The sometimes United Nations

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If you were to ask your partner, your friend, workmate or next-door neighbour just who António Guterres was, and what António did for a crust, how would they respond? How would you fare if you were asked the same questions?

Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres (Getty Images)

The current head of the United Nations may not be a household name for many of us; perhaps name dropping his immediate predecessors as secretary general, Ban ki-moon, Kofi Annan or Boutros Boutros-Ghali, may ring more bells.

The UN has always been bigger than its titular head, of course, and its influence has waxed and waned depending on the willingness of its 193 member states to play nice. (To be fair, that point is more accurately made of the five permanent members of the UN’s security council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.)

Especially in this time of COVID-19 and its aftershocks on the world population’s health and economies, the UN and its most hard-pressed body, the World Health Organization (WHO), play the most vital of roles in trying to share knowledge and resources. That the UN Food Program deserved Nobel Peace Prize also speaks volumes for its contributions.

This month marks 75 years of operations by the United Nations, which was officially convened for the first time in San Francisco on 24 October 1945 after VE Day, VJ Day and the end of the Second World War (8 May, 15 August and 2 September respectively). Australia was one of the founding 50 member states; we were on board also when the body was first announced mid-war, on 1 January 1942, as one of 26 nations scrapping against the Axis entente.

The UN describes itself as ‘a global forum where countries can raise and discuss the most difficult issues, including problems of war and peace’. Saving lives that would otherwise be taken in wars is the big-ticket item; the reason the body was formed.


'The greatest strength of the UN — the accommodating of the fallen, current and rising superpowers in the one body — is also its greatest weakness.'


So, 75 years on, how would the UN be graded in terms of achieving those five tasks? By any assessment, however harsh, I suggest it compares favourably with its predecessor, the ill-fated, ill-equipped League of Nations (formed by the victors after the Great War, the league failed to prevent ‘round two’). So far, we have not melted ourselves down into a thermonuclear puddle, and the UN has statistically played its part in preventing a third world war by providing ‘a forum where diplomacy reduces the chance of war’.

But when you consider the UN’s current challenges, such as COVID-19, climate change, and the fallout over China and the US’ ongoing trade war, the UN is looking rather peaked. (With this year being what it is, maybe we could all do with a nap.)

It is certainly a body that deserves to have its praises sung. Since it commenced the UN has fed more than 90 million people in 75 countries, helped more than 34 million refugees, kept the peace in more than 71 nations, worked with 140 nations to minimise climate change, helped 50 countries a year with elections, helped vaccinate 58 per cent of the world’s children, provided maternal health support for some 30 million women, and protected human rights to the best of its abilities through 80-odd treaties and declarations.

The UN has prevented some mass slaughters throughout its 75-year history while championing its laudable if still aspirational declaration of human rights.

Sadly, to expect more from a body historically and constantly manipulated by its strongest members is naïve.

The greatest strength of the UN — the accommodating of the fallen, current and rising superpowers in the one body — is also its greatest weakness. Russia, China and the US have historically tried to use the UN to roll their dice and move their mice. The primary role of the UN is to protect the world’s population from the predations of war, and we have seen the UN fail in that task, to small and lesser degrees, from its outset.

The losses of life and devastation in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, the wanton bloodshed in internecine conflicts and genocide in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, the invasion of Iraq by the US (ostensibly looking after mythical WMD), the more recent accounts of children molested by UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic — these realities have to be weighed against its comparative successes in countries including El Salvador, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, Timor-Leste, Liberia, Haiti and Kosovo.

As said, the WHO aims to help coordinate the pursuit of a vaccine for COVID-19; a goal not helped by the decrease in funding by the US.

The greater loss of life now unfolding before our eyes was addressed at the UN’s general assembly last month by world leaders. As expected, it was theatre of the absurd, with mutual admonitions and finger-pointing from the US and China. Perhaps the most unstatesmanlike moment was the declaration that the WHO was ‘virtually controlled by China’.

In masterful understatement, the UN notes that ‘just when we need collective action more than ever, support for global cooperation has been flagging. In many countries, public trust in traditional institutions is in decline and relations between countries have been under strain.’

As Prime Minister Scott Morrison inscrutably noted in his address to the UN, that august body is ‘not perfect’. The Australian records Morrison as going down a certain garden path in reminding the world that the virus seems to have originated in China and that there is a ‘mandate to identify the zoonotic source of the COVID-19 virus and how it was transmitted to humans’

Sectarian kowtowing, geopolitical lobbying for supremacy, the Australian government reiterating whatever the US government says. Some things have remained the same since the UN commenced.

If the UN has a mandate, I suggest it would be the same as every human being on the planet; to survive the next few years.


Postscript / confession: I consider myself reasonably well-read and conversant with world affairs, but I had to look Guterres up — I was more familiar with Ban ki-moon, Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali.


Barry GittinsBarry Gittins is a Melbourne writer.

Main image: Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres (Getty Images)

Topic tags: Barry Gittins, UN, 75 anniversary, António Guterres, Australia, US



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Existing comments

If your daughter came home with a proposed fiancée, you wouldn’t need too many questions to size up his worthiness. The key question will be what he does for a crust. The next question is how many times he’s slept around. The key question that tells you if a government is worth anything is what it does for free elections. There is no next question. It’s analytically irrelevant that the UN is a collection of nations. The analytical relevance is that it is a collection of governments. 40% of the permanents on the Security Council are deadbeats because, unlike the 60%, they are not in the space where the nation tells the government what to do. You’ll notice there are no wars in which democracies line up against other democracies. If there's a democracy on one side, there'll be a deadbeat on the other. Or two deadbeats will square off.
roy chen yee | 26 October 2020


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