The United Nations is rarely held up as an exemplar of efficiency and good governance. But former UN employee-turned whistleblower, Michael Soussan, who helped lift the lid on the multi-billion dollar oil-for-food scandal, found even his limited expectations dashed. His story this month tells of a journey from the idealistic optimism of his first joining the UN, to a more sanguine view (informed by corrupt mentors, congressional hearings, and much soul searching) that the institution was fundamentally, and structurally, broken. His conclusion, unusually, is that liberals and leftists like himself—who tend to support the UN, and dismiss alternatives—should be more open to the notion of a “League of Democracies,” as promoted by John McCain and conservative thinkers like Robert Kagan. Soussan concludes that “John McCain’s proposal to form a ‘League of Democracies,’ and Barack Obama’s Berlin speech exhorting the need to strengthen the democratic alliance should both be considered as part of the choice between … trying to fix an ossified, outdated and impossibly ambitious institution, or beginning work on a new one.” Read it here.
Such a league has been widely rubbished, both by foreign policy realists (who view it as unlikely to work) and Wilsonian liberals (who view it as another, mistaken neoconservative adventure.) But is there anything to it? Building on Soussan’s story, this month we are also lucky enough to have a major debate between leading American thinker Phillip Bobbitt, and former UN diplomat David Hannay. Bobbit, who with the publication of his recent book Terror and Consent, confirmed his position among his generation’s most thoughtful foreign policy thinkers, reckons such a league is worth considering. Hanny, meanwhile, defends a future for the UN, asking “Is this really the moment, relatively soon after the ending of the cold war, for us to be dividing the the world between democratic sheep and undemocratic goats?”. Read the debate, in full, here.
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I am the Financial Times’ former UN correspondent, who covered the institution from late 2002-to 2007, including the oil for food scandal and many reform debates.
During that time I witnessed the organisation face some remarkable challenges, including the bitter debate over the war in Iraq, and a new assertiveness by developing powers, which felt left out of decision-making structures.
The debate in question is a relatively well-worn one, no less relevant for its age, which essentially asks us: is there room in this world for a universalist institution that is, precisely because of its universalism, inherently open to compromise at every turn, even when those compromises would appear not to live up to its stated principles.
It’s a can’t live with it can’t live without it situation. You need the universalism to make it work, but the universalism is what makes it not work. The temptation is to throw our hands up in horror and open a cake and coffee shop.
So much for abstraction. In reality, from the very beginning the UN was always an uncomfortable mix of principle and pragmatism, which attempted to steer a course between the world we had and the world we wanted. (With the ‘we’ representing many different constituencies).
I wanted to make a couple of points.
First, we tend to forget that the UN as we know it today – a UN which undertakes peacekeeping missions around the world, coordinates humanitarian responses, conducts international inquiries into political assassinations, guides elections – is relatively new, and very much in the experimental phase.
A flurry of development in the 50s and early 60s soon turned into cold war inaction; and it was only after the end of the Cold War – the first Iraq war being one of the most dramatic expressions of ‘the new world order’ – that the UN became something that could even contemplate an oil for food programme. Today’s UN is less than 20 years old! It hasn’t even left college!
Shashi Tharoor, former UN information head, used to quip that the UN was both stage and actor. During the cold war, it was largely a stage – a meeting room where countries met and talked, and whose rules and systems were essentially those of a conference services organisation.
The fact that a secretariat designed to manage conferences was suddenly asked to run countries inevitably led to many many problems. To fulfill its often imperfect mandates, UN officials were required to break the rules. The countries which gave them those mandates knew full well that if the rules were strictly followed, nothing would have been done. So they turned a blind eye.
The problem is that when rules are broken, with official support, people begin to abuse the system, and so we find a string of scandals.
Does the fact that an organisation with bad rules behaves, on occasion, rather badly mean that the organisation should be abolished, or that the rules should be changed?
Many felt the latter, and recent years have seen a string of reform efforts aimed at changing the rules.
This leads me to the second point. The problem there is that the people who had made the rules in the first place, the winners of WW2, are no longer powerful enough to force through their rules in a world with many new powers.
(And this is relevant to the democracy league. The transatlantic alliance plus its best friends are no longer as powerful as they once were. This smaller group of like-minded countries may no longer have the practical clout they need to push things through alone)
And so, the UN has been engaged in a long protracted battle over what the new rules should be, and who should determine them. Two broad camps have emerged – status quo powers, and rising developing powers. Into this mix a third group must also be considered – the secretariat itself, which is looking for more independence from the member states. Not surprisingly, member states aren’t too keen on that idea, and the current Secretary General is struggling.
What has emerged is a confused directionless malaise at the heart of the organisation. No group, ideology, mission has emerged victorious. As Paul Volcker concluded in his oil-for-food investigation (I paraphrase): when everyone is in charge, and no-one is in charge.
That may lead us to throw our hands in the air and say ‘there’s no point to this; let’s make a smaller club where its easier to agree on the rules.
Here is where I find myself increasingly on the side of those who are wary of the new league.
First, there is no reason to believe that the new club will find it any easier to agree on the rules than the old club. The EU is a constant struggle, and its countries are far more similar than those in a potential league. Add the US to the mix, and you have a constant battle over every line. Then India? Brazil? Indonesia? Many of these very countries are the same countries who, in the UN, are most actively opposing western-instigated reforms.
Second, even if it were to agree on rules, would this club have the clout to address the challenges we face? Answer is almost certainly not. You still need a deal with China, and Russia, and others, to deal with global warming, nuclear proliferation and so forth. This point has been made more eloquently by far more experienced people than I.
Third point – even within the current mess, a lot of good is done. Amazing, but true. Far from perfect, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest its better than doing nothing.
And fourthly, why are we being asked to choose at all? This is in many ways a false choice.
Even under the current system, there are many mutual interest clubs. There is nothing to stop them working together in universalist forum when it suits them.
The international system offers a menu of options, with almost every conceivable grouping you could want. Choose the one that best suits you, where you can realistically hope to achieve your goals.
While deeply flawed, sometimes, the UN (or something like it) will be the best option on offer. There will simply be moments when you need everyone at the table. And for that you need a big meeting room. At least a meeting room which contains the requisite number of people to make a deal actually work.
And more than that – the UN also offers something a number of other clubs doesn’t – a voice for those in small, troubled countries, which would otherwise be ignored. A place for Maldives to warn about sea level rises, for example. That has a profound value, and we should be wary of throwing that away.
I will finish on one last point. In all this talk of leagues of democracies, something is often missing – democracy.
We still tend to focus on governments, and the clubs where they make their decisions. Personally, I don’t fully trust any of them, democratic or autocratic, to do the right thing by me. All are prey to a host of monied special interests.
But the internet and a host of other developments offers us something very exciting – an opportunity to inject far more direct democratic input and scrutiny into the mix.
If we really want to think about reforming the system, certainly we need to find ways to bring South Africans, Indians, Brazilians and Indonesians to the table.
But their governments are not enough. We must also find a way of bringing you and me to the table. That, right now, is where the largest gap lies. There is a yawning democratic deficit at the center of our international institutions, wherever and whatever they may be.
It is high time that is changed.
I believe Mark Turner nailed the core issue very effectively by decrying the “democratic deficit” at the center of our international institutions. And his analysis also does a good job of identifying the potential limitations of McCain’s League of Democracies proposal. Clearly, such a league could not portend to replace the UN in all aspects of its work. Like the Red Cross, many UN humanitarian agencies often need to work in collaboration with tyrannical regimes if they are to intervene is some crises.
But League or no League, how do attend to the democratic deficit in the meantime? One way or another, if the people are to have a voice, they need to be able vote. Could the internet perhaps offer new logistical options that might make a new form of international representation possible. I believe we’ve reached a point where we can afford to ask: why not?