Appraising the U.N. at 50: the looming challenge.

• Author: Falk, Richard A.
• Position: Transcending National Boundaries

IS THE U.N. FAIILING?

In the spring of 1994, The Economist had on its cover a ghastly scene: a landscape of utter desolation, the sky and earth blood red, corpses littering the ground with a flagpole in their midst, its U.N. flag flying at half-mast and a large caption entitling the cover story, "SHAMED ME ME PEACEKEEPERS."(1) Such an iconography of failure is sadly expressive of public disappointment with the United Nations' role in world affairs in light of its inability to avert tragedy in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda.

Such an assessment does not provide a promising background for this year's observance of the 50th anniversary of the U.N.'s founding, which, if nothing else, is certain to generate a multitude of discussions on the past, present and future of the Organization. My aim in this article will be to account for this current attitude of disappointment and to interpret expectations of the United Nations within the larger setting of global restructuring, especially the displacement and realignment of the sovereign state.

It should be noted by way of introduction that it is the peace and security agenda that serves as the prism through which the U.N. is judged by the media and the public. This is understandable, yet misleading. It is misleading because, even considered mechanically as an aggregate of its multifold distinct activities, actors and arenas, the U.N. consists of such diverse main organs as the Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council and the Secretariat, as well as a long list of specialized agencies, among the most important of which are the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Also formally part of the U.N. family, although fully autonomous in operation, are the international financial institutions, which include the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.(2) The U.N.'s range of activities thus encompasses virtually the whole gamut of human concerns. Its many constructive achievements over the years must be balanced against a plethora of shortcomings, making it complicated to evaluate any particular aspect of U.N. work.

At the same time, the tendency to conflate the U.N. in such a way that only the peace and security agenda is sharply profiled is understandable. The main goals of the Organization have always been related to the avoidance of war and the protection of weak states against aggression. That is why the U.N. response to the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait in 1990 seemed such a decisive test of the capacity of the Organization to act in the post-Cold War world, giving then-President George Bush's mobilizing call for "a new world order" much credibility, at least for the duration of the crisis. Two distinct conclusions emerge: First of all, the U.N. is a complex actor with multiple roles that have growing importance in many domains of international life; secondly, despite this diversity, the overriding test of U.N. success or failure focuses on its handling of peace and security challenges.

Overall, this emphasis on peace and security tends to give an undue prominence to the Security Council, and an unwarranted back burner status to other organizational facets of the U.N. Occasionally, the World Court will receive attention through rendering a controversial decision, as it did in 1986 when it held that the efforts of the U.S. government to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua violated international law; or the Secretary-General will make headlines by taking a strong, independent stand on a peace and security issue, such as fashioning a response to genocide in Rwanda. Normally, however, it is the Security Council that takes the heat and gets the credit. This has been especially true since 1989. No longer does the threat of a Soviet veto loom to produce either gridlock or an ineffectual compromise.(3) If the Organization fosters peaceful resolution of warfare or carries out its Charter mandate to protect member states that are victims of aggression, then its achievements are noted and celebrated. In this regard, the U.N. reached its peak of popularity, especially in the United States, after the Gulf War in 1991 by providing the auspices for successfully challenging Iraq's conquest and annexation of Kuwait.(4) This aura of achievement was reinforced by a series of seemingly successful mediation efforts from 1988 to 1990 related to long-festering regional conflicts: Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Namibia and El Salvador.(5) This string of successes, especially given the ending of the Cold War, lent some temporary credibility to expectations of a "new world order," guided by international law and institutionally upheld by a robust United Nations that would be strengthened gradually as public confidence in its effectiveness increased.

What, then, went wrong? Can it be corrected? At bottom, this pattern of popular attitudes, shifting back and forth between hopes raised and hopes dashed, reflects a failure to realize what the U.N. is currently capable of accomplishing and what it is not. This, in turn, relates to the precise type of Organization that the U.N. has become. Can such a family of entrenched bureaucracies, in some way answerable both to world public opinion and to the geopolitical will of its leading member states, be changed to any appreciable extent in the foreseeable future?

From the very outset of the U.N.'s history, it was recognized that the Organization could operate effectively only if its dominant members, the five permanent members of the Security Council, could act in concert. Constitutionally, this precondition was acknowledged in the form of both the veto and permanent membership, given to these five states and only to them. The optimists, such as Franklin Roosevelt, felt that the U.N. at its inception had a good chance of succeeding because these same countries had cooperated to defeat fascism, and thus would be able to suppress their differences well enough to keep their alliance together for the purpose of safeguarding the peace achieved in 1945 after their valiant and exhausting efforts during the Second World War.(6) The pessimists, such as George Kennan and Dean Acheson, anticipated the Soviet challenge, partly as an expected enactment of the Marxist-Leninist orientation and partly as a reflection of the inevitable tendency of leading states to engage in rivalry in the absence of a common enemy. They expected the U.N. to be quickly marginalized, thereby resting their hopes for future peace on a posture of containment and deterrence.(7) As we now know, the pessimists carried the day through the entire Cold War.(8)

Since 1989, the pattern of activities in response to peace and security challenges has reflected the changing character of the global setting - above all, the disappearance of the East-West axis of conflict and the emergence of a far more integrated pattern of economic activity on a global and regional basis. In a sense, the signature of this new era is the positing of a new arrangement of geopolitical priorities, subordinating most peace and security concerns to the issues of economic stability and the expansion of trade. The next section explores this rearrangement of priorities, especially in relation to the changing role of the state and the impact of this process upon the activities of the UN. Security Council.

THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE CHANGING ROLE OF ME STATE

Although simple dualisms are not descriptive of complex reality, it is useful, as a first approximation, to appreciate that the U.N. is an extension of the states system rather than an alternative to it. States are, of course, the only entities eligible for membership, and, in terms of peace and security, completely dominate patterns of access and participation.(9) Furthermore, it is not only states as such, but rather the hierarchy of states that has given structure to international political life as the states system has unfolded over time.

Both points are critical. From a juridical perspective, rules of membership and participation, including procedures for financing, are exclusively premised on states' status as political actors; in the General Assembly, with its role confined to recommendatory authority, all states regardless of size are entitled to equal rights of participation - Liechtenstein's vote counts as much as the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) or that of the United States. In contrast, from a geopolitical perspective (one sensitive to the hierarchy of states that exert influence in the world) and in relation to the operational code of the U.N., the most powerful and influential states as of 1945 have privileged formal status, especially through their capacity to control the decision-making procedures of the U.N., either by mandating coercive action (as in the Gulf War) or by blocking action through the exercise of their veto power (as throughout the Cold War).(10)

But it is not only by way of its formal structures that the U.N. experiences this geopolitical imprint of inequality among states. It pervades the operations of the Organization, the role and selection of the Secretary-General, financing (especially of special budgets needed for peacekeeping), the selectivity practiced with respect to threats to the peace or severe abuses of human rights and the implementation (or lack thereof) of decisions taken by the Security Council. In this respect, the U.N. is often perceived, especially in Africa and Asia, as a virtual instrument of the foreign policy of its most powerful member, the United States, which is believed to exert an influence that extends far...