Should the UN just throw up its hands?
'Never', says the multilateralist. 'Perhaps', whispers a love story from a lost era
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The Big Story:
Nearly 200 countries gathered for the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York with hot wars raging from the Middle East to Europe to Africa. Meanwhile, the UN, the leading global governance institution, seemed helpless, even irrelevant.1
The UN has just adopted a grandly named ‘Pact for the Future’.2
With so much bloodshed, mass displacement and human suffering – not least Gaza, Lebanon, Israel, Ukraine, Sudan – is the UN even capable of addressing world crises?
The UN – which turns 80 next year – is criticised for representing the old order,3 not the world as it is today.
This Week, Those Books:
PLEASE NOTE: Both this week’s picks reflect a certain moment in time and a very particular mindset, which might be disturbing to some.
A passionate defence of UN privilege.
A love story set in the heart of the old League of Nations.
And if you want another read on the United Nations, this 2023 specially unlocked post from the archives will be freely available for one week: Half-time at the UNGA games
The Backstory:
The UN succeeded the Geneva-based League of Nations, the 20th century’s first fully developed international political organisation dedicated to world peace and security.
The League, set up after World War I, lasted just 25 years. It collapsed when it failed to prevent World War II.
But the idea of creating an international organisation that can resolve disputes between countries and enforce peace persisted. That ideal goes back hundreds of years. In the 14th century, Dante wrote a political tract that argued for a world government. In the 18th century, Kant proposed a “league of peace”, a voluntary federation of nations that would ensure “peace by reasoned design”.
Experts say that while the UN was initially conceived as an entity with substantial powers to enact laws that would be binding on member states, it eventually took shape as a “warmed-up League”.4
The UN’s two fundamental flaws are said to be “the principle of one country–one vote in the General Assembly and the veto within the Security Council”5 by any of its five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the UK and US).
This Week’s Books:
Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World
By: David L. Bosco
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2009
This book is worth reading for several reasons – it’s well-written, informative and provocative.
I don’t know if David Bosco6 set out to be punchy. But he is very brave in challenging persistent criticisms of the UN, and more specifically of the Security Council (UNSC), which he acknowledges as “the world’s most elite and powerful diplomatic body”.
He does this by taking a rather small-scale view of the UNSC’s job. Rather than evaluating its global governance role, he examines if the UNSC helped prevent conflict between its five powerful, permanent members, all of whom are nuclear-armed. The focus, he writes, is “less on how the Security Council interacts with the rest of the world and more on its role as a mechanism for producing consensus among the major powers”. Noting that there has never been a sustained military clash among the five permanent members of the UNSC, Bosco says: “Instead of asking whether the council has stamped out regional conflicts, alleviated suffering, and prevented arms proliferation, one asks whether it has helped great-power relations”.
He follows this up by arguing that despite the calls to enlarge and democratise the UNSC, its effectiveness depends on remaining small, elite and relatively opaque – ie, the great powers should be able to argue behind “firmly closed doors”.
Bosco’s contention that the great powers of the UNSC have done just fine by isolating themselves from far-away conflicts was contentious even 15 years ago, when the book was published. So much more today, when no part of the globe is untouched by the effects of distant wars, whether it be migration flows or supply chain disruptions (click on a free-to-read TWTB post on world trade below).
Choice quote:
“When the Council is united, its members can wage war, impose blockades, unseat governments, and levy sanctions, all in the name of the international community. There are almost no limits to the body’s authority. It is built on the assumption that five of the strongest nations have the right and duty to safeguard the globe. Most of the UN structure insists that member states are equal; the council, by contrast, grants the most powerful countries special rights and responsibilities”.
Her Lover (Belle du Seigneur)
By: Albert Cohen. Translated by David Coward
Publisher: Viking
Year: 1995 in English; 1968 in French
French readers of a certain age may know this novel. In fact, they may revere it. This book won Albert Cohen comparison with Proust and Joyce, as well as the Grand Prix of the French Academy. It’s long been considered a masterpiece.
Then, its English translation was published nearly 30 years ago. Over the course of nearly 1,000 pages, we all got to read this love story. Featuring Solal, son of a chief rabbi and now, Under Secretary of the League of Nations in Geneva. And Ariane d'Auble, the blond, beautiful Protestant wife of Solal’s underling. We got to read about the blooming – and withering – of their love. The misogynistic abuse. The anti-Semitism. Somewhere along the way, amid all the cocktails and dinner parties, we came to see the League of Nations as full of lazy, self-interested diplomats, one of whom is Ariane’s husband Adrien Deume.
Despite the status of this novel in the original French, Cohen may come to be chiefly remembered internationally for his contribution to refugee law. A Greek-born, France-bred, Swiss Jewish diplomat, Cohen worked for the International Refugee Organization and the International Labor Organization. After WWII he wrote something that he controversially called his “best book”, a 32-page Agreement on Refugee and Travel Documents. It survives today as Article 28 of the Geneva Convention of 1951, known as the Refugee Convention.
Choice quote:
''In the lobby, the ministers and diplomats circulated, gravely discussing, knowing-eyed, doubting not the high importance of their ephemeral concerns with ant heaps soon to pass away, and no less convinced of their own importance, soberly exchanging futile points of view, ludicrously solemn and dignified, stalked by hemorrhoids…Affability as an obligation of rank, bogus smiles, courtesies delivered with a cruel curl of the lip...”
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The UN has described this year’s annual meeting as the “Super Bowl of global diplomacy”.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that “a powder keg risks engulfing the world” as he urged leaders at the General Assembly to come together to find solutions.
Text of the Pact for the Future, which Secretary-General Guterres said is a “step-change towards more effective, inclusive, networked multilateralism”.
Reuters news agency report on the Pact, which was approved after nine months of negotiation.
Report by the Global Governance Forum on modernising the UN for a new generation.
As Mark Mazower writes in his 2009 book No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations.
Bosco, an associate professor at Indiana University's Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, writes The Multilateralist Substack.