Broken dream

By John Lloyd 
October 8, 2005
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2d69400a-3798-11da-af40-00000e2511c8.html

These are low times for high ideals. Where the rhetoric of world peace and security once echoed, dry voices call for tighter accounting standards. Where the cry of Never again! caught every throat, polling evidence is passed around to show public indifference. The age of the visionary is gone: the auditor and the pollster come into their own.
Maybe these are blessings in disguise. So far, the disguise has been a good one.
For two engines of world union - the United Nations and the European Union - now run near empty. Both have well-defined and generally known crises - part of which is in their internal management and external capability. More importantly, both suffer from a crashing decline in support, trust and belief that their aspirations are anything more than yesterday's news.
At the UN, the noble physiognomy and hypnotic voice of its secretary general takes on a more and more stricken aspect. Kofi Annan entered in 1997 as a reformer, who expressed regret that the UN was weak in Bosnia. Now he has the face of a man who has learned that weakness was his chalice, and will be his legacy.
The United States (which pays 22 per cent of the UN budget) thinks the place is a badly run, nepotistic, ineffectual shambles. Its new envoy is dismissed in most circles outside the US as Bolton the Barbarian: but John Bolton is not so very far from the centre of American politics.
This spring, Annan took delivery of a US bipartisan report (by the Republican Newt Gingrich and the Democrat George Mitchell). It argued that the need for internal reform has never been more pressing; that management reforms have become bogged down under the weight of the organisation's enormous inertia and have failed to create an institution that meets basic standards of good management. The staff is swollen with placemen - and women - who lack the skills or the motivation to perform their duties and (they cite a Deloitte survey) show a dismal morale and a high level of discontent, distrust and pessimism.
There's no strong voice that says this is wrong: only enormous inertia, which trumps all. Other states paddle their own canoes. Last month Junichiro Koizumi, Japan's prime minister, asked again that his country (19.5 per cent of the UN budget) should get a permanent seat on the Security Council. China (2.1 per cent of the budget, but a permanent member) won't have it; the US isn't keen. The 60th anniversary celebrations were subdued.
The UN cannot adequately undertake the tasks bequeathed it, and yet it is being given still more: to intervene in humanitarian catastrophes everywhere. As this is written, two men of conscience - the former Czech president Vaclav Havel and the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu - press on our attention a report that strongly urges the Security Council to take up the situation of Burma. Preserving peace, security and stability in the world... requires nothing less.
What will - what can - take up amount to? If the hard-nosed ayatollahs of Iran can defy a world that has taken up the problem of their apparent intent to become a nuclear-armed power, the hard- nosed generals can keep Aung San Suu Kyi (who won elections 15 years ago) closeted in her house and ensure that their country remains impervious to UN resolutions. There is no agreed way to preserve peace, security and stability in the world: there is only the exercise of US power, about which there is little agreement.
In Europe the German election result forced the two main party leaders, Angela Merkel and Gerhard Schroder, to scrap and posture and deal in the shadows. Their necessary manoeuvrings, and the uncertainty that now afflicts Germany, contrast with the gallery of centre-right and -left statesmen Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, who reconstructed and reunited their state from ruins and division, using Europe as both a political framework and a moral prop.
These, and a later, generation of German politicians saw in Europe a solvent for the nationalism for which they blamed their country's descent into Nazism. That high sentiment is now voiced more in despair than in assertion. The senior German in the European Commission - the social democrat Gunter Verheugen, vice-president for enterprise and industry - gave a speech in June at Berlin's Humboldt University, which began with the observation that populist sentiment appears to be washing away the current political consensus in Europe and ended with a call for more courage.
Germany and France, which promoted the high ideals and cut the low deals of Europe for the past half century, now seem unable to do either. Britain, Europe's most politically robust state, retains (and feels confirmed in) a pragmatic view of Europe as a place where nation states can sensibly work together. It can provide examples of good governance. It cannot make the grand gesture of national transcendence that was injected into Euro- politics at its foundation, and whose weakening has found no replacement.
This might yet turn out to be a blessing - if the UN and the EU are both able to let I would wait upon I can, and to refashion their common aspirations to united action round what the people will support as actively as they did when they saw these institutions as an antidote to war, devastation and want. There is a high bar over which new generations of politicians must aspire to jump. For that generation now exercising, or passing out of, power, the game seems too much altered to allow them to play.