September 2005
UN Reform: Past, Present, and Future
The United Nations World Summit--the largest gathering of heads of state in history--convened this month to review and debate Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s plan of reform for Turtle Bay. What are the prospects and challenges for effective UN reform? Is the September summit likely to produce meaningful changes in the performance of the world body? What are the priorities that the Bush administration should set in pushing its own UN reform agenda? Why have so many past attempts at UN reform failed, and is there any reason to hope that the current effort will prove any different? Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), AEI senior fellow Newt Gingrich, Ambassador Richard Haass, and Dick Thornburgh discussed these and other questions at a September 12 AEI conference.
The Honorable Norm Coleman
United States Senate
The oil-for-food program was a mirror for the United Nations, exposing corruption, fraud, mismanagement, and a lack of accountability. The Volcker Report shows that the scope of corruption and fraud was massive. How do you change the UN without changing the people involved? Normally, if you have a history of fraud and corruption, one which starts at the top and then continues ten levels below, the solution is to clean the organization out. There is currently no mechanism for this type of solution. The UN is wholly resistant to such changes.
In the outcome document, reform is mentioned as the very last item, almost as an afterthought. The UN as an institution needs to change itself. The secretary-general should be given more power so that he can then be held accountable.
There also needs to be more transparency. The UN needs a policy that allows those on the outside to gain access to documents--similar, one might say, to a freedom of information act. This would promote a wider culture of transparency within the UN. The oil-for-food scandal would not have happened if this level of transparency existed.
Meaningful reform will not take place. The United States should be prepared to look to other multilateral organizations to step in if and when the UN fails to change its ways.
Dick Thornburgh
Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham LLP
Challenges within the UN are not very different from those faced by other bureaucracies, but they are overlaid with multinational, multilingual, multicultural, and multiethnic characteristics that often tend to dilute the pursuit of best practices and full accountability.
There are four problems with the UN. First, there is no focal point within the organization for management accountability. The creation, after much U.S. prodding, of the position of deputy secretary-general was meant to remedy this, but it has not done so.
Second, the organization has been beleaguered by integrity problems. As documented in last week’s Volcker Report, the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) has not received acceptance and support within the organization. This is partly due to a failure of the secretary-general’s office to be a champion of OIOS, partly because of a lack of effective whistleblower protections, and also because of an absence of disclosure requirements. According to the Volcker Report, one-third of those assigned to auditing functions are estimated to lack the essential skills to carry out their duties.
Third, recruiting to fill management positions is rife with nepotism and patronage. The UN is a job placement program for second-raters eased out of positions within their home government. There is too much deadwood within the organization. An aggressive buyout for non-performers is a good idea and will save us more in the long term than it will cost in the short term.
Fourth, budget processes are frequently prone to micromanagement by the General Assembly. One of our priorities should be to devise a better budgeting system for the UN. In this regard, private sector consultants can be helpful.
The UN should be effective and efficient. If the UN did not exist, we would have to invent it. That makes it all the more disappointing to see management shortcomings eating away at the UN’s effectiveness and eroding its credibility. The true aspiration of the UN must be, to quote Dag Hammarskjold, “not to bring mankind to Heaven, but to save it from Hell.” Those who convene this month to consider UN reform need to take a hard-nosed and realistic look at its problems and turn this moment of crisis into a better tomorrow. Whether this will occur appears doubtful.
Richard Haass
Council on Foreign Relations
Significant reform at the UN will not happen. The culture of the UN is anti-meritocratic, and changing this will be extraordinarily difficult. The most important institution in the UN is the Security Council. Every idea put forward for Security Council reform, including those in the two high-level panel reports, creates losers as well as winners. A much larger Security Council will complicate decision making and reduce the possibility of reaching consensus. Security Council reform will not happen anytime soon; nor will any other sort of meaningful reform.
Even if reform did take place, it would not matter all that much. This is not because UN reform is a bad thing, quite the opposite: UN reform is desirable for reasons having to do with legitimacy. Eliminating the Commission on Human Rights and creating a peace-building commission would be positive steps. Organizational issues, however, are not at the core of the problem. What is happening with the UN is a familiar phenomenon: an institution that suffers from core political problems that organizational reform will not address.
The main problem is that there is no significant consensus among the various states about how international relations ought to be structured. This lack of consensus is reflected and indeed magnified in the UN’s problems. The answers to the UN’s problems are not in New York but in world capitals. In addition to focusing on the basic rules of international relations, attention should be paid to other institutions, such as, for example, the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO is going to play an enormous role in development, economic growth, and in the integration into the international system of countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia. The WTO is likely to be a far more significant body than the UN.
Efforts at resolving the Darfur massacre should have focused on the African Union, not the UN. The UN does not hold the monopoly on legitimacy or, indeed, multilateral arrangements. As we think about how to structure international relations going forward, interest in UN reform, however valuable, should not become an obsession: reforming the UN cannot be and will not be the answer to what ails international relations today.
Newt Gingrich
AEI
In the sense that the Congress of Vienna lasted only lasted six years, the consensus ultimately breaking down in 1821, the structure of the post-World War II world is collapsing. The UN reflects this outdated order.
The United States should not worry about withholding its dues to the UN. A certain sum of money should be allocated and invested to achieve good things, and to the degree the UN is worthy of that money, it should receive it. But if the UN insists on a Commission on Human Rights that includes Sudan and has Libya as chairmen, U.S. money should be pooled with that of other liberal democracies wanting to create a Human Rights Commission based on the rule of law. The UN will decide by the amount of reform it undergoes the degree to which the United States will pay any attention to it. If the UN is a joke, it should be treated it as a joke. And U.S. time and money should then be spent organizing with other democracies.
The civilized world has an obligation to minimize hell on earth. There is a tendency to hide behind the UN’s incompetence as an excuse for avoiding responsibility; this is what happened in Darfur. Sudan is a weak and criminal regime whose capacity to inflict pain could have been minimized by about six airstrikes. The UN stood in the way, and this was then used as an excuse for inaction. The experience with Darfur should lead us to conclude that those things the UN can do, it should do; and for those it cannot do, the U.S. efforts should support other organizations, preferably regional, permanent when possible, ad hoc when necessary, and be prepared to act unilaterally when unavoidable. This is the end of the structure of 1945. A new one will gradually emerge over the next ten years. To the degree that the UN is reformed, the United States should support it. To the degree it is unwilling to reform, the UN should be ignored.
It is essential to create a conservative internationalism as an intellectual force. There are currently four factions in American life in terms of foreign policy. First, there are the isolationists, who believe, essentially, that the world is bad. They, echoing George Washington, think we can hide behind two oceans and pretend the modern world has not been invented. Isolationism is morally virtuous but a bit nutty. It is impossible for the country today.
Then there are those who want the United States to have a role in the world, but believe it can go it alone. It cannot. The United States has been extraordinarily powerful since 1941 because it is part of a web of friendship and alliances that is historically unprecedented in its size and reach. The United States has troops in 120 countries, most of whom are on training missions. Most are there with the consent of their host: U.S. involvement is voluntary, involving as it does cooperation, not domination.
Thirdly, there is liberal internationalism. This is especially popular among academics, some members of the U.S. Supreme Court, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the State Department. To them, legitimacy flows from popularity. It should not.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is conservative internationalism. Conservatism internationalism differs from liberal internationalism because it starts by saying that American civilization is unique and that our Declaration of Independence, which says that, “We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” is extraordinarily central because it posits that sovereignty centers in the individual not the state, and therefore it is the state which is limited, not the individual. This is dramatically different from any other system in the world including the European Union.
And because the United States is unique, culturally and in its intellectual framework, conservative internationalism must be vigilant in not accepting proposals which come from very different positions of how the world works; these include statements such as “dictatorships are good,” “corruption is unavoidable,” or “the government is dramatically smarter than the citizen.”
Finally, the United States must dramatically transform its institutions of national security. None of these transformations will occur unless the Congress confronts how stunningly parochial and egocentric its system is. The two great branches of legislation and execution have to be transformed if the United States is to bear the responsibility that it will face over the next forty years.
AEI intern Alykhan Velshi prepared this summary.
