Comment: What use the UN?

Times Online
What use the UN?
Rosemary Righter
July 19, 2006

Paul Kennedy
THE PARLIAMENT OF MAN

Thirty years ago in Rome, a French minister started his speech to the general assembly of the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN body so scandal-ridden that it was even then a joke, by pronouncing, very slowly, the words: “A . . . quoi . . . bon, le FAO?”. In the 1970s, that was shocking stuff; but it is, or ought to be, the starting point for any study of the UN.

Paul Kennedy’s answer to that “what use” question is unequivocally positive. The argument of his latest book, The Parliament of Man, “rests on the reasonable assumption that whether we approve of the organisation’s past record or not, the changes taking place in world society will make us turn to it again and again”. How reasonable is that assumption? Could the opposite be equally true?

Oscar Wilde once observed that a map of the world that did not contain Utopia was not worth looking at. No matter that he would not have cared to live there, or that the delusions of the twentieth century were to give politicians terrible cause to write “here be dragons” on those parts of the globe where the engineers of utopian ideologies were at work. The allure of a world made fresh and new lurks deep within us, if only as a compensating myth to shore against disorderly realities.
It is impossible to read the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations without being moved by its affirmation of the triumph of hope over searing experience. “We the peoples . . . determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind . . . reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.”

These are words written in the hot ashes of the Second World War, words about justice, respect for the rule of law and “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”. It is hard to muster the same emotions about the United Nations itself, whose creation was announced by that same Charter. “The peoples” fade out with the preamble; they do not figure in the rest of the text, or for that matter in most UN business ever since. With the single exception of such corporatist oddities as the International Labour Organization, a leftover from the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the United Nations was, and is, exclusively the realm of governments. At various times people become aware how many governments violate the Charter’s principles, without forfeiting their good standing at the UN. But most people have not the faintest idea what goes on there; and, beyond vaguely supposing that the UN must be a good thing, depressingly few people care to find out.

“The scourge of war” is with us, as it was always going to be. But in any of the great questions of war and peace, the United Nations has seldom been more than a bit player. In an early instance of its enduring penchant for optimistic fictions, the UN’s own information department described the Security Council as “a supreme war-making organization”.

It was never anything of the kind. Even if the Cold War had not swiftly put paid to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime vision of “four policemen” (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and, implausibly, Nationalist China) collectively presiding over international security, the UN was essentially a containment mechanism, not a machine for “making war on war”. Over six decades, the Korean War of 1950–53 remains the only war to have been fought under the UN flag, and even then the commanding general was American, and the orders came from Washington and not New York. The Cold War blunted the UN even as a containment device; over the next four decades, 22 million people died in 150 separate conflicts, more than 125 of those conflicts in the developing world. The invention in 1956 of blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers to monitor agreed ceasefires was a brilliant but limited improvisation.

Politically, the UN exerted no influence on the great transformations of the late twentieth century, the collapse of European Communism and the end of the Cold War. That, too, was hardly surprising. More surprising was its stumbling thereafter. In the turbulent decade-and-a-half since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the whole notion of collective security has been tested almost to the point of destruction. The UN’s authority as the source of international legitimacy has been thrown further into question, first in Kosovo, where NATO decided not to seek Security Council authorization which it knew would not be forthcoming, and then, dramatically, in 2003 over Iraq.

As to the Charter’s vision of social progress, the transformation of the world economy since 1945 has indeed brought “better standards of life” within the reach of billions. Not only, however, has the UN’s contribution to development been marginal, but the development tail has come to wag the UN dog. The UN’s specialized agencies were designed as places for experts to exchange ideas, not as the bureaucratic dispensers of a multilateral Maundy money. The doctrinaire tiers-mondisme that came to dominate UN forums in the 1970s held back progress, by over-promoting the role of the State and by encouraging incompetent and corrupt governments to see development aid as a perk to which they were automatically entitled and could use, or more commonly abuse, as they pleased.


Only in the realm of human rights can the UN claim to have made a distinctive and indispensable contribution. Moral touchstones do matter. The high purposes proclaimed at San Francisco in 1945 and in the ambitious Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 have retained their resonance, encouraging a change in thinking about the duties that states owe to their citizens and about the pressures that may legitimately be brought to bear against gross violations of human rights, even where these do not directly threaten international peace and security. Along with the provision of humanitarian assistance, it is in this area that the UN today – despite the lamentable recent failure to make a clean break with the hideous politicization of the UN’s human rights machinery – comes closest to connecting with “the peoples” it was created to serve. There are now dozens of highly effective human rights organizations outside the UN, but all of them benefit from the traction exerted on governments by UN conventions.

The modesty of the UN’s place in world affairs has not prevented the global bureaucracy from expanding massively since 1945 – expanding, as distinct from adapting. Successive efforts at UN reform – and there have been dozens, dating as far back as 1949 – have left the beach more cluttered with debris than before. The consequence of all this “institution-building”, to use a hallowed UN phrase, is complexity and loss of focus. Even the supposedly “political” UN in New York is choked, intellectually as well as physically, by no fewer than a hundred programmes and units, with often overlapping remits, ranging from statistics to family planning, child welfare and gender equality, the urban habitat and even a committee on geographical names.

The “functional” UN, a polycentric cluster of autonomous agencies with their own governing bodies, has proliferated likewise; there are now more than twenty bodies with some kind of agricultural remit, four drugs agencies at the last count, and literally dozens of emergency relief units fighting each other for funds.
The question that thus poses itself is this: in a world that the UN’s founders would have trouble recognizing, what is the comparative advantage of global organizations? Even if we accept multilateral cooperation as a fact of life, do we need all the global machinery that has accumulated over the decades, in a process that more nearly resembles a galactic accident than organic growth led by demand?

Before and especially since 9/11, the effort to reshape our thinking about what constitutes security in a globalized world has exposed severe doctrinal, political, structural and procedural weaknesses in the frameworks devised in and after 1945. The mismatch between supply and demand has become an embarrassment to the UN’s supporters, and an irritant to those politicians still prepared to take it seriously as a vehicle for international cooperation.


How relevant, then, are these bodies to the decisions politicians must take, or to people’s lives? Can the touted advantages of universal membership be mobilized for the common good? Or is there, finally, something inherently anachronistic about purely governmental clubs, populated for the most part by backbiting diplomatic generalists, wrapped in a bureaucratic cocoon where nationality, length of service and political connections outweigh dedication and competence?

The UN no longer exists, as it did in 1945, in lonely eminence. It must compete for influence in a world of instant communications and multiple voices, and of networks inside and outside government that operate across frontiers with unprecedented ease. Globalization is transforming not only the world economy, but also the relations between governments and their increasingly mobile, disconcertingly better-informed citizens. The inter-state threats which the UN’s security machinery was designed to address have been largely displaced by the problems of collapsing, dysfunctional states and the globalization of organized crime and terrorist networks.

In times of rapid change, flexibility is all-important – and flexibility is not a word readily associated with the UN. Institutions are made for man, not the other way round. Institutional inflation, hardened political and bureaucratic arteries, and confidence-sapping internal scandals make the UN a difficult place to get things done. Where alternative channels exist, they are therefore likely to be used.

Professor Kennedy’s American publishers have chosen to market his book as “the first definitive history of the United Nations”; his English publishers as “the first full analysis”. As a bibliography, had one been included, would presumably have made clear, neither claim is accurate. The first attempt to get to grips with the great organizational sprawl clustered under the UN umbrella was Inis Claude’s still impressive Swords into Ploughshares, published four decades ago; students of international affairs have been falling asleep for years over Evan Luard’s worthily compendious volumes; there have been countless collections of academic essays examining the UN from multiple angles and – declaring an interest here – my own less reverent anatomy of the beast appeared eleven years ago.

The untutored enthusiasms of publishers’ blurb writers can be an acute embarrassment to authors and an irritation to readers who have purchased a book under a false prospectus; but in this case, the American subtitle’s grand claim to illuminate “the past, present and future of the United Nations”, implies a certain complicity. (The difference in the subtitles of these two editions is significant. In the US, to have presented this as the story of “the quest for world government” would have fanned the wilder conspiracy theories of the American Right; in Europe, the reaction is more likely to be an approving nod from the bien pensant and mild weariness elsewhere at the reappearance of a well-worn and misleading cliché.)

Kennedy’s project, whose genesis lies in his co-chairmanship a decade ago of one of the innumerable reform panels of the great and the good, offers neither a definitive, nor a particularly up-to-date, account of the UN. As he comes close to conceding, this winsome essay is not really a history at all, but an engagingly written panegyric for the idea of “global governance”.

The UN that interests Kennedy is “a story of human beings groping towards a common end, a future of mutual dignity, prosperity and tolerance through shared control of international instruments”. The trouble with this heart-warming pastoral is that it is hard to square with what actually goes on in the UN’s many mansions.

Take, for a start, the UN General Assembly, his “Parliament of Man”. (The book’s title, taken from Tennyson’s youthful poem “Locksley Hall”, places Kennedy firmly in the camp of nostalgic internationalists.) Far from being an arena where, as he approvingly quotes Tennyson, “the common sense of most . . . hold a fretful realm in awe”, the UN General Assembly is a place where common sense is checked, like a dangerous weapon, at the door.

To sit in on the General Assembly is to be numbed by the vacuity of the set speeches and the absurdity of its bloc politics. What passes for debate there is a mind-numbing, patience-sapping, game of “let’s pretend”. Let’s pretend that all 191 nations are equal not just in law but in weight. Let’s pretend that voting blocs dating back to the heyday of North–South confrontation and the ideological confrontations of the Cold War reflect contemporary political realities. The so-called G-77 of “developing” nations now includes 132 states plus, for opportunistic reasons, China. It bunches the world’s least developed together with wealthy cosmopolitan states that, outside the UN, are significant players, the worst-ruled with the best. Elsewhere they go their own ways. Yet at the UN, the G-77 debates and votes as one, perpetuating an artificial North–South cleavage which poisons the UN’s internal politics and renders reform all but impossible. Kennedy’s “shared control of international instruments” is an unedifying farce.


The General Assembly’s obsession with process, rather than results, is reflected in the inconsequentiality of most of its decisions. UN files are filled with mould-pocked resolutions which never stood a chance of being implemented, reports and requests for further reports. Few of these documents are read by delegates, let alone by their governments. In New York alone, a recent inventory – the first attempted since 1956 – identified no fewer than 9,000 “active mandates” which the secretariat is supposed to be implementing. A body that cannot even organize its own agenda is unlikely to contribute to the better ordering of the world. There and elsewhere in the UN, the grinding of the mill has come to matter more than the quality of the flour produced.

Kennedy concedes that people neither know nor care what the General Assembly gets up to. He raises a gentle eyebrow at such pointless make-work as the solemn designation of 2008 as the Year of the Potato and the “extremely silly” – was it really no worse than that? – “Zionism equals racism” resolution of 1975. Yet he would like the General Assembly to have more power: power over the policies of the thankfully independent Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund; and, approvingly quoting the Brazilian President Lula da Silva, power over “responsibilities for maintaining international peace and security”. Why? Because it is “a barometer of world opinion . . . the global equivalent of a town hall meeting . . . the only sounding board at governmental level for what much of the world thinks and feels”.

This makes a nice change from the temptation, notably among Europeans, to treat the General Assembly as a Third World playpen – a temptation to which the playpen politics of the G-77 has mightily contributed. Yet it leaves this reviewer wondering just how much time Kennedy has put in at General Assembly sessions, let alone at the Economic and Social Committee with its 80,000-page agendas, or at the biennial assemblies of the UN’s nineteen major specialized agencies, long weeks passed haggling over the small print of biennial programmes the size of two fat telephone books. On what close observation of the notoriously ineffective FAO does he base the assertion that it is as important as the World Health Organization? Distance lends perspective, perhaps.

Kennedy’s essay is much too high-minded to make space for the old joke that the UN is “a place where nations which are unable to act individually get together to decide that they are unable to act collectively”. But his reluctance to come down harder on defects that are glaringly apparent makes the book’s general tone of relentless optimism less persuasive. He might have done better to concede that the needle in the General Assembly “barometer” jammed more than three decades ago. A body stuck in an ideological time warp cannot be a reliable sounding board for world opinion. Even the media do a better job.


Where Kennedy scores is with his “new readers start here” approach. This is “UN lite”, a cheerful guided tour with lots of brightly lit signposts. He opens with a lucid summary of the League of Nations experiment and the wartime thinking that went into the United Nations.
Then, with attractive even if somewhat deceptive simplicity, he divides the main body of the essay into six broad themes: the Security Council; peacekeeping and security; economic development; the UN’s “truly revolutionary” social programmes; human rights; and a bromide-laden meditation on civil society, the NGO universe and “how to establish higher forms of global governance”. He ends with safely conventional thoughts on the future of the UN.


Some valid points are made along the way. There is a good crisp run through the League years, where he sensibly builds on Inis Claude’s insight that the Great Powers of 1919 were concerned merely to make the world more accident-proof, and that the League should thus be seen as an outgrowth of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe, not an attempt to replace it. It is startling to discover that a historian of Kennedy’s high reputation should believe that in 1939, Eire was part of the British Empire, and that he talks of “both” Axis powers, apparently forgetting Italy. On wartime planning for the United Nations, it is unfair to suggest that Churchill gave it scant attention until 1943. In the lengthy correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt that preceded the Atlantic Charter of 1941, it was Roosevelt who insisted that Churchill delete from the draft a reference to “effective international organisation”. Churchill managed to get in a phrase envisaging “a wider and permanent system of general security” only on the understanding that this must wait until the Allies had first disarmed the Axis powers and set up their own global policing system.


More broadly, had he paid closer attention to the British side of planning for the United Nations, notably the influence of David Mitrany’s arguments for keeping areas of “practical” cooperation well apart from the UN’s political functions, he might have been less inclined to treat the UN’s polycentric character as a design fault. It was entirely deliberate. The UN was never intended to be a centralized “system”, a hub-and-spokes structure in which all roads led outward from New York. The UN’s specialized agencies are entirely autonomous bodies, each with specific remits, a separate budget, and its own assembly and governing board. The Charter invites them to enter into “relationship” with the General Assembly, but rather as sovereign states might consent to join a confederation.

Kennedy says this “didn’t make sense”. His useful summary of the Charter’s main provisions, which unsurprisingly concentrates largely on the Security Council and the chapters dealing with international peace and security, observes that the General Assembly was given an expansive remit to “promote” (not, as he writes, to supervise) cooperation “in the economic, social, cultural, educational and health fields”. From this he concludes that it is “not unreasonable” to conclude that the founders intended the Assembly’s Economic and Social Council to coordinate the work of the UN’s specialized agencies. But that is not what the Charter says.

The whole point was to let the specialized agencies get on with their work unencumbered by gesture politics. It didn’t work out that way; by the 1970s, the “UN disease” had infected most, though not all, of these bodies. But the outbreaks could at least be separately tackled. Most decisively set apart were the Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank – the two that, not coincidentally, have made the best fist of reinventing themselves down the years in response to changing circumstances and are doing so today. The UN in New York cannot even claim the powers of a holding company – no bad thing, given its inability to keep its own house in order. Even to describe the UN Secretary-General as primus inter pares grossly overstates his influence.

This may seem a narrowly institutional and arcane point. But it is important. The habit of treating the UN as the “system” it is not has mightily distorted past efforts at reform and is still doing so today. Not only is it hopeless to expect the UN to function as a coordinated whole – the only result of such efforts has been the proliferation of committees – but the obsession with “coordination” distracts attention from the great merit of polycentrism, which is that it should be possible to fix the plumbing in those parts of the machine that still matter and downgrade funding and support for those, such as the Industrial Development Organization, that belong in the category of “better dead”.

The chapters that summarize the chequered histories of the Security Council and of UN peacekeeping and enforcement trot along happily enough, and are at their best when dealing with the 1990s. There are curious errors. Professor Kennedy is generous in his acknowledgement of the enviable amount of research assistance made available to him, but the book occasionally betrays the presence of too many hands.
Thus, on page 77 he writes, correctly, that “the UN Charter contains absolutely no mention of the word peacekeeping and offers no guidelines as to the form of this collective action”; yet on page 99, writing of the blurring in the Somalia operation of peacekeeping and peace enforcement, he comments that the borderline between the two is a thin one and that “both options are, after all, offered in Chapter VII of the Charter”. Of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he blandly writes that “Britain and France went along with an aroused United States”. Here again his researchers failed him: in the hours after the invasion, President Bush Sr was able to produce nothing more coherent than “we are ruling nothing in, and nothing out”. It was Margaret Thatcher who, arriving in the States later that day, proposed taking action under Chapter VII, the enforcement provision which had never in the UN’s history been invoked. It was she who announced the decision, at a press conference where a haggard Mr Bush insisted that she take the microphone first.

Most importantly, as a guide to the UN’s likely future, these chapters are gravely weakened by the inexplicably cursory treatment of the rift over what action to take on Iraq that, thirteen years later, split the UN Security Council open. This was as near to its “Abyssinia moment” as the UN has come, the moment when the Security Council marched its men to the top of the hill and then backed off. The Iraq crisis of 2003 brought to a head issues of absolutely primary importance about when intervention is permissible, about the legitimacy of pre-emptive military action and, as Kofi Annan put it, “the adequacy and effectiveness” of rules set in 1945 to deal with terrorism and asymmetric warfare.

When the Security Council cannot agree, and action is urgent, can it ever be the right answer that nothing can therefore be done? What if respect for Security Council decisions, or indecisions, results in the weakening of respect for international law? Questions such as these defeated the League of Nations. Kennedy suggests that the Iraq crisis should perhaps be seen as an example of the UN working much as the founders intended – necessarily at the margin in any conflict where the interests of the Great Powers are directly engaged. This is altogether too calm a conclusion: the UN’s authority rests to a considerable degree on what Hobbes called “the common power to keep men in awe”, and that power has indisputably been weakened.

Well over half of The Parliament of Man is taken up with a glowingly sympathetic treatment of the UN’s other dimensions. Kennedy overestimates the importance of UN development aid, most of which comes in the form of well-paid international consultants, executing thousands of small-budget projects of questionable impact. Despite the tendency of global conferences to set evidently unrealistic targets (who now remembers the WHO’s “Health for All by the Year 2000”?), he is right to point to the importance of the UN’s consciousness-raising functions. Yet there are some major errors of commission and omission.

It is breathtaking to find a Western liberal accepting that “the health and fairness of the world’s press” was “technically within the remit” of UNESCO. That agency’s effort in the 1970s and 1980s to impose a “new world information order” was not just “clumsy and impractical”; it was an attempt to legitimize censorship, in direct violation of UNESCO’s constituted duty to uphold the free flow of words and ideas.

He is brusquely dismissive of the “negative” roles of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor the World Trade Organization – neither of them part of the UN, incidentally – two bodies that have arguably done more, by bringing down protectionist barriers, to bring prosperity within the reach of millions than all the UN’s development programmes put together. Yet he waxes eloquently and at length on the transforming influence of the UN’s “revolutionary” promotion of such “soft agendas” as gender awareness and environmental degradation.

The anti-globalization brigade will find much to approve in Kennedy’s conventionally liberal treatment of North–South confrontation, his bias towards the view that open markets “inherently favour the powerful over the weak”, and his consequent distaste for the World Bank and IMF. But you would have to belong to the lunatic fringe of that movement to accept without question his sweeping assertion that “‘collapsed states’ in many parts of Africa are the ultimate expression of our failure to render help in time”.

This is patronizing nonsense. The reasons why states “fail”, collapsing into anarchy or civil war, are the very reasons that make them difficult to rescue from looming catastrophe. Lousy regimes are hard to help. Once a trend towards violent disorder sets in, savings, investment and growth fall away, people look to their immediate survival, politicians grab the spoils while they still can, and there is a rake’s progress to hell.
This book may make readers feel better about the UN, and that is plainly the intention. But it does not have much new to say about how to get a better product – or, ultimately, about what makes the UN as indispensable as Kennedy would have us believe. His final chapter, on the future, makes a number of pertinent points, most notably on improvements that could be made to the functioning of the Security Council without more fruitless discussions about enlarging its membership. In a deliberately broad essay, it may make sense to all but ignore the latest push to trim the UN agenda and overhaul its management structures – an effort that the G-77, to the detriment of the UN’s poorer members, seems determined to block. But one might have expected insights more profound than a repetition of the sad old saw that the UN is no more than the number of its member states or that “we will witness failures and disappointments in the years to come”.

The UN bulks large for people in Kennedy’s age group, but younger generations will increasingly reject the tired and inaccurate defence that the UN is “the mirror of mankind”. A richer multilateral world is in the making; and the more people become accustomed to thinking globally, the more impatient they will be of closed-circuit governmental bodies. The trouble with books that start from the premiss that the UN is unquestionably a force for the good is that they tend to wrap their theme in a bubble of conventional cant. Paul Kennedy makes many shrewd observations in The Parliament of Man, but the bubble remains, as he intends, intact.