GLOBAL GOVERNANCE UNDER US DIRECTION
by John O'Sullivan
Gulf News
March 27, 2005

The reform package due to be presented to a New York meeting of world leaders in September has been given high marks by both friends and critics of the United Nations.

One discomfiting reason for this is that the UN has fallen so low in public esteem what with the oil-for-food scandal, the sex scandals involving UN soldiers and personnel and the UN's failure to do anything effective about the genocide in Darfur that any signs of commonsense and responsibility in the world body came as both a surprise and a relief.

They came as a particular relief to the Bush administration. Only recently, the United States had almost written off both the UN and Annan as useful contributors to a safer world.

Yet the reform package that the Secretary-General unveiled last week was designed to please Washington more than most. What had happened?

In part that pro-American tilt was a UN response to a diplomatic opportunity. The Bush administration had recently relied on the world body for help in holding elections in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the single superpower, it might need similar help from the UN in future crises. What was required to cement this potential alliance was clear evidence that the UN was not irredeemably hostile to the United States. The distinguished designers of the package provided it.

They were not discouraged by the UN Secretary-General. Kofi Annan has sometimes seemed like a thorn in Washington's side in recent years. Yet this was an exaggeration. He was originally America's candidate for the top UN job.

Annan realised that UN reform could not succeed without the support of its single most important member-state and principal contributor to UN funds. Besides, to redeem the failures, he had to get US backing.

Large ideas

His new chief of staff, the shrewd Mark Malloch Brown, realised something else.

The UN in recent years had become self-absorbed in large ideas of "global governance" under its direction. It had become the instrument of transnational elites, international bodies and NGOs for expanding their influence at the expense of governments.

Its professional bureaucracy too often demonstrated an almost reflexive anti-Americanism. As a result it was losing ground with politicians, especially conservative Republicans, in the United States. Mallock Brown set out to reassure them.

The UN reform package similarly has proposals designed to appease Republican and conservative opinion.

Example One: It proposes a hostile definition of "terrorism" that allows no exception for so-called "freedom fighters" engaging in "liberation struggles" such as Palestinian groups such as Hamas.

That proposal is likely to be opposed by Arab countries who until now have prevented such a definition obtaining international approval.

Since this latest version comes with the backing of a distinguished international commission and the UN bureaucracy, however, it will be much harder for Arab governments to defeat it.

Example Two: It would replace the present scandalous UN Human Rights Commission (on which dictators and despots famously sit) with a smaller and more responsible Human Rights Council.

Example Three: It would accept the right of member-states (by which is meant in this context the United States) to launch pre-emptive military actions against states that constitute a threat without necessarily obtaining the advance approval of the UN Security Council.

This is at least a nod towards the US position on Iraq though it would deny any right of pre-emptive action against merely "latent" threats.

Of course, all these concessions to conservative US opinion will have to be paid for by the United States and the West in the case of the proposal to triple or quadruple the amount of Western aid to the poorest countries, literally paid for.

But the main payment comes in the form of increased power and influence for the UN.

Thus, the report argues that the UN should adopt a new "responsibility to protect" the peoples living under genocidal and brutal governments. That might seems to be a necessary change in international law in the light of Rwanda and Darfur.

But there is a very obvious problem contradiction embodied in it. On the one hand it is a very important change in a structure of international law that has previously been based on the principle of national sovereignty.

On the other hand, as the examples of Rwanda and Darfur demonstrate, there will be no intervention even in such horrifying cases unless the political will to halt genocide exists.

Under present international law, indeed, "genocide" is grounds for international intervention indeed, it makes intervention obligatory. That is why the EU in Darfur and the United States over Rwanda denied that genocide was occurring. Neither wanted to intervene.

This provision, indeed, encapsulates the underlying problem with the UN. It seeks to expand its power on the grounds that it needs to prevent and punish crimes against humanity by regimes such as Iraq and North Korea.

In actual practice, however, such brutalitarian states simply ignore the UN and international law.

The UN's expanded powers then tend to be used mainly against responsible and moderate powers for lesser infractions such as the mere existence of the death penalty.

The brutalitarians will then ignore the UN. And when they threaten even "latent" US interests, it will take action on its own to defend them.

Until that political reality changes, the United States and the UN will always be at odds even if the latest UN reforms go through and improve relations for a while.

John O'Sullivan, former adviser to Lady Thatcher and former opinion editor from the New York Post, is a member of Benador Associates.