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9. Politics and values at the United Nations: Kofi Annan’s Balancing Act
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292 Anthony F. Lang Jr. should act quickly.93 That Boutros-Ghali saw his job as one of convincing the Great Powers of the urgency of the situation can be seen either as an abdication of responsibility or as evidence that he understood that the United Nations will not work without the United States and other Great Powers. The question of how a secretary-general can or cannot influence events must take into account the constraints placed upon him by the international system. At the same time, as this chapter has sought to demonstrate , those constraints are not ironclad. There are arenas in the UN system in which leaders can assert a certain amount of “moral authority.” In so doing, however, they take on a certain amount of moral responsibility for their acts or failures to act. As the role of the secretary-general has evolved, questions about his (and perhaps someday her) responsibility will evolve as well. We may no longer ask simply that the secretary-general bring matters to the attention of the world or wield his moral authority more effectively. It may be that, over time, secretaries-general will be asked to perform more roles. If the office is to change, however, we must be cautious about the responsibilities we place upon one individual. As Boutros-Ghali pointed out in his acceptance speech, while we may want a Utopian City, we must remain realists in our expectations about what can be accomplished. BoutrosGhali struggled with this tension throughout his tenure, as will future secretaries-general. Notes 1. “Oath of Office,” December 3, 1991, reprinted in Charles Hill, ed., ThePapers of United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press) (hereafter Papers of Boutros-Ghali), 1:1 See also his reference to this speech in his memoirs, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A UN-US Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), 12. 2. Two other elements of his personal background influenced his ethical framework: his nationality as an Egyptian and his role as a diplomat. In a full biography of Boutros-Ghali, these dimensions of his background would need to be examined in more depth, but space limitations prevent this here. 3. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egypt’s Road to Jerusalem: A Diplomat’s Story of the Struggle for Peace in the Middle East (New York: Random House, 1997), 4–5. 4. A good description of both the theology and practices of the Coptic Church can be found in Otto Meinardus, Christian Egypt: Faith and Life (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1970). English-language information on the Coptic A Realist in the Utopian City 293 Church can also be found on various Coptic Church websites. An extensive site run by the Coptic Centre in Stevenage, UK, provides links to a number of organizations and text documents (www.copticcentre.com). Two from the United States are quite extensive, including statements by the current Coptic patriarch, Pope Shenouda III. See St. Mark’s Parish in New Jersey (http://saintmark .com/), which also hosts a site devoted to explaining the Coptic Church in general (www.copticchurch.net), and St. Mark’s Coptic Church in Cleveland, Ohio (www.stmarkcoccleveland.org/). I have no way of ascertaining the accuracy of the information posted on these sites, but they seem in communion with the general tenets of the Coptic Church in Egypt, as they are founded by Egyptian immigrants to the United States. The official website of the Coptic Church in Egypt—www.copticpope.org/—contains more Arabic than English. 5. See Pope Shenouda III, The Nature of Christ (1999), available at www .copticchurch.net/topics/theology/nature_of_christ.pdf. 6. For details of this theological controversy, see Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, rev. ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 194–205; and E. Glenn Hinson, The Early Church: Origins to the Dawn of the Middle Ages (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 310–25. 7. In fact, when Boutros-Ghali himself read through an earlier version of this chapter, he suggested deleting much of the material on theology, noting, “I don’t even remember these distinctions, and they have had no impact on me.” Boutros Boutros-Ghali, interview by author, April 22, 2005, Paris. I would like to thank Boutros Boutros-Ghali for his time in both responding to questions and reading a draft version of this chapter. 8. A good treatment of the Coptic reaction to this conflicted political situation is B. L. Carter, The Copts in Egyptian Politics (London: Croom...