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U.N.: GRAND INTENTIONS AND AMORPHOUS AUTHORITY

07/13/1999

UNITED NATIONS -- What a paradoxical place!

Today more than ever, the United Nations is a place of grand themes and impossible implementation, an organization of many exceptional men and women and a multitude of international bureacrats who could surely never hold a job anywhere else, an institution of glorious intention and petty meanspiritedness that often makes the mafia look civilized.

The grand-theme part, for instance, emerged again this week in the many pages of the annual Human Development Report issued by the United

Nations Development Programme (UNDP). It provides a masterful overview of the sometimes harsh realities of globalization in the world.

To its many adherents, globalization is not only an economic schema (the linking of economies across the world through massive instantaneous investment possibilities), but a utopian dream of salvation and prosperity for everyone. The U.N. report warns that, despite the splendid things that globalization can do, it is also creating a "grotesque" polarization between haves and have-nots in both wealthy and poor societies. It is also creating a worldwide "new underclass," expanding benefits rapidly for people who are "wired" to the new economy and the Internet, while millions of people fall by the wayside of the global highways.

The answers? One prominently mentioned is to instill tougher rules on global governance, including principles of performance for multinationals on labor standards, fair trade and environmental protection. A "global forum" would bring together multinational corporations, trade unions, non-governmental organizations and governments to reinforce rules and ethical codes of conduct.

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Despite that highmindedness, the personal and political quarrels never seem to stop. In fact, the greatest spat yet -- the one that got the last U.N. secretary-general, the urbane Boutros Boutros-Ghali, removed from office two years ago by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- was dramatically relived this June when Boutros-Ghali was in Manhattan to promote his book about the affair, "Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga."

I happened to be seated next to the seasoned Egyptian diplomat at a dinner, and found him more cosmopolitan and filled with deviltry than ever. In his book, he charges bluntly that the U.S. administration kept voting for tough Security Council resolutions, but then refused to support the action called for. But his real bile is reserved for "Madeleine," who apparently told him where not to travel, what envoys to appoint and what to say in speeches -- all from a country that wants to appear to run things but does not even pay its $l.2 billion in U.N. bills.

When I asked him about the Kosovo mission, which followed the U.N.'s failures -- under him -- in Bosnia, he only sniffed and insisted that the whole NATO bombing was unnecessary. "If they had just put more observers on the ground in Kosovo, it would never have come to this," he said.

Meanwhile, back at the U.N. building, other new, and often noble, ideas are bobbing up, like the one that underlies NATO's bombing of Kosovo and that is challenging the old U.N. concepts of neutrality and the total sovereignty of the nation-state.

"There's a great body of opinion floating around that governments no longer have the right to mistreat their own people while hiding behind the walls of sovereignty," one of the leaders here quietly told me. "It revolves around the concept of 'humanitarian intervention.' Since the holocaust in Rwanda, the concept of humanitarian intervention is growing. Prior to that, sovereignty was sacred."

Only this week, the U.N. was facing another of the seemingly endless morally ambiguous -- or even disgusting -- choices that it has to make in a world without real international leadership. In Sierra Leone, for instance, the terrible eight-year civil war "ended" with the cruel criminal rebel forces, the same ones that hacked hands and feet off of thousands of people, now sharing power in the government. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan first announced the United Nations would not recognize any amnesty there for crimes that violated international law (right). Yet the next day, he was there in Freetown to give his formal approval to a deal whose existence depends upon the rebels' being guaranteed they will never be prosecuted (wrong).

So, there you have it, this world of the U.N. It is a world where lines of control and authority remain amorphous, in part because of increasing Third Worldization of the organization and in part because of rival intentions, but also because of the lack of American leadership in these corridors.

"A post-cold war international system remains unbuilt," Boutros-Ghali writes at the end of his book, "and the post-cold war period has passed." This is true, and it is equally true that there is really only one way to break the authority jam here and to turn new concepts into new realities. That is for the United States to take responsible, tough-minded leadership and thus to override all the self-imposed impotence and confusion.

We can only hope that the next administration will make that one of its top priorities in an increasingly confused and fragmented world.