Mark Twain, the great American writer and humorist, is reported to have said that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” Twain was responding to media reports of his demise. He died in 1910 at the ripe age of 74 — by the life expectancy of the time. This year, the United Nations, the first truly global organisation, turned a neat 80.
In the life a human being, even in developed countries, living to be 80 is considered a long life. So is the life of a global organisation in a turbulent century. This is especially true for an organisation with ambitions and aspirations of grandeur. The UN tried to reach for the heavens. But now we must wonder whether it has sunk to the pits of hell.
Let’s understand that the UN was born in 1945 right in the thick of Empire and the colonial project when White people subjugated all other races – Black African, Asian, Arab, Latin Americans of native descend, and Pacific Islanders.
To capture the sense of White European hegemony, the English often said the sun never set on the British Empire. The rest of the planet chafed under the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, and other assorted White peoples.
I often wonder what it must feel in your veins to be a member of this “master race.” Adolf Hitler, he of the German Third Reich, tried to take these feelings to a cataclysmic climax. He failed, but not for want of trying.
World’s biggest talking shop
It was out of Hitler’s ashes that the UN was born. Ironically, the United Nations, born out of the wreckage of the League of Nations, reproduced some of the same racial and demonic hierarchies that were central to Hitler’s Aryan hegemony. Let’s reprise a few of these norms and structures of the subjugation of Black, Brown, and Asian peoples by a global White American and European power structure. The first was the physical location of the centre of the United Nations activities in New York and Geneva. This in itself was deeply symbolic of locational superiority of White over “the other.”
To go to the United Nations, “the rest of the world” had to travel to America and Europe. Never mind the vast majority of persons of color lived, and still do, outside America and Europe, and were then held in colonial vassalage.
By Charter and law, the UN’s most powerful body is the Security Council. Only it can make decisions binding on the members. This tiny club has five permanent members, who wield the veto power. No resolution can be passed even if the other 10 non-permanent members outvote the veto five. In effect, the veto five – the United States, Britain, Russia, France, and China – control what the UN can say and do.
A veto of one of the five kills a resolution. Nothing can pass if the US, or Russia, say nyet. Ditto for Britain, China, and France. I am sure you have noticed that four of the veto five are European or majority White nations. Race is the calling card at the UN.
The UN General Assembly, or UNGA, is the world’s biggest talking shop. In there, even little Belize or Djibouti can say anything. They can insult the mighty US with the filthiest of languages. But it’s all “hot air.” That’s because breathing fire doesn’t produce one.
Even if all 193 states of the UN badly want something within UNGA, their wishes or votes are nugatory so long as one of the veto powers doesn’t want it. One often negates 193 in the UN system. To make matters worse, the UN Charter which cast this inequity in stone, cannot be amended if one of the veto five says no. It doesn’t matter that matrix is blatantly racist, obsolete, and indefensible.
Since 1945, the power dynamics of the globe have changed. But the victories of World War II allies have kept the UN’s obsolescence in place. Africa, the fastest growing continent by population and economy, doesn’t have a voice at the UN. Asia, the new centre of the global economy is out, except China. That’s why Kenyan President William Ruto, in his prime time address to the UN this year, argued that equity demands that Africa gets at least two permanent veto-power seats in a long delayed reform of the institution. His speech was cheered over and over by a majority of members. It is this structure of the UN that’s at the centre of its irrelevance and possible death.
It is these archaic, racist, and calamitous structures and normative inequities that stand in direct contradiction to the purposes for which the United Nations was founded in the first place – to outlaw war, protect human rights, and foster equitable development.
The UN watches helplessly as Israel commits genocide in Gaza and Sudan descends into hell. Will the UN die with Sudan and Gaza? It just might in its 80s.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. He’s Senior Advisor on Constitutional Affairs to President William Ruto. @makaumutua
