Why is the United Nations so ineffective?

The United Nations, a successor of the even more useless League of Nations, was incorporated in 1945 with 51 members. It now has 193. By the 1970s, the UN's budget for economic and social development programmes far outstripped its spending on peacekeeping.  

What this article attempts is to develop a peaceful world, a world without war. And to identify the reasons why the United Nations has failed to do that. The leading objective of the United Nations is to maintain international peace and security, not to create a world governing body. The nations of this world demand independence, not an international government.

Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato and joint winner of the 2021 Critic and Conscience of Society Award pointed out in The Times Dec 21, 2022: “There could be no better example of the United Nations’ failure to live up to its founding ideals than the recent visit by secretary general António Guterres to Russia. Attempting to calm the dangerous war in Ukraine, he obtained nothing of significance.”

The peacekeeping failures of the United Nations over the years have been numerous, including:

• Failure to stop the 2003 US invasion or Iraq.
• Inability to stop the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
• Not being able to end the Israel-Palestine conflict.
• Failure to prevent the 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
• Not doing enough to end the genocide in Darfur, from 2003 onwards.
• The Kashmir dispute being the oldest and most serious of all is unresolved since 1948.
• Bosnia, where Dutch UN Peacekeepers failed to prevent the Srebrenica massacre in which Bosnian Serb forces murdered over 8000 Bosnian Muslims.
• Syria, where protests clamouring for political change, evolved into a civil war,
• Papua New Guinea, where local indigenous people clamour for independence from Indonesia,
• The Vietnam War raged for 19 years and cost the lives of two million people. The UN proved powerless to stop it.
• The current crisis in Ukraine

Another example of UN incompetence is Myanmar. The Association for Political Prisoners, a rights monitoring organisation, said over 16,000 people had been detained on political charges in Myanmar since the army takeover in early 2021. Of those arrested, more than 13,000 were still in detention. The association said at least 2,465 civilians had been killed since the 2021 takeover, although the number is thought to be far higher.

The 15-member Security Council has long been split on how to deal with the Myanmar crisis, with China and Russia arguing against strong action. They both abstained from the vote in December 2022 along with India. The remaining 12 members voted in favour.

Under the Charter of the United Nations, all Member States are obligated to comply with Council decisions. Myanmar has been a UN member since 1948.

Under chapter VII of the UN Charter, Article 39 reads “The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

It has failed miserably in this task. Why?

The UN has six principal organs: the General Assembly; the Security Council; the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC);the Trusteeship Council; the International Court of Justice; and the United Nations Secretariat, the UN's executive arm.
A brief outline of these institutions will help us understand the functions of these parts of the UN and possible reasons why the UN’s peacekeeping operations have mostly failed.

There are 195 countries in the world, of which 193 are members of the General Assembly, with the Holy See and Palestine as observer states.

The General Assembly is the only UN organ wherein all member states have equal representation. All 193 Member States of the United Nations are represented in this forum.  

The General Assembly monitors the performance of UN Peacekeeping through its Special committee on Peacekeeping Operations. The membership of this Committee is about 34 participants split between full members and observers. The full members are mostly past or current contributors to peacekeeping operations. It appears to mainly be a monitoring body providing policy recommendations through its annual Report of the Special Committee on Peacekeeping Operations. A review of recent reports raises some issues associated with UN peacekeeping such as “a clear sense of a widening gap between what is being asked of UN peace operations today and what they are able to deliver”. Eradicating sexual exploitation and abuse and placing victims’ rights and dignity at the centre of these efforts are also mentioned, along with the impact of Covid 19. The review does not provide a hard-hitting analysis of why the UN peacekeeping efforts have been a failure. It may be the reasons why the United Nations is accused of being a talk fest.

The Security Council has five permanent members: China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and ten non-permanent members elected for two-year terms by the General Assembly. More than 50 United Nations Member States have never been Members of the Security Council. The UN Security Council determines when and where a UN peace operation should be deployed. It has 15 members, and each member has one vote. Under the Charter of the United Nations, all member states are obligated to comply with Council decisions. The UNSC is the only UN body with the authority to issue binding resolutions on member states. It is generally viewed as the apex of the UN system.

ECOSOC is responsible for coordinating the economic and social fields. It links the many agencies of the United Nations, such as The World Bank, The IMF, The World Health Organisation, and The International Labour Organisation.

The Trusteeship Council was established to help ensure that trust territories were administered in the best interests of their inhabitants and of international peace and security. They are former colonies of the great powers, established by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

The International Court of Justice, known as the World Court, is the main judicial organ of the UN and is located in the Hague,

The United Nations Secretariat is the UN's executive arm. The UN's chief administrative officer is the Secretary-General, currently Portuguese politician António Guterres, who began his first five year-term on 1 January 2017 and was re-elected on 8 June 2021. The secretary-general oversees the UN Secretariat, which functions as the United Nations’ executive office and handles operations, including research, translation, and media relations. The UN Secretariat has a staff of more than thirty-six thousand. This is part of the problem. The current secretary general is seen almost daily on television giving a talk on the seriousness of the current world problem. He also has a huge organisation below him

Suggestions for reform of the United Nations peacekeeping

One suggested possibility for reform is that each country member of the United Nations should contribute proportionally in terms of national income to a military force or equivalent money to United Nations peacekeeping. Thus the UN would have its own policing force, instead of relying on countries for volunteer troops.

A second suggestion is to abolish the veto power. The United Nations has five nations that can veto any resolution that UN members agreed upon. The countries with this veto power are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. These countries have this power because they were the founding countries of the United Nations that wrote the rules for the UN after World War 2.

Gregory Barrow, Director of the World Food Programme in London supports ending the veto power. The presidency of the Security Council is held by each of the members in turn for one month, following the English alphabetical order of the Member States. Each President holds office for one calendar month. Australia held the first presidency of the UNSC.

Dame Margaret Anstee, former UN Under-Secretary-General has suggested that while the final selection of the Secretary-General will always be political, she would establish a selection process to ensure that all candidates for Secretary General have the requisite qualifications and experience and the term of office be limited to one period. To be selected as Secretary-General, a candidate must receive the votes of at least nine members of the United Nations Security Council, with no vetoes from permanent members.

The former Secretary-General Kofi Annan established in 2003 the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. This report identified two main problems facing the UN. Despite some successes there was a problem of effectiveness, demonstrated by the UN failures in Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia. In particular, the UN was not able to mount enforcement operations and had to rely on coalitions of the willing. The second problem was to do with the conceptual framework that might underlie effectiveness, in particular the question of how to build a consensus for new forms of action.

The Brahimi Report on Peace Keeping was another attempt at reform. Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Foreign Minister of Algeria, chaired the inquiry. The report noted that the United Nations member states have not yet implemented a standing UN army or police force. As a result, UN peace operations have been based on ad hoc coalitions of willing states. The report addressed many of the resulting dysfunctions of United Nations peace and security operations, including lack of commitment from Member States to make available peace operations personnel and resources, and particularly its inability to carry out its mission for lack of sound information collection and analysis. Also, it advocated strengthening the UN Department of Peace Operations, a department of the United Nations charged with the planning, preparation, management and direction of UN peacekeeping operations. With an annual budget of roughly $6.5 billion, the DPO is the largest UN agency by expenditure, exceeding the UN's own regular budget. The DPO traces its roots to 1948 with the creation of the United Nations Military Observer Group for India and Pakistan.

 As of March 2020, it oversighted 81,370 personnel serving in thirteen peacekeeping missions. It reports to the UN Secretariat.

In 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali issued “An Agenda for Peace”, a plan to strengthen the UN's capacity for preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping, but it has not had much impact. In March 2007, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution titled “Strengthening the capacity of the Organization in Peacekeeping Operations” called for the re-structuring of the department and the establishment of a separate UN Department of Field Support.

In summary, there have been many attempts to strengthen the peace keeping operations of the United Nations. This analysis believes that there are two major problems The most prominent is the weakness of the UN Secretary General. The first United Nations Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, described it as “the most impossible job on this earth”.

The UN director of Human Rights Watch, Louis Charbonneau, is blunt: "The next UN Secretary General will be judged on his ability to stand up to the very powers that select him”. The U.N. secretary-general is the world’s chief diplomat, but most of the world doesn’t get much say in who gets the position. In the end, it’s the U.N. Security Council’s five permanent veto-wielding powers - Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States - that decide. And a Secretary General is not going to argue against the counties that endorsed his appointment that their veto power should be removed.

The military power in any UN action comes from member states, most notably from the more powerful permanent members of the security council. Understandably, those states will only act in their own direct national interests. Of the 193 UN member states, only 26 are classed as ‘Full Democracies’. Only 58 of the member states supported the anti-Russia resolution over Ukraine

The author of this analysis argues that the peace institutions of this world should force a strengthening of the peace keeping operations of the United Nations through three actions One, strengthening the ability of the Secretary General to act independently of the five veto powers, and two, providing for the United Nations with its own standing peacekeeping force. The UN itself admits that “missions have sometimes lacked the personnel and equipment to meet … threats” The third is to act as a supervisor of plebiscites in attacked or conquered countries to determine what the people there actually wish. It is ensuring democracy – that the wishes of the people – are adopted. Two examples are presented: Russia in Crimea in 2014 and again today in the conquered parts of the Ukraine. The plebiscites managed by Russia are widely considered to be faked.

If the peacekeeping institutions worldwide were to urge their members and supporters to vote only for politicians, regardless of party or country, who would support an independent United Nations, able to act freely on its charter to ensure peace, we would achieve a less conflicted world.