University Times

This month’s historic gathering in New York City of world leaders — some 170 strong — to discuss reforming the United Nations produced mixed results, according to most analysts.

Experts say the summit fell short of the most ambitious goals laid out by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which were to gain consensus for reform in five major areas: the Security Council, terrorism, global development, human rights and military action.

The 35-page document ultimately approved by the U.N. General Assembly calls for doubling global development aid; the establishment of a new peace-building commission for countries making the transition from war to peace; an international responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and a condemnation of terrorism “in all its forms.”

On the other hand, the U.N. envoys could not agree to an international definition of terrorism, deferred the logistics of the new peace-building commission to the General Assembly and came to no agreement at all on nuclear weapons proliferation.

As world leaders and pundits continue to digest the watered-down reforms, local experts took a crack at some of the implications of the new agreement in a Sept. 20 on-campus forum titled, “Empowering Larger Freedom: U.N. Reform and U.S. Interests.”

The forum, which took a cue from the goals laid out by Annan in his “In Larger Freedom” reform proposals, was sponsored by Pitt’s global studies program in the University Center for International Studies, the Global Solutions Education Fund of Pittsburgh and the United Nations Association of Pittsburgh.

The panel of experts included Charli Carpenter, assistant professor at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA); Sky Foerster, president of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh and an adjunct professor at GSPIA, and Jeffrey Laurenti, senior fellow at the Century Foundation. The forum was moderated by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette associate editor and former U.S. ambassador Dan Simpson.

Each speaker took a different tack on what the reforms may mean for U.S. interests. Following are capsulated versions of their presentations.

Dan Simpson: What’s right, what’s wrong with the U.N.

“In most forums like this it is difficult to find anyone who will attack the United Nations,” Simpson began. “So I’m going to attack the United Nations for five minutes and then defend it for five minutes and then turn things over to the panelists who will discuss their particular specialty related to the United Nations.”

Critics of the United Nations see the world body as corrupt, inefficient, expensive and ineffective, Simpson said. “I’ve seen it in the field for some 35 years, and I would say all of those descriptions apply to it.”

There also is an interminable battle between the small countries and the large countries sharing power. In the General Assembly, countries with tiny populations, which often don’t pay their member dues, have the same one vote as the United States, which puts up a quarter of the money to support the U.N. and without which meant the U.N. likely would not survive, he said.

“Then there’s the eternal, boring argument about the membership of the Security Council, which dates from 1945. The minute anyone suggests how the Security Council should be changed, there’s an enormous battle that ends up in a stalemate, as does so much of the U.N. debate,” Simpson noted.

Other criticisms include the role of often inept and corrupt U.N. peace-keeping forces and the lack of accountability structures for U.N. programs such as the recent oil for food program, he said.

Critical, from the point of view from the United States, was the total lack of support for the Iraq War, Simpson added. “Whether you approve of the Iraq War or not, the U.N. has been utterly unresponsive to the United States on the subject of Iraq. Kofi Annan called the war illegal.”

More recently, efforts by U.S. officials to bring Iran before the Security Council to answer for its nuclear program have been opposed by big and little countries alike, he said.

Then Simpson changed gears: “Now, here’s what’s right with the U.N.: It is an enormously hopeful experiment. After World War II, there was a major effort to organize in one body all the nations in the world to try to coordinate their efforts in some very important fields.

“If this U.N. collapsed, we’d just have to come up with another version of it. It is required because if each country is allowed to pursue its own interests without any reference to other countries, without any accountability, there will undoubtedly be trouble and a worse world than the one we live in already.”

The United Nations also plays a crucial role related to economic globalization, he said. “There’s no question that the economies of the countries of the world are interlocked. So there needs to be political and social interactions between countries and the U.N. provides that forum.”

Other positives are that the U.N. serves as an organization “to ensure that the hope of the poor in the world will not be taken away, because nobody else will watch out for them,” Simpson said. “And most importantly the U.N. plays a genuine peace-nurturing role. When two countries begin to gear up for war, the U.N. is the place for recourse.”

Sky Foerster: The core question for reformers

“First, There is no contest about the need for reform in the United Nations. Everyone agrees: Kofi Annan talks about the essentialness of reform, and Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice said the time for reform is now,” Foerster said. “The underlying question is: What kind of reform?”

Reform issues range from management and fiscal governance, to greater transparency, to barriers against corruption and nepotism, to institutional structures, to whether human rights violators get to run havoc over the human rights movement within the U.N., to capacity to mobilize resources against poverty and HIV/AIDS and all the other social and economic ills, to the capacity to address the issues of security, Foerster said.

“But whether you’re talking about security or poverty or whatever issue, the reform debate comes down to a core question, which is the source of great debate in the United States and not just in the U.S., but within the international community,” he said. “And that question is: By reform do we mean creating and enabling the United Nations as an institution to have the capacity to do more? Or is it reform to make sure that there are further checks and balances against the ability of the United Nations to do that which it might want to do within the system — which is a euphemism for the great powers and their veto. In other words, to enable or to restrict?”

The United States should frame that debate in terms of American interests, he said.

“When Kofi Annan visited Pitt a year ago in October, the core of his argument went like this: The United Nations needs the United States because without the biggest guy on the block we just can’t do anything — remember the League of Nations. But the United States needs the United Nations, because the United Nations enables, provides legitimacy for, the United States to pursue its national interests.

“How can anyone disagree with that? The answer is that a lot of people in this country and, by the way, in other countries, do not believe that they need something else to legitimize their national interest, especially when it comes to their security.”

Framed another way, Foerster continued, the question becomes: Does the international system have the right to intervene against a country’s sovereignty for the purpose of righting a wrong, however it is defined?

Under Article I of the U.N. charter, the answer is “no,” he said. Yet, U.N. reforms are endorsing a so-called emerging principle of the responsibility to protect people, even if that means trumping sovereignty.

That’s the essential dilemma: If the United States, or any country, wants to intervene in another country’s affairs because it thinks its vital national security interests are at stake then United Nations approval can legitimize that move in the eyes of the world, Foerster said.

“But sovereignty becomes a wonderful [protection] if you’re one of those resource-rich states that doesn’t want everybody tapping into your pocketbook to go solve their problems. Do we want to allow this organization to define the agenda and oblige us to commit lives and treasure where we might not want to?”

Jeffrey Laurenti: What the summit accomplished

“First, let’s recall why there is a United Nations,” Laurenti said. “There was a world within living memory when you had international affairs based on anarchistic principles, with nations all armed with the notion that military force was a legitimate way to advance their interests. Such policies twice plunged much of the world into war. That’s why we have the United Nations, which gives us a framework for more orderly peaceful political processes for reaching decisions, rather than one against all, and all against one.”

With the United States operating outside the United Nations in Vietnam and now in Iraq, “the country has found itself again flailing about in destructive wars that began very quickly to lose their initial glamour of satisfying America’s interests.”

More significant than Annan’s disapproval of the Iraq invasion is the condemnation of long-standing allies, France, Germany and Russia, among many others, Laurenti pointed out. “That was more important because that’s why none of them would ride to the rescue when America got into trouble in Iraq in an occupation that was not in fact greeted with flowers, but with a much more mixed reaction.”

What did the summit accomplish? Was it worth it?

“By Kofi Annan’s own scorecard, the summit has a mixed result; not the great breakthrough he had hoped for, but slightly more than many expected, because you had conservative nations, including the U.S., which also has been estranged from its own allies on issues of international law, come to some agreements,” Laurenti said.

“Poverty-riddled countries see all these issues of security and terrorism and weapons of mass destruction as not very important to their own problems, compared to grinding misery of the population and how to keep them in line with their own military establishments to protect the ruling classes. To reach any consensus on a program of action on these issues from widely disparate points of view is fairly remarkable.”

Annan cited the lack of Security Council reform as a failure of the summit, Laurenti pointed out. “He said the biggest failure is no nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament agreement — there’s no mention of it at all in the final document — and that was because one very large nuclear power does not want it in the program of action.”

The United States, in the person of John Bolton, did its best to scuttle Annan’s main reform proposals, but did a significant about face after losing the publicity battle, Laurenti said.

Annan was pushing for support of goals advanced and ratified at a U.N. Millennium Summit five years ago, so-called “millennium goals.”

Those included goals that could be measured statistically, such as halving the proportion of those living in poverty and hunger by the year 2015 and doubling aid to developing countries.

Prior to this month’s summit, those goals appeared to be deal-breakers for the United States.

“But Bush, backtracking, made a speech that for the first time endorsed the millennium goals. It was the first time the goals had ever publicly passed his lips,” Laurenti said.

Charli Carpenter: The view of a political scientist

“On the one hand, political scientists want to know what actually goes on in the world, and on the other hand, we want to know what are the obstacles standing in the way of what we hope for,” said Carpenter. “So the compromise is reality versus hope.”

Since the primary function of the United Nations is to collectively legitimize or condemn world programs and actions, that framework allows observers to measure the achievements of the summit in terms of what the United Nations is capable of doing, she said.

“If the goals are the promotion of human dignity, the eradication of poverty, control of weapons of mass destruction and freedom from fear, then ‘enshrining’ those concepts [at the summit], for example, the affirmation of the responsibly to protect people against genocide and other abuses at the hands of their own government,” means that the summit had genuine accomplishments, she said.

“I would argue that human rights trump sovereignty, because, now, sovereignty implies protection of the people. The concepts are not irreconcilable: a condition of sovereign statehood is that you will protect your people. You will not view sovereignty as a smokescreen to hide behind” for human rights abuses, Carpenter said.

“But, from a policy perspective, if the U.N. is just a talk show, then you get the ‘so what’ question. What’s the hoopla all about?” she said. “Is it just a distraction? What really is at stake?”

The language of the human rights initiative was purposefully watered down by Syria, Cuba and the United States, which argued for adding qualifiers such as “in accordance with the U.N. charter,” Carpenter said.

“If you have faith in the power of rhetoric, then those changes are important. But more important is that rhetoric needs political will to back it up. If the U.N is a forum where world leaders can come together and reach a consensus,” that political will can be formidable, she said.

—Peter Hart