Thinking about Global Governance

Why People and Ideas Matter

Thomas G. Weiss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136659744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

One of the more prolific and influential analysts of multilateral approaches to global problem-solving over the last three decades is Thomas G. Weiss. Thinking about Global Governance, Why People and Ideas Matter, assembles key scholarly and policy writing.

This collection organizes his most recent work addressing the core issues of the United Nations, global governance, and humanitarian action. The essays are placed in historical and intellectual context in a substantial new introduction, which contains a healthy dose of the idealism and ethical orientation that invariably characterize his best work.

This volume gives the reader a comprehensive understanding of these key topics for a globalizing world and is an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike.

Part I

The United Nations, Plus ça change

1

Reinvigorating the International Civil Service

“People matter” is a central conclusion from the United Nations Intellectual History Project and the penultimate sentence of the first of 17 published volumes.¹ Yet critical contributions by individuals who work at the world organization are usually overlooked or downplayed by analysts who stress the politics of 192 member states and the supposedly ironclad constraints placed by them on international secretariats. However, I have devoted considerable professional energy to international administration, both as an analyst and as a civil servant.² My proposition is straightforward: the United Nations should rediscover the idealistic roots of the international civil service, make room for creative idea-mongers, and mark out career development paths for a twenty-first century UN Secretariat with greater turnover and younger and more mobile staff. This essay explores the origins of the concept, problems, the logic of reform, and specific improvements. Examples come from the UN’s three main areas of activity—peace and security, human rights, and sustainable development.³

Overwhelming bureaucracy and underwhelming leadership: the “second UN”

If the conceptual UN is unitary, the real organization consists of three linked pieces. The “second UN” consists of heads of secretariats and staff members who are paid from assessed and voluntary budgets. Inis Claude long ago distinguished it from the arena for state decisionmaking, the “first UN” of member states. The “third UN” of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), experts, commissions, and academics is a more recent addition to analytical perspectives.⁴

The possibility of independently recruited professionals with allegiance to the welfare of the planet, not to their home countries, remains a lofty but contested objective. During World War II, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace sponsored conferences to learn from the “great experiment” of the League of Nations.⁵ One essential item of its legacy, the international civil service, was purposefully included as UN Charter Article 101, calling for “securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity.”⁶

The second UN’s most visible champion was Dag Hammarskjöld, whose speech at Oxford in May 1961, shortly before his calamitous death, spelled out the importance of an autonomous and first-rate staff. He asserted that any erosion or abandonment of “the international civil service . . . might, if accepted by the Member nations, well prove to be the Munich of international cooperation.”⁷ His clarion call did not ignore the reality that the international civil service exists to carry out decisions by member states. But Hammarskjöld fervently believed that UN officials could and should pledge allegiance to a larger collective good symbolized by the organization’s light-blue-covered laissez-passer rather than the narrowly perceived national interests of the countries that issue national passports in different colors.

Setting aside senior UN positions for officials approved by their home countries belies that integrity. Governments seek to ensure that their interests are defended inside secretariats, and many have even relied on officials for intelligence. From the outset, for example, the Security Council’s five permanent members have reserved the right to “nominate” (essentially select) nationals to fill the key posts in the Secretary-General’s cabinet. The influx in the 1950s and 1960s of former colonies as new member states led them to clamor for “their” quota or fair share of the patronage opportunities, following the bad example set by major powers and other member states. The result was downplaying competence and exaggerating national origins as the main criterion for recruitment and promotion. Over the years, efforts to improve gender balance have resulted in other types of claims, as has the age profile of secretariats. Virtually all positions above the director level, and often many below as well, are the object of campaigns by governments, including the already rewarded permanent members of the Security Council.

How many people are in today’s second UN? Professional and support staff number approximately 55,000 in the UN proper and in agencies created by the General Assembly, and 20,000 in the specialized agencies. This number includes neither temporary staff in peace operations (about 120,000 in 2008) nor the staff of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank group (another 15,000). These figures represent substantial growth from the approximately 500 employees in the UN’s first year at Lake Success and the peak total of 700 staff employed by the League of Nations.⁸

I emphasize neglected personnel issues because individuals matter, for good and for ill. The second UN does more than simply carry out marching orders from governments. I thus disagree with three analysts who dismiss “the curious notion that the United Nations is an autonomous actor in world affairs that can and does take action independent of the will and wishes of the member governments.”⁹ This obviously is a truism for resolutions, but there is considerably more room for creativity and initiative in numerous activities than is commonly believed.UN officials present ideas to tackle problems, debate them formally and informally with governments, take initiatives, advocate for change, turn general decisions into specific programs, and implement them. They monitor progress and report to national officials and politicians gathering at intergovernmental conferences and in countries in which the UN is operating.

None of this should surprise. It would be a strange and impotent national civil service that took no initiatives or showed no leadership, simply awaiting detailed instructions from the government in power. UN officials are no different except that formal decision makers are government representatives in boards meeting quarterly, annually, or even once every two years. With the exception of the Security Council, decision making and responsibility for implementation in most parts of the UN system, especially the development funds and specialized agencies, depend in large part on staff members as well as executive heads.

Problems in the international civil service

The composition, recruitment, promotion, and retention—and ultimately the disappointing performance—of international civil servants are a substantial part of what ails the world organization. Though writers like Brian Urquhart properly have long called for a dramatic change in the selection process for the Secretary-General and other senior positions,¹⁰ the problems go much deeper. Moreover, the quality and impact of the staff are variables that can be altered far more easily, swiftly, and cheaply than such problems as state sovereignty, counterproductive North-South theater, and extreme decentralization that plague the organization. Examples from the main areas of UN activities highlight what is wrong and needs to be fixed.

International peace and security: the Oil-for-Food scandal and gender imbalance

The maintenance of international peace and security was the main justification for the UN’s establishment. Many persons have served the world organization with distinction and heroism since 1945, including Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21other colleagues who lost their lives in Baghdad in August 2003, and the 17 UN staff who were killed in Algiers in December 2007. Like the 1961 death of Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash in the Congo, these high visibility sacrifices should not overshadow the less dramatic deaths of some 300 other civilian staff members¹¹ and almost 2,600 soldiers in UN service.¹² The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to UN peacekeepers in 1987 and to Kofi Annan and the Secretariat in 2001 reflects this reality.

Valor should not, however, blind us to such serious problems as those encountered in administering the Oil-for-Food Programme (OFFP) and in attempting to improve gender balance. The OFFP scandal was undoubtedly overblown and specifically linked to American domestic politics. Member states were responsible for quietly approving the bulk of the monies that found their way into Saddam Hussein’s coffers and conveniently overlooked leakage to such key US allies as Jordan and Turkey. Nonetheless, the sloppy general management of this politically visible and crucial assignment tarnished the organization’s reputation.

The OFFP was established in 1995 to allow Iraq to sell oil and purchase humanitarian relief items—primarily food and medicine—for ordinary Iraqis who were suffering the devastating effects of sanctions imposed by the Security Council after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The OFFP was regularly criticized as corrupt and inefficient for failing to address the basic needs of Iraqis while lining the pockets of officials. In 2004 the secretary-general finally appointed an Independent Inquiry Committee headed by the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker. The 2005 report pointed to the “ethically improper” conduct of the program’s executive director and allegations about misconduct on the part of Kofi Annan’s son Kojo. Subsequent dismissals of staff and criminal proceedings have resulted.

The main disconcerting details, however, related to an inattentive management system that was outmoded, inept, and quite out of its depth in administering a program of that size and complexity. While evolving from a forum for global policy discussions to leading substantial military and civilian operations worldwide (with costs four times larger than the core budget), advances in communications technology and modern management techniques had seemingly bypassed the Secretariat. Neither the people who had been hired to do the work nor the oversight systems in place were up to the job.

After years of hesitation by the General Assembly, Annan named the first deputy secretary-general in 1997. Rather than an all-purpose stand-in for the Secretary-General, this deputy should have a distinctly different job description. He or she should be an authorized chief operating officer for the organization. In this way, the management buck would stop short of the Secretary-General, who should remain the UN’s chief politician, diplomat, and mediator. The Volcker team proposed that the deputy, like the Secretary-General, be nominated by the Security Council. Such a formality would require amending the UN Charter, but the objective could and should be accommodated by having the Security Council vet and informally approve a nominee.

The preface to the Volcker report could have been written by a Beltway neocon or perhaps US president Barack Obama: “The inescapable conclusion from the Committee’s work is that the United Nations Organization needs thoroughgoing reform—and it needs it urgently.”¹³ Volcker continued: “Willing cooperation and a sense of legitimacy cannot be sustained without a strong sense that the Organization has both competence and integrity. It is precisely those qualities that have been called into question.”¹⁴ Such problems are not unusual but endemic; and “urgent” in UN parlance has a different meaning from any dictionary, since no significant change has followed.

One might have expected the UN to lead in integrating women into work compared with other institutions. The pace has been glacial. In her February 1946“Open Letter to the Women of the World,” Eleanor Roosevelt as first chair of the Commission on Human Rights made a direct appeal to bring women into peace efforts. Some three decades later, at the first UN-sponsored world conference on women in 1975 in Mexico City, governments signed the Declaration of Mexico, which proclaimed: “Women must participate equally with men in the decision-making processes which help to promote peace at all levels.”¹⁵ That same year, General Assembly resolution 3519 called upon women to participate in strengthening international peace and security.

However, the exclusion of women from the trenches and the bureaucracy continues at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As of April 2009, participation by women in UN peace operations was a paltry 2.7 percent.¹⁶ Statistics about women elsewhere in the world organization also are disappointing. The representation of women in the professional and higher categories in the UN system is just over one-third. Only at the entry—P-1 and P-2—professional levels has gender balance been achieved. In the higher categories—D-1 and above—wom...