Why America Still Needs the United Nations

Shashi Tharoor

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

Summary:  Multilateralism is a means, not an end, and there is no more multilateral body than the UN. That may make it unwieldy at times, but the UN's inclusiveness is the key to the legitimacy only it can confer. The organization thus remains an essential force in international politics, and one the United States benefits from greatly.

Shashi Tharoor is UN Undersecretary-General for Communications and Public Information and the author of eight books, including the forthcoming Nehru: The Invention of India. These are his personal views.

THE POWER OF LEGITIMACY

In September 2002, a radical new document declared that "no nation can build a safer, better world alone." These words came not from some utopian internationalist or ivory-tower academic, but from the new National Security Strategy of the United States. For all its underpinnings in realpolitik, the strategy committed the United States to multilateralism.

This statement should not have been surprising, for multilateralism, of course, is not only a means but an end. And for good reason: in international affairs, the choice of method can serve to advertise a country's good faith or disinterestedness. Most states act both unilaterally and multilaterally at times: the former in defense of their national security or in their immediate backyard, the latter in pursuit of global causes. The larger a country's backyard, however, the greater the temptation to act unilaterally across it -- a problem most acute in the case of the United States. But the more far-reaching the issue and the greater the number of countries affected, the less sufficient unilateralism proves, and the less viable it becomes. Hence the ongoing need for multilateralism -- which the U.S. National Security Strategy seemed to recognize.

The United Nations is the preeminent institution of multilateralism. It provides a forum where sovereign states can come together to share burdens, address common problems, and seize common opportunities. The UN helps establish the norms that many countries -- including the United States -- would like everyone to live by. Throughout its history, the United States has seen the advantages of living in a world organized according to laws, values, and principles; in fact, the republic was not yet 30 years old when it first went to war in defense of international law (attacking the Barbary pirates in 1804), and it has done so multiple times since, including in the first Gulf War. The UN, for all its imperfections -- real and perceived -- reflects this American preference for an ordered world.

That Washington has often used force on behalf of such principles makes good political sense. After all, acting in the name of international law is always preferable to acting in the name of national security. Everyone has a stake in the former, and so couching U.S. action in terms of international law universalizes American interests and comforts potential allies. When American actions seem driven by U.S. national security imperatives alone, partners can prove hard to find -- as became clear when, in marked contrast to the first Gulf War, only a small "coalition of the willing" joined Washington the second time around in Iraq. Working within the UN allows the United States to maximize what Joseph Nye calls its "soft power" -- the ability to attract and persuade others to adopt the American agenda -- rather than relying purely on the dissuasive or coercive "hard power" of military force.

Global challenges also require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which the United States or any other country can act completely alone. This truism is currently being confirmed in Iraq, where Washington is discovering that it is better at winning wars than constructing peace. The limitations of military strength in nation building are readily apparent; as Talleyrand pointed out, the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is to sit on it.

Equally important, however, is the need for legitimacy, and here again the UN has proven invaluable. The organization's role in legitimizing state action has been both its most cherished function and, in the United States, its most controversial. As the world's preeminent international organization, the UN embodies world opinion, or at least the opinion of the world's legally constituted states. When the UN Security Council passes a resolution, it is seen as speaking for (and in the interests of) humanity as a whole, and in so doing it confers a legitimacy that is respected by the world's governments, and usually by their publics. When the resolution in question is passed under Chapter VII of the charter -- that document's enforcement provisions -- it becomes legally binding on all member states.

The composition of the council that passes a particular resolution is no more relevant to its legitimacy than that of a national parliament that passes a law; congressional legislation, by the same logic, is not less binding on Americans if the majority that votes for it comes overwhelmingly from small states. The legitimacy of the UN inheres in its universality and not in its structural details, which have long been subject to the clamor for reform. Some Americans have scorned the status and conduct of many of the Security Council members that failed to support the United States on Iraq. But this unseemly sneering over the right of Angola, Cameroon, or Guinea to pass judgment in the council overlooks the valuable contribution their presence makes. The election of small countries to the council bolsters its legitimacy by enhancing its role as a repository of world opinion.

Universality of membership also allows the world to view the UN as something more than the sum of its parts, as an entity that transcends the interests of any one member state. The UN guards the vital principles entrenched in its charter, notably the sovereign equality of states and the inadmissibility of interference in their internal affairs. It is precisely because the UN is the chief guardian of both these sacrosanct principles that it alone is allowed to approve derogations from them. Thus when the UN, in particular the Security Council, legislates an intervention in a sovereign state, it is still seen as upholding the basic principles even while approving a departure from them. When an individual state acts in defiance of the UN, on the other hand, it merely violates these principles.