Global Governance and the UN

You will forgive me, I hope, if my remarks are somewhat contrarian, as well a little contradictory. Contrarian, because whereas it is of course customary to think of the UN as the major global institution, I will in fact raise some doubts as to the depth—in some areas—of the UN’s actual role in global governance—and even raise some cautionary thoughts about the concept of global governance itself. Contradictory, because having done so, I will reflect on my own recent experiences, particularly my role in the establishment of the UN’s operation in Kosovo and my current role in East Timor—two operations where the governance role of the UN is greater than it has ever been in the past!

I will end, as per my invitation, by spending a couple of moments on the question of UN reform, and the possible support role of the Trilateral Commission in that regard.

Global Governance: Some Initial Thoughts and Concepts
Let me reflect initially on the concept of global governance. I shall first make a very general comment: I personally see no incompatibility between globalization, successful regionalism, strong nation-states and thriving sub-national communities. As long as democracy and compromise prevail at all levels. That is where the UN can make a difference.

To narrow the focus somewhat, I think it worth reflecting on two points.

The first is that, dissecting the different debates, one identifies two major threads of debate: one is on the role of the international community in addressing governance challenges within a national or sub-national framework—that is the role of the international community in supporting democratic reform in national governments; and the other, different though clearly related, a debate on the governance of the international community itself.

One of the most interesting issues to think through is where and when these two threads connect or disconnect—indeed I will end my remarks by highlighting what I think is a major disconnect between the way we manage our international governance institutions, and the reforms we are, through them, urging on national governments and communities.

Although the range of topics one can tackle under the rubric of governance is exceptionally broad, there are three sets of issues which dominate the debates, and to which I would like to confine my comments: namely, first, the questions of security; second, economic issues; and, third, legal or regulatory questions. The UN has a role—of varying degrees of importance—in each of these areas, which I will address in reverse order.

I said at the outset that I would be somewhat contrarian and question the actual scope of the UN’s role in global governance. The UN’s role in these three sets of issues differs very greatly.

Legal and Regulatory Architecture
Perhaps where the UN has had most impact on global governance is in the realm of legal and regulatory reform. Here I am thinking of a number of different UN initiatives, which have begun to take root and, if nurtured by such actors as the members of the Trilateral Commission, could end up having a major impact both on the management of international relations, and on national and local governance systems. One thinks of the UN’s work on climate change, on the law of the sea, on biodiversity, on natural disaster management and reduction—in these and related environmental fields, UN summitry, such as the Rio Summit, represents a new process whereby states and state-sponsored organizations come together—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict—with scientists, technical experts, social movements, NGOs, to forge new global consensus about the way we manage our natural environment. It is surely through this kind of coalition that progress will be made in the realm of global governance, using the UN as a springboard to reach global constituencies rather than simply through the UN merely as an intergovernmental institution or other multilateral fora alone.

The environmental efforts of the UN have been well documented and are very familiar, but they are only one small corner of the ongoing work of the UN to develop regulation across jurisdictions that allows peoples to communicate, interact and protect their common interests in a host of dimensions.

Of course, one of the most important areas where the UN is striving to make progress in developing new laws and new regulatory regimes is in the area of human rights and on the international law of war crimes. It is far too early to say what impact these efforts will have—certainly, the development of international agreements on social, economic, civic, and political rights has not stopped massive human rights abuses from being a major feature of the quarter century since they were reached.

Most recently, however, the decision to create an International Criminal Court represents a potential breakthrough—the possible development of a major tool through which to launch a new era of actual enforcement of the myriad laws and norms we have created. I would say that if the Trilateral Commission were to choose to put its efforts into ensuring only one reform or innovation in the realm of global governance, the creation of an effective, independent International Criminal Court is the one place where you would be most likely to be contributing to the creation of a more just, more secure, more stable—and therefore more prosperous—world. It is, in fact, a global shame that such a Court does not yet exist, as the century of genocides, war crimes and crimes against humanity has just come to an end. The century I said, not the crimes I am afraid. Your respective Governments and parliaments have a categorical imperative to follow: the ratification of the Rome Convention on the establishment of the Court.

Economics: Limited UN Role
In a room filled with distinguished and experienced economists, it would be presumptuous to belabour the point that it is in the economic sphere that the role of the UN is perhaps at its most limited. What is the power or even the influence of the UN compared to a major international corporation? Compared to the major stock exchanges? Compared to the credit rating bodies? Even compared to other international organizations such as the IMF or the World Bank—with which, incidentally, we work in remarkable cohesion in East Timor? Or to the WTO or to an even smaller but mighty club, the G-7? It is, in brief, very limited.

There can be little doubt that it is the complex of public and private sector forces in the countries represented in the Trilateral Commission that are the real source of economic clout in the world today, and the main potential engine of good or bad international governance. Yes, your power entails responsibility and accountability in terms of national and global governance. This pertains to both the question of how we manage international finance—the question of the creation of a new international financial regime—and to the somewhat wider question of economic development both at the global level and at the national or, increasingly, at the sub-national or community level. It is really your responsibility—working in part through such international organizations as the IMF, the World Bank, and regional development banks—to ensure that we have a responsible international financial regime that can sponsor growth but also protect against crises. A rescue plan for weaker economies and financial systems, as someone suggested yesterday, must be in place, similar to stand-by arrangements we have in response to natural disasters. In so saying, however, I would urge on you one consideration: that unless the major economic powers take into much greater consideration the growing reality of disparities of income both within and between countries, we run the very real risk not only of consigning literally hundreds of millions of people to a life of pauperism, we also risk disrupting the very architecture of global growth itself. We know from our own national experience that we cannot sustain uneven growth and grossly inequitable development; we must apply that knowledge to our international efforts. This is perhaps the area where the Trilateral Commission can lend its most effective support to the strengthening of the UN’s role, not in managing, but in inspiring global economic and development governance.

Security: Limits and Opportunities
Finally, what of the role of the UN in governance as it pertains to security?

We all know the history of the evolving role of the UN in international security matters. After many euphoric ups and some tragic downs since the early 90s, in the last year, we have seen a new resurgence of the Security Council’s activism with missions in Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone and the DRC. However, in the crucial case of Kosovo, the Security Council was initially bypassed.

Currently, the Security Council is highly constrained and able to act only in the rare circumstances when all or almost all the permanent five powers agree. This in part is a simple reflection of a changed international order, wherein the United States is the world’s only “hyperpower.” While some within the U.S. recognize that the UN is a valuable ally, able to provide a collective framework for tasks—such as engagement in East Timor—that the U.S. could not do alone, other stronger voices query why the U.S. should subject its decisions about the use of its own force to a veto or even verbal questioning by Russia, or China, or France—or for that matter, anyone at all. The Security Council—I speak very frankly here—is in danger of becoming increasingly sidelined and a relic of a bipolar era. Reforming the Security Council to reflect more closely the distribution of political and economic power in the world today—that is of course the major reform needed in the UN. Conversely, no reform of the Council will suffice as long as its supremacy can be challenged.

But of course there are still moments when the Security Council can act, and act in a robust way—and I have been privileged to be involved in a very direct way in two of the major instances of Security Council action in the recent period, namely in its actions on Kosovo and on East Timor.

In Kosovo and East Timor, let me emphasize, we are involved in every aspect of the governance in these territories. We have spent much of the past few weeks negotiating with Australia on exploitation of oil resources in the Timor deep sea Gap, and establishing a framework for judicial cooperation with Indonesia. At the same time we’ve been issuing legal regulations on everything from legal currency to customs and immigration. We are managing social services, the public utilities, prisons; we are responsible for the airports and the ports; we are struggling to create afresh a judicial system, a fiscal authority, a payments office, a taxation regime, a new police force for East Timor. And we represent East Timor internationally. We do all these things in the fullest consultation with the East Timorese (and in particular in consultation with such estimable leaders as Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos Horta—whose support, friendship and cooperation has been invaluable), but nevertheless, we, the UN, are involved in, and responsible for, every detail in the governance of East Timor.

The same thing, to a large extent, is also true in Kosovo.

Both in Kosovo and East Timor the UN faces extraordinary challenges. We are struggling to act as governments, attempting to apply universally-accepted norms of governance, but with absurdly limited resources. We have been very grateful for the support we have received both in Kosovo and in East Timor, and the UN’s efforts continue to be supported, primarily by countries represented in this room and, I know, by some of you, in your personal official capacity. But we cannot escape the reality that we are administering these two territories with missions that were simply not prepared to assume such a broad range of governmental responsibilities. In both cases, we have improvised and that is simply not acceptable. The Secretary-General has established a panel to draw the lessons, positive but especially negative, form recent peace-keeping and peace-building operations.

A further point is the fact that the UN’s presence in both Kosovo and East Timor was a function of a critically important role the UN has played in two different aspects of governance in the security realm—namely the achievement of self-administration in one case and of self-determination in the other, and the expansion of the so-called and somewhat battered concept of humanitarian intervention. While the two cases differed very dramatically in the politics surrounding the eventual authorization of a UN role, in both instances the bottom line is that these two major military, political, and civilian efforts were undertaken by the international community to halt and deter massive human rights abuses against a civilian population and to enable it to enjoy and exercise its civil and political rights. This represents a major evolution in the history of collective security, thus of global security governance, even though I am aware that the notion of an international right to “intervene” on those grounds remains controversial.

But let me also be very clear—every evidence suggests that Kosovo and East Timor are rather exceptional, and perhaps not evidence of a new resurgence of global peacekeeping and peacemaking roles. Indeed, it is very striking that the basic agreement over Kosovo was reached not within the confines of the Security Council, but rather through the G-7—an innovative political use of an exclusive economic club that highlights some of the very real limits of the UN. On East Timor, the happy circumstance—albeit if only after the tragedy—of wide consensus within the international community, a compelling situation, the leadership of certain countries—these all combined to allow the UN to play what I believe will be a very constructive role. But these—as far as we can tell at this point in current history—are exceptions, not the rule.

Trilateral Commission members must use their authority and influence to reaffirm the central—I said central, not exclusive—role of the UN in the preservation and restoration of international peace and security.

UN Reform
Allow me, before I conclude, to touch very briefly on the question of UN reform, and what role the Trilateral Commission can play in that reform.

Let me mention a couple of elements of UN reform that the Trilateral Commission can further.

My friend and colleague Mark Malloch Brown has begun to reshape the UN Development Programme precisely by trying to focus its efforts on governance. I believe he has correctly identified the prospect of a strategic alliance with the World Bank on this issue which, in East Timor, we have extended to the IMF and the Asian Development Bank. For all of their wealth and clout, the international financial institutions were poorly placed until recently to be counselors on governance issues to most of their clients; the UNDP, despite its very limited resources and influence, is very well-placed to play that role. As we are trying to demonstrate in East Timor, global institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, and IMF can, must promote global values and norms, particularly but not limited to, through the implementation of specific peace building mandates of the Security Council.

Your support will also be critical to the efforts of this Secretary-General, who has already made major reforms of the organization, to deepen those reforms. Without them the UN runs the very real risk, which I experience every day, of becoming irrelevant. More importantly, the reform should be one of culture and attitude: the UN must open itself to new forces, new alliances, new webs to promote, rather than merely validate its principles, particularly through a greater involvement of women and youths, which I consider forces of progress. Failing that, the concept of global governance will, sooner rather than later, turn out to be hollow, futile, deceptive, like so many catchwords in recent decades.

Concluding Comments
Thus I end my remarks not on the high-minded concepts of governance but on the need to reform actual management and governance of our institutions themselves. It is only on the basis of sound institutions that we can hope for the UN to have any substantive role in the promotion of better global governance. We will no doubt continue to play a role in facilitating consensus among states. And in exceptional circumstances, such as in Kosovo and East Timor, we will make what I hope will be significant contributions to governance in these local settings.

As I was preparing to leave Dili to join you here, the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, issued his Millennium Report entitled We the Peoples, which is forcefully focused on the human dimension of our global reality. Not surprisingly, the themes are the same, not because great minds think alike, but simply because global priority concerns are obvious.

But the Secretary-General and the organization he leads can only succeed in the global governance agenda of the next century if interests converge, in all of these survival areas: economics and development, human rights and security, a sustainable earth environment, and a renewed United Nations.

Let me appeal to you, the Trilateral Commission individual members, to play that vital, literally global emergency ward role, of bringing convergence about, not only among developed societies of the North, but between them and those of the South. When I say South I mean many things, many cultures, many countries where I have served, but can be summarized in two words: Brazil and Timor. Brazil because it is my country and it encapsulates many if not all of the contrasts, contradictions, hopes, and misery that mirror the globalization process. Timor, because Kofi Annan put me in charge of that tiny country, on its long and traumatic journey to independence, and whose people should be the first beneficiaries of ethical global governance in the 21^st century, in all the areas I have reviewed.

Coming back to my contrarian starting point, global governance far exceeds UN responsibility. The UN is an instrument, a frame, an engine as dynamic, as conciliatory, as innovative, as successful—in global and local terms as the two extremes of the spectrum—the Secretary-General, and yourselves, concerned individuals, and all shades in between—primarily, but not exclusively, states—wish it, allow it, make it be.