Commentary No. 62: Reforming the United Nations

Dr. Michael Oliver

October 1995
Unclassified

Editors Note: Around the world during 1995, events have been organized for the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations, and to honour those who signed the Charter on 26 June 1945 in San Francisco. The 50th Anniversary has also prompted an accumulation of proposals for UN reform, many of which focus on UN practices and on the UN Charter itself. However, we are pleased in what follows to present a somewhat different perspective on UN reform, from a distinguished Canadian, eminently qualified to comment.

Dr. Michael Oliver, former President of Carleton University, is currently active on the Canadian Committee for the 50th Anniversary and is President of the United Nations Association in Canada. His strong calls for reform of the UN as an instrument of global governance divide into four parts: Common Security, Common Development, Common Rights and Common Participation, and stress the need "to make room for the peoples of the world and their associations, and not just their governments".

Disclaimer: Publication of an article in the Commentary series does not imply CSIS authentication of the information nor CSIS endorsement of the author's views.

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The end of the Second World War saw the demise of the ailing League of Nations, the first attempt at global governance. The League had failed because, when faced with major challenges to peace, it was unable to act. Its member states stood by, figuratively wringing their hands, as Japan invaded Manchuria, Germany re-occupied the Rhineland, Italy invaded Ethiopia, and Germany and Italy together helped subvert the legitimate government of Spain. By the time Hitler's Germany began its major moves on Europe, the League meant absolutely nothing as a guarantor of security.

It did leave behind it a network of world institutions in fields other than security: the Universal Postal Union and the World Court, for example. But valuable as they might be, these were peripheral bodies; the central idea of a global institution, embodied in the League of Nations, had to be re-thought and reconstructed.

In the dawn of victory, in the last months (as it turned out) of working alliance, the nations that had won the war put together the Charter of the United Nations. Most of those who re-read that Charter today -- and it has been very little amended -- will still respond to the vision that inspired the UN. And when they look ahead another 50 years and ask where they would want the UN to take them, most observers conclude they would want to build on the UN of 1945, to re-shape and reform¹ it, not demolish it.

That said, complacency ends; the UN as it exists corresponds to no one's dream. It is fitting to celebrate its survival and its real accomplishments, but above all the UN cries out for strengthening, changing and re-charging.

A great deal of what is wrong can be remedied by changes in UN practices and by changes in the Charter itself. It is therefore useful that lists of 'things to be done' are being put before the global public.

Reference will be made to some of the specific reforms that are being recommended, but the focus here is somewhat different. The fundamental reason the UN as it exists does not match the vision of the Charter is that the states and peoples of the world have not wanted it to. The UN has never been assigned the central role in international relations; the values of the Charter have all too often been a background motif played behind the blare of national self-interest, narrowly conceived. If the UN is to be given the chance to be what it could be, 'We the Peoples' have to want it to be vital, want it to be the core expression of a changed international outlook. In essence, the success of the UN during the years ahead depends on a new mind-set, one that can be conveniently analyzed under four headings: Common Security, Common Development, Common Rights and Common Participation.

I. Common Security

In 1945, the authors of the Charter assumed that the pursuit of security and development could be undertaken by the nations of the world acting in concert. However, for the next four decades, quite different assumptions prevailed.

National Security and Collective Security

Security was the dominant concern of the cold war period, and states sought it through building up national security forces and through collective security arrangements like NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The models that received the most attention were those of deterrence, of a balance of terror and of mutually assured destruction. Security was to be achieved through playing a deadly competitive game that featured the diplomacy of threat and counter-threat, the escalation of the destructiveness of weapons systems, and the spread of a blanket of arms on every continent.

Yet throughout this period there were quiet voices that promoted quite a different concept of security, one that was consonant with, and indeed derived from, the UN Charter. The crucial phrase was common security.

Common security makes war itself the enemy. The objective is to increase everyone's security by steadily reducing the risk of war: by disarmament, by agreed systems of inspection and surveillance and by shared early warning systems. Common security asks states and peoples to meet and see how they can be less threatening to one another; it is quite different from meeting with allies to map out a collective defence against 'others' who constitute a common foe.

The future would be much more promising if the intelligence and planning resources of defence establishments and the analysts of universities and think-tanks were as concentrated on common security thinking as they have been for so many years on national security and deterrence. Reforming the UN will require not just a set of amendments or new declarations, but the consecration of the best strategic thinking, in Canada as elsewhere, on the of common security. So saying does not belittle the work of peace research institutes, nor of the NGOs that have promoted humanitarian corridors, days of peace, safe havens and all the other imaginative ways of reducing the brutal impact of war. Nor does it underestimate the importance of pre-cedents for humanitarian intervention that have been established over the last five years. But in most countries of the world, the elaboration of common security models and the problematique development of common security discourse still take second place to the preparation of plans, policies and speeches that have their base in national security or collective security.

Suppose it were possible to push the idea of common security to the very top of the global agenda; the need for changes in the UN then becomes starkly evident. The Security Council, to begin with the key institution, has looked all too often like an instrument of American foreign policy. Both of the UN's major engagements -- Korea in 1950 and Iraq/Kuwait in 1990, and some of its minor ones like Haiti in 1994 -- have corresponded with American interests; and they have been American-led and American-dominated. Of course it is not impossible for short-term American interests and the global interest in common security to coincide, but this will not always be the case. To give credibility to the UN, to clothe it with enhanced legitimacy, the Security Council must accord greater representation to the South, and in keeping with the realities of power distribution in 1995, it must include what were in 1945 'enemy' states, like Japan and Germany. The veto will not be abolished overnight, but the circumstances under which it is used can be narrowed, and by 2045 one may hope that it has withered from disuse.

The ability of the UN to keep the peace depends fundamentally on its ability to practice preventive diplomacy and, more broadly, to help remove the causes of war. But it also depends on its ability, in the last resort, to mobilize armed force, not massively, but rapidly and powerfully. In Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda, the delays in assembling a UN armed presence magnified problems and reduced effectiveness. Voices like that of Sir Brian Urquhart, a former Under-Secretary General of the UN, have for a long time called for the creation of a permanent, rapid deployment force. Canada has taken the problem very seriously and has invited Urquhart to join with Canadian Nobel Prize winner John Polanyi in heading up an international consultative group to do 'an in-depth review of the short-, medium-, and long-term options available to the UN's rapid reaction capability in time of crisis.' On September 26 of this year, the Hon. André Ouellet, Minister of Foreign Affairs, presented to the General Assembly the results of this study, entitled "Towards a Rapid Reaction Capability for the United Nations". Canada will take the lead in gathering support for the "Vanguard Concept" it contains, and for the staged implementation of recommendations in the report.

A lot more must obviously be done if the UN is to be the effective central instrument of common security. Strategic arms reduction is proceeding at a snail's pace, and any elation that might have been felt after the renewal of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was dampened by announcement of the renewal of testing by major powers. The UN plays a very minor role in the complex processes of disarmament and in the prevention of arms proliferation, especially in the regulation of the trade in conventional arms, although the Conventional Arms Register set up in l99l, largely at Canada's urging, is a step in the right direction. Indeed, the challenge that arms control presents to the Security Council as constructed at present is only fully understood when it is realized that 85% of the weapons supplied to developing countries come from the five countries that have permanent seats and a veto: the USA, Russia, China, France and Britain. Russia's economic collapse has made matters worse, for its cut-rate weapons are flooding the market.

We are faced by a complex circularity: achieving common security depends on a reformed United Nations; and UN reform depends on widespread acceptance of common security as the central concept in the search for peace.

II. Common Development

Of all the fields covered by the UN Charter, that in which the 'one world', 'common destiny' outlook seems weakest is economic and social development. It is not that the UN has shrunk from global approaches or is uninvolved in international development. Indeed, if you draw a few tiles from a Scrabble bag and put them together randomly, chances are you will come up with the acronym for a UN agency, and probably a development agency. But the mindset that frames conventional thought on development problems is not common development. Rather, development is approached through the market, with its stress on unfettered competition, and through aid, with its overtones of benevolence and dependency.

During the 1980s especially, the development of a global economy was rapid and relentless. To some parts of the world, like the Four Tigers of East Asia, it brought wealth and reasonably widespread well-being. To Africa and to parts of South America, opening on to a world market coincided with a widening of the gap between rich and poor countries and between rich and poor people. In 1960, the richest 20% of the world's population was 30 times better off than the poorest 20%. Thirty years later, that richest group was 61 times better off.

Few of us would relish the King Canute role of turning back the tide of globalization and returning to local and national markets and single-state control of economies. The power of the state has been enormously eroded by the immense growth of international finance, by instantaneous currency movements and by the dominance of multinational enterprises in world production as well as world trade. Any paper today carries crushing evidence of the confidence world market operators have in their ability to weaken by destabilization any government that fails to meet its low tax, low spending norms. The new market orthodoxies must be unquestioningly accepted, or punishment will follow.

It is likely that the countries which find their internal stability so blatantly threatened are, before long, going to look to new international rules of the game to take the arbitrariness out of global market power. And if they are not pushed in that direction by the frustrations of state powerlessness, they will still have to strengthen global norms so as to prevent the environmental disasters that uncontrolled growth are producing. The UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio was convincing in its central assertion that the only kind of development the world can permit is sustainable development; the more recent Cairo Conference on Population and Development drove home the same message.

The UN as it exists is not well positioned to create the new régime of common development, shared and sustainable. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) has never been able to establish strong leadership over the UN's own specialized agencies and organs in the development field. The Bretton Woods institutions -- the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- pursue goals that are often in direct contradiction to those sought by the United Nations Development Program or UNICEF. Reform will be difficult, for some specialized agencies enjoy more support from member states than does the UN itself. But the common development idea has much force behind it. Canadian Priorities for UN Reform called for the creation of a new Sustainable Development Security Council to replace ECOSOC. It would be a high-level body, able to make binding decisions like those of the Security Council, and with full power to co-ordinate the specialized agencies, including the international financial institutions. This organizational strategy is also favoured by the Commission on Global Governance, which proposes an Economic Security Council conceived on very similar lines, and by the Ford-sponsored Independent Working Group report.

III. Common Rights

The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly in December 1948. It gave substance to the affirmation of faith 'in fundamental human rights and in the dignity and worth of the human person' found in the Preamble to the UN Charter. The Charter also called for international co-operation 'in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for international freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion'. These words have a hollow ring when contrasted with the ethnic cleansing in ex-Yugoslavia, the treatment of Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, and the genocidal slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda. But the very threats to the standards of the Universal Declaration have led to an enhanced UN role in the protection of human rights. Humanitarian intervention in the affairs of member states where fundamental rights are being violated is gaining an acceptance that would have seemed impossible even 10 years ago, and the creation in 1994 of a High Commissioner for Human Rights by the UN underlines the new saliency of a concept of common rights for all peoples.

Nevertheless, the concept of common rights needs to be stated with care, for already tensions between a respect for cultural uniqueness and the assertion of a single, universal standard are appearing. A worldwide concept of personal rights is weakened, not strengthened, if it can be perceived as an extension of the intellectual hegemony of the North, and especially the western liberal sector of the North. But a dialogue can be engaged that is based on mutual respect for cultural traditions; and it can enrich the concepts of universality rather than diluting them. Charles Taylor, the McGill philosopher, proposes that any discussion to expand the scope of universal values begin with this presumption: 'that all human cultures that have animated whole societies over some considerable stretch of time have something important to say to all human beings'. (Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p.66).

The UN of the future should be a crucial locale for just such discussions and for the new understandings of common rights that can emerge from them. The alternatives which Taylor urges us to avoid is for Euro-centred liberal dogmatists to begin all discussions with the demand: "...kindly take your various religious, metaphysical and ethical conceptions and keep them out of the way of the Declaration of Rights which we hereby ground." (Reply and re-articulation' in James Tully (ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p.248).

IV. Common Participation

The preamble to the Charter of the UN begins with the words 'We the peoples ....', but from then on, the Charter deals almost exclusively with states and governments. The UN deals indeed with united nations. But if anything has been learned in the 20th century it is that states and nations are not enough. The last thing a new global order should be is an exclusively governmental creation. At the same time as the institutions are built that can provide common security, shape common development and protect common rights, a global civil society must be built. Eastern Europe learned to its sorrow that without civil society -- a network of autonomous and self-defining associations, parallel to the state -- 'people's democracy' was a meaningless, indeed derisory, term. Whatever structure of expanded international law may be created, whatever means may be chosen to enforce that new set of rules, it risks becoming a system of repression rather than liberation if it is not tempered by a global civil society.

There is a paradox here. On the one hand, the international community seeks to reinforce controls at an inter-state level so as to compensate for the lack of power of individual states to deal with out-of-control international drug traders, arms traders and polluters; OR a set of floating financial operators that can destabilize countries at will; OR multinational corporations that can dictate terms to states that are much less wealthy than they are. On the other hand, adding new levels of authority can be a recipe for disaster unless the means are created to make them accountable to people, not just states. The orthodox method of achieving this, of course, is through the spread of democratic forms of government. However, this should be supported and supplemented by a Web of interconnected associations that crosses boundaries and links common individual and group interests on a global scale. There are already scores of good examples of the kinds of association that are needed: Amnesty International, Africa Watch, the World Federation of United Nations Associations, the innumerable international learned societies that bring scholars and scientists together. Every day, Internet and World Wide Web are creating a thicker, more varied and stronger sub-structure of linkages that can support a truly global civil society. All these surely constitute the sine qua non of an acceptable world future.

It follows that if the UN is to be a fit instrument for global governance, it must make room for the peoples of the world and their associations and not just their governments. Two ways of accomplishing this end have been proposed, and they are not necessarily incompatible.

The first calls for the creation of a Parliamentary Assembly of the United Nations. Parallel to the General Assembly where representatives of the executive arm of states meet, there would be a body that brought together members of the legislative branch of government. With 185 member countries, each of which might be allowed to seat representatives of the main parties, government and opposition, it is easy to see how large such a body might become. There is also a question in some people's minds as to whether they would be distant enough from state power to constitute a credible, independent civil society presence in the UN.

An alternative line of action is to build a non-governmental organization (NGO) presence into the UN. NGOs have already been recognized for many years by the Economic and Social Council in categories that give them different degrees of access to the proceedings of ECOSOC and its associated agencies. Bodies in Category I, like the International Red Cross or the World Federation of United Nations Associations, can participate in almost all of the proceedings of ECOSOC; Category II organizations in a few of them, and organizations 'on the roster' in special cases. But this limited, hierarchic selection of NGOs has been replaced by a much larger number, indeed a multitude, of voluntary organizations that, especially since the UNCED conference in Rio, attend and take some part in UN-sponsored International Conferences. And these conferences, in part because of NGO involvement in formal preparations as well as in conference discussion and parallel sessions, are increasingly the source of new ideas and new policies in international affairs. The problem with NGOs is, of course, that they are by definition self-selecting and therefore not necessarily representative. This leads some critics to believe that they will gain attention as squeaky wheels rather than for the intrinsic merits of their views.

In the Canadian Priorities booklet, the Canadian Committee for the 50th Anniversary endorses both parliamentary and NGO approaches to 'democratization' of the UN. The Committee on Global Governance lends its support particularly to the NGO approach and calls for 'an annual Forum of Civil Society consisting of representatives of organizations to be accredited to the General Assembly'. The Ford-sponsored report also calls for a new dimension of international co-operation involving non-state actors and participation by non-governmental organizations.

Global Community and The State

Common Security, Common Development, Common Rights and Common Participation: there is much more that could be said about the storehouse of concepts that the international community will need for the next 50 years. Neither the creation of a World Criminal Court nor the unanswerable claims for full recognition and for empowerment of women have even been touched upon. But if the four themes outlined above can become part of the mindset of those who are going to shape the next five decades, profound change may be possible.

Is there a real chance of that mindset, based on a concept of commonality, actually shaping international change? Or will the model of sovereign-states-in-interaction still prevail?

The tension between the two models reveals itself with particular force in two of the reports cited: the Commission on Global Governance and the Ford-sponsored Working Group. In both, those who take responsibility for the analysis and proposals put forward include political figures who have had long personal experience in the national interests of sovereign states. Their endorsement of expanded global governance, through a reformed UN, can scarcely have been given in ignorance of the rules of the game played according to 'national self- interest'. How do these figures expect states, and the concept of state sovereignty, to evolve as global governance begins to take shape?

Sharp, clear statements using unambiguous words and phrases cannot be expected at this early stage of the development of thinking about global futures. Rather, we should expect to find a testing of new possible meanings. Is the 'world community' of which both reports speak made up of individuals, or peoples, or sovereign states, or indeed governments? The Ford-sponsored report speaks of the 'nations of the world' needing an organization to reflect their 'common purpose'; 'of the 'regions of the world and their peoples' as a community; and of the desirability of governments being willing to grant more power to the UN. The Commission on Global Governance speaks about sovereignty being 'exercised collectively' by states, and at the same time suggests including in this collective action only those states that permit democratic participation and rest on the continuing consent of the people. Moreover, the Commission continues, where people are subjected to massive suffering and distress, their right to security should out-weigh the state's claim to sovereign jurisdiction. Yet it is by no means clear where lost or transferred sovereignty would go or how decisions about where sovereignty should be located would be made.

What is worth noting, however, is that none of the reports on UN reform is content to make the case for strengthening the UN solely on the grounds of the enlightened self-interest of state actors, speaking exclusively through governments. In the reports, people are being invited to pressure their governments to relinquish some state power, to dilute sovereignty further, not just because that is the best strategy for conserving the state, but because peoples' interests cannot be fully expressed through that exclusive identification with the state traditionally demanded by theories of sovereignty.

The world at the end of the 20th century is obviously not ready to dispense with the state as the main speaker in discussions of global problems. For one thing, in its refined, democratic form, it remains the sole guarantor that the will of the majority will be expressed. For a long time, major questions will be settled in bilateral negotiations offering limited access to non-state players. Multilateral agreements will still reflect the adjustment of national self-interests as often as they express the emergence of a commitment to common problem-solving among members of a world-wide common entity.

But the essential point of this paper, and of the accumulating reports on UN reform, is that a perspective of global community is both indispensable and, in fact, emerging. As it gains strength, it will lead to a more effective, and a much more centrally important, United Nations. The adoption of this new mindset by Canadians, and their insistence that their government adopt it too, could become a significant element in shaping a future, reformed United Nations.

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¹ As this anniversary year proceeds, the accumulation of proposals for UN reform increases. Among the first in the field were Erskine Childers with Brian Urquhart, Renewing the United Nations System (Uppsala, Development Dialogue 1994:1) and, from the Canadian Committee for the 50th Anniversary, Canadian Priorities for United Nations Reform(Ottawa, 1994). In 1995, there have appeared the Report of the Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood (New York: Oxford University Press), the Report of the Independent Working Group on the Future of the United Nations, The United Nations in its Second Half-Century (New York: Ford Foundation) and, in Canada, a Science for Peace publication, edited by E. Fawcett and H. Newcomb, United Nations Reform: Looking Ahead after Fifty Years (Toronto: Dundern Press).

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