The United Nations: Policy and Financing Alternatives. - book reviews

The sub-sub-title of this book is "Innovative Proposals by Visionary Leaders." And so it is. Published in 1995 as the first report of the Global Commission to Fund the United Nations, it has served and is serving its purpose: to stir up the imagination and let sail facts and proposals that contradict such popular assumptions as "most Americans have qualms about the United Nations and its future directions," or "Americans are opposed to taxes for international pollution or currency exchange." The UN budget seems so meager by the end of this book that you wonder why it's getting such a bad rap. A fine document to recalibrate the UN's role in the global commons.

"Who pays for international relations'?... What do `international relations' cost? The calculation cannot be based on the expense accounts of the scattering of diplomats around the world, let alone those concentrated in New York or Geneva or other international watering holes.

You would surely have to add in all the intelligence agents clustered in Washington, Brussels, Istanbul, Cairo, Tokyo and the many other places ... who are assumed ... to have some higher wisdom highly priced in the international market for secret information. And you would have to count the many agents of less impressive yet even more international networks of merchants, shipowners, airlines, insurance underwriters, currency speculators-and militant religionists and terrorist conspirators.

Then you world have to widen the net to count the world's military establishments, and the puffery of the arms suppliers....Better add in, too, the growing army of volunteer peacemakers who cluster around those who brandish the biggest weapons.

You could widen the net further to include all the trade negotiators, the exporters and importers, the protectionist lobbies and free-trade advocates, the business firms that span the globe with their internal transactions, and the miracle workers in information technology who make possible a truly global trade in things, money, culture, ideas and information, more and more of it bounced off orbiters in the sky. You should certainly count the cost of exchanging more than a trillion dollars...each day across the world's increasingly porous boundaries. And you can't leave out the costs of migration -- the costs that were too heavy to bear where the migrants came from, the costs of holding some of them in semi-permanent `camps,' the costs of their transition in leaky boats and across leaky frontiers, the costs of proving they belong somewhere else, the costs of their resettlement wherever compassionate new neighbors welcome them to a new `home'....

The aggregate costs of international relations are thus incalculable. What can be calculated, calibrated, judged, and acted on are the costs of doing something international about the human choices and chances in `world affairs.'

"Virtually an Americans favour US participation in a world conference to make the United Nations more effective in the area of

* global security-92% favour;

* global environmental issues favour; 93%

* helping to shift economies to sustainable development that uses resources less wastefully and does not foreclose continuing development for future generations -- 84% favour.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group