WHEN they had their first General Assembly meeting in San Francisco in 1945, there were a mere 46 of them, states each harboring its own illusions about how the international body would serve its interests.
The Soviet Union believed that Big Power unity would compel the United States and Great Britain to accept Russian hegemony and ambitions in Eastern Europe. The French and the British embraced the UN not only because they viewed it as an improvement on the defunct League of Nations, but also because they saw in the full participation of the United States a strong security system. China, which had not yet fallen to Communist revolutionaries and which was effectively in total dependence on American good will, was ready to accept all US proposals for UN organization and procedures. And the smaller nations actually believed that the UN would strengthen their collective voice under the “sovereign equality of all nations.” That was then.
Today, the United Nations, with 191 members, is holding its 60th General Assembly session, a three-day high level event attended by more than 170 world leaders. They are there to endorse the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) set five years ago to free the world of “the abject and dehumanizing conditions” of poverty, disease and hunger, guarantee at least primary education for every child, save the environment, and help Third World countries pursue meaningful development.
Alas, the three-day world summit, known as the Millennium Summit — with plenary debates made up of two daily meetings and roundtable discussions — will take place against the backdrop of three contentious and rancorous issues.
The first issue is that castigating report by an independent committee of inquiry into the oil for food scandal, headed by Paul Volker, former head of America’s Federal Reserve, that after a year of investigation criticized the UN body, along with its secretary general for a disastrous failure of leadership and supervision. The report, which does not make for pretty reading, talks of corruption, and of bribes, kickbacks and illicit deals going on throughout most of the seven years of the $100 billion program that was set up by the Security Council to help the Iraqi people offset the devastation and human suffering of the economic sanctions.
The end result of all that was that though the secretary general himself was not implicated in any malfeasance, a lot of voices were raised, especially in Washington and especially among Republican legislators, that Kofi Annan should resign since the scandal took place on his watch. (To date, out of a staff of 15,000 at the Secretariat, only three officials have been charged, including the program’s director, Benon Sevan.)
Another reason why today’s summit at the UN will not evoke that “San Francisco moment” of the first General Assembly sixty years ago, would be the contents of another report (its scandalous nature different in kind but the same in degree) issued by the UN itself last Wednesday, that shows how living standards in many parts of the developing world, including parts of the former Soviet Union, have been steadily declining even while conditions elsewhere in the world have largely improved.
Eighteen countries were named where such economic and social regression has taken place. The report, which seeks to assess nations’ economic development, dignity and quality of life, “shows in clear, cold numbers that many countries are not only failing to progress, but are actually slipping backward, and they will continue on that downhill path unless the international community steps in to help,” Kevin Watkins, the main author of the report, told reporters last week.
Then we have, finally, the issue of John Bolton, the bellicose US ambassador to the UN, whom the president sneakily sent to the international body as a “recess appointment” in August, thereby bypassing a congressional confirmation.
A week before today’s summit, Bolton decided to throw a wrench the talks held by a group of about a dozen UN ambassadors whose job was to agree on a document which the world leaders are to approve this coming Friday, at the conclusion of the summit.
As the delegates discussed proposals dealing with human rights, UN management reforms, strategies for conflict resolution and how to define terrorism (some developing countries were still insisting, by Sunday, on the insertion of a clause drawing a distinction between terrorism and “the legitimate right of peoples under occupation to struggle for their independence and in defense of their right to self-determination”), Bolton threw the negotiations into crisis by insisting on hundreds of last minute changes to the 39-page document that everyone else had thought was virtually complete.
“Although many of the alterations demanded were stylistic or anodyne,” wrote the Economist on Saturday, “some of them tore into the delicately balanced ‘grand design’ between rich and poor countries that the UN had taken such pains to erect.” The world today is a different place from the one its original 46 founders had known and dealt with sixty years ago. More than three times as many member states have joined it, many of them formerly colonized countries with an exploding population and decaying, corrupt and repressive political systems, a factor that has widened the gap between rich and poor and made environmental degradation an issue of paramount concern.
A different world indeed.
In 1945, the Big Three, as the US, the USSR and the UK were known, dominated the scene, and all but defined what the UN was all about. Today, of the five permanent members of the Security Council only the United States remains a superpower. The former Soviet Union crumbled into Russia and an assortment of independent states. Britain and France are middle-sized powers of limited military and economic strength. China has little concern for, or a sense of obligation to, the world community. And Germany and Japan remain outside the inner circle, as do other rising regional powers like India, Brazil and Indonesia.
So we know who calls the shots here. But a country like the United States that claims to be, on balance, a force for the moral good in the world will be judged by a high standard.
We will be watching the speeches at the UN beginning today right through Friday by the more than 170 world leaders in attendance. But the country we will be particularly watching out for will be the one that claims for itself the mantle of moral good. And a country imbued with such a sentiment, we expect, will introduce policies that promote that moral good not just because it is in its interest, but also because it is in its nature.
