Speech Given: October 23, 2005 by Francis J. Gavin
It is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. But most people don’t really enjoy their sixtieth birthdays, now do they? I am afraid I will be the skunk at the garden party. What I have to tell about my thoughts on the UN at this moment in time is not uplifting.
One of the goals of the American Assembly’s Next Generation Project is to examine the viability of our international institutions; the program is based on three suppositions:
First, the project is animated by the widespread feeling that something is not quite right with America’s relations with the world, and many of our national and international institutions have been found wanting in the face of new challenges.
The second supposition – the Next Generation part of the project – is the idea that many of our most intelligent young people do not care or are not engaged in the all-important debates that will affect how the US engages the world. In other words a way must be found to bring smart, young people from all walks of life into these debates, if only because we are desperately in need of fresh ideas.
I have had the opportunity to meet many eminent grey hairs and no hairs to talk about these questions– Richard Fisher of the Dallas Fed, Bobby Inman, Chuck Robb, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Lee Hamilton, and Paul Vokcker, to name a few. They are all very wise. But they are the same people we would have sought advice from 10 or 15 years ago. They are all white, and they are all men, and with the exception of Fisher and Robb, they are old. New perspectives and new ideas are needed.
The third proposition is that these debates have been dominated by elites on the east coast, the Amtrak corridor types, as I call them. I was once a proud member of this group, taking shuttles and metroliners from Cambridge to NY to Washington. But I have been in Texas for five years now, and for all its confounding paradoxes and frustrating contradictions, I love this state. I am now a Texan, and very proud of it. I even say “y’all” without thinking about it anymore. It is clear to me that the new ideas that will drive these debates over America’s role in the world must come from places other than New York or Washington or Harvard.
If you look at demographic projects, the State of Texas, to give one example, will pick up eight additional electoral votes by 2030 – the second largest gain behind Florida, which will pick up nine. As I tell my horrified brie eating friends back east, George W. is not the last president Texas will be sending them. In other words, those East Coast types are coming to the conclusion – albeit very reluctantly – that they need to figure out how people think in places like Texas.
As you can imagine, I am very excited about this project, and the future of the UN is at the heart of my concerns. The fate and future of the United Nations – its place in the world and America’s relations to it – are at the heart of this project. There are two aspects to these questions surrounding the UN – substantive and institutional. The substantive question is a sharp but important one – how relevant is the United Nations in an age of globalization?
Remember, the UN was established with one primary goal – to limit and hopefully end wars between states. And, I am happy to report, it has had some success. Sixty years ago, the world had just gone through the last days of a thirty-year global struggle that wreaked unprecedented havoc and suffering. The UN played some part in seeing that great power war did not return, and when we think about the international problems that worry us, a repeat of World War I or II – with fully mobilized war economies and unrelenting bloodshed – are lower on the list than other concerns.
Theses worries have not completely gone away – it would be naive and foolish to believe they were gone forever. But the problems we worry about today are of a much different nature, and it is fair to ask whether the UN – or any of the postwar, Cold War national and global institutions – are up to the task. Many of the issues of globalization are problems of the global commons that either transcend states or involve non-state actors. The challenges we worry about – world health and global epidemics, trafficking in drugs and people, catastrophic terrorism, resource scarcity and environmental degradation, civil wars and ethnic and religious strife – these were not the international issues the UN was set up to fix, and it is reasonable to ask how it can meet these new global challenges.
Take one issue that is at the core of this question – human rights vs. state sovereignty. The UN was established with the idea that national sovereignty and control of one’s borders was almost sacred. But we now correctly recognize that some problems and issues transcend concerns about state sovereignty. If a state exploits its sovereign protection to harm its own citizens, then world public opinion correctly demands that great powers and international institutions respond. But this has been extremely difficult for the UN, an organization whose core mandate is intimately tied to the legitimacy of state sovereignty.
So the question this project deals with – and the question the world community faces – is whether and how global institutions set up to deal with the world of the 1940s can tackle the increasingly complex, transnational challenges of a globalized 21st Century. I am not quite sure, especially when it comes to the UN, and it is certain to be a challenge.
Before the UN can even begin to confront these important substantive questions, it must confront critical institutional issues. In particular, it must come to terms with a grave threat in its own house – systemic corruption and ineffectiveness. This corruption, which has turned out to be far worse than anyone had imagined, has weakened the UN like a virulent cancer.
The charges of the Volcker Commission are truly shocking. When meeting with Paul Volcker one can see that he is clearly a serious man of great integrity. He is not someone who is out to get the United Nations. In fact, he thinks that it is an indispensable vehicle to solve many of the world’s most pressing problems. He is someone who believes in the power of institutions, and he takes how they perform very seriously. Before heading up the UN reform committee, he led an international accounting standards committee that was very critical of the financial practices of many larger U.S. firms, including Enron. He has no political axe to grind; which is what makes the almost 1,000 pages of reports detailing U.N. corruption, cronyism, and incompetence truly appalling.
The U.N. Oil for food program was set up to help those in Iraq whose position was most desperate – the common person whose ability to get food and medical supplies was restricted by postwar sanctions on Iraq. It turns out that the U.N. program aided and abetted an effort to allow Sadaam Hussein to exploit this program to personally enrich both himself and his Baathist regime. Anywhere between 12 and 17 billion dollars was skimmed off oil sales and used to rebuild Iraq’s conventional weapons capabilities, pay off Hussein’s political allies, and fund private offshore bank accounts. U.N. officials did not simply stand by and watch this – many, including the man in charge of the program, Benon Saven, took bribes and kickbacks and personally enriched themselves.
Think about it, a program set up to help the most poor and vulnerable Iraqis instead goes to enrich the regime and bank accounts of a murderous, evil dictator. It is fairly clear that this was not simply an isolated incident. The oil for food program was massive, run out of the Secretariat’s office, and included some of the most important people in the United Nations structure. This scandal is only the largest of many that have hit the UN over the past two decades, and what is depressingly clear to anyone who spends time at the United Nations complex, there is a culture within the institution that allows corruption to flourish and discourages attempts to correct it.
This is a crucial and important point that is not often understood. Institutions all have cultures – we know this from our places of business, houses of worship, schools and civic organizations. The culture that permeates an institution – the values, the incentives, the practices, the history – is, in the end, far more important than its written rules and constitution, and far more difficult to change. Simply changing the leadership will not transform an institution as large and as sprawling as the UN. Pyramids are built from the bottom up, not top down. Re-writing the rules can help – but there are countries throughout the world whose brilliantly written, well-constructed constitutions are irrelevant to the daily practices of the countries they supposedly govern.
This problem goes far deeper, is far more entrenched in the lifeblood of the UN, than many who hope for the best want to admit. This gets to another controversial point – the role of the member states in all of this. Much criticism has been aimed at the Bush administration’s rhetoric and practice when it comes to multilateral diplomacy, and rightly so. But several important points are in order.
First, it was two countries on the Security Council, two countries who have often been out in front of the rhetorical charge against U.S. hegemony, who were most deeply enmeshed in the shameful oil for food scandal, France and Russia. Other member states have – of course - engaged in similar hypocrisies. The Bush administration has no monopoly on bad international behavior. The UN’s long documented tilt against Israel, which no one but the United States has fought against, or allowing brutal regimes like Libya to sit in human rights organizations, simply makes it hard to take some of what the U.N. does seriously.
A personal story highlights this issue. Over ten years ago, I was wandering around the UN building as a tourist, when I saw a sign commemorating the UN’s struggle to free captive nations. The list of captive nations was made up largely of countries that had been or were part of European colonial empires. But I noticed what I thought was an omission – where was the Ukraine, or Georgia, or the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia on the lists of nations held against their will? Certainly, being under the grip of a totalitarian Soviet empire qualified them as captive nations? No, the tour guide told me, they were not. They had been considered part of a sovereign nation, the Soviet Union. This struck me at the time as emblematic of a larger problem that plagued the UN throughout its history – double standards, hypocrisy, and empty moral posturing. What in God’s name was the point of the UN if not to advocate for millions in independent nations living under the tyrannical occupation of one of the worst regimes in human history?
Make no mistake – I am a fierce critic of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, and argued against the War in Iraq for a year before it was launched. I think this administration has done almost irreparable damage to America’s standing in the world. Yet, when I hear criticism of the administration from the UN – it puts my hair on edge. I simply cannot take the moral or political claims of an organization as corrupt, and as misguided, as the UN seriously.
I am not naive about these things – I understand that geopolitical realities will often force organizations to make unpleasant, sometimes even tawdry choices. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt set out to establish the UN, he was confronted with a myriad of difficulties. First he had to deal with the failure of the Wilsonian legacy, and the impotence of the League of Nations. The interwar period had seen a lot of rhetoric about making the world a better place, banning war, utilizing collective security, yet the world sat by as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan road roughshod.
FDR understood that the world was a rough, terrifying place, and that power mattered. So he set up the UN Security Council, based on his “Four” and later Five Policeman concept – the US, China, Russia, Great Britain and eventually France; all considered to be the powers responsible for maintaining world order. This was less a victory for international law and institutions than a replication of the Holly Alliance established by Metternich after the Congress of Vienna. It was a recognition that law is nice, but power is what really matters. And he was right – the Security Council is the most effective, important part of the United Nations.
FDR had to make other accommodations, of course. When he first proposed the idea of a United Nations to Stalin, the Soviet dictator said: ‘Sure, I love the idea’. Oh, and, by the way, we will need fifteen seats in the General Assembly, since the Soviet Union is a confederation of independent, autonomous states. You can imagine how that idea went down with Lithuanian or Georgian émigrés living in the United States. FDR ultimately cut a deal, and the Soviet Union was given three seats in the General Assembly. This was a tawdry, unpleasant compromise, but one that was necessary if FDR’s dream was to come to fruition.
So my complaint is not with the deals that must be made in a complicated world of states with different interests, values and agendas. Instead, it is with the hypocrisy and corruption, traits that undermine the commodity that is most precious to any organization, particularly one devoted to global governance – legitimacy.
As a student of the history of politics, I can tell you that there is not a more important asset to an institution than the belief that it is legitimate, that it has authority, that its right to exist and perform its functions in the world is not questioned. This is especially true of international institutions – remember the realist critique. For realists, the whole notion of international law and institutions makes no sense. There is no global election, to world sovereign, to grant of authority from a higher being that gives an organization its legitimacy. States live in a world of fear and power, military conflict and suspicion, and when real trouble hits, they are in a self-help world where they are left alone to fend for themselves.
The story I always tell students is of Poland in the 18th century – the largest country in Europe in 1700, a relatively enlightened political system, and compared to its near neighbors, highly literate and civilized. By 1800, it didn’t exist – it had been carved up by it neighbors, Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary, because it did not do enough to guarantee its safety in a vicious self-help world. In this view, power matters far more than law. Law is only legitimate when backed by power, which is made possible by sovereignty. Power always has and always will.
I used to buy the realist critique lock, stock, and barrel. I used to think that this meant that there was little point in caring about international law or global institutions. But I recognize that much of this belief, the heart of the realist critique, is as misguided and wrong-headed as the doe-eyed liberal internationalism of the most fervent UN faithful. The truth lies somewhere in between, as it always does. It is clear that international law and global cooperation are increasingly recognized as vital in a globalized world.
There is cooperation on all sorts of mundane but important issues – while we focus on the disagreements over highly charged issues like the Kyoto environmental pact or the International Criminal Court, dozens of global agreements are signed every year, regulating all aspects of life, from accounting and bankruptcy to telecommunications and air travel. Despite the lack of a world sovereign, which many opponents of international law and organizations cite as their primary evidence that international law is not really “law,” there has been a remarkable proliferation of legalized agreements between states since the end of the Cold War, and most of the states that have entered into these agreements have complied and kept their legal obligations.
As legal scholar Louis Henkin once cautiously observed, “Almost all nations obey almost all of their obligations almost all of the time.” This is an impressive record for international law, especially when we keep in mind the fact that there is no world government around to enforce the laws and threaten punishment for noncompliance. The most extreme version of the realist critique is wrong
International agreement is possible in the absence of a sovereign. It is not simply a dog eat dog world. People do support and want to see global solutions to global problems, whether it is world poverty, disease, or terrorism. But, in order for any international organization to achieve these ends, it must have legitimacy. Legitimacy based on the idea that the institutions have an authority based upon higher values, that they seek the best solutions for all, and that it does not engage in favoritism, cronyism, or corruption. To my mind, the corruption and misdeeds by the UN are far worse, far more evil than the run of the mill corruption that takes place on a local or a national level. To me, it is the equivalent of a corrupt cop. When a policeman is bad, it makes us lose faith in the very laws and procedures that are supposed to be there to protect us.
What is ironic, of course, is that it is the very concept of legitimacy – sovereign state legitimacy – that has been one of the UN’s most important contributions to world politics. The UN’s voluminous legal rules and agreements have compelled many nations to justify their actions and policies in accordance with the dictates of international law.
This is a major step forward in international politics. For centuries, states have acted on their own and have done what they wanted with little or no regard for the opinions of other states. In today’s world, countries care deeply about the opinions of other states, and frequently present their actions in terms of international law. Since the formation of the UN, and especially since the end of the Cold War, nations have spent valuable and scare resources – time, money, and talented individuals – on the UN and its international legal rules.
One of the central components of a legalized world is the concept of legitimacy. In a world in which nations have come to respect legal rules and standards, states must go to great lengths to make sure others perceive their actions to be legitimate and legal. The development of legitimacy in international politics coincides with the proliferation of economic interdependence and globalization.
In a world in which people and ideas can move freely across borders, and states are developing deep economic ties, the necessity for the international community to view actions as just, legal, and legitimate becomes paramount. In an increasingly interconnected and legalized world, each nations’ actions and policies must be seen as legitimate and just by other members of the international community because to be labeled a pariah risks being cut out of the complex web of international political and economic relations between countries that permeates today’s world.
This is what makes what has transpired at the UN recently so tragic. The world wants and needs an effective, legitimate United Nations organization. What does this mean for us here in Texas, seemingly worlds removed from these debates and discussions?
In my conversation with Paul Volcker, he asked me what people in Texas thought of the UN. He was, of course, expecting me to say that the majority of meat-eating, flag-waving, pickup-driving people in this reddest of red states hate any idea of multilateral institutions. He also wanted me to say that the way to win any election in Texas was to announce your plan as your first act as the dogcatcher for Sugar Land, Texas was to make the UN illegal. The look in his eye was that of all weary, world wise, cynical Amtrak corridor types. We all know how people like that think about us.
But I told him his core assumptions about Texas and Texans were all wrong. When you dig a bit deeper behind the political sentiment of Texans, you see a more complex picture than people acknowledge. First, we are a state brimming with immigrants, a state that will be filled with more brown and black and other colors than white. These are people who in their gut understand better than most why a world of international law and legitimacy matters, because in many cases, they have, with great sacrifice, left places where those concepts are weak or non-existent.
Then there are the dreaded religious fundamentalists. Say what you want about them, but it has been their loud voice that has played a large role in shaming the world into doing something about the genocide in Darfur. And while you may not like their methods, their voices have made an incredible difference on issues like human trafficking, sex slavery, and AIDs in Africa. Even on the other end of the spectrum, I told Volker, are the rich energy company executives who live in Dallas and Houston and are some of the most avid supporters of the Bush administration. They run the most globalized companies in the world, and travel and do business in more dangerous, unsettled places than just about anybody. Try telling an oil company executive trying to secure a billion dollar pipeline deal in Russia or Kazakhstan that international law, global standards, legitimate institutions, and transparency don’t matter. Of course they know they do – their business absolutely depends on it.
I told Volcker, as I tell all the East Coast types, that most Texans are not isolationists, nor haters of multilateral institutions. We simply look at the deep corruption, anti-Americanism, and empty moral posturing that often takes place at the UN and want nothing to do with it.
So I conclude with hope, and with a plea. It is clear we need the United Nations. Not the one we have now. Not the one that was built by FDR, Churchill and Stalin, 60 years ago, for a world long gone and past. Not the UN that we have seen exposed in the Volcker reports – riddled with corruption and incompetence.
We need a UN of higher principles and greater effectiveness. One that is up to the task of tackling the large array of complex problems that plague the citizens of this planet. Most importantly, we need a UN that is legitimate in the eyes of the world, that is not a polarizing force or a place for moral grandstanding. Rather, an institution that has the faith and trust of the world.
I am sure you are worried and concerned and even defensive about the charges leveled against the UN. I am sure what I have said has not been particularly pleasant to hear. But, it is only by demanding more of the UN – and all our global institutions – that they will change to meet the complex array of global challenges that will confront us for the rest of the 21st century. Because without an effective and legitimate UN, one that is flexible and adaptable, that truly serves the world’s interest, this will be a very rough century indeed.
This is something I keep reminding myself when I wonder about the future of the UN. People care about the United Nations. Even many of those that are most critical, most disappointed, want it to live up to its dreams and ideals. And if we keep caring and thinking and arguing and debating, we can make a difference. The sixtieth birthday party may not have been much fun.
But with the enthusiasm, support, and idealism of groups like yours, there is hope that the next big celebration, the next big birthday party, will be a much happier occasion
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