By Erskine Childers
Colloquium on The United Nations at Fifty:
Whither the next Fifty Years?
Stichting Christenen voor Europa
European Parliament, Brussels
I am delighted to have been asked to link our two Agendas, especially and unusually, giving the Economic and Social Council equal importance with the Security Council "on the front line". I will say much more about this, but I need first to make clear that these will not be observations from the School of "Realism".
This "realism" has been exerting great influence in international decision-making, and grotesquely distorting discussion about the reform and strengthening of the United Nations. One of its most insidious influences is the dictum that the governments that "contribute most" to the UN's budgets should naturally have special influence in its policies, and even in the composition of its organs -- the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the General Assembly, everywhere throughout the United Nations System.
The General Assembly formula for each member's assessed share of the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets is based on the principle of relative capacity-to-pay. The same principle underlies the assessment system of major Specialized Agencies of the UN System like UNESCO and FAO. It is the root principle of democratic revenue-raising and governance in the very countries that demand special influence in the UN on grounds of their contributing the largest money amounts. It is the principle that it is as great a burden for the poorer citizen to find his or her smaller money amount of taxes as it is for the richer to find their larger money amount. Accordingly, since there is equity of burden, no one should have special influence in governance; no rich person and no corporation is entitled to special posts in or influence on the policies -- or reforms -- of public-service institutions. The citizens of Europe had to struggle for a long time to overcome precisely this undemocratic premise in their own countries; they would abandon democratic national governance to modern plutocrats and corporations if they now accepted it at home.
And it is most certainly as great a burden for Jamaica, or Tanzania, or Nepal to find their smaller money amounts of contribution to the UN budgets as it is for the United States or the other so-called "major contributors" to find theirs. Thus, and as within every democratic country, in the United Nations, everyone "pays most".
Yet the "realists" tell us ad nauseam that those who make the largest money contributions in the UN will always call the tune. It would be a signal contribution towards a stronger United Nations if everyone here could pledge never again to stay silent when someone invokes this argument. For if we continue to allow it to pre-dominate we might as well abandon the UN to the Host Country (which has nearly bankrupted it) and the others whose representatives make this argument day in, day out in every UN forum.
Let me now turn to the organs that are our focus in this session. The smaller countries at San Francisco struggled to ensure that these two organs could be -- and I want to emphasise this -- the two sides of a common coin of social equity and peace.
The economic and social causes of conflict were to be addressed by the Economic and Social Council under the authority of the General Assembly as the UN's paramount policy-making body. Where these causes of conflict could not be resolved or at least alleviated in time, the Security Council would have to address the consequences -- but above all, under Chapter VI for peaceful settlement; least of all, and only in tragic last resort, Chapter VII and peace-enforcement.
I will begin with, and concentrate my remarks on the first part of the United Nations spectrum -- causes -- and on the Economic and Social Council. For if we do not at least now enable the UN urgently to tackle the causes of conflict, then as surely as the sun will set tonight, the best-organised early- warning, preventive diplomacy, and peace-keeping capabilities we can instal will be overwhelmed within twenty years by a chain of upheavals that may well escalate into global convulsion.
For brevity I will use the common acronym for the Economic and Social Council, "ECOSOC".
For sound reform in public-service institutions it is vital to know when structure is at fault, and when it is only a surface symptom of political problems. Current proposals calling for the closing down of ECOSOC and for its replacement by one or another smaller body, allegedly for "economic security" are, to say the least, ill-founded. The Charter already mandates ECOSOC to play this economic-security role, under Article 55, to create (and I quote) the "conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations".
In these very words of Article 55, building on the Preamble's goals and the Purposes enunciated in Article 1, ECOSOC was mandated to tackle every one of today's root-causes of upheaval and conflict: low standards of living; unemployment; no or inadequate economic and social progress and development; economic, social, health, educational and cultural problems that can only be tackled at the international dimension; and disrespect for and deprivation of human rights.
And at the largest dimension of these problems, the impoverishment of most of humankind, ECOSOC is also mandated to develop for the General Assembly global macro-economic and macro-social strategies that would, as the Preamble states, "promote the economic and social advancement of all peoples". I emphasise, all peoples.
If ECOSOC has not been able to do this effectively enough, it is not the fault of the Charter or of the design of the Council, but of foreign and economic policy-elites of a small minority of member-countries who have sought to block the implementation of this crucial mandate, because in ECOSOC they have no veto; it demands too much democratic co-operation by them.
A second argument is that ECOSOC is "too large" to be effective as a policy-negotiating body; therefore, we are told, it should be replaced by a smaller council. This is "realist" code language for saying that the only chance of getting the industrial powers to allow the UN to address the macro-economic issues of the real world is if they can have predominant influence in a smaller body.
ECOSOC's 54 members are elected by the General Assembly to be representative of the full UN membership, though the Northern minority actually has a disproportionate number of seats (29 per cent compared with 23 per cent in the General Assembly). But the size of a representative body is not what inhibits complex policy negotiation; it is lack of trust among its members. When such trust develops -- which depends above all on Europe -- the 54 members of ECOSOC will be able to agree on a smaller body of themselves for such purposes.
The real and largest problem about ECOSOC is that ever since decolonization began to give the majority of humankind its majority in the UN, the elites of the industrial powers have not been willing to allow the UN to exercise the global economic leadership which its founders intended.
Without legal or historical grounds they say that the Inter-national Monetary Fund and the World Bank are mandated to deal with global macro-economic issues, and that they will therefore not participate substantively in any such discussions in ECOSOC or the General Assembly. But they do not allow the IMF and World Bank -- which they control -- to deal with these issues either. Nor do they address world macro-economic problems in their G-7 club. The G-7 Summit communiques say that they address "the global economy", but if you read the small print you discover that the G-7 definition of "global economy" is the Japan-North America-Europe economy, of not even one-quarter of humankind.
The United Nations is thus disenfranchised from the real economy of all humankind.
And here enter again the "realists". Their traditional strength has been in diplomatic and political fields. In the early 1980s they acquired new allies in the field of inter- national economic relations, from the rising advocates of the most dangerous fundamentalist religion in our world today -- that which worships the magic of the market. As a result, their cynical perspective is reaching into the daily lives of vast numbers of our sisters and brothers across the world.
One in every four of us alive on Earth this afternoon is sunk in absolute poverty. The gap between the North and South has doubled since 1960: then, the poorest one-fifth of humankind, was at least earning one-thirtieth what the richest one-fifth in the North was earning; today they cannot even earn one-sixtieth what people in the North earn. Eighty per cent of humankind now have only 19 per cent of world trade. But the hectoring preachers of the market religion insist that governments can do nothing effective about this and what is more, they should not even try, because only "market forces" decide who prospers.
They may have almost destroyed an already Cold-War bankrupted Russian economy. The "miracles" they hold up to the world may recurringly blow up in their faces, as in Mexico, hurtling more millions into poverty. One electronic speculator may earn over a billion dollars in personal profit in 36 hours of manipulating a whole portion of a nation's currency reserve back and forth across the world. No matter and never mind; these are the mysterious forces of the market which governments must leave alone, and which the United Nations must not even discuss.
This potentially catastrophic stream of intellectual rubbish seems to have taken such a grip on political minds across the North that one is entitled to wonder if someone has been putting something in their drinking water. Their surrender to this invisible "market" even scares corporation heads: for example, in the June issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1993 the then Chairman of the mighty Sony Corporation, Akio Morita, published an open appeal to the G-7 leaders to re-instal some regulatory influence over international currency movements.
If these political leaders do not soon come out of their trance -- or are not shaken out of it by citizens -- they will fulfil the projections of Claude Julien in this month's "Le Monde Diplomatique", of a world "going down the drain" ("un monde a veau l'eau"). For no institution, anywhere, is dealing with the macro-economic problems of the real world of over 5.7 billion human beings.
The third argument of those who propose to abolish ECOSOC is that it has "failed" because, it is said -- and I quote the standard phraseology -- "it does not attract" high-level economic participation. This is more sheer sophistry. It is not a case of ECOSOC failing to "attract" high-level enough participation, as though the seats were not comfortable enough for senior Ministers. A few governments deliberately decide year after year not to send high-level macro-economic ngotiators, so others do not either!
The proposed smaller council would also be bereft of any pretence at genuine representation of the world community. In the Global Governance Commission's proposal for such a smaller council, what they call the "largest economies" would be members "as of right", with "a constituency system" for representation of regions, and -- I am again quoting verbatim -- "some participation by smaller countries".
So, after fifty years of having to endure one council in the UN containing "members as of right" -- a concept straight out of some pre-mediaeval feudal charter -- we are now urged to acquire another for economic matters.
The other major criticism of ECOSOC is that its agenda is too packed, with too many reports of subdidiary bodies; that it cannot handle them effectively and fulfil its function of co-ordinating the agencies of the System; and that there is duplication of debate with the also overloaded General Assembly. There is validity in these criticisms. But the governing factors behind these problems are that, in a period when the Council has had to add to its workload the staggering range of Agenda 21 issues reported out of the Commission on Sustainable Development, and enormously expanded activities in human rights and humanitarian emergencies, its working time has actually been cut.
Most people, seeing the Security Council in virtually continuous session, do not know that this other Council -- which was supposed to reduce the volume of crises ever needing Security Council attention -- only meets for a total of some five weeks in each year.
This, too, is not an accident; it is entirely in line with the effort to stifle all initiative for action by the United Nations in the most dangerous zone of conflict on our planet -- the frontier of structural economic apartheid between the minority and the majority of humankind.
Let us, then, insist that we get serious about our UN organs, and enable them to work properly. I hope that, in the coming UN-reform debates, European members will have the courage to insist that ECOSOC be enabled to work on its Chartered mandates, and will make clear that Europe is now prepared to participate in formulating macro-economic policies in the UN for the full world. For complex negotation ECOSOC should have an executive committee of its bureau, as the Secretary-General suggests in "An Agenda for Development".
The agenda and workload problem needs the outright decision of its members (no Charter amendment would be required) to enable ECOSOC to work across the whole year. Incidentally, the same need to open up the calendar applies to the General Assembly, which has been kept essentially to only 14 weeks per year ever since the late 1940s.
I have spoken rather more about ECOSOC than about the Security Council, because the latter has enormously preponderant attention in the North -- reflective of the continuing neglect of the causes of the conflicts the UN is then supposed to handle. But there are some fundamental observations about the Security Council that I submit must no longer be only whispered under the intimidation of politeness to "great powerdom" or ignored before the blandishments of "realists".
This organ is the locus of the virtually fascist flaws that were thrust by diktat 50 years ago into the otherwise noble, principled architecture of the United Nations Charter. Some may be shocked by the term "fascist". But had not the powers in 1945 just led a world war against systems of governance in which a minority faction would, 1. create permanent, unelected seats for itself; 2. arrogate to itself the power to block admissions of others to the institution of governance; 3. wield the police power in the community; 4. hold the power to block nominations to the chief public-service post; and 5. have the power to block any amendments to the constitution giving themselves these special privileges? When I was doing my studies, this was indeed called fascism.
The inscription in the Charter by name of 5 out of now 185 countries as so-called "Permanent Members"; the fact that they have never been elected to the Council in fifty years; and their possession of archaic veto powers, are daily living affronts to the memory of those whose sacrifice in the struggle for international democracy we are also commemorating this year. I am not among those who claim that this Security Council has "come into its own" since the end of the Cold War. A more apt description would be that the inner clique that runs it -- really elites within three governments -- have brought down the credibility of the United Nations again and again (not least by labelling as "a UN fiasco" the results of their own refusals to allow it adequate resources for the operations they have authorised). Moreover, they have abused the Charter more than at any time since 1945.
Of all such abuses, one of the darkest stains on the UN flag -- and on these countries' own ethical traditions -- is their repeated extortion of the votes of weaker elected members by economic menaces and bribery: -- "If you do not vote as we tell you next week, you will receive no more "aid", no debt relief, no IMF credit-rating around the world, no IMF short-term credit to pay your last month's oil-import bill" ... or, alternatively, "Here are X billion dollars", or "Here is most- favoured nation trade treatment, as the reward for your compliance with our wishes in the Security Council" (by the way, also in the General Assembly, as witness the railroading the other day of the Non-Proliferation Treaty proceedings).
Such extortion of votes is a criminal felony within the same countries practising it at the United Nations, and is among the gravest violations of the Charter. And here again there has been only meek silence from the rest of Europe about these state-terroristic threats to the health and nutrition, the livelihood and very lives of thousands or millions of citizens of weak countries, the number of potential victims only depending on which countries they target for coercion.
Yet there is now serious discussion about how to protract the undemocratic, unaccountable status of powers that behave thus, by expanding their tawdry club. The grand scheme now is to secure the admission of Germany and Japan to this reliquary cabal by seducing a few large Southern countries into it as well. And there is an unsavoury sameness about this design with the proposed replacement for the Economic and Social Council in which, again, a few large Southern countries would be members "as of right". "Realism" has thus produced a strategy that would seek institutionally to break the solidarity of the majority of humankind even more effectively than the ad hoc efforts by extortion to date.
None of this is the true way ahead. It seems very clever. It has the true macho ring about it. But it would be another betrayal of the hopes and dreams of those who fought to make the United Nations possible. We need a Security Council that can enjoy the confidence of the membership as a whole. Let there quite simply be no reform of it until we can refashion it into a slightly larger body (about 23 seats) entirely elected on the basis of regional representation and rotation, in which most of the big countries will always have seats. There must be no vetoes, but graduated majority voting according to the type and gravity of the decision to be taken.
In conclusion, then, the strength we need for an ethically directed United Nations must truly come from "We, the Peoples", all the Peoples of the United Nations: respecting their cultures and dignity, branding as an outlaw any government seeking to tamper with their equal right to vote freely and without fear. We also need a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly directly elected by the peoples of the world so they can monitor and share responsibility with their national executive governments in the General Assembly next door. I salute the European Parliament for endorsing this.
Above all, the economic and social advancement of all peoples must now be seriously, urgently addressed, both because it is morally indefensible to delay any longer and because it will be catastrophically dangerous to world peace if we do delay and longer.
In all of these needs for our United Nations, Europe bears a heavy responsibility; for if the traditional-power elites will listen to anyone before they do their ultimate worst with our world, they will only listen to Europe.
This continent is where the dream began, in the struggle against political and economic authoritarianism. Let this continent have the courage now to join the majority of humankind to move the dream forward, while time remains.
