Although peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding belong to standard UN activities in the peace and security field, they are not the only ones. There are situations in which the UN can help as convener of peace processes and facilitator of peace agreements. Sometimes, only the unique convening power of the UN can provide real help. The Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in December 2001 is a case in point. On other occasions, UN sponsored conferences such as the ones on the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the more recent one on Syria failed.
While each of these large peace projects have their own features, there is also a common demand for cooperation among the permanent members of the Security Council. The entire history of the UN has confirmed, time and again, that there is no substitute for the cooperation necessary among the permanent members of the Security Council, the collective bearers of special responsibilities for the maintenance of international peace and security. The more effective their cooperation, the better the chances for UN success. Cooperation between permanent members in ←22 | 23→ending the war between Iraq and Iran in the late 1980s is an example which should inspire future action.
Today, with the accumulation of crisis situations, and a growing sense of a gathering storm calls for a renewed effort. A global security compact among the permanent members of the UN Security Council would be necessary. Such a compact was due but did not materialize in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. However, the intervening years have brought additional experience and wisdom. In an increasingly multipolar world, cooperation among the main strategic actors may be more difficult to achieve but it is also more necessary than ever before. Five policemen working in partnership is significantly more effective than two or three, or one working alone. This idea of great powers working together “in concert” is by no means a new one but has its origins in the history of diplomacy in the nineteenth century and was essential to the creation of the United Nations in 1945. The option of its revival, perhaps in the form of a “global security compact for the twenty-first century” should therefore continue to be kept in mind, no matter how serious the obstacles to it are at any given point.
And there is yet another key element in the UN system for the maintenance of peace and security. Recent history has shown that the role of the Secretary-General and his good offices in matters of peace and security continue to be relevant. While the Secretary-General only seldom invokes his powers under Article 99 directly and formally, he can achieve much in informal communication with members of the Security Council, other UN members and above all, with the countries involved in crisis situations. The Secretary-General should be encouraged in this role and should try to exercise this unique potential frequently and courageously – and above all – at an early stage in emerging conflicts.
The UN Charter contains extensive provisions on international economic and social cooperation. Solving economic and social problems was recognized as an important element of peace and is included among the purposes of the UN. However, the institutional evolution and the long-term vision of economic cooperation and development have been far from coherent. The UN was not given the tools for real economic and financial decision-making; those belong to the IMF, World Bank and later GATT, today the WTO. On the other hand, the UN has, from its early days, established various funds “for improvement and growth in the underdeveloped areas”. Today, the total budget of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) – central among the variety of UN agencies, funds and programs – is about $5 billion. This is a significant amount, but not a decisive one, in the contemporary world of global development efforts.
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In addition to funding, the UN continues to play a critically important role in conceptualizing the idea of development. Let me recall some of the main features of this role.
In 1960s and 1970s, the General Assembly adopted two UN development strategies which emphasized the needs of the newly independent countries which became UN member states in the process of decolonization. The slogan “trade, not aid” featured prominently in that context. In the mid-1970s the idea of a “New International Economic Order” was proposed as an attempt to focus the development debate and practice on the needs of the global south and to change international economic relations in the direction of redistributing the benefits of growth. However, the effort of the developing world to put forward a workable agenda of international economic restructuring did not and could not succeed. Instead, the main economic powers strengthened the instruments of the global market model of development and many of the countries of the global south ended the 1980s with adjustment programs imposed by the IMF.
The hardships caused by austerity policies and structural adjustment of the 1980s led to a different, ethically-based rationale for development. The examples of this ethically-based approach include the concept of “adjustment with a human face” proposed by UNICEF, the right to development as a human right and UNDP’s work on human development reports.
However, the ethically-based critique alone could not suffice. The post-cold war period opened a new chapter in the efforts to conceptualize the idea of development in a globalizing world. The UN organized a series of global conferences on various aspects of development which defined the problems and a set of international cooperation goals as well as programs of action in such areas as environment, social development, the role of women, human settlements, population, and human rights. The importance of these conferences, which took place in the major part of 1990s, cannot be overemphasized. The end of the Cold War and the earlier demise of the New International Economic Order idea created a vacuum which could easily lead to the collapse of international development cooperation. UN conferences gave a new impetus and substance to international development, thus enabling a fresh start in the new millennium.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed a set of Millennium Development Goals in the year 2000, which were based on the extensive, serious and solid work completed during the development conferences of the preceding decade. In addition, they were, in the words of Nitin Desai, a former UN Under-Secretary-General on economic and social affairs, “crisp enough to cope with the attention deficit disorder on development issues in the media and in the higher reaches of government.” The MDGs were devoted to the reduction of extreme ←24 | 25→poverty, the improvement of basic health and education conditions, the improvement of maternal health and the reduction of child mortality, as well as ensuring environmental sustainability. The goals also called for a new development partnership without defining it fully.
The Millennium Development Goals led to the Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Development, achieved in 2002, and generated a variety of useful activities by governments, development agencies, the private sector, NGOs, academic institutions and, to a lesser extent, the media. It is important to understand the emergence of the Millennium Development Goals in their historical perspective and in their potential for the future. They were not an arbitrary proposal, but a distillation of several decades of development work and a realistic framework for both future national policy-making and international development cooperation.
The results achieved since the adoption of the MDGs confirm this assessment. This was also the assessment of the High-Level Panel for the Post-2015 Development Agenda, co-chaired by the presidents of Indonesia and Liberia, and the British Prime Minister at the time. The panel wrote that the last thirteen years since the proclamation of the MDGs “have seen the fastest reduction of extreme poverty in human history: there are half a billion fewer people living below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day.” Substantial improvement was reported in such areas as the reduction of child mortality levels and deaths due to malaria. Optimistic assessments were also made by several leading experts. This all contributed to the success of the negotiations for the subsequent fifteen-year period – 2015 to 2030. The UN laid out a system on seventeen Sustainable Development Goals and a set of other tasks forming what became known as “Agenda 2030.”
Agenda 2030 is the most comprehensive and ambitious vision for global development ever defined. It is to the credit of the United Nations that it was able, in 2015, to agree by consensus on this vision. In essence, Agenda 2030 advances three concepts: first, poverty eradication, second, sustainability and third, fairness.
The achievements in poverty reduction and the optimism of