Insights from Outside the Bubble: The Mess / Detlef Palm

The venerable New York Times, whose reliability is beyond reproach, foretold chaos in German politics; likewise, many foreign newspapers hyperventilate about the mess that will ensue as a result of the recent German elections: three parties need to agree to form the government.

Do not worry. I am not going to impose on you my take on what the politics in Germany will be, though I am gladly accepting any bets. I am going to vaguely stick to the theme of my bubble-thoughts: the renewal of the United Nations and especially UNICEF.

First of all, rest assured. The sun will rise and set as usual, regardless the results of any elections in Germany or anywhere in the world. Your pensions will be save, and nobody is going to press any red button.

Second: It is very amusing to read analyses by the foreign press about a country’s politics. I have to restrain myself from losing composure and slapping my knees. What I am trying to say: How can anyone, sitting several thousand miles away, judge what the difficult political decisions will be that may or may not rob the people of a distant country of their good night’s sleep? You have to be there, and you have to inhale a country’s make-up to know what is going on and what will happen next.

Third: Here is the most astonishing twist. For most commentators, anything beyond a binary system, good and bad, capitalist or socialist, men and women, urban and rural or old and young is considered chaotic or messy. As if the human mind is made to only consider plus and minus, or for- and-against something.

The German election demonstrates the bandwidth of today’s concerns. People have views, the issues are many, and there are a lot of permutations on what people like or dislike. There are socialists who do not believe in climate change, and capitalists who think green energy is the next big thing. There are pensioners who fear for their pensions but want their grandchildren to set the agenda for the future. Someone may wonder about gender identity, but earns his living in the carbon industry. The world is not black and white. It is not us and them. It is not West or the East. It is not forward or backwards, or the one party or the other. There is not one truth that is true for everyone.

Let me go back to UNICEF and the UN. UNICEF, and all the other specialized agencies and funds and programmes, are supposed to support national priorities. But different people in a country perceive different things to be a priority; so-called national plans, where they still exist, represent only a certain spectrum of its people. Different UN agencies represent the big worries of different groups of a population; and UNICEF is the agency who is there for those who worry about the wellbeing and the future of a country’s children, regardless who happens to constitute the government.

The UN is ‘we the people’ and not ‘we the national plan’. It is the UNICEF mission to be present in every country on the globe to support the constituency for whom children are a priority, and to make it a priority for those who haven’t yet figured it out. Our field presence is the great advantage that puts us ahead of many other agencies and institutions. Neither the situations nor our mission are messy – we are simply participating in the global and local dialogue on the future of our global community. But we need to be prepared, and our staff need to ditch the idea of being a non-political charity. We need to astutely engage in the public discourse, in favour of children.

And anyone who thinks it is messy to achieve consensus among three political parties should try to get 25 UN agencies agreeing on a plan, called UNDAF or UNSDCF, that actually makes sense.

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