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| The United Nations' Role in Globalization | |||||||||||
| 3 May 2000 | |||||||||||
| After World War II, with all of its bloodshed and carnage that reached virtually every continent on earth, 50 countries formed the United Nations, in part to ensure that a war of such magnitude would be avoided in the future. More than half a century later, the UN is still struggling to fulfill its sometimes ill-defined mandates in a global society that has changed radically through the ensuing years. Especially with the end of the Cold War, the role of the UN has become nebulous at best. In his book Deliver Us from Evil, William Shawcross chronicles the peacekeeping missions that the UN has embarked upon in the past decade, assessing its usefulness and explaining the decisions behind each mission. In the end, Shawcross posits the "question of whether intervention, often demanded for emotional reasons, is necessarily wise."[1] | |||||||||||
| In his book, Shawcross offers a comprehensive review of the various missions taken up by the United Nations around the globe, starting with the formation of UNTAC in Cambodia to offer free and fair elections to people who had suffered autogenocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, dictatorial Communist rule by the invading Vietnamese, and civil war since the imposition of military rule by Hun Sen in 1989. Shawcross carefully constructs the UN's reactions to other crises such as ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, genocide and mass exodus in Rwanda, anarchy in Somalia and Sierra Leone, and repression of freedom in East Timor. By weaving these and other problems facing the United Nations in the 1990's, Shawcross creates an accurate portrayal of the difficulties facing the institution as a new, post-Cold War society has emerged. | |||||||||||
| By painstakingly reconstructing the events surrounding each intervention, Shawcross paints a picture of states that are often unsure of how to react to aggression, ethnic cleansing, and repression. The United Nations, often merely an offshoot of member nations' domestic and foreign policies, has hardly reacted uniformly to these issues. Because most intervention is approved and implemented by the Security Council under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the decisions of the United Nations are manifestations of the fifteen states that serve on the Security Council, and in particular the five permanent members.[2] Hence, the implicit importance of states and the inter-state politicking that surrounds nearly every vote is predicated by a realist perception of the world. More concretely, states are the primary actors within the UN; they are allowed one vote per state, so they must necessarily act as one unit; and their decisions are assumed to be based on rational thought. Within this paradigm, however, pluralist tendencies prevail in the motivations of states and implementation of decisions. Intervention is based on the notion that some states or non-state actors are not acting rationally. Intervention is also not always concerned with the national security of each member state. Rather, the intervention of the 1990's was more humanitarian in nature than militaristic. In addition, non-state actors such as aid organizations, NGO's, regional alliances, and the United Nations itself are vital to intervention. The idea of an international system hearkens to the globalist ideology, but the United Nations is far less sympathetic to ending capitalism and exploitation than it is to other, more liberal policies. The most vital assumption of the United Nations is that the world is not anarchical in structure and that a centralized structure (namely the United Nations itself, with all its various related agencies) can exercise control over a given state. Shawcross does not concern himself with ideologies per se in his book, but in his explanations of the inner-workings of the United Nations, he appears to endorse a quasi-liberal view of the world with tendencies to realism in so far as states are part of the process. | |||||||||||
| One important contribution of Shawcross' work is the way he characterizes the conflicts of the past decade. Unlike Samuel Huntington, who writes of fault-line conflicts that erupt into major wars between civilizations, Shawcross depicts these areas as places of seemingly endless hostilities that have localized causes and global responses. For instance, Huntington asserts that the tensions with Iraq in the past decade have been along civilizational lines (with the West pitted against Islam)[3], making it a traditional fault-line conflict. Shawcross portrays the friction in a more global, politicized way, pointing to the fact that by the time Hussein had recanted on his Memorandum of Understanding with Kofi Annan in late 1998, he had effectively lost the support of all of his allies, including Arabic countries and Russia.[4] | |||||||||||
| The most striking theme of the book was the sheer inability of the United Nations to carry out its mandates as presented by the Security Council because of the lack of will on the part of member nations. This theme concerns itself more with the work of Richard Falk, who effectively argues that in the emerging global civil society, the idea of a citizen pilgrim arises: participating in time, on a journey to a preferred future, a pilgrimage that loosens spatial connections, conceives of the planet as a unity, and associates lotalty with the nonviolent struggle to create a better world, not only for others, but for subsequent generations - a shift in loyalty from space to time. [5] | |||||||||||
| According to Shawcross, the global community is moving in this direction, but is moving in fits and starts. The UN is itself supposed to encompass all states, answer to no particular state, and work toward a future where everyone enjoys some degree of health care, human rights, and literacy. In some areas, it has indeed been successful; it has helped to eradicate diseases such as smallpox and provided relief for disaster victims and refugees.[6] In peacekeeping and rebuilding governments, however, the UN has proven to be inadequately provided with the manpower, firepower, and resources it needs. Gen. Romeo Dallaire was stationed in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide began and warned of the impending massacre in a cable to Annan. When questioned about the cable later, Annan responded, "I don't think anyone in the Security Council would claim lack of information. It was lack of will."[7] This lack of will permeates nearly every intervention that the UN has embarked upon in the past decade. When the media is attentive to an issue, support is high, but as media coverage wanes, governments find domestic interest and support lacking. As a result, only issues that seem to be of paramount importance to donor nations are even partially funded. In Sierra Leone, in which no donor country has a strategic or economic interest, the perpetrators of crimes against humanity forced an elected government to cede power to them while at the same time in Kosovo, an international tribunal was hunting and convicting those guilty of similar crimes.[8] "We want more to be put right, but we are prepared to sacrifice less," writes Shawcross in his epilogue.[9] Without these sacrifices, the global civil society that Falk hopes will emerge is destined to never germinate. | |||||||||||
| Rather than conceiving of the planet as a unity, the members of the United Nations have not forgotten their ties to their own countries. In recent years, the UN has been almost paralyzed by the United States? refusal to pay its past dues. [10] Inter-state rivalries have torn the decisions of the Security Council, as when France insisted upon intervening in Rwanda with its own troops, interfering with the UN force that was already operating there.[11] The uproar surrounding the reelection of Boutros Boutros-Ghali showed how one country?s domestic politics could affect the UN. During the 1996 elections, Republicans were charging that "U.S. foreign policy had been 'subcontracted' to the UN;" Clinton wanted to show that the U.S. still exercised power over the UN and stopped Boutros-Ghali's reelection to prove it.[12] As a result, the most bureaucratic and well-organized manifestation of globalization-from-above has been forced to integrate itself into global society sloppily, inconsistently, and injudiciously. | |||||||||||
| The United Nations certainly has a role to play in the emerging world order. For millions of people, it represents hope and fulfillment in a way that no other organization in the history of man has. Though it has many problems to overcome, it has great potential to spread the best of humanity. Shawcross' observations and criticisms are important in that they illuminate the United Nations as it stands today. Shawcross reminds the reader than upon the formation of the United Nations, an American banker named Beardsley Ruml offered the following prophecy about the world's perception of the UN: | |||||||||||
| At the end of five years you will consider the United Nations is the greatest vision ever realized by man. At the end of ten years you will find doubts within yourself and all through the world. At the end of fifty years you will believe the United Nations will not succeed. You will be certain that all odds are against its ultimate life and success. It will only be when the United Nations is 100 years old that we will know that the United Nations is the only alternative to the demolition of the world.[13] | |||||||||||
| While its true usefulness has yet to be realized, the United Nations certainly offers great potential for protecting the citizens of the world from themselves. | |||||||||||
| [1] Shawcross, William. Deliver Us From Evil. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000: 29. | |||||||||||
| [2] Shawcross: 225. | |||||||||||
| [3] Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996: 247-52. | |||||||||||
| [4] Shawcross: 322. | |||||||||||
| [5] Falk, Richard. Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999: 62. | |||||||||||
| [6] Shawcross: 226. | |||||||||||
| [7] Shawcross: 296. | |||||||||||
| [8] Shawcross: 389. | |||||||||||
| [9] Shawcross: 411. | |||||||||||
| [10] Shawcross: 275. | |||||||||||
| [11] Shawcross: 140. | |||||||||||
| [12] Shawcross: 232. | |||||||||||
| [13] Shawcross: 224. | |||||||||||