THE U.N. AT 50: WHO NEEDS IT?

By JAMES WALSH

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS THE light. At a time when much of the world still huddled under blackouts, the crystalline blaze of San Francisco after dark looked like the very kingdom of heaven. This spectacle greeting the emissaries of 51 countries in April 1945 was an inspiration, for their long journeys to California had a transcendent purpose. Even as Soviet troops were massing on the outskirts of Berlin, even as American and Japanese forces were suffering epic losses in their closing battles, the delegations gathered by the Golden Gate to ordain an end to war for all time.

Never again would one country bulldoze a path of conquest over a neighbor. Never again would the great powers lock in a titanic death struggle ravaging the continents. More than that, the causes of war would be extinguished. Tyranny, injustice and deprivation would never again blot out the light of the world. Governments of good faith would band together under the universal benevolence of something called the United Nations.

How beautiful. How brave. How naive.

History, that insufferable know-it-all, has its noble brow furrowed. While noting much to commend in the way this lofty experiment has played out, it finds the U.N.'s charter conference an affair doomed by internal contradictions. Haunted by the disaster of appeasement, the framers assumed all humanity would rally behind the rescue of any country, no matter how remote the peril to any other country's vital interest. They believed each government would surrender at any time its warmaking powers to a supranational force. They provided not at all for conflicts within nations, and they considered open debate and resolutions of goodwill to be a cure for all evils.

As the world's leaders assemble in New York City this week to celebrate the U.N.'s formal 50th birthday, the occasion augurs more than traffic gridlock unlike any that Manhattan has ever seen. Outside of the champagne parties at Turtle Bay, site of the U.N. headquarters, the anniversary stands to produce a feast of cynicism about the visions of 1945. From this angle, the organization's ambitions look overblown and its bureaucratic arthritis embarrassing. As fashion statement, the U.N. is growing scandalously demode.

Such dismissiveness is perhaps too facile. An enterprise that began life at the blinding dawn of the nuclear age has achieved quite a lot during a passage singularly fraught with danger for the world. The U.N. has served as a forum for hair-trigger antagonists to meet regularly and vent their grievances. It has provided a framework for international laws that govern activities ranging from nuclear nonproliferation to the use of outer space and the ocean floors. It has helped unfortunate nations set up democracies, create livelihoods and combat threats to health. It has acted as a useful buffer in 35 peacekeeping missions, and more than 30 million desperate refugees have come under its wing. Pope John Paul II's Oct. 5 speech to the U.N. highlighted the organization's broad battlefront against circumstances that "offend the conscience of humanity and pose a formidable moral challenge to the human family."

Why much of the world still honors this middle-aged venture is evident, then. But among some Western nations that designed it, at least, the U.N. today often appears worse than dowdy. To them it looks oafish, overgrown, hypocritical, rife with ineptitude and possibly--as some overwrought Americans insist on seeing it--downright wicked. By this light, the creation of a half-century ago comports with reality now about as much as the cookie-cutter shapes of its East River edifices still evoke an idealized modernity. Budget-strapped, groping for a fresh start, the U.N. seems to slouch toward the millennium like a limping panhandler.

As the golden jubilee opens, a historic reckoning seems at hand. Decades of tinkering with the system are at a dead end. Resistance to change within a proliferation of petty baronies and bishoprics has buried in paper nearly every major reform effort. A growing view holds that the U.N. must be reinvented--pardon the expression--in a basic way. Declares Dragoljub Najman, a native Yugoslav who worked in the U.N.'s cultural arm for 30 years: "It's become too large, it's underfinanced, and it's under serious fire. The question you must ask yourself then is whether the U.N. is not headed toward some kind of disaster. I think the answer is probably yes." U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright phrases the choice bluntly: "Reform or die."

Financial calamity beckons even now. A total of $3.3 billion in unpaid assessments is owed by all countries but one, with the U.S. the biggest deadbeat. Washington's arrears amount to $1.4 billion, or nearly a third of the U.N.'s combined budgets of $4.5 billion. The U.S. Congress's Republican majority has withheld payments as a gesture of contempt for the U.N.'s perceived wastefulness. America's 31% budget share may be too high, but the U.N. was justifiably stunned when Congress unilaterally slashed the levy to 25%. This month in the General Assembly, a parade of Uncle Sam's allies scolded this delinquency--what British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind called "representation without taxation."

Just as dire an imbalance shows up on the U.N.'s moral ledgers. With the debacle of Bosnia, in which a "protective" contingent of Blue Helmets could scarcely protect itself, respect for the institution as peacekeeper went into nearly full eclipse. A world that once saw U.N. personnel as angels of redemption witnessed the sight last December of Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali enduring jeers on the streets of Sarajevo. Earlier last year, the peacekeeping sentinel sat on his hands as a volcanic outbreak of bloodshed in Rwanda engulfed half a million people. What appears now to be a prospect for peace in Bosnia has not afforded any graceful exit for the U.N.: only after the Western governments took over the trigger and American diplomacy entered the breach did a settlement begin to take shape.

Such failures make up only isolated counts of a wider indictment. British journalist Rosemary Righter, whose new book critiquing the U.N. is called Utopia Lost, notes that the planetary problem solver figured as a mere bystander in the climactic upheaval of the past 50 years: the Soviet empire's collapse, Germany's unification and the cold war's end. She says, "This was probably the greatest political challenge of this decade, yet it didn't occur to the Russians or East Europeans or anyone else that the U.N. was relevant."

The fall from heaven could not be in sharper contrast with the ideals articulated in San Francisco, where rhetoric went so far as to quote Scripture about the fulfillment of prophecy. Cordell Hull, a U.S. Secretary of State during World War II, proclaimed, "There will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, balances of power or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests."

Minerva Bernardino, the Dominican Republic's delegate and later the first female U.N. ambassador, recalls the sense of high mission. Bernardino, now 88, broke her ankle at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel the night before she was to address the conclave. "They told me I needed a cast to my knee. I said no. They said I would lose my foot. I said, 'I have to make a speech tomorrow and prefer to lose my foot.'" Harold Stassen, also 88 today, was in the U.S. delegation. The former Governor of Minnesota and perennial presidential hopeful recalls the thrill on June 21 as a plenary session in the city's Opera House received a motion to sign the charter: "Nobody spoke. Somebody said, 'Let's vote.' So we did. The chairmen began to stand, and we suddenly realized that everybody was standing, and we broke into applause."

Despite such inspiring beginnings, the parliament of nations at 50 has aged into such a rattletrap that its gruffest champions acknowledge design flaws. More than ever, the Secretariat appears to be a papermaking machine, the General Assembly an unwieldy debating society, and the mishmash of agencies spread around the globe a swamp into which good intentions can sink with barely a trace. Above all, the paramount U.N. duty of keeping the peace is in disgrace. All those recent ambitions of using the Security Council as the vehicle of a post-cold war new world order, with the Permanent Five members exercising a broad mandate from sympathetic countries to deter war, have proved as futile as a stop sign in a demolition derby. What went wrong?

"Failure was built into it by an extraordinary orgy of exaggerated expectations," argues Abba Eban, the longtime former Israeli Foreign Minister and veteran U.N. diplomat. The "messianic feeling, chiefly in the U.S.," that fueled it was captured by Hull's pronouncement, Eban believes. "It was the most ill-considered statement in the history of diplomacy, because he was saying that international organization--which after all is a mechanism, not a principle--was a panacea which would make all previous diplomacy obsolete. It turned out to be totally untrue."

All this from a believer in the institution--as a promise for sorting out truly worldwide issues, at least. In this view, the U.N. as policeman is suited for the job of global traffic cop, not crimebuster. Even though it acted with resolve 35 years ago in what was then the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), and though its authority lent crucial coloration to the American-led defense of South Korea in the 1950s and the ejection of Iraqi invaders from Kuwait as this decade opened, the list of disputes negotiated with only a walk-on part, if any, for the supposed supercop is impressive: a historic handshake across the Rhine between West Germany and France; the start of the Common Market and today's European Union; nuclear treaties between Washington and Moscow; America's rapprochement with China; the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978 and the 1983 Israeli-Palestinian pact.

And hostilities that the hundred-eyed Argus failed to prevent are too numerous to count. Many have fallen into the gray zone of civil war--a counterinsurgency or freedom fight, depending on who tells it, but in any case off limits to a Jesuitic fastidiousness against interfering in a sovereign state. This principle of inviolate borders underscores how much the U.N. was shaped by lessons of the 1930s: Mussolini's seizure of Ethiopia, Japan's invasion of China and Hitler's devouring the appetizer of the Sudetenland. As generals tend to fight the last war, so the U.N.'s founders undertook to preserve the last peace.

Although the U.N. enshrined a roster of universal human rights in 1948, its rule of sovereign noninterference is upheld as sacrosanct by regimes whose behavior at home would not bear close scrutiny. Says Sir Anthony Parsons, British ambassador to the U.N. from 1979 to 1982: "The U.N. has been a disastrous failure there. It set the standards and adopted conventions on everything you can think of--torture, women, children, civil rights--but does nothing to enforce them."

As reform fatigue leads Western countries to despair for the U.N., a number of critics prescribe benign neglect for a creature swollen with rhetoric, unread paperwork and merely stray achievements on the ground. Many agencies are financed in large part by voluntary funds; governments could favor worthwhile functions and let the rest wither away. Parsons' verdict: "Well, let it become irrelevant if it won't reform itself. Don't let's waste too much time and the energy of clever men."

That seems a cruel fate for the principle of world community made flesh with such high purpose. Roelof ("Pik") Botha, South Africa's Foreign Minister from 1977 to last year, still believes in the U.N. idea despite its shortcomings. Though the institution is "like a company that can't market its products and whose board members put their own interests first," Botha suspects that devolution of peacekeeping authority to the regional level could bring the same strengths as any corporate shake-up nowadays. Najman goes further. He thinks the U.N. will increasingly turn to "contracting" out its duties as dire needs arise, the way NATO shouldered responsibilities in Bosnia.

Of course, the big powers that designed the organization could still shake it by the ears if they wished. Yet often they prefer to use the U.N. as a scapegoat for their own lack of resolve, which was what really failed Bosnia for so long. A special debility in handling crises has come from America's modern horror at the possibility that a single soldier might die. Eban notes, "Nothing can happen without the Americans. Everything can happen with them."

Trouble is, the U.N. simply cannot do everything. Governments ask it to do too much already. Clearly, at least, the institution can no longer stretch its peacekeeping duties to every emergency that arises unless member nations--13 of which refused a U.N. call to rescue poor Rwanda--are prepared to face with muscle any aggression against Blue Helmets.

Terming rebukes of the U.N. "unfair," Egypt's Ali Dessouki, dean of economics and political science at Cairo University, observes, "When the big powers are in agreement, the U.N. performs. When they aren't, the U.N. is paralyzed." Security Council members, who ensure that no Secretary-General will pose a challenge to their individual authority, could invest the office with Bismarckian clout at any time. Short of that, they could put a quietus to the outmoded system of rotating the chief's job among "nonaligned" parts of the world.

At bottom, what the U.N. has that no specialized agency can match is universal moral legitimacy. However tattered it may be, the notion of a global human commonwealth is integral to the postwar world and its challenges. As a new century nears, the invention of 1945 may gain a new lease on life in tackling such genuinely globe-girdling issues as energy supplies, counterterrorism, environmental decay and drug trafficking, as well as disease control-jobs no single country can manage. Says Eban: "In the end, the idea of world community is going to succeed. Therefore, the U.N. should dig in its heels and bide its time. The idea of living without a unitary framework of relations, now of all times, is just too crazy." History today may find the luminous San Francisco conference foolish, but it could yet decide: no, crazy-brave.

--Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris, Helen Gibson/London, Marguerite Michaels/New York and Eric Silver/Jerusalem, with other bureaus

With reporting by BRUCE CRUMLEY/PARIS, HELEN GIBSON/LONDON, MARGUERITE MICHAELS/NEW YORK AND ERIC SILVER/JERUSALEM, WITH OTHER BUREAUS