Yesterday was United Nations Day—the 65th anniversary of the day in 1945 when the UN charter legally entered into force. A 65th birthday is not especially exciting and the UN hasn’t been in the news all that much just lately. Certainly not the way it was in 2003 during the build up to Iraq war, when Prospect last asked me to write about it. In the first months of that year, the security council had been the scene of high drama, as Britain and the US sought to browbeat other members into adopting that elusive “second resolution,” which we now know that Britain’s then attorney general had deemed necessary if force were to be used legally against Saddam Hussein. There was no second resolution—despite all the pressure, only four out of 15 council members were prepared to vote for one—but the war happened anyway. Anglo-American forces occupied Iraq and overthrew Saddam. President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier, proclaiming “mission accomplished.” UN secretary general Kofi Annan, fearing that in a US-dominated new world order the UN would be swept into irrelevance like its predecessor the League of Nations, sent a team of the UN’s best and brightest, headed by the ultra-charismatic Sergio Vieira de Mello, to help with Iraq’s post-war reconstruction. But it turned out both he and Bush had miscalculated. It wasn’t a post-war environment at all, but a murderous “a-symmetrical” war, in which Sergio and his colleagues were among the first and most spectacular victims. On 19 August a suicide bomber detonated a truckload of explosives just below the window of Sergio’s office. Both Bush and the UN found themselves in “new world order” very different from the one they had imagined. In 2003 I was paid to speak for the UN. Seven years and a job-change later my perspective may have changed, but so has the world. After a brief burst of hope surrounding Obama’s election, the US seems less and less able to accomplish any of its self-assigned missions. The “unipolar moment”, proclaimed by US columnist Charles Krauthammer after the cold war ended, has well and truly ended. Analysts of geopolitics now differ mainly on whether we are headed for a new bi-polar world, in which a declining US will strive, at least for a time, to contain the power of rising China, or for a multi-polar world in which those two may be pre-eminent but other “emerging” powers—India, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey—as well as other declining but still important ones such as Russia, Japan and the EU, will also elbow their way to a share of influence. Neither of these models looks likely to be as stable as the old “balance of terror,” or as Pax Americana was supposed to be. Both, but especially the multi-polar variant, seem to cry out for an effective multilateral system, in which sovereign states agree to be bound by common rules, jointly arrived at, and great powers work together for peace and progress while smaller states can make their voices heard. Sound familiar? It’s precisely the system described in the UN charter. Sadly, though, the flesh-and-blood UN is at best a pale imitation of such a system, at worst a grotesque caricature. It is still a vital framework for collective bargaining on some global issues, for the coordination of humanitarian relief work after major disasters whether “natural” or “man-made” (an increasingly unreal distinction), for the collection of useful statistics, and for stabilising some conflict-riven societies in not-too-strategic parts of the world (mainly Africa). But hardly anyone now takes it seriously as the main forum of what is now fashionably called “global governance.” A lacklustre secretary general doesn’t help, but far more damaging is the anachronistic, yet seemingly immutable, composition of the security council—where Britain and France still imagine they are “punching above their weight” while the rest of Europe and the genuinely emerging powers are kept at arm’s length—and the unwieldy composition of the general assembly, where each of a host of mini-states has the same weight as India or China, and each is represented only by its government, however representative (or otherwise) that government may be. The structure enshrined in the charter is sound, but it turns out to have been a terrible mistake to make permanent membership of the security council truly permanent, i.e. impervious to power shifts in the real world. It’s true that the various products of G-arithmetic—G7, G8, G20, “G2”—are not currently covering themselves with glory. But unless and until there is agreement to amend the charter, which currently seems very far away, the “G192” seems the least convincing of all. Edward Mortimer was chief speechwriter and director of communications to UN secretary general Kofi Annan. He is now senior vice-president of the Salzburg Global Seminar.
