UNfunded Failure

by Peter de Krassel

Hong Kong, January 15, 2005. Listening to President Bush back pedal on Kofi Annan’s fitness to lead the UN and UN involvement in Iraq are the latest reminders of America’s determination to remain in the geopolitical 20th century instead of taking the lead in the 21st.

The UN is a Cold War relic. Now that the Cold War is dead and buried isn’t the UN funeral overdue? The high profile public squabble between America and Old Europe on whether the UN should authorize an attack against Iraq or give the inspectors more time, highlighted the UN’s dysfunctional irrelevance to the world’s 21st century geopolitical needs. The thought of expanding this dysfunctional dinosaur with more Security Council members is unrealistic and short sighted.

Just as the League of Nations became obsolete, so has the UN. The UN was established to ensure peace globally, primarily in Europe. Today, the biggest threats to peace and world security are in Asia. Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan. Afghanistan and Iraq are reminders that the end of the Cold War does not mean the end of local and regional conventional conflicts, most notably in Asia.

The new global successor of the UN should be named Global Security Council (GSC). The GSC should be headquartered in Hong Kong, the apolitical civilization crossroads of the world. Hong Kong was founded as a commercial trading center and has deliberately kept politics and religion out of its daily life.

English and Chinese are the most numerously spoken languages in the world. Mandarin is clearly the largest language group, with more than eight hundred thirty five million native speakers. English is a distant second, with four hundred and seventy million, followed by Spanish at three hundred and thirty million.

Why is it then that the lingua francas of international organizations like the U.N. are English and French? French should go with the UN bureaucrats and join Latin on the geopolitical lingua and institutional garbage heap. Isn’t it time Chinese became one of the two official languages of international organizations instead of French?

Just as the UN Building was built on the rubble brought over from the London Blitz, the Global Security Council building must be built on the rubble of the World Trade Center at the world’s trade center.

The UN Security Council should be replaced by a GSC with representatives from all major civilizations. Its members should be limited to the core states of each civilization with rotating membership for the civilizations that do not have a core state. The members of this body would be America, China, India, Russia, with representatives from the Muslim world to be determined by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Europe to be determined by the European Union, a representative from Africa to be determined by the African Union, a representative from Asia to too be determined by ASEAN, and a representative from Latin America to be determined by the Organization of American States. Each major civilization would have an equal say and vote in the GSC.

In view of the current ongoing threat of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, the Muslim world should nominate Pakistan as its first representative. This would, hopefully eliminate pakistan’s opposition to India playing a major role in such an organization.

The U.S. and China should attach the highest priority to our global security needs. Isn’t it time America and China finally come together as partners at the dawn of the 21st century to spearhead a GSC?

The rebuilding of post Saddam Iraq can be the seed to germinate the GSC. A body representative of the geopolitical reality of the 21st century’s reawakened civilizations contributing the best they have to offer in the rebuilding of a global Garden of Eden a cradle of fused 21st century civilizations brought together – in Hong Kong.