| | |  Editorials | Opinions 
What is the Future of the UN?
 Guillermo Ramón Adames y Suari - PVNN
January 03, 2010
 |  | What is Latin America today? An overall summary of superiority between national prides. Counties opposing each other. Supra national political parties opposing internal political parties. All of them, extreme regimes. |  | | |
This is certainly one of the most difficult political questions that everybody asks but no one dear to even consider a possible answer. And this is certainly one of my most difficult articles. Don't take me wrong, I gave my life to the UN out of my own will because I believed in its goals.
So, let's try to find an answer.
Let's have an overview of the UN, what is it? The UN system was a "mixture" of the Societé des Nations in Geneva in the 40's (with all its ups and downs) and the awful results of WWII at all levels: human, economical geographical and you name it! When I joined the UN for the first time in the 70's in CEPAL (UN Economic Commission for Latin America) I worked in a number of statistical models to plan the path for economic development in various countries in Central America. And they worked! We all felt we were helping in something.
Afterwards I joined UNESCO (UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization); some of the ideals came from African countries who were scared of losing their African oral traditions: I worked on those projects and they are fascinating. Traditions with ancestral knowledge, filled with myths, exaggerations , witchensess in the way humans are described in the face of earth. African countries were screaming for help to preserve and keep for good that heritage that belonged so dearly to Africa. It could be lost forever as a cause of new worldwide social order and behavior and new values and means. All those countries with superb ideals are fighting each other today under various dictatorships to gain power to natural resources. Dictatorships fighting dictatorships.
What is Latin America today? An overall summary of superiority between national prides. Counties opposing each other. Supra national political parties opposing internal political parties. The "left wing" is in fashion in Latin America today. Left vs. Right whatever Right and Left might mean. (Well, in Latin America and the Caribbean it means getting into the regime and become a "democratic" dictator for life). All of them, extreme regimes. We will soon get back to military dictatorships, then the right and the left again. On the other hand, nationalistic feelings' of superiority between nations. Just like the Nazi regime: The absolute superiority of the Aryan race. We did not learn from WWII.
What is the Middle East? A piece of land originally detained by the British Empire which after the shame of WWII generated the creation of Israel without giving to this new State the possibility of settling in a land without the total control of Jerusalem.
In the 40's when the UN was founded, the "Geography" was different and the UN were in agreement to that geography. Today the "geography" has changed, evolved, or you name it. The world is facing various "mappings". The first one, are the countries that everybody learnt in school. Sometimes countries split as the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic or the ancient Yugoslavia.
Today's world has more and more "partitions" of this very same planet. Take a look at the Corporation's geo-card. Do you know what is the "country partition" of the world made for by Coca-Cola in terms of income? By MacDonald's? And Wall-Mart? And Burger King? To illustrate through the some popular American brands, Consider Airbus Mercedes, Volkswagen, Alcatel, Michelin and the worldwide wine industries to consider some European groups. Likewise, Sony, Mitsubishi, Honda, LG And..? and… ? so there you have another geo-card of the world.
Now let's explore the "Drug" geo-card. We have the Latin American Cartels. The African Cartels. The Middle East and North African Cartels. The gold triangle and Asian Cartels. Afghanistan. China and India and he Malay and Thai cartels: nobody talks about big money made in drugs. This includes traffic and transportation of the drugs between countries. And this is no longer exclusive to stronger economic powers. Today everybody is "in" the drug business. I would include in this group the "medical drugs" which are legal but partition the world by medical laboratories according to pure economic level, not to pain or health needs.
So, take a look now at the "banking" geo card. There are economic regions that go beyond borders. The Asian Tigers, the Latin American Group, the North American Group, and the "European" group. Particularly City Group, HSBC, Société Génerale, BNP, Crédit Lyonnais and others, and not to forget the recent shame of the Swiss banking mess between the Swiss government and the US government. There you are, another geo card. Let me devote a line to the British banking system which controls most of the financial capitols in the world but they try with difficultly to diminish its impact in the world economy and hopes to go unnoticed.
Now let's swift to the "oil" geo-card. The groups are well known. OPEC (to a certain extent) decides the pace of the economy by fixing production and price of oil. So there are "strong" countries and "weak" countries. In this category we have to include "Oil technological countries " and "Technological countries". The US GB and Norway have top technology. We must include the French "Institut du Pétrole", for a country that does not have a drop of oil but has the technology to exploit oil resources situated mostly in Africa: Africa altogether has no oil technology. Countries like Brazil which have some but not all of the technology. Shall I recall the lack of memory in the world when Brazil first came out with "bio-fuel" that everybody laughed at? What is bio-fuel today? Even the US is producing bio-fuel and pretends to be ecological. So there is another geo card.
And now let's take a look at the geo card of the "human rights". Legal paths have evolved to a way that "everybody has rights". Rightly or wrongly it is a reality that we have to live with. The most influential are migrant rights. Developed countries receive in various ways a number of people that come into countries illegally but they have legal rights in an illegal immigrant situation. Basically the right of survival. Despite the fact that it comes out as a contradiction, people come in illegally, work illegally and avoid paying any taxes and benefit of a system to which they do not pay a cent, yet they have "rights" under the host system and any mistreatment is a violation of human rights. On the other hand, because they are illegal, they get exploited by people in host countries and everybody gets its peak. The geo-card of human rights is basically the confrontation of economically developed countries (EU, Australia Canada and USA and the new oil empires basically) surrounded by poor countries or countries that have been taken over by a dictatorship.
I do not want to talk on the religious geo-card but the reader can very well imagine the complications that have been already brought up. Gender rights is another geo-card having its outmost freedom in Europe (particularly the Scandinavian countries) and its low freedom end in muslim/arab/African and Latin American countries. Out of pure politics: I hope not to offend anybody, any right, any religion, any group of countries and...
So? The UN at the time of the Societé des Nations in the 40's was intended to solve the very geo card of the country's geographical limitations. Period. Today that geo-card exists in classrooms only and nowhere else. The UN was conceived to solve a very clear-cut system which no longer exists. The UN costs a lot. And many countries do not pay but have "voting" rights (again, you don't pay but you have rights) in the various UN instances. In today's multiple geo card system, benefiting in whichever way a "country" as we know it will hurt one or various geo-cards described above. The "problem's evaluation system in the UN" is no longer the same. Any, absolutely any answer/ suggestion/ proposition/ alternative will not respond to many of the geo-cards mentioned above.
For a condemning sentence there will be a great number of reasons not to apply it on the grounds of some of the hundreds of "rights" that have been invented since WWII. And when it comes to apply any sanction, it is almost a declared war to somebody, some country, group of people, beliefs or human rights. If you access the resolutions of the UN in a good span of time, you will see that at first a Declaration was relatively simple. If you read the most recent declarations, in order not to hurt sensibilities, feelings, convictions, nationalistic claims and other ideas that can go through your mind, most UN statements are preceded by an innumerable list of "excuses/ reasons/ justifications" to Member States, groups of people, ethnical groups, sexual preferences' groups, minority groups", to take this or that position.
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