The Guardian (yeah, I know) has raised the question as to whether the UN has ended up being about as effective as the League of Nations was in instilling “international order”. Looking at history, they may have a case.
How many large military interventions have been authorized by the UN Security Council?
How many dicators have been blithely tolerated by the UN?
Wasn’t the UN a rip-roaring success in Rwanda?
I’m starting to feel this way more and more every day. The UN is useless, the Security Council is set up in such a way that the personal interests of the member nations prevent anything resembling meaningful action.
On the off chance these were serious questions and not rhetorical:
Let’s see:
Korea: Required that one member of the Security Council not be there.
Kuwait: That’s one that I’ll grant.
Afghanistan: Recognized the inevitable. Bush flatly stated that he’d go in with or without the UN.
How many dictators have been unseated by the UN? How many dictatorial governments have been replaced entirely through the auspices of the UN?
Yes, let the UN answer for Rwanda. They never will.
Well, having nations go against their national interests for the good of mandkind is a utopia, it doesn´t matter how you structure the security council.
Although, I think the veto power is completely wrong and should be banned.
But remember the UN is not just peace, it does allot of other good things. The environment, human rights, international law, development of nations…
The fact is, you cannot have anything other than a glorified League of Nations unless there is going to be real international rule: meaning that states give up their soverignty to a much greater degree in international matters: and even those that directly or indirectly affect the homefront.
The U.N., especially the Security Council was always a very tricky affair: basically it couldn’t divert too much from what the big powers wanted and afford to stay relevant. The fact is, the reality of superpowers like China, the U.S., and Russia, make any sort of consistent application or moral view impossible. They force special accomodation, they make the idea of nations being bound by laws impossible.
The only serious prospect for world unity view at the moment is the rise of a Pax Americana.
Well, I think this depends on what you consider to be in the interests of international order. Take epidemic diseases, such as small pox. This type of catastrophe can destabalize a whole region, and the eradication of small pox is one of the UNs amazing feats. Unfortunately, it seems they are unable to keep up with AIDS, Cholera, and TB. Programs to eradicate disease, or famine, or things like that, in my mind, are necessary to promote international stability, so even though I think the UN has had mixed success with these types of programs, I wouldn’t classify it as being a failure or irrelevant.
If we go to the military aspect, there are many peace-keeping operations which help to maintain the status-quo. True, in some of these cases (Yugoslavia) the UN was paralyzed when the action was playing out, but at the point where a cease-fire comes into place, the UN does a pretty good job of helping things stay that way.
There’s also the diplomatic/negotiation skills of the UN, which many countries look to as the best impartial party they can get to resolve a conflict. Such skills were helpful in ending the Cambodian civil war.
Clearly, the UN in its current form is not the solution to every problem on the globe. But it definitely has its role in promoting international stability. At the very least, it offers a forum for rapid diplomatic exchange and maneuvering, as well as allowing countries a place to air grievances.
I actually almost started a thread about this this morning, but had to run.
If you don’t like the UN, or think it’s an irrelevant debating society, what would you rather?
In this world of extremely powerful countries and willingness by stes to engage in offensive wars, we need either a single entity that rules the entire world, or a collection of entities which agree on a forum and framework for their interaction. The UN is supposed to provide the latter, and consolidate what would otherwise be a tremendously confusing web of uni-, bi-, and multilateral treaties and institutions of varying durability that would have to direct international interaction.
But the UN has only as much legitimacy as its member states lend it, and only as much effectiveness as its members allow. It has no claim to power- it has only the will of its members. If powerful members ignore it when it doens’t suit their purposes, if a large enough contingent of its members are like-minded in their ignoring of important matters because of their own sins, then the organization loses its teeth.
The UN, properly structured (and many will argue it currently is not), can work marvelously when nations act in the best interests of humanity, and the internationaly community.
A man in a civilised society recognises that his rights end where his neighbor’s begin. He recognises that sometimes he should not do certain things, because if everybody did, the world would be a worse place. He recognises that he must respect certain authorities- not because they are absolute, but because as a member of society, they exist because he supports them, and they exist to serve him.
Nations, however, seem sometimes to refuse to treat themselves as analogous to citizens like this, and as such feel free to act entirely in their own interest, or in the interest of those within their country who consider only their own interests.
If nations are like citizens, then the world in which they live must have one of three structures:
There must be a wilingness among nations to co-operate and consistently act in the interests of the whole.
There must be a government which has the capacity to pass and enforce statutes, to regulate how nations, like the analogous citizens, interact with each other
There must be no control at all, and nations must be allowed to interact however they see fit.
IMO: 3 is asking for trouble. It was the case in the past, and international violence was common. In a day when countries have the power and the propensity to invade one another at will without opposition, when nuclear bombs are available to most anyone, unless they are carefully controlled, the unpredicatbility and volatility and gross human cost of governments not receiving censure from the internationaly community for unacceptable actions seems unacceptable.
2 is unacceptable to most people, since the proper distribution of power, and the evasion of corruption in a single monolithic institution would be difficult to achieve.
So, we’re left with international co-operation, and an organisation like the UN seems well-suited - again, with the disclaimer that it must be strucutred properly.
So, how should the UN be structured? The current one isn’t a terrible model to begin from. I would recommend, for starters:
A General Assmebly
A Security Council
A secretary-general, with not complete control over the way things work, decisions being left to the Council and Assembly. The SG’s role is spokesperson, negotiator, etc.
Separate institutions to handle things like food aid, education, the environment, etc. (Like today’s WHO, UNICEF, etc.)
The GA should be structured to handle affairs of long-term policy, budget, etc.
The SC should handle energencies, and any deployment of troops, as required. Troops go in for peacekeeping, or to enforce the will of the international community once all diplomatic and peaceful efforts fail. (See, Persian Gulf War, 1991)
Most of the procedures in place at the UN today work well enough, but one common sticking point is the structure of the Security Council. I favour it’s size- significantly smaller than the General Assembly. But I’m not sure how to fix its structure. Definately, at least some of the members should be chosen at intervals by the GA. Should there be permanent members? They provide stability, and may help prevent an imbalance in the GA from shifting the SC to favour one camp (by having a lot of like-minded GA members vote in like-minded representatives on the SC). Perhaps they need ot be extranational? Like, a permanent member chosen from the EU, one from Africa, one from central Asia, one from east Asia and Oceania, and one each from North and South America?
Under that setup, the permanent representative would be chosen, at intervals, by a committee of representatives from the region in question. So, every three years, say, the African member states get together and choose which of them will hold the seat on the Council. Same for others.
Of coure, how do we decide which states go where… Turkey might find its intersts served by being lumped in with Europe… and some countries in a region might feel marginalised within their region.
Partly, this might be addressed by having the remaining members rotated as they are now. So, every now and then states which aren’t usually in the running for the ‘permanent’ positions can get their chance in the ‘impermanent’ positions.
Another problem: Security Council vetoes. Do the ‘permanent’ members get them? If those members have to reperesent their own regions, maybe they’ll be less likely to misuse a veto for national interest, the way the US and USSR blocked so many Council motions with their own during the cold war? What if one of the ‘permanent’ members represents a country the Council feels it needs to take action against? Perhaps the vetoes should be done away with. Or, kept, but be made non-applicable to actions which affect your own country. (Ie, if Serbia is the current European representative, it cannot veto a Security Council resolution to stop genocide going on inside its borders).
Yet another problem: How do we deal with human rights issues? Suppose there’s a dictator torturing and starving his people, and misappropriating humanitarian aid. Sanctions may only hurt the population. Do we send in the troops? Would any country sign on to the organization if it felt it could be thus threatened? Can the organization thus threaten non-member states? Who decides what constitutes sufficient human rights violations? Does expropriating farmland count? How about the death penalty? How about suppressing journalism? How about failing to provide clean water, food, and health care to your citizens?
I’m afraid I don’t know what to do there…
But I think an international body like the UN is very important- we are all citizens of the world, and we can’t ignore each other, or the consequences of our own acitons, any longer. What other way can we co-ordinate peacekeeping, military action, food aid, and humanitarian programs as they are needed, than with a non-partisan, non-ephemeral, co-operative institution?
Up until the end of the cold war, the U.N. pretty much got a free pass. Nobody expected them to be able to do much and they didn’t. Since then, they completely failed to fulfill their potential.
The U.N. missed its greatest and best opportunity in Bosnia. They had an opportunity to create some real authority for the U.N. and they blew it. I’ve said it in other threads and I’ll say it here. If the UN is ever going to have any real relevance, it is going to have to establish one iron-clad rule. “We don’t say much, but what we do say, you WILL listen to. Defy the Security Council at your peril.”
One problem is that the U.N. can never be what some countries, most specifically France, would like it to be. The Security Counsel is not going to be able to exert authority over great powers such as the U.S. (but also including China and Russia) nor was it ever intended to.
The best that can be hoped for is that the U.N. will be able to keep smaller states more-or-less in line by encouraging more powerful nations to spread the risk of taking action. This doesn’t seem like much but it can significantly alter the calculus. Country A might not like what’s going on with Country Z but is, on balance, unwilling to dedicate the resources to address the problem. If Countries A-M (who all don’t like what’s going on with Country Z) have a method of cooperating and pooling resources, Country A (and B-M) can get the problem sorted at a price they are willing to pay.
Rwanda is a good example. No one was willing to take that mess on by themsleves. But they might have been willing to contribute to a coallition to take that mess on if the U.N. had tried to organize one.
“How many dictators have been unseated by the UN?”
Although I don’t think this is a meaningless question to pose, it’s worth also asking how many dictators was the UN designed to unseat. The purpose of the UN was to prevent wars, not to unseat dictators or even by any other means to ensure democratic governance throughout the globe.
As I’ve said in other UN threads, I am happy to discuss reforming the UN or, for that matter, replacing it with a more updated model. But I also think that there’s a throwing out the baby with a bathwater tendency that runs throughout these “irrelevant” UN threads. Which is to say that specific instances of UN failure (of which there are many) are alleged to discredit the idea of international cooperation altogether.
Humanitarian intervention is a tricky affair, and so is the enforcement of human rights. Before one can begin meaningfully to address where and how the UN can be more effective in such affairs, one has also to recognize that powerful countries such as the United States aren’t always willing to help (viz. the US’s unwillingness to sign a treaty ratifying human rights for women–the only Western to refuse to do so). As to unseating dictators: the US and other Western countries have often been in the business of seating them.
Apos: “The only serious prospect for world unity view at the moment is the rise of a Pax Americana.”
Well, before I assume that you must be waxing ironical let me inquire as to what exactly you mean by the rise of a Pax Americana. Because if you mean what I think you mean, I’m tempted to point out that the main form of “world unity” that the rise of a Pax Americana seems to inspiring right now is a near universal opinion that the US is way out of line.
I was waxing… sort of ironical. Looking at the long term, with what we know now, some sort of greater world unity is not going to happen via an enlightened mutual decision. If it will happen at all, it will happen because someone big consolidates their power.
The question of the U.N.'s relevance is not entirely the U.N.'s fault. If the U.S. had one or two immensely powerful people who controlled a huge portion of the country’s wealth, had overwhleming influence, then our democratic system of government, no matter how laudable, would likewise be irrelevant.
The ‘problem’ with the U.N. is that it doesn’t have armies. The U.N. is in no position to issue ultimatums for anyone, because ultimately in the end, the wars will be fought by citizens of countries, and those countries get to decide whether to put their citizens in harms way.
As long as the U.S. military outspends every other country on the earth combined, any international organization WILL be ultimately have to do what the U.S. wants. The U.S. may be influenced, but ultimately the U.S. isn’t spending all that money so it can turn control of its military over to another body.
Especially not when the U.S. sees the conflict as one vital to the national defense.
I think it’s naive to believe that the UN was designed to unseat dictators or to stop major wars between large armies. Besides the fact that the UN doesn’t have a standing army, there is also the UNSC veto which means that the UN can’t do much unless there is consensus among the permanent 5. In this case there was clearly no consensus either among the permanent members or the others, so it was proper that the UN didn’t give its legitimacy to the war.
Does this mean the UN is useless? Not at all. First of all there is the enormously important humanitarian work which the UN does which has saved millions of lives. Then there is the technical and scientific work on issues like global warming. Finally even if the UN can’t enforce its resolutions it’s useful as a forum where all countries meet and therefore as a source of legitimacy. If you think that this is meanigless think of the famous Adlai Stevensen speech during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The ability of the US to confront the Soviet ambassador within a world forum gave it a huge propoganda victory. If the same speech had been made at , say, a State Department press conference it wouldn’t have been remotely as powerful.
I think there’s a real problem with the logic here. By your own analogy the US is itself the “immensely powerful” person who makes democratic action (seem) irrelevant. Under those conditions, you reason, “enlightened mutual decision” isn’t possible, and the only alternative is an even more effective domination by the world’s one superpower.
Well, since running the world a la a neo-Roman empire is neither practicable nor desirable (even for Americans themselves), I think we can put aside that option. As it happens, even to the very limited extent that the Bush administration has sought such a goal, it has done a pretty good job of making sure that the world’s nations will do whatever they can to keep American power in check.
More important, in contrast to the Bush administration, many other Americans, perhaps even the majority, seem to recognize that their interests are dependent–economically as well as politically–on effective collaboration with the rest of the world. To put this another way, any constructive American administration–(which the Bush administration manifestly is not)–will make an “enlightened” decision to pursue its own interest in developing international cooperation. That’s not an anti-realpolitik stance, to use the fashionable term of the day: it’s a twenty-first century reality. Any other view is either an impracticable delusion of imperial grandeur, or a shortsighted policy predicated on ignorance, and/or dismissal of longterm interests in order to serve the shorterm interests of an elite few (in other words, the Bush administration in a nutshell).
I don’t know what the answer is, well I think I do but it’s unacceptable; International level democracy - decisions based on the majority view and supported by all … the implication is the beginning of a ‘world federation’ and no one, especially the single super power - and the four others with veto powers - is about to relinquish the power it has. So fuck the Muslim world, the non-aligned world, the developing world, etc, etc, etc … it’s our party and we get to decide on the kind of cake, the number of candles, who lights 'em, who blows 'em out … even if it means little tiffs like this one. Unless …. unless …. the EU is as serious as it might just be shaping up to be ….
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Sam Stone *
The ‘problem’ with the U.N. is that it doesn’t have armies. The U.N. is in no position to issue ultimatums for anyone, because ultimately in the end, the wars will be fought by citizens of countries, and those countries get to decide whether to put their citizens in harms way.
Are you suggesting that the UN should have armies? (Probably not which is why you rightly put its alleged problematicness into scare quotes.)
“As long as the U.S. military outspends every other country on the earth combined, any international organization WILL be ultimately have to do what the U.S. wants. The U.S. may be influenced, but ultimately the U.S. isn’t spending all that money so it can turn control of its military over to another body.”
The US is indeed the preeminent military power, and, as a result, it can exert a lot of influence in institutions such as the UN, and get away with a lot. Actually, though, what’s very instructive about recent political events is how, try as it might, the US couldn’t force the Security Council to legitimize
Bush’s personal obsession (I guess you can call it an obsession-a-deux since Tony Blair mystifyingly bouht in). With all its economic muscle, and all its pwer to exert political threats, even beholden countries such as Mexico said, “No thanks.”
The end result is the entire world is pissed off at Americans, Al-Qaeda’s ranks are swelling, and American taxpayers are picking up the whole tab–politically and economically–for an expensive military action that might have been handled under joint auspices. What remains to be seen is what happens in the much more complicated aftermath: in which the US’s military preeminence will matter a whole lot less, and its reliance on allies will show up a whole lot more.
The problem with the Bushies and those who sympathize with them is their fetishization of military power. To paraphrase the remarks of one recalcitrant African nation recently, “What are the Americans going to do to us? Bomb us.” For now, the world is watching–angrily–as the US reduces Iraqi cities to rubble and ashes. But that’s not going to happen to often now is it?
(Oh and please don’t even bother, if you’re tempted, to tell me about how the US is merely acting in its own defense, or liberating the Iraqi people. Outside of the US, with the exception of a few US-identified foreign nationals such as yourself, no one’s buying.)
I am afraid that many Americans are naive about how much mileage American conventional military gives in terms of security. It’s true that the US has an unprecedented lead when it comes to aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, smart bombs and the like and there is no other power capable of challenging it.
Unfortunately that’s not where the main threat to its security lies. Nuclear submarines aren’t very useful in destroying terrorist cells in the middle of some city. The US is heavily dependent on other governments to provide the intelligence and policework to catch the terrorists who threaten it. In fact probably no country in history has ever been as dependent on so many other countries ,all over the world, to ensure the basic security of its citizens.
In addition US security is dependent on world public opinion as never before. Quite simply, the more people hate the US, the more they will support the terrorists who want to attack it ; not necessarily killing Americans directly but giving money or sanctuary to those who do. In addition like in Turkey public opinion will pressure governments to reduce co-operation with the US.
This doesn’t mean the US should never use its military; I supported the effort to remove the Taliban, but that it has to try very hard to establish the legitimacy of any war that it fights. The UN is the main forum where it can do this.
Yep, I agree, CyberPundit. On these geopolitical issues we seem to be eye-to-eye. Alas, I think it may be a while before we can return to debating on the regulating of global trade ;).
—Under those conditions, you reason, “enlightened mutual decision” isn’t possible, and the only alternative is an even more effective domination by the world’s one superpower.—
While there is some relation, I DIDN’T say anything about “under those conditions.” It isn’t the U.S. preventing nations from unifying, its that nations don’t have the same interests, and don’t want to give up soverignty to the winds of international opinion.
Mandelstam: Your comments are really a hijack. There are plenty of other anti-war threads. This thread is discussing the effectiveness of the U.N.
Indeed, I don’t want the U.N. having armies. The U.N. is not a democratic body. It is not accountable. Many of the countries in it are not democracies, and even the Democracies are a level of abstraction away from the true wishes of the citizens.
In other words, I see the U.N. as a potentially dangerous institution. Not to us, but only because the U.S. has the military power to essentially ‘veto’ any U.N. action, aside from its explicit veto on the security council.
The U.N. is useful when kept in its place - as a forum for countries to negotiate, form treaties, etc. As a ‘government’, complete with a military, it would be terrifyingly dangerous.