SINCE TIME BEGAN : salus populi suprema est lex : TUBESTA TS'ENA -WATER IS LIFE : the right of the people is the supreme law : IN TRUTH WE TRUST
Does it matter?
The
small, the rich, the Nordic
Less
influence for US, China
BY : MICHAEL BLANDING : 2014 : WERKER - NOVOSAD
Who really runs the world? We're not talking in a
power-brokers-conspiring-in-the-back-room sort of way. Rather, by looking at
the institutions that countries themselves have set up to organize the world's
affairs, can we determine who is doing most of the managing?
That's the question Eric Werker, associate
professor in the Business, Government, and the International Economy unit at Harvard Business School,
asks in a new working paper, Who Runs the International System?
Power and Staffing at the United Nations Secretariat. He conducted
the research with Dartmouth College Assistant Professor of Economics Paul
Novosad.
Among their findings: Powerful countries including the United States, China, and
India have less administrative influence than you might think ,
while small but rich democracies such as Finland and New Zealand are
overrepresented.
Does it matter?
"There are two views of the United Nations," says
Werker. "Either you think it matters or you don't."
In the first camp are those who
believe that the United Nations has real influence on the world by setting
rules and norms between nations. "Just the conversations that are
happening in the UN are important in determining international priorities—do we
go after landmines, or gender disparity, or corruption? Any of these decisions
will help some countries and hurt others."
In the other camp are those who believe that despite all of these
powers, the United Nations merely reflects the agendas of the states within it.
Either way, the national makeup of
senior positions that run the United Nations can tell us a lot about which
countries are actually calling the shots in world affairs. "Even if you
think the UN is merely reflecting the world order instead of creating it, you
should still know who is running it," says Werker.
Although the United Nations
Secretariat, the executive arm of the organization, has some 43,000 employees
worldwide, most of the strategic decisions are made by 80 or so senior members.
Headed by the Secretary-General, the Secretariat plays key roles in
agenda-setting for various deliberative UN organizations and manages global
peace-keeping operations—including the UN's response to the Ebola outbreak.
There is keen competition and string pulling among nations to win those upper
level staff appointments.
While those members, in theory, are
supposed to check their national allegiances at the door, in practice that's
not the case, says Werker. "Both the UN's own analysis and remarks by
diplomats over the decades have indicated nations really do act in their own
national interest."
By looking at the national
composition of Secretariat staffing over the years, Werker hypothesized that it
is possible to show the changing nature of world power, providing another and
perhaps better way to measure international influence than traditional measures
such as counting the number of tanks and bombs countries possess. "War,
thankfully, is a very rare event," he says. "When two countries do go
to war, it means that one of them has miscalculated. By contrast, in this
setting you have a constant struggle in real time between every nation in the
world vying for influence within the Secretariat."
In order to figure out who has been
winning that competition, Werker and Novosad consulted the Yearbook of the United Nations.
They constructed a database of every senior official in the Secretariat from
1945 to 2008—some 4,000 names in all. Then, consulting news reports and
international directories, they determined the nationality of each of those
officials.
Finally, Werker and Novosad compared
the percentage of officials from each country to the percentage of that
country's world population in order to determine the amount to which a nation
was overrepresented in the Secretariat, "who was punching above their
weight," says Werker. When they did so, a small number of demographically
similar countries came out on top.
The
small, the rich, the Nordic
"We found a handful of smaller,
richer, democracies most represented by this metric, including Sweden, Norway,
and Finland," he says. Rounding out the top five were two other small, rich,
democracies — New Zealand and Ireland. In the top 10 also appeared Denmark and
Switzerland, along with seeming long shots, Panama, Jamaica, and Uruguay.
Werker wasn't surprised about the
overrepresentation of Scandinavian countries, given their high rankings for
education and low rankings for corruption. "The mandate of the UN on
staffing is supposed to rest on three things: competence, integrity, and the
third being national representation," Werker says.
Even when controlling for the first
two measures, the top countries shared other characteristics. Chief among them
were willingness to make investments in international diplomacy—both in terms
of their number of consulates and embassies and the amount of money they put in
diplomatic efforts. While military spending also correlated with influence in
the early years of the institution, it has been less of an indicator in more
recent years, says Werker.
Instead, the countries that seem to
be overrepresented reflect a kind of "soft power," more adept at
working behind the scenes in international institutions.
"At HBS we talk about different
kinds of leadership, and sometimes the best leaders are those who rarely have
to do or say anything, but can be very effective through quiet
example-setting," says Werker. "Maybe we just trust Scandinavians to
be nice neutral parties to undertake these jobs, which is the ultimate soft
power compliment, where you don't even think they are working in their national
interest. That doesn't mean if push came to shove, they would win a military
battle, but the best kind of war is one you don't have to fight."
Less
influence for US, China
As for the United States, even
though it still represents the largest country in terms of actual
representation, its UN-related influence has steadily waned relative to
population. At least until the 1980s, that didn't seem to matter, says Werker,
since its voting record matched that of allies that maintained high degrees of
representation. In the past 35 years, however, the US has diverged from
positions of its allies, leading to a decline in its relative power within the
organization.
Perhaps the most surprising finding
in the survey is the degree to which burgeoning economic powers such as Brazil,
India, and China, have remained underrepresented in the Secretariat—ranking 83,
89, and 95 respectively.
"You can look at this in two
ways," says Werker. "Either in spite of being a military and economic
power, these countries haven't yet been able to project soft power. Or, you can
take another view, that these countries are rejecting the global system. Either
way, it's not clear that it's in the best interest of the world for these
rising powers to take a back seat when it comes to solving international
conflicts."
Then again, says Werker, it took
Germany and Japan many years after World War II in order to reach higher levels
of representation, and both countries still lag compared to other G8 countries
such as the United Kingdom, France, and Canada.
Perhaps it's only a matter of time
before the world order in the United Nations begins to reflect the new world
order on the ground.”
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SINCE TIME BEGAN : salus populi suprema est lex - the right of the people is the supreme law : IN TRUTH WE TRUST
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