In Lebanon yesterday, a roadside bomb injured two UN peacekeepers. Sudanese troops also had a brief skirmish with UN peacekeepers in Darfur Province, wounding a civilian driver. Two incidents in twenty-four hours - another sign that the UN is becoming a target, a player in the political game, rather than the force that arrives to guarantee peace when the politics has concluded.

Complacency

Some time ago we undertook a private survey for what was then a 'rogue state' (though one less so nowadays) amongst the British political class - not amongst those who held power and office but amongst those who influenced those who held power and office.

What we found on this or that detail is nobody's business but that of the client, but we can reveal one finding. If the United Nations thought that it was a good idea for diplomats to dress up in pink and do the fandango, the British people would almost certainly go along with it.

The British may often have had their doubts about the Special Relationship and certainly about the European Union but Blair, otherwise an authoritarian when it came to what the British people want in foreign affairs, knew that he could not get the middle ground for war in 2003 without that second UN Resolution.

There are good reasons for British allegiance to the UN. It is one of the few initiatives that perfectly matches the prejudices of both the centre-right and the centre-left (we only have centrists in the UK) - the Atlantic Charter's progressive feel gives perfect cover to an organisation that the British feel is theirs, representative of their victory in 1945 and their values.

Two declining imperial powers (France and the UK) and an incoming superpower (the US) took 60% of the serious voting on a liberal-progressive mandate, the Atlantic Charter, that has provided the perfect front for the continuation of Western hegemony. 

Within a few years, the 'game' became to out-spin the Communists on having the best ethical rhetoric ... and what Roosevelt and Churchill decided in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean proved to be one of the best political investments the two countries ever made.

This is not to say that the Allies did not take the Atlantic Charter seriously as a moral template but its purpose was political warfare advantage. The conduct of the West in the last sixty years has departed from far more than it has reflected the ethical premises of the agreement. Nevertheless, its existence has allowed liberal opinion in the West to sustain its faith in an organisation that is otherwise now well past its sell-by date.

Why Reform ?

The blind faith of the British ignores the fact that, while the UK and France are major world economies, if the top five economies in 2007 had the veto, they and Russia would be rapidly displaced by Japan, India and Germany, two of which were deadly enemies of the West in 1940 and the other a resentful possession.

In addition, the Atlantic value system, only partially and cynically acceded to by the two Communist partners (China emerging as such much later) has changed from a system based on sovereign nations, primarily concerned with inter-state relations, into something more akin to a universalist crusade to bring these values into play within states.

The 1945 settlement was between state actors, variously if inadequately beholden to their peoples, whereas the United Nations now has 'Global Compacts' in which big business, NGOS and governments all negotiate policy outcomes.

Few of these partners have any real connection to the populations whose interest they claim to serve. Business and NGOs, with their drives for profit and policy change respectively, have no mass mandate whatsoever and neither shareholders nor NGO supporters get much of a vote on what is done in their name.

The 'Democratic Deficit'

If the 'democratic deficit' in the European Union is large, it is huge within the United Nations. To be uncharitable, The UN could be classed as the attempted seizure of power by an international association of do-gooders who run their operations on enthusiasm and a shoestring much like any charity.

The UN General Secretary has openly recognized that the UN is no longer seen as neutral in some parts of the world – but maybe this is because it is not! But the wider perception of an alleged bias by the new General Secretary, Ban KI-Moon, towards the US has missed the point. 

The UN is, by definition, regardless of relations with the US, representative of a liberal values consensus that is always going to be seen as ‘imperialist’ in some radical quarters. And this community of radical resistance, as we have noted elsewhere in As It Happens, is growing.

Of course, most non-Western nations remain committed to the United Nations regardless on two counts - first, as beneficiaries of redistributed largesse and, second, because the UN still retains, despite the attempt of the US Administration to bend the rules under Bush II, its core role as guarantor of some otherwise decidly dodgy and irrational post-imperial boundaries.

The Drift from Original Principles

The current agonising over Kosovo is not just some storm in a teacup about some tribe on the fringe of two empires, European and Russo-Serbian.  It raises fundamental issues about whether the old '45 settlement still stands. 

In the 'old days', the question would not arise - Kosovo would simply be protected from invasion from outside but have no other rights. Now rights of self determination are extending in a haphazard way, not merely to encompass the old empires (the Chinese empire's periphery being conveniently ignored) but those of the smallest of member states.

So, without going down that analytical route in this posting, and putting aside the usual complaints about corruption and waste from neo-conservatives, the United Nations is out of time and place by any reasonable assessment. It badly needs reform - a rare occasion when our views coincide with those of former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Above all, the Security Council no longer represents the global balance of power as economic and military strength shifts from the East to the West. Its veto and General Assembly resolutions are either ineffective (ask the Palestinians) or are only useful now as manipulative tools for those who still retain effective control of the institution.

The logic of effective reform requires that the UN rein its new-found propensity to try and be the super-NGO for the liberal West and to start honing down its functions back to inter-state conflict resolution, research to assist the resolution by regional blocs and member states of trans-state issues, and the management of a very specific group of human rights violations and crises whose perception as 'wrongs' are shared across the globe regardless of ideology.

A Reformed UN-SC

If the European Union could get its act together and displace the two old empires and their defeated giant with just one vote for Europe, not only does Russia remain within the club with the US and China, but a UN-SC of seven (covering those nations with economies in excess of £0.8trillion) could include two additional Asian powers (Japan and India) and a Latin American (Brazil).

Such a reform would certainly last the pace for the next 30 to 40 years before the next round of reforms were required.

A research function could simply be the independent provision of information on trans-state issues - climate, migration, trade, intellectual property or whatever. States could make national interest judgements and then organise matters through conferences that may or may not be managed by an independent United Nations. Instead of presenting a liberal world-view, the United Nations would be a global civil service and a research institute which brokered opinion without taking a view that was more than a recommendation on best practice.

Decadence

But the key is to decide what executive functions the United Nations can and should fulfil and then give it adequate resources and mandate. At the moment, it tries to do everything on a shoe string. It increasingly either fails or becomes part of the game in political warfare operations that are initiated by the darker elements in its larger constituent powers. 

The entire project has become naive - nice people making the world no better. The low point was probably struck when global policy appeared to be manipulated by the appearance of a Hollywood actor with no mandate other than that his handsome face was recognised by millions.

The use of celebrity by the UN is comprehensible but it is a sign of its decadence. A significant minority in the world, especially traditionalists and those whose ethnic aspirations resent its protection of existing borders, are now learning to hate it enough to make it a terrorist target.

It would be tragic if the only result, from a public perspective. of including India, Japan and Brazil on the UN-SC would be more You-Tube clips of some Bollywood actress, a Shanghai starlet and the star of some Latin American soap all exposing some wrong in the world that the UN can do nothing about. 

The UN as emotional outlet for global TV audiences - is that what it will have become in twenty years?  Nor is this NGO-driven all-encompassing ethos going to change in the near future. 

Mission Creep

As we move closer to the 60-year anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [1948] - that other document that competes with the Atlantic Charter [1941] as the moral basis for the United Nations - the UN has announced that it is to push for more economic and social rights, including the human rights responsibilities of companies (at least according to the Canadian-origin UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour).

This, once again, indicates that the UN is effectively the ‘front’ for a set of universalist values that cut directly across the non-universalist claims of both traditionalists and sovereign nations and other identity groups.

To push for more economic and social rights has unintended consequences that undermine the progressive agenda of these nice but ineffectual people. It certainly builds resistance to interference in states' rights but, more importantly, it 'infantilises' dissent within states

Instead of allowing 'learning through doing', creating liberal progressive coalitions within nation-states the hard way from the bottom up, the UN (much like the EU) seeks to impose 'goodness' from above. It is all too 'easy'.

While 'good things' are nicely ensconced in law, acceptance of reform and progressive ideas is culturally shallow. Normal resentments do not emerge as coalitions of the centre-left but as coalitions of the traditionalist and populist right. Legitimacy is questioned. The conditions for insurgency are created.

The UN is becoming a terrorist target precisely because it is incoherent and filled with lovely people who are so convinced of their own righteousness that they cannot see the world from the perspective of the other, any other. Their effective castration of home-grown political action may be the ultimate own goal for liberal progressives.

A Case Study

A decade ago, we acted for a diplomat whose campaign to become Secretary General of a UN organisation. The campaign was always destined to fail but he wanted to put across a simple proposition.

In his view, funds that went into the organisation were being wasted on committees, back-scratching between small states looking for jobs for their under-employed and over-educated political class (the African nations are notorious for this) and on thousands of small projects. 

Funds, he felt, should be accumulated into one massive pot to achieve one single objective within a set period of time. In this particular case, the task was to bring literacy to the poor of the world, especially women, so that they could make effective use of intermediate technology and healthcare instructions. 

This would do more to improve their lives than any academic committee that produced a report on what most in the field knew already. But, of course, there is another side to this. 

To teach the illiterate masses to read in the third world is also to give them the means to read about their disadvantage and consider solutions. This leads to political organisation, the emergence of cadres and, possibly. insurgency - academic committees are always going to be much more preferable. 

Faced with actually empowering the seething masses, the 'bourgeois liberal' takes fright and much prefers methods that allow his or her superior sensibility and education dictate what should be done and for whom - and if this means 'global compacts' with business and some very rum governments, hey, what's the alternative? Revolution?

Career Do-Gooders

An entire class of NGO bureaucrat has emerged out of the West whose self-righteousness beggars belief - and it is no surprise to find that their presence in real war zones, such as Afghanistan, has been major cause of local resentment. 

These are 'career' do-gooders recirculating funds granted to Western development ministries and infecting the original UN mission with an ethos that has turned it from being 'above politics' into a central problem in the increasingly fraught relationship between elites and masses.

Most social and economic transformation projects are best taken out of the United Nations and transferred to partnerships between nation states, to philanthropic organisations (which perhaps the UN should regulate as a sector), and to regional organisations that are partnered by the major powers acting unilaterally or together. 

The African Union, for example, could be far more effective than the United Nations on African issues. The Bush Administration's work in dealing with AIDS and malaria directly has been one of the few success stories of an administration otherwise excoriated across the world. These models of regional organisation and state partnership are always going to be more effective than 'global' solutions.

What Should the UN Be Doing?

The United Nations' role should return be to first principles and to let itself be constrained by two basic objectives - to preserve peace and to halt inter-state atrocities and genocide. To do this, it needs not only to reform and 'de-politicise' the UN-SC within a tighter and less idealistic framework, but to concentrate resources on a standing ability to intervene in three areas:

• against aggressors [with great power engagement]
• against mass murder and genocide in cases where states are involved or have lost control, and
• in disaster relief of a mass nature, including refugee relief.

Of course, there will be grey areas and a body of international law will cover proven state sponsorship of acts of terror against or in other states, political kidnapping and possibly acts of subversion and unlawful influence, including corruption from outside the state. 

The slave trade between states, including people trafficking, would fall within what should be the real engine for the eventual re-expansion of the United Nation's remit into something akin to world government - a political version of the powerful Inter-State Commerce Clause of the US Constitution.

There are still issues of justice to consider. The role of international criminal courts is controversial precisely because they seem to be so often instruments of Western state policy.

Similarly, many NGOS are going to be highly discomfited if the United Nations abandons its decades-long mission creep of accepting every good cause that comes along through a multiplicity of under-funded over-manned special interest organisations.

In some areas , the United Nations may even increase its say in internal affairs - by consent - through effective advisory services. Yes, what I am saying is that the United Nations should cease to be a 'fix' after a peculiarly vicious war sixty years or so ago and should reduce itself to a core function from which a genuinely effective 'world government' could be formed.

The identification of rogue states that prove criminal threats to their neighbours and the negotiation of the redrawing of imperial boundaries and terms for secession or federalisation are issues that the United Nations could be a genuine honest broker instead of the 'front' for a coalition that often seems excessively Western and too damn close to NATO.

A start may be to relocate its headquarters - perhaps to a state that was not on the UN-SC and not automatically Atlanticist such as South Africa or, perhaps, Mexico City, Seoul, Jakarta, Sydney, Istanbul or Buenos Aires - anything that moves it away from 1945.

Getting A Grip

Someone is eventually going to have to get a grip because the United Nations is going to become irrelevant on further failure. Major powers, and certainly weak states with sufficient strength to create an insurgency against an incoming 'peacemaker', will ignore it. More people will die, while peacekeepers stand by - having sleepless nights at their own ineffectiveness.

It is a shame that the credibility of Mr. Blair (outside the US and Israel) is gone so completely.  He could have led a debate, first in the UK, then in Europe and then in the world, about this desperate need to re-think the machinery that is supposed to sustain international peace. 

As it is, all the players are still seeking short term advantage. And there is a powerful bureaucratic inertia within the United Nations that will fight serious reform down to the last almost-useless stipendiary adviser.

On this one, we are pessimists. What could have become the basis for a minimalist but effective world government will be about as relevant as the Vatican or the late Byzantine Empire within a decade or so. A presence with influence, able to affect history, but a shadow of what it could be and the target of rough-hewn barbarians with history on their side.

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