The Scale of Assessments of the UN Budget

This article describes events that took place some three years ago, in the waning days of the Clinton administration. The issue at hand was to reduce the United States' contribution to both the regular and the peacekeeping budgets of the United Nations to a level well below what standard criteria (mostly based on to pay) established. The case made was unpopular and intellectually questionable, but through a combination of aggressive diplomatic initiatives, both at the bilateral and multilateral levels, the United States finally prevailed. The topic is still timely, because very little has been published on the matter in spite of the fact that it involved one of the pivotal negotiations of recent years within the United Nations. (1) In addition, after the recent failure of the Security Council to reach an agreement on the use of force in Iraq, many observers of the UN will feel tempted to revisit the theme of U.S.-UN relations, a matter in which the scale of assessments battle became a defining moment. Of course, that is not to insinuate that the scale of assessments of the UN's budget is comparable to matters dealing with the use of force. Not only are the stakes involved of a totally different nature, but there are also underlying circumstances in the latter case that simply did not surface for such a mundane topic as agreeing on how to assess contributions to finance the budget among the member states. (2) Further, the story I tell in this article took place under a Democratic administration; one can only speculate if the events surrounding the disarmament of Iraq would have had a different outcome had they not occurred under the Bush administration. I do not pretend to offer new conceptual insights. Rather, I draw on the privileged pulpit of the chairman of the Fifth Committee (Administration and Budgetary) to observe the dynamics of decisionmaking in a multilateral setting and to draw some lessons that may prove useful for future negotiations, especially regarding the always contentious and larger issue of how other members of the UN deal with the dominant power in their midst. The Matter Under Consideration On 23 December 2000, the General Assembly approved a new scale of assessments for the UN's regular budget and for its peacekeeping operations. (3) Thus ended an extended, complex, and sometimes even dramatic negotiation, which raised serious issues and dilemmas for all member states. The detonator of these events can be found in the Helms-Biden legislation, approved by the U.S. Senate in June 1999 and enacted by Congress in November of that year. (4) Under the overall objective of reforming the UN, the mentioned legislation set certain conditions for the payment of part of the United States' arrears. Among those conditions, a reduction of the U.S. contribution to the regular budget, from 25 percent to 22 percent, and to peacekeeping operations, from around 31 percent to 25 percent, were set as benchmarks. (5) These conditions were widely condemned and rejected by the rest of the international community as illegal, unilateral, and unfair: illegal, because the United States, as is the case of all members, is bound to meet its commitments to the UN budget in full, on time, and without conditions; unilateral, because a legislative branch mandated its executive branch to act without prior consultation with the other members of a multilateral organization; unfair, because in accordance with the long-established principle of capacity to pay, the U.S. contribution of 25 percent to the regular budget was, in fact, already well below the country's relative participation in world gross national product (GNP). To make matters worse, many perceived the legislation as a form of extortion, in which the United States imposed its own conditions on the collective membership in exchange for paying its arrears. Officials of the Clinton administration were sensitive to these reactions on the part of other members of the UN and mindful of the strong resistance and even resentment that the legislation induced in most quarters outside the United States

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