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5.0 out of 5 stars
Tells of NGO efforts to bring the UN Charter into practice, March 10, 1998
By A Customer
Reviewed by ERSKINE CHILDERS in International Relations, Volume XIII, No 1, April 1996
The United Nations Charter was not going to have any Preamble in the draft that emerged from the powers' discussions at Dumbarton Oaks. It was to begin in the stentorian language of the Covenant of the League of Nations: `The High Contracting Parties ...'. Jan Smuts of South Africa and a few other UN founders urged a beginning with the world's peoples, but it was when a young American woman, Virginia Gildersleeve, got her hands on the draft that the peoples got their opening page (at least).
In the US Constitution from which Dean Gildersleeve drew her inspiration, the people establish their new government. In the Charter, `We, the Peoples of the United Nations' were not allowed to do the equivalent. The Peoples make the marvellous ethical invocations and first statements of what the UN must do. Then in bold capitals the Peoples proclaim that they `HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS' - but abruptly, as though some thoroughly alarmed diplomat was shooing them from halls hallowed for his ilk, the Peoples say that `accordingly, our respective Governments ... do hereby establish the United Nations', and disappear. Article 71 does provide for consultations by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Otherwise the Peoples of the United Nations are not seen in the Charter.
The Conscience of the World is the first book I know of to trace, in such substance and meticulous detail, the story of NGO efforts to bring the Charter's waiting words into practical working life. I had the privilege of working in the NGO community in various countries during the UN's first 20 years, then trying to build UN-system bridges with NGOs from within as a UN civil servant for the next 23, and I can vouch for many of the analyses and insights in this extremely valuable book.
After a good Introduction by Editor Peter Willetts, a retrospect from the Congress of Vienna to the founding of the UN by Bill Seary is followed by a masterly overview of NGO Consultative Status at the UN, again by Dr. Willetts. Then the reader is drawn into the dense undergrowth and complexities of the interplay of two cultures and dozens of sub-cultures - the intergovernmental and the non-governmental communities.
There are excellent historical reconstructions of the growth of NGO action and influence in the UN system in the controversial World Bank (Seamus Cleary), women's rights and other concerns (Jane Connors), Amnesty International (Helena Cooke), the environment (Sally Morphet), the Rights of the Child (Michael Longford), and Refugees (Angela Penrose and John Seaman), and a short and gentle Conclusion by John Sankey. This solid sequence of highly professional and expert-technical essays is nicely leavened by a less taxing yet intellectually challenging `Memoir' about UNESCO and NGOs from Richard Hoggart who saw them from the inside as a UNESCO Assistant Director-General.
This book is not an `easy read' and makes no claim to be. It is densely packed with statistical data and contains long strings of tight analysis. Since it is absolutely bound to have to go into a further edition I need not hesitate to suggest that rather more recurring assembly of key points, and the use of boxes of key facts and more crucial statistics would help. A more substantial and forward-reaching conclusion should be possible when more is clear about how the UN is going to cope with the NGO world's healthy besieging of its central machinery and its agencies. Meanwhile this edition is a `must' for all NGOs that are serious about `working' the UN system, and for government ministries, their diplomatic missions to the UN and Agencies, and the system's own civil servants.
A fairly mutual disdain was for several decades among the reasons why so many NGOs have had the kind of struggle to be heard in UN forums that this book so admirably recounts. My own reading of the history is that the origins of this disdain lie in the interplay of national civil services and national NGOs. Those experiences began between earlier class-dominated government and its hauteur-imitating civil servants on one hand, and often poor, scruffy and seldom well-trained NGO workers (`agitators' one and all!) on the other. These early-engendered perceptions of each other seem to have carried outwards into the intergovernmental and international-NGO dimension.
With the exception of such institution-oriented NGOs as the UN Associations and their global federation (WFUNA), until the 1970s most citizens' organizations held the UN at a suspicious and even contemptuous arm's length as `just another great bureaucracy', meaning more of the same as with national civil services. Over a generation, mainstream Western media depicting the UN as helpless between the Cold War giants also helped to disenchant the growing NGO community.
Then NGOs began to mushroom all over the world on economic, social and environmental issues in the 1970s (each chapter in this book that deals with such issues traces their phenomenal growth). Still, however, except for lobbying at UN `mega-conferences', issue NGOs found it difficult to perceive the importance of the ongoing machinery of the UN system for their goals and activities. This generated a further bouncing-off effect because, when they might suddenly need to penetrate the machinery, many did not know enough about it to get anywhere, but tended to blame `the UN' for mysteries of their own making.
However, many diplomats at the UN could also be extremely haughty. Ever since the first Congress of Vienna they had developed a subtle culture of working with each other. For many NGO spokespersons these ways seemed absurd. The delicate nuances of diplomatic language could be maddening. It took time to discover that when one delegate spent long minutes praising the proposed amendment of another, this actually meant total opposition to it. It could take longer for NGO people to understand that, if diplomats had drafted the phrase `in the context of', they did not want some stranger in blue jeans or tennis shoes asking them with best intentions, `Why don't you just write `because', since that's what you apparently mean?'
On the other hand, many UN diplomats who did believe in NGO voices being heard by delegations would privately express acute and often justified frustration: `Its marvellous when an NGO comes whose representative really knows the subject and also knows what we're trying to do about it and how we have to work ... but may the Good Lord protect us from those who don't know either ...'
This book is full of descriptions by NGO experts of how much knowledge it takes to penetrate the UN intergovernmental culture and why amateurishness helps no one. Michael Longford, in his excellent essay on the history of NGO action for the Rights of the Child, gently points out the enormous difference in impact on the drafting of the UN Declaration thereon as between specialist NGOs who were really expert in the subject, and those who could advocate but could not hold their own with governmental specialists.
Far better strategic and tactical planning is also needed, and NGO practitioners will gain untold benefits in this from this book because it is so meticulously practical, while scholarly. I have for years implored NGOs trying to get the International Monetary Fund to make both economic sense and social equity, to realise that there is little use in demonstrating outside a plush annual IMF meeting if they have not already lobbied their national Ministry of Finance and their parliament's relevant committee. In her incisive, scholarly analysis of the experiences of Amnesty International, Helena Cooke points out how NGOs are often `frustrated to discover [that] there may be limited scope for influencing governments at the meeting itself'.
Gaining consultative status in ECOSOC has often been fraught with international politics, especially those of the Cold War. Peter Willetts point
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