The UN

When I think of Model United Nations, I tend to imagine a few hundred kids sitting in a room raising placards on vote after vote after vote, or nations declaring war on each other.  I recently attended my first Model United Nations conference, and yes, that impression was partially true.  (Zambia floated the idea of declaring war on Slovenia during the final moments of the conference.)

The goal of any General Assembly committee was to pass a resolution to help resolve some of the major issues in command and control of military nuclear technology. Most of my time and energy, however, wasn’t spent on debating the technical specifics of military technology – it was spent on building coalitions. As my partner put it, Model UN is like a debate tournament in which you must convince the other team to agree that you should win. 

The task at hand in the chamber is to author a resolution, but to most of the delegations, it is not about passing any resolution; rather, it is about passing their resolution.  Although all the draft resolutions were, substantively speaking, very similar to one another, people became attached to their own ideas.  (Understandably so – if they didn’t like their ideas, they wouldn’t have written them in the first place.)

The United Nations, Congress – any deliberative body – poses a problem of self-interest versus altruism.  Putting on a show is part of politics.  As Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at an event I recently attended – and I’m paraphrasing here: “The effect that a camera has on a Congressman is that of a full moon on a werewolf.”  Theater takes a backseat to policy.

The UN isn’t exactly the same, since its members aren’t elected.  But the issue of altruism and self-interest is still there.  Part of what makes the real UN so ineffective at times is that all nations are, first and foremost, self-interested actors and their sovereignty permits them to act on that self-interest.  Language and policy has to be watered down so much that everyone can agree to it.  Model UN operated much the same way.