Opinion.

As the twenty-first century draws nearer, we are witnessing an era where foreign policy and international relations are increasingly values-driven. The United States and other major countries from the vanguard of what amounts to a universal crusade to spread doctrines and practice of their version of good governance and democracy, in tandem with wider acceptance of liberal market economic policy as the pathway to modernization. But a profound paradox emerges here. As the world grows more democratic, so the United Nations becomes less democratic--or at least mired in ways of governance reflecting its formative period, which fails to mirror today's world and relative global influence. Realists argue there is no correlation between a more democratic world and a more democratic multilateral system, that no intrinsic linkages exist. That is an argument which rests upon the distribution of power and those that want to maintain their built-in advantage. The signs are that the fundamental logic of such an argument will be put to the test sooner, rather than later, in the century ahead.

Critical reflection drives us to the conclusion that despite urgency and obvious need, the United Nations is probably not going to be reformed in a meaningful way. Differences among Member States stemming from power-political rivalries and "ideological" antagonisms have been fundamental obstacles to United Nations reform. These differences continue today. Even as the debate between East and West lapsed into obsolescence, the debate between North and South continues, with emphasis on conflicting claims on fundamental values and perspectives. The United Nations remains a stake and a prize in the escalating debate. Every proposal for change in the Organization is assessed in light of advantages bestowed upon one or the other side, and every recommendation for reform offered by one is predictably resisted by the other. Such a situation has tended to cause political gridlock everywhere.

The developing countries of the South regard the United Nations as a place of last recourse, not having Group of Seven or Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and having to bend to the conditionalities imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions. These countries believe in the centrality of the United Nations being a universal house, where they plead their case every September at the General Assembly They have not accepted the so-called "division of labour" between the United Nations and other multilateral bodies, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), where the World Bank is accorded primacy in finance and development, the IMF in structural adjustment and the WTO in trade and investment regimes. The United Nations is only allowed to articulate the normative description of"soft issues", such as sustainable development, population and refugees, human rights and humanitarian issues. The frailty of such a role for the United Nations is most recently evident in the outcome of the General Assembly special session three days ago, which reviewed implementation of Agenda 21 and the commitments of the Earth Summit. The outcome reflected the inability of the United Nations to grapple with failure of Governments to meet commitments and its weakness in being able to catalyse the means and resources to operationalize sustainable development. The United Nations has precious little to translate words into real action.

Enthusiasm for reform is also unevenly distributed within the United Nations itself For many of those Secretariat officials who have been busy "reforming" for the last 15 years, the possibility of genuine change is greeted with cynicism. For others in the bureaucracy, the prospect of change is threatening, and the tendency to delay or derail reform via resistance from the inside is quite real.

The one huge task accorded to the United Nations is the maintenance of international peace and security. But this is within the parish and exclusive control of the Security Council, which is very much an elitist structure that the developing countries see in need of urgent reform in order to level the playing field and to broaden the decision-making process. If the United Nations was created by States to serve the interests of States, the States of the South are now insisting on their rights to be counted in the name of sovereign equality. Every aspect of United Nations reform has to factor in this consideration.

This most important dimension of the reform of the Security Council has to contend with the opposition of a dozen or so important countries who have traditionally supported the multilateral thrust and philosophy of the United Nations in all its aspects, but who themselves will not profit from an expansion of the Security Council. I refer here to countries like Canada, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, Mexico and others in the developing world who aspire to be permanent members, but who may well lose in the race. Their position ensures further division within the United Nations when Security Council reform is instituted.

All aspects of United Nations reform have to relate to the overall backdrop of the international scene today. For example, one has to recognize that the gap between the legal and political sovereignty of States and their ability to give that sovereignty concrete shape has never been larger than at present, for example, transboundary nature of environmental pollution, refugee flows across national borders, global communication webs that defy national controls, and so on. Though this gap exists, there is no corresponding international machinery to do the job. The United Nations, standing for that international machinery, is not up to the challenge, whether the global problems relate to the traditional peace and security area or to the economic and social fields. Regional machinery such as the Association of South-East Asian Nations, the Common Market of the Southern Cone and the European Union fare much better, pointing the directions for future linkages between the United Nations and these bodies.

Despite structural difficulties, the United Nations has performed well and has an impressive record of achievements. However, how well has the United Nations done in playing a central role in managing today's problems? The United Nations appears to suffer from two fundamental problems: the ambiguity of its role in the world; and its inability to adapt as the world changes. The role of the United Nations at the close of the twentieth century is determined by two factors, each pulling in opposite directions. While the causes and effects of most major challenges facing Governments are international, the authority for dealing with such problems remains vested in States. Furthermore, the United Nations was established to prevent acts of international aggression, but it is now being asked to solve deep-seated, often seemingly intractable internal problems of vulnerable States and their implosion. Today's wars are often wars within a particular State, civil wars fuelled by easy access to cheap weaponry sold mostly by the major Powers, where conflicts make no distinction in the death and misery they bring, making humanitarian needs greater now than before.

The United Nations is currency over-stretched in areas of peacekeeping and enforcement operations more than it has ever been in its entire history, though this only adds up to about 20 per cent of the United Nations total activity. Added to which the United Nations is now suffocated by criticism and doubt, derived in part by internal discontent, but also because it is mired in a variety of conflicts for which there are no easy or obvious solutions, for example, Cyprus, Western Sahara, Bosnia, Haiti. The United Nations collective security apparatus has been compelled to improvise in these situations. As a result, it has frequently found itself confined to the margins of dangerous conflict, unable to even fulfil the more modest tasks of mediation or peacekeeping. It is also clear that national sovereignty and the principle of non-interference can no longer be used as a mask for actions which violate universal values. This means that States and peoples need to readjust their views of what the United Nations can and cannot do in relation to internal conflicts. The United Nations was established to provide a coordinating core for international activity, but it has a staff no larger than that of major municipal authorities. All the problems on the United Nations agenda today require enormous military, financial, physical and staff resources, but these have to be fought for because Member States do not have or are unwilling to place them at the disposal of the Secretary-General or the Security-Council. At the same time, Member States are not yet accustomed to thinking that multilateral initiatives are the key to world peace and security, and not just an optional extra.

The challenge facing the United Nations in being able to deal with today's problems is not necessarily one of scope, but of knowing how to steer a course between inaction and over-commitment. It is about procedures for responding to and managing crises while laying the foundations for preventing such crises in the future. It is also about developing new ways of doing international politics so that potential problems are surfaced and solved. This requires an acknowledgment that the great bulk of the United Nations work is not in crisis management, the restoration of peace or peacekeeping, but in the less acknowledged work in the areas of development, disarmament, human rights, humanitarian and refugee relief, and environmental protection.

It is not clear how strongly countries really want United Nations reform. The sort of reform being addressed, important as it is, is not intended to shape the United Nations to reflect the world as it is, nor to strengthen the rule of international law. Neither is its purpose to equip the United Nations to sanction countries that fail to meet international treaty obligations--whether they be enforcement of human rights, trade in nuclear fissile material or mandatory financial payments to the United Nations itself. This is attributed to the selectivity and power politics applied by permanent members of the Security Council. Nor do the major States accept the International Court of Justice as a principle buttress for the rule of law in international affairs. In fact, the reforms which are now the subject of intergovernmental debate in the United Nations (except for Security Council reform) are not intended to make the United Nations more democratic, but cost-effective, leaner, more efficient and coordinated. The present reform objectives have in some ways diverted attention from the United Nations real function and responsibilities, and for some, that is their precise purpose.

The United Nations Charter embodies universal values, but the promotion of such values borders on its politicization. This is further sharpened to the extent that liberal global values are now promoted to include not only human rights, but democratic governance and orthodox free market economics. The claim that such a blend of comprehensive and interrelated values provide coherent answers to all the problems of humankind is a notion that many, and not just those in Asia, will harbour deep reservations. While the equivalence of all human rights is a consensual principle, the primacy accorded to civil and political rights, at the expense of social and economic rights, by the chief human rights activist nations has tended to cause imbalance in priorities and application in the international agenda. Readier admission of social and economic rights would, however, carry with it complex repercussions for industrialized economies at a time when environmental protection and sustainable development have risen to the top of the international economic agenda; when the "polluter pays" principle is more assertively proclaimed; and when the poverty gap between the rich and the least developed is widening. The facts speak for themselves--1.4 billion people now live in absolute poverty, 40 per cent more than 15 years ago. When these facts are added to increasing insecurity about basic needs such as access to food and clean water supplies, it is clear that combining the economic and social agenda with the political and civil is no longer an option, but a necessity.

Future historians may come to view the last years of this decade as an age of paradox in which international politics has been dominated by two contradictory facts: increasing nationalism and decreasing national power. The time would seem ripe for adapting international equipment to meet the challenge of such a paradox. But is this possible given the multiplicity of factors that would need to be factored in composing a solution? And would such a composition place the United Nations at the centre of the solution?

Over the last several years, the United Nations has been increasingly incapacitated by an identity crisis which prevents it from articulating a coherent vision of its role in today's world, that is at once compelling and attractive to a balanced majority of its Members. It is a crisis rooted in the evolution of the United Nations political ethos over 50 years. Uncertainty about what a practical United Nations role should be has prevented Member States from developing and refining the United Nations central structure. Even if there were stronger agreement about the United Nations specific role, the United Nations would be poorly equipped to exercise it without a change in its core structure and approach.

Any accurate appraisal of the United Nations must start with the recognition that it is an institution run by 185 directors, 5 more equal than others, all with little in common except that they all possess sovereign statehood and a recognized right to participate in the United Nations. Any discussion of United Nations reform must proceed from a recognition of the very real political and economic constraints under which the Organization must operate. The United Nations and the global community face a set of problems which were neither anticipated nor planned for when the United Nations was established 51 years ago. Only with a clear idea of the source of difficulties that have confronted the United Nations will it be able to meet the challenges of the future.

The United Nations will have to transform itself from an organization serving the interests of States to an organization serving the interests of people living in an interdependent and global society. It will have to provide opportunities for the articulation of grievances and some kind of participation of non-State actors. It could, and should serve as a clearing house for a network of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and stakeholders, whose work and interests are directed towards achieving greater understanding of the complexities of inter-group conflict and developing concrete solutions for the eradication of poverty, for the building of social equity and ensuring sustainability.

Eventually it is essential that supportive Member States work together with NGOs to generate the political pressure necessary to convince reluctant and belligerent Governments of the need to maintain the United Nations, recognizing that it is the most viable opportunity for the articulation, coordination and management of global cooperation. Greater public interest in international affairs is required, particularly among the publics of major countries. This would allow for a resurgent voice for multilateralism, so that the voice of the vocal minority who publicly malign the United Nations is no longer heard unchallenged.

(These are excerpts from the address delivered by then General Assembly President, Razali Ismail of Malaysia, at the first Erskine Childers Memorial Lecture, in London on 30 June.)