The United Nations and the radical chic who crowd its once-hallowed halls are experiencing the best and worst of times. U.N. policies are being embraced by most developed nations, and supporters are elated that national sovereignty is finally taking a back seat to global governance — and in the nick of time, too, given the “perilous” state of the planet. On the other hand, the U.N. isn’t getting the respect and support it believes it deserves, particularly from the United States. Ted Turner’s US$1-billion contribution was welcome to be sure, but George W. Bush might as well be a citizen of the small Utah town that recently declared itself a United Nations-free zone.
While the U.N. needs the U.S., the feeling is hardly mutual. Many rural Americans believe the global agency is undermining their rights and freedoms, even as it ostensibly tries to make the world a safer, cleaner and wealthier place. They resent U.N. intervention in land-use and development controversies, such as the forever-stalled New World gold project in Montana. And in Alaska, citizens were outraged when environmentalists and the U.N. tried to create numerous World Heritage sites and biosphere reserves in defiance of a federal promise of no more land withdrawals. The state has already contributed 62% of all wilderness lands in the U.S., or roughly one-third of its land mass, and citizens there have no interest in ceding jurisdiction of any remaining land to foreign bodies.
The same tactics are being deployed elsewhere, including New Caledonia, where environmental groups are lobbying to have several offshore areas declared World Heritage sites by the U.N. The territory’s president, Pierre Frogier, isn’t fooled. He knows the goal is to block development of several nickel mines, and he’s making sure the world knows the opponents are largely from outside New Caledonia and that environmental standards are in place.
On the social front, the U.N. has focused its efforts on the worthy goal of reducing world poverty. Unfortunately, it doesn’t know how to change the sorry status quo, other than papering the planet with vacuous feel-good charters, organizing endless summits and pillaging rich Peters to pay poor Pauls. Solving the world’s ills requires competence, and on that count, the U.N. is sorely lacking. It has too many paper-pushing bureaucrats, too many eco-doom-and-gloomers, and too many socialists opposed to capitalism and free trade.
Instead of reaching out to credible experts who understand the basic economic principles behind the creation of wealth, the U.N. consults endlessly with a “civil society” made up of — what else? — paper-pushing non-governmental bureaucrats, eco-doom-and-gloomers and anti-everything socialists. It is neither unfair nor unkind to suggest that if these civil society leaders had to run for office, most would be rejected at the polls no less brutally than their peers have been in recent elections across North America. Only about 10% of voters support non-mainstream candidates, no matter how prominent they are in civil society. Yet at the U.N., radicals are given sweeping powers they could never attain at the ballot box.
On the human rights front, Americans were astounded when the U.S. was voted off the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission while nations such as Sudan, Cuba and China were given the nod in a recent secret ballot. Dick Armey, Republican house majority leader, called the votes “grotesquely incomprehensible.” Others said the U.S. was being punished for its refusal to embrace U.N. agreements on matters such as global warming. Whatever the case, the U.N. deserves all the criticism it took for that blunder.
The U.N. also has taken flak for its handling of security matters. Such criticisms are not new, nor confined to its poorly managed military interventions in places such as Rwanda. Indeed, how Kofi Anan became secretary-general after his disastrous “peace-keeping” operation there is one of life’s mysteries. The paper trail that he and his superiors left behind is beyond bone-chilling. There is a time for tact and diplomacy, but genocide is not one of them. As for Sierra Leone, whatever peace exists is being upheld not by the U.N. but by a small crack force of British soldiers. The punk killers who once terrorized the nation have learned to keep a respectful distance.
Historians have not been complimentary of the U.N.’s secretary generals since the days of Dag Hammarskjld. British author Rosemary Righter provides a scathing assessment in her book Utopia Lost: “U Thant was invisible; [Kurt} Waldheim was a liar; [Javier] Perez de Cuellar was a man of whom [it was said] ‘he couldn’t make waves if he fell out of a boat,’ and [Boutrous] Boutrous-Ghali was completely impatient with the job.” Boutrous-Ghali’s vitriolic anti-Western rhetoric earned him the distinction of being the first secretary-general to be denied a second term. The Clinton administration vetoed his candidacy in 1996.
Kofi Anan, while more discreet in his anti-Western biases, also favours extending the U.N.’s global arm through a powerful set of international institutions that would exercise authority over how people, companies and governments run their affairs. Such authority would be excercised not by major powers but by unelected bureaucrats, with Canada’s own Maurice Strong at the helm of this creeping power grab. A myriad of committees would be formed to take on tasks no less challenging than “to reinvent industrial-technological civilization” and to reverse climate patterns allegedly caused by this form of civilization.
To their credit, Americans have no intention of being disenfranchised by nameless eco-socio-bureaucrats sitting in judgment of mankind. Canadians would be well-served to take a similar stand instead of rushing to sign whatever global agreement Maurice Strong and his followers are pushing at the moment.
While there is much fretting about the U.S.’s growing unilateralism, undemocratic multilateralism is a more serious threat. In his great work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) predicted that if despotism were to establish itself in future societies, rulers would not destroy but enervate, extinguish and stupefy a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid animals. “The principle of equality has prepared men for these things,” he writes. “. . . [The] supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot permeate, cannot rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting.”
International agreements have their time and place to be sure, but policy-making should not bypass national governments and representative democracy. As it stands, global policies are generated by unelected and unaccountable people, namely Maurice Strong, a bloated and notoriously inefficient U.N. bureaucracy, and non-government organizations whose perspective is often skewed and limited by single-issue ideologies. While many Western nations, including Canada, seem content to play the role of docile international citizen, America has no intention of surrendering its national sovereignty and values to some fuzzy collectivist notion of global governance.
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