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12 The Legacy and Future Intellectual Challenges
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406 Organization, Ideas, and Challenges 406 12 The Legacy and Future Intellectual Challenges • Ideas Change International Discourse • Ideas Redefine State and Non-state Interests and Goals • Ideas Facilitate New Coalitions • Ideas Become Embedded in Institutions • The UN’s Future Intellectual Challenges This final chapter sheds light on the importance of ideas in international public policy. It does not definitively portray the exact nature of the interplay between politics, power, institutions, and ideas. The voices in these pages do begin, however, to suggest that the United Nations has provided an essential space in which powerful normative and policy agendas have been articulated. In the first four sections of this chapter, the voices help substantiate the four key propositions about the power of ideas adapted from what is, somewhat awkwardly, called the “ideational” literature that we summarized in the introduction.1 The final section looks to the future. We permit our own voices to intrude here more than elsewhere in the volume. What are the most pressing intellectual challenges for the United Nations? What is the UN’s comparative advantage in the marketplace of ideas? Indeed, will there be a United Nations, or is multilateralism a quaint notion left over from the pre–9/11 world? In short, where are we headed and what can be done intellectually to succeed in the struggle for development and social justice? “In some sense, ideas are the currency,”Michael Doyle explained.“The UN has no power. It has good ideas. It convenes, it mobilizes, it inspires, it provides legitimacy. It is an idea shop. So at that level, ideas are very important. But at a different level, no one should think that you apply political science in public policy. It’s just not what happens. We’re responding, on the SecretaryGeneral ’s staff, to what is happening out there in the world—to 9/11,Afghani- The Legacy and Future Intellectual Challenges 407 stan, Iraq, to global poverty, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to the need to protect children, the human rights agenda. It’s a responsive institution. There is only so much ability to lead out of the blue. What the Secretary-General and the best members of his staff are good at is seeing where these waves are coming from and identifying the ones to which the UN would add value, where the leadership of the Secretary-General could make a difference,as it did on HIV/ AIDS; on development issues,at least intellectually;on preventive diplomacy— trying to bring things together. . . . For that, ideas were useful.” “The UN is, of course, a practical body, and it is right that it would be mainly concerned with the urgent and the immediate,” added Amartya Sen. “Yet it is also necessary not to be boorish in ignoring the ancestry of many of the ideas that the UN stands for and tries to promote. I think the UN has, taking the rough with the smooth, made good use of ideas, generally. But it varies a little between different parts of the UN system.As I have worked over the decades with different parts of the UN system, I have been impressed how some of them have been more explicit and more keenly aware of the sophisticated ideas that lie behind the day-to-day work and commitments of the UN. This can make a difference in giving intellectual depth to practical strategies.” Ideas Change International Discourse Ideas substantially influence international public policy by transforming the acceptable middle ground for intellectual engagement. Stated in another way, they can change the nature of international discourse—a necessary, albeit insufficient, step in a path leading to new policies and eventually to altered behavior. As earlier chapters have illustrated, the intellectual agenda, the public policy lexicon, and the language of diplomacy look very different over time as a result of ideas promoted and implemented by the UN. What earlier was unthinkable may have become mainstream, and what earlier was conventional wisdom may have become obsolete. Dharam Ghai told us when ideas fly:“The idea has to have some power. It must be relevant.And it should fit the time. These days, things go very fast. The international development community is well connected. So when some good ideas come, either from within or from outside, and they are relevant and they make sense, people try to join the bandwagon. . . . A lot of the time these things are in the air. . . . A concept emerges which captures this. . . . Then it...