13 Feb NYC to U.N.: Please Don’t Leave Us!
13.02.07
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Although many New Yorkers wouldn’t blink an eye if it happened, NY City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is worried that the United Nations may move its headquarters away from New York City, according to this report. Bloomberg is trying to meet with Secretary of State Rice to get her help on this matter.
If the U.N. leaves town, where would it go? I suppose Switzerland is a good option (now that it has finally consented to join the U.N.). Or Brussels? Anyone have some suggestions?
How about Port Harcourt?
Someplace that can put its money where its mouth is?
Alexander Casella recommended in an op-ed piece that it move to Montreal. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/02/opinion/edcasella.php
Move the UN to Gibraltar
by John Ryle
City of Words, The Guardian (London)
28 July, 1997
Reestablish the UN where it has a better chance of doing good
Reform of the United Nations and debate over the future of Gibraltar are not issues to set the pulse racing. In each of these cases the arguments are recurrent and never satisfactorily resolved. Important they may be, but ennui-inducing. Both issues, as it happened, made the news last week: there were proposals by the UN Secretary-General for changes in the internal organization of the United Nations; then came reports of a renewal of the dispute between Britain and Spain over the fate of the Rock. Both soon vanished from the news. But Gibraltar and the UN could be the answer to each other’s problems.
Criticisms of the UN are various. It is said to be too big and bureaucratic (though its permanent employees in fact number only 50,000) with too many overlapping agencies (thirty plus), all of them either underfunded or overfunded, depending on your point-of-view (about $1.2 billion a year). And it is variously accused of being subject to manipulation by the permanent members of the Security Council, or compromised by financial dependence on the United States, or constrained by the fact that every independent country in the world, however delinquent, is a member of it.
The overriding problem of the UN is evident in its name – the United Nations. The worst problems it has to deal with involve countries that cannot really be called nations – which are not united even within themselves – yet whose political elites cling on to their seats in the UN General Assembly. Failed states, tiny islands, relicts of empire, congeries of peoples unacquainted with government authority – all claim their seats, while nations in the ethnic sense of the word, more substantial and more ancient but lacking their own states, such as the Kurds, have no representation there. Most of the big problems the United Nations deals with involve civil wars where the legitimacy of central government is the main issue. Yet these governments occupy seats at the UN in the same way those of stable democratic countries do. No country has ever been expelled from the UN.
Unlike the Vatican, the UN itself has no single sovereign territory from which to try and solve these problems. The secretariat occupies an enclave in Manhattan, but there are agencies scattered through half-a-dozen world capitals, from Rome to Nairobi.
Gibraltar, as a British overseas territory, a post-colonial anomaly, has no seat at the UN. The current dispute there involves another international organization, NATO. Spain wants to become a full member of NATO and assume regional command of NATO forces. But it disputes ownership of the airport at Gibraltar, which is built on the isthmus that links the Rock to the mainland. Britain is blocking Spain’s full participation in NATO until the issue is resolved.
Even if this particular difficulty is overcome, however, the quarrel will not go away. Like Hong Kong or the Falklands, Gibraltar is a thorn in the flesh of the country to which it belongs geographically – and an onerous responsibility for Britain, the country that exercises political suzerainty over it at a distance.
I was discussing these relicts of empire with my father the other day. He is a veteran of the war in the Mediterranean, old enough to remember the foundation of the UN in 1945 ( though not, he is at pains to point out, the Treaty of Utrecht, which was the deal that gave Gibraltar to Britain in 1713). He proposes a radical solution: move the UN from New York to Gibraltar. Both Britain and Spain, he suggests, could renounce their claims on the colony, which would then become, in a symbolic step towards world government, a UN sovereign territory.
The people of Gibraltar – a suitably mixed bunch – could become the first world citizens. With its headquarters removed from US territory, the UN would be perceived by the rest of the world less as the instrument of US foreign policy and more as a neutral body. And there would be none of the fuss that the UN has created in the past when leaders the US didn’t like – such as Fidel Castro or Yasser Arafat – came to address the assembly.
In Gibraltar the UN would have a global base that could not be equalled in strategic or symbolic terms. The Rock lies at the crossroads of the world: the meeting place of two seas and two continents, of Islam and Christendom, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Securely in Europe, but close enough to feel the heat of Africa, it is also roughly midway between the US and China, countries that are liable to be the key members of the Security Council in future. It has vast underground facilities built during the war and a deep-water port. If anywhere is impregnable, Gibraltar is.
A move to a new location like this would make it easier for the UN to introduce the radical reforms that the current Secretary-General seems to have flunked. The carpet-baggers and time-servers that litter UN agencies – and a good few of the agencies themselves – could be discarded in the move. A lot of these people wouldn’t want to live in Gibraltar anyway. Salary cuts might help. The Bretton Woods Institutions – the World Bank and the IMF – could stay in the United States, which is still the world capital of money. But the political and humanitarian bits of the UN would surely work better in a continent that knows what colonialism is, and that therefore understands better the history of relations between the West and the non-West.
The UN is indispensable; it is also a scandal. Moving it to Gibraltar could be just the new start it needs. The more I think about this the more appealing the idea becomes. Ship the Augean Stables to the Pillars of Hercules. Then it might finally be possible to clean them out and get some work done.
Post Script 2000
An article in the Wall Street Journal of April 20, 2000, by Claudia Rosett, suggested that, in order to give officials a reality check, the headquarters of the IMF and the World Bank should be moved to Jakarta.
Mr. Ryle,
Your proposal is not so much impossible as it is brilliant. Intellectual exercises like yours give me hopes that, despite its predominant self-destructive impulses, human nature has other, valuable traits that make it worth living.
You made my day. Thanks.