Midwesterners Throng to Talk UN

Midwesterners Throng to Talk UN

by David Shorr
Democracy Arsenal
April 6, 2007

Well maybe "throng" is an overstatement, but three days on the road with the State Department's Mark Lagon this week (modeling bipartisan civility) gave me some always-appreciated interchange with citizens in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Many thanks to the good people of Americans for Informed Democracy for arranging the tour, especially our local hosts on the five campuses we visited.

Mark and I are on a shared mission to re-frame the UN debate to make it harder for people to blame the UN for the failures of member states -- or to expect it to work miracles. We talked with Midwesterners about some of the recurring (unhelpful) themes of any discussion of this topic: the quest for structural fixes, blame-the-UN-firsters, and the domestication of the good-works-doing UN (that last one's more my thing than Mark's).

The issue of giving the Security Council a makeover is a distraction. I'm all for changing the composition of the Security Council to reflect 21st Century, as opposed to post-WWII realities. But the rules for who serves, and votes, on decision-making bodies are always the exact thing that is hardest to change.

Meanwhile, we're not focusing on the real issue: what decisions are (or aren't) being made about real-world problems. The anachronistic make-up of the Security Council is not itself preventing the world's nations from cooperating more effectively. The United Nations will (or won't) do whatever its member states want it to. We can discuss countries' diplomatic positions and how they stand in the way of progress on a given issue. In fact, that would be a welcome break from the endless back-and-forthing about the size, composition, and voting rules for this or that UN body -- which is the point.

And so we have a debate on the UN that always highlights the UN's machinery and forgets who is really running things. This has become a widespread and ingrained reflex, and like a reflex, it is often unconscious. "The UN" is often the scapegoat for international inaction, which is very convenient for member states. As if to prove the point, the weekend before Mark and my concert tour, the New York Times, in an otherwise excellent editorial on Darfur, charged that the UN had "disgraced itself." The rest of the piece assigns blame with greater precision, but sweeping condemnations of "the UN" should always prompt us to ask what UN member nations are up to.

Another point that Mark and I heard is that we don't hear enough about the UN's success stories -- the good humanitarian work it does around the world. At one level, the efforts of the UN's specialized agencies (UNICEF, UNHCR) is a reminder that people rather than governments must be the ultimate beneficiaries of the UN. On the other hand, it will be a sad (and violent, impoverished...) world if all we asked of the UN is such technical work. It would be all band-aids and no treatment for the underlying pathology, and world leaders would be off the hook for the hard political work, just as they often already are.