On Reforming the United Nations
Discussion Paper by Bhaskar Menon

Historical Background
To understand the direction and thrust that the reform of the United Nations must take, it is critically important to understand the historical background of international organizations.

There have been three generations of such organizations; the reform effort must produce the fourth generation.

First Generation: International organizations were first made necessary by the standardized communications and transport technologies of the industrial era. The use of the telegraph, railways and steam ships required cooperation across national borders. To coordinate such cooperation governments established agencies with small technical secretariats. Two agencies of the United Nations today trace their origins to that First Generation: the International Telegraphic Union (now the International Telecommunications Union), and the World Meteorological Organization (originally focused on sharing weather information important to shipping).

Second Generation: The need for more extensive cooperation among nations was made clear by the First World War (1914-1919), which killed about ten million people. That “Great War” represented the coming together of two negative trends emerging from the use of industrial technology: one was global war, enormously more destructive than any in history; the other was increased conflict within industrial societies.

International conflict resulted from the drive of industrial nations for resources and markets for their factory-scale production. Initially this conflict pitted European nations against African, American and Asian countries, and then against each other. New technologies such as machine guns and chemical weapons made war itself more devastating than ever before.

Conflict within industrial societies increased because of the emergence of a new factory-based working class outside the feudal framework governing agricultural labour. The ideologues of this new class – socialists and Marxists – postulated “class war” as necessary and unavoidable.

In the First World War these two trends came together. As the major industrial Powers of the day fought each other, a Marxist revolution took place in Russia, creating the Soviet Union.

The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War created the League of Nations. Within the League was an International Labour Office mandated to improve the conditions of workers; it is now a UN Specialized Agency, the International Labour Organization (ILO). There was also a Health Office, reflecting a new international concern that had emerged in the wake of the 1919 influenza pandemic that killed millions of people around the world.

Unlike the First Generation technical organizations, the League of Nations had a pro-active political mandate to resolve international differences peacefully. However, it was limited conceptually: it did not address the basic antagonisms of the colonial era, which led within two decades to the Second World War.

Third Generation: The Second World War killed over 60 million people and devastated Europe and Japan. Planning for a new international organization to replace the defunct League began before the war ended. It took the form of a political organization, the United Nations, linked to autonomous Specialized Agencies dealing with economic and social issues. This architecture reflected the wisdom of experience: the League of Nations had been destroyed by war while the ILO survived, as had earlier specialized agencies. During the six+ decades of the United Nations, the world has been transformed politically and technologically.

Politically, there have been two great waves of change. The first was the dissolution of European empires and the emergence of over a hundred newly independent countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The second wave was caused by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of Marxism as the basis for organizing societies; it ended the Cold War and made democracy itself the preferred model for nations.

Technological transformation has come about because the computer, the fibre-optic cable and communications satellites have combined to revolutionize how information is generated and used. This has carried the international spread of democracy down to the level of individuals.

The Agenda for UN Reform
The transformations described above have affected the functioning of the United Nations without improving its effectiveness. Reform efforts have also been ineffective because they have focused on reconfiguring existing structures without addressing the concepts on which they were built. Any revision of the Charter must begin with a conceptual review of three major aspects: (i) Substantive (ii) Institutional and (iii) Procedural. The review should result in a clear view of how we can incorporate into a Fourth Generation international organization the democratic trends of the past six decades, both political and technological. It should identify the substantive areas on which a successor organization should focus and outline its institutional and procedural arrangements.

Substantive: The review should address how we can best:

1. Accelerate the implementation of the agreed agenda of economic and social development, and especially the realization of the Millennium Development Goals.
2. Promote democratic governance and extend basic human rights to all people.
3. End armed conflict and establish an effective system of international security.
4. Bring about general and complete disarmament under effective international controls.
5. End and reverse processes destroying and degrading the global environment.
6. Eliminate the multi-trillion dollar illicit economy that currently feeds every form of international crime and divert the resources thus freed to the realization of the other five substantive goals.

Institutional: The review must take into account the impact and potential of the democratic revolutions noted above. It must clarify how they have changed the organization of economic, social and political life globally, and what must be done to ensure they stay on track. Specifically, the review should take into account:

1. The evolution of the commercial corporation as the central institution of the industrial era and the driving force of the current phase of economic globalization.
2. The institutional response of societies to corporate globalization and the need for innovation to meet a range of new and emerging economic and social challenges.
3. The nature of the Fourth Generation international organization that will facilitate the realization of substantive goals and how the United Nations System can be effectively and smoothly transformed.

Procedural: The review must take into account not just the functioning of the new international organization but how it can best relate to the economic, social and political trends within societies and internationally. Specifically, this must consider:

1. The emergence of an increasingly networked world, with individuals and organizations able to communicate instantly and cooperate at minimal cost on every issue of concern to them.
2. The most efficient means of arranging the processes of a Fourth Generation international organization to mesh with a networked world: setting in place arrangements for communicating policy and operational decisions of the General Assembly and Security Council to the appropriate national, regional and global networks, receiving feedback and acting on it.

Fourth Generation: The next generation of international organization must set clearly the goal of a completely democratic world. The ordering of its substantive, institutional and procedural priorities must reflect the desire to achieve that goal non-violently and without coercion. The central vision of a new United Nations Charter must be a world at peace in which individuals, communities and nations participate creatively in fashioning and directing a networked, non-bureaucratic global government.

Incremental reforms of the United Nations will not work because the problem is not that the Organization is inefficient but that its structures and processes are largely irrelevant to what is happening in the world. The Security Council, for example, has been so ineffective in its primary job, which is to prevent armed conflict, that for years it has been trying to divert public attention by discussing the corollaries of war such as the protection of civilians – now the primary target of combatants – and saving women and children from massive abuse. The last few months have seen set-piece debates in the Council of these topics that show it in a truly pathetic light. More than a decade after Graca Machel reported that hundreds of thousands of children were being brutalized, drugged and raped to force them into becoming combatants, the most effective action by the Council has been to “name and shame” those involved. The naming has not extended to individuals and corporations in developed countries whose demand for the gold, diamonds, hardwoods, petroleum and other precious resources are today the main reason for continuing conflicts in poor countries. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo efforts to terrorize civilian populations in resource-rich areas have involved the mass rape of women and children; in some villages not one has escaped.

The UN is probably even more ineffective when it comes to other major world problems. On an issue such as global warming, for instance, its analysts have focused intergovernmental negotiations on an approach that cannot possibly work: cuts in emission of “greenhouse gases” from the use of carbon-based “fossil fuels” like coal and petroleum. With over five billion people in poor countries raring to join the industrialized world in a high-energy life style, any “progress” will be illusory. Global warming is a symptom; reducing emissions cannot address the problem itself, which is an enormously destructive pattern of development. In addition, world population is on a steep growth curve; it is now about 6.5 billion and is projected to hit 7 billion early in 2012. It will be more than 9 billion by 2050. The reason why UN analysts have not pointed this out and directed global attention to the only approach to the problem that will work – abandoning the industrial path to development – is nothing more or less than lack of guts. The diplomats who run the organization dare not offend the powerful people who run the world.

The aim of the reform process we have proposed is to take it away from diplomats and put it in the hands of activists around the world. Read it and get involved.