The new secretary-general will need to bridge the growing divide among the member states.
June 30, 2006 - Taking office on Jan. 1, 2007, Kofi Annan's successor will inherit a deeply divided United Nations. A newly empowered group of nations, which includes some of the United States' closest allies in the developing world, has put forward an agenda for reform that would increase the power of those bodies where their influence is greatest, principally the General Assembly, at the expense of the secretary-general and the Security Council. The current permanent members of the Security Council have defined the agenda of the U.N. for the past 60 years—and they want to keep on doing so. The United States, United Kingdom and France, in particular, are asking for greater authority, not less, for the secretary-general. Their rationale: only a strong leader can make the U.N. more efficient and more accountable. So the person taking over the top job will be stepping smack into a power struggle that is already tugging the organization in opposite directions.
This North-South power struggle is not simply a replay of the 1970s when a group of developing nations also wanted to change the way the U.N. worked and the way the secretary-general acted. At that time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., warned that radical Third World countries had hijacked the organization. His book “A Dangerous Place” permanently changed the way many Americans thought about the U.N., and echoes of his ideas still resonate in the Bush administration's criticisms of the international body today. But since then, the influence of the Group of 77 (a group of 132 developing nations also known as the G77) has waned at the U.N. The "developing" countries are now far more diverse and diffuse in their respective interests. They have also split between various regional and smaller interest groups, rarely speaking with one voice anymore. And the notion of a group of "spoilers" opportunistically positioned between the cold-war protagonists, calling for a radical redistribution of wealth, is largely obsolete.
Countries like India, Egypt, Pakistan, South Africa and Brazil are now playing a growing, constructive role in international economic and security affairs. But precisely for that reason, they want and expect a greater role in decision-making at the U.N. They felt frustrated last fall when they failed to get a seat at the "head table" alongside the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China. So they have begun to pursue their agenda within the G77 coalition, using their controlling bloc of 132 votes in the 191-member General Assembly. These countries want more U.N. money to go to development; they see terrorism as a lower-level concern than the U.S. and other Western countries do, and most of them support Iran's "right" to a peaceful nuclear program. They also want greater influence over the direction of U.N. reform and, significantly, over key decisions, including the selection of a new secretary-general.
The recent budget fights at the U.N. demonstrated the state of those tensions. In December, a U.S.-led coalition imposed a six-month cap on spending as a means of keeping up the pressure for their version of U.N. reform. But the G77 states fiercely opposed that action, and by the end of this week they appeared to have won almost everyone's support to lift the cap—with the notable exception of the United States. While the organization's charter gives each state "sovereign equality" (one nation, one vote) on management and budget issues, large donors insist that without reforms aimed at tightening internal controls and accountability, they will no longer fund a "broken" U.N. The real danger is that the next time around neither side will blink.
Two additional factors have further complicated this disturbing polarization at the U.N. The first is China, which straddles the divide as a member of the Security Council and as a developing country that frequently votes with the G77. For example, China opposes sanctions against Sudan for its actions in Darfur because of its long-term energy relationship with the Sudanese. The second factor has been the confrontational style of the current U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton. His approach has hardly produced big dividends. Aside from the defeat in the budget debate, the United States found itself nearly alone in its recent opposition to the newly structured Human Rights Council: a total of four countries, including the United States voted against it, while 170 countries voted for it.
The United States and its allies have to find ways to avoid such isolation if they want to make progress on the issues that truly matter: maintaining the nuclear nonproliferation regime, dealing with failed states, sending a peacekeeping force to Darfur, responding to the threat of terrorism and moving forward with management reforms at the U.N. To achieve those goals, they need to steer a course between outright confrontation with the G77 countries and ignoring them. Neither of those extremes will prove productive. The powers that have always called the shots at the U.N. need to learn to accommodate the aspirations of the developing countries while still pushing their ideas about how the international body should be run.
The same holds true for whomever emerges as Kofi Annan's successor. The new secretary-general will need enough new authority to make key management decisions and reforms. But he or she will also need to find a way to bridge the acrimonious divide among the member states over the future of the U.N. That will mean demonstrating a stronger commitment to development issues, finding new ways to enhance the role of the General Assembly and renewing the push to enlarge the Security Council. It will also mean addressing the pressing issues of budget oversight that the chief donors have every right to demand. It will take a person with formidable diplomatic skills, but also with the courage of his or her convictions, to navigate this tricky terrain. It'll be up to the winner to prove that the U.N. isn't a "dangerous place" anymore but an organization that can truly aspire to fulfill its ever-expanding mission.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13640649/site/newsweek/
June 30, 2006 - Taking office on Jan. 1, 2007, Kofi Annan's successor will inherit a deeply divided United Nations. A newly empowered group of nations, which includes some of the United States' closest allies in the developing world, has put forward an agenda for reform that would increase the power of those bodies where their influence is greatest, principally the General Assembly, at the expense of the secretary-general and the Security Council. The current permanent members of the Security Council have defined the agenda of the U.N. for the past 60 years—and they want to keep on doing so. The United States, United Kingdom and France, in particular, are asking for greater authority, not less, for the secretary-general. Their rationale: only a strong leader can make the U.N. more efficient and more accountable. So the person taking over the top job will be stepping smack into a power struggle that is already tugging the organization in opposite directions.
This North-South power struggle is not simply a replay of the 1970s when a group of developing nations also wanted to change the way the U.N. worked and the way the secretary-general acted. At that time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., warned that radical Third World countries had hijacked the organization. His book “A Dangerous Place” permanently changed the way many Americans thought about the U.N., and echoes of his ideas still resonate in the Bush administration's criticisms of the international body today. But since then, the influence of the Group of 77 (a group of 132 developing nations also known as the G77) has waned at the U.N. The "developing" countries are now far more diverse and diffuse in their respective interests. They have also split between various regional and smaller interest groups, rarely speaking with one voice anymore. And the notion of a group of "spoilers" opportunistically positioned between the cold-war protagonists, calling for a radical redistribution of wealth, is largely obsolete.
Countries like India, Egypt, Pakistan, South Africa and Brazil are now playing a growing, constructive role in international economic and security affairs. But precisely for that reason, they want and expect a greater role in decision-making at the U.N. They felt frustrated last fall when they failed to get a seat at the "head table" alongside the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China. So they have begun to pursue their agenda within the G77 coalition, using their controlling bloc of 132 votes in the 191-member General Assembly. These countries want more U.N. money to go to development; they see terrorism as a lower-level concern than the U.S. and other Western countries do, and most of them support Iran's "right" to a peaceful nuclear program. They also want greater influence over the direction of U.N. reform and, significantly, over key decisions, including the selection of a new secretary-general.
The recent budget fights at the U.N. demonstrated the state of those tensions. In December, a U.S.-led coalition imposed a six-month cap on spending as a means of keeping up the pressure for their version of U.N. reform. But the G77 states fiercely opposed that action, and by the end of this week they appeared to have won almost everyone's support to lift the cap—with the notable exception of the United States. While the organization's charter gives each state "sovereign equality" (one nation, one vote) on management and budget issues, large donors insist that without reforms aimed at tightening internal controls and accountability, they will no longer fund a "broken" U.N. The real danger is that the next time around neither side will blink.
Two additional factors have further complicated this disturbing polarization at the U.N. The first is China, which straddles the divide as a member of the Security Council and as a developing country that frequently votes with the G77. For example, China opposes sanctions against Sudan for its actions in Darfur because of its long-term energy relationship with the Sudanese. The second factor has been the confrontational style of the current U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton. His approach has hardly produced big dividends. Aside from the defeat in the budget debate, the United States found itself nearly alone in its recent opposition to the newly structured Human Rights Council: a total of four countries, including the United States voted against it, while 170 countries voted for it.
The United States and its allies have to find ways to avoid such isolation if they want to make progress on the issues that truly matter: maintaining the nuclear nonproliferation regime, dealing with failed states, sending a peacekeeping force to Darfur, responding to the threat of terrorism and moving forward with management reforms at the U.N. To achieve those goals, they need to steer a course between outright confrontation with the G77 countries and ignoring them. Neither of those extremes will prove productive. The powers that have always called the shots at the U.N. need to learn to accommodate the aspirations of the developing countries while still pushing their ideas about how the international body should be run.
The same holds true for whomever emerges as Kofi Annan's successor. The new secretary-general will need enough new authority to make key management decisions and reforms. But he or she will also need to find a way to bridge the acrimonious divide among the member states over the future of the U.N. That will mean demonstrating a stronger commitment to development issues, finding new ways to enhance the role of the General Assembly and renewing the push to enlarge the Security Council. It will also mean addressing the pressing issues of budget oversight that the chief donors have every right to demand. It will take a person with formidable diplomatic skills, but also with the courage of his or her convictions, to navigate this tricky terrain. It'll be up to the winner to prove that the U.N. isn't a "dangerous place" anymore but an organization that can truly aspire to fulfill its ever-expanding mission.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13640649/site/newsweek/
:lol: