By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban ki-Moon and about 60 of the organization’s top leaders spent the Labor Day weekend in a remote Austrian Alpine retreat discussing how the UN can take charge of the world’s agenda.
Fox News executive editor George Russell reports that the sessions took place behind closed doors in the village of Alpbach, but position papers obtained by Fox give a good idea of what was being discussed:
– how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the fiasco of last year’s Copenhagen summit;
– how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to encompass the idea of “global public goods”;
– how to keep growing U.N. peacekeeping efforts into missions involved in the police, courts, legal systems and other aspects of strife-torn countries;
— how to capitalize on the global tide of migrants from poor nations to rich ones, to encompass a new “international migration governance framework”;
— how to make “clever” use of new technologies to deepen direct ties with what the U.N. calls “civil society,” meaning novel ways to bypass its member nation states and deal directly with constituencies that support U.N. agendas.
Russell also reports that an underlying theme of the sessions was grappling with how to deal with the “pesky issue” of national sovereignty – which is a country’s supreme and independent authority over its own territory – which often thwarts UN ambitions when it comes to global governance.
“Not coincidentally, the conclave of bureaucrats also saw in ‘global governance’ a greater role for themselves,” Russell reports. “As a position paper intended for their first group session put it, in the customary glutinous prose of the organization’s internal documents: ‘the U.N. should be able to take the lead in setting the global agenda, engage effectively with other multinational and regional organizations as well as civil society and non-state stakeholders, and transform itself into a tool to help implement the globally agreed objectives’.”
And for that to happen, the paper continues, “it will be necessary to deeply reflect on the substance of sovereignty . . .”
In the meeting’s position papers, national sovereignty “was specifically indicted for the failure of the much ballyhooed Copenhagen summit on climate change,” Russell reports.
As a result, UN leaders intend to get to work convincing the world that nation-states can’t adequately meet global challenges, but the UN can.
A link to the position papers is available at Fox News.
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