Triumph of dysfunction over reform

THE plans by Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the UN, to reform his unwieldy and dysfunctional organisation are practical, mostly praise-worthy and may even do some good, but they invite this fundamental question: by making a bad organisation better, do you in fact make it worse?

The UN is dysfunctional in every aspect of its being. Its bureaucracy is incompetent, erratically chosen, opaque, unaccountable and parts of it are corrupt, as evident in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. Its General Assembly, where almost every nation - most of them not democracies - is represented, is locked into ritualistic and utterly worthless debate, most of it obsessed, wholly unproductively, with the Israel-Palestine issue.

The General Assembly has become the absolute last word in irrelevance. It may be the most democratic part of the UN, in that it's the part where everyone is represented, but it is also utterly without meaning or consequence, beyond diverting diplomatic resources from more useful tasks and training Third World diplomats especially in the black arts of rancour and futility.

The UN Commission on Human Rights, as Annan himself says, is beset by "declining credibility and professionalism". He recommends its abolition. When Annan, a lifelong UN bureaucrat, recommends that a UN body be abolished, you can pretty much believe that it has become worthless.

The commission spends most of its time either on meaningless motherhood resolutions or on criticism of Israel. Israel does deserve to be criticised from time to time, but it is bizarre that the main dictatorships in the world, the main violators of human rights, are never criticised in the commission.

Some of the UN specialist agencies undoubtedly do good and even heroic work. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has a good record of looking after people that no one else will. But, overall, the specialist agencies are a mixed bag.

The heart of the UN is the Security Council. This is both the key strength and the key weakness of the body. It has five permanent members with veto power - the US, Russia, Britain, France and China. Because it embodies most of the great powers, it is the only part of the UN that anyone really takes seriously. There are also 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council elected for two-year terms by the General Assembly.

The Security Council is the only part of the UN that can authorise the use of force. However, the fact of the veto means that force is never authorised where it cuts across the interests of any of the five veto holders, or any of their friends or allies. This is an enormous constraint on the UN, but it also prevents the UN from doing foolish things, such as starting world wars.

Annan, like every other would-be UN reformer, wants to enlarge the Security Council to make it reflect the power realities of today, although he is not prescriptive about exactly how this is to be done. There are many plans to expand the Security Council. Japan, India, Brazil and Germany are promoting a unity ticket to get themselves on as new permanent members, though it is unlikely they would get the veto power.

There are two problems with expanding the Security Council. One is that it would make it even more difficult to get consensus for any action. The second, even worse, consequence would be if the expansion worked and gave the Security Council greater international legitimacy. This is the key conceptual point in Annan's work as it is in the report of the High Level Panel report, in which Gareth Evans played so prominent a role, which is the basis of Annan's recommendations.

In his report, which Annan's call for reform endorses, Evans, in his typical hyper-lawyerly way, tries to create a code that would govern all the occasions in which any state could use force. The bottom line of all the codes, however, is that, except when a state is acting in direct self-defence, only the Security Council could authorise the use of force.

For the Security Council to actually have this moral authority would be a very bad development indeed for the world and for Australia. Evans is trying to substitute the rule of law for a balance of power approach. But such an eventuality would not lead to the true rule of law but simply an even worse power imbalance than we have now. The veto power alone ensures that UN law does not apply to that 30 per cent of the global population represented by governments with a veto.

In its whole history the UN has only twice acted to enforce collective security, in the Korean War and in the first Gulf War in 1991. On both occasions it did not create a global mission, as the UN founders envisaged, but simply authorised the US to expel North Korean forces from South Korea and Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait.

For much of its existence the UN was paralysed by the US-Soviet polarisation. After the end of the Cold War there was a brief period in which it was thought the Security Council might act as was originally intended. But the 1990s were a decade of shocking UN failure. Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and many others were examples of rank UN impotence. As the Bosnians who fled to Srebrenica found to their mortal cost, anyone depending on UN will to protect their lives was as good as dead.

The UN cannot shoulder this burden, nor should we want it to, given that most of its members are not democracies and most non-democratic governments do not share our fundamental values.

The truth is that what order there is in the international system is provided by the US alliance system. The reason China cannot attack Taiwan is not because of what the UN might say or do but because it fears US intervention. The Kosovo Albanians would have suffered their own genocide without US action - the UN was completely useless in this case because of the Russian veto.

Three very dumb ways to think about the UN are as a system of international law, a world government or a balance to the US. Australia should be absolutely pragmatic about the UN. It is merely one form of international co-operation. It does some good things, which we should support, and some bad things, which we should oppose. But under no circumstances should any Australian government ever feel constrained by UN authority.