open Democracy News Analysis - a democratic united nations? - Comments

Not logged in Lawrence Efana on "The missing link of democratization"

Not logged in Lawrence Efana — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:57:36 +0000

Boutros Boutros-Ghali and 'englishman said' above have it right. It's hard to dismiss arguments of the first: that global democracy in theory and practice is not facing new structural crisis and that problems to solve effectively at global level are not multiplying. So too with the European Union a vibrant sample of the type of governance sort or implicit in former UN Secretary General's paper, it seems sheer idea of global-level move in EU-direction could make anyone pessimistic. The latter is a matter of single sample-solution perspective of a problem not representative enough of the scale of the overall scope of problems configured.

Question: at above levels, aren't we left to continue with debates about a way or ways out? Interests in the ideas of a world government have been with us. Its debates are lame sometimes, but at other times something dramatic adds a new lease of life. The global world we are in today is not same as before. Parallel to the good in terms of progress made, negative characters of the new global world frighteningly, if consensus is mustered include complex realities of [good] governance as a problems, threats of environment, climate, poverty, terrorism, and proliferation of deadly weapons capped by population growth, water shortage problem, hunger problem, health pandemics, drug resistance, insurgence and conflicts, and unusually severe economic and financial downturns. Are their global consequences enough or not to spur a search for new ideas, collective engagement to argue and invent solutions in ways different and able to puff-up selected 'bests' of the current operating models?

EU is no-lesser reality sample in above terms. Yet the Secretary General might sound a utopia, but no mismatch, because of human ingenuity to invent or create and or innovate. Keywords are many in this paper, with 'reform' - relative to rest of them, at least in global structural-setting good governance context. Picking reform is buttressed by 'style and elements' of, should I say, emerging arguments for the theme "Transforming Government for the 21st Century: an initiated project base, abbreviated 'PNSR', (more in http://www.pnsr/web/page/610/sectionid/578/pagelevel/3/interio..) Here the EU-dimension argument is single and analogy, thinking of global contexts of Boutros-Ghali's... So too PNSR, a single sample: equally an analogy, for the sake of its logic, seeks to change character of the 'structural': if for no other reasons but many current threats of equally changing dimensions to the 'global'. PNSR advocates putting ideas before the new US President, look beyond the power and boundary of the nation state, if some menaces of intelligence failures must be avoided, which underlies crave to redefine National Security as a goal. Reform challenge becomes a theme and for that sake leaves nothing out, from the point of the experiences and lessons of history. Boutros-Ghali is analogically not arguing anything different. Factors threatening global world today to occasion new calls for a new form of global governance at the UN-level are the same as those PNSR designers see as key threats of our time calling for integrated approach: that in which the structures-institutions and functions would have to be reformed. Thus human ingenuity is flexible, open and welcoming: not blindly close and dictatorial or let itself bugged down by one sample experience: itself undergoing transformation all the same!

With all due respect for likelihood of its "truth-value" world governance and global parliament: for pains of the nation and regional-level experiences sound much far-fetched and frightening. So too is chaos of 'mob' or 'direct' democracy in their limited or larger forms. From both UN and Bretton Woods' perspectives the G20 is no bad mark. If anything is said to deter the world and its governance process, they are post-UN General Assembly issues, which spill often into its Security Council: its exclusive club], one might argue thinks less of the fate of the world as a whole, except own disparate strategic interests. The member countries though now shifting from time to time, do not seem to really care a dam about usefulness of consensus and minimum use of the so-called 'veto' rights, most of which send out frustrating signal wave rings to the world. Boutros-Ghali refers to oversight absence. Thinking such could be avoided, he uses current lessons of the economic and financial meltdowns to implicitly reason roles of regulation against deregulation. It truly rocks the brain to try to come to grip with all and make sense with the peaceful and prosperous world: what is wanted whether we operate as nations or regional unions still within an apex: the United Nations! Should you all agree to a little man's reappraisal of global burdens, then join to keep the debate and discourse alive and not to frustrate the medium or processes enabling people to do so.

englishman on "The missing link of democratization"

englishman — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 12:18:20 +0000

Some of the many likely problems associated with a UN Parliamentary Assembly are already present in the the EU as discussed in articles and responses "The European Pariament: What's the Point" and "The European Parliament's Future". A main one being how to give such a body any genuine authority without a mechanism and incentive to garner respect from the member states. Local politicians will have little desire to give power away and have the ability, aided by a population fed by nationalistic views, to claim successes for themselves and to blame any such body for all ills that befall their state.

Whilst a noble idea for the future, I fear that it is likely to be impractical for some time. We have a world today where the vast majority are economically poor and not well educated. It may be a desire to distribute wealth and power more evenly, but the wealthy and powerful are not going to agree to such a move being forced upon them, however subtle the attempt. Democracy only works with a well informed populace and this is clearly not the case - even in the developed world. There would be the real danger of a dictatorship of the majority (not even of the proletariat, where at least they were defined as the wealth producers). There needs to be a far greater equalisation of wealth and political ideas before such a system would even be considered.

garydstark on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

garydstark — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:43:22 +0000

This would be in improvement. Any move that increases the reliance on democracy in the UN is a good idea...

gary

garydstark on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

garydstark — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:41:00 +0000

Cathy,

You finished your post with:

"In the end, we keep coming back to the UN and the SC, as bad as it is, because, like democracy, it's the worst system except for all the others. The UN is where all the countries are, so you go there to try to work things out."

I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head...the UN is not ENOUGH like democracy. If you believe in the very concept of democracy (as opposed to dictatorships), it makes no sense to ignore that difference with dealing with countries. If we pretend that Kim Jong-il represents the people of North Korea, you can't hope to achieve progress on issues of human rights. Of course a more real example would be China, which holds a PERMANENT seat in the SC. That's an outrage. And why does France (20th in population) have a seat, but not India (2nd in population)? Clearly the UN is an undemocratic institution, which is the source of many of it's problems. Here's my proposal for how it should be...

www.UnitedDemocraticNations.org

Feedback is welcome...

gary

Lawrence Efana on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

Lawrence Efana — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:09:18 +0000

Happy that Gray agrees with most of what observers feel is UN core problem. I agree too that we would need objective analyses to help us know about its depth as such.

That was why the university was dragged in, thinking of chances to see beyond "poker game", which reduces diplomacy to a raw strategic game of interest hence adds to the frustration of UN as world organization. Lets hope interested scholars are given the chance to join and map the field empirically and theoretically, to in the end introduce better and less conflicting revisions of the values and practices.

The theme: "regionalism" is guarded by two words 'style' and 'approaches'. Contextually, EU successes on intrastate and interstate basis leave much to learn. Interests are not limited to EU regional integration concept only. Other world regions are finding themselves drawn into it. What could then be better than to focus regionalism with a view to advise on aligning endeavours in support and not frustration of UN. Clearly this articulates coordination and openness to plurality of approaches.

Resource question is contextually more challenging. The UN has many agencies parallel to its commitment to peace-making and keeping across conflict zones worldwide. At the same time, besides its peacekeeping undertakings, the same is also a theme for regional/bi-multilateral interests. Here scarcity of resources is a relative problem. Poor regions feel its impact most. To cut short - if it makes sense with analogy], the financial/economic meltdown is witnessing "bellout" endeavours and doing so by redefining the implications for (i) Wall Street, and (ii) Main Street: recent concepts/expressions. Do we figure out any implications for regions and the UN. Who really bells out the UN - venturing to see it [partly] as "world" Main Street object?

Not having said it all, many are saddened about what appears to be the inability of Africa to stand tall over its problems and challenges.

Lawrence Ben [Finland]

gray on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

gray — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:54:35 +0000

Lawrence makes a very valuable point concerning the nature of diplomacy - I think that many of the issues that we are facing now are legacies of deplorable diplomatic approaches, normally focussed on manipulating power for narrow objectives rather than any collective benefit. I think this is improving, but I would like to see some objective analysis of diplomacy and its impacts.

I disagree, however, with the concern about regionalisation. Managing the globe is an enormous problem, and we need a variety of approaches to doing so - we just need to ensure they have some coordination. The UN, for instance, works with the African Union in peacekeeping. We need to ensure that the UN has the resources and support to play its part properly.

merlin landwu on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

merlin landwu — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:22:19 +0000

The UN is in danger of imploding in the same manner as the banking system - all of the ingredients are in place. Particularly the complete lacking of accountability or policing of their actions.
We as a species are incapable of acting without adequate regulation because of the human characteristics endemic in all of us - from the drug addict to the most successful.
Personal greed is the obvious facet and until we can recognise our own fallibility we will never cause the serious change we as a species now need to happen.
An "honesty overhaul" is long overdue. Naive!
It was lack of integrity and a feeling of invincibility that created the banking crisis and will trip up the UN in similar fashion.

Lawrence Efana on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

Lawrence Efana — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:32:18 +0000

Certainly the consensus of opinions is not lacking on the issue of the desirability to restructure the United Nations functionally and structurally.

While that fact of its reality is well demonstrated in the article and comments, I would be frank to raise the point that it appears something important has been 'drowned', and that is, the rather problematic character of diplomacy! What has it meant and how has it functioned? If we have learned anything at all about how it has functioned, how ready are we to apply what we have learned to enrich the pragmatic and yet moral awareness able to uplift UN-functions as an organization and so bring it to the level of what we expect of it?

The subject of diplomacy thus, drags in among others university political science departments, particularly units dealing with its study and possibility of a revisionist approach that can make it possible to reassess its practical outcomes at the nationstate and international levels. On this, all should be concerned about the delight of many to treat it as a "poker-game" subject - the consequence of which inevitably frustrates and breaks the moral 'operative wings' at both levels. You can only argue against the posited if you are not worried about what many times seem as empty words' play and also inaction, leaving observers to wonder about who should bell the cat when everyone is hiding something under the cupboard, explaining partly that which many worry about: dirty diplomacy.

There is a saying that charity begins at home. I am not quite convinced about overflogging the UN without doing the same to the nationstate. The former is afterall a conglomeration of the latter. That makes the call for reform a two-way arrow matter and I seem to believe it is somehow what the idea of change articulates from all we have heard so far. This two-way arrow reform is definitely going to be challenging for many reasons, including the increasing proliferation of nationstates resorting to military-power policies, anti-solidarity economic values, protectionism and increasing regional integration - whatever the reasons are. The latter in particular, depending on style and approach duplicates the UN with known and unknown consequences in the longrun.

All of the above-mentioned directly and indirectly eat-up the status as well as the effectiveness of the UN and that has been argued and known even before we are now where we are on world conflict spots. UN is reduced to an agency without biting legal status but dependent in nearly all senses on what goes on either at the nationstate levels or regional integration levels. Are there reasons to further examine these critically if we want the UN to serve the world better than it has done so far during its short but long and winding history?

I would agree with the author that current financial melt-down effects on national and global economies need not usurp arguments to critically understand what is wrong with the UN, if its renovation challenges are to be dealt with. A mob-democracy on representation basis for world states, might therefore benefit from reassessing the "security council as world cabinet body" and therefore truly for argued and unargued reasons, its manpower/recruitment policy deserves looking into to augment efficiency and commitment.

Lawrence Efana [Finland]

Andrew Turvey on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

Andrew Turvey — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:14:17 +0000

There is a solution - a source for the electricity that you say is so needed. It is called the United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) - an elected parliament of politicians representing the people, not diplomats representing their government. Over 500 parliamentarians have signed up to support it.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Parliamentary_Assembly for more information.

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 08:13:39 +0000

I think this is an important article to stimulate thinking on what might galvanize the UN toward becoming more relevant. It *is* in a crisis which can most dramatically be seen by the huge overextension of the peace-keeping forces, now numbering over 100,000, costing a tremendous amount, with often little to show for enormous expenditures, such as in Darfur.

Carne Ross is right that we're now seeing a proliferation of items from the Security Council that are shy of effective resolutions (which aren't so effective either when they are finally mustered). There are more presidential statements, news statements, etc. An awful lot of time goes into negotiating these PRSTs, getting them "just so," and yet they really are nothing more than a kind of temperature-taking about whether an actual resolution is then possible down the line, using some of the same hard-won language. Much of the time, however, the PRST's never graduate to resolutions.

What I've come to understand about the UN over the years I've observed it is that while you can blame the institution or this or that agency for this or that lapse, it's really an organic sort of mirror that reflects merely the countries in it. This is how states are, and they are not better, when you put them into a group. Seeded throughout all UN agencies as you know, due to "geographical distribution" are representitives of different blocs, especially among the p5, so that in this or that program, you find this or that representative in fact of a state can make or break the program. You can't hire people on merit because of the "geographical distribution" imperative which the states themselves set, and mainly the G77 lashes out about constantly, i.e. in crippling the special procedures of the Human Rights Council.

From the Western perspective, a good deal of the problems now are blamed on the G77, in getting resolutions passed that have anything to do with humanitarian action or human rights or effective peace-keeping. You might well ask yourself whether the G77 is the group that really is suffering from paralysis and sclerosis and irrelevance. It's true that some of the countries in it don't share all of the goals of the "like-minded" who can dominate -- and destroy -- various efforts. Take something like "responsibility to protect," or the formation of the Human Rights Council, which can be scuppered by Cuba and other countries that follow a kind of old Soviet line, seeing each action in the UN not as an opportunity to collaborate on solving a world problem through universal values and the UN Charter, but an opportunity to thwart, bedevil, harass, obstruct the West or the North.

The G77 can rightly point to various moral equivalency invocations like "the Iraq war" to make just about any action the Western powers conceive as illegitimate.

Recently, at a conference on the OSCE at the Finnish Embassy in Washington, the Greek ambassador pointed out that the problems of OSCE could not be fixed, nor the body made more relevant, until the p5 came to some better agreement about how to cooperate. And yet the s10 and other powers you've noted like Germany, Japan, Brazil, Nigeria, think the p5 will never do this, and simply demand expansion as a solution to the p5 split.

At OSCE you can see that even without China, you have the West-East split with particularly the US-Russian standoff, and that will not be so easily fixed, when even on situations that ostensibly these great powers from one civilization should agree on, like Zimbabwe or Iran,you find Russia deliberately putting a stick in the eye of the West on these issues.

We're at a stark point where some of the crises that have come up, say the war in Georgia, show the SC to be largely irrelevant. It cannot use its existing mechanisms, such as an SC debate (which was requested by Georgia on July 21, before the war broke out) to get an effective result. Issues like Kosovo and Georgia bounce back and forth between New York and Brussels, between the SC and then back over to the EU or even OSCE, which, as weak and sprawling as it is, is able to effect more action at times than the SC. This is not for lack of early warning. Walter Kalin, as an UN special rapporteur, sounded the alarm on the Georgian and South Ossetian issues back in 2006, for example.

Probably the tackling of the various crises Carne Ross outlines will have to do with simultaneous actions, both improvement of bilaterals between the US and Russia and the US, EU, and Russia; engagement with China; more involvement of the s10; speeding up talks on the enlargement; strengthening regional arrangements like the AU and OSCE and working out the UN's relationship to them.

In the end, we keep coming back to the UN and the SC, as bad as it is, because, like democracy, it's the worst system except for all the others. The UN is where all the countries are, so you go there to try to work things out.

Cathy Fitzpatrick

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/un_tethered

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/ngo_accountability

gray on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

gray — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:46:42 +0000

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It is
great to see a call for greater support for the reform for the UN – the gap
between its ideals and reality is a great concern for those who want the UN to
succeed, and a delight for those who want to see it disappear.

The UN
is the world’s big experiment in global governance, our attempt to find a
rational and humane way of controlling the world – not the first experiment, but
by far the most successful to date. It has brought us from a state 60 years ago
when we were just recovering from a devastating world war and facing the
prospect of further world wars, with global powers threatening each other with
nuclear weapons, widespread poverty and oppression, and many countries under
colonial rule. Now,
nations, NGOs and corporations are cooperating on a host of security, economic
and social development and environmental programs which are transforming the
way we live, and engaging widely with the community. Despite the headlines,
human security and development have improved enormously. We are still, however,
a long way from where we want to be.

It is really important to
recognise that the UN is our creation, and it is only by putting more effort
(and perhaps wisdom) into it, can we make it better. And certainly, we cannot
be relying on Washington to solve our problems, we all need to contribute.

We also need in-depth
understanding of what is happening to appreciate the nature of the movement,
and where pressure can best be applied (see www.securitycouncilreport.org)

Gray Southon

precycled on "United Nations in trouble: time for another San Francisco "

precycled — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:36:33 +0000

Great article. The UN's ineffectiveness may not be entirely self-inflicted. Please see my review of the UN' including its first effort at sustainable development, in 1972, which was heavily lobbied by big business and consequently produced a declaration which neatly transferred responsibility from the market (whose "essential" duty of economic development should not be "hampered") to government, where it has remained ever since in paper-shuffling limbo. http://www.blindspot.org.uk/unreview.html

The UN is now belatedly issuing a 'call for evidence' to support "transformative thinking" in a 'Green Economy Initiative'. See http://www.unep.ch/etb/publications/Green%20Economy/TowardsGreenEconomyFlyer.pdf

Don't hold your breath, however. Submissions are not being acknowledged and I fear mine has already been filed away under 'too ambitious'.

james greyson www.blindspot.org.uk