By Flora Lewis
July 2, 1999
The war in Kosovo has provoked a tidal wave of concern about American intentions around the world far beyond what anyone in the United States seems to realize.
It is not just the Russians and the Chinese who think that the United States has now decided to ride roughshod over everyone else. In Western Europe, Japan and Latin America, according to reports I hear, people are getting worried that there is nothing to restrain or balance U.S. power.
This is a matter of perception. Americans tend to see the rest of the world as something of a nuisance intruding in their domestic concerns, or free-loaders, or cynics, but not helpless victims of America's overwhelming might. The United States sees all kinds of unreasonable barriers to its good and generous ideas, and everyone else sees a calculated American strategy to run the world.
Communication is not working. The United States is failing to explain that it knows its vision for a peaceful, humane world requires full partnership with others. According to a recent comment in the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, ''The world risks growing distrust of an America which pretends to be the leader but whose political luminaries show an impenetrable provincialism, even an obscene incompetence.''
This unease about the United States is part of the reason why the United Nations is taking on new importance. The organization has not been hopelessly weakened by NATO's decision to use force against Yugoslavia without UN legitimation, as critics said. On the contrary, there is a new and stronger sense of the need and importance of the UN role in defining acceptable international behavior than at any time since the start of the Cold War.
Ramesh Thakur, vice rector of the UN university in Tokyo, wrote recently that ''for cynics, the United Nations exists so that nations that are unable to do anything individually can get together to decide that nothing can be done collectively'' (IHT, June 25). And so it seemed for most of the time since 1945 when it came to the primary UN task of keeping, or enforcing, peace.
The founders in San Francisco never imagined that the organization, which then numbered 51 states, would grow to more than 185, but it is largely their fault. Their main concern was to avoid the mistakes that proved fatal to the League of Nations.
But their insistence on near-absolute equality of states (short of five permanent Security Council seats with a veto) provided a tremendous incentive for the creation of new, often microdot, states when decolonization spread. The British left federations to assume viability for erstwhile colonies in three different continents. All broke up within a couple of years because each part wanted a UN seat and a prime minister more than rational development.
There is a clear clash now, made pointedly in Kosovo, between the claims of international law to respect state sovereignty and to respect nonterritorial obligations such as universal human rights.
Given the existing structure of the United Nations, reforms to set priorities will be very difficult. But treaties such as the one establishing the international war crimes tribunal respond to the growing sense that basic rules must be made and enforced, not only on how states treat each other but also on how they treat their people.
An assortment of original ideas is being proposed. One comes from Georges Berthoin, a former French diplomat who was active in launching the Common Market and a co-founder of the Trilateral Commission. He points out that there is constant reference to the ''international community'' but that nobody knows just what it is.
Ambiguity is becoming dangerous. Without a real community, only power will count, provoking the organization of counterpower. That is not in the U.S. interest, he argues. ''We all need a framework that transcends us, and within which we feel legitimately at home.''
Mr. Berthoin would have the United Nations borrow from the European Union the institution of an independent authority (such as the European Commission) charged with identifying the common interests of member states, with each one continuing to represent its own interest. No state is subservient to another, but there is a place for common reflection and independent initiative.
There is not much chance that the United States would welcome his suggestion that France convene a world conference to set up a ''real international community.'' Still, Americans who deride the United Nations, refuse to pay their UN bills, or treat it as a foreign irritant rather than a society in which the United States holds proud membership, should be aware of the hostility that arouses.
As a result of World War II, the United States learned to be a great power, mostly more but sometimes less well. As a result of the Cold War and the transformation of world affairs that globalization connotes, the United States must learn to be a special power, constrained by its own might to feel and observe community.
