<blockquote>"
Many diplomats are convinced that the road ahead will be even worse than it is now, as we may be witnessing only the beginning stages of a major economic crisis that calls for the declaration of a global state of emergency by the UN, per the advice of Panama and other states.
This may not be such a bad idea, seeing how in the host country, the United States, the Republican presidential hopeful, Senator John McCain, has suspended his campaign for the sake of focusing on the economic crisis, which some say may rival that of the Great Depression.
...
A leaner, smarter UN is what is needed, not one self-encumbered by grandiose, unreachable objectives that target its legitimacy due to the unbridgeable gaps between the realistic possible and hopeful expectations. Goals cannot be reached as long as the UN leader is addicted to the UN's opiate of MDG and other similar well-meaning yet ultimately unworkable ideas."</blockquote>
Saving the UN from itselfSaving the UN from itself
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Sep 26, 2008
SourceAt this year's United Nations ritual of the gathering of world leaders at its headquarters in New York, the yawning expectations of business as usual are coupled with thinly veiled concerns about how the world organization may be adversely impacted, financially and otherwise, by the global economic crisis. There are also ominous signs of a new cold war that could be capable of paralyzing the UN Security Council.
In his opening remarks to the General Assembly, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon hardly had any positive words to say about global affairs, which reflects a growing mood for confrontation rather than collaboration. It is also a potential "retreat from progress" on several fronts, including the lofty UN war on poverty, and member states are increasingly "inward looking".
Indeed, Ban's list of "challenges of global leadership" is a long one, and the UN, as the "champion of the most vulnerable", is particularly in the spotlight as a global source to tackle problems. But can it?
The UN, as a complex global body covering a wide array of issues ranging from peace and security to development to human rights, is to a large extent a mirror of the global community it represents. The usual hustle and bustle of diplomats and journalists and photographers scurrying through the UN hallways and cafeterias seems to have been replaced with a mostly deflated sense of doom and gloom.
This is mainly because the optimism of a couple of years ago, when Ban assumed the helm, has been dashed by the despairing mood of inaction and even paralysis in light of the multiple economic and non-economic problems and concerns gripping the world community, East and West.
Many diplomats are convinced that the road ahead will be even worse than it is now, as we may be witnessing only the beginning stages of a major economic crisis that calls for the declaration of a global state of emergency by the UN, per the advice of Panama and other states.
This may not be such a bad idea, seeing how in the host country, the United States, the Republican presidential hopeful, Senator John McCain, has suspended his campaign for the sake of focusing on the economic crisis, which some say may rival that of the Great Depression.
"With Western economies hurting, that will translate into reduced financial support for the UN, and the timing couldn't be worse because the UN is forced to do a lot more, especially on the economic front, as well as peace and security," said a high-ranking UN official on the condition of anonymity. The official added that the initial high expectations of Ban had been replaced with a "negative perception" about his lack of adequate leadership skills, even though Ban "prefers to blame other UN branches" for what this official described as a growing UN atrophy.
What is the root cause of this atrophy? There is no simple answer and certainly Ban has inherited many of the current problems, chipping away at the UN's coherence, effectiveness and dynamism.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDG), for instance, increasingly appear less like a sign of the UN's achievement and more an indication of its failure, like a heavy boulder chained to the secretary general's legs that is dragging him, and the entire organization, down a slippery road to bigger and bigger gaps between expectations and realities.
Perhaps the MDG's cumbersome economic, environmental and social agenda, to eradicate global poverty by half by 2015, tackle AIDS, the gender gap, schooling and such like should have never been adopted as long as the UN lacked the necessary "economic and financial teeth" to tackle them, the same UN official insisted. Now, the best the UN can do is to report how far behind those goals it is and, increasingly, how unrealistic and unreachable some of those goals are.
Thus, a grand new initiative that was born by the collective desire to use UN machinery to achieve solid progress for the most deprived 1.5 billion of the world's population has for all practical purposes fizzled. And this without anyone at the UN displaying sufficient boldness and courage to admit it.
Given the seduction of big ideas bedeviling the UN, Ban continues with the pattern of behavior of his immediate predecessor, Kofi Annan, whose concerns for "legacy" were a not insignificant engine behind those unworkable ideas. This is reflected in Ban's handling of the world's soaring food crisis, prompting him to create a "high-level group" to come up with a recipe for action.
But no matter what recommendations and action plans put forth by this advisory group, it is a sure bet they will have minimal impact on the food crisis, simply because the UN is not a key economic institution on the global scene. Previous attempts of reform to better equip it with an economic role and input, chiefly by revitalizing the Economic and Social council (ECOSOC) have not panned out and, instead, ECOSOC remains as marginal to the world economic decision-making processes as it was a decade ago.
Yet, putting the cart before the horse, the UN chose to prioritize global economic issues without first mustering the necessary institutional muscle, let alone finances, without which it cannot hope to make more than nominal progress toward its MDG objectives.
Not only that, some of the UN's MDG efforts are channeled through the Global Compact, focusing on enlisting corporate support for such MDG projects as clean water and environment. This is fine, but only as long as they do not represent a bifurcation, organizationally and agenda-wise, given the recent decision of Ban to unhook Global Compact from his office.
As for UN's human-rights agenda, in a year reserved to celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the economic crisis has completely overshadowed this initiative, prompting the UN's recently expanded Human Rights Council to zero in on "food rights". Again, given the paucity of the UN's net economic input, such a refocusing of the Human Rights Council may seem in tune with changing times, yet hardly capable of adding to the UN's overall relevance.
With respect to peace and security, the initial verdict on the recent organizational restructuring of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) is not out. One can only hope this move, swallowing roughly half of the UN's annual budget, will improve its performance, instead of proving those reforms as another sad re-enactment of typical UN bureaucratic reshuffling.
A key issue is whether or not the DKPO's restructuring, delegating some of its responsibilities of the head of the office, that is, the under secretary general for Peacekeeping Operations, to other hands has been a smart move, or simply an invitation to more, unintended, internal frictions and overlapping responsibilities.
The DPKO's sister organization, the newly founded Peacebuilding Commission, has managed to put together a sizable peacebuilding fund of approximately US$240 million. This is earmarked for "post-conflict" societies and is a small though important area of the UN's current activities about which its officials like to boast.
The problem is that in most of the 19 conflict-ridden countries in which the UN has peacekeepers on the ground, the certificate of evolving to a more benign "post-conflict" status may not be forthcoming. If anything, growing economic woes may hurl some borderline countries such as Congo back into civil war and anarchy, thus exacerbating the UN's burdens. Already, the UN is so stretched that it has managed to raise only half the peacekeeping forces called for in a Security Council resolution on Darfur, as a result of which the crisis there has become a daily reminder of the UN's impotence.
Clearly, it would be sheer error to succumb to blanket cynicism and to blame the UN for its egregious shortcomings when many of those, such as its inability to intervene in the Georgia crisis due to Russia's opposition in the Security Council, stem from inter-state problems outside the UN. As often repeated by UN officials, including the one cited above, the world would be a lot worse without the UN.
A leaner, smarter UN is what is needed, not one self-encumbered by grandiose, unreachable objectives that target its legitimacy due to the unbridgeable gaps between the realistic possible and hopeful expectations. Goals cannot be reached as long as the UN leader is addicted to the UN's opiate of MDG and other similar well-meaning yet ultimately unworkable ideas.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction. For his Wikipedia entry, click here.Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.