Life's Persistent Questions

Why UN doesn't work.

I read David Brooks from NYT more than any other columnist from their opinion lineup. He has an article today on the real fight behind John Bolton's confirmation. It is the battle over two visions of the UN's role in international politics--global governance vs. international peacemaker. Brooks and Bolton are for the lateral, and they distrust the current UN for overreaching that role.

Brooks made five points, but I only found the first to be the most convincing:

We'll never accept it, first, because it is undemocratic. It is impossible to set up legitimate global authorities because there is no global democracy, no sense of common peoplehood and trust. So multilateral organizations can never look like legislatures, with open debate, up or down votes and the losers accepting majority decisions.

Instead, they look like meetings of unelected elites, of technocrats who make decisions in secret and who rely upon intentionally impenetrable language, who settle differences through arcane fudges. Americans, like most peoples, will never surrender even a bit of their national democracy for the sake of multilateral technocracy.

The fact that Russia and China make up two fifth of the permanent security council has always bothered me, and Brooks only revealed this hypocrisy of UN, a supposedly advanced democratic creation, while been straight-jacketed by undemocratic components. The rest of his arguments includes (1) UN's lack of accountability, (2) the superiority of U.S. Constituition, (3) lack of enforcibility of its resolution, and (4) its anti-Zionist agenda. (1) is really inevitable in any large institution, including the U.S.--at least UN fires people when things go bad. (2) is really an extention of his best argument, i.e. everyone needs to become more democratic, like us (or U.S.), wink wink. (3) is partly the result of large members like the U.S. and Russia and China. (4), well, I will leave that alone.

So yes, the belief that UN should act as a superduper World Government is naive, but build strong international institution isn't easy, but it is necessary.

P.S. Perhaps a better idea to build strong and democratic global institutions should be modeled after EU. Its membership is based on potential nations' ability to demonstrate democratic governance and sound fiscal responsibility. Ok, maybe not the latter.

posted by hedgehog @ 2:34 PM