A Shared Responsibility for a More Secure World

The Iraq war roiled the UN-centered world of diplomacy as few other issues have since 1945. No one disputed the abhorrent nature of Saddam Hussein's regime, but many questioned the circumstances governing the use of force. After March 2003, few disputed the urgent need for new institutional framework and vision that could marry prudent anticipatory self-defense against imminent threats to the centuries-old dream of world where force is in the service of global rule of law that protects the innocent without shielding the criminals. To forge new consensus, in November 2003, Secretary-General Kofi Annan established his High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (HLP), group of sixteen distinguished individuals to probe the nature and gravity of today's threats and to recommend collective solutions through reformed UN. Its December 2004 report, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, (1) provides brief survey of the sixty-year history of the UN, useful analysis of the challenges confronting it today, and set of broad and specific proposals to improve its performance and relevance. Because of space constraints, this article concentrates on critical reflections while taking for granted broad agreement with much of the report. It groups comments under the two headings of normative-cum-conceptual analyses, and institutional restructuring proposals. Iraq had proven doubly damaging. In the countries that waged war, the UN was pilloried for failing to bless the effort to end brutal regime's decade of defiance of world will. In the more numerous countries that opposed the war, the world organization supposedly betrayed the most fundamental of its mandates: to stop wars of aggression, particularly by major powers. Whereas the United States provoked crisis of UN authority and legitimacy over this issue, the UN in turn provoked crisis of U.S. power. Certainty of moral clarity put the Bush administration on course that seriously eroded its moral authority in the exercise of global power. A lack of moral clarity--values and principles in defense of which it is prepared to stand up and be counted--diminished the UN's moral authority and legitimacy. An equally grave menace to the UN's viability may well come from the countries of the global South. If the UN performs the function for them that the Warsaw Pact did for the Soviet satellites, it will endanger the autonomy and security of most member states, not act as guarantor of collective security according to UN Charter provisions. There is also lack of sensitivity within the Secretariat to the widely held perception that the UN is unduly deferential to the host country--constantly exposed as it is to U.S.-centric worldviews and analyses by the dominant media, prone to preemptive appeasement of Washington's sensitivities, and insufficiently attentive to the views of developing countries. (2) Established to provide predictability and order in world in constant flux, the UN--a bridge between power and principles, between state-based realism and universal idealism--is at once the symbol of humanity's collective aspirations for better life in safer world for all, forum for negotiating the terms of converting collective aspirations into common program of action, and the principal international instrument for the realization of the aspirations and the implementation of the plans. It operates today in global environment that is vastly more challenging, complex, and demanding than the world of 1945. It must assess and address the changing nature of threats in the modern world, the inadequacy of existing international norms and laws in confronting such threats, and the need for new rules of the game to replace them. What kind of blueprint is provided by A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility? The composition of the panel was initially ridiculed for its average age (about seventy) when the task was to look to the future--relics trying to reform relic and a cross between nostalgia and deja vu were among the choicer descriptions

Collective responsibility · Diplomacy · International law · Political science · Politics · Public international law · Restructuring · Sociology · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · War, Ethics, and Justification

• Authorizing Humanitarian Intervention

  Open Access•Cristina Gabriela Badescu•Canadian Journal of Political…•2007

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