The Millennium Assembly

In retrospect, it is difficult to understand why United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and his senior advisers (most notably the Canadian academic John Ruggie, who masterminded the affair) were so determined to organize a summit conference of world leaders and representatives of nongovemmental organizations (NGOs) on the occasion of the first General Assembly of the new millennium. [1] In many ways, the 1990s was a decade of peacekeeping failures and conferences for the world organization. The failures are all too obvious; and most of the conferences, if they are remembered at all, exist only in the institutional memories of the organizations that participated in them. Successive UN conferences on children (1990), education (1990 and 2000), the earth (1992), human rights (1993), population and development (1994), women (1995), social issues (1995), and food (1996) produced little if anything of practical value. Those present, whether from governments or the nongovernmental sector, insisted on their good intentions; proclaimed their commitment either to improving the future of some disadvantaged group or to furthering economic improvement, tolerance, and equity; and set some target date by which the condition under discussion was supposed to get better, even as they wrangled in private over the language of the final declaration. However technically feasible such goals as halving child mortality and providing safe drinking water to everyone in the world by 2015, it must have been abundantly clear, even in the euphoric atmosphere of subsidized virtue that UN conferences engender, that these goals were as unreachable as Secretary-General Annan's ridiculous, if well-intentioned, assertion that it would be possible to halve the number of young people carrying the HIV virus by 2010. The latter assertion, one might add, was made at a time when the AIDS epidemic was spreading, not coming under control. But, in a sense, the United Nations Secretariat is the last remaining bastion of rigid philosophical nominalism. Its leadership seems to believe that if a pious wish is repeated often enough, then it will become true, if only by dint of restatement. Obviously, this is only part of the story. From the secretary-general on down, UN officials have always operated on two levels, and probably always will. On the one hand, the best of them are canny international civil servants--people who are well versed in the way things work in the real world and quite unsentimental about what member states are really up to. On the other hand, these same officials seem entirely comfortable shifting gears and becoming cheerleaders for a new moral order of justice and equity, an order that their daily experience must tell them is probably no closer today than it was a hundred years ago. Human nature is the same as it always was; the world remains the same slaughterhouse it has always been. Again, no one knows this better than UN officials. Indeed, in fairness to the world organization, its role has shifted away from being the premier institution for international peace and security--a task that it could not fulfill during the Cold War through no fault of its own. Post--Cold War crises like Bosnia and Rwanda have demonstrated that the UN is incapable of fulfilling its role, at least without such major reforms that the institution would effectively be reinvented. The UN has become a giant alleviation machine, and UN officials have more and more concentrated on the most dire places in the world. The president of the United States or the Japanese premier does not wake up thinking about massacres in Congo or the war along the Tajik-Afghan border; Kofi Annan does. But for him, there seems to be nothing promethean about such knowledge. When he and, for that matter, his predecessor, the justly maligned Boutros Boutros-Ghali, have spoken in the name of the UN Charter--that is, have used the UN secretar y-generalship as a bully pulpit to plead the cause of a better world--they have tended to pretend things are getting better rather than worse. …

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