After months of speculation and considerable intrigue, the United Nations Security Council has settled into the task of choosing the next Secretary General of the world organisation. By a vote of fourteen to one last week it supported a second term for" Dr Boutros Boutros Ghali. Unfortunately for him and for the prospect of smooth decision making the one dissident vote came from the United States, signalling clearly that a re elected President Clinton was in no mood to alter opposition to the Egyptian incumbent.
In these circumstances it is significant that this first vote panned out as it did. The US has not endeared itself to its Security Council partners by its unrelenting hostility to Dr Boutros Ghali. It has been driven by a combination of electoral opportunism and an apparently rooted opposition to any further ceding of superpower hegemony to the UN, backed up by an arrogant refusal to pay its dues which has driven the organisation to use desperate means to cover expenses.
This cocktail of US attitudes sits very uneasily with the Clinton administration's liberal internationalist credentials and has clearly antagonised even its closest allies. In the highly secretive from the point of view of transparency and accountability, the highly unsatisfactory diplomatic game used to choose the UN's chief executive we can expect to see several more such votes in order to test the resolve of all concerned. Simultaneously, the search has started for serious candidates, initially from Africa, who could command sufficient support if, as most expect, the US holds hard to its position.
Unfortunately for the UN, matters are so polarised that there is likely to be a premium on consensus and unadventurous thinking in seeking out a successor to Dr Boutros Ghali, assuming he does not survive or that the compromise floated at the European Union's Florence Council last June of a two year extension to his term is not revived.
Despite a ruthless and authoritarian programme of retrenchment and reform initiated and implemented by Dr Boutros Ghali precisely to answer US criticisms of the UN's elephantine and bureaucratic procedures in recent years, the organisation remains ill equipped to respond to the demands which a turbulent world makes upon it. Instead, staff morale has suffered severely. The impasse at the top has spread indecision and drift throughout its various levels and has tended to reinforce the baleful and inefficient autonomy of its many valuable agencies. The effects can clearly be seen during the Zaire/Rwanda crisis, in which other international players such as the European Union and the Organisation of African Unity have been much more focused and active.
The UN badly needs to resolve its leadership question and to address the need for reform and reanimation urgently and radically. It remains an indispensable global mechanism in an unstable world. But it has to adapt to many of the new realities thrown up after the end of the Cold War. If, eventually, US intransigence forces the departure of Dr Boutros Ghali, the least that should be demanded of President Clinton in his second term is that he commits his administration whole heartedly, both politically and fiscally, to addressing these challenges.