An experiment UNdone: Prashant Jha writes on what ails the United Nations
There are no two ways about it: the UN, now 80 years old, has failed at its core mission of preserving the peace.What role can it play? Why do we still need it?
The United Nations has failed.
Think of how frequently you have encountered that cliche. Like most cliches, it contains more than an element of truth.
If one views the UN’s core mandate as maintaining international peace and security, it has failed; look around and the number of hot inter-state and intra-state conflicts offer ample proof of this. If one views the UN’s core mandate as addressing poverty and deprivation, it has failed; look around and the extent of distress, particularly in the Global South, offers proof of this. If one views the UN’s core mandate as giving an equal voice to all nations, it has failed; look around and the composition of the Security Council and the permanent inequality embedded in its structure of a permanent five offers ample proof of this.
But there are larger truths that the cliche hides.
It isn’t so much the UN that has failed, as the states that constitute it. That collective failure is embedded in the very nature of an international system based on sovereign statehood in principle, where major powers play a disproportionate role in practice. Eighty years ago, these two features of the system allowed for the formation of the United Nations, but also imposed limitations on it.
A global compromise
The fundamental conceptual misunderstanding about the UN stems from seeing it as somehow distinct from the sovereign states that constitute it.
The international system is anarchic by nature; there is no overarching authority. The UN is not a supra-national executive authority, a world government of sorts, to which national political authorities have ceded authority. This means its officials have neither any special authority over national leaders and officials nor can they issue binding orders.
The UN is not a supra-national legislative body, a global legislature of sorts, to which national legislatures have ceded law-making powers. This means its resolutions and deliberations don’t carry any imprint of authority, except as part of a gradual process of norm-setting.
The UN is also not a supra-national judicial authority to which sovereign states have ceded ultimate judicial decision-making authority; even in cases where international tribunals or international legal conventions play a role, it is often contingent on the voluntary participation of the concerned states.
The UN therefore has very limited power. It is only these limits on its power, in fact, that made its formation possible. The experiment required the buy-in of major powers, and major powers signed on because they wouldn’t really have to cede decision-making rights. For the large swathes of the world emerging out of colonialism, meanwhile, sovereignty was sacred, and the idea of ceding authority to largely white bureaucrats in Western capitals would not have appealed either. The compromises that enabled the formation of the UN have allowed it to last this long, but have also come to define, and limit, it.
Unequal, inefficient
Hadn’t we tried this before and found it wouldn’t work?
After World War 1, the US, under Woodrow Wilson, championed the idea of a global mediation organisation. The US Congress didn’t ratify American participation. The League of Nations was formed in 1920, but the world’s dominant power stayed out of it, rendering it ineffective from inception.
World War 2 saw the US, UK and Russia on the same side. This unique moment in history allowed for a compact among them to create a global organisation in which the big three — as well as France and China — would wield more power than all the others, through the mechanism of a permanent Security Council membership, and veto on all other membership bids.
This institutionalised a sort of caste system within the global body that persists, and is a blot on UN’s claims of treating all states alike.
Through much of the Cold War, as a result of this structure, the US-Russia battle rendered the Security Council ineffective. In the 1990s, as the Cold War ended and the US emerged as the world’s only superpower still standing, it used the UN to cover up its international interventions.
With geopolitical competition returning in full swing in recent decades, both on the US-Russia and US-China axes, cooperative international action has been more elusive than ever.
This has yielded, essentially, the worst of both worlds. UN embraced inequality in exchange for a hoped-for efficiency. It made inequality permanent, failed to change with the times to reflect new values and realities. As a result, it failed on the efficiency front too.
Given that it was never accorded the power or resources to “keep global peace” or “eradicate poverty”, perhaps it is fairer to judge its success on more limited yardsticks.
A different metric
The United Nations is not just the theatre that plays out during high-voltage Security Council sessions or the annual General Assembly in September. The true value of this body lies, perhaps, in the everyday, grassroots apparatus at work around the world.
From funding health programmes and providing vaccines to the world’s poorest communities to deploying peacekeepers in arenas of uneasy coexistence between warring parties, from monitoring global financial stability and offering development assistance to setting international civil aviation norms, from warning the world of the climate crisis and being the home of an admittedly weak but only international framework for climate negotiations (the UNFCCC) to assisting refugees, from speaking the now fashionably-derided but hard-fought and valuable language of human rights to delivering food to devastated zones, from pushing the world to meet sustainable development goals to assisting post-conflict societies with democracy and state-building, the UN system does more than it is credited for.
To be sure, its bureaucracy has its own agendas, prejudices and vested institutional interests. Its agencies often fail, and fail spectacularly, at the targets they set for themselves. The system is rife with waste. And top UN jobs are still controlled by the historically dominant states.
In smaller developing countries, the UN developmental apparatus has been known to create a parasitical professional class and stifle local economies. UN diplomats have often been too meek in the face of the powerful.
Despite all this, it remains an idea worth defending, amid intensifying wars and conflicts, and transnational challenges arising from the climate crisis, the pandemic, and technological disruption. The most powerful state in the international system may have launched a war against multilateralism, but the rest of the world, especially those on the margins, continue to need multilateral bodies and international mechanisms that allow them to express a voice and cast a vote.
Formed amid the rubble of a war that ended exactly eight decades ago, how the UN navigates a new era of war and uncertainty will determine how history judges it at 100.
(Prashant Jha is a political analyst)
