Politics and Process at the United Nations: The Global Dance

POLITICS AND PROCESS AT THE UNITED NATIONS The Global Dance Courtney B. Smith Boulder Lynne Rienner, 2006. 32gpp, US$24.99 paper (ISBN 1588263487)IRRELEVANT OR INDISPENSABLE The United Nations the 21st Century Paul Heinbecker & Patricia Goff, eds. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 160pp, $24.95 paper (ISBN 0889204934)ADAPTING THE UNITED NATIONS TO POSTMODERN ERA, 2nd ed., W. Andy Knight, ed. New York: Palgrave, 2005. 283pp, US$34.95 paper (ISBN 0333801504)The UN celebrated its 60th anniversary September 2005 with a gloomy summit short on achievements. Indeed, Canada's quest for endorsement of the responsibility to protect principle, improbably crowned by success on that occasion, was the only good surprise. Negotiations on the summit outcome document were preceded by an ill-humoured debate over security council expansion, leaving several aspirants to new permanent seats out of sorts when their gambit failed.Serious attention to Kofi Annaris recommendations, contained a thoughtful report-topically titled in larger freedom-was scant. The commendably thorough and remarkably consensual conclusions of Annan's high-level panel on threats, challenges, and change, A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, released December 2004, were much admired, but little read. Few realized that one of its recommendations was to address the problem of international crime as a serious security threat. The report also contained key elements for a consensus on the definition of terrorism that had so long eluded the UN (endorsed by Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League, a panel member). Incredibly, the summit flubbed any serious treatment of both terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. UN delegates ignored their own many failures serenely, as ever.The three volumes reviewed here address the United Nations and its current travails a variety of ways. Courtney B. Smith, a dean the John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations of Seton Hall University, sets herself the ambitious task of surveying the UN's principal political groupings of states, decision-making organs, mode of diplomacy, and resulting outcomes. Paul Heinbecker-a recent Canadian ambassador to the UN-and Patricia Goff offer an edited volume of papers and remarks drawn from a conference on UN reform at the striking new Centre on International Governance Innovation (CIGI) headquarters Waterloo and co-sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University. Andy Knight returns to an earlier set of essays on the UN, updating the volume four years later to encompass recent developments the reform agenda and the political backdrop thereto.Smith's book, involving significant research and analysis, deserves the most attention. It is a single-author effort, resulting authorial coherence. Smith is an admirably clear, jargon-free writer. In seeking to cover the UN, she develops an approach deriving from earlier research models but adapted to recent trends. She leaves aside the thriving, competitive, often exasperatingly self-regarding world of UN agencies, funds, and programs to focus on central UN organs: the general assembly, the security council, the sadly ineffective economic and social council and the secretary general. She does this by examining how delegates work, how formal and informal groups coalesce at the UN and what roles nongovernmental actors-including large, generally international companies-play and why. second section of the book looks at decision-making, institutional interactions, and the importance of individual personalities at the UN, the latter a particularly welcome perspective much overlooked by scholars quest of systemic answers.Smith is not shy of focusing on process considerations her penultimate chapter. Procedures, as lawyers know, often facilitate solutions (not least by calming emotional fever-from which states often suffer at the UN) and sometimes constitute solutions and of themselves. …

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