Changes At The United Nations

In June 26, 1945, 50 world leaders gathered in San Francisco to sign a remarkable document. Born from months of painstaking negotiation, even as the second world war still raged, the charter of the United Nations called upon countries to"save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind".

It sought a new world order, guided by the principle that"armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest" or in self-defence. A set of institutions, including a Security Council and General Assembly, would be established to make sure that happened.

Harry Truman, US president, believed something profound had taken place."What a great day this can be in history!" he told an audience of 3,500 people."We all have to recognise - no matter how great our strength - that we must deny ourselves the licence to always do as we please. This is the price that each nation will have to pay for world peace."

But he added some prescient words."No-one claims that it is now a final or a perfect instrument. It has not been poured into a fixed model. Changing world conditions will need readjustments of peace and not of war."

Sixty years later, many believe the time for that readjustment is long overdue. In the US, which provides one-fifth of the UN's budget, there has been criticism of the UN Security Council's failure to authorise war against Iraq, and there is continued disappointment at the UN's inability to pick up the pieces.

Faced with growing threats from terrorism and nuclear proliferation, many are asking whether Washington might not stand a better chance of enhancing stability through a coalition of like-minded friends. In this way, they would not have to make the compromises that are part and parcel of working with the UN.

Over recent months, US senators and congressmen have launched a full-scale attack over alleged UN mismanagement of Iraq's multibillion-dollar"oil for food" programme, and rightwing commentators are calling for Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, to resign. In California, one conservative group called"Move America Forward" has launched a media campaign in favour of"kicking the UN out of the US".

For the UN, these are worrying times."Were an outright breach to occur between the United States and the United Nations," writes Niall Ferguson, the British historian, in Colossus, his book on the American empire,"the latter would for all practical purposes be defunct".

But the criticism does not only come from the US. Opponents of the Iraq war are disappointed that the UN was unable to stop it. Many countries complain that the UN is a club dominated by rich nations who have limited concern for their problems. Human rights activists are horrified at the UN's inability to stop widespread killing in Sudan's Darfur region.

In September last year, with pressure mounting, Mr Annan, realising his organisation faced a moment of truth, decided to take action."Three years ago, when you came here for the Millennium Summit, we shared a vision of global solidarity and collective security," he told a gathering of the UN General Assembly."But recent events have called that consensus into question.

"We have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself. We must not shy away from questions about the adequacy and effectiveness of the rules and instruments at our disposal."

In essence, as his advisers make clear, the challenge is this: can the UN reassert its legitimacy and make itself effective enough to convince nations that it is actually capable of making the world a safer place?

As a first step, Mr Annan appointed a 16-person panel of veteran politicians and diplomats from across the globe. This includes Yevgenii Primakov, former Russian prime minister, Brent Scowcroft, former US national security adviser, and David Hannay, former UK ambassador to the UN. The panel was asked to assess the greatest threats facing mankind, consider how collective action might address them, and advise on how the UN should be reformed to make that possible. A report, the product of their deliberations, is to be published this week. What it says and how it is received promise to define the UN's standing for many years to come.

When the UN was first conceived, its founders' primary concern was conflict between powerful states and their allies. Today, that concern remains but the focus has shifted to a new problem: the proliferation of failed or rogue states, which become breeding grounds for disease, offer havens to non-state terrorist groups and encourage the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Few believe that current international institutions, the UN among them, are sufficiently well-equipped to meet the challenge."Almost all our institutions are structured for a world that has departed," Mr Scowcroft says. Historians add that for much of its existence the UN has been among the less effective of those institutions. During the cold war, superpower rivalry stymied any coherent action by the organisation.

After the fall of the Berlin wall, hopes rose that the UN could finally play the role originally intended, when the Security Council agreed to repel Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. That success set in train a proliferation of UN missions around the globe.

But the recent war in Iraq has shattered the illusion of a new post cold war consensus and, in the process, highlighted the weaknesses of the UN. The Security Council split apart over the invasion and an effort to involve the UN in its reconstruction was sharply curtailed by a bomb attack on its Baghdad headquarters that left 22 people dead, including the chief of the Iraq mission.

Elsewhere, the UN's inability, or unwillingness, to stop daily killings in Darfur in Sudan - which the US has deemed a genocide - and the limited impact of its efforts to tackle terrorist financing and illegal arms dealing have reinforced international scepticism about the body's effectiveness.

It is hardly surprising that senior management at the UN, based on the 38th floor of its Manhattan headquarters, is worried the patience of the organisation's single biggest sponsor is wearing thin."There is a fairly widespread gloom that we are not going in the right direction," confesses Edward Mortimer, an adviser to Mr Annan. he UN report is expected to identify a host of global threats to security, interpreting this in its broadest sense - not just"hard" threats such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation and biological weapons but also"soft" threats such as disease, poverty and climate change. But that is the easy part. The harder task is to find ways to tackle those problems.

Among the proposed solutions are a definition of terrorism, something that has eluded the UN for years; an updating of the nuclear non-proliferation regime; a Dollars 10bn budget to tackle Aids (vastly more than the present allocation); and the completion of the Doha"development round" of trade talks by 2006 designed to tackle poverty in developing countries.

The panel also proposes a clarification of the UN's position on the use of force - specifically military intervention. It reaffirms a Canadian idea that the world has a"responsibility to protect" citizens when their governments abuse them. But it will not expand the right of self-defence, enshrined in the UN charter, to include pre-emptive action against potential attackers - UN assent will still be required.

If this may disappoint some US policymakers, the report does not set out to constrain US power. Indeed, many US policymakers have called for a more assertive" community of democracies" to encourage better government. The report is believed to recognise that many international organisations, not just the UN, will need to co-operate if the global threats are to be tackled effectively.

But if the report makes some concessions to US thinking, the bottom line is likely to be that only a concert of all world nations - namely the UN - ultimately has the legitimacy and pulling power to bring states together and foster effective action against the biggest global threats.

How, then, should the UN reform itself to achieve its goals? Tom Franck, professor of law at New York University, says it is important to realise the UN is two things. First, it is a meeting room where states come together and debate their problems. When they agree on how to tackle a problem, the world unites and takes"legitimate" action. If they do not agree, there is little that can be done.

Second, the UN is a corps of international civil servants led by Mr Annan, charged with implementing the tasks given by the states or helping organise others to do so - such as peacekeepers or aid agencies. This second UN is a bureaucracy, subject to sclerosis and bad management like any other.

So the UN needs to address two broad questions. One, how should the"meeting room" be organised to best effect? And, two, how should the bureaucracy be reformed so it can effectively fulfil the mandates established in the meeting room? The question of the meeting room leads to the fraught question of Security Council enlargement. It is widely felt that the UN's main law-making body needs to represent better the shape of today's world if it is to get wider support.

On this, the report is understood to be more pragmatic than bold. It shies away from any clear recommendation, offering a choice of two. The council currently comprises 15 members, five of which have permanent seats and a veto - namely the US, the UK, France, Russia and China. One of the proposals is to create six new permanent seats (most likely Japan, Germany, Brazil, India, Egypt and either Nigeria or South Africa - although no countries are named), and four new rotating seats. The new permanent members would have no veto.

The alternative is to introduce a category of"semi-permanent" five-year seats. This is strongly opposed by those hoping for a permanent seat, but it remains unclear whether they will be able to overcome regional rivalries in order to achieve their goal. Also, the US has proved reluctant to sanction significant Security Council expansion in the past, and so far has only supported Japan's bid.

As for reforming the UN's bureaucracy, there is one suggestion for a new Peace Building Commission. This would comprise UN agencies, member states and the international financial institutions. Some see it as a kind of reborn UN Trusteeship Council - the now defunct body established to help new countries govern themselves. Its aim would be to foster a far more coherent approach to preventing conflict, building institutions, installing justice and promoting the rule of law."This is the one area where the UN has dramatically underperformed historically," says a senior UN official."This whole set of activities needs some new level of organisation and resourcing."

But whether a Peace Building Commission can boost the quality of the civil servants working in the UN secretariat and its agencies is another matter. Diplomats say efforts to get more capable people into the system, and fire the incompetent or corrupt, are consistently stymied at a political level. Internal UN rivalries make effective co-ordination an uphill struggle. Staff recently hit out at the lack of accountability within the secretariat. Some fear the UN machinery is, by its very nature, incapable of reform.

On Thursday, when the the report is out, the real work begins. The panel members will need to convince their governments that the benefits of reform (allowing for the risks of failure) outweigh the costs. Mr Annan will issue his own report to the UN General assembly in March 2005. At a summit in September, the UN will take the final decisions.

For it all to work, what UN analysts call a"grand bargain" will be needed: marrying action on rich countries' security concerns with action on poor countries' development aims. No-one expects it to be easy. Pessimists say reform has been tried, and derailed, many times before.

UN officials say no-one should underestimate the moment's importance. Can countries, above all the US, truly believe the UN is the right place to address their problems and are they willing to make the compromises that its successful reform will entail?

When Mr Annan established the panel he called for"bold" solutions. The world is about to find out whether the panel members have been bold enough to satisfy US concerns, or so bold that the US is unwilling to sanction them.