Reforming the United Nations

A boring old chestnut? Consider Lebanon and Darfur.

THE UNITED Nations has recently come in for a beating: It has been attacked over the oil-for-food scandal and treated with occasional contempt by the Bush administration. And yet the world's tendency to turn to the United Nations has if anything grown stronger. Between 2000 and 2005 the number of peacekeepers serving under U.N. resolutions jumped from 48,000 to 86,000, and plans for an expanded presence in Lebanon, and possibly in Darfur and East Timor, could push the total to 120,000. This schizophrenia -- the tendency both to attack the United Nations and to demand its assistance -- is dangerous. If the United States and its allies want the United Nations to unscramble problems, they must do more to nurture it.

This plea has been heard before from U.N. sympathizers, but recent events underline its urgency. The Lebanon war was remarkable for the way in which all sides agreed that an expanded U.N. force would be an essential component of a peace deal; an early suggestion that there could be a non-U.N. deployment got no traction. Equally, the genocide in Darfur has tested the idea that a non-U.N. peacekeeping force could work better than a U.N. one; it turned out that the experimental African Union force that deployed in Darfur was inadequate. Hence the push now for a U.N. force, which would be better managed thanks to the United Nations' relatively sound planning capacity and better financed because of an established system for sharing the costs of blue helmets among the U.N. member states.

In the past, critics in the United States have felt free to attack the United Nations because they believed that there were alternative tools to achieve foreign-policy objectives; the United States could go "forum shopping," as President Bush's U.N. ambassador calls it. But Darfur shows that forum shopping can backfire, while Lebanon suggests that the world regards alternatives to the U.N. as insufficiently legitimate. For all the shortcomings of the United Nations, its Security Council enjoys more moral authority on matters of war and peace than any other international body; and for jobs such as peacekeeping or the supervision of elections in countries such as Iraq and Congo, it may be the least bad institution available. The forum-shopping excuse for denigrating the United Nations must therefore be buried. Instead, critics must channel their energy into promoting the reforms that could make the United Nations more effective.

There is blame to go round for the stagnation of existing reform efforts. Developing countries that don't pay for the U.N. budget and feel little responsibility for global governance often want the institution to be a place of sinecures and pompous speeches. Unfortunately, these countries dominate the U.N. General Assembly by sheer force of numbers and so can block management reforms. Meanwhile, rich nations are not blameless either. The Bush administration has failed to build a coalition of reformers who could prevail over entrenched seat-warmers. The British and French have resisted change that could undermine their privileged positions as veto-wielding members of the Security Council.

Last year U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan made a big push for reform, but neither rich countries nor poor countries showed much interest in supporting him. Now Mr. Annan is nearing the end of his term. An insistent determination to modernize the United Nations will be a necessary quality for whoever succeeds him.