The decline of nations and the future of the U.N.

• Author: Renner, Michael

The last year of the U.N.'s first half century could hardly have been more schizophrenic. The organization found itself in growing demand for services that individual nations are finding harder to provide for themselves - ranging from peacekeeping to monitoring transborder environmental threats. At the same time, it found itself being brought close to collapse by its worsening financial crisis. Member states, some of them righteously withholding the dues they owed, lectured the U.N. about the necessity of "reinventing" itself - but failed to do much to help that happen.

One reason for that failure may be that the world's nations, whose organization this is, are no longer the locus of the world's most pressing problems. Reinvention may now require far more than just reorganizing the bureaucracy (difficult as that may be), or running the U.N. more like a business. We see signs that to be effective in the future, the world body will need to be guided increasingly by non-governmental participants. Among the signs:

* The declining authority of national governments the world over, as a result both of globalizing trends (such as global trade and climate change), and of fragmenting trends that defy national cohesiveness (such as ethnic conflicts and the demand for greater local self-determination);

* The fact that most of the great conflicts now taking place are not between nations but within them, involving peoples that have no representation at the United Nations - the Berbers, the Chechens, the Ogoni, the Yanomami, the Kurds, the Karen, and hundreds more;

* Growing evidence that the global market poses a threat to both cultural and biological diversity, and the need for defenders of diversity to be in on global governance.

Non-governmental organizations, or NGOs, already have had a strong presence and influence at key U.N...