Forget the faulty escalator! With all the challenges facing the UN, now isn’t the time to throw in the towel on our global meeting house

Helen Clark Foundation Honorary Senior Fellow argues that the UN may be at a low ebb, but it is as important as ever for everyday New Zealanders. This piece was originally published in Newsroom.

Everyday Kiwis reflecting on events at the UN General Assembly last month can be forgiven for feeling a bit bamboozled by the number (and gravity) of global challenges facing the UN. Conflicts of breath-taking intensity and complexity, unmet needs in ongoing health and humanitarian crises, the behemoth of climate change. The UN itself is also facing its own existential threats – not least declining funding and (in some quarters) waning political interest.

Add to this malfunctioning escalators in New York, critical commentary by global leaders, the usual politicking, and the UN circus may have felt a little hard to swallow this year.

I now hear some fellow New Zealanders asking: do we still need the UN? Should we believe those who tell us it is an outdated diplomatic side-show to the ‘real’ deal-making and realpolitik these days? Shall we throw in the UN towel, and leave it to ‘big guys’ to run the global show for us?

Or in this era of upcycling, rather than throwing away, do we build on what we’ve got, renew the UN for the future?

The answer is a resounding yes to the latter. As New Zealanders, we need a well-functioning, effective UN. While the UN system has become sluggish in places, as Helen Clark put it succinctly last month “There’s a lot going on and even though in many ways the UN is at its weakest in the 80 years…. this is still a place where people come to meet, to talk”. This is vital – because as any good mediator worth their salt knows, without kōrero, without dialogue, there is no resolution in any conflict or difficult conversation, or the sort of challenges the world is presently faced with.

Consider the 194 member states of the UN as a dysfunctional global family, beset by the usual rivalries, power imbalances, unfairness and gripes of any normal family unit. If we remove the diplo-speak, the UN offers a safe space to hold discussions within the whānau that might otherwise not occur constructively on their own. Do we want to live in a family where we send the rowdy kids or the bullies ‘outside’, to brawl it out on their own, no matter the devastating global consequences? No. The UN offers a controlled space for dialogue, bringing the protagonists together, with other family members as witnesses and mediators, a finely tuned ‘diplomatic group therapy’.

It’s not just talk-shopping: these diplomatic group-therapy sessions can and often do act as a critical pressure release valve for difficult conversations that we (as countries, regional blocs, or communities) have been unable to either hold, or resolve, at home.

As a New Zealand diplomat working at the UN, I spent hours at the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in my earlier years, and witnessed countries’ devastating labour disputes handled in a well-organised way – with equal voice from worker, government and business representatives. In the most confronting cases, human rights defenders who had faced torture and incarceration at home spoke courageously of the challenges they were fighting to overcome – staring down the threat of reprisal, to bring their story to a collective global audience at the UN.
It was a formative experience – and provided a real window for me into the soul of the UN.

At its heart, the UN project is about peace, it is about voice, courage and agency, and levelling the playing field for member states.

It’s obvious where New Zealand fits in this mix, proudly and unashamedly one of the small states who rely on a rules-based international system, with a strong UN at its heart.

Since its beginning, we have supported the UN as a meeting house where justice and equity are upheld. A founding member in 1945, New Zealand has always known that the UN project was essential to our peace, our wellbeing, and our future, and it has always received strong bipartisan support. [The picture on the left shows New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser signing the UN Charter in 1945]

Following those heady early days, the worthy UN system is now being let down by rules, systems and procedures which can appear to reflect – at worst – an antiquated, non-inclusive and outdated way of managing world affairs. It has become expensive and inefficient in places, and its wider agencies are struggling with budgetary and internal reforms.

Perhaps the UN’s most prominent failing is its failure to act meaningfully on many of the weightiest geopolitical issues. Given the often competing and conflicting views of major players, the UN’s hands (and that of the Security Council) are almost always tied. Then Prime Minister John Key said during one UN address in 2016 that New Zealand was deeply troubled to see the pre-eminent body for international peace and security failing to live up to its responsibilities, and this has been echoed over the years by numerous UN statements by our Prime Ministers from both sides of the house, Foreign Ministers and senior diplomats.

Despite these well-recognised faults, the UN holds immense value for New Zealand – as imperfect as it is – and we continue to rely upon it. While we may not always agree across the political spectrum on the particular issues facing the UN, our political parties have traditionally united behind ensuring a strong, efficient UN remains the pre-eminent global meeting house to discuss global challenges, and to find a way through them. At a time when some major economies and military powers are increasingly choosing to parley over the heads of the majority of UN member-states, Kiwis agree there is – and has always been – greater value in working towards solutions together. Because solutions which are collective and recognise everyone’s needs are likely to be more fair, sustainable and durable.

So what can we do to make the UN better, stronger, and more credible?

We can love our UN meeting house, recognise its faults, patch it up (to use a good Kiwi phrase) – and basically help it do better. We can ‘get in behind’ successive New Zealand governments’ long-standing, bi-partisan advocacy for UN reform, and its efforts to build a better and stronger UN – which should serve the needs of the smaller players as well as it serves the needs of major powers. We can learn about and support well-reasoned platforms for reform. The movement Article 109, re-launched last month in New York and vocally supported by leading experts, is a powerful coalition of advocates for UN Charter reform, working to create the future we all want to see as part of a modernized and more inclusive UN.

All of these efforts recognise that UN reform is not about tearing down – it’s about building up. In an era of increasing polarisation and great power politics, the most sensible thing smaller countries like New Zealand can do is to help build stronger global institutions. This starts with the UN, which has done more than any institution in history to ensure the little guys are not left outside the tent when geopolitical business gets done.

If we can see what is good for New Zealand, we will stay strong on UN reform. We’ll give our leaders and diplomats a voice to speak for us in New York and beyond, ensuring New Zealand remains a vocal advocate for a well-functioning, efficient UN system. We’ll continue pushing for transparency, equity, and effectiveness in global governance – principles which promote New Zealand’s (and our region’s) security, resilience and prosperity.

We must recognise that our future depends not just on what we do at home, in our own backyard, but on how we shape the world we’re part of. The UN is only as strong as our commitment to it.

Lucy Cassels is an Honorary Fellow at the Helen Clark Foundation, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Melbourne Climate Futures, University of Melbourne.