MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th November, 2020) The world's major powers should allow the UN Secretariat to perform its functions as the organization has more responsibility than it had during the Cold War, Jean-Marie Guehenno, a former French diplomat and ex-UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, said at an online round-table conference broadcast from Moscow.
The event, titled The World Without the UN?, was organized on Thursday by the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a non-governmental public association, in collaboration with the Alexander Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund as a part of the Laboratory of Historical Memory initiative. During the conference, current and former UN diplomats, as well as international relations specialists from Russian and the United States, discussed the role of the United Nations in the modern world as well as new challenges that the organization is facing.
"Nowadays, the UN has a huge responsibility that did not exist during the cold war. During the cold war, this organization was smaller in scale, which is why if we want to grant the UN this responsibility, it is important to allow it to function, and allow the Secretary General to be more a General than a Secretary... we need large states to allow the UN Secretariat to do its job," Guehenno told participants. He also drew attention to the initiative by French President Emmanuel Macron, to limit the veto power of the UN Security Council's members when discussing responses to mass atrocities, adding that the UN must be given more room for maneuver by world powers.
Meanwhile, First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy accentuated the crisis of trust in the UN, caused in his opinion by the US expansionism and urged giving more voice to underrepresented countries with large populations.
"We are working for democracy. The UN security council is a reflection of world democracy, and democracy should be determined not by how much money you have and if you can or cannot pay for a certain solution or other. It is the voice of the countries who are subject to conflict-resolution measures," Polyanskiy remarked.
Timofey Bordachev, the program director of the Valdai Discussion Club, and an academic supervisor at the Higher school of Economics, said that the UN has to adapt to the shift from a unipolar to multipolar international order.
"This change in the global balance of power after the cold war is continuing today, and the UN is specifically facing this problem... from my point of view, there is currently no answer to the question of how this ideal, institutionalized UN system could be adapted to the change in the balance of power," Bordachev noted.
The conference was concluded with a statement by the head of the UN Information Center in Moscow, Alexander Gorelik, who proposed that the organization should hold conferences with experts to analyze a broader spectrum of issues, ranging from war to inequality and poverty.
