Overburdened and inert.(Globalisation trends)

THE UNITED NATIONS exists in a world of instant communication and multiple voices, a scene crowded with other influential actors and networks, inside and outside government, crossing frontiers with unprecedented ease. It is a world that the UN's founders would have trouble recognising. Two trends, neither of which they could have foreseen, have declared themselves in the turbulent decade and a half since the ending of the Cold War.

The first, broadly positive, is globalisation. I use this much-abused but actually neutral term to describe the frontier-leaping transformations in transport, markets and capital flows, science and biotechnology, telecommunications and the unprecedented ease of access to all manner of information via the interact. They have enabled people to cross not only frontiers, but time-barriers: only consider the spread of mobile phones in countries with few rural landline connections. Against epidemics and environmental degradation, path-breaking technologies are developing; the challenge is to put them to better use.

These engines of change are transforming not only the world economy, but the relationships between governments and their increasingly mobile, disconcertingly well-informed, citizenry.

The second, daunting, trend, partly linked to the strains as well as opportunities opened up by this revolution in social and economic affairs, is the displacement of the inter-state threats the UN was designed to address by such insidious and intractable security challenges as the collapse of dysfunctional states in near-anarchy, extreme humanitarian distress or outright conflict; and the globalisation of organised crime and terrorist networks. These evils combined with particularly deadly effect in Afghanistan. The suggestion that poverty and terrorism go together is an insult to billions of law-abiding poor people and respectably run poor countries. But the corrosive and destabilising effects of foul government may have become greater in this globalised world. Organised crime and terrorism are by no means confined to collapsing states, but they unquestionably feed on the carcasses of political and social failure.

Given the uncertainties created by these radical social and strategic mutations, it is small wonder that shares in collective security, a concept that itself is in need of careful redefinition, have been more than usually volatile over the past fifteen years. They went over the top in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, when another George Bush greeted that incomplete success as the harbinger of a "new world order" under the auspices of a revitalised UN. They dropped in the disorders of the 1990s, rallied in the wake of the al Qaeda terrorist attack on US targets in 2001--an atrocity that brought home to Western publics a menace with which people in Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were already sickeningly familiar--and crashed heavily two years later with the Security Council deadlock on Iraq.

During this period, the UN's credibility as an enforcer of peace, rather than a patroller of agreed ceasefires, was tested almost to destruction. The Somalia operation, in trouble almost from the outset, disintegrated after the warlord Mohammed Aideed attacked UN peacekeepers and the US military abandoned retaliatory action against him. In Bosnia, the UN "dual key" arrangement with NATO was a fiasco, culminating in the Srebrenica massacre. In 1994, when the UN ignored General Dallaire's appeal for reinforcements in Rwanda--responsibility for which is shared by the peacekeeping department then headed by Kofi Annan, and the Security Council--it knew it was walking away from a bloodbath. In 2000, the Brahimi report on peace operations bluntly concluded that "over the past decade the UN has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge and it cannot do any better today".

The UN remains heavily engaged in peace operations, currently fielding around 80,000 personnel. Yet the sorry saga of the Congo operation suggests that the reinforced UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations remains unequal to the task of managing "strenuous" missions. The newly created Peacebuilding Commission adds an extra layer to post-conflict management. It remains to be seen whether it will secure greater coherence, effectiveness and speed of reaction. The problems go deeper than lack of airlift, finance and stand-by brigades. The deeper question is whether international bureaucracies should be attempting to run complex military operations in unstable or hostile environments. In Kosovo and then in Afghanistan, governments turned to NATO.