Becoming our man in Geneva

Grahame Greene’s novel about Geneva ignores it, focusing instead on the nasty foibles of the very rich. And if they mention it at all, modern novelists writing about Geneva use the UN at best as a backdrop for international intrigue but more often as a metaphor for international impotence.

For someone preparing to take up the position of Britain’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and other International Organisations in Geneva, this literature is a salutary reminder. Even in Britain, the country that did as much as any other to found the United Nations and the League of Nations before it, support and understanding for this international system is weak.

I began my career dealing with the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. Bag carrier to senior diplomats attending crisis meetings of major powers, junior political officer in an embassy responsible for documenting oppression and establishing links with the opposition. The United Nations was a major presence in those conflicts. But it was also a controversial one, because of the confused Security Council mandates, the endless siege of Sarajevo, the tragedy of Srebrenica, the daily humiliation of its peacekeepers. The UN failed in Bosnia, NATO had to come in.

That was the shorthand consensus anyway, at least in London and Washington, and its implications have been playing out ever since.

But there has always been another United Nations, in Geneva. This city belongs to a different, and older, international tradition. Long before the failed experiment of the League of Nations, Geneva was home both to the first significant efforts to codify international law and to the first technical agencies. It is these agencies, like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the many that came after, such as the World Health Organisation, the World Intellectual Property Office, the International Standards Organisation, the International Organisation of Migration, the High Commissioner for Refugees, and the World Trade Organisation, that give Geneva its unique and essential place in the international system. They are centres of global expertise, set international norms, and enjoy considerable if not baronial independence. Some aren’t even part of the UN.

Someone told me that to understand Geneva you have to leave it. The beautiful shores of lake Leman and the acronyms of UN process are a world away from the villages in the jungle ravaged by disease where the WHO works, or the tent cities in the desert where UNHCR house countless desperate refugees, or the megaports in Asia that have sprung up on the back of world trade.

So as part of my preparations for taking up the job I went to West Africa to see the UN effort to counter the Ebola outbreak that was threatening to become a pandemic crisis. There I met dozens of remarkable people operating in atrocious conditions, sometimes putting their own lives at risk. Many worked for the UN agencies in Geneva, for the World Food Programme, for the UN in New York, or for the many national and international NGOs that were supporting the UN effort. In an unprecedented crisis, nations had come together in the UN, and implemented a common plan.

In New York, Britain’s leading position is written into the founding charter of the United Nations and given daily reality through our permanent seat on the Security Council. In Geneva, it depends more on our commitment to the 0.7% target for Overseas Development Assistance. We are the only G7 country to have met that pledge. The last act of the last Parliament enshrined it in law.

All told, the UK channels over £2 billion a year to the 37 agencies, funds and bodies based in Geneva. The UK is usually one of the top five donors to every Geneva body. We will invest £1 billion in the Global Funds that are fighting diseases such as Malaria, TB and AIDS and developing vaccines for Ebola this year. We’re an elected member of the Human Rights Council, active in the many bodies in Geneva shaping the future of the Internet, and at the heart of the international system of arms control – rarely more relevant than today – that is centred in the city.

The UK also contributes through the leadership of its diplomacy and through the important contributions made by UK citizens like Guy Ryder who serve the UN with distinction in Geneva.

Yet this system is poorly understood even in Britain, the country that did so much to build it. That is perhaps the greatest risk of all. As one young doctor told me, in a sweltering portacabin in Conakry, if Britain does not support and shape the future of this remarkable system, who will?
Unless our citizens understand and support the system as a whole the political will to continue to fund it cannot be taken for granted. And the risk grows that it will be treated transactionally, as a tool to be used only a case-by-case basis, rather than as a global public good.

It is an important challenge, both for the UN system and for a new ambassador like me.