611) Paul Kennedy revisita a historia da ONU

Charles De Gaulle chamava a ONU de "le grand machin", de forma depreciativa, por certo.
Não sei se Paul Kennedy, o celebrado historiador, autor de "Ascensão e queda das grandes potências", tem a mesma opinião.
Eu ainda não li e não conheço o livro que ele acaba de publicar sobre a ONU. Uma resenha foi publicada no NYT deste fim de semana.

Bad Company

THE PARLIAMENT OF MAN: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations.
By Paul Kennedy.
361 pp. Random House. $26.95.

Review by JAMES TRAUB
The New York Times Review of Books, August 13, 2006

If the United Nations didn’t exist, Fox News would have to invent it. There is no more satisfying all-purpose explanation for America’s failure to have its way in the world than “the U.N.” Indeed, our very own ambassador to the institution, John Bolton, has described it as “a target-rich environment” — like Iran, perhaps, but without the capacity to fight back.

It takes a brave man, or a blithe one, to write about the United Nations as if it had some purpose other than either to obstruct or to accommodate American policy goals. I’m not sure which category the Yale historian Paul Kennedy belongs to, but it’s safe to say “The Parliament of Man” will earn him no credit from the America-first crowd.

One of the chief virtues of this even-handed, mild-mannered appraisal is Kennedy’s ability to embed the United Nations in the long history of schemes to end war once and for all. The dream of substituting reason for force, he writes, was “a central part of the intellectual architecture of the Enlightenment” — most famously captured in Immanuel Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” of 1795. Statesmen themselves had little patience for such castles in the sky — until the 19th-century tangle of treaty obligations was buried, along with the youth of Europe, beneath the fields of Flanders. War had now become so abhorrent that the Kantian project seemed not naïve but indispensable, and the world’s chief states sought collective security in a League of Nations.

Kennedy observes that the League represented a real advance. But the shameful failure of its feeble fail-safe mechanisms in the face of German and Japanese aggression proved all too clearly that no parliament of man (a term first coined by the young Tennyson) could afford to be blind to the real nature of states and of men. American and British diplomats toiling in the havoc of World War II thus designed an astonishingly ambitious replacement for the League. Difficult though it is to recall today, the United Nations was expected to operate as an institutionalized form of the wartime alliance, with the victorious powers at its core and a military committee to serve as their Joint Chiefs of Staff. The planners were also acutely aware of the political effects of the Depression, which had legitimized authoritarianism of both the left and the right, so they established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to ensure economic stability. The system that emerged genuinely constituted, as Kennedy observes, “a new world order.”

But this order, too, abjectly failed when the cold war paralyzed the collective-security apparatus. Kennedy provides a dutiful, and largely familiar, summation of the 45-year deep freeze that ended with the first gulf war, and then a quick account of the phases that followed: post-cold-war euphoria; humiliating reversals in the Balkans and Africa; chastened but increasingly forceful activism under Secretary General Kofi Annan, and finally the train wreck of the debate over war in Iraq. Kennedy’s regard for the system’s design leads him to insist that this confrontation actually vindicated the United Nations Charter. “One of the breaker points (fuses) built into the 1945 system had been triggered,” he writes, since one permanent member of the Council had tried, and failed, to gain the acquiescence of the other four. This is a little bit on the order of: the house may have burned down, but at least the alarm worked.

“The Parliament of Man” is organized thematically rather than chronologically — good for conceptual clarity, bad for narrative drive — and Kennedy devotes as much attention to the “soft” United Nations of social and economic development as to the “hard” United Nations of political mediation and peacekeeping. The former is the organization that most people outside the West care about, and that absorbs most of its energies, in the form of the many agencies and programs dealing with poverty, the environment, women’s rights and public health.

Western analysts and journalists tend to give the soft United Nations short shrift. What, after all, is the connection between all these programs and the actual condition of men, women and children? Kennedy, to his credit, concedes that United Nations development bodies haven’t done much to eradicate poverty, and that the low status of women “remains a signal failure in our human condition.” But he also claims — convincingly, I think — that concepts like “sustainable development” that have emerged from the endless palaver have changed the global debate in lasting and important ways. Hardheaded Western critics should bear this distinction in mind before dismissing the whole kit and caboodle.

At the United Nations, Kennedy will probably be seen as belonging to the group known as “critical friends.” At times his wish to vindicate his faith in the beleaguered institution makes him too friendly a critic. Like many United Nations officials, he blames peacekeeping failures on the shortsightedness or hypocrisy of member states rather than on the professionals in the Secretariat; his lengthy indictment with regard to Bosnia, for example, includes not a word about the peacekeepers’ own self-defeating culture of neutrality. He is too easy on the many third-world states that have resisted — and continue to resist — efforts to modernize the institution. (He characterizes the notorious 1975 “Zionism equals racism” resolution merely as “extremely silly.”) Washington has been a bad player, but it’s had lots of company.

Kennedy closes with his own ambitious agenda of reform, including proposals to establish a stand-by force of 100,000 soldiers, revive the military committee, develop a sophisticated intelligence capacity and add eight or nine nonpermanent members to the Security Council. But these suggestions have been made before, and the member states have rejected them all. The United Nations appears to be impervious to serious reform. It’s not hard to see why: the 191 members, with their wildly clashing interests, cannot even agree on what the institution is for. Its universality indeed makes it the realization of Tennyson’s parliament of man. This is, at the same time, the United Nations’ curse.

James Traub’s book “The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power,” will be published this fall.