The Seventeenth Corbishley
Memorial Lecture 1993
The United Nations-Forward or Back?
by Sir Brian Urquhart KCMG MBE
FOREWORD By the Chairman of the Wyndham Place Trust, George Wedell
Sir Brian Urquhart’s lecture more than fulfilled the brief given to him by the Wyndham Place mist, which was to analyse a key function of the United Nations at a time of unprecedented demand for its intervention. in concentrating his lecture on the peace-keeping activities of the United Nations he analysed both the essential character of the function of the Organisation: and the contradictions: political, economic and structural, which render the carrying-out of this function as difficult as it is vital
Sir Brian also discusses the task of the UN Secretariat. The Secretariat has a splendid history of taking on essential functions when they arise, without waiting for earmarked funds to arrive. Successive Secretaries-General and their staffs have recognised that they must lead, in the hope that their constituents will follow. These acts of faith have put to shame those dependent on the effectiveness of the organisation but are reluctant to will the means. Little by little in the last year, many of those countries which have withheld their contributions have been shamed into action. And while the present position of the UN is by no means satisfactory, the faith and consistency of its permanent staff over the decades are beginning to bear fruit. Sir Brian is one of the small band of men and women who have served the UN for most of their careers. He is therefore entitled to a significant share of the recognition which the UN is beginning to receive.
Sir Brian’s Lecture bears witness to the UN’s unique role in the affairs of the nations as they reluctantly recognise the need to coexist or they will perish. The world owes to the Organisation an immeasurable debt, both for what has been achieved, and for what it is doing now to deal with the consequences of liberalisation on a global scale.
The Trustees hope that the lecture will be read and marked by all those who have responsibility for world peace and the rule of law, and that it will lead to an even stronger commitment by the nations to its support.
THE UNITED NATIONS-FORWARD OR BACK?
I am very honoured and pleased to have been asked to give the Thomas Corbishley Memorial Lecture. I see that the Wyndham Place mist is dedicated to ‘peace, world order and the rule of law’. Having read that rather short description, I wondered why I was giving a lecture at all because it says all that needs to be said. Father Corbishley was actively devoted to these simple, but immensely important objectives, especially in Europe, and he was an active member of the Wyndham Place mist.
I chose this title because it is a very testing time for everybody, and particularly for the world organisation - the United Nations. After the frozen certainties of the Cold War, we are suddenly in a period of a free-for-all, for which nobody was prepared. Events are moving in a series of unexpected directions. There is a great need for a basic reappraisal and a review, not only of the institutions which we hope one day will manage this world rather better, but also of the ideas behind them. It is often said that we now live in a ‘multi-polar’ world, whatever that may be. I prefer the formulation given by the great American philosopher and baseball player, Yogi Berra ,who once said that if you reach a fork in the road, take it! Everyone is so keen on stereotyping problems and directions that we often find ourselves in an unnecessary state of depression because we have not been able to follow some strict ideological plan.
As always, the United Nations is the symbol and stage on which this confusion is acted out. Also, throughout its history, it has provided an extremely useful scapegoat, one of its main functions, particularly for governments. It is the only universal institution with the scope and the mandate to try to look to the future as well as to the confusions of the present. For better or worse, it must be the foundation on which the future management of the planet will have to be based, whether it is suited for that purpose or not. I am reminded of the motorist in Ireland who stopped in a small village to ask the way to Limerick. The answer came back, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here!’ The UN is rather like that. It was set up for different purposes than those for which it is now being used. It needs a great deal of attention, work and criticism if it is to live up to the hopes and aspirations which people have for it now.
At the moment, it is quite clear that the United Nations is involved in far too many situations at the same time. I want to deal with one particular category of situations, the so-called peace-keeping and peace operations. The basic functions of the United Nations are far more important, in the historical sense, than peace-keeping operations which now occupy the front pages of the newspapers. The truth is that these operations are the symptoms of much more serious problems. If we do not develop international institutions which can address the problems of poverty, population, environmental degradation and our use of natural resources, and a series of inter-connected problems of that kind, we will see more and more situations of violence and disaster, and have less confidence in our handling of them.
I propose to deal with the UN’s handling of the symptoms, the so-called peace-keeping operations, because they illuminate the possibilities of the organisation, as well as its very great problems and its shortcomings.
There is an urgent need to redefine and re-orient the world organisation. There is also an urgent need for governments to take a look at the UN Charter, which they signed with great enthusiasm in 1945, and ask themselves if they really want to support the world organisation which is based on it. In my long life in the UN, there were many moments when it was not at all clear to me that even those governments which spouted the most favourable rhetoric about the UN were actually prepared to support the organisation to the full and with all the implications of that support.
In 1945, there was a vision. It was the result of a great act of statesmanship which was then called post-war planning, mostly inspired by the United States. Post-war planning was designed to have in place by the end of the war, which we had to assume we would win, a complete structure on which to try to build a better, more peaceful, equitable and just world. Roosevelt was the leader in this effort. He had attended the Versailles Conference in 1919 as Under-Secretary for the Navy of the United States, and had been appalled at the mistakes of a Conference for which there had been no serious preparation. He determined that this should not happen again. The result was that in 1945, when the war finally ended, there was in place a complete structure of international institutions: the United Nations and the Charter, the International Court of Justice, the specialised agencies and the Bretton Woods institutions, the Bank and the Fund, and a trade organisation which never came into being, together with regional organisations, and a concept of a better world based on the notion of collective security.
The idea was that the United Nations would do two things: it would provide a system under which nations could unite in situations of danger, and it would also allow them to harmonise their national policies for great economic and social objectives, development, decolonisation, human rights, inter-national law and so on.
Unfortunately the system was based on one false assumption and a notable lack of foresight. The false assumption was that the permanent members of the Security Council, the leaders of the victorious alliance in World War Two, would stay together after the war to manage, supervise and, if necessary, enforce the peace. The Charter was to some extent a formula for dealing retrospectively with Hitler and Mussolini, but they were not the problem after the war. Furthermore, the five permanent members had no intention of staying together. They instantly fell out, and therefore the United Nations - the name referred to nations united in war and came from the Atlantic Charter - fell to pieces in one very important respect. The structure for collective security was frozen throughout the Cold War, and instead, various people, including Dag Hammarskjold and Ralph Bunche, improvised a series of arrangements for containing conflict, and particularly for preventing regional conflicts from detonating a nuclear war between east and west, something that nearly happened several times. In retrospect, perhaps the great achievement of the United Nations in the Cold War was to help to prevent that from happening. The containment of those conflicts in the Middle East, the Congo, the Cuban missile crisis, and the successive wars between India and Pakistan. was an extremely important function. The invention of a completely new category of international action, now called peace-keeping, was an important factor in trying to bring about that containment.
In 1945, no one foresaw to any great extent the revolutionary changes in the human condition which would soon change the world. Nobody believed that decolonisation would only take 20-25 years. It was supposed to take 100 years. People were not able to foresee - how could they? - the implications for human life and human organisation of the technological revolution, especially the revolution in communications. Neither did they foresee that the population would double in the next 45 years, and could probably double again by the year 2030.
Forty-eight years later we face an extremely different sort of world from the one which confronted the founders of the United Nations. The world is no longer frozen by Cold War certainties, and by the necessity of containing conflict so that it does not trigger a nuclear confrontation. Instead we have a great deal of confusion, and unlike 1945, there is no post-Cold War planning. There is no uniting vision of how we would like the world to develop in the future.
At the end of the Cold War, unwisely I think, there was a good deal of premature boasting about the UN. There was a great deal of talk about the renaissance, about how it would now work as originally intended, and everything would be fine. President Bush even mentioned the 'new world order', an unfortunate phrase in more ways than one. In fact there were some early and rather promising successes - the end of the Iran/Iraq war, the successful bringing to independence of Namibia, and some achievements which attracted very little attention - for example the highly original negotiation to end the endemic civil war in El Salvador.
It is usually the failures that make the news. The general impression is that the UN is floundering, has done nothing and is hopelessly ineffective and inefficient. That is particularly because in the last four years, the UN has initiated seventeen peace-keeping operations world wide, as compared to thirteen in all of the previous 40 years. Its workload and its responsibilities have increased enormously.
This has led to the United Nations’ current crisis of credibility and relevance, which is particularly acute in the United States, where people have been conditioned to believe in instant satisfaction and success and find it very hard to believe that some problems take a bit longer, or even may not, strictly speaking, be soluble at all.
The nature of the situations in which the UN Is now involved is also fundamentally different. The UN was set up as a mechanism to deal with disputes and conflicts between states. It is specifically debarred from the internal problems of states, but virtually all its current activities are in civil wars of various kinds within the boundaries of states or collapsed states like Somalia or Yugoslavia. It is not set up to do this and is therefore going through a highly experimental phase. This is particularly true in ex-Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti and Angola.
The UN has very meagre resources and always has had. Contrary to popular belief, it operates on a shoestring. Thus new responsibilities have greatly strained the organisation. There is at present a great outburst of the phenomenon which Dag Hammarskjold called ‘blaming the storm on the ship’. We see a great deal of that nowadays. There is also a great outburst of general name-calling, particularly in the United States, where Congress blames the UN, the UN blames the United States, other people blame each other. If a crew on a ship starts to argue among themselves, it is very likely that the ship will come to no good. The truth is we are all out at sea, in very rough conditions, and at the moment, we only have a very vague idea of our destination. We do not have a compass or a chart, as we had in 1945, and we are not clear where we are going. Name-calling and blaming the storm on the ship are the last ways to deal with this situation.
Negative reporting disguises some basic facts. First, the UN is constantly given new responsibilities, not only in peace-keeping operations, but in huge global problems, like the environment, or ‘sustainable development’, but its most powerful members are more reluctant than ever to increase its resources, its authority and its financial base. In fact some of them even fail to pay their assessed contributions, which is a Treaty obligation.
There has been a hiring freeze in the UN Secretariat and a zero-growth budget for some six years. However, the workload has multiplied by a factor of about ten. The UN used to have about 10,000 troops in the field, it now has 80,000 It is something of a miracle that the organisation keeps going at all, but the story of the expense and inefficiency of the UN continues to be the dominant comment.
Governments, and particularly the permanent members of the Security Council, have often used the United Nations as a fig leaf for operations which are unpopular with their own constituencies, and they have often also used it as a scapegoat. We now see some examples of that tendency in the tragedies of Bosnia and Somalia. It is sometimes convenient to pretend that the UN is an Independent organisation of loony foreigners, somewhere on the East River in New York, and that governments do not have much to do with it. President Clinton, for example, recently told the General Assembly that "American people will not continue to support UN peace operations unless the UN learns to say ‘no’." A visitor from Mars would not suspect from that remark that the United States is a member of the organisation - a permanent member with a veto - and that it has voted for every one of the operations which are now in question.
The scapegoat and fig leaf business causes considerable confusion, but the real source lies much deeper. The original strength of the United Nations lay in the solidarity of its members in the face of danger and in pursuing great objectives for the future. Roosevelt deliberately insisted that the San Francisco Conference, which wrote the Charter, should take place before the war ended, believing, quite rightly, that the Charter would be much stronger if the people who were negotiating it had very clearly in their heads the horrors of war. To some extent, that solidarity has evaporated. The unimaginable potential danger of a nuclear confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States has given way to a new and unanticipated harvest of so-called low-level violence, disorder and human suffering, which is, in many ways, much more difficult to tackle and does not induce a feeling of world-wide solidarity. With that phenomenon, much of the sense of solidarity has vanished.
The vision of San Francisco is dimmed. Instead. governments are preoccupied with over-commitment to the United Nations, with the expense and risks to national troops in international operations.
The current debate in Washington on American participation in peace-keeping operations can have a very serious ripple effect outside the United States. Somalia is the first operation in which American troops have taken part on the ground. They have taken some casualties, as have other contingents, and this has created a debate about whether they should be there in the first place, who should command them and what the United Nations is trying to do. If this debate is not handled with forethought it will increase the problem of credibility and confidence for the UN. My own feeling is that it would be a great pity if the dead hand of the Cold War were now to be replaced by governmental cold feet about the UN. This is what appears to be happening at the moment.
During the Cold War, we used to think that it would be wonderful if the Security Council could agree on everything. The fact that it now can, turns out not to be an unqualified benefit. The Security Council turns out hundreds of resolutions - there are 53 on Yugoslavia alone - but it is harder and harder to make those resolutions into a reality on the ground. The average person in Sarajevo is unlikely to feel that the words and decisions of the Security Council have much effect on the situation. There is also a growing gulf between commitments to new operations and the availability of resources to allow the UN to take on more responsibilities.
There is also the very basic problem of the identity of the United Nations in the post-Cold War world. As I said, the organisation was set up as a mechanism for dealing with disputes and conflicts between states, and peace-keeping was developed under very specific conditions to help in that process. There had to be a peace to keep, i.e. a cease-fire. There had to be the consent, however reluctant, of those in conflict. There had to be cooperation. It was understood that peace-keeping operations would not use force and would stay above the conflict. It was possible to do this in conflicts between states because governments tend to have some respect for the Security Council and can also be brought under quite considerable pressure if necessary by other governments. However, if one is dealing with thugs and various other tough characters, such as the UN is now dealing with, that pressure is not effective. They have never heard of the Charter and could not care less about the Security Council. A peace-keeping operation is much more difficult in such conditions.
Other difficult questions also arise. When should the UN become involved and when should it not? What should the nature of its involvement be, and what conditions should be demanded in advance for that involvement? Before we rush into any more situations, I hope that these issues will be debated with much more clarity than they have been debated so far.
There is a much more basic question. Is the UN the organisation that was set up in 1945 to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, an organisation of sovereign states, whose conflicts and problems were supposed to be the threat to peace that had to be met? Or is it the embryonic structure of a world community that only exists at the moment in speeches
to the General Assembly? Is it the fire brigade, emergency squad, rescue operation and police force of the world? That is the way the public and the media increasingly see the UN. If that is really the case, there will have to be a serious review of the way it is organised, how it is to be supported and how it is to conduct its operations. Apart from the confusion over some UN operations, this question has enormous legal, constitutional, political, military, organisational, and of course, financial implications. Because of the press of events in the last three or four years, there has not been time to think these things through.
The UN increasingly becomes involved in situations for emotional and political reasons in a rather haphazard way, without necessarily thinking of the consequences. There is very little rational analysis in advance of Security Council decisions about what a situation and its main elements really are, what the UN can do about it, and even whether, in reality, it can do anything useful at all.
The problem sometimes comes down to committing the peacekeeping forces where the conditions do not exist for a peacekeeping operation to function in the usual way. The result - in Croatia and Bosnia, for example - was that the troops and civilians, who are beyond praise in what they are trying to do, have a terrible moral dilemma, If they try to do something to help people they are accused of abetting ethnic cleansing, or if they do not, they are accused of negligence and hard-heartedness. The one thing they cannot do is to settle the issue by force, and the public sometimes has difficulty in understanding that.
There is now some question as to whether this enormous effort, both civilian and military, in the second year of the war, is not in fact feeding the war, as well as the afflicted population If that is the case, some very hard and hard-hearted decisions will have to be taken. This dilemma was not foreseen at the outset. Another major issue is the use of force. To put a force into a country which has collapsed, like Somalia, under the enforcement chapter of the Charter, Chapter VII, seems to me a profoundly questionable idea. Experience seems to show that using force, particularly in a civil war, is not a good way of achieving a satisfactory result. That lesson has been learned again in Somalia with results that are both tragic and embarrassing General Aidid, who was pursued, on instructions of the Security Council, as a thug and a murderer, is now regarded as an essential partner in any negotiation of the future of Somalia -
The agreement over Angola was not negotiated by the United Nations, but in the frenzy of post-Cold War enthusiasm by the United States, South Africa and the Soviet Union. It was almost certain to fail because It made no preparation whatsoever to prepare the people in Angola (who had never voted before) and It made no arrangements to disarm the two factions. It was all left to good will, which Is a commodity that Is in extraordinary short supply In Angola, and to a ludicrously small UN team of 73 unarmed observers. The result of the elections was a bloodbath.
Iin Haiti the UN monitored the election which brought President Aristide to power, but it did not occur to anyone to wonder what would happen if he was thrown out. The present stalemate is a source of enormous embarrassment to the United Nations and of great suffering to the people of Haiti.
I mention these examples because what is required now Is a very hard-headed approach to the future commitments of the United Nations.
There are also very great practical problems with the United Nations. There is now an extraordinarily long delay between decision and action. It took six months to get 500 lightly armed Pakistani soldiers to Mogadlshu. In the old days that did not happen. We deployed 5,000 men in the first four days in the Congo, although most of us had not known previously where the Congo was.
There was total anarchy, but people had not yet really started to kill each other in earnest, and the situation was brought under control for the first two months of the UN’s operation in the Congo. Unfortunately it then broke down on Cold War lines with the President being backed by the West and the Prime Minister being backed by the East - the worst of situations. Immediate deployment after a Security Council decision is far more likely to be effective.
At present, the UN has little capacity to analyse situations before decisions are taken, or any reliable capacity for prompt and decisive action when the decision is taken. The result is often very untidy, controversial and ineffective intervention which lead to endless recriminations.
Scapegoating is not conducive to improvement. and in fact something is now being done now to provide a minimal infrastructure for the UN. Until now, every operation has started from scratch and on a shoestring, which is inefficient and extremely expensive in the long run. There is now an effort to build in contingency planning, training, logistics and an operational direction capacity as well. Let us hope that it will all make some difference.
At the moment, a great effort is also being made to provide a pool of standby troops in the member countries, to be trained and ready for UN involvement. A great effort is also being made to cooperate more with regional organisations. most of which have little or no capacity at all for this kind of thing. The trouble with standby operations is a political rather than a military one. Now that the UN has had some rather disagreeable experiences with these operations, governments will be more reluctant to send their troops into situations which they do not fully understand, which are nothing to do with their national security and which are very far from home. The United States has already made this very clear, and I have no doubt that others will follow. In theory, a standby arrangement is wonderful, but in practice it requires a political decision to send troops. I wonder how often a decision will be positive in the two or three vital days when it is vital to take hold of a situation and show that the Security Council is serious.
If the UN continues to be involved in the kind of violent situations which it now tries to cope with, it must have some minimum, highly trained, instantly available capacity for immediate deployment, for a spearhead role to help people who may fight each other to get out of that situation before they are hopelessly locked into it. Such a spearhead unit could also to do a kind of operational reconnaissance, to see what the situation is, how feasible a big UN operation would be and whether it is the kind of situation where an international intervention can do any good at all. The UN does not have that capacity at the moment. A rapid deployment force would not be a substitute for the national contingents of a larger and later operation.
I put these views in an article in the New York Review of Books about six months ago. After a highly sceptical reception, this idea, which is by no means a new suggestion, is now occasionally mentioned as a possible scheme. Like most good ideas, there are scores of objections to it: expense, control, supranationality, making the Security Council autocratic, and so on. There is one good argument for it, which is that it may be the right thing to do.
The objections to a volunteer international force, a kind of standing UN police force, are very similar to the objections that were made in the 1830s to Sir Robert Peel’s idea of a national police force. That idea, too, was greeted with some derision. Yet, some 30 or 40 years later, nobody could imagine Great Britain without a police force, and a great number of countries followed suit.
Either the UN should get out of the business of trying to deal with violent, low-level conflict, or if it stays in it, it must be given as least the minimum capacity to do something sensible.
Let me briefly mention some shorter term problems which have now become part of the debate. I mentioned the use of force; It is a very beguiling idea that the use of major force will solve political problems, but I do not believe it is a very valid one. The principle of the integrity of command of a UN operation has almost collapsed in Bosnia and Somalia. When every contingent in a UN force refers all its orders to its home capital before it obey them no coherent or effective operations possible.
Financing remains a tremendous problem. The Volker-Ogata Report produced by the Ford Foundation earlier this year, is an important contribution to the debate.
The 1992 expenses of the UN were less than the cost of two Stealth bombers, a weapon that is unlikely to be used in the future. There is a great deal to be done in getting the UN accepted as an integral part of the foreign and defence policies of its members. At the moment, it is mostly the Foreign Office budgets which pay the UN expenses, not the Defence departments. If one compares defence expenditures with assessments for UN peacekeeping, the average across the board is $1 for peace-keeping to $1400 for national defence, and yet it is the UN soldiers who are under fire around the world.
Let me finish with two basic questions which apply both to the long term problems which someone has to tackle if we are to have a decent 21st Century, and also the international peace and security role of the United Nations now so much discussed. We have to ask ourselves whether governments still hold the 1945 vision of the UN as the key to a more peaceful, just, equitable and prosperous world. Secondly, are governments prepared to develop the UN role both in peace and security and in economic and social matters, so that from being an international institution, it becomes eventually the constitutional mechanism of a world community which does not yet exist, but which politicians continually talk about.
The survival of our children and grandchildren may be involved with the answer to this question. We are at a unique point in human history. We have invented a number of ways of putting an end to the human experiment altogether, either by a sudden act or by a lingering series of major failures. This is the first time the human race has been in that position. We have also developed some enormous advantages: knowledge of an extraordinary scope and detail, the capacity to compute and foresee the future on the basis of that knowledge, and of course, mass communications. There is also a growing respect for individuals and individual human rights and a general sense that human society ought to be a society of decency and compassion. That respect is far more widespread than it used to be, and it is something which we should feel proud of.
A serious approach to the future requires both leadership and a long view. International leadership and the long view are not very popular with national politicians in the age of television and the public opinion poll. We have to revive the state of mind which animated governments during the war and in the late 1940s, when it seemed natural to embark on very long term and important historic tasks.
I hope that these and other questions will form the basis of a great debate and reassessment on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995, and that new and valid ideas and proposals and serious programmes for action will emerge. Groups like the Wyndham Place mist can contribute to that debate and point it in the right direction.
The Chairman: I think you will agree that our expectations were more than fulfilled by Sir Brian. We will go straight into discussion.
Mr Bruce Ritchie: I am a member of the Executive of the Association of World Federalists. I want to remind everyone that twenty years ago this year, the Wyndham Place mist produced a pamphlet called Keeping the Peace. The editor was a young man who sadly died this year. John Bowyer. I was very lucky to be at College with him. He was a great and wonderful friend. It is very encouraging, Sir Brian, to hear you say what the Wyndham Place mist said then. We were very amateurish when we wrote that pamphlet, but I am delighted that you support the general concept of an individual peace-keeping force.
Sir Brian Urguhart: Thank you. This is not a new idea. We suggested a smaller version of it in the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. It was regarded with contempt and derision by the great powers.
You have put your finger on a very important point. This will also do a great deal psychologically. Young people all over the world have a great deal of difficulty in identifying themselves at all with the United Nations. They have a feeling that it is very much an organisation of diplomats and bureaucrats and politicians and an older generation. If there was a really highly regarded, small, UN volunteer force of this kind, a force which was very hard to get into, I believe it would attract the interest and attention and loyalty of young people in a way that nothing else will. It is extremely important to have some UN activity that young people can aspire to in a practical way.
Margaret Quass: Can I ask Sir Brian what his views are on the proposed changes in the Security Council, i.e. its enlargement to include the big contributors, such as Japan and Germany? Do you think it is desirous, and if so, do you think it will happen in view of the fact that present members seem very satisfied with things as they are?
Sir Brian Urquhart: Let me take the last part of that question first. One of the great present dangers is that some people are all too satisfied with the way things are and that has created a great deal of disaffection in the hearts of all the rest. There is now a growing perception in the developing world, which is probably unfair, that the Security Council is increasingly the plaything of the United States, sometimes joined by Britain and France, that it is an industrial world organisation, and that it does not address their concerns at all, particularly about things like intervention inside the boundaries of a state.
Much of this is untrue, but there is a certain amount of sense In it too. Basically the Security Council membership is an anachronism. It does not reflect, as it was supposed to reflect, the balance of economic, military and political power in the world; Its five permanent members, cannot by the wildest stretch of imagination be seen as the most powerful countries in the world any more.
But the Security Council also has to be much more representative. It probably has to include Japan and Germany, because they are a very important financial support for the organisation. The representativeness of the membership has to be set against the effectiveness of any body of people over a certain size. The Security Council has already been increased once - from eleven to 15 members. The British and French are unlikely to resign their permanent seat.
If Germany and Japan wanted to become permanent members, probably without veto, the Council would still not be more representative of the concerns of the various regions of the world. The idea is also to put in three so-called regional superpowers from Latin America, Africa and Asia. That sounds fine until one looks at the problems involved between Indonesia and India, Nigeria and Egypt, and certainly between Argentina and Brazil. We may cross the starting line, but the end is not in sight. I imagine that the revamping of the Security Council will be pushed forward in the 50th anniversary year, but it will not be easy.
Professor Wedell: Could I pursue that for a moment? It cannot be taken for granted that this country and France are entitled forever and ever to continue a situation which reflects their position in the world in 1945. In the 1990s some corporate representation of the European Community would be more appropriate. One would have to find some alternating role for the regional super powers, five years each or something of that order. It is important that some solution is found that reflects the realities of the world. Do you think that that is a way of moving forward and could public opinion be made to support it?
Sir Brian Urquhart: I don’t know about the British and the French. There Is some doubt now as to the enthusiasm of the Japanese and the Germans. The privilege of permanent membership has many obligations - a higher contribution for peace-keeping and more active participation. Both countries have major constitutional and other problems.
Mr E Wistricht: Specifically on this issue, under the Maastricht Treaty we now have a commitment to a common foreign and security policy for its members. Indeed there may well be a decision that the operations within the United Nations should be part of common action. That then implies that the Community as such should act as one. Whether it means that Britain and France give up their places or not, I do not know, but it means that if Germany, France and Britain were permanent members, they would have to act as one in the exercise of policy matters.
Sir Brian Urquhart: I would not count on it! It is a nice idea. At that rate, it would be best for the European Community to have one seat. However, the recent performance over Yugoslavia shows that we have a very long way to go before the European Community act and think as one in serious policy matters.
Sir Edward Hunter-Blair: (Wyndham Place Trust) I have the impression that interest in the United Nations among the general population in Great Britain is very small. The United Nations Association was active and influential in Britain some years ago, but is now almost non-existent and non-active. The European Community may not be altogether popular in Britain, but at least it is controversial and discussed. The United Nations among the general public in Great Britain holds very little interest in comparison. Do you agree that this is a good or bad thing, and what should be done?
Sir Brian Urquhart: Your opinion on this is much sounder than mine. I live in the United States. I hope you are being pessimistic, but I am not so sure. One of the problems with the United Nations is that most of what it does is very difficult for the ordinary person to identity with, unless they happen to be nationally concerned with the matter at hand. For example, during the Suez crisis, there was no lack of interest - mostly negative - in the UN. It happened because the United Kingdom was involved in the life or death struggle, or thought they were. Public interest will come and go.
It is very difficult to interest people in institutions on a long term basis, and it is extremely difficult to interest them in long term problems on a regular basis. You can scare the public into an interest in the environment by skillfully designed press reporting for about six months or so, but it then goes out of fashion like last year’s hat, and there is another scare, population, AIDS, drugs, crime, etc., and the public fails to see that these are all really aspects of a single, very complex problem which has to be tackled. That is a great problem with the UN. It tries to focus on global problems. but it is very cumbersome. The UN is hopeless at public relations.
I do not remember a time when the United Nations was the centre of thinking of people in this country or even in the United States, except on the occasions when it suddenly occupied the headlines. In the 1973 war, when for a few days it looked as if the Soviet Union and the United States might clash in the Middle East and we managed to insert, at seventeen hours notice, a peacekeeping force which pinned down the cease fire between Egypt and Israel, the UN suddenly became a very popular organisation for about three weeks. Even Dr Waldheim, the Secretary-General, became popular!
I would like to see young people trying to realise that time is very short for the kind of integrated effort to deal with global problems which will be needed if the human race is to avoid coming to grinding halt in the second half of the next century. The statistics are terrifying and if that is not enough, the actual phenomena are terrifying. Many countries in Africa have an unbelievable AIDS rate, and a vast unemployment rate. How can any organised society survive in those conditions for very long? It does not stop there. Poverty and desperation cause migration which in turn causes upheavals in the countries of destination. There are all sorts of political, psychological and racial consequences.
We need to find a way to make people interested in this subject, as a way of looking at their own future. The United Nations, so far, has not been very good at that.
Professor Wedell: This is the problem that all international organisations face. The vast majority of people living on this earth are too preoccupied with getting by. It is a fact of life that one has to take into account.
Dr James Mark: Following on this point, I noticed that Sir Brian said at the beginning of his lecture that the peace-keeping operations in conserving the peace were less important in the long run than conserving the development of the undeveloped. If that is so, I wonder whether you could say a little more about what you would see as realistic objectives for the United Nations in the field of combating poverty and encouraging economic development?
Sir Brian Urquhart: Perhaps I expressed myself badly. In an ordinary nation state, if there is not a minimal degree of law and order, long term problems cannot be tackled, because there are no resources to do it, nobody’s attention is on it and you will get no support for it. That is true throughout the world. I am not saying that peace-keeping operations are not important. In fifty years time, they will be seen to be less historically important than the effort, or the failure to make the effort, to tackle major economic and social problems. In this area, the UN is in bad shape. For various reasons, the UN does not, except in a formal way, impinge upon the economic process in the world at large. No finance minister or chairman of a central bank ever goes to a UN meeting. They go to the Bank and Fund in Washington, which are organisations with weighted voting. The~ do not go to the General Assembly which used to be popular when the west had an automatic majority, but has now become a place of limbo and distraction.
There is very little macro-economic planning for the future on a global basis which relates to everyone who lives on earth The Group of Seven represents one set of interests - more or less. There is nothing which represents a serious effort to reconcile the interests of the whole population. At the moment there appears to be no John Maynard Keynes, no Jean Monnet, no person who has developed a new over-arching concept which would reconcile vast population increase, technology which reduces jobs, an extraordinarily uneven use of the world’s resources, mass unemployment, migration as the result of extreme poverty, and environmental damage, sometimes to the point of destroying what little life support there was in a country. We tinker with the old models. Nobody has thought out any revolutionary new equation which would begin to bring those facts into some relationship with each other.
I may be talking perfect nonsense, but in the long run, provided one can prevent the world from blowing itself up, which is by no means certain because nuclear proliferation is still a very dangerous issue, there should be some global effort to look at economic and social problems from the point of view of all people involved, not just one group of fortunate people. That is how the people of the developing world tend to see the UN and they do not like it.
Ms M. Davies (United Nations Association): I am from the United Nations Association - still on its feet and increasing every day! I wanted to mention that the United Nations has had some terrible friends among the newspapers in this country. While on a visit to New York recently someone asked me what was happening in Britain because all the leading papers carried bad reports of the UN. Your lecture has put the record straight in my ways because we understand what is happening.
Do you know why the press are so against the United Nations? I have an idea of where it is coming from. Secondly, in your final remarks you said that you wanted to ask the question in the fiftieth anniversary year whether governments still have a vision. We have already set up a fiftieth anniversary committee in this country. I feel we should also ask people whether they still have the vision. Many of us do. I refer to the Preamble to the Charter of the UN which reads ‘We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...
You, sir, have spent your whole life determined to save succeeding generations. I would not only want to ask Governments, but wonder whether you would include asking people whether they also have that vision.
Sir Brian Urquhart: In the past forty-odd years, I have often wondered myself why people are anti-UN. There are two basic reasons. First, the UN is the greatest single organised group of foreigners in the world, no matter what nationality you are, and foreigners are always easy to criticise. Secondly, particularly during a very confused time, it is much easier to find a scapegoat than it is to propose how to move into smoother waters in an organised way. The UN sets itself up for that every time. It is a great pity. I do not know what can be done about It. Much of it is to do with leadership, that rather unquantifiable quality which makes all the difference in human enterprises of all kinds. Dag Hammarskjold was Secretary General of the UN for eight years, and, although he was very unpopular in this country over Suez, he was regarded as a world class figure and a leader. Mr Boutros Ghali has tended to alienate a great number of people, although he is a courageous man and a clever one. The Secretary General has no power and no constituency. The Secretary General’s constituency has to be developed over time by leadership. Until that happens the Secretary General is very often blamed for things which he is blameless.
Mr John Leech (Federal Trust): We are used to saying in relation to the European Community that it has a democratic deficit. The UN appears to have a democratic surfeit. It is a wholly political organisation: it has hived off all the professional and functional activities to specialised agencies and therefore it is totally political. One of the difficulties is that as a political organisation it is trying to do a number of functional jobs. I wonder how that might be remedied. What of the Military Staff Committee, which was built into the structure but which appears to be almost wholly inactive ? Is that not a possible route for getting the kind of analysis which you were suggesting did not inform the Council’s political resolutions? Could that be activated and become effective?
Sir Brian Urquhart: I would not want anybody to conclude from your remarks that specialised agencies were totally unpolitical. They are quite political, and more’s the pity. Your point is a very important one. The UN was set up as a diplomatic and bureaucratic organisation which has now drifted into field operations to a point where its field operations budget is much bigger than its regular budget. It has not really adjusted itself to that phenomenon yet.
Incidentally I wish more attention were paid to the importance of developing the international civil service. This is an idea where we have gone backwards in the most disastrous way in the last 15-20 years. There is far too much interference in the staffing of the UN. Too many people take instructions from their governments, which the Charter forbids them to do,and governments tend to manipulate the UN Secretariat. It has become almost a non-international civil service which has greatly decreased the confidence which governments - and people- have in the UN. That has to change.
The Military Staff Committee is a mystery to me. When I was a boy, it was referred to as the ‘teeth of the Charter’, and yet these ‘teeth’ have remained completely inactive for nearly 50 years. They have never chomped on a single thing. For reasons which I fail to understand, the United States and the United Kingdom and France are very loathe to activate the Military Staff Committee. I tried on a number of occasions to get people to consider it. For example, during the Iran/Iraq War, when seven or eight navies were moving around the Persian Gulf, protecting their own shipping, at considerable hazard to life and limb, we suggested that it would be a good idea to ask the Military Staff Committee to co-ordinate these naval forces It was precisely the kind of thing they were supposed to do. The answer was an emphatic ‘no’. The Russians and Chinese are now in, supposedly our friends, so that is not the reason. Perhaps it is because of a deep distrust of a military body at Chief of Staff level, taking over the function which it was given in the Charter. The MSC could solve many of the problems of the UN in military, logistic and intelligence if that body was activated at a reasonable level and became the adviser it was supposed to be. The MSC can also co-opt people from other countries, so there is no problem about it being a narrow group. Does anyone know of any reason why the MSC is not used?
Professor Wedell: To the simple-minded, the reason is obvious. If you had an effective committee, it would cause many problems to the politicians!
Sir Brian Urquhart: You have said in one sentence what I tried to say in twenty!
Commander Ian Bartholomew (Global Security Programme, Cambridge): I have a related question to what we have been talking about on the MSC. You pointed out the very great problems that there have been in Somalia, particularly with nations being inclined to go through their own national command chains rather than through a central one. This would not be a problem for the volunteer force that you envisage. but I wonder if you could tell me what you see is the minimum UN structure that would be required to command such a force, and secondly, if it was a spearhead force, and therefore you anticipated national contingents following it up, how you would seek to integrate the operation of a UN force with national contingents.
Sir Brian Urquhart: It is a very good question. I made this proposal not because I feel anyone will jump on it as the beginning of the millennium, but because it so focuses attention on the present problems in a way where people start arguing in a heated manner.
My idea would be the following. In the first place, the force would be under the control of the Security Council and the Secretary General. Neither could operate without the other. It could not be committed if there was no decision to commit it. If there was such a decision, it should be understood that in certain circumstances it should have the capacity to call on strategic aid support, for example, from the permanent members. My own feeling is that immediate intervention by a third party in these situations has a good chance of being successful. After a delay of six months the conflict becomes far more difficult to resolve. The volunteer force would have to be seen as a spearhead force which would be quite small, extremely carefully trained, not only from the military point of view, but also in the techniques of negotiation and peace-keeping.
Sooner or later the UN will cross the border from just being an inter-governmental organisation to having some supra-national powers. It will not function if it does not have them. It almost gets them when a crisis is bad enough and it is left to the Secretary General, but it has no standing practical capacity to exercise those powers, even in the most limited way.
This would be an experiment. It would be an interesting and useful complement to the national forces who will always be the main part of these operations. At the moment, there is no spearhead. We need something to fill that gap which has always been there, and is there now.
Mr Michael Smart (Wyndham Place Trust): Although I warmly applaud the call for vision, I believe that the international order has to be built with the crooked timber of humanity, including some very imperfect national governments and we therefore need to take a hard look at the practicalities. I would like to ask Sir Brian what he thinks of the proposals in Boutros Ghali’s Agenda for Peace which came out last year. It seemed practical and feasible, but had very little public attention in Britain. One point which I thought particularly valuable was the Peace Endowment Fund to finance the initial costs of peacekeeping operations which would take contributions from individuals as well as governments. This might provide one bridge to people which is very much lacking.
Sir Brian Urquhart: I share your feeling about the Agenda’ for Peace. The problem was that its most adventurous proposals, for example, the Volunteer Peace Enforcement Units, were received in stony silence, not least in the Third World. The Peace Endowment Fund was an excellent idea. In fact we have echoed that in the Volker-Ogata Report in slightly different terms. We have a very long way to go on this. Also, I am not sure how much private contributions would bring in.
Mr Michael Smart: Provided Governments did not scale down their contributions.
Sir Brian Urguhart: Of course Governments do not like the idea of private contributions for obvious reasons. The budget is their control, and a living veto of some UN activities.
Mrs H Adamson: I would like to comment on what the last two speakers have said on why we are not getting the cooperation of the major governments as far as spending on a foreign defence force from the UN. It seems obvious to me that these people are politicians and It has taken years and years for them to gain power in their own countries. To give up that power to another force is quite an undertaking. The defence departments within our countries are also powerful and for them to give up any of their share of the power is another question.
The bridge to the people is the most important point that was made. Most of the people want peace, and what you have suggested is total common sense. If you appeal directly to the people to back the UN peace-keeping defence force,, the people are the ones who will eventually control their politicians and make their voices heard. That is our strength. Go back to the people and by-pass the politicians so that the politicians have to listen to the people
Sir Brian Urquhari: That is a suitable note to end on.
Professor Wedell: It is indeed a suitable note to end on. You will all agree that we have had a most interesting and extremely suggestive lecture on this very intractable problem. As a former European civil servant, I wondered how a world civil servant views these situations; and to find Sir Brian after some 40 years of service with the United Nations looking forward, having clear ideas of what ought to be done, ideas that are modest, practical and extremely reasonable, is a great inspiration to us all.
Personally, I am sure Sir Brian has identified two of the most difficult things to achieve in an international context: a reliable, moderately efficient and committed international civil service; and the emergence of a political and diplomatic class which does not regards itself as a law unto Itself. There Is a tendency towards the politicisation as well as the professionalisation of international politics which tends to leave out the ordinary citizen. These are two areas where we have to watch how one can humanise the classe politique and how one can create an administrative structure that is sufficiently effective to be able to take the steps that need to be taken.
As somebody said earlier, the mist is not totally naked in this field, having set up a Commission under Lord Longford thirty years ago to produce Keeping the Peace which proposed the establishment of what was then called ‘a light standing force’. What Sir Brian now proposes is very similar to the considerations we thought about in the early 1960s. Perhaps in the 199Os that will come to fruition.
We are most grateful to Sir Brian for taking the trouble and time to talk to us. It has been very informative and I hope that we may all help the UN in our various ways. Thank you very much.