What's Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix it

Thomas G. Weiss

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745661469
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Six decades after its establishment, the United Nations and its system of related agencies and programs are perpetually in crisis. While the twentieth century's world wars gave rise to ground-breaking efforts at international organization in 1919 and 1945, today's UN is ill-equipped to deal with contemporary challenges to world order. Neither the end of the Cold War nor the aftermath of 9/11 has led to the "next generation" of multilateral institutions.

But what exactly is wrong with the UN, and how can we fix it? Is it possible to retrofit the world body? In his succinct and hard-hitting analysis, Thomas G. Weiss takes a diagnose-and-cure approach to the world organization's inherent difficulties. In the first half of the book, he considers: the problems of international leadership and decision making in a world of self-interested states; the diplomatic difficulties caused by the artificial divisions between the industrialized North and the global South; the structural problems of managing the UN's many overlapping jurisdictions, agencies, and bodies; and the challenges of bureaucracy and leadership. The second half shows how to mitigate these maladies and points the way to a world in which the UN's institutional ills might be "cured." His remedies are not based on pious hopes of a miracle cure for the UN, but rather on specific and encouraging examples that could be replicated. With considered optimism and in contrast to received wisdom, Weiss contends that substantial change in intergovernmental institutions is plausible and possible.

The new and expanded second edition of this well-regarded and indispensable book will continue to spark debate amongst students, scholars, and policymakers concerned with international politics, as well as anyone genuinely interested in the future of the United Nations and multilateral cooperation.

Part One

Diagnosing the Ills

CHAPTER ONE

Westphalia, Alive But Not Well

Many of the most intractable problems (ranging from pandemics to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction) are transnational in scope; and addressing them successfully requires action that is not only multilateral (involving more than two states) but also global. The policy authority and resource capacity necessary for tackling such problems, however, remains vested in states rather than in the United Nations. Established in 1945 by sovereign states seeking to protect themselves against external aggression, the UN was not built to confront many of the challenges that face the world today. The disconnect between the nature of a growing number of problems and the nature of the UN goes a long way toward explaining the world organization’s recurrent difficulties on many fronts and the often fitful nature of what essentially are tactical and short-term responses to challenges that require strategic transnational thinking and sustained global attention.

The logic of the system of world politics continues to reflect the basic principle of sovereign jurisdiction, which has its roots in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Only those rules consented to, and only those organizations voluntarily accepted, exist in interstate relations. Sovereignty, constructed to produce order and to buttress central authority within the state, also means that central authority over global society and interstate relations has necessarily remained underdeveloped. All territorial states came to be seen as equal in the sense of having ultimate authority to prescribe what “should be” in their jurisdictions; and sovereign equality is the most essential building block of the world organization as spelled out in Article 2 of the UN Charter (or constitution).

Interstate relations reflect what political scientists label “anarchy”—no overarching authority exists beyond that of individual states. In the history of international relations and despite the notion of the sovereign equality of states, of course, all sorts of unequal relations have existed and have even been formally approved. In this sense, the fact that the five permanent members of the Security Council (P-5) each possess the veto follows many examples of inequality.¹ Indeed, the widespread exceptions and routine violations have led Stephen Krasner to characterize the notion of sovereignty as “organized hypocrisy.”²

The range of views about the conceptual traction and inherent value of national sovereignty varies. Krasner appropriately identified four different types: international legal (or mutual recognition between formal juridical entities); Westphalian (or the exclusion of external actors from a given territory); domestic (or the ability to exercise control within a territory); and interdependence (or the capacity to regulate the flow of information, goods, services, money, people, or pollution across borders).

Whatever variety used by diplomats or scholars, there are two poles that characterize contemporary stances on the value of sovereignty. On the one hand, the most numerous are those who tightly embrace it—not only many Third World countries but also “new sovereigntists” in the United States and elsewhere in the West. On the other hand, there are those who embrace passionately the construction of human rights norms as a step toward breaking down the “protection” supposedly afforded to war criminals by national boundaries. In between, there are more ambivalent observers, including those who see the erosion of sovereignty by globalization as an inexorable development with pluses and minuses.

Not surprisingly, proponents of the main theories of international relations—realism, institutionalism, constructivism—also vary in their appreciation of the current value of state sovereignty and its relevance for global problem-solving. Readers who have plowed through this literature will recall that for realists, sovereignty is an unquestioned value and the only way to think about world politics and foreign policy. For liberal institutionalists, it is a given that can be accommodated by pursuing enlightened policies within intergovernmental organizations to foster cooperation and reduce transaction costs. And for constructivists (or ideationalists), sovereignty is contingent, and so its definition and content can be altered over time by individuals and states. In the interests of full disclosure, the author falls in the last camp.

National interests currently are the only widely acceptable basis for governments to make decisions, which explains the narrow (i.e., national and not global) calculations by major as well as middle and minor powers. The United States and, increasingly, China are the contemporary hegemons, but the United Kingdom and Brazil are hardly different in the way that they approach international decisions; going it alone is easier for the hegemons, but others follow the same decision-making logic. Sovereignty is thus the explanation for the current multilateral system as well as the explanation for why that system is in such dire straits. This chapter begins with an overview of sovereignty in the age of globalization before examining some contemporary illustrations of the resulting difficulties that inhibit addressing looming problems in international peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development.

State Sovereignty, Worldwide Challenges, and Interdependence

Individuals exist and are grouped into nations. Nations, in turn, are governed by states. And states have governments, sometimes elected and sometimes imposed. Sovereignty is an attribute of all states, which is exercised by governments, whatever their orientations or origins. What is frequently called “national sovereignty” is actually state sovereignty. Whether the citizens of a nation are sovereign refers to whether the state derives its legitimacy ultimately from popular will. This latter issue has, for a long time, been considered an interior or domestic question; external actors have no authority to pronounce on it—although friends and foes alike are continually subjected to pressures from foreign ministries.

Most states—but especially the younger ones that achieved formal independence as a result of decolonization beginning in the late 1940s and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s—value state sovereignty more than supranational cooperation to improve security, protect human rights, or pursue sustainable development. Many African and Asian countries achieved independence after extensive and protracted nationalist struggles; the leaders of such efforts helped to establish new states and shape the founding principles of their foreign policies. The anticolonial impulse survives in the corporate memory of elites whose views sometimes fail to get a respectful hearing in western policy and scholarly circles. Paternalism by the self-appointed custodians of morality and human conscience undermines the credibility of many western powers who preach human rights and intervention. Ramesh Thakur points out that developing countries “are neither amused nor mindful at being lectured on universal human values by those who failed to practice the same during European colonialism and now urge them to cooperate in promoting ‘global’ human rights norms.”³

Anyone with even the most superficial understanding of colonial history should be able to understand readily why independence is precious. Algerian president Abdelazia Bouteflika’s remarks during the 1999 General Assembly capture this reality: “We do not deny that the United Nations has the right and the duty to help suffering humanity, but we remain extremely sensitive to any undermining of our sovereignty, not only because sovereignty is our last defence against the rules of an unequal world, but because we are not taking part in the decision-making process of the Security Council.”⁴

Edward Luck has pointed to American “exceptionalism” and traditional skepticism about inroads on its authority within the UN that is every bit as intense as any Third World state.⁵ As Richard Haass puts it, “Americans have traditionally guarded their sovereignty with more than a little ferocity.”⁶

China, too, argues that only the state, not outside parties, can determine what is best for its own people, whether in the realm of security, human rights, or sustainable human development.

The perpetuation of state sovereignty—the idea that each state has absolute authority over a given population and territory and should be free from outside interference—as the essential organizing principle provides obvious benefits within the international system. It affords newer, smaller, and less powerful states an equal legal footing and a seat at the international table with older or more powerful states. It also guarantees some order and predictability within what Hedley Bull and the members of the English School call “international society.”⁷ Indeed, they see state sovereignty as not only a functional but also a political value that allows national societies to make choices and keep international organizations accountable.⁸

Moreover, international cooperation exists as a result of agreements among sovereign states—letters are delivered, flights take off and land, trade grows steadily—but it falls far short of giving international organizations the wherewithal to override decisions by states that fail to abide by the terms of their agreements or that simply opt out. The agreement in the UN Charter not to use military force except with authorization from the Security Council or in self-defense, for example, is ignored with few consequences for those who do so.

Nevertheless, as the peoples and states of the world become more materially and morally interconnected, the need for more effective international management increases. Terrorism, HIV/AIDS, economic crises, refugee movements, nuclear proliferation, and climate change all pose threats that are global in scope and cannot be adequately addressed by states acting individually to protect only their own citizens or territory. In today’s world of near instantaneous global travel, to halt the spread of an infectious disease within its own territory, a state must also expend a certain amount of energy and resources on preventing the spread of disease in other states. Some may view such action as a moral imperative, but it is equally a practical necessity.

As peoples and states become not just interconnected but interdependent (meaning that their relations become sensitive enough that their own welfare is substantially affected by the decisions of others), demands often increase for more robust international management, which causes notions of state sovereignty to adapt. Americans are interconnected with Hondurans concerning trade in bananas; but Americans can do without the fruit or easily find alternate sources of supply. By contrast, in 1990 Americans were interdependent with Kuwaitis concerning trade in oil. As such, this relationship was far more sensitive because energy is a necessity for which alternate suppliers are not numerous and the rapidly rising costs of finding such a supplier would have caused a major disruption in American society and the world economy. As a result of interdependence, some issues that were formerly considered domestic and inconsequential have come to be redefined as international and significant because of the strength of transnational concerns of either a material or a moral nature.

Still, even in the context of interdependence, most states are reluctant to transfer authority to international organizations, and certainly to the United Nations. The George W. Bush administration’s 2001 ceremonial gesture to revoke its predecessor’s last-minute signature of the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a case in point. Regardless of the fact that the court is in many ways the product of American input and reflects American values, the United States refuses to become a party—even under the Obama administration—pointing to fears that joining the court will result in a loss of sovereignty. While the United States may be able to provide a few global public goods—for instance, protecting the earth from an incoming meteor—far more of them require action (e.g., acid rain) or inaction (e.g., nuclear weapon testing or non-proliferation) by all states.⁹ As such, less rather than more narrow conceptions of state sovereignty, and more rather than less cooperation, is required in Washington and all other capitals.

International Peace and Security: Saving Succeeding Generations from War

For many observers, international peace and security is the essence of the world organization’s work. Indeed, emerging from the ashes of World War II, the United Nations was designed, unlike its defunct predecessor the League of Nations, to have military teeth to back up collective decisions. Going beyond the League’s attempts to delay the outbreak of war through the establishment of a set of procedures constituting a cooling-off period for those countries contemplating the use of force, the international community of states undertook a new experiment to halt war by signing the Charter in 1945. Two world wars within two decades, the Holocaust, and the advent of the nuclear age produced, temporarily at least, sufficient political will to improve on the League of Nations, to safeguard the peace that had been won at great cost. In the inspiring words of the Charter’s Preamble, the UN’s role was to save “succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

In spite of the initial unanimity, Cold War divisions between the West and the Soviet bloc quickly resulted in permanent members’ overzealous use of their veto power, thus preventing the Security Council from acting to address threats to peace and security. The post-Cold War honeymoon in the late 1980s and early 1990s offered a brief glimmer of hope that the Security Council would be allowed to fulfill its mandate to restore and maintain international peace and security. But preoccupations with state sovereignty soon once again constrained the Security Council even though the use of vetoes diminished. The end of the Cold War thus ushered in neither the “end of history” nor the “end of geography” in any meaningful way,¹⁰ but rather a widespread resurgence of sacrosanct notions of sovereignty, th...