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Strengthening
the United Nations: an Ambitious Agenda
By Dietrich
Fischer
Pace University
Co-Director, TRANSCEND: A Peace and Development
Network
114 Conover Road, Princeton Junction, NJ 08550, USA
email fischer@transcend.org, website www.transcend.org
In 1945, the UN was founded to prevent interstate
wars like Hitler's march into Poland 1939 that started
World War II. Despite a lot of criticism of the UN, it
has been amazingly successful in achieving this goal.
There are still many wars, but almost all of them today
are civil wars. Of 39 wars in 1995, all were civil wars.
The Gulf War in 1990 was the last war of aggression, and
it was decisively repelled by an international force in
1991. The UN was explicitly prevented from doing anything
to stop civil wars by the provision in its current
Charter that it should not interfere in the internal
affairs of sovereign member states. In the second half
century of its existence, the UN needs to be
strengthened, so that it can also help prevent or end
civil wars.
When people talk about UN reform, they usually mean to
down-size it, to make it less expensive, calling it a
"bloated, inefficient, wasteful bureaucracy." In 1997,
the CIA for the first time published its budget, $26.6
million, compared to the UN's annual budget of $1.3
billion, or 20 times larger. What has the CIA done with
it? It did not predict the end of the Cold War, nor the
Iranian revolution. It has overthrown some democratically
elected governments. If we look for a wasteful
bureaucracy, I would rather name the CIA than the UN. I
wish their budgets were switched.
The United Nations plays an essential role in enabling
us to solve problems that no nation can solve by itself,
in peacekeeping, development, protecting the environment,
defending human rights, among others.
Not all of these problems are caused deliberately. In
fact, few people advocate war, poverty, pollution or
torture. Why, then, do we have so much of all of these?
Is it due to human selfishness, short-sightedness,
inadequate legal systems, or simply ignorance? All of
these factors play a role and several more. It is
interesting that all of them can be seen as various
defects of effective regulatory feedback systems. Any
viable system needs regulatory feedback systems to
maintain a healthy state and to enable it to adapt to
changing external conditions. For example, in the human
body we have the immune system that detects disease germs
and eliminates them before they multiply and spread
throughout the body. In a society, we have the legal
system where laws determine what is acceptable behavior,
courts decide whether someone has violated the law and
police and the prison system are there to enforce the
law.
Such a feedback system has three components: (1)
agreement on a goal, (2) ways to measure deviations from
the goal, and (3) some mechanism to move the system
closer to the goal if it has deviated.
Such a system can be defective in six ways. I will
first list them, and then suggest how the UN can be
strengthened to deal more effectively with those six
problems.
First, there may be no agreement on the goal. That is
a question of conflict resolution.
Second, even if there is agreement on the goal,
deviations from it may not be noticed. That is a question
of observation and measurement. For example, as long as
we did not know that we are slowly destroying the ozone
layer that protects us from cancer-causing ultraviolet
radiation, nothing was done to stop that process.
Third, even if deviations are noticed, those who can
correct a problem may have no interest in doing so,
because others are affected. That is a question of
externalities that economists have addressed, and also of
ethics, whether we care about each other.
Fourth, even if the people who cause a problem are
affected by it themselves, that may take place with a
delay, and if they don't look ahead, they may fail to
prevent the problem. That is a question of future
planning.
Fifth, even if those who cause a problem are affected
by it immediately, they may not act rationally, out of
prejudice, hatred or other feelings. That is a question
of psychology and culture.
And finally, perhaps the most frequent cause of
problems, people may be fully aware of them and wish to
correct them but do not know how or do not have the
necessary means. This is a question of science,
technology, education and economics.
Let us see how the UN may be strengthened to deal more
effectively with each of these six problems.
The first is agreement. Responsibility for reaching
agreement on what to do currently rests with the UN
Security Council in case of a breach of the peace, and
with the General Assembly and special conferences or
committees regarding other global problems. But those
institutions should be more democratic. That struck me
when I once observed negotiations about a new wheat
agreement which should also have foreseen food aid to
hunger regions. After several months of leisurely talks
the negotiations broke down in failure and the delegates
went home. But those delegates did not suffer from hunger
at all--if anything, they suffered from over-eating. I
felt at the time that the people who suffered from hunger
should have been represented at the negotiating table to
plead their case. Or if for some reason that was not
possible, at least the negotiators who failed to reach
agreement should have been held accountable for their
failure. Maybe the Catholic church has found a solution
to that problem. There used to be periods when the
Cardinals could not agree on who should be the next pope,
with the result of two or more counter-popes. Finally the
church decided to simply lock up the Cardinals in the
Sistine Chapel and not let them out until they have
reached unanimous agreement on who should be the next
pope. Perhaps we should lock up disarmament negotiators
in one room and not let them out until they have reached
a settlement.
The next is observation. In 1978, France proposed the
creation of an International Satellite Monitoring Agency
to verify arms control agreements and also provide early
warnings of droughts, plant diseases and other natural
disasters. At that time the two superpowers vetoed the
proposal. Now that the cold war is over, the proposal
might be revived. It is not even necessary to have
universal agreement. A company in California has plans to
sell satellite picture with a 3 meter resolution that
could provide that function.
Greater openness is also needed to prevent the spread
of nuclear weapons, especially to terrorists. If the
bombs at the World Trade Center in New York or in
Oklahoma City had been nuclear, hundreds of thousands of
people would have been killed. Dozens of terrorist bombs
explode each year throughout the world. Unless we can
prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to more and more
countries and finally eliminate them, the risk grows that
some may end up in the hands of terrorists. The threat of
retaliation has no effect on suicide bombers. Currently,
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose role
it is to enforce the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of
1970, can inspect suspected nuclear facilities only with
the voluntary consent of the host country. If a border
guard could inspect the car of a suspected drug smuggler
only in places where the smuggler agreed, such an
"inspection" would be a joke. The IAEA must be
strengthened to gain the authority to make random
inspections of suspected nuclear weapons plants. Of
course, many governments would currently oppose such a
proposal as an infringement on their national
sovereignty. But this was also the reaction of many
airline passengers when airlines began to inspect their
luggage for guns and explosives after a series of
hijackings. Many protested against being suspected as a
potential terrorist and argued that this was a violation
of their right to privacy. Today, most airline passengers
realize that only if everybody's luggage is inspected,
including their own, can they be safe. Sooner or later,
national governments will reach the same conclusion. The
question is only, will they do so before or after the
first terrorist nuclear bomb explodes?
The third problem is incentives. Oskar Morgenstern has
pointed out that if the people who make decisions about
war and peace would have to fight themselves at the front
line, there would be fewer wars. It is remarkable that
there has never been any war between two democracies. The
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral
Assistance (IDEA), which was founded 1995 in Stockholm
with 14 initial member countries, seeks to assist
countries who request help in monitoring elections and
printing ballots. This institute deserves to be
strengthened and expanded. Former US President Jimmy
Carter, who has participated in many efforts to mediate
an end to wars and to observe elections, pointed out that
in a civil war, both sides are usually deeply convinced
that the vast majority of the people are on their side.
If they can be assured of free and fair elections, which
they expect to win, both sides are often willing to lay
down their arms and settle their dispute through ballots
instead of bullets. It is important to make sure that
there is no election fraud, and that all parties have
fair access to the voters via the media before elections.
Equally important is to guarantee that the election
results will be honored by all parties. If groups who
overthrow an elected government by force or prevent it
from taking office would automatically face strong
sanctions by the international community, there would be
fewer military coups. Such an institution could play an
important role in helping prevent or end civil wars.
One proposal for reforming the UN has been to create
an International Criminal Court. Today the World Court
can only hear cases brought by one government against
another, and has no enforcement powers. It is unrealistic
to expect that citizens can always find justice within
their own country, particularly if they are persecuted by
their own government and the government controls the
courts. For this reason, we need to create an
International Criminal Court to which citizens or ethnic
minorities who are oppressed by their own government can
appeal if necessary, and which can enforce its
decisions.
Does the International Community have the right, or
even the duty, to intervene in the internal affairs of a
state? Under Roman law the head of a household, the
"pater familias," had absolute sovereignty over his
family. He could sell his children into slavery or beat
them to death, and the state had no right to intervene in
this internal family affair. Today we consider this
concept absurd. That does not mean that if we hear a
dispute in a neighbor's house, we break down the door and
tell people how to settle their dispute. But if a spouse
or children feel threatened, they must be able to seek
protection from the police. In the same way, it is wrong
for a government to intervene in another state and to
tell other people how they should run their internal
affairs. But if members of a minority, or sometimes of a
majority, are oppressed by their own government, they
must be able to appeal for help to a higher
authority.
The fourth area is how to overcome time delays. The UN
Secretary General has on occasion personally mediated
disputes between various parties and helped avoid a war.
But he is overloaded. There should be an entire UN agency
that focuses on discovering where tensions are building
up and help to find peaceful settlements before they
break out in war.
In 1993, three private individuals from the Project on
Ethnic Relations were able to help achieve an agreement
between the Rumanian government and its Hungarian
minority, allowing the ethnic Hungarians to use their own
language again in school instruction and local
newspapers, in return for the promise not to seek
secession. This may well have prevented another civil war
as in former Yugoslavia. This effort, which took less
than two weeks, cost about a million times less than
sending troops to Bosnia and Herzegovina for over three
years, with ultimately 60,000 necessary to stop the war.
Intervening early with mediation is not only much less
expensive, but most of all it can help save many lives.
This strongly suggests that we should put greater
resources into preventive diplomacy.
Another example that shows that a small investment
early can have big consequences down the road is the
following: Alexander Yakovlev, a close aide to Gorbachev
and the key architect of perestroika and the end of the
Cold War, was among the first group of about 30 Soviet
exchange students who came to the United States with a
Fulbright Fellowship in 1956-57. The few thousand dollars
invested in that fellowship may have done more to end the
nuclear confrontation between the United States and
Russia than the trillions of dollars the United States
spent for weapons over the four decades of the Cold
War.
If there is a war nevertheless, the response should be
swifter. Right now, if there is aggression, the Security
Council has to meet and deliberate whether to assemble an
international peace-keeping force to react to it, as in
1994 concerning the question of stopping the massacres in
Rwanda. If each time there was a violent crime in a town,
the town council would have to call a meeting to
deliberate whether to hire a police force to deal with
the problem, that would be far too slow. We need a
standing UN Peacekeeping Force that can respond quickly
in case of aggression. In the past, peacekeeping forces
could only intervene if both sides agreed. If the police
could stop a criminal from beating up a victim only if
the criminal agreed, the police would be powerless.
The fifth problem is how to overcome prejudice and
hatred. UNESCO has assembled international teams of
historians to write history textbooks that are free of
national bias, the vilification of enemies and the
glorification of victory in past wars. But even more
people could be reached if the UN had an international
radio and television network--as a complement, not
replacement for national news--where different points of
view from around the world could be heard and where
global problems could be debated and various solutions
proposed.
Sixth, resources. The UN budget is now about what New
York City spends for garbage collection, and with that it
is expected to solve every problem in the world. It has
inadequate funds. Jan Tinbergen has observed that to
almost every department or ministry at the national level
there is some corresponding international organization,
with one important exception, the treasury. And yet the
treasury, which collects taxes and uses them to finance
the rest of the government is the most essential part of
any government. Without a treasury, a government would
collapse. So he called for the creation of a World
Treasury. It is probably a long way until there is global
agreement on some world income taxes, but there are other
possible sources of funding. For example, the UN could
auction off rights to mineral exploration on the deep
seabed outside any country's jurisdiction. That would not
only raise revenue, but such an orderly process would
also help avoid future wars over those resources.
Enormous savings could also be achieved through
disarmament, by creating a joint UN Peacekeeping Force to
oppose aggression. The present situation, in which each
country maintains its own military forces, is as wasteful
as if every house in a community maintained its own fire
engine.
The growing global interdependence has given rise to
some problems that individual states can no longer solve
alone. Only through worldwide cooperation can we prevent
climate shifts, stem the international drug trade, or
prevent nuclear terrorism. At the same time, improvements
in transportation and communication have made global
cooperation easier.
Many governments are still reluctant to join a global
authority to deal with global problems out of fear that
they would lose part of their national sovereignty. But
that fear is mistaken. No country today, for example, has
sovereign control over the ozone layer or is able to
prevent the sale of nuclear weapons to terrorists, unless
all countries with nuclear technology cooperate. By
creating global authorities that can limit emission
quotas of noxious gases or verify nuclear disarmament
agreements, we do not give up control over our destiny.
On the contrary, we gain added control that we do not now
posses and could never achieve at the national level.
The first advanced civilizations emerged about 6,000
years ago in the Nile, Euphrates and Yellow River valleys
when farmers faced problems that they could not solve
alone. To prevent recurrent floods and droughts, it was
necessary to build dams to control the flow of those
rivers, requiring the organized cooperation of thousands
of individuals. This gave rise to the first states, the
development of written language, the codification of
laws, and a flourishing of science and the arts. Today we
face some problems that not even a superpower can solve
by itself. Hopefully, this will lead to greater
world-wide cooperation before it is too late.
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