By Thomas S. Axworthy
September 2020
China Today
This September, virtually, due to COVID-19, leaders from around the world will make speeches lauding, decrying, or reflecting on the history of the United Nations. This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations and, in the recent past, such anniversaries have been marked by significant action by the 193 states that are members of the organization. In 2005, for example, the 60th anniversary of the UN, which followed the horror of the Rwandan genocide, the General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution on the Responsibility to Protect, a major advance in international law where every state acknowledged in paragraphs 138-139 of the World Summit Outcome Document that it had the “responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.”
Faced with the ravages of the
COVID-19 pandemic, which has so far
infected over 30 million people and
is responsible for nearly a million
deaths as of September 24, can
the leaders of the world mark this
anniversary by moving forcefully in
2020 not only to combat the current
pandemic but also to reaffirm global
cooperation to secure peace and
stability, fight climate change,
promote sustainable development, and
achieve better equality between men
and women, four of the many
central pillars of the modern
UN?
The fall session of the UN General
Assembly is always one of the great
events of international diplomacy:
leaders flock to New York to speak
to the Assembly and engage in
critical bilateral meetings with
their peers; ambassadors engage
in hushed hallway
diplomacy; and NGOs organize a
plethora of off-site conferences,
hoping to attract the attention of
current decision makers to their
cause. Not this year. For the first
time since the founding of the
United Nations, leaders will not be
attending in person.
UN Secretary-General Antonio
Guterres began the High-Level
Meeting on September 21 speaking to
the Declaration for the
Commemoration of the 75th
Anniversary of the United Nations
(achieved after a hectic summer of
negotiation between member states)
followed by leaders delivering their
respective addresses by video link.
President Xi Jinping reminded
delegates that 75 years ago China
was the first country to sign on to
the UN Charter and that since its
founding, “the UN has withstood one
test after another and emerged with
renewed vigor.”
France and Germany launched an
Alliance for Multilateralism in
defence of a rule-based world order
in 2019. Referencing the pandemic,
French President Emmanuel Macron
said in his speech given to the
general debate of the UN General
Assembly, “We must together lay the
foundations for a fairer, more
balanced, more equitable, more
sustainable globalization.” He said
that the reconstruction of the
foundations of the international
order requires the establishment of
functional international cooperation
based on clear rules, defined and
respected by all. The theme was
echoed by German Chancellor Angela
Merkel, who told the assembly, “In
the end, the United Nations can only
be as good as its members are
united.” The cuckoo in the nest, was
Donald Trump, who used his speech,
as if he was at a campaign rally, to
laud his America First policy.
In the Declaration for the 75th
Anniversary of the United Nations,
today’s leaders pay tribute to their
predecessors who had the vision to
create the United Nations in the
first place. There is no other
global organization with the
legitimacy, convening power, and
normative impact as the United
Nations. The respect of today’s
leaders for those who preceded them
is well founded: In the midst of the
colossal life and death struggle of
World War II, the Allied powers
convened planning sessions at
Dunbarton Oaks in Washington DC and
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Out of
these conferences came concrete
plans on the mission and structure
of the UN and the World Bank. At
Dunbarton Oaks in 1944, the
delegates made a key decision about
the future international
organization: It was to be an
organization of states dependant on
the decisions of a host of member
states, not a world government. And
the United Nations right from the
start had no independent source of
financing or tax base. It is
dependent financially on the
assessed and voluntary contributions
of the member states. The UN General
Assembly, for example, approved a
US$3.07 billion regular budget for
the Secretariat in 2020, a pittance
compared to the US$88.2 billion
budget of its host city New York for
the fiscal year 2021. New York City
spends over three times as much on
policing alone (near US$11 billion)
as the regular budget of the UN does
on trying to solve all the problems
of the world.
It is important that we keep these
facts in mind when we assess the
highs and lows of the history of the
UN over the past 75 years. It has
many achievements but just as many
disappointments, especially when we
look at expansive goals like ending
world poverty. At the UN, the glass
is always half full or half empty
depending on one’s perspective. The
preamble of the UN Charter pledges
“to save succeeding generations from
the scourge of war,” and preventing
conflict or helping to resolve it if
war breaks out has always been the
preeminent purpose of the UN. Around
60 million people had died in the
ravages of WWII starting with
Japan’s invasion of China and
Hitler’s aggression against his
neighbours, so it was the trauma
from witnessing those horrors that
weighed down on the minds of the
UN’s founders. The UN of course has
not ended war, but it has developed
the concept of peacekeeping where
troops voluntarily supplied by UN
members interpose themselves between
opposing armies, police ceasefires,
and implement resolutions of the
Security Council. The first mission
began in 1948 followed by more than
70 in succeeding years with more
than a million men and woman having
served under the UN flag. And
conflict and violence is not a
problem that is going away: 52
active state-based armed conflicts
were recorded in 2018, the highest
total since 1991.
The 51 nations that signed the UN
Charter in 1945 have expanded to 193
states today demonstrating both the
organization’s ability to adapt to
changing times and its ability to
influence one of the great turning
points of modern history, the end of
empires and overt colonialism. In
the 60s and 70s of the preceding
century, nations in Africa, Asia,
and the Middle East freed themselves
from the shackles of imperialistic
colonization, transforming the UN by
giving it enhanced legitimacy. A
milestone in this development was
the vote of the General Assembly in
1971 recognizing the government of
the People’s Republic of China as
“the only legitimate representative
of China” giving the People’s
Republic its rightful chair in the
Security Council and bringing into
the UN system a government that
represented a quarter of
humanity.
The transformation of the United
Nations by the South led to another
major development, the focusing of
the UN system on social and economic
equity as much as traditional
concerns about peace and security.
The World Health Organization, the
Food and Agriculture Organization,
UNICEF, and a host of other programs
have greatly helped save and improve
lives of millions. The World Health
Organization, to cite just one
example, has led the fight against
small pox and polio, eradicating
these age old diseases from all but
a handful of countries. The UN now
stands for a just world as well as a
more peaceful one.
The third of the major UN
transformations since 1945 is the
growing partnership with civil
society. In 1972 the UN sponsored
the Stockholm Conference on the
Human Environment and created the
United Nations Environment
Programme. Since that time the
health of the planet, biodiversity,
and slowing down and adapting to
climate change has become a major
focus of the UN’s work. But a key
impetus for the Stockholm Conference
was the advocacy of hundreds of
environmental groups which urged the
states to take action to make
development sustainable. Indeed at
Stockholm while delegates met
officially, parallel conferences of
NGOs took place outside the formal
proceedings and the NGOs presented
an alternative and more radical set
of environmental principles. Since
1972, civil society organizations
have contributed to every major UN
initiative from renewals of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, the 2015
Paris Climate Conference, to the
drafting of the 75th anniversary
declaration this summer. Ambassadors
now know that mobilization and
initiatives originating from civil
society cannot be ignored.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a stark
reminder of the need for
international cooperation to solve
humankind’s problems. Viruses know
no borders. But it has also revealed
the perversity of some members of
humanity. In the midst of the
pandemic, Donald Trump announced
that the United States would cease
funding the World Health
Organization and the United States
has refused to join the
international alliance to develop
and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine.
These actions follow his withdrawal
from the Paris Agreement, the Iran
nuclear deal, the 1987
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty, blocking the appellate body
of the World Trade Organization, and
the list goes on and on.
Dean Acheson, a former U.S.
Secretary of State, active in the
post-WWII program of international
institutional reform, said he was
“Present at the Creation.” With
Donald Trump we have been Present at
the Destruction. We can only hope
that other world leaders approach
the 75th Anniversary of the United
Nations with a resolve to move the
world forward not backward. Given
the still raging COVID-19 pandemic
and the host of world problems
crying out for global action, we
have never needed the United Nations
more. We must hope that that Xi
Jinping is right that “after the
storm comes the rainbow.”
THOMAS S. AXWORTHY is the
Secretary General of the
InterAction Council.