Panel discussion: can the United Nations survive?
2003 Report (Continued)
Nevertheless, power remains a factor and the U.S. has accumulated such a high degree of power that it threatens the international system. Ambassador Mahbubani recalled the League of Nations, which collapsed without U.S. support, and he predicted that if the UN allows the U.S. to leave without accommodating the country's needs, the UN will fail as well. But does the UN then have to accept everything the U.S. does? The U.S. did go to war with Iraq without specific UN support, but the Bush administration has since come back to the UN for help with the reconstruction. The Ambassador argued that this demonstrated that the UN still has something that the U.S. wants--namely, legitimacy, the importance of which is frequently underestimated. While there has been much talk of legitimacy as an abstract commodity, it is in fact a very practical way of getting troops, money, and so forth. Ambassador Mahbubani concluded that the United Nations has a monopoly on international legitimacy and must act wisely to use this tool of legitimacy in practical ways.
Ambassador Mahbubani was followed by Ambassador Pierre Schori, Permanent Representative of Sweden to the UN, who began by stating that the UN is very much alive, at the center of international attention, and, for the moment, being courted by the world's only superpower. (President Bush had just circulated a new resolution to the Security Council encouraging it to "strengthen its role" in Iraq.) Yet, Ambassador Schori recognized, the UN is facing a double threat: first, from those who want to abuse legitimacy, and second, from those who refuse change. He went on to explain that, in this interdependent world, multinational security in an age of terrorism cannot be achieved through nations acting alone according to narrow definitions of their national interest. We have reached a state, he contended, at which we must give the Security Council the power to act to protect individual survival over state sovereignty, in order to guard against genocide and other mass violations of human rights. The problem, in the Ambassador's assessment, is that Third World nations fear that intervention will be used to achieve hidden agendas and that funding these activities will take money away from foreign aid budgets.
Pierre Schori maintained that the only way to overcome this problem is to affect radical change within the UN in order to achieve greater equality and greater effectiveness. We need to devote major resources to strengthening the UN through reform, to aligning its different functions and the relationships between them, and to establishing a common security agenda. The Ambassador asserted that the number of members of the Security Council should increase and that we must separate the notions of humanitarian intervention and regime change, which have gotten confused. He stated, in conclusion, that the UN must and will survive. In the words of Kofi Annan, "the United Nations is by no means a perfect instrument, but it is a precious one."
The final panelist to comment was Edward Mortimer, Director of the Speechwriting Unit in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. Mortimer first returned to the issue of the moral stand described by Tlili versus the "neo-realist" perspective represented by Glennon, speculating that perhaps there was actually no conflict between the two point of views, but that morality is just a more enlightened and broader way of understanding one's own self-interest. What Tlili referred to as morality, Mortimer explained, was actually an enlargement, in time and space, of one's reality.
Back to the top.Upcoming Event
“Miral: A Palestinian/Israeli Dialogue On and Off Screen”
Film Screening and Panel Discussion
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts
Thursday, February 2, 2012, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
(Reception to follow)
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