Global Diplomacy_ the United Nations in the World

1. Global Diplomacy: the United Nations in the World B
Think
Again: The
United
Nations
Bureaucratic. Ineffective. Undemocratic. Anti-United
States. And after the bitter debate over the use of force
in Iraq, critics might add "useless" to the list of
adjectives describing the United Nations. So why was
the United Nations the first place the Bush
administration went for approval after winning the
war? Because for $1.25 billion a year -- roughly what
the Pentagon spends every 32 hours -- the United
Nations is still the best investment that the world can
make in stopping AIDS and SARS, feeding the poor,
helping refugees, and fighting global crime and the
spread of nuclear weapons.
By Madeleine K. Albright served as the U.S. secretary of state from 1997 to 2001.
OCTOBER 29, 2009, 8:10 PM
“The United Nations Has Become Irrelevant“
No. The second Gulf War battered the U.N. Security Council’s already shaky
prestige. Hawks condemned the council for failing to bless the war;
opponents for failing to block it. Nevertheless, when major combat stopped,
the United States and Great Britain rushed to seek council authorization for
their joint occupation of Iraq, the lifting of sanctions, and the right to
market Iraqi oil.
What lessons will emerge from the wrangle over Iraq? Will France, Russia,
and China grudgingly concede U.S. dominance and cooperate sufficiently to
keep the United States from routinely bypassing the Security Council? Or
might they form an opposition bloc that paralyzes the body? Will the
United States and United Kingdom proceed triumphantly? Or will they
suffer so many headaches in Iraq that they conclude, in hindsight, that
initiating the war without council support was a mistake?
Both sides have reason to move toward cooperation. The French, Russians,
and Chinese all derive outsized influence from their status as permanent
Security Council members; they see the panel as a means to mitigate U.S.
hegemony and do not want the White House to pronounce it dead. And
despite their unilateralist tendencies, Bush administration officials will
welcome council support when battling terrorists and rogue states in the
future. Although the council is not and never has been the preeminent
arbiter of war and peace that its supporters wish it were, it remains the
most widely accepted source of international legitimacy — and legitimacy
still has meaning, even for empires. That is why U.S. President George W.
Bush and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell both made their major
prewar, pro-war presentations before a U.N. audience.
Beyond the council itself, the United Nations’ ongoing relevance is evident
in the work of the more than two dozen organizations comprising the U.N.
system. In 2003 alone, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported
that Iran had processed nuclear materials in violation of its Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty obligations; the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia tried deposed Yugoslav leader Slobodan
Milosevic for genocide; and the World Health Organization successfully
coordinated the global response to severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS). Meanwhile, the World Food Programme has fed more than 70
million people annually for the last five years; the U.N. High Commissioner
for Refugees maintains a lifeline to the international homeless; the U.N.
Children’s Fund has launched a campaign to end forced childhood
marriage; the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS remains a focal point
for global efforts to defeat HIV/AIDS; and the U.N. Population Fund helps
families plan, mothers survive, and children grow up healthy in the most
impoverished places on earth. The United Nations may seem useless to the
self-satisfied, narrow-minded, and micro-hearted minority, but to most of
the world’s population, it remains highly relevant indeed.
“Relations Between the United States and the United Nations Are at an
All-Time Low“
Not even close. One day before the U.N. General Assembly convened in
1952, Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began hearings in
New York on the loyalty of U.S. citizens employed by the United Nations. A
federal grand jury then opened a competing inquiry in the same city on the
same subject. (Some U.N. employees called to testify even invoked their
constitutional right against self-incrimination.) The furor generated
massive indignation and mutual U.S.-U.N. distrust. J.B. Mathews, chief
investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, declared
that the United Nations “could not be less of a cruel hoax if it had been
organized in Hell for the sole purpose of aiding and abetting the destruction
of the United States.”
East-West and North-South tensions transformed the General Assembly
into hostile territory through much of the 1970s and 1980s. U.S.
ambassadors such as Daniel P. Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick earned
combat pay rebutting the verbal pyrotechnics of delegates in the throes of
anti-Semitic passions and Marxist moonbeams. The low point was the
passage in 1975 of a resolution equating Zionism with racism.
In the 1990s, supporters of the Contract With America, led by Republican
Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, lambasted U.N. peacekeeping, blocked
payment of U.N. dues, and ridiculed U.N. programs. Similarly, Republican
Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina spoke for many of the far-right-minded
but wrong-headed when he termed the United Nations “the nemesis of
millions of Americans.”
Today, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, U.S. citizens consider
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan the fourth most respected world leader
(trailing, in order, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, U.S. President George
W. Bush, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon). The United States has
paid back most of its acknowledged U.N. arrears. The United Nations’
agenda and core U.S. security interests have gradually converged. For
example, the U.N. Charter says nothing about the importance of elected
government, yet U.N. missions routinely sponsor democratic transitions,
monitor elections, and promote free institutions. The charter explicitly
prohibits U.N. intervention in the internal affairs of any government (save
for enforcement actions), yet the U.N. High Commissioner for Human
Rights, created in 1993 at the United States’ urging, exists solely to nudge
governments to do the right thing by their own people. The United Nations’
founders never mentioned terrorism, yet today the United Nations
encourages governments to ratify antiterrorist conventions, freeze terrorist
assets, and tighten security on land, in air, and at sea. Polls continue to
show that a significant majority of U.S. citizens believe the United States
should seek U.N. authorization before using force and should cooperate
with other nations through the world body.
“The Bush Administration’s Doctrine of Preemption Is Not Authorized by
the U.N. Charter“
So? The charter calls upon states to attempt to settle disputes peacefully
and, failing that, to refer matters to the Security Council for appropriate
action. Article 51 provides that nothing in the charter “shall impair the
inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack
occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council
has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and
security.”
Compare that to this passage from President Bush’s 2002 National Security
Strategy: “Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States
can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The
inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and

2. the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’
choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies
strike first.”
The mystery here is not what the administration said, but rather why it
chose to arouse global controversy by elevating what has always been a
residual option into a highly publicized doctrine. In reality, no U.S.
president would allow an international treaty to prevent actions genuinely
necessary to deter or preempt imminent attack upon the United States. The
notion that the United States has relied solely “on a reactive posture” in the
past is not true. In the name of self-defense, U.S. administrations of both
parties initiated actions during the Cold War that violated the sovereignty
of other nations. In 1994, the Clinton administration considered military
strikes against nuclear facilities in North Korea. In 1998, U.S. President Bill
Clinton launched cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation
for the terrorist bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa and in an effort to
prevent al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from striking again.
Whether tracking the language of Article 51 or not, the Bush
administration’s preemption doctrine will prove a departure from past
practice only if it is implemented in a manner that is aggressive, indifferent
to precedent, and careless of the information used to justify military action.
Calibrated and effective actions taken against real enemies posing an
imminent danger should not overturn the international legal apple cart.
Measures wide of that standard would indeed raise troubling questions
about whether the United States is setting itself above the law or tacitly
acknowledging the right of every nation to act militarily against threats that
are merely potential and suspected. The administration approached that
line by invading Iraq, but the issue was blurred by the multiple rationales
given for the conflict — enforcement of Security Council resolutions
(relatively strong legal grounds), self-defense (in this case, shaky), and
liberation (shakier still). The issue now is whether the administration
intends to strike first against nuclear aspirants North Korea and Iran (and,
if so, on what evidence) and whether it will exhaust other options first.
Thus far, the administration is traveling the diplomatic route.
“Political Correctness Often Trumps Substance at the United Nations“
Correct. The Cold War and the rapid growth in U.N. membership following
decolonization shaped the United Nations’ civil service, requiring the
distribution of jobs on the basis of geography rather than qualifications.
The U.S. Congress did not help over the years by buying in to the notion
that the United States was entitled to many jobs and then filling them with
defeated politicians.
While at the United Nations, I used to joke that managing the global
institution was like trying to run a business with 184 chief executive officers
— each with a different language, a distinct set of priorities, and an
unemployed brother-in-law seeking a paycheck. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan has done about everything possible within the system to reward high
achievers and improve recruitment, but the pressure to satisfy members
from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe remains a management nightmare.
Another long-standing problem is that decisions on U.N. committee chairs
and memberships are most often made on a regional and rotating basis,
with equal weight given to, for example, South Africa and Swaziland. By
tradition, these decisions are sacrosanct, leading to the recent spectacle of
Libya chairing the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. To prevent such an
outcome, one must be willing to break some diplomatic china. Former
President Clinton did so in blocking the reelection of Secretary-General
Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1996 and defeating Sudan’s regionally endorsed
nomination for Security Council membership in 2000. Both initiatives
prompted resentment toward the United States, but both enhanced the
standing and credibility of the United Nations.
“U.N. Peacekeeping Has Failed“
Untrue. U.N. peacekeeping has maintained order in such diverse places as
Namibia, El Salvador, Cambodia, eastern Slavonia, Mozambique, and
Cyprus. The traditional U.N. mission is a confidence-building exercise,
conducted in strict neutrality between parties that seek international help
in preserving or implementing peace. U.N. peacemaking, however, is quite
another matter. During my years as the U.S. permanent representative to
the United Nations, the tragic experiences in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Somalia, and Rwanda showed that traditional U.N. peacekeepers lack the
mandate, command structure, unity of purpose, and military might to
succeed in the more urgent and nasty cases — where the fighting is hot, the
innocent are dying, and the combatants oppose an international presence.
Such weaknesses, sadly, are inherent in the voluntary and collective nature
of the United Nations. When the going gets tough, the tough tend to go
wherever they want, notwithstanding the wishes of U.N. commanders.
One possible solution: peace-enforcement missions authorized by the
United Nations, in which the Security Council deputizes an appropriate
major power to organize a coalition and enforce the world’s collective will.
The council sets the overall mandate, but the lead nation calls the shots —
literally and figuratively — necessary to achieve the mission. The U.S.-led
intervention in Haiti (1994), the Australian-led rescue of East Timor (1999),
and the British action in Sierra Leone (2000) were largely successful and
provide a model for the future.
Peacemaking is a hard, dangerous, and often thankless task. To deter
people with guns, other people with more and bigger guns are necessary,
and finding such people is not easy. It is one thing to expect a soldier to risk
life and limb defending his or her homeland. It is another to expect that
same soldier to travel halfway around the world and perhaps to die while
trying to quell a struggle over diamonds, oil, or ethnic dominance on
someone else’s home turf. Most people are simply not that altruistic,
especially when they see many intervention forces blamed for what such
forces fail to accomplish rather than credited for the burdens they assume.
As a result, the world is left with an international system of crisis response
that is pragmatic, episodic, and incremental rather than principled,
reliable, and decisive.
Without any expectation of perfection or even consistency, the
international community can nevertheless make the best of things by doing
more to equip and train selected military units willing to volunteer in
advance for peace enforcement; by recruiting personnel to fill the gap
between lightly armed police and heavily armed conventional military; by
prosecuting war criminals; and by attacking the roots of conflicts such as
arms peddling and economic desperation.
“The U.N. Security Council Should Be Enlarged“
Indubitably, but don’t hold your breath. Probably no U.N. issue has been
studied more with less to show for the effort than Security Council
enlargement.
To ensure the council’s strength as a guardian of international security and
peace, the United Nations’ founders assigned permanent membership and
veto authority to the five leading nations on the winning side of World War
II: the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China.
(Other countries compete for election to fill the 10 remaining council seats,
with the winners serving a two-year term.) Obviously, the world has
changed a bit since 1945: U.N. membership has more than tripled, and
three of the eight most populous nations in the world can now be found in
South Asia. Despite an apparent consensus to enlarge the council, its
members have been tied up in knots trying to decide how. Major debates
include fair regional representation (if India deserves a permanent seat,
what about Pakistan?) and reluctance to extend veto power to additional
countries.
During my years at the United Nations in the mid-1990s, the United States
supported expanding the council to no more than 21 members and granting
permanent seats to Japan and Germany. This position outraged Italian
Ambassador F. Paolo Fulci, whose country opposed the addition of more
permanent members. By that logic, he argued, if Japan and Germany joined
the Security Council, Italy should be included as a permanent member, too.
“After all,” he argued, “Italians also lost World War II.”
“The United Nations Is a Threat to the Sovereignty of the United States“
Balderdash. The United Nations’ authority flows from its members; it is
servant, not master. The United Nations has no armed forces of its own, no
power of arrest, no authority to tax, no right to confiscate, no ability to
regulate, no capacity to override treaties, and — despite the paranoia of
some — no black helicopters poised to swoop down upon innocent homes
in the middle of the night and steal lawn furniture. The U.N. General
Assembly has little power, except to approve the U.N. budget, which it does
by consensus. Meanwhile, the Security Council, which does have power,
cannot act without the acquiescence of the United States and the other four
permanent members. That means that no secretary-general can be elected,
no U.N. peacekeeping operation initiated, and no U.N. tribunal established
without the approval of the United States. Questions about the efficiency of
the United Nations and many of its specific actions are legitimate, but
worries about U.S. sovereignty are misplaced and appear to come primarily
from people aggrieved to find the United Nations so full of foreigners. That,
I am constrained to say, simply cannot be helped.

3. “The United Nations Is a Huge Bureaucracy“
Nope. A bureaucracy certainly, but not huge. The annual budget for core
U.N. functions — based in New York City, Geneva, Nairobi, Vienna, and five
regional commissions — is about $1.25 billion, or roughly what the
Pentagon spends every 32 hours. The U.N. Secretariat has reduced its staff
by just under 25 percent over the last 20 years and has had a zero-growth
budget since 1996. The entire U.N. system, composed of the secretariat and
29 other organizations, employs a little more than 50,000 people, or just
2,000 more than work for the city of Stockholm. Total annual expenditures
by all U.N. funds, programs, and specialized agencies equal about one
fourth the municipal budget of New York City.
Madeleine K. Albright is the chair of Albright Stonebridge Group and a professor, author, diplomat, and businesswoman who served as
the secretary of state of the United States.
U.N. Secretary-General António
Guterres: My Vision for
Revitalizing the United Nations
BY ANTÓNIO GUTERRES ON 01/09/17 AT 7:47 AM EST
When I was growing up reading history books as a young student, it
seemed all wars had a winner. Yet in today's wars, it is increasingly
clear that no one wins. Everyone loses.
Look no further than the horrifying bloodshed in Syria. A conflict in
one country is creating instability on a global scale. Years of brutal
fighting have brought chaos to an entire region, with tremors felt
around the world. Decades of economic development have been
reversed. Millions more children and young people are vulnerable to
the cycle of dispossession, underdevelopment, radicalization and
conflict.
Around the world, conflicts have become more complex and
interlinked—producing gross violations of international
humanitarian law and human rights abuses. People are fleeing their
homes on a scale not seen for decades. Global terrorism threatens
every region. Meanwhile, climate change, population growth, rapid
urbanization, food insecurity and water scarcity are adding to the
tensions and instability.
The greatest shortcoming of the international community today is
its failure to prevent conflict and maintain global security. As
secretary-general of the United Nations, I have called for a surge in
diplomacy for peace and appealed for 2017 to be a year for peace.
The United Nations was born from war. Today, we must be here for
peace.
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2017
Preventing conflict means going back to basics—strengthening
institutions and building resilient societies. Since so many conflicts
emerge from disenfranchisement and marginalization, it means
putting respect for human rights at the center of national and

4. international policy. It means protecting and empowering women
and girls, one of the most important steps in sustainable
development.
Where wars are already raging, we need mediation, arbitration and
creative diplomacy backed by all countries with influence. Members
of the U.N. Security Council must live up to their responsibilities.
The United Nations—and I, personally—will be ready to engage in
conflict resolution wherever and whenever we can add value.
Civil Defense members look for survivors under the rubble of
damaged buildings after airstrikes on the northern neighborhood of
Idlib, Syria, December 5, 2016.
AMMAR ABDULLAH/REUTERS
Looking forward, we must make sure countries do not even set off
on the path of instability and conflict, but settle their differences
peacefully, benefiting people and the planet.
The U.N. has taken important strides to achieve this in recent years.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by world
leaders two years ago, is a blueprint for making our world more
equitable, sustainable and livable.
To implement this plan—and its 17 Sustainable Development
Goals—we need to broaden the circle of action to include
governments, bilateral and international organizations, and
international financial institutions. Partnerships with civil society,
the business community and others are critical to success.
I am also committed to make sure the U.N. system is reformed and
united to provide the development support to member states
needed to achieve these goals.
For the U.N. to achieve its full purpose and potential, it too must
change. It is time for us to recognize shortcomings and reform the
way we work.
First, we must bring greater coherence and consistency to our
efforts to build and maintain peace. Too often, U.N. peacekeepers
face an impossible task in countries that are still at war and where
there is no real peace to keep. Greater conceptual clarity and a
shared understanding of the scope of peacekeeping must pave the
way for urgent reforms that create a continuum from conflict
prevention and resolution to peacekeeping, peacebuilding and
development.
Second, we need to reform the U.N.'s internal management through
simplification, decentralization and flexibility. The United Nations
must focus on delivery rather than process; and on people rather
than bureaucracy. I am committed to building a culture of
accountability, strong performance management and effective
protection for whistleblowers.
Gender parity is also pivotal. I intend to make sure women take their
rightful place at senior levels in the U.N., and to create a clear
roadmap with benchmarks and time frames to recruit more women
at all levels of the organization.
But these vital reforms will depend on trust between leaders, people
and institutions—both national and international. We must move
beyond the mutual fear that is driving decisions and attitudes
around the world. It is time for leaders to listen and show that they
care about their own people, and about the global stability and
solidarity on which we all depend.
It is time for all of us to remember the values of our common
humanity, the values that are fundamental to all religions and that
form the basis of the U.N. Charter: peace, justice, respect, human
rights, tolerance and solidarity.
All those with power and influence have a particular responsibility
to recommit to these ideals. We face enormous global challenges.
They can be solved only if we work together.
António Guterres is secretary-general of the United Nations.
The UN at 70: does the United Nations have
a future?
Take part in our special series examining the global organisation established to
bring us security, but challenged over its accountability, impact and future
The United Nations marks its 70th birthday this autumn. But beyond the balloons, the
bunting and the Ban Ki-moon speeches, there will be plenty of soul-searching about the
future of the organisation.
Its centrepiece – the security council – appears increasingly incapable of delivering security:
its peacekeepers can’t always keep the peace, its health body has been shown up by the Ebola
epidemic, while its refugee agency is struggling to deal with record numbers of people fleeing
conflict or persecution.
And the UN itself has ballooned: 85,000 bureaucrats, an annual spend of about $40bn
(£26bn) – 2,000 times that of the organisation’s budget during its first year in 1946.
Spending has quadrupled in the past 20 years – and still several agencies struggle to balance
their books.
What can be done? Over a period of three weeks this September, in the run-up to a crucial
general assembly at the end of the month, and anticipating the birthday celebrations at the
end of October, the Guardian is publishing a special series on the UN that focuses on its
successes and failures.
In dispatches, films, interviews and data exercises, we examine how the UN became so big,
what it is good at, where it is lacking and why it is so unaccountable. We speak to top officials
and ousted whistleblowers, frontline staff and tax-free bureaucrats about reform, and
whether the problem is the intransigence of member states or the bureaucracy itself.
There’s a game in which you can explore exactly what the UN has done for you. And we
welcome reader insights, either alongside the work that we publish or at one of our live
events.
It’s your UN. But is it working for you?

5. 70 years and half a trillion dollars later:
what has the UN achieved?
This article is more than 7 years old
The United Nations has saved millions of lives and boosted health and
education across the world. But it is bloated, undemocratic – and very
expensive.
It was Dag Hammarskjöld, the tragic second UN secretary general, who had it best. The
United Nations, he said, “was created not to lead mankind to heaven but to save humanity
from hell”.
The kind of hell Hammarskjöld had in mind was not hard to imagine in the wake of world
war and Hitler’s extermination camps, and with the atom bomb’s shadow spreading across
the globe.
How much of a part the UN played in holding nuclear armageddon at bay divides historians.
But there is little doubt that in the lifetime that has passed since it was set up in 1945 it
helped save millions from other kinds of hell. From the deepest of poverty. From watching
their children die of treatable diseases. From starvation and exposure as they fled wars made
in the cauldron of ideological rivalries between Washington and Moscow but fought on
battlefields in Africa and Asia.
The UN’s children’s organisation, Unicef, provided an education and a path to a better life
for millions, including the present UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. The UN’s
development programmes were instrumental in helping countries newly freed from colonial
rule to govern themselves.
d failing' in face of ever-growing refugee crisis
And yet. In its 70 years, the United Nations may have been hailed as the great hope for the
future of mankind – but it has also been dismissed as a shameful den of dictatorships. It has
infuriated with its numbing bureaucracy, its institutional cover-ups of corruption and the
undemocratic politics of its security council. It goes to war in the name of peace but has been
a bystander through genocide. It has spent more than half a trillion dollars in 70 years.
“Like everybody says, if you didn’t have the UN you’d have to invent it,” said David Shearer,
who served the organisation in senior posts in Rwanda, Belgrade, Afghanistan, Iraq and
Jerusalem. He is now New Zealand’s shadow foreign minister. “But it’s imperfect, of course it
is, and everybody knows that it is,” he said.
As the UN marks the 70th anniversary of its founding this autumn, those imperfections –
and how the UN addresses them – have come to the fore as the organisation struggles to
define its role in the 21st century.
Tensions between western governments, which see the UN as bloated and inefficient, and
developing countries, which regard it as undemocratic and dominated by the rich, have
rippled across the organisation as ballooning costs drive the push for reform.
Even accounting for inflation, annual UN expenditure is 40 times higher than it was in the
early 1950s. The organisation now encompasses 17 specialised agencies, 14 funds and a
secretariat with 17 departments employing 41,000 people.
Its regular budget, which is agreed every two years and goes to pay for the cost of
administering the UN – including mouthwatering daily allowances which result in many of
its bureaucrats being far better paid than American civil servants – has more than doubled
over the past two decades to $5.4bn.
United Nations peacekeepers north of the provincial capital of Goma, Congo, 2008.
Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
But that is just a small portion of the total spend. Peacekeeping costs another $9bn a year,
with 120,000 peacekeepers deployed mostly in Africa. Some missions have lasted more than
a decade. And then there are the voluntary contributions from individual governments that
go to fund a large part of disaster relief, development work and agencies such as Unicef. They
have risen sixfold over the past 25 years to $28.8bn. And yet even at that level, some
agencies are warning that they are operating on the brink of bankruptcy.
Higher and higher
Even with costs surging fourfold in the last 20 years, total UN spending this year is still only
about half of New York City’s $75bn budget.
“There is no single institution that I found more exhilarating at its best, yet more
debilitatingly frustrating at its worst, than the United Nations,” said Gareth Evans, a former
foreign minister of Australia and strong critic of the way the UN is run. He said his efforts to
advance reform of the UN “were about as quixotic and unproductive as anything I have ever
tried to do”.
That’s a sentiment widely shared among diplomats and UN officials.
Valerie Amos, Britain’s former international development minister, described the UN as a
valuable ally in delivering UK aid but lamented its inefficiency.
“There were concerns about the UN being overly bureaucratic and slow in the way it dealt
with development issues. I think that’s one of the criticisms of the UN that remains until
now, that since it was formed it has become bigger and bigger. Many organisations have
overlapping mandates. It’s become an organisation that’s quite unwieldy in lots of respects,”
Lady Amos said.
Helmets belonging to soldiers of the Nigerian army before deployment to Mali in 2013.
Photograph: Afolabi Sotunde/Reuters/Corbis
Helen Clark, head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the most
powerful woman at the UN, dealt with the organisation from the outside as prime minister of
New Zealand. She said that as the leader of a small country she valued being able to use the
UN’s size and resources to deliver New Zealand’s aid programme, such as emergency
assistance to Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami.
But once she started work at the UNDP six years ago she was less impressed. “When I
arrived, the organisation was a little over a year into its first ever strategic plan. What that
tells you is that modern management and modern strategic planning was late coming to the
UN,” she said. Clark laughed as she said the plan she was presented with was so broad in its
goals that it made no sense.

6. Shearer, who headed Save the Children in Somalia, Rwanda and Sri Lanka before joining the
UN, said the organisation’s strength lay in what he called its “gravitas”. Governments may
turn away NGOs but the UN cannot be ignored. Neither can the UN’s huge logistical
capabilities, such as the World Food Programme’s airlifts, be matched by any private
organisation.
But he said the UN was weighed down by “incompetence” and red tape. “It’s a very heavily
bureaucratic organisation. It hasn’t changed in a lot of years. It’s built systems on top of
systems on top of systems,” he said. “Getting the right people, that was the Rosetta Stone of
the UN for me. Once I cracked that, it meant I could use the organisation how it was
supposed to be used irrespective of the structure, because the structure will always protect
the incompetent, in a sense.”
The United Nations Security Council votes on a resolution at the headquarters in New York.
Photograph: Craig Ruttle/AP
A decade ago, the UN launched its most enduring report into reform. A panel – co-chaired by
the prime ministers of Mozambique, Norway and Pakistan, and including the then British
chancellor, Gordon Brown – wrote a devastating document. It ticked off criticisms which
said the UN was badly failing those it was supposed to help. Its work on development was
described as “often fragmented and weak”; its governance was called “inefficient and
ineffective”.
The report said the UN’s taste for setting goals at the expense of delivering results failed the
poorest and most vulnerable. It also criticised a system of funding for many UN programmes
in which officials had to beg for money from governments year after year, making it difficult
to plan.
“Cooperation between organisations has been hindered by competition for funding, mission
creep and by outdated business practices,” it said. “In some sectors, such as water and
energy, more than 20 UN agencies are active and compete for limited resources without a
clear collaborative framework. More than 30 UN agencies and programmes have a stake in
environmental management.”
The organisation has grown so big that at times it is working against itself. Critics point to
large numbers of support staff doing ill-defined jobs. Staff costs account for two-thirds or
more of some UN agencies’ outgoings. “Performance management is a joke,” said one
official. “Almost everyone gets ‘above average’ in their assessment.”
The UN is so fragmented that each agency has its own IT system.
The reform report noted that about one-third of the UN operations in 60 countries had a
budget of less than $2m per agency, which meant that they could do little more than afford
the cost of running the office.
The report proposed extensive changes to promote greater collaboration and efficiency under
a programme called Delivering as One. This included myriad UN agencies in a single country
coming under the authority of one official, and working more closely with the governments
of those countries, which often had no idea what the UN was doing.
Soldiers of the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, 2013. Photograph: Luis
Echeverria/Xinhua Press/Corbis
Ban, who recalls learning from books provided by Unicef as a child after his family was
forced to flee during the first UN-led war in his native Korea in the 1950s, told the Guardian
that rapid change was happening and that Delivering as One was at the heart of it.
“The United Nations of today is hugely different from the United Nations 70 years ago, and
therefore it is very important the United Nations changes and adapts itself to changing
circumstances,” he said. “It’s been changing, very drastically now. I have seen this kind of
duplication between and among United Nations agencies, for example water issues.
Delivering as One, working as one, in the United Nations, that’s the main motor of my
administration and I have been engaging with all different agencies and funds and
programmes so that we can Deliver as One.”
failing Syria, Ban Ki-moon admits
But that is not what others see. A pilot programme was rolled out in eight countries and was
regarded as successful. But the broader reforms never came.
The executive director of the reform report was Adnan Amin, a Kenyan development
economist who was head of the Chief Executives Board for Coordination, which represents
all UN programmes as well as associated organisations such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. He said the changes proposed in the report were
“fundamentally good ideas” but had not had the impact its authors had hoped for.
“It’s led to reams of reports written in the UN, many of them impenetrable to the rest of the
world because of the jargon used. I think there has been incremental progress but I don’t
think we can say there’s been a fundamental change in the way the UN does business,” he
said.
Amin said the UN had set itself yet more goals but failed to heed the report’s warning about
lack of results.
“What we have now is another multiplication of targets and goals which are an
extraordinarily comprehensive assessment of what’s needed to be done but there’s no
operational clarity around them. Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to monitor it? Who’s
accountable for it? The goals themselves are pretty impressive but it doesn’t say anything to
the UN about what they should be doing,” he said.
“We still have a lot of fragmentation. There are about 1,200 country offices of the UN around
the world. There are 100 countries with more than 10 UN country offices in each country.
You have country offices with a budget of eight or nine million [dollars] and a staff of five
people. Half the money goes for the operational expenses of the office, leaving what is
actually a minuscule amount of money for programming or key activities. In the context of
what’s happening today, a few million is not going to make any difference.”
The walking sticks commonly carried by Somali elders and the protective gear worn by the
United Nations staff outside a conference hall in Mogadishu, Somalia, 2012. Photograph:
Dai Kurokawa/epa/Corbis

7. The drag on reform comes from different directions. Some UN agencies resist it.
Clark chairs the UN Development Group, an umbrella of major agencies, where she is
responsible for implementing Delivering as One. “When I started learning about the arcane
intricacies of Delivering as One, there were criticisms that it was very bureaucratic and
process oriented. I have to say I believe there was some truth in those criticisms,” she said.
She introduced a system, known as standard operating procedures, which she said was
aimed at “not having the whole working together effort drowned in process”. “It hasn’t been
easy because there are many different agencies involved and they have all developed over the
years their own procedures and ways of working. It has required long and patient negotiation
to get to the point of having standard operating procedures. It couldn’t just be decreed
because no one has the power to decree it,” she said.
But the bigger obstacle to reform perhaps comes from the UN members states themselves.
After she left the British government, Amos became the UN undersecretary general for
humanitarian affairs.
“I don’t think people give enough weight to the fact that the United Nations is a body made
up of its member states of 193 nations. You have member states coming at the reform agenda
with very, very different perspectives,” she said. “One of the things I saw close up was that if,
for example, you had a UN entity based in a particular country and you are seeking to reform
and streamline and so on, very often that country will argue strenuously against taking away
any resources.
“Even if you’re saying you want to cut a few staff because it makes sense to have them
somewhere else, there will be really serious lobbying against that.”
Soldiers of the UN Disengagement Observer Force on an observation tower overlooking
Syria. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters/Corbis
Amin was confronted with this when the panel drawing up the reform report attempted to
get agreement on some of the changes it recommended.
“You can hardly touch any mandate, as minuscule as it might be, that doesn’t have one or
two strong advocates from member states behind it,” he said. “Through a very bruising
one-year consultation process it became very evident that there was not that much that could
be done that could fly politically and we ended up getting rid of two small gender outfits and
creating a much bigger gender agency.”
One diplomat points to the saga of the UN print shop in New York, a growing anachronism
in the digital age. After it was flooded during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, officials seized the
opportunity to shut it down and shed 60 jobs. Even though those affected were promised
work elsewhere in the UN, there was strong resistance from a grouping of developing
countries opposed to the cutting of any posts.
Reformers are pushing for the 80 separate locations where UN payrolls are processed to be
whittled down considerably, but have again run into resistance. They question the need to
have large numbers of routine administrative jobs in high-cost cities such as New York and
Geneva. They ask why foreign nationals on expensive expat packages, which pay for benefits
such as private education for their children, are recruited to do them.
There is a tendency by the countries which pay most of the bills to portray the poorer ones,
grouped in the G77 of 134 nations, as a drag on modernisation and the principal obstacle to
reform.
But G77 countries say that behind claims of greater efficiency and modern management
methods, wealthier nations are tightening their grip on the UN.
India is a leading member of the G77. Its ambassador to the UN, Asoke Kumar Mukerji, said
the rich countries took the high-level jobs in the name of efficiency.
“If you look at the secretariat of the United Nations it is dominated by industrialised
economies because they are the ones who contribute the bulk of the budget and they get the
bulk of the positions in the secretariat, managerial positions,” he said. “The point that the
G77 is an obstacle isn’t fair because the G77 is marginalised in the overall secretariat of the
United Nations.”
Clark has been praised for her reforms of the UNDP. She is touted as a potential successor to
Ban and the UN’s first female secretary general, although the politics of the appointment,
which moves between regions, is a big obstacle. The New Zealander is lauded by some
western diplomats for forcing through reforms, which they say are making the UNDP more
efficient.
The G77 sees it differently. It has criticised what it says are the diminishing number of
managerial jobs inside the UNDP for people from the developing countries the programme is
supposed to be serving. Mukerji said it was an issue increasingly raised at UNDP board
meetings.
A general view of the assembly room during a session of the Human Rights Council at the
European headquarters of the UN in Geneva, Switzerland. Photograph: Salvatore Di
Nolfi/Epa/Corbis
“If you do not have developing country people inside the structure of the UNDP at
managerial level up to the senior management, then you do have an agency which doesn’t
understand the ethos of the countries where it operates,” he said.
The divvying up of jobs is a source of perpetual tension within the UN. “There’s an enormous
amount of lobbying by member states for particular jobs,” said Amos. “I was rather taken
aback at the amount of lobbying that goes on and that does not just go on for senior jobs, it
goes on for jobs across the system.
“How you reflect in a 193-member state organisation the diversity of the member states and
retain a merit-based system is a huge challenge for the UN. We have to move away from this
idea that it’s about having people who can somehow run an agenda for that particular
country.”
One senior UN official said politics continued to play a major part in the allocations of jobs.
“Appointments should be on merit but the truth is that if a particular country, one you need
to keep on side for political or financial reasons, wants you to put one of its own in to a
particular job, then sometimes you do it if it’s not going to mess things up too much.
Sometimes that person is very competent. If they’re not you just end up working around
them,” he said.

8. the UN? No 1: the UNHCR
“It does mean that there are people who don’t seem to be particularly good or work very hard
at what they do. But there are other people who are very good and they carry the rest.”
Although the major powers complain about developing nations insisting on what one official
called “jobs for the boys”, they behave little differently. “The permanent members of the
security council all expect to have a senior person from their country around the UN table,”
said Amos.
The US gets Unicef and the World Food Programme. China runs the Department of
Economic and Social Affairs. Russia is in charge of crime.
An Iraqi collect boxes of food donated by the World Food Programme. Photograph: Haidar
Mohammed Ali/AFP/Getty Images
Amos’s former job as head of humanitarian affairs is regarded as a British fiefdom. Her
predecessor was British; so was her successor. That appointment laid bare the entitlement
felt by the UK.
The prime minister, David Cameron, put forward just one name to the UN for the post – his
former health minister Andrew Lansley. Ban demanded he submit at least three and
eventually a former minister at the Department for International Development, Stephen
O’Brien, was appointed. Although Cameron did not get his first choice, the post remained in
British hands.
The sharpest confrontations over money and cuts come in what is known as the UN’s fifth
committee, which oversees budget and administration. Because it is open to all member
states and makes decisions by a simple majority, the committee is where the G77 exerts its
greatest influence.
“There are massive fights,” said one official who described the US, EU, Japan and Australia
on the side of cutting budgets, inefficiency and jobs while the G77 was painted as wanting
more spending and more jobs for their nations.
The UN’s largest contributors have a caustic view of the committee, regarding it as run by
countries who make a minimal contribution to the cost of the UN but decide both the
secretariat and peacekeeping budgets.
UN armoured personnel carriers, manned by Zambian soldiers serving with the international
peacekeeping force, patrolling the streets of Abyei, South Sudan, in 2011. Photograph:
Stuart Price/EPA
Officials and diplomats of all kinds bemoan a lack of assertive leadership. They have one eye
on the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, but he is a product of the permanent members of UN
security council.
“It would be great to see what difference a strong secretary general would make,” said one
top official. “We all say it knowing that it is unlikely that we will ever get one because the
stronger member states have such an interest in not having a strong secretary general. They
want a secretary general they are able to influence, lobby.”
Which raises what many consider the real obstacle to remaking the UN for the 21st century –
that its most powerful body is still locked in 1945.
The five permanent members, the victors over Germany and Japan, hold the whip hand
through vetoes. For all the noise from the US, Britain and France in particular about
modernising the UN, they show no willingness to give up the power they wield sometimes in
ways governed entirely by political interest. Since 1982, the US has used its security council
veto to block resolutions critical of Israel 35 times. The total number of resolutions blocked
by other permanent members over the same period is 27. More recently, Russia and China
have used their vetoes to block UN intervention in Syria.
India, the world’s second most populous nation, is pushing for expansion of the security
council to include six more permanent members with the right of veto, as well as several
more non-permanent members. Mukerji, the Indian ambassador to the UN, said his country
had been pressing for several years for agreement on a document that will be the basis of
negotiations.
“It’s incredible that in the United Nations, which produces negotiating texts on every other
area it deals with, in the area of security council reform it has just not been able to put a text
on the table,” he said.
Appetite for broader reform seems just as tepid.
“Where is the conversation happening which says that, in 2015 and beyond, what is the
United Nations there for?” Amos asked. “What should be the core activities of the UN that
should receive a significant proportion of the regular funding of the UN?”
This article was amended on 9 September 2015. An earlier version said that the US had
exercised its security council veto to protect Israel from criticism more times than the total
number of vetoes cast by the other permanent members combined. That has been corrected
to say that since 1982, the US has used its veto to block resolutions critical of Israel 35 times,
while the total number of resolutions blocked by other permanent members over the same
period is 27. The article was further amended on 18 September 2015 to correct an editing
error that left iy saying that Dag Hammarskjöld was the third UN secretary general.