A peacekeeping body at war with itself

It takes less than an hour to fly from Washington DC to New York City. But, if you are a diplomat, you might as well be travelling to a distant planet, such is the gulf in diplomatic culture between America’s capital and the United Nations’ headquarters. Whenever I went to see my opposite number at the UN, Jeremy Greenstock, I felt that I was entering a hermetically sealed universe, where ambassadors marched to an arcane beat governed by the mysteries of multilateral diplomacy. During my time in Washington, a new French ambassador arrived, who had been transferred directly from the UN. He confessed to me that, of all his postings, he had the greatest difficulty getting used to Washington, only 200 miles or so down the road from Manhattan.

There is more than a whiff of an unreal world in Kofi Annan’s memoir of his lifetime inside the United Nations. ‘Stepping into a UN hall’, he says, ‘often felt like entering a time machine.’ It is hardly surprising. In its central mission — to keep, and sometimes make, the peace in violent areas around the world — the UN has largely failed since its creation. Vast amounts of time are spent in the negotiation of documents and declarations. Meanwhile, in the real, Hobbesian world of Darfur, Central Africa or the Middle East, people are slaughtered in murderous conflicts. In the UN’s parallel universe diplomacy has become for the most part a form of air-conditioned displacement activity. ‘I draft, therefore I am’, a young British diplomat at our UN mission once said to me.

Of course, peacekeeping is not all the UN does. It implements huge programmes of variable quality in areas like health, food, and children’s welfare. But this is marginal to the organisation’s founding rationale. The UN is supposed to have learnt the lessons of the abject failure of the League of Nations to stop wars in the 1930s.