Development, Security, and Dignity:
The Secretary-General’s Proposals for UN Reform
With keynote address by
Mark Malloch Brown
Chef de Cabinet, Office of the UN Secretary General
Welcome by
Timothy Wirth
President, UN Foundation
And open discussion with
Nancy Birdsall
President, Center for Global Development
Kim Holmes
Vice President and Director, Davis Institute for International Policy
The Heritage Foundation
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Dean, Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
Moderated by
Stewart Patrick
Research Fellow, Center for Global Development
at
Westin Embassy Row
2100 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC
Wednesday, June 1, 2005
Transcript prepared from tape recording.
NANCY BIRDSALL: Welcome on this beautiful morning. Let met start by asking you
to turn off your cell phones if you have cell phones, then introduce myself. I’m Nancy
Birdsall, President of the Center for Global Development. We’re very pleased to be cohosting this event with United Nations Foundation, and we’re particularly pleased to have
here Tim Wirth, who will introduce our featured speaker, who is a good friend of the
Center for Global Development and a dear and old friend of mine now – we’ve had
enough years to say that we’re old friends, Mark Malloch Brown. I do want to mention
that this event will be on the record. We have a very full agenda, so I’ll be very brief. As
you know, even from the headlines in the last couple of weeks, with the nomination of
John Bolton to be the United Nations – to be the Ambassador of the U.S. to the United
Nations, we have had a period of stormy relations between the U.S. and the UN, with
many Americans questioning and asking about the value of the United Nations, and the
proper place of the United Nations in U.S. foreign policy. History does teach us, for
certain, that if the UN is to be effective, it has to be backed by strong and vigorous
American leadership. So I think of our task this morning as twofold – one is to consider
the UN itself, whether the Secretary General’s Reform Plan promises a more effective
United Nations, and the second is to consider whether that UN Reform Plan promises a
more constructive relationship between the United States and the UN. We’re very
pleased – I’m very pleased that the Center for Global Development has already
contributed indirectly to these debates; in February, Kemal Dervis, a non-resident Fellow,
wrote a book for us – it’s called A Better Globalization, Legitimacy, Governance And
Reform, and it includes a very intriguing discussion of an approach in particular to reform
of the United Nations’ Security Council. We were of course extremely pleased when
Kemal was appointed the next Administrator of the United Nations’ Development
Program, succeeding Mark Malloch Brown. In addition to that, a year ago or so, the
Center for Global Development issued a report called On The Brink, which is an
assessment of the U.S. approach to national security issues, and as is the case with
Kemal’s book, this report brings out the very close relationship between development and
security, and the challenge of collective security in our global system. It focuses in
particular on the problem of weak state capacity, and the reality that one or two weak
states, if they are the weakest links in a chain of global security, can create problems for
all of us. In any event, in both these cases, both Kemal’s book and the book On The
Brink, we have been trying to put development at the heart of the security issue, and of
course we were therefore very pleased to have this United Nations report under the
leadership of Kofi Annan, make the same link indeed. Now let me turn to Tim Wirth,
and give you an introduction to Tim before he starts. I know all about Tim, but I’m going
to do it properly from his distinguished bio. He is as you all know the President of the
United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund, and I remember meeting Tim when I
was at the Inter-American Development Bank in 1998 when he was thinking about the
shape that the United Nations Foundation should take, what it’s mission should be, and
we can all salut him for the work he has done in creating not only an institution that’s
impressive, but ensuring that it’s mission is a clear, important and compelling one.
Timothy, before being at the United Nations, served at the U.S. Department of State as
the First Undersecretary for Global Affairs, from 1993 to 1997. As many of you will
know, prior to that, he was a Congressman from Colorado, and then a Senator from
Colorado, who chose interestingly enough not to be re-elected. Prior to entering politics,
Timothy Wirth was in private business, and he’s a member of the Harvard Board of
Overseers. Tim – where are you. You have the floor.
TIM WIRTH:
Thank you very much Nancy, and to all of you, thank you
very much for being here. We have a very distinguished assemblage and I think a really
first-rate program for all of you. So again, thank you for coming – a beautiful day – to
think about the important issues of the state of the world. It seems to me that from time
to time, politic planets align, and when they do, they create space for leadership, create
energy for new initiatives, and create attention from important publics and constituents.
It doesn’t happen very often. You sometimes get a number of events that come together,
and I think we are, in 2005, at one of those times where there is a lot of space created for
a number of very significant new initiatives. And let me just describe two pieces of this
in an introduction of our speaker. One of the areas created for new leadership is on the
development side. With the Millennium Development Goals and a very clear sense of
the possible – any of you who, as all of you have been I know, been engaged with Jeff
Sachs as sort of agent of the Secretary General and the UN’s Millennium Assembly, has
done just a terrific job of giving people a sense of the possible, rather than a sense of
despair. The Millennium Challenge Account from this Administration was promised,
and some delivery on that promise, a sense as well of this Administration – so important
as Nancy pointed out – thinking differently and providing leadership. The buyout of
loans from the World Bank, new creative financing there, and the creating is also part of
the space for better thinking and better action and development. The new President of the
World Bank arriving today with certainly very close ties to this Administration and a lot
of very real and promising field experience and academic awareness, and of course Tony
Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s initiative. You know, all of these together, and there are
many others creating part of this space, part of this opportunity that we see today.
Coupled with that is a very significant reform agenda. In the 15 years that I have been
dealing in and out, sometimes very closely with the UN, I have never seen such very
broad commitment to change at the United Nations. The Secretary General has taken
very real leadership, and this is his signature event as he goes into the last two years of
his very important stewardship at the UN, with a high level panel appointed to report it,
as you know, last December, and his own and larger Freedom Summary Report of the
linkage between the reform agenda and the development agenda. The commitment to the
Secretariat coming together, that very important bureaucracy, not always friendly to
reform, not always friendly to change, but I think you get a real sense there as well of a
commitment to change. The Gingrich Mitchell Report which will be out some time in the
first couple of weeks of June, which I think has a real opportunity to make a significant
impact on the Congress and be watched very closely. Hyde and Lantos introducing
legislation that they are currently scheduled to be marking up some time in the second
week of June, and of course, very importantly, the role the U.S. Government must play in
all of this, and I think defining some of their agendas, I spent a good part of yesterday
morning, for example, with the new Undersecretary for Management, Christopher
Burnham, who I think today is his first day as well on the job, and we see, so again, part
of the momentum for change at the UN. If you look at these two large clumps of
activities, on the development side and on the reform side, again you can recognize that
in fact planets are aligning. Now if Nancy and I were to write a resume for the perfect
person, the perfect quarterback to sort of fill this space, to take advantage of this
opportunity, I think that we would write Mark Malloch Brown’s resume. A field
organization with UNHCR in Thailand, a political focus with a great deal of experience
working on the election of Corizon Aquino in the Philippines and joining Sanchez de al
Sada in Bolivia, very important political antennae, extremely sensitive to, again, this
space that he now occupies, right handed Jim Wolfensohn at the World Bank doing a
terrific job on the communications side there, a successful tenure at UNDP – I think most
people point to as a very good model for how change has to come about, and how
enlightened leadership bringing the UN system along, engaging member states, has got to
be part of what the UN does in the future – Mark has that record, and now as Chief of
Staff of the Secretary General, taking over this small and modest task of trying to
organize all of the various elements of the UN and bring them together. It is a perfect
combination to fill this very, very important space, and Mark we are so pleased to have
you with us today to share your thoughts with us and please join me in welcoming Mark
Malloch Brown.
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Well, Tim, thank you for that, and thank you
Nancy. I mean it’s hard to say no to the two of you, two very old friends, both of you.
And also of course, Tim, I couldn’t afford to have you be up here talking about the UN
without me being there to rebut it.
Next Speaker:
****
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
So, let me just say that I think this is an
extraordinary moment, as Tim described. You know, I parcel out my time carefully, but
was very keen to barnstorm Washington, if one can barnstorm a city that prefers to be
brainstormed, I think, but on this issue of UN reform, I’ve been down to visit the
Congress, to unusually for a UN official, to do an unsworn hearing for Henry Hydes’
Committee, down to see the Administration over the last few weeks because we have
reached an intense point now, where either the U.S. ambitions for UN reform converge
with the reform ambitions of other potential progressive allies of the U.S. for reform, or
they deviate, and once more, the U.S. reform plan comes across as too unilateral, too
singularly a product of Washington and its political environment intentions, and not
responsive enough to the real global challenges of the UN, or indeed to the priorities of
other shareholders, and so this is a critical moment, because literally as we speak, the
President of the General Assembly has been finishing the first consultations on the
Secretary General’s Reform Plans, and probably by Friday, will publish his first draft
version of what would be a declaration to be adopted by heads of government in
September, and 175 of them have committed to coming, although interestingly, not yet I
think it’s right to say, President Bush who is a little cautiously awaiting to see how this
Reform Plan will shape up. But there is a huge energy for this reform in New York, and
a tremendous amount of coincidence between it and what is being considered here in
Washington, so the trick is to get them to reinforce each other rather than compete with
or butt heads with each other. So, let me just say a word about this New York Reform
Plan. Its origins are in a sense exactly the same as reform here in Washington for the
UN. First, the catastrophe institutionally of the Iraq War. A catastrophe inside the UN
because it divided our most important members, it exposed the weaknesses of the
Security Council, it called into question the whole doctrine of collective security and its
relevance to today’s kinds of wars and today’s kinds of terrorist challenges. And, the
second driver of reform, as with Washington, is the exposure, perhaps initially for
political reasons, but certainly an exposure which has revealed very serious management
flaws in their own right of the oil for food, and the inquiries that have followed it. And of
course, it’s not just that there have been management weaknesses revealed by this. It’s
that in a sense unleashed – the press corps has found plenty of other things to be rightly
mad as hell about – the sexual exploitation by peacekeepers in different African missions,
a whole host of issues which just shouldn’t be there in well-run organizations and which
badly need correction. So again, the wellsprings of reform in New York are very, very
similar to here, and if there is a third, it’s an exhaustion at both ends with a UN civil
service which has tipped its head to reform, but has really been deeply conservative and
reform resistant for a very, very long time. So again, the New York membership of the
UN is as skeptical as those in Washington about whether those of us on the inside will
really make reform work or not, so a lot of common origins of approach. And I think,
even a common origin of vision or a common vision going forward, in that the Secretary
General, having consulted widely through a high level panel on security which had a very
prominent American member, Brent Scocroft amongst its number, through an effort that
Tim referred to, to really lay out a development blueprint to achieve the Millennium
Development goals, a process led by Jeff Sachs, the Columbia development economist,
but where there were probably another 50 or so Americans involved out of the
250 academics and policy makers worldwide, who cooperated on that, and Nancy
Birdsall indeed was one of the taskforce leaders for that work, so a huge American
investment again in the development strategy. And of course on the third part of the
Secretary General’s vision, human rights and democracy, again tremendous American
intellectual leadership. The Democracy Fund, which is part of this Reform Plan, is
something that President Bush proposed at the last General Assembly in which Kim
Holmes did a lot to try and get established before he left office. The human rights
reforms linked to that which called for the end of this terrible blot on the UN’s reputation,
the Human Rights Commission in Geneva which the Secretary General has been as
outspoken as any American official in calling an embarrassment to the UN, a betrayal of
any decent minimum standard of human rights, and so the call for a smaller, more
selective Human Rights Council that has standards for its membership, which tries to set
a more appropriate bar for participation, and is backed by strength and office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights – all of these things are things for which there is broad
support, and you know perhaps if there are differences, they are ones that can well be
bridged. And let me just touch quickly on them. If you for a moment step back and see
the Secretary General’s vision as having three pillars to it – development, security and
human rights, backed by a big dose of management reform to make the institution better
able to deliver on those three priorities. The key proposal on the development is a sharp
increase in development assistance to .7 % of GDP. The dramatic breakthrough has been
in Europe, led by particularly Tony Blair and President Chirac of France, where Europe is
now committed, even before we get to the G8 Summit, to a timeline to reaching .7% by
2015 or 2016. For the first time ever, the .7 isn’t some sort of throw-away line at the end
of a UN communiqué – it’s got more than half of the donor community in terms of aid
volume committed to growing their aid to these very ambitious levels between now and
2015. But of course, not everybody’s yet part of the party, and the U.S. is holding back
from this, Japan is holding back from this, Canada as well, and other non-G8 donors such
as Australia. So, there is still work to be done, and you know, the U.S. makes some very
good counter-arguments. It’s increased its ODA more dramatically in the last four or five
years than at any time in 30 or 40 years. There is a very strong flow of both remittances
but also private giving for development, and there is the U.S.’s huge commitment to
international security. So, for the U.S., the trick is to stop saying no, and say yes around
the things that the U.S. is doing so effectively, and I would list in them the Millennium
Challenge Account, but there’s an urgent need for the meeting of minds around this, to
find a way that the U.S. can support this European growth in aid, be a partner to it, while
remaining true to its own rather different vision of how to build up aid volume and aid
priorities. On the security side, huge debate still on the Security Council, to what extent
can the Security Council be expanded and enlarged in a way which makes it more
accountable and more representative of the world as it is today. And you know the
question was asked me is, well, do the plans for expansion – what would have happened
if you had run the Iraq War vote again, with an expanded Security Council, and the
answer is you’d have gotten pretty much the same result, a divided Council. But, if you
take the more typical wars to come across the Security Council’s desk, conflicts in Africa
such as Liberia or DRC, conflicts in the former Yugoslavia or Afghanistan or other failed
or failing states, there would be a dramatic change if there was a more representative
Security Council in terms of the willingness of the new members to put up resources for
Security Council operations they have voted for. The so-called G4, the countries banging
most persistently at the door for admission to some kind of permanent status in the
Council, Japan, Germany, India and Brazil – between them contribute twice as much as
the so-called P4, that is, the U.S.’s four other permanent neighbors on the Security
Council, France, U.K., China and Russia. So there is, as I like to call it, a Boston Tea
Party problem. Very major UN contributors have been called upon to finance the
exploding peacekeeping budget, and not having a vote on those operations. To just give
you a sense of that budget, it will have grown from $4 Billion last year, to a little under
$4 Billion to $5 Billion by the end of this year. That compares to a regular UN
Secretariat budget of a little bit under $2 Billion a year. So it is by far now the giant that
overshadows the Secretariat. But, it’s also, in a sense, reflective of the overall change in
the UN, which leads me to the management reform, because the UN that you think of, of
conferences and reports, is very much a kind of legacy UN which has been frozen in size
for years. The pity is it’s been writing reports for the same subjects every year during
that period of, in a sense, being in a no-growth situation, and there’s not been enough
retiring of old mandates and introduction of new ones. But nevertheless, that old UN has
in some ways disguised the emergence of a new UN, and that new UN is about big
operations around the world. The organization that I have led, UNDP, its resources have
grown 40 % in the last five years, so that it is now a $4 Billion a year organization.
Peacekeeping, as I’ve mentioned, is now $5 Billion a year, whereas the UN proper, the
Secretariat and its related operations around the world, is less than $2 Billion a year, yet it
is reputationally the one that overshadows so much of this new operation. Now, it is also
– and the reason for that is it has a culture and a management approach which is created
over 60 years, and has been based on the minutiae of micromanagement by governments
over posts and budgets, the role of the formidable bureaucratic processes that one
remembers from before re-engineered government in any of our countries where there
had to be a lot of signatures on any decision. Whereas the new UN, the world of
development, of humanitarian work, of UNICEF or **** or a high commission of
refugees or a World Food Program, is very much reflective of modern public sector best
practice – decentralized organizations, decisions made in the field, accountable to their
donors year on year for results - they want to get their resources renewed - and with a
level of efficiency that I think can be well compared to that of a good international NGO,
and with lots of political advantages that an NGO doesn’t have in terms of
intergovernmental status and access and authority. But the old UN has not escaped the
trap of its past. And so the whole challenge is to find ways to put a similar process of
renewal into those older but more visible parts of the UN, and that is the management
reform bit that is now so important to put in proper oversight, proper accountability for
audit results, to get a much more effective strategic decision-making process in the
secretariat, to correct the problems that oil for food has revealed, senior officials
inadequately disclosing outside business and financial interests, of senior officials not
well qualified for the jobs they hold, and the introduction of much more competitive
recruitment processes, the early results of which we’ve seen in the wonderful selection of
Kemal Dervis as the new Head of UNDP and Antonio Gutierrez, the former Portuguese
Prime Minister, as the new High Commissioner for Refugees, both visionary people who
I think will reflect a whole new stature of international leadership that comes from having
competed against the best in the world to win those jobs, very different to the old corridor
and smoke-filled room way that international appointments have been made. Now, all of
this effort to recast the UN, to get governments behind this approach, to buy in to all of
these changes, is underway in New York. But of course, as so often, a separate equally
important process derived from the same roots with many people who absolutely share
the aspirations of those in New York for an effective UN, is underway here in
Washington, centered on Henry Hyde’s Committee on the House side, on various
activities by different – by Senators Lugar and Biden, but also Homan and Levin on the
Senate side, and centered on the Gingrich Mitchell Panel for the U.S. Institute of Peace,
so an awful lot is happening in terms of reform ideas here in Washington, and the
challenge is how to marry the two. I began by saying that we just have the first draft of
the Heads of Government Resolution for September coming out now. The challenge is
how to get this Washington conversation engaged with the New York conversation. It
looks as though almost certainly the individual to do that will be Ambassador Bolton, if
indeed he is confirmed in a few days’ time. And I think there will be many in this room
who will take right pleasure that the first task he has to do is to find common cause
between Washington’s reform plans and the rest of the world’s. It may be prove to be
one of those things to be careful of getting what you pray for. But I suspect it’s
something he is well aware is going to be his first challenge, and one which will allow
him, if he carries it off successfully, to win his spurs with his UN colleagues, as much as
with those who have opposed him in this town. If on the other hand, these two reform
lines continue to go along beside each other, then there is a real risk that come
September, there is a division, and that the plans that go before the leaders for approval
lack the critical American input, because obviously America has certain lines in the sand,
certain red lines that the U.S. quite properly, in terms of its own national interest, does
not want reform to cross, views as to what can be done to properly define the use of force
without limiting the U.S.’s right to act in self-defense, and in a preventative context, the
concerns that the enlargement of the Security Council could create workable institution,
if over-enlarged or done under the wrong terms and conditions, the fear that the ODA
issue will be passed in a way that doesn’t allow the U.S. space for its rather different
vision of ODA, and the fear that the Human Rights agenda will be lost, because the U.S.
won’t be there as an effective co-sponsor with Europe and other allies in terms of getting
it done in a multilateral way. So, a real moment of opportunity and challenge for U.S.
diplomacy. Never have the omens, as Tim said, been so good for UN Reform and yet it
is by no means a done deal. All the pieces are in play in New York, but if the U.S. is not
there to patch them and help put them down in the right places on the board, this could
end up a catastrophic year where hopes of reformers in Washington and around the world
are disappointed, and that a mood of recrimination sets in, and I cannot myself see
another such opportunity for UN reform in a very long period ahead, because failure this
time and the recrimination it would breed would mean that the succession to a new
Secretary General eighteen months from now would be so much a reflection of that
division and anger that whoever became Secretary General would inherit such a divided
house that it would be almost impossible to lead an effective organization and to retool it
for the challenges ahead. Thank you.
STEWART PATRICK:
Thank you Mark, for providing this rich agenda for
discussion. My name is Stewart Patrick. I’m a Research Fellow at the Center for Global
Development where I direct the project on weak states and U.S. national security. Prior
to joining CGD, I spent 2 ½ years on the policy planning staff at the State Department,
where I got some exposure to UN reform issues. As Nancy mentioned, the key message
of the report is that in an age of transnational threats, our collective security depends on
capable responsible states that are willing and able to provide for their citizens security,
development and human rights. We are fortunate today to have three distinguished
experts as well as Mark to participate in that discussion on these three pillars of the
Secretary General’s report, as well as some of the management and administrative
reforms that have been suggested. You have their bios, so I will keep these intros short.
I think you all know Nancy Birdsall, President of CGD. As Mark mentioned, among her
many other activities, Nancy served as co-chair of the Millennium Project Taskforce
Report on Education and Gender, which is a compiling of the Sachs Report that has been
integrated into the SG’s report. Kim Holmes is Vice-President and Director of the Davis
Center for International Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He just left the Bush
Administration where he served, as you know as Assistant Secretary of State for
International Organization Affairs. As this is only his second day in his current job, we
are delighted, and particularly delighted, that he agreed to participate in this. Anne-Marie
Slaughter, who has braved Amtrak’s usually efficiency to get her, is Dean of the
Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Among her many activities, she’s a
member of the Gingrich Mitchell Taskforce on the future of the United Nations, and if we
behave ourselves, perhaps we will get her to offer a preview of their findings. I’m not
sure if that’s allowed. Our goal in this session is to consider what elements of the UN
Reform Plan Mark outlined are most worthwhile and have the best prospects of being
endorsed at the high level event in September. As was mentioned earlier by Nancy, I
believe, we’re looking for ideas that promise to make the UN both more effective and
also promise to put U.S./UN relations on a sounder footing so that we’re not always
lurching from crisis to crisis, whether it’s an arrears crisis, or crisis over Security Council
breakdown in Iraq. In terms of format, what I propose is that I’ll direct questions to our
panel members, while inviting others, including Mark, to join into the fray as they wish.
To cover as much ground as possible, I ask that you keep your responses as brief as
possible, no more than one or two minutes, so that we can cover a lot of ground. I’ll
continue in this vein until about 11:30, and then we’ll open it up to discussion from the
audience, and I’ll set some ground rules then for audience participation. My first
question is a general one, really, to frame our discussion about U.S./UN relations, and I’d
like to start with Kim, given your most recent experience, but then invite others to join in
and that’s – it’s stimulated by this thought, that the U.S. did more than any other country,
obviously, to create the United Nations, and yet, ever since its creation, the U.S. attitude
has really been one of ambivalence and dissatisfaction with different aspects of UN
performance. And I guess I wonder, from your own perspective, and from what you saw
in Washington, what are the main sources of this attitude. Is it a sense that the UN has
failed to live up to the promise of its founding ideals? Or is it a gnawing view that there
is a real trade off between a sort of vigorous and effective UN on the one hand, and the
protection of American sovereignty and freedom of action on the other, which is a claim
that’s often made by many commentators, and does the Reform Plan go in to any
direction to address either of these concerns?
KIM HOLMES:
You know, I think if you look at some of the opinion polls
that have been taken over the last year and a half in the United States about the attitudes
of Americans about the UN, you will notice that before the Iraqi War, there was a
majority of Americans that had a positive view of the UN, and because of the very
divisions that occurred in the Security Council that Mark said about the war, there was a
perception on the part of many Americans that the United Nations should have been
tarred of the whole view of the divisions on the Security Council, were somehow
standing against American national interests, and that sort of spins off into the whole
sovereignty debate. And I think that anyone who knows the history of the ambivalent
relationship between the United States and the UN will also know that its historically true
that even though the United States, right after World War II, was a major player in
creating the UN, it’s also true that over the last 50 or 60 years, the United States as
emerged as a unique superpower. There’s no other country like it, in terms of its power,
its wealth, its influence, and no one should be surprised that a country that large would
have a different attitude about the United Nations than a small country in Africa, for
example. I mean, it’s just a historical reality, so we shouldn’t be as surprised at this as
we sometimes pretend to be. Having said all that, I can assure you that certainly it was
the case in the Bush Administration, and it’s the case of the people that I’ve talked to in
Congress, that the main purpose of reform should be to ensure that the United Nations
performs as best and effectively as it can, according to the original purposes of the
Charter. There is a perception on the part of many Americans, I think it’s probably true
in the Congress as well, that over the last 25 to 30 years, the UN has sort of gone off in a
direction that is in some areas that it should not have gone off in to, and it’s not just a
question of being inefficient, it’s also a question of trying to focus on the core issues of
security, peace, human rights and development, and making sure that it is an effective
deliverer of services for the most people and the most countries in the world. And I think
on that principle, there isn’t really much of a disagreement. There is a disagreement over
the mechanism and the how’s, and some of perhaps even the philosophical underpinnings
of these disagreements that we find in some of these issues, which we have to flush out,
and the last thing I’ll say before – well, actually, while I have the floor here, is that Mark
is absolutely right about the reform paths – the American and the UN. They must
converge; otherwise, the process will not work. But it’s a two-way street, and it has to be
understood, given what I just said about the special and unique nature of the American
participation in relationship to the UN, we have to also understand that that two-way
street is going to require perhaps more accommodation than some other countries would
like.
STEWART PATRICK:
Okay, did anybody else want to comment?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Yes. I want to start by taking a little bit of
issue with the U.S. as grand superpower worrying about the UN, because what is striking
to me is that the closest precedent to our position today in the world, when we were – the
disparity between our power and the power of other nations in the world was as great as it
is now, was 1945, and that’s when we set up the UN. If we had set up the UN in 1949,
when it was clear that the Soviet Union was no longer an ally but indeed the new enemy,
then it would seem to make complete sense to me that once that enemy was gone, we
would rethink the UN. But in fact, we created the UN exactly at the moment of our
greatest power, when Russia, the Soviet Union, was on its knees, when Britain and
France were in shambles and of course we faced two defeated powers, and at that
moment, we decided our security was best ensured by institutionalizing a collective
security system. So, I would start from the premise that there is an argument about how
collective security enhances our security, that is as applicable today as it was in 1945.
That said, I would agree that there’s a tremendous desire to see the U.S. live up to its
ideals, but I just put one thought on the table – there’s a new set of ideals that didn’t hold
in 1945. One of my faculty members just said that he gave a questionnaire to his 200
Princeton students about when was force unquestionably legitimate? It was second, the
sort of number two candidate for when force was unquestionably legitimate was selfdefense. The number one example was to use force to prevent genocide or massive
violations of human rights. That wasn’t part of the deal in 1945 – it is part of what
Americans and many members of Congress see around the world today, and to see a UN
that cannot act in the face of hundreds of thousands of people being killed, makes a
mockery of the ideals of the Charter to many Americans.
STEWART PATRICK:
Nancy.
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Just to comment on this from the point of view – I
can’t really speak for the way Americans as a group see the UN, but I would say that
from the point of view of the development community, there is ambivalence, and it
arrived, not so much towards the UN; there’s ambivalence about this issue of the U.S.
role and how that fits in to a UN role, and I believe the ambivalence arises from a
difficulty that we see in the U.S. itself, particularly in this Administration, and maybe of
the prior Administration as well in the 90s, of adjusting to a world that, for development
anyway, has become much more multilateral by definition. It is not the days of the
Marshall Plan, when the U.S. could be the leader and could be unilateral because it was
the only power with the financial capability to take action. It was 95 % or more of
development kinds of transfers in the late 40s. By 1960, the U.S. was still on the order of
50 % - it was supplying 50 % of all the resources for development assistance programs.
Today, the U.S. is supplying something maybe, 20, 25% at the most, of all the resources
for development programs, but there hasn’t been an adjustment to the reality that we are
now embedded in a much larger, almost chaotic system of transfers, and so we have an
kind of crisis in that there isn’t the same leadership from the U.S. that there used to be,
nor is there yet leadership from anywhere else. There is not yet leadership from the UN.
I was struck by something that Mark said about the UNDP being $4 Billion and so on –
you know, from the point of view of the development community, there is actually
unhealthy competition among UN agencies, which adds to the unhealthy competition
among all of the bilateral donors, including the U.S., all of the international NGOs, from
the point of view of recipient countries. And I know what it was – Mark said that UN
agencies in development are accountable to their donors. Well that is a sign of one of the
complications we face, that they’re competing with each other to be visible, to obtain
next year’s resources, the World Food Program, UNICEF and so on – that’s just a miniexample of this larger problem on the development side.
STEWART PATRICK:
Thank you. I want to begin to move into some of
the different pillars of the Report. The title of the Report is, In Larger Freedom, and its
subsections pay homage to Franklin Roosevelt’s famous For Freedom speech of January
1931. President Bush, of course, speaks a lot about freedom having made it the
cornerstone of American foreign policy. Are these two concepts of freedom the same?
Kim, I wonder if you think if the Secretary General’s proposals were implemented,
would it advance, in a sense, the President’s freedom agenda? Are there important
aspects of it that would …
KIM HOLMES:
Well I can’t speak on all of them. I mean, I think that
certainly the spirit of the, and the main points about the importance of freedom that you
just mentioned, I think is philosophically and politically important, that we both are
talking about freedom. We may have different variations on the specifics of what that
may mean in certain circumstances, and even how we get there. But I think it’s important
and I think we should recognize that there is some compatibility there that we should
work on. I think particularly, you might be asking about this later, in the area of
democracy and human rights, there is more convergence than divergence. There
certainly is – we were very pleased in the outcome of both the high level panel report and
also the Secretary General’s report when I was in the Administration, that there was an
understanding and a recognition that something must be done about how the UN is
approaching human rights, and perhaps we can talk about the details of that later, but I’m
raising it now because I believe that on these two fundamental points, the understanding
that what basically the UN should be doing in protecting human dignity, in terms of
democracy and freedom and human rights, I think there’s a lot we can work with. I do
think, though, that we have to explore more deeply how these various pillars and the
various mechanisms we have actually serve this purpose, and of course, that’s when we
get into details.
STEWART PATRICK:
With specific reference to the Human Rights
Council, do you see it as a step forward, and are we fairly confident that the United
States, for instance, would actually be elected to the membership… And would it matter?
KIM HOLMES:
Well, yes it would matter. It would matter a great deal. I
think that if you were to have a Human Rights Council in the United Nations that did not
have the United States, or any other leading democracy on it, it would be a farce, frankly,
and so whatever criteria you develop, whether it’s smaller or larger, whatever you do,
there has to be some recognition of that fact. I think that the problem with the Human
Rights Commission has always been the way it elects its members. It uses a rotation
scheme where there is no recognition, or very little recognition I should say, on the part
of some of the regional blocks, about who they were putting forward to represent their
regions, and so you would have Sudan and whatever other countries are there, whose
main purpose was to get on the Commission to protect themselves from country-specific
resolutions, and that’s why there was a breakdown. I don’t think that universal
membership is the answer, either, and I was very glad that the Secretary General’s report
did not conclude that, because you would have essentially a third committee in Geneva to
have that, so, whatever the result is, I think that the main thrust of the reforms about
enhancing the capabilities of the High Commissioner’s office to do more field work,
more ground work, working on human rights in a democracy context, I think that’s
important, and also ensuring that there are some kind of standards, whether they are
declared by the Secretary General or High Commissioner or somebody, that if you’re
going to be a member of this Commission, you’re going to adhere to certain standards.
We have to recognize that there is going to be tension in the UN, which is a universal
membership organization, and a Commissioner of Human Rights when in fact not all of
the countries of the UN respect human rights. There’s a built-in conflict there that we’re
going to have to recognize, and we’re going to have to get around it.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So, I agree with a lot of that, and I think
there are a couple ways in which the President’s Freedom Agenda and the Secretary
General’s Freedom Agenda can intersect, and they are important ways of connecting the
New York and Washington conversations, and to start with, I think to be fair to President
Bush, the – if you go back to the 2002 National Security Strategy, everyone focused on
the use of force part up front with preemption, but there’s a whole section of that strategy
that emphasizes development, free trade – there’s a lot about free trade being a moral
imperative, in part because of what it will do for developing countries, so I think this has
been a part of the Administration’s agenda, it was very much a part of Secretary Powell’s
agenda. But looking where we are now, there are two important connections. One is, I
think, the responsibility to protect resonates with many in Washington, with many in the
Congress – the notion that the UN for the first time would accept the idea that
governments that do not protect their own people should forfeit their right against
intervention. This is a way of recognizing that not all governments behave the same way
within the UN, and it’s a very bold step. Once you’ve acknowledged a government’s
responsibility to protect its people against massive human rights violations, then you have
to start recognizing that 1.6 million people die a year from violence, 15 million die from
infectious disease and poverty-related diseases, so that becomes a vehicle I think where
you can connect the two halves of freedom. The second is to emphasize a caucus of the
democracies. The – it’s interesting. Boutros Boutros Galli had an agenda for democracy,
back in 1994, I think, and there is a lot of language in Kofi Annan’s various speeches
about democracy, but by and large, the high level panel was allergic to the idea that you
keep your regional groupings, but you also allow democracies to work within the UN in a
caucus. I think that’s a way of bringing the two together that could be very fruitful.
STEWART PATRICK:
That’s excellent. I was going to bring up the
democracy agenda because it’s obviously very – how do you make the UN a greater
exponent to the democratic principles. On the responsibility of protecting, you brought it
up that a major unknown is whether or not the United States, as we look forward to the
September high level event, will actually endorse that norm. One can think of President
Bush going either way on that regard. In one sense, given his quite moralistic strain of
foreign policies, distinctions between good and evil, etc., that if these atrocities or
genocide has been committed, and the government is unwilling or incapable of actually
doing anything about it, that responsibility should befall the international community.
The question I have is, is this likely to be endorsed, either by the U.S. or the G77 in
September, and if so, would it make a whit of difference, practically speaking, in a case
like Darfur.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Kim and I may have different ideas about
this, and I’m not going to speak for the group of 77 – Mark can talk about that. I think
actually this is a President who read Samantha Power’s article on Rwanda and said, not
on my watch, and he has been very strong, rhetorically, on Darfur, and I think more than
that, Secretary Powell did a great deal and Bob Zelig is trying to do what he can right
now, so I actually think that is likely to be endorsed. Whether it makes a difference, I
think is connected to many, many other parts of the Reform Agenda. I would include
there Security Council expansion – in other words, it’s only going to make a difference if
the UN and Security Council itself is far more effective and proactive, so they’re not
waiting the way they are now, but they’re going in very early, preferably with nonforcible measures, but backing it with the threat of force if necessary.
KIM HOLMES:
Can I just add something?
STEWART PATRICK:
Sure, of course.
KIM HOLMES:
I think that President Bush has been acting already as if there were
a moral imperative, in terms of responsibility to protect, is a moral issue. He took the
lead of course, and we were doing a lot of this work in the Security Council in Sudan
right before I left – there were three resolutions passed, and the United States was taking
a leadership role in the Council on this very issue; you mention Secretary Powell’s
statement about genocide, and in other places, this is the way I think the President does
think. I think, though, it is also important for Americans, and this is part of my job and it
is part of all of our jobs as analysts, that we make sure that we’re very clear about what
this means. On the one hand, you can say that it is certainly the responsibility of all
governments to protect the people against genocide, and therefore if they don’t do that,
they have forfeited their right of sovereignty. That is the, in terms of an international
legal regime, or the role of the UN or Security Council, that’s reflected on what those
countries have done in terms of affecting their own people. The question is, is what is the
obligation of the international community, and who should be doing something about
this, and what is the role of the Security Council. In other words, if you start looking at it
as a legal obligation issue in which the Security Council is supposed to be establishing
certain criteria and has certain obligations, that will be legally automatic on the part of
other countries to do certain things, that is much more complicated than just a simple
moral point that we should be doing something to protect against genocide, which
obviously we can all agree about that. And I think that we have more or less been
operating under that assumption already. So the question is, what difference would it
make, unless you answer some of these other questions about what the Security Council’s
obligations would be: what kind of criteria, are they going to pass a resolution saying
that in the future, there will be certain criteria that you have to use under certain
circumstances, these kind of complicated questions have to be answered too.
STEWART PATRICK:
Mark, did you want to add …
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Yes, I just wanted to add that, you know, I think
Darfur really is a practical challenge to all of us about, without political will, we can rejigger the institutional arrangements, but we’re probably not going to get a real time, real
response with results to take advantage of the kind of responsibility to protect doctrine.
And we’ve talked quite a lot about Darfur, and the USA panel is seized with it, and I
suspect as an example of UN impotence. We predictably see it a little differently, and
actually we see it as in a sense, a challenge to the real sort of authenticity and honesty of
international diplomacy. Do states do what they say they mean? Because, you know,
Darfur is in the middle of nowhere, it’s the most godforsaken difficult peacekeeping
operation you can imagine, a region the size of France, not easily reachable, incredibly
difficult long logistic lines with a need for huge air power, if you need to lift your troops
out, if there’s trouble, and so, for all the brave talk, there ain’t any Western peacekeepers
in Darfur, and there are none volunteering to go to Darfur. So, hence the initially
fallback proposal of an African Union peacekeeping force, which I can see some people
in this room have been there and would probably confirm, Eileen, I see you amongst
others, that you know, the African Union is actually doing a pretty good job, given that
it’s a few thousand troops bumping around with a few elderly Toyota four wheelers. But,
you know, the Sudanese and the African Union have both said this should be an African
peacekeeping force. The Sudanese have made it clear, if you try to Europeanize this or
even Asianize this, we’re going to raise the costs of peacekeeping considerably, because
we’re not going to cooperate. So, what has the Secretary General done very much
prompted by Anne-Marie and others, you know, he went last week to Addis, the
Commander of NATO was there, Mr. Solana was there, and he said, give more money,
give helicopters, give money, so that we can put more peacekeepers on the ground,
African peacekeepers. He then went to Darfur, because everybody had been telling us we
need to go there and strikingly say, if the problem’s not fixed, so he went there on the eve
of the Memorial Day weekend with Nick Kristof of the New York Times, with Ken
Bacon and George Ruff and other leaders; you wouldn’t have noticed it in the whole of
the American media, because it was last year’s problem. Darfur isn’t this year’s problem.
And the ephemeral character of media and political support for this is to me as much a
challenge as anything, as you know, I wear one of these wristbands, Samantha Power
wristbands, which says, Not On My Watch, Save Darfur, but it is really an issue of how
do we build and sustain political support for this. It’s not just institutional reform.
STEWART PATRICK:
Thank you. I’d like to move on to, from freedom,
to living dignity, which is in a sense what we are talking about, to freedom from want,
and to ask a question or two on development. One of the main themes of the report is
that poverty alleviation is within our grasp, and that all we really need to do is to ramp up
our ODA, our overseas official development assistance massively, so that we can “go to
scale”. We need to have 0.7% ODA as Mark mentioned. The Europeans are beginning
to buy into this. This is a beguiling diagnosis, but my question to Nancy really is, is it
accurate? Do we really know how to make aid be used effectively, and do developing
countries have the capacity to make use of the doubling of ODA?
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Well, I think that’s for development, the
development community in this country anyway, the million dollar question. I think
what’s striking about the presentation that Mark made this morning is the emphasis he
put on the 0.7%, and it’s striking to me because I can understand it, it’s something that
people can you know hold on to, as a concrete goal, and I endorse completely the point
that he made, that there’s movement toward that objective in Europe. I wish that the
United States would follow more aggressively, as Mark said, with a yes, at least on the
spirit of the thing, in concert with the fact that there has been a turnaround in the amount
of aid. At the same time, there’s no question that along with many of my colleagues at
the Center for Global Development, we think it’s critical to put as much emphasis as
possible on ensuring that that aid is used effectively, and I don’t think that we’ve really
gotten the answer yet to how we could ramp up at the level that is called for, or is implied
by the 0.7%, in countries where it can be most effectively used. And that’s because most
of those countries where it can be effectively used and are very poor, are already having
50% or more of their government budgets financed by donors, and that means that
they’re actually have close to 100% of all their public investment financed by donors. So
that’s good. You know, there’s progress in those countries. We can see that that’s
working in many of them, in Mozambique, in Uganda, although Uganda’s beginning to
make some of us nervous, in Senegal, in Central America, in Nicaragua and Honduras.
The question is, how to make aid effective in states that are weak and failing. I think
there are many ways to do that, that are reflected in the reports of the Sachs group, and
we’ve got to keep talking about those ways, but perhaps the most important thing is to
start systematically evaluating how we do aid in those weaker settings. There are all
kinds of issues that people in the development community are aware of – should it be
more or less budget support, aid has to be more predictable, it can’t be so volatile. I think
the discussion on Darfur was important in terms of making the connection to the
development question, because Mark ended up saying in effect, where’s the money, and I
think the whole issue of having sufficient resources not only for peacekeeping but for
exploiting windows of opportunity, when there is a chance to go in and help quickly a
country that is on the rebound or is in trouble, a reforming government that is getting into
trouble, and needs some quick support, and here’s where there’s a lot said, but still not
enough about what can be done. I think there’s a tremendous investment needed in
assessing what is being done, and how it could be more effective. So, you know the
irony in all this to me is that 0.7% is pathetic, if you think of the challenge we face as
having some sort of a global social contract that meets the challenges associated with a
global system, and an increasingly global economy. Within countries, we spend 20, 30%
of our resources in some sort of transfer programs, redistribution programs, programs to
improve opportunities, to ensure equal opportunities, public education, health, pensions,
unemployment insurance, so if we compare 0.7% to 20%, then you have to ask the
question, why is it so little, and then we have to come back to ensuring that at least that
0.7% is used effectively in order to demonstrate how we can move beyond that.
STEWART PATRICK:
Can I follow up on another development-related
question? As Mark mentioned, today is Paul Wolfowitz’s first day on the job. And the
World Bank is nominally part of the UN system. From your – very nominal perhaps.
From your own experience at the Bank, and also at the Inter-American Development
Bank, how do you view the respective roles of the Bank and the UN in the development
enterprise? It will be interesting to get a little interaction here; obviously, Mark you have
experience in both institutions. Do you have any thoughts about how Paul Wolfowitz and
Kemal Dervis might align their two institutions to cooperate more effectively in this
regard?
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Well, I think history is a bit of a curse, here, in that
when we were talking earlier about ambivalence and I think your question, Stu, was is it
about bureaucratic problems or is it about the superpower syndrome that makes the U.S.
ambivalent, and certainly, from the point of view of someone who’s been in the World
Bank, there is a lot of ambivalence about the United Nations, based on a long history in
which the UN was seen as inefficient and you know, the famous example given by people
who know, the World Bank is things work so much better because the power in the
World Bank and the votes, the voting shares, are set by capital shares, so there’s an
alignment of financial responsibility and accountability that has made the World Bank so
much more efficient in the use of its resources than the United Nations. So, now I think
in the last three or four years, there’s been a tremendous effort on the part of the World
Bank and the multilateral bank community to get in line with the leadership coming from
the United Nations on, in particular, the Millennium Development goals. That alignment,
however, has been primarily at the top. I don’t see or feel a whole lot of alignment
throughout the bureaucracies in the multilateral banks. I think there’s still a sense that, in
the banks, we know how to do it better, based perhaps more on history than anything
else. Maybe that’s changing, but that ambivalence is there, and it is related to this
difference as viewed in the effectiveness dimension. The tension is with, ironically, the
fact that on legitimacy issues, the Bank is far behind because the representation of the
borrowers in the World Bank is so limited; their voice, their votes. So you have one set
of - one institution of World Bank, which has a history, I believe, of being more
effective, and another institution, the United Nations, that is seen as much more
legitimate, and so the UN is trying to become more effective. The World Bank needs to
try to become more legitimate, and as you know, one of our recommendations in the
report that the Center issued this morning is that Mr. Wolfowitz takes on improving the
legitimacy of the World Bank by asking its governors to find ways to make the borrowers
more – have more voice, more votes, in the immediate term. That to me is the way to
bring two institutions together to work on legitimacy in one, and effectiveness in the
other.
STEWART PATRICK:
Mark, do you want to make a comment?
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Well, I mean, actually the legitimacy
argument is clear. I am really impressed to see how many World Bank friends are here
today to here an old UNDP administrator, rather than being at the Bank to here their new
chief on his first day, but we won’t tell him. And you know, I also have to say that
Nancy, who I consider the most independent minded, analytically rigorous member of the
development community …
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Oh oh, now what’s he going to say!
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
… has one blind spot – whenever I hear her
say how efficient World Bank is, I think, you know, that sounds …
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Everything’s relative, Mark.
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
… but I think in a sense, her dichotomy is
absolutely right, but just speaking from the UNDP end of it, two points. One, actually on
Jim Wolfensohn’s last night as President of the World Bank, technically, he, Kofi Annan
and I all sat round the same dinner table in New York, and I was reminded just what good
friends we are, as leaders of these different institutions. But so will Paul Wolfowitz and
Kemal Dervis be, and in a funny kind of way, they may get on better than Jim and I did,
despite our many years of friendship, because I think they have a very clear
understanding of what the two institutions can bring to each other. And let me just say
that with increased aid flows, I believe very strongly the UN system, particularly UNDP,
but UNICEF and the others as well, is in the following areas. One is advocacy to keep
this level of aid growth up, second is exactly your agenda of capacity building and good
governments, where our legitimacy allows us to be a much more effective force for
arguing that often in developing countries than sometimes the Bank is. And as we
become a capacity building good government system, we complement a bank which is
really about resource transfer, and has a lot of technical assistance activities as well, but
there are core, they’re the Bank’s, if you like second course. And so I think there is a real
partnership, and the final area is in these failing states where we have more access, we’re
there throughout, and where early governance and restoration of services is a nature for
us, as long as we then hand over to the Bank a lot of the sort of heavy lifting of major
financing of reconstruction when a country is ready for that, so I hope the contours of a
very productive partnership are there, and I think we’ll have the leadership to get it done
on both sides.
STEWART PATRICK:
Can I just interject there that an important part of
that partnership will obviously be in the peace building commission, which I’m very
pleased the U.S. government has endorsed and it appears to have very widespread
support, and so hopefully that will be one of the things that come out of the September
high level event. Anne-Marie and Kim?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I want to actually put forward my own
hobbyhorse here because I think that there is a way that both could come together with a
slightly different institutional architecture. One of the World Bank’s big legitimacy
problems is exactly the lack of participation from donor countries, as you said. I would
argue part of the UN’s effectiveness problems are a lack of institutionalized contacts with
the officials on the ground. So, imagine if both institutions agreed to institutionalize
networks of the health officials, the education officials, the welfare officials, in these
developing countries, as informal networks. I say this all the time; we have an
international competition network of antitrust ministers, we should be able to do the same
thing in ways that would institutionalize the interaction and create, not a formal treatybased institution, but an institution that could work with both, and probably with a peace
building commission as well.
STEWART PATRICK:
Kim?
KIM HOLMES:
Mark mentioned in his speech and it’s been mentioned here
a couple of times also that the United States, over the last few years, as decreased its level
of development aid, and the whole MCA, that Millennium Challenge Account, and the
concepts and precepts behind that, were very much in synch with what you’re saying
with the purpose – you need to keep your eye on the ball of the effectiveness of the aid.
So, I agree with you that we cannot take our eye off of that. That was a tremendous
accomplishment with the Monterey Consensus and it’s been replicated throughout the
UN, and I have two concerns about focusing on the 0.7% ODA levels. One is that I’m
concerned that we all must recognize, certainly in this country, that the levels of aids
have been going up because the political perception in this country has been that we have
in fact moved beyond just measuring how much money is spent or how it’s spent, and so
the political consensus behind us doing more is based upon the continuation of the
Monterey Consensus, and if the perception ever gets imbedded in the political body of
this country, that we are moving away from that, in fact that we are going back to simply
measuring inputs and not outputs, then that political consensus behind that will probably
go down. And so the concern I have is that it’s not just the fact that looking at the 0.7%
is an arbitrary way of measuring development because it really isn’t about resource
transfer, it’s about economic growth and development, and to do it in a sustainable way.
That’s way it’s really about – what kind of institutions do these countries have in order to
take the aid and also develop wealth on their own. That’s what development is all about.
So, how we – I just don’t want to lose that, and I’m concerned that if we – when we have
to, as you said, Mark, you have to reduce things to sound bites and the media only pays
certain attention to what any of us ever say, so if we get to the point where ODA levels of
0.7% is all we talk about, the main thing we talk about, or the top priority, I’m concerned
it will have an effect on the political consensus in this country to actually increase our
levels, even though it may be lower than many people in this room already think.
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Yes, I have a middle ground between 0.7
and the current U.S. language. If I can say in Washington the three hallowed words we
never hear officially, Millennium Development Goals.
NANCY BIRDSALL:
remarks.
It’s the getting to Yes that you mentioned in your
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
That is the core of a new American conversation on
this, to say, we want to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. We’re not
frightened of them, including Goal 8, a partnership of rich countries to support poor
countries’ efforts, and we recognize that they are underpinned by a bargain between north
and south on good governance and institution building and all these things, and I think
the American cup would emerge immediately in this ODA debate to be seen as half full
rather than half empty. If your colleagues could just bring themselves to embrace that
concept of language.
STEWART PATRICK:
I want to ask one question on the use of force.
Anne-Marie, as you know, the Report …
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Can I just make one point on this, to reiterate what
Mark said on the Millennium Development Goals, and maybe because Kim is here, to ask
him, if he could say a few words about what is the problem for this Administration in
going public with those three words. Is it the 0.7% in and of itself? I can’t believe that,
because there are so many ways you can talk about the Millennium Development Goals
as a compact, as a partnership. My deep concern is that the ambivalence comes around
the ambivalence with which we started this conversation, namely that the U.S. is
accustomed to being the superpower, even on analytic leadership, on development issues.
The Millennium Challenge Account is to be applauded; it’s a great idea, it’s being done
with the kind of discipline that is admirable in the sense that the idea is to create
incentives by saying, these countries are eligible, they are eligible when they meet certain
criteria. But even the Millennium Challenge Account is being done in a very unilateral
way at the ground level, as is President Bush’s initiative on AIDS. Still, although the talk
is multilateral, the implementation is still pretty unilateral. So, what is it that is making it
so difficult for this Administration to go – take that step on the three big words?
KIM HOLMES:
It’s not that. It’s – when you talk about the MCA and the
support the Administration has for AIDS and the tremendous amount of money that the
United States puts into these programs, and the interest that we have in ensuring that
there’s accountability, that the money is spent well, and that we have programs to ensure
that the money is delivered, our concern about accountability should not be characterized
as unilateral, because you’ve already sort of set the debate at that point about, what really
matters is whether it’s multilateral or unilateral. That’s not the way I thought about it;
it’s certainly not the way any of us in any of the meetings that I was in, thought about it.
We were trying to think about, how can we make the funding that was being provided by
the American taxpayers as effective as possible? And as far as the Millennium
Development Goals, I can only tell you that we have joined in consensus and supported
many of the MDG’s, but Goal 8 is the one that we had some problems with. Mark and I
have had many interesting conversations over this. This is our position, for the reasons I
just said a minute ago. So, I’m not going to speak on behalf of everybody in the
Administration, I’m not in it anymore, I can just tell you my own personal view, and
when I was there, that’s the concern we had, was the one I gave you a minute ago, is that
it trivializes what development should be about by focusing too much on what it should
not be. [Dictation ends here]
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Effective response. Some of those are just common
sense and obviously if you don’t think you’re going to be effective using force, you don’t
use force. Proportionality is built in to the law of war and the number of them are very
clearly built into our own military code, so it’s an odd mix of some common sense
principles and some principles that I would prefer to see continue enshrined in the law of
war which our own armed forces recognize rather than mixing them into this kind of
reasonableness calculus. I think the real issue and I don’t think it’s an issue on which
you’re going to get much further than the current charter is to what extent does the United
States perceive that it is important and valuable and I would even say necessary but that’s
probably a step a little too far to go to the Security Council first.
In any context in which it’s thinking about using force. And I would leave the, I would
make a very strong argument that it should go first. I would then not answer the question
about what happens if the Security Council says no because frankly all the way through
the claim war, the Security Council was deadlocked and parties on all sides didn’t use it.
But I think the emphasis here should be as with development, if we can agree on a set of
reforms to make the Security Council more effective and above all proactive in a whole
range of things, again from trying to address a Darfur before it becomes the issue it is
today, working very actively on a much expanded definition of security, the I think a lot
of the actual practical problems we’ve seen will fall away because there will be a sense
we go to the UN, the Security Council will respond, and that’s better for everyone
concerned.
STEWART PATRICK:
I, before we go to the audience, we just, one final question
and that is, are there any prospects, in your view, near term prospects for Security
Council reform?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
but -
Mm, I just got a good bottle of wine that there were
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Could I maybe ask Anne-Marie, Kim and Mark actually a
related question. Are the proposals on the um, the existing proposals for reform of the
UN Security Council, would any of them create the setting, the legitimacy for the kinds
of proactive, the kind of proactive engagement you were describing?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I think Plan B. would in the following sense. I
really do think that expanding the Council not only to increase more representation from
developing countries but more representation from countries who pay an enormous
amount of money and are needed to make it, to give the Security Council the capacity
that we agreed that it needs is very important. I have been quite convinced that if you
expand to 24 without adding the veto and I just don’t think, that’s a non-starter, it’s not
going to be any less effective and I think it could be more effective in some cases by
shaming holdouts.
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Hm.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
In other words, if you are a nation that wants to vote
against going into Darfur, it’s a lot harder to do so in a larger Security Council where you
can say even if it looks like a veto is going to be actually issued, you know, you have 20
other nations on the Security Council lined up against you. So I’ve been convinced that
it’s not going to be less effective. It could be more effective and it will be more
legitimate.
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Mm hm.
KIM HOLMES:
No, I think the question of when you look at what will make the
Security Council effective, you can look at it as a capacity question, you can look at it as
a political question. And you can ask yourself that over the last decade or even going
back even further in terms of the political side of the issue whether or not you had an
expanding counsel of 24 countries, whether or not it would make the Security Council
more effective in dealing with issues like Rwanda or issues like Darfur or some of the
harder cases. And whether or not we are essentially saying no because first of all, if the
Security Council has not worked in the past and will not work in the future effectively
unless the P5 for an agreement and that will remain true even if you expand it. So, that’s
sort of like an 800-pound gorilla sitting out there in the middle of the discussion that no
too many people talk about, that’s why there was a decision over Iraq. When you notice
it when France and the United States work together on issues like Lebanon, the Council
works fairly well so, it comes back to really to the question of what do you mean by
effectiveness. I can certainly understand if you had countries like Japan and others who
do pay a lot of money to the Council and wonder why they don’t have a seat there. You
can make an argument that very likely those countries and perhaps others will provide
more passive. I can see that. But would it necessarily make the Council politically more
effective in hard cases? I just don’ know. Uh, the, I think it’s just an unknown question.
And also I don’t NANCY BIRDSALL:
Isn’t, isn’t the point of Anne Marie that aside from the hard
cases, it would probably make the Security Council more effective on cases like Darfur
now which is no longer visible?
KIM HOLMES:
Well, the hard, the difficulty in the Security Council over Darfur
was the fact that Russia and China were opposed to, to the initiatives that the United
States, and the UK, and France were supporting on getting the peacekeeping operation,
putting sanctions and uh, having some kind of accountability mechanism.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
KIM HOLMES:
The P5 was -
NANCY BIRDSALL:
- The point is they’d be more exposed.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
15 to 3, we went.
KIM HOLMES:
terribly.
But my point is -
It would be 22 to 2, which on Kosovo when it was
That wouldn’t have made any difference. They were exposed now
NANCY BIRDSALL:
I don’t think so
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Not really. I don’t think so. I think you could
really, that is what happened on Kosovo right. We knew there was going to be a block,
but we also knew it was 15-3, and I think it with Iraq
KIM HOLMES:
But Russia still blocked it.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
We had nine, we had nine votes on the US side and
probably as a result, even though France would have vetoed, the legitimacy would have
been quite different. I think it gives you more political room for maneuver.
KIM HOLMES:
But as we all know from Russia, Russia threatened Kosovo.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Yeah.
KIM HOLMES:
It vetoed, so it terribly exposed them, China could not have been
more exposed. We made this our point secure, time and time again.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
They’re hiding behind the French.
STEWART PATRICK:
Well, we’ll agree to disagree on that question now. Let’s
move now to the audience. I invite members of the audience to ask questions. I ask each
questioner to please go to the microphone, state your name and affiliation, and please
keep your question brief and to the point so any, anybody who has a question please. I
think I’ll probably take these in groups of two. Go ahead.
JOHN DAVY:
Good afternoon. My name is John Davy and I work with the US
Global Leadership Campaign. I have a question for the whole floor, though it’s
specifically asked for Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown, how can the UN assuage US fears that
reform undermines America’s role in the world?
STEWART PATRICK:
Great, uh, next question, we’re going to take them in twos.
DAVID DEVLIN-FOLTZ: David Devlin-Foltz from the Aspen Institute. Though I
don’t follow this closely, I understand that the uh, House version of the budget would
significantly cut assessments to the UN. Uh, and that’s a form of leverage uh, probably
one that you would prefer not to see exercises. Are there other forms of leverage that the
Congress might have to uh, I’m sorry, to bring about reform?
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Okay, well just on the first, I think this, that the
biggest case for UN reform is one that is remade which was in 1945 facing a very similar
context of the American military, political and economic dominance and a recognition
that America needed a mechanism for leveraging other’s help for managing global
problems, problems America couldn’t avoid engaging with created the United Nations.
And I think that argument is as true today as then and therefore, it requires a UN
strengthened reformed able to play that role. So I do not for a moment believe UN
reform should threaten American interests. I think the argument we have to make is that
it is probably in America interests more than any other nations uh, to have an effective
UN where the American public opinion supports and enjoys. On the second point of and
Greg, you’re quite right we don’t like withholding and it’s exactly the kind of action
which makes collective pressure for reform by America and it’s allies in New York
almost impossible because it is so much in your face to Europeans, Asians, Africans,
others who want to find common ground for reform that it stops the conversations stone
dead before you begin it. And in fact, it was withholdings in the distance that it built
within the UN and the US back in the 90s that I think led to the political weakness that in
turn, led to disasters like Rwanda. So I think it’s a very dangerous course that doesn’t do
as much on reform as many believe it does but it does create vulnerabilities in the
political management of global problems that can have devastating consequences.
STEWART PATRICK:
Other questions?
JASON CALDER: My name is Jason Calder, I’m with Carter Center in Atlanta.
Thank you to the floor for the great discussion. And this last exchange on the millennium
development goals because I was going to bring that up if you didn’t uh, I would, can you
comment a little bit then on terms of these two tracks of reform on the UN? What should
be expected out of Washington on the development agenda if we don’t have this tie-in to
the MDGs explicitly?
STEWART PATRICK:
Go ahead PLEASE.
Next Speaker: My name is Francois ****, I work for All Africa.com. Earlier the year,
the African Union convened a meeting for them to assert a common position on UN
reform and there, rejected both Plan A and Plan B of UN reform because to them any
reform plan that has to be put forth has to take into account some kind of geopolitical
balance where Africa just like all other regions of the world must have a say in the
Security Council with veto right. I wonder if you could give the rationale for denying
that claim? Thank you.
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Well I’ll take number one of what’s on the agenda. I think
it’s a good question, um, and we didn’t and especially because we really didn’t talk very
much about the other aspects of what can be done on development besides money. And
uh, here I think it is true that one way that the Bush administration could get to yes on the
millennium development goals is by emphasizing some of the other ways in which the
US contributes and in particular, uh, at the Center as some of you know, we have an
index that ranks which countries in terms of their development friendliness on different
measures of interaction between the rich and poor world. And the US is the top scorer, it
ranks first on trade. It’s not great, there are a lot of problems. Uh, but it’s still the best
among poor lot of rich countries in terms of the approach that they take to ensuring that
they are trading opportunities in open markets for exporters from the developing world.
Then US ranks reasonably amongst the highest on migration because we’re a very open
economy and we have much more openness to people moving in and migration,
international migration generates remittances, it generates grain gain and so on. We rank
recently good, reasonably in the middle I say on security issues and I can go on and on
like that. Now what the Bush administration could bring to the meetings at the GA
Summit and Gleneagles and to New York in September are a deal on debt if there’s an
easy compromise I think with the Europeans on writing off the debt of a select group of
very poor countries that have been made eligible for the HIPAA Initiative at the World
Bank IMF. It could bring uh, a big push on trade capacity building for trade. It could
bring a proposal on peacekeeping that would ensure more robust and more rapid
financing for the kinds of peacekeeping operations that we were talking about. So, there
are you know, a host of ideas which are already there, you know, on the Bush
administration agenda in one form or another that could be brought which, and I hope,
that these are the kinds of things that President Bush will be discussing with Prime
Minister Blair when Blair visits I guess next week.
STEWART PATRICK:
The second question was on the African Union meeting in
which there was a sense that Africa should have representation of the veto. Mark, would
you like to address that?
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Yeah, just very simply all the new permanent
members would like the veto but I think the view of the rest of the membership,
permanent and non-permanent, it a bad idea. You know, and being that five is already
too many vetoes in the eyes of most nations. So the veto is, is, I very much doubt is
going to fly so the issue is, is Option A which creates six new permanent members and
Option B which creates a category of members to indeed, a semi-permanent is that they
get re-elected on a longer term basis. And Africa does very well on the vote proposals.
It’s actually frankly over-represented because it gets two of these new permanent or
semi-permanent members despite the fact that it is only one-tenth of the world
population. So it’s doing very, very well under this theme and I think African leaders
have come to realize that the combination of the ODA reforms and MDGs and these
Security Council reforms are a once-in-a-lifetime bargain that Africa should seize
because if it doesn’t then we come back to the reform agenda five years from now, I think
Asia’s population growth will mean that any reforms will be much more weighted Asia’s
way than this current thing, so I think Africa recognizes this is a bargain to try and seize
now and they’re becoming very active in New York and in the African Union, to, to push
for this.
STEWART PATRICK:
Other questions.
JOEL TOURNEY: Hi Joel Tourney from Refugees International. Mark, I wanted to
ask you about the Peace Building Commission. I mean, it seems to me it deals with an
absolutely fundamental issue this transition from conflict to getting a country on the path
to recovery but my concern if I’m reading the proposal correctly is I don’t see a Peace
Building Commission having executive authority which I fear leaves you in the same
place you are now which is at the end of the day, the World Bank, the UNDP and other
agencies responsible for recovery are going to have to get on the same page with the host
government and make something work. And my fear about the Peace Building
Commission is it’s just going to end up, you know, from the standpoint of Liberia or
Cambodia or Sierra Leone, it’s just another set of meetings, another process, and then the
Peace Building Commission leaves and there you are with the same competition among
the agencies not having a coherent plan to really helping the country, you know, recover
effectively. So, I’m wondering if I’m misreading this or if this is a, if this is a concern
with the way the proposal is currently put forward?
CHRISTA RIDDLEY:
Hi I’m Christa Riddley from Oxfam and uh, I’m very
happy to hear that Ms. Slaughter believes that responsibility to protect will likely pass
through in September. I think at minimum it’s a commitment that country should be able
to make. And as we look at situations like Rwanda and Darfour we are, we have to think
about that. But I wanted to bring up another thing that uh, I thought Mr. Brown was
speaking of in terms of commitment to humanitarian crises and I don’t think it’s only
money, I think you were saying that there are many other things aside from money. But I
wanted to ask about the idea of a $1 billion trust fund to be able to cover some of these
humanitarian emergencies that don’t ever get funded fully like the DRC and like some of
the other small countries, Central Africa Republic, a long list of the tap appeals that get
50 percent funding every year and how this could close the gap and considering uh, US’s
vision about aid funding whether they would also be opposed to, to some additional fund
for the humanitarian crises as well.
STEWART PATRICK:
commitment.
Um, I guess the first question was on the peace building
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Sure, let me take the first and, and just one quick
observation on the second. On the first, Joel, you’re right it is deliberately not intended
as an executive body because you know, we started from the premise that what’s missing
is a place where in a serious strategic way we can pull together the economic, political
and security strands of peace building. The bank does microeconomics in Washington,
we do the politics and securities, and a bit of the economics in New York and the two
don’t really talk to each other. We’ve all heard of the classic examples of moving
towards microeconomic stabilization prematurely forcing an over-quick demobilization
of an army, not allowing the peace dividend of a new school and the hospitals or other
public spending which is critical to the peace. So we wanted to create a forum where all
actors around the table, the institutions but also the governments, both Security Council
and interested neighbors who all have a role either pulling a country apart or gluing it
together through their hands and there just needs to be an overall coherence of strategy
and approach that has been missing possibly back by a trust fund to resources going
forward. But, we’ll have to find our way. I mean, we’ll have the backing of the Security
Council but it is also not only does not want to replace the executive operational capacity
of the different entities coming to the table, it also with an institution like World Bank or
the IMF has to recognize very real issues of their own sovereign board arrangements
which don’t allow them to, to, to report to the UN. But just, if I could, just one sentence
on the Humanitarian Fund, it was part of the Secretary General’s proposal but it is
unfortunately at the moment not depicted or strongly reflected in the early draft of the
agenda for September, so for Oxfam it’s a very good issue to be lobbying governments
on between now and September to make sure it’s back in there because it is a key tool.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I, I can actually reinforce that because it goes back
to something Kim said which I think there is tremendous support and recognition for the
principal of responsibility to protect. That means, governments have the responsibility to
protect their own people and if they do not over a certain threshold, then they forfeit their,
a degree of their sovereignty. The tricky part is exactly the suspicion that what that
means is the responsibility devolves to the Security Council and then the pressure will be
on the United States to do something about it and there, I think, is what you were talking
about. There, the argument that you have a fund, a standing fund, and better yet troops of
various kinds allocated in various ways will help reassure the United States on that point.
I think, though, it is likely, it shouldn’t be because we want Security Council expansion
to block everything but ideally, there’s room for a great package deal there with Security
Council expansion where you get other nations to contribute heavily to that fund, thereby
assuring the capacity but also the, the sharing of the political responsibility for
intervention in humanitarian crises.
STEWART PATRICK:
with you.
ELAINE JONES:
I think these will be the last two questions. Fred, let’s start
Okay. My name is Elaine Jones, -
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
ELAINE JONES:
That doesn’t sound like Fred.
Sorry.
STEWART PATRICK:
That’s all right. Go ahead, go ahead.
ELAINE JONES: I thought my name was Fred, I don’t know. I’d like to direct my
question to Mr. Kim Holmes. The UN spends millions and millions of dollars every year
talking about development, generating resolution after resolution, year after year. Are
you disappointed that the Secretary General’s recommendations on UN reform only
superficially address the effectiveness of the General Assembly, the Economic and Social
Council, and the Regional and Function Commissions?
KIM HOLMES:
You read my speeches. Yes, there’s a third area too which I’ll get
in to. Yes, I have, I’ve said this a number of occasions and I’ve even talked to Mark
about it that there seems to be consensus of almost everybody I talk to that the General
Assembly and Ecosoft are not functioning as well as they should. They have duplicative
agendas, they go back and redo the, revisit the same resolutions every year that they
passed the previous year, and it’s devaluing the currency of the legitimacy as a result of
it. I guess, my guess is that it’s because reform of the General Assembly would be so
difficult to do and there are so many vested interests in the current operation of the
General Assembly and Ecosoft that we thought it was simply it’s probably too difficult to
do, that’s my own guess about why it was not, why it was not address. And I fully admit
that it is difficult. About a year and a half ago, when there was a discussion in the
previous tenure of the President of the General Assembly about reforming the General
Assembly, we in the IO Bureau at State, we started bringing some, or started bringing up
some ideas of well, maybe we can made a General Committee, have more executive
guidance roles so that they could go in and streamline the agenda so they wouldn’t be
doing the same thing over and over again. Uh, we practically brought, we got nowhere
because of all the vested interests that would line up against changing this very
conservative institution of the General Assembly blocked any kind of change. I think
also Ecosoc is a, an organization that’s not functioning very well. It’s either too large or
too small depending on who you talk to and that should tell you that there’s something
wrong with the way it’s operating. I think also one other thing while I have the floor that
I haven’t had a chance to emphasize is, is from the United States’ point of view one thing
it must have, and you mentioned it Mark in your speech, that must be a part of the
bargain on UN reform to get the United States more supportive is that we must be talking
about management reform and dealing with the implications of the Oil-for-Food issue as
much as we talk about these other issues. But if that is not done, there’s going to be the
perception in Congress, writing all this legislation, I saw some of the staffers in here a
minute ago, is going to be the perception that, that uh, that the United States is not getting
what it wants out of the process and then we will go into this possible holding strategy.
So I would encourage you, Mark, and others and all of you to elevate the discussion of
secretariat reform, management reform, at the same level that we’re doing these other
things. Talking about these other issues, I think they are as important for the future
legitimacy of the UN not just in the United States but other places too.
STEWART PATRICK:
Thank you very much. Uh Fred.
FRED TIPSON:
Just a question about the role of the private secretary. I know the
Secretary General and of course STEWART PATRICK:
By the way, excuse me, Fred Tipson from Microsoft.
FRED TIPSON:
Fred Tipson, work on development of the Microsoft programs.
Uh, Secretary General with the global contact and in other ways yourself, the
public/private partnerships and so on, I really tried to engage the private secretary in a
new way but there doesn’t really appear to be much private secretary involvement and I
don’t want to overemphasize that term in the whole cause of UN reform and development
is a critical importance obviously to the whole global economy, the success of an
individual corporation, but the global contact seems to have run out of gas, again based
on your reaction on that, but how can the private sector um, engage more effectively in
this whole process of making the UN a more effective institution?
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
Well, Fred, I mean, I think two answers that one, I
hope global compact hasn’t run out of steam. I mean, in fact, wearing my UNDP hat, a
number of public/private partnerships, the commitment of wave after wave of new
companies to corporate social responsibility suggests there’s a huge amount of energy
still in that activity and indeed, there will be, so then moving to the second question, the
role in UN reform. Um, now I, I think that well, there are going to be private sector
representatives at the summit in September. As always, never enough governments are
very jealous about letting civil society and private sectors to the table and they’re
behaving as usual on this, so it’s not as broad a representation as we, the secretariat, have
argued for. But I, I think more profoundly, you know, I, I, I’m not, I think there will be a
lot of private sector involvement in the management reform that Kim has just been
talking about. Um, you know, already we’re bringing in quite a few of recruits we’re
making on key management tasks accountability oversight. Management itself, a, you
know, a lot or more of them have private sector backgrounds. Before, the Senior
American that we just started today is a new under Secretary General of management,
Chris Berman, comes most immediately from the State Department but from a private
sector background in part before that. So I, I think that the management cultures are
getting closer at the same time we’re doing more and more together in the field. But I
take the point we don’t have a panel of CEOs talking to us in any sort of organized way
of reform but you know, I bet when you reorganize Microsoft, you won’t be having me
on a panel to talk to you about reform because um, you know, it’s sometimes our job is to
get our house in order so we can better partner rather than you know, having you come in
to tell us how to organize our house.
NANCY BIRDSALL:
Stu, can I say something on this issue, not so much about
management reform at the UN per se, but I think that on the private sector role in
development, there is so much more that could be done in the competitive private sector,
particularly in the US to deal with the corruption problem, both in developing countries
and in amongst some OECD firms. And I think this is also a critical role where the
UNDP has, and is, doing more and more. It’s not just about governments within
countries but within the global system, the extracted industry’s transparency initiative is
only one example. We have still on the books in the US legislation that is making it quite
easy actually for, through deferred tax arrangements, for our corporations to seem to be
complying with the US anti-bribery act. We don’t have any OECD countries very good
enforcement of comparable legislation. We have a lot of illegal capital plight, we have
problems with what banks, private banks should and should not, what they should need to
reveal at least um, in a manner that allows aggregation of illegal capital flight and tax
flight and so on. So, there’s, you know, I think the role of the private sector through the
global compact much more emphasis could be put on pushing for good public policy
within developing countries and within the rich countries as opposed to bits and pieces of
little projects that look like corporate social responsibility but aren’t going to the heart of
the matter because in the western economies, it was the private sector that pushed for a
level playing field under which competition could work and the magic of the market
could thrive in an environment with adequate regulatory and tax arrangements.
STEWART PATRICK:
Uh, we pushed up to the end of our two hours. I want to
give the last word, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on what success might look like
in September or, or how you’d, you, in your dreams you’d like this all to play out.
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
STEWART PATRICK:
Well -
Hopefully not your wildest dreams, I don’t know.
MARK MALLOCH BROWN:
I could say well, dreams and they’re nightmares
please. I mean, I, I as I say, I think that you know frankly, we’re coming up reform from
New York and Washington from the same, for the same reasons including oil for food
and I really take your steer Kim on the need to constantly stress the management reform
because you know, the UN is very good at big idea reform and less good on the nitty
gritty detail of making things work and operate better so I think it is a very important
dimension on that. And my hope is if we can just get these two conversations together, if
we can you know, see the US lead and participate in developing a common reform plan
which is adopted by world leaders in September, and we found the rarest of moments a
real sweet spot where crisis and failure, because that is what oil for food was and what
the Iraq war was, whatever side of it you were on. The UN’s role in it were not happy,
whether you were in favor of the war or against it, nobody can be pleased with, with, with
the way everything played out. So, you know, kind of turning back to the opportunity of
a renewed UN and one which over time, not necessarily in the year left after September
to this Secretary General but in his successor’s term, will actually go much further down
the road of reform. I mean, someone has led the development side. I would like to
predict that in five year’s time, there will not be UNPD and UNICEF and WHO or if they
are, they will be brand names on a single development delivery system working behind a
common country strategy and reporting to a single unified executive board system with a
strong executive management and leadership led by one individual accountable for
development within the UN and so I think we are going to go through a period which
only starts with September of radical transformation. But if September fails and we don’t
create platform for the subsequent transformation and instead, we create recrimination
and nightmares.
STEWART PATRICK
Wow, before we close, I’d like to give special thanks to my
colleague, Sarah Dean, who’s our meeting impresario and helped make this possible and
also to Johanna Mendelssohn, foreman of the UN Foundation for ensuring the UN
Foundation’s support. Could you please join me in thanking Mark and our panel.