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

Thomas G. Weiss

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509507474
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Seven decades after its establishment, the United Nations and its system of related organizations 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 that makes it incapable of confronting contemporary global challenges and, more importantly, can we fix it?

In this revised and updated third edition of his popular text, leading scholar of global governance 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 complications 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." Weiss's 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, he contends that substantial change is both plausible and possible.

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 individual states rather than in the collective United Nations. Established in 1945 by sovereign states seeking to protect themselves against external aggression, the UN was not built to confront today’s numerous challenges. The disconnect between the nature of a growing number of problems and the nature of the available solutions within 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 (the organization’s founding constitutional document).

Interstate relations reflect what political scientists label “anarchy”—no overarching authority exists beyond that of individual states. This central metaphor is accurate yet unfortunate in two ways: it too easily serves as a justification for unilateralism in foreign policy; and it turns attention away from perceiving and explaining the dominant patterns of peace and cooperation in international relations. Moreover, 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 is only one of 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, and 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 is 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 developing 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 finding solutions to 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 governments are continually subjected to pressures and more intrusive measures from other states.

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 armed 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 undoubtedly undermines the credibility of many representatives of western powers who preach human rights and intervention. Australian National University’s 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 Give the West an inch, so the argument goes, and it will take a mile.

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 that of any Third World state.⁵ In an understatement, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass declares, “Americans have traditionally guarded their sovereignty with more than a little ferocity.”⁶ In fact, every state argues that only its government and 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 should be free from outside interference as it exercises absolute authority over a given population and territory—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 high table with older or more powerful states. It also guarantees some order and predictability within what Hedley Bull and the me...