Why we need the UN

There has been no improvement with the appointment of the current incumbent, Ban Ki-Moon. The former South Korean Foreign Minister has been accused of presiding over an opaque appointments system in which positions for high-ranking officials are not properly advertised and backgrounds often inadequately checked. Ban’s reaction to what was, after all, the finding of an official committee set up by the General Assembly, was to demand that its report be kept secret.

He has also come under criticism for failing to speak out strongly enough on human rights issues, with the head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, saying Ban had been “notably reluctant to put pressure on abusive governments”. Roth named China, Sudan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka as examples of where the Secretary General had failed to condemn the actions of repressive regimes.

Ban has countered by saying his brand of “quiet diplomacy” was a more effective, if less obvious way of applying pressure, although he has since been more open in with his comments on events in the Middle East and most recently on Palestine’s U.N. campaign to be recognised as a state.

Most damaging has been comments from a former high-ranking U.N. official, Swede Inga-Britt Ahlenius who blamed Ban’s poor leadership on the world body “falling apart” and “drifting into irrelevance”. All this gives fuel to the John Boltons of the world, who detest the U.N. and would be happy to see it dismantled.

While the Australian Government’s official position remains one of strong support for the world body, and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd tours the world in his indefatigable campaign to gain Australia a term on the Security Council, there has been a subtle change in emphasis with our promotion of the Group of 20 major advanced and emerging economies. Some influential commentators, notably veteran foreign correspondent and author Bruce Grant, believe the G20 and other transnational and regional groupings will grow in influence as the U.N. declines.

Others disagree. Former Undersecretary for Global Affairs in the Clinton Administration, Timothy Wirth, says the U.S should be doing more to defend the U.N. from its critics. “While the United Nations is an imperfect institution in need of additional and meaningful improvements, attempts to demonise it and label it as irrelevant have negative consequences for U.S. interests,” Wirth says. “A weakened U.N will make it harder for the U.S. to push its interests and those of its allies, while making it more difficult to pursue reform.”

Wirth calls for a more constructive critique of the U.N’s failings and in this he is echoed by the Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the City University of New York, Thomas Weiss, who believes it is only the U.N. that can tackle the increasing array of transnational challenges, something Kofi Anan described as “problems without passports”. “These problems range from climate change, migration and pandemics, to terrorism, financial flows and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” Weiss says.

But while the problems may be transnational, the U.N’s ability to deal with them is still dependent on the old Westphalian system of individual nation states. The result, Weiss says, is “fitful, tactical and short-term local responses to threats that require sustained, strategic and long-term global thinking and action.”

The U.N. treads a delicate line. It has no standing army and its authority is entirely vested in its member states. Dag Hammarskjold saw the dangers in this, tried to steer a more independent course and (some say) paid the price for it. No Secretary General has made any serious attempt to copy him since.

And yet in a world that is so different from 1945 there are problems needing urgent attention that only an international institution like the U.N. can address. Weiss says that for all its warts, it still matters because it can bring legitimacy and idealism to negotiating tables otherwise cluttered by the detritus of national and regional interests.

Because of this there is an urgent need for the world organisation to reinvent itself to once again play a vital role in global affairs.