A new year is a good time for nations, like families, to review the institutions they support. For 2024 I have a suggestion for the UK: it could do worse than standing back and considering hard how it should deal in future with the United Nations and its offshoots.
We’re not talking here about leaving the UN as a whole. Except for the lunatic Republican fringe in the United States, there is no serious call for any country to do this. Indeed, there are legal doubts about whether this is even possible, the charter being silent on the matter. (Indonesia purported to quit in the 1960s, but it soon changed its mind and the episode is now universally forgotten.)
Whatever its limitations, the UN on balance still does its core job of helping promote peace, at least where the big boys don’t have skin in the game. While its posturing over Ukraine and ill-disguised desire to wrong-foot Israel at every opportunity has been less than satisfactory, we have to contrast its entirely correct position over, for example, Iraq and Kuwait in 1990. The unsung but beneficial operations of its troops in Cyprus, Kosovo, the Middle East, Kashmir and about half-a-dozen places in Africa deserve mention too.
The problem arises with the UN’s fringe activities
The problem arises with the UN’s fringe activities. Since 1945, we have seen significant mission creep away from the its core function of peacekeeping. In particular, it has spawned body after body dealing with everything from trade to tourism, development to dispute resolution, and sponsored large numbers of international conventions on all sorts of subjects.
Some of these activities do much good. Boringly technical, but clearly essential, arrangements for things like international air and sea carriage, or postal and telecommunication service co-ordination, today operate largely under the wing of the UN. A great deal of good work is also done for international commerce by other technical forums, like the UN commission on international trade law (UNCITRAL). Equally, on balance no decent person would want to suppress bodies like the World Bank or the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Go outside these specialised cases, however, and you might begin to ask some hard questions. One difficulty arises from the fact that many UN institutions appear unnecessary and open to partisan takeover. Take UNESCO, for example: an organisation at one time so corrupt and institutionally anti-Western that between 1984 and 2002 – and again between 2017 and this year – the US simply pulled out. But even putting such troubles aside, do we actually need an international body to encourage cultural development, or to declare ‘world heritage site’ if the relevant states ask it to?
Preserving the iconic is something nation states can do perfectly well themselves. This is something the UK has recently found. In 2021-2022, London faced impertinent demands from UN diplomats about the planning of the Liverpool waterfront (rightly rejected, leading to a petulant withdrawal of world heritage status from the city). Only last year the UK was similarly ordered to think again about the Stonehenge tunnel. Is this game really worth the candle?
Or even take the World Health Organisation. Promoting health and warning of epidemics is obviously a good thing, as is producing a classification of diseases: but do we need a UN body to do it? True, in the past it has had its triumphs: its efforts partly led to the eradication of smallpox in 1977. More recently, however, it essentially did China’s bidding over the search for the origins of Covid and drew heavy criticism from its foot-dragging investigation of the ‘lab leak’ theory. It is now sponsoring a rather unnecessary convention on pandemic preparedness which is giving rise to considerable worries about civil liberties. There is surely an argument that our money could be better spent on other forms of health promotion.
In the last few years in the UK, UN apparatchiks have demanded large-scale redistribution of tax monies to the poor
The other difficulty lies, oddly enough, in the UN-sponsored humanitarian conventions. At first sight, there is nothing wrong with formal interstate agreements on, say, children’s rights, or discrimination against women, or economic and social rights (all of which the UK has ratified).
The devil, however, is in the detail. All these instruments are fairly open-ended and vague, and allow UN appointees to put forward their own (invariably progressive) interpretations as reasons for demands for action. These demands are invariably couched in the language of ‘international law requires’ and hence sit rather ill with the decision-making powers of state governments.
In the last few years in the UK, UN apparatchiks have, in the name of international law, demanded large-scale redistribution of tax monies to the poor; intervention in the media to prevent ‘stereotypical’ depictions of women; special measures to achieve parity in the numbers of male and female MPs; abortion on demand; no-fault divorce; a legal bar on all selective education; the banning of the smacking of children; the effective abolition of school Combined Cadet Force (CCFs), and a complete prohibition on recruitment for the armed forces in schools.
These may or may not be good things: indeed, at least one of then – no fault divorce – has now been enacted here. But this was at least done by an elected parliament responsible to voters. What is unacceptable is that these treaties should, on much the same lines as the European Convention on Human Rights in the hands of an activist Strasbourg court, be gradually expanded by a process of fairly subjective interpretation into instruments requiring states to disregard their electors’ wishes and enact ever more progressive measures in line with the world views of the UN commentariat.
There would be little lost were the UK to follow the example of the US, which has signed up to very few of these instruments. We should begin the gentle process of withdrawal from those conventions that afford us no positive benefit, pointing out that we do not need the help of the UN to protect women, children and others.
In short, the UK should carry on being a model member of the UN in its original guise as a peacekeeping force, and participate in technical agreements necessary for international coordination. Beyond this, it should be deeply sceptical. Unless there is a good self-interested reason to participate in some UN organisation or initiative, there is much to be said for a policy of wishing it well but then politely standing back.
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