ACRONYM

A C A B Q : C C P O Q : E C E : F A O : I S C C

: J U N I C : I A E A : I B E : I C A O : I N S

T R A W : I C S : O C : W F U N A : I C C : I C

S C : I C J : U N C S D : U N V : I N I A : I L

O : I M F : I T U : I T C : J I U : I L O / I T

C : J I A M C A T T : J U N I C : M I G A : O C

: O O S A : U N B A : U N C H S : U N I C E F :

U N C I T R A L : U N C C D : U N C T A D : U N

I F E M : U N D P : U N E S C O : U N F C C C :

U N E P : U N : U N H C H R : U N H C R : U N I

D O : U N I D I R : U N I T A R : U N D C P : U

N I S : U N I C R I : U N J S P F : U N S C O :

U N O G : U N O V : U N F P A : U N P A : U N R

I S D : U N S C : U N U : U N V : I B R D : W F

P : W H O : W I P O : W M O : W T O : A C A B Q

: C C P O Q : E C E : I S C C : F A O : I A C S

D : I A E A : I F A D : I B E : I C S : I C A O

: I C S C : I C C : I C J : I N I A : I L O : I

M F : I N S T R A W : I T U : U N B A : I T C :

J I U : J I A M C A T T : J U N I C : U N A I D

S : M I G A : O C : O O S A : U N C H S : U N I

C E F : U N C I T R A L : U N C S D : U N C C D

: U N C T A D : U N I F E M : U N D P : U N E S

C O : U N E P : U N F C C C : U N : U N H C H R

: U N H C R : U N I D O : U N I D I R : U N I T

A R : U N D C P : U N I S : U N I C R I : U N J

S P F : U N O G : U N O V : U N S C O : U N F P

A : U N P A : U N R I S D : U N S C : U N U : U

N V : I B R D : W F P : W H O : W I P O : W M O

: W T O : A C A B Q : C C P O Q : E C E : I S C

C : O O S A : A C S D : I A E A : I B E : I C S

: I C A O : I I D S : M I G A : O C : U N B A :

U N C H S : U N I C E F : U N C I T R A L : O C

S p r i n g 2 0 1 2

Can We Fix the United

Nations?t h o m a S g . w e i S S

V O L 1 : N O 1

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Published in the United States by the World Federation of United Nations Associations, 1 United Nations Plaza, Room 1177, New York, NY, 10017

Copyright © 2012 by the World Federation of United Nations Associations

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Series Editor Bonian Golmohammadi, Editor Fruzsina Molnar Straus, Design by Stislow Design

iSSn 2226-9207

1 Foreword

2 Can We Fix the United Nations? THOMAS G WEISS

2 Introduction

3 Me-first International Decision-making

5 What’s Wrong?

8 Can We Fix It?

20 Washington and the United Nations

24 What Happened to the Idea of

World Government?

26 Conclusion

27 Author Biography

27 Resources 28 Dialogue

c o n t e n t S

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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 informa-tion 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 ex-pressed are those of our contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of WFUNA- its leader-ship, 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 analy-sis 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 criti-cal, 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 insid-ers”. Our goal is for the text to serve as a catalyst for further discussion and debate through ACRO-NYM’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.

F o r e w o r d

At WFUNA, we believe in the fundamental value of the United Nations, but we also understand that it is far from perfect.

Bonian golmohammadi

Secretary-General, World Federation of United Nations Associations

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t h o m a S g . w e i S S

over a decade into the 21St century, 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.

Can We Fix the United Nations?

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Both World War I and II gave rise to ground-breaking efforts resulting in the first two generations of universal international organiza-tions. 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,

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.

What, exactly, is wrong with the UN, and can we fix it? This essay begins by examining the fundamental nature of the problem of national-interest 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,

O P P O S I T E ( 1 9 5 0 ) A N D A B O V E ( 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 A N D U N P h o T o / R i C k B A j o R N A S

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financial flows, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Effectively address-ing any of these threats requires vigorous approaches and actions that are not unilateral, bilateral, or even multilateral, but rather global.

Ironically, the policy authority and resources for tackling global problems remain vested individu-ally 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.

For all of its shortcomings and weaknesses, the United Nations—and its system of specialized agencies and programs—is the closest approxi-mation that we have to a central institutional presence on the world stage. The UN urgently requires strengthening. The proposition here

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.

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.”

While his administration’s delivery has lagged rhetoric, nonetheless that same theme song needs to be sung at higher decibel levels by

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.YA l E G l o B A l o N l i N E © 2 0 0 5 YA l E C E N T E R F o R T h E S T U D Y o F G l o B A l i z AT i o N

i n d i a n

o c e a n

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INFECTED: 139DEATHS: 13

ENGLAND


UNITED STATES


BRAZIL


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ITALY


THAILAND


SINGAPORE


AUSTRALIA


MALAYSIA


VIETNAM


SWITZERLAND


GERMANY


SPAIN


IRELAND


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HONG KONG


SARS spread 2002—an example of “problems without passports”

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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.

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.

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.

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

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 intergov-ernmental organizations (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the African Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the Organization of American

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.

SARS spread 2002—an example of “problems without passports”

U N P h o T o / E S k i N D E R D E B E B E

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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.

t h e F o u r a F F l i c t i o n S :

1 Rigidly prioritizing state sovereignty restricts interna-tional decision-making on trans-boundary problems

2 Dated and divisive member state groupings and useless diplomatic theatrics

3 Decenralized, chaotic and wasteful nature of the UN system

4 Low productivity of UN bureaucracy and under-whelming leadership

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 U TA k A N A G ATA

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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.

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 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

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.

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

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

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.

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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.

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.U N P h o T o

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

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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. 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 commu-nity 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

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.

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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 popula-tions, 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.orgU N P h o T o / A l B E R T G o N z A l E z F A R R A N

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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.

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 industri-alized 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

climate change, development finance, nonprolif-eration, 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 fortifica-tions 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 subse-quently 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

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.

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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-the-board 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 issues-based and interest-based coalitions. Less posturing and role-playing is a prerequisite for the future health of the world organization.

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 / j E A N - M A R C F E R R é

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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 develop-ment. 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

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-by-crisis 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

Mark Malloch-BrownU N P h o T o / M A R k G A R T E N

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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 “system-wide 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 Commis-sioner 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

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 A R k G A R T E N

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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 consoli-dated 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 opera-tional 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 TA N T o N W i N T E R

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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?

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.

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 secretary- general, 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.

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,

t h e F o u r F i x e S :

1 Promoting multilateral cooperation through good international citizenship

2 Bridging the North-South divide through creative issue-focused partnerships

3 Pursuing system coherence, centralization and consolida-tion as well as restructuring financing and spending

4 Reinvigorating UN staff and fostering imaginative leadership

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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.

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, diplo-mats, 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

UN Secretary-General meets staff.U N P h o T o / E S k i N D E R D E B E B E

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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 excel-lence—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-and-bolts 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 longer-term 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 N D E R D E B E B E

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Without first-rate people and adequate funding, messages typically are watered down to satisfy the lowest common intergovernmental denomi-nator. 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.

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.

Washington and the United Nations

Almost seven decades after its establishment, the United Nations and the system of related agencies and programs seemingly are perpetu-ally 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

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.”

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 multilat-eralism, 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.

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 Secretary-General Ban ki-moon shortly after Mr. Ban took the oath of office in 2006.U N P h o T o / M A R k G A R T E N

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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 Compre-hensive Test Ban Treaty.

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 N D E R D E B E B E

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

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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

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 intergovern-mental 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

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.

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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 PA R i S

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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

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 Machiavel-lianism. 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.

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?

While not a world government by any stretch of the imagina-tion, 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.

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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 univer-sity 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 dis-course in, for example, newly independent India. In an address to the UN General Assembly as late as December 1956, Jawaharlal Nehru argued:

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“The only way to look ahead assuredly is for some kind of world order, One World, to emerge.”

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

“The Blind Men and the Elephant”:It was six men of Indostan, to learning much inclinedWho went to “see” the elephant, though all of them were blind.The first approached the elephant and happening to fallAgainst 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 wide-ranging 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. ■

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thomaS g. weiSS 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).

A C R O N Y M 27

weBSiteS

generalRalph Bunche Institute for International Studies—http://web.gc.cuny.edu/dept/rbins/ The World Federation of United Nations Associations—www.wfuna.org

united nations reformCenter 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.orgUnited 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 protectAsia-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 relationsUNA-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

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d i a l o g u e

acronym caFé

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Starter QueStionS

• Is the United Nations still relevant in today’s globalized world?

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• The author presents several ideas for strengthening the United Nations system, such as consolidation and centralization backed by strategic donor country invest-

ments. What are some other possibilities for bringing about constructive change at the UN and addressing the “afflictions” pinpointed in the article?

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• How can civil society effectively contribute to the strengthening of the United Nations system?

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