As the 59th UN General Assembly convenes, the cradle of multilateralism seems to have lost its way. Sweeping reforms are called for but appear unfeasible. Should the EU take it on itself to save the UN or, on the contrary, accelerate its demise?
UN reform as a European challenge
Numbering almost 60, the different agencies of the UN don't fit the needs of the modern world. What role for Europe in this difficult, but unavoidable reform process?
Piotr Kaczynski - Warsaw - 13.9.2004
What future for the Security Council?
Although there is a consensus about the need for Security Council reform, there is little agreement about the shape this will take. What's the role of the EU in the jungle of propositions and ambitions?
Zane Bandere - Riga - 13.9.2004
A Vote for Europe!
Europe’s division over the war in Iraq drew attention to how little influence it has on world events when it is unable to agree on a common position. A joint seat on the Security Council would force the EU to develop effective consensus-building mec
Tobias Lenz - 13.9.2004
The ICC: a Triumph of UN-EU Cooperation
Now fully operational, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the product of Europe’s wish to export its model of suprantional protection of the rights of the individual.
Jean-Laurent Lastelle - 13.9.200
UN reform as a European challenge
by Piotr Kaczynski - Warsaw
Numbering almost 60, the different agencies of the UN don't fit the needs of the modern world. What role for Europe in this difficult, but unavoidable reform process?
On September 14, the UN General Assembly will begin its 59th session in New York. However, the United Nations, created as a result of the Second World War and on the eve of the Cold War, no longer corresponds to the division of power in today’s world. In 1945 the United States' supremacy was hardly in doubt; the Soviet Union's position had been strengthened while the European countries' positions had been significantly weakened by the war.
Over the past fifty-nine years the United Nations has evolved little, while the world has changed a lot: Africa is decolonized, the Cold War is over and new regional powers have emerged. State sovereignty has been weakened, non-state actors play an important role in international relations and there is a war on terror.
New start after the Cold War
While the world has changed over the last six decades, the United Nations has been unable to adapt itself fully to the changing environment and new challenges. It is true that a series of worldwide conferences was launched in the 1990s, from the Earth Summit in Rio and the Human Rights Conference in Vienna to the Conference on Racism in Durban. Yet they did not meet people’s hopes and aspirations as most of the states failed to implement the summits' recommendations. Concerning the structure of the UN there had been minor reforms in the past, but none of them ever met the growing needs for a structurally reformed UN. However the necessity of such a reform became more and more pressing over the decades, and in recent years, under the aegis of Kofi Annan, a debate on such a reform has been launched. The Secretary General himself stated in his Millennium Report, that “If the international community were to create a new United Nations tomorrow, its make-up would surely be different from the one we have.”
The main bodies of the United Nations are the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council the International Court of Justice and the Trusteeship Council. Today there is no need for the latter, its activities were suspended in 1994. The composition of the most politically important body, the Security Council, also needs revision. Yet the biggest challenges to UN reform lie elsewhere: there is an urgent need to include issues other than security and peace in the UN Charter. For instance, the protection of the environment and of human rights, which are already mentioned in the UN Charter, but which need a profound organizational change in order to be more effective.
Yet the biggest challenge is to answer the following question: How to better coordinate different international agencies of the UN System ? Today their actions are often contradictory.
The European Union in the UN
The European Union does not have a seat in the UN. The obvious reason is that the EU is not a state and only states are members of the United Nations. All the EU states, however, are very active members of the UN and affiliated to the various UN organizations. Needless to say, citizens from two European countries, today EU member states, have served as UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold of Sweden and Kurt Waldheim of Austria. Two out of five permanent Security Council seats belong to European nations, France and the UK, the UN is widely sponsored by the EU states, and so on. In short, the impact the EU states has on the UN is overwhelming.
Unfortunately the impact of the EU members within the UN does not correspond to the impact of the EU. The European Union’s foreign policy is far from being efficient or effective, it is still rather an idea than a reality. A coherent EU foreign policy within the UN hardly exists. It is true that the member states coordinate their statements and initiatives, table common proposals and usually vote together. Yet all this is being done at the intergovernmental level of the Council of Ministers, without a European perspective and with limited participation of the European Commission and the European Parliament. In reality, Javier Solana, “Mister Europe” as he is called in Brussels, has no real powers at his disposal. The real powers have never been transferred to Mr. Solana, they remain the sole preserve of the nation state.
From this perspective, when Gerhard Schroeder demands a permanent seat on the UN Security Council for Germany, he does not behave as a true, committed European. When the German Chancellor demands a permanent seat on the UN SC he acts on behalf of Germany (not the European Union) at the expense of other EU member states. Not that the other European states behave better; the British and the French for over fifty years have refused to confer with each other within the UN SC.
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What future for the Security Council?
by Zane Bandere - Riga
Although there is a consensus about the need for Security Council reform, there is little agreement about the shape this will take. What's the role of the EU in the jungle of propositions and ambitions?
Talk of a much-needed reform of the SC has been going on for years but the only viable reform took place in 1965 when the SC was expanded from eleven members to fifteen. The current fifteen members are comprised of five permanent veto holders (USA, Russia, China, France and Great Britain) and ten non-permanent members (currently Chile, Germany, Pakistan, Philippines, Romania, Spain, Algeria, Angola, Benin, Brazil) elected for a two-year term. A new reform needs to address the issue of representation, veto power and efficiency of decision-making.
According to Dr. Chris Reus-Smith of the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University in an interview with CNS News, ‘the original great powers are no longer representative of the major states’. Analysts say new membership should be granted on the basis of balanced regional representation or to take into account great military/economic powers, or, possibly, to balance developed and developing countries. The USA has proposed a ‘regional’ representation with Brazil being a permanent member for Latin America, Nigeria for Africa etc. This, however has had negative responses from jealous neighbours such as Argentina, South Africa, Egypt and Pakistan, which is not prepared to lose out to India.
Model for Reform
In November 2003, Kofi Annan finally announced the creation of a High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change to undertake a thorough assessment of the principal organs of the United Nations. In August the Panel, comprising sixteen prominent personalities from all regions, came up with a preliminary proposal to create a three-tier Security Council by adding seven or eight ‘semi-permanent’ members with no veto rights elected for five years, while leaving the current permanent membership of the SC intact, to the great satisfaction of its members.
Europe, be it its individual member states or the EU as a whole, has not remained silent on this either. In March this year German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made it clear to the media that his country hopes to gain a permanent seat, being the third largest net contributor to the organisation and the second largest contributor of troops to UN-mandated missions. However, according to the new plan, German hopes are not high. Manuel Fröhlich of the German Association for the UN told Deutsche Welle on 20 August that the new three-tier plan is a ‘minimal solution’ that will annoy a majority of the members, especially those eyeing up a permanent seat.
Italy also has put forward a proposal in which some twenty or thirty states making significant contributions to the UN’s peace and security functions, would be added to the SC, including Italy. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has even written a letter to George W. Bush to ask for US support in gaining a seat on the Council. But relevant UN internal discussions show a different picture.
Europe looks for a single seat
The idea of regional representation includes the question of a possible rotating European Union seat, replacing the current French and British seats. Last September in a statement to the UN Austrian Foreign Affairs Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner said that for the European Union ‘speaking in one voice also means more common positions in Security Council matters’, and that this logic ‘might one day even lead to the EU having a seat on the SC’.
Furthermore, the EU’s High Representative on Common Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana, last year stated that a single EU seat with permanent membership would help to resolve the political crisis in Europe with differences in opinion between UK and France on the one side, as permanent members, and Spain and Germany, as non-permanent members, on the other. For Solana it is also a question of Europe’s role in world politics: ‘Imagine what influence Europe could have had if it had spoken with one voice?’
It is obvious that some kind of change in Europe’s representation is needed, as according to Marcel H. Van Herpen from the Cicero Foundation, the EU is already overrepresented. A rotating EU seat would give a chance to Germany, whose quest for an individual permanent seat is not viable. But one can presume that neither France nor Britain is likely to give up their seat.
Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Franco Frattini supports an EU seat even though it is not an option at the moment, as he said to Agenzia Giornalistica Italia on August 27. Frattini is cautious about the legal side – the UN statute does not foresee regional representation yet and he fears that an EU seat would be ‘unacceptable’ to other regional organisms such as the African Union and the Organization of American States. Frattini’s concern is understandable, as he is in favour of a concept of rotation in a regional context, with Italy then being able to compete for the European seat along with Germany and possibly also Spain.
Many say that a situation where no serious revision has taken place since 1945 should not be repeated. Thus any model for reform should be revised in twelve to fifteen years. The UN Panel is expected to issue its first official proposals in December this year, leaving plenty of room for discussion and negotiation in the meantime.
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A Vote for Europe!
by Tobias Lenz - 13.9.2004
Traduction - Natasha Hurley
Europe’s division over the war in Iraq drew attention to how little influence it has on world events when it is unable to agree on a common position. A joint seat on the Security Council would force the EU to develop effective consensus-building mechanisms in the field of foreign policy.
Whether you consider Europe’s division over the war in Iraq to be a disaster for European foreign policy or not, one thing is clear: when important national interests of individual Member States are at stake, the countries of the EU do not speak in unison. National egos have the upper hand. Unanimous voting, which, according to the new constitutional treaty, is how all foreign policy issues are to be decided, has become a pointless exercise. It suddenly seems as if the flame of the state system of 19th -century Europe has been rekindled: foreign policy is seen as being the sole preserve of the sovereign nation state. The common interest in the peaceful resolution of conflict disappears under the unyielding boot of national sovereignty.
The Lessons of History
Through collective action, the six founding states of what was then the European Community hoped to consign this short-sighted attitude –the very same that made Europe engage in two devastating world wars during the course of the 20th century- to the past once and for all. The enlightened fathers of European unification planned to make war in Europe impossible through the joint control of the raw materials of war such as coal and steel. The goal of economic prosperity through the creation of a common market would come later. In this respect, the concept underlying European integration is very much that of a peace project, and, as everybody knows, the preservation of peace is inextricably linked with the external relations of nation states. However, it took the EU until the end of the Cold War to draw up a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). This policy relies on cooperation between the governments of Europe. Supranational bodies such as the European Commission and the European Parliament, which represent a genuinely European interest, are as good as excluded from the CFSP decision-making process. Even the Union’s Minister of Foreign Affairs provided for in the new Constitution will not be able to alter the intergovernmental bias of the CFSP, although former US Secretary of State Kissinger’s famous wish for a hotline to the European Union will be fulfilled at last. Nevertheless, the fundamental problem remains: in the absence of an appropriate legal framework, the nation state still gets its way in the end.
Europe must develop a common Foreign Policy
The only way of dealing with the heterogeneousness of national foreign policies is by ‘Europeanising’ foreign policy. National egos must at last be silenced, and priority given to the imperative of world peace. The ‘Monnet Method’, named after one of the founding fathers of the European Community, and according to which the European bodies should share power, must also determine the EU’s foreign policy. A similar conviction must have inspired the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt when, in 1991, he first came up with the idea of turning the British and French seats on the United Nations Security Council into a single European seat. The basic idea is the same: the time has come to usher in a new era of European foreign policy and simultaneously take leave of national foreign policies. The endless spats among Europeans, such as the recent falling out between Germany and Italy over the acquisition of a permanent seat on the Security Council, must be put behind us for once and for all. The nation states of Europe no longer have the right to prevent the formulation of common positions in the field of foreign policy; in other words, they must not prevent Europe from finding a voice of its own. Given the catastrophic route taken by national foreign policy in the 20th century, would it not have been logical, in the wake of European unification, to repair the damage by developing a common foreign policy, instead of concentrating solely on trade and the internal market. And would it not have been sensible to make it part of the very organization that came into being as a peace project in the aftermath of the Second World War, i.e. the European Community?
Europe can be proud of what it has achieved so far. It has shown the whole world that the peaceful and long-term resolution of conflict is possible through political unification. This has conferred upon it not only credibility but also the duty to commit itself to the development of a multilataeral framework for the regulation of international relations. That is another reason that Europe could use to justify a joint seat on the Security Council, namely that as a successful forerunner and advocate of a new world order, it would be able to act as an advertisement for the future of regional integration.
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The ICC: a Triumph of UN-EU Cooperation
Jean-Laurent Lastelle –
Traduction - Natasha Hurley
Now fully operational, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the product of Europe’s wish to export its model of suprantional protection of the rights of the individual.
As the third assembly of ICC signatories draws to an end in the Hague, the air still resounds with the words of Kofi Annan: "In the prospect of an International Criminal Court lies the promise of universal justice". The UN’s desire to establish an international criminal justice system goes back to the days of the League of Nations and the beginnings of the international organisation. As long ago as August 12 1948, the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide gave birth to a universal criminal justice system. However, it did not make provision for any sanction mechanisms. The Great Powers, the world’s ‘policemen’, were not inclined to rectify the situation.
After the Cold War, the powerlessness –some might say the passivity- of both the US and Europe faced with genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia shocked public opinion and breathed new life into the idea of a permanent criminal court. Two ad hoc international criminal tribunals were set up by the Security Council, one for the Former Yugoslavia (ITFY, located in the Hague) in 1993, and one for Rwanda (ITR, located in Arusha, Tanzania) in 1994. Although unable to prevent the crimes from occurring in the first place, the Security Council was keen to punish the guilty parties. It was seen that the definition of a set of legal norms, alongside specific procedures for enforcing these norms within an independent instiutional framework, could be used to prevent crimes from going unpunished, as well as to dissuade potential criminals.
The ICC gets under way
According to Antonio Cassese, former President of the ITFY , the tribunals served as a stepping stone towards the establishment of a permanent court which has the advantage of being stable and not focused on any one area of the globe or on any situation in particular. Through the lobbying of a coalition of NGOs, ICCNow (International Criminal Court Now), and the involvement of a group of ‘pilot’ states (comprising most of the members of the EU, Germany at the forefront, as well as Canada, Australia, Argentina and South Africa), the Statute of Rome establishing the ICC was adopted on July 18 1998, during a conference held at the United Nations.
The Court effectively came into being on April 11 2002, at which date a total of 60 states had ratified its statute. Its job is to gather together all the counts of indictment against any individual (irrespective of rank, status or nationality) suspected of genocide, of crimes against humanity, of war crimes, or of crimes of aggression for any acts committed after July 1st 2002. However, it can only act as a complement to national legal systems in cases where these are unable or unwilling to prosecute the criminals. The Court’s judges took up their duties following a swearing-in ceremony held on March 11 2003, and were followed by Argentinean Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who took up his post on June 16 2003.
US vs. EU
The existence of the ICC is of great geopolitical significance. Apart from being a commendable undertaking by the UN, it squares with continental Europe’s ideas on the establishment of an international society regulated by the rule of law, which is the embodiment of a specific conception of justice and social organisation. Europe is trying to reproduce the model that made it strong at the international level: supranational rules sanctioned by real institutions which lead to the emergence of a new identity and a universal justice system, blind to the nationality of those who are brought before its courts. In order to achieve this, Europe recommends getting rid of any kind of discrimination on the basis of nationality. This method was adopted in the case of the European Council’s European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which is now able to deal with cases involving the defence of the rights of the individual. The Court’s universal jurisdiction is modelled on that of the Convention for the Prevention of Torture which has been in force since 1989, and which sanctions visits to any place where it is suspected that human beings are being subjected to inhuman treatment.
The supranational dream has come up against strong opposition from the United States. Having signed the statute in 2000, they consequently withdrew their consent in May 2002, and have been involved in a fierce battle against the international criminal justice system ever since. In July 2003, the Pentagon announced that it was suspending military aid to thirty-five countries including Colombia and Slovenia. These countries were guilty of having refused to sign the bilateral agreement exempting US nationals from prosecution before the ICC. US legal tradition refuses to acknowledge any authority above the American State, an attitude which has earned the superpower its reputation for unilateralism, from Guantanamo to Iraq.
Victory for the EU-UN
The countries of Europe are not without their own reservations. France, for example, has refused to acknowledge the Court’s jurisdiction in matters relating to war crimes for a transitional period of seven years. The world’s big military powers are always solicitous of their own citizens. However, it remains that the ICC is the product of an irrevesible process; it is a functioning institution, the first step towards the creation of a universal justice system. As a European-inspired triumph for the UN, it constitutes the most admirable example of UN-EU cooperation, and a good reason not to give up hope.
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