(Continuation from previous issue – UNS 622)

Why America still needs the UN

Shashi Tharoor, USG for Communications and Public information (UN)

In it together

The UN’s relevance does not stand or fall on its conduct on any one issue. When the crisis has passed, the world will still be left with, to use Annan’s phrase, innumerable «problems without passports» — threats such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the degradation of our common environment, contagious disease and chronic starvation, human rights and human wrongs, mass illiteracy and massive displacement. These are problems that no one country, however powerful, can solve alone. The problems are the shared responsibility of humankind and cry out for solutions that, like the problems themselves, also cross frontiers. The UN exists to find these solutions through the common endeavor of all states. It is the indispensable global organization for a globalizing world.

Large portions of the world’s population require the UN’s assistance to surmount problems they cannot overcome on their own. As these words are written, civil war rages in Congo and Liberia and sputters in Cote d’Ivoire, while long-running conflicts may be close to permanent solution in Cyprus and Sierra Leone. The arduous task of nation building proceeds fitfully in Afghanistan, the Balkans, East Timor, and Iraq. Twenty million refugees and displaced persons, from Palestine to Liberia and beyond, depend on the UN for shelter and succor. Decades of development in Africa are being wiped out by the scourge of hiv/aids (and its deadly interaction with famine and drought), and the Millennium Development Goals — agreed on with much fanfare in September 2000, at the UN’s Millennium Summit, the largest gathering of heads of government in human history — remain unfulfilled. Too many countries still lack the wherewithal to eliminate poverty, educate girls, safeguard health, and provide their people with clean drinking water. If the UN did not exist to help tackle these problems, they would undoubtedly end up on the doorstep of the world’s only superpower.

The UN is also essential to Americans’ pursuit of their own prosperity. Today, whether one is from Tashkent or Tallahas- see, it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of one’s own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction; people, goods, and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed, and ease. The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in Southeast Asia or southern Africa — from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against aids — can affect Americans. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream now.

Thus U.S. foreign policy today has become as much a matter of managing global issues as managing bilateral ones. At the same time, the concept of the nation-state as self-sufficient has also weakened; although the state remains the primary political unit, most citizens now instinctively understand that it cannot do everything on its own. To function in the world, people increasingly have to deal with institutions and individuals beyond their country’s borders. American jobs depend not only on local firms and factories, but also on faraway markets, grants of licenses and access from foreign governments, international trade rules that ensure the free movement of goods and persons, and international financial institutions that ensure stability. There are thus few unilateralists in the American business community. Americans’ safety, meanwhile, depends not only on local police forces, but also on guarding against the global spread of pollution, disease, terror, illegal drugs, and WMD. As the World Health Organization’s successful battle against the dreaded sars epidemic has demonstrated, «problems without passports» are those that only international action can solve.

Fortunately, the UN and its broad family of agencies have, in nearly six decades of life, built a remarkable record of expertise and achievement on these issues. The UN has brought humanitarian relief to millions in need and helped people rebuild their countries from the ruins of war. It has challenged poverty, fought apartheid, protected the rights of children, promoted decolonization and democracy, and placed environ- mental and gender issues at the top of the world’s agenda. These are no small achievements, and represent issues the United States cannot afford to neglect.

The United Nations is a valuable antidote to the tendency to disregard the problems of the periphery — the kinds of problems Americans may prefer not to deal with but that are impossible to ignore. Handling them multilaterally is the obvious way to ensure they are tackled; it is also the only way. Americans will be safer in a world improved by the UN’s efforts, which will be needed long after Iraq has passed from the headlines.

Keeping gulliver on board

The exercise of American power may well be the central issue in world politics today, but that power is only enhanced if its use is perceived as legitimate. Ironically, although many in Washington distrust the world body, many abroad think the Security Council is too much in thrall to its most powerful member. The debates over Iraq proved that that is not always the case; but even if it were, it is far better to have a world organization that is anchored in geopolitical reality than one that is too detached from the verities of global power to be effective. A UN that provides a vital political and diplomatic framework for the actions of its most powerful member, while casting them in the context of international law and legitimacy (and bringing to bear on them the perspectives and concerns of its universal membership) is a UN that remains essential to the world in which we live.

The goals of the charter, however, cannot be met without embracing the fundamental premise that President Harry Truman enunciated in 1945:

We all have to recognize that no matter how great our strength, we must deny our- selves the license to do always as we please. No one nation ... can or should expect any special privilege which harms any other nation. ... Unless we are all willing to pay that price, no organization for world peace can accomplish its purpose. And what a reasonable price that is!

The UN, from the start, assumed the willingness of its members to accept restraints on their own short-term goals and policies by subordinating their actions to internationally agreed rules and procedures, in the broader long-term interests of world order. This was an explicit alternative to the model of past centuries, when strong states developed their military power to enforce their politics, and weak states took refuge in alliances with stronger ones. This formula guaranteed large-scale warfare; as Franklin Roosevelt put it to both houses of Congress after the Allied conference at Yalta, the UN would replace the arms races, military alliances, balance-of-power politics, and «all the arrangements that had led to war» so often in the past. The UN was meant to help create a world in which its member states would overcome their vulnerabilities by embedding themselves in international institutions, where the use of force would be subjected to the constraints of international law. Power politics would not disappear from the face of the earth but would be practiced with due regard for universally upheld rules and norms. Such a system also offered the United States — then, as now, the world’s unchallenged superpower — the assurance that other countries would not feel the need to develop coalitions to balance its power. Instead, the UN provided a framework for them to work in partnership with the United States.

This is the system to which the world must now rededicate itself. Votaries of the UN have long argued that if the world body did not exist, we would have to invent it. Sadly, it is hard to believe that today’s leaders could manage such a feat. Hammarskjold once described the UN as an adventure — a Santa Maria battling its way through storms and uncharted oceans to a new world, only to find that the people on shore blamed the storms on the ship itself. Five decades later, Ham- marskjold33’s metaphor still holds true: the UN continues to sail in turbulent waters and is still blamed for the squalls that assail it.

This brings to mind another metaphor: if international institutions serve principally as ropes that tie Gulliver down, then Gulliver will have every interest in snapping the ropes and breaking free of the constraints imposed on him. If, however, these institutions constitute a vessel sturdy enough for Gulliver to sail, and the Lilliputians cheer- fully help him man the bridge and hoist the mainsail because they want to travel to the same destination, then Gulliver is unlikely to jump ship and try to swim on alone. So the world should similarly hold fast to its determination to live by shared values and com- mon rules and to steer together the multilateral institutions that the enlightened leaders of the last century bequeathed to us. Only by doing so will our ship best the storm — with Gulliver still on board.

Foreign Affairs, 1 September 2003.