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Home » Thinkers & Themes » Thinkers » Boulding & Forsberg
A Conversation with Elise Boulding and Randall Forsberg PART II: AUGUST 2002 Read Part I: New Definitions and Moral Responses
As this discussion focuses on the role of international law and international institutions, it emphasizes the role of the UN and possible UN reforms. Boulding underscores the necessity of redefining concepts of national identity and advocates an understanding of the UN and its many programs as part of responsible citizenship. Forsberg explains the lack of confidence that many countries feel toward the UN and refers to the European Union as a model of balancing interests of nation-states within a larger framework. The NGO community's relationship to the UN is also considered as a means of enhancing opportunities for peace. The BRC's Patti Marxsen moderates. PM: We're going to move on to a second group of questions, which have to do with the international response to terrorism. What we'd like to explore with you are the strengths and weaknesses of our current system of international law and how those strengths and weaknesses have helped to shape world events since 9/11. To begin with, wars, as they have evolved, have been tools to deal with interstate security. In the face of international human rights treaties, has war become an outdated mode of dispute resolution, in the context of human rights and, by extension, human security? EB: For me, one of the biggest discoveries since our dialogue in this book has been the difficulty we are facing in developing a system of international governance. I've been reading books on governance, the process by which new values are accepted and then new principles are accepted and then formulations of them are developed in terms of the behavior of nation-states. This process is very painful and very difficult. There are a few states for whom it is relatively easy to go for the UN concept and then sign treaties and so on. But there are number of states for whom it is very difficult, most of all, perhaps, the U.S. The fact that we're "unsigning" treaties now wasn't as visible when we had our original conversation for Abolishing War, but even at that time it was obvious that there were many treaties which we hadn't signed. This sense that there is a body of international law developing that will make war unnecessary, which was the frame of mind in 1899 when the Hague Conference was convened, is not a simple matter. What was intended by the phrase used when the UN was established: "we the peoples of the UN"? It was "we the peoples," not "we the states of the UN." My feeling is that we have an enormous task here of developing a willingness to be governed by UN treaties, and by international law. This willingness has to come from grassroots movements and the NGOs and civil society. This means there has to be much more of a process of education and public discussion on this. It's going to be a very long haul. I was remembering the other day that we used to have a course that everybody had to take when I was a graduating senior in high school called "Problems in American Democracy." Well, what we need today is a course that every student takes called "Problems in UN Democracy." Because unless a young person happens to have a teacher who likes to do a project on UN model assemblies, they just don't learn anything about the UN. So we need to work on instilling that feeling of identification with a body that administers laws that states will follow; we just have much further to go than we thought on that. PM: Does this come out of what you were talking about earlier, the "island mentality" of Americans? EB: Yes, but it isn't only Americans. America's "island mentality" is particularly strong, but there is a general, global issue of having underestimated the difficulties of the treaty process and states accepting the values of the rule of law. PM: I know Randy has some things to say on this, but I want to pursue this just a little deeper with you, Elise. What is at the crux of that? Is it a sense that we shouldn't be ruled by people who might be "lesser" than ourselves? EB: We've gone through a century of creating nation-states. So the values of love of country, patriotism, loyalty, giving your all, fighting to establish it, wars of independence, the American Revolution, and so on are very high in our thinking. Living in New England, I'm conscious that the American Revolution is alive and well. You don't get that out in Colorado, where I lived for 30 years. And now, just at the point where we have the UN with its assimilating principle, we also have a new challenge of becoming aware of the 10,000 ethnies, cultural and racial identity groups. All of the work on human rights law has developed an awareness that the ethnic minorities in different countries are not getting a fair deal. Some are, there are even some that are dominant. But precisely at the moment where the old melting pot thesis has fallen apart — that idea that once you become a citizen of this new country, then everybody becomes more alike — we are faced with the question of how we can give enough recognition to the ethnic minorities within state borders. That's a whole different kind of an issue about nationalism, which now needs to be redefined. And just talking about diversity doesn't do it. There is one old model, Switzerland, and some new models like in Spain, where the provinces of the country have a substantial degree of autonomy. Then there are countries like Norway, which gave the Saami people their own parliament. All of these things are very new. At a time when it's urgent to develop a state system that gives equal status to its minorities, the U.S., which boasts so about its democracy, has done very poorly on this. It's done very poorly with the Native American peoples and broken lots of treaties. Then, of course, there's the whole history of slavery. Clearly, simple love of country or a simple patriotism, based on stereotypes of who belongs, just doesn't go in this era. A much more complex love of country, an inclusive love that includes all the people in it, could then prepare people to accept an identification with the UN, which has a lot of other countries with a diversity of populations. Our ideas about national identity have to change in order for the UN identity to come clear. PM: Randy, I'll just ask you to pick up any point you wish there. Elise, as usual, has given us a lot to think about. RF: I'll just comment on a couple of areas where I don't agree with Elise. In looking at the course of international treaties, particularly relating to war and armaments, my sense is actually that all countries except the United States have been moving forward. In the global environment and even regarding the treaties that relate to trade and trying to reduce trade tariffs and barriers, the behavior of the United States in the last decade has been pretty exceptional. EB: I have to agree with that. I was just trying to be less hard on the U.S. RF: But apart from treaties, there are other ways in which countries have shown their reluctance, their lack of confidence in acting through the United Nations as a body with greater political power and more instruments at its disposal. In particular, the one that strikes me the most, and where I do agree with Elise, is when it comes to the possibility of replacing the United States as the body that tries to prevent armed conflict and intervene and stop it when it happens. Not surprisingly, most developing countries do not want to give the UN more power, even though, from the viewpoint of the industrial world, this would be a progressive step; it would be equalizing because it would take the response out of the hands of one country and put it into the hands of international law and the international community. However, from the viewpoint of countries like India, Egypt, and Brazil — the nonaligned movement – this represents a threatening step. It might also be felt as threatening to China and Russia, who have their own internal conflicts. All of these countries, in fact just about everywhere outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries – which includes the United States and Canada, Japan, Australia, and western Europe – people are afraid that if the UN has more power to intervene in internal conflicts, the UN will end up intervening in their country and this will represent a loss of authority and power on the part of their government. So regarding this aspect of changes needed for peace, there is actually a collusion between the United States, which doesn't want to give up power, and Third World countries, who are afraid of vesting more power in the UN. Between those two, it's hard to move forward. There's also a lack of confidence that the Security Council, which has responsibility for war-related issues, will act in a responsible way to apply the rule of law and oppose violence in a non-partisan manner regardless of whether oil is at stake or "only" lives, as in Africa. This lack of confidence extends to a concern that the Security Council should be empowered to act merely to save lives, not to change governments. In terms of the minority situation, while I agree with Elise I think that the rise of a kind of identification with one's cultural background has taken away that sense that we're all moving toward a cosmopolitan future very rapidly, it seems to me that this is less of an obstacle to strengthening international law and strengthening the international system than is the U.S. tendency toward isolationism and our "island mentality," or lack of awareness of other cultures. In particular, I think it's important to contrast Europe with the United States because Europe has now been through a process of having had nation-states for quite a while, and they've now begun to submerge the nation-states in a larger framework. EB: Yes, but they've also set up a minorities commission and they're busy recognizing autonomous minorities in the member-states in the European Union (EU). So there's a fascinating, complex process going on within the European Union. RF: I heard about this recently from Rolf Ekeus whom I met at a meeting in Germany. He's the High Commissioner on National Minorities for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which has a close association with the European Union. He stresses commission on minorities as supposed to for minorities because, as he explained, in some cases you can have an ethnic minority that's in power and you will have a linguistic majority that's not in power and feels oppressed or deprived of rights. There are very complicated situations about minorities. PM: We haven't uttered a word that seems to me to be just below the surface here, which is racism. Is racism part of our reluctance as "flag-waving Americans" to participate in the world on a more equal basis and to share the power? EB: Oddly enough, although I've been concerned about racism for years, I never thought about that in relation to our willingness to be international. PM: We're talking about ethnic minorities. Is that a nice way of saying other races? EB: Sometimes it will be the same race, but a different language and religion. Like the Arabs. Jews are Arabs. That whole business is very complex. Also, I think our efforts to build up human rights law are backfiring in every country because everyone has signed onto it but they're not living up to it. There are difficulties in making human rights laws as they apply to minorities operational, and certainly racism has something to do with it, but of course racism can also exist within the minorities. It's an interesting question. PM: Randy, do you want to speak to that? RF: I meant to say this earlier: I think a lot of the contemporary problems that relate to 9/11 really do relate to this particular U.S. administration, or to the Republican Party in the United States in the 1990s, including this Republican administration and the Republican-controlled Congress during the Clinton administration. The current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice both have a view of international law and the international community and the role of the United States that's very regressive. Their perspective on the world goes back to the pre-World War II isolationists, a "we don't need anyone and we should avoid entangling alliances" approach to foreign policy. PM: What's the source of that point of view? RF: In some ways, it's an American isolationism. . . a terrible, really intense unilateralism. But in other ways it's a product of the corruption of having been a great power or superpower for 50 years and having grown used to the idea of justifying high-handedness and unilateralism on the grounds that we are engaged in a world struggle. And then you take away the world struggle, and the high-handedness and unilateralism are still there. So it seems a lot more ideological than it is racist. It has to do with ideas about the role of nation-states in the world and the role of the United States in the world, which are very conservative – realpolitik ideas that are nineteenth-century concepts more than anything else. This ideology is totally inappropriate and out of step with the rest of the world — including Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, Russia, and China — but, unfortunately, it resonates with this unipolar world we've had since the collapse of the former Soviet Union left the United States alone. In this atmosphere, the rise of internal conflicts really lends itself not to sharing power but to grabbing and holding power. EB: I agree with that very much. PM: Let's return to the role of the UN. Is the UN viable? Could it be more viable? Has it acted appropriately since September 11th? RF: Many people around the world feel that the UN is controlled by the United States and is just an extension of U.S. power. At the same time, many people in the United States feel that the UN is controlled by poor Third World countries who want us to give them a lot while they don't give anything. So there's a paradox: each side feels very skeptical about the impartiality and usefulness of the UN. This, of course, makes it weaker. I think the current UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has done a lot to strengthen the credibility of the UN as an organization that is working hard to try to prevent and end conflicts and take some courageous stands, as has Mary Robinson, the High Commissioner on Human Rights. But the UN is really only as strong as the countries participating in it will allow it to be. EB: That's true, that's exactly right. RF: I don't think there's any question that it's a viable body. It can be even more effective or less effective, and I think it's effectiveness in different areas has varied. The role of the UN over a long period of time is growing in importance, in its centrality, and in our acceptance of it. I don't think there's any way to undo this or reverse it or marginalize it. But I do think this unilateralist and reactionary administration in the United States led by George W. Bush is marginalizing the UN about as much as you can. I just have to hope that when we get a new administration, they will do more to strengthen the UN, as well as the body of international law. PM: Randy, when you spoke at the BRC during a Coalition for a Strong United Nations conference a few months ago, you talked about how the UN might take a stronger role in disarmament and how the UN might advance the idea of abolishing war. Could you speak a little bit about what the UN might do differently to advance peace? RF: In the program of Global Action to Prevent War with which I've been involved for some time, we have put a lot of emphasis on strengthening the ability of both the UN and also UN-affiliated regional organizations, which are like mini-UNs on each continent. We are very focused on the ability of the major UN and the mini-UNs to prevent and end conflicts so as to create an international environment in which the resources devoted to the military could go down and fewer people would be killed in war. To that end, there are an awful lot of things that the UN and its regional bodies could do that aren't being done today. For example, it could have a monitoring center with experts on regional conflicts who are fluent in the languages, history, and culture of various regions. Such a monitoring center could publish daily reports on where conflicts are escalating and getting out of hand and leading toward violence so that we wouldn't only rely on conventional news media and their "hotspot mentality," but would also keep abreast of other places in the world where there are growing armed conflicts well in advance of a major conflict. EB: It would take a substantial investment to set that up. RF: Yes, but the UN employs thousands of people, and a hundred people dedicated to that job could make a really important difference. Also, because in this Information Age where so many of us have technology resources in our homes and offices, people at monitoring centers could post daily briefings on the Internet that would be a resource for everyone worldwide. This would help the UN Secretariat function better because the same people could then serve as UN ambassadors, or as representatives of the Secretary-General. I mean, they could go into conflicts, both for fact-finding and also as mediators, to try to bring the parties together. This would create a kind of a back channel or second-track type of negotiation. Another possible change relates to the UN General Assembly, which is the representative body of all the nations. The UN General Assembly could organize a conflict prevention committee that would hold hearings on ongoing conflicts or emerging conflicts and publish reports and give advice to the Security Council. You could have the president of the General Assembly serve as an ex-officio member of the Security Council so that you actually have a direct link between the General Assembly as a whole and the Security Council. Right now, only the Security Council is directly empowered to take action in relation to conflicts. If you supplemented that by having more powers at the disposal of the Secretary-General and the Secretariat and the General Assembly, then that would help compensate for some of the inaction of the Security Council. Too often, what's been happening over the last decade is that conflicts are drawn to the attention of the Security Council and it doesn't do anything. There are two dangers with the UN: one is that it will be too interventionary and the other is that it will be too passive. What we've seen over the last decade is the too-passive approach, particularly in Rwanda, where they let the genocide of a million people happen without doing a thing to stop it. By having a more active General Assembly and Secretary General, you could compensate and also bring pressure to bear on the Security Council to act more decisively to make sure that things like that don't happen. PM: Those are great examples. Did you want to speak to the question, Elise, about what the UN might do differently? EB: I would start with the Security Council and say that the five permanent members of the Security Council (the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, the U.S., China, and France) are impeding so much of what needs to happen. Having the Security Council be completely rotational is one approach. But another important one is not to have the right of veto. In some parts of the UN, if there's only one negative vote, then a motion passes. But in the Security Council, if there's one negative vote, the whole thing is held up. It's mostly the U.S. that holds things up, but other countries may do the same. I look at the structure of the UN as an amazing convergence of so many different kinds of bodies: the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and a host of other bodies like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and then all the commissions. There are hundreds of different bodies that are dealing hands-on, to varying degrees, with different aspects of governance and the multiple purposes of the UN: development, environment, peace, and so on. But because of the funding shortage, none of these bodies has the staff it needs. Not a single one is adequately staffed. The Tobin tax concept, which is a proposed tax on all international monetary transactions, would fund the UN. We've got to keep working on that until we finally get it through, because without funding, the UN will not realize its full potential. The UN certainly has its bureaucratic inefficiencies. And Third World countries, particularly, have suffered from that. So they have a "beef" and it's a legitimate one, except that the inefficiencies are not inherent in the UN but related to the willingness to fund it and strengthen its different bodies. I also want to speak to the UN's role as a peacekeeper. I completely agree with what Randy has said about peacekeeping. It's urgently important. But there is a model for training of UN peacekeepers. In Canada, the Pearson Institute does that kind of training and in Scandinavia they also do that kind of training. When people are trained as UN peacekeepers, they aren't just trained as regular soldiers. They are given special skills of how to operate when you're occupying a territory and how to deal with conflicts and tensions. The UN civilian police force (UNCIVPOL) needs special training and a substantial expansion. Then there's the concept of a standing UN army; we definitely need that. Also, there's an international nonviolent peace force being developed by NGOs that needs to collaborate with the UN peacekeepers. So there's a lot of good stuff that can happen and that will make UN peacekeeping much more effective. But, at the moment, most UN peacekeepers have no training except as soldiers. This means they may do as much harm as they do good sometimes. PM: Would you agree that the changes that both of you are suggesting could happen today without any major debate or change of law? Or will some of the important, long-range changes require more dialogue and debate over time? RF: I think the idea of giving up the veto in the Security Council will take longer. I was going to add, there could be a campaign to restrict the use of the veto to its original purpose, which is to veto a war on your own territory. This would be a very, very narrow use. The original idea was, since each of the great powers could effectively fight back against the others, why sanction any such war? Why not have a veto to prevent any UN war against the great powers? That was the purpose of the creation of the veto. EB: I didn't know that. RF: The original idea was to spare an unnecessary war of several of the great powers against another one. PM: So you would restrict it to that original intention. RF: Right. It was supposed to be restricted to when one of the great powers was directly affected. EB: But of course you could always say, "This affects national security." RF: Yes, but the meaning of that term originally referred to war on your own territory. So there is a historical, legal precedent for moving back and becoming much more restrictive, and I think that would be another intermediate step. PM: It seems that these good suggestions are within our reach, if only we could find the political will. With that hopeful outlook in mind, what is the appropriate role and/or responsibility for NGOs in the world today? EB: Well, one thing that the best of the NGOs are doing is creating dialogue, the kind of thing we were talking about before. I also think NGOs have to work both on their own national governments and on their governments' missions to the UN. Very often, they'll be good on one but not on the other. But unless you do both, the national missions to the UN can't go beyond what their governments allow them to do. PM: Can either of you give us an example ? RF: Well, I think an example would be what the Quakers are doing. They have an office at the UN that hosts receptions for UN delegations regularly and has been doing so for 50 years and is quite influential. They also have an office in Geneva that does the same thing there, and they have a committee on national legislation in Washington as well as service committees that try to educate people around the country. So that's a diversified way of acting. Another organization that's very strong in that respect is the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which has a project at the UN called Reaching Critical Will. They've established a Web site with that name because they agree with the comment that you made earlier, that constructive action lies within our power, if we could just muster the political will. There are three issue areas where NGOs have been very effective in working at the UN, as Elise just said they must, as well as on their national governments and on their populations. The first one is land mines, where there has been a tremendously effective, coordinated effort; the second one is the International Criminal Court; and the third is nuclear proliferation. There's been a very active community of groups working to strengthen the Nonproliferation Treaty at the UN, and those groups are all affiliated with groups at home that work on the same kind of issues in terms of national legislation. EB: Also, let's not forget the treaty on the environment. The NGOs have been very important to that effort. Another thing we wouldn't have without NGOs is the law of the sea. There's a wonderful book about this by Ralph and Miriam Levering entitled Citizen Action for Global Change: The Neptune Group and the Law of the Sea (Syracuse University Press, 1999). Those efforts operated for over nine years and included lobbying almost daily with different countries to get wording that resulted in the final law of the sea. The intense effort at the UN itself was backed up by efforts in national capitals. The work of NGOs occurred outside of all the formal procedures but was crucial to creating the outcome, the treaty itself. PM: How important is it in terms of making the UN effective in the world to give NGOs more of an institutional voice, an institutional standing within the UN, and for NGOs to organize in order to do this? There was a movement for a civil society forum. What's happening with this? EB: Current procedures for giving an institutional voice to NGOs are too restrictive. Well, from the NGO perspective, it's too restrictive. That is, the number of NGOs that can actually get a full pass to a range of commissions and all the meetings that they would need to attend is limited. And there are some that really have a hard time getting in. On the other hand, we can understand from the UN perspective that they feel overwhelmed. There needs to be an overhaul of the NGO recognition procedure. The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which used to be the entry point for NGOs, is not functioning effectively now because it's not been given the resources it needs in the UN budget. That's tragic because it was, for many years, the NGOs entry point and a new entry point hasn't yet been developed. RF: There has been an idea that the UN could do more to institutionalize input from NGOs, for example, by having a meeting, let's say, every other year between representatives of the NGO community and representatives from the General Assembly and the Secretariat. This would allow for a direct, formalized dialogue, not just individual, personal lobbying. There are precedents for doing this in the sense that many regional conferences now include official NGO representatives in their membership, NGOs that are active on the issues that they're discussing. The UN is probably moving in the direction of doing this. As an example, the NGO groups working on nonproliferation have a formal opportunity for input at a meeting on nuclear nonproliferation that is held every year at the UN and at the treaty's five-year review conference. At this year's NPT conference, there were eight days of meetings, including one morning set aside entirely for NGOs to make comments on what they thought should be happening. So, while they haven't participated as a decision-maker in any formal sense, they have had input. PM: Apart from finding a voice within the UN and working to influence national governments, what else can or must NGOs do? RF: I think NGOs could do a lot more on educating their own publics as a route to their governments. This is very, very tough because it's expensive. It costs a lot of money to have an impact on a broad public, either through producing books or producing a television documentary or by conducting teacher-education programs to educate college teachers or by developing programs to influence a high-school curriculum. To have a widespread impact is hard. It takes a lot of resources to do anything on a broad scale; but there are a lot of ways in which people concerned with specific issues that relate to the UN and to international affairs can influence public opinion *** Read Part I: New Definitions and Moral Responses
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