The Big Blue Bore
YOU KNOW what's boring? United Nations Day is boring.
Nowhere is U.N. Day more boring than in the United States of America, where everything is so exciting. Though America is the U.N.'s once-proud father, we don't celebrate U.N. Day here with used-car blowouts like we do other holidays. There are no picnics, days off work, presents, parades or fireworks. There's nothing but a boring, unreported and heavily accented speech from the Secretary General and a boring concert of Korean and Senegalese music that nobody hears. The only reason I even know this Sunday is U.N. Day is because I went to write something exciting in the October 24 box on my wall planner, and there it was staring back at me like the Swedish agriculture minister: United Nations Day (US). As soon as I saw the words, I was bored.
It makes sense that U.N. Day is such a boring holiday, because whatever else you think about it, the U.N. is a very boring institution. Its headquarters at Turtle Bay resemble a massive, late- Tito-era post office; its bland basement cafe serves international nouveau mush; its spokespeople speak the beigest of bureaucratese in six languages; its cable tv station makes C-Span look like the Spice Channel; and its boring-ass, acronym-laden agencies are always talking about and doing the most boring things imaginable, like trying to end child hunger, contain AIDS, police ceasefires, control overpopulation and provide clean water and vaccinations to the boring people who lack them.
Yet, I've always had a soft spot for the United Nations, even before I knew much about its dull work. As a kid I was fascinated by the logo, which seemed like something out of Buck Rogers: A north polar projection of the globe in concentric rings, flanked by crossed olive branches. I still have a childlike wonder for its unique status as an entity. At once no country and every country, the U.N. squats a fat piece of stateless East River real estate-deeded for all time by the Rockefeller trust-upon which local, state and federal laws do not apply. It's Manhattan's very own space station.
The first time I visited Turtle Bay, I bought a U.N. t-shirt at the space-station gift shop. I've since learned to gird myself for the inevitable comments when I wear it. From the left, I hear how the U.N. is just a large wrench in the toolbox of American Empire, and did I not know that the Iraq sanctions were enforced in the U.N.'s name? From the right, I get rants about threatened sovereignty and the wicked farce of giving states like Syria a soapbox and a seat at the table.
The current government in Washington openly represents the latter argument like none before it. Despite belated and halfhearted genuflections dictated by the mess in Iraq, the Bush administration's contempt of the U.N. is best summed up by robo-fundie Phyllis Schafly, who wrote about the organization's threat to our precious bodily fluids thusly in 1998: "The Senate should reject all U.N. treaties out of hand. Every single one would reduce our rights, freedom and sovereignty... We Americans have a constitutional republic so unique, so precious, so successful that it would be total folly to put our necks in a yoke with any other nation."
Today's anti-U.N. lobby is a motley crew. To the right of Schafly you still have The Turner Diaries and black helicopter crowds who think Kofi Annan is the Antichrist and that platoons of Bangladeshi blue helmets are about to storm the Georgia coast. To her left are media-friendly neocons like David Brooks, who cloak their visceral hatred of the U.N. by cynically decrying the Security Council's failure to stop massacres in places like Sudan. (Brooks tried this in a recent Times column, in which he notably failed to mention that U.N. aid is the only thing keeping thousands of people alive in refugee camps along the Sudan-Chad border. He also failed to mention that it was the U.S. alone who vetoed action in Rwanda.) Then there are honest hard-power junkies like Richard Perle and David Frum, who froth and bristle at the very existence of an international organization that purports to hold the key to legitimizing the use of force.
In a political culture that pits howling U.N.-haters against the organization's few tepid defenders, it's easy to forget that the U.N. has its roots in a hugely popular bipartisan project borne of the raging fires of world war. FDR, who gave the U.N. its name, tasked the State Department with drawing up plans for an international body just weeks after Pearl Harbor. If it was too late to stop this war, Roosevelt wanted to get a jump on preventing the next one. In 1942, Winston Churchill signed onto the United Nations Declaration as an affirmation of Allied commitment to the Atlantic Charter and the defeat of the Axis powers. Roosevelt believed so deeply in the project that it's said he died for it by making the arduous journey to Yalta in poor health just to shore up Stalin's shaky support.
When Truman was sworn in after FDR's wartime death, his first act as president was to declare his commitment to his predecessor's vision. In this, Republicans across the aisle supported him, their nativist instincts newly tempered by the horrors of war and an appreciation for America's new status as a global superpower. Plans were made for a ratifying conference in San Francisco, to which 50 countries sent delegations. With Europe and Japan still in smoking ruins, the delegates drafted what they thought was a plan to finally set the world right.
Today nobody talks about the Treaty of San Francisco the way they talk about the Treaty of Westphalia or the Congress of Vienna, but they should. The U.N. Charter crafted at the conference represents the latest-and probably the last-incarnation of a very old, important and, yes, exciting idea. This is the idea that nations are capable of setting up a mechanism through which to work out their differences peacefully. As the nuclear age dawned, the urgency of making a cooperative system work became obvious, and a large majority of Americans supported their country's vigorous involvement in the U.N.. (They still do.) Now that we've compounded the nuclear threat with an ecological one, the urgency is greater still.
Yet the flame of hope the U.N. represents is today weakened most by the country that gave it its noble birth. The rhetoric and policies coming out of Washington have even undermined one of the U.N.'s most important and uncontroversial founding achievements-the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Never has the U.N. building seemed more like a space station fallen to America, the Secretary General more like a brother from another planet.
Which isn't to say the U.N. has become "irrelevant," as Bush claimed before attacking Iraq. Nor is it sitting idle. One of the lessons the U.N.'s fathers took from the failed League of Nations was the need for a foreign aid component. Currently between 80 and 90 percent of the U.N.'s budget goes to its Nobel Peace Prize-winning sub-organizations like the Children's Fund, the World Food Programme, the World Health Organization and the Commission for Refugees.
But as important as this work is, the framers never intended the U.N. to be a vast social services organization. It was to be the flexible and respected lynchpin in a system of shared security, grounded in international law. As this hope grows more distant, the president is right-by working so hard to fulfill his own prophecy, the U.N.'s security role is indeed in danger of becoming irrelevant. Should this happen, it would be an historic tragedy. As Dwight Eisenhower told skeptical Americans back in the 1950s, "With all the defects, with all the failures that we can check up against it, the U.N. still represents man's best-organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield."
Old Ike was right. And 50 years later, the boring thing is still all we got. Happy United Nations Day, everyone.