Weight of the world
OF ALL the world’s problems, which is most urgent: the
slow warming of the atmosphere coupled with the unhappy prospect of
longer droughts, devastating cyclones and rising oceans?
Or what US President George Bush this week called “the defining
ideological struggle of the 21st century”, fighting terrorism and
violent Islamist extremism?
Perhaps the most pressing challenge facing the planet is
finishing the long 60-year campaign to rid the world of nuclear
weapons?
Who can say where any single priority lies. Yet what links each
problem is the solution or rather, how to go about finding
one. No country, acting alone, has the answer.
“There are a great number of problems now you cannot solve on a
purely national basis,” says Sir Brian Urquhart, a veteran diplomat
of 41 years with the United Nations. “I mean, pandemics for example
due to the way that we can almost instantaneously circle the
world, pandemics have become a major problem.
“It’s no good supposing you can have one great country solving
it. They can’t. Even the United States can’t.”
Urquhart, a man whose remarkable career has been likened to a
history of the UN itself, was among the handful of staff who in
1945 worked at the founding of the organisation. He became one of
its most influential officials, serving as under secretary-general
for political affairs in the 1970s and ’80s.
Despite the technological and cultural advances of the past 60
years, he notes, the UN is still the only forum bringing together
the world’s governments to solve global problems. Nearly 200
countries are now members. And this week, the UN enjoyed the fond
attention of one of world’s youngest administrations, with a visit
by Australia’s Foreign Minister to the New York headquarters.
“The new Government came into office with a commitment to
increase the reliance and importance placed on the United Nations,”
Stephen Smith said after meeting senior UN officials. As part of a
plan to reshape foreign policy, he has pledged to make multilateral
diplomacy a focus of Australia’s approach to world affairs.
But Smith also carried a message from Canberra the old
institution is showing its age and struggling to keep pace with
modern challenges. Reform is needed, particularly in UN bureaucracy
and in the shape of the organisation.
Talk of reform has echoed around the halls of the UN for years
and largely come to nothing. Exposing waste and corruption inside
the bureaucracy (known as the secretariat) is a favourite pastime
of UN critics. The oil-for-food scandal, in which millions of
dollars padded the bank accounts of Saddam Hussein’s cronies in
Iraq and a few bent UN officials, helped to fuel an image of
administrative incompetence.
Urquhart concedes the secretariat needs improvement, but he sees
the need for a much wider and more radical change.
“I mean, nobody had ever heard of ‘global problems’ in 1945;
that phrase didn’t exist. Membership was 51. The theory about
international peace and security was the UN would rely on the
wartime alliance, which would stick together and monitor the peace,
and if necessary, enforce it.
“Really, all these things are a little bit out of date, to put
it mildly,” he says.
The biggest debate over reforming the organisation centres on
the Security Council, the only part of the UN with the power to
demand action by its members. The council is made up of 15
countries; 10 of these serve rotating two-year terms. But five
powerful countries are always at the table, a legacy from World War
II. Britain, China, France, Russia and the US each invested
with the “veto”, meaning if any one does not support a resolution,
even in the face of all the other members, the organisation is
paralysed.
Smith used his New York trip to join calls to enlarge the number
of permanent seats on the Security Council. Japan and India should
be included, he said, to reflect the new power structures of the
modern world. Many question why Europe should have three seats
counting Russia and Asia only one. But should we
expect to see an enlarged Security Council?
“I am afraid the chances are not good in the short term,” says
Harvard University professor Joseph Nye, a renowned expert on
international affairs. He points to the failure of recent proposals
to expand the Security Council, made after detailed consultation by
the former secretary-general.
“Unfortunately political rivalries have prevented
implementation. China is not happy about enhancing the power of
Japan. Pakistan is jealous of India,” says Nye. Smith is realistic
about the challenge. “I’m not expecting that anything will occur
overnight,” he said.
But Australia might try to influence the process from the
inside. Smith also used his trip to flag an interest in Australia
gaining a prized temporary Security Council seat for the first time
in more than two decades.
If successful, this would underline a distinct shift in
Australian foreign policy after the Howard years. After years of
frustration about UN diplomatic stalling and criticism of
Australia’s hardline approach to refugee arrivals and other
policies, the former government had thinly disguised contempt for
the world body. Alexander Downer, Australia’s longest-serving
foreign minister, dismissed multilateralism as ineffective and
unfocused.
But Urquhart says nations such as Australia, what he calls the
“sensible countries”, are desperately needed to show that the UN
has a role in the modern age. He is optimistic the change in
Australian attitudes might make the Labor Government the first in a
new generation of governments to focus on multilateralism.
But he says a frank discussion is needed to identify the real
problems that bedevil the UN as an international organisation.
“There is the problem, particularly related to global problems,
of what the balance really is between national sovereignty and
international management and responsibility. And this is the
obstacle, the rock, on which the UN is always coming to a dead
halt.”
And, after watching the world lurch through crisis after crisis
and the organisation struggle to keep up, the wise old diplomat has
some blunt advice.
“What I would love to see is someone maybe your foreign
minister will be the guy to do it who would really just cut
the bullshit and lay out the complicated problems about taking the
UN into the current world, which is completely different from the
world it was founded in.”
Over to you, Mr Smith.
Daniel Flitton is diplomatic editor.
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Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 12:03 am under