World View: "We recognise that development, peace and security and human rights are interlinked and mutually reinforcing". So says the text agreed by representatives of the 191 United Nations member states at their millennium review summit this week.
In his address to the General Assembly on Wednesday the Taoiseach echoed these sentiments: "The links between development, security and human rights are clear and inescapable."
These linkages are both conceptual and political. They are a central part of the deal put forward by UN secretary general Kofi Annan in his comprehensive reform package entitled In Larger Freedom: Towards Security, Development and Human Rights for All last March. This was based on two major reports commissioned by him to draw security and development issues together.
A high-level panel on threats, challenges and change reported in November 2004; and 250 development experts prepared and then reviewed the UN project to halve primary poverty by 2015 by achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs).
Speaking at the UN two years ago, Annan said the world organisation had reached a fork in the road between indispensability and marginalisation. His plan is intended to ensure the former road is taken. It is based on a deal whereby the developing states accept the security, disarmament, anti-terrorism and human rights agenda and the developed ones commit themselves to the MDGs.
This ambitious agenda was skilfully assembled and mobilised by Annan over the last two years. It encompasses many of the most pressing issues in world politics, including Iraq, Iran, global poverty, indebtedness, trade, nuclear non-proliferation, anti-terrorism, peace-building and environmental degradation and protection.
There has been a huge mobilisation of international civil society around elements of it this summer at the G8 summit, bringing the agenda beyond state executives to peoples and citizens.
And yet Annan told the General Assembly on Wednesday that, although the text agreed is a good start, it is not the "sweeping and fundamental reform" he had originally proposed. The failure to agree on disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation and to drop the subject altogether was a "real disgrace". Without it he fears a "cascade of proliferation" arising from tensions between the peaceful and military use of nuclear energy.
The document seeks a comprehensive convention on terrorism but fails to rule out attacks on civilians, which some states see as part of legitimate struggles for self-determination. It fails to resolve the issue of Security Council reform.
On the plus side the development goals are reaffirmed in detail over 17 pages of the 35-page document, but often more in principle than in practice. A great deal will depend on WTO trade talks and concrete implementation of commitments on debt and aid.
A peacekeeping commission is to be set up to help countries emerging from conflict; but whether it should report to the Security Council of the General Assembly is left unresolved and it does not deal with conflict prevention.
There is an important new commitment to take collective action should national authorities fail "to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity"; but there is no formal obligation to intervene.
A new human rights council will replace the discredited Human Rights Commission; but its membership rules are still to be agreed.
In assessing this outcome the key issue is whether the original conceptual and political linkages between security and development on which it is based have been broken. Or can they be retrieved as the agreement is implemented and revisited?
The New York Times says it is a squandered once-in-
a-generation opportunity, responsibility for which is widely shared but with the Bush administration disproportion-
ately to blame for the political failure involved.
By sending the "notoriously undiplomatic and congress-
ionally unacceptable" John Bolton as ambassador to the UN, Bush set up a dynamic that transformed "what had been a painful and difficult search for workable diplomatic com-
promises into a competitive exercise in political posturing".
Bush in fact supported the MDGs in his speech and accepted that it is an interdependent world. But the NYT argues that "by the time Washington retreated to a more realistic position, it was too late to retrieve much of the bold original agenda".
Most of Bolton's 400 killer amendments to the draft were eventually dropped; but America's zealous protection of Security Council prerogatives against those of the General Assembly and its refusal to allow the secretary general to set specific development goals led others to contest his right to set standards for management and human rights.
The political consensus between most of the member states was thereby upset by Bolton's legitimising of obstruction from states such as Egypt, Pakistan, Algeria, Cuba and Venezuela, which otherwise would not have been able to block it, according to seasoned UN observers. The question is whether this political failure upends the conceptual breakthrough on which Annan's reform agenda is based.
David Hannay, a prominent member of the high-level panel appointed in 2003 and a former British ambassador to the UN and the EU, argued at the Institute of European Affairs in Dublin this week that this is not necessarily so.
The major step forward involved in recognising that security and development are not two separate issues but one single agenda is affirmed by the G8 summit and several of the plus factors already mentioned.
And the real test will be whether what has been agreed is implemented when challenges arise on Kyoto, Doha, MDGs, North Korea and Iran, Palestine or Kashmir.
Hannay stressed how important the EU has been in providing the intellectual underpinning to link security and development, whether in its own security strategy based on effective multilateralism, the close fit between that and its battle groups plan to support UN peacekeeping, or its comprehensive endorsement of Annan's plan last June.
These linkages between security and development can survive. But ensuring they do will in future depend on political action by citizens as well as diplomatic action by states.
Exploring how such wider democratic legitimacy for them can be obtained, several new movements advocate that the UN should have a parallel parliamentary tier alongside the General Assembly.
Their views may be found at www.opendemocracy.net