World order dreaming: a guide to conversations about the United Nations
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 1: Insecurity in the New World Order
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Frank Moorhouse
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Frank Moorhouse's biography and other articles by this writer
Perpetual Peace ... philosophers who dream this sweet dream ...
– Immanuel Kant
Soon war will simply be one chemist approaching another chemist
at the border, each carrying a deadly phial.
– Oscar Wilde
The most potent, confusing and mythical concept in contemporary politics is that of "The UN". On occasions the expression "The UN" becomes a form of prayer. As a one-time Irish ambassador to the UN, Conor Cruise O'Brien, said "... the cynicism necessary in the approach to the United Nations, must at some point be made to yield to reverence: the reverence which is appropriate to ... an institution which is humanity's prayer to itself to be saved from itself ..."
During the long build-up to the Iraq war, I was in China (Hong Kong and Shanghai) and the United States (Austin and Harvard) speaking about my novels Grand Days and Dark Palace, both set in the League of Nations in Geneva between the wars. I found discussion hovered anxiously around fears that the US go-it-alone posturing meant the "collapse of the UN" or that the "UN is useless", as an internationally celebrated French writer said at the Sydney Writers' Festival this year.
Although I spent some years researching the League of Nations for my novels (and, as a consequence, also researching the United Nations), I am not a scholar in the sense that international relations is my professional field of study. I am a storyteller and I suppose it is the stories we tell ourselves about the fate of the world that interest me. Of all the stories we tell about the world it is "the world that we want", the way we want the world to be, which is one of the most potent, along with the stories we tell ourselves about the creation of the world and nature of an afterlife. To call these "stories" is not to discredit them or to remove them from reality or feasibility but to put them in their own special realm.
It is difficult to keep the structure of the UN clear in conversation or in our minds because it is three things at once: an organisational reality – many agencies, commissions, committees and missions engaged daily in practical activities; a volatile political reality – centred on the politics of the Security Council but including Assembly committees and commissions and the agencies; -and a strange mythological ideality – it is the focus of our dreaming about the world.
When people say "the UN is irrelevant now" they usually mean that the Security Council is irrelevant, although some people also question the whole idea of "international aid" and of attempts by the international body to assist, reconstruct or reform nation states in crisis. But under the UN Charter, it is the Security Council that is responsible for the peace of the world.
The mythology
Conversation about the UN often slips into the mythological and only with difficulty does it struggle back to some political reality. The dreaming began centuries ago and in many minds in many countries – the dreaming of a single world political entity (or at least a global consciousness) and of perpetual peace. Perhaps the best known is that of Immanuel Kant titled Perpetual Peace: a philosophical sketch 1795 (by the way, the name the League of Nations came from this essay).
As O'Brien suggested, much of this "imagining" of a world body is almost theological. Among some there is an elemental hankering for a suprahuman agency, above petty politics and above crude nationalism.
"I want the UN to jump in there [Bosnia] and push the two sides apart and say ‘Now stay there and talk'," a 29-year-old, university-educated, male in France said to me at one of my talks.
I came across another expression of this dream in popular culture. I happen to have been watching Superman III at 3am in a hotel room in some strange city. In the film, Superman addresses the UN Assembly (which has a black woman president) and tells the nations of the world of the "folly of their ways" and announces, "Effective immediately I am going to rid the planet of nuclear weapons" (what kept you so long, Superman?). In the film, the representatives of the nations of the world rise to their feet and applaud.
I find the following positions recurring in conversation: "We have to have faith in the UN – there has always to be a better way than war."
"We have to abandon national sovereignty and intervene when humanity demands it – and the UN is the only body with the authority to do this."
And I hear the contra positions, which say: "There will always be war and the need for war – it is part of human nature." Kant believed that the natural state of the world was war – either hostilities or the threat of war. But he also believed that the world could be brought to a "state of peace".
I also hear it argued that ‘We can't let a body such as the UN composed of unelected foreigners dictate to us'. But national sovereignty has for a century now been increasingly modified by treaties and change in the nature of national boundaries (most dramatically in Europe with the European Union). But for liberal democracies the nation state is still the most functional political unit.
This fear of infringement of sovereignty was stated recently in an Australia newspaper in an argument against the Kyoto Protocols ‘... the prospect of Australia becoming part of an international bureaucracy, with extraordinary powers of inspection and control over the domestic economy...'
The UN is gradually developing the political sophistication of knowing when to pass a decision to the political unit multi-national, regional or local, which is, by authority, resources, and size, most suited to handling it.
The dream of higher wisdom
The dreaming also expresses itself in our impulse to use the UN as a superior court, a place of ultimate wisdom. Here, UN means not only the Security Council but also its agencies, committees and commissions.
So the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission asked the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations to make a ruling on the South Australian Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has asked the International Labour Organisation (a UN agency) to investigate its complaints against the Australian laws on compulsory arbitration and awards.
Other appeals to UN bodies have been about issues such as the saving of the Franklin River and the defence of homosexual rights in Tasmania.
This year, a UN committee on racism was asked by an Aboriginal group to rule on a local dispute over whether the naming of a sports stadium in Queensland as the E.S. "Nigger" Brown Stadium was racist.
Why would the UN method of making a decision be wiser or fairer than what we have in Australia? What values operate in the UN that are not in the Australian electoral ethos or our court system?
As the Prime Minister of Thailand said recently in answer to a question from a reporter about the rulings of a UN body: "The UN is not my father."
The dream of disarmament
In 1932, there was a remarkable gathering in Geneva, now forgotten, convened by the League of Nations of almost all the nation states of the world – including USA and USSR – to adopt a plan to disarm the world.
The Disarmament Conference met to reduce the armed forces of all countries to a level compatible with national safety, ultimately to the level of police forces. The nation states had already signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy.
As a next step, the League of Nations worked for seven years planning ways of disarming the world and finally brought together a draft convention.
The city of Geneva built two new hotels and a special conference hall to house the Disarmament Conference's 3000 delegates, lobbyists, journalists, observers and others. On the opening of the conference, the church bells of Geneva were rung and broadcast around the world and church bells were rung in many countries.
People heard the president of the conference, Arthur Henderson, ask the assembled delegates: "Have we all genuinely renounced war as an instrument of national policy?"
He then assured the world that disarmament would be "a Christmas present for the whole world".
The plan was first to lock together the big powers – Britain, Japan, USA, France, Germany and Russia – to set ratios for their armies, navies, air forces and their munitions production and then, over the years, to reduce the quantities within these ratios to zero and along with it the armaments of all other countries.
International inspection teams were to travel freely in all countries to prevent secret rearmament (the US found this an unacceptable breach of its national sovereignty).
The banning of all aircraft and submarines was considered. Winston Churchill said that because of military misuse of air transport, it should be abolished. The delegates tried to separate defensive weapons, aggressive weapons and weapons of retaliation but found it difficult, if not impossible.
As it happened, Hitler was elected to power and Germany walked out because the conference could not agree to rearm Germany to the level of the great powers before disarmament could begin. Japan had invaded Manchuria and was condemned by the League and it walked out of both the conference and the League.
The conference continued in a futile way until 1935 when, with the world rearming around it, it collapsed. The UN struggles on with inspection regimes, disarmament programs – landmines, bio-chemical weapons, nuclear weapons.