I’ve only read the report once quickly but I want to get a few preliminary thoughts out. The report extends the notion of security beyond inter-state conflict or terrorism to include issues like poverty, disease, civil war, international crime, and the international sex trade. It repeatedly observes the connection between poverty and civil war:
“Poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation and war feed one another in a deadly cycle. Poverty (as measured by per capita gross domestic product (GDP)) is strongly associated with the outbreak of civil war (see figure below). Such diseases as malaria and HIV/AIDS continue to cause large numbers of deaths and reinforce poverty. Disease and poverty, in turn, are connected to environmental degradation; climate change exacerbates the occurrence of such infectious disease as malaria and dengue fever. Environmental stress, caused by large populations and shortages of land and other natural resources, can contribute to civil violence.”
The equation the authors of the report are pressing upon us is that poverty and the other ills they list leads to war and terrorism and that the only solution to the threats of war and terrorism is a global one spearheaded by the United Nations.
Nowhere in the report is there any mention of the role of liberal democracy in this equation. I believe that liberal democracy and free markets foster economic and social welfare. While soothing to the autocrats and totalitarian members of the United Nations the formulation used by the authors of the report renders down to turning the poor nations of Africa, Asia, and South America into permanent charity cases. This approach has failed in the past and there’s absolutely no reason to believe it will succeed any better now.
The committee has the following recommendations:
- Re-vitalize the General Assembly.
- Expand the Security Council.
- Establish a Peacebuilding Commission.
- Enlist the support of regional organizations.
- Expand the role of the Economic and Social Council.
- Expand the role of the Commission for Human Rights.
Re-vitalize the General Assembly
The committee acknowledges that a key problem with the General Assembly is its lack of ability to achieve consensus. Their basic recommendation is that the member nations grow up. As I wrote earlier consensus is not merely an expediter of democratic processes it’s a prerequisite. My own recommendation is that requirements be placed for membership in the General Assembly. Accepting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be a start. Establishing such a requirement would effectively preclude nearly all of the Arab League nations from membership and one Security Council member: China. No consensus can be reached at this time for that reason and the General Assembly is irremediable.
Expand the Security Council
As I’ve mentioned here and here the Security Council should be a forum for security producing nations not security consuming nations. The committee acknowledges, as I’ve said, the problems with the General Assembly. How does making the Security Council more closely resemble the failed General Assembly render the Security Council more effective? My own solution is to establish formal membership criteria for Security Council membership and make veto-wielding membership automatic on meeting the criteria. Since any reasonable membership criteria would either remove current veto-wielding members or include nearly the whole General Assembly, this will never happen. The Security Council, too, is irremediable.
The other recommendations
Where I come from when an organization fails and is demonstrated to be institutionally corrupt you don’t generally expand its budget and increase its scope and influence. My recommendation: the committee needs to go back to the drawing board.
UPDATE: Submitted to The Beltway Traffic Jam
