What is Required

I think also that people have got to come to terms with the fact that if an international organization is going to succeed in critical situations, it has to have authority, the necessary resources, the necessary infrastructure and the ability to act quickly. The UN has none of these things. It improvises every single time and, miraculously, sometimes it even succeeds. But the big obstacle to developing the UN is the reassertion of the extreme importance of national sovereignty now. National sovereignty has been eroded in the private sector, mostly by the global market and communications. But the UN, which is an international body, is the headquarters of the movement that backs the most strict interpretation of national sovereignty. And that means that it's never going to be ready to deal with the crises. Until we reach the point where Governments are prepared to discuss a new balance between national sovereignty and international authority and responsibility, we are going to continue to have considerable confusion. And, of course, the UN is a very useful scapegoat. When you aren't prepared to do anything, it's useful to be able to blame a nice large organization like this one.

The Question of Ready Resources

The stand-by arrangements proposal by which Governments create force reserves, which the UN can readily draw upon for peacekeeping, sounds nice. But, personally, I am very skeptical. You know, Article 43 of the Charter, with the undertaking of Member States to make forces available to the Security Council—it was a big deal in 1945Chas never been realized. Actual availability of these forces is based on the political situation and willingness of a given Government at a given time. There were 20 stand-by arrangements at the time of the Rwanda crisis in 1994, but not a single one of them could be called on. Stand-by arrangements are something of a delusion, an illusion, that there is some arrangement.

I was in the army for six years during the war. You don't just put a military organization in the field overnight. There are such things as training, logistics, staff and command, the whole business of getting people used to working with each other and so on; not to mention getting a proper mandate, which the Security Council is not very good at. And until you can begin to tackle those problems, there is a degree of improvisation, which can be extremely dangerous.

Politicians and soldiers have always come from different points of view. Politicians very often put soldiers into impossible situations, and nothing will change that. But you could do a lot, actually, by a determined effort on both sides. When I was running peacekeeping, which was from 1970 to 1986, we made a point of getting the commanders and their staff in the field to come to New York at least once a year, spend some time, really seeing what the Security Council and everything else was like, and by the same token, of going ourselves and spending a lot of time with the operations in the field to see what problems they had. And I think that that worked very well on the whole. You can do a lot to bridge the gulf between the military and civilian viewpoints.

Cooperation With Other Organizations

There has been a certain amount of cooperation and interaction between regional organizations and the UN in the maintenance of world peace and security. But regional organizations have regional problems and, of course, they don't have any money either and very little resources. Obviously, if you could settle things at a regional level, there's no excuse for bringing them to the UN. And it's easier now when we are past the cold war, because the Soviet Union deeply distrusted regional organizations, which it regarded, with I think a certain amount of justification, as being mostly Western-sponsored outfits. Now we can start to have a rational relationship between regional organizations and the UN. But, of course, again it comes down to questions of resources and money.

The Financial Situation

On the budget, the United States is the largest contributor. Both the League of Nations and the United Nations were basically American concepts. I am always amazed how easily other countries accepted this, but they did. So I think it's particularly unfortunate that we have a stand-off on payments, not with the United States Administration but with the American Congress. I think, again, it is largely due to this resurgent, intense preoccupation with national sovereignty—with the result that there is a natural basic aversion to international organizations and a distrust of them, and an extreme unwillingness to support or finance them. This is particularly bad because the United States is the natural leader of the United Nations, and it's the host country.

It's a great liability for the United Nations and, especially, for the Secretary-General, who has to operate the Organization when more than a third of the budget simply isn't paid in. That's a very difficult thing for a body which is not allowed to borrow or go into debt. It's not just the UN. There is a feeling that, in some way, the United States can retire into itself again and be a sort of unilateral Power. And I don't believe that that's a practical concept for the United States or anybody else. But that's what we have. The Secretary-General is doing what he can. He established a programme of reform, which is what he can do, but the real reform needed is to look at the balance between international authority and responsibility and national sovereignty, and try to figure out how you can preserve both of them in balance, so that you don't completely hobble the United Nations whenever it tries to do anything. We are nowhere near that—no one even wants to discuss it.

There are all these things that the United Nations does which nobody really even hears very much about—all its work on international law, human rights, economic and social activities, which are very, very important, not to mention the various specialized agencies. If these were suddenly stopped, I think it would certainly get the attention of the public. But nobody thinks about it much when it's still going on.

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