Biting the bullet
If Éamon de Valera’s attempts to run a closed economy up until the 1950s resulted in nothing more than the highest emigration levels since the 1880s, then retreating from the world economy nowadays is certainly not an option open to any nation anywhere.
And of course it’s not just economics: environmental, security, food and health issues are all converging to mould every national political agenda. Increasingly it is global issues that will determine our quality of life, which will require resolution on a global scale. So argues UN veteran, Mark Malloch-Brown in The Unfinished Global Revolution.
Lord Mark Malloch-Brown (he was made a minister and peer by Gordon Brown) traces the recent history of the UN since his career started there in the 1970s, and which culminated in his becoming UN deputy secretary general, after six years as head of development programmes.
As “Kofi Annan’s right hand man”, as Malloch-Brown describes himself, he was in a privileged spot.
“My life as a journalist, political consultant, international official and later British minister had given me plenty of opportunity to observe the unpredictability of international events,” he writes.
“I often had a front row seat for witnessing the turning point so in the move from the divided world of the Cold War to a freer, faster but so far, less managed future.”
Malloch-Brown is an impressive player and somewhat impressed by himself, but his career — and careerism — have been extraordinary.
He has worked as political consultant to the Philippines’ Cory Aquino and Peru’s Mario Vargas Lllosa in their election campaigns, in addition to a stint at the World Bank, and working with George Soros, and at 57 is now chairing an international consultancy.
His book is timely, as in the absence of the emergence of a gang of international super heroes, the UN is all we’ve got in this era of huge global change.
As China’s economy accelerates ahead of the US, as the climate visibly warms, and as the world financial system slowly picks itself off the floor, the UN’s position becomes all the more critical as a forum for debate and a way to apply some form of managed change as the world order moves into a very new epoch.
This is the thrust of Malloch-Brown’s argument: how after all his experience in world events, the UN needs to play a greater role, with a greater strategy and a greater mandate.
And yet, the UN remains a bit mysterious in spite of itself. While it prides itself on transparency, the decision-making and politics behind an organisation that sets out to represent the world and which hosts 192 member states is obviously going to be far from straightforward, and is all the time compounded by the diversity of its activities — from managing refugees, human rights, health, agriculture, economics to its seconded army of 100,000 peacekeepers.
For the American right, the UN is part of a global conspiracy and a corrupt, squanderer of resources. Malloch-Brown defends the UN by citing the findings of an internal report that found the UN “was not so much corrupt as incompetent”.
When the UN does appear in the news, which is quite seldom given the scale of its activities, it is invariably for the wrong reasons, such as the delays in delivering results in Haiti or the local people’s accusations there that UN troops were responsible for the cholera outbreak there. While the UN featured in the recent batch of Wikileaks US diplomatic releases (Hilary Clinton reputedly encouraged spying on UN personnel), it was hardly as prominent as might be expected for the world’s governing body, which gives an indication of its standing in current ‘realpolitik’.
Malloch-Brown joined the UN in 1979 and found it bogged down in the self-serving debates and proxy conflicts being generated by the US and Russia in the Cold War. “Nothing in the UN is as straight forward as it looks,” he learned, and with its power to take preventative action in conflicts dissipated by members’ voting blocks, the UN became forced to extend its brief from conflict prevention to cleaning up afterwards.
What emerged from that era, and the refugee crises spawned by the superpowers’ outsourced wars in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Angola and the Middle East, was the need for the UN to extend its activities further into humanitarian support activities.
“The Cambodian genocide taught us an enduring lesson: our presence counts as much as the food and medicine we deliver. By bearing witness we could head off some of the uglier human rights abuses.”
The UN response after the genocide was ad hoc, though apparently effective. “We would build camps and usher in refugees until somebody made us stop,” Malloch-Brown writes. He left the operation, he tells us, to write the emergency handbook for the UNHCR (despite having just arrived in the job, which suggest a certain fluidity in how the UN operated).
There are clearly great achievements and great people involved in the three decades the book covers, but they are glossed over here as the author aims to offer argument more than insight into the workings of the UN.
There are some descriptions of the struggles and victories that enable the UN to do good, such as its struggle with the pharmaceutical industry to introduce affordable Aids drugs (the industry eventually swung around to subsidise treatments for developing countries, as Aids treatment for patients moved from $10,000 a year to less than $100 today: “Shame proved more powerful than profits,” he writes), but the author offers little revelation about how decisions were arrived at.
But it is here that the book probably provides its most important lesson, which is how public opinion and, more importantly, the expression of it, really does affect the international political agenda.
The pharma industry reversed its policy on HIV treatment in the face of public pressure, but politicians too are very conscious of displays of public opinion both at the UN and the G8, something Bono and Bob Geldof recognise and harness (both are mentioned here, with Bono being credited as being “the more practical”).
It’s impossible to disagree with Malloch-Brown’s arguments — for instance that the force of our age, globalisation, “was so evidently unfair and painful to so many who lost their jobs and enterprises, that some way of managing these issues at a global level seemed necessary”.
Or that market forces have been given too much of a free hand in determining how the world now operates, or that democracies are a preferable system of government.
But the material Malloch-Brown’s provides offers little new insight into the workings or capabilities of the UN beyond what any half diligent newspaper reader will already know.
The UN certainly does great work, but it might learn how to communicate some passion for its task from the NGOs it now works alongside, something this book lacks too.
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