bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2000-2001) — Winter 2000/2001 // Hiver 2000/2001, pp. 40–41
WHOSE WORLD IS IT ANYWAY?
CIVIL SOCIETY: THE UNITED
NATIONS AND THE MULTILATERAL
FUTURE. Edited by John W. Foster with
Anita Anand. United Nations Association
in Canada: 1999. 560 pp., $32.00
BREAD NOT BOMBS: A POLITICAL
AGENDA FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. By
Douglas Roche. University of Alberta Press:
1999. 184 pp., $19.95
U.N. JIGSAW: AN EASY READER
ABOUT LIFE AND WORK AT THE
UNITED NATIONS, by Wilfrid Grey.
Vantage Press, New York: 2000. 365 pp.,
US$13.95
It seems that a particular chapter closed in Canada’s close relationship with the United Nations this December. We finished a lively two-year stint on the Security Council. Robert Fowler, Canada’s ambassador at the United Nations for most of that period and the chair of an unprecedented panel investigating the diamond smuggling from Angola, has moved on to a post in Rome. Lloyd Axworthy, an activist as Foreign Affairs Minister, left office for (he no doubt hopes) a quieter time pursuing his international concerns at the University of British Columbia. What these two men left behind with the United Nations Security Council was noteworthy and, one hopes, enduring: a broadening of attitudes about “security,” focusing primarily on human security and the improvement of life for the most vulnerable, the poorest and the victims of conflict.
These three books fit well into the atmosphere that Fowler and Axworthy worked to create. The large volume on the increasing role of civil society was aimed at the World Conference on Civil Society held in Montreal in December 1999, and at the following millenium events at the United Nations in 2000. Published in English and French, it was a massive undertaking for the United Nations Association in Canada and, while it is a daunting size for busy internationalists and somewhat confusing in its split-page layout, it is well worth the determined study. It has overcome the dangers of duplication (or contradiction) which, having eight authors contribute chapters, might present; and it gains from having the perspectives of writers from India, England and Latin America, as well as Canadians of the stature of Professor Michael Oliver and John Foster, former head of Oxfam Canada and professor of human rights in Saskatchewan.
The book builds logically from a survey of the world scene in which civil society has flowered to a summary of world conferences and their aims and perceived achievements. Today’s world has not been particularly welcoming soil for its growth, dotted with landmines and strewn with civilian dead. Nevertheless, some amazing figures are cited for the numbers of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), even in unlikely places: 22,000 NGOs in Nepal and 2 million in the United States. Civil society is the “most elastic of concepts,” the main authors admit. Nor is the book any sort of uncritical puff for the United Nations. Rather, it is sparing in claims of results from the series of world conferences in the 1990s. The Copenhagen summit on social development “focused attention on the negative side of economic globalization” and “integrated the decisions of other conferences into a comprehensive plan for meeting basic human needs” — this sounds tentative and procedural. But the opinions embedded in the text are strong. The 1997 military budgets of the United States and its NATO allies were, in total, four times the size of those of all potential enemies. “If one is addressing the military side of building peace, it seems relatively clear where attention, energy and political pressure should be directed.” Later, in an astringent section on the World Trade Organization, Foster writes of the link between trade growth and the erosion of prospects for low-skilled workers, and points out that in seven years the government’s unemployment insurance coverage dropped in Canada from 87 percent to 42 percent of the jobless.
Senator Roche’s punchy book — the 16th this journalist-politician has written — is also full of statistics that will, or should, disturb the comfortable westerner. One-quarter of the single parents in his hometown of Edmonton, he writes, are living in absolute poverty. Western countries together spend 10 times as much on defence as they offer in development aid to poorer countries. Meanwhile, India ranks 142nd in the world in per capita income and first in the importing of arms. The world doesn’t have to behave this way, and war is not inevitable, he argues, as he usefully summarizes the Hague Appeal for Peace and lists the 16 principles of the Earth Charter that sprang from the Rio Summit and the Brundtland Commission.
Finally, Wilfrid Grey’s most readable book justifies the claim of its subtitle to be “an easy reader.” It is aimed at students in high schools and colleges, but there is an amount in it which diplomats (including those who have served in the Canadian mission in New York) will find extremely interesting. Grey, an Englishman much involved in decolonization in Africa, knows the United Nations in New York inside out as an NGO observer. Over the years he has gathered interviews from ambassadors representing all sizes of countries, from China to Andorra.
For the newcomer, he is a tour guide to its art collection, library and even its post office in sections titled “Walkabout.” For the presuming expert he has, for example, 23 short sections dealing with human rights, ranging widely and giving Mexican and Japanese views, and detailing human rights abuses in Mauritania. While we all have read about Rigoberto Menchu, where else would you learn that Panama’s Esmeralda Brown has played a central role in the UN’s work to help the world’s 300 million indigenous peoples?
Other chapters cover disarmament, peacekeeping, economic issues and environment in digestible sections (one has Brian Tobin and Emma Bonino squaring off about straddling fish stocks). But it also ventures into rarely trodden areas such as a balanced discussion of the media coverage and freedom of religion. Lastly, it has what too many books lack: an excellent index.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2000-2001) — Winter 2000/2001 // Hiver 2000/2001, pp. 40–41. Read the rest of this issue →
