Ban Ki-moon has given a long and enlightening interview to the Wall Street Journal (which duly responded by publishing a rather mean article about his time as Secretary-General). It contains quite a lot of interesting stuff on individual crises and his leadership style. But what dominates the conversation is his pessimism about the UN’s shrinking place in the world:
Mr. Ban: There should be a clear understanding what kind of a role do you expect, and what kind of a role the United Nations should play at this time, in the 21st century. Your philosophical views of the United Nations may be still like in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s at the latest. Your view of the United Nations is not 21st century. During the Cold War era, the United Nations might have been the only and most universal organization in the international community. But you are still looking at the early stage of that time of the United Nations. Now you have the European Union, African Union and League of Arab States and many regional and sub-regional and quite big organizations. There are many actors now. It used to be the United States and the Soviet Union until lately. Now you have all the European leaders, Germans, French, the European Commission. Many other European powers with quite high economic development. The European Union has now emerged as a political player, a global player.
It used to be only the United States. Now the United States is still the global power, but still one of the global powers. The United Nations has become one of the global players, it’s not the only one. Therefore you cannot expect all from the Secretary General. Those days are over.
At this point in the interview a “senior aide” steps into point out that the UN is very busy with peacekeeping, aid delivery, etc. – which was not exactly the SG’s theme. What’s striking about this passage is that Ban seems to have a pretty strong analysis of the way the world is going (i.e. away from the UN) combined with a nostalgia for a time that never existed. There was never a moment where the UN was a sole, unquestioned source of authority in world affairs. Yes, people talked like that in 1945 – and again, very briefly, in the early 1990s – but it was always rhetoric not reality. Every Secretary-General has had to struggle against global divisions. This is not new.
But Ban has not finished on the subject of his limited power:
Well, there are many areas where I can’t do, where even the Americans can not do. I’m not supposed to be responsible for anything happens in Afghanistan and Pakistan–all this political situation. But we are concentrating on how can we mobilize humanitarian assistance for all these affected people, displaced persons. We have no peacekeepers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The whole dynamics have changed.
[ . . . ]
You have seen North Korea, you have seen Iran, you have seen many countries who have not implemented Security Council resolutions, which are binding. There really isn’t any forceful enforcement capacity of the United Nations, legally speaking. That’s why President Bush took that action by creating multinational forces in Iraq because the Security Council was divided. So all this kind of blame and criticism comes to the Secretary General, that the U.N. is not able to address these issues. I want you to understand.
I can see what Ban is trying to do here, showing that he is a realist. But even if the Secretary-General has a limited conception of his role, he should still have a strategy to make use of what power he has. He needs to lay one out.
