The UN at 75
This is a piece I submitted on spec unsuccessfully, sticking it up here in case of interest. I wrote it in late October of last year so obviously a few references are now out of date: Trump was not re-elected and Guterres has announced he would like to stand again. He’s also been remarkably consistent on the subject of his “Common Agenda” but there hasn’t been much more detail since. And finally Sir Brian finally did pass away, much missed and just shy of his 102nd birthday.
The UN at 75
The United Nations just celebrated its 75th birthday. It did so at a time when the global calamities of Covid-19 and climate change and a period of increased tensions between world powers would appear to place it more firmly in the limelight than ever. Yet, if you were to stop a random passerby in the street of any major world capital and ask them the name of the Secretary-General, it is more likely than not that they would not be able to tell you.
The UN has had low profile Secretaries-General before, and that isn’t always a bad thing. Indeed some of the most effective mediation and peacebuilding initiatives the role has performed — U Thant’s private diplomacy around the Cuban missile crisis, Perez de Cuellar’s negotiations to bring the Iran-Iraq war to a close — have taken place in precisely the form of low-key behind-the-scenes manner that the current Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, clearly prefers. The inverse is also true: some Secretaries-General didn’t so much achieve fame as notoriety, be it in the unveiling of Kurt Waldheim’s Nazi past or the manner in which Ban Ki-moon became the avatar for diplomatic spinelessness[1]. But rarely has the international system been so much in the news, and yet its leader so little, than over the past four years.
For a while the Secretary-General and his High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein[2] formed an effective if perhaps unintended double act, with Zeid as the public facing “bad cop” speaking truth to power, and Guterres as the behind-the-scenes “good cop” making the best use of the space Zeid opened up: Zeid would, for example, call a speech on terrorism by UK Prime Minister at the time Theresa May, “a gift from a major western leader to every authoritarian figure around the world who shamelessly violates human rights under the pretext of fighting terrorism”, and five months later Guterres would use London as the venue for unveiling his terrorism strategy.[3] However, neither seemed to appreciated the value the other brought to this partnership and when Zeid’s term ended in 2018 he felt he could not serve another.[4] Since then the Organisation has been rarely heard from on the international stage.
This was a deliberate choice on the part of Guterres; he hoped that by flying under the radar the UN could avoid becoming a cause celebre for President Donald Trump; so risking the billions of dollars that the organisation receives from the United States.[5] However, the consequence has been the perception of a void at the centre of the global system.
This made the Secretary-General’s Nelson Mandela Day speech on the 18 July all the more remarkable. Guterres is not the most passionate or arresting of speakers, but when warmed up he is capable of becoming interesting, and this was one of his best. He skilfully intertwined the Black Lives Matter protests, the #MeToo movement, the climate crisis and the coronavirus pandemic into a compelling analysis of a global system beset by a crisis of inequality and alienation, to which the only solution was radical social democracy — indeed something very like the Green New Deal voters had just so comprehensively rejected in two of the UN Security Council’s permanent members: in the British General Election and the US Democratic primary.[6] He did not of course name it as such, and as a good UN diplomat he took pains to avoid using anything that might be construed as partisan language. But the content of his speech was, undoubtedly, a political agenda and a political agenda of the centre-left at that.
It should come as no surprise that the Secretary-General thought these things, only that he said them. As Prime Minister of Portugal in the late 1990s, and as President of the Socialist International immediately afterwards, Guterres had pursued a platform of moderate social democracy heavily influenced by Giddens’ third way — much like contemporaries Blair and Jospin. And while the subsequent decades pushed many of his political persuasion to the neoliberal centre right (or outed the fact that that was where their hearts had always been) Guterres’ subsequent career saw him made UN High Commissioner for Refugees, a job guaranteed to prevent complacency as to the efficacy of the approach of the political centre.
Indeed at a 2016 hustings[7] event as part of the selection process for the role of Secretary-General he provided perhaps the only unexpected moment when he broke with the cozy and vaguely neoliberal consensus of the panel and provided a very old fashioned answer to the question of UN reform arguing (I paraphrase) that it is all well and good talking about efficiencies and better management but what the UN really needs is a few billion additional dollars and the authority to spend it as the Secretary-General sees fit.[8]
Guterres therefore might not be a natural radical, but he has adroitly analysed the moment as requiring radicalism, within the confines of the structures we have, as providing the only viable path for avoiding major structural changes to our economy. As such he recognised that the ideology of the Green New Deal, as articulated by the likes of Corbyn in the UK and Occasio-Cortez in the US, was not a threat to his own, but indeed the only hope of retaining something of the world he recognises. The real surprise is not so much that he felt this — the current historical moment would make it appear self-evident — but that so many of his fellow moderate social democrats did not, and reacted to that project with such hostility. This is a phenomenon that many people have tried to explain — the late David Graeber’s The Center Blows Itself Up[9] providing more insight than most — but which continues to perplex me.
But it is still surprising that he said any of these things out loud. The Secretary-General is fond of quoting his favourite philosopher, Habermas, and arguing that his role is to facilitate communicative action by helping the world understand itself.[10] However, up until this moment he had manifestly not done so. In attempting to perform that function now he has not only broken with his own practice over the past three and a half years of never saying anything contentious about anything, but also with the practice of the UN more generally, and of most his predecessors who, no matter how outspoken they may have been on other issues, were at pains to avoid placing themselves on the left-right political spectrum. He also rather missed the moment, making his pitch after the argument appears to be in retreat — for now — in the key territories of the US and (to a lesser extent) the UK. So why did this unlikely voice for radical social democracy come out swinging for the concept, and why now?
A political UN
Let’s first of all consider what the UN is and what it isn’t.
The United Nations was the formal name for the military alliance more commonly known as the Allies, that came together to defeat the Axis powers during World War two. The international organisation of the same name was originally envisaged as a continuation of that alliance; a political project perhaps not in a left-right sense (the Allies were a broad enough tent to accommodate both Stalin and Churchill) but in a grander geopolitical sense — indeed, frankly, the continuation of empire by other means[11], with the colonial and quasi-colonial powers working together to divide up the world into their spheres of influence[12]. It was intended as a coercive project, an early comic strip[13] designed to popularise the idea of the UN envisages the recalcitrant state of “Bratavania” being brought to heel after the five permanent members of the Security Council stop all trains entering the country, cut off telephone, radio and telegraphic communications, and threaten the country with the joint power of the UN Air Force.[14]
The shattering of this alliance and the cold war that followed put paid to that vision, and any chance of it being resurrected died in 1960 when the final dissolution of the British and French empires dramatically increased the number of members of the UN, forever shifting the voting numbers in the General Assembly towards former colonies of the global south who had earned a deep suspicion of anything which could be perceived as a violation of sovereignty. The big powers of 1945 still had their role cemented within the UN Security Council but, aside from a brief period of western hegemony in the 1990s (during which those powers managed to achieve surprisingly little), the inability of those powers to act in concert neuters much of their influence.
Thus the UN we have is one that exists to serve a community of nation states, a community it has been instructed to view as absolutely sovereign. It might be a matter of regret to some reformers that the UN is not able to impose the Rooseveltian liberal consensus of 1945 on the peoples of the world, but it is not a regret I share. It is surely to the good that the peoples of the world have been given some say in that matter and that we no longer have an Imperial UN in a position to negate their agency, even if the consequence of this is that the UN therefore has no ability to shape events itself other than that which member states give it.
The UN we have is therefore not part of political society at all in the Gramscian sense of being part of the domain of hard power but is rather a meeting place for political society actors to interact according to the rules of consent. While few would recognise the UN as being part of civil society, one could make the argument that insofar as it performs a function of mediating between political society and the rest of us, and insofar as it sits firmly within the realm of consent, it does fit within the Gramscian conception of that term. Perhaps this can best be articulated by saying that the UN is the place where political society convenes in the manner of civil society.
In some ways it is no more than a place: a forum, a stage upon which the actions of states can play out. Former US Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke once famously pointed out that blaming the organisation for global failures such as the genocide in Rwanda is similar to blaming Madison Square Gardens for the performance of the New York Knicks[15]. I often make a similar argument when I give talks about UN reform, pointing out that reforming the United Nations in the hope that doing so would make the world a better place is equivalent to designing a different shape of coffee cup in the hope that that would make the coffee taste nicer.
I overstate for effect. Of course, having such a stage does influence the politics that takes place within it. For one thing, while states do not stride out upon it as anything close to equals the very nature of having a platform amplifies the voices of the less powerful, while the need to observe certain forms and customs acts as a brake on the more powerful. Thus the UN provides a mechanism for hard power actors to talk to each other on terms closer to equality.
The stage provided by the UN has human geography effects too. It provides a liminal space, literally in the sense — pre Covid — of the corridors of the Headquarters building. Here all manner of informal conversations and parallel tracks for diplomacy can open up. It has its own bureaucracy — termed the “second UN” in a seminal paper by Weiss, Carayannis and Jolly — and has generated its own industry — the “third UN” — of lobbyists, academics, civil society organisations and interested parties.
Thus the institution, particularly in the form of the second and third UNs, becomes a powerful creator of international norms and commonly agreed standards of behaviour which are then — sometimes — adopted by the first UN of member states. By and large these standards didn’t really coalesce around any specific ideology but merely reflect the multiple ideologies, and often contradictions, that exist within the three UNs and the 193 countries that are members of them. This can lead to tensions. For example, the first UN of states, are — as we have discussed, primarily[16] — ardent supporters of the doctrine of absolute sovereignty, but the nature of the UN as a world institution meant that the second and third UNs attract more than their fair share of globalists, world federalists and internationalists. Likewise, most states are former colonies, and as a consequence decolonisation and self-determination rose high up the UN’s agenda in the 1960s and ’70s, but the Security Council still reflects and cements the imperial and post-imperial world order and so strengthens that hand of states which wish to maintain some semblance of the 1945 quasi-imperial status quo.
The UN’s most striking successes have come either at the intersection points of these dynamics (for example in the struggle against apartheid, which married the progressive instincts of much of the second and third UNs with a solidarity from the majority global south states in the first) or in the managing of those tensions itself. In delegitimising and marginalising conflicts not fought with the unanimous consent of the five powers of 1945 (who not coincidentally soon became the five major nuclear powers) the UN has doubtless prevented many wars[17]. And in providing mechanisms for diplomacy and de-escalation, and the venue for the occasional theatrical letting off of steam[18], the UN continues to succeed in its greatest achievement: so far preventing world war three.
Where the UN finds it much more difficult to have an impact is where there is significant dispute in the norms it is attempting to normalise. The UN Charter outlined three “pillars” of work the organisation should focus on: peace and security, human rights, and development. Of the three, development has — by and large — been the least politically contentious and so over time the organisation has come to focus disproportionately on it[19]. In a way this is a waste — one could make an argument that development is the least important pillar; this is not to say that it isn’t important but that of the three development is likely the area where the role of the UN can be most readily replaced by other organisations and agencies. Nevertheless it became the organisation’s dominant focus: states of the global south pushed a development agenda because they, rightly, felt they were owed the money; states of the global north pushed a development agenda out of a desire to see tangible results for their investment; and the second and third UNs pushed a development agenda because they saw political space for the UN to do good deeds.
Of course “least politically contentious” does not mean that there were no controversies in development — there have been many[20] — but it does mean that relatively speaking the UNs vision for development — now codified into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — has enjoyed broad support from virtually all member states.
The ’20s have been termed the “decade of delivery” for the SDGs. Guterres couched his Mandela Day speech in terms of that delivery. He made the persuasive case that radical social democracy and the delivery of the SDGs are one and the same goal — that moving to a sustainable economy and society without poverty and with equality is not just a left wing ideal but the promise all states made when they agreed to the SDGs.
I think this is broadly true. The SDGs might not have seemed particularly political, or radical, when they were agreed[21] but since then — much as with the broader argument for social democracy we discussed previously — the pressures of climate change, economic crisis and Coronavirus have removed the space for credible non-radical responses. Furthermore, while previous development agendas merely attempted to do quantifiable but non-structural good, the SDGs seek to fix the ailments of society; and while at the time that may have seemed a logical next step, as one gets into the work of doing so, one realises that this is fundamentally a matter of politics. When one couples this with the previously vacuous mantra of “leaving no one behind” and takes seriously — as the Secretary-General clearly does[22] — the notion of ensuring that the global system delivers for those who currently feel alienated from it, then what one is left with is an agenda which — while a UN bureaucrat might hesitate to say so out loud — cannot but be to the left of centre.
Guterres has therefore merely pointed out the elephant in the room; the inconvenient truth that the agenda that was agreed by member states precisely to avoid any contentious issues of politics cannot actually be achieved without taking a political stance — and a currently fairly unpopular one at that.
As to why he did it now: it may be that having seen the way Trump had behaved despite his attempts to accommodate him at every turn Guterres finally snapped and decided he may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. It may also be that he was paving the way for the end of his first term — that the speech can be understood either as a Knectian letter of resignation if he does not stand again, or as an inspirational vision for a second term if he does.[23] But I wonder if he simply felt that these things were soon to become self-evident, that both he and his organisation were soon to face a conflict that neither of them could duck, and thus thought he might as well get ahead of things by striking the first blow.
He’s probably right. But if he is the consequence is that the Sustainable Development Goals, until now almost the only part of the UN’s agenda states could be relied upon to agree on, becomes contested political territory. And given that as we have discussed nothing happens at the UN without the consent of states that likely means this agenda too grinds to a halt. Can this be avoided? Perhaps a larger, and longer term, if more subtle shift in the organisation gives some cause for hope, but yet further grounds for fear.
Unsteady states
We have seen how the UN started as a political project of a particular, like minded, group of countries. It then evolved into a wider forum for, and beholden to, sovereign states — all of them, if not equally. Where will it go next?
One of the most common types of UN reform proposal, which comes in various flavours, is the idea of giving the UN the power to coerce, to force states to do its bidding. This is essentially a realisation of the imperial aspirations of the great powers of 1945, although since then it became popular first with (often leftist[24]) world federalists and subsequently with cosmopolitan liberals. I find the idea deeply problematic — those who coerce will invariably be those who have historically coerced — and inherently authoritarian. I also find it to be about the most dull vision for the future one could possibly have — a global superstate which recreates all the problems of the late 20th century state only on a larger scale.
To take a particularly exuberant example of the genre, the book “Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century” posits the creation of a world government in all but name[25] which would enforce its edicts via an army it would recruit, answering directly to the organisation, of up to 3.6 million soldiers armed with weapons confiscated during a global disarmament programme.[26] That’s clearly not a likely outcome, but more modest ideas in the same vein have a surprising amount of currency within certain admittedly limited political circles. A campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly, a self-admitted step on the road to a world government with executive authority, is one of the most visible UN reform campaigns around.
One further feels that this is where the heart of the political centre is, and that the likes of Macron and Merkel[27], who in 2018 announced their “Alliance for Multilateralism” which very much sits within this ideological tradition, would love to be able to redesign a United Nations that could hold Bratavania to account at a second Yalta. Understanding that this is not viable such voices instead turn to minilateralism: the idea of an international but non-global system of cooperation. This has been argued for in a number of places this year, notably in the first foreign policy op-ed of UK Labour Foreign Policy Spokesperson Lisa Nandy, and a Project Syndicate piece from the President of the Council of Foreign Relations Richard N. Haass[28]. This vision sees an organisation such as NATO, the G7, G20, D10,[29] D20[30] or “five eyes”[31] take on many of the roles currently performed by the United Nations.
Minilateralism seems to be having a moment in the sun, but one hopes it is just a passing phase. Aside from the fact that these are invariably coalitions of the rich, and often of the white, and so will primarily answer to those interests, there is a severe risk that such a move could exacerbate feelings of alienation around our global system. Guterres rightly pointed to the crisis of legitimacy caused by the feeling among many that international institutions do not speak for them. Enthusiastically embracing a two speed system of global governance which abandons half the world entirely would only perpetuate that crisis.
No good answers are to be found there either then. However, one can sympathise with the desperation those who want our global system to work better feel in trying to come up with a big new idea, and why new ideas might appeal even if they are obnoxious or fanciful. Because outside of such ideas what remains is rather dry. In 1994 Erskine Childers[32] and Brian Urquhart[33] wrote a book called “Renewing the United Nations System”. It contains pretty much every idea that has ever been had in UN reform, almost everything written since just repeats bits of it, and few of those ideas have been implemented either. UN reform can often feel like a rat race: the politics for what would make a big difference are just too difficult (and member states don’t want the UN to work too well) and the things that will make a small difference make too small of a difference to be interesting[34].
The sad truth is that for all its frustrations we’re probably better off with the system we have than with anything we could establish in the current moment. It is unlikely that the leadership of 2020 would do a better job than that of 1945: very stable geniuses notwithstanding our current set of world leaders contains a bumper crop of tyrants and demagogues and some very wet and idealess moderates. Where there is intellectual leadership, such as is offered by France’s Emmanuel Macron, it does not set pulses racing either — the big idea appearing to be little more than reheated late 20th/early 21st century liberalism with a frisson of neoimperialism.
But even if the UN will not change, and should not change, radically or soon, it will evolve in deeper and more subtle ways. This is particularly true as the blocks from which it is built, those sovereign states, are themselves changing, and perhaps disintegrating.
Benedict Anderson famously linked the rise of the notion of the Westphalian state to print capitalism which allowed for a real-time national political conversation. It therefore stands to reason that as we move to a world of digital capitalism, where conversations cross borders with ease enabling a real time global political conversation[35], then we will also move away from the notion of the state.[36]
One of the ways in which this erosion of sovereignty manifests is in the empowerment of transnational capital. This is far from a new development; as early as 1972 Salvador Allende went to the UN General Assembly to complain of the aggressive political interference of two multinationals: ITT and Kennecott Copper (now part of Rio Tinto). He then elaborated into a more general warning on the threat posed by multinationals:
“We are faced by a direct confrontation between the large transnational corporations and the states. The corporations are interfering in the fundamental political, economic and military decisions of the states. The corporations are global organizations that do not depend on any state and whose activities are not controlled by, nor are they accountable to any parliament or any other institution representative of the collective interest. In short, all the world political structure is being undermined.”
Allende’s intervention stands in a tradition, perhaps even started it, of leftist opposition to this phenomenon of “globalism”. This opposition peaked in the late 1990s antiglobalisation movement peaking with the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, and Hardt and Negri’s famous book “Empire”. It has not disappeared, and of late has been joined by the more conspiracist and nativist anti-globalist sentiment of the populist right.
Preventing globalism these days feels like an attempt to hold back an unstoppable tide. The noisy nationalism (in any case probably more a sign of injury than of rude health) of the current moment notwithstanding longer term and more structural trends make it appear increasingly unlikely that power will continue to be concentrated uniquely and exclusively at the level of the nation state.
Further, while many felt that the state could act as a bulwark against private interest, support for the doctrine of sovereignty tout court was in any instance never the objective either of Empire (which mounted a much more sophisticated and specific critique of gangster global conglomerates) or of the Seattle demonstrators (whose primary target was the neoliberal policies of the Bretton Woods institutions — policies which haven’t been abandoned entirely but which have lost their sheen even for the most blinkered of policymakers in the aftermath of the credit crunch, Greece, and all that followed). While some more traditional voices on the left, many with sentimental attachments forged in the struggle for self-determination in the 1960s, do feel questioning state sovereignty can open doors to neocolonial agendas that are best kept closed[37], this has always been a position lacking in nuance. I do not accept the logic that the nation state, without qualification, is a good unto itself; the merit of the state as a vector for the interests of the people depends on the action of the state in question. Certainly we are not in a portentous moment for the defence of sovereignty; we are currently in the midst of a climate crisis, a global health crisis and a crisis of inequality at a time when most states are firmly under the control of a political class who have no interest in resolving these problems.[38]
Besides, the erosion of sovereignty doesn’t just have to mean globalisation. It could also facilitate all kinds of interesting and potentially positive renegotiations of the parameters of power: the moving of decisionmaking downwards instead of upwards, the emergence of dual power and parallel horizontal power structures, and a re-drawing of the boundaries of power between the realms of coercion and consent, between civil society and political society in that Gramscian sense.
Granted a radical and immediate transformation of the nature of the state seems unlikely. But the parameters of power around the notion of the state will invariably evolve with time, in one direction or another. If power is leaching from the institution of the state why not ask how we might use this opportunity to move it downwards rather than upwards? Rather than attempt to hold back the passage of time, and seek to protect the institution of dubious virtue that is the Westphalian state, it may be more productive to instead think about what more interesting structures and processes might fill the governance gap; a gap that will be, and is being, filled by global capital if something more democratic does not.
Can the UN be an ally in this process? Could it play a role in coordinating and consolidating non-state and civil society actors and so reach beyond states to the “We the Peoples”[39] that introduce the United Nations Charter? Could it help encourage new, participatory, voluntary and local forms of governance to emerge? And would this in turn allow the UN to circumvent the objection of much of the global political classes to the radical agenda that will be needed to achieve the SDGs?
To be honest it’s a stretch.
Unlike previous initiatives there is a recognition, integrated throughout the SDGs and codified in its famous “Goal 17 (partnerships for the goals)” that this agenda cannot be delivered by states alone but must involve non-state actors. “Multistakeholder partnership” is the current buzz-phrase of choice at UN HQ. But one will look in vain for any comprehensive or nuanced understanding, or even a formal definition, of what such partnership means. The UN’s SDG knowledge platform talks vaguely of “initiatives voluntarily undertaken by Governments, intergovernmental organizations, major groups and others stakeholders, which efforts are contributing to the implementation of inter-governmentally agreed development goals”. The sense here, then, and echoed elsewhere within and around the SDGs is that the UN looks to the non-state sector as potential providers and implementers, but control rests firmly with government and intergovernmental processes. There is the intention to delegate work beyond the state, but not authority, and certainly not to develop a parallel power base — a constituency for the goals themselves beyond the state — and so compel or circumvent reluctant state actors.
This certainly seems to be the practice with respect to one of the first, and undeniably most successful,[40] multistakeholder partnerships: GAVI, the world vaccine alliance. GAVI’s board is a mixture of state, interstate, non-state and independent individuals, but the board largely determine the “how” of the work, the “what” — vaccinating children with the 11 WHO recommended childhood vaccines — remains with an interstate process. Furthermore, GAVI is primarily pay-to-play: while some board members[41] are chosen for their expertise most are selected for what their organisation can contribute to the alliance in terms of funding and capability — not for the fact that they might have a popular mandate from those GAVI’s work affects or that they represent particularly at risk, vulnerable or marginalised communities. That is mostly left to the state representatives on the board; non-state actors are considered useful for what they can do, but not valued for their ability to speak for those states do not otherwise hear.
The reality is that both by design and through 75 years of practice the UN remains a hopelessly state-centric organisation. Further, where it does reach out beyond the state it tends to seek the hand of the private sector first: thus there is a focal agency — the UN Global Compact — for businesses but no equivalent focal point for civil society. Antonio Guterres was too busy to attend the UN’s 75th anniversary civil society forum, or even to send a video message[42], but did find the time earlier in the year to record an advert for Goldman Sachs, the investment bank which is all but the poster child for irresponsible global capital.
But for all that, the UN is still the stage upon which the debate over the ownership of the global political agenda, codified in the goals, will take place. And as a stage, it still has its merits. It does allow people, and increasingly not just states, to address each other on global issues, and it does provide for a levelling of sorts. It may not be the easiest terrain upon which the peoples of the world could seek to wrest power from the forces of dated Westphalian sovereignty and unfettered global capital alike, but ultimately it is where that battle will need to be fought. Humanity faces problems that span the globe, the UN has a global agenda to counter them. Whether that agenda is controlled by states, by capital, or by the people, will do much to establish the trajectory of the mid 21st century.
Afterword
Guterres is not very good at follow up. He tends to make speeches and then forget about them, and as a result the various ideas he suggests and mechanisms he establishes tend to run into the sand. It would be rash to assume that his Mandela day speech will be an exception, although he has repeatedly returned to the twin themes of a Green New Deal and “new social contract” in subsequent speeches.
Even so, because he was right, this won’t be the last we hear about these subjects. The world will still get warmer, and will still continue to fray at the seams of unsustainable levels of inequality. We will continue to be taken by surprise by catastrophes for which it was not in our short-term economic interests to prepare.
So what happens next? The United Nations spent its 75th anniversary having what it called “the world’s biggest conversation” on the subject of “the world we want; the UN we need”. Interspersed throughout it, seemingly at the Secretary-General’s insistence, was this question of what the world will look like on the UN’s 100th birthday, in 25 years time. What is the world we want for 2045, and what is the UN we need to get there?
I’ve always struggled a little with that question. I want a world in which the UN is no longer necessary, because there are no longer nations to be united, and because my hope for any organisation, the UN included, is always that it can achieve its mission so it can disband. Granted 25 years isn’t very long, and my guess is the organisation will most likely survive to see its hundredth birthday. But to set the question in those terms without qualification seems entitled; implying that the UN has some permanent right to exist in and of itself, not just for what it can achieve for the people it serves. It is always a red flag when an organisation stops thinking that a successful outcome would be it no longer needing to exist. Like sovereign states themselves, the UN appears to be looking at their status in the present moment and assuming it will last forever. It does not occur to them that they may just be manifestation of this particular moment in the historical progression.
But while states continue to exist, and while there continues to be wars, abuses, and needs to meet, we need a mechanism for managing coordination and cooperation.
And so we’re stuck with the UN that is. And frankly, we could do worse. It is what it is, but what it’s done isn’t half bad. It has thus far prevented world war three and avoided a nuclear exchange. It has allowed the conversations to happen that led to the eradication of smallpox and will shortly do the same for polio. It brought an end to direct empire, and gave independence to over 80 countries, and it eventually combined with the ANC to bring apartheid South Africa to its knees. And there is scarcely a single disaster or catastrophe, man made or natural, that has occurred over the last 75 years — even those during which the organisation disgraced itself — which would not have been far worse had there been no United Nations.
The Secretary-General spoke of “the world we want; the UN we need”. The world I want does not need the UN, but the world we have needs the UN we’ve got.
Footnotes:
[1] Some criticisms of Ban are entirely justified, he was certainly far from the bravest or most principled Secretary-General, particularly in his calamitous first term. But a more nuanced reading of his role is possible, taking into account the constraints he found himself under, and the really quite impressive work he did in the circumstances during his second term on some issues dear to his heart, particularly climate change and sexual orientation and gender identity. Perhaps the fairest summary of his career is Richard Gowan’s piece for World Politics Review, “Why Ban Ki-moon Might Deserve a Fond Farewell at the U.N. After All”.
[2] Zeid is something of a UN celebrity in his own right. The heir to the defunct Iraqi throne (when not serving in the UN he is “Prince Zeid” of the House of Hashim) he served as Jordan’s ambassador to the UN (and in that capacity spent a term on the Security-Council and wrote a critically acclaimed white paper on the problem of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse), and ran for Secretary-General himself in 2006 (granted he didn’t do very well, he came last in informal straw polling and dropped out to allow Ban to be acclaimed the victor).
[3] Zeid made his comments in June 2017 at the annual Grotius lecture for the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. Guterres unveiled his strategy in a speech at SOAS University of London in November 2017.
[4] His replacement Michelle Bachelet — a former President of Chile, a torture survivor, and the daughter of a victim of Pinochet — would have appeared unlikely to shrink into the background, and yet she has, presumably as a condition of her appointment. It’s also worth noting that no high commissioner has ever survived a full two terms: Lasso quit three years in to his first term to go back to Peruvian politics, Robinson was only given a truncated one year second term due to a falling out with the US over the war on terror, De Mello was killed by Al Qaeda while on secondment in Iraq after only a year, Ramcharan only served on an interim basis, Arbour chose, perhaps under pressure, to only serve one term, and Pillay was only given a truncated two year second term again due to pressure from the US.
[5] Dues payable to the UN are derived according to a complicated formula which is primarily based on ability to pay but also makes allowances for other factors. The US’s contribution to the Organisation’s regular budget is locked at 22% — the absolute ceiling for the amount any one state can provide. While if it wasn’t for this ceiling the US would owe considerably more, this is still around $700 million a year, nearly double the 12% contribution of China, the second highest contributor. Meanwhile the UN’s peacekeeping budget is calculated according to a separate formula allowing larger discounts for developing states subsidised by a surcharge on permanent members of the Security Council in recognition of their additional responsibility for peacekeeping. The result is that the US pays some 28% of the budget, around an additional $1.8 billion a year. These contributions are mandatory, and Trump could not withhold them without consequence, or for very long without Congressional approval, but he has enough discretion to cause the Organisation significant cashflow difficulties. Meanwhile US contributions to other parts of the UN’s family of organisations, many of them voluntary, make up another $7–8 billion, despite Trump cutbacks, and truly swingeing cuts here could be devastating to the Organisation. The US is, for example, the largest donor to the largest of the UN’s specialist agencies: the World Food Programme, providing over a third of its funding. The WFP doesn’t just alleviate hunger, it also provides the logistical backbone, and the airline, for the vast majority of the UN and associated agencies’ other work. Cuts here would be debilitating, and it is for that reason that the head of the WFP is invariably an American with good links to the current administration: currently David Beasley — former Republican Governor of South Carolina. Whether the WFP’s Nobel prize will stir a jealous Trump into making swingeing pre-election cuts remains to be seen, but Trump and Beasley are reported to be on good terms.
[6] Which of course in turn owes its rise to similar, and more successful, movements in Uruguay, Mexico, Greece, Spain, Ireland, and the Secretary-General’s native Portugal — but it is its manifestation in the US and UK which has generated the most attention in the Anglocentric bubble around UN headquarters.
[7] Held in London at the Barbican and co-organised by the Guardian and UNA-UK — my former employer (although I had not yet joined at the time and was in the audience as a member of the public).
[8] Ever the politician, Guterres took a very different approach when finding himself in office alongside a Trump administration demanding swingeing budget cuts. He has swung the blade with gusto, with considerable impact on staff morale — particularly as he has followed the grand tradition of UN restructurings in reducing available resources while never trimming the scope or mandate of the Organisation’s activities — forcing programmes and mechanisms to limp on but not putting any out of their misery. Indeed he has contributed to the bloating effect of successive waves of organisational reform that invariably add new mechanisms without taking old ones away — most laughably establishing two new and separate mechanisms for identifying and eliminating duplication within the UN system!
[9] The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’ — New York Review of Books.
[10] See for example, his answer to a question on the value of social media at a public event held in Central Hall Westminster in 2017, again hosted by UNA-UK, and available on their Youtube account.
[11] Frantz Fanon famously said “the UN is the legal card used by imperialist interests when the card of brute force has failed.”
[12] Although even then the capture was not absolute: newly independent nations like India and the Philippines forced themselves into important positions at the UN General Assembly and lawyers and activists from the global south, such as Pakistan’s Shaista Ikramullah and India’s VL Pandit succeeded in defeating US/UK/French (collectively known as the P3) attempts to exclude racial equality and self determination from the UN Charter and subsequent declaration on human rights.
[13] Loraine Sievers, a former UN official and co-author of the indispensable textbook “The procedure of the UN Security Council”, maintains a lively twitter presence at @SCProcedure, and has been tweeting out a series of comic books in which the UN feature, including this one.
[14] Article 45 of the UN Charter calls for the establishment of a joint United Nations airforce. It has never been enacted.
[15] Holbrooke of course neglects to mention that he himself was one of the Knicks in that example, the actions and inactions of the United States being one of the primary facilitators of the genocide.
[16] There are exceptions to this, and a greater or smaller number of them depending on the issue at hand. Many states in the UN General Assembly, for example, drop their opposition to interference in the governance of sovereign states when Israel is the state in question (although of course there is much more to that contested example). And there is a significant minority, generally including most small island states, much of Latin America and sometimes joined by — depending on the issue — Western European or African states (the latter less so of late), who don’t see sovereignty as an absolute, or international action as necessarily a threat to it. Nevertheless securing a two thirds majority of votes for anything that might be considered to impinge sovereignty at the General Assembly is an uphill task, and in the UN Security Council it has invariably proved to be impossible of late due to the veto power of Russia (who will always oppose such measures), China (who will usually do likewise) and the US (who will sometimes, particularly if Israel’s sovereignty is on the line).
[17] This is quite a hard thing to evidence as it is hard to give examples of a thing not happening. This in turn gives rise to one criticism of the UN: that it is the rain man, perennially pointing at the sky and saying “look at all the wars that aren’t happening!” But one can look to Thant’s diplomacy during the Cuba Missile Crisis, or Annan’s in Iraq in 1998 to see some of the wars that came close enough to happening as to be noticeable and yet were avoided (granted the US did bomb Iraq in 1998, but an all out war was prevented, or at least deferred for five years)
[18] Sometimes such acts are performative, in the sense that they attempt to develop a geopolitical reality in terms of speech-act theory, other times they are merely theatrical, in terms of allowing a country to vent on the global stage, to relent without losing face or, quite often, to allow the diplomatic corps to satisfy their domestic political masters and/or public that they tried and thus that the matter can be allowed to drop.
[19] It’s difficult to measure precisely due to the lack of easily comparable data from the UN’s quasi-autonomous and largely development focussed specialised agencies but broadly speaking if you look at either budgets or personnel the UN spends about 66% of its resources on development, 30% on peace and security, and 3% on human rights.
[20] The “right to development”, the role of gender in development and the question of whose vision for development should be followed were particularly contentious examples.
[21] There is of course a lunatic fringe, led by the John Birch Society in the US, who have long argued that the UN is a cultural Marxist plot. For reasons that are as bewildering as they are these people haven’t fixated on the SDGs so much as “Agenda 21” which was the SDGs’ predecessor’s predecessor’s predecessor, and hasn’t been relevant since 1992.
[22] In an earlier speech at the start of the year Guterres named “deep and growing global mistrust” as one of his “four horsemen” that the organisation needs to overcome, and placed a commitment to tackling alienation and inequality at the heart of his response.
[23] The general consensus seems to be that he will stand again if Trump loses and will resign if he wins. Outlining a bold vision just before attempting to woo member states for a second term might seem brave, but in reality the risks are small. World leaders that aren’t Trump know not to be too worried by mere rhetoric from a Secretary-General, and frankly at the moment they’re just looking for reassurance that he has the energy for the term ahead.
[24] Elaine Mokhtefi’s incredible autobiography “Algiers, third world capital” is primarily the story of how she, a working class Jewish Brooklynite, ended up becoming the primary fixer to the Black Panthers during their Algerian exile. Along the way she visited Hamburger Heaven with President Benkhedda, danced the night away with Frantz Fanon, and met everyone from Nina Simone to the Red Army Faction. But what her book also does is outline the early history of the world federalist movement, and how closely interconnected its student wing was with 1960s international socialism
[25] The theory of change for this proposal would make a Posadist blush: it is hoped that civil society pressure will spring the idea into being, and if not then the inevitable nuclear war that follows will leave no alternative
[26] In fairness to the text it is primarily not a proposal for UN reform but an academic exercise in international law. I’m not a lawyer but I’m sure its legal arguments are solid — the problem is its political arguments. I further feel that a work outlining such an imperial ideology for global governance should attempt to cite at least one non-white non-global north scholar, it does not.
[27] This is potentially unfair on Merkel, who — as is traditional in recent German foreign policy — is very conservative in terms of coercive foreign policy and lacks the outward looking military posture of other NATO members. But insofar as Germany acts as a primary convener of EU and NATO political currents, they must take some ownership for the ideas represented by those currents.
[28] Having previously been championed by former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt in a speech about the “invisible chain” — two years later we are none the wiser as to what he meant.
[29] An idea conceived by the United Kingdom by inviting South Korea, India and Australia to join the G7, and sometimes called the “alliance for democracies”
[30] This is the idea championed by Lisa Nandy although she has so far not identified who the 20 democracies in question would be. Presumably one would start with the G20, remove Saudi Arabia, China, the EU, and perhaps Russia, and add four countries the UK is on better terms with.
[31] This is a global intelligence sharing network comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Former Australian Prime Minister and current UK trade envoy Tony Abbott has advocated widening the group to include the “like minded democracies” of Israel, Singapore, Japan and eventually India. Quite what makes this group like minded (for example if one were to take an issue like nuclear security you would be unlikely to find two countries further apart than Israel and Japan) is a question for Mr Abbott.
[32] The third of his name, son of Ireland’s fourth President and grandson of the author of “Riddle of the Sands”
[33] A former British Paratrooper who liberated Bergen-Belsen, he was the second person ever hired to the UN and worked in a senior capacity for the organisation for 40 years, effectively inventing UN peacekeeping. Since then he has been one of the most thoughtful and interesting thinkers about the UN in print. At the time of writing he is 101 and still alive.
[34] We suffer in part here from political egomania. There are lots and lots of boring but important reforms the UN desperately needs, in my day job I used to do nothing but talk about them. But when politicians think about the UN at all they tend to think in grand terms: they want to build a new tower of Babel not fix the plumbing in the rather modest building we have.
[35] It is of course not a truly global conversation. But nor does it respect sovereign borders. The domestic politics of one country (frequently the United States) regularly intrudes upon the newsfeeds within others, and horizontal linkages around values and interests segregate audiences far more than vertical geographic ones
[36] This is hardly an original thought, a body of scholarship exists on the subject, with Hardt and Negri’s Empire at its centre. There is not space for a full literature review here, but in any instance I hope we have now reached a point where this development can be taken as self evident.
[37] Their fear is essentially the same as the hope of cosmopolitan liberals: a global superstate, and is equally unlikely.
[38] Ultimately your opinion on whether the state qua the state is a good unto itself will vary with your political persuasions. Personally I’ve always preferred Kropotkin to Hobbes.
[39] Childers and Urquhart’s book contains the memorable quip that “the peoples of the United Nations introduce the Charter and then completely disappear from that document.” And indeed from the organisation.
[40] GAVI have immunised 760 million children and counting, probably saving around 13 million lives.
[41] 66% of the board are alliance partners, 33% are independent experts. The board has 28 members: UNICEF, WHO, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hold permanent seats, the rest are chosen on a rolling basis by the previous board for term limits of various lengths in the following proportions: 9 independent individuals, 5 state governments of developing countries, 5 state governments of donor countries, 1 seat for the CEO (chosen by the board), and 1 seat each for: research institutions, the vaccine industry in developing countries, the vaccine industry in developed countries, and wider civil society.
[42] He did send a video message to a second event commemorating the signing of the UN charter.
