In The Other UN, Le Monde diplomatique contributor Anne-Cecile Robert gives an overview of the missions of the three UN headquarters outside the one in Manhattan. Writing from Vienna, Robert notes,
The UN’s supremacy on the international stage is eroding partly because its founding texts retain a humanist philosophy which is alien to the globalised economic order.
As a bureaucracy that employs 44 thousand people worldwide, the big bureaucracy has become synonymous with big business interests. Yet, this tarnished image, says Robert, obscures the other UN work on such problems as landmines and refugees.
In The UNHCR’s Evolving Mandate, Le Monde diplomatique contributor Augusta Conchiglia reports that 50 million people are now uprooted. As the result of wars, politics, and large scale international development projects [including those of other UN agencies] leading to one humanitarian crisis after another, internally displaced persons now exceed other forced migrations.
With the growing inequalities worldwide, however, the debate in Europe, observes, Conchiglia, is on how to prevent the entry of people, rather than how to provide their countries with the political and economic support they need.
In New Challenges, Le Monde diplomatique writer Antonio Guterres notes that displacement shows no signs of abating. Indeed, refugees returning have dropped by 80%, while at the same time, the number of places available for resettlement currently accommodates less than 1% of the global refugee population.
As Guterres remarks, impoverishment combined with easy access to arms results in increased conflict and political instability. As generators of both, the members of the UN Security Council have a lot to answer for.
Beginning June 20, Le Monde diplomatique looks at the UN in Decline.
How silly to write that the UN is in decline as if it were some entity with a life force of its own. A similar argument made by people who write about government bureaucracies as if they were somehow not of the people and their elected representatives. If the UN as an organization is less effective in some areas, it is because the member states who govern and manage the UN do not have the will to make it effective. When the member states want it to be effective, it is. When it is not effective, that is the will of the majority of states/members who control its votes and finances. Put responsibility where it belongs when you write, not in some fanciful place…
Thank you for commenting, Ned. The purpose of the Le Monde diplomatique inquiry that asks the question, Is the UN in Decline?, is, as I understand it, to examine whether the UN will be able to meet the needs it has served in the past under the current circumstances.
As you point out, if its member states have been corrupted to the extent they are no longer accountable to their own citizens, then it is perhaps fanciful to expect the UN to be any less corrupt. Yet, the dysfunction of international institutions with a special mandate to serve humanity requires our attention for that very reason.
When systems of governance — national or international — submit to the mandates of transnational criminal enterprise, i.e. wars of aggression and economic subversion, they decline in terms of moral legitimacy. Examining the UN decline in terms of functionality and legitimacy is one way of putting responsibility where it belongs.