On UN Day 2024 An Occasional Pessimist Considers the Future : Tom McDermott

Two weeks ago Paula Claycomb gave us a lovely meditation on how to deal with gloom and doom (Hope for Paula, the Cynic). Like many of us, Paula becomes depressed when she thinks about the future health of Planet Earth and its inhabitants. Paula went on to offer her prescription - spending time with good friends, playing with pets, and replacing the daily overload of news articles with the reading of positive books and articles. She even listed several positive articles from News & Views as good ‘pick-me-ups’. Thanks Paula.

Like Paula, I too am in a down mood these days. I wish I had a prescription to offer myself and others. Sadly, I don’t.

I've always considered myself an optimist. Like most of us in XUNICEF I was privileged to work for the UN and UNICEF during what history may record as a golden age of multilateralism—a time of unprecedented progress for humanity. Our generation witnessed remarkable achievements for humankind: the Child Survival Revolution, the CRC, CEDAW and many other steps forward towards better lives for people. We saw child mortality plummet, education access expand, and extreme poverty retreat across continents. The arc of history seemed to bend decisively toward progress.

Yet even in those optimistic times, we faced our moments of profound doubt. I remember the despair I felt during Somalia's descent into chaos, the collapse of Sudan, the seemingly endless wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the growing dread before the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Whatever we felt back then, we kept going, and somehow muddled our way through to better days.

Our ability to get on with the job was often because we had strong organizations behind us with ample funding, skilled and dedicated staff, and the support of most of the major UN member states.

But that was then and now is now. A few years from now will UN agencies like UNICEF have the same support of member-states, and the ample funding and the staff? Our mission will not have changed, but our resources and political support may decline sharply. So too, we may see a further decline in respect for humanitarians and safety in their work. If we come to face a hostile international climate, would the UN and organizations like UNICEF be able to ‘keep going’?  Consider the situation of UNRWA, and ask whether other UN agencies might survive in similar situations.

In a few days my country faces an election that could very well bring Donald Trump back to the Presidency. If he wins, he will join a growing number of other autocratic nationalist leaders who abhor democracy, international institutions, and multilateral action. These leaders denigrate international organizations, and undermine long established standards of human rights and relations between nations.

Consider how in this year alone we have witnessed wars in Palestine and Lebanon where the words “ethnic-cleansing” and “genocide” have taken on new meaning, wars in which accepted national military strategy includes starvation and cutting off of water, food and all external aid. We even witnessed the ambassador of a member-state react to a resolution establishing Palestinian membership rights in the UN by standing at the podium and literally shredding the UN Charter.

Remember that these events took place under a Biden / Harris Administration. No doubt, the situation could have been much worse under a Trump Administration - but how different would it really be in terms of action? Would we see a change in the approach to ‘regime change’ and “remaking the Middle East”? Or, for that matter, in the trillions being spent on nuclear rearmament and larger than ever funding for our military and intelligence establishments? Admittedly, there would be a major difference in how a Trump Administration or a Harris Administration would approach issues of climate change, migration, humanitarian aid, and foreign affairs, but I fear that much of the world will see little difference between the two.

History offers us some important lessons about institutional and personal resilience in the face of dark times when international organizations failed in the face of militarism, extreme nationalism and fascism. Despite the signs of collapse all around them, some individuals kept faith with their values and long-term goals. They were resilient. They “kept faith” and remained confident in their direction, allowing them to carry on in the worst of times.

Consider the League of Nations and China’s Ambassador Wellington Koo, who was one of the League’s founding fathers. Only a decade after the League was established, Koo was forced to watch as one of the League's permanent members, Japan, invaded China and began a long occupation of Manchuria. When two years later in 1933 the League finally got around to condemning the invasion, Japan angrily left the League. So did Germany, following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor earlier the same year.   Italy was the next to abandon the League in 1937 following its invasion of Ethiopia.  The League was dead, but Koo and other true believers in the rule of law and multilateral action kept pressing forward towards a new and stronger organization. In 1945 Koo was there in San Francisco to participate in the birth of the United Nations.

I think too of the resilience of people like the first chairman of UNICEF’s Executive Board, Dr. Ludwik Rajchman, who in 1921 at age 33 became the first director of the League of Nations’ Health Organization. How must he have felt only a decade later to watch his global health organization lose stature and funding as the League collapsed? His strong anti-fascist views forced him to resign his post with the League in 1939.  Officially, the League's Health Organization died along with the League.  In reality the network built by the organization survived and thrived during the war years, exchanging vital information across borders and between warring parties.  Despite the war Rajchman never lost faith in the network he had helped create or in the value of an international public health organization.  In 1943 he proposed a ‘United Nations Health Service’.  The organization soon became today's WHO.  As the war wound down, Rajchman helped create the health division within the newly created UN Relief and Rehabilitation agency (UNRRA) aimed at restoration of health services in war ravaged countries. When UNRRA closed, he urged the General Assembly to use the agency’s remaining funds as the initial resources to establish the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund which became UNICEF.  Rajchman was probably the only person to whom both WHO and UNICEF can look back as a founding father.

Finally, I think of UNICEF’s first Representative in China, Dr. Marcel Junod.  ICRC sent him as a young physician to Ethiopia in 1935 during the second Italian Ethiopian war. In addition to negotiating prisoner releases, he documented the first use of poison gas against a civilian population. He next became the ICRC delegate in Spain during the terrible final days of the Civil War. In 1939, he was in Germany and its occupied territories negotiating prisoner releases and stopping a threatened mass execution of French POWs. In 1944 he was sent off to Japan where he became the first foreign physician to enter and document the situation in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb attacks. In 1948 Maurice Pate appointed him as UNICEF’s first Representative in China. When I think of Junod and the many men and women of his time, I am awe-struck by their resilience, but also their faith in humanity, despite all the evil that surrounded them.

People like Koo, Rajchman, and Junod should remind us that the current challenges to multilateralism, while severe, are not unprecedented. They and many like them demonstrated that institutional decline isn't inevitable, and that the dedication of individuals can help rebuild and reimagine international cooperation during and after the worst of times.

The true test of our generation's legacy won't be measured by the institutions we built in times of success and optimism, but by how well we've prepared the next generation to defend and reinvent them in the face of hostile governments that may undermine or actively obstruct our mission. If and when our organizations confront such challenges, we must trust in our successors' resilience and their unwavering commitment to our shared mission.

Will the international organizations of today and those who serve in them have the resilience to carry on through what may be very dark times? Has our generation of humanitarians done enough to prepare our successors for the challenges ahead? We love to speak of our past successes, but do we also speak of our many failures?   Have we shared the lessons from our darkest moments? Have we conveyed that the march of progress isn't linear, that it requires constant vigilance and renewal?

Only time will tell. 

I wish all of us a happy UN Day 2024! 

 It’s a good day to reread Paula’s formula - fewer news stories, more meditation and reading of positive writing, and more time with friends and pets. To which let me add - good food, fresh air, long walks, and good sleep. The world will still be there tomorrow - or at least I hope so.