In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This conference is taking place at a very good moment and it’s just when we should be taking stock of the UN Reform agenda. The cards are already all on the table, some might argue, rather too many cards, but I don’t believe so myself because we are dealing with extremely complex matters and it doesn’t help to simplify them excessively. You’ve got the Report of the High-level Panel (HLP), the joint views from fifteen other colleagues from all around the world. You have Jeffrey Sachs’s report which he has introduced with great eloquence and you have the Secretary General’s (SG) own contribution which drew the threads of these reports together and identified the agenda that needed to be addressed by heads of government in September. I underline that because I think that it was absolutely essential the SG indicated the areas that needed to be addressed in September and I think we shouldn ’t spend too much time on his rather vexed reference to packages. It’s also a watershed, this meeting, between what has been happening the last four months, a very lively debate, livelier and wider in world terms I think than what has taken place in most people’s living memories about the UN’s system and how it works and how it ought to work in the future, and the move into a period of negotiation which now needs to get under way if there is to be a reasonable harvest in September . Now, I have been around a lot, and I do apologize for the fact that my travels since the High-level Panel Report have mainly been devoted to what I would call my parish, which is Western Europe and North America. I therefore do not, for one minute, wish to suggest that what I say reflects the reactions there have been, more widely; many of the meetings I have gone to have had representatives from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. lord david hannay 4 UN REFORM AND THE HIGHLEVEL PANEL REPORT ON THREATS, CHALLENGES, AND CHANGE 25 One thing that has struck me during these thousands of miles I have been traveling and advocating the High-level Panel’s report has been a contrast between the reactions to it in Europe and Canada and those in the United States. There has been a marked discrepancy in the reactions. In Europe and Canada, on the whole, people seem, governments seem, to be anxious to get on with the reform agenda as it has been identified and as it has been prescribed in the HLP Report and the SG’s report. In the US, there is a lot more existential questioning of the UN and there is of course a forcefully promoted, anti-UN agenda. Let’s face it, there are two quite different opinions and it is important to keep them apart and not to get into a situation where you think that every criticism made by every American is designed to do down the United Nations. It isn’t: it is designed to make the UN a better place too, but they come at it from a bit of a different angle, which is not surprising given the nature of the world power balance as it is now. Second, I have come across a great deal of what I call loose talk of grand bargains. Now let me be very clear on this; I and the panel on which I served are quite clear. You have to have a broad security agenda that encompasses poverty, organized crime, environment, disease , and so on, as well as the more obvious issues of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and state failure. You have to have this broad agenda and proceed across the whole of that agenda if you are going to have any chance of producing a more secure and more equitable world. But that is a bit different from saying that one part of the agenda belongs as it were to the developing countries and if the developed countries put enough in the kitty, then they will graciously (the developing countries), agree to do something on security. Nor do I think that the developed countries should be saying that what they do on development depends on what developing countries agree to on security. I believe that to be conceptually—and in every other way— a flawed concept, and I would argue very, very strongly that we should...

Share