Will the watering-down of Kofi Annan's reform proposals contribute to the decline of the UN, asks Deaglán de Bréadún.
We are told that president Harry Truman, who oversaw the establishment of the United Nations in San Francisco 60 years ago, carried around a piece of paper with the words of Lord Tennyson's Locksley Hall on it, folded neatly inside his wallet. What attracted Truman to this poem was Tennyson's futuristic vision of a "parliament of man, the federation of the world", which would ensure that peace, stability and justice between nations were the order of the day.
The concept of the UN as a parliament came up again this week at a press conference in New York, where it was introduced by no less a person than Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself. The draft declaration for the World Summit had just been released and he was responding to tough questions from reporters, who put it to him bluntly that this was a pale shadow of his own proposals for UN reform issued last March.
"I know it is something that happens in all parliamentary processes. You put forward a bill, and you never get everything that you put out," he said. "This happens even in a national parliament, where there is one nationality and people share the same common goal, have the same vision of their nation and where they want to go. And here you have 191 (member states) with different ambitions, different perceptions - but at the same time all anxious to strengthen collective security."
Despite Annan's protestations, there was a widespread feeling, particularly among US journalists and non-governmental organisations, that most of Annan's initial proposals had been watered down almost to the point of being meaningless. As far as they were concerned, Kofi Annan had set out looking for a strong commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on the reduction of poverty and disease - a set of targets adopted at the UN Millennium Summit, a previous gathering of world leaders, five years ago - but the language in this regard in the draft declaration was weak and watery.
Likewise, he had sought a Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission but ended up with little more than the new title, with no guarantee that the new council would not continue to be dominated by gross human rights abusers who gave the commission such a bad name.
On terrorism, he had failed to secure a legal definition of the term: the deliberate killing of innocent civilians. This concept had fallen foul of countries that felt it would make bona fide struggles against occupation and colonial domination illegitimate.
A Peace-Building Commission would be set up to assist areas emerging from conflict, but a last-minute dispute as to whether it would report to the Security Council or the General Assembly was left unresolved. Worst of all, the entire section on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament had been dropped from the document, which Annan himself described as a "real disgrace". It seemed that the only substantial proposal to get through largely untouched was the strengthened commitment by the member states to prevent genocide in failed states, in line with the new concept of "responsibility to protect".
The journalists didn't pull their punches and some of them made reference to the recent report on corrupt practices in the Iraqi Oil-for-Food Programme in which Annan's performance as a manager was sharply criticised, although he was personally cleared of corruption. The Secretary-General had told member states the UN was at "a fork in the road", but this document had fallen foul of regional rivalries and national self-interest. "The summit is a fiasco," one journalist said finally, and another suggested the UN had passed its sell-by date.
This analysis was challenged by Annan and it wasn't shared by the people around him either. Sources in the UN apparatus even suggested to The Irish Times that the US media and public opinion weren't used to the kind of protracted negotiations that finally gave birth to the draft declaration.
Europeans on the other hand were well-versed in the kind of late-night stand-offs for which Brussels is justly famous.
The 35-page document was agreed on Tuesday afternoon, but as late as Tuesday morning there were still 140 sets of brackets in it to indicate disputed wording, and 27 separate issues remained to be resolved. Then the outgoing president of the General Assembly, Jean Ping of Gabon, "plonked" (as one UN source put it) a clean text down on the table and said it was this document or nothing.
The tactic worked, and while UN officials would not pretend the negotiation was a complete triumph for them and they were particularly disappointed about the disarmament issue, "a lot of the other things we asked for are more or less there".
This kind of long-drawn-out negotiation about its own affairs is a relatively rare experience for the UN. Another factor was the 750 proposed changes to the document, which were circulated at a late stage by the new US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. A highly controversial figure, Bolton's critics compared him to "a bull in a china shop". He is clearly intent on shaking up the UN and rendering it more amenable to the Bush administration's agenda. A leading neo-conservative ideologue, Bolton's hard-line position stirred up a hornets' nest on the other side of the spectrum.
A number of countries known to their critics as "the spoilers" stiffened their opposition to various aspects of the document, including many issues that previously seemed to have been agreed. The list of "spoilers" can vary, but countries most often mentioned include Pakistan, Algeria, Cuba, Venezuela, Jamaica (in its role as leader of the Non-Aligned Movement), Egypt, and Syria to some extent. Some of these countries' delegations were led by ambassadors with long UN experience who, in the words of one observer, were "used to throwing their weight around".
The Millennium Development Goals were the original focus of the summit. When these were adopted in 2000, it was decided to hold a review summit after five years - UN reform was added to the agenda at a later stage. But the changes Bolton proposed sought to delete a sentence that regretted the "slow and uneven implementation" of the MDGs. In the final draft, references to the goals were toned down significantly. But it was said that the White House was taken aback by the Bolton line on the MDGs and, in his speech to the summit on Wednesday, President Bush said unequivocally, "We are committed to the Millennium Development Goals." US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice played a significant role behind the scenes in moderating the US stance, following representations from her British counterpart, Jack Straw. Britain currently holds the European presidency, so Straw was speaking on behalf of the entire EU.
Whatever may have changed or fallen by the wayside following Kofi Annan's original proposals last March, the one element that survived was the concept of responsibility to protect. This was originally propounded by Annan under the label of "humanitarian intervention" but this had echoes of old-style "gunboat diplomacy" by the former colonial powers and was eventually dropped. A journalist coined the phrase "the Annan doctrine" - the clear intention of the Secretary-General was to put something in place that would help to prevent future genocidal massacres such as took place a decade ago in Rwanda and the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Now the world community is committed to the responsibility to protect, and while words alone are obviously no guarantee that genocide will be prevented in the future, the commitment is there in black and white for those who wish to make use of it.
Achieving this may come to be seen as the main element of Kofi Annan's political legacy. It will at least have to be taken into account when his career is being assessed. Rwanda and Srebrenica happened on his watch - he was head of UN peacekeeping at the time - and a comparable tragedy in the future could well be the end of the UN as a meaningful international body. Indeed, some would already say that the UN's response to the tragedy in Sudan is grossly inadequate and on a par with its reaction to Rwanda and Srebrenica.
Ireland had a direct involvement in the negotiations on UN reform, mainly through Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern, who was appointed last April as one of five special envoys on the issue by the Secretary-General. Ahern's main beat was the European continent: he travelled about 70,000 miles and met some 46 foreign ministers or heads of government in the process. The Minister worked in close co-operation with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Foreign Affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. Meanwhile a high-profile joint campaign for membership of an expanded Security Council had been launched by the "group of four" - Brazil, Germany, India and Japan - and this gave rise to tensions among the member states, but Kofi Annan asked the envoys to remain neutral on Security Council reform and eventually the issue was shelved until the end of the year.
A strategy was in place to increase EU development aid as a quid pro quo for the developing world - particularly African countries - lending their support to the reform process, and in particular the responsibility to protect. In the latter stages of the negotiations in New York, EU missions were meeting on a daily basis to co-ordinate their approach and Ireland was represented by its UN Ambassador, Richard Ryan.
When the UN was founded 60 years ago, there were only 51 member-states. Now there are 191 and the difficulties and complications have increased accordingly. This week's summit showed there is still a lot of work to be done to build greater coherence among the international community and to instil a spirit encapsulated in president Truman's instructions to the US delegation as they were leaving for the west coast on April 17th, 1945: "We ought to strive for an organisation to which all nations would delegate enough powers to prevent another world war."
Deaglán de Bréadún is the Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times