Platform

SHASHI THAROOR’S REMARKS
TO REGIONAL GROUPS

“THE FUTURE OF THE UN”

Text prepared for delivery

JULY 2006, NEW YORK

[The following text was the basis for remarks delivered by Shashi Tharoor, candidate for UN Secretary-General, at meetings of the five Regional Groups of the United Nations. While there were linguistic variations – different portions were delivered in French at the meetings with the African Group and with the Western European and Others Group – the basic address is as given below, and constitutes Mr Tharoor’s platform as a candidate. In addition, he responded in detail to questions posed to him by Permanent Representatives and delegates attending these meetings. The questions and responses have not been transcribed.]

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Excellencies, Friends,

I am most grateful for this invitation to address your regional group. I welcome the opportunity to discuss vital issues concerning the future of the United Nations, and that is what I hope to address, as we work together to chart a course for our organization into the 21 st century.

The United Nations started out as a vision in the minds of leaders who were determined to make the second half of the twentieth century different from the much-troubled first. They drew up rules to govern international behaviour, and founded institutions in which different nations could cooperate for the common good.

Their idea -- now called “global governance” – was to create an international architecture that could foster international cooperation, elaborate consensual global norms and establish predictable, universally applicable rules, to the benefit of all – as an alternative to the military alliances and balance of power politics that wreaked such havoc in the preceding five decades.

The keystone of the arch, so to speak, was the United Nations itself. The UN was seen by those world leaders as the only possible answer to the disastrous experiences of the first half of the century – fifty years in which the world had suffered two world wars, countless civil wars, brutal dictatorships, mass expulsions of populations, and the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

The new United Nations would stand for a world in which people of different nations and cultures would look on each other, not as subjects of fear and suspicion, but as potential partners, able to exchange goods and ideas to their mutual benefit. A place where small states and big would be able to work as sovereign equals, pursuing common objectives in a universal forum.

And it would provide a means to address what we sometimes like to call ‘problems without passports’ – problems that cross all frontiers uninvited (climate change, drug trafficking, terrorism, epidemics, refugee movements and so on) – and whose solutions also can have no passports because no one country or group of countries, however rich or powerful, can tackle them alone.

It is the resolution of these problems that remains at the very core of the UN’s activities.

Indeed, today I think it is fair to say that even those countries that once felt insulated from external dangers -- by wealth or strength or distance -- now realize that the safety of people everywhere depends not only on local security forces, but also on guarding against terrorism; warding off the global spread of pollution, of diseases, of illegal drugs and of weapons of mass destruction; and on promoting human rights, democracy and development. Jobs anywhere depend not only on local firms and factories, but on faraway markets for the goods they buy and produce, on licenses and access from foreign governments, on an international environment that allows the free movement of goods and persons, and on international institutions that ensure stability – in short, on the international system constructed in 1945.

And so, in 2006, I would argue that the need for a universal means for global governance, a mechanism for international cooperation -- indeed, let us call it by its name, for a United Nations -- is stronger than ever.

Which leads me to the next question. What kind of United Nations should we build for the future? Part of the answer to that question must lie in the past.

Of course, the UN has never been, and will never be, a perfect body. It has acted unwisely at times, and failed to act at others. We can each find examples of the UN’s failures and setbacks.

But the United Nations, at its best and its worst, is a mirror of the world: it reflects not just our divisions and disagreements but also our hopes and convictions. As our great second Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, put it, the United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.

And that it has. We must not forget that the UN has achieved an enormous amount in its 60 years. Most important of all, it prevented the Cold War from turning hot – first, by providing a roof under which the two superpower adversaries could meet and engage, and second, by mounting peacekeeping operations that ensured that local and regional conflicts were contained and did not ignite a superpower clash that could have sparked off a global conflagration.

Today, while the Security Council grapples with Lebanon, the Palestinian situation, Iran and North Korea , the UN remains at the heart of the challenges of world disorder and must respond effectively to them. Over the years, more than 170 UN-assisted peace settlements have ended regional conflicts. Over 300 international treaties have been negotiated at the UN, setting an international framework that reduces the prospect for conflict among sovereign States. The UN has built global norms that are universally accepted in areas as diverse as decolonization and disarmament, development and democratization.

And the UN remains second to none in its unquestioned experience, leadership and authority in co-ordinating humanitarian action, from tsunamis to human waves of refugees. When the blue flag flies over a disaster zone, all know that humanity is taking responsibility -- not any one Government -- and that when the UN succeeds, the whole world wins. Our newly-established revolving fund for emergency response to humanitarian disasters reflects and strengthens our ability to make a difference. And these are achievements we can build on.

But since the best crystal ball is often the rear view mirror, I hope you will allow me a personal look into the past as well. For the UN has not just changed enormously in those first 60 years; it has been transformed in the career span of one UN official standing before you. If I had even suggested to my seniors when I joined the Organization 28 years ago that the UN would one day observe and even run elections in sovereign states, conduct intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction, impose comprehensive sanctions on the entire import-export trade of a Member State, create a counter-terrorism committee to monitor national actions against terrorists, or set up international criminal tribunals and coerce governments into handing over their citizens to be tried by foreigners under international law, I am sure they would have told me that I simply did not understand what the United Nations was all about.

And yet the UN has done every one of those things during the last two decades, and more. The United Nations, in short, has been a highly adaptable institution that has evolved in response to changing times.

Since it has worked in practice, my UN of the future must be firmly anchored in its own experience, even as it sails onward. But though our walls are lined with Nobel Prize certificates, we must not rest on our laurels. We need reform, not because the UN has failed, but because it has succeeded enough to be worth investing in.

The need for reform has become clear in recent years, and we live in a time when divisions in the UN have led to genuine worries that the old East-West divide is being replaced by a new and equally serious North-South divide. Many diplomats and academic observers are speaking increasingly of a crisis of confidence in the international system. But we speak a lot of languages at the UN. Indeed, I am the Secretariat’s Co-odinator for Multilingualism. And my Chinese friends tell me that in their language, the Chinese character for “crisis” is made up of two other characters – the character for “danger” and the character for “opportunity”. Today, we must see the danger and seize the opportunity.

A series of far reaching proposals were made by the Secretary-General, and at the World Summit last year, some 170 world leaders – the largest ever gathering of heads of State and government in human history – agreed on a plan to reshape the international architecture for the twenty-first century. We have to build on that level of political agreement and take our organization forward in the common interest. And that is where the new Secretary-General comes in.

Mr Chairman,

Fifty-three years ago the first outgoing Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, described the post he was handing over to Dag Hammarskjold as “the most impossible job in the world”. A function described in the Charter as the Chief Administrative Officer of the Organization, yet one with major unspecified political responsibilities and communications challenges. Today the Secretary-General commands great diplomatic legitimacy, and even greater media visibility, but less political power than the language of the UN Charter suggests. To be effective, he must be skilled at managing staff and budgets, gifted at public diplomacy (and its behind-the-scenes variant), and able to engage the loyalties of a wide array of external actors, including non-governmental organizations, business groups, and journalists. And he must work well, above all, with Governments: He must convince the nations of the poor and conflict-ridden South that their interests are uppermost in his mind while ensuring that he can work effectively with the wealthy and powerful North. He must recognize the power and the prerogatives of the Security Council, especially its five permanent members, while staying attentive to the priorities and passions of the General Assembly. He must promote dialogue across the divides – geographic, political, ideological – and work with Member States to search for common solutions. And he must present member states with politically achievable proposals and implement his mandates within the means they provide him.

Above all, the Secretary-Generall needs a vision of the higher purpose of his office and an awareness of its potential and limitations. In other words, to be successful, he must conceive and project a vision of the UN as it should be, while administering and defending the organization as it is. Truly an impossible job. But understanding what it takes is the first step to doing it well.

I come to it, Your Excellencies, with 28 years of service to the United Nations in a wide variety of areas – refugees and humanitarian work, peacekeeping, service in the Secretary-General’s office and now the management of a large department that I was appointed to reform. In the process I have seen, from the inside and the ground up, most of the major types of challenges with which a Secretary-General can expect to be faced. I believe I can handle them well. I offer both continuity and change: continuity with the best traditions of the United Nations, change because change is a constant in our Organization. I believe an effective United Nations is essential as the indispensable global institution for our globalizing world. And a vital task of the next Secretary-General will be to ensure that the institution is ready for the challenges of the 21 st century, building on the changes Kofi Annan has already introduced but prepared to deal with the unpredictable challenges of tomorrow.

Let us have no illusions about the scale of those challenges. The divisions over the Iraq war dramatically affected the UN’s standing – our image went down in the US because the UN did not support the Administration on the war, and it went down in many other countries because the UN was unable to prevent the war. We disappointed both sets of expectations, and some famous and rather powerful voices began to speak of the UN’s irrelevance. This is ironic, because the United Nations reflects, as I pointed out earlier, the realities of the world, and our willingness to co-operate with each other.

As Secretary-General, however, I would focus on those areas which are within my direct competence. None is more important than the reinforcement of the operational capacity of the UN -- to fulfil the Millennium Development Goals, mount effective peace-keeping operations, and respond urgently to crises. As the Chief Administrative Officer of the Organization, I would ensure the strengthening of the international civil service, insisting that staff of both sexes, of the highest competence and integrity, are appointed to responsible positions, and that due regard is paid to geographical and gender representation so that the Secretariat fairly reflects the cultural diversity of our planet. That also requires staff who can perform their functions in both the working languages of the Secretariat, as well as use the other official languages.

I spoke of continuity and change. There is much at the UN that must continue – our excellent work in development, humanitarian relief, and in crisis response, to take but three examples. We must continue to improve our ability to mount effective peace-keeping operations (currently they take too long to deploy and are uneven in quality). The UN is, and must continue to be, a forum where the rich and powerful can commit their strength and their wealth to the cause of a better world. And it must continue to provide the stage where great and proud nations, big and small, rich and poor, can meet as equals to iron out their differences and find common cause in their shared humanity. The UN will only succeed as a recourse for all and not the instrument of a few.

And to be that, the UN must embrace sensible reform. Mahatma Gandhi once said, “you must be the change you wish to see in the world”. What is true for individuals applies also to institutions. The UN is no exception. If we want to change the world, we must change too. And I respectfully suggest that managing change is best done by someone who knows how to do it – who values and respects the traditions and principles of the institution he serves, and who understands that at the UN the diplomacy of management is as important as management itself.

A new Secretary-General must also do everything possible to build on the reforms achieved in recent months. And we must change in promoting democracy and good governance as essential to development – we now have a Democracy Fund to help us do that, financed not just by the rich West but by countries like India. The UN must stand up for human rights everywhere, ensuring that the new Human Rights Council fulfils its responsibilities more effectively than the over-politicized Human Rights Commission it replaced. And we must not let conflicts reignite when the peacekeepers have left: we must work in the newly-created Peacebuilding Commission to ensure that conflict gives way to development and to democratic institution-building so that peace is truly sustainable. These are institutions in which Member States and the Secretary-General will have to work hand in glove. Equally important, the doubling of the budget of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights will permit us to make a difference in operational terms where it counts – in the field, not just in the conference room in Geneva.

It is too early to say how effective these new changes will be -- the proof of the pudding is in the eating. But we now have a recipe that should work.

And there are other obvious tasks for a new Secretary-General. The first is to ensure that the UN is organized to be ready to tackle a vast range of problems effectively, and to be prepared for new and unpredictable ones – three years ago, who had even heard of the grave risk of avian flu?

As an immediate task, the new Secretary-General must work together with States on the unfinished business of management reform, especially to ensure ethics, accountability and transparency, together with truly independent audit oversight. I would focus on building issue-based coalitions on specific practical problems (management inefficiencies, procurement policies, information technology, outsourcing) that have little to do with ideological politics. There is enough going on to say that our interest in reform is far from over. If the recent changes and the necessary future ones can be brought to fruition and made to work effectively, they will go a long way to setting in place a structure that will allow us to move into the future with renewed confidence, so our next Secretary-General can concentrate on implementation.

Development must be a major priority for the UN. Let us not forget that at the Summit, leaders from donor and developing nations alike made a strong and unambiguous commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, which for the most part are not on course to being met. They devoted a separate section of their Declaration to the compelling problems of Africa. We must hold them to their commitments, and work to ensure that the world develops mechanisms that should make successful and sustainable development more likely. Not all of this will happen at the UN – the WTO and the Bretton Woods institutions, in particular, have a key role to play – but the UN remains indispensable as the place where political agreement can be reached on development goals, and where the agenda is set on issues that affect the well-being of the overwhelming majority of the world’s people, and where the voice of each of you is heard on that agenda.

I have, I hope, painted a picture of the UN of the future as firmly anchored in its achievements, but eagerly engaged in transforming itself in the light of changing circumstances. A refurbished UN, built on the strong foundations laid down in 1945, buttressed by the innovations and achievements of the last sixty years, and renovated to take account of the problems that we have uncovered in the course of dealing with the real challenges of the changing world outside.

Realistically, it will probably be a UN that is more sharply focused on areas where it has a proven and undoubted capacity to make a difference. It will, for example, continue to be the first port of call to coordinate the world’s response when major humanitarian disasters strike. It is currently the most successful practitioner, and will likely remain the means of choice, to monitor peace treaties. And when territories must be administered while political solutions evolve and the modus operandi for lasting peace are established, the world will continue to turn to the UN since it transcends any one Government’s interests but acts in the name of all.

It will not, I imagine, lead military interventions – peacekeeping excepted – although its legislative bodies will undoubtedly remain the primary source of legitimacy for any such interventions. But where others have the capacity, the resources and the will to keep the peace – NATO in Afghanistan, the EU in Bosnia, though not yet the AU in Darfur – the UN should stand aside and bless their efforts. And where the task – enforcing peace in Iraq, for instance – is clearly beyond us, we should offer political counsel and humanitarian assistance, but let wars be fought by warriors, not peacekeepers.

Above all, perhaps, I can see no other entity that could, with the same efficiency and objectivity, provide the means to address the gaps and the cracks in the façade of the international system, through which many of the twenty-first century’s problems – from environmental degradation to global epidemics to human rights abuses to international terrorism – would otherwise prosper.

So much for the architecture. But, as the old saying goes, a house is not a home. Something more – something extremely important, although not quite so tangible -- is needed before we can be happy that our Organization is all it can be in the twenty-first century.

At this time of turbulence and transformation, the new UN must encapsulate the 21 st century’s equivalent of the spirit that informed its founding.

It must amplify the voices of those who would otherwise not be heard, and serve as a canopy beneath which all can feel secure.

The UN of the future must never forget that it is both a child and a source of hopes for a better world – hopes that all human beings share.

To achieve this, those of us who work for the new UN must know when to speak up … and when to listen. The UN belongs to its Member States, and no task is more important for a Secretary-General than to listen to the representatives of the Member States, while taking his own independent decisions with the interests of all before him. That is why I am here today.

Above all I wish simply to say that I hope to be at your service, and I respectfully request the opportunity to be invited to serve.

And that, I think, is an appropriate note on which to turn the floor over to you, for your own questions and comments.