He says much of the world now regards the UN as the captive of the US and its allies.

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In the West, the UN is regarded as largely a good thing, with its many arms dedicated to helping refugees, resolving conflicts and, if necessary, to stepping in with the blue helmets to keep the peace.

In other parts of the world, however, the UN is no longer regarded in this benign light. Indeed, in a substantial part of the developing world it has come to seem an instrument of western oppression and US hegemony – a club of the big boys intent on bullying smaller countries in the interests of Washington and its European allies....

Iraq has much to do with this change in perceptions. Of course, the UN had been attacked elsewhere before the invasion took place. But Washington's decision to press ahead with occupation regardless showed to much of the Muslim world both the UN's powerlessness and the extent to which it was regarded as a tool of the US, not an independent source of global governance. The rest of the world has been brought up to believe that the security role of the UN was to keep a peace already agreed. Now it saw that the UN was being pushed to impose a peace on terms dictated from outside.

The trouble with denying this and protesting the UN's innocence is that the Third World perception of it as an instrument of the West has some basis to it. If you take the Middle East, the succession of resolutions on Palestine, never implemented and almost universally ignored, the relent tless pinioning of Saddam Hussein through sanctions and then enforced regime-change, the current pursuit of Iran through sanctions and threat, are all seen expressions not of international concern but western self-interest. And the same is true of much of Africa, where the blue helmet has come to represent western ideas of order rather than local concerns for justice.

The heart of the problem is the UN Security Council. So long as the Cold War defined the world, it made sense to lock the nuclear powers into a committee that could stop local conflicts escalating into global confrontation. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the Security Council lost its purpose. Instead, it has been used by its western members as a sanction for whatever intervention they deem right. As they, and particularly the US, are the chief funders of the UN, it is hard for the organisation to avoid going along with them.

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[ 14 December 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

As N Spector mentioned, they did give legitimacy to the Afghanistan situation, though. Western countries entered the Afghan civil war without UN involvement, but after the Taliban fell the UN became a central player in everything that has happened since. The UN took responsibility for helping create a new Afghan government (was it wrong of them to do so?), and then sanctioned a military deployment to assist the new government in stabilizing the country.

On the original topic, I wouldn't want to comment on Adrian Hamilton's assertions until I understood exactly how he is able to categorize "Third World preception". This sounds like one of those rhetorical devices that doesn't really exist, like 'the Jewish vote'.

What's interesting is that many Americans tend to see the UN as a tool of authoritarian governments, who outnumber functional democracies by a good margin in the one-state one-vote Assembly. To this I would ask what exactly do we expect out of the UN?

The fact is every country sits at the international table with the primary goal of promoting its own interests. Those interests may or may not align with common interests, but how can there be an effective mechanism to try to direct these interests toward any sort of ideal?

I think maybe good evidence against the UN being a tool of the United States is that the Americans are generally the main opposition to expansion of UN powers. If they were comfortable with levers of power within the organization, I would think they would want to make it larger.

Is the UN really anything more than a forum full of opaque realpolitik? Can it realistically ever be anything more than that?

From: East of the Sun, West of the Moon | Registered: Jun 2004  |  IP: Logged

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The U.S. government dominates the very world body for which it frequently expresses contempt. Indeed, Washington shamelessly manipulates the U.N. to serve nefarious purposes, only to cast aspersions on the body's effectiveness and refuse to pay proper dues when U.N. agencies offer so much as a hint of disapproval toward U.S. policies.

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