Global
history
Real world
Country rating
New growth theory
Globalization
Malaise in Globalization
Mercantilism is back
World corruption
Migrations
Gender
World population
Modern
slavery
Ecology
Letter
to President Bush
New
war
Anti semitism
Reshaping
the world
1-INTRODUCTION
2-RESULTS
3-NEW ORGANIZATION
4-CONCLUSION
European constitution
Global learning system
Global
coaching
UNITED
NATIONS REFORM
RESHAPING
THE WORLD
SUMMARY
With the oil for food program corruption, time is coming to say that it is too much! We cannot go on any more with the United Nations which is more and more a machine against Freedom. Considering this situation, the UN should not be reformed but abandoned. However, free democracies have not interest to get out of the organization. It should be better to progressively end it in reducing finance and opposing veto to any reform
Considering the war on terrorism, democracies have to establish a new organization.
1-INTRODUCTION 2-RESULTS 3-NEW ORGANIZATION 4-CONCLUSION
According to the charter, the UN has a main goal: To preserve international peace and security. Other roles include international cooperation and topics with regard of economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian problems, notably in promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms.
The Organization is mainly based on the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Secretary-general. The General Assembly consists of all the Members of the United Nations. Each member has one vote and decisions on important questions have to be made by a two-thirds majority of the members present and voting. The General Assembly makes recommendations and elects the non-permanent members of the Security Council.
The Security Council consists of fifteen members. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States are permanent members with a veto power. The General Assembly elects ten other Members to be non-permanent members. The Security Council has the primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. It may use force to restore peace and relies on a Military Staff Committee which comprises the Chiefs of Staff of the permanent members.
The Secretary-General is appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the Security Council.
In addition, there are the Economic and Social Council ( Fifty-four Members elected by the General Assembly. It set up commissions in economic and social fields and for the promotion of human rights) and the International Court of Justice which deals with any legal question such as territory litigations. Fifteen other independent organizations, termed "specialized agencies", are linked to the UN.
1-INTRODUCTION
2-RESULTS 3-NEW ORGANIZATION 4-CONCLUSION
The results are quite bad because the unanimity of the five permanent members of the Security Council was never assured and because the emergence of the third world in the General Assembly distorted the spirit of the entire organization.
21-Impossible agreement in the security council
The main goal: To maintain international peace and security has never been achieved because it was impossible to get the unanimity of the five permanent members of the Security Council. This unanimity based on wartime alliance quickly broke down when the Cold War started in 1947. To day, a new shift prevents any real decisions, except endless talks and compromises.
211-Cold war
During the cold war, the UN reflected the bipolar world and both superpowers tried to use the organization in their own interest. At the beginning the balance in the UN was in favor of the Free World. For example, the UN under US leadership resisted to the north Korean aggression. By the mid of 1970, thanks for the new countries issued of the process of decolonization, the Soviet Union got a large influence in the general assembly.
The UN had not played a major role during this period. The Organization only provided with the ultimate forum for East and West on the occasions when they found themselves on a potentially fatal collision course. With the fall of the Berlin war and the first war gulf, the image of the UN improved. As a result, people thought that the organization could have a new chance.
212-Peacekeeping operations
With the end of the cold war, the Security Council, committed the UN to involvement in many failed States. These peacekeeping operations resulted in a tragedy in Bosnia with the slaughtering of civilians in Srebrenica, and an international scandal in Rwanda that led to the genocide of some 800,000 people and the displacement of two and a half million more, in a population of some eight millions.
It is fair to recognize that these failures result of opposite interests into the Security Council: In Bosnia, Russia was reluctant to apply retaliations against Serbia. In Rwanda, France was involved in the Hutu power. As a result the UN's mandates were often weak or ambiguous.
213-New war
The United Nations Security Council's inability to achieve consensus prior to the Iraq War was the last act of this series of events. After the cold war shift opposing the USA and Soviet Union, there is a new shift opposing France to the United States. This shift is not new and had begun immediately after the fall of the Berlin war. However, it clearly appeared with the beginning of the new war.
France refuses to consider the September/11 aggression as a new war. More precisely, France never applies the adjective jihadist or islamist to the terrorist threat. The French government currently states that terrorism is caused by injustice. In doing so, France tries to take the leadership of the third world and to use UN as a counter-weight of America. About the motivations click on: Europe at War
In short, the main goal regarding peace and security has never been fulfilled.
22-General assembly out of control
By contrast, the UN has displayed a great activism in social and economic regulations: The General Assembly is more and more a machine against free countries, free trade, economic growth and scientific or technical progress.
221-Emergence of the third world and failed states
In 1945, decolonization was supposed to take more than a hundred years. After Indian independence in 1947, the process was more rapid than anyone had foreseen. At the outset the UN had fifty members. Due to decolonization, it now has 190, and the so-called Third World has a large majority in the General Assembly.
In fact, decolonization was not a Charter goal. The chapter 11 of the chart regarding non self governing territories just states that the countries which assume responsibilities for the administration of territories accept the obligation to promote the well-being of the inhabitants, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement.
More than the UN, the US and then the Soviet Union have played a major role in speeding up the process. As a result, decolonization could be seen as the main asset of the UN. On the other hand, the speed of the process has led to many failed states ruled by outlaws notably in Africa and Arab countries. Click on Africa: The solution
222-Emergence of NGO's
Beside the emergence of the third world, a new phenomenon has recently appeared with the increasing role of the NGO's on the world scene. NGO's could be compared to small international political parties. They already have access to many UN bodies( The economic and social council has granted more than 1500 the right to be present, to lobby and to make statements. The department of public information allows another 1500 NGO's to observe some meetings). Right now, NGO's ask to have access to the general assembly and aim to evolve to partnerships just like the governments.
NGO's claim that they represent the civil society. In case of dictatorship it could sound right. In fact, the the NGO's are mainly opposed to the western democratic governments that are democratically elected! Since they only represent themselves, such a behavior looks like Bolshevik strategy based on the conquest of the power through small minorities of activists teams.
What are their objectives? Their key word is justice: Economic justice, social and political justice, gender equality, sustainable human development and so on. In fact, all their activities are oriented against the democracies and they more and more represent the political channel of the dictatorships.
This emergence brought a new emphasis on certain global problems such as development, population, natural resources, the environment that were not considered in the chart as major topics of the Organization. As a result, the initial UN purposes have been distorted.
223-Initial goals distorted
The UN system claims that it is the largest multilateral source of grant development assistance. In fact, all the serious job is made up by the World Bank, the IMf and the bilateral donors agencies. The regional missions of the UN are always advocating the worst projects of the developing countries. Instead to play a role of facilitator, they complicate the job of the serious donors and appear as a fountain of demagogy. The UN also claims that it is improving global trade relations: In the last decade, the UN, has became the voice of the anti globalization opposed to free trade. The failure of Cancun is a good example of the UN inability to deal with these matters. Go to : Globalization
The United Nations are playing an increasing role in the environment. The "Earth Summit," held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, resulted in treaties embodied in a wide variety of international conventions and in national legislation's as well. The UN is becoming a bastion of regulations. From Rio to Joburg, it has constantly advocated for malthusian views and outdated theories opposed to Science and progress. Click on: New growth theory and Ecology
It is fair to mention that UN agencies have gotten some results in health and relief for humanitarian disasters but there are some doubts about grants diverted by warlords and dictators.
224-Support of dictatorships
Since adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the UN has only focused on facts existing in western friendly countries: For example, regarding women's rights, the UN has never condemned the inhuman women conditions under the shari'a. It offers a large tribune for dictators as we have seen at Joburg summit: Mugabe has been cheered by the audience! Recently the Human Right commission chose Libya as Chairman! More and more the General Assembly is out of control and represents the last shield for dictatorships.
In fact, the UN has always worked as a machine against West. For example, considering that european population is aged, the UN proposed to implement in Europe before 2040, 105 Millions of migrants coming from the South! It was called a replacement migration. Could you imagine a survey recommending the migration of 100 millions of Europeans in Africa! It should be an international scandal with accusation of invasion or genocide. In fact, such provocative surveys show the hidden purposes of the UN framework. There is only one wise answer: To close the business and to disband its supporters!
1-INTRODUCTION 2-RESULTS 3-NEW ORGANIZATION 4-CONCLUSION
3-NEW ORGANIZATION
Due to these poor results, many people plead for an UN reform. There are yet many reform groups but they do not make any progress. In fact a reform is impossible. We should have better to imagine a new organization in accordance with our own goals.
31-Impossible reform
The inefficient UN machinery results from major disagreements among its members and consequently people also disagree on what kind of reform is needed.
The main idea is to reform the Security Council. Democracies could accept to add as permanent members Japan and Germany due to their economic power. it is also proposed that India and Brazil should be admitted as permanent members. Do these new permanent members will have a veto right? The question is yet debating. The idea is to keep the number of permanent and non permanent members under 20 (In accordance with the call for a common European foreign policy, the European Union should be represented at the Security Council. It should mean the suppression of the British and French seats and their replacement by a single European Union seat!). What is more, the democracies want to down size the multiple agencies, to avoid replication, to streamline the secretary and to set up a democracy group or caucus that would promote democratic values and leadership within the UN system.
On the other hand, the non democratic nations and their NGO's framework want to enlarge to 25 the number of security council and mainly to prohibit or to limit the use of the veto power ( For example they agree to include Germany and Japan as permanent members but with no veto powers).
Secondly, they want to provide General Assembly with leadership and to focus on development tasks and to treat as secondary the peacekeeping's, humanitarian and human rights functions. They also propose that the NGO's could be present in the General Assembly. Finally, they want to establish a non democratic world State.
All these proposals whatever their origin (free or no free countries) are useless: Firstly, the Security Council has not performed its tasks with only five permanent members and the fact to enlarge it could only undermine efforts to combat terrorism. Secondly, the General Assembly is in the hands of an irresponsible majority that is bent to pursue unfriendly policies regarding freedom and the West. Thirdly, the Article 108 of the chart specifies that amendments to the Charter must be adopted by a vote of two thirds of the members of the General Assembly. It means that a reform is quite impossible. What is more, the democracies have no interests in such a reform.
Considering this situation, the UN should not be reformed but abandoned. However, free democracies have not interest to get out of the organization. It should be better to progressively end it in reducing finance and opposing veto to any change.
32-New organization
On the other hand, the perils and opportunities of an increasingly globalized world illustrate the need for an organization. It means that we must create a new international organization based on free countries.
321-The mission dictates the organization.
Our mission is to defeat the jihadist world threat and the dictatorships which support it. The conduct of this new war and its achievement must lead to a new organization of the free world. Click on: New war
The primary goal cannot be peace because we have first to won the war and to spread democracy through a series of preemptive wars, based on a military superiority. Firstly, we have to neutralize the jihadist network and to overthrow the dictatorships which are the real causes of this plague. Secondly, we must bring Democracy to the Arab world and Africa. Thirdly, we have to promote education in order to eradicate obscurantism and negative beliefs. Democracy and education are the long term answer to Jihadism.
322-Free people organization concept
Firstly, only free countries with democratic institutions could be accepted as memberships. Secondly, we must also take in account the national government's ability to fulfill its responsibilities as a sovereign state. A country which should only be democratic and which should be unable to protect its citizens and foreigners could not be considered as a state fulfilling its responsibilities. Thirdly, a democratic country which allows some backward laws such as the shari'a cannot be accepted as member. Despite the relativism inherited from materialism and the UN philosophy, we must consider that Societies based on enlightenment, freedom and democracy, trust in progress, and love for science are ethically superior to other societies based on outdated concepts. Only countries adopting civilized concepts should be admit as members.
Regarding the General Assembly, the UN has never worked out the contradiction between respect for national sovereignty on the one hand, and the Charter principles of democracy and human rights on the other. We must do what we can to overcome these contradictions. In fact nations are not equal and a true democracy must take in account the population and the economic power. It should be wise that each member has a number of representatives in accordance with its population and its economic power. In addition, free organizations of citizens could represent the non free countries in General Assembly.
A Freedom council will play the same role as the former Security Council. At first glance, it could include right now the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, India, Russia and China (supposing it becomes a free country). Such an ensemble would represent more than 50% of the world population and would have a sufficient world legitimacy for acting. Click on : Real world
Do these permanent members will have a veto right? The question merits to be debated.
What criteria should the Freedom Council use to authorize military action? If we overthrow Saddam Hussein due to his crimes, we have the same rights and reasons to remove Mugabe, Taylor and so on. Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq give us the method for restoring freedom, peace and security in the more afflicted countries. It implies also that we shall bring to the populations a large economic aid, a wide technical assistance and a permanent security support with multilateral troops during the implementation of the new institutions. Click on : Africa: The solution
In order to reach these goals, the new organization will establish an international trusteeship system for the administration and supervision of the liberated territories. The basic objectives of the trusteeship system are to promote the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the inhabitants of the trust territories, and their progressive development towards self-government; to encourage respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as race, sex, language, or religion,
Considering the specialized Agencies, we may keep, as an acceptable legacy of the UN, the agencies dedicated to health, humanitarian assistance, or other useful and recognized topics. On the other hand, Agencies dealing with wrong concepts in development and environment, or only good to propagate anti western propaganda such as UNESCO will be shut. By contrast, the power of the World Bank and the IMF could be enforced.
The new organization will create a world educational agencies in order to establish a global learning project to reduce illiteracy and promote positive beliefs. This agency could play a major role, in partnership with private corporations in establishing an on line learning system to distribute secondary education in poor countries that cannot afford the cost of the ineffective and expensive programs offered by traditional public education. Based on available technologies, these systems would channel our best values and provide us with the ultimate weapon against out dated ideologies. Click on: Global learning system
323-Agenda
This new organization could take a lot of time to be completed. On the other hand the UN system could take a lot of time to die.
1-INTRODUCTION 2-RESULTS 3-NEW ORGANIZATION 4-CONCLUSION
This paper is not an exhaustive study and mainly opens roads for new ideas. All your contributions are welcomed and would be inserted in this survey.
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1-I
absolutley agree with this opinion. The United Nations can and will not
be effective in today's world. The United States having most member Countries
against it is also a problem. The changing face of the world has become
a challenge and only the U.S. is dealing with it anyway. Besides all that
was listed as reform I think there is one that is missing. France is the
driver of the European Union and now has 25 member States. All of this
done to create a body the size of the U.S. This is their way of getting
their bigger role on the world stage and that is fine, but the U.N. should
adjust. The CIA World Factbook list the " European Union" as
a Country right under the United States in total economy.
The E.U. has 25 members States and all of them have a seat in the United
Nations. All but one of those seats should be deleted from the the U.N.
If they are all going to be in the E.U and act as a single Nation they
should not have 25 votes! The U.N. dues should also be re-calculated in
this instance also since they want to be one Country. Their GDP is listed
at 12 Trillion and just under the U.S. It is time to reduce the U.S. share
and increase the E.U. share. This is one of the costs of the world stage!
kelly and sheila Brown
kbkel39@earthlink.net
2-The following article America and the United Nations is abridged from a speech delivered on December 5, 2005, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., at Hillsdale College’s sixth annual Churchill Dinner. The author, MARK STEYN, is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, and also writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator in Britain, the Western Standard in Canada, the Australian, Hawke’s Day Today in New Zealand, and the Jerusalem Post. In addition, he is drama critic for the New Criterion, writes National Review’s “Happy Warrior” column, and appears regularly on the Hugh Hewitt Radio Show. He has published two collections of writings, The Face of the Tiger and Mark Steyn from Head to Toe, and a book on musical theater, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight.
Hillsdale College was founded by Christians and still holds to it Judeo-Christian heritage. In 1850, Hillsdale was the first American college to prohibit in its charter all discrimination based on race, religion, or sex. It was active in the anti-slavery movement. Hillsdale became an early force for the abolition of slavery and for the education of black students; in fact, blacks were admitted immediately after the 1844 founding. The College became the second in the nation to grant four-year liberal arts degrees to women. One of the Presidents, Edmund Fairfield, was a leading founder of the Republican Party in 1854.
America and the United Nations
Reprinted
from Imprimis Jan. 2006
Mark Steyn
Journalist
At one level, the United Nations is merely the latest variant on the Congress of Vienna held almost two centuries ago—a venue where the great powers sit down to resolve the problems of the world to their mutual satisfaction. Unfortunately, unlike Lord Castlereagh, Prince Metternich and Talleyrand, none of whom would be asked to audition for a “We Are The World” charity fundraising single, the UN has become the repository of all the West’s sappiest illusions of one-worldism.
Let me give an example. Nearly three years ago, the space shuttle Columbia crashed, and Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show saluted the fallen heroes as follows: “They were an airborne United Nations—men, women, an African-American, an Indian woman, an Israeli....” By contrast, there’s a famous terror-supporting Islamist imam in Britain, Abu Hamza, who, when the shuttle crashed, claimed it was God’s punishment “because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam.” Say what you like about the old Islamofascist nutcake, but he was at least paying attention to the particulars of the situation, not just peddling, as Katie Couric did, vapid “multi-culti” bromides.
Why couldn’t Katie have said the Columbia was an airborne America? After all, the “Indian woman,” Kalpana Chawla, was the American Dream writ large upon the stars: she emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s and became an astronaut within a decade. What an incredible country. But somehow it wasn’t enough to see in the crew’s multiple ethnicities a stirring testament to the possibilities of her own land; instead, Katie upgraded them into an emblem of what seemed to her a far nobler ideal—the UN.
In the days before Miss Couric’s observation—this was in 2003, just before the Iraq war— there had been two notable news items about the United Nations: (1) The newly elected chair of the UN Human Rights Commission was Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya; and (2) it was announced that in May, the presidency of the UN Conference on Disarmament would pass to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. But as Katie demonstrated, no matter what the UN actually is, the very initials evoke in her and many others some vague blurry memory of a long-ago UNESCO benefit with Danny Kaye or Audrey Hepburn surrounded by smiling children of many lands. There were many woozy Western leftists who felt—and still feel—that the theoretical idealism of Communism excused all its terrible failures in practice. The UN gets a similar pass, but from a far larger number of people. How else to explain all the polls in Europe, Australia, Canada and even America that show large numbers of people will only support war if it’s approved by the UN?
The Real UN
In fact, however, the UN is a shamefully squalid organization whose corruption is almost impossible to exaggerate. If you think—as the media and the left do in this country—that Iraq is a God-awful mess (which it’s not), then try being the Balkans or Sudan or even Cyprus or anywhere where the problem’s been left to the United Nations. If you don’t want to bulk up your pension by skimming the Oil-for-Food program, no need to worry. Whatever your bag, the UN can find somewhere that suits—in West Africa, it’s Sex-for-Food, with aid workers demanding sexual services from locals as young as four; in Cambodia, it’s drug dealing; in Kenya, it’s the refugee extortion racket; in the Balkans, sex slaves. On a UN peace mission, everyone gets his piece.
Didier Bourguet, a UN staffer in Congo and the Central African Republic, enjoyed the pleasures of 12-year-old girls, and as a result is now on trial in France. His lawyer has said he was part of a UN pedophile network operating from Africa to southeast Asia. But has anyone read anything about that? The merest glimpse of a U.S. servicewoman leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with girlie knickers on his head was enough to prompt calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam’s torture chambers were now open “under new management.” But systemic UN child sex in at least 50 percent of their missions? The transnational morality set can barely stifle their yawns. If you’re going to sexually assault prepubescent girls, make sure you’re wearing a blue helmet.
And at least the Pentagon put a stop to Abu Ghraib. As a British UN official in the Congo told my newspaper in London: “The crux of the problem is that if the UN gets bolshie”—that’s Britspeak for complaining aggressively—“with these governments then they stop providing the UN with troops and staff.” That’s the system in a nutshell: when a British bigwig is with British forces, he’ll enforce British standards; when a British official is holed up with an impeccably “multilateral” force of Uruguayans, Tunisians, etc., he’s more circumspect. When in Rome, do as the Visigoths do. In Congo, the UN had to forbid all contact between its predatory forces and the natives. The rest of the world should be so lucky.
The child sex racket is only the most extreme example of what’s wrong with the UN approach to the world. Developed peoples value resilience: when disaster strikes, you bounce back. A hurricane flattens Florida, you patch things up and reopen. As the New Colonial Class, the UN doesn’t look at it like that: when disaster strikes, it just proves that you and your countrymen are children who need to be taken under the transnational wing. The folks who have been under the UN wing the longest—indeed, the only ones with their own permanent UN agency and semi-centenarian “refugee camps”—are the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth: the Palestinians. UN territories like Kosovo are the global equivalent of inner-city housing projects with the blue helmets as local enforcers for the absentee slum landlord. By contrast, a couple of years after imperialist warmonger Bush showed up, Afghanistan and Iraq have elections, presidents and prime ministers.
Let’s just take one of the scandals that go widely unreported in the American media—the UN Oil-for-Food program. Among the targets of the corruption investigation was Kofi Annan’s son Kojo—who had a $30,000-a-year job but managed to find a spare quarter-million dollars sitting around to invest in a Swiss football club. The investigators then broadened their sights to include Kofi’s brother Kobina Annan, the Ghanaian Ambassador to Morocco, who has ties to a businessman behind several of the entities involved in the scandal—one Michael Wilson, the son of the former Ghanaian Ambassador to Switzerland and a childhood friend of young Kojo. Mr. Wilson is currently being investigated for bribery involving a $50 million contract to renovate the Geneva offices of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization.
The actual head of the Oil-for-Food racket, Kofi sidekick Benon Sevan, has resigned, having hitherto insisted that a mysterious six-figure sum in his bank account was a gift from his elderly aunt, a lady of modest means who lived in a two-room flat in Cyprus. Paul Volcker’s investigators had planned to confirm with auntie her nephew’s version of events, but unfortunately she fell down an elevator shaft and died. It now seems likely that the windfall had less to do with Mr. Sevan’s late aunt than with his soliciting of oil allocations for a company run by a cousin of Kofi Annan’s predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
Despite current investigations into his brother, his son, his son’s best friend, his predecessor’s cousin, his former chief of staff, his procurement officer and the executive director of the UN’s biggest ever program, the Secretary-General insists he remains committed to staying on and tackling the important work of “reforming” the UN. Unfortunately, his Executive Coordinator for United Nations Reform has also had to resign.
You’d think that by now, respect for the UN would be plummeting faster than Benon Sevan’s auntie down that lift shaft. After all, these aren’t peripheral figures or minor departments. They reach right into the heart of UN policy on two of the critical issues of the day—Iraq and North Korea. Most of the Ghanaian diplomatic corps and their progeny seem to have directorships at companies with UN contracts and/or Saddamite oil options.
What’s important to understand is that Mr. Annan’s ramshackle UN of humanitarian money-launderers, peacekeeper-rapists and a Human Rights Commission that looks like a lifetime-achievement awards ceremony for the world’s torturers is not a momentary aberration. Nor can it be corrected by bureaucratic reforms designed to ensure that the failed Budget Oversight Committee will henceforth be policed by a Budget Oversight Committee Oversight Committee. The Oil-for-Food fiasco is the UN—the predictable spawn of its utopian fantasies and fetid realities. If Saddam grasped this more clearly than, say, Katie Couric or John Kerry, well, that’s why he is—was—an A-list dictator and they’re not.
Why was there an Oil-for-Food program in the first place? Because back in the 90s, having thrown a big old multilateral Gulf War and gotten to the gates of Baghdad, the grand UN coalition then decided against toppling Saddam. So, having shirked the responsibilities that come with having a real policy, America and its allies were in the market for a pseudo-policy. And where does an advanced Western democracy go when it wants a pseudo-policy? Why, the UN! Saddam correctly calculated that the great powers were over-invested in Oil-for-Food as a figleaf for their lack of will, and reasoned that in such an environment their figleaf would also serve as a discreet veil for all kinds of other activities. He didn’t game the system; he simply understood far better than Clinton and Bush Sr., John Major and Tony Blair how it worked.
Failures of Transnationalism
Transnationalism is the mechanism by which the world’s most enlightened progressives provide cover for its darkest forces. It’s a largely unconscious alliance, but not an illogical one. Western proponents of Kyoto and some of the other loopy NGO-beloved eco-doom-mongering concepts up for debate in Montreal at the moment have at least this much in common with psychotic Third World thugocracies: they find it hard to win free elections, they regard transnational bodies as useful for conferring a respect unearned at the ballot box, and they are unduly troubled by the lack of accountability in global institutions.
Those of us who believe that big government is by definition remote government—and that therefore the UN’s pretensions to world government make it potentially the worst of all—should, in theory, argue for withdrawal from the organization. Outside of a few college towns and coastal enclaves, I don’t believe there would be any political downside for candidates campaigning on a platform of pulling out of the UN entirely, and I’d encourage Republicans to do so if only as a way of unnerving those lazy pols like John Kerry who are prone to mindless transnationalist boosterism. But as a matter of practical politics, I can’t see the U.S. leaving the UN anytime soon.
Can the U.S. force the UN to reform itself? Look at it this way: With hindsight, the UN was most effective when it was least effective—that’s to say, the four decades between Korea and the Gulf War, when the Cold War’s mutually-assured vetoes at least accurately represented the global stand-off. Now, however, we’re in a unipolar world. As a result, the UN is no longer a permanent talking-shop for the world’s powers but an alternative power in and of itself—a sort of ersatz superpower intended to counter the real one. Consider the 85 yes-or-no votes America made in the General Assembly in 2003: Arab League members voted against the U.S. position 88.7% of the time; ASEAN members voted against the U.S. position 84.5% of the time; Islamic Conference members voted against the U.S. position 84.1% of the time; African members voted against the U.S. position 83.8% of the time; Non-Aligned Movement members voted against the U.S. position 82.7% of the time; and European Union members voted against the U.S. position 54.5% of the time.
You can take the view of the European elites that this is proof of America’s isolation and that the U.S. now needs to issue a “Declaration of Interdependence” with the world. Or you can be like the proud mom in Irving Berlin’s WWI marching song: “They Were All Out Of Step But Jim.” But what these figures really demonstrate is that the logic of the post-Cold War UN is to be institutionally anti-American. The U.S. could seize on Kofi Annan’s present embarrassment and lean hard on him to reform this and reorganize that and reinvent the other and, if it employs its full diplomatic muscle, it might get those anti-U.S. votes down to…a tad over 80%. And along the way it would find that it had “reformed” a corrupt, dysfunctional, sclerotic anti-American club into a lean, mean, functioning, effective anti-American club. Which is, if they’re honest, what most reformers mean by “reform.”
In the old days, ramshackle dictatorships were proxies for heavyweight patrons, but not any more. These days, psychotic dictators represent only themselves. Yet somehow, in the post-Cold War talking shops, the loony tunes’ prestige has been enhanced: the UN, as Canadian writer George Jonas puts it, enables “dysfunctional dictatorships to punch above their weight.” Away from Kofi and Co., the world is moving more or less in the right direction: entire regions that were once wall-to-wall tyrannies are now filled with flawed but broadly functioning democracies—e.g., Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America. The UN has been irrelevant to this transformation. Its structures resist reform and the principal beneficiaries are the thug states.
What Actually Works?
What should replace the UN? Some people talk about a “caucus of the democracies.” But I’d like to propose a more radical suggestion: nothing. In the war on terror, America’s most important relationships have been not transnational but bilateral: Australia’s John Howard didn’t dispatch troops to Iraq because the Aussies and the Yanks belong to the same international talking shop; Tony Blair’s reliability on war and terror isn’t because of the European Union but in spite of it. These relationships are meaningful precisely because they’re not the product of formal transnational bureaucracies.
When the tsunami hit last year, hundreds of thousands of people died within minutes. The Australians and Americans arrived within hours. The UN was unable to get to Banda Aceh for weeks. Instead, the humanitarian fat cats were back in New York and Geneva holding press conferences warning about post-tsunami health consequences—dysentery, cholera, BSE from water-logged cattle, etc.—that, its spokesmen assured us, would kill as many people as the original disaster. But this never happened, any more than did their predictions of disaster for Iraq: “The head of the World Food Program has warned that Iraq could spiral into a massive humanitarian disaster.” Or for Afghanistan: “The UN Children’s Fund has estimated that as many as 100,000 Afghan children could die of cold, disease and hunger.”
It’s one thing to invent humanitarian disasters to disparage Bush’s unilateralist warmongering; but in the wake of the tsunami, the UN was reduced to inventing a humanitarian disaster in order to distract attention from the existing humanitarian disaster it wasn’t doing anything about.
In fact, the whole idea of multilateral organizations feels a bit last millennium. With hindsight, institutions like the UN seem like a hangover from the Congress of Vienna age when contact between nations was limited to the potentates’ emissaries. That’s why transnationalism so appeals both to Euro-statists and to dictators—the great men of the world meeting together to decide things for everyone else. But, in the era of the Internet, five-cents-per-minute international phone rates, bank cards issued in Finland that you can use in an ATM in Brazil or Fiji, and blue collar families taking cheap vacations in the Maldives and Bali, the bloated UN bureaucracy seems at best irrelevant and at worst an obstruction to the progress of international relations. I’m all in favor of the Universal Postal Union and the Berne Copyright Convention, but they work precisely because dysfunctional dictators weren’t involved. The non-nutcake jurisdictions came together, and others were required to be in compliance before they could join. That’s why they work and endure. Transnational institutions should reflect points of agreement: Americans don’t mind the Toronto Blue Jays playing in the same baseball league—and even winning it occasionally—because they’re all agreed on the rules of baseball. A joint North American Public Health Commission, on the other hand, would be a bureaucratic boondoggle seeking to reconcile two incompatible health systems. Imagine then what happens when you put America, Denmark, Libya and Syria on a human rights committee, and then try and explain why the verdict of such a committee should be given any weight when the U.S. is weighing its vital national interest.
It’s a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog mess and mix ’em together, the result will taste more like dog mess than ice cream. That’s the problem with the UN. If you make the free nations and the thug states members of the same club, the danger isn’t that they’ll meet each other half-way but that the free world winds up going three-quarters or seven-eighths of the way. Indeed, the UN has met the thug states so much more than half way that they now largely share the dictators’ view of their peoples—as either helpless children who need every decision made for them, or a bunch of dupes whose national wealth can be rerouted to a Swiss bank account.
Perhaps that malign combination of empty European gesture-politics and Third World larceny would be relatively harmless, at least in the geopolitical sense, if these were quieter times. But they’re not. This is an age in which America and its real allies—a bigger number than you’d think—need to be free to act without being a latter-day Gulliver ensnared by Lilliputian UN resolutions from head to toe. After all, consider the alternative to American action. As you may have noticed, the good people of Darfur in Sudan have been fortunate enough not to attract the attention of the arrogant cowboy unilateralist Bush and have instead fallen under the care of the UN multilateral compassion set. So, after months of expressing deep, grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan managed to persuade the UN to set up a committee to look into what’s going on in Darfur. Eventually, they reported back that it’s not genocide.
That’s great news, isn’t it? Because if it had been genocide, that would have been very, very serious. As yet another Kofi Annan-appointed UN committee boldly declared a year ago: “Genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated.” So thank goodness what’s going on in Sudan isn’t genocide. Instead, it’s just 100,000 corpses who all happen to be from the same ethnic group—which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone’s dead, and none of the multilateral compassion types have to worry their pretty heads about it.
That’s the transnational establishment’s alternative to Bush and his “coalition of the willing”: appoint a committee that agrees on the urgent need to do nothing at all. Thus, last year the UN Human Rights Commission announced the working group that will decide which complaints will be heard at its annual meeting in Geneva this spring: the five-nation panel that will select which human-rights violations will be up for discussion comprises the Netherlands, Hungary, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. I wouldn’t bet on them finding room on their crowded agenda for the question of human rights in Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.
One of the mystifying aspects of UN worship is the assumption that this embryo world government is a “progressive” concept. It’s not. Most of us in our business and family and consumer relationships are plugged into global networks far better for the long-term health of the planet than using American money to set up Eurowimp talking shops manned by African thugs—which is what the UN Human Rights Commission boils down to.
Judging by Results
Go back to that tsunami. While the UN and its agencies were on television badgering and hectoring the West for its stinginess, the actual relief efforts were being made by a couple of diverted U.S. naval groups and the Royal Australian Navy. The Scandinavians can’t fly in relief supplies, because they don’t have any C-130s. All they can do is wait for the UN to swing by and pick up their check. And it says something for the post-modern decadence of the age that that gives you supposed moral superiority.
There’s a moment in the latest Batman movie in which Bruce Wayne has just bumped into his childhood sweetheart, Rachel Dawes, in the lobby of some Gotham City hotel. Unfortunately he’s sopping wet, having been cavorting in the ornamental fountain with a couple of hot pieces of arm candy. Rachel is a crusading district attorney and Bruce can see she’s a bit disappointed to discover her old pal is now Paris Hilton in drag. So he attempts to assure her that deep down he still cares about all the worthy stuff. Rachel swats this aside. It’s not what you feel inside that counts, she says. “It’s what you do that defines you.”
Bruce wanes, visibly, under her withering riposte. I wouldn’t claim this film has anything as coherent as a philosophy, but its director thought enough of that line to reprise it late in the action. “It’s what you do that defines you,” Batman whispers to Rachel before diving off a rooftop to go whump the bad guys. “Bruce...?” she says, faintly.
A couple of days after seeing this film I read that the Oxfam international aid organization had paid the better part of a million bucks to Sri Lankan customs officials for the privilege of having 25 four-wheel-drive vehicles allowed into the country to get aid out to remote villages on washed-out roads hit by the tsunami. The Indian-made Mahindras stood idle on the dock in Colombo for a month as Oxfam’s representatives were buried under a tsunami of paperwork. Fourteen Unicef ambulances sent to Indonesia spent two months sitting on the dock of the bay wasting time, as the late Otis Redding so shrewdly anticipated.
The tsunami may have been unprecedented, but what followed was business as usual—the sloth and corruption of government, the feebleness of the brand-name NGOs, the compassion-exhibitionism of the transnational jet set. If we lived in a world where “it’s what you do that defines you,” we’d be heaping praise on the U.S. and Australian militaries, who in the immediate hours after the tsunami dispatched their forces to save lives, distribute food and restore water, power and communications.
According to my favorite foreign minister these days, Australia’s Alexander Downer, “Iraq was a clear example about how outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism.... Increasingly multilateralism is a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator. Multilateral institutions need to become more results-oriented.”
Which is pretty much the Batman thesis: It’s what we do that defines us. And we’ll do more without the UN.
Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College, www.hillsdale.edu.
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