The truck bomb that destroyed the UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19th August has been as shocking to the UN as a political community as the events of 11th September were to most Americans. Hyperbole? No one who witnessed the outpouring of emotion at UN headquarters in New York or Geneva would think so. But the depth of grief and outrage engendered by the murder of Kofi Annan's special representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 of his UN colleagues, goes beyond the fact that, trite as it may sound, most UN staffers think of themselves as belonging to a sort of extended family. More crucially, they regard themselves as working not just for an institution (as people tend to do at the World Bank or the IMF) but as serving a cause. That cause, as a surprising number of them will say without a trace of irony, is the cause of humanity.
It is easy for an outsider to be cynical about the UN. The end of the cold war had encouraged absurdly high hopes for the organisation, hopes that were cruelly deflated by the triple peacekeeping disasters of Somalia (1993), Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia (1992-95). UN peacekeeping had many successes in the past, from Cyprus to Cambodia, and its peacekeeping department won a Nobel prize in 1988. But in Bosnia the moral limits of the peacekeeping ethos were exposed to the world. UN officials refused to accept that they had an obligation to take the Bosnian-that is, the victims' side-against the government in Belgrade and its Bosnian Serb surrogates. They hewed to the most exquisite neutrality, insisting that this is what their security council mandate demanded.
For an organisation that continued, at the time, to insist that it was morally superior to the governments it served-the bureaucratic arm of the world's transcendental values, as Michael Barnett, an American scholar who worked for the UN on Rwanda, put it-this was an astonishing position to take. Later, too late for the 250,000 who died during the Bosnian conflict, the UN admitted as much. In its self-lacerating report on the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, it concluded that there had been a "pervasive ambivalence within the UN regarding the role of force in the pursuit of peace" and "an institutional ideology of impartiality even when confronted with attempted genocide."
Rwanda in 1994 was worse. Months before the genocide began, Romeo Dallaire, the UN force commander on the ground, warned UN officials in New York-notably Kofi Annan, then head of the peacekeeping department-of the impending slaughter of Rwanda's minority Tutsis by elements of the Hutu-dominated government. Dallaire asked for permission to act against those plotting the slaughter. New York refused, insisting that his job was to assist with the recently signed peace accord, and even reprimanded Dallaire saying that raids against weapons stores "could only be viewed as hostile by the Rwandan government." In fact, the UN, still smarting from a peacekeeping failure in Somalia not of its own making, was more concerned about its own institutional survival than anything else. As Iqbal Riza, Annan's chef de cabinet once he became secretary general, put it, "We could not risk another Somalia... We did not want the Rwandan peacekeeping mission to collapse." Another UN inquest painted "a picture of a failed response to early warning."
Despite these reports on the Bosnian and Rwandan disasters-which, to his great credit, Annan either commissioned or permitted to be issued after he became secretary general-UN officials could (and can still) be found shifting the blame for the world body's often disgraceful conduct on to the member states, and above all on to Britain, France, Russia, China and the US, the permanent, veto-wielding members of the security council. In fairness, this is par for the international course. Just as the UN claims success for itself when it mounts effective peacekeeping or nation-building operations (in El Salvador, in Mozambique, in East Timor under de Mello's leadership), while attributing the failures (Bosnia, Rwanda) to the ill-conceived mandates imposed on it by member states, so the great powers routinely blame the UN for their failures, as the US did so infamously when its own bungling led to an unexpected reverse in Somalia.
Still, a culture of blamelessness is so ingrained at the UN that even Kofi Annan-who has probably been more frankly self- critical about the world body's shortcomings than any of his predecessors-could address a passing-out parade of troops from Unprofor, the UN's peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, and tell them after the Srebrenica massacre, that they had performed admirably. What he meant was that since they had been given an appalling and unworkable mandate by the UN security council, they had done the best they could.
The problem here is that UN officials, while insisting, when criticised, that they have no real autonomy, do not present themselves as an international bureaucracy, or a servicing secretariat along the lines of the African Union. On the contrary, they routinely make large moral claims for the institution. These claims of moral authority, and the credibility they continue to have around the world, are what makes the UN a central, rather than a subaltern institution. The question is whether these claims should still be taken seriously. That they continue to exert a powerful influence is beyond doubt. If they did not, there would be no urgent discussion of the US needing to turn the Iraq operation over to the world organisation to impart some legitimacy to the postwar occupation. But does it really make sense to invest such hopes in the UN? That uncomfortable question is seldom addressed by those who wish the UN well. (Those who wish it harm, notably within the Bush administration, particularly at the department of defence, are another matter.)
In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Shashi Tharoor made an eloquent case for the US to recommit itself to the principle of multilateralism in international affairs generally and to the UN specifically. (Tharoor, a career UN official and novelist, is part of a talented brains trust around Annan which has also included former Financial Times journalist Edward Mortimer and, until recently, American international relations scholar Michael Doyle.) In the course of setting out his argument, Tharoor addressed the issue of the UN both as a stage and as an actor. The stage role is indisputable. The UN is where "states declaim their differences and their convergences." But when he says actor, he means actor in the theatrical sense-someone performing according to a script written by someone else-and not the more commonsense definition of someone capable of acting for himself. "The UN is the actor," he writes "that executes policies made on its stage, sins... committed by individual governments are thus routinely blamed on the organisation itself." Using the metaphor coined by an earlier secretary general, Dag Hammarskj?ld, Tharoor describes the UN as "a Santa Maria battling its way through storms and uncharted oceans to a new world, only to find that the people on shore have blamed the storms on the ship." This vision is astonishingly self-regarding. And note the logic of the argument: if the UN can do no wrong, then surely it must be supported, on the "something is better than nothing" principle.
There are many reasons to support the UN-Tharoor offers some of them in his article, which debunks the quasi-abolitionist arguments of Bush administration officials like Richard Perle and John Bolton-but the fact that it exists is not one of them. The same thing could have been said about the League of Nations in the 1920s or the 1930s. By chance, the Guardian recently reprinted an editorial it ran on 27th August 1928, on the occasion of the signing of the Kellogg-Briand pact that was meant to "outlaw" war, in which it made just such a case. "Anyone can point out the weaknesses of the League," the leader writer intoned, "describe its failures, analyse its vices; but the man who does not see that the creation of the League has put man's hope for peace and his nobler ambitions on a new basis is blind to the history of human institutions."
The point here is not to claim that the UN is as great a failure as the League, or to deny its successes, above all in its sometimes heroic efforts to alleviate human misery among the poor-the cause to which de Mello devoted most of his career. The sheer range of issues the UN is concerned with through its agencies-such as the World Health Organisation, Unicef, the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme)-from treaty law to sanitation, and from peace and security to the environment, proves, as Tharoor rightly insists, that it is not irrelevant. The UN's humanitarian agencies are often criticised for inefficiency and corruption, and like any other governmental bureaucracy they have their share of fools and knaves. But these specialised UN agencies remain the court of last resort for refugees, child soldiers, and, indeed, for the billions of people in the poor world, above all in sub-Saharan Africa.
Still, the UN was not founded as some giant alleviation machine-the International Committee of the Red Cross writ large-even though human rights, justice, better living standards, and human dignity are mentioned in the UN charter. It was founded first and foremost as a peace and security institution, designed, as the charter put it, to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" and to "maintain international peace and security." UN officials now routinely claim that peace and security are only one imperative among several. But this is historically inaccurate and self-serving. The UN was founded as a central part of the postwar answer to Nazism. It was not created to bring relief, valuable as such a mission is. Indeed, if the failures of UN peacekeeping in the 1990s really are the pattern of the world organisation's future, if the UN is incapable of autonomous action in the field of peace and security, and if all it can now be is a giant diplomatic talking shop and a giant relief and development institution, then the case for abolition is far stronger than even the UN's critics have previously suggested.
This may not be the case. Certainly, the war in Iraq has demonstrated the limits of American unilateralism as clearly as it has demonstrated the reality of the US's unprecedented military power. And "cleaning up" after US invasions of the new type-Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq-may indeed afford the UN a role as the de facto colonial office to US power. It is still, however, unclear whether the UN will either accept or be invited to play such a role. What is clear is that being fuelled with good intentions is not enough. If the UN is worth defending, it must be because of what it accomplishes, not for some radiant future it may lead us to. After communism, we should be inoculated permanently against radiant futures. And the example of the League of Nations should serve as a cautionary tale for those who wish to think seriously, rather than sentimentally, about the UN.
Proponents of the UN often remark that if the world body did not exist, it would have to be invented again. Doubtless this is true. The need for what we now call multilateral solutions to international problems did not begin with the founding of the UN in 1945, nor will it end when it is eventually superseded. But the UN is an institution with a particular history and a specific set of underlying assumptions. It is an intergovernmental institution; in other words, a body comprising-and with a secretariat responsible to-the world's states, not the world's peoples. Notwithstanding Annan's attempts to challenge an unqualified reading of sovereignty-in which states are free to do anything within their own borders-the UN's bedrock assumption remains state sovereignty. This is what has made going beyond the rhetorical commitment to human rights- a hallmark of Annan's tenure-so fraught. And it is perhaps why the UN can never live up to the expectations of the world's peoples, even though for some it continues to incarnate them.
For all its pretensions to moral leadership, the UN remains the product of the postwar period in which it was established. Its charter emerged from the negotiations between the founding members in 1944 and 1945, as Stephen Schlesinger details in a fascinating new book. And it is only sensible to imagine that another global body might well be configured differently, and be better equipped to cope with a world that has changed out of all recognition. To say that an institution has outlived its time is not the same thing as saying it is useless. The UN presided with great intelligence and commitment over the dissolution of Europe's colonial empires (the last mission of this type was de Mello's UN administration in East Timor). But the fact that it was well suited to the era of decolonisation does not change the fact that it may be ill suited to the 21st century, with its rogue states, WMD, international terror networks and an interventionist global superpower.
To claim as William Shawcross did in his book on UN peacekeeping, Deliver Us from Evil, that Kofi Annan was "charged with the moral leadership of the world," is to indulge in a preposterous sort of sycophancy that impedes serious thought about the UN's future. Annan has had a long and distinguished career within the UN bureaucracy, which he entered as a young man and in which he has served, with the exception of one brief stint in the government of his native Ghana, for his entire adult life. But he is not the secular equivalent of the Pope or the Dalai Lama: he is a politician, a man of power. The cloying press coverage Annan tends to receive, at least outside the US, probably serves to obscure the fact that he is indeed the only secular world leader whose brief is as much concerned with the poor and the powerless throughout the world as with the powerful. A British prime minister or a US president does not wake up prepared to devote most of his day to the problems of refugees in northeastern Congo or pollution in the Malacca strait. For Annan, such issues lie at the heart of his work. But as observers of the UN have pointed out since its inception, the world body is not a moral post. Annan is the head of the secretariat of an intergovernmental organisation-a body whose charter is virtually silent on the secretary general's actual power and role.
Each secretary general has defined his position according to his own lights. Dag Hammarskj?ld, who held the post between the surprise resignation in 1953 of Trygve Lie, the first secretary general, and his own mysterious 1961 death in Congo, was probably the most daring. The much underrated U Thant, who succeeded Hammarskj?ld and served until 1971, took many more risks than he is usually given credit for, and went so far as to denounce in public the American war in Vietnam-something it is difficult to imagine either his predecessors or his successors doing. Kurt Waldheim (1972-81) was a Nazi, of course; P?rez de Cu?llar (1982-91) a cautious, canny diplomat; and Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1992-96) so thoroughly tyrannised his staff that when Washington decided to deny him a second term, the rank and file at UN headquarters were hard pressed to come up with convincing expressions of regret. Annan, while undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations, impressed the US government by his willingness to co-operate with their (belated) decision to intervene in the Balkans. But while there is much evidence that Annan was an effective official, he gave no sign of any special moral leadership. Indeed, many, myself included, reproached him for not resigning over the peacekeeping debacles in Bosnia and Rwanda, which were under his direct supervision. On form, he seemed a decent, intelligent, refined man, but not someone who would rock the boat.
It is one of the surprises of Annan's tenure, which began in 1997, that this man, who is the first career UN official to become secretary general, has been willing to go out on a political limb more frequently than his detractors ever imagined. This is not to say that he has defied the US. On taking office, Annan made it his highest priority to restore relations with Washington and to get the US government to repay the vast arrears in dues it owed the UN. Soon after 11th September, the Bush administration defused the dues crisis by handing over $582m, although the UN claims the US still owes it over $1bn, mainly for peacekeeping duties. (Total annual UN spend, including agencies and peacekeeping, is over $5bn.) To be effective, the UN is dependent on US participation and on US financial contributions, something Annan and his advisors recognised from the beginning. His success in patching up relations with the US was an extraordinary diplomatic coup. Annan even managed to charm (or at least neutralise) that diehard reactionary opponent of the UN, Jesse Helms. What it must have cost Annan to make such efforts can only be guessed at. A friend of mine in the secretariat would only say at the time, "Paris is worth a mass."
The lesson of the League of Nations-from which the US absented itself-played an important role in Annan's calculations. Whatever he may or may not have thought of particular US policies (urging the US to lift Iraqi sanctions in the mid-1990s was one issue on which Annan did challenge Washington, albeit discreetly), Annan remained faithful to his initial analysis of the UN's situation: with the Americans, the world body could succeed in achieving many of its goals, but without the US it would flounder. And Annan's goals were ambitious. In 2000, he convened the so-called millennium summit, which was meant not only to chart the course of the UN in the coming decades, but also to set ambitious targets for poverty alleviation, the environment, and education, as well as peace and security. The summit was controversial. Many UN officials privately believed the organisation had already hosted too many conferences, and that the gap between the goals set forth and the actual willingness of member states to meet their commitments had grown too great. But Annan persisted; the summit was held-the largest in UN history-and the goals duly set. (The sceptical officials look almost certain to be proved correct, at least in the field of development aid where few rich countries are likely to reach their targets.)
To make even a formal success of securing international approval of the millennium goals, Annan had to secure the assent of the US in a way that his predecessors had never been able to do. The rationale was simple. As Tharoor puts it in his Foreign Affairs piece, turning a dismissive metaphor coined by the American neoconservative Charles Krauthammer wittily on its head, "If international institutions serve as ropes that tie Gulliver down, then Gulliver will have every interest in snapping the ropes and breaking free of the constraints imposed on him. If, however, these institutions constitute a vessel sturdy enough for Gulliver to sail, and the Lilliputians cheerfully help him to man the bridge and hoist the mainsail because they want to travel to the same destination, then Gulliver is unlikely to jump ship and try to swim on alone." The image is an unfortunate one-what the delegations from the UN's other 190 member states feel about being called Lilliputians, one can only imagine-but privately both serving and former UN officials make the same point, however much they might grouse about the US. Annan would have been grossly irresponsible, both to the UN as an institution and to his role as a political leader trying to further international peace and security, they argue, if he tried to map out a strategy for global governance that did not have the US at its centre. Annan's position in this regard is often described as being similar to Tony Blair. Like Annan, Blair is supposed to think that, for better or worse, for the forseeable future, the US is the only power that can define the global agenda. If it can be persuaded to act in good causes then those causes will be furthered. But if the US declines to act, little will come of the moral ambitions of the human rights revolution or of the lofty goals set by the UN's millennium summit.
There are obvious flaws in this argument. It assumes that the US and the UN, or, for that matter, the US and the British government, really do have the same goals. What if Gulliver wants to sail one way and the Lilliputians another? Or what if the Lilliputians, small though they may be, don't want to "cheerfully help him man the bridge," particularly if the bridge in question happens to be Iraq? UN officials are at least privately appalled at the demands made by many US political figures and commentators that America be given special privileges at the UN. This stance is exemplified by Washington's annual demand in the security council-so far grudgingly granted-for exemption for its personnel from the rules of the new international criminal court. But might cannot make right, protest the critics of the UN's "Gulliver strategy," holding up Iraq as evidence for their conviction that in its desperation not to alienate the US, the UN is becoming too compliant. They point out that, despite the fact that most UN member states opposed the war and Annan himself spoke out repeatedly against it, as soon as the war ended, the secretariat was more than willing to help the US pass a security council resolution recognising the postwar occupation by US and British forces and authorising the UN to send a special representative to Iraq.
That special representative was, of course, Sergio Vieira de Mello. For many reasons, de Mello did not want to take up the post. He had only recently been appointed UN high commissioner for human rights. An ambitious and self-confident man, of formidable intellectual gifts, courage and charisma, he was widely touted as a future secretary general. And he had never refused an assignment, above all from Kofi Annan, an old friend. He had left the UNHCR to be the UN's proconsul in Sarajevo in 1994. He had left the post of head of the UN office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs (OCHA) briefly to run the UN authority in Kosovo after the Serbs withdrew, and, later, to become the transitional administrator of newly freed East Timor. But he had not wanted to go to Baghdad, and only agreed to serve for a four-month, non-renewable period-a term that had less than six weeks to run when he was murdered. Before he went to Baghdad, he complained that he had virtually no authority, an unclear mandate, and that the chances of the UN being made the scapegoat for any failures on the part of the US occupation authorities were high. Once he got there, he went to work with a will, almost single-handedly making it possible for the US administrator, L Paul Bremer, to set up the Iraqi governing council. But he never liked the mission. "Pray for me," he told a journalist friend shortly before his assassination.
De Mello's predicament was exactly the one that critics of the UN's "keep the US on board at any cost" had feared. Perhaps Annan had feared it as well. After de Mello's death, Annan said publicly that any future UN role would require a much clearer and more elaborated mandate. And yet it seemed safe to assume that within a fairly short period of time, the secretary general would push the UN back towards the role it had played throughout his tenure-that of good soldier. UN officials were painfully aware that they would do a better job in postwar Iraq than the Americans were doing. Post-conflict reconstruction and governance was, after all, as much the UN's forte as war was the US's forte. So there were ethical as well as institutional pressures to toe the US line, even if this ran the risk of appearing to take on the colonial office mantle. But such an accusation, previously restricted to figures on the extreme left, has acquired a new centrality in the aftermath of the terrorist attack that killed de Mello. The attacks have shown that the terrorists and their supporters inside and outside Iraq, make little distinction between the US and the UN. True in Iraq, the UN had long been perceived in a hostile light by many Iraqis because it had directed the sanctions regime. But the fact that Annan, in the name of the UN, had opposed the war (as he had opposed the sanctions), that de Mello in particular had been fervently against it, changed nothing. In the ruins of the Baghdad headquarters, the UN is counting the cost of keeping Gulliver on board.
What to do about all this once the period of mourning for de Mello had passed? There are two issues-that of the UN's role in Iraq, and more broadly of the UN's future. Iraq is the simpler of the two. From the UN secretariat's perspective, the threat to international peace and security posed by the US's failure to bring order and stability to Iraq in the first months of the postwar occupation was so grave that a UN role was a necessity. The impediment has been the question of whether the US would be willing to grant the UN enough autonomy to get security council authorisation for such a mission.
The deeper crisis of the UN as an institution is not subject to the vagaries of political negotiation. Although Iraq and de Mello's assassination brought it into sharp relief, the crisis has been developing for more than a decade. The basis of the UN has always been hope balanced against realpolitik. In the aftermath of the cold war, hopes were again raised high, only to be dashed first by the failures of UN peacekeeping and more recently by the rebirth of military unilateralism from Kosovo to Iraq.
There are three ways the UN can now go, excluding dissolution. The first is to continue as it is, with all the obvious risks of a slide into irrelevancy; the second is for the UN to become the de facto servant of US foreign policy; and the third is to undertake realistic reform. Suddenly, all those questions about UN reform that were batted back and forth for decades in think tanks and seminar rooms, in studies commissioned by the UN or by sympathetic governments, have acquired a new, despairing urgency. (Should the security council expand or contract? Should the number of veto-wielding permanent members expand or contract? How can the military staff committee or the general assembly be reinvigorated?) Nevertheless, the obstacles that have prevented reform in the past remain-from the narrow self-interest of member states (notably Britain and France's desire to cling on to their vetoes) to the realisation that an expansion of the security council will make it more discordant rather than less. In these circumstances, serious reform seems unrealistic and realistic reform seems unserious. And it is all made worse by the perception that the US, after 9/11, spurns not just the UN but multilateralism in general.
To the surprise of his critics, myself included, Annan seems to have grasped the magnitude of the crisis. At a press conference at UN headquarters on 8th September, ostensibly to discuss his report on the implementation of the millennium declaration, Annan startled his audience by declaring that "events have shaken the international system. I am not even sure whether the consensus and the vision that the millennium declaration expressed are still intact." He said that the UN system as a whole, from the security council and the general assembly to the economic and social council and the trusteeship council might need "radical reform" if they were to "regain" their authority. He later insisted that the security council needed to be made "more democratic and more representative" with "an expansion in membership."
These statements represented an astonishing departure for Annan, a man who is deeply grounded in the cautious institutional culture of the UN and resolutely optimistic about both the world situation and the future of the UN. It was not that what the secretary general was saying was original. In private, most senior UN officials express themselves along these lines at least some of the time. It was his willingness to stop pretending that the UN could sail into the future confident that it was the right institution, organised along the right lines, to meet and cope with the challenges the present already posed and the future held. Whether he will follow through on this is another matter. But Annan is right: it is not clear how to rebuild an international system that is faced simultaneously by the unheard-of challenges of a unipolar world in terms of state power, but also a world in which even the most powerful state is vulnerable to attack by small groups armed with weapons that alter strategic reality. The UN was established in 1945. There is nothing in its founding documents or institutional structures that are relevant to the current crisis.
What remains is the hope of a better, fairer world. It is that hope that de Mello died for, and that the UN is based on. The problem is that hope is not enough, as Annan in effect admitted. And perhaps the UN is not enough either, or not the institution through which these challenges can be addressed. That, I suspect, is Annan's real fear. In the meantime, no one seems to have a better idea. A dissolution of the UN followed by the creation of a new world organisation less in thrall to member states and less confused about its own role might be preferable, but there is no chance of this occurring. For member states like the UN as it is-powerless by design, in the phrase of writer Michel Feher.
If the UN is incapable of serving as the ultimate arbiter of peace and security in the world, the only alternative is force exercised by powerful member states. But no nation, no matter how good its intentions, has the right, the wisdom, or the capacity to act consistently in the world's interests. To imagine otherwise, as some do in Washington, is even more utopian and ill-judged than the most woolly headed idealising of the UN. In any case, as the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq has demonstrated these last few months, and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has demonstrated these last 35 years, force may be necessary but it is never sufficient. The Santa Maria seems to have hit an iceberg. Thank God the crew has at least stopped smiling and pretending everything is OK.
