It’s ironic that at the same time congressional hearings about the suitability of John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN, the topic of UN reform is all the rage. Frankly, I can’t think of a single reason to reform the UN, but I can think of many reasons to re-form the UN. I recently sat in on a lecture given by Ferry de Kerckhove, Director-General, International Organizations Bureau, Foreign affairs Canada, which for me was an education in the minutiae of futility.
Mister de Kerckhove’s topic was entitled "The U.N.: Mission Impossible?" and it covered the current jockeying by various power blocs in an effort to bring about meaningful reform. among the proposals being floated is to increase the size of the Security Council from its current 15 members to 23 members as well as raising the number of permanent members with veto powers from its current five to 11. Having seen the UN at work these past few years, I hold little hope for any reform to be meaningful or effective for that matter.
Reforming the Security Council is probably the trickiest proposition of any schemes currently under consideration. The reasons are quite obvious, considering that with any one permanent member having veto powers, any plan proposed to the council is subject to the self-interest of any one country with permanent membership. If attaining consensus was difficult with any one of five countries able to veto a given action, imagine the difficulty with which a consensus would be reached if any one of 11 countries had that same power.
But that isn’t the worst of it. The UN is lobbying to get all member nations to pay the same percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in dues. This would mean that the wealthiest countries in the world (Japan and the United States) would be paying a lot more, despite the fact that currently they account for 19% and 22% of total UN revenue, while a country like Canada currently accounts for less than 3% of total UN revenue. If these contributions are translated into a percentage of GDP, then both Japan and the US pay less than 0.2%, while Canada’s share amounts to 0.7%, which is roughly what most other countries pay as well.
I cannot imagine that either the US or Japan would be open to this type of scheme, particularly in light of the fact that China is making great efforts to minimize Japan’s power at the UN and the European Union and the arab bloc is attempting to hamstring the U.S.
as the UN’s bureaucracy grows, the organization’s ability to get anything done declines proportionately. among the UN’s mandates is the "responsibility to protect". Or R2P in UN speak. Simply put, this means that any country engaging in genocide or any country mistreating a large part of its citizenry would in theory face UN intervention. But, that’s easier said than done, Mr. de Kerckhove explained, as the UN hasn’t quite gotten around to defining what exactly constitutes genocide. Is it 100 dead? 1,000? 10,000?
I would have thought that given the relatively recent examples of the slaughter in Rwanda, the massacre of Kurds in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the current conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, the UN wouldn’t be having that much trouble in identifying genocide. Wouldn’t the saying "if it quacks like a duck" apply in this case? apparently not, as the UN is still attempting to give a clear definition. One would think that the UN could second some of the chaps from the EU, who I am sure would be able to provide a concise definition of genocide willy-nilly, given the fact that they have a clear and specific definition of everything including what actually constitutes a banana.
Other problems the UN seems to be struggling with is how to define terrorism, what does intervention constitute and when is it appropriate and then the whole issue of holding its employees accountable, following the recent Oil for Food scandal, the allegations of sexual harassment and pedophilia among a number UN employees.
Reforming the UN is like attempting to get a can of centipedes to form a conga line. I’m much more in favour of re-forming the UN under a different name, with member states only admitted if they have a democratically elected government and are committed to maintaining democracy. One of the objections that have been raised against John Bolton is that he reputedly said, "There is no such thing as United Nations". If he didn’t say it, he should have because it is true. The current mish-mosh of 191 countries, each with one vote and each committed to the furtherance of its own national/ethnic/religious interests is simply too cumbersome to function well.
There are some UN organizations that are doing a great job. The World Health Organization (WHO), for one. But for the most part the rest are a joke. The fact that the UN pays lip service to a wide variety of human rights, while many member states sitting on the UN’s Human Rights Commission are themselves guilty of the most heinous human rights abuses makes it a joke in poor taste. The ineffectiveness of that organization was highlighted last December when the very smug Jan Egeland, UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, called the west "stingy". Yet it took that organization nearly four weeks to get a team into the area and they were only there to assess the disaster, while the "stingy" West had boots on the ground and relief supplies in the area within 24 hours. as an aside, it seems that the longer and more complex an official’s title is, the less effective he and his organization are.
Reform or re-form. I can’t think of one good reason to reform the UN. It’s throwing good money after bad. The more I think about the idea of re-forming the UN, the more attractive it becomes. In that respect, I’m with John Bolton (or whoever it was that said) "There is no such thing as United Nations".