As the UN turns 80, the organization is facing more threats to its own continued existence than ever before, and some countries welcome that
More than 140 world leaders traveled to New York last month to mark the UN's unhappy 80th birthday. The world's premier multilateral organization was created after World War II "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." However, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently conceded, the organization is marking its "anniversary in a world scarred by brutal and widespread conflicts, deep inequalities and injustice, flagrant violations of human rights, and looming existential threats."
The central problem is that the UN's success has always depended on cooperation between the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council: the UK, China, France, Russia, and the US. The grand bargain at the UN's founding sought to balance great-power preponderance with some influence for smaller powers over socioeconomic matters and the UN budget. Ultimately, no one could forget that its headquarters were in New York, and that its charter was drafted largely by US Department of State officials under the watchful eye of former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Given this reality, US President Donald Trump's speech to the General Assembly was an act of institutional infanticide. He not only dismissed the UN as irrelevant, but questioned the very principles that have held its 193 members together: peacekeeping, organizing responses to global challenges, fostering international cooperation and financing development. Since his return to the White House, the US has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, the WHO, and UNESCO.
Moreover, as of April, the US owed the UN US$3 billion -- unpaid budget commitments that come on top of its deep cuts to funding for development and humanitarian relief. The resulting financial strains have hamstrung the UN's life-saving work around the world. Only half of the US$50 billion in humanitarian funds requested last year have been collected, and further cuts are threatening funding for 11.6 million refugees and 16.7 million food-insecure people under the care of various UN relief programs.
With Trump blithely brushing aside the UN's many achievements, it is worth revisiting the organization's successes and failures to determine where it might go next. These could be broken down into its three main mandates: global security, development and human rights.
In terms of security, the UN's effectiveness was of course constrained for four decades by the Cold War, which prevented it from playing its envisaged role, as US and Soviet vetoes in the Security Council guaranteed paralysis. Nonetheless, the UN managed to improvise by deploying peacekeepers to many conflict zones over the years. The first such mission helped monitor a ceasefire along Israel's border in 1948. Over the next 30 years, 12 additional missions were deployed to theaters like Lebanon, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), and Yemen. Although not always successful, these efforts helped the world avoid a superpower-induced nuclear conflagration.
The end of the Cold War then allowed for closer great-power cooperation and expanded UN peacekeeping efforts. Between 1992 and 2006, two African secretaries-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, built the post-Cold War security architecture that is still used today.
That system chalked up major successes in Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, but also spectacular failures in Rwanda, Bosnia, Angola and Somalia. While the UN still has more than 60,000 peacekeepers in places like the DR Congo, South Sudan, Kosovo and Kashmir, their efficacy has come under question. Half of the 58 post-Cold War deployments have been in Africa, where the UN has often lacked enforcement capacity (which depends on political will).
In terms of development, as countries across the Global South escaped the colonial yoke and entered the UN in the 1950s, they sought to push socioeconomic issues -- especially poverty reduction -- higher up the agenda. Two important figures championed these efforts: Raul Prebisch, who led the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, and subsequently the UN Conference on Trade and Development, and Adebayo Adedeji, who headed the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Both opposed the World Bank and the IMF's typical policy prescriptions, pushing instead for fairer trade in which countries from the Global South promoted development through regional integration.
These efforts proved unsuccessful, because powerful Western governments ultimately controlled the Bretton Woods institutions. Despite some progress, with more than 30 developing countries graduating to middle-income status by 2019, the sobering reality is that just 35 percent of the targets set by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals are on track to being met or are making moderate progress. The record is not all negative, though. Even after massive funding cuts, the UN still managed to provide humanitarian relief to 116 million people last year.
That brings us to human rights, where the UN has proved especially impotent. Its own Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory recently declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and yet the organization as a whole has failed to take any serious action to halt the killing. The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (from which the Trump administration withdrew the US in February) remains ineffectual and politicized. Flagrant abuses continue to go unpunished in the DR Congo, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kashmir, Myanmar, and many other places, and migrants are being brutalized across Europe and the US.
Owing to the UN's deteriorating financial situation, Guterres has been forced to accelerate various cost-cutting reforms that were already underway. He has proposed slashing US$500 million from next year's budget (15 percent of UN programming); reducing staff by 19 percent; cutting the peacekeeping budget by 11.2 percent; relocating offices from high-cost New York and Geneva to cheaper cities; streamlining the work of UN agencies and ending overlapping mandates; and clustering more activities under UN Regional Commissions. Other proposals include consolidating the 20-odd UN agencies that often compete for scarce resources in country offices with small budgets; abolishing the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS; merging the UN Development Programme with the UN Office for Project Services; and combining UN Women with the UN Population Fund.
When the UN's predecessor -- the League of Nations -- collapsed on the eve of WWII, it was not even given a decent burial. The UN has clearly recognized the urgent need to reform or face the prospect of its own demise. Unfortunately, some members appear to welcome that prospect.
Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria's Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, served on UN missions in South Africa, Western Sahara, and Iraq. He is the author of The Splendid Tapestry of African Life: Essays on a Resilient Continent, its Diaspora, and the World and the editor of The Black Atlantic's Triple Burden: Slavery, Colonialism, and Reparations.Copyright: Project Syndicate