Esme Montgomery ¦ Chief Copy Editor
This October, Dublin played host to the One Young World Summit 2014, a meeting of the brightest young minds from across the world. The delegates of the summit meet annually to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world on an international scale. On the agenda this year was everything from entrepreneurialism to sustainable living, and debates were enriched by the expertise of a series of star guests, including former President of Ireland Mary Robinson and Seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan.
Perhaps the most topical and interesting of the talks was led by Michael Møller, the Acting Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva and employee of the United Nations since 1979. His special session entitled “Can the UN rise to the challenges of today?” attempted to grasp the current geopolitical factors making it difficult for the UN to engineer a better and safer world for us to live in.
The United Nations, founded in 1945 after the Second World War, is an organisation of 51 countries “committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights”, according to the organisation’s website. However, Michael Møller, who has worked at the UN for over 30 years, admitted that this aim is often frustrated by problems both within and outside the UN. He summed up the three main problems facing the UN today and offered several possible solutions that would make the organisation more effective, powerful and efficient in its push towards international social harmony.
Antiquated Structures
Structurally, the United Nations is made up of six main bodies, the most well known of which are the General Assembly and Security Council, but also including the Economic and Social Council, the International Court of Justice, the Secretariat and the Trusteeship Council. On top of these are a number of associated bodies and UN entities, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), many of which you will have heard of and which play a huge role on a global scale.
However, Møller pointed out that the most critical problem facing the UN internally is that these structures, established almost 70 years ago, have not changed at the pace the world has. Consequently, even when UN employees and officials around the world discover potential solutions to problems such as the spread of malaria in Sub-Saharan Africa or political warfare between Ukraine and Russia, they find it very difficult to implement the solutions. As Møller puts it, the intellectual understanding of complex world issues has increased, but the structure of the organisation has not changed fast enough.
Criticisms of the structure of the UN have come from all sides: from newspapers such as the Independent to university professors and government ministers. Common to all of these is the accusation that the UN is ill equipped to deal with twenty-first century issues. The problem stems from the over-bureaucratic structure of the UN, which means that each action requires months of deliberation, and the limitations on the UN’s power, which means it does not have enough legal power to enforce mandates.
Møller stressed the importance of building up political enthusiasm to restructure the system, which he believes can be achieved through collaboration and the hiring of young people who bring a fresh mind to the organisation. As he put it, “business as usual is simply not a viable option any more.”
Public Cynicism
Negative perceptions of the UN have become widespread in the last few years. Møller admits that the reputation of the UN has been damaged by several high profile responses to international issues which have been inadequate or delayed, such as the UN’s slow response to the Ebola epidemic in Africa this year and the lack of decisive action during the crisis in Syria. The media’s one-sided reporting of the activities of the UN (i.e. wholly negative) fails to make the public aware of the many successes of the organisation in the past years, causing a skewed perception of the UN.
This public perception of the UN as inadequate has not been helped by 2008 global financial crash. Resource allocation to the UN is based on financial considerations, meaning that after the crash many bodies of the UN received less funding. One such organisation is the World Health Organisation, which had hundreds of millions cut from its budget the same year that the Ebola crisis demanded an unprecedented effort at halting the spread of the disease. Moreover, budget cuts make it harder for the UN to achieve meaningful and lasting change. Nowadays UN responses are increasingly responsive rather than preventative— imagine them as more like slapping a bandage on a cut than preventing the actual wound from occurring. These solutions are often strained and short-term. Projects to achieve lasting change, such as the UN Millennium Development Goals, are under stress. Møller says the 2008 financial crash has directly affected the UN’s development goals and made it harder for them to be achieved in a timely fashion.
Resource pressure has created “problems of priority” which have become an unfortunate reality for the UN. The global demands on the UN appear to be getting greater each year and the system is overstretched financially and in terms of workload. Consequently many local or regional development issues are buried under the pile of international crises such as warfare and disease and do not receive the attention or resources they deserve.
Møller is optimistic that problems of resource pressure, which lead to the public’s cynicism about the effectiveness of the UN, can be tackled. He believes that the response must start with the individual, and that a much greater scope for local activism and community initiatives could ease the resource problem and bring back a sense of enthusiasm to the organisation’s project.
Power Politics
Møller strongly believes that the UN should be the moral voice of the world. This huge global responsibility is limited by the power politics of both the states involved and outside states.
One of the main strengths of the UN is that it is made up of lots of countries, all working together to find solutions for global issues. However this also brings its own issues. Despite the fact that the UN Charter emphasises the importance of equality of all states, the organisation itself is unequal. The General Assembly gives one vote to each state, but the Security Council is made up of only five permanent members and fifteen rotating members that serve a fixed term. The five permanent members (China, France, Russia, the UK and the USA) all have the power to veto any decision and block the resolution from passing. Therefore any political disagreements between these five countries make it very difficult for any security resolutions to come into effect. For example, the frequent historical disagreements between Russia and the USA, most recently over the annexation of Crimea by Russia, make it more likely that power politics outside the control of the UN will block UN Security Council action even on unrelated issues.
For Møller, having the right perspective on the power politics that daily halt the efficiency of the UN is essential. In order to keep positive over the 30 years he has worked for the UN he has reminded himself that the UN is less corrupt, less flawed and less inefficient than many of the states they are trying to help. For many countries without political or economic strength, the UN is the only organisation that can help.
Despite the problems the UN faces, it still remains the best-equipped organisation to tackle the many and developing global issues. Of course, like any international organisation, it would benefit from greater resource allocation, more enforceable legal powers and internal restructuring. However despite this, its thousands of employees work everyday to do the best with what they’ve got. People across the world depend upon them.
