The UN at a Crossroads

Good morning. My name is Carlos Pascual. I am the Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policies Studies Program here at the Brookings Institution, and I would like to welcome you to Brookings. The talk that we have today by Mark Malloch Brown, the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, is part of a conference that we are holding on the use of force and its legitimacy. It is part of the conclusion of a multiyear project that has brought us all around the world in consultations with regional experts, academics, think tank analysts, political figures, and policy figures, to try to better understand how to grapple with this question of the use of force. There are a number of very key things that have come out of these discussions that you will see in papers that are going to be put forth, including the importance of having broad strategies to deal with humanitarian transitions, weapons of mass destruction and their proliferation, terrorism and conflict, that within those strategies force may in fact be a legitimate or a useful component, but that force is not the only strategy that is necessary to advance. So what this project has been grappling with is what are the right strategies to approach those broad questions of transition, and where does force fit in. We are particularly indebted to the two individuals who have played a leadership role on pulling this project together, Jim Steinberg who was my predecessor here at Brookings as the Vice President and the Director of Foreign Policy Studies, and Ivo Daalder, one of our Senior Fellows, who have done an extraordinary job in pulling together extremely talented people from throughout the world, and those who dedicated their time to participate in the project, thank you very much for the insights that you have provided. The project is done in the spirit of understanding how to build effective and capable multilateral institutions. It is done in the spirit of recognizing that if these institutions cannot change to address the kinds of realities that we have today that require us to deal with transnational threats, as Jim Steinberg said yesterday at the opening, the reality that the individual instabilities within countries can in fact have global impacts in the transnational world that we live in today, if we cannot deal with those two sets of issues, the internal instability of countries and the transnational implications, then we are not adequately serving the global security interests that we have as well as the security interests of the United States. We are very fortunate in this context to have an opportunity to hear from an individual who has really spent his life dealing with this challenge of transition, and in particular in recent years, dealing with the challenge of building an effective multilateral system and building an effective United Nations. Mark Malloch Brown as all of you know is the Deputy Secretary-General at the U.N. He was Kofi Annan's Chief of Staff before that. Before that he was the head of UNDP and the U.N. Development Group. So his fundamental challenge at the U.N. has been to not only build an effective institution, but to build it recognizing that the world is changing and how should these institutions change in that context. Before that, Mark was at the World Bank where he was the Vice President in charge of External Affairs and Relations with the United Nations. He has worked with UNHCR, he has been a report with The Economist, and he has been a specialist in communication strategies. Throughout all of that, I think the key theme that Mark has worked with is how to empower people to deal with transitional environments. So we are very pleased to be able to give him this forum to address us and share his ideas on where we are in the process of reforming multilateral institutions and where should we go in the future. Mark, thank you. Thank you, Carlos, Ivo, Jim, and everybody who has been involved in this I think very important undertaking, this group who have met now a number of times, and the rest of us are joining them today for this lecture. When Brookings started to look into this issue of the legitimate uses of force, it was at the same time that a high-level panel set up by Kofi Annan was asking itself the same questions at the United Nations, all of this in 2003 in the aftermath of the Iraq War. If I look back to 2003, my own suspicion about our high-level panel is that it asked the wrong question but got the right answer. Let me say what I mean by that, which is that in the immediate aftermath of Iraq, the real casualty appeared to be the U.N. Security Council. I think what preoccupied all of us was that it had failed to contain the United States within a strategy of dealing with Saddam Hussein that the U.S. could live with. The U.S. impatience, the presumption of the imminence of the threat, the assumption that there were weapons of mass destruction, all combined to mean that the U.S. was not willing ultimately to operate within the strictures of the Council or at the pace that the Security Council wanted to deal with the problem. Therefore, the casualty seemed to be the Security Council. Three years later, I suspect we draw a rather different conclusion from it, that in some ways 2003 was the "High Noon" of acting outside the context of the Security Council, the difficulties in an era of asymmetric conflict even for a country as powerful as the United States, the difficulties of intervention which lacks that broader international legitimacy that comes from the Council meant that it has left the U.S. wary of taking on other similar challenges through a narrow coalition of the willing or acting alone. And it has driven the U.S. back to the Security Council in a way which would have been seen as utterly implausible only 3 short years ago. So that today we see North Korea, Iran, Darfur, Lebanon and the Middle East very much on the docket of the Council and, indeed, Myanmar, an issue where Washington has been hugely ahead of the rest of the world in trying to get resolute action, that too has been brought through U.S. diplomacy to the Security Council. But I do not think we should take any comfort as multilateralists from this swing of the pendulum back to the United Nations because unless the U.N. is able to live up to the renewed expectations of it to be able to deal robustly with these crises, one can only assume that the pendulum will keep on swinging or swing in a new direction, but it is impossible to imagine, whatever the setbacks in terms of Iraq policy, that the U.S. would invest its foreign policy in an institution such as the Security Council that did not deliver results. Therefore, of course, that list of crises that I have observed that are on our docket at the moment are a huge challenge to the effectiveness of the Council and it would need an utterly rosy-eyed U.N. optimist to believe that we are going to quickly and rapidly come up with smart, quick, effective solutions on that range of issues. That drives us to say: what is it that we should or can do to strengthen the United Nations to make it a better multilateral partner for a U.S. seeking again to solve global problems through the U.N. Here to the high-level panel's answer to its own questions which were, first, did we need to reopen the U.N. Charter? That is always a problematic issue. It is in its own way as difficult as opening a lot of national constitutions. We have not had a series of amendments like the U.S. Constitution has, and we have been very afraid and timid to open up what we fear would be a Pandora's Box where whatever improvements we secured might be offset by interventions by groups of member states intending to weaken the Charter. The reason that the Charter is in itself actually a rather strong document is of course the historical circumstances in which it was written which was in the immediate ending months and months after the Second World War where in a sense the driving ideas for the drafter was not the League of Nations . anything but, please . a recognition that the League of Nations had lacked the robustness or interventionist requirements in terms of the use of force, or let me say preventive requirements in terms of the use of force, necessary for it to effectively keep the peace. So chastened by the experience of the Second World War and the utter failure of the League of Nations to stand up in any way to the unfolding events of the 1930s, the Allies and victors of the Second World War who drafted the Charter did so with the intention that it would be a forceful instrument, and the Security Council particularly a forceful instrument, in keeping the peace in the postwar world. But of course there were certain aspects of that design which may have looked very good in 1945 but hardly hold up in terms of the legitimacy of the Charter and the effectiveness of peacekeeping in the Security Council today in 2006. I think there are several changes particularly that we have to recognize and see what we are going to do to adjust to. The first is the assumption that wars would largely be between states, armies crossing borders to invade neighbors, the phenomenon of war which had led us into the two World Wars of the first half of the last century, and the idea that wars would instead migrate to be within states and no longer between formal armies but very heavily targeting civilians was not something that was foreseen. Nor was the idea that the whole rules of combat coming almost from the chivalry of many centuries earlier would be thrown aside in terms of preventive strikes using new generations of weapons which allowed very powerful countries to be struck in their heartland before they even knew that they were formally under attack. And of course, these kinds of issues and how to address them were very, very much alive in 2003 as they had been from 9/11 onwards. The second, if you like, change in the U.N. itself which was not foreseen by the founders was its emergence as a universal body. I know within this panel that we are joining today there has been I think a minority that has embraced this club of democracies idea, if only international affairs were managed by a small like-minded group of nations, we would not have the problems we have. Of course, that was very much the original idea of those who founded the United Nations. The term United Nations was not the inclusive term that we see it as today. It was a term the Allies used to describe themselves during the Second World War which they then applied to this new institution that they had set up and intended to indefinitely control through their veto rights on the Security Council, and it was only over time with decolonization and enlightened leadership in Washington particularly that essentially it moved towards expanding membership as new countries emerged, therefore, from some dozens of members at the beginning, to 192 today. But if you think if it had stuck to that club of democracies version of 1945, just like-minded allies, where we would be today on the problems I mentioned earlier such as North Korea, Darfur, Iran, or even the Middle East, because under that formula, China would not occupy the Chinese seat in the Security Council, Taiwan would. Indeed, were you today to introduce a club of democracies to replace the U.N., at a stroke you would eliminate a country of 1.3 billion people from its membership and tie he arms of that institution in terms of any credible strategy for dealing with either North Korea, Iran, or Darfur. And it was of course those pragmatic considerations which led generations of leadership here in Washington and in New York to recognize that you got much more power from an institution which was truly universal, that its legitimacy was not derived by commitment to a single democratic idea, but to the idea instead that all kinds of problems, not just political and security problems, but public-health problems, environmental problems, issues of poverty, all of them had to be dealt with on a transnational global basis by countries who might not in terms of their own values and organization of their political lives at home be natural soul mates. So the organization has become both universal, and as it has done so, a more and more quarrelsome club of countries with very different views on issues. And at the same time, is being challenged by new kinds of warfare that it had not foreseen at the time the Charter was written. So that has led perhaps predictably to a crisis of governance in the organization. As the news kinds of warfare forced the Security Council even without a Charter change to envisage earlier interventions, preemptive interventions, if you like, when there is an imminent threat of conflict, as we are forced to embrace doctrines like the responsibility to protect with its obligation on the international community to intervene in a country over the original Charter recognition of national sovereignty in order to stop an internal genocide or major mass human-rights violation in which the government is either not stopping it or is even party to it. these intrusions on the old laws of war and sovereignty gradually take the U.N. into new waters, the crisis of governance only becomes greater because a more intrusive body is one where even more member states fret at the lack of representativeness of its principal, or at least perceived principal organ, the Security Council, and particularly the issue of the P5's veto. That, if you like, marginalization or frustration of many members that they do not have a central enough place in the decision making of the organization has impeded their desire to see a retooling of the United Nations means of averting conflict, and I will come back to this in a little bit more detail later and, above all, this sense that the P5 is not representative of the political economy of 2006 and, therefore, nor is the Security Council. And beneath that, a sense that the universal membership of the General Assembly versus its very closed 15-person membership of the Security Council, the five permanent members and the 10 2-year elected term members, that this has created a them-and-us class system that it takes a Brit to particularly recognize. But as we also recognize and have spent many centuries trying to solve in our own system, if you do create a powerful inner group and leave others outside, a lot of bricks get thrown through the windows, and that has in a sense been the challenge now for the organization and it is one which threatens its legitimacy and therefore threatens its authority as an effective tool to prevent conflict. I want to take these different issues and what we have tried to do about them as well as the roadblocks that have been thrown in our way to do more. The first one I have mentioned is the changed nature of conflict where essentially in a kind of Indian summer of legislative activity by this Secretary-General and General Assembly, we have done much more than a late term, by normal political theory lame-duck Secretary-General might have been expected to achieve, because first we got through the General Assembly last year this radical new doctrine of the responsibility to protect, and I will come back to its application in the case of Darfur if only to head off a few fierce questioners before they get at me. Secondly, the issue of a counter-terrorism strategy where finally we have managed to get the member states to agree to a collective approach across the U.N. system dealing with terrorism, both the military and security dimensions and the information-exchange dimensions, but also locking in a human-rights dimension and the need to make sure that as we combine internationally to combat terrorism we do not undermine the whole thing by an unnecessary and drastic reduction of people's human rights around the world. The third issue or institutional change that we have made is that we have been able to win the agreement to a Peace Building Commission. The idea here was that with conflict now within states, the most dangerous moment for international organizations in terms of helping a country through an exit strategy to conflict and back to sustained development is often the immediate post-conflict period. Some of you who have heard me talk before may know that this is a particular bugbear of mine to watch the economic international institutions race rapidly to try and get post-conflict states to live within their economic means and to have balanced budgets, et cetera, at a time that there is almost no tax or income base for the post-conflict government. While at the same time, the political institutions and security institutions in New York want to be as Keynesian as possible to spend lots on demobilizing rebels or on integrating them into an expanded national army, lots on school and health clinics for the previously rebel areas of the country, lots on job creation for those same areas, on the logic of not just an economic pump-priming logic, but more a political pump-priming logic, that unless you quickly show a peace dividend to victims of conflict, there is a high propensity for countries to slip back into conflict. I suspect you are all familiar with the statistics that Paul Collier has developed which shows that indeed there is an 80-percent or even 90-percent-plus likelihood of conflict resuming in the first year, and that like a patient being slowly led through rehabilitation, every year the likelihood of conflict gets a bit less. for us, the Peace Building Commission is an attempt to bring donors, neighbors, international economic and political institutions together around buying into a single peace-building strategy for a country where all of our economic, political and security support is moving in the same direction and is not contradictory with each other and contributing indeed to undermining the fragile peace rather than building on it. Of course, the fourth change that we have made in this last sort of legislative rush is the new Human Rights Council. This has had a mixed record so far. I am sure all of you are aware that here in Washington there were a lot of reservations about it which I think many in Washington, including The Washington Post this morning, have been confirmed by the early acts of the new Council. We ourselves, Kofi Annan and all of us in the senior management of the U.N., including Louise Arbour, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, are deeply troubled by the early acts of this Council which has, for example, taken an extremely one-sided view on the conflict in Lebanon where it has set up an inquiry into Israeli abuses but has not matched it with an inquiry into Hizballah attacks on civilians, and we find this kind of already sort of political lens being applied to the decisions of the Council deeply disappointing. I must observe though that one of the design faults in the new Council which has to be put fairly and squarely on the U.S. door is that in all of the negotiations, whether it is Security Council reform or the Human Rights Council, the U.S. has a passion for smallness, an assumption that if you cannot get people around a small table together for direct negotiations, you cannot solve any problem in the world. And the consequence for the Human Rights Council was to cut the size over the old Human Rights Commission, and when we did that and had to representative of today's population and economic distribution in the world, sure enough, the region that took a huge hair cut was the European region. As a result, there is now an in- built developing country majority on the Human Rights Council which there was not before, and let me say when I say developing world, it is not Latin America. As it has voted so far, there has been a Latin America/Western Europe group, but then there has been an African, Asian, and Middle Eastern group that have voted together, and that latter group has a built-in majority under the smaller council than we had wanted that the U.S. had pressed for as a condition for its involvement, and I devoutly hope that when we come to Security Council reform that this similar obsession with size will not drive aside these very important debates about representativeness and making sure that the good guys have enough position. But the fact is, a lot of the African countries that have voted, if you like, disappointingly, are democracies, which again raises questions about whether a club of democracies really is as useful an international tool as some believe. But I think secondly raises a much more fundamental question which is that still this legitimacy issue and internal cultural commitment amongst the weaker member states in the U.N. system to the overall pride and success of the organization as a whole is poisoned by this governance issue. My own view is if all the governance was working well and the countries of Africa or Asia felt that they really had an adequate voice in the say of the total institutions of the organization, this kind of highly politicized behavior in a vehicle like the Human Rights Council would diminish and perhaps even go away. So this legitimacy/inclusion argument remains enormously important, hence, to how we struggle to now that we have become a universal organization, how we handle reform of these institutions to allow more representative participation. And the top of that list is the Security Council because if it is to be a stronger instrument of intervention, then it must be more broadly representative of world power. And when you look for example at the extreme caution that a country like India has traditionally shown to the involvement of the U.N. and the Security Council to its own neighbors such as Nepal, you recognize that a country such as India must be brought into the tent. You cannot expect to have effective global security strategies with India outside. Without a single country in Latin America in the Council, perhaps most notably Brazil in terms of its size, it is equally difficult to imagine a Council which carries global legitimacy and force. Without Japan and Germany, huge economic powers in their own right, without a single member from Africa or a single Islamic nation, it is hard to believe that this Council really will enjoy adequate legitimacy. So we have here a major challenge, and I am going to come back again in a moment to explain what reform might look like, and we will have more opportunity to do that perhaps during the questions and answers after this. But let me at this point just add one further issue which is that while there has to be an expansion of membership and the original visions of how this options of how this might be done of either more permanent members or more slightly longer-term members than just the 2-year terms, both those options seem to have fallen away in view of some kind of consensus in the middle which would satisfy both sides to this argument. But I think those of us involved with the Security Council believe that almost as important as the reform of membership is the reform of its procedures. To watch during several long grim days in August the difficulty of getting not a resolution, but just a strong presidential statement on the Lebanon-Israel conflict condemning the civilian causalities and calling for a cease-fire and to see just two countries able to hold up the will of the rest of the Council on this really I think suggests that there are procedural issues that need to be addressed as much as membership issues. Let me just go to the other issue that is critical to a more effective Council, and that is an effective Department of Peacekeeping Operations, one really able to deploy quickly into a Darfur or into a Southern Lebanon and do so with the equipment, the material, the people, and the political will and resources to get the job done and do it in a way which is not going to challenge any sort of agent of dissent to risk attacking us when we do this. Peacekeeping which is a bit of a sort of ragtag operation in the sense that we have to beg and borrow our soldiers for each operation, there is no standby force, there is no common training; given all of these constraints, it has exploded in size. When this Secretary-General came to office, there were 20,000 peacekeepers in the field. By the end of this year, there will be 100,000. Possibly by the spring of 2007 there will be as many as 130,000 or 140,000. The U.N. peacekeepers are by far the second-largest international deployment of soldiers in the world after that of the United States. We are ahead of NATO by a multiple of several-fold; we are ahead of the U.K., France, China, or Russia or any of the other possible candidates you might think of. And yet unlike NATO, we do not have the sort of staff headquarters support to these operations. We do not have the standby arrangements where units in NATO member states regularly train together and are on standby for rapid deployment. We do not have access to the military police resources that are increasingly a vital part of the peacekeeping in these internal conflicts. So there is a massive issue of improving how we generate forces in a quick, timely, effective way. Nor do we pre-force deployment have an effective repertoire anymore of sanctions always, and I am going to come back to this in the case of Darfur in a second. But what I just wanted to say here is that we face in the situation of Darfur, an all-too-frequent case for the U.N. where essentially there is a little bit of bluff playing in that we are saying to President Bashir of Sudan give us consent for deployment or else, and there are a lot of questions about what plausibly the "or else" is. President Bashir looks at us and he thinks he has seen us blink, and that makes it hugely difficult to credibly address this issue of winning his consent to deployment. Therefore, let me very quickly just take Darfur as an example, if you like, of the limitations of this U.N. that the U.S. has pragmatically returned to in the recent years as a partner in achieving multilateral solutions to problems that it no longer feels equipped to solve itself. Our first diplomatic push for Darfur was a largely Western push, and to this day, by far the best leaders on the Darfur issue are President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. They are the most outspoken, they are the most clearly personally seized by it, but they are not the most effective in securing President Bashir's cooperation, in my view. They have a vital role, but what is critical is that they reach out to build a broader coalition, and I think the U.S. is very seized of this and is working very hard with us to try and get Arab neighbors and African neighbors, along with their regional institutions the African Union and the Arab League, much more engaged in a concerted diplomatic effort to press Bashir to accept a U.N. deployment. The other critical partner to this is China, Sudan's new principal energy client, and a late convert to putting direct pressure on Sudan to admit U.N. peacekeepers, and I think in that sense we have actually arrived at a very important new direction in the road where the efforts of Secretary Rice along with my own boss Kofi Annan, but also of Prime Minister Blair and others, is to now much more directed not just to the direct pressure by British or American envoys or, indeed, ultimatums from Washington or London or indeed from New York, but much more to a concerted, much broader diplomatic effort by these regional neighbors and other voices that have huge influence on Sudanese decision making. The second thing is that the same message is now being delivered: there is no choice, there must be a U.N. deployment, perhaps in partnership with the A.U., but there needs to be more troops there and they need to be there quickly. The third element to that is perhaps a better refined sense of what are the carrots and sticks that President Bashir faces. On the one hand, there has been a notable failure by all of us to put enough pressure on the rebels who did not join the Darfur Peace Agreement to sign up and participate. President Bashir has a legitimate complaint about this. Second, clearer assurances that the U.N. is going to do nothing to undermine his sovereignty. It is a sort of spurious fear in the sense that we have 9,000 peacekeepers in Southern Sudan who have helped stabilize Sudan heartily undermine it, but nevertheless it seems to be a particular concern of his not least because of his presumed link to the ICC indictments of leading Sudanese officials which there seems to be a deeply held fear in Sudan that we would use our peacekeepers to arrest and apprehend Sudanese officials. So I think they are starting to understand that there are benefits to allowing a deployment now, and at the same time there are real costs. And I think here I have been struck by how little work has been done on the nonmilitary sanction, if you like. Beneath the threat of deploying or else there has not been enough done on what are the levers you use on an oil-rich boomtown regime like that in Khartoum. There are real pressure points. Selling oil means you meet clients, but selling oil also means that your exchequer is full, you want to use your money to buy goods and services for the country aboard, your officials want to travel and enjoy their new status as an oil-rich regime, all of that is threatened if you are a pariah in the international community and falling under sanctions pressure. So my own view is there are a very tough set of sanctions, but that we have not done enough to develop and build the support to use them if we have to. But I also have to say that we can never take the military option off the table of deploying even without the consent of the Sudanese government, and the reason for that is not because I believe that there is today the will to do it, in fact, we only have five countries who have volunteered troops for this force at the moment, and this at the moment is a force designed to go in with a peace to keep, but assuming that we could build such a force and could go in, the key trigger point will be what happens on the ground in Darfur where the omens are very, very bad indeed. Humanitarian access has sharply decreased, our humanitarian workers cannot get to certain areas West of Al Fasha, and we fear the worst because of the massive amount of Sudanese armament deployed in the area. This is a region and a country at a real tipping point which could tip back into massive loss of life again. And of course if that happens, I think all the work that so many of you here and others have done to build an understanding in America and Europe of this terrible tragedy that is unfolding, would unleash itself in an irresistible political pressure to do something. So I do not think President Bashir should assume that just because at the moment we are looking for a way to win his consent to deploy that if indeed he blocks us and the situation tips into mass violence that political leaders in the West would be able to resist deployment, but I think what they would have to understand is this would be the worst option for everybody involved, not just for the Sudanese. This remains unchanged as we have argued so long an area the size of France in the middle of Africa with huge logistics challenges and really plausibly only a place where you can save life if there is a peace agreement to enforce, not if you are trying to stop a thousand intergroup conflicts, even with 20,000 peacekeepers and a lot of helicopter support power we just will not be able to keep the peace in an area that big if there is not one negotiated and agreed on to keep between the Khartoum government and the different rebel groups in Darfur. So a unilateral military intervention is absolutely the worst option for everybody involved and it is not one which I think is in anybody's list of likely scenarios at the moment, but we should not rule out that if this negotiation and nonmilitary set of sticks and carrots fails that public opinion I devoutly hope will expect us to fulfill the last condition of responsibility to protect which is if sanctions and other means fail, there is an obligation in the international community to step in and end conflict. So just in closing, I think Darfur shows the challenges. We do not have 20,000 troops lined up and ready to go, we do not have them let alone ready, we do not have the equipment to go with them. We are not yet even fully deployed in Southern Lebanon, sufficiently deployed to serve the needs at the moment. But the U.N. peacekeeping operation is still remarkably amateurish, inspired, brilliant, well led, making due with very little, but in terms of its staffing, its financial resources, its cost base, it is a very thin blue force compared to similar operations undertaken by the U.S. and others in terms of peacekeeping. The Security Council which is the empowerer of these different strategies, peacekeeping and others, suffers still from this issue of a crisis of legitimacy coming from the narrowness of its representation. So my bottom line is here we warmly welcome the U.S. back to multilateral diplomacy, but we are conscious that unless the U.S. joins with us in investing in true reform of this institution, governance, management and resources, it will never be an adequate vehicle to carry the new expectations that this administration is placing upon us. Thank you very much.