Needed: A Revitalised United Nations

Joseph E. Schwartzberg, a specialist on South and South-East Asia, has been a professor in the department of geography at the University of Minnesota since 1964. He is a member of the national board of the World Federalist Association and was president of the WFA’s Minnesota chapter for six years.

On 20 January 2025 Jesse Helms, the powerful Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate, delivered an unprecedented address before the United Nations Security Council in which he explained why he often criticised the United Nations and stipulated the conditions under which the US government would settle the considerable arrears it owes the world body. In particular, he called for the United Nations to concentrate mainly on its core task of maintaining peace and warned against any attempts by the United Nations to infringe on American sovereignty. Discounting the fact that opinion polls consistently show high levels of popular support for the United Nations,¹ Helms asserted that his views also reflected those of the American people.

 

What accounts for this lamentable scenario? Why should the United Nations and the related agencies that constitute the UN system be held in so little esteem by many conservative American politicians in an age when, clearly, that system is needed as never before? In what follows I shall consider not only some misperceptions about the United Nations that provide a partial answer to this profoundly troubling question, but also the real shortcomings of the UN system—for there are many—as well as its major achievements. I shall also discuss some of the ways in which the system can be restructured and revitalised so it can strengthen its capabilities to do what the world requires of it and thereby gain the support it so vitally needs.

 

America’s limited interest in the United Nations, I would submit, stems largely from the country’s excessive preoccupation with domestic concerns: the economy, crime, race relations, the erosion of the family, and so forth. But that understandable, if misguided, parochialism and the concomitant aversion to entangling foreign involvements are only a part of the story. Because the United Nations failed to restore order in several recent peacekeeping ventures—most notably in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia—and to prevent large-scale violence in Kosovo and East Timor, the organisation is widely perceived as unequal to the principal task set forth in the preamble to its charter, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”. Regrettably, few critics of the United Nations recognise that the failure is not really that of the system, but rather of the members of the United Nations to live up to the obligations they undertook when they joined the organisation. Is it not, after all, the height of hypocrisy for members of the US Congress to castigate the United Nations for its alleged inability to keep the peace, when, at the same time, they vote to deny the organisation the very means to do the job? Presently, the United States, by far the leading debtor to the United Nations, owes the organisation well over a billion dollars in back dues, out of a total debt (including the cost of peacekeeping operations) of several billion. This places the United Nations on the very brink of insolvency. The United States also withholds other forms of support, for example, in respect to the United Nations’ population and environmental programmes, and has failed to ratify various human rights covenants that have gained virtually universal support from other democratic nations.

Unfounded Criticisms

Three misperceptions about the UN system are held by many members of Congress and by much of the American public as well. First, there is the belief that the United Nations is excessively costly and represents—or may soon represent—a significant drain on the federal budget. Second, it is supposed that the United Nations has given rise to a vast and inept bureaucracy. Finally, many see the United Nations as poised to assume the role of a global government, and thereby greatly to curtail American sovereignty. None of these views is valid. Let us examine each of them.

 

As is well known, America’s assessed share of the regular operating budget of the United Nations is 25 per cent, slightly less than its roughly 26 or 27 per cent share of the world’s total gross national product. But, notwithstanding its present modest underassessment, one of the conditions which the United States is seeking to impose on the United Nations in return for paying only a portion of its long-standing arrears is that of having its assessment level lowered to 22 per cent. (In respect to peacekeeping, the United States seeks to reduce its assessment from 31 to 25 per cent.) If paid in full, America’s annual contribution to the UN budget would come, as of 1999, to a mere $1.12 per person, a figure which would represent a smaller fraction of its GNP (less than 0.04 per cent) than is the case for most other developed nations. Another way to put the UN budget in perspective was set forth in an authoritative report by Sir Brian Urquhart and the late Erskine Childers, entitled Renewing the United Nations System. The authors observed that the citizens of the United Kingdom annually spend on alcoholic beverages three-and-a-half times as much as the estimated worldwide expenditures for the entire UN system. In 1999, the United Nations’ expenditures were approximately $10 billion, including the costs of its specialised agencies other than the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This represents a mere 0.03 per cent of the world’s GNP. The cost of peacekeeping, though still the largest single component of those expenditures, declined from a high of $3.5 billion in 1994 to a total of less than $1 billion in 1998—less than the cost of New York City’s police department. By contrast, the US defence budget for 1999 was $271 billion, while the combined military budget of the world as a whole was almost three times as great.

 

As for the United Nations’ being a vast and inept bureaucracy, one should note that currently the number of employees in the entire system—including the specialised agencies, the World Bank, the IMF and UN offices in well over a hundred countries—is only about 64,700. Many American states and more than a few American cities maintain larger payrolls than that. While it is true that some of the United Nations’ internationally recruited employees are less skilled than one would wish, and that various components of the system sometimes work at cross-purposes, the same may be said of virtually any large bureaucracy. Given the difficulties that the United Nations faces, the wonder is, rather, that the system functions as well as it does and that most of its culturally diverse staff, drawn from 160 countries, work with a degree of dedication that few other organisations, public or private, can command.

 

The third misperception about the United Nations is that it functions as a world government. Although I believe that some form of democratic, federal, limited world government will ultimately be recognised as necessary, the United Nations is still quite far from assuming such a role. While some globally minded persons do see themselves as citizens of the world, not one of them yet has such a status in any legal sense. Unlike national governments, the United Nations exercises no sovereignty, passes no internationally binding laws, cannot levy taxes on individuals or corporations, and has no standing armed forces. Therefore, it has no coercive capability in confronting violators of international law, except as regards Chapter VII military operations, which the Security Council has only twice invoked. Practically all that the United Nations does depends on the voluntary compliance of its members, a compliance that is all too often withheld, not only by authoritarian states, but often by democracies as well.

UN Achievements

Although the criticisms levelled at the United Nations by right-wing ideologues and their followers in the United States are mostly unfounded, the UN system does have serious shortcomings and could benefit greatly from substantial reform. But, before considering what needs fixing to enable a revitalised United Nations to realise the goals set forth by its founders—and to perform a host of other essential tasks that its founders could scarcely have envisaged in 1945—it would be in order to recapitulate some of the system’s many remarkable successes.

 

First, let us consider issues of war and peace. Obviously, the United Nations has not freed the world from the scourge of war. But it has prevented a great many wars from getting out of control: the Indo-Pakistan war of 1947–8, the war following Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and numerous others. Moreover, timely action by the Security Council has prevented the outbreak of many other threatened wars, for example, the one that might have occurred between Indonesia and the Netherlands when Indonesia was pressing its claim to West New Guinea in the early 1960s. The very fact that the United Nations provides a universal forum wherein even the weakest of nations may obtain a hearing often exerts a significant effect in defusing conditions that might otherwise lead to international strife.

 

A more unqualified success has been the United Nations’ remarkably effective oversight of the process of decolonisation involving nearly half the world’s people inhabiting virtually the whole of Africa, much of Asia and the Pacific, and many countries in and near the Caribbean Basin. Of the 188 countries now within the United Nations fully one hundred were colonial dependencies in 1945. (Another fourteen were, in effect, dependencies, though officially non‑Russian republics within the Soviet Union.) At times the decolonisation process was violent, as in the Congo, where the United Nations was called on to restore order after the Belgian withdrawal in 1960; but more often it was orderly.

 

Horrendous as war is, it has not been—contrary to common belief—the number one cause of human mortality over the centuries. Famine and several communicable diseases have exacted far heavier tolls. In many parts of the world, the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation, one of many specialised agencies affiliated with the United Nations, has done much to reduce the incidence and severity of famine and to point the way to agricultural self-sufficiency.

 

But far more striking successes have been registered concerning human health. For example, the World Health Organisation, headquartered in Geneva, co-ordinated a global effort to eradicate smallpox. The world’s last case of smallpox was recorded in Ethiopia in 1977. And yet, not long before then, I visited a village in India where roughly one thousand people out of a total population of three thousand died of smallpox only weeks before my arrival. The estimated cost of ridding the world of smallpox was under half a billion dollars, less than a fourth of the $2.2 billion that the United States paid for each of its B-2 Stealth Bombers. An earlier campaign to wipe out malaria worldwide was a near success. Had the international will to finish the job been just a bit greater, it might have succeeded before mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT, the key agent in reducing malarial morbidity. Currently, a major thrust of Unicef is to inoculate all children in developing countries against five major diseases: diphtheria, measles, polio, tetanus and typhoid. While that programme still has some way to go, it appears that polio is about to join smallpox as a wholly eradicated disease. And it is noteworthy that there are already many low-income countries in which rates of inoculation are higher than those of most inner-city neighbourhoods in the United States.

 

Humanitarian interventions under UN auspices in response to natural and human-generated catastrophes assume many forms. Most important, perhaps, is the role of the UN high commissioner for refugees in seeing to the needs of some twenty-five million people driven by violence or the threat of genocide from their countries of origin, not to mention another thirty million or so internally displaced persons.

 

Economic and social development is an important concern of numerous agencies within the UN system. The Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc), whose fifty-four (originally eighteen) member nations are periodically elected by the General Assembly, is charged with co-ordinating the work of the United Nations proper, its constellation of affiliated agencies and its five Regional Economic Commissions. While the council’s functioning to date has been less than stellar, the work of many of the specialised agencies, such as the WHO and FAO, has contributed enormously to improving the world. Several of the specialised agencies, despite working with small staffs and very modest budgets, are nevertheless responsible for regulating worldwide activities that affect the daily lives of billions of people.

 

Supplementing the work of Ecosoc is the UN Development Programme, overseen by the UN Secretariat. With field offices in well over one hundred countries, the UNDP provides the world’s largest programme of multilateral technical assistance. Depending mainly on voluntary contributions, it has initiated many thousands of projects in virtually all parts of the developing world: resource surveys, assessments of development assets, promotion of specific industries and exports, development and transfer of culturally appropriate technology, economic and social planning, promotion of technical co-operation, skills training and numerous others.

The World Bank and the IMF

Of particular importance are the so-called Bretton Woods institutions, that is, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, more commonly known as the World Bank, now the world’s principal source of development loans, and the IMF, whose main task is to help stabilise world currencies and regulate exchanges among them. Their ties to the United Nations are, regrettably, more tenuous than those of other specialised agencies directly linked to Ecosoc, and they not infrequently appear to be pursuing different agendas or even to be working at cross-purposes from those of other parts of the UN system. This stems in large part from the fact that the decision-making systems vary from one agency to another. Whereas most specialised agencies vote, like the General Assembly, on the one nation, one vote principle, the more powerful World Bank and IMF follow the shareholder principle whereby voting strength is in proportion to the equity invested by each member nation in the organisation. This gives a decided advantage to the world’s more developed nations and, in particular, to the United States. Not surprisingly, decisions taken by the bank and the IMF often appear to the world’s less developed nations to reflect more the economic philosophy of the rich than the vital needs of the poor. Further, the conditions demanding economic policy reforms that are set in return for the extension of loans are perceived as excessively harsh, whatever their objective merits may be. Moreover, many of the development projects funded by the bank have proved to be ecologically harmful. Nevertheless, there have been signs recently that the bank has taken the views of its critics to heart and that it has moderated its policies to make them more environmentally and culturally sensitive and to pay greater heed to the importance of developing “human capital”.

 

In 1992 the UN Conference on the Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro. That landmark summit meeting—the largest international gathering in the history of our planet—made clear the numerous connections between environmental and developmental concerns. Participants adopted two important environmental treaties, as well as the non-binding “Agenda 21” setting forth guidelines for the new century. They also called for a UN Commission on Sustainable Development, which the General Assembly subsequently created. Although the official accomplishments of the Rio conference were substantially less than they might have been—mainly because of the obstructionist stance adopted by the then US president, George Bush—the catalytic effect of the gathering in energising and linking hundreds of concerned non-governmental organisations from all over the world was truly remarkable.

 

The Rio conference was but one among many UN-sponsored international gatherings at which representatives from civil society, working primarily through NGOs, have played an increasingly prominent role. The Social Summit in Copenhagen and the Conference on Population in Cairo (both held in 1994), the 1995 Conference on Women in Beijing, and numerous others, have created vital and influential new networks that, thanks to the powerful assistance of the Internet, are now reshaping the agenda for progressive change at the global, national and local levels. Without the supportive role of the UN system, this synergism would not have developed. But, thanks largely to the United Nations, we should witness the continuing development of vast and ever more effective citizens’ groups working to enhance human dignity, global justice and responsible planetary management.

 

We may conclude this review of UN accomplishments with some comments on human rights. Among the most noteworthy achievements of the General Assembly was the promulgation, with no dissenting votes, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. At the time, most nations paid little more than lip-service, if that, to the lofty principles which that declaration enunciated. Nevertheless, the declaration is now regarded as part of the body of customary international law. Since its adoption, a number of more explicit covenants have been adopted by the General Assembly and ratified by sufficient numbers of nations to be recognised also as constituting part of customary international law. The two most important such covenants, both adopted in 1966 and entering into force in 1976, are those relating to civil and political rights, which the United States has ratified, and to economic, social and cultural rights, which the United States has yet to ratify.

 

Other important human rights covenants, conventions and declarations relate to the self-determination of nations (a topic of rapidly growing importance), racial discrimination, apartheid, religious intolerance, genocide, slavery, torture, war crimes, forced labour, refugees, stateless persons, discrimination against women, the rights of the child, and so forth. Some of these have become international law; others still await the requisite number of ratifications. Even though many of these human rights enactments have been poorly observed, the fact that the United Nations has created so large a body of relevant international law is, in my view, of great historical importance. And, drawing on the precedent set at Nuremberg after the Second World War, the United Nations has finally seen fit to institute special tribunals to deal with genocide, war crimes and other “crimes against humanity” in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Even more promising is the drafting in Rome in 1998 of a treaty to establish a standing International Criminal Court to try individuals (not nations) indicted for perpetrating such offences.

Essential Reforms

Politically, economically, ecologically and spiritually, our highly interdependent world is ailing. Serious and mutually reinforcing threats to our future welfare assume numerous forms. Much of what we must do to confront those threats can best be accomplished at the local or national level. But many problems—for example, global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, global resource depletion, rampant population growth, pollution, proliferating ethnic strife, genocide, the obscene North–South economic gap, Third World debt, persistent militarism, the narcotics trade and other issues—must largely be addressed at the global level. The UN system offers the only obvious set of institutional mechanisms for effecting the necessary responses. However, as presently constituted, that system suffers from serious structural deficiencies and cannot do all that it must. Although numerous reforms are needed, I shall focus in what follows only on those I deem most essential.

 

To begin with, the voting system in both the 188-member General Assembly and the 15-member Security Council is neither realistic nor democratic. Given the one nation, one vote decision-making system in the General Assembly (and in Ecosoc and most of the specialised agencies), its smallest member, Nauru (admitted to the United Nations in 1999), with a population of only 10,500, has the same vote as China, with a population of nearly 1.3 billion—a discrepancy of roughly 120,000 to 1. Since a two-thirds vote is required to pass a resolution on a substantive matter, it is theoretically possible for the sixty-three least populous member nations, with a combined population of only around 1.7 per cent of the world’s total, to frustrate the will of the remaining 98.3 per cent. Much the same could be said of a somewhat different group of small and/or impoverished states collectively accounting for less than 0.2 per cent of the total UN budget! (Presently, thirty-two states each contribute a stipulated minimum of 0.001 per cent of the total budget.) Is it any wonder, then, that decisions taken within the General Assembly are only recommendatory, rather than binding? No great, or even medium-sized, power will willingly consent to sacrifice even a small portion of its precious sovereignty to a would-be legislative body in which the allocation of power bears so little resemblance to the distribution of economic and demographic strength in the real world (i.e., the world outside the United Nations itself).

 

Equally problematic is the veto power exercised by each of the five permanent members of the Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Thus, either France or the United Kingdom, each with not quite 1.0 per cent of the world’s people, could, in principle, block the wishes of the representatives of the remaining 99 per cent. What could be less democratic? It is hardly surprising, then, that most of the world’s nations are leery of proposals to assign permanent seats in the Security Council to two additional wealthy members, namely Japan and Germany. Although a strong case can be made for expanding the Security Council, all the formulae for doing so that have been officially presented so far are, in my view, self-serving and seriously flawed.

A Formula for Change

Given the problems just noted, I would argue for several fundamental structural reforms. First, as many critics of the United Nations have suggested, there must be an objective and flexible system of weighted voting in the General Assembly. Such a system should combine three valid bases for representation: (a) share of the world’s total population (the democratic principle); (b) share of the total contribution to the UN budget (the shareholder principle, in effect, the ability to do good); and (c) share of the total membership (the principle of the sovereign equality of nations, which undergirds the rule of one nation, one vote). At the outset, none of these should take logical precedence over the others. Each nation’s vote would then be determined by what might be described as its “Entitlement Quotient” (EQ), based on the following formula:

 

EQ = (%P + %C + %M)/3

 

in which %P = population as a percentage of the world’s total, %C = contributions to the UN budget as a percentage of the total, and %M = membership as a percentage of the total number of nations in the General Assembly (presently 188, which would give each nation a score of 1/188 or 0.53 per cent). To take the case of the United States, the EQ would be

 

(4.71% + 25.00% + 0.53%)/3

 

or 30.24% / 3, which comes to 10.08 per cent. At the opposite extreme would be a number of microstates, such as Nauru, whose EQ would be something like

 

(<0.001% + 0.001% + 0.53%)/3

 

or 0.532% / 3, which comes to not quite 0.18 per cent. The ratio between the highest and lowest EQ, then, would be 56:1.

 

Based on calculations using 1995 data, the EQs (in per cent) for the top ten nations would be as follows: United States 10.1, China 7.7, India 5.8, Japan 4.6, Germany 3.9, France 2.7, United Kingdom 2.2, Italy 1.8, Brazil 1.6 and Indonesia 1.4. Five other nations would each exceed 1.0 per cent and a total of thirty-three would be net gainers (each with an EQ of at least 0.54 per cent). Although these thirty-three nations make up only a small proportion of the United Nations’ membership, they would have 79.6 per cent of the world’s total population and contribute 88.4 per cent of the total UN budget. Their combined EQ would total 69.1 per cent. While this is less, one might argue, than they merit, it is far better than the 17.6 per cent of the General Assembly votes that they presently control.

 

The EQ system is also applicable, with appropriate modifications, to the Security Council. Rather than having any member designated as “permanent” (a word that should be eschewed in any charter), one might specify that any single nation with an EQ exceeding a specified threshold, say 4.0 per cent, or any voluntarily formed bloc of nations whose combined EQ exceeded the stipulated threshold, would automatically be entitled to a Security Council seat. With a threshold set at 4.0 per cent, the nations qualifying automatically would be, in order, the United States, China, India and Japan. But Germany and Austria combined would also be eligible, as would France with the Benelux countries, the United Kingdom with the Scandinavian countries, and so forth. If the number of seats in the council were increased to eighteen (a workable, though admittedly arbitrary figure), one could envisage the formation of thirteen regional blocs, based on common interests, in addition to the four automatic qualifiers. This would leave one seat for a nation (e.g., Canada) from among the group of nations which, for one reason or another, would not fit into any of the likely regional blocs.²

 

An important feature of the proposed use of EQs in determining weighted voting in the General Assembly and the allocation of seats in the Security Council is that it would result in a rough parity of voting strength between the world’s more industrialised economies (including the European republics within the Commonwealth of Independent States) and those of the rest of the world (including China). This would mean, given the two-thirds majority required for decisions on substantive matters, that neither group of nations could command an automatic majority (as the Third World now does in the General Assembly) in the furtherance of its own agenda. Rather, creative compromises would be required, recognising the interests and needs of diverse parties, as is typically the case in democratic governance.

 

While it will be necessary, in my view, to give the General Assembly the power to make legally binding decisions, using some sort of realistic weighted voting system, it is equally necessary to ensure that such power be carefully circumscribed so as to preclude tyranny. As a general principle, the United Nations should be empowered to take action only on matters that cannot be effectively dealt with by individual nations acting on their own. In all other matters, the sovereignty of the member nations should be guaranteed. This would simply be a long overdue application, at the global level, of the constitutional principle of territorial division of powers that characterises all successful democratic federations.

Overcoming Opposition

Proposals for as radical a set of structural changes in the United Nations as those advocated in the preceding paragraphs would, obviously, be greeted initially with considerable scepticism. Selling them to the concerned parties will not be easy. But, considered as a package, the changes offer some trade-offs that might be seen by enough nations as sufficiently desirable to win the requisite support. Considering the Security Council alone, for example, there is no compelling reason why either the United Kingdom or France should give up its seat as a permanent member or surrender the veto power which that status confers. However, when one considers the suggested changes in the General Assembly, whereby the United Kingdom and France would increase their share of the total vote by roughly four and five times respectively and whereby numerous like-minded democracies would also be among the thirty-three nations gaining in power, the sense of loss would be substantially mitigated. Moreover, if in a given period France, for example, were to be represented on the Security Council by a Belgian or a Dutchman and/or the United Kingdom by a Swede or a Dane, that would probably not be seen as a serious blow to their national interest. Conceivably, an agreement to phase out the veto over a period of fifteen years or so, in combination with the EQ voting system, would garner the necessary global consensus.

 

Apart from the predictable reluctance to give up permanent Security Council membership and the attendant veto, one might expect initial opposition to the new system from the 155 nations whose individual voting power would be reduced from the present 0.53 per cent of the total to as little, in the extreme case, as 0.18 per cent. But, even with the new system, that group of objectively weak nations would be substantially over-represented in that they would have a combined EQ of 38.1 per cent, despite collectively accounting for only 20.4 per cent of the world’s population. And, if the 33 relatively powerful nations that would gain in power were to support the suggested change, the weak 155 could probably not hold out long against them in that they command virtually no power outside the arena of the United Nations itself. Moreover, what all nations would ultimately recognise, one hopes, is that a realistic and more democratic voting system would result in a United Nations less prone to deadlock and more capable of addressing pressing issues of global security, economic development and social justice. To mitigate the concern of those nations reluctant to embrace the new system, one might stipulate that it automatically be subject to review and possible modification after an initial trial period of about twenty-five years.

 

In passing, one may note several suggestions for special chambers to supplement the General Assembly. These might include a parliamentary assembly, with members elected by the parliaments of the world (along lines initially followed within the European Community); a popularly elected people’s assembly; and an assembly representing civil society, with representatives chosen by NGOs. In all cases, the suggested new assemblies would initially exercise no more than a recommendatory and consultative role and would meet only for a relatively short period, say in September and October, to coincide with the start of the term of the General Assembly. The size, nature and potential efficacy of such assemblies, as well as the means of choosing them, will require much additional thought.

 

To establish a credible UN system, certain decisions of the Security Council and the General Assembly must be both binding and enforceable. This implies the creation of a standing UN force, which, in my view, should be an elite, globally recruited, all-volunteer body of men and women, especially trained in peacekeeping, peace enforcement and a variety of related tasks. When not actually engaged in overtly military operations, the force could be employed in a variety of constructive public works and training projects in the countries where its units would be garrisoned. Additionally, it would be available at all times for providing humanitarian relief in the event of earthquakes, floods, cyclones, or other natural disasters. Detailed plans for establishing the suggested UN force already exist.³

 

While the creation of the force would not be cheap, its anticipated costs would probably come to no more than a very small fraction of the world’s total annual military expenditures, which in 1998 (the latest year for which data are available) were $785 billion. And, to the extent that reliance on a UN force would enable individual nations to reduce their individual military expenditures, the revenue that would be saved could make unprecedented funding available for the promotion of vitally needed educational, health and other human services. Moreover, the contributions that the force would make to the economies of the host countries in which it would be stationed, and the development of human capital that would result from the training of the volunteers, would result in additional major economic benefits.

 

Up to now, when the Security Council has mandated economic sanctions or peacekeeping or peace enforcement measures, the targets of those measures have been member states of the United Nations. In principle this is wrong in that those who suffer most from such sanctions are innocent civilians who are then made to pay a heavy price for the transgressions of their typically autocratic leaders. Rather than trying to punish whole nations, efforts must henceforth be made to apprehend and bring to trial individuals who break the law. This implies the establishment of an International Criminal Court and the codification of international criminal law. After long debate, the draft statute for an ICC was agreed to in Rome in July 1998 by a substantial majority of the world’s nations (including every major democracy other than the United States). Ratification of the ICC Treaty by sixty nations will suffice to bring about its creation—with or without the concurrence of the United States—a process that may take as much as a decade to complete.

 

Important as the ICC will be, it is also vitally necessary to strengthen the already existing, but woefully under-utilised, International Court of Justice in The Hague. We must somehow ensure that all UN member nations agree to accept the court’s jurisdiction in cases of alleged breaches of international law that do not involve individual malfeasance and that they then abide by the court’s verdicts. Achieving this prerequisite for ensuring that the force of law ultimately replaces the law of force in world affairs will almost surely prove even more difficult than instituting the ICC; but the necessity of the task allows for no other long-term alternative.

Strengthening UN Agencies

Since the conclusion of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the vast majority of armed conflicts around the world have been internal and ethnically based. Several dozen such struggles are currently raging, and it seems likely that the number will increase, rather than diminish, in the foreseeable future. To deal with the anticipated wave of demands for national self-determination by various ethnic groups in the century ahead, the now moribund UN Trusteeship Council should be converted into a human rights council with greater competence than the existing UN Commission on Human Rights. To diminish the propensity of certain ethnic groups to resort to violence in pursuing their goals, guidelines should be formulated for the preparation of dossiers documenting alleged human rights abuses, for investigating the validity of the allegations and for recommending corrective action. Without recourse to legal remedies, it is only natural for egregiously oppressed peoples to resort to arms in an attempt to throw off the yoke of their oppressors, even at the risk—as is so often the case—of protracted brutal repression by the parent state.

 

In addition to the proposed human rights council there is a need to oversee the management of the oceans, Antarctica, outer space and other global commons. Though this need may not yet appear pressing, there can be no denying the increasing environmental stress to which the planetary ecosystem is being subjected by our ever more industrialised, chemically dependent, energy-guzzling and often over-consuming society. Processes affecting the world’s atmosphere, oceans and groundwater respect no international boundaries. Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere, whether by deforestation in Brazil or vehicle traffic in Britain, similarly contributes to the process of global warming. Radioactive wastes emitted from nuclear reactors at Chernobyl in the Ukraine required the destruction of herds of reindeer in Swedish Lapland, more than a thousand kilometres away. Mechanisms for redressing ecological grievances transcending international boundaries are yet to be put in place.

 

We have already noted that Ecosoc has not been notably successful in co-ordinating the agendas of the highly diverse specialised agencies. Some informed critics have argued that Ecosoc should be scrapped altogether and have suggested that the presently weak Commission on Sustainable Development, established in the aftermath of the 1992 Rio summit, should be expanded and given a greater role in its stead. But, whatever the mechanisms adopted, the functions and competence of the UN system regarding environmental and developmental issues will have to be significantly increased.

 

To pay for its future expanded role, the United Nations will require a reliable and substantially augmented financial base. Taxes on international trade, postal deliveries, air travel and arms shipments are among the means suggested to raise the needed revenues. A proposal put forward by the American Nobel economics laureate James Tobin is to impose a very low tax on speculative foreign currency transactions, which add nothing to the world’s production of goods and services and often contribute to the financial instability of relatively weak economies. Such transactions currently run to approximately $1.5 trillion a day and taxing them at even an exceedingly modest rate could yield billions of dollars of revenue annually.

 

One or more such taxes to help finance the United Nations’ specialised agencies and, perhaps, the fixed costs of maintaining the proposed UN standing peace force, would be desirable. But the core expenses of the United Nations’ principal organs should continue to be provided from national assessments. However, in place of the present complicated system for determining the percentage share of the budget to be met by each member nation, I would argue for a flat rate of assessment set as a stipulated percentage of each nation’s GNP. Given the world’s current total GNP, roughly $31 trillion, a rate as low as 0.04 per cent (1/25 of 1.0 per cent) would yield more than $12 billion, which is almost five times the United Nations’ 1998–9 budget. Although some might argue that fairness calls for a progressive system of taxation, the assessment rate suggested is so low that even the poorest of nations could afford it. (For example, at 0.04 per cent, the assessed annual contribution from São Tomé and Príncipe would come to a mere $18,000.) In any event, the redistributive effects of many UN activities, especially in the realm of development, would mitigate whatever slight burden the world’s poorer nations might experience from paying their UN dues.

 

The main argument for a flat assessment rate is that it would preclude complaints from anti-UN politicians in well-to-do states that their countries were bearing an unfair burden in funding the United Nations. Many ill-informed Americans agree with Senator Jesse Helms’s assertion that the US assessment of 25 per cent of the total UN budget is unfair, not realising that the US share of the world’s total GNP is about 26 per cent. In fact, the United States stands alone among wealthy nations in being assessed at a rate less than its proportional share of the world’s total income. If Americans knew that their country’s assessment rate was neither more nor less than that of any other country, even the world’s poorest, all cause for complaint would disappear. Further, if voting in the General Assembly and seating in the Security Council were by EQ, as recommended earlier in this essay, a nation’s failure to pay its assessed UN dues would result in an automatic reduction in its voting power and could jeopardise its right to a Security Council seat. Thus, the United Nations’ present problem of slow or non-payment of dues by the United States, its principal debtor, and by other nations as well, would surely disappear.

Obstacles to Reform

None of the recommendations set forth in this essay will be easy to implement. However, the penalties for ignoring the issues to which they relate will, sooner or later, far exceed the costs of constructive change. While the old adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is especially applicable in matters of peacekeeping (as has been gruesomely proved by experience in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor), it is also applicable, if not yet so obvious, to protecting the environment and to many other domains as well.

 

Perhaps the most promising route to reform of the UN system would be to make use of a provision wisely inserted into the UN Charter by the original drafters of that document. They correctly anticipated that significant changes would eventually be needed, but they could not perceive that the Cold War would so long frustrate all attempts at substantially changing the power relationships laid down by the “big five” permanent members of the Security Council. Article 109, paragraph 1 of the charter states:

 

A General Conference of the members of the United Nations for the purpose of reviewing the present charter may be held at a date and place to be fixed by a two-thirds vote of the members of the General Assembly and by a vote of any nine [emphasis added, originally “any seven”] members of the Security Council. Each member of the United Nations shall have one vote in the conference.

 

Now that the Cold War is over, action on this article, which is not subject to the veto, is long overdue. However, major hurdles would remain in that paragraph 2 specifies:

 

Any alteration of the present charter recommended by a two-thirds vote of the conference shall take effect when ratified in accordance with their respective constitutional processes by two-thirds of the members of the United Nations including all the permanent members of the Security Council.

 

Hence, the prospect of the veto must again be confronted, and however sensible the proposals set forth in this essay might appear to most thinking people, it does not follow that any of them will be adopted without overcoming substantial political resistance. This would be true, of course, of reform efforts without, as well as with, resort to a general charter review conference.

 

There are three main sticking points in the way of reform. First, there is insufficient recognition of the gravity of a number of serious and growing threats to the wellbeing of our planet. Second, it will be necessary to overcome a pervasive and unhealthy obsession with the protection of unbridled national sovereignty, the idea that nobody is going to tell us—be we Americans, Frenchmen, Chinese, or citizens of almost any other country—how we ought to behave within our own national borders or how we may deploy our national economic and military power. Finally, there is still a demonstrable lack of the requisite political will. After all, when confronted by a set of short-term domestic concerns that bear on the next election, politicians typically avoid focusing on issues perceived to have mainly long-term and international consequences.

 

What the world now desperately needs, therefore, is enlightened leaders with creative vision and the courage to face squarely, rather than gloss over, tough yet inescapable problems. But, equally, we need informed and committed citizens willing to organise across national lines and to work hard to promote a broadly based campaign for better global governance. Without a substantial number of such committed citizens, few leaders will be able to marshal the resolve to address the issues that the world must sooner or later confront if humankind is to avoid catastrophe. All concerned and thinking members of the human family, then, must join in the effort. Working together, committed citizens can make a difference.

Endnotes

1. See Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay, and Phillip Warf, “The Myth of American Rejectionism”, in this issue of Global Dialogue. Ed.

 

2. A map showing a hypothetical distribution of national and regional seats in a Security Council constituted according to the system outlined here appears in Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “Towards a More Representative and Effective Security Council”, Political Geography 13, no. 6 (November 1994), pp. 483–91.

 

3. See, for example, Joseph E. Schwartzberg, “A New Perspective on Peacekeeping: Lessons from Bosnia and Elsewhere”, Global Governance 3, no. 1 (1997), pp. 1–15. [See also Georgios Kostakos, “A Rapid Reaction Capability for the United Nations?”, in this issue of Global Dialogue. Ed.]