U of Ideas of General Interest -- September 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor, (217) 333-2177; [email protected]
PEACEKEEPING
Solutions to U.N.'s money woes fraught with problems, authors say
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- The rewards of peace may be priceless, but the cost of keeping it is staggering. So staggering that the world's chief peacemaker -- the United Nations -- is in financial crisis, and, what is worse, most of the options that would resolve the crisis have serious problems.
So says University of Illinois political scientist Paul Diehl, who, with his student Elijah Pharoahkhan, has done a systematic analysis of the U.N.'s options for financial and political viability. Their findings will be published in a forthcoming issue of Policy Studies Review.
The heart of the problem, Diehl said, lies with the U.N.'s system of financing. Rather than having one standard system, peacekeeping missions are financed through several mechanisms: the regular U.N. budget, disputants' budgets, and, primarily, U.N. member states' contributions. However, U.N. members, mostly for political reasons, often refuse to pay their financial obligations -- or do so in an untimely manner, thus pushing the U.N. deeper into debt.
Aggravating the problem is that the U.N.'s peacekeeping services are in greater demand than ever. In fact, the agency "has launched more peacekeeping operations in the last decade of this century than it did in the previous 45 years of its existence," Diehl said, noting that 30 of the 50 U.N. peacekeeping missions have been deployed between 1990 and 1997, resulting in "far larger than expected costs." Also, many operations are now more complex and require a greater number of troops, and therefore are considerably more expensive than traditional operations.
The consequences of the U.N.'s ever-growing debt due to peacekeeping are "highly deleterious," Diehl said. "Cost starts to become a factor in assessing whether to authorize a new mission, how large that mission should be, and how long it could be kept in place. Normally, those kinds of decisions should be made primarily on political or strategic grounds."
Proposals to resolve financing problems are wide-ranging: making only incremental changes, such as late-payment fees and new methods of calculating fees; levying international taxes -- for example, a small uniform tax on foreign exchange transactions, a tax on "global commons" -- oceans, outer space, or a tax on arms sales; and creating programs -- for example, setting up a separate budget for peacekeeping or incorporating peacekeeping funding in member states' national defense budgets.
The incremental changes would have a "marginal effect on the U.N. financial crisis," the authors write, and many proposals for new programs are "severely flawed" and would create problems. The authors believe the most attractive option is the one that would impose new international taxes. This measure could provide adequate revenue for peacekeeping operations, meet unexpected demands in the security area, and remove the dependency of the United Nations on direct member contributions. The main stumbling block to this proposal lies with the states: "They are as yet unwilling to relinquish the influence that comes with directly providing or withholding funds to the U.N."
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