The U.N. Crisis Is About More Than Money

In the midst of the latest crescendo about the “financial crisis” of the United Nations, two important points have been missed. First, the U.N.’s real problem today is a crisis of legitimacy, not of money, and it was caused by a combination of grave doubts about the U.N. within the United States and the failure of the organization’s other members to respond. Second, the answer to the U.N.’s crisis is not to be found in exhortations about America’s supposed legal obligations or a quick rush of payments, but in a political resolution of the crisis of legitimacy.

Failure to understand these points--the central problem of the Clinton administration’s position--leads inevitably to viewing the crisis as a bean-counting exercise. If only Congress would appropriate enough money, the administration asserts, reform would sweep the U.N. But this facile “solution” would exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy. The administrative and management failures, budgetary excesses and unaccountable and indecipherable work, though, are not the only and perhaps not even the central cause of congressional dissatisfaction. The real issue is the feeling that the U.N. is a great, rusting hulk of a bureaucratic superstructure, enmeshed in governing bodies, councils and conferences, dealing with issues from the ridiculous to the sublime, brightened only occasionally by moments like the Persian Gulf War. This is the U.N. in the minds of many Americans.

Complaint after complaint is made to the rest of the U.N. membership. At best there is no response. At worst--last year--the rest of the membership voted the United States off the 16-member budget committee. This petulant and shortsighted rebuff raises questions about whether the other governments understand either the principle or the depth of feeling of many members of Congress on the U.N.’s failings.

The root of this legitimacy crisis is that the U.N.’s “one-nation-one-vote” system for financial matters again has collapsed. First under assault in the mid-1980s, this system escaped congressional efforts to allocate voting weights to the shares of U.N. financial contributions. Replacing General Assembly voting with a “consensus” approach--which theoretically gave every U.N. member a veto--was supposedly the solution, but it has manifestly failed to protect U.S. interests.

Accordingly, administration efforts to rush through supplemental appropriations or to reach agreement with Congress on management benchmarks and targets ultimately must fail to resolve the questions of U.N. legitimacy. There simply is no magic number of staff cuts, no blood oath to swear on permissible budgetary increases and no perfect measurement of efficiency that can answer the legitimacy doubts.

In fairness to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, many of the U.N.’s problems are caused by the demands and decisions of the member governments, not simply by the inefficiency of the secretariat. The unwillingness of the Clinton administration to even address the fundamental issues, however, only ensures that the crisis of legitimacy will grow and fester.

Understanding the crisis underscores the wrongheadedness of insisting that the U.S. is committing “illegal” acts by withholding all or part of its assessed contributions. The U.N. charter is fundamentally a political, not a legal document. On finances, it amounts to little more than “an agreement to agree.” The U.S. currently is not agreeing to financial manhandling by a heedless majority in the General Assembly. Payments of assessed contributions by the U.S. (or any other member) are not a unilateral obligation. If the General Assembly were to decide to fund research into New Age channeling for peace, would the U.S. really be legally obligated to pay its assessed share? If it were to decide that the U.S. share of the budget should be 99% rather than 25%, would anyone seriously insist that we would be acting illegally for refusing to go along?

Critics of the United States will charge that we are using our financial leverage in a way not available to any other member. Here, I can only say to the critics, “Welcome to reality.” If that kind of U.N. is unacceptable to them, they also have political options to which they can resort. Just 51 years old, the U.N. is aging poorly. It can be saved and live a productive life, but it needs radical surgery. Congress may yet be able to explain this to the administration and the other U.N. members.