Global Policy Forum

By Francesco Grillo and Clare O'Brien

According to leaks, the United Nations High Level Panel is about to confound skeptical expectations of yet another, lowest common denominator UN talking shop. Instead of skirting them, the report will make powerful recommendations on crucial issues, including criteria for the legitimate use of force in self-defence, and regulating the clash between the rights of individuals to be protected" and state sovereignty. From the outset Kofi Annan's intentions for the Panel were clear. It benefited from a tightly defined security" remit, geared towards managing general expectations, and yielding practicable results - this was no "clean slate" exercise, with all the UN's current failings up for discussion. Of necessity, it was also narrowly composed, of elder statesmen (average age 70, nearly all men and retired): how else to deliver results with a hope of acceptance by incumbent governments? Apparently these defensible tactics have delivered the desired result: synthesis of an authoritative, international viewpoint, within the public domain, and advocating key changes, including membership of the Security Council and even extending to changes to the Charter.

But our question is: will this be enough to deliver an effective UN? And even more is it enough in order to have global governance instruments able to respond to changes that in the last fifteen years have been of a magnitude comparable to a world war? The diplomatic drama in the run up to Iraq provoked a wave of distaste across the world. But the prospect of a US imposition of will, bypassing the principles of multilateralism and collective security on which the post-war vision was at least nominally founded, was only half the story.

Equally unacceptable, and much more frustrating was the space that had been allowed to open, as a result of the UN's outdated decision-making structures, and constitutional stagnation, in which the US could make an arguable case for unilateralism. This raises the fundamental question of whether deep institutional reform can ever be initiated and managed entirely from within the system we want to change. If it can, progressive forces need to consider how to influence the content of the resulting package, and how to correct, instead of replicate, today's shortcomings. On the other hand, if, as the UN's constitutional and organizational stagnation perhaps suggests, some external challenge – whether organised or spontaneous, as in Ukraine – is always required to trigger transformative institutional change, it now falls to exogenous interests, outside states diplomacy, to think carefully about how to generate clear, coordinated messages that cannot be ignored by governments and political parties.

In this setting we believe a wider, more energetic process is needed to activate effective reform. And bringing about such a process calls, in turn, for strategic, co-ordinated thought and action. Jubilee 2000 and International Criminal Court (ICC) campaigns succeeded in building first popular, and then political, support for aims deemed impossible by conventional diplomatic wisdom. What were their secrets of success? What scope is there for a global coalition based on a clear UN reform platform? How could emerging interests, for example global cities, be involved and mobilised, alongside established NGO and business constituencies? How could reform be marketed to capture imagination and overcome apathy? Even more fundamentally, do we need democratic" inputs, or better how much" democracy does legitimate institutional reform need? How large should be the share of public opinion and the segments reforms should aim to engage in order to have enough" energy to be realized? We believe that making the UN a more popular concept is crucial. If we consider the issues that the High Level Panel (HLP) has considered we find: poverty, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, even infectious diseases.

But we need to go beyond the HLP's terms of reference, and back to the vision" of the Presidents of the USA who launched the UN and League of Nations before it. The organization's purpose should be not only saving the world from hell" but also delivering progress". Reform should not only improve the UN's capability to respond to threats, but also its, sometimes unique - because global –scope and capacity to advance and govern technological progress (on energy, for instance) and research. Much wider missions will also require consideration of a broader set of options, and radical questions like those discussed in Vision's position paper. We believe two ideas deserve urgent consideration. First, formation of a global platform of think-tanks, committed to innovating, and consensus-building, on the core aims of UN reform 2005-6. Such a platform could help to foster both closer European cooperation, and to catalyse more effective civil society campaigns. Second - potentially one such initiative - a European-led "San Francisco II", running in parallel with state-level deliberations over 2005-6, to popularise the UN reform project and stimulate stronger public ownership over it.

This note was written by Francesco Grillo and Clare O'Brien. It draws on arguments in a TransformUN position paper "United Nations: A framework for the reform", which can be found here. Francesco Grillo is President and co-Founder of Vision, a think tank dedicated to the strategic thinking on the transformations triggered by technologies and globalisation .Clare O'Brien is Research Fellow at the Human Rights Futures programme, based at the London School of Economics' Centre for the Study of Human Rights.