Back to basics is a misleading narrative for the UN’s future

By Ronny Patz

The United Nations has never been only about preventing wars.

There is a new catchphrase that dominates debates about the future of the United Nations: “back to basics”. I want to question both the logic of “back” and the logic of “basics”. I argue for a forward-looking approach instead of invoking a past that never existed.

Proponents of the idea of “back to basics”, a slogan prominently used by the US administration, among others, claim that there was an ideal past of the UN in which the organization did nothing more but to prevent conflicts and wars – and successfully so. In this imagined past, there was unity among member states, and the UN system was not as fragmented, not as complex to manage and not as expensive as today.

But a resolution adopted during the fourth session of the UN General Assembly in 1949 already then highlighted the “problem of the proliferation and overlapping of the programmes of the United Nations and of the specialized agencies.”

Proliferation and overlap were already present in 1949

The “back to basics” narrative argues, implicitly and explicitly, that the UN was created in 1945 out of the ashes of World War II, built on the ruins of the failed League of Nations that had been unable to prevent this war.

However, academic research has shown, again and again, that the United Nations system with its many agencies and related organizations has deep organizational and ideological roots in the League of Nations. The League was never just about preventing wars but also had ambitions related to global health, refugee policy, intellectual cooperation, economic stabilization, and workers’ rights.

When the UN was created in 1945, these and other ambitions were maintained alongside the goal of preventing another global war. Massive humanitarian operations were ongoing under the UN’s roofs in the first years after the war to support the large populations displaced by the war. The Bretton Woods financial organizations assisted with post-war reconstruction. Early on, projects for international development and technical assistance were organized through the UN and its newly formed Specialized Agencies such as the World Health Organization, which succeeded the League of Nations Health Organization.

The UN Charter defines a broad programme

Not surprisingly, the UN’s purposes and principles set out in Article 1 UN Charter define a broad programme around four interrelated goals to “maintain international peace and security”; “develop friendly relations among nations”; “achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”; and to “be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends”. That’s a broad, idealistic programme, not just some basics.

The UN’s so-called “basics” in the field of collective security were so idealistic to even include the possibility that the UN Security Council would one day command armed forces made available by member states. And still, establishing the first major peacekeeping missions around the Suez crisis and in Congo were an innovation, not something that existed from day one. Those missions had to be established and financed against the resistance of veto powers like France or the Soviet Union, both unwilling to pay for those missions.

Today, even “basic” peace missions are being discontinued

This revolt against what today are considered by some to be the basics of the UN’s work led to the first major financial crisis of the UN in the 1960s, which at the time was largely contained by the USA who bought a large share of the debt bonds the UN issued.

Today, many UN peace missions are being discontinued, not because they are no longer needed but because veto powers including the USA are unwilling or unable to agree on them anymore. Instead, they prefer to engage in unilateral wars and invasions, voice threats to neighbouring countries, and sustain decades-old conflicts. It is almost ridiculous to hear the same countries speak about going back to basics.

The world of today is different from 1945

1945 was an important moment for global governance in the wake of a massive war. However, a lot of the progress that the UN helped shape, including in decolonization, had not yet been achieved. When the Charter was signed, the first atomic bomb had not yet been dropped on Hiroshima, so the nuclear threat to human survival was not even considered at the time. Humanity had not gone to space, was not able to manipulate genes, had not developed artificial intelligence, and had not realized that industrial-scale progress would mean the destruction of our planet’s ecosystems and lead to massive climate change.

We cannot go back to basics, imagined or not, when the world of today is totally different from 1945, even if many of the original challenges still exist. So let’s rather work on rethinking what the ambitions of the Charter mean, how we can “achieve international co-operation” and use the UN as “a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations”.

Instead of going back to imagined basics, we need to find new ways

Maybe placing some countries above others in the Security Council does not help? Maybe giving micro-states and the world’s population giants the same one vote each in the General Assembly is not very democratic? Maybe expecting two countries – China and the USA – to shoulder more than 40 percent of the UN’s budget is increasing the risk of financial failure instead of producing global justice? And maybe some of the cost-cutting reforms of the past two years are just ways to avoid talking about how we can build humanity-oriented, fair, and realistic backbone structures of global cooperation for the 21^st century?

Instead of going back to imagined basics, we need to find new ways of cooperating as humanity. Some bold ideas have been around for a long time and may still be relevant, if not more so in times of today’s transactional multilateralism.

Let’s be bolder as citizens of the world

Organizations like Democracy Without Borders might highlight that the UK Secretary of State, back in 1945, proposed a discussion on setting up a directly elected world assembly, to name just one example. Others like the Article 109 coalition remind us that going back to basics could also mean to go back to the drawing board and rethink what we expect from global cooperation.

In any case, let’s try to not just tighten some of the screws in an aging machinery and not to reduce the UN to ideas and practices that it was never limited to. Let’s be bolder as citizens of the world and ask for a UN that looks beyond the basics, that modernizes the machine instead of just oiling its most visible parts.

Ronny Patz is a researcher in the UN team at IDOS, the German Institute of Development and Sustainability based in Bonn.

This article was first published on the blog of Democracy Without Borders.

Pictures: UN Flag Parade in Geneva: EGilham [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons (cropped); portrait Ronny Patz: Thomas Roese [all rights reserved].