The United Nations Today - As Good as it Gets?

The United Nations Today: As Good as it Gets?




- by Jamie Arbuckle, for Peacehawks



What’s Wrong With the United Nations, and How to Fix It
By Thomas Weiss,
Polity Press, 292 pp., $19.45, 2009



The UN … is essentially the collective agent of its member states. Many of the UN’s organizational incapacities could be corrected by additional resources from its member states, who devote but a tiny fraction of the resources they spend on national security to collective action under the umbrella of the United Nations.
- Peacemaking and Peacekeeping for the New Century, Ottunnu and Doyle, Rowan and Littlefield, New York, 1996







This is an interesting book about the United Nations, and an impressive effort to get beyond the usual procedural and structural tinkering which has characterized and limited most efforts to “improve” the U.N. Thomas Weiss is certainly well qualified to write this book. He combines the skills and the background of a practitioner and a scholar: he served with the U.N. Secretariat for a decade, but has also distinguished himself as an academic for over 25 years, during which he has been a profound student of and a prolific writer, researcher and teacher about, the U.N.

Sir Brian Urqhuhart, in his foreword, tells us that Weiss has come to the “bold and original conclusion” “that world government is the necessary conceptual basis for adequate future management of the major problems of our planet.” Weiss’ solution is actually much more cautious and nuanced – and realistic - than that.

Weiss makes it clear that he considers a preoccupation with sovereignty as a major problem in taking concerted action to confront global challenges: “… treating traditional sovereignty as a cornerstone for the United Nations is a fundamental structural weakness in urgent need of replacement.” He goes on: “The shortcomings of sovereignty and the ill-health of the UN system for the human rights arena can be illustrated with several examples …”. “Westphalian sovereignty impinges directly on more robust action by the United Nations in protecting the human environment.” Weiss concludes that “Westphalian sovereignty is … a chronic ailment for the United Nations, and perhaps a lethal one for the planet …”

But Weiss leaves us under no illusions that sovereignty is any less likely to be the basis for whatever international order may obtain, now or in the near future: “… the state remains essential for national, regional and global problem-solving, and nothing in this book gainsays this stark reality.” And then Weiss turns the corner, and tells us what he really means:

Yet put simply, states and their creations in the form of the current generation of intergovernmental bureaucracies cannot address the transnational problems confronting the world. As a result, and ironically, we have embraced global governance.

Weiss thus distances himself from the chimera* of global government and advocates instead global governance; governance being a more qualitative term, which Weiss defines as

… the totality of institutions, policies, rules, practices, norms, procedures, and initiatives by which states and their citizens try to bring order and predictability to their responses to such universal problems as warfare, poverty, and environmental degradation.