The Best Time? On the End of Time?

IT WOULD BE ILLUSORY TO SAY ITS FUTURE IS IN ITS OWN HANDS

The twenty-first century will either be the best time or the end of time for the United Nations. The alternatives are that stark.

The imperative of an effective world Organization has not been so clear since its founding in the shadow of this century's bloodiest war. Strife girdles the globe, from Kosovo to East Timor. The economy has gone global, and sovereignty is under siege. Democracy and decentralization--natural allies--are ascendant. And there is no way for any State, even the most self-sufficient States, to secure its interests acting alone.

But faith in the dream is fading in the United Nations' most influential member--the United States--not because of any fundamental disagreement of policy, but because the United Nations does not seem to matter enough. If the United States loses interest, the Organization will lose its way--and go the way of the League of Nations.

So what is to be done? How can the United Nations realize its immense promise and reclaim the role for which it was created? The short answer is success in Kosovo and East Timor. Nothing will matter more. And nothing will be more difficult.

Turning to the institutional issues, one key to a revitalized UN is to focus on core missions, do them well and make certain that the United Nations' many publics are aware of what the Organization is doing. These missions must be important, they must draw upon the United Nations' singular strength--its universality and the immense moral authority that bestows upon its leaders--and they must be within the means (institutional, political and financial) of the United Nations to achieve.

I would identify five such overarching missions: international peace and security; good governance (democracy, the rule of law and human rights); humanitarian relief; the formulation of international standards and norms of commercial and political behaviour; and sustainable development.

Each of these missions draws heavily upon the United Nations' unique legitimacy as the universal world Organization. Each is tailored to the United Nations' comparative advantage in relation to other national and multilateral actors. And all must meet huge and growing needs. Here are a few initiatives that meet the criteria.

* An all-volunteer rapid reaction peace-keeping force is not a new idea. But there may be new opportunity in the twenty-first century to bring such a force into being. The proliferation of conflicts, not implicating the vital national interests of any of the leading powers, eventually will force recognition of a choice other than staying out and going in alone or with others on terms which rule out the risk of casualties, but assure that intervention will follow rather than prevent humanitarian disaster. Under current practice, intervention is acceptable only where the risk of casualties is minimal. The right answer is to create an all-volunteer peacekeeping corps within the militaries of each participating United Nations Member State, which would mean that potential participants, including American soldiers, would have a choice--they could opt in to the corps or not. The corps would be deployed only at the direction of the Security Council. Common training, shared doctrine and advance arrangements for command and control would make the force far more effective than in the past.

* Resort to intervention should be preceded by a new preventive diplomacy of diversity. Political arrangements, skillfully designed to balance and accommodate the competing interests and colliding fears of ethnic groups, must be engineered. Take a case in point. If the international community had refused to recognize as States the former republics which broke away from Yugoslavia until the concerns of the minority ethnic communities in Croatia and Bosnia had been satisfactorily addressed, isn't it possible that the resulting slaughter could have been avoided? Preventive diplomacy, backed by the international community, would call for creation of a diplomatic corps available for rapid deployment, and trained in the mediation and remediation of ethnic conflict.

* The ceaseless churning of the global economy is creating a new role for the United Nations in addressing some of the most profound causes of instability. It is now clear beyond debate that change ceaseless and that those which fail to adapt break down. Further, an openness to change requires democratic institutions. There is, in short, an alignment between political democracy and the policies needed to succeed economically. Just as technology is driving toward individualization and away from statism, the imperatives of the global economy are driving toward democracy and the rule of law. Developing countries caught up in these swirling currents are unlikely to accept assistance on matters as politically sensitive as this from other States bilaterally. As the universal Organization, the United Nations is uniquely positioned to overcome this resistance. This calls for a specially focused effort to assist these countries in building the soft infrastructure of democratic institutions and the culture which sustains them--the rule of law, the protection of human rights, the installation of good governance and the creation of social safety nets to help those who will find themselves on the wrong side of change.

* An allied role for the United Nations is to identify and disseminate best practices in terms of development--what works, what does not and why. Again, this would draw upon the United Nations comparative advantage as the pre-eminent universal international organization. UN-sponsored conferences would provide an obvious forum for evaluating and disseminating such best practices.

* To generate and sustain public support for its work, the United Nations must create a new culture of performance. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for the United Nations "to become a results-based organization". That means budgeting for results, setting expectations for programmes, measuring performance and reporting the results. Transparency, accountability and performance must be the watchwords of the United Nations of the twenty-first century.

It would be illusory to suggest that the United Nations future lies in its own hands. The reality, of course, is that it cannot succeed unless Member States, and in particular the United States, would have it so. What the United Nations can do is to put the case in its best light by projecting what a well functioning UN could accomplish. As we enter a new century and millennium, there is opportunity anew to make this case.

David E. Birenbaum was United States Representative at the United Nations for Management and Reform, 1994-1996, and is a Partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Jacobson, Washington, D.C.