{"id":367364,"date":"2010-02-26T19:09:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-27T00:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anthonyclarkarend.com\/?p=2102"},"modified":"2010-02-26T19:09:27","modified_gmt":"2010-02-27T00:09:27","slug":"the-un%e2%80%99s-approval-ratings%e2%80%93-better-than-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/367364","title":{"rendered":"The UN\u2019s approval ratings\u2013 better than Congress"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"My friend and colleague, Erik Voeten<\/a> posts over at The Monkey Cage<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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A new Gallup World Affairs Poll <\/a>shows that thirty-one percent of Americans say the United Nations is doing a good job of solving the problems it has had to face. This is a slight improvement over last year\u2019s numbers but still low. Over at Opinio Juris, there is a debate <\/a>on whether these low approval numbers reflect the ignorance of Americans about what the UN actually does. Perhaps, although it is important to put these numbers in some context. For example, only 18% of Americans<\/a> gives Congress a favorable approval rating. More importantly, the temporal fluctuations in approval ratings are quite sensible.<\/p>\n

\"GallupUN.gif\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Approval first dipped in the 1970s when the Cold War produced a stalemate that led to what legendary political scientist Erns Haas labeled \u201cregime decay\u201d <\/a> at the UN.<\/span> Just to give some numbers: between 1977 and the start of the Gulf War, the UN Security Council adopted only two resolutions under Chapter VII <\/span>(resolutions that are binding and used to authorize sanctions and force).<\/div>\n

This changed rather dramatically after the success of the first Persian Gulf War. Between 1990 and 1998, the Council approved 145 Chapter VII <\/span>resolutions. Yet, some of those authorized missions didn\u2019t turn out so well. One can hardly blame Americans for lowering their faith in the ability of the UN to solve problems after what happened in Srebrenica and Rwanda in the mid 1990s. Richard Holbrooke likes to say that<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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blaming the U.N. <\/span>for Rwanda is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yet, this is not very persuasive as the UN itself acknowledged in the Brahimi report<\/a> and its Srebrenica report<\/a>. Surely, the UN bureaucrats can\u2019t stop genocide by themselves but bureaucratic dysfunctionality didn\u2019t help matters either, as Michael Barnett points out in Eyewitness to a Genocide.<\/a>Approval then went up again around September 11, when the UN did act decisively, and dropped during the Iraq war controversy. We don\u2019t know, of course, whether Americans lost their faith in the UN because it failed to authorize the war in Iraq or because it failed to prevent the U.S. <\/span>from launching the invasion. There is probably some of each going on and both seem reasonable inferences depending on ones ideological starting point. In the aggregate, then, these data don\u2019t give much reason to believe that the \u201cpublic\u201d is any more or less unreasonable in its judgments of UN job approval rates than it is in evaluating Congress or other institutions.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I think Erik’s analysis makes a lot of sense. But I do think that many Americans don’t really understand the actual nature and role of the United Nations. Of course, I am not sure the ratings would be any higher if they did. The UN does so many different things– Dr. Jose Sorzano<\/a>, who was Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN from the US in the 1980s, used to say, there were several “UN’s”– the UN of the Security Council, the UN of the Specialized Agencies, the UN of the General Assembly, etc.\u00a0 How somebody would rate “the UN,” would depend upon which of these “UN’s” that person had in mind.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend and colleague, Erik Voeten posts over at The Monkey Cage: A new Gallup World Affairs Poll shows that thirty-one percent of Americans say the United Nations is doing a good job of solving the problems it has had to face. This is a slight improvement over last year\u2019s numbers but still low. Over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3977,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3977"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}