The most serious challenge that the United Nations will have to deal with during the first decades of the twenty-first century is the increased imbalance between the rich and poor, between globalization and marginalization. Already, the 1999 Human Development Report points to the fact that the income gap between the fifth of the world's population living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest had deteriorated, from 60 to 1 in 1990 to 74 to 1 in 1997. Not only is the rate of disparity accelerating, but so too is the relationship between those at the top and the bottom of the Human Development Index. A global system within which the assets of the three richest people in the world are more than the combined gross national product of all least developed countries and their 600 million people is in structural and possibly terminal imbalance.

Recent years have shown increasing concentrations of income, resources and wealth between a smaller percentage of people, corporations and countries, largely within the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the rest. Global trade imbalances reinforce the marginalization and vulnerability of a region such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which is not only dependent upon a very small range of basic export commodities, but also more vulnerable to global market turbulence.

In this region, exports constitute nearly 30 per cent of gross domestic product, compared to only 19 per cent for the OECD. Yet, these countries, the United Nations Development Programme points out, hang on the vagaries of global markets, with the prices of primary commodities having fallen to their lowest levels in a century and a half.

As a result, wealth and opportunity, indeed the benefits of globalization, driven by market expansion, accrue to a handful of countries and an increasingly smaller portion of the global population. The United Nations was established to deal with interstate conflict -- a task made even more urgent with the advent of nuclear weapons. Structurally, it still reflects the dominant power balance within the international system at the end of the Second World War. At that time, the vast number of the present members of the United Nations were either under colonial or other type of domination, and population pressure and interdependence had not made disparity a global concern. Populations have subsequently swollen and the gulf between the rich old millions and the destitute poor young billions has increased.

Not only has the number of Member States more than doubled since 1945, but the nature of global, and indeed of national governance, has also changed. In a world within which money, not ideology or needs, dominates in the allocation of resources, economic relationships and disparities increasingly lie at the root of the forthcoming global crisis. In the aftermath of the demise of ideological conflict, there are many who fear that future conflict may occur along the fault lines between civilizations and cultures.

Economic marginalization, often a result of globalization, will inevitably reinforce irredentism in a potent new ideology of global apartheid. Poverty, not politics, lies at the root of these divisions. It is the commitment to a more equitable global order that must inevitably be at the core of global governance.

Meeting this challenge will cut to the heart of the international system, the United Nations in particular. Without a change in the character and focus of the United Nations itself, away from a body dedicated to preventing interstate conflict in the interests of rich countries and towards a global, rules-based institution that places equitable human development at the core of its concern, the world body will become increasingly irrelevant to the global strategic challenge of disparity. This cannot be met by reforms built on a system of global governance and the myth of equality of nations. For many poor, weak and marginal countries, national sovereignty remains the only protection from the power of globalization that is often viewed as a predatory and unregulated agent of the powerful. For the weak, national sovereignty provides some measure of protection against the power of the global market, against a system that serves a complex, integrated high quality economy of which they are not part. The relentless pressure of the market entrenches the monopoly of the educated elite countries and tightens the bondage of the poor, whether by defining research agendas, the control of intellectual property rights and patents, ever-more stringent ecological standards, or "first world" labour requirements that cannot be met in developing countries. A balance must therefore be sought between the impact of globalization and the protection offered by national sovereignty.

UN Photo

As we come to the end of the twentieth century, it is evident that the United Nations needs to revisit the fundamentals of the international system and the tools that it wishes to use to avoid, manage and end conflict. The debate about changing the composition of the Security Council is but one component of a much larger challenge. This challenge is no less than reinventing global governance in the interests of a more equitable global dispensation within which the poor will not come to the attention of the rich only through the extent of environmental damage and the threat of refugees, but as part of a global agenda that seeks to address disparity.

If we accept that the United Nations is no more than its members, this challenge reflects acutely upon the manner and resources that Member States dedicate to its revitalization. Given the nature of global dominance of the United States, a precondition for the revitalization of global governance is gaining United States support for a rules-based international system, without myopic focus on national interests and profits before all else.

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