The U.N. is based on a concept that borders on the ridiculous. The goal is to assemble delegates from the world's nations, discuss pertinent issues, make decisions on them, and then try to encourage policy changes or even in extreme cases to perform actions themselves. Yet the concept of U.N. power depends upon the willing consent of its members, few of which really want the U.N. deciding the extent of the sovereign laws of their respective states. The extreme version of is caricatured by militia extremists claiming that U.N. minions will swoop in with black helicopters and create a world government.
That is the extreme version, but fears of losing sovereignty are hardly overdone. The fact is that the voting procedure of the General Assembly is assigned on a one-vote-per-nation status. The United States, Egypt, Spain, China, etc., all have the same voting power. Look at any globe and one notices that there are lots of small countries located in areas of the world, and many of these small countries have social and economic problems. These small countries, many of whom resent the West, and are endowed with more voting power that the West, even though they have less power, contribute less money, and have fewer people. How "democratic" is it of the U.N. to give Paraguay, a country with 3.5 million people and little geostrategic importance the same voting power as Germany, a country of profound significance and well over 80 million people?
It is true that the power of the United States, China, and three other states is enhanced somewhat by permanent seats on the 15-member U.N. Security Council. They also have the power to end certain U.N. measures with vetoes. However, this supposed power is not democratically based either. Currently, the three remaining Security Council slots are filled by Britain, France, and Russia. Though these nations are certainly powerful, Japan and Germany should clearly be on the Security Council as well. The fact that these nations have risen to prominence without so being placed into the Security Council is ridiculous.
This inability to respond adequately to the outside world is a direct result of problems in the U.N.'s basic structure. When all countries are thrown together into a legislative body, with no substantial characteristics uniting the participants, agreement on anything is hard to come by. As the Economist noted in October, agreeing on adjustments to the Security Council is nearly impossible as countries bicker over which states deserve the posts.
However, the problem of lacking unity goes far beyond the problem of adjusting the Security Council. Since there is almost no unifying factor between the members, consensus by the entire body on an issue is almost impossible. Summits on the environment, women's rights, and population inevitably turn into finger- pointing exercises which do little to really deal with the problems. It is certainly true that the Rio conference on the environment in 1992 produced some environmental legislation in the U.S. and other states, but the reaction by other nations has been less enthusiastic. As with other issues, many nations simply do not feel that economic development should be subservient to the demands of the U.N. As occurred with the Rio treaty, the terms of agreement are ignored or simply broken by many nations.
These inability of the U.N. to effectively deal with these social issues would be irrelevant if it could deal with world security problems, but the U.N. has shown few signs of real leadership in the post-Cold War era. The U.N.-led coalition against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War is the lone exception. Yet was this really a U.N. effort? The action was U.S.-led in all crucial respects, from most aspects of military planning to most of the funding. The U.N. basically gave multilateral support for an action mainly supported by the U.S. Giving the U.N. credit for "leadership" in this case is misleading.
The place where U.N. claims of leadership should really be examined are places like Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Bosnia. Far from the resounding success of the Gulf War, these operations have been marked by a remarkable lack of success. These cases provide an excellent example of a U.N. tendency to work in what The New Republic's Peter Beinart calls "'low politics,' where it [the U.N.] manifests global conscience by delivering humanitarian relief to desperate population." These are assignments involving famine relief, monitoring votes, and other social programs. How effective is the U.N. with such situations? Beinart's recent article, "Aid and Abet", shows how U.N. policies have been unsuccessful and even counter-productive in the African states. In both Ethiopia and Somalia, U.N. efforts wasted precious time in acting against the famines that struck both nations. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the Red Cross and World Vision Relief got into the action much quicker than did the U.N., and also tended to adapt to situations in the nations much more quickly. In Ethiopia, Beinart claims, the U.N. actions also helped keep dictator Mengistu Mariam in power by denying the plight of rebels in war-torn pockets in the country.
Refusal to improvise and a tendency to bicker over minute details bogged down relief efforts in Somalia. Beinart is convinced that NGOs do a better job in these cases - "the contrast with the Red Cross - which in 1991 and 1992 fed roughly 1.5 million people, more than all the U.N. agencies combined - could not be sharper." The U.N. has been much quicker to act in Rwanda, but the results are still problematic. The U.N. did little to bring Rwanda's mass murderers to justice - the result is a situation in which the warring Hutus and Tutsis are by no means peaceful. In trying not to alienate either side, the U.N. has recreated a situation in which violent enemies are supposed to try and live in peaceful coexistence. Current U.N. refugee camps, composed largely of Hutus, are being dominated by militias of violent Tutsis. With no attempt to create any justice, the enmity between the two rival clans will simply continue to tear at each other's throats.
One seemingly successful story is that of Cambodia, in which the U.N. spent 2.6 billion dollars to finance a democratic election. Now the winning party, led by joint prime minister Hun Sen, has raised many a human-rights-watch eyebrow with recent arrests. Members of the former government are being persecuted (Sen appears to believe that a plot was afoot to assassinate him) and the country appears to be of increasing appeal to drug traffickers, a December Economist notes. Though recent worries have emerged regarding the democratic inclinations of the winners and the country's stability, the U.N. appears to believe that this was a "success". Perhaps more visible than operations in Africa or Cambodia are the current problems in Bosnia, yet even here the U.N. presence has been less than constructive. As was the case in Rwanda, where the U.N. tried to maintain political neutrality, policy in the former Yugoslavia has tried to be neutral, ignoring the fact that these conflicts are because of political and ethnic splits which have to be dealt with in order for the conflicts to end. U.N. peacekeepers were supposed to protect designated U.N. "safe areas" from Serbian attack; instead, the Serbs simply ignored the U.N. and took over the sites of Zepa and Srebrenica.
Anxious not to offend Serbian (and Russian) sensibilities, the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was allowed only to protect itself, and not allowed to try and stop the slaughters occurring due to "ethnic cleansing" policies. By trying to maintain a neutrality, the U.N. boxed itself in. Since Russia has a major role in the U.N., and it is historically allied with the Serbs, the U.N. was essentially paralyzed.
The real peacekeeping role has been led by NATO. Air strikes under NATO auspices were a major turning point of the war, and NATO is clearly more effective. Far more unified in its opinions than the U.N., the NATO alliance does not need to waste valuable time on extensive decision making. Actions can be accomplished quickly and decisively since positions of organizational consensus are easier to reach. The most effective world-politics organization in the past fifty has not been the U.N., but NATO. Its ability to focus was a direct result of the fact that the member states shared common goals. The U.N. has suffered due to its lack of the same effectiveness.
The United Nations comes to its fiftieth birthday a venerable organization of dubious historical value. As an institution it has clearly failed to take consideration of the vastly different political landscape in which it now exists. Its very nature as a body of worldwide membership causes even the slightest resolutions to be held up by contingents of small, sparsely populated states. These underpinnings lead the U.N. into situations in which it seeks to avoid offending, and ends up doing little of value, or at worst causing real harm.
History has shown us that successful organizations are able to adapt, are able to come to decisions, and are able to make stands. Regional organizations such as NATO, the EC, NAFTA, and OPEC have proven to be far more effective at advancing the demands of their member states. The United Nations is of dubious value in the post-Cold War era, as people around the world can show. Here's hoping that the celebration last summer will make way for the sobering realization that the U.N. deserves little of the respect that it has. MR