UN Transformation Concept

Executive Director of the Planetary Development Institute

19/10/2015

Many political scientists, economists, experts and analysts of modern international social processes have long argued that despite its continuous activity and sessions, the United Nations can hardly be said to fulfil its charter functions in full. They blame it on the UN outdated structure, inadequate decision making and decision enforcing mechanisms, and insufficient resources.  

In this regard, the inadequate resource base is the organisation’s main problem. Currently, UN member-states’ contributions compose the UN resources. These payments do not match the UN functions in amount; nor are they made consistently timewise. The Planetary Development Institute proposes a new concept of filling the UN resource base, and proposes to modernise and transform the United Nations to turn it into a Neo UN. 

This concept implies that the macroeconomic institution of planetary rent must become a radically new, strategic direction for forming the Neo UN resource base. The UN should also acquire expanded functions and mandate. Creating the planetary rent institution is linked to the institution of planetary ownership of resources found in the World Ocean, atmosphere, stratosphere, troposphere, outer space etc., as well as some internal resources of individual countries, referred to as the “lungs” of the Earth (Brazilian and Russian forests etc.). 

When creating the institute of planetary rent, we must focus on some key principles about who the ownership agents are of planetary property. 

Every person living on the planet is an owner of planetary natural resources, or in a more general sense of the common planetary ecological environment. However strange it may look, the planet itself, “Mother Earth”, is also an owner of natural resources, including common planetary ones, because it is a living bio-organism, a biosphere. Consequently, fish, mussels and mammals in the ocean, birds in the air, lions, animals, snakes and insects on the land “own” their particular habitat. 

We must recognise this fundamental condition if we are to abandon the anthropocentrism paradigm. Homo sapiens is not king of nature, especially when man becomes in effect homo-non-sapiens (an unreasonable man) by killing other living creatures and damaging nature through war, conflict, and barbaric technology, waste disposal and mineral resource extraction, etc. 

Nature is valuable by itself; it is unique and unreplicable, with many of its resources non-renewable. Therefore, the planet as a self-developing living organism must be, alongside people, society and state, a mega owner of natural (its own!) resources, which are parts of its organism. 

In the end, as rent it is not money, but pure water, clean air, reforested land and renewed resources that we do not consider renewable. Nature must get back its integrity it needs to reproduce and ensure full biota cycles.  

Full planetary rent must include absolute rent and differentiated rent. A methodological approach to the assessment of an average planetary absolute rent must be based on the calculation of the ecological-economic value of the planetary property, including an average income and environmental protection components. 

Obviously, calculating an environmental protection effect provided by a particular planetary property (the World Ocean, atmosphere etc.) is the most difficult task. 

Environmental Protection Effect is prevented damage that can occur if a certain volume of the World Ocean or atmosphere is destroyed or polluted. Environmental Protection Effect exists, because the natural environment is the required quality condition. 

The Neo UN must become an international world development management system. The Neo UN is a planetary organization of world development management (EcoWorld). 

Planetary rent must feed into an International Fund of Harmonious World Development (IFHWD), which will become the basis of the Neo UN-EcoWorld resource base used in accordance with the world centre’s functions. 

The IFHWD must replace the International Monetary Fund not to create institutions with overlapping functions; all the more so that the IMF is a largely discredited organization in many countries. A number of other funds have to be created (e.g., a UN Population Fund, a UN Capital Development Fund) to become part of the integrated IFHWD. Therefore, the IFHWD must concentrate resources based on planetary rent, while the distribution of funds must be carried out in accordance with Neo UN Charter priorities. We must reiterate that Neo-UN functions and mandate must be modernised, and the organisation’s decisions must be imperative, i.e. mandatory for compliance.  

Despite the seemingly fantastic nature of the proposed ideas, they just follow some established trends in international relations and international law. Without listing all the multiple examples, we would like to point out a few of the most representative ones. First of all, it is the legal regime regarding international territory (the World Ocean beyond exclusive economic zones; the International maritime area of the ocean floor “the sea floor and its subsurface reserves beyond the limits of the continental shelf”; outer space with astronomical bodies; and the Antarctic), and national territory (international rivers; canals and straits; archipelago and territorial waters in the context of free passage law etc.), used for the good of all humanity. International legal research is of fundamental importance that presumes that the planet’s crust is common good beyond the continental shelf. In this regard, countries technologically capable of commercial use, must give a part of their revenues to a UN Fund (its specialised body), thus increasing the technological level of underdeveloped countries. These norms have a concrete practical application for Russia as it plans to collaborate with France on developing metallic concretions in the Atlantic. Legislation is under development that fixes responsibility on agents of international law for an ecocide, a mass destruction of the environment threatening the whole of humanity.  

We believe that the international law-maker will take this route of ensuring an ecological future involving the Earth’s lungs (Amazon rainforests, Siberian forests etc.), fresh drinking water supplies (first of all, the ice shield and shelf glaciers of the Antarctic). Traditionally, the Kyoto Agreement is quoted here as one of universal agreements implying global atmospheric protection measures. It is important for us as it caused some leading countries to deny the principles of CO2 emission quotas, and generates a discussion of whether greenhouse effect has been thumped up by the “nuclear lobby” advocating the construction of nuclear power plants.  

We cannot help pointing out, however, that no established branch of international law, the environmental law, exists, despite the fact that a number of regional and global agreements have been operating for some centuries that regulate some relations in this field: conventions on rare and migrating animals, some quite effective measures on restoring the population of large marine mammals etc. 

At the same time, implementing these global conceptual goals faces difficult international legal challenges. Traditionally, the main one is the issue of national sovereignty as a basic element of the current world order. Obviously, there is no need to abandon this institution. We just need universal international organisations to be able to unite the efforts of different nations. Sovereignty is defined in many ways, one of which describes it as an apply diminishing as some rights are delegated to an international organisation, while another implies that an organisation optimizes the participants’ common efforts just as a rope allows many people to apply their force to it in a tug-of-war.  

As far as the mandatory character of a future Neo UN’s decisions, the world community has some relevant experience, albeit not so clear-cut legally, that dates back to the middle of the 20th century. It involves some legally binding international norms affecting nuclear arms that ensure stability in the post-WW2 world. 

In any case, the world community must decide – both in a theoretic and a practical sense – the sovereignty problem in the context of expected planetary rent redistribution. It has to do with the existence of several dozen micro states as international legal entities, whose physical size and the resources they command do not allow them meet minimal civilisation development index values. However undemocratic this measure could be these countries cannot claim equality in future world governance if they follow the principle expressed in the proverbial Russian film quotation «don’t teach me how to live, better help me financially”. 

We do not mean here the European micro states (Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, Lichtenstein, and Vatican) that have found their niche in Euro civilisation. It concerns mainly the states in Oceania and South America that have emerged as a result of the geopolitical and ideological struggle of the second half of the 20th century.  

The future Neo UN structure is undoubtedly very important. There are two types of designing universal international organisations: one is of the League of Nations type that showed its practical helplessness in resolving practical issues of endorsing its Charter and maintaining world peace; and the other is of the UN type that has a structure similar to that of a national state. 

It is logical to suppose that it would be of little use supplementing the current structure with another “Planetary Rent Council”. However, it is expedient to use in the new organisation the UN’s general structure and a Security Council as its basic element (with the possible expansion of permanent members fr om developed countries but without the right of veto).  

New air should be breathed into the now conserved UN Trusteeship Council. Just as the institute of bankruptcy exists in national laws for both economic entities and municipal councils, there is a need to introduce a mechanism making micro states fulfil their obligations as the basis of limiting or even removing sovereignty. This practice was used with Germany and Japan after the Second World War, wh ere the state had not fulfilled its obligation to its citizens. 

Other UN bodies (UNECOSOC and its specialised agencies and the International Court of Justice) are reducing the role of UN member states and increasing their functions as an executive branch of government. For example, we deem it necessary that Neo UN should incorporate in its future structure IAEA. The threat of nuclear technology proliferation, and, as a consequence, easy access to a so-called dirty bomb by politically unstable regimes makes this issue quite pressing. A dirty bomb is a weapon using spent nuclear fuel or another source of radiation and any explosive to spread radiation over vast territories. This weapon has only one destructive effect of a nuclear weapon – radioactive contamination, but it requires hardly any special technology to be produced or used. 

Consequently, the UN General Assembly should start transforming itself into a future World Parliament, but at the initial stage this transformation should include the so called “soft law” norms enforced not by legal obligations of states to comply with them but by the Neo UN Security Council’s decisions. 

It is premature to invest the UN General Assembly clear legislative functions. Examples are still vivid of newly independent colonies trying to impose contributions on their former colonial powers, set up 200-mile territorial waters etc.  

Even several dozen micro states among current General Assembly members could direct the organisation’s legislative activity whose objective is to make sure planetary rent revenue is distributed unfairly.  

We believe that these transformations could give the future Neo UN clear resource-underwritten functions based on the ideology of planetary rent appropriation and distribution in the context of harmonious civilisation development. The fundamental ideas mentioned above could be used to create a world constitution incorporating both the current legal principles and new international legal imperatives. A systemic design of this international institution is a matter of further discussions.

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