Festivals, Museums, and Awards
In stirring opening remarks at the international 2021 mega-conference, Palestine Writes, Susan Abulhawa, asserts that “..this festival is meant to expand Palestine’s cultural imprint in the world.” Such an imprint is being achieved by Palestinian cultural creativity, inscribing the Palestinian struggle and the distinctive spirit of the Palestinian people at the center of the moral and political imagination of persons of conscience around the world. By so doing, Israel’s concerted attempt to remove the Palestinian struggle from the global agenda is being thwarted, discredited, and increasingly likely, reversed.
When the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court had the audacity to decide on February 5, 2021 that its Prosecutor had the authority to investigate allegations of international crimes of Israel in occupied Palestine it both struck a blow for international law but also exposed the raw nerve of Israeli defensive sensibilities. Netanyahu slammed this professionally crafted judicial opinion by respected jurists as ‘pure antisemitism’ and other Israeli leaders denounced the ICC decision as one more indication of Israel-bashing. Such an inflated response exposed the raw nerve of Israel vulnerability to being judged by international law criteria. After all at this stage the ICC proposed nothing more than an investigation of behavior in occupied Palestine that seemed beyond much doubt to violate the basis norms of international humanitarian law. Israel’s angry expresses its acute awareness of the importance of what goes on in the realm of ideas, whether legal, moral, or cultural.
Cultural vitality and pride is in such a setting integral to resistance.The outcome of this dialectical interplay between asserting the Palestinian presence and resisting Israel continuous practices of erasure has been the central theme of the struggle for land, sovereign authority, international legitimacy that has gone on for over a century, and seems likely to continue as far ahead as can be foreseen. To keep Palestinian hopes alive under such circumstances of oppression and uncertainty depends on remembering precious past times, envisaging a brighter future, and depicting the heroic exploits and incidents of the long ordeal. Such ‘work’ relies heavily on the energies of the mind, above all the moral, political, cultural, and spiritual imagination as expressed through words, images, and sounds, that is, poems and fiction, pictures and painting, and music of all sorts. This work is being done superbly well by Palestinian artists, whether in prisons, refugee camps, or exile. It inspires those of us who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people as they break their chains to live as a free people sooner than our reasoning faculties suggest as possible. It is this mysterious anticipatory power of the imagination to make the impossible happen that makes experts and politicians repeatedly wrong, and so often vindicates the prophetic sensibilities of poets and visionaries.
I had the pleasure of taking part a decade ago in the Palestine Book Awards an annual event in London that combined celebrating the most notable books published during the year, either by Palestinian writers or about Palestine. The events are also high-spirited, likeminded gatherings at which several speakers trace the trajectory of the struggle, comment upon the ordeals afflicting the Palestinian people, while marveling at that special trait of sumud that underpina their uncanny hopes for the future. I was dazzled then, and since, by the Palestinian cultural performance exhibited by the quality of the books receiving these annual awards, Olympian standards sustained over all these years. These PBA gatherings have also been learning experiences for me, especially clarifying the relations between cultural vitality and emancipatory politics.
For many years, I viewed culture as a stimulating confirmation of Palestinian steadfastness, or sumud, which I innocently understood somewhat too passively as ‘resilience,’ essentially the capacity to endure abuse without giving in to malevolent pressures, while also bearing witness to the righteousness of a struggle for basic rights. Underpinning every sentiment was this sense of a collective sacred mission to recover a stolen national homeland, no matter what the costs and however long it takes. Without the fulfillment of such a mission every pause in the ongoing
struggle will never amount to more than a ceasefire, although the entrepreneurs of diplomacy may call it ‘peace.’ The right of self-determination is never realized without justice as ascetained by the satisfaction of legitimate grievances. Such a requirement does rule out a political compromise, especially as here where valid claims overlap and where the passage of
time has given rise to legitimating expectations once seen as unlawful encroachments. Yet a compromise between two aspiring peoples must be based on the abandonment of hierarchy and the acceptance of equality as guiding the negotiated relationship.
It is only through a longer immersion in this Palestinian engagement with the arts that I have come to realize that culture is resistance, and perhaps in the end more critical to the outcome of a struggle for land, dignity, sovereignty and homeland, than weaponry and coercive diplomacy. I realized that ‘culture’ broadly conceived was what I had delimited as ‘legitimacy’ by reference to Palestinian grievances as articulated through the rhetoric of law and morality.
Why Culture Matters
For a variety of reasons, I had become convinced that in the period since 1945 that the outcome of conflicts for the control of national space in colonized societies were more often won by the side that prevailed in the domains of symbolic politics rather than as was believed by most political elites, who claimed for themselves the mantle of ‘realism,’ by the side that controlled bloody battlefields and combat zones by force of arms. I named this new reality ‘Legitimacy Wars’ reshaping the balance of forces in many national settings as a ‘war’ waged with norms of law, morality, spiritual commitment, and truthfulness, rather than just with guns, missiles, and propaganda.
It was my further observation that the downfall of European colonialism all over Asia and Africa was a consequence of being defeated in a series of Legitimacy Wars, that is, by the weaker side militarily. What sustained these struggles was this vision of righteousness that could conquer hearts and minds, if mobilized, and if exerting sufficient pressure, could eventually transform even the calculations of militarists, politicians, and cynical commentators. Such a process over 25 years ago, it should be remembered, brought apartheid South Africa to its knees, unexpectedly produced the release of Nelson Mandela from a seemingly endless jail sentence. Systemic racism of the worst sort was replaced with constitutional democracy. All this was achieved without reliance on guns and bullets. The anti-apartheid movement waged a Legitimacy War on a global scale and prevailed, with Mandela hailed worldwide as leader and peacemaker.
This dynamic of mind over matter is not so easy to comprehend, but without this understanding, the importance of the cultural dimension of a Legitimacy War cannot be grasped. It is partly historically conditioned. For decades before the anti-colonial wars were won by colonized peoples, there was an acceptance of the idea that without better weapons the foreigners would never be defeated by the natives. It was the rise of nationalism as empowering people that created confidence in the validity of national grievances and several changes took place on the colonial side that eventually made it too costly in lives and treasures to uphold by force of arms its position of control and privilege. For one thing the morality of colonialism had come under ideological challenge even in the home countries of the colonialists, especially after the Russian Revolution, for another the European colonial powers were in decline and Western interests were being upheld by the United States with its own geopolitical ambivalence resulting from an anti-colonial heritage, which although weak and relegated to the past, was not entirely absent. It was also important that the economics that made colonialism and racism so profitable had been largely superseded by industrialism. On the nationalist side, these developments raised the expectations of national leaders who saw paths to victory, based on sustained struggle and perseverance. The belief gained societal credence that colonialism was a dying enterprise, and that it was better for the colonist to get out sooner than persist until pushed out.
The Zionist Project, Settler Colonialism, Palestinian Catastrophe
It is obvious that national characteristics play a vital role in the course of such struggles. The Palestinian situation is rendered more complex and uncertain due to the distinctiveness of Palestine. Although the land of Palestine was predominantly Arab in 1917 when the infamous Balfour Declaration was made by the British Foreign Office, with a Jewish minority of under 10%, the ambitions of the Zionist Project were for a long time not viewed through the optic of colonialism, but rather more in accord with a one-sided claim of a needed sanctuary for the Jewish people that would be freed from the afflictions of antisemitism. The underlying Zionist claim was that if a Jewish homeland could be established in Palestine, it would occasion a rebirth of Judaism in an atmosphere where the virtues of Jewishness would reveal themselves. Somehow the absolute necessity of disappearing as many Palestinians as possible remained a hidden part of the dominant Zionist narrative so effectively promoted and disseminated throughout the West.
The urgency surrounding the Zionist Project and its international political leverage increased as the extremities of Nazi antisemitism unfolded in an international atmosphere beset by increasing tensions between Hitler’s Germany and the liberal democracies. The most unspeakable of Jewish tragedies culminated in the Holocaust giving moral and political traction to Zionist claims, the full extent of which were only revealed by stages, a process that is continuing until today. While this was happening to the Jews under the midday sun of Western media ascendancy, the Palestinian reality was obscured by shadows taking the form of demeaning propaganda and one erasure after another, constant humiliations, and such a total marginalization that their grievances were both unknown and delegitimized. Even the infant UN conspired by decreeing partition over Arab objections and without consultation with Palestinians or their representatives, much less securing the consent, of the population. Palestine was partitioned by UN decree, with its territory to be divided into two sovereign states and the city of Jerusalem internationalized. What transpired was the cynical acceptance of partition by the Zionist side as a stepping stone to the fuller realization of its dream and its naïve rejection by the Palestinian side understandably outraged by an international proposal to establish by fiat a Jewish state, splintering in a cruel manner an ancient and essentially non-Jewish society.
From that defining moment in 1947, the future of racial dominance and victimization was prefigured. First came the Nabka, involving the forcible dispossession and displacement of as many as 750,000 Palestinians. Such gross ethnic cleansing was coupled with the total demolition of hundreds of Palestinian villages, further reinforced by an iron law of non-return to their homes and communities that had deep roots. It was this Western infusion of Jews, either escaping from persecution in Europe or spurred by the idealistic visions of a Jewish renaissance in this nascent state, that led inevitably to many cycles of resistance and repression, to the permanent indignities of refugee camps and the uncertainties of involuntary exile. The Western view was that Jewish victimization must be acknowledged through impunity for recourse to crimes against humanity while the existential fury of Palestinian victimization must be erased from the Western mind or discredited by images of backwardness, racism, and totally dismissed by superimposing allegations of terrorism so as to hide Palestinian recourse to its collective right of resistance. In this maelstrom of erasures and distortions, Israel benefitted from establishing its false credentials as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East,’ overlooking how such a temporarily legitimating identity rested on permanently driving Palestinian residents from their land.
The early Israeli leadership was Jewish to its secular core, and defiantly non-religious. And yet David Ben-Gurion, the charismatic first president of the state of Israel tactically proclaimed, ‘the bible shall be our weapon.’ What he meant became clear only by stages. Ben Gurion was referencing the degree to which the Zionist Project was a ongoing process rather than a single state-establishing terminal event associated with the origins of the state of Israel when it was established in 1948. As the process unfolded it became clear that the light at the end of the Zionist tunnel was the whole of ‘the promised land,’ a biblical injunction without any foundation in either international law or contemporary notions of self-determination. It required the passage of 70 years for Israelis to feel confident enough to allow the light of day to reveal the true nature of Zionist agenda in the Basic Law enacted in 2018. This law chiseled into the granite of irreversibility,d removed the last shred of ambiguity from the reality of Israel as resting on the legalization of Jewish supremacy. The concrete embodiments of the Basic Law were unmistakable: making Hebrew the only official language of the country and affirming that only Jews enjoyed the right of self-determination within Israel. These de facto circumstances had existed before being made explicit by legal enactment, but were effectively occluded for decades from critical scrutiny by Israeli diplomatic ploys and the charade of the Oslo ‘peace process’ that gave Israel the time it needed to establish a choke hold in the West Bank that the UN had set aside for a Palestinian state by way of a cascade of settlements that even the United States and European Union countries considered to be flagrant violations of Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
As time passed, the godfathering role of the UN as providing legitimacy for the partition of Palestine gave way to the strategic partisanship with the United States that provided the geopolitical muscle needed to keep shrinking the territorial and political expectations of any viable Palestinian state while nurturing Israeli ambitions to achieve a Greater Israel. Not only does the United States annually subsidize Israel’s military superiority with respect to its neighbors, but it turns a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal while prepping for an aggressive war should Iran even come close to the nuclear weapons threshold. Instead of seeking denuclearization of the region by agreeing to a nuclear free zone for the Middle East, favored by all relevant governments including Iran except Israel. The US allows Israel plus its Arab Gulf partners to keep the Middle East on the knife edge of a potentially disastrous regional war.
Without looking at the many bends in the road that led from the birth of the Zionist Project in the late 19th century to the present, we can grasp the tragic depth of what has befallen the Palestinian people through two apertures of historical illumination: settler colonialism and apartheid. By and large, due to the post-1945 surge of nationalist self-assertion, European colonialism has been tossed in the dustbin of history, with the exception of those former British colonies that in the colonial age were able to establish their own independent sovereign states by driving native populations into near total physical and pscho-political submission. Israel is a more flagrant exception, defying the decolonizing trend by establishing and even internationally legitimating its state during the last stage of transition to post-colonial realities. Because the fundamental rationale of the Israeli state is at once racist and superimposed on Palestine by European outsiders against their will in a hostile political environment, repression, resistance, and apartheid necessarily follow with an iron logic that will persists as long as both sides are unwavering in their claims of right.
There is no denying the existence of contradictory narratives, and the need for choice and commitment. The Israeli narrative, as suggested, rests on escaping persecution, Biblical authority and entitlement, effective control, the erasure of Palestinian legitimacy, and geopolitical alignments, as well as international, and a fragile and partial regional acceptance taking the form of Abraham Accords tying several Arab regimes to a process of normalization with Israel. These agreements were the last hour initiatives of the Trump presidency that bribed and browbeat Arab leaders to take steps that made the U.S. look like a peacemaker in the Middle East even if ‘the deal of the century’ found its way into the nearest garbage can.
In contrast, the Palestinian narrative is premised on sanctified national identity, struggle for basic rights, ordeals of suffering and victimization, being disenfranchised in their own homeland, supported by historical flows and precedents in analogous Legitimacy Wars, and a global solidarity movement that is responsive to aspirations for a just and sustainable peace that will allow both peoples to flourish as equals in a single democratic, secular state. Not surprisingly, the strongest most heartfelt demonstrations of solidarity come from South Africa and Namibia, that is, where the European forms of settler colonialism and apartheid were most starkly enacted. It is also no accident that Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland and Black Lives Matter in the United States bond so spontaneously with the Palestinian ordeal as all of these
movements have long endured abuse based on race and religion.
The politics of domination dims the light cast by cultural forces leading to detachment and dissent, while the culture of resistance illuminates suffering and struggle by casting blazing lights. It is in this spirit that we look over the list of those writers honored each year by PBA.
It was this same spirit of cultural vivacity, rather than spectacular shows of counterinsurgency weapons, that made Palestine Writes, a spiritual sibling of PBA, such an exemplary and memorable festival of love, solidarity, witnessing, and truth-telling. This contrast between pride in weaponry and hopes/nightmares is to express in the clearest possible cultural idiom the stark differences between a reliance for ‘peace’ on state-sponsored violence as the source of social order and on nurturing visions that celebrate peaceful futures that animate this desperate people-driven, bottom-up struggle for emancipation.
The Realities of Cultural Resistance
Susan Abulhawa’s heartfelt eloquence sets the tone for both Palestine Writes and PBA. Her opening greetings to those around the world attending the online festival, who were gathered virtually in the city of Jerusalem chosen both as a point of meeting for attendees but also the emotive geographical North Star of the Palestinian struggle. Her initial words drew attention to “the thirst for….dedicated celebration of our heritage, our imaginations, and cultural productions.” She went on to make it unmistakably clear that this festival was not to be experienced as a kind of literary salon of mutual self-congratulation: this festival “is for the stone throwers, the street marchers, the agitators and disrupters. It is for the kite flyers, the hunger strikers, the political prisoners.”
I was also struck by Palestinian/American poet Forgo Tbakhi’s quote of Sophia Azeb haunting observation, “[w]e are always in the process of becoming Palestinians.” Tbakhi adds, “[p]art of the cultural revolt is a deep investment in asking what it means to be Palestinian or what it could mean.” Putting the fierce invocation of Abulhawa together with the soul-searching of Tbakhi seems to suggest that the artist’s vocation does not end on the printed page, vivid painting, musical score, or cinematic imagery. Beyond the cultural productions, as crucial as they are, is the commitment to the risks, costs, and satisfactions of activism, whatever form it might take.
Palestine Writes ended with moving testimony by two iconic figures, Angela Davis and Hanan Ashrawi, revered for their persevering, lifelong, brave, and principled engagement in struggles for liberation from oppression. It is symbolic that Angela Davis came to the Palestinian movement of solidarity from her lifelong opposition to racism in all its ugly manifestations in the United States.
A letter from political prisoner, Khalida Jarrar, smuggled from her Israeli jail cell and read by her daughters at Palestine Writes offer us the authentic confirmation of how integral access to culture, which during imprisonment means books, is to the politics of struggle: “Books constitute the foundation of life in prison. They preserve the psychological and moral balance of the freedom fighters who view their detentions as part of the overall resistance against the colonial occupation of Palestine. Books also play a role in each prisoner’s individual struggle of will between them and the prisons’ authorities. In other words, the struggle becomes a challenge for Palestinian prisoners as the jailors seek to strip us from our humanity and keep us isolated from the outside world. The challenge for prisoners is to transform our detention into a state of a ‘cultural revolution’ through reading, education and literary discussions.”
As we ponder such words, we understand that books are not only a matter of keeping morale under conditions of isolation, mistreatment, and confinement, but an active medium of struggle in at least two ways. First, in an ongoing battle with prison authorities to be allowed books of choice. Jarrar points out, for instance, that Gramsci’s books are forbidden. And secondly, the reading of books with other political prisoners not only keeps spirits high but amounts to adult education in revolutionary praxis. I had an Egyptian friend who told me similar tales about his years in Nasser’s desert jail for political prisoners.
This fugitive participation of Khalida Jarrar in the final moments of Palestine Writes helps us appreciate that political prisoners are the living expression of Palestinian resistance, paying the double unjustifiable price of living under oppressive prison-like circumstances and then being punished for resisting by being further confined in prison cells. They also remind those of us living outside of Palestine, whether Palestinian or not, that there is a life and death struggle for freedom continuing, which resists not only daily oppression, but also various forms of Israeli expansion, territorial by way of de facto expansion and psychological by seeking to crush all forms of Palestinian resistance including its borderless expression through books, films, dance, music, works of art.
Endings and Beginnings
Against this background we can better appreciate why these cultural occasions on both sides of the Atlantic, although festive, are less about festivity than community, resistance, and struggle. In this regard, calling attention to the best books produced by Palestinians or about Palestine year by year is one active front in the ongoing Legitimacy War, a non-violent battlefield yet combative. These occurrences are also a time of stocktaking in a constantly changing political landscape, as well as opportunities for a renewal and repositioning of engagement by way of solidarity activities. We are not all guilty, but we are all responsible, and can muster only the feeblest of excuses if we decline to play a part. Reading and reflecting on relevant books is playing a part. It raises our consciousness and keeps awakening our conscience to the unmet urgencies of the Palestinian challenge. It can lead from the pages of a book or the rhythms of a song to joining the BDS Campaign or to the streets for protests.
These Palestinian cultural events should be seen as embarking on a series of new beginnings, on deepening as awareness of the present situation, and of enriching remembrances of past glories of heroics and martyrdom, not primarily as events bounded in time. These gatherings are renewals and discoveries of such deeply felt identifications, and beyond that, an opening of our ears to melodic bells, a subtle summoning to take action.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
The UN: Instrumental or Normative?
21 MarThe UN: Instrumental or Normative?
[Prefatory Note: A greatly modified version of this post was published in Middle East Eye on March 12, 2018, under the title, “The UN: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.”]
A Renewed Crisis of Confidence
During the Cold War, the UN frequently disappointed even its most ardent followers because it seemed paralyzed by the rivalry between East and West whenever a political crisis threatened world peace. Giving the veto power to the five permanent members of the Security Council almost assured that when ideological and geopolitical views clashed, which was virtually all the time, during the first 40 years after 1945, the UN would watch unfolding war-threatening events and violent encounters between ideological adversaries from the sidelines.
Then in 1989-1991 the Cold War abruptly ended, and the UN seemed to function for a short while as a Western-led alliance, dramatized by the Security Council support for the First Iraq War that restored Kuwaiti sovereignty in 1992 after Iraq’s aggression the prior year with a show of high technology American military power. Such a use of the UN was hailed at the time by the U.S. Government as signaling the birth of ‘a new world order’ based on the implementation of the UN Charter, and making use of the Security Council as the bastion of world order, which was at last made possible by the Soviet collapse and its acceptance of a Westernized spin on global policy issues. Yet this image of the convergence of the geopolitical agenda and the UN Charter was soon criticized as ‘hegemonic’ and began to be questioned by Russia and China. Even an independent minded UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, let it be known that the unconditional mandate given to allied powers in the Gulf War was not in keeping with the role envisioned for the UN as keeping a watchful eye on any use of force that the Security Council had authorized. The Secretary General at the time, Perez de Cuellar went further, suggesting the Iraq was ready to withdraw from Kuwait prior to being attacked if only given an assurance that it would not in any event , which was never given, suggesting that even this supposed triumph of UN peace diplomacy was a sham, disguising a geopolitical war of choice.
The misleading plea at the Security Council in 2011 for a strictly limited humanitarian intervention in Libya under the auspices of NATO to protect the people of Benghazi from an onslaught was used as a blatant pretext to achieve regime change in Libya by an all out military attack. It succeeded in ridding the country of Qaddafi, replacing his brutal dictatorship with an undeliverable promise to instill a democratic political order. Instead of order what NATO brought to Libya, with Obama’s White House ‘leading from behind,’ was prolonged chaos and strife, and a set of actions that far the initial, quite ambivalent (five absentions, including Russia, China, and Germany) Security Council mandate, the West eventually paid a heavy price, and the UN an even heavier one. The Libyan deception undermined the trust of Russia and China, and others, in the good faith of the West, incapacitating the UN in future crisis situations where it might have played a constructive humanitarian role, most notably Syria, and also Yemen.
Arguably, the tragic ordeal of Syria epitomizes the inability of the UN to uphold even the most minimal interests of humanity, saving civilians from deliberate slaughter and atrocity. Even when ceasefires were belatedly agreed upon, they were almost immediately ignored, making a sad mockery of UN authority, and leaving for the world public to witness a gory spectacle of the most inhumane warfare that went on and on without the will or capacity of the UN to do anything about it. For this reason it is not surprising that the UN is currently belittled and widely seen as irrelevant to the deeper challenges facing the world, whether in combat zones, climate change, human rights, or even threats of nuclear conflagration.
Such a dismissive view of the UN is understandable, in view of these recent developments, but it is clearly mistaken, and even dangerously wrong. The world needs, more even than in 1945 when governments established the UN as a global problem-solving mechanism with the overriding objective of avoiding future major wars, an objective given urgent poignancy by the atomic bombings of Japanese cities. The UN despite failing badly in the context of war/peace has reinvented itself, providing a variety of vital services to the world community, especially valuable for the less developed, smaller, and poorer countries. The UN retains the potential to do more, really much more, but in the end the UN role and contributions are dependent upon the political will of its five permanent members, the so-called p-5, which amount to requiring a geopolitical consensus, which in the current world setting seems almost as elusive as during the Cold War, although for somewhat different reasons.
Four Ways of Looking at the UN
Since its origins there have been four main attitudes toward the UN. When considered together these four overlapping viewpoints help explain why the UN remains controversial in achievement even after more than 70 years of existence. The fact that the Organization is still there, and it is notable that every sovereign state, without exception, values the benefits of membership even if the target of censure or sanctions. This should tell us something about the degree to which governments value participation in the UN and the services that it provides. These four attitudes are not distinct, and do overlap to varying degrees, yet each captures an aspect of the overall debate that has swirled about appraisals of the UN ever since its founding.
First, there are the idealists who want to believe the stirring pledge of the Preamble to the UN Charter “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Such persons believe that a new era of law-based global security was launched when the UN was established in 1945, thinking that the Organization would be ready and able to prevent the recurrence of major war as even leading governments had become scared of future warfare, and it was shown during the anti-Fascist war that ideological and geopolitical adversaries could cooperate when their interests converged. These idealists, although disappointed over the years, continue to hope that at some point the leaders of the big states will strengthen the capabilities of the UN so that it can fulfill this original lofty aspiration of securing a peaceful and just world order and stand ready to meet whatever global challenges arise in the future. In some helpful sense we can think of these UN idealists as ‘incurable optimists,’ given the accumulated experience since 1945.
Then there are the realists who dominate governments and think tanks, and were worried in the immediate aftermath of World War II that the idealists would lead the world astray by raising expectations of great power restraint and cooperation beyond reason and the lessons of history. The realists believe that international history was, and always will be a narrative of military power and powerlessness, with war, war making, and coercive diplomacy a permanent part of the global setting regardless of drastc changes in technology and global power balances. For realists the UN can be of occaisonal use to its dominant members in shaping global policy, provided its limitations are properly understood. The UN offers world leaders a talk shop in a complex world and discussion can sometimes be helpful in swaying international public opinion in the direction being advocated by a government or even in uncovering common ground. Realists adopt an essentially instrumental and marginalizing view of the UN, in effect believing that major political action on security and economic matters will always be shaped in venues under the discretionary control of sovereign states represented by governments that make security policy with blinders that ignore, or at lest minimize, non-military approaches to conflict resolutions. In essence, realists embrace a tragic sense of life, and can be regarded as ‘incurable pessimists,’ who however catastrophic the costs, continue to rely on war and threats to keep the peace.
A third set of attitudes is that of cynics who regard the UN as a hypocritical and dangerous distraction from serious global problem-solving. The UN has neither power nor authority to take action to keep the peace except in the rare instances when major players agree on what to do. In effect, the UN was always irrelevant and worthless from the perspective of shaping a peaceful and just world, and to believe otherwise is to be naïve about the workings of world politics in a state-centric system. From this cynical perspective the UN is a wasteful and misleading public relations stunt that diverts energy and clear thought from prudent present behavior, and even more so, from the kind of radical political action that would be needed to make the world secure and just. The UN cynics are essentially the gadflies who remind the public that it is foolish, or worse, to invest hope in the UN on the big challenges facing humanity.
Finally, there are the opponents, who oppose the whole idea of the UN as a world organization, and fear that it poses a threat to the primacy of national sovereignty and the pursuit of national interests and grand strategy. Opponents are hostile to the UN, often susceptible to conspiracy theories warning that there are social forces plotting to turn the UN into a world government, which they consider a prelude to global tyranny. The paranoia of the opponents is the furthest removed from reality among these four viewpoints, but remains influential as shaping populist attitudes toward the UN and internationalism generally in the present era where democratic forms of governance are giving way to a variety of autocracies that have in common a refusal to meet global challenges by reliance on the UN or other cooperative mechanisms, including even in the domain of trade, investment, and environmental protection. Trump’s ‘America First’ chant is emblematic of this outlook, which exerts political pressures, using funding as leverage, on the UN to serve the national interests of its leading members. It is illustrative of this atmosphere that the UN is being attacked as an Israel-bashing organization rather than being criticized for its failure to respond to well-grounded Palestinian grievances. These opponents are not reality-based, but rather are faith-based, and can be considered as ‘rejectionists’ when it comes to respect for the authority of the UN, or for that matter, of international law in general.
If we ask who has gotten the better of the implicit argument between these four ways of perceiving the UN, it is hard to avoid giving the prize to the realists. In a way this is not surprising. As realists dominate all public and private institutions, their dominant tendency is to treat the UN as a site of struggle that can be most useful in all out efforts to mobilize support for a controversial policy—for instance, sanctions against North Korea or Iran. Yet the most effective realists do not wish to appear as cynics or rejectionists, and so often hide their instrumental moves behind idealistic rhetoric. The realists are able to impose their view of the UN role on the operations of the Organization, but at the same time, realists are at a loss as to the nature of ‘the real,’ and thus seem oblivious to the need for a stronger UN to address global challenges, including climate change, nuclear crises, humanitarian catastrophes, and natural disasters.
In contrast, the cynics want to pierce illusions, not only of the idealists, but also of the realists, especially when their voices seek to cloak power moves in the sweeter language of human rights, democracy, and peace. Idealists also struggle to gain relevance by claiming that their views are more realistic than those of the realists, pointing to the looming urgencies of nuclear war and climate change. And, of course, opponents see these differences about the UN role as a dangerous smokescreen hiding the never ending plot to hijack the UN to establish a world government or to serve the nefarious interests of global adversaries.
What the UN Contributes
These perspectives, while illuminating general attitudes, are too crude to tell the whole story of what the UN can and cannot accomplish First of all, there is the question of organizational complexity. The UN is composed of many institutions with very different agendas and budgets, many of which are either technical or removed from the everyday scrutiny of diplomats and experts. Most people when they think of the UN are mainly concerned with what the Security Council does with respect to the main war/peace issues of the day, maybe a bit attentive to action taken by the General Assembly, especially if it collides with geopolitical priorities, and sometimes responsive to what the UN Secretary General says or does.
There is only interest, for instance, in the Human Rights Council in Geneva when it reinforces or thwarts some kind of foreign policy consensus of big powers or issues a report critical of Israel. In the early 1970s countries from the Global South wanted to reform trade and investment patterns, mounting a campaign in the General Assembly, which led them to be slapped down by the West that wanted above all to insulate the operations of the world economy from any reforms that would diminish their advantageous positions in global trading and investment contexts.
The UN is exceedingly valuable, especially for poorer countries, as a source of information and guidance on crucial matters of health, food policy, environment, human rights, protection of children and refugees, and preservation of cultural heritage. Its specialized agencies provide reliable policy guidance and offer governments help in promoting economic development, and set humane policy targets for the world in the form of Sustainable Development Goals. In effect, the UN quietly performs a wide array of service functions that enable governments to pursue their national policies in a more effective and humane manner, and operates within a normative setting that is best characterized as ‘global humanism.’
Perhaps even more significantly, the UN has greater authority than any political actor in determining whether certain claims by states or peoples are legitimate or not. UN responses to the legitimacy of a national struggle is an important expression of soft power that often contributes to shaping the political outcome of conflicts. In effect, the UN is influential in the waging of Legitimacy Wars that are fought on the symbolic battlefields of such principal UN organs as the Security Council and General Assembly. Contrary to what realists profess, most international conflicts since 1945 have been resolved in favor of the side that prevails in a Legitimacy War rather than the winner of hard power struggles on the battlefield. The UN played a crucial role in supporting the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles, as well as setting forth normative standards supportive of the Right to Development and Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, and also in promoting public order of the oceans and Antarctica. Despite its shortcomings in directly upholding peace and promoting justice, the UN remains, on balance, a vital presence in international life even with respect to conflict and peacekeeping, its potential to do much more remains as great as the day it was established.
Conclusion
The UN has been disappointing in implementing its Charter in relation to the P-5, and has not overcome the double standards that apply to upholding international law. The weak are held potentially accountable, while the strong enjoy impunity almost without exception. Nevertheless, the UN is indispensable as a soft power actor that helps the weaker side prevail in Legitimacy Wars. The UN seems helpless to stop the carnage in Syria or Yemen yet it can identify wrongdoing and frequently mobilize public opinion on behalf of the victims of abusive behavior. We can hope for more, but we should not overlook, or fail to appreciate, the significant positive accomplishments of the UN over the years.
If we seek a stronger more effective UN, the path is clear. Make the Organization more detached from geopolitics, abolish the veto, establish independent funding by a global tax, and elect a Secretary General without P-5 vetting. There was a golden opportunity to do this in the decade of the 1990s was never acted upon. American global leadership failed, being focused on a triumphalist reading of the end of the Cold War, and directed its attention to maximizing neoliberal globalization and liberal forms of democratic governance around the world, believing that states so organized do not wage war against one another. This refusal to adopt a normative approach based on shared values, goals, and challenges has marginalized the UN that continues to be dominated by the instrumental tactics of its main members.
Tags: idealism, Legitimacy Wars, P-5, peace & security, realism, Security Council, Skepticism, United Nations