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The Unfinished Global Revolution: The Pursuit of a New International Politics. By Mark Malloch Brown. Penguin Press; 272 pages; $27.95. Allen Lane; £25. Buy fromAmazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
THE clash that will really matter, contends Mark Malloch Brown in this admirable book, is between international co-operation and old-fashioned nationalism. With the world fast becoming a global bazaar, governments must commit themselves to an international framework of rules and institutions that would, he believes, make it a safer, fairer and less destructive place. Does the United Nations, where Lord Malloch-Brown spent much of his career, offer such a framework? Sadly no—unless, that is, countries can actually decide, by accepting the loss of certain of their own rights and privileges, to make it a less feeble and dysfunctional body.
People take jobs for odd reasons. But Lord Malloch-Brown’s career seems to have followed a curiously logical pattern, each job-change marking a stage in his earnest search for an answer to the world’s problems. In 1979, after a frustrating start battling bureaucracy at the United Nations (UN)—and a brief sideways stint as a political correspondent on this newspaper—he set off to help the refugees fleeing South-East Asia’s awful wars. Humanitarian work for the UN, he concluded at the time, was a fine pursuit so long as it was kept as far away as could be from UN politics.
Instead of dealing with the causes of conflict, he worried that he was merely applying sticking plaster to its tragic consequences. Democracy, he believed, was the path to conflict resolution. So he transformed himself into a democratic mercenary, a counsellor to several would-be leaders, including Corazon Aquino who led the movement that toppled Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, an inspired novelist who failed to make the presidency. After a while, he again became disillusioned, this time with the powers of democracy. Struggling countries, he recognised, needed economic security no less than political freedom. So he upped and joined first the World Bank and then its much poorer cousin, the UN Development Programme.
He shone as head of the UNDP which, unlike the World Bank, was considered by people in poor countries to be on their side. Because the agency was so short of money, he switched its priorities. Instead of supporting thousands of worthy but tiny projects he concentrated on providing practical advice to national decision- makers who could make a real difference to the ways their economies operated.
He was eventually brought back to politics by the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq. Involved in the UN’s reconstruction attempts in both countries, he crossed to the top floor of its secretariat to become Kofi Annan’s right-hand man. Lord Malloch-Brown depicts Mr Annan as a principled and (so far as possible) effective UN secretary-general. However, his opposition to the Iraq war brought him up against George Bush, who punished him by appointing John Bolton as America’s ambassador to the UN. Mr Bolton, an arch-conservative who loathed what he saw as the UN’s efforts to constrain America, unsurprisingly gets a rough ride in this book.
After corruption was once again exposed in UN ranks (not good, but limited to a handful of people), the Americans called on the organisation to reform itself. Few would disagree with that aim. But meaningful long-term reform will never come from internal tinkering with personnel and procedures that successive secretary-generals have had a shot at. Instead, the organisation needs a complete overhaul, starting with the Security Council, whose permanent members must share more power with emerging countries.
It was the glum realisation that this was not going to happen quickly (as much as his tussles with Mr Bolton) that seems to have persuaded the author to leave the UN and, newly ennobled, briefly join the British government under Gordon Brown. The prime minister proved a fountain of ideas for a common global approach. But he was a hopelessly unpopular spokesman: his international vision only irritated a hostile British public, hungry for homespun solutions to its problems.
And there’s the rub. Most people—whether they be British voters, Mr Bolton or, for that matter, the rulers of the emerging world—are inveterate nationalists. Yet the author’s conclusions remain cautiously optimistic. With every international agreement to reduce poverty, regulate finance, combat terrorism or protect the environment, we may be moving, tortoise-like, towards the global revolution he advocates so eloquently.
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