Let’s get back to work, shall we? The administration is turning over in less than three weeks, President Clinton is still groping for a legacy and he’s turning to ecumenism for help. Southern Baptist Clinton is throwing a Hail Mary pass and he’s hoping a Muslim and Jew will catch it. If Bill gets a deal on the middle east, maybe historians will overlook everything else. Jimmy Carter still has the Camp David accords to point to.
Most of those involved believe the Bush team will be less helpful in the mideast than Mr. Clinton is, and if a settlement doesn’t happen soon, Ehud Barak may lose his seat to Ariel Sharon and the situation will go from bad to unthinkable.
A distant memory from civics class tells me that’s not supposed to be the shape of things in 2001. The international politics of peace were supposed to have risen above the petty politics of states. The United Nations, which was still young when I sat in civics class, was supposed to grow strong and flex its muscles in the cause of impartiality. We now know the UN has a set of built-in contradictions it can never rise above.
The first contradiction allows members of the Security Council – permanent members especially – to stop action on any issue they choose. In a situation like Israel versus the Palestinians, the US, which sees Israel as a client state, will prevent the UN from getting involved.
Unfortunately, the exact opposite also seems to be true. If a member nation on the Security Council does not have an interest in a regional issue, nothing gets done, either. Take Rwanda for example. We all now agree that a modest force of UN peacekeepers, well-placed in the mid-1990s, could have prevented the Hutus and the Tutsis from slaughtering each other. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. No nation on the Security Council wanted to send the troops to lead the peacekeeping mission. Some people have suggested that a rapid-response force be formed with troops from non-Security Council nations. That’s not likely to happen, because the big boys don’t want any of the second-tier nations getting a leg up. If Superman decides against saving the drowning baby, he’s not going to let Jimmy Olsen step in and do it instead.
A third contradiction finds the United Nations as a political organization in an economic era. The UN was formed as a response to World War Two, just as the League of Nations was formed as a response to World War One. The era of multinational military alliances passed with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. We are now in the era of multinational corporations and the organizations that count are the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Which does not mean there is no role left for the United Nations. Globalization, like global conflict, makes a mess. It drives people, poor people, from their villages and makes refugees of them, whether they’re internal refugees, living in the shanties of East Timor after soldiers who were allegedly protecting them destroyed their homes, or international refugees, like the great east to west and south to north migrations of displaced people looking for work.
The UN’s most prominent work today is dealing with refugees, starving children and fighting the global spread of AIDS. Cleaning up the mess. An organization that started with such high hopes, what some people thought would evolve into a world government, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, fair and just to all, has been relegated to cleaning up the mess left by the real world government, the one motivated by greed, not fairness and profit, not justice.
Maybe it’s not such a bad role after all. If we are ever going to make a better world, the kind envisioned at the UN’s founding, compassion is a good place to start.
Cleaning Up The Mess
Let’s get back to work, shall we? The administration is turning over in less than three weeks, President Clinton is still groping for a legacy and he’s turning to ecumenism for help. Southern Baptist Clinton is throwing a Hail Mary pass and he’s hoping a Muslim and Jew will catch it. If Bill gets a deal on the middle east, maybe historians will overlook everything else. Jimmy Carter still has the Camp David accords to point to.
Most of those involved believe the Bush team will be less helpful in the mideast than Mr. Clinton is, and if a settlement doesn’t happen soon, Ehud Barak may lose his seat to Ariel Sharon and the situation will go from bad to unthinkable.
A distant memory from civics class tells me that’s not supposed to be the shape of things in 2001. The international politics of peace were supposed to have risen above the petty politics of states. The United Nations, which was still young when I sat in civics class, was supposed to grow strong and flex its muscles in the cause of impartiality. We now know the UN has a set of built-in contradictions it can never rise above.
The first contradiction allows members of the Security Council – permanent members especially – to stop action on any issue they choose. In a situation like Israel versus the Palestinians, the US, which sees Israel as a client state, will prevent the UN from getting involved.
Unfortunately, the exact opposite also seems to be true. If a member nation on the Security Council does not have an interest in a regional issue, nothing gets done, either. Take Rwanda for example. We all now agree that a modest force of UN peacekeepers, well-placed in the mid-1990s, could have prevented the Hutus and the Tutsis from slaughtering each other. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved. No nation on the Security Council wanted to send the troops to lead the peacekeeping mission. Some people have suggested that a rapid-response force be formed with troops from non-Security Council nations. That’s not likely to happen, because the big boys don’t want any of the second-tier nations getting a leg up. If Superman decides against saving the drowning baby, he’s not going to let Jimmy Olsen step in and do it instead.
A third contradiction finds the United Nations as a political organization in an economic era. The UN was formed as a response to World War Two, just as the League of Nations was formed as a response to World War One. The era of multinational military alliances passed with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. We are now in the era of multinational corporations and the organizations that count are the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Which does not mean there is no role left for the United Nations. Globalization, like global conflict, makes a mess. It drives people, poor people, from their villages and makes refugees of them, whether they’re internal refugees, living in the shanties of East Timor after soldiers who were allegedly protecting them destroyed their homes, or international refugees, like the great east to west and south to north migrations of displaced people looking for work.
The UN’s most prominent work today is dealing with refugees, starving children and fighting the global spread of AIDS. Cleaning up the mess. An organization that started with such high hopes, what some people thought would evolve into a world government, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, fair and just to all, has been relegated to cleaning up the mess left by the real world government, the one motivated by greed, not fairness and profit, not justice.
Maybe it’s not such a bad role after all. If we are ever going to make a better world, the kind envisioned at the UN’s founding, compassion is a good place to start.