Contenu du sommaire : L'ONU

The structure and operation of the United Nations have not changed for fifty years, although the period has witnessed the end of the Cold War and a redistribution of powers within the family of nations in the context of globalization. A drastic reform is necessary. The main obstacles for such a reform come from the North-South divide. The rich nations tend to see the UNO as an extension of their own foreign policy. In addition, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has become the sole superpower. On the other hand, the Third World developing countries demand a democratization of the UN and the taking into account of their own expectations in terms of development and assistance. One must imagine a United Nations Organization able to satisfy the needs of mankind, to encourage a renewed North-South dialogue, and to create the conditions of a democratization of the globalization process before this process distorts democracy.

The Society of Nations and the United Nations are the successive children of the same project of perpetual peace through collective security. The United States was the initiator of this project and it imposed itself, at the end of the First World War, as the umpire of the world balance of power. With the creation of the Society of Nations, three key questions were raised : who should be associated ? What police power ? What economic bases ? The Society of Nations was an extraordinary “first experiment”, but it was probably bound to fail, given the enormous discrepancy between goals and means. The United Nations drew the lessons from these shortcomings but could not help be confronted again to the very structure of the world system which was articulated around sovereign and highly unequal national states, unwilling to give up their main asset, i.e. the control of their armed forces.

The UN system includes the UNO itself and a number of specialized or related institutions. The activities of these institutions and the many agencies of the UN cover the entire spectrum of social life. But the system created at the end of the Second World War has aged. It is being criticized for its slowness and inefficiency. The UNO vessel seems to have lost its captain. The unequal character of the IFM and the World Bank, together with the policies they impose on poor countries from the South are often criticized. With the World Trade Organization, the IFM and the World Bank appear as the instruments of “neo-liberal globalization”. The question is whether the international organization can be democratized and become the instrument of a renewed multilateralism.

The General Assembly which, until the beginning of the 1980s, had been the real gravity center of the UN, has gradually turned into a chat box without any grip on reality since the end of the Cold War. However, it is not without a number of assets in the framework of the “particular bicephalousness” created by the authors of the Charter, and it has forged the instruments and concepts necessary to compensate for the weaknesses of the Security Council. To this end, on the occasion of the Kosovo and Iraq crises, it could have used the “Dean Acheson resolution” of 1950, had it had the political will to do so.

The unusually mediatized trials and tribulations of the Security Council in 2003, should not mask the permanent questions about its role and usefulness. It is often criticized for its very conception, its composition, the right of veto, its inability to implement its decisions, or its supposedly arbitrary judgment. This criticism should be tempered. Indeed one could mention the progress achieved by the Council for some years, its institutional dynamic, the functional adjustments it has operated, and the adaptation to new themes which has led it to intervene in such domains as state reconstruction, international terrorism, and tomorrow maybe the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The real challenge it faces is the determination of the United States to avoid any limitation to its hegemony.

The media focus on the General Secretary of the United Nations is as important as the number of articles of the UN Charter dealing with this position is limited. His appointment is discussed in a very rudimentary manner leaving many questions unanswered. The member states have been able to find practical and acceptable solutions to the problems that have appeared. They have thus expressed their interest for a General Secretary who should be able to work without being continually involved in conflicts about the legitimacy of his election. The administrative tasks of the General Secretary – as well as all his exclusively international tasks for that matter – are also presented in a very rudimentary and general manner in the Charter. He, nevertheless, plays an important role in the preparation and the implementation of almost all the resolutions and decisions of the various agencies and sub-agencies of the United Nations. On the other hand, the role of Article 99 of the Charter is often overestimated. Even without this Article, the General Secretary would not be a purely administrative position and Article 99 does not give him, in practice, an explicitly political responsibility. His responsibilities for the management of the staff are clearly established in the founding texts, but here again in a very general fashion. The role of the General Secretary is extremely important for the smooth operation of the Organization in all its spheres of competence. Despite Article 99, this role is highly political and very difficult to perform.

According to the UN Charter, the World Court of Justice is the main judicial organ of the UN Although the Court is an independent judicial institution, it is nevertheless part of the Organization. It therefore entertains a complex relationship with the General Assembly and the Security Council, as regards its composition, its administrative operation, the mode of referral of cases, or the implementation of its rulings. The recent multiplication of international courts within and outside the UN raises questions about the role the World Court could play in this new context in order to guarantee the unity and respect of international law.

The United States has, to a large extent, inspired the creation of the United Nations and the idea that an “international community” could have a legitimacy superior to that of the states which compose it. However, in recent years, the United Nations have been the target of caustic criticism by the United States. Their mutual relationship has changed from the hope, following the first Persian Gulf War, that the UN might finally perform the role envisaged by its founders, to the bitter quarrels of the late 1990s. However, since September 11, Americans think that the legitimacy of any international action comes from the participation to a system of democratic values rather than from the reproduction of the very imperfect world reality represented by the UN. The question now is whether the traumatized United States will maintain this idealistic vision of the international community, or whether it will move back to the realism that characterized most of its policy from 1945 to the 1990s.

Since its creation the United Nations have decided, led or authorized military operations to maintain peace, to restore peace, or for humanitarian reasons. At first simple actions of interposition, these operations have become more constraining, in particular since the end of the Cold War, to the point of representing actions that aim to impose peace. But the material, judicial, and human means given to the Organization by the member states have not always been equal to its needs. Consequently, the efficiency of its interventions has declined and it has been the target of sometimes harsh criticism. This has, in turn, led the Security Council to subcontract these actions to the states that were willing to undertake them, in particular for humanitarian aims. However, several recent military interventions have been deployed without the consent of the United Nations. A general reappraisal of the UN's intervention capacity has become necessary but it depends on the political will of the member states.

In this article Hubert Védrine recalls the arguments in favor of a reform of the United Nations – even if such a reform seems at a standstill today –, as well as the necessary re-legitimization of the multilateral system in order to counter the unilateralist trend. In addition to reforms regarding the management and operation of the Organization, he advocates the opening of the Security Council to six new permanent members, the monitoring and self-limitation of the right of veto, the widening of Article VII to humanitarian interventions, the reactivation and redefinition of administrative supervision, and a second constitutive chamber. The author favors an Economic and Social Security Council, but is suspicious of a global institutional “architecture” with excessive powers, and feels that it is not up to the WTO to implement social and environmental criteria. Hubert Védrine thinks that this reform should not aim to create ideal and perfect institutions, nor to regroup democracies in opposition to other regimes, but to improve the framework within which all countries should be able to coexist and cooperate.