UN “envoys” in M.E.: Perpetuating European power, excluding the rest?

I guess the idea that (mainly male) people of European origin have some kind of near-monopoly on wisdom regarding the administration of Middle East affairs goes back a long way…
As regular JWN readers will know, I remain a stalwart supporter of the idea that the UN should, in general, play a much bigger role in Middle Eastern diplomacy than it has until now. (Including in both the Arab-Israeli peace process, and the negotiations over the US’s ever-closer exit from Iraq.)
But this is completely outrageous! New UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recently announced the appointment of the third of the UN’s “special envoys” in the Middle East– and just like the other two, this one is a white, male European. Namely, Michael Williams of the UK, who has been appointed as “Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.”
That’s the same job that Terje Larsen– yes, the author of the failed “Oslo” interim-accord project– was handed on a plate way back when. But in December 2004 Larsen was moved over to become “Special Envoy for the implementation of Security Council resolution 1559 (2004)” — John Bolton’s anti-Syrian resolution. And in March 2005, Larsen was joined on the “Lebanon beat” by his countryman Geir Pedersen, who is the SG’s “Personal Representative for Southern Lebanon.”
The Brits and the Norwegians both have quite a lot of responsibility for the present imbroglios in the Middle East. I don’t understand why anyone would think these countries’ citizenries have any special “wisdom” regarding the region?
Plus, the whole issue of access to the levers of power is a central part of what has made today’s world so inequitable, and this unequal access still, today, perpetuates the world’s deeply engrained inequities on a continuing basis…
Isn’t it bad enough that the top seats in the World Bank and the IMF are “by custom” divided up between the US and the Europeans? Isn’t it also shameful that today, despite the UN having been in existence for 62 years, this so-called “world organization” has still done nothing effective at all to seek out and empower a whole, globally representative range of people capable of becoming effective Mideast envoys?

7 thoughts on “UN “envoys” in M.E.: Perpetuating European power, excluding the rest?”

  1. Helena:
    These comments on the UN are right on the mark.
    I for one would like to see the UN morph into a genuine democratic multinational institution dedicated to peace and justice in the world. But until and unless this happen there is no reason to think it will not continue to carry out its western assigned function of providing propaganda cover for sanctions on perceived enemies of the US and wars of aggression and conquest waged by the big powers.
    That is why I am VERY cynical about Bush calling for UN intervention in Iraq. The purpose of any such intervention probably would be to pull US chestnuts out of the fire and provide more propaganda cover for a brutal war of aggression that has all but destroyed Iraqi society.

  2. I appreciate your considered comments on the role of the United Nations. Its potential for good is huge-but for far too long it has been governed by purely Western “ïnterests”-namely greed and power.
    A truly democratic United Nations will be able to ensure that a dispassionate and realistic assessment of Middle East pow politics will enable the rights of the dispossessed and disenfranchised (by those same Western interests)can be addressed

  3. A genuinely globally democratic UN would be wonderful, but at this point in time, I think most 3rd world governments are so non-representative of their own people that replacing say a British or Norwegian man with say an Egyptian one would just move us from someone fairly representative of the over-represented part of the world to someone unrepresentative of the underpresented part of the world.
    I recall the video of the Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their family singing “We Are the World”.

  5. “… I remain a stalwart supporter of the idea that the UN should, in general, play a much bigger role in …”
    With all due respect, expecting any good to come out of the UN, other than for the powerful and affluent nations that are its masters, is irrationally wishful sentimentalism. Even in the bipolar world of the 50s-90s, the UN almost always acted as an agent for hegemony of power, and since the demise of the Soviet Union, well I don’t really have to tell you. The GA can issue as many near-unanimous commuiques as it wishes, but when it comes to real action, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine, … all have some sweet stories to tell. There is a great article in the LRB at :
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n09/ande01_.html
    for anyone who still harbors optimistic delusions about the beneficience of the UN.

  6. I agree with an earlier comment, wipe the slate clean and create a new organisation. “United” is frankly a bit unrealistic, so how about a “League of” Nations?

  7. N Chamberlain,
    It is quite interesting when you look at the declassified parts of the negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco: the US side (pretty much all of them, from FDR to Pasvolsky, Stettinius, Dulles, Connally, Rockefeller, and Truman) all objected to any wording that would reenforce the notion that this is going to be a “Federation of equals”. And the media was constantly bombarded by stories about “the Great Four”. There is much more to it but I don’t want to lengthen the post. The two books that Perry Anderson refers to in his great LRB article which I have posted above [Robert Hildebrand’s Dumbarton Oaks (1990) and Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation (2003)] although both completely sympathetic to the US goals, reveal some eyeopening secrets that tell you how the whole thing was nothing but an imperial tool from the get-go.
    Also see this in the NLR: [You can download the pdf]
    http://newleftreview.org/?view=2478

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