The fear of mysterious black helicopters is a signature issue for the American right. A Google search will bring up 19,600 results when they are mentioned along with the UN. ‘The black helicopter guys’ whisper darkly about how UN agents and the rest of the new world order are scuttling around the US homeland at night in unmarked cars and helicopters. Watch out children, Kofi Annan might be under your bed, preparing a draft statement of position.
That is the extreme end of a fear of multinationalism that dominates the most of the American right. It can be as visceral as Eurosceptism is here; it can have the same smell of paranoia and insecurity. In a funny way, the US action in Iraq seemed to be designed as much to topple the UN Security Council from its place as capstone for international relations as to topple Saddam’s regime. But the really funny thing is that America may be partly right: the UN simply cannot survive into 21st century as it is currently constituted.
The UN is very good at one thing in international relations: protecting the boundaries of member nations. When it comes to preventing genocide or civil war, it is institutionally puzzled. It has also failed to adapt to the post-cold war world. The present number of Security Council resolutions is 1565. The entire cold war period produced 644. More than twice that number has been produced in under half the time. Since the cold war the Security Council has been spinning as a free wheel, ever faster because it is touching the world less and less. And ‘resolution’ itself is a strange term for the productions of the UN Security Council. Most of its resolutions are dead letters. All too often, whatever the problem is, the answer turns out to be some subtle variation on ‘wait and see’.
When Clement Attlee spoke at Westminster at the launch of the UN in 1946, stability of existing borders was far from the limit of his ambitions for the UN:
‘In the purposes of the United Nations we have linked with the achievement of freedom from fear, the delivery of mankind from the peril of want… Without social justice and security there is no real foundation for peace, for it is among the socially disinherited and those that have nothing to lose that the gangster and the aggressor recruit their supporters.’
It is clear that he foresaw a body that was not just morally neutral, not just a guardian of the status quo. It would dare to work in the interests of people as well as the interests of governments, behind the borders of sovereign nations. What would he think of the Sudanese government being voted back onto the UN Committee on Human Rights just as it is being investigated for genocide?
One of the truly dangerous effects of anti-Americanism is that it can drive us into instinctive positions. The US is unilateralist and somewhat paranoid about the UN. But its basic critique of the body is right. And it is doing something about it. It is setting up a ‘democracy caucus’ within the UN following a number of summits by the State Department-supported ‘Community of Democracies’. It is an interesting notion. At the very least it brings values other than state sovereignty into the heart of UN decision-making.
But Britain should surely not be just another contributor to the debate. Our place on the Security Council, our part in founding the UN, and even our role in the Commonwealth (a global slice of largely democratic states) oblige us to do more. And looking to recent history, so too does Iraq. Whether history judges our actions in Iraq right or wrong depends not on the daily currents of debate but the eventual consequences of the action. Two matter most. First, will Iraq eventually become a functioning liberal democracy? Second, having called time on the existing system of international security and law, did we go on to build a better one?
Now is the time for the Labour party to call on its internationalism and its humanity and to vigorously join the debate about the UN. What system will protect human rights as well as nation interests? How can we ensure that the genocides and civil wars that stained the 1990s are not repeated? How can the world apply pressure on the most powerful nations, even nuclear nations, when they abuse their own populations? And yes, if you like, what system will harness and contain US power?
It is time to reform the UN: much was wrong with the status quo even before 2003, and others have now begun the debate. Labour and other progressives parties cannot be hampered by faction, ‘yankophobia’, lack of internationalism, or even exhaustion. We must make our contribution, with our values that remain the same as Clement Attlee’s in 1946:
‘In the Charter we reaffirm our faith in fundamental human rights. We see the freedom of the individual in the state as an essential complement to the freedom of the state in the world community of nations.’