Ladies and Gentlemen, Friends,

Our subject today is a broad one: “Building a 21st Century United Nations”. And to understand the challenges the United Nations faces this century, we need to go back to the end of the cold war and to the extraordinary period of globalisation that followed it.

During the 1990s, we saw a dramatic integration of world economies around trade, information, capital and even cultural flows. Indeed, in some ways, it seemed we had reached a moment where international organizations had their epiphany:
the world order they had been calling for, often as lonely voices during those cold war years, had finally come about.

So for all of us, who believe in these organizations, there has been a real sense of dismay at the fact that, 15 years later, nearly all of these organizations are in a profound crisis of legitimacy, mandate and purpose. Not just the United Nations, but also the European Commission, the Bretton Woods Institutions, and even the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) — despite its growing out of area operations. And, if all of these organizations are struggling to recover lost ground with public opinion in member countries, to reconnect with those they are seeking to help, reconnect with the governments that must support them, one must, I think, seek some common roots and explanations for why these very international organizations are in crisis.


A Broad Legitimacy Crisis

I see three broad roots to this crisis.

First, one of governance; second, one of expanding number of demands placed on this Organization; third, a gap between their mission and those new demands.

In terms of governance, all of these institutions have a system of ownership which rests in the outcome of the Second World War.

And yet when you look at today versus then, the world could not be a more different place. Yes, China is a permanent member of the Security Council, but in some ways the one whose voice is least evidently heard. And yet it, together with India, comprises a third of the world’s population and arguably an even larger share of economic dynamism and change in today’s world.

And India is not in that Security Council, as we heard loudly and angrily during the debate about the Security Council enlargement last year. Nor, of course, is Brazil and nor is Germany, and nor, should I add, is Italy, or a single African State.

But it is not just about leaving out big important powers, it is about leaving out voices that are critical to solving the kinds of problems around the world, that in the case of the United Nations, the Security Council must address.

It is very hard, for example, to deal with the problem of the Sudan and Darfur, unless all those with oil companies in the Sudan are part of a common diplomatic front to press the Khartoum government to accept UN deployment. And it is simply impossible for the traditional western powers to solve the problem of North Korea without the full involvement of China certainly, but also other Asian regional powers as well.

Or take conflict. A United Nations built on the ashes of 1945 was driven by a vision of conflict resolution of traditional inter-State wars. Today we have very few of those. Most conflicts we are dealing with in Africa and elsewhere are today inside a State -- fired by ethnic, class, religious and other schisms.

And, as we have brought down the number of those conflicts, quite successfully in fact, over the last decade, the one growing albeit from a relatively low base, source of conflict and violence and fatalities, is terrorism. While the General Assembly’s recent adoption of the United Nations counter-terrorism strategy is good news and provides a United Nations framework to address this global threat, its implementation will be complicated by the still unresolved political controversies: State terrorism, the definition itself of terrorism, self-determination, and foreign occupation.

Finally, in our globalised world, it is almost impossible to sustain the levels of inequality and poverty where more than a billion people are still living on less than one euro a day, and, in fact, almost half of the world’s population, 45% or so, still living on less than two euros a day. But even as the debates are gradually changing, and the issues are new, the structures to deal with them have largely remained unchanged for 60 years.


A Wide-Ranging in Tray

On a typical day at the United Nations, I am occasionally a little daunted by the difference between the size of the problems and the weakness of the institutional means we have to address them.

On any morning there are a couple of conflicts somewhere, which have flared up overnight. There is Darfur, which continues to resist the kind of international intervention required to end what is the closest thing we have at the moment to an internal genocide. We have the difficult issue of Iran’s nuclear programme, also the focus of attention of the Security Council and the international community; the long running, intractable difficulties of seeking a resolution in the wider Middle East (including the Palestinian-Israeli issue and the more recent conflict in Lebanon with all its ramifications); and the stabilization of Iraq. And, while the United Nations has been a little on the margins of that effort – at least when compared to our role in Afghanistan – we nevertheless are the second biggest international presence there, after the coalition, and have been heavily involved in the elections, the writing of the constitution, the political negotiations for a broad based government, and, more recently, the development of an International Compact between Iraq and the international community to support overall efforts to stabilize the country politically and economically – the latter like so much else has been in close partnership with the European Commission.

But look beyond these political issues to something I have already mentioned: Avian Flu, where the United Nations not only has to figure out how to protect our operations during an outbreak, if it tragically occurs, but how we will be able to deliver humanitarian assistance and support world-wide while trying to protect our people and broader operational effectiveness in other areas at the same time.

And, of course, beside all those old problems of conflict and health are very new ones. For example, how, if at all, the United Nations should be involved in an issue such as internet governance. And, as a result, when one looks at this vast range of issues, one again and again, comes back to this question: how can a venerable
1945-designed institution deal with all this?

Three Pillars for the Future

To answer that, let me set out what Secretary-General Kofi Annan saw as the three pillars around which we need to reorganise today’s United Nations to give it focus, and to reconnect it and make it more relevant to its core constituents:
the peoples of the world. And as we looked both across Western and developing country audiences alike it seemed to us that there was a great commonality of demand in three broad areas: development, security and human rights and democracy.

On the development front, this has been driven by a conviction that our world today has to tackle poverty collectively, because the current trends are just not sustainable. And it is from this impulse that the extraordinarily ambitious goal of trying to halve extreme poverty world-wide by 2015 is ultimately derived from. It is a goal that came out of the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, and it is a goal whose implementation needs in part to be orchestrated by the United Nations, but has got as far as it has because of a much more wide-ranging support cutting across governments, the private sector and others.

The very real successes that have already been achieved -- most notably, the European Union’s commitment to ratcheting up development funding for the future to the kind of scale we need to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and meet the 0.7% target.

The result is that, on the development side, the world now has a bold ambitious strategy which goes much wider than the United Nations and involves governments, the European Commission, the World Bank, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and, very significantly, the private sector. But somehow that network focused on the MDGs needs a centre, and, I think, the United Nations provides that today – and last year’s United Nations World Summit in New York provided a key focal point for rich and poor countries alike to recommit to their implementation over the next decade.

The second pillar of this new, refocused United Nations is security.
And, in today’s world, it is rooted in the fact I cited earlier that the old wars across borders have been replaced by these new threats and that there is a need for an international security regime to address them.

So this means a huge focus on trying to get a common definition of terrorism, not just agreed, but put at the basis of global anti-terrorism collaboration and cooperation addressing all of its dimensions. And it means a new focus on failing and failed States, which are often not just a problem for their own citizens, but a time bomb waiting to go off in the broader world.

And, as a result, we also created, out of our summit last September, a new Peace Building Commission, intended to bring together the economics, the politics and security of rebuilding States that have fallen apart in this way. And we also got a doctrine passed, the so called “responsibility to protect”, championed by Kofi Annan since he become Secretary-General. The idea that when a State turns on its own citizens and the level of human rights abuse comes close to that of a war crime or a genocide, that it no longer remains that State’s business; that there is an overriding obligation on the world to intervene and stop it. That if you like is the legacy of Rwanda and of the former Yugoslavia.

But now in Darfur we see the principle put to the test, and we see the difficulty of constructing an effective diplomatic effort and resourcing it with the troops and money and political will to actually go into a very distant place, the size of France, and impose a peace.

And from there to the third pillar of this new United Nations: a focus on human rights and democracy underpinned by the conviction that these are universal concepts even if their application may be culturally and politically defined, particularly in the case of democracy.

Here, what we need to do is to take human rights to the centre of the political discourse, to drive these universal values across all societies and all peoples in those societies. And hence the efforts to create a credible Human Rights Council (HRC) now taking up some of the tough issues, such as the peer review mechanism for abusers that will ultimately determine whether or not it will be an improvement to its discredited predecessor. Unfortunately, the Council has got off to a bad start. Its first item was Israel and it is already divided along North-South lines, with a group of recidivist countries opposing the pro-human rights ones. It is absolutely essential that the HRC members create progressive cross-regional coalitions in order for it not to head down the path of the former, discredited Commission on Human Rights.


Investing in the United Nations

Now to underpin these three new pillars, United Nations of development, security and human rights, is a need for major management reform.

Nothing symbolises this issue of an institution still too closely held down by its 1945 roots, than the management and institutional arrangements of today’s United Nations. The United Nations of 60 years ago -- even the United Nations of 10 years ago -- was a rather stable, static Secretariat which largely wrote reports and organised conferences out of New York and its European capitals, Geneva and Vienna, which set many of the goals for development and other areas that we are striving to reach today. But it bears little relationship to the exploding new business of operations in some of the world’s most difficult neighbourhoods that consumes us today.

The United Nations spends some $2 billion a year on the activities I have just described. By contrast, there is some $20 billion a year devoted to development, humanitarian and peacekeeping work around the world, all of it done in hugely difficult circumstances. About half of it is done by United Nations agencies, such as the United Nations Development Programme, which I headed for 6 years. And most of those agencies are not tied down by this 1945 architecture – they have changed with times, in large part because they are voluntarily funded and so every year have to meet the market test of whether we have performed successfully in the eyes of our donors. And the other half is to support 100,000 soldiers and police officers in peace operations around the world including the strengthening of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) — the number could climb to 115,000 if Darfur comes on stream.

So, what we proposed in our report Investing in the United Nations, launched in New York earlier this year, were changes in the whole structure of the Organization, its management systems, its investment in people, the way we develop our leadership, the way we run things in terms of our global Information Technology system, to one which reflects this new global operational reality. Unfortunately, many of these reform proposals were largely blocked by the wider political tensions and splits between groups and individual Member States. But, in the few months that remain, we still hope to move forward, as much as we can, some of the outstanding aspects of the management reform agenda-- human resource management, governance and oversight, etc. The next Secretary-General will have to do much more in the area of management reform, and I sincerely hope that he or she will be given the space to do it.

And there is one additional dimension to this reform effort and that is the restructuring of the development side of the United Nations system. We have set up a new panel to try and set out a plan of how we can integrate today’s rather diffuse, broken up system of United Nations development agencies into a single more integrated group that really works together in cohesively at country level. The panel is chaired by the Prime Ministers of Mozambique, Pakistan and Norway – EC Commissioner Louis Michel is a member. And I hope and believe this group will deliver a bold blueprint to make sure that we have the arrangements to deliver on the MDGs.


A New United Nations

So a new United Nations.

I believe we really are creating a genuinely new United Nations based around these three pillars of development and security and human rights, backed by a reformed management structure and a more coherent, committed system working on the ground around the world, that we hope will reconnect us with people.

And, while the broader crisis of legitimacy facing multilateral organizations is very much with us, in the case of the United Nations at least, I hope we have now got the plan in place to confront these challenges. We had the broad vision endorsed successfully at the summit we had last September. Now we and our successors, supported by our Member States, will have to demonstrate how to handle these difficult operations -- from public health to humanitarian crises, to peacekeeping -- the kind of performance which wins back public trust. I think if we can do that, we will have an international system in which people will regain confidence and trust. And, as I watch what is happening at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other international organizations, I think they, too, are embarking on similar journeys of reform.

These last few weeks, especially, as the Secretary-General traveled through the Middle East, I saw again the legitimacy and the reach of the United Nations. Its indispensable role in securing the peace in Lebanon has reminded us all how powerful this Organization can be, when everyone wants it to succeed.

In closing, let me just thank the organizers for allowing me to speak to you today and assembling such a wonderful audience.

Thank you.

 

Further Information

- For his CV, see http://www.un.org/News/ossg/sg/stories/dsgbio.asp

- UN reform homepage. Find reference reports and materials at the official Reform homepage of the United Nations: www.un.org/reform

- More articles on UN reform, see also: http://www.una-uk.org/reform/articles.html