The UN at a crossroads - With all of its wrongdoings, is it time for a new one?

Opinion analysis by Zeina Dagher, Featured Writer

November 12th, 2021

How many times have we heard – or even said: “But where’s the UN?!” after reading or hearing about a disaster occurring somewhere in the world? Dag Hammarskjöld, the second UN Secretary General, once said when faced with criticism against the UN: “It was created not to lead mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell”. This may seem too apologetic towards the UN, if it wasn’t that we’re very much still in that same hell that Hammarskjöld was referencing to over 70 years ago. In fact, we’re still witnessing armed conflicts, terrorism and genocides all around the world, and on top of all of that, climate and environmental disasters. Today, it doesn’t feel like the UN is doing a great job saving us from all of it either. While it is true that many people dump their inflated ideals of international cohesion and morality on this institution’s back, often without really knowing what it can or can’t do, it’s undeniable that the UN has gone through a big transformation ever since its creation 76 years ago. And in light of many recent events that characterize our 21st century, pointing out its failures isn’t a difficult task. However, it seems like the world isn’t debating whether the UN is in decline or not – the answer is very clear. Rather, some have moved on to another question: what do we have to replace it with? Aside from the great international implications this would have, one can’t help but wonder: are we being too harsh on an institution that, we have to admit, has helped millions globally over the years? What is causing its decline? Is it still salvable, or would replacing it with another international institution be better for our modern necessities?

Many don’t really know what the UN was created for, or how it came to be in the first place. After World War I, a few countries came together and developed the League of Nations, based on then-US President Wilson’s 14 points. Its main job was to solve disputes between countries. However, it clearly failed because World War II started not long after that. Thus, there was a need for a new, reformed organization that could promote global peace. Efforts were pioneered by Roosevelt and Churchill, who used to secretly meet in 1941 to establish the goals and outlines of the UN. Then, in 1942, representatives from 26 Allied nations met in Washington, D.C. to sign the Declaration of the United Nations, which essentially described the war objectives of the Allied powers against Germany, Italy and Japan. Finally, the outlines of the UN Charter were determined by leaders at a conference in San Francisco in April of 1945, and a few months later was ratified by 51 members. Today, the UN counts 193 member states.

As outlined in the UN Charter, the organization has 4 main goals that can all be resumed into one: maintain international peace. But over the years, it’s taken on other activities, with the Charter envisioning the organization as “a guardian of international peace and security, as a promoter of human rights, as a protector of international law, and as an engineer of socioeconomic advancement.” And so, what can it do exactly?

As the guardian of international peace, the founders of the UN established the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and vested it with the authority to enact international sanctions and authorize military action, but only through UNSC resolutions. Military interventions are voted upon at the Council by its 15 members, and if approved, peacekeepers are sent on ground. They are groups of soldiers, officers or civilians, that go to a conflict area and try to keep warring parties apart. Although they carry weapons, they are only allowed to fight back when they are attacked. Aside from armed forces, the international sanctions that the UNSC approves can range from comprehensive economic and trade sanctions, to more targeted measures such as arms embargoes, travel bans, and financial or commodity restrictions. The UN has conducted a large number of successful peacekeeping operations: for example, in Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mozambique, Namibia and Tajikistan. But most of the time, it tries to maintain peace through inoffensive means – such as negotiation, like it’s been most notably doing to keep nuclear wars at bay.

The role that the UN is most known for is its stance as a defender of human rights, which it achieves through two main types of bodies: Charter Bodies and Treaty Bodies. Charter bodies include the Human Rights Council, which reviews the record of every member state once every four years and makes recommendations for improvement. Treaty bodies have the responsibility to monitor and promote the compliance of state parties with a particular human rights treaty that they signed. They also make reports and recommendations, and sometimes can receive human rights violations complaints from individuals. Yet, a lot of the human rights work has been done through organizations such as UNICEF, the WHO, WFP, and so on. It is undeniable that their work has allowed the eradication of many diseases, the alleviation of refugee crises through UN temporary camps and aid, the implementation of schools in developing countries, and much more 70% of the work of the UN is spent on the promotion of socioeconomic development: in 2018, the UNDP invested more than $1 billion to strengthen the communities’ resilience to crises, and provided 31 million people with better services to prevent poverty.

Those previously mentioned points could not have been possible without an international legal frame, that the UN develops and protects. The international law is enshrined in conventions, treaties and standards, with the UN acting as one of the main international agents that drafts and negotiates these documents, to later be submitted to member states in order to be ratified. One of the most famous documents is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it isn’t the only one. The UN also comprises a judicial branch: The International Court of Justice, made up of 15 judges. It’s the main forum that helps resolve international conflicts in accordance with international law and gives advisory opinions on legal questions from authorized international entities. Along with the UNSC’s sanctions, the ICJ plays an important role in the enforcement of international law, as these decisions are binding. However, because member states are sovereign and cannot be coerced in the same manner that ordinary people are, the primary way in which international law is enforced is when states simply enforce it internally. Also, in order to have a conflict resolved by the ICJ, both parties should consent to its intervention.

Although there’s much to praise the UN for, it has undeniably evolved into a bureaucratic monster, practicing institutional cover-ups of corruption, and covering the undemocratic politics of its security council. It goes to war in the name of peace, but has been a bystander through genocide. And, while it makes the world believe that it’s running on a shoestring, the UN has spent more than half a trillion dollars in 70 years. Thus, the organization’s popularity is most certainly in decline, and the world isn’t short in criticism towards it – neither are diplomats and UN officials, who widely share the sentiment as well. And ultimately, the UN’s taste for setting goals at the expense of delivering results fails towards the poorest and most vulnerable.

With that being said, why is the UN in decline? What many consider to be the real obstacle to remaking the UN in the 21st century is that its most powerful body is still stuck in 1945, while geopolitics have changed a lot over time. In 1965, the Security Council expanded from 11 members to 15. Although it included 22% of the General Assembly members in 1945, it now has just 8% - its veto-wielding the “permanent five” (China, France, Russia, the UK and the US), who have remained the victorious powers for 75 years now, with no representation from Latin America, Africa or South Asia. Without change, the legitimacy gap will only keep growing, as the decision-making process isn’t only undemocratic, but also useless against violations of international law committed by its permanent members. In fact, the US, Britain and France constantly call for modernizing the UN, but they show no willingness to give up the power they possess – thus, they will always want to have a Secretary-General that they will be able to influence. Since 1982, the US has used its SC veto to block resolutions critical towards Israel 35 times, which is why the UN has been so passive in the face of the Palestinians’ struggles. More recently, Russia and China have used their vetoes to block UN intervention in Syria, especially regarding the scandal about the use of chemical weapons. If the traditional struggle of the UN was about how it would deal with conflicts between or within states without offending their national sovereignty, the change in modern conflict methods was also added on the pile of obstacles that the UN still fails to adapt to. Ever since the Cold War and up until today, conflicts largely consist of proxy wars, in which a third party intervenes indirectly in order to influence the strategic outcome in favor of its preferred faction. This has complicated war and prolonged the mediation process for the UN. Also, with many of the P5 states being engaged in proxy wars, the UNSC’s ability to intervene in such conflicts is all the more unlikely. Consequently, the organization has been having a responsive rather than a reactive approach to confronting international crises, and nations are growing disinterested in international consensus building, whereby the P5 is too focused on their own interests, while the rest know that their voices aren’t going to make that much of an impact.

Speaking of the UN’s inaction, even its action has often resulted in major failures, most notably in peacekeeping (although this is the UN’s main field of action). In fact, in many instances, peacekeeping missions failed because of ineffective leadership and a limited range of actions available to the UN, resulting in massacres and genocides. The Rwanda genocide of 1994 speaks volumes about that. Back in New York, the UN had ignored warnings that a genocide against Tutsis was being planned in Rwanda, and the SC ordered peacekeepers to abandon the school they were hiding civilians in, in order to escort foreigners to the airport and out of Rwanda. As the soldiers left, Tutsis begged to be shot rather than left to the militia’s machetes. Within hours, the 2,000 people at the school were murdered by guns, grenades and blades. Only a year later, peacekeepers failed to stop the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica, Bosnia. There are many other examples of peacekeepers standing by, watching as innocent civilians are being killed. Also, this isn’t a funding issue: peacekeeping costs $9bn a year, with 120,000 peacekeepers being deployed mostly in Africa, and some missions lasting more than a decade. Under the UN Charter, all member states are required to supply troops where necessary. However, mostly developing countries send soldiers on UN peacekeeping missions, the “rich western” states showing disinterest in these efforts.

The UN also clearly suffers from gross mismanagement of funds. In fact, money is being thrown on salaries and functional costs a lot more than on aid and development missions. The cost of administering the UN often includes heavy daily allowances to its bureaucrats, and has more than doubled over the past two decades, resulting in a whopping $5.4bn. But, whenever the UN tries to reform a certain UN entity in a certain country and cut back on staff in order to save money, very often that country will argue strenuously against taking away any resources, and there will be really serious lobbying against that. In fact, politics continue to play a major part in the allocations of jobs. While appointments should be based on merit, the truth is that if a particular country is a crucial financial and political member, and wants one of its own to be appointed to a particular job, UN officials will sometimes do it if it is not going to mess things up too much. Sometimes, that person happens to be competent, but if they’re not, the UN staff just ends up working around them.

This isn’t the only example of corruption within the UN. In fact, there are scandals upon scandals that chipped away at the organization’s legitimacy over the years. Personnel from the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo are accused of at least 150 major human rights violations. The crimes involve rape and forced prostitution of women and young girls across the country, including inside a Congolese refugee camp. This scandal definitely makes a mockery of the UN’s professed commitment to upholding basic human rights. Yet, what’s surprising is that this isn’t the biggest scandal in the UN’s history. The Oil-for-Food debacle has undoubtedly shattered the illusion of the UN’s moral authority. Set up in the mid-1990s as a means of providing humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people, the UN-run Oil-for-Food program was subverted and manipulated by Saddam Hussein’s regime, with the proven complicity of UN officials, to help prop him up. His dictatorship was able to steal billions of dollars from the program by fraud, bribery, treachery, and manipulating personnel, all under the noses of UN bureaucrats. Another scandal is the tsunami disaster of 2004, which claimed around 231 000 lives and displaced two million people. It prompted an outpouring of humanitarian aid from around the world, which the UN was coordinating. However, an investigation by the Financial Times revealed that: “As much as a third of the money raised by the UN for its tsunami response was being swallowed up by salaries and administrative overheads.”. Many UN officials declined requests for information, while others offered incomplete data.

This mismanagement highlights yet another problem – the UN still employs many outdated human resources, management, and budget practices that are not reflective of a 21st century institution. Its own staff have stated that it is overly bureaucratic and slow in the way it deals with many issues, and lacks coherent strategic planning. That, with the veto issue, is also why the UN has been so passive in the face of climate change, knowing that scientists call for immediate action.

As such, the UN stands as an inefficient yet very expensive international structure today, which has prompted many critics to call for its dismantlement and replacement with another entity, that could adapt a lot more to our modern world’s necessities and rapid shifts. There is already a clear proposition of an entity that could replace the UN: The Covenant of Democratic Nations. But looking into this project, it stems mainly from the minds of white American Zionists, who are frustrated by the UN’s repeated condemnations of Israel’s human rights violations. We are far from the ideal in terms of the international coordination that many wish to see.

Therefore, with no serious replacement proposition that could unite global powers and put all countries on the same level, some believe that the best option would be to keep the UN, but put efforts into reforming it. The first reform would be adding permanent seats, to achieve a more democratic and realistic representation. However, such change needs an amendment of the charter, which requires the votes of two-thirds of the General Assembly and the approval of the current P5. In the meantime, lesser changes could help, like increasing transparency and accountability. It could create an external body to supervise UN operations, make sure recruitments are being done on a merit-basis, encourage whistleblowers and heavily sanction wrongdoers, publishing performance reports online, and much more. Another much needed reform is to change its development and aid architectures. This includes increasing coordination, eliminating useless UN organs and staff, enhancing partnerships with the private sector and civil society, and so on. And in a world where conflict and human rights abuses are a daily occurrence, some peacekeeping efforts are a necessity, while others are a waste of funds. The UN should move more quickly to wind down operations that have outlived their usefulness, improve mission planning, take better care of UN mission personnel, and hold accountable those who fail to fulfill their tasks.

These are but some reform propositions among many others, that aren’t really difficult to carry out. And it seems like we are heading towards a reformed UN rather than a new international entity, because the UN itself has repeatedly acknowledged its need for change. Back in a 2015 General Assembly session, member states agreed that at the age of 70, the organization had the wisdom and experience to recognize its mistakes, and the strength to correct them.