The
United Nations System:
Prospects
for Renewal
By
Richard
Falk
Professor of International Law and
Practise, Princeton University
TFF
associate
February 19, 2002
The undertaking of this chapter is to consider the
record of the United Nations System since its inception,
with an eye focused on prospects for renewal and reform
at the present time. The main criteria relied upon for
assessment are considerations of effectiveness and
legitimacy in relation to the operations of the United
Nations.
The chapter begins with a discussion of why the
present global setting is resistant to renewal and
reform, but with the qualification that such a climate of
resistance could change rapidly. And that over time, the
sheer complexity of international life and the salience
of global scale problems is likely to exert pressures to
strengthen the United Nations.
From matters of context, the chapter moves on to
discuss the historical origins of the United Nations, and
the extent to which the experiences with global security
prior to 1945 shaped the character of the UN in relation
to the all-important peace and security agenda. This look
backwards is then followed by an analysis of the
evolution of the Organization, especially in relation to
the two most influential contextual factors, namely, the
decolonization process and the cold war. In these
regards, the United Nations System as a whole has over
the years emerged as a site of struggle in relation to
both the East-West conflict, largely superseded since
1989, and the still persisting North-South encounter. The
chapter also considers the creative role played by the
United Nations with respect to arranging conferences on
global challenges on a range of issues including
environment, women, population, and human rights. These
conferences were not only important substantively, but
they gave considerable access to transnational social
forces as represented by non-governmental
organizations.
The chapter concludes with sections devoted to
prospects for enhancing UN effectiveness and legitimacy.
In this regard, emphasis is placed on geopolitical
factors as creating the most difficult obstacle to
reform. Also, several concrete proposals for reform are
sketched to provide examples of practical, non-utopian
steps that would both strengthen the UN and serve the
cause of human wellbeing. At the same time, to underscore
the dysfunction of geopolitical influences, it is made
clear that the short-term prospects for achieving needed
and desirable reforms are rather grim. It would seem that
the UN will not be fundamentally reformable until the
movement for global democracy gains far greater leverage
than it presently possesses.
Points of Departure
It needs to be acknowledged at the outset, for reasons
to be explained later, that the global setting is not
currently favorable to moves designed to strengthen most
key activities of the United Nations System. Such an
assessment is sharply at odds with the case for new roles
and functions based on the changing world order agenda.
It also reflects the missed opportunities of the
historical situation to promote peace, justice,
development, democracy, and sustainability provided by
the ending of the cold war and the associated muting of
strategic conflict among leading states. Such
opportunities were also provided by the mood after the
Gulf War in 1991 and again in 1995 on the occasion of the
50th anniversary of the United Nations. Somehow these
moments of seeming opportunity for major UN reform and
evolution came and went without a single notable
achievement.
This pessimistic mood, as well, expresses the
institutional frustration arising from the apparent
inability in this period for UN members to reach any
agreement on a formula for an expansion of the permanent
membership of the Security Council. It is generally
accepted by all shades of opinion that some Security
Council expansion would be important, at least, to take
account of the fundamental changes in the composition of
international society, since 1945, especially the far
greater role being played by non-Western countries. The
failure to make progress on this symbolic issue has
tinged with doubt the whole project of UN reform.
But there are some additional factors that have also
had a negative impact. The failure of the United States
to meet its financial obligations in recent years has
acted as a depressant throughout the UN system. Because
the US shoulders the biggest financial burden, being
responsible as of now for 25% of the budget, its
non-payment produces considerable pressure throughout the
UN system and puts the bureaucracy constantly on a crisis
footing that distracts energies from its substantive
duties. Furthermore, the recent American theme song of
"downsizing," while justified with respect to aspects of
the UN, generally works against efforts to strengthen the
organization.
Even more to the point, the UN is judged by the public
mainly in relation to peace and security issues, and
although the criteria for assessment vary in different
parts of the world, there is a general sense that the UN
has not fared well in the 1990s. The UN performance in
Bosnia and Rwanda were widely perceived as dismal
failures, associated with inept and insufficient
responses in the setting of genocidal behavior. In light
of these experiences, bypassing of the UN Charter
requirements of Security Council authorization in the
launch of the NATO War over Kosovo in early 1999,
reinforced the impression that the UN peace and security
role was being eclipsed in dangerous ways that left the
way open for unregulated geopolitical initiatives.
It should be appreciated that the UN does not deserve
most of the blame for these developments. It was expected
to address complex humanitarian emergencies without the
necessary resources and guidelines to ensure successful
outcomes. The membership of the Security Council often
lacked a sufficient political will to generate effective
action in response to the challenges of the last decade,
and irresponsibly designated the UN to take action. It
needs to be remembered that the UN is essentially "a club
of sovereign states," with the Permanent Members of the
Security Council being given a privileged status. As
such, especially in the area of peacekeeping, it is an
extension of the state system rather than an alternative
to it. It also needs to be appreciated that aside from
the Gulf War, the challenges directed at the UN derived
from catastrophic circumstances internal to
sovereign states. The status of these challenges was
somewhat questionable constitutionally and logistically,
given the understanding that the defining mandate of the
UN was deliberately confined to international
conflict situations.(1) In fact, the last three
secretaries general of the Organization have in various
ways argued that the evolution of international human
rights norms has eroded the domestic jurisdiction
limitation. These leaders insisted that the UN was now
available in the event of humanitarian catastrophes even
it situated entirely within a state.
It would be a great mistake to confuse this present
conjuncture of disappointments and setbacks with a more
durable assessment of the prospects of the Organization
for reform and adaptation. The climate of relevant
opinion can change rapidly. The complexity of
international life, combined with the reluctance of
leading states to act where their national interests are
not at risk, will create many occasions when the UN
provides the only arena within which an acceptable
pattern of response can be fashioned. Despite the
disillusionment with the peacekeeping efforts of the
1990s, the major states continue to turn to the UN. This
was again evident late in 1999. Emergency arrangements
for East Timor and Sierra Leone were fashioned, although
belatedly in view of the human carnage, as responses to
humanitarian catastrophes that had been experienced by
each of these countries.
Also, it is a serious error, although commonly made,
to reduce the actuality of the United Nations to its
efforts in the realm of peace and security. True, this is
the litmus test relied upon by the media and the public,
particularly in the North, to assess whether the UN is
working or not. A more adequate assessment would also
consider the relevance of the UN to a spectrum of issues,
including development, human rights, environment, health,
labor, and global economic policy. Arguably, for most of
the peoples in the world, who are located in the South,
the role of the UN outside the area of peace and security
is what makes the Organization affect their lives and
improve life circumstances, as when UNICEF or UNDP are
active and visible on the local scene. In contrast, for
the countries of the North, their awareness of the UN
role is largely confined to media reports relating to the
peace and security agenda.
Overall, the UN has proved to be resilient. The
complexity of international society, as well as multiple
forms of interdependence, have established the
Organization as indispensable for the practical
implementation of many aspects of the global policy
agenda. As well, the range of activities that proceed in
the specialized agencies of the UN perform a myriad of
useful, even indispensable, information-gathering and
lawmaking functions.(2)
Furthermore, it is quite likely that the currently
obstructive approach of the United States will swing back
in more internationalist and positive directions in the
years ahead. Such a policy shift in Washington would
alter the overall climate of opinion, being far more
appreciative of the contributions of the UN and
supportive of needed reforms, including selective support
for institutional expansion to take better account of
various global developments. The present phase of
American foreign policy, characterized by President
Clinton as newly "isolationist," reflects a temporary
conservative turn toward domestic politics, which may
well be soon replaced by a new phase of internationalist
engagement. Such an American readjustment would likely
have many favorable ramifications for the future role of
the UN System.
It is also important not to take due account of some
long-term trends that have been evident in the course of
the UN experience that now stretches over more than five
decades. The UN survived the fissures of both the cold
war and the turbulent dynamics of decolonization without
producing any significant withdrawal from participation.
Such a record is in contrast to the experience of the
League of Nations. Several important countries never
participated and others withdrew in disgust. The UN has
achieved near universality of membership that now extends
to about 99% of the people living on the planet. Its
solid footing in world politics is almost beyond question
at this point.
Despite ups and downs in perception and performance,
the UN is here to stay. The increasingly global scope and
complexity of policy issues, as well as the diminished
territoriality of economic relationships, suggests a
potentiality for expanding governance roles for the UN.
At the same time, difficulties, as noted are apparent. At
their core is a concern as to whether the richer, more
powerful, countries of the North will be wise and
generous enough to allow the UN to act on behalf of all
the peoples of the world in a manner that is both
effective and legitimate. At issue, is the extent of
willingness to endow the UN with the capabilities to
uphold the global public goods of the planet as a whole,
and to serve as an agent for the promotion of human
development.(3)
The Original Design
The mixture of global circumstances and short-term
historical memory conditioned the original conception of
the United Nations. In 1945 World War II had ended and
the Atlantic Alliance of victorious powers was intent on
preserving the peace in the world ahead. The United
Nations was formed predominantly to avoid the recurrence
of major war, but there was a tension at the outset
between skeptics and true believers. The skeptics doubted
that the wartime alliance would hold or that collective
security would work. They were convinced that only
countervailing power organized to deter potential
adversaries could increase the chances for the avoidance
of major warfare in the future. The so-called "lessons of
Munich" were uppermost in their minds, that appeasement
and disarmament do not bring peace, but on the contrary,
nurture an appetite for aggression.
The true believers in the UN idea take a longer view
of history. They thought that any reversion to balance of
power geopolitics would culminate in World War III, which
would be catastrophic in the nuclear age. For them the
only path to peace and stability was by way of a strong
United Nations. They hoped that the UN would gradually
induce the leading sovereign states to disarm by stages,
building up in the process an independent enforcement
capability within the United Nations, and producing over
time a world order premised on respect for the Rule of
Law. Such a maximalist view of the United Nations rested
on the belief that the peaceful evolution of
international society depended on establishing some form
of limited world government that would eliminate war as a
social institution.(4)
The war/peace preoccupation surrounding the
establishment of the United Nations needs to be
understood in relation to several additional formative
factors. To begin with, the Westphalian idea of a world
of sovereign, territorially based, states as the sole
significant political actor on the global stage was so
widely accepted as to be presupposed. At the same time,
there was an appreciation, especially by the victorious
powers in World War II, that the prospects for collective
security depended on sustaining their wartime alliance
against the defeated Axis powers. It was this
geopolitical argument that was translated into a
constitutional arrangement by establishing a Security
Council with five permanent members, each given a veto
power over substantive decisions. Here was the central
gamble with respect to the UN role on the essential goal
of keeping world peace: if the P-5 could agree, there was
no further obstacle to creating within the framework of
the UN an effective response, and the institutional
skeleton for doing so was set forth in Chapter VII of the
Charter; contrariwise, in the face of disagreement
between the five permanent members, the Organization
encoded its inability to act at all in response to a
world crisis, however serious.
This submission to geopolitical realism has persisted
throughout the entire lifetime of the United Nations. It
raises two sorts of questions: first, are the
geopolitical premises of 1945 still valid in 2000? If
not, should there be changes made in the character of
permanent membership to reflect shifts in power
relations? So far, to the extent that shifts have been
seriously contemplated at all by leading members, they
have been in the direction of expanding the P-5 to P-7 or
even P-11, but not of substituting, say, India for
Britain or Japan for France. Nor have serious proposals
been made to consider "Europe" as a consolidated
representative that would break the statist monopoly over
formal participation and membership, or, more radically,
to create a permanent rotating seat for economically
disadvantaged states or for a roster of the ten
governments with the best human rights records.
The second more fundamental question, is the whole
idea of conditioning UN response on a geopolitical
consensus. Such a notion takes account of the
concentration of military power and diplomatic leverage
in the hands of several predominant states. By so doing,
it contradicts the premise of a law-governed world
community, and tends to invite selective enforcement of
the UN Charter. This raises serious questions about
legitimacy as well as effectiveness, issues
that have dogged the Organization since its
inception.
Moving in a quite opposite direction was the lower
profile agenda of the United Nations as reflected in the
wider ambit of the UN System. It was recognized that the
complexity and interrelatedness of
international life meant that the Organization needed to
coordinate policy and dissemination information across a
broad range of specialized concerns: food, children,
culture, labor, health, communications, monetary
stability, and developmental finance. This set of
functional undertakings has been in the form of a large
number of specialized agencies and programs that together
comprise the UN System. Their activities have been almost
always backgrounded in relation to the overall work of
the United Nations, and are knowledgeably perceived by
only a handful of specialists. On occasion, in the face
of a political encounter, this or that specialized agency
or substantive program becomes controversial. The role of
the IMF/World Bank is difficult to categorize in these
respects. These Bretton Woods agencies are technically
part of the UN functional landscape, but operationally
and psychologically they operate autonomously, outside
the UN System, with influence concentrated in a few
governments representing the world's richest states.
Leaving aside the Bretton Woods dimension, it is
widely agreed that these functional activities of the UN
have contributed greatly, although unevenly, to the
governance of human affairs over the course of the last
century. Over the years, as the global agenda shifts and
policy priorities change, innovations have been made,
adding and adapting programs, commissions, and
institutional arenas. Especially prominent have been a
variety of important initiatives associated with the
developmental priorities of the countries of the South,
as well as the establishment of UNEP in recognition of a
global environmental dimension and the steady expansion
of human rights activities in response to rising interest
and support for a global approach to their
implementation. Within these functional settings of the
United Nations System much more of a spirit of technical
cooperation prevails. There is far less allowance made
for a privileged status for leading states, partly
because fundamental questions of sovereign rights and
ideological identity are not often at stake. At the same
time, especially when East/West and North/South tensions
became acute, these agencies and activities could come
under sharp attack from one or another perspective
because their functional objectivity was allegedly being
subordinated to partisan concerns. For instance, the
United States withdrew from UNESCO almost 20 years ago,
and remains unrepresented.
As a preliminary assessment, it can be concluded that
the central UN mission to provide peace and security for
countries confronting aggression, has had a generally
disappointing history. The geopolitical consensus that
existed in 1945 was soon replaced by the gridlock of the
cold war. When the UN was able to act at all, it was
either a matter of fortuitous circumstance (as in the
Korean War) or exceptional geopolitical conditions of
superpower convergence (as in the Suez Campaign of 1956).
Otherwise, the UN role was either to provide a kind of
geopolitical cover (as in the Gulf War) or to act in a
neutral peacekeeping role based on consent of adversary
parties (the essential innovation of Dag
Hammarskjöld). In neither setting, did the UN
demonstrate the political will or capability to protect
potential and actual victims of aggression, and in this
central respect did not overcome the self-help character
of global security based on the military might of
particular states as augmented by alliance
relationships.
The UN peace and security role should then be
understood, as facilitative of traditional
diplomacy, but in no way superseding a statist
form of world order. As such, the promise of the Charter
has not been fulfilled in practice, and the decade since
the end of the cold war confirms that the resistance to
collective security is deeper than had been widely
supposed, namely, as merely a reflection of strategic
conflict and ideological antagonism. Unlike in relation
to world trade arrangements, or in the setting of
European regionalism, the member states of the United
Nations have not been prepared to transfer sovereign
authority and capabilities to the Security Council with
respect to matters of peace and security. Leading states,
the geopolitical actors, obviously prefer to rely upon
traditional methods of unilateral action or by way of a
coalition of the like-minded. The UN Security Council has
been invoked on occasion to legitimize or even to
disguise recourse to war in the event that a consensus
exists among the P-5, as occurred to some extent during
the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91. But if such legitimation is
not forthcoming or might be seen as an impediment to
effective action, then the UN is evaded as occurred
during superpower actions in the cold war (e.g. Vietnam,
Afghanistan) or subsequently, as in the war waged by NATO
early in 1999 against former Yugoslavia in relation to
the fate of Kosovo.
With respect to the functional side of UN activities,
the overall picture is much more favorable. The UN has
fulfilled, or in some cases exceeded, what seemed to be
expectations in 1945. The budgets of specialized agencies
and commissions have risen over the years, and the work
being done has been generally respected and useful,
although some of it has been controversial. The
functional dimension of the UN System has demonstrated an
impressive capacity to provide niches for new
undertakings within the existing framework (as with
providing a forum for indigenous peoples) or to establish
entirely new institutional arenas (as with UNEP and
UNDP). Of course, there are complicating features that
qualify enthusiasm for the functional work of the UN.
Some agencies declined in prestige due to changes in the
social structure, such as the ILO. Others became
embroiled in one way or another, often arbitrarily, in a
variety of reformist or backlash reactions associated
with dogmatic neo-liberalism, as was the case with
respect to UNESCO and to some extent the ILO. More could
certainly have been usefully done by the UN in relation
to this functional agenda, but overall the functional
side of the UN System seems to be well-established on a
basis that does not disappoint UN supporters or greatly
antagonize UN critics. Such a generalization needs to be
qualified to take account of the general downsizing
mandate of the last several years of budgetary austerity,
which itself may reflect some wider tendencies associated
with downward pressures on expenditures on public goods,
particularly on global public goods.(5) This latter
development seems connected with the drift in all areas
of finance in the direction of privatization, a
reflection of the view that market discipline is more
efficient than bureaucratic management of a public sector
character.
The Relevance of the Global Setting
The history of the UN is very much entwined with two
fissures in international society that has preoccupied
the political imagination for more than fifty years. The
first of these fissures was the East/West divide that
spiraled out of the unresolved aftermath of World War II.
It assumed the character of a war-threatening rivalry
that affected all regions of the world and made plausible
the possibility of an apocalyptic world war fought with
nuclear weaponry. The second fissure was the North/South
divide that came to the fore as a sequel to
decolonization. These two conflict configurations were
overlapped at many points, including the efforts of both
superpowers to find as many ideological friends as
possible among the newly independent countries in the
South. These efforts gave governments leverage to obtain
foreign economic assistance. But the superpower rivalry
also produced ghastly competitive interventions that
resulted in prolonged warfare, especially in relation to
divided countries such as Vietnam and Korea, but also in
borderland areas such as Afghanistan.
The United Nations was one arena in which these two
defining struggles were waged, but in differing modes,
with confusing and variable effects. The East/West
rivalry was most evident in its tendency to paralyze the
Security Council in relation to issues of peace and
security. At times, this stalemate was broken. At the
start of the Korean War in 1950, the Soviet Union was
boycotting the Security Council. With an irony that
became evident only after the Sino/Soviet break years
later, Moscow was absent to protest the refusal of the
Security Council to acknowledge the outcome of the
Chinese Revolution by allowing the most populous country
to be represented by Beijing. As a result of the Soviet
absence, the UN Security Council was not paralyzed by the
veto, and was able to authorize an American-led UN
response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea. The
Soviet Union never again made such an institutional
mistake, and was thus able to block subsequent Security
Council action with which it disagreed.
On a few other occasions, the superpowers were in
agreement, usually for differing reasons. In 1956 they
both opposed in the Security Council the attack on Egypt
by the combined military forces of Israel, France, and
Britain, and successfully induced these countries to
withdraw from occupied Egyptian territory. There was also
a much contested effort to cooperate in the newly
independent Belgian Congo (later Zaire) in 1960 to
prevent civil war and secession, but the end result was
to bring the East/West struggle to the fore with
contradictory views about what should have been the UN
mission. And again in the early 1980s, both superpowers
encouraged a non-response by the Security Council to
Iraq's invasion of Iran because both welcomed the efforts
to weaken, if not destroy, the Islamic Republic than Iran
had become since the Shah's overthrow in 1979. Finally,
during the Gorbachev period of leadership, the Soviet
Union adopted a cooperative attitude that enabled the UN
to play an important facilitative diplomatic role in
bringing to an end violent regional conflicts in the
Iran/Iraq War, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Angola, and
elsewhere.
What seems clear is that the East/West conflict
pervaded all aspects of UN activity during the cold war
years. It was particularly evident whenever global
security issues were raised, and in relation to the
activities of the Security Council. The ideologically
grounded gridlock was widely accepted as the explanation
for the relative ineffectiveness of the United Nations
with respect to peace and security questions. In
actuality, the cold war tensions affected all aspects of
the work of the UN, requiring compromises to be reached
so as to permit activity of any sort. From the outset,
the Soviet side adopted a defensive posture, recognizing
that it was outnumbered if issues were resolved on a
straight majority basis. At one point in the 1960s,
Nikita Khrushchev proposed a troika arrangement for UN
governance, including the creation of three secretaries
generals to represent the differing perspectives of East,
West, and the Non-Aligned Movement. Such an initiative
was angrily rebuffed by the West, and led no where.
Similarly, the Western-led effort in the same period to
deprive the Soviet Union of its vote in the General
Assembly due to its refusal to pay for peacekeeping
operations that it opposed was eventually abandoned as
futile. The Organization lived with the cold war after
these failed efforts to exert control, limping along, but
managing to remain useful, at least as a talking shop, in
relation to its less visible humanitarian activities, and
as support for the priorities of the South.
Of course, by the 1990s, the cold war came to an
abrupt end, the Soviet Union collapsed into its
constituent republics, and the disruptive effects of a
pervasive geopolitical rivalry, reinforced by ideological
antagonism, disappeared. This change of atmosphere
allowed the Security Council to act cohesively in 1990-91
in response to Iraq's conquest and annexation of Kuwait,
authorizing a major military response to aggression as an
expression of collective security. President George Bush
even proclaimed the emergence of "a new world order" as
premised upon fulfilling this promise of cooperation
under UN auspices in meeting threats of international
aggression.
The Gulf War "succeeded" to the extent of restoring
Kuwaiti sovereignty and independence, but it left
controversy in its wake that persists to this day. Many
observers within and without the UN believed that the
Security Council had give the American-led coalition a
blank check to conduct warfare without fully exhausting
diplomatic remedies, thereby giving rise to the criticism
that the Security Council had itself been "hijacked" by
the Americans. In this respect, the legitimacy of the
Organization depends on its gaining greater distance from
the control mechanisms of geopolitics, but the manner of
UN financing, Security Council voting, and backroom
diplomacy make this prospect now seem remote.
In any event, as the prior section suggests, the end
of the cold war did not bring the UN into a golden age in
the peacekeeping area. China and Russia, as do many
lesser states, remain skeptical about using the
Organization for undertakings that infringe on
territorial sovereignty. The United States seems
reluctant to support the UN unless it can exert virtually
unilateral control over the definition of the mission and
its operational implementation. Such an attitude induced
leading Western governments to bypass UN authority in
fashioning a Kosovo strategy that relied on the more
hospitable arena of NATO to carry out a response to
Serbian ethnic cleansing. Such an experience damaged the
reputation of the UN, but only briefly, as the
Organization was brought back into the Kosovo picture in
the post-conflict setting, as well as almost immediately
being given central responsibility for difficult new
peacekeeping missions in East Timor and Sierra Leone.
The other great configuration affecting the United
Nations has been the North/South divide. Because of a
differing agenda and a lack of influence on the Security
Council, this divide has been most evident within the one
state/one vote General Assembly. It was in this setting
that the newly independent states from non-Western
countries mounted their various attacks on the way in
which international society was organized, especially its
economic dimensions. This attack reached its climax in
the 1970s with the demand by the non-aligned bloc of
countries for "a new international economic order." This
demand for restructuring was backed up in this period by
the formidable "oil weapon" being wielded by OPEC, and by
a generally accommodating West worried about alienating
leaders of the South in the overriding struggle with the
East for global preeminence. The South achieved a kind of
pyrric victory in 1974, taking the form of a Charter for
the New International Economic Order and an accompanying
Program of Action. It achieved some tangible results by
establishing and expanding some arenas within the UN
system that were responsive to its demands for assistance
in the process of development, including UNCTAD and UNDP,
but also in other organizational settings as well. The
normative momentum culminated in the articulation of a
Right to Development that remains a relevant influence in
efforts to implement the International Covenant on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, and underpins the
now well known support of UNDP for an orientation toward
global trade and investment policy that rests on "human
security," a deliberate challenge to a capital-driven
preoccupation that assesses "development" and economic
performance by exclusive reference to growth and
efficiency trends.
But then came the 1980s with their ideological
backlash led by the Thatcher/Reagan governments of
Britain and the United States that included attacks on
socialist thinking, non-market approaches, and "the
irresponsible majorities" mobilized in the General
Assembly. This backlash was the beginning of the
neo-liberal consensus that took hold of world society in
the 1990s, greatly strengthened by the collapse from
within of the Soviet bloc and by the extraordinary
developmental achievements of market-oriented countries
with strong private sectors in the South, especially in
the Asia-Pacific region. The North became more
ideologically united around the neo-liberal approach,
including an effort to curtail UN activities oriented
toward the normative outlooks of the South, which had
been funded and established during earlier periods of
cooptation by the 1980s, the South was so deeply divided
that it could not mount any kind of effective
resistance.
In this atmosphere, the role of the UN in promoting
equitable development was eclipsed, and all efforts at
criticism of capitalist approaches to growth were
sidelined, if not abandoned. Symbolic was the abolition
of the UN Center on Transnational Corporations, which was
targeted by Washington in the early 1990s, as potentially
hostile to private sector approaches to the world
economic development. Despite this general trend to
downplay normative concerns in the setting of the world
economy, some minor rearguard efforts went forward, but
with only minimal impact. Undoubtedly, the most
interesting of these counter-moves was the 1995
Copenhagen "Social Summit" that did its best to put back
on the UN agenda concerns of the peoples of the South
with such social issues as unemployment, poverty, and
personal insecurity. The leading UN members of the North
gave this initiative only the most grudging nominal
support, and so far, this challenge to neo-liberalism has
not amounted to much.
In conclusion, as the United Nations enters the 21st
century neither of the two large defining cleavages so
central to its activities over the last half of the 20th
century remain, at least not in their earlier, coherent
form. The prevailing ideas are dominated by a fairly
bland ideological agreement that has resulted in the
ascendancy of the Bretton Woods approach to development
and ad hoc opportunism in the context of peace and
security. Whether greater concern with the social
dimensions of development and a more principled approach
to global security will emerge in the years ahead are
among the most salient issues confronting the United
Nations at this time.
The 1997 Asian financial crisis, and its wider
reverberations in Japan, Russia, and Latin America, did
create some apparent exercises in rethinking by advocates
of neo-liberalism, including by those who led the Bretton
Woods institutions. Many attempts were made to assess
what had generated the collapse, as well as to criticize
economistic prescriptions for recovery that caused
disastrous short-term human consequences, as in Indonesia
where many millions were abruptly pushed back below the
poverty line. This experience led to soul-search by
neo-liberals, and for policy alternatives. Calls for "a
new financial architecture" and "responsible globality"
were frequently uttered to call attention to the need for
more governance associated with the workings of financial
markets and to emphasize the relevance of social
dimensions to public sector policies. The idea of
"globalization with a human face" was put forward as a
new orientation toward economic policy, and seemed to
guide the World Bank and IMF leadership toward the
adopting of more flexible approaches to matters of
conditionality, debt repayment, and structural
adjustment. With the apparent Asian recovery process now
underway, this reformist mood seems to be have been
dissipated before any serious substantive adjustments
were made. The neo-liberal consensus seems in control
once more, at least until the next crisis!
A Note on Governance within the UN
System
The placement of the Bretton Woods institutions and
the World Trade Organization within the organizational
frame of the United Nations is deeply misleading. For all
practical purposes, the IMF, World Bank, and WTO are
autonomous international actors, governed by their
distinct institutional structures and accountable to
their managerial boards composed of country
representatives weighted to reflected proportionate
capital contributions. As a result, the orientation of
the Bretton Woods/WTO has tended to reflect the
neo-liberal outlook in its purest Northern forms, raising
many questions of representativeness from the
perspectives of the South. These actors have been the
focus of grassroots protest activities for many years,
being seen as virtual conduits for the allegedly
heartless policies and priorities of private sector banks
and corporations. They have also been accused of being
environmentally insensitive in their endorsement of
mega-projects in the name of growth-oriented development.
(6)
Any deep reform of the UN System as a whole would have
to extend to these hitherto nearly autonomous actors,
creating a more organic link to ideas of human
development favored by other arenas within the UN,
especially UNDP. Such reforms would include
representation on a basis that gave some managerial voice
to officials confronting massive poverty and other forms
of social and environmental devastation, as well as some
voices from global civil society directly accountable to
the peoples of the world.
This issue of representation is accentuated by the
degree to which countries in the North and private sector
actors deliberately structure global economic governance
in a manner that avoids accountability to or
participation by the United Nations with its more
avowedly normative or value-oriented
agendas associated with equity and responses to human
suffering arising from growing economic disparities. The
annual meetings of the G-7 leaders and the gatherings of
the World Economic Forum at Davos lend credibility to the
view that global economic governance is fashioned by a
coalition of leading private sector advocates and of
ideologically passive political leaders from the world's
most prosperous countries that seek to guide the global
policy agenda on the basis of technocratic
criteria.
It is evident that the significance of the Bretton
Woods institutions plus the WTO is not acknowledged
adequately in most formal presentations of the United
Nations System. There are two ways to approach this. One
would be to portray these global economic institutions as
having moved to the center of the UN scheme, displacing
earlier ideas of the Organization as centered around the
General Assembly or Security Council. The other way to
conceive of this relationship is to treat these
institutions as outside the United Nations, and linked to
states in the North and to such private sector arenas as
the World Economic Forum. Such a conceptualization would
admit the autonomous character of these
actors&emdash;being non-accountable in the UN&emdash;and
avoid an artificial inclusion arising from a nominal,
formal link by way of UN flow charts. Either portrayal
contains a partial truth, which will be explored in the
next section that considers the different "images" of the
UN System that derive from three principal ways of
depicting the hierarchy of institutions that make up the
Organization.
Four Images of the United Nations System
In most organizational presentations of the United
Nations System, the General Assembly is depicted as the
central organ, with the Security Council, Trusteeship
Council, International Court of Justice, Economic and
Social Council, and Secretariat as the five subsidiary
organs comprising the core operation of the United
Nations. (See Figure 1, Appendix) Radiating from this
core, by way of the Economic and Social Council, are the
specialized agencies and several commissions, while other
subsidiary bodies are attached directly to the General
Assembly. It is true that the General Assembly is the UN
organ with the widest substantive mandate, with all
members represented, and with annual sessions that
attract heads of state and prominent officials. When the
Security Council has been deadlocked, or when the agenda
has been dominated by issues other than peace and
security, then the General Assembly has been in the
limelight.
At the same time, such a depiction of the system seems
misleading in some fundamental respects. For one thing,
the overall rationale for the UN and the continuing
perception of its success and failure is very much
related to the roles assigned to the Security Council.
For another, by deliberate design, only the Security
Council can make "decisions" binding on the entire
membership, and it is only in the Security Council that
the geopolitical actors are given permanent membership
and a veto. By contrast, the General Assembly has only
recommendatory authority, which can be obtained by a
two-thirds majority vote, that might be composed of
states representing a very small percentage of either the
world's population, its GDP, and its financial
contribution to the United Nations. Especially during the
late 1960s and the 1970s when newly independent states
were active in coalition, assertive in their demands
directed at the market economies of the North, and the
Security Council was paralyzed by superpower rivalry, the
General Assembly did seem to epitomize the United
Nations.
Such majoritarian developments occasioned a backlash
among leading countries in the North that started in the
1980s, and has continued until the present. It was partly
motivated by an ideological response to the demands of
the South for economic restructuring based on
countervailing power (OPEC in the 1970s) and equitable
arguments for reform (Non-Aligned Movement and the
campaign to establish a New International Economic
Order). With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end
of the cold war, the spread of market-oriented
constitutionalism among the countries of the South, and
the rise of neo-liberal economic globalization, the
General Assembly has been again eclipsed.
The Security Council reemerged in the late 1980s and
1990s as the lynchpin of the UN, with great media
attention given to a large expansion of UN peacekeeping
activities in many countries, and a deliberate effort
spearheaded by the P-5 to focus UN budgetary and
administrative reform on "downsizing" organizational
commitments to the developmental priorities of the South.
(See Figure 2, Appendix)
It is also possible to conceive of the Bretton Woods
institutions, with the addition of World Trade
Organization, as the central player in the United Nations
system. (See Figure 3, Appendix) Although normally
portrayed as part of the periphery occupied by
specialized agencies, the IMF/World Bank are arguably the
most influential and consequential part of the
Organization. Their influence is felt by many
governments, and their policy and authority is supported
by financial leverage, geopolitical authority, and
ideological consensus. Such a view of the UN System is
admittedly idiosyncratic, especially as the Bretton Woods
actors operate so autonomously in relation to the rest of
the UN, as to be often perceived as actually
outside the system.
The final image is partly futuristic, taking account
of possible institutional reforms (Global Peoples
Assembly), Economic Security Council) and of the
importance of economic global governance (IMF, World
Bank, and WTO). It conceives of the United Nations System
as significantly renewed by incorporating both the
democratizing demands of transnational social forces and
the marketizing requirement of globalization.
Each of these four images reveals a partial reality,
and none is entirely satisfactory on its own. On balance,
the second image, based on the peace and security agenda,
with the Security Council as the presiding organ, seems
to be the most accurate of the three. After all, the
establishment of the United Nations, as was the case with
its predecessor, the League of Nations, was
overwhelmingly a response to war and a quest for a more
peaceful world. Also, as a matter of public perception,
the success and failure of the UN seems principally
connected with its ability to keep the peace and protect
its members from aggression. As well, the constitutional
arrangements of the Charter, do seem to be far more
sensitive to power configurations and organizational
responsibilities in relation to the Security Council than
anywhere else in the system. Thus, while a combination of
the three images is helpful, it seems correct to view the
second image as the most consistently illuminating,
especially, as in this project, since the Bretton Woods
actors are viewed as distinct from the UN. Further, the
current climate of opinion in the Organization seems to
be in favor of minimizing the UN role in the promotion of
human development and global social priorities.
The United Nations as a Contested Political
Arena
As mentioned, in 1945 the structure of world order was
very much dominated by sovereign states, and by Western
ideas and arrangements, including vast overseas colonial
empires. At first, the only important tension within the
United Nations was between the socialism of the Soviet
bloc and the market constitutionalism of the Atlantic
Alliance. No doubt, partly because the Soviet group of UN
members were much smaller than its Atlanticist rivals,
Moscow was particularly insistent on respect for
sovereign rights and the non-intervention norm. In this
respect, the UN from the outset was a creation and
creature of the state system of diplomacy, an instrument
of statecraft, and a club of states that limited full
access to states.
Membership in the United Nations resulted in some
significant formal abridgements of sovereignty,
especially for "normal states," that is other than the
P-5. For these normal states, decisions could be made in
the Security Council that affected their vital interests,
despite the absence of their agreement or even
participation. And even the General Assembly, as the
conscience of the world community, could mobilize
pressures that exerted influence on matters about which
important states felt deeply, as seemed to be the case in
relation to Chinese representation or during the latter
stages of the anti-apartheid campaign. Yet by and large,
the UN was and remains a bastion of statism, even more so
in some respects than at the time of its creation. It now
incorporates the former colonies from Africa and Asia,
extending its statist reach to embrace virtually the
entirety of the planet. The formal proceedings of all
parts of the UN system are restricted in their
participation to states, and only states.
This statist model of organization is confronting
three important challenges as a result of the emergence
of new actors and organizational claims. These challenges
have been widely interpreted as resulting in the decline
(or at least the change in the role) of the state, and
have cast doubt on the legitimacy and adequacy of a
United Nations based on a membership that is strictly
limited to states.
The first set of challenges are associated with the
great and growing influence exerted by international NGOs
and generally by transnational voluntary association of
various sorts.(7) There is much writing evaluating these
initiatives, and whether there is in gestation a new
political reality that can be described as "global civil
society" or alternatively, as
"globalization-from-below."(8) The Charter makes a
minimal gesture of acknowledgement in the extremely
limited setting of the Economic and Social Council with
respect to NGOs in Article 71, proposing "suitable
arrangements for consultation with non-governmental
organizations which are concerned with matters within its
competence." Informally, civil society actors have been
effectively active in a variety of UN arenas, especially
in relation to the great global conferences of the early
1990s on policy issues and in lawmaking settings,
particularly on environment and human rights. At the same
time, given the importance widely attributed to these
transnational civic initiatives and the growing support
for global democracy, the UN is seen as not providing
sufficient formal and effective access to this dimension
of international political life.(9)
The second important area of formal exclusion involves
the direct representation in some form of global market
forces, the business and finance actors that have given
shape and direction to economic globalization,
capital-driven "globalization-from-above." Arguably,
given the orientation of many governments and of the
Bretton Woods institutions, these perspectives have
sufficient access and influence by way of indirect
representation and influence, and do not need, or even
desire, any more direct form of participation in the
United Nations System. At the 1992 Rio Conference on
Environment and Development part of the budget was
covered by a Business Council composed of CEOs from world
corporations, which was active at the conference and has
continued to operate in relation to the Commission on
Sustainable Development. Also, there have been
discussions about financing part of the UNDP budget on
the basis of voluntary contributions from the private
sector.
In a widely publicized initiative, the media
billionaire, Ted Turner, pledged $1 billion a few years
ago to cover a selected group of issues involving UN
humanitarian activities. The financing crisis of the
United Nations, arising from non-payment of dues and
arrears by leading members, has encouraged options
involving various strategies of "privatization," an
aspect of a broader trend toward transferring
responsibility from the public sector to the private
sector. Most controversially, there are privatizing
initiatives of a mercenary character in the peacekeeping
field, especially in Africa where private companies, such
as Executive Outcomes, have taken on peacekeeping roles
as profit-making ventures in the face of internal strife.
Such a disturbing development has occurred partly to
re-employ the security operatives from the apartheid
regime in South Africa and partly to fill the vacuum
created by the decline of great power interest in
sub-Saharan Africa.
There is also the matter of taking account of arenas
that have been formed by private sector initiative to
exert influence on global policy. The Global Economic
Forum that meets annually at Davos, Switzerland is
currently the most prominent of these arenas. Presumably,
in recognition of its relevance, the UN Secretary General
Kofi Annan has addressed the Forum each year prior to
2000. The main burden of his remarks has been the need of
the United Nations to find ways to take account of the
less statist character of international society. In 1998
Mr. Annan proposed a double "partnership," first between
the UN on one side and the business community on the
other, and secondly, between the UN and civil society. He
didn't go into specifics, but strongly suggested that
such partnership was necessary to ensure continued UN
relevance. In 1999 Mr. Annan moved in a complementary
direction, urging business actors to comply voluntarily
with international standards applicable to environmental,
labor, and human rights even when not obliged to do so by
states within which operations were occurring. He pledged
UN collaboration in such efforts, and seemed to be
proposing such action as a move toward the negotiation of
a global social contract based on a novel idea of private
sector "global citizenship."
One expression of the potency of global market forces
involves the establishment of the World Trade
Organization, involving important transfers of
sovereignty by states for the sake of promoting freer
trade. If the logic and dynamics of globalization support
institutional innovation at the global (and regional)
level, then opposition will recede. It is worth comparing
the obstacles to institutionalization with respect to the
environment, an area where market forces prefer to rely
on the self-organizing features of markets to the
establishment of a coercive regime promoting "free
trade."
A third area of significance involves the growth of
regionalism, especially in Europe over the course of the
last half century. The Charter seeks to accommodate
regional actors in Chapter X, especially with respect to
their role in peace and security based on the primacy of
the Security Council. Whether the NATO initiatives in
Kosovo permanently disrupt this relationship is uncertain
at this point, but at minimum suggest the need to rethink
coordination between the Security Council and enforcement
under the aegis of regional organizations. The issue has
arisen before on several occasions during the cold war
when the Soviet Union used the Warsaw Pact to validate
interventions in Eastern Europe and the United States
relied on SEATO authorization for Vietnam and other
regional mandates for Caribbean interventionary
activities.
Perhaps, the more consequential issue arising from
regionalism is one of representation and restructuring.
In some sense, if the European Union were to occupy a
permanent seat in the Security Council, it would pave the
way for expanded non-Western representation, as well as
giving non-represented "nations" in Europe a sense that
their identities were less violated than by way of
statist patterns of representation. If regionalism
evolves further in other parts of the world, then it
would seem desirable to find ways to enable their formal
participation as regions in a wide range of UN
activities.
As far as I know, Kofi Annan has yet to include
regional actors in his speculations about the necessary
outreach of a revitalized United Nations. A better
incorporation of regionalism within the UN System would
fit with his general appreciation that it is important to
take organizational account of the rise of international
actors other than states in this period since the
founding of the United Nations. Of course, there is a
certain degree of ambivalence in UN circles about the
merits of mega-regionalism as it could be understood as a
rival approach to global governance rather than as an
aspect of a UN-led world order. A world of regions could
evolve either as a complement or as an alternative to an
augmented United Nations, but the regional dimension
cannot be any longer neglected in analyzing prospects for
global governance.
There is no assurance that regionalism would operate
in a more democratic manner than the United Nations.
Indeed, there have been complaints about the democratic
deficit in Europe and the non-accountability and
non-transparency of the European Commission in Brussels.
At the same time, the future of regionalism is tied
closely to the European experience, and this experience
clearly emphasizes the importance of a shared commitment
to democracy as a foundation for further integrative
steps. By democracy, the main emphasis has been upon
democracy in state/society relations, but there are
glimmerings of a growing acceptance of democratic
practices in relations between member states and the
European Union. The evolution of European Parliament and
the acceptance by members of external accountability with
respect to economic disputes and human rights suggest the
democratization of regionalism in a manner and depth that
remains inconceivable for the United Nations.
It is also unclear as to whether regionalism will
displace or complement the United Nations in the years
ahead. The most likely expectation is that the
relationship will vary with the subject-matter. In
peacekeeping there has seemed to be a complementary
relationship in Africa, but a somewhat competitive one in
relation to Balkans' peacekeeping in the 1990s. In more
functional areas, such as environment and economic
relations, the prospects remain good for cooperative
relations between the UN and regional actors.
Reconsidering Cold War Gridlock
The generally disappointing UN performance on peace
and security was explained and excused by reference to
the cold war. After all, the original understanding of
the UN rested on an acceptance of the idea that
collective security could only operate on the basis of a
P-5 consensus. Accordingly, with the end of the cold war,
there was the hope that the UN could finally fulfill this
more ambitious role contemplated by the UN Charter. Such
an expectation seemed confirmed when the Gulf Crisis of
1990 gave way to a political consensus that was
translated in the Gulf War into a recovery of Kuwaiti
sovereignty. It then seemed natural to believe that the
UN was finally entering a golden age of P-5 cooperation,
which would feature the flourishing of collective
security. And then when the Security Council proceeded to
endorse humanitarian missions to overcome internal
conflicts in several countries in the early 1990s, this
sense of an emergent strong UN peaked.
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that such optimism
about the UN was ill-founded and premature. The Gulf War
quickly came to be seen as a job half done, and carried
out in a manner that contained disturbing implications.
It was soon evident that despite the Security Council
mandate, the war itself amounted to an exercise in
traditional alliance diplomacy, with only the most
nominal participation by the UN. There was little or no
reliance on a collaborative process of the sort
contemplated by Chapter VII of the Charter. Once the UN
mandate was given, it functioned virtually as a signal
for the American-led coalition to embark on a war,
control its parameters, define its goals, and negotiate
its termination.
The Security Council moves in the direction of
humanitarian intervention also ran into formidable
obstacles. These undertakings were UN ventures bearing on
situations of intranational strife or emergency.
By conception, such undertakings were constitutionally
controversial due to the domestic jurisdiction provision
of Article 2(7) of the Charter, and the attachment to its
strict interpretation by a sovereignty-oriented group of
states led by China. This limitation on UN authority
written into the Charter was a pledge given particularly
to weaker states, but also at the time to large states
such as the Soviet Union likely to be outvoted, that
their territorial sovereignty would not, under any
circumstances, be subject to challenge as a result of
becoming members of the United Nations. The
counter-argument also seemed strong: given the evolution
of international human rights in the course of several
decades, governments had effectively accepted over time
an erosion of this limitation on UN authority, and had
submitted themselves to the possibility of humanitarian
intervention in the event of gross and massive violation
of fundamental human rights or in situations of chaos in
which large portions of the citizens found that their
basic rights including the right to life was in jeopardy.
Such a reinterpretation of the Security Council role,
while generally endorsed by the West and successive
Secretary Generals (Perez de Cueller, Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, and Kofi Annan). However, it was never
accepted in Asia where there existed the contrary view
that human rights violations and humanitarian
emergencies, even of an acute variety, could never
justify a UN intervention in internal affairs. In Asia,
suspicion abounds about the renewal of Northern dominance
of the region under the aegis of "human rights" and
"humanitarian intervention." The riposte of the North has
been that such concerns are but a diversionary move to
hide the refusal to uphold international human rights
standards. As with many such disputes, both sides seem to
be right. The fundamental matter remains in a condition
of constitutional flux.
Additionally, decisive political problems arose that
have mooted the constitutional controversy, at least for
the present. It became obvious first in relation to
Somalia, and then more blatantly with respect to Bosnia
and Rwanda, that the P-5, and especially the United
States, did not possess the political will to engage in
effective forms of humanitarian intervention. As Kosovo
in 1999 shows, such will for a variety of reasons seems
abundantly present when NATO acts, because the
credibility of this prince of alliances is a strategic
interest for geopolitical actors that must be upheld at
all costs. But even here, it is upheld in a manner that
has deepened the tragedy of those for whom the
intervention is supposedly being undertaken. NATO bombed
extensively for 78 days without committing ground forces,
thereby insulating vicious patterns of retaliation
against the Kosovar community. Beyond this, NATO focused
its initial bombing almost exclusively on anti-aircraft
capabilities rather than Serb military forces, conveying
the impression that the safety of NATO flight crews were
given clear priority over the fate of Kosovars.
And of course, by shifting humanitarian intervention
from the collective frame of the Security Council to that
of NATO, the undertaking evades vetoes by China and
Russia, but at a constitutional and political cost. It is
evident, that such a path contravenes the Charter idea
clearly expressed in Article 53 that regional enforcement
activity is never legally permissible without Security
Council approval. As such, the UN has been bypassed by
this NATO operation, as rarely so blatantly before in the
course of its history. Such a sidelining of the UN is
only partly explained by the fact that China and Russia
were deeply opposed recourse to the use of force against
Yugoslavia. The West was also convinced that NATO was
more capable than the UN of bringing force to bear
effectively based on earlier experiences in Bosnia. Also,
it seemed geopolitically advantageous to give the mandate
to NATO, which was in any event casting about for a role
since it had lost its raison d'être after
the collapse of any Soviet threat to Europe. Of course,
in defense of evading the Security Council was the
perception of urgency based on Belgrade's repressive
policies in Kosovo that were assuming genocidal
proportions. In such a setting, some sort of humanitarian
response, regardless of constitutional niceties, had
become a moral and political imperative.
Despite this discouraging picture of UN
marginalization, it still seems useful to consider the
case for adjustments of the United Nations System that
would make the Organization more effective in the early
21st century. The balance of opinion as to the UN could
shift quickly, especially if the traditional non-UN
approaches to peace and security come to be regarded as
self-destructive and policy failures. It is also possible
that a surge of public support could at some point induce
political leaders to engage more fully and creatively
with the United Nations, including the provision of more
independent financing and peacekeeping arrangements.
Challenges and Responses: Two Examples
Of course, in the history of the United Nations there
have been many challenges directed at institutional
style, capacity, and orientation. Some of the most
complex and difficult challenges have been produced by
changes in the global setting, particularly in relation
to geopolitical alignment. The onset and then the
termination of the cold war were undoubtedly the most
decisive changes associated with the United Nations
System, especially as conceived from the perspective of
the second image of Security Council dominance. The cold
war involved a deep geopolitical cleavage that interfered
with the capacity of the UN to achieve consensus on a
wide range of issues, especially those involving contest
peace and security questions. The difficulty of injecting
UN peacekeeping into an East/West contested situation
became evident in relation to the Congo Crisis of 1960,
and its aftermath.
The end of the cold war did not mean the end of
geopolitical disputes and divergencies, but it did make
many previously gridlocked issues available for potential
UN response. The Gulf War manifested the potential for
consensus, but it also served as a warning sign that
seems to have made many states more reluctant to give a
blank check to UN action of an enforcement nature. Also,
the problems of political will associated with the
proposed humanitarian operations under UN auspices in
relation to Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda made it clear
that consensus was not enough to ensure an effective UN
response. It was also important to have sufficient
resolve to mobilize the means or capabilities required to
have a reasonable prospect of attaining the desired goal.
It has become clear in the 1990s that the P-5 were not
prepared to satisfy this condition in humanitarian
settings even if a consensus could be obtained in support
of a UN undertaking.
But other challenges to the United Nations System
derived from other sources, especially from the various
effects of decolonization and from the appearance of new
concerns on the global policy agenda. With decolonization
came a new focus on the concerns of the South. This
concern took a variety of forms, including an emphasis on
development and economic assistance. By the 1970s these
concerns became increasingly militant, representing more
than an effort not to be drawn into the cold war, but to
reform the terms of trade between North and South, and
generally establish what was claimed to be a more
equitable set of relations affecting global economic
policy. This campaign was crystallized around the call
for a New International Economic Order, an effort
reinforced by the use of OPEC influence to raise world
oil prices, moves that caused gas lines in the West and
created the novel impression that the North might be
vulnerable to initiatives taken by way of the coordinated
action of the South. "The oil weapon" was wielded within
the halls of the UN, especially at the Sixth Special
Session of the General Assembly, devoted to the call for
a NIEO. The result was a series of normative instruments
purporting to set a new framework for North/South
relations based on greater fairness and mutuality than in
the past, weakening international legal protection of
foreign investment, but mainly dealing with tone and
atmospherics. There was little of a substantive nature in
this normative assault, enabling most countries in the
North to go along with these pronouncements without
feeling that their present conduct was being questioned
or that they had undertaken to act differently in the
future.(10)
The fact that a new normative architecture is set
forth without any prospect of substantive results is not
by itself discrediting of a UN initiative, or evidence
that the General Assembly is a toothless giant. I think
such an assessment could be made of the early efforts of
the UN to internationalize the subject-matter of human
rights, and yet over time this undertaking has to be
ranked with leading UN achievements.(11) But the campaign
to create the NIEO must be assessed as a disabling
failure. It prompted an ideological/geopolitical backlash
led by Reagan/Thatcher forces during the 1980s. It
overstated the solidarity of the South and did not take
account of the degree to which socialism and
state-directed economies were in retreat all over the
world. And most of all, unlike with human rights, there
was neither civil society reinforcement of the
inter-governmental momentum or some degree of
geopolitical opportunism at work (as had helped give
human rights degrees of potency in various settings such
as in relation to mounting Western pressure against the
oppressive regimes of Eastern Europe). And so the NIEO
seemed like empty confrontational rhetoric that was not
related to any viable political project. When the oil
weapon disappeared and OPEC disunity surfaced, the final
nail was hammered into the NIEO coffin. The NIEO
experience does show how the UN General Assembly can be
mobilized for sweeping reform, but also how such efforts
can end in frustration if there is either a political
backlash or an absence of follow through.
This failure to reform the world economy as such
should not detract from the success of the South with
respect to the enactment of supportive normative
guidelines by way of a series of General Assembly
initiatives. As early as 1962, the General Assembly
adopted a resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over
Natural Resources that was supposed to put the rights of
a people ahead of those of foreign investors, regardless
of contractual arrangements.(12) The International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights also
affirms the importance of ensuring each person in every
country basic human needs.(13) And perhaps most relevant
of all, the adoption in 1986 of a comprehensive
Declaration on the Right of Development.(14) The success
of the South, at a normative level of discourse, was to
establish the goal of development as a policy imperative
that could not be trumped even by invoking market
efficiency factors. This must be counted as a limited
victory, as it was not possible to move from the right to
development to specific reforms that might facilitate
what the UNDP called "pro-growth development" in its
Human Development Reports or what Chile claimed to
be "growth with equity."
The UN story pertaining to the new agenda of
environment, population, and resources tells a different,
generally more positive story about the creative capacity
of the General Assembly to respond to the felt needs of
the peoples of the world. The idea of organizing a global
inter-governmental conference on a broad policy concern
under UN auspices was an expansion of activities
explicitly foreseen. The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the
Human Environment, despite a variety of difficulties, was
a major contribution in several respects. It greatly
raised environmental awareness among the governments and
peoples of the world, and was thus an invaluable learning
experience. Such learning occurred in the preparatory
process, at the conference itself, and in its aftermath.
Many governments established ministries of environmental
affairs or bureaucratic units devoted to environmental
policy. The UN itself established UNEP as an expression
of continuing concern, which was less than
environmentalists hoped for, but more than what had
existed. The transnational environmental movement made
its debut at Stockholm, capturing the imagination of many
among the assembled media, and suggesting the presence of
new non-state actors as real social forces. And the UN
displayed a capacity to promote consciousness-raising
with respect to emergent global challenges. The Stockholm
Declaration on the Human Environment, although
non-binding in a legal sense, was an immense contribution
to the creation of a normative architecture for
environmental protection, and has served as a building
block for subsequent international law efforts.
The Stockholm conference also disclosed problems. It
became evident that organizers had not addressed the
North/South dimension of environmentalism in a
reconciling manner. Many from the South believed that the
stress on environmental dangers, especially those
associated with industrialism, were being invoked
intentionally or unwittingly, to inhibit the drive to
develop poor countries as rapidly as possible.
Governments confronted by massive poverty and capital
scarcity did not want to accept responsibility for
expensive restrictions on industrial and agricultural
activities. The insensitive militancy of environmental
activists from Northern voluntary organizations also
contributed to an atmosphere of North/South tensions.
Also, much of the citizen activism in relation to the
governmental undertakings seemed overly confrontational.
Finally, the geopolitical dimension was evident at
Stockholm, especially in view of the exclusion of
environmental harm caused by war from the agenda, given
the sensitivities surrounding this concern that arose
from some of the tactics relied upon by the United States
in the Vietnam War.
But the idea of UN-sponsored global conferences took
off. Other conferences in the 1970s and 1980s were held
on population policy, on food, on human habitat, and on
women. Although somewhat less visible than the Stockholm
event, these conferences exhibited the virtues associated
with Stockholm and avoided some of the weaknesses, making
a special effort to take account of developmental
priorities of the South. And then came the 1990s, and a
series of highly orchestrated UN conferences were
arranged, with strong provision for participation by
global civil society. The Rio Conference on Environment
and Development held in 1992, twenty years after
Stockholm, was the most elaborate world conference ever
held, and managed to attract both more heads of state
than any prior international event and more civil society
activists. It also gave an explicit role to business
leaders, recognizing the relevance and importance of
market forces to environmental protection. Benefiting
from the report of the Brundtland Commission that had
been widely distributed within the UN System, the
North/South divide was significantly lessened. This was
signaled by adopting the name "environment and
development" for the conference as compared to the
Stockholm name of "human environment."(15) The
reconciling idea of "sustainable development" was widely
endorsed as the guiding concept, and it was understood
that "poverty" would be treated as a form of
"pollution."
A new normative framework was adopted in the form of
the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and
some progress was made on such broad issues as climate
change, biodiversity, and the protection of forests. The
Declaration, in comparison with that adopted in
Stockholm, does contain explicit reference to indigenous
peoples, women, and youth as constituencies with special
concerns and potential contributions relative to
environmental process. Also, Rio was sensitive to the
importance of followthrough, formulating an elaborate
action program in the form of Agenda 21 that included
cost estimates for each recommended course of action, as
well as establishing a Commission for Sustainable
Development with periodic meetings to monitor
implementation of the program of action.
But again there were problems. At Rio it was the rich
countries of the North that seemed most worried, fearing
that either their life style would be cramped or
criticized, or that they would be asked to pay most of
the costs for environmental cleanup. There was also the
feeling that civil society perspectives were being
"handled" rather than "addressed," and that arrangements
for participation were designed for "cooption" rather
than "dialogue." Yet again the main impression was one of
learning and policy impact, especially by media
attentiveness. The UN organized and sponsored several
other mega-conferences in the succeeding years: human
rights in Vienna (1993); population in Cairo (1994);
social summit in Copenhagen (1995) and women in Beijing
(1995); habitat in Istanbul (1996). All of these
conferences linked their efforts explicitly to
development, and each attracted major civil society
inputs. Indeed, the impact of civil society initiatives
at Cairo and Copenhagen challenged many governmental
perspectives both substantively and in terms of process.
As a result, there has been a backlash. UN conferences on
broad issues of global policy are not likely to occur in
the near future. The official explanation will be that
such conferences were "expensive jamborees" that
accomplished little, and were thus good targets for the
budget-slashers. My own interpretation of the backlash is
different, and stresses the extent to which the UN
conference arenas were losing their statist character,
and becoming "dangerous" experiments in global
democracy.
Whether such conferences will be held in the future,
and whether they will be inclusive of civil society and
market perspectives, is an important uncertainty about
the UN role early in the 21st century. Surely the need
persists for consciousness-raising and the provision of
broad normative frameworks useful for resolving more
specific controversies. And surely, the democratic spirit
of the times is not likely to exempt UN activities
indefinitely. But whether the present downsizing approach
can be effectively challenged in relation to the UN role
in providing the auspices for global conference diplomacy
is not at all clear at this point.
Toward a More Legitimate and Effective United
Nations
To simplify matters, reformist energies need to be
understood in relation to two overriding goals: a more
legitimate United Nations and a more effective United
Nations. The Organization, in general, will operate more
legitimately and appear to be doing so in relation to
three standards of assessment: (1) acting in accordance
with the United Nations Charter, including its broad
constitutional principles and objectives; (2) achieving
representativeness in relation to the peoples of the
world, particularly on the Security Council, and
operating in a manner that embodies democratic practices
of participation, transparency, and accountability; (3)
moving toward political independence in relation to the
most powerful geopolitical actors in the world, which
will depend on the avoidance of "double standards" in
responding to circumstances of conflict and emergency and
on staffing its bureaucracy with international civil
servants who possess integrity and competence.
The quest for UN effectiveness is a matter of ensuring
that the Organization has the capabilities and political
will to carry out its various missions.(16) At times, as
arguably in the Gulf War, effectiveness is achieved at
the expense of legitimacy. UN effectiveness is partly a
matter of money, but it is mainly a matter of achieving
the requisite degree of support from its members,
especially the permanent members of the Security Council.
The UN can only hope to be effective to the extent that
these members are in substantial agreement about specific
undertakings and overall organizational role, although
there are various opportunities for bargaining and
compromises if there is a commitment to effectiveness and
to the goals of humane global governance.
It is increasingly important in achieving legitimacy
and effectiveness for the UN to be strongly supported by
relevant sectors of global civil society and the most
influential media commentary and coverage. There is no
doubt that "the CNN factor" shapes perceptions of
legitimacy and effectiveness, not only for large parts of
the public, but also for many leaders. It is a subtle
matter as various political tendencies also use the media
to advance their particular agendas.
As stressed earlier, the outlook for significant
institutional reform does not appear to be bright at
present. Yet the future potential of the United Nations
System cannot begin to be realized without some
significant adjustment to changing global realities. In
brief, a United Nations created in 1945 to serve the
interests of the then largely Western group of states
that continued to govern many peoples by colonial title.
This world order has been significantly transformed by
the universality of participation by independent
sovereign states, by policy agendas shaped in response to
multiple forms of global interconnectedness, and by the
emergence of global civil society and of global market
forces that often manage to elude the regulatory
mechanisms of the state system.
Accordingly, it seems appropriate to offer a few
recommended institutional modifications despite an
appreciation that their attainment is not likely within
the short-run. At the same time, it is important not to
be captive of projective thinking, that measures future
possibilities by the present outlook. From such a
projective perspective, the movement against colonialism
would never have been entertained, nor the emancipation
of the countries of East Europe from Soviet dominion, nor
the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, nor the
political independence of East Timor. Defining what the
UN needs, as well as taking account of the current set of
circumstances, guides the following set of illustrative
recommendations.(17)
(1) Independent Financing. The idea of
separating UN funding to some extent from government
contributions has been around for a long time. Whether to
tax transnational financial transactions or some use of
the global commons or arms sales has also been debated
for years. The financing pressures on the UN in recent
years as a result of the non-payment of dues and
assessments provide an additional rationale for
restructuring UN financing arrangements at this time.
Also, the weakness of political will in humanitarian
settings suggests that an enhanced UN role in the future
depends in part on a financing structure that is
independent from P-5 control.
For these reasons, it is important to renew the
recommendation to seriously explore the prospect for
various alternative modes of partial independent
financing. Success here would both contribute to the
overall effectiveness of the UN System but would also be
understood as a loosening of the reins of political
control now exercised by the strongest member states.
Precisely for this reason, it is important to realize
that the issue of financing is less about money than
political control. Once this is realized, it makes plain
why the resistance of some governments is so intense, and
why only a mobilization of even stronger
counter-pressures of civil society in those same
countries is likely to make independent financing a
feasible project.
(2) Volunteer Peace Force. To enable more
reliable Security Council responses, especially in the
setting of humanitarian challenges of small or medium
scale, the establishment of a high quality UN Volunteer
Peace Force would be of great benefit. It would allow the
Organization to respond without expecting member states
to expose their citizens to loss of life. It would tend
to depoliticize such undertakings, and yet provide the UN
Security Council with a mechanism to extend rapidly
collective security responses to situations of severe
humanitarian emergency.
The character of such a Force, and its administrative
relation to the UN System would have to be worked out in
great detail. It would be an expensive undertaking if
done in a professionally responsible manner. The
coordination of control between the Security Council and
the Secretary General would be an important concern of
members if such an initiative moved beyond the proposal
stage. Again, major sovereign states are reluctant to
allow peacekeeping capabilities come into existence that
might not be subject to their political control. And as
with financing, the pressures from civil society will be
crucial to shape a setting in which sympathetic leaders
can accept some loss of sovereign authority. Of course,
the payoff for such states is a shift of responsibility
away from themselves in situations where the pressure to
act is great, but the absence of strategic interests
makes any substantial commitment difficult to
justify.
Despite practical obstacles, the case for a UN
Volunteer Force drawn from many countries seems strong at
this point. Resistance from P-5 governments, reluctant to
give up their current measure of control over UN
peacekeeping, is likely to persist, but it might
dissipate in due course, given disenchantment with
alternative approaches.
(3) Global Peoples Assembly. Modeled somewhat
on the European Parliament, and designed to give the
peoples of the world more meaningful opportunities for
participation in the UN System, it is proposed that a
Peoples Assembly would help to diminish the so-called
"democratic deficit" in the United Nations.(18) This new
organ could be structured to be a parallel body to that
of the General Assembly.(19) It would be the voice of
global civil society, providing a great testing ground
for the practice of global democracy.
Here, too, problems of organization and conception are
complex and opposition can be expected to be formidable.
The current Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has supported
the convening of a Peoples Millennium Assembly in the
year 2000. It is a low-priority project, to meet only on
a single occasion, but its advocacy expressed the
desirability of having the peoples of the world
participate more directly and democratically in the work
of the United Nations. At this point, it is uncertain
whether this Millennium Assembly will spark a movement to
achieve some more regular institutionalization, and if
so, on what basis.
There are some experiments along these lines that
suggest the operational feasibility of the idea. There
have been three Assemblies of the Peoples of the United
Nations held in alternate years in Perugia, Italy.
Delegates come from as many as 140 countries, their
participation financed by a coalition of municipalities
in Italy each of which takes responsibility for paying
travel and accommodation costs of one or more delegate
from a non-Western country. The result is a stimulating
confirmation of the extent to which such a democratizing
initiative brings to the surface a different set of
grievances and aspirations than those deriving from
inter-governmental or even NGO circles.
(4) Economic Security Council. One proposal
that has received prominent endorsement is the idea of
establishing an Economic Security Council.(20) Such a new
organ for the United Nations would acknowledge the
increasing importance of the economic dimensions of world
order, as well as the current insufficiency of
institutional arrangements for economic governance at the
global level. In part, such a proposal seeks to ensure
that the United Nations possesses an arena suitable for
the formation of global economic policy and capable of
providing regulatory authority as needed.
Perhaps, the most compelling rationale for an Economic
Security Council relates to security dimensions of the
world economy. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997
disclosed how abruptly the economic vulnerability of
countries in the South can result in massive suffering
for large proportions of the population. Indonesia,
probably the hardest hit of the Asian countries, was
confronted with a humanitarian catastrophe, with some 50%
of its population being pushed well below subsistence in
the months after brunt of the Asian Financial Crisis and
the prescribed IMF medicine was felt. An Economic
Security Council would be tasked with addressing the
social and environmental effects of world economic
developments.
Of course, the prospects for establishing an Economic
Security Council are not currently favorable. Rich
countries favor addressing global economic issues outside
the United Nations, and have established their own
arenas, including the Annual Economic Summit (G-7), the
World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization, among
others. It is likely that the Permanent Members of the
Security Council would regard the idea of an Economic
Security Council as a threat to their institutional
primacy. Also, the bargaining to construct an Economic
Security Council that took account of varying levels of
influence and yet was representative of the peoples of
the world would undoubtedly strain diplomatic
capabilities to their limits. Such strain would be
greater, still, if efforts were made to eliminate the
veto and ensure access for certain NGOs and private
sector representatives in the formal workings of the new
organ.
But the existence of practical and political obstacles
is no reason to bury an idea, whose realization could
bring great benefit to the global public good.
Conclusion
The full range of institutional adjustments that would
strengthen the capacity of the UN System to respond to
the range of challenges is beyond the scope of this
chapter. The proposals sketched were chosen for
illustrative purposes, and because they seemed responsive
to the most salient current weaknesses. Omitted was the
much discussed reform of the Security Council, both in
relation to membership and the exercise of the veto.
Until the Security Council incorporates the changes in
the composition of international society wrought by the
collapse of colonialism and the rise of non-Western
civilizations, the entire Organization will remain under
a shadow of anachronistic Euro-centrism. And yet, the
Charter is difficult to amend, making it easier for
countries with entrenched advantages to oppose needed
adjustments. In a sense, the inability to reform the
Security Council despite the magnitude of change in the
global setting is symbolic of the extent to which the
Charter framework reflecting the realities of 1945
hampers the effectiveness and legitimacy of the United
Nations at the start of the 21st century.
But the Charter has proved flexible in some respects,
and the overall role of the Organization has proved
invaluable for all members of international society. It
is notable that the UN membership now represents over 99%
of the people living in the world, and that no government
currently conceives of its interests as better served by
withdrawing from the United Nations. Such universality of
participation (leaving aside the special case of
Switzerland), is in contrast with selective membership
and withdrawal that undermined the League of Nations from
its inception in 1920.
No one knows what will prove feasible by way of reform
as it becomes evident that the impact of globalization is
profoundly changing perceptions, influence patterns, and
aspirational priorities, as well as altering the
perspectives and role of the sovereign state. The 1999
"Battle of Seattle," although directed at the World Trade
Organization, was directed against the overall pattern of
global governance associated with economic globalization.
Whether such protest was a flash-in-the-pan of global
consciousness or an expression of a rising challenge to
the manner by which the world is now organized, cannot
yet be foretold. Certainly one possibility is to bring
greater transparency and accountability into all aspects
of UN operations. In this regard, the effectiveness and
legitimacy of the UN seems likely to depend on whether it
funds suitable ways to incorporate representatives of
both global civil society and of global market forces
into its everyday operations. In an important sense, the
challenge of the first fifty years was centered on the
incorporation of non-Western states. For the next fifty
years the challenge will be to incorporate non-state
actors. The UN must meet this challenge, or it will find
its potential and actual influence ebbing away to other
policymaking arenas. Such an outlook should encourage a
boldness of imagination as a way of engaging world
citizenry, the media, and private and public sector
leaders in discussion about building a sustainable and
satisfying future for the peoples of the world as we
embark on a new century. Such a discussion is more
necessary than ever given the rise of non-Western
civilizations, making a dialogue of civilizations the
only viable alternative to a clash of civilization. And
what better focus for such an undertaking than building
the sort of United Nations that can be of benefit to all
peoples in the world.
ENDNOTES
(1) According to the UN Charter, Article 2(7), the
Organization was prohibited from intervening in matters
"essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of states."
This was understood to mean civil strife and conditions
of oppressive government. The only qualification of this
principle was the caveat that such a restriction of UN
authority "shall not prejudice the application of
enforcement measures under Chapter VII.
(2) For useful introductory overviews of the United
Nations System see Lawrence Ziring, Robert Riggs, and
Jack Plano, The United Nations: International
Organization and World Politics (Orlando, Florida:
Harcourt College Publishers, 3rd ed., 2000). Karen A.
Mingst and Margaret P. Karns, The United Nations in
the Post-Cold War Era (Boulder, Colorado: Westview,
1995). Also see Muthiah Alagappa and Takashi Inoguchi,
eds., International Security Management and the United
Nations (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1999) for
wide-ranging interpretation of UN role in a changing
global setting.
(3) See Mahbubul Haq, Reflections on Human
Development (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995); see also the annual volumes since 1991 containing
the Human Development Report of UNDP, published under the
imprint of Oxford University Press.
(4) See proposals to convert United Nations into a
form of limited world government in Grenville Clark and
Louis B. Sohn, World Peace Through World Law
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 3rd rev. ed.,
1966); for general theoretical inquiry see Cornelius F.
Murphy, Jr., Theories of World Governance
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
1999).
(5) See Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, and Marc A.
Stern, eds., Global Public Goods: International
Cooperation in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
(6) E.g. Bruce Rich, Mortgaging the Future: The
World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis
of Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Robin
Broad (with John Cavanagh), Plundering Paradise: The
Struggle for the Environment in the Philippines
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
(7) See Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink,
Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in
International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998). Thomas Risse-Kappen, ed.,
Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State
Actors, Domestic Structures, and International
Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995). Jackie Smith and others, eds., Transnational
Social Movements and World Politics: Solidarity beyond
the State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press,
1997).
(8) Falk, On Humane Governance: Toward a New Global
Politics (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995).
(9) David Held, Democracy and the Global Order:
From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Paul
Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic
Politics (SUNY Press, 1996); also R. Falk and Andrew
Strauss, "On the Creation of a Global Peoples Assembly:
Legitimacy and the Power of Popular Sovereignty,"
unpublished Ms., 1999.
(10) See Declaration on the Establishment of a NIEO
and Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, in
Weston and others, eds., Supplement of Basic
Documents (St Paul, MN: West Publishing Co., 3rd rev.
ed., 1997) 705-16.
(11) See Falk, "A Half Century of Human Rights,"
Australian Journal of International Affairs, 52:
255-72 (1998).
(12) GA Res. 1803, 14 Dec. 1962; see also GA Res.
3171, 17 Dec 1973.
(13) See Art. 25,28 of Universal Declaration and
Covenant, 16 Dec 1966.
(14) 4 Dec 1986.
(15) Our Common Future (Oxford University
Press, 1987).
(16) For comprehensive proposals see Our Global
Neighborhood, Report of the Commission on Global
Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
esp. 225-302; Erskine Childers and Brian Urquhart,
Renewing the United Nations System (Uppsala,
Sweden: Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 1994).
(17) Note that the most ambitious orientation toward
reform, the establishment of a world government, is not
even considered here. Such an exclusion is justified on
practical grounds. There is no significant support for
such a transformative move either at the level of
grassroots or among elite opinion. At the same time,
there are visionaries who continue to believe that the
integrative trends of world society and the
disintegrative dangers of a total ecological or
geopolitical collapse make world government possible,
necessary, and desirable. One such carefully presented
proposal is that of James A. Yunker, World Union on
the Horizon: The Case for Supranational Federation
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993); see also
a range of views on these issues in Errol E. Harris and
James A. Yunker, eds., Toward Genuine Global
Governance: Critical Reactions to 'Our Global
Neighborhood' (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999); for the
more influential ideas favoring "global governance" as a
functional and normative goal that avoids the feasibility
and bureaucratic pitfalls of "world government," see
James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds.,
Governance without Government: Order and Change in
World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992) and the range of contributions to T.V. Paul
and John A. Hall, International Order and the Future
of World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
(18) See Richard Falk and Andrew Strauss, paper, &
IHT articles; also Our Global Neighborhood Report of
the Independent Commission on Global Governance (New
York: Oxford, 1995).
(19) The GPA would be started on an informal,
experimental basis, with an annual session of one month.
One approach would be to allow each member of the United
Nations, on the basis of population, to establish a
democratic procedure for selecting 1-10 delegates.
Another approach would be to ask the Nobel Prize
Committee to convene a panel of Nobel Peace Prize winners
to designate a corporate body of 300 delegates
representing the peoples of the world. Funding could be
arranged on a decentralized basis taking account of
income levels. As with the European Parliament, the early
activities of the GPA would not have lawmaking effects,
but as the experiment proceeded, a gradual accretion of
functions and powers could be expected to occur.
(20) Jacques Delors elaborated his support for this
new UN organ during his keynote address to the United
Nations Seminar on "Values and Market Economies," Centre
de Conférence Internationales, Paris, France,
19-20 January 2000.
©
TFF & the author 2002
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