The Good for Something U.N.
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
January 31, 2005

In a hilarious early episode of "Seinfeld," Jerry convinces Elaine that Tolstoy's monumental "War and Peace" was originally titled "War: What Is It Good For?" The same attitude seems to prevail these days with regard to our other great institutions. A lot of people, particularly in the United States, have been asking of late, "The United Nations: what is it good for?"

The most devastating natural disaster in living memory, the Indian Ocean tsunami , has given us part of the answer. The U.N. rushed to the rescue and is spearheading the largest humanitarian operation the region has ever seen. International aid workers, soldiers and survivors are working side by side to deliver food and medical supplies provided both by traditional Western donor countries and less wealthy Asian ones. Less than a month after the horror, and amid the turmoil of a massive cleanup, children in Sri Lanka are heading back to school. The worst of the feared second wave of deaths--those from hunger and disease--has not happened.

But is that all the U.N. is good for--coordinating humanitarian relief? Some think that's where the world body's real strength lies: pulling together the resources, and expertise, of all countries to tackle those challenges that are an affront to humanity. Many U.N. agencies have established a global reputation for excellence in delivering aid--notably UNICEF (helping children), UNHCR (protecting and assisting refugees), the World Food Program and the World Health Organization, which have all been in the forefront of international crises and disasters for nearly six decades.

What makes the U.N. effective at this kind of work? I found out for myself a quarter century ago, as a young man running the UNHCR office (and the refugee camp that went with it) in Singapore at the peak of the Vietnamese boat-people crisis. It was obvious that some of the things I did could have been done just as well by nongovernmental organizations, church groups, compassionate individuals--all of whom I indeed enlisted in the cause as partners, donors and volunteers at the camp. But the U.N. could also do things that these good folks could not--because, as an intergovernmental body, the U.N. has clout with its member states. Only the U.N. could negotiate with the Singaporean government the terms under which refugees rescued at sea could be brought into the port; only the U.N. could arrange their disembarkation; only the U.N. was allowed to be responsible for the camp; only the U.N. could work out the guarantees of resettlement in foreign countries without which the refugees could not disembark; only the U.N., in the end, could persuade immigration officials of a dozen foreign countries to admit refugees and resolve problem cases. The U.N., I realized through my own work, isn't just a way of bureaucratizing our consciences--it makes a real difference to real human beings.

Equally important, the U.N. enjoys the support of many governments precisely because it does not belong to any single one of them. Whenever donors jostle for attention or national interests threaten to take center stage, the U.N. is preferred because it embodies the collective interest. Many organizations must bring their expertise to bear on disasters like the Asian tsunami; only the U.N. is unchallenged as the coordinating authority. No government likes to give in or play second fiddle to another state, but all can serve under a common flag that represents everyone. The same American expert, adviser or aid worker is easier for a sensitive government to admit when he or she arrives as a U.N. official.

That is the essence of the "legitimacy question." Because of its universality, the U.N. enjoys a standing in the eyes of the world that gives its collective actions and decisions a legitimacy that no individual government enjoys beyond its own borders. This is why the U.N. is the preferred vehicle to address all those "problems without passports" that cross frontiers--human rights, climate change, drug trafficking--and those activities that we simply have to handle collectively in a globalizing world (from a universal postal system to an international civil-aviation organization). And it's also why the world's sole superpower has found it necessary to go to the U.N. when it has wished to undertake new initiatives in Iraq or Sudan or even Haiti. The U.N. provides the only forum to marshal the political will of all governments behind a course of action that could not legitimately be undertaken by only one.

That's why it's not enough, as some American critics have suggested, to answer the "Seinfeld" question by seeing the U.N. as good only for relief work. The very qualities that make the U.N. the most convenient body to tackle humanitarian disasters are also the ones that make it the indispensable source of collective decision and action on issues of international peace and security. Indeed, as Tolstoy would have put it, of war and peace.