The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., in room SD-192, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Robert W. Kasten, Jr. (chairman), presiding. Present: Senators Kasten, Rudman, and Specter. UNITED NATIONS U.S. PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE STATEMENT OF HON. JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK, U.S. PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE TO THE UNITED NATIONS INTRODUCTION OF WITNESS Senator KASTEN. The subcommittee will come to order. This morning we are privileged to have with us the Honorable Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Representative to the United Nations. Ambassador Kirkpatrick, the subcommittee is looking forward to your testimony today and working with you during the coming year. I especially, from my experience as a delegate to the last General Assembly, look forward to a continuing close working relationship with you. As I have said several times in the past, both publicly and privately, I greatly admire the work that you and your associates are doing in New York, and I want to help you, and I know the subcommittee wants to help you in any way that we can. As you know, your full statement will be printed in the hearing record, and if you would summarize your statement, we would have more time for questions. Also we have a statement from Gregory Newell, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, which we will insert in the record at the appropriate place. So, welcome, we are glad to have you with us. We very much appreciate the opportunity to work with you this morning. [The statement of Ambassador Kirkpatrick follows:] PREPARED STATEMENT OF JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK UNITED STATES PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE TO THE UNITED NATIONS Mr. Chairman: Last year, appearing before this Subcommittee, I presented a kind of report card on my first sixteen months at the United Nations, in the course of which I tried to make four major points. These were: The UN is an important body, worthy of our attention. founders hoped for. The UN does not reflect or represent the world in the way representative bodies usually do. The question for the US and for all countries committed to democracy and self-determination is whether the UN can be made a more effective instrument for problem-solving and peace-making among nations, an institution which helps resolve differences rather than exacerbate them. Today, I would like to talk about a phenomenon that underlies these considerations, an activity which determines whether the United Nations becomes involved in conflict resolution or conflict exacerbation. I want to talk about voting. behavior in the UN, and I will try to explain why we seem so often to be on the wrong side of lopsided votes, and what this tells us about ourselves and about the UN. From the very earliest days of the UN, we here in the United States have had a fundamentally flawed mental picture of how issues are decided at the United Nations. We have imagined that the General Assembly, or whatever UN body is under consideration is made up of individual voting members who listen carefully to the arguments pro and con, decide what is right and just and in their country's interest, and vote accordingly. This is what political scientists call the "rational activist" view of voting behavior. Why we should have believed that anything in this imperfect world would operate on a totally rational basis, is an interesting question. After all, legislatures do not behave in this way. With all respect, I may suggest it is open to question whether the Congress of the United States operates on so pure a basis of absolute rationality. Yet somehow, we expected that the United Nations would behave in this manner. Indeed, we profess surprise and disappointment that it does not. How does the UN behave? You may not be too surprised to learn that voting behavior at Turtle Bay is rather like voting behavior in any legislature. That is, voting alliances, temporary or of longer duration are formed on the basis of shared interests. Favors are extended, obligations accumulated and discharged, arms are twisted, horses traded and occasionally, or so one hears, a vote may be bought - or at least rented. There is one phenomenon which is unique to UN voting behavior, however, and that is the role and influence of the various regional voting blocs. Regional organizations have played a key role in the UN since the organization was established. The Charter, in Article 52, encourages the involvement of regional organizations in the settlement of international disputes, and in Article 53 even recommends to the Security Council that regional organizations be used to enforce Council decisions. The Charter thus institutionalizes a role for regional groupings within the UN system. Over time, a network of informal arrangements has grown up, linking the Secretariat of the UN with the secretariats of the various regional groups such as the Organization for African Unity or the Islamic Conference. In fact, some inter national civil servants move from a job with one or another The numbers tell the story. The Organization for African Unity has about 50 members one-third of the UN membership. The Asian group has about 40 members. A voting coalition of the two will have enough votes to carry any issue, even allowing for defectors or absentees, regardless of who else may be opposed. Similarly, the Non-Aligned Movement has about 96 members at present. If the NAM caucus takes a position on an issue, that position will determine whether the issue is voted up or down in the UN. The influence of these voting blocs is so all pervasive, that today in the UN, aside from the US, only Canada, New Zealand, Australia and a very few others, exist outside of voting blocs, and the Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders have the British Commonwealth Club to which they can repair. But we are members of no Club, given the rational activist approach we adopted at the beginning of our UN career and, perhaps even more importantly, given the fact that our interests are global rather than regional in scope. When we examine an issue, we must determine how it will affect NATO, whether it will have an impact on security on the Korean peninsula, or the prospects for peace in the Middle East, stability in the South Atlantic or economic development in the Caribbean. For many UN members, the claims of regional solidarity or some form of religious or cultural affinity can be commanding. This is not true for the United States. So we find ourselves in an arena which is dominated by the concerns of the regional voting blocs. What are they? - Because the regional organizations themselves are heterogeneous the Organization for African Unity, for example, includes Arab states and black states, Islamic states and Christian states, kingdoms and socialist republics broad unity tends to coalesce only around certain "lowest common denominator issues: attacks on Israel and South Africa; attacks on multinational corporations, the bogeymen of the new international mythology; support for any organization which describes itself as a "national liberation movement"; support for high levels of resource transfers from the industrialized to the nonindustrialized world as a matter of right and obligation. Thus the agenda of the General Assembly tends to be the same from year to year. Indeed, aside from the addition or subtraction of verbal curlicues, not only the agenda items but the resolutions themselves are the same from year to year. There are the inevitable twenty or thirty resolutions attacking South African behavior and the equally inevitable ten or twenty resolutions attacking Israel. There are never any resolutions calling upon the Arab countries of the Middle East to make peace with Israel, nor are there resolutions which might lead the South Africans to believe that if they did modify their behavior which indeed is an affront to human sensi bilities - - their international isolation might be lessened. Meanwhile, in the realm of resource transfers and economic development, codes of conduct for multinational corporations are elaborated which, if followed, probably would drive these firms out of business and surely would drive them out of the non-developed world, scuttling the economies of many of these third world states in the process. At the same time, new "human rights" are identified, for example the right to painfree, adjustment-free economic development. I have no doubt 16-524 0-83-33 |