Twenty years ago the historian and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien argued that a key aspect of global security, one that was nearly always overlooked, was the United Nations’s unrelenting search for solutions to insoluble crises. Its willingness to intervene in potentially disastrous situations – like the 1956 Soviet occupation of Hungary ‒ let the superpowers play their Cold War chess games in relative safety. For while both sides could rail against the UN’s inevitable failure to resolve a crisis, its presence averted direct military confrontation, let bureaucrats tone down their leaders’ rhetoric and minimize belligerent postures, and find ways out of foreign entanglements.
Even now the UN continues to play this role. Its failures, however agonising, are still preferable to inaction, or, as with Syria, a head-to-head clash between the main sponsors of the violence. The scope of the UN’s peacekeeping role has also expanded considerably since O’Brien highlighted its useful failures. There are now more than 125,000 UN personnel (military and civilian) deployed in 16 peacekeeping missions in Africa, the Middle East, and Haiti. Although these are often treated as political theatre, gestures of goodwill rather than hard commitments, more than 1,600 lives have been lost in the current missions, and several of them face long and uncertain futures.
This year will likely reshape the UN in several important ways, affecting not just its role in global hot spots, but the institution’s entire outlook and ambitions. A key change will be the replacement of the current self-effacing Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, with a more charismatic leader, perhaps even with the first female to hold that position. The new leader will be chosen with unprecedented transparency thanks to pressure from a wide range of governments and civil society groups who have called for the old, behind-the-scenes lobbying to be replaced by publicly accessible résumés and campaigning.
Mr Ban’s successor will have the Paris climate change agreement as an example of what can be done if the UN can sustain a more assertive internationalism. There has never been such a collaborative spirit between the large number of relatively small and underdeveloped countries, precisely the ones who will be most affected by issues like global warming. Nor has there ever been such a willingness to reconsider the outmoded structure and deliberations of certain aspects of the organization, specifically the Security Council, and the anachronistic veto wielded by its permanent members.
Successful reform of such a complex institution will of course require considerable political skill, not to mention luck, especially since several of the UN’s largest funders are among its loudest critics. Former New York Times correspondent Barbara Crosette observes, for instance, that: “If a Republican presidential candidate wins in 2016, the first ax to fall would surely be on the UN Population Fund, whose work in women’s reproductive health led to the Bush administration’s withholding the annual American contributions to the fund.” The next Secretary General will have to work out how to prevent these cherry picking attitudes while retaining US support for humanitarian and relief work, its essential role in developing societies, and its defence of racial and sexual minorities.
One key to short-term success in these areas will be the implementation of a new development agenda drafted by member states and civil society, unlike the more top-down Millennium Development Goals which it replaces. The 15-year policy informed by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals has a similar emphasis on ending poverty and hunger and lessening social inequality, but it can be implemented far more pragmatically. Governments will be able to focus on specific goals and devise appropriate ways of measuring their success. During the next few months it is essential that as many governments as possible set rigorous standards for how these SDGs and their 169 targets are measured, but there has been little action on this front so far.
These changes could turn the UN into something that actively improves the world rather than simply supervising, and collecting the blame for, its most intractable problems, but their success will depend largely on how energetically small countries, like ours, involve themselves in the transformation.
