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United Nations

My Lords, in the few minutes I have available to wind up for the Opposition, I will confine myself to saying that I almost 100 per cent agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Howells of St Davids, had to say at the opening of this debate. The UN is falling short; the core of it does need reform; it is spectacularly out of step, as she says, and far-reaching transformation is needed. The irony is that successive Secretaries-General have called for reform to come again and again, when people have sincerely wanted reform, but it has not happened. Frankly, it is ridiculous that Japan and Germany and India and Brazil should not now be permanent members of the UN Security Council. Japan and Germany are the second and third largest funders of the United Nations, and Japan pays one fifth of all peacekeeping operations of the UN. It is extraordinary that they are still excluded. I agree very much agree with those who say—the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is to the forefront in this—that reform needs to reflect the shift away from the old western and Atlantic hegemony. I agree with the noble Lord and I love his phrase "indispensable but ineffective", which just about sums up the position. The same could be said of many other 20th-century institutions, in fact the whole architecture of the 20th century, which includes NATO, the IMF which has entirely the wrong weighting, the World Trade Organisation which is running out of steam, the nuclear proliferation or NPT regime which needs revising, and indeed the European Union. We expect much too much of the United Nations. Our hopes become almost overweighed in favour of the belief that the United Nations, by talking and gathering together, can solve all the world’s problems. It cannot be done in that centralised way. We need new platforms and new networks in a totally transformed global situation. I was glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, in particular, say that the Commonwealth had a key part to play in this. When it comes to, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, allowing the people of smaller and deprived nations to feel that they have a part to play, it is organisations such as the Commonwealth that are bound to give a supplementary role to what can be provided in the enormous and sometimes remote United Nations with its 181 members, or whatever the number is, where voices tend to be drowned in the higher babble of the whole organisation. I simply end my few minutes by quoting Boutros Boutros Ghali, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, who said in 1993: ""The globalization now taking place requires a profoundly renewed concept of the State. Between the isolated individual and the world there must be an intermediate element. This element is the State and national sovereignty. They respond to the needs of all human beings for identification. In a world both impersonal and fragmented such a need is greater than it has ever been in history"." That Secretary-General put his finger on the fundamental need for a balance between the great UN forum, which has its part to play, and the needs of national identity and the nation states, which will be the most creative network of the 21st century. Boutros Boutros Ghali was one of the best Secretaries-General that the United Nations has had; of course, they refused him a second term.