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What kind of new worldwide organisation could be established
that would truly defend humankind’s common resources and limit
the major powers? Here are some suggestions for further debate.
By Monique
Chemillier-Gendreau
THE reform of the United Nations is an old problem (1). UN
bureaucracy, grossly inflated over the years, is widely thought
inefficient. The Security Council, the main UN peacemaking body,
still dominated by the victors of the second world war, has not
lived up to its mandate. It has allowed conflicts to proliferate
and intervened arbitrarily. The peace dividend promised at the
end of the cold war was an illusion. Arms sales have soared
again because the major powers chose to militarise their
economies. Peacekeeping missions have developed exponentially,
often leading to fiascos (2). President George Bush’s unilateral
decision to invade Iraq removed a dictatorship only to plunge
that country into chaos and violence, further confirming the
helplessness of the UN.
The subject of reform was raised again recently in a study on
threats, challenges and change made by a high-level panel of
experts and presented to the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan,
at the end of 2004. It was also taken up in his report published
on 21 March 2005 (3), which contained an analysis of the
challenges of a changing world - wars between states, civil
violence, poverty, infectious diseases, environmental
degradation, terrorism, organised crime, nuclear, radiological,
chemical and biological weapons - and emphasised preventive
action, with peacekeeping linked to the conditions for
establishing peace.
He incorporated the detailed proposals put forward by the panel
for the control of weapons (marking and locating light weaponry,
transparency of arms stocks) as well as its definition of
terrorism: “Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended
to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or
non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or
compelling a government or an international organisation to do
or abstain from doing any act.”
He proposes setting up a peacebuilding commission to help
counter the risks of disintegration faced by any country
emerging from conflict. The report insists that all member
states sign and ratify many treaties covering the protection of
civilians, aspects of disarmament, and particularly the Rome
Statute that gives authority to the International Criminal
Court. But these seem empty words, given that international law,
which remains the framework for any reform, leaves sovereign
states totally free in their commitments. One wonders what
impact his appeal will have on power-hungry states that have so
often demonstrated that they were above regulation.
Despite the importance of these considerations to the
environment in which vital peacekeeping mechanisms are deployed,
they do little to mask the limits of the proposals on the main
issue: the institutional reform of the UN. Annan avoids this
heart of the problem. The permanent members remain unchallenged,
even though the legitimacy of the five second world war victors
has been eroded.
So despite promising statements on democratising the council,
tantamount to an admission that its composition bears no
relation to the declared intention of equality between members,
there is no hint of any advance in the democratic process. The
status of the permanent members and their veto remains intact as
unjustified positions of power. Yet the record of the member
states who have held the reins for half a century should be
grounds enough to plead for an end to this system. The impunity
of those nations, the consolidation of their powers, and their
global militarisation are all arguments against their
privileges. Germany, Japan, Brazil and India, the “G4”, are open
candidates for this privileged status, and many other nations
are standing by.
The permanence of power remains unchallenged even though it is
ephemeral by nature. New members who could be admitted to the
club because they are powerful today may be overtaken by those
more powerful tomorrow. What really needs to be questioned is
power itself as a criterion for appointing leading members. The
history of democracy has been a constant struggle against the
usurpation of power by the richest and strongest. The proposed
changes will leave the Security Council as the same aristocratic
body at odds with the egalitarian essence of democracy. The
proposal to democratise the council is a sham.
The veto is also a subject of acrimonious debate. G4 candidates
for permanent membership accept that the price of entry to the
circle of power is a postponement of their veto for 15 years.
The Africans have resisted this, and what happens this month is
mostly in their hands, because any amendment must receive
two-thirds of the vote in the General Assembly. To be enforced,
it must then be ratified by two-thirds of the member states,
including the five permanent members.
The proposals for the assembly are weak. Those for the
replacement of the Commission for Human Rights by a human rights
council are only a relative improvement, since the function and
powers of this new body have not been stipulated. The only
reform that would improve efficiency in human rights, as desired
by many victims of abuses, would be the establishment of an
international court of human rights, which would enforce the
rights laid down in international treaties and hear individual
appeals in special circumstances. Europe has had such an
organisation since 1959 with the Strasbourg-based European Court
of Human Rights, giving Europeans an advantage over other
continents. This gap should be closed soon. The proposed council
will not be enough.
Although the report seriously analyses the causes of insecurity
in the world, security is not equated with the definition of
common resources within the global political community. That is
the major challenge of our era. Two factors block the measures
suggested: the continuing dominance of the victors of 1945, and
the universal spread of extreme free-market values since the
collapse of communism. All of us have something to lose.
If we want to imagine another worldwide institutional system, we
must examine the world we live in and ask ourselves what our
goals should be. In 1945 the predominant idea was collective
security, at a time when threats were between states, military
force pitted against military force. As Annan points out, the
threats have changed.
The spread of conventional and nuclear weapons, and terrorism
and genocide through such rudimentary means as the machete, are
violence that goes beyond state borders. We need to examine the
reasons for this violence. Hunger, indecent development gaps,
inequality in the face of natural disasters (particularly
climatic ones), the major powers’ encouragement of arms sales
and other trafficking, ideologies that breed racism and
discrimination (neo-Nazi factions in European and Russian
countries, “Ivoirité” in the Ivory Coast, discriminatory Zionism
against Arabs in Israel, with implications for the failure of
the peace process, radical Islam). Human beings will always be
confronted by their own violence. Globalisation is leaving many
more poor by the wayside, provoking new forms of violence and
widespread terrorism.
The UN response to these problems, even the redrafted version
that adopted Annan’s proposals, is not enough. The complexity of
a global society is totally ignored. The UN manages inter-state
relations, albeit feebly. The intense relations established
directly between populations outside state control are
developing into a power struggle to the detriment of the human
rights they pretend to observe. Despite warnings by the UN
Development Programme, the UN has done nothing about the
protection and equitable sharing of such vital resources as
water, energy, knowledge and medication.
If the UN cannot be reformed, and the major powers refuse to
give up their prerogatives and hog most of the world’s
resources, then a new organisation of the global community must
be invented soon. Those states that bear the brunt of
globalisation would be well advised to consider quitting the UN
immediately and founding a new organisation adapted to their
requirements.
What might it be? The new organisation could establish its
headquarters in Jerusalem, as Regis Debray has suggested, or in
Africa or Latin America, as a symbolic move away from the West.
Its purpose might be to construct a universal political
community, not to replace national communities but to complement
them and cater for the complexity of a society that combines
inter-state and inter-individual relations. The main challenge
would be to define and defend mankind’s common resources.
Peacekeeping could then become more than a belated, often
useless, stopgap.
The institution required for such a project could be built
around four political bodies. A general assembly would represent
the states. A second assembly would deal with the difficult
problem of representing peoples. It would not be directly
elected, to avoid manipulation. A special section devoted to
civil society through NGOs would not be a good idea, since they
are set up independently and their geographic spread is uneven.
An acceptable solution for the present might be a second
assembly for national parliaments, each of which would send a
number of members proportionate to its population, in accordance
with a system that would prevent over- or under-representation.
Small states would have to group together to send
representatives. This would offset the first assembly’s one
state, one vote system that would give them too great an
advantage. Both assemblies would work together bicamerally with
commissions to deal with political, economic, social, military
and cultural matters of global importance. The laws voted would
no longer be soft laws, but would be enforceable. The Economic
and Social Council would disappear, as would the Trusteeship
Council (4).
Two councils would be attached to the two assemblies, one
charged with preventive (non-military) action and peacekeeping,
the other with intervention in the event of conflict. The 25
members of the first council would be parliamentary
representatives elected solely by, and from, the members of the
second assembly, all for the same duration. Their remit would be
to enact measures taken by the organisation in the common
interest.
The second council, in charge of security, would have
representatives of the 25 states elected by both assemblies
together, all with the same term of office and decision-making
powers. The permanent-member category and veto would be
eliminated. There would need to be a way of regulating the
paradox of giving responsibility for peace to states that might
have an interest in waging war. An ineligibility clause to
council membership should block states that have voted for high
military budgets in relation to their social expenditure, or
that committed aggression in the two years before the elections.
There would still be a secretary general who would be
accountable for his actions to both assemblies. The
International Court of Justice would change status and merge
with the International Criminal Court. The dual jurisdiction of
the new body would be enforceable by law (5). An international
court for human rights would complete the legal setup.
There is much discussion along these lines outside government
circles (6). These proposals are made for discussion, but there
are imperatives behind them: the need for democracy (by the
elimination of all prerogatives that benefit only a few states),
for law (by strengthening the competence of the general
assemblies) and justice (by the mandatory nature of
international law). These cannot be ignored for much longer.
Translated by Krystyna Horko
(1) See Joachim Muller, Reforming the United Nations,
Kluwer Law International, The Hague, 2001.
(2) See Maurice Bertrand, L’ONU, La Découverte, Paris,
2004 (5th edition).
(3) United Nations document A/59/2005, see:
http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/
...
(4) The Trusteeship Council was one of the main UN organisations
charged with supervising the administrations of the trust
territories. After the independence of Palau, the last such
territory, it suspended operations on 1 November 1994.
(5) The International Court of Justice settles disputes between
states. The International Criminal Court may judge individuals
accused of certain international crimes.
(6) See Daniele Archibugi and David Held, Cosmopolitan
Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge 1995.
Le Monde
Diplomatique
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