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Slow Death or New Direction for the UN?

Nov 19, 2020 Mark Malloch-Brown

For most of its 75-year existence, the United Nations has struggled to strike a balance between its lofty founding aspirations and realities on the ground. But in today's fast-changing geopolitical environment, the organization may be facing its biggest challenge yet.

LONDON – For much of its life, the United Nations has hidden behind the comfortable maxim that, “If we didn’t have it, we would have to invent it.” Now at the venerable age of 75 (old enough to have been a 2020 US presidential candidate), the organization still enjoys widespread approval in global opinion polls.

But beneath the surface, the UN faces difficulties that cannot be ignored. Judging by traditional and social media, the issues that the UN pushes tend to get little traction. Worse, when it comes to maintaining peace and security, the UN is often stymied by its dysfunctional Security Council, which itself reflects an increasingly divided world. Whether in Syria, Yemen, or Libya, progress toward securing peace has been glacial, with much more being decided on the battlefield than at the Security Council. These same divisions have also hampered human-rights advocacy, as has the recent election that awarded seats on the UN Human Rights Council to Russia, Cuba, and China.

Of course, the UN has always mirrored the world it represents. There was broad member support for a strong UN only in its initial years and during the early years of Kofi Annan’s tenure as secretary-general in the late 1990s. Otherwise, the UN has typically operated against strong headwinds; and now, a number of political and demographic changes are rapidly reshaping the UN’s world.

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j. von Hettlingen Nov 21, 2020

Mark Malloch-Brown says the UN, at 75, needs reforms that reflect the changing global reality. The challenges - climate change, new technologies, pandemics, and inequality - are posing a reality check to the world body. However it still adheres to a charter that “rests squarely on the liberal-democratic values of the winners of World War II.” The number of member states grew from 51 in 1945 to 193 in 2011, while “political and demographic changes are rapidly reshaping” the world.
According to the author, today, our world is “younger overall.” The US hegemony seems to be waning, with the balance of power shifting to a multipolar world order, with China being a key actor. The UN’s “central dilemma” is that much of today’s population lives “under authoritarian rule, ranging from despots without even a pretense of democratic legitimacy to elected autocrats who have eroded democratic institutions and checks on their power.”
Given these circumstances the UN has “no choice but to contend with this increasingly undemocratic world.” Its main challenge “is to fashion a practical, achievable agenda without betraying its founding charter and its commitment to human rights and other freedoms,” by tapping into “its current strengths.” As an embodiment of “collective rights,” the UN is “uniquely positioned to mobilize action on issues like climate change, which threatens poor farmers in developing countries as much as it does rich Manhattanites who are exposed to rising sea levels.”
What critics loathe about the UN is that it has become a sclerotic, political behemoth. Some compare it to a vintage typewriter struggling to compete in digital age. As a result of complex bureaucracy, the UN system is seen as a black hole into which countless dollars and human aspirations disappear. The world body has been grappling with a major systemic financing crisis for years. There jas been a cash flow crisis in recent months with the US and its treaty obligations, due to Trump’s aversion to multilateral institutions and international organisations.
For years calls for reforming the UN Security Council have fallen on deaf ears. The UNSC has been widely criticised as having been sidelined as China, Russia and the US have vied in their threats to use their vetos. Known collectively as the P5, the five permanent members - China, France, Russia, the UK and the US - reflect the outcome of the World War II, but exclude many major economies including Brazil, Germany, India and Japan.
Due to a decades-old territorial dispute between China and India, and intermittent clashes at their border in the Himalayas, Beijing, which has veto power in the UNSC as one of its five permanent members, has been stonewalling India's efforts to become permanent member of the powerful UN body for years, pointing out lack of consensus even though the other four - US, UK, France and Russia - have backed New Delhi's membership.
The UNSC is a principal crisis-management body, empowered to impose binding obligations on the 193 UN member states to maintain peace. In the past, numerous attempts to reform the Council, including the expansion of its permanent membership, had foundered on the vetos of the P5. Sadly, entrenched interests made fundamental reform of the Council extremely unlikely. The Council will remain ineffectual until it is reformed - a distant prospect.
According to the author, “there are ways around this paralysis.” During the original Cold War, the UN, without reference to the Security Council, launched major initiatives to address humanitarian crises and to support new members emerging from colonial rule. UN development and humanitarian agencies often drew on their own mandates and international law to intervene when the circumstances required it.”
In this regard, multilateralism could still be kept afloat, by changing the powers of the General Assembly, or by building from below to make the UN more effective on issues such as climate change, trade, health and labour standards - efforts to narrow the gap of “inequality” and to eliminate “exclusion.”
It remains to be seen whether the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), “remain an example of the UN at its best,” as General Seccretary Antonio Guterres calls for “A New Social Contract for a New Era.”
Although the UN “provides an indispensable global good by producing league tables of human development and organizing broad coalitions to achieve steady progress on key indicators of well-being,” the main criticism of the SDGs is that they have set unrealistic objectives for 2030. Developing countries do not always have the resources or support to fulfil these goals.
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william etheridge Nov 19, 2020

Not hard.
Problem simply is a number of important international players are openly opposed to, out of step with, a transparent honest rule of law and evidence based liberal global order.
Like alas when the UN was born, on doorstep of the Cold War.
Illustrated lately by Covid and WHO.
And despite the self evident historically transformational benefits of such an order, especially for the poorest.
It’s ironic China’s pathbreaking reforms from c1980 – to escape the Maoist totalitarian nightmare - borrowed mainly from the “West”, from the ”noxious” liberal order they like to demonise, ie freer markets and private property.
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