The United States and the United Nations: Looking Forward to a Post-Westphalian World

An introductory meditation*

The panel on The United States and the United Nations is the only one on that subject at the 2009 International Studies Association Convention in New York City from Sunday, February 8 to Wednesday, February 11. Coming shortly after the Obama Administration begins its work, the panel provides a unique opportunity to reflect on how the United States can rebuild its leadership of the United Nations based on an analysis of past policies. Because of the timing, the subject and the location, the panel should be seen as an event that can help put new US policies into a context that will help academics and practitioners alike understand their implications.

The abstract that was submitted for the panel states:

The change in administrations in the United States in January 2009 has provided an opportunity to review the United States' relationship with the United Nations. This relationship has been grounded in a history that has been turbulent, a kind of conflict, often about values, more often about finances. The relationship is also changing because of the consequences of globalization and interdependence in which the single super-power model of the past 20 years has been replaced by what many might term a post-Westphalian structure. The panel will examine the past to see what prospects for increased and improved US involvement in this new situation.

The overall theme for ISA 2009 is “Exploring the Past, Anticipating the Future.” The premise is that we should take a look at past practices to see what is likely – or desirable – to happen in the future.[1] Our panel is one of those highlighted as being part of the Convention theme.

In proposing the panel, I suggested the subtitle “Looking Forward to a Post-Westphalian World.” Most of international relations theory – along with most international law – accepts the model that nation-states are the determinative actors in international politics, a model that is said to have been put in place by the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty-Years War.[2] The United Nations was established according to that model explicitly in the Charter. While the Charter Preamble some very forward looking purposes in the name of the peoples of the United Nations, realism then enters in the statement that “Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.”

In the 63 years since that point, the Westphalian model has continued to dominate. However, looking forward, I can see a shift towards a United Nations that is much more nuanced, based on an international public sector that delivers an increasingly important range of services. While the governance structure will still be Westphalian, the institution itself will take on more government-like functions, simply because no alternative is better for dealing with several critical problems. The probable re-negotiation of the Bretton Woods Agreement to give the International Monetary Fund a greater regulatory role over the international financial system will be one new area; management of the global response to climate change will be another. The United States will have to decide about its role in this new situation.

The question to be posed in the panel session is first, what is that likely role and, second, what should be the United States position in defining it. The papers that have been scheduled explore elements of this. I think, as they are being drafted, it might be useful to exchange views on the basic proposition that the international public sector is evolving rapidly.

WA31: Wednesday 8:00 AM - 9:45 AM[3]

Sponsor(s): Exploring the Past, Anticipating the Future

Chair Joseph Nye, Harvard University

Disc. Spencer Boyer, Center for American Progress

Disc. Jean Krasno, Yale University

Disc. Gillian Sorensen, United Nations

Exploring Past Threats: Role of Rhetoric in U.S. Foreign Policy

Lusk, Adam: Temple University

The United States and UN Management: Ideology, Politics and Money

since 1945 to the Future

Mathiason, John: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs,

Syracuse University

Responsible Sovereignty in an Era of Transnational Threats: US

Leadership in a world of Asymmetric Multi-Polarity

Jones, Bruce: Goldsmith College

My view of the past is largely built on personal experience, as is my perspective on the future. Let me explain.

My first contact with the United Nations came in 1958 when, as a sophomore at Wheaton High School on the western border of Minnesota, I won a trip to the United Nations. Together with four other high school students, I toured the United Nations and even had an interview with Andrew Cordier in his office on the 38^th Floor.[4] While it was an impressive building (rather new then), the organization itself did not seem exciting and was probably not a major player in global politics.

My next contact came in the summer of 1963, when I was an intern in the US State Department. I was assigned to the Office of Central African Affairs, which was overseeing the US relations with the Congo, including the UN operation, which had marked an increase in the UN role. The head of the office was G. McMurtrie Godley and the US ambassador was Edmund Gullion and one of the middle-level officers was Frank Carlucci. One of my tasks that summer, together with the junior-most foreign service officer in the office, was to calculate how much it would cost to keep the United Nations in the Congo for another year. I learned later that the sum became the basis for the decision and that it was a case of the United States imposing its will on the UN through budgetary processes.

Three years later, I was completing my dissertation research in Venezuela for M.I.T., and was planning to join the US Foreign Service, when I was offered the chance to join the United Nations as an expert in evaluation of social aspects of agrarian reform. I believe that working for the UN was a conflict of interest and I resigned my State Department reserve position. As a technical assistance expert, I was part of an early effort to deliver public services from an international perspective.

In September 1971 I joined the United Nations Secretariat, where I remained for the next 25 years. During that period, I saw the UN evolve very, very slowly. During part of the period, I was assigned to UNDP in Pakistan and interacted with USAID, among others. During another part, I was part of the secretariat unit that produced reports for the Committee for Programme and Coordination. In that job, I interacted with many governments, including the United States. During the last part of my career, I was the Deputy Director of the Division for the Advancement of Women, the senior US national in the UN Office at Vienna, and had ample contact with the US.

Since retiring and becoming essentially an academic, I have focused my work on United Nations reform, especially on issues of accountability. In the course of extensive consulting, I have worked with a number of UN organizations whose responsibilities have been expanding, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. I have also done work for the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services. All of this has convinced me that we are seeing a growth and expansion of the international public sector that can be projected into the future. In an article that I wrote for the journal Global Governance[5], I noted that if the growth rate of the Secretariat between 1995 and 2005 were to be maintained until 2020, the international public service would number almost 320,000.

The United States, given its role in founding the United Nations and as its main contributor, has been important in shaping what the United Nations can do or not. Over the last eight years, it has lost its leadership role and has become essentially reactive. Given the neo-realist approach to international politics based on a unilateralist model followed by the US administration, this is what could have been expected. But even over the past sixty years, the United States has had an ambivalent view of the United Nations and its role. The public discourse about the UN has focused on high politics, revolving around the Security Council and the General Assembly in New York. Only infrequently has the focus been on the wider, service-delivering, part of the United Nations. During my tenure at the UN, the United States was most effective during the administration of George H.W. Bush, who recognized the value of the United Nations system in dealing with problems that the United States either could not address by itself or did not want to.

Now is an appropriate time to ask, in the context of globalization, international recession, nuclear non-proliferation and climate change, what role the United States would see for the international system and how leadership can be provided.

Two of the papers in the panel address the issue of what multilateralism (Wright) and sovereignty (Jones) mean today. Lusk’s paper will focus on how rhetoric can shape the US role in the UN.

My paper will focus on a specific point at which the US interest and the UN intersect: finance and management. This is the rather undramatic aspect of public management, yet it is probably the place that issues of the role of the international public sector play out. The United States started as a strong defender of UN finance and management (the first US representative to the Fifth Committee of the General Assembly was Senator Arthur Vandenberg, at one point a famous isolationist.) At the Second General Assembly, the US representative was Adlai Stevenson, who said, at one point in the debate:

“As regards the 1948 estimates, the programmes of the substantive Departments and Councils necessarily depended upon the amount of resources available. It was not surprising that the estimates showed a increase under that head. In so far as that increase connoted increasing reliance on the United Nations it was a laudable one. Nevertheless, economy was necessary and all unessential practices should be abandoned.”

Over time, the United Nations has lurched from financial crisis to financial crisis and the US has often provoked the lurch. In the earliest crises, resulting from the Korean and Congo operations, the US supported the UN. By the mid-1970’s, the US began to consider the UN a “dangerous place” as Daniel Patrick Moynihan characterized it.[6] The issue of how much the US should fund and for what was always present, but became more seriously with the Kassebaum amendment in 1986 which limited U.S. payments to the United Nations and the specialized agencies to 20% of their budgets unless the organizations institute a decision-making system for budgetary matters providing voting strength proportional to the size of contributions.[7] This led to the practice, followed to today, of budgets adopted by consensus (which, in effect, meant that the United States could block any budget with which it disagreed). This system worked until 2006, when the General Assembly decided to authorize full financing for the 2006-2007 budget, even though the United States dissociated itself from the consensus. The current system of management governance is now under considerable strain, and efforts to achieve management reform have been complex.

It is into this situation that the new administration will have to move and it is an area where the United State might again exert leadership. The paper will conclude with an exploration of various means to do so, based on past practice, precedents and new imperatives.

The review of these papers by the various discussants, under the leadership of the chair, should provide a vibrant debate about the future of multilateralism in an era of change.