ACABQ : CCPOQ : ECE : FAO : I S CC
: JUNIC: IAEA: IBE: ICAO: INS
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INIA:
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Nations?
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t h o m a s g . w e i ss
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J IU: J IAMCATT: JUNIC:UNAID
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1Foreword
UNC I T RA L : UNC CD : UNC TAD : UN
2Can We Fix the United Nations?
T homas
G Weiss
I F EM
:
UNDP : UNE S CO : UN F C C C :
2Introduction
3
Me-first International Decision-making
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What’s
Wrong?
8
Can We Fix It?
NI S :UNICRI :UNJSPF :UNSCO:
20 Washington and the United Nations
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Happened
to O
the Idea
of
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OWhat
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World Government?
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26Conclusion
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27Resources
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Published
the United
by the World
Federation
of
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UN
:
UNHCHR
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New York, NY, 10017
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Copyright © 2012 by the World Federation of United Nations
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Foreword
B o ni an G o l m o ham ma d i
Secretary-General,
World Federation of
United Nations Associations
At WFUNA, we believe in the fundamental value of the United
Nations, but we also understand that it is far from perfect.
To use the words of Professor Thomas G. Weiss, the first contributing author to this publication, “for all
of its shortcomings and weaknesses, the United Nations…is the closest approximation that we have to
a central institutional presence on the world stage. The UN urgently requires strengthening.” As a
global advocate for the world organization, one of WFUNA’s central aims is to provide useful information and create platforms for discussion that can bring about new ideas and original
approaches for building a UN that can better rise to the challenges and demands of today’s complex
world. We believe in the power of knowledge, creative communication, collaboration and innovation.
The idea behind ACRONYM is to provide the “UN insider” perspective. It aims to be the publication that
gives public voice to the conversations happening over coffee at Headquarters cafeterias in New York,
in the winding corridors of the Palais in Geneva, and in the field, at the country offices of UN agencies.
ACRONYM aspires to complement these viewpoints with those of United Nations Associations leaders
and members, the wider NGO sector, academia, youth activists, corporate and philanthropic partners,
the scientific community, and all others who share our invested interest in the United Nations. Written by
and for the wider UN community, ACRONYM is a publication for the global citizen.
We aspire to provide a diverse array of perspectives on the United Nations. As a result, the views expressed are those of our contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of WFUNA- its leadership, membership or staff.
The name ACRONYM symbolizes something that—for better or for worse—is inherently representative
of the United Nations and it’s complex systems and functioning. It’s as characteristic of the organization
as the blue helmet or the General Assembly Hall. As supporters of the UN we lovingly embrace it’s
quirks—including all 316 commonly used acronyms listed on the UN’s website! Of course we do not
overlook that WFUNA is one of the toughest UN-related acronyms of all. We feel that for these reasons,
the name we selected for this publication expresses its UN focus, realizes that no-nonsense self-criticism
is essential for growth, and even brings some lightness and humor to issues that are tough to tackle.
Our vision for ACRONYM is that it will grow into a resource that readers can rely on for in-depth analysis and forward-looking original thinking. ACRONYM won’t shy away from addressing issues that
might be controversial, complex or difficult. To inspire positive change, we must be honest and critical, getting into the “nitty-gritty” of the UN’s reality and potential.
The format of ACRONYM will continue to be much like this first issue—each edition will feature
a specific topic or theme related to the United Nations from the perspective of one or more “UN insiders”. Our goal is for the text to serve as a catalyst for further discussion and debate through ACRONYM’s online interactive features and workshops. We welcome thoughts, feedback and ideas from our
readers, as well as proposals for future articles.
WFUNA and ACRONYM are looking forward to embarking on a new journey with you- a journey driven
by a vision of a stronger, more effective United Nations.
ACRONYM
1
t h o m a s g . w e i ss
Can We Fix the
United Nations?
Over a decade into the 21st cen tury,
the United Nations appears remarkably ill adapted
to the times. The organization was founded on a
forward-looking vision that was very much ahead
of the curve in 1945, but is hardly apt for today, let
alone tomorrow.
2
ACRONYM
require a cataclysm—a dirty nuclear bomb, a
worldwide economic depression, catastrophic
climate change—to generate a new range of
institutions capable of handling the challenges
of our increasingly interconnected world. As
an inveterate optimist, I hope that the answer to
the latter question is a negative. I believe that it
is possible to substantially alter the current
United Nations.
Both World War I and II gave rise to groundbreaking efforts resulting in the first two
generations of universal international organizations. At the end of the Cold War we all heaved
a collective sigh of relief as the East-West
confrontation ended with a whimper, not a bang.
As a result, however, this conflict did not lead to
the creation of a “third generation” of multilateral
institutions, which we desperately need.
The Beatles once asked in a hit song: “Will you
still need me/will you still feed me/when I’m
64?” Last October, the United Nations turned a
venerable 66. Has the world organization,
another post–World War II baby boomer, aged
well? Many think that it should have taken early
retirement. Is it possible to retrofit the world
body? What would stimulate governments and
“We the Peoples of the United Nations”—the
stirring words that begin the UN Charter—to
formulate and pursue more creative visions and
a substantially different kind of universal
intergovernmental organization?
I leave it to the readers to determine how they
feel regarding whether the current generation
of organizations is fixable, or whether we, sadly,
opposite ( 1 9 5 0 ) and above ( 2 0 1 1 ) : The United
Nations “then and now.” Symbolic of the overall need for
renewal, the physical structure of the headquarters building
is undergoing a historic renovation under the Capital Master
Plan framework. With a budget of $1,876.7 million, the
completion is planned for 2014.
U N P h o t o / M B and U N P h o t o / R i c k B a j o rnas
What, exactly, is wrong with the UN, and can
we fix it? This essay begins by examining the
fundamental nature of the problem of nationalinterest decision-making for an interdependent
world. It then explores, specifically, what ails the
world body and how we might improve it, and
concludes with some specific thoughts about the
United States–United Nations relationship in a
presidential election year, as well as about the
abandoned notion of a world government.
Me-first International
Decision-making
All countries and the governments that represent
them—none more so than major powers like
China and the United States—are loath to accept
elements of overarching central authority and
the inroads that it might make into their capacities
to act autonomously. Noninterference and
certainly nonintervention in the internal affairs
of states are firmly held and defended principles
that are spelled out in no uncertain terms in
Article 2 of the UN Charter. State sovereignty
remains sacrosanct even as the reality of
globalization, technological advances, and
interdependence, along with a growing number
of trans-boundary crises, should place planetary
interests more squarely on the agenda, even in
Beijing and Washington.
Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan
coined the apt expression “problems without
passports.” Many of the most intractable
challenges facing humankind are transnational.
That is, acid rain does not require a visa to move
from one side of the American-Canadian border
to the other, and neither do numerous other
actual or looming threats, ranging from climate
change, migration, and pandemics to terrorism,
ACRONYM
3
financial flows, and proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction (WMDs). Effectively addressing any of these threats requires vigorous
approaches and actions that are not unilateral,
bilateral, or even multilateral, but rather global.
is that it is not far-fetched to imagine that, over
the coming decades, the international community
of states will agree to a gradual advance of
intergovernmental agreements and powers
along the lines that Europe as a whole has
nurtured. This will not, of course, be the world
government that motivated so many World
Federalists in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as a
lesser number today, but it would undoubtedly
be a move in the right direction.
Ironically, the policy authority and resources for
tackling global problems remain vested individually in the 193 member states of the United
Nations rather than collectively in the universal
body. The fundamental disjuncture between the
nature of a growing number of global threats and
the current inadequate structures for international
problem-solving and decision-making goes a
long way toward explaining fitful, tactical, and
short-term local responses to challenges that
require sustained, strategic, and longer-term
global thinking and action.
Shortly before his inauguration, President
Barack Obama announced not only that the
United States was rejoining the planet and was
prepared to reengage with other countries (both
friends and foes) but also that multilateralism
in general and the UN in particular would be
essential to American foreign policy during his
administration. He stated straightforwardly: “The
global challenges we face demand global
institutions that work.”
For all of its shortcomings and weaknesses, the
United Nations—and its system of specialized
agencies and programs—is the closest approximation that we have to a central institutional
presence on the world stage. The UN urgently
requires strengthening. The proposition here
While his administration’s delivery has lagged
rhetoric, nonetheless that same theme song
needs to be sung at higher decibel levels by
SARS spread 2002—an example of “problems without passports”
G ER M AN Y
E NGLA ND
INFECTED: 6
DEATHS: 0
C A NA DA
INFECTED: 139
DEATHS: 13
INFECTED: 7
DEATHS: 0
I R E LA ND
SWITZERLAND
INFECTED: 1
DEATHS: 0
INFECTED: 1
DEATHS: 0
UNITED STATES
S PA I N
INFECTED: 141
DEATHS: 0
INFECTED: 1
DEATHS: 0
ITALY
FRANCE
INFECTED: 5
DEATHS: 0
HO N G KO N G
C HIN A
INFECTED: 2001
DEATHS: 92
INFECTED: 1434
DEATHS: 100
INFECTED: 3
DEATHS: 0
V IET N AM
At l a n t i c
T HAILAN D
ocean
INFECTED: 7
DEATHS: 2
BRAZIL
INFECTED: 1
DEATHS: 0
INFECTED: 63
DEATHS: 5
M ALAYSIA
INDIAN
SIN G APO R E
ocean
INFECTED: 186
DEATHS: 16
INFECTED: 6
DEATHS: 1
pa c i f i c o c e a n
AUST R ALIA
INFECTED: 3
DEATHS: 0
Infectious diseases are examples of “problems without passports” in a globalized world. In February 2002, a Chinese doctor who
had treated yet undiagnosed Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) patients checked into a hotel in Hong Kong. Within
24-hours 12 people who had stayed in the same hotel were infected and took the disease with them to Singapore, Hong Kong,
Vietnam, Ireland and Canada. In the coming months the epidemic infected 8,098 people, killing about 800 worldwide. The World
Health Organization coordinated an immediate international response and the epidemic was declared over by late July 2003.
Y a l e G l o ba l On l i ne © 2 0 0 5 Y a l e C enter f o r t h e S tudy o f G l o ba l i z at i o n
4
ACRONYM
For those whose preoccupation is nuclear
proliferation, the evidence is obvious from the
stalled discussions in reviews of the Treaty
on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
accompanied by ongoing developments in Iran
and North Korea. For those worried about
climate change, the evidence lies in the paltry
results to replace the Kyoto Protocol emanating
from conferences in 2009 to 2011 in Copenhagen,
Cancún, and Durban.
U N P h o t o / E s k i nder D ebebe
other vocalists as well. A global institution that
works is not the G-7/8, or the upgraded G-20
version, which includes emerging powers; it also
is not ad hoc coalitions of the willing in Iraq and
Afghanistan; and it is not Robert Kagan’s “League
of Democracies.” We require a universal body to
formulate global norms, make global law, and
enforce global decisions. Anything less constitutes
wishful thinking to escape from the complexities
of daunting global challenges.
At the same time, the sickly condition of the world
organization is clear: The United Nations often is
paralyzed. On its best days, it limps. But before
prescribing a course of treatment, we must first
diagnose and understand the underlying causes.
According to all too many realist (small “r”)
national decision-makers as well as the so-called
Realist (capital “R”) scholars of international
relations, narrowly defined vital interests are the
only basis on which to make commitments or
avoid them. The United Nations remains the last
and most formidable bastion of sacrosanct state
sovereignty, ironically, even as globalization
continues apace and trans-boundary problems
The United Nations remains
the last and most formidable
bastion of sacrosanct state
sovereignty, ironically, even as
globalization continues apace
and trans-boundary problems
proliferate and intensify.
What’s Wrong?
Four infections afflict the world body. The first—
perhaps the most obvious and certainly the
most acute—is a reflection of the overall
problem described above, namely the enduring
concept of the international community as a
system of sovereign states, a notion dating back
to the 1648 Treaties of Westphalia following the
Thirty Years’ War. The basis for membership in
the world organization, of course, reflects the
equality of states, at least on paper. As a result of
sovereignty’s grip and continuing influence, the
gap is steadily growing between virtually all of
the life-threatening global challenges facing the
planet and the ability of current international
decision-making processes to deal with them.
proliferate and intensify. National borders make
less and less sense, but that is the basis on
which the UN operates.
Yet the current international system functions
amid a growing number of anomalies between
virtually all of the life-menacing threats facing
the planet and existing structures to make
international decisions to do something about
them. The United Nations is not an exception.
With the possible exception of the European
Union for a handful of issues, all other intergovernmental organizations (the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, the African Union, the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, and the Organization of American
ACRONYM
5
T h e f o u r a ff l i c t i o n s :
1Rigidly prioritizing state
sovereignty restricts international decision-making on
trans-boundary problems
2Dated and divisive member
state groupings and useless
diplomatic theatrics
3Decenralized, chaotic
and wasteful nature of
the UN system
4Low productivity of UN
bureaucracy and underwhelming leadership
States) base decisions exclusively on narrowly
defined national interests.
Thus, the calculated vital interests of major
powers obviously create enormous obstacles
to action by the United Nations. But such states
are not the only ones impeding collective
action. Smaller and poorer—or newer and less
powerful—states are as vehemently protective
of their so-called sovereignty as the major
powers. “Organized hypocrisy,” as former U.S.
National Security Council director and Stanford
professor Stephen Krasner reminds us, is either
365 years old or 365 years young.
The second ailment stems from the diplomatic
burlesque that passes for diplomacy in UN
circles on First Avenue in Manhattan or on
the Avenue de la Paix in Geneva. The artificial
divide between the aging acting troupes
from the industrialized North and from the
developing countries of the global South
provide the main drama. Launched in the
1950s and 1960s as a way to create diplomatic
space for international security and economic
negotiations by countries on the margins of
international politics, the once creative voices
of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the
Group of 77 developing countries (G-77) now
have become prisoners of their own rhetoric.
These rigid and counterproductive groups—
and the artificial divisions and toxic atmosphere
that they create—end up constituting almost
insurmountable barriers to diplomatic initiatives.
Serious conversation is virtually impossible and
is replaced by meaningless posturing in order
to score points back home.
Some spectacular recent examples of marquee
“stars” include former U.S. ambassador to the
UN John Bolton and Venezuelan President Hugo
Chávez. In the limelight of the General Assembly’s
stage in the fall of 2006, Chávez’s performance
referred to George W. Bush as the devil and
stated that “it smells of sulfur” and “he came here
William Taubman, author of Khrushchev: The Man and His Era
writes that after banging a table with both his fists, the Soviet
leader took off his right shoe — a loafer or sandal, according
to Khrushchev’s son, because he hated tying laces — waved it
and then “banged it on the table, louder and louder, until
everyone in the hall was watching and buzzing.” Afterward
Khrushchev was said to have remarked, “It was such fun!
The U.N. is sort of a parliament, you know, where the minority
has to make itself known, one way or another. We’re in the
minority for the time being, but not for long.”
U N P h o t o / Y uta k a N agata
6
ACRONYM
talking as if he were the owner of the world.”
Bolton responded by calling Chávez irrelevant
and warned that Venezuela would be “disruptive”
if elected to the UN Security Council.
feudalism than with a modern organization.
Frequent use also is made of the term “family,” a
folksy but preferable image because, like many
such units, the UN is dysfunctional and divided.
But this “theater” has a long and undistinguished
history. Who can forget Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev’s 1960 shoe-banging incident on
the podium, or Yasser Arafat checking his pistol
before entering the General Assembly Hall in
1974—the first person to address the body with
a holster on his hip while claiming to be carrying
an olive branch? Or former Maryknoll priest
and president of the General Assembly Miguel
d’Escoto Brockmann, who in 2009 invited Noam
Chomsky (whose book sales had skyrocketed
because of Chávez’s earlier endorsement) to
rail against “the responsibility to protect” as
“redecorated colonialism”?
Former senior staff members Brian Urquhart
and Erskine Childers used a music metaphor
to capture the essence of the problem: “The
orchestra pays minimum heed to its conductor.”
In his customary picturesque fashion, Sir Robert
Jackson, the Australian logistics genius who
moved goods to Malta and the Middle East in
World War II and subsequently oversaw a
number of key UN humanitarian operations,
began his 1969 evaluation of the UN development
system by writing: “The machine as a whole has
become unmanageable in the strictest sense of
the word. As a result, it is becoming slower and
Former Canadian politician and senior UNICEF
official Stephen Lewis has written: “Men and
women cannot live by rhetoric alone.” But
clearly his characterization does not apply to
UN ambassadors and officials.
These two structural political problems are
exacerbated by two internal organizational
problems. The latter consist of two different,
albeit related, ailments: the decentralized—not
to say chaotic and wasteful—nature of the UN
system, and the nature of UN staffs and their
leadership. Each should be examined in turn.
The third malady arises from the overlapping
jurisdictions of various UN bodies, the lack of
coordination among their activities, and the
absence of centralized financing for the system
as a whole; struggling over turf is more attractive
than sensible collaboration. The UN’s various
moving parts work at cross-purposes instead of
in a more integrated, mutually reinforcing, and
collaborative fashion. Agencies relentlessly
pursue cutthroat fundraising to finance their
expanding mandates, stake out territory, and
pursue mission creep.
The UN’s organizational chart appears in every
textbook and on the website. Euphemistically,
the caption refers to a “system,” a term that
implies coherence and cohesion. The world
body in reality has more in common with
According to the report of the
Advisory Committee on Administrative
and Budgetary Questions on the
UN’s 2012-2013 budget, 74 cents out
of every dollar the United Nations
spends is related to personnel costs.
more unwieldy like some prehistoric monster.”
The lumbering dinosaur is now more than 40
years older but certainly is not better adapted
to the climate of the 21st century.
The fourth and final disorder stems from the
overwhelming weight of the UN bureaucracy,
its low productivity, and the underwhelming
leadership within the international secretariats.
The stereotype of a bloated administration is
inaccurate in some ways because it overlooks
determined efforts by many talented and
dedicated individuals. However, the world
body’s recruitment and promotion methods
are certainly part of what ails it. When success
occurs, it usually reflects personalities and
serendipity rather than recruitment of the best
persons for the right reasons and institutional
ACRONYM
7
structures designed to foster collaboration.
Staff costs account for the lion’s share of the
UN budget, and the international civil service
is a potential resource whose composition,
productivity, and culture could change, and
change quickly. There is little hope in the short
run, however, as the low-key and uninspiring
leadership of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
will continue for another five years following
his election for a second term in 2011.
In fact, the third and fourth internal structural
problems combine to form a UN system whose
organizational chart would challenge even
Rube Goldberg to find a better design for futile
complexity. Current agencies all focus on a
substantive area, often located in a different city
from relevant UN partners, and have separate
budgets, governing boards, organizational
cultures, and independent executive heads.
Institutional fragmentation and competition lead
not only to wasteful overlap and redundancy but
also to issues falling between agency stools.
Moreover, secretariats are staffed with too many
people who are hired, retained and/or promoted
for the wrong reasons, being led often by senior
staff selected with political motivations. Dealing
with crucial global challenges such as climate
change, pandemics, terrorism, and WMDs
requires multidisciplinary perspectives, efforts
across sectors with firm central direction and
inspired leadership. The UN too rarely supplies
any of these.
Can We Fix It?
Are there possible palliatives, if not cures, for
the United Nations? The four afflictions suggest
four ways to initiate surgery that is radical and
not merely cosmetic. Or perhaps better said,
they suggest how to mitigate these problems
as well as point the way to a more ideal world
in which the UN’s institutional ills might be
“cured.” While the list of shortcomings could be
extended substantially, the concrete examples
of solutions are less numerous. This essay,
however, devotes more space to highlighting
steps in the right direction as well as experiments
that contain kernels of creative and worthwhile
ideas that might be replicated.
8
ACRONYM
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish Jewish lawyer, dedicated
his life to creating legal protections for ethnic, national,
religious, and cultural groups. He coined the term “genocide”
and successfully lobbied for the creation of the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
UN Photo
Why? The answer is important: The fixes are not
based on pious hopes for the UN equivalent of a
scientific breakthrough or miracle cure, but
rather on specific and encouraging examples
that could be repeated. They suggest that
change is possible; we are not starting from
scratch. Nonetheless, the proposed health
regimen begins with the most difficult and least
likely palliatives and moves toward easier ones.
A case could be made for doing the reverse, of
course, but in an age of cynicism and nihilism, it
seemed sensible to end with the more doable.
Rienhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” is a
reminder of the necessity for those interested in
the United Nations to change what we can: “God,
give us grace to accept with serenity the things
that cannot be changed, courage to change the
things that should be changed, and the wisdom
to distinguish the one from the other.”
The first remedy requires building upon the
spotty yet significant progress to date in
recasting national interests in terms of good
global citizenship and enhancing international
responsibilities. The prescription for the
Westphalian system’s ailments consists of yet
more energetic recalculations of the shared
benefits of fostering the provision of global
public goods and respecting international
commitments. Democratic member states,
whether large or small, should theoretically find
this pill relatively easy to swallow because they
have a long-term, rational, and vital interest
as well as a moral responsibility to promote
multilateral cooperation.
While it will undoubtedly have a Pollyanna-ish
ring, there is more than a therapeutic benefit
from uttering “good international citizenship,”
an expression coined by Gareth Evans, the
former Australian foreign minister and onetime
president of the International Crisis Group. This
vision underpins the conviction that there is a
relationship between the provision of basic
rights and wider international security. Nothing
illustrates this better than “the responsibility to
protect” (R2P), which redefines state sovereignty
as contingent upon a modicum of respect
for human rights rather than as an absolute
characteristic. While R2P imposes the primary
responsibility for human rights on governmental
authorities, it argues that, if a state is unwilling
or unable to honor its responsibility—or worse,
is itself the perpetrator of mass atrocities—then
the responsibility to protect the rights of
individuals shifts upward to the international
community of states.
With the possible exception
of Raphael Lemkin’s efforts
and the 1948 Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, no
idea has moved faster in the
international normative arena
than R2P.
With the possible exception of Raphael Lemkin’s
efforts and the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, no
idea has moved faster in the international
normative arena than R2P. And the benefits from
redefining sovereignty were evident when rebels
captured and executed Muammar el-Qaddhafi in
late October 2011, which only somewhat tarnished
the seminal human rights advance of the year, the
international decision to protect Libyans from
their 69-year-old dictator’s murderous ways. A
less authoritarian form of government is hardly
guaranteed, and blowback almost inevitable. But
robust military action suggests that it is not
quixotic to utter “never again”—no more
Holocausts, Cambodias, and Rwandas—and
occasionally mean it if state sovereignty is
redefined so that individual rights trump an
aberrant interpretation of a sovereign’s rights.
Why is this significant? Because R2P’s central
normative tenet is that state sovereignty is
contingent, not absolute; it entails duties and not
simply rights. As such, unease arises for thugs
hiding behind the supposedly sacrosanct shield
of nonintervention in domestic affairs, the
principle for membership outlined in the UN
Charter’s Article 2. However, after centuries of
largely looking the other way, Westphalian
sovereignty no longer necessarily provides a
license for mass murder. Every state has a
responsibility to protect its own citizens from
mass killings and other egregious violations
of their rights. As noted, however, a state’s
sovereignty is temporarily abrogated when it
is manifestly unable or unwilling to exercise
that responsibility. Meanwhile, the responsibility
to protect devolves to the international community of states, ideally acting through the UN
Security Council.
This dual framework—internal and external—
was embraced by more than 150 heads of state
and government at the UN’s 60th anniversary,
and it has the potential to expand further in
customary international law. The 2005 World
Summit agreed to implement a norm that
embodied what the world organization had
actually been mandated to do since its creation,
namely to ensure “freedom from fear.”
The history of international diplomacy and
public international law over the last three and
a half centuries tells us how states have slowly
and gradually accepted various limits on their
conduct by ratifying treaties to constrain their
margins of maneuver. One of the main ways
to alter the definition of sovereignty has
been through what Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948
presciently predicted would be “a curious
grapevine” that would spread human rights
ideas. The challenge for states worldwide will
ACRONYM
9
Adopted as a norm at the United Nations
World Summit in 2005 the Responsibility
to Protect—known as R2P—refers to the
obligation of states towards their populations, and towards all populations at risk of
genocide and other large-scale atrocities. For
more R2P info visit WFUNA’s website www.
wfuna.org/r2p and the Global Centre for the
Responsibility to Protect www.globalr2p.org
U N P h o t o / A l bert G o n z a l e z F arran
10
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ACRONYM
11
be to squarely face the reality that the domestic
institutions that every society relies upon to
provide public goods do not exist at the global
level for genocide prevention or any other
crucial international issue.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is no
power to tax, conscript, regulate, or quarantine.
Are these not precisely the attributes required
for international decisions to attack global
problems? But at least we have seen that
progress is possible when sovereignty is
redefined to include a modicum of respect for
human rights.
Fortunately, moving
toward issues-based and
interest-based negotiations
is not merely an essential
prescription for what ails
the United Nations but also
a realistic possibility. Indeed,
states on occasion have
breached the fortifications
around the North-South
camps and forged creative
partnerships that portend the
formation of other types of
coalitions that might unclog
deliberations elsewhere.
Moving out of the North-South quagmire is the
second prescription for what ails the United
Nations. Fortunately, states on occasion have
forged creative partnerships across the fictitious
boundaries that supposedly divide the industrialized world from the developing countries of the
global South. Less posturing and role-playing is
a prerequisite for the future health of the world
organization specifically, and for world politics
more generally. Building bridges across the
South-North divide is required for addressing
12
ACRONYM
climate change, development finance, nonproliferation, reproductive rights, and terrorism, to
name merely a few of the most pressing and
distressing issues.
Fortunately, moving toward issues-based and
interest-based negotiations is not merely an
essential prescription for what ails the United
Nations but also a realistic possibility. Indeed,
states on occasion have breached the fortifications around the North-South camps and forged
creative partnerships that portend the formation
of other types of coalitions that might unclog
deliberations elsewhere.
Examples of wide-ranging partnerships across
continents and ideologies include those that
negotiated the treaties to ban landmines and to
establish the International Criminal Court.
Landmines mobilized a very diverse group of
countries across the usual North-South divide as
well as global civil society under the leadership
of the World Federalist Movement (WFM) and
the usually reticent International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC). The idea of a permanent
criminal court had been discussed since the late
1940s but received a push after the ad hoc
tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
The shortcomings, including costs and the
burden of evidence, demonstrated the need for
a permanent court that could also act as a
deterrent for future thugs. The 60-country,
like-minded coalition gathered in Rome in 1998
and represented a formidable and persuasive
group that joined forces with the 700 members
of the NGO Coalition for an International
Criminal Court. The ICC treaty moved ahead
vigorously in spite of strong opposition from
several permanent members of the Security
Council, and the wisdom of that tactic has subsequently been demonstrated as some of those
same permanent members have seen the ICC’s
utility demonstrated for international judicial
pursuit and judgments for Sudan and Libya.
The breakthroughs in security and human rights
were mirrored in the economic arena by the
Global Compact, which seeks to bring civil
society and transnational corporations into a
more productive partnership with the United
Nations. The energy and resources of for-profit
and not-for-profit private actors clearly is a
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a unique process that involves a review of the human rights records of all 193 UN Member
States once every four years. The UPR is a state-driven process, under the auspices of the Human Rights Council, which provides
the opportunity for each State to declare what actions they have taken to improve the human rights situations in their countries
and to fulfill their human rights obligations.
U N P h o t o / Jean - M arc F err é
requirement for the future health of international
cooperation. While that reality seems obvious to
many, the creation of the Global Compact
required setting aside the long-standing and
familiar shibboleths about the dangers of the
market and other neo-imperial designs from the
global capitalist North that formerly were
rejected automatically by the global South and
many NGOs as well. Moreover, it suggests how
the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)
and other UN bodies could evolve in shedding
other stereotypical images of what is plausible
and desirable.
One possible bridge across the so-called
North-South divide would involve enhanced
transparency. While major problems still exist
for any hard-nosed implementation of the
Universal Periodic Review within the Human
Rights Council, a variation would be worthwhile
to consider implementing in a variety of other
contexts. Why not require a universal periodic
review of commitments to the Millennium
Development Goals for the 54 elected members
of ECOSOC? Rather than a voluntary system that
allows member states merely to report what
they wish on topics that suit them, would it not
make sense to move toward more transparency
with independent, obligatory, and across-theboard scrutiny of the wealthy and poor of
industrialized and developing countries?
While they got a bad name during the Iraq War,
serious international politics invariably involve
“coalitions of the willing.” The results-oriented
negotiations on landmines and the ICC and the
operations of the Global Compact suggest the
benefits of more pragmatism and less ideology
in international deliberations. The proposition
here is that such a reorientation is not impossible
for climate change, development finance,
nonproliferation, reproductive rights, and
terrorism. Within international institutions, we
should be seeking larger and more legitimate
coalitions of the willing around specific policies.
The tired North-South shenanigans and theatrics
of the past serve no one’s interest and should be
tossed into history’s dustbin. UN policy debates
and negotiations can and should reflect issuesbased and interest-based coalitions. Less
posturing and role-playing is a prerequisite for
the future health of the world organization.
ACRONYM
13
The third line of treatment would be to pursue
the possibility of making the UN’s work more
coherent, as advocated by Delivering as One,
one of the last reports initiated by Kofi Annan
before his departure as UN secretary-general.
To be fair, there has been more adaptation by
the United Nations over time than many recognize.
Indeed, founders might not recognize today
some elements of the world organization that
they created in 1945. In particular, the UN’s
current portfolio reflects a vast institutional and
substantive terrain that covers an ever-expanding
list of issues linked to international peace and
security, human rights, and sustainable development. Because everything is linked to everything
else, even the purview of development policy
now includes everything from security crises
(which interrupt development) to peace-building
efforts (which, after war, are stepping stones
toward a more normal development path).
Moreover, various parts of the system seek not
only high-level engagement by member states,
but also by representatives from international
financial institutions, the private sector, and civil
society. Such is the messiness of the contemporary
United Nations.
Nonetheless, those same founders would
certainly find a familiar decentralized institutional
approach to problem-solving that is incapable
of addressing the kinds of life-threatening
global challenges increasingly and routinely
confronting humanity. As the saying goes, “The
Mark Malloch-Brown
U N P h o t o / M ar k G arten
more things change, the more they stay the
same.” Of course, the very nature of “change”
can itself be a problematic concept. Looking to
identify momentous change through a crisis-bycrisis approach is misleading to the story that
I am trying to tell. In fact, the historical tale is
about uneven change within the UN system
despite substantial alterations in the nature of
world politics. Thus, on the scorecard we should
be aware that change is quite different for
someone playing the stock market than for
those trying to understand international
relations, where recent events are of little
interest unless they have a demonstrable effect
on how diplomatic, military, or humanitarian work
is done. There is continuity in the relationship
between the UN system and world politics. At the
same time, change has occurred in both the nature
of the world organization as well as the material
and normative dimensions of world politics.
That said, eyes nonetheless customarily glaze
over at the mere mention of the term “reform”
to respond to changed conditions and improve
coordination among UN agencies. Why?
Because nothing to date has even modestly
reduced the turf battles and unproductive
competition for funds that characterize the
so-called UN system. The former administrator
of the UN Development Program (UNDP) and
chef de cabinet for Annan was subsequently a
junior minister in the last government of UK
Prime Minister Tony Blair. In picturesque terms,
Mark Malloch Brown recalled that the UN is the
only institution where reform is a more popular
topic than sex around water coolers and during
coffee breaks. Not surprisingly, then, talk is
cheap, and virtually no meaningful reform has
taken place.
But could it? Yes, but donors would have to stop
talking out of both sides of their mouths and
insist upon the centralization and consolidation
that they often preach in UN forums and before
parliamentary bodies. This is not an impossible
task—nor is adopting modest alternative means of
financing for the world body, such as infinitesimal
percentage taxes on financial transfers or airline
tickets. Washington and other donors, however,
have routinely fought such measures in the past
because they would give the world organization
the kind of autonomy that it requires. And
14
ACRONYM
The UN system includes 13 Programmes and Funds
(e.g. UNICEF), 15 Specialized Agencies (e.g. WHO), 4 Research
and Training Institutes (e.g. Institute for Disarmament
Research), 6 Other Entities (e.g. UN Women), 17 ECOSOC
Commissions and Committees (e.g. Commission on
Sustainable Development), 13 Other ECOSOC Bodies (e.g.
Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues), 12 Security Council
Subsidiary or Advisory Bodies (e.g. Counter-Terrorism
Committee), 2 Trust Funds (e.g. Democracy Fund) and a
slew of other bodies, secretariats, councils and other related
organizations and organs.
U N P h o t o / M ar k G arten
consolidation of agencies, programs, and
funding would require confronting domestic
lobbies and interests, both public and private,
which wish to maintain the kind of control that
comes with principal-agent relationships.
It is hard to keep a straight face when examining
documents and resolutions that refer to “systemwide coherence.” The overlapping jurisdictions
of various UN bodies, the lack of coordination
among their activities, and the absence of
centralized financing for the system as a whole
make bureaucratic struggles more attractive
than sensible collaboration. The incentives for
going it alone are currently overwhelming. The
UN’s various moving parts work at cross-purposes
instead of in a more integrated, mutually
reinforcing, and collaborative fashion. Agencies
relentlessly pursue cutthroat fundraising to
finance their expanding mandates, stake out
territory, and seek mission creep. Fundamental
change and collaboration are not in the career
interests of any UN bureaucracy or its leadership;
turf battles and a scramble for resources are.
Consolidation is anathema as officials rationalize
futile complexity and react to incentives from
donors to go their own way. Individual organiza-
tions focus on substantive areas and are often
located in a different geographical location from
other UN partners. As each organization has a
separate budget, governing board, cultures, and
executive head, what else should one expect?
An almost universal chorus sings the atonal tune
praising decentralization and autonomy, and
various UN forums provide some of the best
acoustical concert halls for this cacophony.
Yet the kind of reform that almost occurred in 1997
in the humanitarian arena illustrates what would
be plausible if donors backed centralization
with resources instead of pretending they did
but continuing to parcel out funding. At that
time, Maurice Strong—who amongst many
iterations of UN involvement was the first
Executive Director of the United Nations
Environment Programme—proposed pulling
together the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) with relevant parts
of UNICEF, the World Food Programme, and the
UNDP. That proposal lasted until the sky was
supposed to be falling, at least according to
agency heads. “Coordination lite,” the UN’s
perpetual solution to overlap, was supposed to
improve delivery and protection. The powerless
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
ACRONYM
15
Affairs resulted—a warmed-over version of
a previous concoction, the Department for
Humanitarian Affairs.
Without counting the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF)—de jure but
not de facto components of the UN system—
more than 50,000 UN officials spread out in 15
different headquarter country locations and in
some, 1,400 representative offices worldwide
command annual budgets of almost $20 billion
but are largely indifferent to other family
members. They constitute ECOSOC’s portfolio
to foster so-called system-wide coherence.
Competition and duplication necessitate ever
more elaborate and expensive oversight.
Current efforts revolve around creating “One
UN” at the country level but the collective
memory is short. In the early 1990s, 15 unified
offices were created in the former Soviet Union
but rapidly were undermined by agency rivalry.
One possible bright spot is that opinion among
development specialists seems to reflect the
realization of the desperate need for change even
if leaving the system alone appears the only
option because inertia is so overwhelming and
supposedly support is lacking any real shake-ups.
A 2010 independent survey conducted by the
Future of the UN Development System (FUNDS)
Project received more than 3,000 responses from
every part of the globe and from the private
sector, NGOs, academia, and governments.
Respondents—90 percent of whom were located
in the global South—agreed that the UN’s
neutrality and objectivity were strong suits, but
that decentralization was by far the defining
weakness. When asked about 2025, more than
70 percent of those replying agreed that there
should be fewer UN agencies with dramatic
changes in mandates and functions, including
stronger NGO and private-sector participation.
Nearly 70 percent of respondents supported
the appointment of a single head of the UN
development system, although views were split
about a single headquarters. Almost 80 percent
sought a single representative and country
program in each developing country.
ECOSOC’s operating style itself is a microcosm
of failed efforts at restructuring. Proposals to
create a single governing board for myriad
special funds and programs, for instance, are
met with guffaws. In relationship to the kind
of consolidation that is necessary, the decision
to create UN Women in July 2010 was an
encouraging institutional breakthrough of sorts
for the United Nations. While no formal UN
institution had ever previously been shuttered
as an anachronism, at least UN Women consolidated four previously weaker autonomous
units. It would have been an even more crucial
precedent had the consolidation also folded into
the UN Population Fund and avoided creating
yet another governing body. Billed as an effort
to pool resources and mandates, the new UN
Women did not incorporate the largest operational agency with an impact on women’s lives
Michelle Bachelet (left), executive
director of UN Women, attends a
celebration of International Women’s
Day in Monrovia, Liberia, hosted by
President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (right)
U N P h o t o / S tant o n W i nter
16
ACRONYM
and created yet another executive board (albeit
with nontraditional donors). Why is it not
possible to consolidate executive boards?
Do we really require an 11th one specifically
to engage in gender theological disputes?
The four fixes:
In short, the UN system remains more wasteful
and weak than it should be. Indeed, much of
what passes for “reform” amounts to wishful
thinking. I could refer to vintages and bottles,
but perhaps a better metaphor is George
Bernard Shaw’s description of a second marriage,
the triumph of hope over experience. We need to
get more from the system through centralization
and consolidation rather than hoping for the
best from ad hoc serendipity and fortuitous
personal chemistry.
2Bridging the North-South
divide through creative
issue-focused partnerships
As argued above, donor countries hold the key
to moving ahead on this score. If they would
back their rhetoric with cash, then consolidation
and centralization, rather than endless chatter,
would result. The mobilization of “coherence
funds” for use by UNDP resident coordinators
for the initial eight country experiments with
Delivering as One appear to have been crucial
carrots to foster more centralization and seem
to be working according to early assessments.
But donors are inconsistent—their contrariness
in the various corridors of UN organizations is
legendary. The very countries that bemoan
the world organization’s incoherence also
field delegations to different UN entities,
which acquiesce in widening mandates and
untrammeled decentralization of responsibilities
to an increasingly chaotic and competitive
field network.
The final therapy consists of taking steps to
reinvigorate the staff of the United Nations.
There is an urgent need to revive the notion of
an autonomous international civil service as
championed by the UN’s second secretarygeneral, Dag Hammarskjöld. Competence and
integrity should outweigh nationality and
gender considerations as well as cronyism,
which have become the principal criteria for
recruitment, retention, and promotion. In fact,
Hammarskjöld’s ideal goes back to what a
working group of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace during World War II called
the “great experiment” of the League of Nations.
1Promoting multilateral
cooperation through good
international citizenship
3Pursuing system coherence,
centralization and consolidation as well as restructuring
financing and spending
4Reinvigorating UN staff
and fostering imaginative
leadership
Moving back to the future for the United
Nations would involve open searches for
recruiting people with integrity and talent.
No exceptions. It is especially important
because there are numerous ways to attract
more mobile and younger staff members with
greater turnover and fewer permanent contracts
while providing better career development for
the world organization of the 21st century. As
noted earlier, because the expenditures for
UN staff account for such a huge chunk of
the organization’s budget, strengthening
performance and productivity by improving
output and efficiency should be at the top of
any to-do list. And undertaking such change is
doable in that it largely is an administrative
issue and does not necessitate changes in
geopolitics or Charter amendments.
An oft-ignored reality for the UN system involves
having people and leadership capable of
influencing deliberations and priority-setting
based on the following realization: Ideas and
concepts are a main driving force in human
progress and arguably are the most important
contribution of the United Nations over the last
six-and-a-half decades. This conclusion emanates
from a decade of research by the independent
United Nations Intellectual History Project,
ACRONYM
17
UN Secretary-General meets staff.
U N P h o t o / E s k i nder D ebebe
whose directors (Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij,
and this author) summarized their findings from
17 commissioned books and an oral history in
UN Ideas That Changed the World (Indiana
University Press, 2009).
The staff members across the UN system should
provide more intellectual leadership about the
fundamentally changed nature of contemporary
problems and their solutions. They should seek
to bridge the deepening gap between scientific
knowledge and political decision-making.
Because policy research and ideas matter so
much, the world organization should enhance its
ability to produce or nurture world-class public
intellectuals, scholars, thinkers, planners, and
practitioners. UN officials are typically considered
second-class citizens in comparison with
counterparts from the Washington-based
international financial institutions. This notion
partially reflects the resources devoted to
research by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, as well as their respective
cultures, media attention, dissemination outlets,
and the use of the research in decision-making.
18
ACRONYM
But there is much more to the story because
reality is different. Nine persons with substantial
experience within the United Nations and its
policy discussions have won the Nobel Prize in
economic sciences—Jan Tinbergen, Wassily
Leontief, Gunnar Myrdal, James Meade, W. Arthur
Lewis, Theodore W. Schultz, Lawrence R. Klein,
Richard Stone, and Amartya Sen—whereas only
one from the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has
done so. But he resigned from his post at the
Bank in protest and is now deeply associated
with UN policy work. And this list is in addition
to individual Nobel Peace Prize winners who
worked for years as staff members of the United
Nations: Ralph Bunche, Dag Hammarskjöld, Kofi
Annan, Mohammed ElBaradei, and Martti
Ahtisaari. In total, some 15 organizations, diplomats, or statesmen associated with the United
Nations have also won a Nobel Peace Prize. No
other organization comes even close to being
such a center of excellence, a fact missed by
many politicians, the media, and a global public
looking for answers to global predicaments.
In order to have ideas and the people who
produce them taken more seriously, a number
of priority steps should be taken to improve
research, analysis, and policy work. Various
steps should be on the agenda for senior
leadership in order to: facilitate staff exchanges
from universities and think tanks for original
and synthetic research; create space within the
UN system for truly independent research and
analysis; increase interaction and exchanges
between the analytical staff of the Bretton Woods
institutions and the UN economic and social
departments and offices; ensure more effective
outreach and media promotion activities so that
the economic and social research produced by
the UN reaches more audiences and has more
impact on the decisions of economic and finance
ministers around the world; and transform
recruitment, appointment, promotion, and
organization of responsibilities as an integral
part of a new human resources strategy to exert
intellectual leadership.
Despite a rich tradition of contributions from
various UN agencies and organizations, the
system’s full potential for policy research and
analysis has scarcely been tapped. Cross-agency
collaboration is too rare. Research staff in
different parts of the world organization reporting
to ECOSOC seldom venture beyond the walls of
their departmental silos. Regular, mandatory
gatherings for sharing research and ideas could
reduce parochialism. A research council, for
instance, should be established in order to
expand opportunities for information-sharing
and collaboration, and reduce the chances of
redundancy and the pursuit of different projects
at cross-purposes.
The UN should seek as many alliances as
possible with centers of expertise and excellence—in academia, think tanks, government
policy units, and corporate research centers.
Human resources policy should do more to
foster an atmosphere that encourages creative
thinking, penetrating analysis, and policy-focused
research of a high intellectual and critical
caliber. The model of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change could well be
replicated for other issues. The 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize was awarded to this group because
mobilizing the talents of world-class public
intellectuals under UN auspices (in this case,
the World Meteorological Organization and the
UN Environment Programme) established the
reality of human contribution to climate change.
The intellectual firepower of staff members is
essential, and will depend on improvements and
better professional procedures in recruitment,
appointment, and promotion. These nuts-andbolts issues of operational alliances and staffing
affect directly the quality of policy outputs from
across the UN system.
By definition, however, such an orientation
requires courage and autonomy by the most
senior UN officials. It is a fool’s errand to try
and please all 193 member states all of the time
if a bold and forward-looking policy agenda is
desired. Calling into question conventional
or politically correct wisdom requires longerterm funding. Encouraging free thinking and
exploration of ideas and approaches is vital
but not cheap. Ideally, donors should provide
multiyear funding for research and analysis—
with no strings attached—through assessed
contributions, but voluntary funding is more
likely. In any case, conversations about the
system-wide need for such policy autonomy
should be on ECOSOC’s agenda.
UN Secretary-General addresses a meeting of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the urgency
of global action to prevent future climate oriented disasters.
U N P h o t o / E s k i nder D ebebe
ACRONYM
19
Without first-rate people and adequate funding,
messages typically are watered down to satisfy
the lowest common intergovernmental denominator. We have learned since 1990 from the howls
often greeting the annual Human Development
Report that intellectual independence can be
tolerated even by hypersensitive government
representatives. As might be imagined, calling
a spade a shovel in numerical terms does not
always gain friends and fans among governments
that fare less well than they thought they should
have. Government officials ask how the United
States could not be first, how Russia could rate
so poorly on so many indicators, and how 15
African countries could always bring up the rear.
we could not do, which was followed by the
Somali debacle and then Rwanda when there
apparently was nothing that we could do. The
heralded arrival to and subsequent departure
from the U.S. mission to the UN of the neo-con
firebrand John Bolton at the end of the George W.
Bush administration and his replacement by a
more pro-UN Susan Rice since the outset of the
Obama administration is a microcosm of the
U.S.’s long-standing hate-love relationship with
the United Nations. Ironically, of course, the UN
system itself reflects American values and
design—a history of ups and downs that former
professor and UN Assistant-Secretary-General
Edward Luck calls “mixed messages.”
But UNDP’s experience over the last two
decades suggests that researchers can be
liberated from the need to check analyses
before publication with boards or donors. The
widespread use of such a procedure will require
“islands” or “safety zones,” within which serious
and independent analysis can take place not
only away from daily tasks but without fearing
the loss of income or publication because one
or more governments are irked. The tolerance
for controversy should be far higher; academic
freedom should not be an alien concept for
researchers working within UN secretariats on
21st-century intellectual and policy challenges.
U.S. leadership and participation, or at least
acquiescence, have long been prerequisites
for significant change at the United Nations.
Conventional wisdom has it that the United
States often has virtually no interest in multilateralism, and in election years, even less. With a
bevy of Republican candidates clamoring for
more actions like invoking the 1994 law to cut
funding to UNESCO following the decision to
admit Palestine, readers may think that I have
been inhaling and not just smoking in proposing
to look toward Washington in 2012.
Washington and the
United Nations
Almost seven decades after its establishment,
the United Nations and the system of related
agencies and programs seemingly are perpetually in crisis, and part of the explanation is the
ambivalence toward the world organization by
its most important member, the United States.
The somber departure in December 2006, after
10 years, of the controversial but telegenic and
Nobel Prize–winning seventh Secretary-General
Annan, and his replacement in January 2007 by a
rather faceless South Korean functionary, Ban
Ki-moon, who was reelected in 2011, is merely
the latest of the about-faces so characteristic of
UN history. It was not that long ago that the Cold
War’s end supposedly signaled the “renaissance”
of multilateralism when there was nothing that
20
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While revitalizing the United Nations may strike
readers not only as far-fetched but also as a
peripheral priority in the midst of massive
domestic problems and the 2012 presidential
Former secretary-general Kofi Annan, (left) and SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon shortly after Mr. Ban took the Oath of
office in 2006.
U N P h o t o / M ar k G arten
U.S. President Barack Obama, flanked by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and President of France Nicolas Sarkozy,
during the high-level meeting on Libya.
U N P h o t o / E s k i nder D ebebe
race, it should not be. Strobe Talbott, the president
of the Brookings Institution and former deputy
secretary of state, wrote that “mega-threats can
be held at bay in the crucial years immediately
ahead only through multilateralism on a scale
far beyond anything the world has achieved to
date.” Such a change would require American
leadership like that in evidence in the aftermath
of World War II, when the United States boldly
led the effort to construct a second generation of
international organizations on the ashes of the
first, the League of Nations.
Expectations of the Obama presidency were as
impossibly high internationally as domestically,
including reviving U.S. multilateral leadership. His
rhetorical contributions have been appreciable—
not only his Cairo speech on tolerance but also
numerous others that indicated the United States
was prepared to assume a leadership role, and
considered multilateralism essential to U.S.
foreign policy. Many of his first specific steps
were in the right direction, including repaying
American arrears to the UN, funding programs
for reproductive health, joining the Human
Rights Council, moving ahead with nuclear arms
reductions, and preparing to initial the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
American participation in the Libya effort was
one of the few unequivocal successes of the
administration’s foreign policy. Speaking in Brazil
after Security Council resolution 1973 and the
imposition of the no-fly zone, Nobel laureate
Obama saw no contradiction with his prize—one
can favor peace but still authorize force to halt the
“butchering” of civilians. The president’s decision
provided no political advantage but prevented
massacres that would have “stained the conscience
of the world.” The much-scorned “leading from
behind” actually meant complementing essential
U.S. military assets with those from NATO partners
backed by a UN decision and regional diplomatic
support from the Arab League, Gulf Cooperation
Council, and African Union. Given the looming
and massive cuts in defense appropriations,
similar multilateral diplomatic and operational
efforts undoubtedly will be required.
Before leaving office, it was already obvious
to the bipartisan secretary of defense Robert
Gates that “the United States cannot kill or
capture its way to victory” and “is unlikely to
repeat another Iraq or Afghanistan—that is,
forced regime change followed by nation
building under fire.” The sobering experiences
of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan have
highlighted the limits of U.S. military and
ACRONYM
21
diplomatic power, a realization that is akin to the
equally obvious and mammoth shortcomings in
Washington’s inability to go solo and address
the ongoing economic and financial crisis.
Hence, multilateralism must reemerge as a
priority for this administration, or even a
Republican one, however low-key its treatment
during the campaign. In addition to the security
arena, the global financial and economic
meltdown should have made clearer what
previous crises had not—namely the risks,
problems, and costs of a global economy without
adequate international institutions, democratic
decision-making, or powers to bring order and
ensure compliance with collective decisions.
No less a towering commentator than Henry
Kissinger, whose realist credentials are intact,
wrote: “The financial collapse exposed the
mirage. It made evident the absence of global
institutions to cushion the shock and to reverse
the trend.” After an initial expansion of the G-20
and decisions to provide additional reserves for
the IMF and additional representation for
development countries there and in the World
Bank, business as usual has returned as the
standard operating procedure. To date, however,
trillions of dollars, euros, and pounds have been
used to paper over the cracks. Why was it
impossible to imagine taking the almost $800
billion rescue package approved by Congress as
the basis for an economic lending operation of
several trillion dollars—that is, use a reasonable
7–8 fold multiplier rather than the 35–40 one
used by failed and irresponsible banks—to
relaunch growth of the global economy?
What other trans-boundary problems should be
on the sensible priority list for this or any U.S.
administration? Most informed Americans would
certainly acknowledge that, when it comes to
spotting, warning, and managing international
health hazards—for example, the severe acute
respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, the avian
flu more recently, and AIDS perennially—the
World Health Organization is indispensable and
unrivaled. Monitoring international crime
statistics and the narcotics trade, policing
nuclear power and human trafficking, and
numerous other important global functions are
all based within the UN system. Washington’s
short list for the United Nations would include not
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only post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan
and Iraq, but also fighting terrorism (for instance,
sharing information and monitoring moneylaundering activities), confronting infectious
diseases, pursuing environmental sustainability,
monitoring human rights, providing humanitarian
aid, addressing global poverty, rescheduling
debt, and fostering trade.
Washington’s short list for
the United Nations would
include not only post-conflict
reconstruction in Afghanistan
and Iraq, but also fighting
terrorism (for instance, sharing
information and monitoring
money-laundering activities),
confronting infectious diseases,
pursuing environmental
sustainability, monitoring
human rights, providing
humanitarian aid, addressing
global poverty, rescheduling
debt, and fostering trade.
But perhaps we can learn from history? In
a book about the origins of American
multilateralism, Council on Foreign Relations
analyst Stewart Patrick makes a persuasive case:
“The fundamental questions facing the 1940s
generation confront us again today. As then, the
United States remains by far the most powerful
country in the world, but its contemporary
security, political, and economic challenges
are rarely amenable to unilateral action.” The
creation of a third generation of intergovernmental organizations should be moved toward
the top of the American foreign policy agenda.
The next generation would have world-class and
independent executive leadership with more
centralization and better funding. Like the
The World Health Organization (WHO) is
the directing and coordinating authority
for health within the United Nations
system. Amongst its many achievements,
the eradication of smallpox—a disease
which had maimed and killed millions—
in the late 1970s is one of WHO’s
proudest achievements. It was the first
and so far the only time that a major
infectious disease has been eradicated.
U N P h o t o / S o p h i a P ar i s
ACRONYM
23
European Union, community-wide calculations of
interest for a substantial number of issues would
replace those exclusively based on narrowly
conceived national interests. While not a world
government by any stretch of the imagination,
the new generation of international institutions
would nonetheless have elements of overarching
authority and enhanced mechanisms for
ensuring compliance—indeed, the World Trade
While not a world government
by any stretch of the imagination, the new generation of
international institutions would
nonetheless have elements of
overarching authority and
enhanced mechanisms for
ensuring compliance—indeed,
the World Trade Organization
already has some.
Organization already has some. Instituting the
four remedies described here could amount to
the establishment of a third generation.
Le machin is what Charles de Gaulle famously
dubbed the United Nations, thereby dismissing
international cooperation as frivolous in
comparison with the real red meat of international
affairs, national interests and Realpolitik, or what
goes by the label of raison d’état or Machiavellianism. He conveniently ignored that the formal
birth of “the thing” was not the signing of the
UN Charter in June 1945, but rather the adoption
of the “Declaration by the United Nations” in
Washington in January 1942. The 26 countries
that defeated Fascism also anticipated the formal
establishment of a world organization as an
essential extension of their wartime commitments.
These were not pie-in-the-sky utopians but
pragmatic idealists. The UN system was not
viewed as a liberal plaything to be tossed aside
every time the going got tough, but rather a vital
necessity for postwar order and prosperity.
24
ACRONYM
One of the first persons recruited by the United
Nations in 1946 after having fought in the war
and undoubtedly the most widely respected
commentator on the world organization, Sir Brian
Urquhart, recalls the “remarkable generation of
leaders and public servants” who were the U.S.
leaders during and after World War II. And what
was their orientation? These pragmatic idealists
were “more concerned about the future of
humanity than the outcome of the next election;
and they understood that finding solutions to
postwar problems was much more important
than being popular with one or another part of
the American electorate.”
That same informed but visionary realism is
very much needed again.
What Happened to the Idea
of World Government?
As long as we are peering backward, it is worth
revisiting the big idea that led to the establishment
of the World Federalists. Why? The answer is
straightforward: because world government was
a reflection of what kinds of visionary thinking
was possible, but has been banned since in
sensible discussions and is entirely absent from
classrooms. In fact, I cannot recall a single
undergraduate or graduate student inquiring
about the theoretical possibility of a central
political authority exercising elements of
universal legal jurisdiction. Certainly no
younger scholar would wish to cut short her
career by writing a dissertation about it.
Although “world government” is no longer
used in polite company, it was once a staple of
informed debate on international affairs. And as
hard as it is to believe for younger readers, this
tendency was especially pronounced in the
United States. Could there really once have been
a sizable group of prominent Americans from
every walk of life—including politicians who
passed resolutions in 30 of 48 state legislatures—
who supported pooling American sovereignty
with that of other countries?
One now requires unfathomable powers of
imagination to envision a Washington where
the idea of world government was a staple of
public policy analysis. Yet a 1949 sense of
Congress resolution argued for “a fundamental
objective of the foreign policy of the United
States to support and strengthen the United
Nations and to seek its development into a
world federation.” It was sponsored by 111
representatives, including two future presidents,
John F. Kennedy and Gerald Ford, as well as the
likes of such hard-headed politicians as Mike
Mansfield, Henry Cabot Lodge, Christian Herter,
”Scoop” Jackson, and Jacob Javits.
In fact, in the 1940s it was impossible in the
United States to read periodicals, listen to the
radio, or watch newsreels and not encounter the
idea of world government. No one persuaded
the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration to
include the idea of world government in
American proposals in San Francisco, but peace
movements of various stripes certainly raised
the profile of supranationality. The cause had
an unusual hero, the defeated 1940 Republican
candidate for president Wendell Wilkie, who in
1943 published an unlikely best seller called
One World, which attenuated the Republican
Party’s isolationism and eventually helped
secure bipartisan approval of the United
Nations. What would any author do today if he
or she sold 2 million copies with that title?
The June 1945 signing of the world organization’s
Charter in San Francisco, shortly before the
nuclear age began, diminished the leverage
and influence of those pushing for a world
federation. Yet one legacy was the United World
Federalists (UWF), whose members were
inspired by another best seller, Emery Reves’s
The Anatomy of Peace, which was serialized in
Reader’s Digest and argued that the United
Nations of member states had to be replaced
by worldwide law. Grenville Clark, a Wall Street
lawyer and friend of Roosevelt, teamed up with
Harvard law professor Louis Sohn to burnish
these ideas in what later became their classic
World Peace Through World Law. Simultaneously,
financier Bernard Baruch devised a visionary
plan to place the nuclear fuel cycle under the
United Nations at a time when the United States
still enjoyed the atomic monopoly. Led by its
president, Robert M. Hutchins, the University
of Chicago from 1945 to 1951 sponsored a
prominent group of scholars in the Committee
to Frame a World Constitution.
The movement was not a lunatic fringe. It
included not only Nobel laureates and a scientific
luminary like Albert Einstein, but also such
visible entertainers as Ronald Reagan, E.B. White,
and Oscar Hammerstein. Future Senators Alan
Cranston and Harris Wofford sought to spread
the message of world federalism among university students, and the Student Federalists became
the largest nonpartisan political organization in
the country. Prominent individuals included, at
one time or another, Kurt Vonnegut, Walter
Cronkite, H.G. Wells, Peter Ustinov, Supreme
Court Justices William Douglas and Owen
Roberts, Senator Estes Kefauver, and Senator
and future Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
This momentary enthusiasm evaporated by
the early 1950s, when the world government idea
was hidden by the Iron Curtain, overshadowed
by the Cold War, and eclipsed by Senator
Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt. On the right wing,
this jump-started the engines of the black
helicopters that are still whirling and fostered
labeling advocates for world government as
communist fellow travelers; on the left wing, the
idea has encountered fears of top-down tyranny
in a dystopia.
Most European intellectuals focused on the
Continent’s reconstruction, although a few
pursued the universal federal idea, including
Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand
Russell, and John Boyd Orr (the first head of the
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization). Led
by the French banker Jean Monnet, European
intellectuals pursued a federal idea for the
Continent rather than one for the globe.
Most of the countries in what we now call the
“global South” were still colonies, and local
independence struggles were far more pressing
than thinking through distant world orders.
Nonetheless, aspirations about a world federal
government were not absent from public discourse in, for example, newly independent India.
In an address to the UN General Assembly as late
as December 1956, Jawaharlal Nehru argued:
ACRONYM
25
The short answer to the question asked in
the title to this section is: The United States
became obsessed with anticommunism;
Europe focused on the construction of a
regional economic and political federation;
the burgeoning number of postcolonial
countries shifted their preoccupations toward
nonalignment and Third World solidarity; and
scholars got out of the business.
Conclusion
It is hard to be overly sanguine about
implementing any time soon my suggested
changes for the United Nations: Chipping away
at narrowly defined national sovereignty;
closing down the North-South theater; pursuing
organizational consolidation; and fostering
imaginative leadership. Without them, however,
the lack of coherence and results will further
damage credibility and gives rise to additional
public cynicism.
The look at contemporary Washington politics
and a brief historical journey are essential
to the story that I want to tell. After having
encountered diagnoses of the four main
ailments for what is wrong with the UN and
prognoses for how (partially) to fix it, puzzled
readers may think of John Godfrey Saxe’s fable
26
ACRONYM
“The Blind Men and the Elephant”:
It was six men of Indostan, to learning much
inclined
Who went to “see” the elephant, though all of
them were blind.
The first approached the elephant and happening
to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side at once began
to bawl,
“This wonder of an elephant is very like a wall.”
Another argues that the elephant is clearly like a
spear, while another “boldly up and spake” that
it is actually more like a snake.
I have parsed my views about the United
Nations, but there are numerous other wideranging views about the world organization’s
problems and prospects. Political differences
and contestation are inevitable and desirable
in an institution with 193 member states and
tens of thousands of staff members and soldiers.
Analogous to the six men of the imaginary
Indostan, there is little consensus among
scholars, governments, international civil
servants, journalists, and civil society about
whether the beast is really more like a wall,
spear, or snake. Is the world organization the
potential solution to pressing global problems
or a pathetic reflection of the inability of human
beings to attack the problems that threaten
their survival and dignity?
This essay represents an honest attempt to
accurately describe the UN animal and not
reinvent an elephant, and the goal is certainly
not to start what Saxe saw as a “theologic war.”
Analyses of UN affairs and recommendations
about the world body’s future are similar to that
conflict in so far as narrow perspectives impede
the perception that we are experiencing this
elephant together. Hopefully, this essay has
clarified at least some differences in perception.
I remain persuaded that individuals and states
can be as strong as the institutions that they
create. There are plenty of things that are wrong,
but many can be fixed. For all its warts, the
United Nations still matters for its norms,
legitimacy, and idealism. The world organization
urgently needs to reinvent itself and be a vital
force in global affairs. ■
i l l ustrat i o n : J o h n S t i s l o w
“The only way to look ahead assuredly is for
some kind of world order, One World, to emerge.”
author biography
T h oma s G . W e iss is presidential professor of political science and
director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The
Graduate Center of The City University of New York. This essay is based
on the new edition of his What’s Wrong With the United Nations and
How to Fix It (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012). His other recent single-authored books include
Thinking about Global Governance: Why People and Ideas Matter (London: Routledge, 2011).
Resources
WE B SITE S
General
Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies—http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/rbins/
The World Federation of United Nations Associations—www.wfuna.org
United Nations Reform
Center for UN Reform Education—www.centerforunreform.org
NGO Liaison Service, UN civil society relations—www.un-ngls.org/orf/UNreform.htm
Reform the UN—www.reformtheUN.org
United Nations, Strengthening the UN—www.un.org/en/strengtheningtheun
United Nations Association of New Zealand, UN Renewal—www.unanz.org.nz/Programmes/
UNRenewal/tabid/89/Default.aspx
UNA-UK, Reform—www.una-uk.org/reform
World Federalist Movement—www.wfm-igp.org
Responsibility to Protect
Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect—www.r2pasiapacific.org
Global Action to Prevent War—www.globalactionpw.org
Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect—www.globalr2p.org
International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect—www.responsibilitytoprotect.org
WFUNA—www.wfuna.org/r2p
U.S.–UN Relations
UNA-USA—www.unausa.org
UN Foundation—www.unfoundation.org
Better World Campaign—www.betterworldcampaign.org
United States Mission to the UN—www.usun.state.gov
ACRONYM
27
Dialogue
ACRONYM C af é
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Starter Q ues t ion s
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author presents several ideas for
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backed by strategic donor country invest-
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the UN and addressing the “afflictions”
pinpointed in the article?
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SC: ICJ :UNCSD:UNV: INIA: I L
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C: J IAMCATT: JUNIC:MIGA:OC
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: CCPOQ:
ECE
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FAO:
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At the
heart of:
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mission
is the
belief
that a strong
and
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United
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