United Nations in decline

At the end of a long day of reading and writing (no arithmetic), I went off with a friend to play a short, par-three golf course nestled on the edge of our village. The course was deserted but as we brushed by a bend of trees going up to the tee of the only long hole, we saw three boys banging away merrily at balls and making lively comments. They were loose-limbed youngsters who, as an ageing old pro once said enviously as he watched one of the type, they wind up like snakes.

I first thought they were a mirage. They'd not been ahead of us anywhere. They appeared from nowhere. In fact they'd appeared from over the wire fence that separates the hallowed turf from the road. As luck would have it, who should show up but the owner of the course. Just the right man in the right place at the right moment and he strode off down the fairway shouting at them to be off.

He wasn't shouting as an angry man, he was shouting to be heard and when he came close, he talked to them and told them the rule, the etiquette, rather, 'You can't cut in on the next hole if you see anybody approaching the previous green!' To be proper, you should leave one empty hole before you jump the usual sequence of holes. Incidentally, you're not supposed to climb over fences to get a free game.

Well, the boys were agape more than aghast for a minute or two and then they shuffled off. The owner is by no means a timid man. He didn't even argue with them. He talked to them like a kindly uncle, explaining to a four-year-old what a knife and fork are for. I said to him, 'Well, you were certainly sweet and reasonable.' 'Have to be,' he said, 'you can't bawl 'em out or they'll come back next time with their gang and tear up the greens.' They certainly didn't seem like a rough-house gang but I bowed to the owner's experience. 'Trouble is,' he said, 'you can't bet any more that they're going to listen to teacher.'

Next day, by some mental process I doubt even a neuroscientist could explain, I picked up the text of a speech by a man who once was in charge of this country's arms control agency and I read his conclusion and I thought what a pity he hadn't been on the golf course and heard the last line of its owner.

The learned man's conclusion was that it's a mistake to think of arms control as the root of national foreign policy. It should be rooted in the bodies, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice at the Hague, that preside over international law and set the standards of civilised behaviour between nations. The International Court responds to cases brought by any nation that feels its sovereign rights have been violated. The court calls in the defendant nation. In theory, it appears, the court rules and the guilty party goes home promising to be a good boy from then on.

This is the fiction, the ideal rationale for the court's very existence. The big boys don't listen to teacher any more. The Soviet Union has regularly chuckled and ignored cases brought against it before the court. Most recently, the United States secretly mined the harbours of Nicaragua and was found guilty of invading the rights of that sovereign nation but the United States decided to skip the hearing.

Harbouring these dim thoughts, I watched some of the session of the United Nations' general assembly the other day when President Reagan came to give his annual address. It was quite like old times. Here was a president pledging his steady devotion to peace and at the same time bemoaning the fact that the Soviet Union will not play the game. The game, that is, of respecting international law and the rules of civilised behaviour. And there was the chief Soviet delegate and the new Soviet foreign secretary sitting and listening to him, heads cocked to their translator's earphone, registering no emotion of any recognisable kind.

At least, it was not like one old famous time when Mr Khrushchev, paying rapt attention to a dignified bawling out from the American delegate, took off his shoe and banged it on his desk. Mr Shevardnadze kept his cool and his shoes on and he stayed in his seat.

For the first 20 years or so of the United Nations, we scribblers in the press gallery used to take bets on how long it would be before Mr Gromyko walked out. They don't walk out any more which, at first thought, might seem a sign of improvement in manners, one to chalk up for civilised behaviour.

The truth is, however, that nobody needs to feel frightened or nervous in any way, any longer. Walking out was a hopeful sign that the United Nations was a body of some authority. By walking out on a speech, you made a public show of shock, that the speaker was breaking the rules of decorum. Nobody now cares who breaks what rule.

In the first happy years of the United Nations, we, of the West – the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia – and our obedient satellites in Central and South America, we had things all our own way. There was such a dependable majority on our side, in all votes and resolutions aimed at the Soviet Union, and its fewer satellites, that the Russians had to invent the walk-out to show that they counted at all.

Well, for certainly 20 of the past 40 years of the UN's life, the Africans and the Asian nations have been coming in and the majority is heavy on the Russian side and it drones on and on, lamenting and voting against our side with mechanical dependability.

So United Nations' debates, so-called, are now intolerable for a sane outsider to listen to. There is a resigned, exhausted air about them, like the clinical whispers of a group of doctors around the bedside of a king, discussing how to treat him when they all know he's on his deathbed.

There has not been a time when the reputation of the United Nations and public confidence in it in many nations have been so low. Of course, everybody, including the secretariat and the delegates, has admitted with a shrug for years that the main purpose of the UN when it was christened with such enthusiasm in San Francisco, the main purpose to prevent aggression through the supreme body, the Security Council, has long ago been ignored. That purpose, the ability to achieve it, was based in the original set-up of the Security Council, the hope that the original big five – America, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and China – would always agree on serious threats to peace and stop them. Some hope.

Only America and the Soviet Union are big powers any more. China, the big boy, is now Taiwan, the little boy, exiled off the mainland and Communist China moved in, in its place. Even at the start, the charter allowed for the strong possibility that the five might not always agree, so the right of any of them to veto a decision of the other four was built in. It was used from the beginning countless times by the Soviet Union and later by the rest of us.

The only time the Security Council had a unanimous vote was on going into Korea. It was unanimous, the unanimity of four because the Russians said they'd boycott the council until Communist China was let in and they were doing so and the Russians, in those day before the jet airplane, couldn't get a top delegate to New York in time to slap down his veto.

Real power, we all know, went into action outside the UN and it's been so for, say, 25 years at least. Everybody forgets now the wars, little wars that could have grown into big wars, which the UN managed to stop way back there – in Africa and the Middle East, mainly. Even so, in previous years, the contemptuous remarks of politicians and other public figures here and in Europe that the United Nations was powerless, a mere public sounding board for everyone's ideology and pet grievance, were always resented by the top officers of the UN.

This year, the secretary-general himself says he doubts he'll run for another five-year term. He said the other day, 'I don't see any reason why I should preside over the collapse of the organisation. I'm a Peruvian diplomat. I don't have to make a sacrifice and die with my ship.'

Mr Pérez de Cuéllar is no firebrand. He couldn't get elected by all factions if he were. He's about as tactful, tolerant, patient as a diplomat can be. He was facing the fact, however, that the United Nations is close to actual bankruptcy and this can easily be put down to the action of the United States' Congress in cutting America's annual dues, but first, you have to ask, cutting down from what?

Forty years ago, the United States paid 40 per cent of the UN's entire budget, when there were 51 members. Since 1972, when there were over a hundred member nations – there are now 158 – the United States has paid one-quarter of the budget. Congress has said that 20 per cent, one-fifth, must be the limit. Let the other 157 nations do their share!

By contrast, the Soviet Union pays in only a third as much as the United States – say, seven per cent of the UN budget. Or rather the Russians ought to be paying so much, so little. In practice, they don't. They are $250 million behind in their payments.

What it all means is that by the end of the next year, the fiscal year, the UN will not be able to meet its payroll. The cuts will hurt, which they ought to, the overblown bureaucracy of the UN but they will hurt also the non-governmental agencies. Worst of all, to my mind, the World Health Organisation, which is the world's only 24-hour clearing station and early-warning headquarters of the existence of epidemic disease anywhere and everywhere. It's due to the World Health Organisation, more than to any other institution, that in a world in which millions of people fly every day, there are so few carriers of disease from one country, from one continent to another.

But in spite of the dire threats and expectations, I believe the United Nations will survive. When it comes to pronouncing the execution order, even the most peppery opponents pause. Without the UN, we should have no world body to which, in a terrific crisis, a massive nuclear accident, say, every nation could come together and face, in common, a common peril.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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