Irrelevant or Indispensable?: The United Nations in the Twenty-first Century

1. Introduction

1 International institutions are often forged in the fire of experience, responses to events that demonstrate what can happen when international cooperation breaks down. The United Nations (UN) is one of these organizations. In the wake of two catastrophic world wars within a thirty-year period, the victors of World War II convened fifty-one countries to fashion a collective security arrangement that would prevent in the second half of the twentieth century a repeat of the horrible events of the first half. Not surprisingly, the founders put into place an organization that reflected both the main political concerns and the distribution of power of the 1940s, as well as the lessons derived from the failure of the League of Nations. Sixty years after the birth of the UN, the array of concerns has shifted and expanded. Collective security continues to be a central issue, but our answers to the question about the UN’s collective security mandate, “security from what?” would differ substantially from the answers the founders might have offered in 1945. For example, civil wars and terrorism are much more likely to disrupt global security than great power war. Small arms or “dirty bombs” are of much greater concern for many than missiles and warheads. Furthermore, the major threat to the security of countless people is not violence or conflict. Indeed, for millions the major threat to well-being comes from poverty, disease, inequality, forced migration or environmental degradation. These latter threats ensure that the broad goal of development exists alongside security as central objectives for the United Nations today, objectives Secretary General Kofi Annan has conceptualized as “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear.” Increasingly, it is becoming apparent that these goals will not be attained in isolation from each paul heinbecker patricia goff 1 INTRODUCTION other. As the Secretary General has observed, “we will not enjoy development without security, we will not enjoy security without development , and we will not enjoy either without respect for human rights.”1 The answer to the question “security for whom?” has also changed. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and genocide in Rwanda again demonstrate that states may be unwilling or unable to protect their citizens from security threats or might themselves be the threat. This sad realization has led to a broadening of the very notion of security, to include not only national security or the security of the state, but also human security, or the security of the individual. It has also led to the emerging norm that holds that, in the face of large-scale loss of life, the principle of non-intervention yields temporarily to the responsibility of the international community to protect the innocent. Sovereignty, after all, comprises both rights and responsibilities. Just as the nature of our concerns has changed, so has the constellation of powerful actors on the global stage. In 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union were emergent powers, while Germany and Japan were defeated and devastated. In 2005, the United States is the sole superpower and the Soviet Union is no more. Japan is the second largest economic power in the world, Germany is at the centre of a new type of supranational organization; the European Union, and developing countries like China, Brazil, and India occupy positions of growing political and economic influence. These states operate alongside increasingly prominent private entities and civil society groups. This shift in the distribution of power, accompanied by the emergence of new threats and concerns, means that the context within which the United Nations operates has changed dramatically since 1945. The need to adapt to twenty-first-century socio-political and economic realities is the strongest argument in favour of United Nations reform today. Current realities require the UN to be relevant to the security of the weak and the powerful; to be as effective at peace-building as it is at peacekeeping; to anticipate and respond to the transnational challenges of our time, while promoting and consolidating the rule of law. The United Nations remains indispensable to the preservation of peace and security, to the attainment of prosperity, and to the advancement of human rights, but its mandate, and the tools at its disposal to fulfill it, must be adapted to the changing times. • • • 2 introduction This volume assembles the papers and speeches that were delivered at a conference on United Nations reform, held in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in early...