pursuing the process laid
out in the Charter itself to define the most appropriate vision for the
challenges of the 21st Century.
In 1945 Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago,
feared that the simultaneous dawn of both a timid UN Charter and a new
atomic age meant that "mankind has made up its mind for self destruction."
So, he assembled some of the greatest intellectuals of the day, and grandly
designated them "The Committee to Frame a World Constitution."
Any philanthropists out there who might consider launching a "Committee
to Frame a New UN Charter" today? It is hard to imagine anything
that might better serve as an engine of our global political imagination.
THE WHOLE EARTH: GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
Singapore's UN ambassador Kishore Mahbubani says the UN is "based
on the strange principle that nation-states pursuing national interests
will somehow take care of our global commons."
John Kenneth Galbraith, who died earlier this year, said not long before
he died: "The greatest political conflict of our time (is) that of
national interest as opposed to transnational concern and responsibility."
George F. Kennan, arguably America's pre-eminent 20th Century foreign
policy sage who died last year, floated the idea of a global "House
of Councilors," whose members would explicitly not represent nations
or regions, but instead strive to identify the perspective of the whole,
the transnational vital interest, the global public good. Perhaps we can
peer even more dimly into the future.
Many thinkers have maintained that it is within the power of the human
imagination to envision abolishing war itself. Many have suggested that
organizing the world into separate sovereign states, each pouring enormous
quantities of treasure, talent and often blood into the ability to make
war on other states, is perhaps not the end of history. Many have imagined
that someday there may be a next step in the social evolution of the human
species.
Nearly 700 years ago, in his De Monarchia, Dante insisted, "to achieve
a state of universal peace and well-being, a single world government is
necessary." That remarkable proposition was elaborated in Immanuel
Kant's “Perpetual Peace”, Jean Jacques Rousseau's “A Lasting Peace Through
the Federation of Europe”, H.G. Wells's “A Modern Utopia”, Emery Reves's
“The Anatomy of Peace”, Vernon Nash's “The World Must Be Governed”, Wendell
Willkie's “One World”, Bertrand Russell's “Toward World Government”, G.A.
Borgese's “Foundations of the World Republic”, Mortimer Adler's “How to
Think About War and Peace”, and Grenville Clark and Louis Sohn's “World
Peace Through World Law”.
And that same proposition was forcibly defended - especially around the
middle of the last century - by figures like Albert Einstein, Winston
Churchill, Sigmund Freud, Arnold Toynbee, E.B. White, Norman Cousins,
Oscar Hammerstein, Carl Van Doren, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Owen Roberts
and William Douglas, and future U.S. Senators Alan Cranston, Harris Wofford,
Paul Simon, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Many of them felt their hearts
as well as their heads moved by the words that had been uttered a century
earlier by Alfred Lord Tennyson, who dreamt of the hour when we might
"hear the war drum throb no longer, see the battle flags all furled,
in the parliament of man, the federation of the world." The San Francisco
Charter itself, in its very first sentence, states that its principal
purpose is "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war."
Perhaps we might permit ourselves the intellectual freedom to consider
how, some distant day, we actually might.
THE PRAGMATICS OF IDEALISM
Few of these global governance reform proposals, admittedly, are likely
to be politically “realistic” in the near term. The veto, for example,
might be the single most intractable feature of global governance, since
- as The Economist magazine put it so pithily several years ago - "the
vetoers can veto a veto of the veto."
But how will we ever get rid of the veto if no one even says that we ought
to get rid of the veto? How can we ever change the political realities
of the near term if we don't even discuss what might be desirable in the
long term?
If politics, as every undergraduate knows, is the art of the possible,
then this kind of conversation can, must, serve as a catalyst for expanding
the parameters of political possibility.
After your visit to Muir Woods, get back on the Golden Gate Bridge, cross
back into San Francisco, turn left at the Bay Bridge to Oakland, then
continue east until you get yourself to the Washington Mall.
Make your way then, with haste, to the Jefferson Memorial. There you will
find these words: "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws
and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with
the progress of the human mind. We might as well require a man to wear
still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain
ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
The time has come to weave a new coat for a third-generation world
organization. We must seize the opportunity to invent a garment of our
own, one designed not for our ancestors, but for weathering the storms,
exploring the vistas, and reaching for the promise of the uncharted 21st
century.
In
"Letters", to the Editor, of the Foreign Service Journal, this
article was lauded in a tribute to "The Greatest Statesman",
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The letter, written by an SFSO (Senior
Foreign Service Officer), Gunther K. Rosinus, reinforces the need for
attention to reforming the United Nations.
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