Even if the Cold War had not swiftly put paid to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime vision of “four policemen” (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and, implausibly, Nationalist China) collectively presiding over international security, the UN was essentially a containment mechanism, not a machine for ‘making war on war’. Over six decades, the Korean War of 1950–53 remains the only war to have been fought under the UN flag, and even then the commanding general was American, and the orders came from Washington and not New York. The Cold War blunted the UN even as a containment device; over the next four decades, 22 million people died in 150 separate conflicts, more than 125 of those conflicts in the developing world. The invention in 1956 of blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers to monitor agreed ceasefires was a limited improvisation.

Politically, the UN exerted no influence on the great transformations of the late twentieth century, the collapse of European Communism and the end of the Cold War. That, too, was hardly surprising. More surprising was its stumbling thereafter. In the turbulent decade-and-a-half since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the whole notion of collective security has been tested almost to the point of destruction. The UN’s authority as the source of international legitimacy has been thrown further into question, first in Kosovo, where NATO decided not to seek Security Council authorization which it knew would not be forthcoming, and then, dramatically, in 2003 over Iraq.

As to the Charter’s vision of social progress, the transformation of the world economy since 1945 has indeed brought “better standards of life” within the reach of billions. Not only, however, has the UN’s contribution to development been marginal, but the development tail has come to wag the UN dog. The UN’s specialized agencies were designed as places for experts to exchange ideas, not as the bureaucratic dispensers of a multilateral Maundy money. The doctrinaire tiers-mondisme that came to dominate UN forums in the 1970s held back progress, by over-promoting the role of the State and by encouraging incompetent and corrupt governments to see development aid as a perk to which they were automatically entitled and could use, or more commonly abuse, as they pleased.

Only in the realm of human rights can the UN claim to have made a distinctive contribution. Moral touchstones do matter. The high purposes proclaimed at San Francisco in 1945 and in the ambitious Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 have retained their resonance, encouraging a change in thinking about the duties that states owe to their citizens and about the pressures that may legitimately be brought to bear against gross violations of human rights, even where these do not directly threaten international peace and security. Along with the provision of humanitarian assistance, it is in this area that the UN today – despite the lamentable recent failure to make a clean break with the hideous politicization of the UN’s human rights machinery – comes closest to connecting with “the peoples” it was created to serve. There are now dozens of highly effective human rights organizations outside the UN, but all of them benefit from the traction exerted on governments by UN conventions.

The modesty of the UN’s place in world affairs has not prevented the global bureaucracy from expanding massively since 1945 – expanding, as distinct from adapting. Successive efforts at UN reform – and there have been dozens, dating as far back as 1949 – have left the beach more cluttered with debris than before. The consequence of all this “institution-building”, to use a hallowed UN phrase, is complexity and loss of focus. Even the supposedly “political” UN in New York is choked, intellectually as well as physically, by no fewer than a hundred programmes and units, with often overlapping remits, ranging from statistics to family planning, child welfare and gender equality, the urban habitat and even a committee on geographical names.

The 'functional' UN, a polycentric cluster of autonomous agencies with their own governing bodies, has proliferated likewise; there are now more than twenty bodies with some kind of agricultural remit, four drugs agencies at the last count, and literally dozens of emergency relief units fighting each other for funds.

The question that thus poses itself is this: in a world that the UN’s founders would have trouble recognizing, what is the comparative advantage of global organizations? Even if we accept multilateral cooperation as a fact of life, do we need all the global machinery that has accumulated over the decades, in a process that more nearly resembles a galactic accident than organic growth led by demand?

Before and especially since 9/11, the effort to reshape our thinking about what constitutes security in a globalized world has exposed severe doctrinal, political, structural and procedural weaknesses in the frameworks devised in and after 1945. The mismatch between supply and demand has become an embarrassment to the UN’s supporters, and an irritant to those politicians still prepared to take it seriously as a vehicle for international cooperation.

How relevant, then, are these bodies to the decisions politicians must take, or to people’s lives? Can the touted advantages of universal membership be mobilized for the common good? Or is there, finally, something inherently anachronistic about purely governmental clubs, populated for the most part by backbiting diplomatic generalists, wrapped in a bureaucratic cocoon where nationality, length of service and political connections outweigh dedication and competence?

The UN no longer exists, as it did in 1945, in lonely eminence. It must compete for influence in a world of instant communications and multiple voices, and of networks inside and outside government that operate across frontiers with unprecedented ease. Globalization is transforming not only the world economy, but also the relations between governments and their increasingly mobile, disconcertingly better-informed citizens. The inter-state threats which the UN’s security machinery was designed to address have been largely displaced by the problems of collapsing, dysfunctional states and the globalization of organized crime and terrorist networks.

In times of rapid change, flexibility is all-important – and flexibility is not a word readily associated with the UN. Institutions are made for man, not the other way round. Institutional inflation, hardened political and bureaucratic arteries, and confidence-sapping internal scandals make the UN a difficult place to get things done. Where alternative channels exist, they are therefore likely to be used.

The first attempt to get to grips with the great organizational sprawl clustered under the UN umbrella was Inis Claude’s still impressive Swords into Ploughshares, published four decades ago; students of international affairs have been falling asleep for years over Evan Luard’s worthily compendious volumes; there have been countless collections of academic essays examining the UN from multiple angles and – declaring an interest here – my own less reverent anatomy of the beast appeared eleven years ago.

To sit in on the General Assembly is to be numbed by the vacuity of the set speeches and the absurdity of its bloc politics. What passes for debate there is a mind-numbing, patience-sapping, game of “let’s pretend”. Let’s pretend that all 191 nations are equal not just in law but in weight. Let’s pretend that voting blocs dating back to the heyday of North–South confrontation and the ideological confrontations of the Cold War reflect contemporary political realities. The so-called G-77 of “developing” nations now includes 132 states plus, for opportunistic reasons, China. It bunches the world’s least developed together with wealthy cosmopolitan states that, outside the UN, are significant players, the worst-ruled with the best. Elsewhere they go their own ways. Yet at the UN, the G-77 debates and votes as one, perpetuating an artificial North–South cleavage which poisons the UN’s internal politics and renders reform all but impossible.

The General Assembly’s obsession with process, rather than results, is reflected in the inconsequentiality of most of its decisions. UN files are filled with mould-pocked resolutions which never stood a chance of being implemented, reports and requests for further reports. Few of these documents are read by delegates, let alone by their governments. In New York alone, a recent inventory – the first attempted since 1956 – identified no fewer than 9,000 “active mandates” which the secretariat is supposed to be implementing. A body that cannot even organize its own agenda is unlikely to contribute to the better ordering of the world. There and elsewhere in the UN, the grinding of the mill has come to matter more than the quality of the flour produced.

Thus the old joke that the UN is “a place where nations which are unable to act individually get together to decide that they are unable to act collectively” still has credence today. A body stuck in an ideological time warp cannot be a reliable sounding board for world opinion. Even the media do a better job.

The UN was never intended to be a centralized “system”, a hub-and-spokes structure in which all roads led outward from New York. The UN’s specialized agencies are entirely autonomous bodies, each with specific remits, a separate budget, and its own assembly and governing board. The Charter invites them to enter into “relationship” with the General Assembly, but rather as sovereign states might consent to join a confederation.

The UN in New York cannot even claim the powers of a holding company – no bad thing, given its inability to keep its own house in order. Even to describe the UN Secretary-General as primus inter pares grossly overstates his influence. The habit of treating the UN as the “system” it is not has mightily distorted past efforts at reform and is still doing so today. Not only is it hopeless to expect the UN to function as a coordinated whole – the only result of such efforts has been the proliferation of committees – but the obsession with “coordination” distracts attention from the great merit of polycentrism, which is that it should be possible to fix the plumbing in those parts of the machine that still matter and downgrade funding and support for those, such as the Industrial Development Organization, that belong in the category of 'better dead'.

The Iraq crisis of 2003 brought to a head issues of absolutely primary importance about when intervention is permissible, about the legitimacy of pre-emptive military action and, as Kofi Annan put it, “the adequacy and effectiveness” of rules set in 1945 to deal with terrorism and asymmetric warfare.

The reasons why states 'fail', collapsing into anarchy or civil war, are the very reasons that make them difficult to rescue from looming catastrophe. Lousy regimes are hard to help. Once a trend towards violent disorder sets in, savings, investment and growth fall away, people look to their immediate survival, politicians grab the spoils while they still can.

Where the UN bulks large for older people, younger generations will increasingly reject the tired and inaccurate defence that the UN is “the mirror of mankind”. A richer multilateral world is in the making; and the more people become accustomed to thinking globally, the more impatient they will be of closed-circuit governmental bodies.

Conclusion: All the original UN members in 1945 shared one characteristic, to be invited to the UN's founding conference in San Francisco, a state had to have declared war on at least one of the Axis powers.

The UN's American founders assumed that it would be possible to freeze the wartime alliance of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and France.

One of the flaws of the early UN was that because of Stalin's wartime cooperation with Roosevelt, the organization's architects had an excessively benign, if not naïve, view of the USSR.

And like our acclaimed article series “Enter revealed, the acting secretary-general at the UN's 1945 founding conference, Alger Hiss, was probably a Soviet spy.

The problem, also was that the UN member states soon lost a common sense of purpose, which had been so vital to the international body at its founding. For example UN diplomats surrendered to demands from states like China, Indonesia, and Malaysia by drafting a final declaration that omitted any reference to individual rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of assembly.(1)

In fact the UN has dropped the ball repeatedly when it was expected to defend peoples who relied on its flag for their protection.

On January 11, 1994, the commander of UN peacekeeping forces in war-torn Rwanda, Major General Romeo Dallaire, sent this coded cable to UN headquarters. It warns of a reliable report from a "top level" informant that an extremist militia being trained in the Rwandan army's camps is planning the "extermination" of the minority Tutsi ethnic group. In the cable, Dallaire asks permission to seize the militia's weapons caches to try to prevent the slaughter. But the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations-headed by Kofi Annan, later to become UN secretary-general-denied Dallaire's request, not wanting to compromise the UN's impartiality in the Rwandan conflict. Three months later, the genocide began; more than 800,000 Rwandans were killed:

Or why didn't UN peacekeepers prevent Europe's worst massacre since World War II? This UN report in French, with English translation when you click on the documents reveals that in a secret June 4, 1995, meeting, the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army offered a deal to the UN commander in the former Yugoslavia, France's General Bernard Janvier: If the UN halted air strikes, the Serbs would release UN hostages (mostly French troops) and leave peacekeepers alone in the future. Did Janvier accept the offer? This UN account doesn't say so, but just three days later the Serbs began releasing the hostages. And when the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica fell on July 11, Janvier refused to authorize timely air attacks to stop the Serbs. More than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims were ultimately slaughtered:

The UN is supposed to be a force for international security. Instead it has allowed crises to explode. And the UN's failure in one conflict only creates other crises, as the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide reveals.

To be sure, some UN specialized agencies are successful at humanitarian work. The World Food Program, for example, fed 90 million people around the world in 2000, many of whom would have come close to starvation without its assistance, and the World Health Organization saved millions of lives by orchestrating the international response to the outbreak of SARS in the Far East and North America.(2)

This deficiency in the UN is hard for many to admit. The UN is protected by a very high wall of political correctness that makes criticism of it tantamount to an attack on all of mankind. But it is time to recognize that it has utterly failed to achieve its founders' goals: to halt aggression.

Today we know that the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to a great extent the consequence of a long lasting conflict between the Great Russians - the `core nation' of the empire - on the one hand, and the dominant ethnic groups of the other fourteen national Soviet republics, on the other hand. We also know that  a continuing tradition which emphasises Russia's orthodox and traditional past, an intellectual current has been drawing on western European neo-fascist ideas and adapting them to the Russian situation (increasing conservatism across Russia as a whole, these ideas during the 1990’s had an impact right across the political spectrum). The latter we will investige in a following part of this ongoing reports.

 
 

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