Canada 2020: part 6

Jennifer Welsh
Jennifer Welsh, one of Canada's most brilliant and accomplished young minds, has a provocative plan to remedy our diminishing international status and our lack of coherent direction for the future. She is the author of At Home in the World: Canada's Global Vision for the 21st Century. Welsh holds a master's and doctorate in international relations from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and is currently a university lecturer in international relations and a fellow of Somerville College at the University of Oxford.

Reviving the spirit of San Francisco?
Jennifer Welsh Aug. 1, 2006

July 17, 2020 (New York) – Canada's Ambassador to the United Nations, Jasmine Basran, is taping up the last of her boxes as the movers empty out her large office on Manhattan's Second Avenue.

"We just couldn't justify such a large space, when our mission to the UN has been so reduced."

There was barely a whimper in Canada when the Department of Foreign Affairs announced in 2018 that staffing for Canada's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York would be cut from over 30 to just fewer than 10.

"Our diplomatic presence now needs to be concentrated elsewhere, particularly at the Canadian mission to NATO in Brussels," Basran explained.

Earlier in the day, the ambassador gave us a tour of the UN Security Council chamber, which looks more like a museum than a forum for active diplomacy. The council hasn't met formally in over a year due to the deadlock over Syria's testing of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Ever since the U.S. campaign to give newly independent Taiwan a non-permanent seat on the security council, there has been virtually no possibility of the permanent members agreeing to collective action. China, backed by Russia, vetoes most of the resolutions proposed by the United States and the European Union. Japan and India, the two new semi-permanent members of the council (added during the reform conference of 2012) also tend to be divided on U.S.-inspired initiatives.

Basran, however, seems philosophical about the council's lack of activity.

"The council was also marginalized during the Cold War. The 1990s were in many ways the exception rather than the rule. Really, for the past decade, the action has been happening elsewhere. NATO is now the primary focus of Canada's international diplomacy."

What a dramatic change from 30 years ago, when commentators everywhere were proclaiming the death of NATO after the fall of Communism. NATO's original purpose, as a diplomat once quipped, had been to "keep the U.S. in, the Germans down, and the Russians out."

But without the Soviet bloc to serve as an external enemy for the Western alliance, NATO was expected to crumble and give way to a revitalized United Nations.

Today, this prediction looks like a quaint piece of history. NATO has continued its process of expansion, which began in 1999 with the admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and continued with the addition of 10 countries over the following decade. The latest successful applicants — Bosnia, Georgia, and Ukraine — have brought the total number in the alliance up to 32. Throughout the process, the United States has pursued its objective of transforming NATO into a global forum for democracies, which can act collectively to promote democratic values among and beyond its members.

NATO has also proved that it can intervene more quickly in trouble spots around the globe. Its Council for Peace and Security, created in 2012, has at its disposal a contingent of troops from each member state that can be sent abroad for humanitarian missions. The most successful operation of this kind occurred in 2015, when violence broke out in Zimbabwe following the death of Robert Mugabe. Close to 1,000 Canadian troops — taken from our new Standing Contingency Task Force — were deployed in Zimbabwe as part of the NATO mission.

For Canadians, the transition to this new world has been difficult and confusing. In a 2004 poll conducted by The Dominion Institute, just after the breakdown in diplomacy over the Iraq War, almost three-quarters of Canadians said that the UN was still a better venue in which Canada could make a difference in the world than alternative, regional organizations. Far from being a sign of the UN's failure, Canadians believed the crisis over Iraq demonstrated the pitfalls that would face countries if they acted without UN support.

A long-time supporter of UN

For 70 years, Canada was a staunch and consistent supporter of the UN's multilateral mechanisms, and was at one time the seventh-largest donor to the UN and one of the major troop-contributing countries to UN peacekeeping. Indeed, this last area of activity was a dominant component of the Canadian national identity during the second half of the 20th century. But this self-image has undergone significant evolution.

Long used to thinking of themselves as the "world's peacekeepers," who rarely fire a gun, Canadians over the past two decades have watched their men and women in uniform engage in direct and fierce combat in the countryside and towns of Afghanistan. (In fact, as a third of Canadians predicted back in 2006, there is still a small contingent of Canadian troops on the ground helping with security efforts in southern Afghanistan today.)

At the same time, the country's participation in UN peacekeeping operations continued to decline after 2000 — partly as a result of a shortage of Canadian human resources but also due to the fact that more developing countries (particularly from Asia and Africa) provide the horsepower for peacekeeping and peacebuilding missions.

To be sure, it has taken some time for Canadians to relinquish their hopes and dreams for the UN. In 2010, the vast majority still would have agreed with the words of their former Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who described the UN as "our best, and perhaps our last, hope of bringing about a creative peace if mankind is to end a savage tradition that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

But these dreams were already beginning to look unrealistic in September of 2005, when leaders from around the globe converged at the 60th Anniversary Summit of the UN in New York.

Despite some positive changes to the workings of the organization, the summit failed to reinvigorate the UN after its painful experiences during the Iraq War and the scandals associated with the Oil-for-Food Program. This failure was mainly a consequence of unreasonably high expectations — raised in particular by former Secretary General Kofi Annan's reform rhetoric prior to the summit. Annan heralded the gathering of leaders as a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity to transform the UN from a body established out of the ashes of the Second World War into a forum that could manage the threats and challenges of the 21st century.

Leaders salvaged some kind of agreement, and posed smiling for the cameras outside the UN's headquarters. Then prime minister Paul Martin proclaimed at the time that: "Canada cannot conceive of a world succeeding without the United Nations."

In the end, however, the negotiations did not succeed in building a consensus on a new conception of collective security — one that could encapsulate both the threats from weapons proliferation and the human catastrophe of underdevelopment. The summit's outcome only deepened the divisions between the developing world and the developed world (particularly the U.S.), and made ongoing discussions about the UN's role in the world even more fractious.
Powerful developed states continued to fear that the UN would not act decisively on the threats that concern them (terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and trans-national crime), while developing countries continued to insist that the greatest threats to their security reside elsewhere — in poverty, infectious disease, and collapsing state structures.

The first sign of malaise for the UN came with the failure to agree on a budget in 2007. This left the new secretary general, Sri Lankan diplomat Jayantha Dhanapala, without the resources needed to support ongoing UN peacekeeping missions in Liberia, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Burundi and Sudan. (Close to 90,000 military personnel and civilian police were serving in these missions, with an annual budget of over $5 billion US.)

Anyone reading the tea-leaves in 2006 could have predicted this impending train wreck. In May of that year, a majority of developing countries (led by the G77 and China) set up a roadblock to much-needed management reforms of the UN by refusing to approve the secretary general's reform proposals. But the United States had linked its backing for the budget to progress on these improvements in the UN's management and administration. The stage was set for a confrontation.

Things got worse

The crisis intensified in 2008, with the disastrous end to the UN peacekeeping mission in Darfur. It had taken two years for the secretary general to persuade the Sudanese government to accept 10,000 UN personnel on its territory to replace the mission of the African Union. By the time the UN finally took over, in the spring of 2007, a total of 300,000 civilians had died and close to three million were forced from their homes. In addition, the slow lead-up to an international deployment allowed Islamic militants in the region to mobilize, creating an environment of extreme danger for foreign troops. After a disastrous show down in which over 1,000 peacekeepers were killed, troop-donating countries airlifted their soldiers out of the country.

The final blow came in 2010, when Dhanapala's term of office was not renewed, due to diplomatic confrontation between the United States and China. That left the secretary general's office unfilled for two years, while an interim official headed up the secretariat. Hopes were raised when a candidate who could garner universal support was nominated, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai. But only four months after he was installed, in 2012, he was assassinated by Taliban terrorists.

That year saw the UN descend into an existential crisis. For a time it appeared as though its member states might rally. Encouragingly, states such as Germany, Brazil, and South Africa set aside their ambitions for security council membership, and allowed a more modest proposal for council reform (which added two new semi-permanent members and five new non-permanent members) to be endorsed by the General Assembly. But the UN has never really recovered from the events of 2008-2012, and the frontal assault on its vocation as a force for global peace and dialogue.

For so long, the biggest factor working in favour of the UN was the lack of alternatives. Defenders of the organization, when faced with criticism, would commonly reply: "If the United Nations didn't exist, it would have to be invented." After 2012, this rationale began to lose its punch.

Even in the realm of poverty reduction and health, alternative organizations and actors - whether the Gates Foundation or the Global Fund for HIV/Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis — began to outstrip the UN in terms of both funding and effectiveness. Without commitment, leadership, and new ideas from its member states, the UN could not maintain its status at the top of the global multilateral hierarchy.

Meanwhile, regional bodies were growing in strength and finding faster, more effective ways to engage in collective action. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the African Union (AU), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) followed NATO's lead in developing co-operative approaches to security and defence. Today, an ad hoc body has been established to facilitate dialogue among these regional organizations on global crises. On the economic, health, and environmental fronts, the new "L20" (an expansion on the old G8) has taken centre-stage as a forum for managing global financial matters, threats to the environment, and potential outbreaks of infectious disease. Canada has been particularly active in this innovative body, and is playing a constructive bridging role between developed and developing countries.

All of these organizations operate with a lighter "footprint" than the UN, and have thus far been able to avoid the failures of management and oversight which dogged the UN during the first decade of this century. But then again, none of these regional alternatives is driven by the ambition and hope that characterized the founding fathers of the United Nations.

The more historically minded among us still think back wistfully to 1945, and the "spirit of San Francisco." Could such a spirit be revived again, to breathe new life into the United Nations?
Before we could hope for a new "San Francisco," we would need a new "Dumbarton Oaks" — the meeting at which the Allied Powers came together to agree upon a global vision and to lead the process of change. But this looks unlikely today. The scheme for the UN worked, according to the great historian Paul Kennedy, because the bigger and wealthier powers realized that they had to be "providers" of international security for others.

At the moment, this leadership and engagement from the great powers is lacking. So too is a collective sense of responsibility, or a consensus among them about the most important security challenges facing the international community. The United States, as so many predicted 15 years ago, is no longer the unrivalled superpower. And the new great powers, China, India, and Brazil, have yet to define their global vision.

So, in the meantime, the government of Canada is decorating its new suite of offices on the Rue de la Regence in Brussels, and sending the high profile Justin Trudeau to serve as Canada's new ambassador to NATO.

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