Reforming
the United Nations:
A Global Civil Society Perspective
By
Richard
Falk, TFF Associate
September 23, 2005
I. The
Background of UN Reform
As portrayed in the media, the
issue of UN reform is often reduced in public discussion
to the enlargement of the permanent membership of the
Security Council to make it more representative of the
power structure of states in the world as of 2005. There
is no doubt that this issue has a significant substantive
and symbolic importance in showing the capacity of the UN
to adjust to changes in the relations among states, and
especially to give states that were either defeated in
World War II or situated in then colonized Third World
regions a proper place at the head table of the United
Nations.
This persisting preoccupation also
illustrates the disabling inability of the membership to
agree upon a solution to the challenge of reform despite
a major push in the period leading up to the millennium
in 2000. These difficulties apply even to basic reforms
that were almost universally accepted as necessary. More
recently, it has been recognized that the essential
agenda of UN reform runs far deeper and is far wider than
an expanded membership for the Security Council, and
poses decisive challenges to and opportunities for global
civil society in these early years of the 21st
century.
Of course, the United Nations is
used to designate a complex assemblage of distinct
actors, organizations, programs, and a wide range of
undertakings. It is a complex system, and has grown more
complex during its existence as additional goals and
functions have been adopted. To talk about the reform of
the United Nations is rather ambiguous in its intended
meaning.
In this essay reform is understood
to refer to basic adjustments needed to ensure continuing
relevance to the global problematique. But reform can
also be properly understood as pertaining to changes
throughout the UN System, including with regard to the
activities of the various specialized agencies and the
organizational interplay of the various actors.
Rethinking the role of the Secretary General, and of
leadership within the United Nations, as well as of the
principal organs, the Security Council and the General
Assembly, are daunting tasks, each of which is complex.
The agenda of UN reform can only be touched upon
impressionistically, and in light of the apparent
priorities of global civil society, which center more and
more on the democratization of global political
spaces.
The problem of
presentations of the UN
There is also the highly contested
terrain of representation as it pertains to the United
Nations. The UN is represented variously by its most
ardent supporters as a straight road to peace, justice,
and global governance. The UN is often represented by its
fiercest critics as a dream palace of illusion, as 'a
dangerous place' where 'irresponsible majorities' rule
the roost, and as a site of irrelevance when it comes to
the critical challenges of global security and the world
economy. This spectrum of representations explains why it
seems often impossible to achieve a consensus as to the
content and character of global reform.
Both clusters of representations,
the favorable and the critical, tend to proceed from the
premise that the UN is the boldest experiment ever with
respect to the establishment of institutional authority
that challenges the primacy of the sovereign state, thus
overlooking the extent to which the boldest initiatives
of this sort should be associated with either the
European Union or the triad of organizations( IMF, World
Bank, and WTO). The first two are nominally linked to the
UN, but operationally autonomous, while the WTO was
deliberately established with no formal link to the UN.
At this stage of history even
governmental critics treat the UN as a sufficiently
important arena for achieving the legitimation of
policies that there is rarely advocated the policy option
of withdrawal. But to acknowledge this importance is not
the same as a shared commitment to a stronger or more
effective Organization, the goals of genuine UN reform.
It is this encounter in the realm of representation, and
related imaginaries of world order, that has made
reformist efforts in the UN setting so often come to
grief. Such a realization of these difficulties erodes
commitments to reform, and suggests the need for 'a
politics of reform for the UN' on the part of those who
believe that the UN has the potential to contribute more
to peace, justice, equity, and sustainability in the
world.
Kofi Annan: "The
UN has come to a fork in the road..."
The profound character of the
reformist imperative was most dramatically articulated by
UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, when in a September
2003 speech to the General Assembly he said:
"We have come
to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less
decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations
was founded. I believe the time is ripe for a hard
look at fundamental issues, and at the structural
changes that may be needed in order to strengthen
[the Organization]. History is a harsh
judge: it will not forgive us if we let this moment
pass."
In effect, the Secretary General
was saying the UN must change to survive and flourish as
the institutional centerpiece of hope for a better world.
Such a call, made beneath the shadow of the controversial
Iraq War undertaken by its leading member without the
benefit of a mandate from the Security Council, and in a
manner so defiant of the UN Charter that Annan had
himself publicly declared it 'illegal.' The invasion of
Iraq violates the core conception of the United Nations
as an organization dedicated, above all, to the
prevention of war (allowing only a narrow exception for
wars of self-defense) based on an unconditional
prohibition on unilateral recourse to war.
The UN was also under a related
somewhat earlier dark shadow cast by the obvious
implications of the 9/11 attacks on the United States,
indicating the menacing rise of non-state political
actors and the related inability, already acknowledged in
the 1990s, to treat crises internal to states as beyond
the purview of the UN, and as raising difficult questions
about the nature of wars undertaken in the name of
self-defense.
Such a realization of the need for
fundamental adjustment in doctrine and practice was also
reinforced by the rise of international human rights as a
challenge to the territorial supremacy of the sovereign
state. Additionally, on several earlier occasions, most
notably in the course of talks given at the World
Economic Forum at Davos, Annan had indicated the
importance for the United Nations of finding ways to make
its structure and operations more receptive to the
participation of both global market forces and civil
society actors, thereby acknowledging that the 1945 image
of world order as constituted by sovereign states was no
longer adequate as the foundation for global governance
in an era of multidimensional globalization.
And so there was little doubt that
the Secretary General's arresting words about a fork in
the road were a timely acknowledgement that the UN needed
substantial reforms if it were to adapt to the changing
needs of the 21st century, as well as fulfill its
potential contributions to the widespread calls for
democratic forms of global governance. [See David
Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative
to the Washington Consensus (Polity,
2004)]
Realist and
idealist aspects of the UN-civil society
relations
The relation of civil society
actors to the United Nations has been complex and
problematic from the time of founding. There is no doubt
that the peoples of the world, and their associations and
representatives, who hoped for a more peaceful, orderly,
and humane world looked upon the establishment of the
United Nations as a historic positive step, and believed
that over time it would encourage the emergence of a
warless world governed by the rule of law, especially
with respect to the use of force to resolve international
disputes. The UN was seen in 1945 as an idealist dream
coming true, and as offering the best prospect of curbing
the international behavior of sovereign states.
The long strategic and ideological
conflict associated with the cold war often resulted in
stalemates within the Organization, and suggested that
the important developments in the area of peace and
security were carried on by traditional modes of
statecraft. It also became painfully clear that the
voices of civil society, although acknowledged as
formally relevant, were not heeded in the conduct of the
central activities of the UN. The UN was, as clearly
intended by its founding governments, a club of, by, and
for states, and dominated by the strongest states,
suggesting the persistence of geopolitics as the
foundation of world order in the decades following upon
World War II.
No feature of the UN better
expressed this geopolitical character of the Organization
than the veto power given to the permanent members (P-5),
which effectively acknowledged the inability of the UN to
address threats to global security generated by the most
powerful states. Such a constitutional limit on authority
was both reassurance that sovereign rights would not be
brushed aside by an attempt of a major state to establish
a global tyranny under UN auspices and a warning to
leading states that they could not count on the UN to
uphold their vital interests, including their
self-defense. This realist image of the UN sat
uncomfortably over the years with lingering idealist
expectations, accounting for both disappointments about
the failures to implement the Charter, especially in the
setting of collective security, as well as an insistence
by peace and justice forces that all members live
according to the guidelines of the Charter.
Throughout the period of the cold
war civil society actors increasingly disregarded the
United Nations, concentrating their energies on issue
areas such as human rights, environment, social justice
or shaped movements opposing the Vietnam War or building
the worldwide anti-apartheid campaign. In the 1970s and
the 1980s, civil society energies led to the emergence of
both robust anti-nuclear movements and anti-authoritarian
networks that proclaimed their belief in 'détente
from below,' joining activists East and West in
collaborative undertakings that defied the rigid
boundaries of the cold war, epitomized the Berlin Wall.
[Kaldor & Falk; Keck & Sikkunk, Activists
Across Borders]
What is notable about these
developments is that they took shape almost entirely
outside of the United Nations. At the same time, some
NGOs and private citizens were advising government
delegation, and providing them with valuable information,
behind the scenes at major lawmaking conferences
sponsored by the United Nations, particularly assisting
understaffed and inexperienced Third World countries to
be better informed about proposed treaty arrangement
affecting their interests. One of the first of these
settings that demonstrated the invaluable informal
contributions of these NGOs was the decade long
negotiations under UN auspices that produced the Law of
the Sea Convention in 1982 that has provided the world
with an impressive, if imperfect, public order of the
oceans.
Another instance, although
technically outside the formal purview of the United
Nations (with the International Red Cross as the formal
sponsor) was the effort during the 1970s to supplement
the Geneva Conventions of 1949 setting forth
International Humanitarian Law by addressing problems
associated with civil wars. Without the informational
resources provided by NGOs and individuals recruited from
civil society, Third World delegations would have been
overwhelmed and easily manipulated by the negotiating
positions and pressure tactics relied upon by leading
countries, especially the United States.
From Stockholm
1971 onwards the relationship matured
It was only, however, with the
onset of global conferences on policy issues, pioneered
and prefigured by the Stockholm Conference on the Human
Environment in 1971, that the UN became a major arena for
transnational civil forces, both as a source of pressure
exerted on inter-governmental activities and as an
occasion for networking and organizing. Unlike the
earlier low profile roles intended to disguise the
influence of the NGOs in intergovernmental negotiations,
here the intention was primarily to exert highly visible
influence on the most powerful states and to gain
attention for dissident views in the global media
assembled to cover the event, although the quiet NGO
roles of providing information and analyzing policy
options continued to be an invaluable equalizer on such
occasions.
This dynamic reached a climax in
the 1990s with a series of high-profile UN conferences
that featured strong and vivid participation by civil
society actors, and the early articulation by
commentators on the international scene of the presence
of new political formation identified as 'global civil
society.'
The very success of this informal
penetration of UN processes induced a backlash on the
part of several leading governments, sensing a loss of
control by states of the policy-forming process, and
making the holding of such conferences politically
difficult. Representatives of large states described
these conferences as 'spectacles' and as 'a waste of
money and time,' but the real objection was their
showcasing of the vitality of civil society actors and
networks that so often put governments on the defensive
with respect to global policy debates.
In effect, civil society actors
were creative in their discovery of ways to make
effective use of the United Nations to promote their
aspirations, but the statist and geopolitical composition
of the UN, which endures, also displayed its capacity to
hit back, to control the purse strings of global
diplomacy, and essentially to shut the off civil society
access with respect to its major undertakings.
The facilitating
Secretary-General and the recent - disappointing statist
- reports
The Secretary General, as political
leader and moral authority figure, has struggled to
balance the contending forces and aspirations of the
Organization. To gain help and support he constituted two
prominent panels to study reform prospects, and to
deliver reports in 2004. The first of these panels was
composed of 'Eminent Persons,' chaired by Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, former President of Brasil, and was
charged with looking into to the relations between the
United Nations and civil society. It issued its report of
June 7, 2004. ["We the peoples: civil society, the
United Nations, and global governance," Report of the
Panel of Eminent Persons on United Nations-Civil Society
Relations, A/58/817] It covers the subject-matter
comprehensively, offering 30 proposals for reform.
The second initiative was charged
with reconsidering the role of the United Nations with
respect to peace and security, was similarly constituted,
chaired by Anand Panyarachun, former Prime Minister of
Thailand, submitted its report on December 4, 2004 to the
Secretary General. ["A more secure world: Our Shared
Responsibility," Report of the Secretary-General's
High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change," UN
Publications, 2004].
This latter report is exclusively
dedicated to the substantive issues associated with the
current global setting, and does not directly acknowledge
the role or significance of global civil society, but its
language and approach does reflect to some degree civil
society perspectives, including especially its call for
reconfiguring security as 'human security' rather than as
either 'national security' or 'collective security.' At
the same time, both panels were chaired and composed of
individuals whose qualifications were based on their
statist credentials, having held high positions in
governments or inter-governmental institutions, and the
recommendations for reform are sensible, but not bold or
imaginative. The reports also reflect pressures to be
geopolitically credible and balanced.
For instance, the most interesting
and widely noticed discussion in the High-level Panel on
Security is its acknowledgement that anticipatory
self-defense may be justifiable in a post-9/11 world, but
that the legitimacy of such a claim depends on Security
Council authorization, thereby acknowledging the
substantive merits of the Bush Doctrine (of preemptive
war) while reaffirming the UN procedural role in
identifying appropriate circumstances. Credibility with
civil society audiences is less crucial, but not entirely
irrelevant to the prospects for exerting influence.
In the background is the question
of whether civil society actors should devote their
energies and resources to this debate on UN reform, or
concentrate their efforts on grassroots contributions to
human betterment. This is an old debate that revives the
view that the civil society effort to shape a consensus
on UN reform via the report of an independent
international commission led nowhere, and was largely
ignored within the United Nations itself. [The report
was published under the title Our Global Neighborhood
(Oxford, 1995) on behalf of the Commission on Global
Governance.] The issue of UN reform overlaps with and
is intimately related to discourses on 'global
governance.' - examples include Falk, On Humane Global
Governance; Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order
(Princeton, 2004); Amitai Etzioni, From Empire to
Community: A New Approach to International Relations
(Palgrave, 2004); David Held, Democracy and the Global
Order (Polity, 1995).]
It is notable and appropriate that
the Global Civil Society 2004/5 features as its lead
contribution an essay by Kenneth Anderson and David Rieff
that counsels international NGOs to give up the
pretensions associated with claiming the existence of
'global civil society' and stop trying to play a role in
the construction of global governance. In their words,
"..international NGOs should give up their claims to
represent global civil society, give up their dreams of
representing the peoples of the world&emdash;indeed,
devote fewer of their resources to advocacy and more time
and care to the actual needs of their actual
constituencies, and re-establish their claims of
expertise and competence." [26-39, at 36]
Such an admonition can be heard
either as a rather sinister message to get out of the way
of a resilient geopolitically administered world order or
merely as realist counsel to civil society actors to
focus their efforts and resources in ways that ensure
greater effectiveness. [The advice is rendered more
controversial, and in my view dubious, by the authors'
insistence that if international NGOs, and their
intellectual spokespersons and allies continue to
criticize the American role in the post-9/11 world it
would be 'the surest' way to guarantee the 'irrelevance'
of civil society perspectives and values. At 37-38.]
Such a direction of advice would suggest that civil
society actors have little or no part to play in shaping
the debate on UN reform, or more generally, on the future
shape of global governance, but must content themselves
with services to humanity performed in the niches of
relief work and by mounting grassroots protests directed
at particular projects.
Informal reforms
- examples that have worked well
There is a final preliminary issue
bearing on the nature of 'reform' within the UN context.
It should be understood that the basic reformist process
has been informal, continuous, and internal to the UN
System, filling in gaps by practice and reinterpreting
the text of Charter provisions by changing values and
norms. This reflects, above all, the difficulty of
achieving formal explicit changes due to the cumbersome
character of the amendment procedure and a result of the
political obstacles blocking the formation of a requisite
consensus, especially among the P-5. [Article 108 of
the UN Charter requires a 2/3s vote of the General
Assembly that is then "ratified in accordance with their
respective constitutional processes by two thirds of the
Members of the United Nations, including all the
permanent members of the Security Council.]
The informal process of reform has
many important examples. Already in the 1950s, the
Security Council found a way to circumvent the difficulty
of confronting the prospect of blockage due to the Soviet
boycott (prompted by the failure to accredit the
Communist government in Beijing to represent China)
during the Korean War. Article 27(3) requires that
decisions of the Security Council on substantive issues
be supported by nine members, "including the concurring
votes of the permanent members..." A common sense reading
of this text would suggest that absence or abstention
prevents a Security Council decision, but the practice
established the precedent that the Council can decide if
the permanent members do not cast a negative vote, which
is quite a reform of the veto power as expressed in the
Charter provision.
The other potential way to
circumvent a veto was established by The Uniting for
Peace Resolution, which gave the General Assembly the
capacity to recommend action in the peace and security
context if the Security Council was gridlocked by the
veto, which was also adopted in the setting of the Korean
War and based on cold war geopolitics in the 1950s, which
gave the West an assured majority in the General
Assembly. [Uniting for Peace Resolution, GA Res.
377A, 3 Nov. 1950]
In a sense, the Uniting for Peace
approach was discreetly abandoned by the West as soon as
it became apparent that the United States and the West
might invoke the veto, and that there occurred a loss of
assured majorities in the General Assembly due to
expanded membership of formerly colonized
countries.
A second example is the significant
development of coercive peacemaking under Chapter VI of
the UN Charter during the tenure of Dag Hammarskjöld
in the 1960s, described at the time as an 'innovation'
being neither prescribed nor proscribed by the Charter,
but useful in dealing with situations other than
warmaking, addressed in Chapter VII, that called for UN
peacekeeping.
A third example of increasing
importance since the end of the cold war, is the
narrowing of the significance and scope of the
prohibition on the UN in Article 2(7) to refrain from
intervention "in matters that are essentially within the
domestic jurisdiction of sovereign states." Such a
conception of Westphalian deference to territorial
sovereignty reflected the ethos of 1945, but as civil
wars became internationalized and as acute violations of
human rights, particularly 'ethnic cleansing' and
genocide, became challenges to the organized
international community, the UN non-intervention norm was
gradually qualified. This process reached a climax in the
period after the Kosovo War in 1999, and produced a
doctrine of humanitarian intervention rationalized as 'a
responsibility to protect.' [See Responsibility to
Protect, Report of the International Commission on
Intervention and StateSovereignty (International Research
Development Centre, 2001); see also the report of the
Independent International Commission on Kosovo, Kosovo
Report (Oxford, 2000), especially
163-198.]
A final unconsummated instance of
reform by interpretation, practice, experience, and
reasonableness relates to the High-level Panel on
Security's recommended expansion of the idea of
self-defense beyond the image in the Charter language
that would appear to rule out anticipatory claims.
[Article 51 appears to limit claims by the words "if
an armed attacks occurs," and although this restrictive
language has long been eroded by state practice and by
the commentary of international law experts, it has not
been directly challenged as by the recent Panel until
now.] As suggested above, it represents a
geopolitical compromise that is unlikely to be accepted
by the current American political leadership, or even
possibly by the opposition that in the last presidential
election affirmed that the United States would not await
UN authorization to pursue its security interests.
What is most relevant here is that
the High-level Panel recognized the need for adjustment
with respect to this core idea in the Charter, offered a
practical suggestion for closing the gap between legal
rules and security threats, and explicitly declared in
its report that it was not necessary to amend the
language of the Charter even when addressing this
fundamental matter of discretion to use international
force.
From the foregoing it becomes
evident that while the case for reform is strong,
political obstacles often make formal adjustments by way
of amendments difficult, if not impossible. Further, that
the poster child of reform, restructuring the Security
Council with respect to membership, size, and
availability of the veto, does depend on a formal
amendment, but it is also made problematic by an absence
of agreement among members as to the specifics of the
reform measure. And finally, that significant reform
initiatives can proceed by way of practice and
interpretation, which has enabled the UN throughout its
history to respond with an impressive degree of
flexibility to changes in the global settings.
Is the UN and
civil society inherently beneficial to the
world?
There is often implicit in
discussions of both the United Nations and global civil
society that their influence is inherently beneficial for
the pursuit of widely shared world order goals associated
with what I have called elsewhere 'human global
governance.' [Falk, On Humane Global Governance
(Polity, 1995); The Declining World Order: America's
Neo-Imperial World Order (Routledge, 2004)] In both
instances, such an assumption is misleading. Any
political actor, however benign its mandate, can be
twisted by pressures to pursue policies that corrupt and
deform. The United Nations has not always adhered to its
lofty goals, as when for instance it persisted for twelve
years with a program of sanctions despite evidence of
severe harm to the civilian population of Iraq in the
aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Even if civil society
actors are restricted to those that affirm positive world
order values, the initiatives taken by a given actor or
individual may be corrupt, not reflective of democratic
procedures, and regressive in impact. Therefore, a
critical posture needs to be adopted by those that
purport to discuss the United Nations from the
perspective of global civil society.
The interest of civil society in a
robust United Nations that is strengthened in response to
globalization and the various issues relating to 'new
wars' is taken as a premise in the discussion that
follows. In other words, the focus is placed on the UN
System, as well as on accommodating the participation of
global civil society within a structure that was made by
and for sovereign states.
II. A
Reformist Perspective
How should the 'citizenry' of
global civil society, acknowledging multiple identities,
think about the reform of the United Nations? This
overall questions gives rise to two different concerns:
first, how can the United Nations as a generally
benevolent element in world order be strengthened to help
achieve a more peaceful, fair, sustainable, and just life
for the peoples of the planet, considered as individual
subjects and as members of various communities? And
secondly, how the role and worldviews of global civil
society be made more effective within the United Nations,
including the participation of its representatives in the
work of the Organization? Responses to these questions
are made against the background of the discussion in the
prior section.
The magnitude of the changes in the
structures and norms of the world have altered so much
since 1945 that it is tempting to suggest that the United
Nations inscribes within its multitude of actors and
operations a set of arrangements that no longer reflect
the fundamental characteristics of world order, and that
it might be best to redesign a world organization that
takes proper account of the emergence of global civil
society, of market forces, and of radical shifts in
relative power among states and regions. That is, UN
reformism is not responsive to the real challenge of
adjustment, which is structural transformation.
Such an outlook makes sense from
the apolitical perspective of pure reason, but it is not
worth seriously entertaining, as starting over is at this
point completely beyond the horizons of possibility, and
such advocacy by civil society actors would exhibit a
spirit of futility. It is necessary to work to strengthen
the United Nations as it has evolved over the course of
its history. Such an effort is difficult enough if
ambitiously conceived, and may turn out to be also
impossible, as it must overcome the resistance of
entrenched interests to reforms that are otherwise widely
supported and seem sensible.
For instance, enlarging the
permanent membership of the Security Council is opposed
in some governmental quarters because it will allegedly
produce a more unwieldy body less able to respond
effectively to crises. At the same time, recasting the
composition of membership within the scope of the present
frame of fifteen members seems virtually impossible due
to the refusal of Britain and France to agree to a
consolidation of European membership, which would dilute
their independent roles as permanent members.
In effect, widely needed and
generally accepted reforms are often blocked by the
entrenched vested interests of particular members,
especially those enjoying veto power, in retaining
outmoded features. This nationalist myopia can often
outweigh the more general interest of all states in
enhancing UN effectiveness and legitimacy. The Security
Council expansion debate is helpful in illuminating these
various aspects of the UN reform process.
The establishment of the UN in the
first place was only feasible because of the historical
climate that existed immediately after World War II
strongly supported steps at the global level to prevent
the recurrence of strategic warfare in the form of a
third world war. This shared resolve reflected the
enormous casualties of the war just ended, as well as the
shock effect of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. It is
also reflected the capacity of the victorious powers in
the war to impose their will on the post-war world.
Political space existed, but only for a short time, to
institute a new type of global architecture that were
intended to build upon and correct the deficiencies of
the League of Nations that had emerged after World War I
in a somewhat analogous political climate.
The structures embodied in the
United Nations, even under these favorable circumstances,
were shaped by the persisting primacy of state
sovereignty as the constitutive principle of world order.
As a result, the United Nations as established fell far
short of what would be needed to realize the aspirations
announced in the Charter, but what was agreed upon in San
Francisco would itself have not been possible only a year
or so later as the hard lines of tension and distrust
associated with the cold war began to define the new
geopolitical condition of bipolarity. Had the world
leaders not seized the moment in 1945 it is rather
doubtful that the United Nations would have been
established in any form, and world order would have been
entirely based on regional groupings of states and
traditional alliances.
And the period following the cold
war is no more favorable to UN reform despite the
disappearance of strategic conflict and ideological
bipolarity that had earlier blocked agreements associated
with strengthening the United Nations. In some ways this
is surprising, and mainly reflects what might be best
described as the imperial tendencies of the United
States, as well as the neo-liberal orientations of the
main managers of the world economy who adhered to the
so-called 'Washington consensus,' as modified over the
years.
In effect, these characteristics of
the global setting meant that leaders from the North were
reluctant to entrust global policy to the United Nations,
preferring either unilateral geopolitics managed from
Washington, or arenas removed from Third World influence
such as the G-8 annual economic summits or the annual
meetings of World Economic Forum at Davos.
Obstacles should
not obscure the potentials of the United
Nations
These obstacles to needed UN reform
are serious, but they should not obscure the actual and
potential roles of the United Nations in promoting goals
that accord with the dominant viewpoints of global civil
society. The existence of a global organization with
nearly universal membership of states creates a framework
for dialogue and initiative that exerts a significant
impact on the media and on world public opinion. Such
universality sustained now for sixty years contrasts with
the experience of the League, where leading states, such
as the United States, never joined, and important
countries withdrew their membership out of disgust, such
as the Soviet Union.
The UN Charter, together with
lawmaking treaties that bind all governments, provides an
authoritative framework for judging whether contested
action by a state is consistent with international law,
and this is of decisive importance for articulating and
unifying the global voices of civil society. The
mobilization of opposition to the Iraq War, climaxing in
the February 15, 2003 worldwide demonstrations against
the war were greatly facilitated by the existence of the
UN norms and by the failure of the Security Council to
endorse the proposed US-led invasion of Iraq.
The UN has provided crucial support
for some of the leading projects of global civil society
including decolonization and self-determination,
anti-apartheid, democracy, development, human rights,
humanitarian intervention, accountability for
international crimes, peacekeeping, environmental
protection, and consciousness raising with respect to
such issues as demographic pressures, poverty,
joblessness, and transnational crime, social and economic
justice.
In approaching the subject-matter
of UN reform from a global civil society perspective, it
is helpful to distinguish horizontal from vertical
reforms. Horizontal reforms are associated with
adjustments at the inter-governmental level of
participation by sovereign states, currently the only
members of the Organization. The expansion of the
Security Council is a prototype example of a horizontal
reform, making the system more responsive to the
relations among sovereign states.
Such reforms are not irrelevant by
any means to civil society to the extent that anything
that makes the UN more effective and legitimate helps
realize a central goal of a more humane and reliable
approach to global governance depends on the appropriate
participation of states. At the same time, the most
direct concerns of civil society are associated with
vertical reforms, taking account of other actors and
social forces than states reflecting the growing
obsolescence of any system of global governance that
relies exclusively on a Westphalian conception of world
order.
Thus, the remainder of this essay
will be mainly devoted to exploring this vertical
approach to UN reform, but will devote some attention to
the proposed direction of horizontal reforms touching on
interests of global civil society, especially as affected
by the proposed recommendations of the
Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on
Security.
III.
Bringing Global Civil Society Into the UN: Proposals and
Prospects for Vertical Reform
There is no doubt that one of the
major trends in world politics since 1945 is the complex
and contradictory rise of non-state actors as
participants in world order. This rise has been
celebrated in certain circles as crucial for a positive
view of the human future, and bemoaned in others as the
onset of global chaos, being prominently described by
some influential commentators as an "age of terrorism."
All along Third World perspectives
within the UN in relation to the right of development
were resisted by the North as being essentially
anti-capitalist. This resistance expressed itself by
efforts within the UN to marginalize certain
institutional influences, for instance, UNCTAD (UN
Conference on Trade and Development), ILO, and others. It
also expressed itself through the successful effort of
the United States to terminate altogether the UN Center
of Information of World Corporations in 1991, apparently
a move that was demanded by Washington as the price for
supporting the selection of Boutros Boutros Ghali as
Secretary General. In other words, to the extent that
civil society activism, reinforcing Third World outlooks
at the UN, was seen as oppositional to the precepts of a
neo-liberal world economy, it was regarded as a threat to
the sort of 'club' that some of the leading states wanted
the UN to remain.
Contrasts in the
treatment of corporations and civil society organisations
Kofi Annan has tried to mediate
between these contradictory tendencies. He has
consistently during his tenure as Secretary General
called for the incorporation of civil society
perspectives, as well as global market perspectives, into
the operations of the United Nations. Annan has also
given full recognition to the challenges posed by
non-state transnational terrorism and crime, particularly
in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The membership of
the United Nations, although somewhat divided, has been
able to find spaces for multinational corporations to
participate in diverse ways: by receiving funds for
specific programs, by establishing advisory bodies drawn
from the world of business (as in relation to
environmental policy), by creating a global compact that
allows companies to agree voluntarily to pledge adherence
to international standards bearing on human rights, labor
practices, and environmental protection.
By contrast, the informal efforts
of global civil society to participate in UN activities
has been treated by the mainstream media as
confrontational, especially with respect to global policy
conferences such as the Copenhagen Social Summit (1995)
and the Durban Conference on Racism (2001). These
concerns about the outlook of global civil society were
confirmed for conservative statist and economistic forces
by the street demonstrations at UN events, starting with
the opposition to WTO December 1999 meetings in Seattle.
The visibility of the non-state presence, the
articulation of demands that appeared critical of and
hostile toward corporate globalization and American
geopolitical leadership produced an anti-global civil
society backlash. This found tangible expression in
efforts to eliminate UN arenas where civil society voices
and networking were taking place, especially the large
conferences on major global policy issues.
The Cardoso
Panel
In the spirit of Annan's fork in
the road speech UN reform needed to explore, among other
topics, that of facilitating a better connection between
global civil society and the Organization. As mentioned
earlier, in 2003 Annan established "A Panel of Eminent
Persons on United Nations-Civil Society Relations" under
the chairmanship of Fernando Henrique Cardoso
(hereinafter referred to as the Cardoso Panel). The
Cardoso Panel Report emphasizes intangible encouragements
to civil society by way of calls to the UN System to
consult more with multiple constituencies additional to
governments affected by policy and to establish a spirit
of engagement at the level of international institutions
and national governments. [Cardoso Panel Report,
A/58/817 (2004)].
Among the 30 proposals set forth in
some detail none is of major consequence, although there
is a motif of soft advocacy on behalf of greater global
civil society participation as integral to a more
effective United Nations in the future. Proposal 4 is
indicative of the approach taken, one mindful of
geopolitical skepticism while still promoting a more
positive future for civil society activities within the
frame of the United Nations.
The language of the proposal is
revealing: "The United Nations should retain the global
conference mechanism but use it sparingly to address
major emerging policy issues" (italics added) in
circumstances where public understanding and opinions is
important as the basis for "concerted global action."
Further, that "[t]he participation of civil
society and other constituencies should be planned in
collaboration with their networks." Here the word
'planned' acknowledges statist concerns with spontaneous
or uncontrolled forms of participation.
There is also a conscious effort to
portray the relations between civil society and the
private sector in positive terms based on collaborative
action via the embrace of ideas about 'partnerships,' the
Global Compact, and the establishment of a new Office of
Constituency Engagement and Partnerships (Proposal 24)
that would include "a civil society unit" and "the Global
Compact Office," as well as an "Elected Representatives
Liaison Unit" (to connect with parliamentary
representatives, thereby giving national democracy a
global reach), a "Partnership Development Unit"
(incorporating efforts to foster private sector
partnerships), and the secretariat of the recently
established "Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues."
This is a catchall bureaucratic
consolidation that draws inspiration from trendy ideas of
the 1990s, including 'stakeholder democracy' as a
self-conscious way of acknowledging the multiplicity of
constituencies affected by private and public policy
decisions and of new modalities of networking as creating
connections between constituencies that might otherwise
be devoting their energies to adversarial activities.
[See Anne-Marie Slaughter, on the reshaping of global
policy formation and implementation by networks that
disaggregate the state as unitary actor]
What is missing from the Cardoso
Report are bold proposals that would give global civil
society and its representatives an assured and distinct
role in future UN activities. The reliance on
consultation and exhortation to engage civil society is
not likely to produce relations of trust or to establish
significant channels of influence. The Cardoso Report as
a whole, despite its consoling rhetoric with respect to
the significance of civil society, can be read as more of
an effort to achieve 'pacification' and minor
bureaucratic adjustments rather than 'reform.' None of
the real priorities of civil society with respect to the
UN are addressed in a positive and direct way, if at all:
for instance, a regular mode of participation on an
annual basis either by way of ad hoc assemblies of civil
society representatives or a parallel organ to the
General Assembly as a way of allowing the voices of
non-state actors to be consistently heard at a level that
acknowledges the political weight of these perspectives.
The proposal for the establishment of a World or Global
Peoples Assembly, on a basis analogous to the European
Parliament is not even mentioned in the Cardoso Report
despite the emphasis given to such an institutional
innovation by civil society advocates.
IV. UN
Reform from the Perspective of Global Civil
Society
Aside from participation and
influence within the UN System, what is being identified
here as 'vertical reform,' the relations between the UN
and global civil society, there is the overall concern
with the future of the UN, seeking to prevent aggressive
war, to promote a more equitable world economy, to
respond more quickly and effectively to humanitarian and
natural disasters, to uphold human rights and the rule of
law, and to contribute to the emergence of a humane and
democratic structure of global governance engages members
of global civil society as world citizens.
Another statis
report: A More Secure World: Our Shared
Responsibility
The foundation for such a
discussion is provided by the report of the High-Level
Panel convened by the Secretary General issued under the
title A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. The
Report is comprehensive, and can only be discussed
selectively, in relation to its central concern with
expanding the understanding and approach to the core
responsibility of the UN to facilitate collective
security.
The Report is written from a
statist standpoint, with issues of feasibility in mind,
and only tangentially refers to or reflects the influence
of global civil society perspectives. Civil society
activists concerned with global policy should read this
Report both for its conceptual contributions and as an
expression of the best inter-governmental thinking about
the role of the United Nations in the 21st century and of
how to depict 'security' as a central preoccupation. The
strong endorsement of the findings of the Report by Kofi
Annan also makes its impact likely to be strong in
relation to future discussions of UN reform.
The two main premises of A More
Secure World are that it is no longer viable to limit the
security concerns of states to conflicts between
sovereign states. It is necessary to consider conflicts
within states, as well as conditions of infectious
disease, extreme poverty, acute oppression. In the words
of the Report "the indivisibility of security, economic
development, and human freedom" (p.1) must be the basis
for UN thinking about effectiveness. In a nod to civil
society perspectives, there is acknowledged the new
orientation toward security implied by the nomenclature
of 'human security.'
While affirming the role of the UN
in addressing the security challenge, the Report argues
that it is "the front-line actors" that "continue to be
individual sovereign States" bear the main burden of
responsibility. Further that security rests on "three
pillars:" threats to security are interconnected and
require attention at national, regional, and global
levels; that no state can address these threats on its
own; and that not every state has the capacity to uphold
its responsibilities to its own people or to ensure that
harm to neighbors will not be done. [all references
are to p.1]
In its synopsis, there is little
doubt that the Report seeks to address the United States
as primary and controversial actor, exhibiting sympathy
with its circumstances but warning against unilateralism,
especially with respect to war making. This spirit is
well conveyed by the following sentence: "Recommendations
that ignore underlying power realities will be doomed to
failure or irrelevance, but recommendations that simply
reflect raw distributions of power and make no effort to
bolster international principles are unlikely to gain the
widespread adherence required to shift international
behaviour." (p.4)
The Report advocates no structural
changes, but a more adaptive use of existing
institutional mechanisms. While recognizing the need to
think of self-defense in light of changing technologies
and conflict patterns, there is affirmed the adequacy of
the Charter framework, which conveys both faith in the
susceptibility of the text to interpretation and the
difficulty to prescribe any formal changes that would
call into play the cumbersome amendment process embedded
in the Charter. In essence, the preemptive thinking of
the United States after 9/11 is affirmed, but its
unilateral enactment is rejected.
In relation to Iraq this would
mainly suggest that the United States was wrong to invade
Iraq without Security Council authorization. It is also
possible for Washington to read the Report as saying that
the Security Council should not have withheld its
authorization given the demonstration of an Iraqi threat,
although in light of the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction such a reading seems strained to say the
least.
There is set forth in the Report a
set of five criteria that should be relied upon by the
Security Council in debates and discussions pertaining to
the use of military force: seriousness of threat, proper
purpose, last resort, proportional means, and balance of
consequences. (p.67) This set of criteria amounts to a
revival of a just war approach to the use of force,
combining considerations of law, morality, and
politics.
The Report also endorses the
approach to humanitarian intervention adopted by the
International Commission on State Sovereignty and
Intervention, which is not surprising considering that
the forceful co-chair of the latter was Gareth Evans, who
was also a member of the High-level Panel. [See
Report of the Commission, "The Responsibility to
Protect."] In essence, sovereignty is overridden if a
humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding within a state, but
the political language of response is shifted from
encroachment on the state to the duty of the
international community to act. The approach is
well-expressed in the Report: We endorse the merging norm
that there is a collective international responsibility
to protect, exercisable by the Security Council
authorizing military intervention as a last resort, in
the event of genocide or other large-scale killing,
ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international
humanitarian law which sovereign Governments have proved
powerless or unwilling to prevent." (p.66) There is no
mention of what is the status of a claim to protect by a
state or a group of states in the event of the failure of
the Security Council to mandate action. Does such a
residual responsibility exist? This question has proved
decisive in relation to Kosovo, Rwanda, and more
recently, the Sudan.
Again, the statist constraints on
the political imagination of the High-level Panel are
apparent. There is no discussion, much less advocacy, of
the establishment of a UN Emergency Force that could
implement the responsibility to protect norm, and thereby
somewhat diminish the problems poses by the absence of a
consensus in the Security Council. Furthermore, there is
no consideration of whether the UN could become more
effective and legitimate if it could put its funding on a
basis that was not as tied to geopolitical control. There
has been floating around in civil societies for decades
several variations on the initial proposal of a 'Tobin
Tax' on transnational currency transactions.
Statist versus
reformist approaches
Such desirable reforms, which also
seem necessary if the goal of UN reform is to make the
Organization effective and legitimate in relation to
collective security, are not regarded as feasible within
the framework of statist geopolitics that continues to
set operative limits within the UN System. What should
global civil society do about these limits? Respect them
or seek to mount a climate of opinion that weakens or
circumvents them?
The successful movement to
establish an International Criminal Court is illustrative
of a reformist move that came into being, at least
formally, outside of these limits on feasibility. William
Pace, a leader of the NGO coalition that collaborated
with governments during the latter years of the 1990s,
likes to tell the story that he was advised by many
within the UN that the project was impossibly utopian
given the firmness of US opposition.
The mobilization of global civil
society appeared to create a momentum that overcame
geopolitical resistance. Of course, the success may be
less than meets the eye if the ICC is not entrusted with
indictments and prosecutions in the coming years. There
are other important indications that civil society
initiatives can obtain results despite geopolitical
opposition: the separate requests to the International
Court of Justice for Advisory Opinions with respect to
the legality of nuclear weapons and the legality of the
Israeli security wall; the push for a treaty of
prohibition on the use of anti-personnel land mines; and
widespread adherence to the Kyoto Protocol restricting
greenhouse gas emissions.
Such successes should not be
overstated. The opposing states can still nullify the
'success' by refusing to comply, or by simply ignoring
the institutional or normative claims. The lesson here is
that global civil society, acting in collaboration with
sympathetic governments, can pursue reformist projects
that stretch, if not break free of, the geopolitical
limits on political action, and that is an indispensable
contribution to the global reform process, within and
without the United Nations.
On the central issue of global
security, it is important for global civil society forces
to unite behind the terminology and outlook of 'human
security,' thereby placing peoples and their concerns at
the center of security discourse. At this point, within
UN circles, especially the Security Council, the notion
of security, despite some willingness to acknowledge the
wider reach of security, remains preoccupied with the
security of sovereign states. Even with the greater
willingness to discuss the responsibility of the UN to
protect vulnerable peoples facing genocidal threats, the
political will of the Organization depends on support
from major states, and this support is forthcoming or
not, mainly on the basis of national interests.
The situation is more encouraging
in the setting of natural disasters exhibiting more sense
of human solidarity, and a willingness of states,
regions, NGOs, and international institutions to work
together for shared humanitarian goals. The response to
the humanitarian catastrophe produced by the Indian Ocean
tsunami at the end of 2004 is illustrative of levels of
cooperation and rapid response unimaginable in the
context of a human rights crisis. It is instructive to
compare response to genocidal threats in Rwanda, Sudan,
and even Bosnia, with the response to the
tsunami.
V.
Conclusions
Of course, part of the glory of
global civil society is its diversity of viewpoints,
priorities, goals. This essay has assumed that it is
still possible to write on the basis of 'an overlapping
consensus' with respect to UN reform, that is,
sufficiently shared views on core issues to enable the
presentation of ideas and recommendations without
detailing lines of divergence.
Further, no effort has been made
in this essay to consider radical alternatives such as
abandoning the United Nations as a site of struggle for a
better world. The slogan of the World Social Forum
'another world is possible' does not entail abandoning
those features of existing world order that hold some
promise for the present and future. The United
Nations, despite limitations and disappointments, remains
a source of hope about improving the circumstances of
humanity. It deserves the attentiveness of global
civil society, both in appreciation of its substantial
achievements and to monitor its failures to uphold the UN
Charter and the rule of law.
The reform of the UN is an integral
aspect of any plausible program for the extension of
democracy to regions and to the world, and to the
thinking of 'the cosmopolitian democracy' school of
thought.
In the end, there is no
substitute for encouraging the moral and political
imagination of citizens of global civil society to
determine the horizons of possibility for the peoples of
the world. Many changes that occurred in the 1990s
were pronounced as 'impossible' by custodians of the
reasonable, and if their counsel had been heeded, East
Europe might still be under the dominion of corrupt,
authoritarian rule, South Africa could still be a haven
for apartheid governance, and the cold war might never
have ended.
Given the widely acknowledged
transformations of the global setting in the course of
recent decades, it certainly seems opportune to give
free rein to the imaginative energies of global civil
society. And this not mean an embrace of phantasy,
but rather an engagement in the struggle to produce the
sort of world order that seems most compatible with
physical and spiritual survival of the peoples of the
earth, realizing that we will never know without such a
struggle what are the true limits of the possible.
Such an orientation toward the
lifeworld should also guide our thinking on this crucial
topic of UN reform.
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